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

by Robert Hofler

  When he returned to Los Angeles, Dominick attended another round of dinners. One of those was to celebrate the upcoming TV movie adaptation of his novel A Season in Purgatory. David Brown and Aaron Spelling were the executive producers, and they had hired Robert “Buzz” Berger to produce. Or, as Berger put it, “I thought I was going to keep Spelling and Brown from killing each other.”

  Dominick rarely received tips anymore about who murdered Martha Moxley. The corpses of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman replaced hers in the tabloid zeitgeist, but he wondered if a TV movie could reignite interest in the Moxley murder. Dominick, who tried to grapple for control of NBC’s The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, kept his distance from this Spelling–Brown project. The Simpson trial occupied him full-time, but out of courtesy he accepted Buzz Berger’s invitation.

  “It was during the O.J. thing and Dominick was so involved,” said Berger. John le Carré also attended the TV producer’s party, but it was Dominick, not the famed author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, who held everyone’s attention with his trial gossip. “He was singing for his supper, and everyone was tremendously interested,” said Berger. At one point, the producer asked Dominick, “Why did you get out of TV and get into writing?”

  “Because I couldn’t get a job,” he replied. “I was a drunk.”

  Berger held up his end of the conversation by telling Dominick stories from the front line of his battles with Spelling and Brown. The most outrageous behavior, however, came not from the two entertainment titans but actor Patrick Dempsey, who had been cast as Harrison Burns, the young friend who helps the killer move the body the night of the murder in A Season in Purgatory. Dempsey had indulged his ego by rewriting the script, which he presented to Berger the day before rehearsals began in Atlanta, Georgia.

  Hearing the story, Dominick could only laugh and shake his head. Yes, he had made the right decision—or someone had made the right decision for him—to leave Hollywood. He absolutely hated the collaborative nature of the entertainment business. “When you write you do it yourself,” he said of his books. “You produce a hit movie there are sixty people who helped you do it. But to write a book and to have your name on the spine of the book, I’m so proud of that.”

  Amid the talk of O.J. trivia, egomaniacal producers, and narcissistic actors, Dominick told Berger’s dinner guests about a letter he had received from a woman whose daughter was dating John Sweeney, now working as a chef in Seattle. Dominick said he had recently contacted the mother, telling her, “Get your daughter out of that situation as fast as you can. She could end up dead.”

  “That was Nick’s ongoing theme: people who get away with murder,” said Berger.

  And there were other dinners in Los Angeles where Dominick starred.

  Playboy editor Lawrence Grobel threw one of the more eclectic parties of the summer. Diane Keaton and crime novelist Elmore Leonard attended, but the two bigger attractions were Dominick and the man who “wrote” O.J. Simpson’s recent best seller, I Want to Tell You. It was quite a book and Lawrence Schiller was quite a character.

  After Simpson’s arrest, Schiller had to sneak into jail to interview him for the book. “They needed to raise money for his defense,” Schiller recalled. Simpson’s close friend Robert Kardashian had come to him, asking for ideas, and Schiller suggested a book based on Simpson’s responses to the thousands of letters he received in jail. An automatic best seller, such a tome would help pay Simpson’s $50,000-a-day defense bill that included not only the salaries of a dozen lawyers but an attendant team of investigators, forensic scientists, and jury experts. But the book needed to be written and published quickly, before the jury had been sequestered. “Nobody knew I was interviewing O.J. with a tape recorder in jail,” said Schiller. He kept the enterprise secret by commuting from a house in the San Fernando Valley, “which nobody knew about,” and driving to the jail every day in a different car.

  Dominick and David Margolick “didn’t know what to think of Schiller at the beginning of the trial,” said the New York Times reporter. “He hung around” the defense team. Neither journalist knew what he was doing there, and only later did Dominick and Margolick realize Schiller’s close access to many of the major players in Simpson’s camp. According to Schiller, he soon became one of Dominick and Margolick’s major sources.

  “I wasn’t interested in getting anything out of them; I didn’t need anything,” Schiller said of his two favorite reporters, “because I was on the inside where everyone wanted to be. The only two people I shared with were David Margolick and Dominick.”

  On at least one occasion, Schiller did get some payback for all the news he fed Dominick from the inside. Everyone on the defense team hated Simpson’s idea to do a pay-per-view interview, rumored to be worth $20 million.

  “We were all upset, which is one of the reasons I leaked it to Dominick,” said Schiller. “This was a way of making it go away. Dominick could make a big issue out of it.” Which he did with great moral outrage in Vanity Fair. He wrote how the deal would potentially pay all Simpson’s legal bills so he could “restart his life. . . . But I couldn’t help thinking to myself, What about Nicole? What about Ron? Do we just forget about them?” And as always, he groused about a defendant spending $50,000 a day to win his acquittal, in essence, rigging the justice system.

  As Schiller and the Dream Team had hoped, the Simpson pay-per-view deal never materialized.

  Schiller recalled Dominick being in top form at Lawrence Grobel’s dinner party. Dominick talked about his concern for a twenty-six-year-old jurist, a flight attendant, who begged to be relieved of duty. “I knew she was flipping out because she never watched the drama that was happening and never took one note,” Dominick told Grobel’s guests. Judge Ito did not let her off the jury until she “ate a light bulb, she swallowed a bottle of perfume, and she slit her wrists.” Even over dinner, guests could count on Dominick never to spare them the graphic details.

  “Dominick held court that night,” said Schiller. “Everyone wanted to hear Dominick tell his stories, because he could tell them with wit, humor, and irony.”

  Schiller was less enamored, however, with what Dominick wrote in Vanity Fair as the trial progressed. “I wouldn’t use the words ‘flipping out,’” he said of his friend’s mental state. “I felt he was losing some objectivity. There was less clarity. I was concerned. If you look at the stuff he wrote at the beginning of the trial and then at the end, there’s a difference.”

  Dominick and Schiller became friends. Jeffrey Toobin did not. “Schiller specialized in exploiting an arcane and odious corner of the literary marketplace: the purchase of book rights to murderers’ life stories,” Toobin reported, alluding to book deals Schiller had made with other killers, ranging from Jack Ruby to Gary Gilmore.

  Toobin even accused Schiller of leaking “hate-filled tidbits to reporters,” such as the Laura Hart McKinny tapes in which Mark Fuhrman uttered the N-word forty-two times. Schiller denied the accusation.

  Late in the trial, when Dominick mulled what kind of a book he would write on O.J. Simpson, he considered doing a novel that would be to Los Angeles what People Like Us was to New York. He wanted to call his Schiller character Joel Zircon (an agent’s name recycled from The Winners), someone who worked the courtroom from all angles, who had multiple inside tracks and used everyone against everyone else.

  Dominick told Schiller about the Zircon character and how it would be based on him. “I want to put you in the book and I’d like your permission,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Schiller.

  “I’m going to call you a double or triple agent in the book.”

  “Whatever you want to do is fine with me,” said Schiller, who had no intention of reading the book.

  “We were close,” Schiller recalled. “Dominick even came to my engagement party during the trial. That’s the level we were on.” Schiller may have been friends with a murderer, but when it came to getting access, Dominick never held that li
ability against a good source.

  On August 7 Dominick got word that Alex Dunne was missing. He had been staying with his invalid mother, Lenny, and gone for a hike in the Santa Rita Mountains near her ranch in Nogales, Arizona. Because Alex took no food or water, he had been expected to return home that evening. When he did not, a friend of Lenny’s phoned Dominick the next day. Griffin Dunne was already flying to Arizona to be with his mother, who had not yet been told of her younger son’s disappearance.

  It was not the first time Alex ran into trouble on a hike. Years earlier, he and Griffin had vacationed together in St. Barts, and when Alex wandered into a forest of poisonous manchineel trees, he broke out with a severe rash that led to his being knocked unconscious for hours. It was the last time the two brothers vacationed together.

  Dominick’s presence so pervaded the media during the last weeks of the Simpson trial that even the disappearance of his son turned into a major news event. CNN did hourly updates, and all major news outlets wanted interviews with Dominick. Griffin told his father to ignore the requests, but Dominick knew better. As a reporter, he felt obliged to cooperate with his colleagues in the Fourth Estate.

  After four days in Nogales, Dominick gave up hope that Alex would ever be found alive. Then a severe summer storm hit the mountain range, forcing the search to be called off. Although the torrential rains appeared to be the worst news possible, they saved Alex’s life and prevented him from further dehydration. The following day he walked out of the mountain range to safety.

  At the hospital, Dominick found his son to be in good shape, although he continued to be dehydrated and suffered minor abrasions and bruises. Dominick was relieved. However, he worried about all the press hoopla and what people would say since his son was not badly hurt. He told friends, “If only he’d broken a leg.”

  That August, the trial still had a few more weeks to go. Linda Deutsch recalled her colleague’s special take on everything. “Dominick looked at everything almost from a cinematic viewpoint,” she said. Deutsch remembered the day prosecutor Chris Darden made the mistake of having Simpson try on one of the bloody gloves, a glove having shrunk from its original size. Dominick both marveled and recoiled at the moment when Simpson manipulated the glove so it would not fit. “Did you see that?” Dominick asked her. “He took those gloves like he was running across a football field with the football!” He threw up his hands. “This case is over!”

  Dominick spoke those words on June 15, 1995. Somehow, he did not feel the case was over on September 29, when, after more than sixty objections from the defense lawyers, Chris Darden and Marcia Clark ended their rebuttal. Judge Ito ruled that the jury could not begin deliberations that Friday afternoon. They had to wait the weekend, sequestered at the Hotel Intercontinental. Like every other avid observer of the trial, Dominick spent those days pondering the lawyers’ summations.

  The reporters, however, were not sequestered. On the contrary. They relaxed that weekend in a major way. “We had some great parties,” said James Willwerth. “Dominick didn’t go to those. I went to all of them.” Dominick made one exception. On September 30 he attended a party given by Joe McGinnis at the Hollywood Hills house he rented from songwriter Leslie Bricusse.

  Theirs was a tight group. “During the nine months of that trial all the reporters developed the sort of friendships you generally only develop in college living together day in and day out,” Dan Abrams noted.

  On that final Saturday in September, the Trial of the Century spawned the reporter’s Party of the Year when McGinnis and New York Daily News reporter Michelle Caruso celebrated the feast of San Gennaro and invited all their friends in the press. They served Italian food, played raucous music, and turned the saint’s statue to the wall. Out of friendship with McGinnis, Dominick made an appearance that afternoon but did not stay long. On his way out, he warned the Newsday reporter Shirley Perlman, “I’m not sure you want to go in there.” He intimated that a few of the forty guests had lost their inhibitions, as well as their clothes, when they jumped from the hot tub to the swimming pool and back. The New York Post’s Page Six column got the story, and the only person quoted was Dominick, who never could kick his habit of talking to gossip columnists. Hetero as well as lesbian goings-on were reported, and as Dominick told the Post, “Everyone’s been to a party where they’ve gone too far.”

  No reporter at the pool party expected the jury to reach a fast decision. They could indulge in much more R&R in the coming days. The first interruption to those plans came on Monday, October 2.

  At 9:15 a.m., the twelve members of the jury gathered in the deliberation room, a few steps away from Judge Ito’s courtroom. The jury had deliberated for only a couple of hours when they asked to rehear the testimony of Allan Park, the chauffeur who picked up Simpson shortly after the murders took place and drove him to the airport for his flight to Chicago. Dominick found hope for a guilty verdict in that the jury asked to hear only Park’s testimony. Word then arrived shortly before 3:00 p.m.: the jury had reached a verdict. Judge Ito could have called the jury into the courtroom to read the decision. Instead, he sequestered them one more day, and called for the verdict to be read Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. As Marcia Clark noted, “No one had anticipated this quick turnaround. Not the LAPD. Not the Sheriff’s Department. They had to ramp up security in case the verdict lit a torch to the city.”

  Clark had been shopping when she got the news. Johnnie Cochran was making a speech in San Francisco. At Vanity Fair, Wayne Lawson and other staffers had flown to Savannah, Georgia, for a short vacation. They had just closed the November issue when Graydon Carter phoned to let Lawson know the breaking news.

  “Wayne, you’ve got to get Dominick on the phone,” Carter said. “I’m holding the issue.” Lawson quickly turned the ritziest guest house in Savannah “into an office for about twelve hours.”

  Three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, it was not easy getting to the courthouse that Tuesday morning. The police banned cars in the vicinity. The hallway outside the courtroom itself was jammed. Jeffrey Toobin reported, “NBC had forty camera crews ready to roll. . . . ABC had assigned four producers to each juror.” And when they arrived, Clark and Cochran’s respective entourages included at least four guards each.

  As usual, Dominick sat between the Goldman family and reporter Shoreen Maghame. He squeezed Kim Goldman’s hand but knew not to try to make conversation with her or the family. They were too distraught. Instead, he spoke to Maghame, telling her how certain he was of the jury’s decision. They had found Simpson guilty. It upset him, however, that not everyone agreed. That morning, he watched NBC news and listened as Ira Reiner, now a commentator for the network, predicted that Simpson would be acquitted, even though quick decisions by juries generally presage guilty verdicts. The other five talking heads on NBC disagreed with the former L.A. district attorney, and Dominick could not understand how Reiner, a respected friend from the Menendez trial, could be so willfully wrong.

  Maghame admitted to Dominick that she did not know how the jury had decided. He then pointed to the reaction of Simpson’s son, Jason, sitting nearby and sobbing uncontrollably. Jason knew something they did not. The jury had found his father guilty, Dominick believed.

  “It’s easy to say now that people knew he was going to be acquitted,” said Maghame, looking back at October 3, 1995. “But I don’t think that’s what people thought at the time. It was really tense leading up to the verdict. Nobody knew how things were going to unfold. Thousands of people were outside the courthouse.” The defense lawyers sat right in front of her and Dominick in the courtroom.

  “O.J.’s son was sobbing in a puddle, and the verdict hadn’t been read yet,” Maghame recalled. Then the jury entered the courtroom. She noticed how juror number 6 looked at defense attorney Carl Douglas and “closed his eyes and nodded a little bit.” Another defense lawyer, Shawn Chapman, was crying at the time. She and Dominick were sitting so close to Simpson’s second tier of lawyers that Magha
me could hear Douglas tell Chapman, “Stop crying. We won.”

  Maghame thought, “Oh my God, holy shit.”

  When the “not guilty” verdicts were read, “I literally thought Kim Goldman was going to die,” said Maghame. Dominick’s mouth dropped open; he looked around and then turned to Maghame. “What happened?” he asked weakly.

  Maghame realized that Dominick was in a state of shock; it was not registering. She put a hand on his leg. “Dominick, I’m sorry. He was acquitted.”

  “No, what do you mean?”

  “They said not guilty.”

  “No, no, that’s not right.”

  “He got away with it. Yes, that’s what it means.”

  “What about Fred?” Dominick asked. It was obvious to Maghame that Dominick was reliving the day in court when his daughter’s killer received a lesser verdict than second-degree murder.

  Dominick heard Kim Goldman say to Simpson, “Murderer.” He then looked at juror number 6, Lon Cryer, as he left the jury box, his right hand raised in a fist.

  Sitting in his Manhattan apartment, Griffin Dunne saw his father’s stunned expression on the TV and began to weep.

  Dominick did manage to say good-bye to Simpson’s sisters, Carmelita and Shirley, despite his extreme discomfort. Art Harris approached as soon as Dominick left the courtroom. The CNN correspondent wanted him to appear on air to discuss the verdict, but Dominick declined. “I’m not myself,” he said. Also, he wanted to go to the prosecution’s press conference to hear what Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, and district attorney Gil Garcetti would say.