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

by Robert Hofler

  Chris Darden tried to use Shipp’s testimony to counter the defense’s charge that the LAPD had, in any way, framed Simpson for the murders, and, in fact, the city’s police officers maintained an overly cordial relationship with the defendant. Shipp also testified that he had once been a part-time instructor at the Los Angeles Police Academy, where he taught classes on domestic abuse. O.J. and Nicole Simpson knew of his work at the academy, and years ago, the couple had separate talks with him about an altercation that took place between them on New Year’s Day 1989. The couple had gotten into a physical fight after having sex and sought counseling. Shipp gave them a handbook on domestic violence, later testifying at the trial that while Nicole thought she fit some of the profiles of battered wives, O.J. admitted to identifying with only one trait of husbands who batter: obsessive jealousy.

  Darden told the jury that Simpson’s admission of killing his former wife in a dream was “about as relevant as any statement could be, save an outright confession.”

  The prosecutor was overly optimistic. Carl Douglas cross-examined Shipp, and Dominick left no doubt about what he thought of the defense attorney’s interview technique. He later wrote, “I think that I have never seen a meaner face than Carl Douglas’s when he went after Shipp in his cross-examination.”

  Douglas tried to portray Shipp as a liar, a drunk, and a part-time actor who, rather than being Simpson’s friend, was searching for his brief moment in the spotlight. The “friendship” question was crucial because Douglas wanted to show that Shipp did not have the kind of close relationship with Simpson that would have allowed him to share secrets like beating his wife or having dreams of killing her.

  Shipp admitted on the stand, “I guess you can say I was like everybody else, one of his servants. I did police stuff for him all the time. I ran license plates. That’s what I was. I mean, like I said, I loved the guy.”

  Douglas also attacked Shipp for giving an interview to Sheila Weller, author of the Simpson book Raging Heart. Shipp replied that Weller did not pay him for the interview and had promised him anonymity. Weller identified him in the book as Leo.

  Douglas asked Shipp, “Were you prepared to share intimate secrets about your friend to a total stranger without the promise of anonymity?”

  “Oh, no. No,” replied Shipp.

  “So the promise of anonymity was the reason or the motivation for you to share intimate secrets with your friend to a total stranger?”

  “Correct.”

  To Dominick and others, Shipp was a courageous man who spoke the truth to serve justice.

  To many in the African American community, Shipp was at best a snitch. Marcia Clark reported being shocked by what happened following Shipp’s testimony. “Black journalists in the newsroom below us were branding him a liar and a traitor,” she wrote. The black-owned L.A.-based newspaper the Sentinel called Shipp a “drunk” in its article “O.J.’s Cast of ‘Addicts,’ ‘Liars.’” In the Los Angeles neighborhood where Shipp lived, black people called him a Judas to his face, and death threats were directed not only at him but his wife and children.

  Dominick joined Marcia Clark in writing about the racial divide in the journalists’ reactions, but not everyone agreed with their negative assessment. John Johnson, an African American journalist, covered the trial for WABC. “First and foremost, there weren’t that many black journalists covering the trial,” Johnson recalled. “It was a major trial and considered a plumb assignment.” Johnson said he had no problem finding Simpson guilty of the murders. Long before the trial, he had been a guest at Simpson’s Rockingham estate; he danced with Nicole and discovered firsthand just how “jealous O.J. could be.” Despite his own negative impressions of the defendant, Johnson felt that many white journalists were “not sensitive to the subject of a black man murdering a white woman in the American culture.”

  Dominick may have contributed to such insensitivity. After he attended the L.A. Opera’s opening-night performance of Otello, Dominick remarked on how the audience recoiled when the tenor Plácido Domingo, in blackface, strangled his blonde Desdemona, soprano June Anderson. He even quoted socialite Barbara Davis as saying, “The jury should see this!”

  “What did [an opera] have to do with the Simpson trial?” asked John Johnson. In an even greater leap from reality to theater, Dominick went on to cast a real-life player in the Simpson drama to essay the role of Iago. “Sometimes I think Al Cowlings fits the part,” he wrote. Dominick never explained how Cowlings in any way resembled one of Shakespeare’s most unmotivated villains.

  The uproar surrounding Ron Shipp only increased in the following month when Simpson’s mother, Eunice, and sisters, Shirley and Carmelita, testified that Shipp was never alone with O.J. on June 13. Eunice Simpson also said that Shipp looked “spaced” that night at Rockingham.

  Right after his day in court, Shipp felt so ostracized that he considered seeking professional help but knew he could not trust psychiatrists. “I was afraid to see a therapist because they were selling their stories,” he said. Shipp recalled how Nicole and O.J.’s respective therapists had sold their stories to the press. During his pretrial talks with the prosecutors, Shipp became friendly with Patti Jo Fairbanks and felt she was one of the few people in whom he could confide.

  Fairbanks suggested he speak to Dominick. She explained how Judge Ito had seated her reporter friend next to the victims’ families and how he had spoken and given comfort to Craig Cignarelli, another controversial witness, during the Menendez trial. She assured Shipp that Dominick would be equally discreet with him.

  Over the weeks following his testimony, Shipp and Dominick met several times at either the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Hills Hotel, wherever Dominick was staying at the time. “These people, at times, they were like my therapist,” Shipp said of Dominick and author Sheila Weller.

  He talked to Dominick about his posttestimony trauma. “In my ignorance, I truly believed in my heart that anybody, not just the African American community who loved O.J., once they knew what he did, would think he should fry. Yet there were those who didn’t care, and that’s what I couldn’t understand.”

  During one conversation at the Chateau, something happened to Shipp that he did not expect: he let his pent-up anger come to the surface to explode in front of his new reporter friend. Shipp recalled, “I sat there and I went off. I went off with a bunch of my frustrations. I said, ‘Dominick, I’m a victim here. Look at what has happened!’ I went off on the world. I was very disappointed with what I saw in life.”

  Shipp’s own friends tried to justify the Simpson family’s behavior, telling him, “Hey, Ron, this guy is fighting for his freedom.”

  Shipp disagreed. “That’s OK if you’re not guilty. But this guy? C’mon. I can’t believe they made his mom and sisters lie on the stand!” he said.

  Dominick listened, but it unnerved him when Shipp lost control and started screaming in his hotel room. “I felt so bad,” Shipp recalled. “Dominick looked at me, the look that he gave me! He looked at me like, ‘Is this guy getting ready to completely flip out?’ And another part of him was so sad for me.”

  Shipp spent the rest of their time together at the Chateau trying to apologize for his outburst.

  “Dominick helped Ron so much,” said Patti Jo Fairbanks. “Dominick was so involved with helping victims.”

  Dominick saw himself in the Fred Goldman family and how they never missed a day of the Simpson trial. Likewise, he came to criticize the Brown family because after the first few weeks they rarely made visits to the courtroom. One day over lunch, Dominick asked Fairbanks what compelled the Brown family to be so negligent. Fairbanks, who claimed to have a “warped sense of humor,” told him, “You know, a double homicide doesn’t make a dysfunctional family functional.”

  Dominick reached into his pocket to pull out a gold-fringed Smythson’s notebook and “frantically” started writing with his Mont Blanc pen. “Dominick,” Fairbanks warned, “if you ever quote me on that I�
�ll kill you!”

  He immediately put away his expensive pen and paper, and the two friends continued with their lunch. But Dominick remembered Fairbanks’s quote, and he did not delete from his notebook what she said that day.

  There were other witnesses Dominick also helped. “He did befriend Ron Shipp and Mark Fuhrman,” said Fairbanks. “Mark owes Dominick a lot more than people know. Dominick felt so bad. He felt Mark deserved better, and Mark did deserve better.”

  Mark Fuhrman was supposed to be one of the prosecution’s star witnesses. The Toobin article in the New Yorker, as well as F. Lee Bailey’s cross-examination, destroyed whatever luster Fuhrman possessed pretrial. The defense team produced no fewer than four witnesses to contradict Fuhrman’s testimony that he had not used the N-word in ten years. One of those witnesses, Laura Hart McKinny, was a former girlfriend who, working on a screenplay with the detective, recorded audiotapes in which Fuhrman repeatedly used the racial slur. The prosecution charged that the playing of the tape was too inflammatory, but Judge Ito ruled that a few segments could be played to the jury.

  Fuhrman later pleaded guilty to perjury but always maintained that he did not remove the glove from Nicole Simpson’s condo and place it at Rockingham.

  “Mark was a guy who did the right thing and paid a helluva price for it,” said Fairbanks. And no one agreed with her more on that point than her friend from Vanity Fair.

  Dominick said his friendship with the detective did not begin during the trial. As Fairbanks explained, “Mark was out of the trial very quickly.”

  Dan Abrams agreed. “Fuhrman was under pretty tight security at the time,” he recalled. “Dominick probably didn’t see him apart from when Fuhrman passed us by in the hallway.”

  Whether they met during the trial or not, Lucianne Goldberg believed that her phone friend Dominick quickly developed a “crush” on the detective. Certainly Fuhrman’s appearance and charisma were noted by many, including his major nemesis in the press. Jeffrey Toobin wrote, “In the flesh, Mark Fuhrman was an imposing figure, a muscular six foot three inches, the first man in the courtroom who appeared a physical match for the defendant.”

  Among the reporters, CNN’s Art Harris arguably had the most contact with Fuhrman during the trial. Harris knew of the McKinny tapes but he also knew Fuhrman to be a respected, hardworking detective. Shortly after the Toobin article appeared in the New Yorker, Harris began work on a segment for CNN that would reveal the positive side of Fuhrman.

  “I found three black women who said Mark was a great detective,” Harris recalled. These women knew Fuhrman through his work on cases involving the respective murders of friends and relatives. “They said he was very compassionate with their family, that he helped solve the murders and gave them closure. They went on camera [for CNN]. It was a pretty interesting piece. The defense wasn’t thrilled.”

  Dominick and Harris discussed the controversial detective. “Dominick was one of those who saw through the BS and the spin of what [the defense] was up to,” said Harris. “Dominick knew that a good cop was a good cop, and he may have wished he had had a Mark Fuhrman with his daughter’s case. Dominick and I talked about it a lot.”

  After the McKinny tapes surfaced late in the trial, Fuhrman returned to court. This time he took the Fifth, even to the question of whether he had planted the glove. Harris sat near Dominick that day in court. The TV camera followed the detective, and when he saw a friend in court, Fuhrman walked by Harris on his way to the stand to grab the correspondent’s shoulder.

  “I was not a reactionary or an ideologue,” said Harris. “But when Mark squeezed my shoulder, I knew the irony. ‘OK, Art Harris is going to be known as Mark Fuhrman’s friend.’ I saw the cutline. And the irony was not lost on Dominick.”

  Dominick, however, never wrote about Harris’s difficult moment in court. He wrote about Fuhrman’s kids instead. “What’s it going to be like for them?” he worried in print.

  Kim Goldman could not look at Fuhrman when he repeatedly took the Fifth, and instead she sobbed softly in court. Dominick could feel her fury but kept his own opinion of the detective to himself. Later that day, Fred Goldman held an impromptu press conference on the courthouse steps. “This is not the Mark Fuhrman trial!” he pleaded.

  “Dominick became family to me during that trial. The closest and bright spot in my day,” said Kim Goldman. “He loved me like a daughter. I can’t express how much his role really helped me personally. My dad would say the same thing.” Dominick’s own daughter had been about the same age as Kim when she was murdered, and they talked about Dominique. “There was a lot of that. I never felt he was trying to get anything from me. It was a genuine fondness,” said Kim.

  The only real disagreements Dominick and Kim had during the long trial stemmed from his cordial relationship with Simpson’s mother and sisters. “He was friendly with them, which drove me nuts,” she recalled. “And they knew he thought their son was guilty.”

  She told Dominick she did not like his talking with Eunice, Shirley, and Carmelita. “I hate it when you do that!” she said.

  “I know that,” he replied.

  Better than anyone, Kim Goldman knew how Dominick really felt about O.J. Simpson. “Which made it comfortable for me to talk to him,” she said.

  In early June, the jury finally saw the autopsy photographs of the two victims. Dominick and other reporters had to hire an attorney “to argue our right to view the photographs.” The trial began with the crime-scene photos, with the victims’ clothes covering much of the carnage. The autopsy photos were much more graphic. Placed on easels, they exposed every knife mark on the two corpses.

  More than any of the other forty-seven reporters present, Dominick had a visceral reaction to the autopsy photographs. A few colleagues asked if he was all right. He waved away their concern but soon had to sit down. He felt faint. Shoreen Maghame sat beside him. Dominick later wrote: “What was the most haunting, what bothered me the most when I looked at these pictures was that their eyes were open. All I could think of was that she saw him. She knew. Her lips were opened. Her hair turned dark from the blood from her scalp. It just haunted me. The look on her face.”

  Reporters thought Dominick saw his own daughter’s murder when he examined the autopsy photos. Later, Linda Deutsch asked him, “Why do you choose to do this?”

  Deutsch believed that Dominick, by looking at the autopsy photographs and attending court every day, “was sentencing himself to a purgatory of reliving his daughter’s killing. Other than that he was fascinated with the process.”

  But to her question, why he put himself through it, Dominick remained silent. “No, I didn’t get an answer from him,” Deutsch said.

  “He went almost insane,” said Griffin Dunne. “It was like a disembowelment for him, with everything that happened with Dominique. It was just churning up every ugly memory.”

  13

  Princess Diana and Breakdowns

  As the Simpson trial entered its six month, everyone grew tired, became high-strung, got testy. Among the reporters, Dominick led the charge against the Nation of Islam guards who prevented anyone from entering the men’s room whenever Johnnie Cochran used the facilities. Dominick expressed his fear to friends that he was “losing it.” Whether or not he needed a break from his O.J. obsession, Graydon Carter gave him one: a special out-of-the-country assignment for Vanity Fair.

  Dominick did not keep his UK visit in late June 1995 a secret. He needed to tell Judge Ito his reason for leaving the courtroom or risk losing his reserved seat. Otherwise, he enjoyed bragging about it.

  “I have to leave Los Angeles for a few days,” Dominick told Dan Abrams. “Graydon wants me to go to London over the weekend to cover a party Vanity Fair is giving at the Serpentine Galleries to honor Princess Diana.” No journalist knew better how to bury the lede for maximum effect, now that he knew what the word meant.

  Abrams joked, asking that Dominick set him up on a date with the suddenly single
princess.

  “Are you serious?” Dominick asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?! Because . . . she’s Princess fucking Di. That’s why not!”

  Dominick did not know if it was wise to leave Los Angeles for even a few days and possibly miss something important. Princess Diana, however, specifically requested his presence at the party. Obsessed by the Simpson case, she wanted to meet the reporter whose Menendez trial coverage she had discussed with him long-distance on the phone. His going to the party almost qualified as a command performance, and in his journal, Dominick wrote how “camp” it was, going from O.J. to Princess Di.

  At the Serpentine Galleries, Dominick again received preferential seating, next to the princess. When she asked if the trial ever got boring, Dominick mentioned that Judge Ito sometimes let the lawyers speak too long. He went on to tell her that the star-struck judge gave the princess his regards.

  Princess Diana dazzled that day in what was to become known as her “revenge dress,” a black off-the-shoulder ensemble designed for her three years before by Greek designer Christina Stambolian. Because she considered the dress too daring, Diana never wore it. She had planned to wear a Valentino gown at the Serpentine Galleries party, but her unfaithful husband upended those plans. The day before the gala, Prince Charles admitted his infidelity, having carried on a long-term affair with Camilla Parker Bowles. At the last minute, Diana chucked the more sedate Valentino for the far sexier Stambolian. She then goosed the low-cut dress by wearing the tallest high-heel shoes ever seen on a member of the royal family. What better day to be seated next to the royal cuckquean? Dominick Dunne from West Hartford had arrived! He was finally there.