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

by Robert Hofler

  But Dominick had an alternate version of what happened that night. He imagined Lana and the lawyer concocting the whole Cheryl-stabbed-him defense, with Geisler coaxing her, “How about if Cheryl did it, trying to protect her mother from this thug who was beating the crap out of her?”

  Even then, Dominick had a flair for drama, not to mention a sore spot for criminals who call their lawyers long before they phone the ambulance or the police. He called it “a rich-people thing.”

  Alex Dunne did not remember the night of April 4, 1958. “But my dad was obsessed with that story,” he said. “His story was that the daughter took the rap, the daughter didn’t really kill him.”

  Dominick remembered it simply as “one of the stories that most influenced me.” He found it even more alluring in its intrigue and cover-up than the Woodward or the Lonergan murders. Only later, more than a quarter century later, did he realize murder could be personal, ugly, and anything but fascinating.

  Dominique Dunne was born on November 23, 1959. “Dominique became our treasure,” he said, referring to the two infant girls who died before her. Dominick called her Darling. “My relationship with my daughter was perfect,” he said. “I adored her and she me.”

  The relationships with his two sons proved more complex.

  “Even at age eight we knew he was flawed the way he’d get so upset and worked up about stuff,” said Griffin Dunne. “He drove my mom up the wall. He was a human being in development.”

  “Our mother was a real free spirit,” said Alex Dunne. “Dad had to have everything just so.”

  Griffin believed, “conscious or not,” that their upbringing was “based on the royal family. The nanny would have meals with the kids and the adults would check in, have a little something maybe and then go out to drink and dance,” he recalled. “They would think nothing of having people in black tie, and we’d be upstairs and listen to them getting hammered and having a great time.”

  Photographs of the two boys, and later Dominique, show them in matching outfits for a casual day at the beach or a dip in the backyard pool. “Even we were art-directed,” said Griffin. Dominick’s attention to the styling of his children was never more evident than when it came to the family portraits, based on Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the royal family. “They were deadly serious Christmas cards, taken in the middle of summer. They weren’t your happy Christmas cards. No smiling. They were ‘Look how beautiful this family is.’ We hated them,” said Griffin.

  One year, Dominick set up his Leica and then promptly tripped over the tripod. All three kids broke up laughing, their expressions of spontaneous delight over their father’s unexpected tumble recorded on film. “That’s the only card I kept,” said Griffin.

  What his sons already knew at an early age is what many people were openly saying about Dominick in the 1960s. “He’s a snob,” they said. Later, he would develop a sense of self-deprecating humor about his social climbing, his name-dropping, and his star-fixations, but in the early 1960s Dominick turned those avocations into a full-time career, and he nurtured them with solemn devotion. His social predilection combined with his drinking and extramarital affairs with other men made him something less than admired in Hollywood. “His reputations had holes in it,” said Freddy Eberstadt. “Lenny’s never did.”

  Lenny remained his greatest asset. It may have been why Frank Sinatra decided to unload on her, and not Dominick, that terrible night at the Bistro. The agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar was throwing a party in the upstairs room at the tony Beverly Hills restaurant, and whatever Sinatra said to Lenny there left her in tears. (A soused Sinatra also tore into Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Lazar at the Bistro party.) Dominick would only say how Sinatra had called him a “loser,” but there were implications that Sinatra also thought Lenny was being used by her husband, and not just for her money.

  For a man of Sinatra’s ego, humiliating a man’s wife did not satiate his need to conquer and destroy. His next ploy would be to confront Dominick, albeit with somebody else’s fist.

  Shortly before that encounter took place, Dominick found himself seduced into making a mistake he would not be able to correct for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, it played into Sinatra’s plan to further denigrate him in the eyes of Lenny and all of Hollywood.

  In the early 1960s, Dominick’s haircutter Jay Sebring talked him into getting a toupee to cover a growing bald spot at the crown of his head. Sebring, who introduced the blow dryer to men’s hairstyling, said he could make him a small toupee that would blend in with his real hair and no one would ever know. Concerned about his appearance—“I always felt insecure about my looks”—Dominick agreed to wear it. But he hated it. He even wrote in his private journal how he would rather be exposed as a homosexual than as a rug wearer. That is doubtful; Dominick often resorted to exaggeration to make his point, even to himself. When he became a journalist, the worst thing Dominick Dunne could write about a man was that he put a rug on his head. He never wrote publicly that he used to wear one.

  Dominick always believed that no one can spot a rug on a man’s head faster than a fellow rug wearer. Frank Sinatra wore a toupee, and Dominick believed Sinatra knew about his own hairpiece. Long before Hollywood and the rest of America had become litigiously inclined, Sinatra used to pay the Daisy’s maître d’ to humiliate people he disliked. Dominick called himself and Lenny “charter members” of the Sunset Strip disco, a private club with a $500 initiation fee. “It’s our own little Hollywood clique,” said TV producer Aaron Spelling. “If you get bombed, it’s not in the paper next day.” Nor did George the maître d’ punching Dominick make the paper. It was a soft punch, by all accounts, and no sooner did he throw it than George apologized, saying, “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Dunne. Mr. Sinatra made me hit you in the head.”

  Dominick asked if he had been paid. George said Sinatra gave him fifty dollars.

  Over the years, the “Frank Sinatra paid George to hit me” story was one of Dominick’s most oft told. His story began, “Frank Sinatra picked on me. I was the amusement for Sinatra. My humiliation was his fun.” Dominick, however, always left out one important detail in the retelling, and it was the thing that made the punch so potentially ego-bruising. There was something about the way George said “hit you in the head” that led Dominick to believe he meant to use the word “toupee” instead. Being hit by a fist under any circumstance is awful, but what Dominick worried about most when he took George’s fist was that his rug would dislodge. Billy Wilder’s wife nearly guessed the truth. She told Dominick what she thought of Sinatra’s unprompted attack. “If he ever did that to me, I would pull his wig off,” said Audrey Wilder.

  Dominick did not pull off Sinatra’s wig, but he and Lenny never returned to the Daisy, where, in the following decade, O.J. Simpson would meet the blonde waitress Nicole Brown. Otherwise, Dominick’s partying, drinking, philandering, and social climbing continued unabated.

  “Nick kind of lost his head in Los Angeles,” said Freddy Eberstadt. “Lenny stayed level-headed. He got swept away by the grandeur and glamour. It was the only time I was not very close to him. I found him quite difficult.”

  Years later, Dominick repeatedly admitted, “I write assholes so well because I used to be an asshole.” He did not exaggerate. In the 1960s he got into a too-public fight with Henry Fonda’s third wife, Afdera Franchetti. He laughed too hard at skater Sonja Henie taking a bad fall on the ice when she came out of retirement. At very private parties, he took too many snapshots of Princess Margaret and union lawyer Sidney Korshak, “who was never photographed,” Dominick noted. In some ways, Dominick Dunne turned himself into something of a joke. He got invited to important parties, but often only after the dinner had been served to the host’s small, select group of truly important friends. He and Lenny soon became known as the After Dinner Dunnes.

  Worst of all, his marriage to Lenny was breaking up and people knew it. He did what many Hollywood spouses do when they want to plast
er over fissures in a marriage. He decided to celebrate their wedding anniversary in grand fashion. It was 1964, and they had been married ten years.

  “It was strained then,” Mart Crowley said of the Dunne marriage. At the time, the future playwright was the secretary of Natalie Wood, one of Lenny Dunne’s closest friends. “Lenny and Nick just got through that [anniversary] party, before the marriage really did fall apart,” said Crowley.

  If Lenny’s mother, Beatriz, ever needed more evidence that her son-in-law lived in high style thanks to her daughter’s bank account, it was the $20,000 party Dominick threw on April 24, 1964. “Lenny’s mother was furious,” he wrote.

  Dominick dubbed it the Black and White Ball. He got the idea from his dinner guest Cecil Beaton, who had been in town to design the sets and costumes for the new movie musical My Fair Lady at Warner Bros. “The black-and-white motif for our party was taken from the Ascot scene,” Dominick noted, referring to the film’s chiaroscuro visuals.

  “It was gorgeous,” said Mart Crowley. “Yes, the party was over the top, but not in a glitzy Hollywood way.”

  Dominick put his stage-manager talents into full play to redecorate the house as if it were a theater set. He put all the downstairs furniture into storage and sent his three children to spend the night at the Beverly Crest Hotel. Before they left home that evening, Griffin, Alex, and Dominique got to see the opulent magic created by a famous muralist and stage designer.

  “Jack McCullagh turned the house into a stage,” Alex Dunne recalled. “He built these beautiful white trellises that we had for years later. The trellises were very French, making the place look like a chateau. We had these cypress trees by the pool in the backyard and Jack painted these jungle scenes so you saw animal faces coming at you through the trees. It was a big deal and I couldn’t understand why we weren’t allowed to be there.”

  Even the invitations were special, engraved by Smythson’s of Bond Street in London. It advised women to wear black or white. Men would be wearing tuxedos, of course. Dominick planned for 250 guests and absolutely no more. He even told some of his bachelor friends they could not bring a date. “I was one of the extra men that were invited,” said Crowley. “We were always useful, to invite the women to dance. I could get a party going. I could dance with everybody.” The Beverly Hills fire marshal put a limit on the number of guests. No more than 250. But at the last moment Truman Capote phoned to make it an illegal 252.

  Capote was the guest of David O. Selznick and Jennifer Jones. In Cold Blood was more than a year away from being published, in 1965, but the writer had publicized it relentlessly. “So naturally we invited him,” Dominick reported. “Then he called and asked if he could bring Alvin Dewey—the Kansas detective who had broken the case and arrested the killers—and his wife. I told Truman that because of fire laws we couldn’t let anyone bring extra guests. But he wouldn’t let it go. It was clear that he wasn’t going to hang up until he had gotten the Deweys into the party, so eventually I relented.”

  If a party takes place in Beverly Hills and no one is there to photograph or report it, has the party really taken place? Dominick did not think so. He enlisted his soon-to-be sister-in-law to pull some strings at Vogue, where Joan Didion reviewed movies (until a 143-word pan of The Sound of Music got her fired the month before Vogue published its coverage of the Black and White Ball). The fashion magazine sent photographer Bob Willoughby. Dominick got his artist-friend Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood’s partner, to sketch Lenny’s gown for an item in Women’s Wear Daily. He also had luck finding someone to report on the party, even though he would be the one providing all the copy. George Christy told Dominick that such a party was not right for his column in Town & Country. “I was doing interviews with Alfred Hitchcock, that kind of thing,” Christy recalled. However, the columnist promised to pass on Dominick’s “party details” to Aileen Mehle, who wrote as Suzy Knickerbocker for the Journal-American. “It’d give her column international flair rather than just New York society,” said Christy.

  As promised, Suzy ran Dominick’s copy, reporting on a guest list featuring an eclectic roundup of movie stars, from Loretta Young to Dennis Hopper, along with top directors Billy Wilder and Vincente Minnelli, L.A. society ladies Betsy Bloomingdale and Edie Goetz, as well as a future first lady and president, Nancy and Ronald Reagan. Dominick was thrilled. Suzy even repeated verbatim some of the copy he gave her: “There were hydrangeas everywhere, two orchestras, and a late supper. The music stopped at four.” Years later, Dominick repeated those words in his published memoir, The Way We Lived Then.

  “It was an exciting launch for his social career,” said Christy, who told Dominick to “send me more. I’ll pass them on.” Christy was just one of many columnists who began receiving Dominick’s morning reports of parties he gave and the parties he attended. Lenny told him, “If all else fails, you can always write a column.” She knew her husband better than he did.

  Dominick’s unbridled drive was part entitlement, part anxiety. Even though his marriage was falling apart, he deserved to throw himself a $20,000 party, but the sheer extravagance masked deep insecurity. “I always felt I was there on a pass,” he said of life in Beverly Hills. “I wasn’t going to last. I didn’t belong there. I always had a feeling I wasn’t a part of this. I was just watching.”

  Griffin Dunne saw the unhappy side of his father’s obsession. “He was at the mercy of these people who he was entertaining. It was almost as if they weren’t real unless they liked him and came to his house,” he said. Even their presence was not enough. Dominick needed to relive the experience through the voluminous scrapbooks he kept, ordered specially from Smythson’s. “Every telegram and every acceptance to his invitation were ironed into a scrapbook. He would use an iron so they would stay in,” said Griffin. Dominick was creating the life of the person he had invented to replace the boy he had been born, and his fabricated life needed to be documented. He needed to believe it was real, that he was not making it up.

  Dominick’s career in television became a sideline, although a very successful one. He left Fox television, where he produced the hit TV series Adventures in Paradise, to become a vice president at Four Star Television, which had fourteen shows on the air when he arrived there in 1963. Although he partnered with the movie stars David Niven and Charles Boyer, fellow actor Dick Powell led the company, its true visionary. He and his wife, June Allyson, were close friends of Nancy and Ronald Reagan in their actor days. Powell used to tell Dominick, “See if you can find a part for Nancy on Burke’s Law,” one of Four Star’s most popular series. Powell did not have to recommend Nancy. Neither did Dominick. TV executives and casting directors all wanted to meet her, and not because she was a great or even an adequate actress. Privately, Dominick told friends that Mrs. Reagan was a popular request thanks to her expertise at performing fellatio upon request. Powell, however, did not continue to support the actress’s flagging career too long after Dominick’s arrival at Four Star. He died of cancer at age fifty-eight, and his absence soon affected the company. Within two years of Powell’s death, Four Star had only five shows on the air; two years later only one. Dominick could do nothing to stop the precipitous decline.

  He tried with a TV marriage not made in heaven.

  In 1965 the seminal gay-themed play Boys in the Band was three years away from being produced on stage, but it was already “indicative of what was on my brain,” said its creator. Mart Crowley always wanted to be a writer, but after an assistant’s job on the movie Splendor in the Grass, he ended up as Natalie Wood’s secretary instead. But he was no ordinary secretary. Sometime during all the phone answering, he found time to come up with an idea for the actress’s next film.

  What Crowley wrote was a screenplay based on a book by Dorothy Baker, the author of several controversial books on lesbianism, as well as a similarly themed play called Trio, which closed on Broadway when Protestant ministers put up a picket line in 1945. Today, Baker is best known for he
r novel Young Man with a Horn, the screen version of which stars Lauren Bacall as Kirk Douglas’s sophisticated, aloof, and very bisexual wife. In 1962 Baker wrote a novel called Cassandra at the Wedding, about twin sisters—one heterosexual, the other lesbian—and Natalie Wood, at the peak of her popularity, possessed the clout to get Twentieth Century Fox to buy the movie rights for her. The screenplay was written by her secretary, Mart Crowley, and Dominick’s old boss Martin Manulis would produce.

  “We were preparing Cassandra at the Wedding, and Nick and I met through Martin,” said Crowley. The three men lunched and discovered they shared the same sense of camp humor, among a few other things. “We laughed a lot,” said Crowley.

  But two weeks before shooting was to begin on Cassandra at the Wedding, Fox pulled the plug. “Darryl Zanuck never liked the script; they knew it was a controversial film,” said Crowley. “They used the sets for What a Way to Go! Threw some hot pink paint on them.” Manulis licked his wounds and instead produced The Days of Wine and Roses, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick, which he had originally done on TV at Playhouse 90. As would happen throughout their careers, Dominick and Crowley threw each other a lifeline. This time it was Dominick’s turn to give Crowley a job. “I was at liberty and Nick gave me a six-month contract at Four Star Television,” said Crowley.

  One day, the young secretary turned writer was “sleeping on the couch in my cubby hole of an office” when Dominick ran in panic-stricken. He had just shown a veteran movie star the script, by Cy Howard, for a pilot titled The Bette Davis Show.

  “No way!” Bette Davis told Dominick. “I’m backing out.” Dominick begged her to give him the weekend to have the script rewritten. She harrumphed. What could be done in a weekend? Dominick told Crowley to do his stuff. Fast.