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

by Robert Hofler

  Erik claimed not to be homosexual but said, “If I was gay, Craig [Cignarelli] would be my boyfriend.”

  “The statement is nonsensical, but I didn’t challenge it,” said Kearney. One day, Erik gave Kearney a screenplay he had written. He wanted the photographer’s opinion. It told the story of a teenager who kills his parents to collect the insurance money. Kearney did not read the script but knew the general outline from what Erik told him. “It’s horrible enough reading your own stuff,” Kearney surmised. “And I shelved it.”

  Kearney met Erik’s brother only once. “Lyle raced over to my house one day. He came over and pressed me about my time with Erik and what he had told me, because nothing had happened. It’s obvious to me now that [the double murder] was in the planning stage. Lyle was upset,” said Kearney.

  He also recalled a day that Erik stopped at his apartment in West Hollywood and arrived not in his usual sports car but an old clunker.

  “My god, Cinderella! What happened?” asked Kearney, staring at the car.

  “My car is in the shop,” Erik said. Kearney asked about a small debt that Erik owed him. “I won’t have your money for a while,” he replied.

  “You live in Beverly Hills and you don’t have forty dollars?”

  As soon as Kearney heard about the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez, he contacted the LAPD. The police were not only interested in the photographs he had taken of Erik; they also wanted to see Erik’s screenplay. Kearney flew back to Los Angeles from New Orleans. “A detective and I went to my storage locker to look for the script. My locker was a mess. We didn’t find the script. We did find my pictures. And I made those available,” he said.

  It was this detective, befriended by Dominick, who told him about Kearney’s photographs of Erik Menendez. “Dominick was very apologetic when he first phoned me,” Kearney recalled. “He was very respectful.”

  In their conversations, Dominick focused on the photographs because in his testimony Erik claimed that his father forced him to pose naked over an oval mirror to obtain a more dramatic view. Dominick rejected that story. He believed Erik got the idea of the mirror from one of Kearney’s photo sessions. It was this photo that Dominick insisted accompany his article in the pages of Vanity Fair.

  Dominick and Kearney discussed at length the day Erik showed up in a beat-up car. Kearney never knew for sure if Erik and Lyle were sexually abused by Jose Menendez. “I don’t know. What I do know is the father cut them off. He cut them off where it hurt the most in Beverly Hills,” Kearney said of money, cars, and clothes. “And that’s where it was all trailing from. The car wasn’t in a shop. The father had taken it away from him. Lyle couldn’t be a nobody. Erik wasn’t strong enough to defy that hook Lyle had in him. Dominick saw that.”

  In addition to being a respectful interviewer, Dominick turned into a most entertaining phone mate. During their conversations, Dominick would often break to take another call. Back on the line, he apologized, “Oh, that was Barbara Walters.” Or “Oh, that was Princess Diana.” Both women wanted to hear the latest gossip on the Menendez trial. (Much to his delight, Dominick would later be introduced to the princess, and again, it would be her interest in an American murder trial that led to their face-to-face meeting.)

  Dominick tried to put Kearney in touch with Barbara Walters, who wanted to interview him on ABC about Erik’s sexual orientation. Kearney rejected the request. “I wasn’t too interested in that,” he said.

  “Dominick had the aspect of an older gay man. If he had his choice, he would have been a queen,” said Kearney. “He would have enjoyed holding court with all these women with the latest gossip.” Like Craig Cignarelli, Kearney saw a similarity between Dominick and Truman Capote, but for a very different reason. Kearney had seen Robert Morse in the Capote bio play Tru, and the actor’s spot-on portrayal reminded him of Dominick, “taking phone calls from these women who just wanted the latest dish. Not that I think any of that interfered with Dominick’s quest for the truth,” said Kearney.

  He thoroughly enjoyed his conversations with the Vanity Fair writer. Much less comfortable were the phone calls he received from an assistant on one of the Menendez brothers’ defense teams. “So Mr. Kearney, you’ve been with Erik. Tell me the size of his penis,” the attorney wanted to know.

  Kearney thought fast. “Have you measured someone’s penis lately?” he asked. “If I tell you it’s seven and it turns out to be six inches, you’ll call me a liar.”

  From there, the phone conversation descended further. Obviously, Kearney handled it with aplomb. He never had to make the trip back to Los Angeles to testify in the Van Nuys Superior Courthouse.

  After three weeks of deliberation, Erik Menendez’s jury found itself deadlocked, unable to come to a unanimous decision on any of the charges: first-degree murder, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter. Two weeks later, Lyle Menendez’s jury was also deadlocked, and Judge Weisberg declared two mistrials. In the following month, the judge announced that the Menendez brothers would be retried but that the second trial would use only one jury.

  Shortly after the judge’s announcement, Leslie Abramson spoke to reporters and jurors who had been sympathetic to the defense. At the by-invitation-only meeting, she called Dominick “the little puke, the little closet queen.” Robert Rand printed Abramson’s slurs in a lengthy article on the trial for Playboy magazine. Throughout the trial, Dominick feared being outed and now a reporter he considered a friend, who called him his mentor, did the job. Mutual friends said Dominick felt “betrayed” that Rand repeated in print Abramson’s smack talk.

  “It was like a piece of kryptonite with Superman,” Rand said of Dominick’s reaction. The two men did not speak for years. “It was kind of funny. There were so many instances of his doing that to people, writing candidly about people in an uncomfortable way.” Dominick’s dilemma was one faced by any closeted journalist: while he expected his own privacy to be respected, he often delved into the personal lives of others, whether those confidential details related to money matters, judge-chamber negotiations, or health, like his February 1989 Vanity Fair article “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale,” published shortly before the photographer’s death from complications with AIDS.

  Dominick looked forward to the next Menendez trial but would not cover it. (At that second trial, in 1994, both brothers would be convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.) On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were knifed to death outside her condo at 875 South Bundy Drive in Brentwood, California. The suspect: O.J. Simpson.

  Between the Menendez trial and this new double murder, Dominick found his personal life rocked again when friends leaked him a copy of his brother’s new novel. Dominick, who claimed to have stopped reading John Gregory Dunne’s novels years ago, intended not to read Playland, about a child film star gone to seed. Obviously, he did get as far as the novel’s dedication page. His brother liked to splurge when it came to this publishing ritual, and Playland was no exception. In addition to mentioning over a half-dozen other people, John Gregory Dunne dedicated the book to Leslie Abramson and her husband, Tim Rutten, and their two children.

  “It broke Dominick’s heart,” said Pamela Bozanich.

  Dominick claimed to be “appalled” at the dedication to a woman who symbolized everything he loathed about defense attorneys. “It’s a curious stand he’s taken in light of what’s happened to a murdered child in our family,” Dominick complained of John. “If that’s what he thinks is right, that’s fine for him. But not for me. It’s not right for me to remain friendly with him.”

  Dominick wrote about the feud in Vanity Fair: “After that my brother and I did not speak for more than six years.” The two brothers were already not speaking by the time Playland appeared in book stores. Dominick, however, found it easier to pin their fight on a public matter, like a novel’s dedication, than a private one having to do with a series of hurtful sli
ghts regarding the memory of his murdered daughter.

  Dominick was not the only one who did not return for the second Menendez trial. His friend Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor, also found herself transfixed by O.J. Simpson. Although she never visited the Los Angeles courthouse for the so-called Trial of the Century, she did not have to show up in person. She had her own personal mole who told her everything about it, and that included what attorney was screwing what attorney and what witness was screwing what reporter. The murderers changed. Dominick did not.

  12

  O.J. and Parties

  One of the first people to phone Dominick after reports of the double murders in Brentwood made the news was a reporter friend from the Menendez trial. Shoreen Maghame needed some information. “Did you know O.J.?” she asked Dominick.

  “No, not really,” he said.

  His reply surprised Maghame. “I thought you knew everyone in Los Angeles!” she said.

  Dominick knew everyone in Los Angeles connected to the entertainment business. Sports were another story. Dominick knew more about O.J. Simpson as a bad actor than as a great football player. He often told people, he was the sissy. The three other Dunne brothers played sports, not him.

  In the very beginning, Dominick knew about the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman only from TV news reports, which made it clear that they took place when O.J. Simpson had been out of town on a Hertz golf promotional. Dominick told Maghame, “Lucky for him he was in Chicago when it happened.”

  It disappointed Maghame that her Vanity Fair friend was not, as usual, a great source. “Dominick definitely thought Simpson was innocent at first,” she recalled. “I believe everyone did, as we were told O.J. was in Chicago. That didn’t last long. Information from the investigation quickly started leaking out. And, once the chase happened, I’m fairly positive Dominick was convinced he’d done it.”

  In fact, Dominick was convinced of Simpson’s guilt even before the attempted escape to Mexico in the white Bronco driven by Al Cowlings on June 17, 1994. When Simpson arrived back in Los Angeles from Chicago on the morning of June 13, the police briefly handcuffed him outside his Brentwood estate at 360 North Rockingham Drive. Dominick recalled, “For ten minutes, O.J. was in handcuffs. He let them do it. I said, ‘He did it.’ It’s a gut feeling.” It was the same gut feeling he had when he looked into Claus von Bülow’s eyes. It was the same gut feeling he had when he saw Lyle Menendez’s cocky walk at his parents’ memorial service. These men were guilty.

  There were also Dominick’s daily phone calls to Lucianne Goldberg. Both of them knew it. O.J. Simpson had done it. What more proof did anyone need?

  Like most of America, Dominick watched on TV as Simpson tried to escape to Mexico in the white Bronco as people along the highway held signs, “Go, Juice, Go!” That summer, he attended his fiftieth class reunion at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut, and told his old classmates how appalled he was by the highway spectacle of people cheering a man who had murdered his ex-wife and a stranger. Among his many Simpson stories, he also asked his classmate Clifford McCormick not to leave him alone in case he ran into one of Canterbury’s more illustrious alums. Sargent Shriver, a Kennedy brother-in-law and founder of the Peace Corps, was there to celebrate his sixtieth class reunion, and Dominick felt he needed protection. “The Kennedys hate me!” he told McCormick. “Don’t leave me!”

  In January 1995 Dominick attended the pretrial hearings at which the major topics were whether Judge Lance Ito would allow TV cameras into his courtroom and if charges of domestic abuse against Simpson would be presented to the jury. Dominick had just turned sixty-nine; most reporters there were two or three decades younger. His age, however, did not prevent him from securing one of the twenty-five seats set aside for journalists at the pretrial. “Dominick was first in line every day at 6:00 a.m.,” said Jeffrey Toobin, a legal analyst for CNN and the New Yorker. At the time, Toobin was a thirty-four-year-old reporter covering the trial for the magazine. “I was close behind him in line. I admired Dominick for that, showing up every day early.” While reporters’ seats would be assigned during the trial, it was strictly first come, first serve at the pretrial.

  Toobin may have admired Dominick, but Dominick did not admire Toobin, and he let the reporter’s boss at the New Yorker know it. He told Tina Brown he strongly objected to Toobin’s article “An Incendiary Defense” for her magazine; it essentially laid the groundwork for the defense’s strategy that detective Mark Fuhrman was a racist rogue cop who may have planted some of the evidence, including a bloody glove, at Simpson’s residence. In case anyone missed the point, Toobin asked Fuhrman point blank, “Did you plant the glove?” After responding no, Fuhrman ended their phone conversation. Toobin made sure to include that exchange in “An Incendiary Defense,” published six months before the pretrial.

  Tina Brown knew how easily Dominick could be swayed by small expressions of respect and deference. She wisely suggested that he meet Toobin. “You’ll like Jeffrey,” she said. And, of course, Brown was right. Dominick and Toobin met during the pretrial hearings in the terrazzo corridors of the courthouse. Toobin found him “standoffish” at first, but they quickly got to know each other and became friends. Much later in the trial, Dominick confessed to Toobin, “I didn’t want to like you. I was mad about that piece in the New Yorker.” The two men never agreed about Fuhrman and his motives. But they did agree about Simpson. He murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

  Dominick was not the only one who thought the defense team literally handed Toobin the police file on Fuhrman, the basis for his New Yorker article. Dominick’s telephone friend Lucianne Goldberg went so far as to call Toobin “a turd.” While he denied the charges of being given any report, Toobin did receive an important tip about Fuhrman.

  Even before the preliminary hearings, the New Yorker reporter spoke to his old Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who had already joined Simpson’s defense, soon to be known as the Dream Team. Dershowitz said of Fuhrman, “He sounds like Oliver North, looks like Oliver North, and lies like Oliver North.” With that character assassination in mind, Toobin visited the Los Angeles County Courthouse, where he found Fuhrman’s file in the City of Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System, case number C 465,544. A disability report there contained a detailed psychological portrait of the man. While the report praised Fuhrman’s work as a detective, it also included a statement from a superior questioning his obsession with the “big arrest.” In the file, psychologist Dr. Ronald R. Koegler wrote: “After a while [Fuhrman] began to dislike his work, especially the ‘low-class people’ he was dealing with. He bragged about violence he used in subduing suspects, including chokeholds, and said he would break their hands or face or arms or legs, if necessary.”

  Toobin knew what he had found. As he reported, “The Fuhrman disability case had the potential to thrust the specter of Rodney King into the middle of the Simpson case.”

  Dominick knew Toobin’s tipster, having met Alan Dershowitz at the second Claus von Bülow trial. The two men decided early on to be friendly adversaries. “Dominick understood my role,” said Dershowitz. “Dominick could never do what I did. But as long as I admitted to myself they were guilty, as long as I didn’t distort or lie . . . He didn’t like my clients, but he wasn’t going to take it out on me.”

  According to Dershowitz, he and Dominick engaged in many long conversations during the course of both the von Bülow and the Simpson trials, conversations Dominick never wrote about. Dershowitz linked the two murder cases because, as he told Dominick, both involved evidence being either planted (the bag with the insulin-encrusted syringes in Sunny von Bülow’s closet at Clarendon Court) or tampered with (a bloody sock found in O.J. Simpson’s bedroom at his Rockingham estate). The lawyer and the reporter argued at length over the bloody sock. Dershowitz wanted to know why the blood contained EDTA, “which can only be found in a test tube, not in human blood.” (Marcia Clark, the lead pros
ecutor, maintained that since EDTA is used as a food preservative, it is often found in human blood.) Also troubling for Dershowitz was the mirror pattern of blood on the sock, apparently the result of blood having been poured onto the fabric rather than splashed.

  “Dominick and I talked a lot about the ends and the means,” Dershowitz recalled. “Once Dominick thought someone was guilty, he didn’t care what the means to get him convicted were. As a lawyer, I care a lot about the means.” Dershowitz told his reporter friend, “Well, the police tampered with the evidence.” And Dominick told his lawyer friend, “Look, if the police did something wrong, then the police should be prosecuted, but the guilty shouldn’t go free.”

  Dominick’s profound disappointment with defense lawyers had not changed from all the previous trials. But he had changed.

  He was not the old Nick Dunne of Hollywood failure, or even the Nick Dunne who wrote a few articles and books. He returned to Los Angeles this time as Dominick Dunne. “Just call me Dominick,” he said by way of introduction. He came to cover the O.J. Simpson trial as a best-selling novelist and the writer who most personified Vanity Fair and, in turn, the trial itself.

  “Dominick was very low key during the Menendez case. He wasn’t a big socializer,” said Patti Jo Fairbanks, the district attorney’s senior legal assistant. “But when he came back for the O.J. case, not only was he on the A-list but he was number 1 on the A-list. That guy was going everywhere! There wasn’t anyone who didn’t want to meet Dominick Dunne. And he loved it. It told him that he had redeemed himself from his former life in L.A.”