Old Hollywood acquaintances who had snubbed him in the 1970s now invited him to parties—or, in the case of Gregory Peck’s wife, Veronique—other people’s parties. In his private journal, Dominick wrote of Mrs. Peck being pretentious and superior. She had dismissed him repeatedly when he was Nick Dunne, the failure.
The Simpson trial transformed him into what New York magazine would soon call “America’s most famous journalist.” More important for Mrs. Gregory Peck, Dominick was the only person she knew who held a seat (soon to be permanent) in Judge Lance Ito’s courtroom for the O.J. Simpson trial. She took it upon herself to invite him to a party being given at the home of the human rights activist Stanley Sheinbaum and his wife, Betty, daughter of movie mogul Harry Warner. The party would be in honor of King Hussein and Queen Noor, whom Dominick had profiled for Vanity Fair. As Veronique Peck put it to Dominick, “Stanley thought you might fill the king and queen in on the trial.”
Dominick did not mind gossiping for his dinner. He did not think much of Mrs. Peck, but he always admired Sheinbaum and his humanitarian projects.
More gracious were invitations from an old friend who had never turned her back on him. Tita Cahn gave a series of parties in 1995, all of which had one requirement. “You could attend only if you wanted to talk about O.J.,” said the hostess. “I seat twelve, so we’d have one conversation.”
Dominick was a constant at those dinners. Other guests would rotate, although Sherry Lansing and her husband, director William Friedkin, frequently attended. “Leaving those parties I had this feeling of being so special,” said Lansing, then CEO of Paramount Pictures. “I’d think, ‘Oh God, I have the inside track on the trial.’” But not for long. “A few days later Vanity Fair came out, and now the whole world knows!”
And the world eagerly anticipated Dominick’s O.J. reporting in Vanity Fair. “People waited for those columns like they waited for the next Dickens installment in New York Harbor,” said his editor Wayne Lawson. “That’s how popular those things were in the course of those trials. And he knew it, and he knew that he could approach anybody and they would give him a quote.”
Suddenly, it was de rigueur in Los Angeles to have Dominick Dunne as a guest at your party. It was how the town’s elite got the inside scoop before the readers of Vanity Fair and, better yet, learned something that the magazine’s lawyers might excise to avoid libel.
As with the von Bülow and Menendez trials, Dominick observed what other reporters saw but rarely put in print. Just as Dominick knew Claus von Bülow’s position in New York and Newport society, he knew all about Hollywood star treatment, even if it was for an accused murderer. Only Dominick knew to report that the defendant and his dozen lawyers “had the curious look of a dinner party” in the Ito courtroom. Only Dominick knew to report how the younger lawyers laughed too much at Simpson’s jokes “the way people who are not used to being in the orbit of a celebrity do.” Dominick also made a specialty of giving bits of information about the never-photographed jurors, flaunting his superior sense of taste to flatter the readers of Vanity Fair. In one article, he noted the hairdos of two alternates, so elaborate that “they must have to get up at five every morning to prepare themselves.”
In January 1995, during the pretrial hearings, every successful party list in Los Angeles included not only Dominick but one of the trial’s attorneys as well, preferably from the prosecution. Ray Stark called upon his daughter, Wendy, to extend a party invitation to her good friend from Vanity Fair. Despite Dominick’s roman à clef The Winners, the Stark family never took offense. That dispute would come later when he wrote about them in Another City, Not My Own. In winter 1995, however, all was calm between the Starks and Dominick, even if he had to tell Wendy he could not possibly attend her father’s upcoming party. He was too busy. Wendy could not imagine the old Nick Dunne saying such a thing. But she knew when to bring out the big guns: Marcia Clark would be attending Daddy’s fete.
Dominick suddenly was not so busy that night.
Ray Stark made only one demand. “Please don’t ask Marcia about the trial or O.J.,” he asked.
Dominick pitied Clark even before the trial began. Prosecutors had to be tough, and juries were sexist, he firmly believed. They did not like strong female attorneys, even if their job was to put rapists and murderers behind bars.
Dominick obeyed Ray Stark’s edict, which did not mean Clark could not ask questions. She wanted to know how Betsy Bloomingdale could invite him back into her home after Dominick wrote An Inconvenient Woman.
Dominick demurred. He called Betsy a “classy” lady.
Classy had nothing to do with it. Nor did Betsy’s explanation regarding their détente. She said they made up at Spago at one of Swifty Lazar’s Oscar parties. “Everyone was looking because there he was and there I was and blah blah blah,” Betsy recalled. “But I said, ‘Hello.’ And he said, ‘Hello.’ And then we were all great friends after that. A ‘hello’ could do it.”
Saying “hello” also had nothing to do with it. In the end, the patrician Betsy Bloomingdale wanted the O.J. dirt just like everybody else in town.
“The measure of Dominick’s power was that after he wrote An Inconvenient Woman Betsy Bloomingdale had to forgive him,” said AP reporter Linda Deutsch. “Otherwise, she would have been out of the social set and wouldn’t have heard all the gossip.”
“Once Dominick got to be famous, people like Betsy Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan didn’t care anymore,” said his book publicist Judy Hilsinger. “They wanted proximity to him because he had all the O.J. gossip. And Betsy and Nancy were so close.”
Dominick topped the town’s A-list. He could even entertain a notorious madam at a high-profile lunch and still curry the favor of the former first lady and her superwealthy best friend.
Heidi Fleiss first heard about Dominick wanting to meet her sometime after her 1994 arrest for attempted pandering. “It was at the Playboy mansion at one of Hugh Hefner’s Tuesday night card games,” she recalled. A mutual friend approached her about talking to the Vanity Fair writer. “Sure. Put me in touch,” said Fleiss. In early 1995, she was suffering through her own trial in Los Angeles, and Dominick believed, incredulously, that she would do more time for her victimless crime than Simpson would for double murder.
Dominick arranged a proper lunch for Heidi and him to chat at the Hotel Bel-Air. “It was the most awesome day of my life!” gushed Fleiss. Excited, she even sweetened the date by bringing “a couple of my top hookers with me.” Dominick did not mention the two uninvited guests in his Vanity Fair article, but he treated them with all due respect and kindness. “Dominick knew pain,” said Fleiss. “He helped a lot of people, including me. He made a connection. He could have been a snobby asshole; he had achieved that. But he wasn’t that way at all. He was wonderful.”
To Dominick’s surprise, Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale were also dining that afternoon at the Bel-Air, and as soon as he, Fleiss, and her hooker friends stepped into the restaurant, the two doyennes sent word to join them. “We just had a lot of L.A. gossip,” Fleiss said of the diverse party. After Nancy and Betsy left the hotel restaurant, she turned to Dominick. “I can’t fucking believe what just happened here!” Fleiss exclaimed. Neither could he.
The Dominick-and-Betsy rapprochement did not end there. He even received a Bloomingdale invitation to a party that took place the night after the TV movie version of An Inconvenient Woman re-aired and a few million viewers watched again as Jill Eikenberry’s wealthy widow ordered a hit on Rebecca De Mornay’s out-of-work mistress.
Covering a long trial can be a grind, but stories like the first lady and her best friend dining with a madam and her girls put Dominick in good stead with the other reporters. What other journalist could corral with such tales?
“Every morning outside the courtroom, there was the bull pen of reporters,” Linda Deutsch recalled. “Everybody talked about what had happened, and the highlight was always Dominick. He regaled everyone with h
is evening before.”
Deutsch especially liked the story Dominick told about going to a rich woman’s home for a party, at which the hostess announced, “I’m delaying my next facelift until after the O.J. trial is over!”
“Dominick had sort of been run out of town, and with the O.J. trial he felt he had been welcomed back,” said Beth Karas, a reporter for Court TV. Her favorite stories from Dominick involved his weekly lunches with Elizabeth Taylor, another chameleon friend who forgave him the Ash Wednesday debacle in order to get all the O.J. news. He strongly advised the movie star not to be seen at Johnnie Cochran’s tribute to her lawyer Neil Papiano in order to avoid a photo op with the murderer’s biggest defender. More fun were Dominick’s stories about lunch with Liz when her other guest was the king of pop. One afternoon, Michael Jackson brought his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, who sat down to eat with them. “It was the most bizarre day of my life,” said Dominick. Jackson made a habit of bringing Taylor an extravagant gift, always tied up with a lavender ribbon to match her famous eyes. Inside one such package, she found a diamond and a sapphire bracelet. “For lunch! For lunch!” Dominick exclaimed, both shocked and delighted at Jackson’s casual display of his mega-wealth.
“He would act out Elizabeth opening the gift,” Karas recalled. “Dominick loved being the belle of the ball. He was redeemed.”
Time magazine’s James Willwerth saw something beyond mere entertainment in Dominick’s morning floor show for the reporters. “Dominick milked the bull pen,” said Willwerth. “If he told you great Hollywood stories and you listened to it, you want to please him, especially in L.A. And there’s Dominick, ‘Give me some of your inside stuff on O.J. and I’ll give you some of my Hollywood stories.’”
Marie Brenner, who covered the Simpson trial for Vogue, put a more positive spin on her friend’s relationship to the reporters. “Dominick was extra conversational and goading,” she said. “He knew he got his best material from the roving reporters, who would open up to it—the minutia they couldn’t use but he could use to weave these brilliant tales. Dominick was there both as sponge and commentator and parish priest and father figure. He was there having fun. He made everything fun.”
“He wasn’t looking to be the purveyor of sage advice,” noted Dan Abrams. “He wanted information from me, too.”
Dominick was especially popular with those reporters he took to dinner on the Vanity Fair expense account, whether the restaurant was Cicada, Eclipse, Le Dome, or Mortons. “The most defined memories were the excitement of going out to dinner with Dominick during the trial,” said Abrams. “It wasn’t like going out to dinner with a colleague. It was going out with a celebrity. Harry Belafonte comes up to the table; every megastar treated Dominick like he was a star.”
During the trial, defense attorneys Johnnie Cochrane and Robert Shapiro, as well as prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, emerged as some of the best-known personalities in America. “And Dominick was up there, particularly among the Hollywood elite,” said Abrams. “He was the personification of the case to them.” Abrams also noted how Simpson’s lawyers always treated Dominick “with kid gloves,” even though he was virulently antidefense. “O.J.’s lawyers all hated me,” said Dominick. And it was true. Johnnie Cochran explained Dominick’s reporting bias. “If you’re on the defense, it’s going to be an attack. That’s what Dominick lives for,” said the attorney. But Cochran and others on the Dream Team knew not to start a public fight with him. They had seen how Dominick tried to decimate Leslie Abramson’s reputation in TV interviews and Vanity Fair, and they learned not to cross him.
Abrams found Dominick “very democratic” with his rotation of reporter dinner guests. One night he would be Dominick’s guest; the next night it would ABC’s Cynthia McFadden or the New York Times’ David Margolick or the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. “It was always a treat to go out with him.”
Dominick relished being recognized, especially by other celebrities. “I love being famous,” he said infectiously with no guile, and he took genuine pleasure when Sacha Baron Cohen and Bono introduced themselves. But he got equal joy when more obscure personalities approached him.
Shirley Perlman, a reporter for Newsday, remembered one evening after dinner at Mortons. When a tall man approached them in the parking lot, she stepped aside to give him and Dominick some privacy to talk. Afterward, Dominick asked Perlman, “Do you know who that was?”
Perlman had no idea. “That was John Bryan!” exclaimed Dominick. Perlman still had no idea. “He’s the guy who sucked Fergie’s toes!” said Dominick. Bryan, an American financial manager, had confided in Dominick that he never really sucked the toes of the Duchess of York. He had merely kissed the instep of her foot when they were in the south of France together. Dominick said he did not believe that story for a second.
Dominick felt he owed Perlman big time during the Simpson trial. It was she, after all, who had warned him about a film crew in the courthouse. Perlman heard from another reporter that Michael Moore’s people were roaming the halls. In the press room, Perlman waved to Dominick but he did not have time to talk.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Where are you going?” she wanted to know.
“There’s a film crew that wants to interview me.”
“Be careful,” warned Perlman. “I understand Michael Moore is in the courthouse.”
Dominick nodded and then left. A few minutes later, he returned. “Oh honey, thank you.”
The film crew did not identify their muckraking filmmaker when they had first approached Dominick for an interview. But later, when he asked about Moore, on Perlman’s tip, they had to tell him the truth: Moore was taping his satirical newscast for NBC, TV Nation, and they were doing a segment on a retired U.S. Army psychological operations expert who wanted to reduce the amount of media coverage devoted to O.J. Simpson. Dominick would have been a prime target for Moore’s faux exposé.
“I owe you,” Dominick told Perlman.
The only real dustup Dominick had with his fellow reporters occurred just as the trial itself began. Judge Ito assigned Dominick, along with book writers Joe McGinnis and Joseph Bosco, reserved seats in the courtroom for the run of the trial. Many other reporters were given alternate-day seats or, worse, were relegated to the press rooms, where they had to watch the trial on closed-circuit TV. Bob Poole, writing for the Los Angeles Times, tore into Ito’s decision to give a permanent reserved seat to book authors and writers with long lead times, like Dominick. For his Times tirade, Poole interviewed Paul Pringle of the Copley News Service, who took specific aim at Dominick, calling him “Judith Krantz in pants.” Dominick later heard that Leslie Abramson took special delight in his masculinity being called into question. It was payback for his calling her kinky hair “Rastafarian.”
Dominick’s front-row seat in the courtroom was better than permanent. He sat between the Goldman and Brown families. Although Judge Ito let Dominick know it was very much his decision, an old friend from the Menendez trial made it happen.
“There was an issue of what reporter was going to sit next to [the victims’] family members,” said Patti Jo Fairbanks. In private negotiations with Ito, the senior legal assistant told the judge, “Hey, you’ve got to sit Dominick there. I can trust this man explicitly.” She told Ito about Dominick’s own similar tragedy, and how among all the reporters he would be the most sympathetic to the families. Fairbanks knew Dominick would not “infringe on their privacy. We did it to protect the families.”
The sister of Ron Goldman recalled her first impressions of the visitor seated to her immediate left. “Dominick was very much an observer in the beginning,” said Kim Goldman. “We were in shell shock, and Dominick had this nervous energy about him. He’d come in all frazzled, like the Nutty Professor with all these papers, a big bag, and he’d scribbled on his pad. He was kind of a character. I didn’t know anything about him.”
Kim Goldman said that in time she, her father, and her st
epmother began to look upon Dominick “as family.” He also played the cicerone of celebrity, letting the Goldmans know whenever someone famous visited the courtroom. Kim often did not know the celebs by face or name, leaving it to Dominick to give a detailed description of why they were notable and, of course, how he knew them personally and what he thought of them.
Dominick and the Goldmans also became kindred prisoners of the courtroom. Often, he would ask, “Why are we sitting here?” The inconvenience of a long trial rankled Dominick, being called into the courtroom and then sitting there waiting, waiting. “It can be very frustrating,” said Kim. “You’re called into court and then nothing happens for an hour.”
But that sense of unending boredom came later. When the trial began on January 24, 1995, the prosecution immediately introduced the grizzly crime-scene photographs of the two victims. The body of Nicole Brown Simpson, her arms and legs drawn up in a fetal position, rested at the bottom of the steps to her condo’s front door. Marcia Clark pointed to the photographs of Ron Goldman and spoke of his being “literally backed into a cage,” pushed into the corner of a fence, his shirt over his face, his bare torso punctured with several knife wounds.
A famous black man killing his white ex-wife: in America, it could not turn into anything but a media circus focused on race. It began with Jeffrey Toobin’s indictment of Mark Fuhrman six months before the trial began. Less than a week into the trial, on February 1, the first African American witness was called to testify, questioned by the prosecution’s only African American lawyer. The circus promptly acquired a whole new ring of action.
Chris Darden asked Ronald G. Shipp, a former police officer, to describe visiting Simpson’s Brentwood estate on June 13, 1994, a day after the murders. He had gone there as O.J.’s friend, Shipp said, to commiserate with the family over the death of Nicole Brown Simpson. According to Shipp, Simpson had asked to see him alone, and in his upstairs bedroom the two men talked about DNA testing. Simpson wanted to know how long it took to get the results. Shipp did not know but guessed a few weeks. More significant, Simpson went on to reveal his most recent nightmares. In his testimony, Shipp recalled that conversation: “He jokingly said, ‘To be honest, Shipp, I’ve had some dreams about killing [Nicole].’” (The two men also discussed the possibility of Simpson’s taking a lie detector test, although Judge Ito did not allow that part of their conversation to be retold to the jury.)
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 26
