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

by Robert Hofler

  Before the trial began, Dominick saw Michael Skakel’s attorney at the coffee shop in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Despite his belief in Skakel’s guilt, he gave Mickey Sherman a tip. “It was helpful for the Skakel trial,” Sherman recalled. “Dominick told me one of the investigators had a book deal, which [Frank Garr] denied on the stand. He wrote it with ghostwriter Len Levitt.”

  Dominick’s tip to Sherman was nearly as inaccurate as the big scoop he had for Laura Ingraham. He told the conservative radio host about what he believed was Congressman Gary Condit’s involvement with the disappearance of a twenty-five-year-old intern named Chandra Levy. Those revelations to Ingraham and Sherman made Dominick two for two and wrong on both counts: no Arab threw Chandra Levy out of an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean, and Frank Garr never coauthored a book with Len Levitt. Because Levitt’s book Conviction: Solving the Martha Moxley Murder came out two years after Mickey Sherman’s confrontation with Frank Garr on the witness stand, people had forgotten the courtroom exchange. While Garr was quoted in the book, Levitt wrote Conviction alone.

  The inaccurate story regarding Chandra Levy was much more exposed, not to mention even more preposterously false. People remembered what Dominick said, and those people included Gary Condit. Dominick told his tale on Larry King Live, as well as at various lunches and dinner parties. But he reserved his most detailed account for the Laura Ingraham Show. Ingraham was an odd choice. Dominick did not care for the radio host’s conservative politics, but they had met recently at the Ritz Hotel in Paris and he found her engaging. “We always have a few laughs together,” he noted. When they saw each other again in New York at the Carlyle and she took him to lunch at Patroon, he could not help but share some political dirt: a man who claimed to be a “horse whisperer” had phoned him with an incredible story. Ingraham thought it such a great story she wanted Dominick to repeat it on her radio program. He agreed, even though he wondered, Who listened to Laura Ingraham, anyway?

  “Now, some of this I can’t explain, and I don’t want to get into any trouble,” Dominick’s radio interview began, “but according to what the procurer told the horse whisperer who told me, is that Gary Condit was often a guest at some of the Middle Eastern embassies in Washington where all these ladies were, and that he had let it be known that he was in a relationship with a woman that was over, but she was a clinger. He couldn’t get rid of her. And he had made promises to her that he couldn’t keep and apparently she knew things about him and had threatened to go public. And at one point, he said, ‘This woman is driving me crazy,’ or words to that effect. And I wrote all this down at the time. And what the horse whisperer said the procurer said is, by saying that, [Condit] created the environment that led to her disappearance. And she shortly thereafter vanished.”

  Dominick told less elaborate versions of his Condit/Levy story at dinner parties where the guests included his close friends Casey Ribikoff, Liz Smith, Cynthia McFadden, and Henry Grunwald. It was Grunwald, a former Time magazine editor, who told him he must contact the FBI, which Dominick did.

  “He had much to say at dinner parties,” said Liz Smith. “I think he sort of went around the bend after the O.J. trial. I thought he took a lot of chances.”

  Dominick told the Condit/Levy story overseas as well. Edmund White, author of The Farewell Symphony and other autobiographical novels, met Dominick in London through a mutual friend. At the time, Marguerite Littman was working with the Elton John and Princess Diana foundations to consolidate their various AIDS charities. The American socialite had many stories to tell about the two famous Brits, and White wanted to hear every tidbit. “Dominick, however, wasn’t interested,” White recalled. “He kept telling us he had this big scoop. But the names Chandra Levy and Gary Condit didn’t mean anything to us. Marguerite and I didn’t care. Dominick got upset.”

  Even before police found Chandra Levy’s skeletal remains in a Washington, DC, park, Gary Condit hit Dominick with a lawsuit for libel.

  Dominick apologized publicly and profusely, admitting he had fallen for the story “hook, line, and sinker. I sounded like a fool. A horse whisperer? The laughs they got over the horse whisperer,” he said.

  His reputation as a journalist took a serious hit. “He was totally freaked out by it. It made him crazy,” said Dan Abrams. “He knew he made a mistake. He felt ashamed.”

  Condit, of course, wanted more than an apology from Dominick. “He went on the air and called me a murderer and said I had something to do with the kidnapping, that I plotted the kidnapping,” said the congressman from California.

  Before the Condit controversy broke, filmmaker Barry Avrich had just finished making a documentary on Dominick’s career. At the beginning of their collaboration, Dominick loved the idea of having his story put on film. To get acquainted, he invited Avrich to his Connecticut house. “I have something to show you,” he said and took the filmmaker to his office. Dominick removed some files of photographs from a cabinet.

  Avrich tried not to appear shocked or sickened. “They were the autopsy and crime scene photos of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. They were ghastly, like nothing I’d ever seen,” Avrich remembered. If Dominick nearly fainted in 1995 when he first saw these photographs in the Los Angeles courthouse, he had fully recovered from any trauma by the time he showed them to Avrich in the safety of his office. (Other guests to his Connecticut house, including producer Martin Ransohoff and his wife, Joan, were also shown the Goldman/Simpson photographs.) Dominick kept a collection of other notable photographs as well. They included the shirtless photo of a young Erik Menendez taken by Philip Kearney. “He could be a Calvin Klein model,” said Dominick, who went on to tell the filmmaker that he had recently written a letter to Erik in prison requesting an interview. He had read Erik’s many unproduced screenplays, written before the two sons committed parricide, and praised his talent as a writer. In the letter, he also confessed to Erik “how often you come to my mind.” Dominick told Avrich, “I don’t know why, but I was captivated by him.”

  After their photo-viewing session, the two men began to hit some bumps in their working relationship. “Dominick complained about all sorts of little things,” said Avrich. “He complained about someone being in his line of sight. The food we catered he didn’t like. Then he ate everything.” Much more upsetting to Dominick was Avrich’s wish to interview Mark Fuhrman for the film. “He had some issue with Fuhrman,” said Avrich. Dominick also hated the documentary’s title, Guilty Pleasure, which he found tacky. Finally, he demanded that Avrich not include an interview with defense attorney Edward Greenspan, who voiced strong objections to Dominick’s brand of advocacy journalism. “Remove it or I’m not coming to the screening!” said Dominick. Since a celebrity-filled preview had been planned for later in the week, it was not a mild threat. When Avrich refused to re-edit the film, Dominick showed up at the screening two days later as if never having voiced any objection.

  On one major point, however, Dominick got his way. To promote the film, he had been booked to appear on Larry King Live, but just then Gary Condit filed his lawsuit. “I can’t do it,” said Dominick, who broke out in hives from the stress.

  Avrich needed the publicity for his film. He told Dominick that he would talk to King and get him to agree not to ask about Condit. Dominick knew better. “Larry wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t ask about it,” said Dominick.

  Almost worse than the lawsuit was the rupture it created for Dominick at Vanity Fair. Confusion immediately arose over what Graydon Carter did or did not tell Dominick regarding the lawsuit. Even though he had not made the false claim about Condit in the pages of Vanity Fair, Dominick believed that Carter had assured him his legal costs would be covered by the magazine. In the immediate wake of the lawsuit, there had been a phone conversation between the editor and S. I. Newhouse, who owned Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher. In many conversations and letters with his friends, Dominick repeated what he firmly believed Carter told him: “We’re
going to take care of your legal bills. I talked to Si in Vienna this morning and he said he’d take care of it.” According to Dominick, Carter went on to say that because Condé Nast was not being sued, the company could not pay for the legal expenses or the possible settlement, if there was one. However, Dominick would receive a bonus at the end of the year.

  Owen Laster, Dominick’s agent, wrote letters to Carter asking him to put in writing that Vanity Fair would “indemnify” his client. Carter refused to comply and soon became incensed with Laster’s badgering. Later, Dominick went around Laster to write a letter to the head of the William Morris Agency, asking Jim Wiatt to intervene. That ploy did not sit well with Carter or Laster. Dominick never was the most discreet negotiator. Angered at Vanity Fair, he even went so far as to write a pitch letter offering his writing services to editor Anna Wintour at Vogue, also published by Condé Nast.

  “Later, Graydon said he hadn’t said it,” Dominick recalled. He wanted to settle with Condit. He feared being poor again. Dominick told friends that Carter told him not to settle. In covering the controversy, New York magazine featured an interview with the Vanity Fair editor. Chris Smith wrote how Graydon Carter “shrugs off the Condit case.” Carter went on to tell Smith, “We’ve had huge lawsuits. We fought Mohamed Al-Fayed for three years and beat him. I told Nick, ‘Let’s take this to court, let’s fight it all the way. It will be like a scene out of a Frank Capra movie, in the end. Grow your beard long and you’ll look like Saint Nicholas when you get into the courtroom, like Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street. There’ll be bags of mail.’ Gary Condit has got a nerve to do this.”

  Dominick’s friends and family took his side in the controversy when they saw the effect of Vanity Fair’s “let’s fight it all the way” stance. “Dominick Dunne made Vanity Fair,” said Jesse Kornbluth, who left the magazine shortly after Graydon Carter replaced Tina Brown.

  Another Brown acolyte also empathized with Dominick’s predicament. “When you get mad at a family member, there was that kind of hurt Dominick felt,” said Kevin Sessums. “He and I identified as Vanity Fair writers; our names were on the cover all the time. We were in the office, at the parties. You began to think of it as the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s this ersatz family that takes over your life. It’s hard to cop to it when you realize it ain’t your family. It’s a job. He was slowly being pushed aside. The cancer also scared him.”

  Dominick’s recent ill-health indeed exacerbated the ordeal. “I’ve had prostate cancer,” he said. “I don’t want to tie up my creative period; the days are getting thin.” Dominick later wrote, “Rudolph Giuliani had better luck with his radiation than I did. Mine turned out to be a disaster. I got over-radiated in a private area and suffered terrible pain—three weeks of it. They don’t warn you about the pain.”

  Regardless of the extreme physical suffering, the treatments worked. They rid him of the cancer. But Kevin Sessums was right. The cancer scared him, and it also scared him that the Condit lawsuit could decimate his hard-earned reputation and wealth. A couple of years earlier, before the cancer and Condit, Dominick met with his financial adviser for lunch. Asa Maynor asked him, “Are you happy your account has appreciated?” His reply surprised her. “Not really,” he said. “When people come up to me on the street and ask for my autograph, that’s what I like.” He went on to tell her how silly and irresponsible he had been in his old Hollywood days, spending all that money on lavish parties. “I’ll never do that again.”

  Now, with the cancer and the Condit lawsuit and the trouble at Vanity Fair, he told his friends and assistants, “I can’t go back to being poor.” He especially wanted to leave a large estate for his granddaughter, Hannah.

  That was Dominick’s side of things. Not lost on editors at Vanity Fair were Dominick’s earlier complaints that they had rejected his many requests to write in depth about the Chandra Levy/Gary Condit story. Then, after getting sued about those same false stories, he complained that Vanity Fair was not paying his legal expenses. He also construed that the magazine was somehow complicit because Condit’s lawyer had requested all drafts of his articles mentioning Condit. Rather than showing collusion, any deletions or changes made by the magazine’s fact checkers and lawyers would prove the opposite: Dominick, in fact, had been protected by the magazine. And there were other problems with Vanity Fair’s star writer.

  As the American public began to receive more of its news from the Internet, there were cutbacks in spending at magazines, even at Vanity Fair. The photo department there assigned top photographers, from Wayne Maser to Harry Benson, to shoot a portrait of Dominick every month to illustrate his column. Dominick adamantly refused the request ever to use outtakes. Much more costly were his expense reports, the dollar amounts of which dazzled. He thought nothing of spending $3,500 for two nights at Claridge’s in London or $5,000 for a weekend at the Ritz in Paris. Editorial assistants at the magazine knew to book those hotels, as well as the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Sometimes they were less certain about other cities and occasionally made the grievous error of putting Dominick in what he considered substandard lodgings. “Do you know who I am?” he’d scream on the phone. “I’m a star at this fucking magazine!”

  Another standard retort around the magazine’s offices was Dominick’s other pointed question to staffers, “Where is my special treatment?!”

  Four of Dominick’s personal assistants worked for a very different man over the years he employed them at the East Forty-Ninth Street apartment. What they did was less a job, more a fun gossip fest.

  “Dominick didn’t need an assistant. He just needed company,” said Jack Donahue. “I’d sit there for three hours, type a schedule, and listen to fun stories, laughing all the time.”

  “This was the ideal job,” said Laura Nappi Connolly. “Dominick was like more of a friend than a boss. We used to have coffee every morning and read Page Six together. And we’d dish.”

  “No one was funnier and more generous,” said Jack Cummings III. “The flip side is Dominick was Irish Catholic like me: chip on our shoulder, easily offended.”

  “Dominick knew he name-dropped and reveled in it, and part of his charm was his acknowledging that he did it,” said William Baldwin Young, another assistant. “He would dish but hated to be dished about.” Young recalled when Out magazine columnist Michelangelo Signorile wrote about Dominick’s sexual orientation and how “upset Dominick got.”

  The assistants knew he liked to be called Dominick. “Nick” was only acceptable from friends who knew him before his New York renaissance. Like most secretaries, they kept schedules, answered phones, made reservations. More unusual duties included sending out monthly checks to a few of Dominick’s needier friends, among them, Frederick Combs, who died of AIDS in 1992. Otherwise, their jobs ran the gamut, whether it was listening to Dominick’s complaints about going to any dinner hosted by Barbara Walters (“She moderates”) or buying him the latest gay porn video. “He’d heard that Ryan Idol was the flavor of the moment. He heard he was the boy the gay execs were hiring,” said William Baldwin Young.

  Jack Cummings ran a small theater company, the Transport Group, and when the New York Times gave one of his shows a bad review, Dominick was the first to call him. “Fuck ’em!” he said. “And take the day off!”

  If any of his personal assistants ever made a mistake, Dominick lightly dismissed it and soon forgot. He was much, much less forgiving of the people at Vanity Fair. A bad seat at the magazine’s annual Oscar party required not one but multiple apologies from the magazine’s flunkies, as well as Graydon Carter. Most upsetting to Dominick was the 1995 fete when his tablemates Denise Brown and Madonna canceled at the last minute and a couple of nobodies, in his opinion, appeared in their place. “Dominick could take offense easily,” said Graydon Carter. “Especially during his star period in the 1990s.”

  When it became clear to Dominick that a $25,000 year-end bonus was all Vanity Fair would “contribute” to his legal fees,
he argued that the page of advertising opposite his column was the highest priced in the magazine. He said he had spoken to an advertising executive at Vanity Fair who told him his articles were responsible for $500,000 a year in ad sales. He said the William Morris Agency got him speaking fees of $25,000 per engagement but he often spoke to Vanity Fair advertisers for free. Graydon Carter disputed Dominick’s ad-sales figures, as well as his speaking engagements for the magazine. “I do not recall Dominick speaking to advertisers,” the editor said. “I do recall one or two in-store cocktail events where Dominick would have appeared in conjunction with promotion for one of his books.”

  Dominick learned from the best when it came to expecting grand treatment. He had been taught by Elizabeth Taylor, but Vanity Fair staffers did not call him Liz. They nicknamed him “Lear on the heath” and said he had gone completely “haywire.”

  A great storyteller, Dominick knew how to embellish, claiming his legal bills were costing him $90,000 a month. Rich Bernstein, Vanity Fair’s counsel, suggested a top lawyer in Washington, DC, who could handle the Condit libel lawsuit for him. Dominick interpreted that recommendation as meaning Condé Nast would pay for the new lawyer. Again, it escalated into another huge misunderstanding. Bernstein merely made a recommendation, not an offer to pay for the attorney’s services. In the beginning, Dominick said he liked the DC attorney. Later, he found it impossible to work with her, given that she lived two hundred miles away in the nation’s capital. On good days, he called the situation a “major misalliance.” On other days, he called it “a fucking disaster.” If ever Dominick needed a moment to prove to his Vanity Fair editors how much the magazine needed him, it was the Michael Skakel trial.