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

by Robert Hofler

  Dominick enjoyed the Hadlyme house more than ever, and, now seriously ill, he preferred repairing old injuries to starting new fights. It continued to sadden him that Annette and Oscar de la Renta thought he had based his Mickie Minardos character in People Like Us on the fashion designer. As an olive branch, he took up Mrs. de la Renta’s cause to defend a young gallery owner, James Sansum, who had been accused of stealing from his mentor.

  “Dominick saw it as a rapprochement with Annette,” said Sansum. Dominick wrote two items on the lawsuit for Vanity Fair, taking Sansum’s side in the controversy, despite it not being a particularly compelling story. It was a small, cozy world of Manhattan gallery owners and high-society folk. Sansum’s boyfriend, Markham Roberts, roomed at Brown University with Alex Bolen, who married Annette de la Renta’s daughter Eliza Reed. As gallery owners, Sansum and Roberts also knew Dominick’s gallery-owner friend Angus Wilkie, another Hadlyme neighbor, who made the introductions. As he so often did, Dominick turned his Vanity Fair profile subject into a personal friend and invited Sansum and Roberts to his Connecticut house to see the unveiling of his new Absolute Dunne vodka ad, framed and placed in his powder room (aptly named for the owner’s near addiction to talcum powder). The three of them also indulged in a weekend-long Luchino Visconti film festival, which included a screening of the director’s Death in Venice. Dominick laughed longest at Dirk Bogarde being “pinked up” to play the aging, obsessed admirer of an adolescent boy. Soon, he was telling the young couple about Visconti’s lover, Helmut Berger, and the Ash Wednesday debacle, as well as Elizabeth Taylor’s bizarre friendship with Michael Jackson. “Scared by fame, they had sympathy for each other,” said Dominick.

  “We became fast friends,” Sansum said. “Obviously, it began with his helping me.” There was also their homosexuality; it was the other thing they shared, although Dominick did not write about their same-sex attractions in his Vanity Fair articles on Sansum. Instead, he wrote how they were both stutterers and had suffered murders in their immediate families. Publicly, Dominick always said his father called him a sissy. He felt more comfortable speaking in private to Sansum and Roberts and expanded on the sissy remarks, telling them that his father “saw it in me and it made him sick. He wanted to beat it out of me.” There was no doubt that the “it” was his sexual orientation.

  Dominick told Roberts and Sansum that he “envied” their relationship. According to Roberts, coming out for Dominick was “a big deal. He was dancing around that topic. It was something he was trying to express.” Dominick explained his reluctance to leave the closet. “When you have children, it is difficult,” he said. “It negates your earlier life.” He feared being viewed as a liar, or for people to think he never truly loved Lenny.

  Dominick’s friendship with Roberts and Sansum was not atypical. He also revealed his true sexual orientation to other young gay men.

  When Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer visited the Connecticut house, Dominick brought out his many photo albums for a show-and-tell session. “Picture by picture he pointed out all the guys he had affairs with,” Tyrnauer recalled. Pointing to each of those photos, Dominick tended to repeat himself: “I hate to tell you, but I had a little number with that one.” Most of the men he singled out were ballet dancers or little-known actors. “The ‘little numbers’ were enormous,” said Tyrnauer. “He really was in the closet at Vanity Fair.”

  The albums contained many photos of Lenny. Whenever Dominick saw one of her, he rubbed his finger over the image. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he asked.

  “There was this push-pull,” said Tyrnauer.

  William Mann also found Dominick to be open about his sexuality when he visited him in Connecticut. Mann had written two biographies on homosexuals, film director John Schlesinger and interior designer William Haines. The journalist’s credits also include the book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910–1969. At work on a Katharine Hepburn biography, Mann contacted Dominick to see if he would be interviewed about the legendary actress who used to live across the street from the Dunne family in West Hartford. That book, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn, would be the first ever to include interviews with Scotty Bowers about his Hollywood escort service, which Hepburn and Spencer Tracy both used. Mann asked about Bowers, and Dominick told him that Scotty was a very reliable source, one whose word could be trusted without reservation. Dominick did not reveal his own professional relationship with Bowers.

  As usual when being interviewed by reporters, Dominick enjoyed asking his own questions, and wanted to know about Mann’s personal life. The biographer replied that he had been in a committed relationship with another man for several years. Dominick then offered his own disclosure, saying, “I’m a closeted homosexual.”

  Mann puzzled over how to react to Dominick’s remark. He did not want to lie and say he had no idea about his host’s homosexuality. Also, Mann thought Dominick would be offended if he said he already knew. And there was the greater question. “Who calls himself a closeted homosexual?” Mann thought. It was a first for a journalist who had conducted hundreds of interviews in his career.

  For Dominick, being open about his sexual orientation was more difficult when talking to old friends, gay or straight. Dominick never discussed his sexual orientation with Mart Crowley, not even when they would be at a small dinner party at Roddy McDowall’s house in Studio City and the only other guest was the very out writer Gavin Lambert, author of Inside Daisy Clover. It was the same with heterosexuals he had known since the 1950s and earlier. “When he was with Mary Rodgers and Chuck Hollerith, Dominick would talk about Lenny being the love of his life,” said Jack Cummings. “They would roll their eyes.”

  Near the end of his life, Dominick took his first public step outside the closet. For a routine phone interview, the English reporter Tim Teeman sat at his office desk at the Times of London to speak long-distance to Dominick about his life and career. At one point in their transatlantic talk, Dominick asked Teeman, “Are you married?” Teeman replied, “No, I’m gay.” Completely unprompted, Dominick said, “I’m a closeted bisexual celibate.” The comment led to Teeman’s asking Dominick about his marriage to Lenny. The question did not receive an answer, at least, not a direct one. “In my era, gay men were expected to get married,” said Dominick.

  The “closeted” remark to Tim Teeman replicated Dominick’s admission to William Mann. Only it was different. When someone calls himself “closeted” to a reporter who is going to print that remark, the person is no longer, in essence, in the closet. But even with Teeman, Dominick took a step many homosexuals had before him, first claiming to be bisexual and saving full disclosure for later. The next step would be his upcoming novel, A Solo Act. Norman Carby denied that his partner ever expressed any sexual interest in women, and as for being celibate for twenty years, Carby said their relationship was intimate until the last year of Dominick’s life. Scotty Bowers also revealed that Dominick used his escort service up to 2009. Saying he had been celibate for twenty years may have been peremptory on Dominick’s part; it put a halt to questions about his current romantic life.

  Dominick’s claim to being celibate did not surprise reporters or cause them to pursue the topic. In the After the Party documentary, Dominick takes obvious pleasure in telling the story that, after being diagnosed with prostate cancer, his doctor told him he could no longer have sex. “Oh, I don’t care about that!” Dominick replied—as if erectile dysfunction ruled out every sex act known to man. One thing was certain: Dominick had bladder cancer, and it caused him excruciating pain. He controlled it when around people, but alone in his apartment he said he screamed in agony. There was also the almost constant need to urinate. He wrote to his new Vanity Fair editor Anne Fulenwider that he knew every restroom in midtown Manhattan. Doctors recommended having the bladder removed, but Dominick decided against it after talking to Buck Henry, who had undergone the operation. The screenwriter’s horror stories left Dominick in “a state of te
rror.”

  Late in 2007 Dominick’s scheduled chemotherapy treatments in New York City forced him to leave London and miss Mohamed Al-Fayed’s big day in court at the Princess Diana inquest. The Egyptian billionaire had leveled accusations of a conspiracy in the automobile death of the princess and his son, Dodi, in 1997. It “sickened” Dominick that he had to rely on friends’ reports from the London courtroom to complete his story for Vanity Fair.

  He vowed not to let cancer control his life a second time. In 2008 Dominick made his last visits to the Academy Awards and the Cannes Film Festival. To make the trips, he stopped the chemotherapy treatments, much to his friends’ and family’s dismay. Dominick did not care. He told Tita Cahn, “I’d rather be kissed by Nicole Kidman in front of the Carlton than stay here and finish my chemo.”

  The cancer, however, did force him to slow down and reflect. He not only repaired his friendship with Annette and Oscar de la Renta but with journalists Greta Van Susteren and Robert Rand. That summer he also made friends with a Kennedy, even though it was a rapprochement conducted long-distance and in private. It thrilled Dominick how Edward Kennedy put his political muscle behind the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. Dominick considered the junior senator from Illinois to be “like God” and stood up and applauded in the TV room of his Connecticut house when Kennedy introduced Obama at the 2008 National Democratic Convention in Denver.

  Dominick’s forgiveness, however, did not extend to everyone. When an old friend, Gary Pudney, threw him a party in Los Angeles for his eighty-third birthday, the CBS executive gave Dominick the guest list beforehand to approve. More than four decades after Frank Sinatra paid to have him punched at the Daisy, Dominick was not going to forgive the singer or, by association, his daughter. “The only name he crossed off the list was that of Tina Sinatra,” said Pudney.

  At the time, Dominick sincerely believed he would never cover another trial for Vanity Fair, that the Phil Spector trial had been his last. He was wrong. And again, it was O.J. Simpson who got him back into the courtroom. It was their third go-round.

  During the criminal trial in 1995, armed guards separated Dominick from Simpson. They saw each other every day of the trial but never met. During Simpson’s civil trial in 1996–97, there were no guards present, and the defendant frequently wandered the hallways of the Santa Monica courthouse, looking to schmooze with reporters whom he could charm with the Juice. Although Simpson tried, Dominick made sure never to shake the hand of the murderer. He did not want that photograph to appear anywhere.

  In late 2008 Dominick walked into the Las Vegas courtroom a far frailer man, there to cover the O.J. Simpson trial for armed robbery, kidnapping, and theft of the athlete’s sports memorabilia. Linda Deutsch found Dominick to be so ill it “astonished” her that he wanted to attend the trial. Besides, he appeared uninspired. “What is this?” Dominick asked her. “This is the stupidest trial. Who cares about stolen footballs?”

  In some ways, Dominick was now almost the bigger news. The New York Times even sent a reporter, there to cover the trial as well as interview America’s most famous journalist. Dominick relished being profiled. “I had a literary following before,” he told the Times, “but because of O.J. I became a name and a public person, which I love. I think it would be a fitting way to end.”

  At one point in the trial, a Simpson fan entered the courtroom to get the defendant’s autograph. Then she noticed another famous person sitting there. “It’s Dominick Dunne!” she exclaimed and ran over to kiss him before being promptly removed from the courtroom. “Hey, she’s after Dominick!” O.J. Simpson said with a laugh. “She’s not after me.”

  During one recess in the trial, Linda Deutsch introduced Simpson to his major journalist-nemesis. This time, Dominick did shake the hand of the defendant, who promptly launched his charm offensive. “Mr. Dunne, it is so wonderful to meet you. I watch your TV show all the time. I love it,” said Simpson.

  Dominick melted. He later told Deutsch, “I hate to admit it, but I like the guy.” The following day, he and the AP reporter were sitting on a bench in the hallway. Again, Simpson approached to say hello. “O.J., I really hope you beat this,” said Dominick.

  “It was such a turnaround,” Deutsch recalled. “You could have knocked me over with a feather.”

  In Las Vegas, Dominick renewed his always cordial relationship with Simpson’s mother and two sisters, and they expressed deep concern when one day in court he collapsed from fatigue. When it happened, Dominick told his fellow reporter Beth Karas, “Call Griffin. He’ll know what to do.”

  Two hours later, Griffin Dunne arrived in Las Vegas to find his father not in a hospital but ensconced in his hotel suite, where he was “getting flowers and watching the news about himself, which he loved,” said his son. The following day, Griffin accompanied his father to the courthouse. He found it a much less heady experience from Dominick’s previous go-rounds with Simpson. “The first O.J. trial, compared to a movie, would have been a top-drawer, big Hollywood production,” Griffin opined. “The [third] one was like going on the set of a porno.”

  Even pornography has its thrills. One day during the trial, Simpson approached Griffin to ask, “Are you Dominick’s son?” The two men shook hands even before Griffin realized to whom he was speaking, and just as Simpson had plied the father with compliments about his on-camera career, so he massaged the ego of the son. “I didn’t know what to do. I just let the hand go up and down, up and down,” Griffin recalled. “It was the most surreal moment of my life.”

  After the jury delivered Simpson’s guilty verdict on December 5, Dominick did not feel well enough to travel even farther west for Amphai and Alex Dunne’s second wedding, on December 14, held at the Hollywood Hills home of Adam Belanoff, a producer-writer on The Closer. His non-appearance did not surprise most guests. The year before, Dominick played himself on the detective TV series in two episodes, and the show’s creator, James Duff, recalled his old friend being charming and upbeat on the set. “But he had lost weight and clothes weren’t fitting him properly, and he was so tailored,” said Duff.

  During the last few months of his life, Dominick would try stem-cell treatments instead of chemo to rid himself of cancer. He made three separate trips to a clinic in the Dominican Republic and two trips to one in Germany. The first trip to the Caribbean cost him nothing because he had agreed to write about the treatment. He traveled there alone, but on the four other trips abroad Norman Carby accompanied him.

  Dominick knew he was dying. “He was very angry about it,” said Carby. Dominick had worked too hard for his resurrection and incredible success, and felt that all those many years of compromise and failure followed by only twenty-five years of good times were not enough. “He wanted to live.”

  Dominick’s last two articles for Vanity Fair were his coverage of the Simpson civil trial in Las Vegas and an obituary for Sunny von Bülow, who died on December 6, 2008, at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where she had lived in a coma for twenty-eight years. After her funeral, the reception at the Georgian Suite proved poignant for Dominick. He saw an old colleague from the second Claus von Bülow trial, the Providence Journal’s Tracy Breton; in the years after the trail he helped launch her publishing career in New York. “He introduced me to all these people! Dominick was so generous,” said the writer. Sunny’s postfuneral event reminded Dominick of the Duchess of Guermantes ball from Remembrance of Things Past, one of his favorite novels. Marcel Proust’s characters reunite years later only to discover that they have all grown old and are about to die.

  One of his major disappointments was being too ill to cover the second Phil Spector trial, which lasted only a few days and ended with a conviction for second-degree murder. On May 29, 2009, Spector received a sentence of nineteen years to life.

  That summer, Dominick and Norman Carby made their last visit to the German clinic, and the two men took car trips to find the castle in Bavaria where the princess of Lippe had once lived. Wanting
to look back at his youth and relive memories of postwar Germany, Dominick wrote a letter to “Your Majesty,” the princess’s granddaughter. He wanted to find the castle where he had read Life magazine articles to the old woman and witnessed the mass wedding of former Nazi prisoners. “But we never found the castle,” said Carby.

  The stem-cell treatments that summer were not successful, and when Carby knew it was hopeless he sent for Griffin. At the German clinic, Dominick’s son met Carby, not as his late sister’s good friend but his father’s longtime partner. “Norman was looking after him,” Griffin recalled. “I saw this history, a long affectionate, real history between these two men. For the week it was like getting to know a stepbrother I didn’t know.”

  At the clinic, Dominick spent time not only with Griffin and Carby but Allan Carr’s good friend Alana Hamilton. They talked about the flamboyant producer’s party for her and Rod Stewart when she was pregnant and recently married to the rock star. Hamilton had traveled to the Bavarian clinic to care for her friend Farrah Fawcett, a patient there. Dominick never got to meet the Charlie’s Angels star, who would soon die at the clinic, but he nonetheless left her a gift: his rolls of imported American toilet paper. Dominick could not tolerate the roughness of European brands.

  Finally, it was time to go home. On August 14, Carby and Dominick boarded a Lufthansa flight to New York City and were about to take their first-class seats when a flight attendant approached. She apologized but had to inform them that the captain would not allow such an obviously sick person to remain on the plane for what would be a seven-hour flight. They would have to depart the aircraft immediately. Carby did not flinch as he lied as he had never lied before, and insisted with utmost calm and confidence that he had everything under control. There would be no problem during the flight across the Atlantic, he said repeatedly. In the end, Dominick’s six-foot-five companion succeeded in convincing the pilot and the flight attendant that everything would be fine. On the contrary, Dominick suffered from severe diarrhea, and before boarding the plane Carby had ordered an ambulance to meet them at JFK International Airport to take his partner directly to Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. “Norman was a fucking saint,” said Mart Crowley.