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

by Robert Hofler

  But Harris pursued, and after a short conversation, Dominick agreed to be interviewed on air. He would always regret the interview. Harris led him to the space reserved for CNN; it was an open-air platform, part of a four-story structure erected to accommodate the widespread international coverage in the trial’s final days. Susan Rooks in Washington, DC, conducted the CNN interview and was already on the air with Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren. Both interviewees hosted CNN’s Burden of Proof, a program in which she took the defense’s position and he that of the prosecution.

  Dominick was not happy to be sharing air time with the pro-defense Van Susteren, even if she was a few thousand miles away in another city. “Greta Van Susteren! She must be thrilled with the news!” he told Harris.

  Rooks wasted no time asking Dominick his opinion of the verdict. Despite the crowd being four stories below, it was clear those gathered there agreed with the not-guilty verdict. Dominick did not care. He began the interview by calling the verdict “a disgrace. . . . They just gave the middle finger to justice. They did not even bother to deliberate.”

  Dominick and Cossack began to argue over the Fuhrman tapes. Dominick thought they played a crucial role in the jury’s decision. Cossack did not think they mattered all that much. Van Susteren broke in to say, “The jury has spoken. The jury has given its message to the L.A.P.D.”

  At which Dominick lost it. “Giving a message to the L.A.P.D. was not what the jury’s job was in this courtroom!” he shouted. Dominick heard a roar from the crowd below. At first, he thought his comments had sparked a near riot. Then he looked down to the ground to see a group of cops being jeered.

  Dominick looked back into the camera. “That’s what your message from the jury to the L.A.P.D. is all about,” he shouted, then disconnected the mic. “I don’t have to take this crap.” As he left the makeshift set, a woman who had been watching the CNN program on a monitor taunted him, telling him he should die.

  As with almost everyone else in America, Dominick watched the endless playback of the moment in court when the verdict was announced and Kim Goldman sobbed against her father’s shoulder and Dominick sat there absolutely dumbfounded, his jaw hanging as if broken. “I look like a small-mouth bass,” he later remarked. His friend Joan Ransohoff tried to commiserate. “No, you look like a big-mouth bass,” she joked.

  A few weeks later in New York, Griffin threw a seventieth birthday party for Dominick. In a toast, he told his father, “I beg you, let this be your last murder trial.” Everyone laughed, but Griffin’s wish was sincere.

  Before Dominick could complete his book on the trial, other titles hit the market, including the best sellers The Run of His Life, by Jeffrey Toobin, and American Tragedy, by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth. Even though Joe McGinnis held a permanent seat in the courtroom, he never wrote a book on the trial “and had to give back his advance,” said Schiller. “After the other books, there was nothing left to say.”

  Which was Dominick’s dilemma. Under contract to Crown Publishing to deliver a book on the trial, he suffered more than his usual bouts of writer’s block. Ultimately, he decided to resurrect his alter ego reporter from People Like Us and have Gus Bailey cover the Simpson trial.

  Another City, Not My Own would be subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir. Dominick had never written anything like it—and neither had anyone else. Dominick was Gus Bailey. He put the words he had spoken into Gus Bailey’s mouth. But almost all the other “characters” in the novel, from Marcia Clark to Elizabeth Taylor, were not given fictional names. He called them Marcia Clark, Elizabeth Taylor, Jeffrey Toobin, Lawrence Schiller, and so on. Plus, he used their real quotes. Griffin Dunne said it was all true. The exceptions were his immediate family, whose names were changed to Grafton and Zander. The only major departure from reality was the novel’s bizarre ending: Bailey is shot in the face by the serial killer Andrew Cunanan. Dominick said he wanted to kill off the Bailey character “as a way of ridding myself of my obsession with O.J. Simpson, whose evil was in my system.” Shortly before Dominick had finished writing the novel, Cunanan murdered the designer Gianni Versace, shooting him in the face.

  The reviews for Another City were mixed. Time magazine called it “thoroughly absorbing” in its name-dropping: “let’s be honest: there is something fascinating about hearing Elizabeth Taylor discuss [criminologist] Dennis Fung.” The New York Times, however, called it “numbing” and its violent finale “preposterous.” Dominick suffered that review in silence, but not the pan in the Los Angeles Times. He lashed out at the newspaper’s book review editor, Steve Wasserman, calling him a “fuckin’ liar.” In Dominick’s opinion, Wasserman purposefully assigned a hostile detractor, Gary Indiana, to write the newspaper’s review of Another City. The editor defended his choice of reviewers, saying, “I am not aware of any animus toward Dunne on the part of Indiana.” Dominick scoffed at Wasserman’s defense. Indiana had recently written Resentment: A Comedy, a roman à clef in which he cast Dominick as Fawbus Kennedy, John Gregory Dunne as Sean Kennedy, and Joan Didion as Cora Winchell—three famous writers who “can’t get through a paragraph without telling you which famous people they know.” The novel went on to speculate “what a family dinner with the three of them must be like.” Considering the scabrous characters that Dominick based on Claus von Bülow, Jerry Zipkin, Alfred Taubman, and others, what Indiana wrote was mild.

  Regardless, Dominick thought his brother’s reporter-friend Tim Rutten at the Times had intervened and gotten Wasserman to assign Indiana the review, an assumption that failed to take into account how much Resentment also lampooned the Didions. Compounding the controversy was Liz Smith, who wrote not one but two columns on the book review, publishing excerpts from Dominick’s letter to Wasserman before the editor had actually received the complaint in the mail.

  More serious and long-lasting were the problems Another City created with Dominick’s friends Wendy and Ray Stark. Despite his novel’s gossipy style, Dominick had always avoided the Truman Capote curse of revealing the true secrets of good friends. In Another City, he did Capote one better and made up secrets about good friends, namely the Starks, and referred to them as “the Starks.” In the book’s fictitious finale, Gus Bailey is shot by Andrew Cunanan, whom he first meets as a guest of Ray Stark the night the producer throws a party honoring Marcia Clark.

  The fallout from Stark landed hard on Dominick. He told friends of the film producer’s anger, and how he accused him, “You put a murderer at my table!” Wendy Stark joined with her father, and for the first time in their long friendship she stopped speaking to Dominick.

  “Nick used real names,” she recalled. “My daughter was in elementary school, and all of a sudden Nick writes that Andrew Cunanan was at our house! The school parents thought I was this racy mother sending my daughter to a conservative school. I was upset. Andrew Cunanan was never at our house, but people didn’t know the difference.”

  Wendy Stark sympathized with Dominick’s dilemma but only a little, saying, “Nick couldn’t find an ending for the story so he used our house as a setting.” She thought he should have titled the novel Another Ending, Not My Own.

  Others were not happy but kept it to themselves. While Dominick contacted many people to secure their permission to use direct quotes, one of those people was not Patti Jo Fairbanks. The D.A.’s senior legal assistant was shocked to see her words about Nicole Brown Simpson’s family appear in print in Another City: “You know, a double homicide doesn’t make a dysfunctional family functional.”

  She thought of phoning Dominick to complain. Then she remembered his response whenever anyone got upset about one of his articles in Vanity Fair. Dominick used to say, “They’ll have to get over it!”

  Fairbanks told herself, “I’ll just have to get over it.”

  Also voicing problems with Another City, Not My Own was a coauthor of American Tragedy. The book, written by Lawrence Schiller and James Willwerth, broke the news that the Dream Team ha
d “staged” the Simpson estate before jurors were given a tour of the house. Photographs of blacks took the place of whites, among other ethnic embellishments of radical interior redesign. “Dominick presented that as his research,” said Willwerth, who complained to Schiller, who told his coauthor he did not care.

  Dominick considered Another City, Not My Own one of his weaker efforts. He wanted to return to writing a real novel, not a fictionalized memoir. In that endeavor he was encouraged by a visiting professor at UCLA. After the usual letter and e-mail introductions, they met at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. The restaurant catered to geriatric celebrities who were no longer frequently recognized, and Dominick’s choice of the Hamlet, rather than Cicada or Mortons, summed up his expectations on what would come of this meeting in academe.

  Dominick never considered himself a great novelist. He always told people he was no Truman Capote. He liked to quote W. Somerset Maugham, who put himself at the top of the “second echelon” of writers. Dominick readily admitted, “I’m very aware that I’m more a popular success than a literary success.”

  Despite such an admission, Dr. Robert von Dassanowsky saw considerable literary value in what Dominick wrote, and his request for an interview flattered him. It was not every day that a college professor and scholar wanted to take his novels seriously as feminist tracts, of all things.

  The lunch was typical of most Dominick had in one major way. He enjoyed getting up from the table to launch into celebrity greetings. That afternoon he saw Broadway star Carol Channing, and after she and Dominick finished complimenting each other, Dassanowsky set forth his proposal over hamburgers and french fries. “Someone should write a book about your novels,” said the professor, who wanted to write just such a tome.

  “No, it’s not that kind of work,” said Dominick.

  “No, it’s valid. It will happen soon. Your work does cross over into social chronicling.”

  Dominick thanked Dassanowsky for his very positive review of A Season in Purgatory in LA Weekly, in which the novel was favorably compared to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Just as Waugh’s narrator Charles Ryder goes from loving Lord Sebastian Flyte to loving his sister, Julia, so Dominick’s Harrison Burns falls in love with Constant Bradley and later his sister, Kit.

  The professor meant the comparison as a compliment but was not sure Dominick took it as such. “He was afraid of it,” said Dassanowsky. “On one level, Dominick was happy because it gave him literary credential. On the other, he didn’t want someone saying he’s stealing from Waugh. I knew it was a little of both.”

  Dominick expected his lunch date to ask about the real identities of his fictional characters, how Jules Mendelson was based on Alfred S. Bloomingdale, and so on. Dassanowsky knew not to go there. Instead, they talked about the disappointment of his collaborations with his brother and sister-in-law on The Panic in Needle Park and Play It as It Lays.

  “He had been writing with his brother, but then he was pushed back into the producer’s role. There was hurt there,” said Dassanowsky. “He couldn’t get beyond that. In the end, he detached himself from the script; his work wasn’t needed or wanted. His brother was the writer.”

  But mostly, the two men talked about Dominick’s female characters and how they were “injured by the patriarchy; it is the only life they know and they die from it,” Dassanowsky noted. “His wife, Lenny, became a model for that, this idealization he creates, these monuments to women who get crushed by society. He identified with that: someone who doesn’t fit in and feels too much and trusts too much, and gets kicked in the teeth.”

  Dassanowsky gave no empty praise to Dominick. Eventually, he went on to write not a book but a long article, titled “The Inconvenient Women: Female Consciousness and the American Gentry in the Novels of Dominick Dunne,” for Popular Culture Review. He did more than toss around a few feminist tropes. He used the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theories to analyze Alice and Ann Grenville, portraying them not as women “but an idealized fantasy fulfillment of masculine desire. Women internalize male desire and are thus used to adapting to roles that further the patriarchy.”

  Dassanowsky also used the analytical framework of Elaine Showalter, a founder of feminist literary criticism, to chart the three phases of growth in Dominick’s female characters, taking Flo March and Pauline Mendelson in An Inconvenient Woman from their initiation into (1) the “prevailing modes of male-dominant tradition” to (2) “protest” to (3) “a search for identity.”

  Finally, Dominick had been taken seriously as a writer, even if he did not believe every word of the esteemed professor’s praise.

  14

  Skakels and Wills

  Shortly before the publication of Another City, Not My Own, CBS aired its new miniseries A Season in Purgatory. “It aroused public interest in the case, and the paperback went back onto the best-seller list,” said the show’s producer Buzz Berger.

  The TV adaptation of A Season in Purgatory in 1996 also brought to light one crucial piece of evidence that reinvigorated Dominick’s interest in the case. After the show aired on CBS, he received a message at the Vanity Fair offices about the Moxley murder.

  Dominick never shrugged off such tips, even though many of them turned out to be from cranks and crazies. In this case, he did not just return the phone call. He set up a lunch with the caller at no less a restaurant than Patroon on East Forty-Sixth Street. Jamie Bryan was not what Dominick expected when the young man arrived for their lunch meeting. He looked about eighteen years old and was not attired for such a tony boîte. Bryan wore jeans and a T-shirt, which, among other things, made it an awkward lunch for Dominick. People kept giving the odd couple questioning glances.

  Bryan had in his possession the Sutton report, commissioned by Rushton Skakel to exonerate his two sons of any wrongdoing. The young man feared being exposed but took the chance with Dominick because he did not want the report to go unread. Maybe Bryan also wanted to write for Vanity Fair, and this was his chance. He had ambitions to be a writer. In a way, he already was one, which is why he had the Sutton report. Surprisingly, Sutton Associates never required Bryan to sign a confidentiality agreement even though his job as staff writer involved taking the detectives’ findings and writing up a likely scenario of how the Moxley murder took place. His conclusion: Michael Skakel had committed the murder.

  Dominick worried about receiving purloined material from a boy in jeans and a T-shirt. Little did he know over lunch at Patroon that the report solved the case; at least it solved it for Dominick.

  Bryan thought he had made it clear to his Patroon lunch date that his superiors at Sutton Associates called it a “speculative report.” Dominick, however, did not see the report as speculation; to him it was all fact. He would later send a letter of apology to Bryan, saying he did not recall any conversation about the report being anything but completely factual.

  Dominick always believed he held a bombshell in his hands with the report. He phoned Dorthy Moxley. The call took place late in 1996, and it was not one of his friendly “how are you?” calls. It was urgent. “Dorthy, I know who killed Martha!” he exclaimed.

  “I was dumbfounded,” Dorthy Moxley recalled. Dominick told her about Jamie Bryan—“don’t tell anyone his name”—and that he had given him the Sutton report, commissioned by Rushton Skakel and now suppressed by him. “I haven’t read it,” Dominick said, “but I’ll call you as soon as I have a chance to read it. Don’t tell anybody.”

  “OK, I won’t,” she promised.

  But Dorthy Moxley got “antsy.” She phoned Dominick the next day. Again, he told her he hadn’t read the report because “I have this huge mess. I left the faucet running in the kitchen and everything is flooded. I’ll have to get back to you.” He said he would read it as soon as possible but would also have to return it to Bryan right away.

  Dominick came to think of his solving the Martha Moxley murder as a selfless cause. “My only motivation i
n this has been Mrs. Moxley,” he said. “No one understands the pain she’s experienced like I do.”

  Dorthy Moxley saw the matter in a somewhat different light. Thinking back on their brief back-to-back phone conversations in late 1996, she surmised, “Dominick wasn’t being nice. He did not send back the report. He had a huge ego. He wanted to help. I knew he was concerned, but it had to be Dominick first.”

  Dorthy reread Len Levitt’s newspaper article on the case in which he mentioned Sutton Associates, but nowhere did he write anything about Michael being the killer. “Len didn’t have all that in the article,” she said.

  A few more days passed. She did not want to phone Dominick again; instead, Dorthy called Levitt. She told him that Dominick had the Sutton report, and, according to him, it proved who killed her daughter.

  “Leave it to me; I’ll find out,” said Levitt, who immediately phoned Dominick, who immediately phoned Dorthy to “castigate me,” she said.

  “We didn’t talk for a couple of years,” said Dorthy.

  It was the same with Len Levitt. “Dominick and I didn’t talk for two years,” said Levitt, who, at the time, feared he might have missed something crucial in the report. Dominick, however, refused to show him the report so it could be restudied.

  Detective Frank Garr was different. Garr wore a badge, and when he demanded to see the Sutton report, Dominick did as ordered. Garr later told Levitt, “I first heard about [the report] from Dorthy. She calls me at home on a Saturday and tells me Dominick has it and Len Levitt knows about it. It was one of the few times I was upset with her. No, I was furious. I mean, what good does Dominick Dunne or Len Levitt having the report do? Are they going to make an arrest? Why hasn’t anyone told me? So I called Dominick and he gave it to me. But there was nothing in it. It was all theories and speculation.”