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

by Robert Hofler

  After the rabbi answered in the affirmative, Ted Maher stood up to ask his own questions of the holy man. Maher was not an easy client and indulged in a few controversial moves unhelpful to his cause. Among other things, he asked the rabbi to say a prayer for Safra. Rabbi Sitruk nodded, and facing the larger-than-life crucifix nailed to the courtroom wall in this Roman Catholic country, he began to pray out loud in Hebrew.

  Manasse remembered it as being a “very emotional moment. People were crying.” He noticed that Dominick ran from the courtroom during the rabbi’s prayer. Afterward, Manasse asked Dominick if he, too, had found himself overcome with emotion. Dominick told him no, at least not that kind of emotion. “I ran out of the courtroom because I couldn’t stop laughing!” he said. Dominick never fell for courtroom theatrics.

  In the beginning, Mia Certic observed a studied caution around Dominick for the simple reason that she refused to accept Maher’s version of events. After the nurse testified in court, Dominick turned to Certic. “What do you think?” he asked.

  “He seems a pretty unreliable witness,” she replied.

  “To say nothing of unlikable,” he added.

  Certic believed that “the scales had fallen from Dominick’s eyes. Ted Maher had clearly lied to everyone.” He was guilty of killing Safra, although it was probably not his intention.

  Michael Griffith, for his part, found the Vanity Fair writer to be a willing student. The American defense attorney spoon-fed the case to Dominick, careful to emphasize how Edmond Safra’s life could have been saved if the police had not taken more than two hours to break into the apartment after being notified of the fire. Also, the autopsy report indicated a severe altercation had taken place between Safra and another nurse, Vivian Torrente, who also died in the fire. Safra had reason to be paranoid of the Russian Mafia, but adding to that sense of insecurity was a drug he took for Parkinson’s disease. The autopsy reports showed Safra and Torrente’s DNA under each other’s fingernails, and there was a combat-type injury to her trachea. Obviously, a struggle between the two had taken place.

  The American attorney was also useful to Dominick in other ways. On the first day of the trial, there were hundreds of reporters trying to gain entrance to the Palais de Justice. Dominick feared he would not get a seat. “You stay close to me,” Griffith told him. “If you have to sit on my lap, I’ll get you in.”

  Once inside, Dominick thanked him but added, “Mike, I better move to another location. It looks like I’m part of the defense team.”

  Which is when he sat down next to Mia Certic. At the end of the trial, he told her, “I don’t know what to do.” Maher was not the total innocent he had written about in Vanity Fair, and he wanted to talk to someone about his new doubts. She invited him to her villa for lunch but made the major mistake of not informing Dominick that her residence was in France, a ten-minute drive outside the principality. Shortly after her driver picked him up at the Hotel de Paris in Monaco, the sedan approached the border. “Where are we going?!” Dominick demanded to know.

  “He flipped,” said Certic. “Did he think he was being kidnapped and taken away? He was very nervous. It took him a while to relax.” It also did not help that Dominick’s hostess that day played the wrong kind of music when he arrived at her French villa. “We had Frank Sinatra on, and he looks at me like I’d put it on to taunt him,” said Certic. How could she have known that old Blue Eyes had once paid a maître d’ fifty dollars to punch him in the face?

  Over lunch, Dominick told Certic about his deep concerns for his safety. He thought his phone at the Hotel de Paris was tapped. “Everyone’s phone in Monaco is tapped, seriously,” said Certic. He also worried about blackmail and firmly believed someone had tried to set him up with an underage boy at the hotel. “He was genuinely spooked by Safra, which is not to suggest she was behind any of his fears,” said Certic.

  There were also his very considerable concerns about how to cover the trial for Vanity Fair. Having now sat in the Monaco court, he realized some of his suppositions were incorrect or misleading. Certic told him, “You should say, ‘It looked like that to me, but now that I’ve been here I was wrong.’”

  “I just don’t know what to do,” Dominick said again and again.

  People Like Us was not Dominick’s Truman Capote moment, according to Liz Smith. His Safra reporting was that moment. “Mrs. Safra was so generous and giving so much money to Israel, and Dominick kept carrying on about the murder investigation after the fire,” said Smith. “He wasn’t so popular in New York after that.”

  Dominick even believed that someone in the Safra camp might have been behind the horse whisperer giving him the Condit/Levy story. He said as much in a memo to Graydon Carter, dated October 7, 2001: “Maybe I was being set up by Lily Safra, who has sworn to get even with me. . . . Martha Stewart got an e-mail from your friend Jean Pigozzi, telling her that he and Joel Silver had just been with Lily at La Leopolda, and he said tell your friend Dominick Dunne to be careful, something’s going to happen to him.”

  When Carter put a moratorium on any more mentions of the Monaco trial in Vanity Fair, Dominick railed that Lily Safra and Alfred Taubman were behind the decision, having met and spoken to the editor at a dinner party. The wealthy real estate developer harbored his own solid reason for hating Dominick, one that could be summed up in three words: People Like Us, with its boorish Taubman-esque character Elias Renthal. Distraught, Dominick asked Liz Smith to write about such a deal being made among Safra, Taubman, and Carter. She wrote him a note to decline his appeal. After having endured monthly attacks (“The Liz Smith Tote Board”) in Graydon Carter’s Spy magazine, Smith was not about to relive bad times by using her syndicated column to expose a three-headed cabal as imagined by her possibly paranoid friend.

  Carter denied being pressured. “At a certain point, after Ted Maher, the male nurse, confessed to setting the fire, we all felt that [Dominick] had pretty much exhausted the topic,” the editor explained.

  Two months after being sentenced to ten years in prison, Maher escaped from the Monaco jail and was apprehended seven hours later in Nice, France. He would not be released until October 2007, when Dominick wasted no time getting him booked for an interview on Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice. On an episode titled “Murder in Monaco,” Maher maintained his innocence, as well as his story that he had been attacked by two assailants the night of Edmond Safra’s death. While people working on the TV series said their host’s confidence in Maher had been deeply shaken, Dominick took the middle ground for his on-air interview. He concluded, “The truth went to the grave with Edmond Safra.”

  18

  Editors and E-mails

  Dominick groomed a reputation for taking offense and cutting off old friends. Just as capriciously, he often renewed those severed relationships overnight. “I hate that person. We’re friends again,” he would tell his assistant William Baldwin Young. When asked how his change of heart came about, Dominick said, “I have no idea. It just happened.”

  Young explained, “That’s the way he preferred to deal with conflicts. ‘Let’s not make a big deal out of it, let’s move on.’”

  Dominick was no less forgiving with his immediate family. After not speaking for years, Dominick and his brother John met “by happenstance” in the hematology department at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. In 2002 Dominick was recovering from prostate cancer and doing well. John was battling a bad heart but not doing well. John tended to be “dismissive” of his problems, but, according to Griffin Dunne, who stayed in touch with his uncle, Dominick’s younger brother always thought he could have a heart attack and die at any moment.

  In the past, whenever the two brothers happened to be at the same party or event, Joan Didion might say a few polite words to Dominick and then go to her husband in the other room. But Joan was not there at NewYork-Presbyterian. Alone together, Dominick and John chatted as they waited to see their respective doctors. “And then John called me o
n the phone to wish me well,” Dominick recalled. “All the hostility that had built up simply vanished. . . . We never tried to clear up what had gone so wrong.”

  As he did with many close friends, Dominick began having daily phone conversations with John. The brothers shared an interest in politics, fine literature, gossip, and name-dropping, and if the story was worthy, John would call for Joan to pick up the other line to listen and comment.

  The reconciliation of the Dunne brothers did not last long. John’s daughter, Quintana, suffered poor health, and shortly before Christmas 2003, she went into the hospital with a serious case of what was thought to be either Avian flu or walking pneumonia. When Dominick received a phone call from his sister-in-law late on December 30, he feared Joan was calling to say Quintana had passed away. Instead, Joan told him it was John. He suffered a massive heart attack in their apartment after coming home from the hospital to see their daughter, and he died there. Dominick was the first person she called that night with the news.

  John’s body was cremated and the funeral delayed until March 23, 2004, making it possible for Quintana to attend. Dominick sat with Joan and her daughter in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Before taking his seat, he saw his brother’s good friends Leslie Abramson and Tim Rutten in the church. He thought it best to ignore them but then thought again. “Hi, Leslie. Thank you for coming,” he said. It made sense considering the circumstances. Abramson smiled and returned his greeting. Quintana Roo Dunne, having briefly recovered, passed away a year after her father.

  Sometime after the Michael Skakel trial, Graydon Carter quipped, “The wealthy people just aren’t shooting each other at the rate we’d like them to for Dominick’s purposes.” It was a joke, but it was also the truth. If O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers had not committed double murders, would Dominick Dunne ever have become the most famous journalist in America? When it came to celebrity crime, the 1990s had it all over the 2000s.

  In spring 2003 Dominick’s reporting on the Martha Stewart trial lacked its usual lethal punch. The American businesswoman would be found guilty on all four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about an extremely well-timed stock sale. Jeffrey Toobin, covering the Stewart trial for the New Yorker, reconnected with Dominick in the lower Manhattan courthouse. “Anyone who sat in that courtroom, as we both did, had to be convinced she lied,” said Toobin.

  Dominick was not convinced. Instead of pointing out little details to skewer Stewart, like the $12,000 Hermes Birkin bag she carried to court each day, he arduously defended her choice of expensive accessories. “Nobody mentioned it was twelve years old,” he reported on the handbag.

  Regarding the guilty verdict, Dominick wrote, “There was an audible gasp in the courtroom, and I was part of it.” Even more embarrassing, he went on to write that after the verdict he made his first-ever visit to a Kmart, where he bought some Martha Stewart merchandise. “I just wanted her to stay in business,” he insisted.

  His reporting on Robert Blake also limped. The actor went to trial in December 2004, accused of having had his wife, Bonnie Lee Bakley, shot to death outside a restaurant in Studio City, California, on the night of May 4, 2001. But the homicide never caught fire with the public’s imagination. The victim, people said, was a horrible person who deserved to die, and the defendant, never a huge star, had not enjoyed a hit movie or TV show in decades. Neither was Blake good-looking in the mold of O.J. Simpson or even Erik Menendez. In other words, it was not a sexy murder, and, worse for Dominick’s purposes, he knew and liked Blake. “I suspect that I would have disliked [Bakley] as much as Blake apparently did,” he wrote in Vanity Fair. “I am almost always pro-prosecution in murder cases, but I cannot help feeling sad about the untenable position Robert Blake is in.”

  Dominick, not to mention his editors at Vanity Fair, could only hope for the Phil Spector murder trial to begin as soon as possible. Spector was a guy Dominick knew, hated, and could not wait to squish under his Gucci gumshoe. The famous and very eccentric record producer had been charged with shooting the actress-waitress Lana Clarkson to death on the morning of February 3, 2003. Dominick needed the trial now, not three years from now.

  Instead, the Condit lawsuit slogged on, and he could not write about the imperious Lily Safra anymore.

  The year 2005 was not a good one for Dominick or his estranged son, Alex. Dominick looked forward to Vanity Fair’s party to celebrate his eightieth birthday on October 29, 2005. A big bash at P. J. Clarke’s was in the offing when Griffin Dunne told his father to call it off. It looked bad; the Condit lawsuit and his wrangling with the magazine had not been resolved. Various gossip columns reported that he was about to be fired, or would quit; and Dominick made no secret that he was writing an article titled “I Talked to Si in Vienna This Morning.” Obviously, he was not writing such an exposé for Vanity Fair, even though he still held a contract with the magazine. For his part, Graydon Carter did not recall planning a birthday celebration for Dominick, and if he had “we would probably have done it upstairs at La Grenouille,” not at the rowdy P. J. Clarke’s, said the editor.

  In the end, Dominick threw his own birthday party for eighty of his closest friends, and, not wanting “any ick,” he invited Graydon Carter. Reaching the numeral eighty forced Dominick to stretch the definition of the word “friend,” and his voluminous invitation list included such guests as Marisa Berenson and Bob Colacello, people who had either snubbed or trashed him in the past. When real friends asked how he could hobnob with such turncoats, Dominick always said, “Believe me, I’ll never forget it, but that’s not going to stop me.’” In a way, it was now his turn to use them, either as sources or mere glitter to add luster to his life.

  Not invited to Dominick’s birthday party was his “other” son. When reporters asked about Alex, Dominick used to say that he was the shy one who vanished. “He became bipolar and wouldn’t take his medication,” Dominick said of their estrangement. Occasionally, he would hear that Alex had been seen in Cairo or the Philippines.

  In 2005 Alex Dunne suffered two strokes at the age of forty-eight. Now living in Portland, Oregon, he had been taking classes to be a court reporter, but the back-to-back strokes made such a career change impossible. He could no longer type or write and entered a long period of arduous rehabilitation.

  Cardiac arrest and stroke are very different medical conditions, but their respective effects on Dominick and Alex produced similar results in the two men. In 1978, after suffering cardiac arrest, Dominick totally re-evaluated his life and left Los Angeles for Oregon. Regarding his recovery from stroke, Alex said, “It was like coming out of a fog. I have had my own mental health issues over the years.”

  His much-regretted request to be disinherited, Alex said, had nothing to do with his father sending him an article on depression from the Wall Street Journal, as Dominick believed. Alex did not recall such an article. The reason for his wanting to be disinherited, he said, stemmed from “my own internal struggles . . . which I inexplicably projected onto my dad, [which] were responsible for me doing such a horrible thing to him.”

  On one of his many travels overseas, Alex met a Thai woman in Singapore. Amphai Kayongwaen worked as a waitress at a restaurant he frequented. They talked. They dated. They fell in love.

  “Once I got engaged, I called my dad out of the blue. I hadn’t spoken to him in several years,” Alex recalled.

  Their conversation in 2006 began in the simplest way possible. “Hi, Dad,” said Alex.

  Dominick gasped, “Oh my God!”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Alex. “I realize what an idiot I’ve been. It’s totally my fault and my deepest apologies. I want you to know I’m getting married. I’d love for you to come to the wedding in Thailand.”

  Alex remembered there being total silence on the other end of the phone for about two minutes.

  “Dad,” he began again, “I just said I’m getting married and you haven’t sa
id anything.”

  “What do you want me to say?” asked Dominick. “You haven’t called me in years!”

  “How about ‘great’? Something!”

  Alex arranged for a travel companion to escort his father to the remote Thai village for the 2007 wedding, but Dominick refused the invitation. He did not feel well enough to make the trip. “I don’t want to die in Thailand,” he told his son. “When I meet her, I want her to speak English.”

  “Oh, you do?” said Alex. “Well, I’d love that, too, Dad . . . but you know . . .”

  Soon after the wedding, Alex and Amphai Dunne moved to the United States to live in Los Angeles and Portland. “When my dad finally did meet her, he just adored her,” said Alex. Regarding his long estrangement from his father, he explained, “It crushed me every day.”

  Dominick’s rapprochement with his son turned out to be easier than the one with his magazine. By now, Dominick had severed ties with the DC lawyer recommended to him by Vanity Fair and was on a path to make an out-of-court settlement with Gary Condit through a new lawyer, Paul LiCalsi. He did not want to attend a Vanity Fair staff party in January 2006, but LiCalsi advised Dominick to go for appearances’ sake. Fortunately, Wendy Stark was in town and agreed to be his date. Dominick never liked to attend parties or funerals alone, and the Vanity Fair event was no exception.

  The first few moments at the party did not go well. Dominick thought Graydon Carter gave him a cool reception. Then again, “After the fallout, Dominick was hypersensitive to anything Graydon said or e-mailed him,” said Jack Cummings. Dominick used to tell his assistant, “Jack, I guess in the end I’m just a mick who needs to get even.”

  He said he identified with Bette Davis, at her noblest, in Now, Voyager, but Dominick more resembled Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress: the injured mouse who learned hard, questionable lessons about self-defense from a circling father hawk.