by Maureen Orth
Phil concluded that a propensity toward violence lurked just beneath the surface in Andrew. “There was always something at least Zorro-esque, Errol Flynn–esque, in the sense that, while his manner was deliberately foppish and fey, there was an express willingness he’d talk about to allow things to become violent if they needed to.”
From Andrew’s reading of the Marquis de Sade or The Scarlet Pimpernel , for example, he would exhibit “off with their heads,” noblesse-oblige attitudes, suggesting that having superior knowledge or status keeps one above the law. Even more chilling was Andrew’s frequent use of violent expressions in his speech. Instead of repeating the common phrase “going ballistic,” Andrew would often substitute “going on a five-state killing spree.” He’d say, “If I found out I had AIDS, I’d be so mad I’d go on a five-state killing spree,” or “This is outrageous enough to make me go on a five-state killing spree.” Andrew’s frequent use of this phrase to be humorous was disquieting to Phil, who later told the FBI about it, after Andrew had actually committed murders in four states.
Phil always thought that Andrew had a dark side, a reservoir of pent-up anger that was better left unexplored. Andrew once claimed to Phil that his generation was obsessed with just two things: money and death.
6
Capriccio
WHILE ANDREW WAS denying his sexuality to Lizzie and Phil, he was energetically networking with other young gays around the Berkeley campus and keeping a journal of his nocturnal encounters in the crowded Castro bars in San Francisco. The Castro was like a liberated small town, populated mostly by gays and lesbians. Andrew could converse about current affairs, but he didn’t seem much interested in the politically charged atmosphere—his upbringing of spoon-fed San Diego conservatism wouldn’t have been embraced in the Castro. He concentrated on his social life.
While Andrew appeared very devil-may-care, he really wasn’t. By the late eighties the Castro was reeling from the AIDS epidemic, and Andrew, like so many others, was filled with anxiety that he might contract the disease. Even as far back as the 1970s, 40 percent of the 1500 gay white males in the San Francisco area interviewed by two researchers from the Institute for Sex Research (later renamed the Kinsey Institute) said that they had each had more than five hundred sexual partners. By the time Andrew arrived, a great political battle was raging over whether or not the number of sexual partners one had was relevant to one’s susceptibility to the disease. In the earliest days of AIDS, some gay leaders in San Francisco were reluctant even to publish scientific data showing that the disease could be spread by sexual transmission.
Later they continued to be sensitive about any suggestion that promiscuity was responsible for the plague ravishing their neighborhood. Andrew, however, apparently thought that numbers counted. He was having frequent, furtive sex and was feeling both scared and guilty. Elizabeth Oglesby found Andrew’s journal after he had moved away. (Unfortunately, the diary was also destroyed in the 1991 Oakland fire.) “It was amazing, like the journal was his friend,” she says. “He talked about being too promiscuous—his fear of AIDS and his fear of too many contacts. It was all about the men he met in the bars.” In his journal, at least, Andrew could be candid and “unsophisticated.”
In fact, he was so secretive about his sex life that many people thought he was asexual. Just as he suppressed and numbed his feelings, so he hid rejection. Never one to score easily, he affected nonchalance when people he liked were unresponsive to him. That didn’t keep him from eyeing or trying—he was smitten for a while, for instance, with a graduate student in Spanish whom he’d invite to the opera—but much of what he really felt remained hidden, even in a place where being up front was a way of life.
In Berkeley, among the evergreens and eucalyptus, between the early-morning fog and the mild, sunny late-afternoon breezes, one can find pairs of every class, race, ideology, and gender preference in the world. For Andrew, there was an ample sense of choice and competition in gay interaction as well, which mirrored the vast spectrum of Berkeley itself.
For instance, Andrew, who hated to work out, did not have to cope with the rigorous cult of the body that is practiced in gay society almost everywhere. In Berkeley, Andrew cultivated a mussy professor look older than his years. Not even his closest friends knew how young he was—they all thought he was close to thirty. Every day he wore the same lime-green Ralph Lauren sweater and khakis and brown Cole-Haan shoes. He also wore glasses and carried a cane, perhaps remembering his father’s earlier symbolic admonition that “You’ve got to carry a cane to be a step above the rest.” He soon acquired a brainy group of fun-loving friends, but was very select in what he let be known about himself. “He hung around very intelligent, talented people, because he wanted these people to be responsible to him,” says former Berkeley student Doug Stubblefield, who was his close friend in those days.
His hip new friends heard all about his father, the Filipino general. “Yeah, the General’s calling me back to fly the Buddy Holly death planes,” he would say. He was a pilot, he went on, and he was referring to rattletrap aircraft he named after the fifties rock legend who had died in a small-plane crash. His family in his stories was superrich, but had lost much of its fortune when Marcos was over-thrown; he told hilarious tales of Imelda Marcos.
Yet other friends barely heard him mention that he was half Filipino. Jerome Gentes, who met Andrew at Berkeley in the fall of 1989, says that even though “Filipino was the hot race on campus that year, Andrew wanted to be blond and blue-eyed.” Gentes, who was twenty-five at the time and had lived with an older man, found Andrew a kindred spirit. They both joined a gay group sponsored by the Berkeley Student Union and open to the campus community. Andrew talked about going back to school, but he hadn’t done well at UCSD, so he was probably not in a position to transfer, and going to a junior college would have been way beneath the image he had of himself.
Gentes liked Andrew, but he found that for all of Andrew’s big talk, he pulled away sexually. An ex-Catholic himself, Gentes felt that Andrew was like a lot of young gay Catholics and former Catholics—he had a prudish streak that wouldn’t allow him to explore his sexuality.
“Andrew talked a lot about how nasty he was—I really didn’t believe it. When I became intimate with him, he was really withdrawn.” He also often talked about pornography and “leather”—a neutral word for sadomasochistic sex. “It was shocking to the other guys in the group—so many hadn’t explored it. I got the feeling Andrew had explored it but hadn’t gone through it.”
The most amazing thing Andrew told the group was that his father was gay and had a young boyfriend, whom Andrew resented. Andrew said his father had bought the boyfriend a better car than Andrew had. One day he announced that his father was in town, driving around in a Rolls-Royce, and that he was going to go shopping with him and the boyfriend. No one, of course, ever met the General.
“I would try to press him for details,” Gentes says. “He made it sound so perverse—an Oedipal thing.” But Andrew never said there had been anything sexual between him and his father, which left Gentes to wonder. “What he did say was that his father had stolen a boyfriend away from him.” At the same time, Gentes realized that much of what Andrew said was lies. “I felt Andrew was searching for connection, for some point of reference.” Over time, Gentes concluded that Andrew’s father was not gay, but others completely accepted what Andrew told them about his father’s preferences. As Gentes says, “He really was a bundle of contradictions.”
Finally, Gentes realized that Andrew wasn’t ready to be honest and he told him that if he couldn’t be honest he didn’t want to be his friend. Gentes began to distance himself from Andrew. Over the years, the rupture of friendships over the issue of truth would become a recurring theme for Andrew. People would go through a process of confusion followed by frustration, and finally begin to realize that he was simply not able to be forthright. Many didn’t mind, because they considered him cheap entertainment. But other
s did mind, and they would back off or drop him altogether. Over and over, Andrew’s inability to deal honestly caused him to lose the people he most cared about. He never had trouble making new acquaintances, however.
IN THOSE DAYS Andrew never really had any money, but that didn’t seem to deter him. “Andrew would leave the house with three dollars and thirty-five cents and come back with change left over after dining, et cetera. I believe he took the art of getting other people to pay for him to a level of real excellence,” says Phil Merrill.
Andrew would normally wait for his friend Doug Stubblefield to give him a ride across the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. “He would go out and have one drink. And if he didn’t go out, he would read Vanity Fair and books,” says Stubblefield, who also bought him W. The two would take W to a café and read about the jet set. Andrew loved feeling part of that world, and with his facility for memorizing he knew dozens of the international set by name and castle.
Andrew brought Doug home once and told him that he was half owner of the house he was living in with Phil and Lizzie. To Doug, Andrew was a graduate of Choate, the elite Connecticut prep school, and later he had gone to Bennington and Yale. As proof, he proudly wore a Choate sweatshirt. “His story was always that his family had money, not that he had money.” Doug also heard about Andrew’s rich Filipino father, the landowner with sugar plantations, and Andrew confided to him that he was writing a novel about his experiences in the Philippines. He let Doug hear some of the material he was dictating into a tape recorder, and Stubblefield was impressed. “It was filled with subtle allusions and metaphors.”
Doug found the stories Andrew told him very entertaining and didn’t care whether or not they were true. He liked the fact that he got “the good stuff” and not the same old bar stories Andrew told everyone else. He appreciated that Andrew, with that manic voice and laugh, tried to be good and sincere about listening to others, “but he still required being the center of attention.” Doug realized that Andrew had built up a shield no one could ever penetrate. “He’d turn around with one phrase, and get the laugh, and yet would never let you in.” Andrew confided to Doug Stubblefield—as he had confided to Matthew Rifat when he was barely thirteen—that he was convinced that he would one day be famous. “He didn’t know where he fit in but he knew he was exceptionally talented and had something to give, but didn’t know what that would be, and that was frustrating for him. He knew he could be famous if he just got the right match.”
In San Francisco, as at Bishop’s, Andrew was once again pasting together an identity so that he would be instantly noticed in the bars and cafés he frequented. The fact that so many young people in the Castro, as in Hillcrest in San Diego, were from out of town and were just coming out, reinventing themselves along the way, helped Andrew get by with his tall tales. The city was thoroughly welcoming; the Gay Pride Parade featured every group from Dykes on Bikes to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Within that wide arc, says one of Andrew’s friends, “he carried off the bon vivant. He didn’t need to do what ordinary mortals do, and he was a man with a million masks. Everybody knew a different Andrew.”
His favorite hangout was the Midnight Sun, a yuppie gay bar in the heart of the Castro filled with “employed eligibles,” “prissy queens,” and older men looking for pickups. A long bar extends along one wall, with colorful banners hanging over it at an angle. Throughout the spacious room, video screens are suspended over small high round tables that patrons lean against while watching everything from comic routines—which Andrew was very good at mimicking—to gay pornography. It was a perfect setup for Andrew to dart around and mingle in, and to begin his eventual career as a greeter and matchmaker.
At the Midnight Sun, Andrew and Doug hung out with a bright young redheaded attorney named Eli Gould, who represented clients in Silicon Valley. Eli would buy Andrew an Irish whiskey, which he’d nurse all night, and then Joe, the bartender, might give him another. The Midnight Sun was right across Eighteenth Street from Gould’s favorite restaurant, Lupann’s, where a brass plaque commemorates his place at the bar. From that bar Andrew could see everyone who walked into the Midnight Sun, and if he felt so inclined, he’d follow.
Eli Gould, whom Andrew greatly respected and admired, was the third of the Tres Amigos, along with Andrew and Doug Stubblefield. Gould was Jewish and dignified, and before long Andrew began telling people at the Midnight Sun that he, too, was Jewish. This process of changing his religion from Catholic to Jewish had begun in San Diego. At first, Andrew’s letting people believe he was part Jewish was a tool of convenience, but it could also carry an ugly ethnic slur. One naval officer who knew Andrew during his first year at UCSD, in 1987–88, was witness to the transformation. Some nights Andrew would be so “on” when he hung out at the West Coast, a now defunct dance club in Hillcrest, that he would bellow, “I’m so loud I sound like I’m a New York Jew!” Within a short time he was actually claiming Jewish blood, complete with parents who lived on Fifth Avenue.
But the reference could still be disparaging. “What do you expect from a Jew?” Andrew asked on another occasion. The surprised naval officer asked, “Since when are you Jewish?” Andrew didn’t answer.
The half-Jewish, half-Filipino claim was baffling, but Andrew actually got people to believe him. Steven Gomer, who is Jewish and works for a San Francisco brokerage house, met Andrew in the Midnight Sun shortly after arriving in San Francisco from New Jersey in 1990. At first, Andrew introduced Steven to just about everyone he knew. “He just seemed so gentlemanly, and the way he introduced other people and the way he knew everyone and everything was so gracious. He was just much more mature and refined than I was—more than any of my other friends at that point were.”
To Steven, Andrew “mentioned his mother being like a Filipina/Jewish kind of princess. Not a princess, specifically, but a real maven of the arts and a real pampered woman, who knew the finer things in life.” Steven recalls asking, “Was her father Jewish? Was he Filipino? Then it was, like, ‘It’s much more complex than that, Steven.’ He was extensively Filipino, but he knew everything about Judaism, and I couldn’t see the tie.” Steven never got an explanation. “These were just ‘little lies,’” he says. “Was he a wonderful friend? Did he remember everything I ever confided in him, provide me with valuable advice, teach me a lot about social graces and academic fields of study?” The answer was a resounding yes. Andrew would tutor Steven from whatever “seven-hundred- or eight-hundred-page book he was reading.” Steven, who already knew Eli Gould, says, “Eli, like me, comes from an upstanding Jewish family. If he considers Andrew to be a quality individual and someone worthy of being his best friend, that’s good enough for me.”
Andrew told Gomer, who grew up in the northern part of New Jersey, that he was from the southern part of the state and a graduate of Lawrenceville, the prestigious prep school, but had studied at Choate as well. When Gomer teased Andrew by saying that Choate had once had a cocaine problem, “he pretended to take offense, as if I were insulting him personally.” But Andrew also set out to teach Gomer how to become a gentleman. “He was so much politer, more dignified, reserved than I am.” Over Diet Cokes he would buy for Steven, Andrew explained “The Rules” to him. “He felt very strongly that only fools work. But he did so in a way that was sensitive to my status in life. There was really no reason why someone should need to work,” Steven recalls Andrew saying, “work with your own hands or work an hourly ledger when you can find others to do the work for you. He was not alluding to being kept by others—more to the fact that a smart businessman doles out responsibilities and has others take the work for him, and he collects on the backs of the employees’ efforts.”
Perhaps the greatest thrill Andrew provided Steven was an introduction one night at the Midnight Sun to the elegant blade about town, Harry de Wildt, a ubiquitous socialite who was a staple of the late Herb Caen’s gossip column. The flamboyant, Dutch-born de Wildt, a sixtyish dandy, is married to a younger, b
ig-boned Hillman heiress. A lun-cheon crony of Mayor Willie Brown’s, he lives in a grand apartment on Nob Hill and prides himself, as he puts it, on having a “natural curiosity, whether I go to dinner at the Gettys’ or visit the gutter,” which may account for why he has been seen both at board meetings of the San Francisco Opera and at the Stud, a dance club in the south of the Market Street area, where Doug Stubblefield and Andrew would often go after the Midnight Sun. De Wildt says he thinks nothing of getting up at 4 A.M. to visit a new place. “I lead a full life, I’m curious, I’m invited everywhere.”
“Harry was almost always there, and there were always our snide comments,” says Stubblefield. “We would share jokes about Harry de Wildt.” Andrew set out to meet Harry and “become his best friend,” and he did succeed in becoming friendly with him. Several times they went out clubbing in a group. Andrew would also visit the health club at the Fairmont Hotel, which Harry de Wildt frequented, reportedly prompting de Wildt to quip that a workout for Andrew meant sitting in the club sauna. For Andrew, de Wildt was definitely someone to cultivate.
Andrew had a “pure admiration for Harry de Wildt,” says Philip Merrill, and “came home all excited after the first time he met him.” Thereafter, Phil would hear Andrew speaking to de Wildt on the phone to make plans.
But Harry de Wildt categorically denies ever having met Andrew Cunanan: “I haven’t had the pleasure or displeasure of meeting Mr. Cunanan. I have never met him. I have never known him.” Though his denial is contradicted by at least a half-dozen eyewitnesses, de Wildt insists: “Listen, I have the body of an eighteen-year-old boy. I keep him in a hotel in the Tenderloin! That joke was told me by a married man with five children! Anyone can say anything!”
