Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

by Robert Hofler

  In his Vanity Fair article “Fatal Charm,” Dominick pointed out how von Bülow snubbed the woman who saved his life: “He bypassed the embrace and kiss offered him by Mrs. Reynolds . . . and gave her a peck on the cheek. Then he raced to the telephone to call Cosima.” Compared to the tirades Dominick would deliver to acquitted murderers in the near future, Claus von Bülow got off easy. “His dark and spacious place in social history was assured,” wrote Dominick.

  In 1985 David Kuhn had been hired to be an editor at Vanity Fair, and the first issue he worked on was the one featuring Dominick’s von Bülow cover story.

  “It was a huge turning point for the magazine,” said Kuhn. “No one did that kind of reporting before him. It was intimate reportage of high-society, front-page crime where the writer got to know the people at the center of it. It was a new kind of storytelling. And Nick Dunne was connected enough to the subjects to get inside their world.”

  Seemingly overnight, Dominick emerged as real competition for John Gregory Dunne and on his brother’s turf—as a writer. Dominick had a best-selling novel; he had also now written a groundbreaking article that everyone in the Didions’ social set was talking about in a magazine creating considerably more buzz than Esquire, where John wrote. Suddenly, Dominick loomed large enough for his brother to swipe at publicly, but without mentioning his name. And John drew blood in a way that only a sibling knows how. For Esquire’s October 1986 issue, John wrote an essay titled “How to Write a Novel,” in which he felt compelled to reveal a piece of “coincidental obscenity,” as he called it. He had been working on his novel The Red White and Blue and six months before Dominique Dunne’s murder, John wrote the following passage: “I do not understand people who attend the trials of those accused of murdering their loved ones. You see them on the local newscasts. . . . I watch them kiss the prosecutor when the guilty verdict is brought in or scream at those jurors who were convinced that the pimply-faced defendant was the buggerer of Jimmy and the dismemberer of Johnny.”

  John gave no reason to repeat this quote in the pages of Esquire, other than to show his prescience. If Dominick was already not speaking much to his brother, the time now arrived for others in the immediate Dunne family to join him. John’s comments in Esquire so outraged Alex Dunne that the nephew played “a prank” on his uncle. “It took John ten years to figure out who did it,” said Dominick’s son, who kept secret the nature of that payback.

  Once again, Liz Smith was asked to write something in her column, although this time Dominick did not approach her. At least, not directly. In his vast collection of correspondence, Dominick kept a letter from a man who pleaded with Smith to expose John Gregory Dunne’s “cowardly blow” in Esquire to his brother’s family. Smith, however, resisted the call. She never wrote a column about John’s controversial essay.

  The murder and its aftermath brought Dominick and Lenny closer together. The same was not true for Dominick and his son Alex. Years later, after he reconciled with his father, Alex spoke of having “mental health issues,” which became especially acute after the loss of his sister. “The trouble started at the time of the murder,” said Dominick. “I think that they were the closest brother and sister I ever saw.”

  Dominique’s murder proved traumatic for everyone in the Dunne family circle, including Norman Carby, who moved to Hawaii to get away from bad memories in Los Angeles. Several friends noted how the ordeal affected Alex even more profoundly. Around the time that John Gregory Dunne’s article “How to Write a Novel” appeared in Esquire, Alex met with his father at a restaurant in San Francisco where he unloaded on Dominick every abuse, real and imaginary, that he had suffered in the Dunne family. The outburst stunned Dominick and called up all the negative feelings he had for his own father. He found it incomprehensible to think that one of his own children hated him as much as Dominick hated Dr. Dunne. He asked Alex to forgive him and not do anything drastic, at least not until Lenny had passed way.

  Personally, Dominick was devastated by Alex.

  Professionally, he was at a very different place, having realized his most intoxicating Hollywood dream. The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, a best-selling novel, had been turned into a movie, even if it was a TV movie. Although the show’s producers had been careful to consider some of his complaints about the script, they worried about Dominick’s reaction to the finished four-hour miniseries, and wisely inoculated themselves from a bad review by giving him a special private screening, not at NBC or Lorimar but the Beverly Hills home of the movie’s star. Dominick would never trash the finished product in front of Ann-Margret. And as they expected, he loved being given special treatment. “He liked the movie very much,” said John Erman.

  Better yet, when it aired on February 8, 1987, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles not only achieved spectacular ratings and boosted paperback sales of the novel; it reached the audience that Dominick cared about most. “There were screening parties up and down Park Avenue,” Sue Pollock recalled.

  9

  Novels and Payback

  If the jury acquitted Claus von Bülow, Dominick’s Vanity Fair cover story tried to indict him. Again. But even that profile was not enough for Dominick when it came to skewering Claus and Andrea. He remembered Betsy Bloomingdale’s phrase “people like us,” meaning people who had a lot more money than they should and did not know it. People Like Us would be about those overly indulged, clueless, superrich people.

  Dominick wrote the novel not once but twice. A computer person he met at an AA meeting on Perry Street in the Village turned out not to be a computer expert. After this recovering alcoholic set up Dominick’s computer, it malfunctioned, completely destroying his entire manuscript, and Dominick had no choice but to rewrite it from memory. When he had finished People Like Us a second time and turned it in to Crown Publishing, a few observers got the impression that Dominick had written a scathing indictment of New York society in the vein of Truman Capote’s “La Côte Basque 1965.” Women’s Wear Daily went so far as to suggest that Dominick used Claus von Bülow and Andrea Reynolds as prototypes for two of his most repellent characters: Yvonne Lupescu, after shooting her necrophiliac boyfriend Constantine de Rahm, quickly runs off to a high-society ball to establish a fraudulent alibi.

  Griffin Dunne did not love People Like Us when his father first gave him the manuscript to read prepublication. Tom Wolfe’s indictment of the city’s financial titans, The Bonfire of the Vanities, had been published to great critical and commercial success the year before. Griffin warned, “Dad, this is in the same terrain. They’re going to criticize you, and you’re taking on these people.”

  Women’s Wear Daily obtained early galleys of the book and claimed that Dominick had not ripped off Tom Wolfe; rather, he had pulled a Truman Capote and was about to “bite the hands that fed him,” much as the author of In Cold Blood did with Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Matthau, and other lady friends, aka “the swans,” whom he turned into uncomplimentary fictional caricatures in “La Côte Basque 1965.”

  Dominick’s old Interview nemesis, now a colleague at Vanity Fair, knew he was up to something with the novel. “There we were, at a table for eight, and he didn’t say a word,” Bob Colacello said of Dominick. “He just listened and listened and listened. That’s when I knew he was writing a book about this group.”

  “This group” was the new money of shopping-mall magnate Alfred Taubman and his arriviste wife, Judith Mazor Rounick, a former Israeli beauty queen, who crashed in a very Ivan Boesky way. (In People Like Us, Dominick presages Taubman’s own fall shortly after the turn of the millennium when the Sotheby’s businessman went to jail for price fixing and antitrust violations.) Dominick, for legal reasons, always insisted that his characters were fiction and neither the Taubmans nor the Boeskys nor even the Saul Steinbergs were his Elias and Ruby Renthal in People Like Us. Neither were Claus von Bülow and Andrea Reynolds in any way the inspiration for Constantine de Rahm and Yvonne Lupescu. So he said. Dominick did admit to basing one of h
is People Like Us characters on a real person. In the novel, a TV newscaster named Bernard Slatkin marries a woman worth billions. Dominick knew the journalist Jesse Kornbluth, who married a woman worth only one billion dollars, Katharine Anne Johnson, her mother being Anne Cox Chambers of Cox Enterprises. The Slatkin character also bears some resemblance to Chuck Scarborough, the New York City newscaster who married and quickly divorced Anne Ford of the automobile dynasty.

  The inspiration for Slatkin’s marriage to a wealthy debutante came to Dominick in 1987 at a lavish party held in a big white tent erected beside the Boathouse in Central Park. At the postwedding dinner, he had been seated next to Jesse Kornbluth’s mother and proceeded to “pump” Pearl Kornbluth for every detail of her son’s illustrious first wedding (“it cost $800,000 in 1984”) and subsequent short-lived marriage. What made it a curious conversation was Dominick’s interest in Jesse’s previous wife, Katharine, rather than his current hours-long bride, Annette Tapert. According to Jesse Kornbluth, his mother revealed “how my former mother-in-law, Anne Cox Chambers, called her to ask if there was any chance I’d go back to Katharine Johnson, and Nick put that in People Like Us.”

  In that novel, the confluence of fiction and reality also tilts in the latter’s favor with Dominick’s introduction of the character Gus Bailey, who resembles the acerbic Burnsy Harrison, edited out of The Winners on the strong recommendation of Michael Korda. Gus Bailey is Dominick: a glossy magazine writer, divorced from an invalid wife and father of two adult sons, who hires a private detective to follow his daughter’s killer upon his release from jail after receiving a prison sentence of only two and a half years. In Dominick’s one fictional stretch, Bailey is heterosexual and very good in bed.

  Prepublication of the novel, Women’s Wear Daily predicted another “La Côte Basque 1965” scandal in the making, even though Dominick protested, “I didn’t tell one private thing I know. There’s not one betrayal in this book.” Egos got manhandled nonetheless.

  Annette and Oscar de la Renta were not happy with the characters of a wealthy socialite who marries a Greek shoe designer, named Loelia and Mickie Minardos. “It wasn’t based on Oscar,” Dominick told his publicist Judy Hilsinger. But the de la Rentas chose not to believe his denial. Their anger may have had less to do with People Like Us than the story Dominick told around town that the Argentinian fashion designer used to be nicknamed Darkie in his boarding-school days in Europe.

  Other people were also miffed. In People Like Us, Dominick turned the fawning Women’s Wear Daily columnist Aileen Mehle into the fawning columnist Dolly de Longpre. Dominick’s friend Alice Mason told him that Mehle had read early galleys of the novel, and if he did not change the de Longpre character substantially there would be serious repercussions. Dominick denied making any edits, but another society columnist, David Patrick Columbia, insisted changes were made to accommodate the woman best known as Suzy in Women’s Wear Daily. Perhaps not enough changes were made. Seated next to Mehle at a Metropolitan Museum gala hosted by actor Michael Douglas and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Diandra, Dominick overheard Suzy vow, “I will not be where this man is!” He liked Mehle when she wrote about his Black and White Ball in her Journal-American column. Dominick did not like Mehle when she subsequently wrote about Lenny and him, opining, “She’s the cattle heiress. He’s the vice president of Four Star, and that’s about four more stars than you can give this marriage.”

  Dominick’s jibes at Mehle were hardly his most pointed in People Like Us. He saved those poison-tipped stilettoes for Jerry Zipkin, the inspiration for the loathsome character Ezzie Fenwick, and it is doubtful he let any personality warts there get sliced in the editing process. According to Griffin Dunne, his father hated Zipkin and took delight in writing about the aging “walker” who sports “one peculiar eye, rather like a poached egg in appearance,” and speaks in a “nasal voice.” At heart, Dominick envied Zipkin, who had been the protégé and longtime friend of his literary idol W. Somerset Maugham. In more recent history, Zipkin had the ear, as well as the arm, of such high-profile women as Lee Radziwill, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Nancy Reagan, who called him “a great teacher.” On the subject of Zipkin, Dominick tended to agree with the lady who called him “the chief eunuch of the last empress of China.” Dominick put it more bluntly one night at the theater when, walking down the aisle, he accidently tripped, causing his archenemy to laugh excessively. “You cunt!” Dominick yelled back in a voice as loud as Zipkin’s cackle.

  Mart Crowley said the two men hated each other so much “because they were the same person.”

  Politically, they were not the same person. Dominick’s Barry Goldwater days were long behind him when he used the C-word to describe America’s best-known walker, whereas the homosexual Zipkin remained loyal to the Republican Party in an era when Ronald Reagan banned people with HIV from entering the country. Still, the Zipkin comparisons never failed to rankle Dominick. When a reporter from the New York Times called him a “walker” in so many words, Dominick shot back, “I never became an extra man. That ain’t my role.” He was a published writer, after all. What did Zipkin do but go to parties and openings?

  In another respect, Dominick was also right. People Like Us did not alienate his friends in the way that “La Côte Basque 1965” alienated Truman Capote’s. “They weren’t real friends,” Tita Cahn said of the “people” in People Like Us. “Nick was smart enough to know he was their flavor of the month. But he was enjoying it, and he would sit at their table and entertain them. Babe Paley was a true friend of Truman Capote’s. That was different.”

  Others agreed. “Dominick would never have written about the swans the way Truman did. He was careful,” said Jesse Kornbluth.

  Except for the Zipkin character, Dominick kept Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale’s circle of West Coast friends out of the Manhattan milieu of People Like Us. Two years later, those illustrious Angelinos were not so lucky. With the 1990 publication of An Inconvenient Woman, it was such an easy twist of fact and fiction to have the $18,000-a-month mistress character, Flo March, murdered on a hit ordered by the billionaire’s widow, Pauline Mendelson.

  Dominick never believed that Marvin Pancoast acted alone in murdering Vicki Morgan. He had been looking for a way to tell his version of the story when another murder enflamed his sense of justice. It also fascinated him that the victim happened to have been a very close friend of Jerry Zipkin, Betsy Bloomingdale, and Nancy Reagan, and resembled in many ways the seventy-five-year-old Zipkin.

  On September 25, 1987, someone shot and killed Alfredo de la Vega, a seventy-five-year-old realtor who had recently attended a belated birthday party for the first lady, Nancy Reagan. The homicide took place in de la Vega’s apartment at 1285 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in West Hollywood. Bruce Nelson, a fellow top-of-the-line realtor, was one of the few people who knew de la Vega who, in turn, spoke to Dominick about the murder. “If it would have been anybody else, it would have been a full-page headline, and there was just one blip in the Los Angeles Times,” said Nelson. “It was during the Iran-Contra scandal. Alfred had become friendly with the Reagans, and to save any kind of controversy they squashed the story.” And that included an article Dominick wanted to write for Vanity Fair on the murder. “He tried to get into it,” said Nelson. “He was squashed all along the way. The word [went out] that Dominick was persona non grata. ‘Don’t talk to him.’”

  It was another hushed-up murder of yet another gay Republican bachelor with ties to the political establishment. John Gavin, a former actor and ambassador to Mexico, eulogized de la Vega, a longtime friend of his well-connected Mexican-Californian family. “We are all terribly saddened. He was an uncle figure to me. He was a person who had many friends. He loved life and enjoyed the social whirl. He was in great demand,” said Gavin, née John Golenor.

  His short quote was the last the Los Angeles Times would write about Alfredo de la Vega. Dominick wanted to correct that slight and decided to connect the de la Vega an
d Vicki Morgan murders, making the former crime a gay bashing in his novel An Inconvenient Woman. “Don’t use the real names, then you can’t be sued,” he told Nelson.

  “Dominick did believe that a friend of de la Vega knew Pancoast and may have been involved in both murders,” said Norman Carby.

  If people would not talk to him about Alfredo de la Vega for a nonfiction piece in Vanity Fair, he would recycle everything he knew about the case, put it all in An Inconvenient Woman, and call the homosexual victim Hector Paradiso.

  The novel received Dominick’s first unqualified rave from the New York Times. Equally gratifying, the review was written by a fellow best-selling novelist (and daughter of producer and former MGM president Dore Schary). “This is a smart novel because Dominick Dunne understands the distance between Los Angeles society and the spicy bazaars of Hollywood,” wrote Jill Robinson. “And what makes Mr. Dunne not only first-rate, but also different from other writers who write about the very rich in late twentieth-century America, is his knowledge that there’s more to it than getting the labels and the street names right. He shows he knows by the way he tells you how his people feel, the way they listen, the things they cover up and the things they don’t. He’s lived in L.A. and gets it right, but he has the perspective you only get when you leave. He knows every story there is to tell, precisely how it happened and why it happened. He also knows there’s nothing up there in society to envy.”

  According to Elizabeth Ashley, An Inconvenient Woman was spot-on, about not only L.A. society but the high-priced call girls who work the town. The actress knew Dominick from her role in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles; she played a character inspired by Bobo Sears, the chorus girl who married and quickly divorced Standard Oil scion Winthrop Rockefeller.

  “It’s awfully good,” Ashley said of An Inconvenient Woman. A friend of the actress had been one of the most expensive call girls in Los Angeles before she married a movie star and sat on the board of an art museum there. “She was one of the smartest women. She knew a lot of the younger women in the business. They were still friends of hers and knew people involved in the whole [Vicki Morgan] thing. She knew Bloomingdale. Dominick got it!” said Ashley.