Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  And why did Andrew kill those five people before killing himself on a boarded-up houseboat in Miami Beach? The FBI conducted more than a thousand interviews, but still the Bureau professes to know very little. Andrew’s old schoolmates and the hundreds of people he interacted with in his short life appear perplexed. His mother believes that whatever happened, her son was set up and is now a saint in heaven.

  MaryAnn’s dark eyes burn as she hugs those who have come to the service. One well-dressed woman presses money into her palm. “Closure,” whispers Sister Dolores, Andrew’s old catechism teacher from Saint Rose of Lima Parish in nearby Chula Vista, when she comes up to MaryAnn. She urges her to think about other things and rest. “You need closure.”

  But there is too much pain for that.

  2

  Childhood

  MARYANN CUNANAN GIVES away whatever money she gets—to cab drivers, to the church, to whomever. On the dusty street where she lives alone in a small, run-down, one-bedroom bungalow in National City, far from her other three children, she has sunk several thousand dollars into landscaping a small plot next to her house as a memorial garden to Andrew.

  Following Andrew’s Mass for the Souls at Holy Cross, MaryAnn returns home and shows visitors the plot, which contains a few sad cacti and a wilted basil plant. Then she goes inside, puts her false teeth in her pocket, and begins chain-smoking and talking nonstop—demanding constant attention, changing her mind repeatedly about what she wants for lunch, telling one visitor to look for forks “in the drawer with the brooches.”

  It is one of the grotesqueries of the tabloid culture we live in that no matter what heinous crimes an individual commits, a temptation of the individual’s family is to make money off the tragedy. And so it was with the Cunanans. Even MaryAnn. Dazed and confused, they were besieged to go public, wooed with bouquets and limousines by TV networks, hounded by tabloid reporters offering money, by producers ready to offer deals for putative books and TV movies, and by lawyers only too happy to act as their agents and to draft contracts signing over the family’s exclusive “life rights.” In this case those rights would be for stories of a son and a brother they no longer knew, the more sensational and sordid the better, from the media’s standpoint.

  Although they had no communication with Andrew for nearly a decade, Elena and Christopher Cunanan, Andrew’s older sister and brother, had made a book deal and attempted to include their unpredictable mother in it. They will not speak for publication unless they are paid, and thus would not participate in this book. Shortly after Andrew’s death, MaryAnn began traveling with a lawyer, who could monitor her remarks. Her daughter Gina alone refused to sell her memories.

  MaryAnn’s living room is furnished with four old wooden folding chairs, a worn metal desk chair, a sixties bamboo barrel chair with a faded pillow on it, a broken electric fan, and a new television set and tape deck. But the dominant feature is a shrine to Andrew, an altar on which she keeps a burning candle, family photos from happier times, cards people have sent her, pictures of saints, and a rosary blessed by the pope.

  Despite being heavily medicated and having a tenuous hold on lucidity in conversations about her youngest child, MaryAnn has an alarming fierceness about her. And a defiance. She is Sicilian, she says, and proud to be “a peasant.” She went on Larry King Live to describe Andrew as “beautiful, intelligent, handsome, bright … gifted … I just want to remember the good things.” She has been under a psychiatrist’s care for years and receives medical disability payments from the government. More than once since Andrew’s death, she has attempted suicide. One minute she can be kind and accommodating, almost cloyingly so, the next she is snarling and bitter, giving a visitor the evil eye. “Do you know what mal occhio means? I’m giving it to you right now.” She contorts her face into a satanic mask. It’s scary. Her son Christopher described it to the San Diego Union-Tribune by saying, “She is very vulnerable and emotionally frail. Mentally she’s just not right.”

  MaryAnn Schillaci was the child of immigrants. Her parents had come to Ohio from Palermo in 1928 and she boasts that her father was in the Mob. She calls herself a “menopause baby,” born late to her mother. Her father, she says, owned a barber shop and part of a bar. As a child she was doted on and overprotected, and she was happiest when her parents would put her up on a table to dance and perform. MaryAnn has come to believe that her parents’ age at her birth contributed to her being born with a “defect” and a “dark side” that she has to struggle to control. Like many children of immigrants, she did not speak English until she went to school, but once she starts talking she has few natural brakes. “Am I talking too much?” she will ask. “Should I take a pill? My husband used to hit me to get me to stop. He said he couldn’t think.”

  Today, her life is full of strangers—FBI agents, lawyers promising deals, TV bookers, and friends of “Andrew DeSilva,” as Andrew called himself in local gay bars, which his mother sometimes visits. To all who will listen, MaryAnn Cunanan insists that her son was not responsible for the death of Gianni Versace. She declares that his murder spree was all a Mafia setup: “Andrew met Versace through S&M sex,” she says. But then the details get vague.

  In her grief, MaryAnn has become Andrew’s protector and archivist. She has collected his clothes and his property and she gives his shirts away to people she likes. She excitedly declares that “Vanity Fair was Andrew’s favorite magazine,” then darts into her bedroom and emerges with the latest Vogue, a startling item given her surroundings. “I bought this because this is where Andrew purchased all his clothes from.” She means that he wore designer labels. In a curious way she is proud of his notoriety and wonders who should play Andrew in the movie. She says she had hoped her son Christopher would, “but he can’t act.” She is also thinking of former Olympic diver Greg Louganis.

  Asked when she first realized Andrew was gay, she snaps, “From the time he was born, stupid.” A few minutes later she corrects herself, saying that she knew on his sixteenth birthday, by “the way he put on a pink sweater.” In fact, his homosexuality could never be broached at home. MaryAnn seems to acknowledge this chasm when she says, “You can pray all you want and say all the rosaries you want, but they all have free will. Just wait until your son is sixteen. As soon as they can drive, they no longer belong to you.”

  For years, MaryAnn and her absent husband lived through their two youngest children, particularly Andrew, because they had “no emotional life together,” according to a neighbor. MaryAnn says, “Andrew was my marriage counselor. We would take walks around the block together and he would explain things to me.” Andrew became his parents’ confidant. Despite the bleakness of the union, MaryAnn emphasizes she has never divorced her husband. After giving unflattering portraits of several people close to her—always excluding Andrew—MaryAnn begins to tire. She disappears into the bedroom and returns wearing white pantyhose and a Sesame Street T-shirt with the puppet characters Bert and Ernie on the front. She is carrying a Bert doll.

  Her medication is making her sleepy. She closes her eyes, but not before revealing, “I’m a Scorpio. I have a dark side, which I try to overcome with the good. I have a bad and a good, and the good overcomes the bad—if I wear my glasses. Where are my glasses?” She impatiently searches for a pair of iridescent blue sunglasses, finds them, and pops them on. “If I wear my glasses, then I’m good, because nobody can see me.”

  Before her visitors go, MaryAnn wants snapshots taken. She imitates movie stars, posing with her hand on her hip, turning for a three-quarter view, throwing her head back over her shoulder. She demands, “Who am I? Don’t you remember Silvana Mangano? Don’t you remember Anna Magnani?” As she recalls these fifties and sixties Italian actresses, MaryAnn suddenly smolders with hostility. “I’m ugly but I’m the actress, right?” she implores. “Right?”

  Then she announces that we must stand up, join hands with her in a circle, and sing along to “Everybody sing praise to the Lord, for He is wonde
rful.” MaryAnn makes everyone swing their arms up and down and step into the middle of the circle and back. “You’re not singing right,” she growls impatiently, asserting her control. “You’re moving your arms too fast!” With her cigarette clenched between her gums, MaryAnn dances in and out, in and out, and when she looks at a visitor her eyes are filled with hatred.

  ANDREW PHILLIP, THE spoiled baby, was meant to fulfill the dreams of his mismatched parents. MaryAnn’s own mother had died when MaryAnn was nineteen, and the young girl moved to southern California to live with her older brother. She claims that his wife did not appreciate the affectionate hugs and kisses that the brother and sister, who had grown up in a warm, demonstrative family, be-stowed on each other. She knew she was not really welcome. She worked as a telephone operator and waitressed at a bar in Long Beach, a sailors’ town then, twenty-five miles southeast of Los Angeles. One night at the bar, in 1961, she looked up and her heart stopped. Pete Cunanan, eleven years older than her, had just swaggered in. “He was dressed in a white tuxedo, and I thought he looked like a Filipino Errol Flynn.”

  Pete Cunanan knew he had a way with the ladies, and he and MaryAnn danced the night away. Pete was a career enlisted man who had joined the U.S. Navy “fresh off the banana boat” from his village of Baliuag, twenty-five miles from Manila, nearly a decade before. He had a booming voice and a knowing manner. He was a navy hospital corpsman and a striver, acutely aware of rank and gradations of status. To fortify his big dreams and limitless ambition, he was taking courses in financial management and later would go to school at night and eventually earn two master’s degrees, in business administration and health finance. He was proud of his military record. Pete believed in spit and polish—he wanted to be a big shot.

  Short and powerfully built, he had a pencil-thin mustache and, later, a nail two inches long on one pinky finger. There were rumors that he was descended from a fierce warrior tribe and that he had been a fearless guerrilla fighter in World War II. Fun-loving MaryAnn, with dark hair, large eyes, and a piercing laugh, would stuff socks in her bra to make herself more sexy to him. Although she was promised to someone back home, and sent money to Ohio every week for her wedding, she was instantly attracted to Pete.

  MaryAnn was six months pregnant when she and Pete got married. Their first child, Christopher, was born in August 1961. Pete was soon transferred to the U.S. Naval Hospital in St. Albans, New York, where MaryAnn gave birth to blond, blue-eyed Elena in 1963. In 1966 the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, and when the Vietnam War began heating up, Pete became part of the First Hospital Company, First Marine Division. The Fleet Marines, who hit the beaches from naval ships, counted on the hospital to tend to their wounded. MaryAnn stayed behind with the two babies, but even before Pete left, their marriage was awash in acrimony.

  Pete had become convinced that his wife was unfaithful to him. Today, he flat-out declares that “she is the mother of four; I am the father of three.” Andrew’s godfather, Delfin Labao, who comes from Pete’s town in the Philippines and is called Uncle Del by the Cunanan children, has known the couple from the beginning. He confirms Pete’s belief that Elena is not his daughter. Pete soon adopted an attitude of total disgust toward his wife. “He abused her so much,” says Labao. “It was a very sad marriage.”

  Pete Cunanan denies that he was ever physically abusive but MaryAnn insists that he struck her and pulled her hair. Pete’s strong belief in her infidelity fueled an anger that convinced him he had license to behave as he wished. MaryAnn, never very stable, eventually became fragile and dependent, yet at the same time passive-aggressive and manipulative. Money was a constant source of friction.

  MaryAnn would spend freely, and she was not above withholding sex as a way to get things out of her husband. “I used sex to get him to buy me dining room furniture,” she says. She indulged the kids with music lessons and toys. “She spent money like crazy,” Pete says. “I had three bank accounts, but only one with my home address. If she thought I was hiding money, she’d sulk all day long.” Her blithe attitude toward money, and Pete’s notions of grandeur, were a dangerous combination, not only for the household bank account but also for the children to observe. Meanwhile, MaryAnn continued to get pregnant.

  In 1967, while Pete was with the Fleet Marines, the couple’s second daughter, Regina, was born. A few months before “Gina’s” birth in October, the Cunanans purchased their first house, for $12,500, in scruffy National City, San Diego’s outlying shipyard town. Squeezed between two freeways, the community was a far cry from the palatial setting Andrew would later brag about coming from. By the time Andrew made his arrival two years later, Pete had been transferred to the Naval Hospital in San Diego.

  ANDREW’S BIRTH WAS not easy. Delfin Labao says that MaryAnn lost a lot of blood, and a few months later she suffered a postpartum depression so severe that she could not even comb her hair. She required hospitalization for three months and was unable to care for her baby. It was the first of several breakdowns. Pete says he tried to fill the breach, coping as best he could while caring for the infant, who almost never cried. The experience created an ineffable bond. “I raised that boy from the cradle,” Pete Cunanan says. “I changed his diapers and fed him his bottles.” Once, when Andrew was a baby, he burned his foot by stepping on a floor heater, but Pete scooped him up and kissed him and marveled that the child didn’t cry. From birth Andrew was his father’s clear favorite. To make ends meet with four young children and a wife disabled by mental illness, Pete took a second, part-time job as a lab technician.

  Christopher and Elena, the two older children, were raised differently than Gina and Andrew. Their mother calls them “street kids.” They were not given the advantages that Gina and Andrew got. To all of his siblings, it must have appeared that Andrew was the favorite one. His brother called him “the white sheep.” While Christopher was left to shift more or less on his own, Elena, blond and beautiful, began to take dance lessons from a neighborhood lady known as “Granny Dancing,” and dancing became a big part of her life. Gina, also attractive but more cerebral and tomboyish, did not compete with her older sister. She grew up secretive and private. Andrew, from the beginning, was the adored little prince.

  When Andrew was three, Pete retired from the navy with a full pension after twenty years as a chief petty officer. His dream was to become a stockbroker. While working as a lab technician, he continued to pursue his studies in business administration and eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in 1976 and a master’s degree in business administration in 1977. “It was upward mobility from that point on!” Pete boasts. “Wherever there were rich people, that’s where you would find me!”

  When Andrew was four, MaryAnn considered using the money she had recently inherited from her father to start a new life without Pete. Instead, with Pete cosigning, she bought a bigger house just a few miles east, in Bonita, for $96,000. The three-bedroom California ranch, in a middle-class neighborhood with good schools nearby, was a big step up.

  BONITA, MEANING “PRETTY” in Spanish, was once the lemon capital of the world, a paradise of lemon groves and dairy farms. Its rock quarry provided stone for the fashionable Victorian Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, whose guests would take the train and spend the day picnicking at the site of Bonita’s Sweetwater Dam, once reputed to be the tallest in the world. In 1916 a flood broke one side of the dam after a prodigious rainstorm. The rains had supposedly been brought down by a professional cloud seeder, who became the inspiration for the Broadway play The Rainmaker. By the time the Cunanans bought there in the early seventies, the lemon groves had disappeared and the dairy farms were on their way out. Bonita was still, however, a horsey, countrified retreat with a mild climate in a lush valley surrounded by canyons overlooking the Pacific. Cookie-cutter tract developments were just beginning to cover the hillsides when the Cunanans moved to 5777 Watercrest Drive, the last house on the block at the bottom of a hill, across the street from a Little League baseball
field.

  The Cunanans’ house was standard-issue California ranch, but on the road above Watercrest were some very expensive homes with stables, where it still felt like the country. Many people who lived in Bonita were well off, and most residents sent their kids to public school. Because Bonita was surrounded by lower-income areas such as Chula Vista, however, and because the Mexican border was only ten miles away, there seemed to be a strong sense of pecking order in play there. Andrew’s parents were always careful to see that he had what the rich kids had.

  Andrew was a handsome child with a precocious sparkle. When he was ready to enroll at Sunnyside Elementary, he was a comely combination of his parents, with skin that looked permanently tanned, thick dark eyebrows, and large hazel eyes. It was not immediately apparent that he was half Filipino, and in school he never said he was. He was extroverted and happy in Miss Bobbie Hatfield’s kindergarten. Although his parents believed he was a genius, Miss Hatfield, who has taught for over thirty years, did not find him exceptional. But it was enough that his parents did.

  Part of the family lore that Andrew’s parents and siblings have told on television—apart from the fact that they considered themselves a normal and typical American middle-class family—is that Andrew had read the Bible by age seven and could memorize long passages of the encyclopedia. Reading, it seems, became his retreat early on. According to his father, Andrew would opt out of the flare-ups at home with a book. “Andrew had a way of defending himself. He’d put on a nice smile and walk away. He had this expression—‘Gosh, Mom. Gosh, Dad.’ He’d grab his encyclopedia, lie down on the bed, and read.”

  Pete dealt with the misery of his marriage by staying out late and not being home very much. In 1979, when Andrew was ten, he began a training program to be a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch—a cause of great pride to him, which he communicated in no uncertain terms to his family. “Hey, I could talk—a man who is a stockbroker, with his social standing, his intelligence, and I’m not bad-looking either.” Pete was a strict disciplinarian, however, and everyone knew he was the boss. If the children were watching television, for example, and Pete came in, they would automatically vacate the room so that he could sit down and eat his dinner by himself on a small table in front of the set.