by Maureen Orth
“All of Andrew’s supposed close friends had money—young professional types,” says Brian Wade Smith, who once dated Jeff Trail and saw Andrew in Hillcrest, San Francisco, and Minneapolis. “There was Andrew taking them to the places to go. They were lonely and didn’t have other people to go to these places with. Andrew would always say, ‘Oh, I have a friend I’ll set you up with.’ It was lonely people with money and no place to go.” In Hillcrest, where sex is often not only the coin of the realm but also the great equalizer, Andrew was assured of having a ready audience among those who were in need of a road map.
“You have the haves, the have-nots, the wanna-bes, the escapists, the power junkies, the superior, the inferior—it runs the gamut—all played out by one gender as opposed to traditionally what’s been the rule all down the line,” says longtime Hillcrest resident Anthony Dabiere, a former waiter and real-estate broker who knew Andrew and had observed him for years. Dabiere also points out that when a single gender assumes both male and female roles, the rules become more intricate. “Then the game is reinvented, and the natural proclivity of men to be in competition is only heightened to sometimes absurd levels as men compete with each other as both prizes and judges.”
One of Hillcrest’s attractions is that it is nonintimidating to, say, transplanted gay Midwesterners, young men from small towns in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, or Kansas, who crave the freedom and the climate of California but find that West Hollywood and the Castro have too much attitude. “In the Midwest, to go to a gay bar you have to drive two or three hours to get where there is a city feeling,” says Tim Barthel, who is from Michigan. “The attraction here is the pace. It’s not L.A. or San Francisco. When you walk into a bar here, you’ll generally know 50 percent of the people.”
The small-town kids were far more apt to accept Andrew’s stories than kids from New York or Los Angeles. “He chose military boys and boys from the Midwest and transplant people. In general, his group was easily snowed,” says Chris Fahey. “Very deliberately, that was his selection process. He replied to his skeptics with those willing to buy into his act.” Andrew eventually became a fixture of the neighborhood, a combination cruise director and welcome wagon. In the bars, everyone knew Andrew.
“In the gay world, you can be virtually anybody without needing to advertise it. But if you choose to adopt a certain posture and broadcast it, nobody will question you all that stringently,” says Dabiere. “It’s an open market, where the only real criterion is what you want to bring to your presentation. If you choose to go out in dungarees and sweat-shirts, you will get to a certain level, and that may be your choice. If you want to supersede it, all you have to do is go to Nordstrom and buy yourself a nice new outfit and voila!”
Hillcrest, says Dabiere, is filled with people who live for the moment. “The relatively close proximity of a moneyed population from La Jolla alongside a youth-and-beach population gives elbow-rubbing opportunities for those who choose to pursue them. You can have a pauper alongside a prince without any trouble at all.”
SAN DIEGO MAY be the seventh largest city in the United States, fast growing and spreading, with seventy miles of beaches and ninety museums, but in many ways it seems like a small town. Almost everybody is from someplace else, ingenuous enough not to laugh off somebody like Andrew’s brand of audacious fabrication, and rootless enough not to be able to check it out. The outdoor life and climate are superb for tourism, and the burgeoning high-tech industry promises ever increasing prosperity. San Diego is less the sleepy naval headquarters and conservative country cousin to Los Angeles and San Francisco than in previous decades; it has the Old Globe Theater, a symphony orchestra, Sea World, and the famous zoo, but it also has some catching up to do.
In 1991, when Andrew returned to San Diego, the economy was firmly anchored to the aerospace industry. In the next few years that economy took a nosedive, as the Cold War wound down and defense jobs were phased out. The gay community, however, had by then begun to flex its economic and political muscle. One of its most visible leaders, Nicole Ramirez-Murray, who is billed as “the self-pro-claimed mayor of the gay community,” is a controversial Chicano Republican turned Democratic activist; a columnist; a public relations consultant; and a witty, performing drag queen.
“I have one side of my closet organized with gowns, dresses, and crowns,” Nicole declares, sitting in her apartment filled with tchotchkes and faux Fabergé eggs, “and the other side with suits and ties. I wear both.” In 1990, Nicole spearheaded the community effort to help raise early significant money for a city council race, and gays and lesbians have gotten the attention of local politicians ever since. “We have a swing vote in two assembly districts and one state senate district and in two city-council districts,” says Nicole, “and more important, we have swing money, too.”
Hillcrest, a gentrified neighborhood of rehabilitated storefronts, outdoor cafés, bars, restaurants, bookstores, and supermarkets, including many gay-owned businesses, began taking off in the late eighties. Announced in huge letters on a pink Art Deco neon sign that arches over University Avenue at the intersection of Fifth Street, Hillcrest has a friendly feel to it, and Andrew Cunanan soon began to call it his true home.
FOR THOSE LIKE Andrew who make the bar scene and want to be considered A-listers, the neighborhood is segregated into highly stratified cliques. These include the rigid “cult of masculinity” prevalent in urban gay ghettos, fueled by drugs and the promise of hot sex. The gay media is filled with images of pumped, hairless “muscle boys,” all signifying what author Michelangelo Signorile calls “a fast-food lifestyle for people with a fast and furious appetite.”
Andrew bought heavily into every part of that mystique, just as he had slavishly lusted for the material goods of his privileged classmates in high school. Gay author Armistead Maupin says, “He was seduced by the democratization of sex—the idea that, if you have the right goods, at a certain point you can meet anybody and do anything.” Andrew’s whole life was now determined by the dictates of gay status.
The living in Hillcrest, shaped by the mild coastal weather, is fairly laid back. Yet, Hillcrest is just as susceptible as big brother Los Angeles, or many other gay communities, to falling prey to many “debated-from-within-the-community” issues: whether the only thing gay liberation has wrought is a docile market for a certain life-style based on appearance, labels, possessions, and the aforementioned, much-discussed cult of the body; whether people are too often judged by the kind of car they drive or by how buff their physique is, etc. Similarly, drug use, consumption of pornography, and the injection of steroids to build up muscles are commonplace. San Diego even has the advantage of being near the Mexican border, where liposuction is cheap. The buff boys often ingest various nutritional supplements like creatine to convert fat to muscle more quickly. They then appear tan, shirtless, and rippling—on weekends in Balboa Park—riding bikes, grooming their dogs, and playing volleyball in an informal beauty pageant.
Andrew, who had no patience for the gym, and to his peers, never appeared very comfortable with his body, was forced to find another way to compete. He frequently went to Black’s Beach, the nude beach in La Jolla, but he never took his clothes off. The cult of the body was an arena that Andrew could not enter with his own age group, and he did not try. Rather, with his cultivation of the finer things—particularly art and classical music—and his penchant for quips, Andrew sought to become a throwback to an older form of gay stereotype, what Daniel Harris in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture calls “the high aesthete with the rapier wit.” Such an existence requires not only considerable leisure time, which Andrew had, but also ample financial resources—much harder to come by.
The question always being asked was where did Andrew get his money? While he was still living in the Bay Area, Andrew had apparently explored the possibility of being paid for his sexual services. From Berkeley, Andrew made frequent, secret forays down to southern California on weekends when he could hitc
h rides, apparently trying to ply himself as a paid escort or kept boy.
In December 1989, a young computer software salesman visiting Los Angeles from Cincinnati met Andrew at a party in the Hollywood Hills for two country singers. Andrew was with a man about seventy-five years old, a doctor from San Bernardino. The two young men struck up a conversation, and Andrew was very interested to hear that the salesman was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The next afternoon, Andrew, who introduced himself as Tony Cunanan, paid him a visit there, calmly throwing down his duffel bag as if he were planning to stay.
The two spent a couple of hours lounging at the hotel pool, went out that evening, and then spent the night together in the salesman’s room. Andrew came across as smart and smooth. The next day the salesman dropped him off at a health club on Santa Monica Boulevard, and the two promised to keep in touch. But the salesman thought it had been just another one-night stand. Andrew told his new friend that he was rooming with an escort in Los Angeles who billed himself “the best face in L.A.,” and left him a phone number and a box number in Newport Beach. The salesman returned home.
A few months later he got a Disneyland postcard from Tony, saying he’d like to move away from California. Meanwhile, the salesman had lost his job and decided to move to Florida. He became an escort at the now defunct Exotic Escorts Service of Fort Lauderdale. Tony contacted him again. “He said there were too many other guys trying to do what he was doing in California and he’d like to try Florida—someplace where it was warm.” The salesman offered to help him get set up in the escort business. Tony said thanks, but nothing happened. Nevertheless, he called every few months.
In 1991, about the time Lizzie and Phil Merrill were getting ready to move out of Berkeley, the salesman showed up at a party and a photo shoot for a male calendar of Exotic escorts at the Glow Lounge. According to the salesman, the owner of the service told him that he had been contacted by Tony from California, and that the owner had sent a few jobs his way. The owner said he was impressed that Tony had remitted the proper share of the take back to him. The owner then explained that Tony had come to Florida for a little while and had said that he was willing to go anywhere to work. The former salesman was a little put out—after all, he was the one who had recommended the service to Tony in the first place. Why hadn’t Tony called him?
(Interestingly, the salesman remembers that some of his clients were executives of the Home Shopping Network, headquartered in nearby St. Petersburg, Florida. Marilyn Miglin, the widow of Andrew’s third murder victim, has been associated with Home Shopping Network since 1993, and her husband took time off from his real estate business in the early nineties to help her run Marilyn Miglin Cosmetics. Could Tony/Andrew have heard of Lee or Marilyn Miglin through the Home Shopping Network connection? Could he possibly have met Lee Miglin?)
The escort-service owner, now in poor health, with a police record and retired, is extremely reluctant to answer questions about his previous activities, and will confirm little. He remembers clients from the Home Shopping Network. He says he does not remember Tony, and neither does the woman who answered the phones. He recognizes the salesman’s voice on the phone but not his name. The salesman has excellent recall, can remember minute details, and has even saved the letter from the escort-service owner asking him to be there. He believes that he met Andrew Cunanan, and that Andrew was in Florida trying to be a male escort on a few occasions. Andrew did tell people he had spent time in Florida. But Andrew lied so much to so many different people that this story cannot be completely verified.
There is a similar story. A well-known San Diego gay, who fixes up dates as a favor for visiting VIPs, definitely remembers Andrew being brought to him when he first returned to Hillcrest. “One of my boys called me up to meet him. He said, ‘He’s part Asian.’ I said, ‘I’ve never had a call asking for an Asian.’ The guy said, ‘Well, he’s real smart and cute.’ I thought, Maybe a dinner date, but it’s usually sex they want. Andrew came over to my apartment. Right away, I didn’t think he was that cute. I said, ‘What are your best attributes?’ He said, ‘My smile and my eyes. I think I have sexy eyes.’ I said, ‘Anything else?’ Andrew said, ‘I’m OK, I’m about average there.’ He looked around my apartment and talked about the art, so I took a mental note that he was a good conversationalist. He only fit with about four people in all those years. If someone wants someone just for dinner—the politicians—it was a quickie three hundred dollars for him and no sex.” But the problem, the arranger goes on to explain, was “They’re very specific about what they ask for. I have a congressman who asks for ‘this many inches cut from his hair and his feet cleaned.’”
On that level of specificity, Andrew was hard to “reference.” “My boy told me, ‘He’s really looking for someone to keep him,’ but he never fit the mold.” For years afterward, whenever Andrew would run into the arranger, they would merely nod. In the end, Andrew wasn’t ornamental enough—nor “boyish” or patient enough. To really make it as a kept boy, one has to have both the right equipment and an obliging temperament. Some boys do, and “they wind up with Jaguars and property in their names,” the arranger tells me. “Andrew was stupid.”
Nicole agrees. “I’ve met too many Andrews. Andrew blew it. Instead of thinking stocks, investments, he wanted too much. If you’re going to be kept like that, they don’t want you going to gay bars—you have to be at their beck and call. Many are married, and they put you in a condo. But Andrew wanted to have a way of showing off. He needed the approval of his peers—‘Oh my God, you’re fabulous, you have so much money.’” Andrew, Nicole concluded, was not cut out for the boy-toy big time. But he never stopped trying.
“Very early on, in a young adult gay life, you can take a path and become a prostitute, a porn star, but there are others who are not that at all,” says Chris Fahey, who works in Hillcrest restaurants and observed Andrew for years. “There are certain specifics to the gay world. It’s tight knit and hush-hush about men who may be prostitutes. Most people in the straight community think it’s the type of thing that strippers do, but it goes on in the gay community much more than you might think. People come out and take one path or another. If you wanted to be absorbed in the gay community [as a prostitute], you could be absorbed pretty easily.”
Robbins doesn’t believe that Andrew ever turned tricks. “I saw him with tons of older people, but I knew most of them and I knew their relationship—all the ones in San Diego at least. They all were aboveboard.” Robbins knew Andrew was searching for a sugar daddy. “He definitely wanted somebody to keep him, there was no question.” But he wanted more. His four criteria, Robbins says, were that the person be “rich, intelligent, artistic, and famous.” Such a person was worth waiting for. “I would equate him more to a very beautiful woman who’s just not going to slut around. She’s definitely going to go after somebody, but she’s saving herself.” Otherwise, “once they get a reputation like that, who wants them?”
Fahey is less charitable in his assessment. He was a nineteen-year-old waiter at a restaurant called Canes California Bistro when he met Andrew in 1992. Andrew would come in four or five times a week with Lincoln Aston or another “older gentlemen.” Andrew told Fahey that he could get him “any kind of fake I.D. I wanted from the Department of Motor Vehicles. He never produced it.” Fahey, who is from the East Coast, says, “You can tell who has money. On the West Coast, lots of people had airs. It was obvious he didn’t have money.” Based on his own observation and other people’s remarks about Andrew, Fahey says, he put two and two together. “It was obvious to me he was a prostitute.” Fahey developed a visceral dislike of Andrew. “That guy is so creepy,” he told Trent Smith, the maître d’, “I don’t even want to be around him.”
“Andrew?” Smith replied. “He’s harmless.”
At home, MaryAnn would often find expensive clothes and shoes in Andrew’s room. “He doesn’t have any money,” she told Hal Melowitz. “He’s stayed out for days. Hal, look
,” she said, showing Melowitz $700 suits from Nordstrom with the tags still on and $300 shoes. “Look what he came home with now—Ferragamo shoes.” MaryAnn also discovered matchbooks from gay clubs and bars. “Where are these clubs?” she asked Melowitz. She even called some of the places, and people there would tell her straight out that they were gay bars.
When MaryAnn was alone, Melowitz would try to reason with her. “MaryAnn, these are gay nightclubs.” But MaryAnn was in total denial. Instead, “She talked about Andrew going back to school and on to greatness.” Though Andrew claimed for years that he was studying for a Ph.D. at UCSD, he left school forever in June 1992. When people checked, no one could find an Andrew DeSilva registered.
LIKE A BAT, Andrew took flight for his prey at night. From the beginning, there was a certain rhythm to Andrew’s nocturnal wanderings. Mondays, Nicole held forth as the witty and acerbic emcee at the Hole, a funky outdoor bar with a shower stage left, located near the old Marine Corps recruiting station. Wearing sequined chiffon, a red ponytail wig, and gold sling-back heels, Nicole would race over after doing the introductions to the Monday drag show at the Brass Rail in Hillcrest and conduct the weekly Wet ’n Wild underwear contest.
In gay America, men treat each other as objects in a manner that most women today would consider blatantly sexist. In a raucous crowd of closeted military men, gym rats flexing their biceps, and a few proper La Jolla gentlemen, Andrew could be found many Mondays in a blazer, watching as contestants were hauled up onstage, stripped to their underwear, and told to get under the shower and then come out and dance. While they shook their booty, they’d be questioned by Nicole.
“You have a nice body,” she told one young black. “Did you get it at the gym?” “No.” “Where? Running from the police?” The crowd hooted its disapproval. “Hey, I’m Mexican,” Nicole countered. “If you’re Mexican or black, you run from the police.” To another man who identified himself as “Irish/Indian,” she said, “You must be one big fuckin’ drunk!” She told a navy man, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, just open your mouth. I hate little teeny ones—they poke.”
