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

by Robert Hofler

  Dominick and Carby often arrived together at Hilhaven Lodge, but even at these anything-goes affairs he kept his boyfriend at an uncomfortable distance. “He never wanted it to look like we were on a date,” said Carby. Dominick continued that charade even at the party Carr gave for ballet star Rudolf Nureyev in early April 1974. Also attending were Bianca Jagger, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Diana Ross, and Roman Polanski.

  In Joyce Haber’s coverage of the pre-Easter party for the Los Angeles Times, the gossip nearly outed the attendees: “If Bunnies were lacking, muscle-bound young men were not. Mae West would have had as much of a ball as Nureyev.” As usual, Dominick made a point to be on the phone the next day to give Haber some of her juicier tidbits about the party, but he knew when to shut up. Dominick told her nothing about the subsequent party that Carr threw for the émigré danseur.

  “Nureyev was sexually insatiable,” said Dominick. “For one party in his honor, Allan hired a hustler for every room in his house so Nureyev could be served on the spot, if he so chose.” Carr jokingly required all guests to bring a mattress to his house that night, which is why it came to be dubbed the Nureyev Mattress Party. Some revelers wondered if it was payback for all the women Nureyev had to dance with on that previous evening. At the all-male party, Allan Carr welcomed his guest of honor with an abundance of Beluga caviar, Stolichnaya vodka, and Hollywood rent boys. It is the latter dishes that Nureyev never got around to sampling, since he retired to a stone cottage on the estate—the same stone cottage where Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini consummated their adulterous affair a quarter century earlier—and quickly inspired two dozen men to offer him their bodies.

  When Dominick sometimes retold the Nureyev gang-bang story, he often added a disclaimer. “I wasn’t there. It’s just what I heard,” he would say with a smile.

  “We were there,” said Carby.

  Otherwise, the 1970s were not a good decade for Dominick’s party card. So much had changed since he arrived in Hollywood in the 1950s. His lavish Black and White Ball had been forgotten, unlike Truman Capote’s copycat Black and White Ball two years later in New York City that quickly took on a resplendent aura of urban myth. Worse, Capote did not invite the Dunnes to his party, a slight Dominick never forgot.

  When he was married to Lenny, Dominick received numerous invitations to parties given at Jules and Doris Stein’s home. Their house, called Misty Mountain, offered awesome views of Los Angeles and beyond. They did not get more powerful in Hollywood than Jules Stein, who in the 1920s founded MCA, an agency known as the Octopus even before it acquired Decca Records and Universal Pictures. Dominick signed the Steins’ guest book hundreds of times. He had been to all of their daughters’ coming-out parties and considered himself such a good friend that, when Jules left parties early and his wife invariably got drunk, Dominick made it his responsibility to see tipsy Doris up the treacherous drive to Misty Mountain.

  Now a midlevel executive at RCA, Dominick no longer got an invitation to the Steins’ home. In a way, it gave him enormous freedom. No longer beholden to the Steins or people like them, Dominick became a receptacle not only for stories of Hollywood humiliation he witnessed but stories that he merely heard—like the one about Doris passing out drunk in her bathtub after a late-night party in London, Jules bringing a pillow to prop under her head so she would not drown, and her thinking he was trying to smother her and yelling for help. “It’s really a terrible story to repeat, isn’t it?” said Dominick, who repeated it a lot. He also coined a couple of great one-liners: “Sit down! You’re not going to believe what I’m going to tell you.” And “I never repeat gossip, so listen closely the first time.” Which always got a big laugh.

  What did he have to lose now? With reckless abandon, Dominick confessed to friends, as well as people he had met for the first time, about being thrown off the Hollywood merry-go-round: how the wife of the producer of Johnny Carson’s talk show had disinvited him to a party at the last minute because a friend had not left for Europe after all and she could only seat an even dozen for dinner. It hurt, but not as bad as Swifty Lazar dumping him from his annual Academy Awards blow-out, which numbered two hundred guests at the Bistro Garden. Twelve guests was one thing, but when you were not in the top two hundred in Hollywood, you were worse than dead. You were the uninvited.

  It especially galled Dominick that he no longer received invitations to parties where the hostesses had to replace the Steuben glass ash trays with a dime-store variety because a columnist for one of the trade newspapers kept stealing the expensive kind. “He gets invited, but not me,” Dominick complained. Suddenly, Lenny’s taunt “if all else fails, you can become a columnist” looked prophetic, if still not a compliment. Maybe he should be a columnist—just to get invited to parties the way kleptomaniac reporters did.

  Instead, Dominick told his stories for free. Tony Kiser met him in 1974, and, among other reasons, they became good friends because “Dominick was always very honest about his problems in Hollywood. It was one of his more endearing qualities, his utter honesty on that point,” said Kiser. Also, Dominick knew everyone in Hollywood, and while Kiser came from big money back East, he was new to town, “because I got a job working at Universal television.” Kiser began as the producer’s assistant on McMillan & Wife and quickly worked his way up to associate producer on TV shows like Columbo and Rich Man, Poor Man.

  Fortunately for Dominick, Allan Carr could always be counted on to throw another party. At least they had pizzazz, even if there were only a smattering of A-listers. In November 1975 Dominick entertained a few of his friends at a cocktail party. His doorbell at Spalding Drive rang, and when he went to answer it, a uniformed officer greeted him with a summons. At least, Dominick thought it was a summons. His guests had to wonder what crime he had committed. “When you open the front door and someone is serving you a subpoena, your heart stops!” said Dominick.

  Then he realized: it was an Allan Carr joke, and not only a joke but an invitation to a party in honor of Truman Capote, to take place on December 15, 1975, at the vacant Lincoln Heights Jail in northeast Los Angeles. Dominick got the joke, lame as it was: Capote wrote In Cold Blood, hence the jailhouse theme. It was the way Carr’s mind worked. Who cared if the novel had been published nearly a decade earlier? At least the party would be a good plug for Capote’s acting debut in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death, which was Truman’s official reason for being in town. A more apt way to honor Capote, thought Dominick, would be a party in a restaurant decorated to look like La Côte Basque, which was the title of a chapter in Capote’s long-awaited and still-unfinished novel Answered Prayers. That chapter, excerpted in Esquire magazine, was the real reason the author fled New York City. “La Côte Basque 1965” totally alienated Capote’s good friend Babe Paley; it was also said to have caused the suicide of chorus-girl-turned-socialite Ann Woodward, who thought her resemblance to a husband-killer in the short story hit too close to her Park Avenue apartment.

  The night of Carr’s Capote party, Dominick drove himself to the jail, a trek that took him past downtown L.A. and Chinatown and into forgotten Lincoln Heights, the city’s dumping ground for all its street-maintenance equipment. Carr staged a faux riot at the entrance of the jail, with actors dressed as escaped prisoners directing cars to the nearest parking area. Dominick might have brought his boyfriend, but Norman Carby was working that night: a member of the costume-catering company known as the Doo Dah Gang, he donned a cop’s uniform to take guests’ mug shots, which wound up on a souvenir coffee cup. Carr spent the early evening, as people arrived, screaming at members of the Gang. “Do something! There are no ashtrays! They’ll mutiny,” he said of his guests, who included Peter Sellers, Diana Ross, and Lucille Ball. Others like David Niven, Charles Bronson, and Francesco Scavullo danced as the Link, a five-piece band, played “Jailhouse Rock” and “Killing Me Softly with His Song.”

  The guest of honor played along, for a while. Truman Capote wore tinted specs and a gangste
r mix of big-brimmed black Borsalino, a double-breasted jacket, and what he called “my Brazilian dancing shoes,” which sported red leather and rubber soles. However, the experience of being one of five hundred well-dressed guests crammed into a space built for three hundred convicts left Capote oddly unnerved. People tried to have fun, but they were in a jail. It was creepy. The guest of honor retreated to a cell to be alone. It was at this moment that Dominick, standing alone in another cell, caught his eye. He also was not in a party mood—at least not this party. “There was such sadness in Truman’s eyes,” said Dominick. “He never recovered from that snub of Mrs. Paley’s. This was not his new milieu—Hollywood, and it wasn’t up to what he was used to in New York.”

  Ditto Dominick in Hollywood. Never had he identified more with the author of In Cold Blood.

  The journalist Dotson Rader knew both men. In the early 1970s, Rader met Dominick at “some boy parties given by a film distributor” in Hollywood. “Dominick was just this little guy who was nice and told stories about a lot of famous people,” Rader recalled. “He was very gossipy, and seemed to be using his story-telling. It was like Truman in a way, a way of getting attention, because Dominick wasn’t physically prepossessing. It was the way someone who wasn’t a born star could dominate a conversation or get the attention of people.”

  Rader did not remember Capote being fond of Dominick: “What Truman found deeply annoying is Dominick wasn’t just gay and quiet. He was gay and boastful about being straight.” Rader went on to admit, “We were all captive to the times.”

  Sometime after Allan Carr’s jailhouse party, Rader met for drinks with Dominick and Capote at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. “You used to go in there, and if you sat long enough you’d end up with four or five people you hadn’t seen in a while. People drift in who you know,” Rader noted.

  A friend of Capote arrived unexpectedly at the hotel lounge. The woman’s marriage to a movie star was not going well, and because she wanted to confide in Capote, the two of them went off to a corner to commiserate and drink. When the unhappy wife finally left, Capote returned to Dominick and Rader. “She’s in one of those marriages that end up in either murder or suicide,” he told them.

  “There’s no nice way to get out,” Dominick added.

  “And that’s how the subject of suicide came up,” said Rader, who had no idea that Dominick struggled with thoughts of ending his own life. That destructive impulse resurfaced more vigorously on Rader’s subsequent trip to Los Angeles, where he had been invited to a party at Tony Kiser’s house in Malibu. Rader saw Dominick there. He had been drinking heavily. “I have a car,” Rader suggested. “Let me give you a lift.”

  “No, no,” Dominick replied, drunk.

  Rader insisted. “I’ve got a driver. I never drive in L.A. I’m giving you a lift.”

  Dominick carried a little black bag with him that night. “Like a doctor’s bag, but it wasn’t,” said Rader. In their ride back to Beverly Hills, Dominick brought up his deep depression, that he did not have any money, his career had tanked. He oozed self-pity.

  “There’s broke and there’s broke,” Rader told him. “You’re not broke.” They talked about getting together the next day when Dominick mentioned that he would not be spending the night at his Spalding Drive apartment. “I’m checking into the Tropicana tonight,” he said, and gave the motel address to the driver.

  “Why the Tropicana?” asked Rader.

  “I’ve got friends meeting me there.”

  “At the Tropicana?”

  “Yes, I do have friends.”

  “I know you have friends.”

  “You’ve got to drop me off there.”

  Dominick refused Rader’s offer to go to the motel with him. “I’ll see you, darling,” Dominick said, and was gone.

  A few blocks later, Rader noticed Dominick’s little black bag. He had left it in the car. Rader looked inside, thinking he would have the driver take the bag back to the Tropicana. “It was full of pills, four bottles of pills,” said Rader. “Opiates and Quaaludes. It didn’t occur to me that he was going to kill himself. He’s going to take a trip on this shit, which is fine. But it’s not fine if you’re drunk. It will kill you.”

  Rather than return Dominick’s bag to the Tropicana, Rader took it with him back to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and later phoned Dominick to say that he had given the bag to the hotel management. Dominick could pick it up there at his convenience.

  Years later, Dominick admitted, “I was always with strangers doing drugs. I was in somebody’s closet. We used a Turnbull & Asser tie to get the vein going and we were shooting cocaine and one of the people died and I ran.”

  His young journalist friend Marie Brenner said she did not know that Dominick Dunne, the one who “set the curtains on fire. I didn’t see that person.” To Brenner and her journalist boyfriend Jesse Kornbluth, Dominick became “a kind of father figure” in the 1970s. The three met him through Griffin Dunne, and the couple found Dominick deeply interested in their work as writers for the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, and other major periodicals. Kornbluth also had ambitions to write screenplays. “We were known as the Young Didions,” said Kornbluth, which did not do much for his ego.

  “Jesse and I used to see Dominick regularly,” Brenner recalled. “I always had the sense he was a reporter manqué. Whether he was reporting or not, he was acting like a reporter. He was obsessed with news, what’s going on, who’s doing what to whom. He also had a tremendous sense of self, or whatever it is you need to document yourself.” She enjoyed looking at the detailed scrapbooks he kept of his many parties. “He was reporting his own life from such an early moment, a memoirist from the earliest moment.”

  More than assembling scrapbooks, Dominick loved writing letters. He wrote letters on a daily basis, and at least two of his children inherited that interest.

  When Dominick produced movies, Alex and Griffin Dunne would occasionally write to congratulate their father. A typical letter began with good wishes about the fate of one of his films at the latest festival, whether it be Cannes or Venice. As with missives from most teenage boys to their parents, good wishes often led to requests for money or a new leather jacket. (In the following decade, Alex’s letters to his father would become far more intimate and expansive, occupying several pages.) Dominique’s letters to her father were always very personal. Dominick called her “darling,” and their relationship was epitomized in one letter written to him after she had returned to Italy to continue her studies in Florence. She wrote to her father, asking that he tell no one about her being attacked by a man near the Ponte Vecchio. The incident took place one night after seeing the movie Young Frankenstein with school friends. Badly bruised, she told friends how she had fallen down a flight of steps. Dominique considered returning to the States but in the end decided to write her father a letter instead, only asking for his “sympathy.”

  Dominick’s own letter writing took on a novelistic quality, especially with regard to his own reduced relationships with some of Hollywood’s major powerbrokers. Fran and Ray Stark continued to invite him to the occasional dinner at Trader Vic’s. On Sunday nights, the Polynesian-themed restaurant in Beverly Hills attracted not only the producer of Funny Girl and his wife but Nancy and Ronald Reagan sitting next to Hannah and Alan J. Pakula sitting next to Betsy and Alfred S. Bloomingdale. Afterward, Dominick wrote down what Ray and Fran said over dinner, including the producer’s joke about which ethnic group hit the pavement first after jumping off a tall building. It was not a very good joke, but it startled Dominick. Stark’s own son had committed suicide in the previous decade by leaping from a window.

  Dominick told stories, but people also told stories about Dominick. He had never worked with Daniel Melnick, but that did not prevent the producer of Straw Dogs and All That Jazz from taking a Sinatra-level dislike to him. Shortly after Melnick had been made head of production at MGM, turning the near-dead studio around with such hits as The Sunshine
Boys and Network, he told people that one of the Dunne children had caught Dominick having sex with another man in his Spalding Drive apartment. The story had legs and would continue to be told in Hollywood even after Dominick’s death in 2009. When Dominick first heard the sordid tale, he panicked. He railed at the rumor, which he claimed to be totally false. But what could he say or do to resurrect his already beleaguered reputation? He called the rumor the kind of story that, in its ugliness, could cause him to commit suicide, like Truman Capote’s short story in Esquire had destroyed Ann Woodward. All he could do was write in his journal of the pain at being held in such “low esteem” in Hollywood when he was broke, unemployed, and utterly defenseless.

  His only solace was his letters and journals. And gossip. Dominick told friends that he had several outlandish vignettes involving the first families of Hollywood. “I’ve listened to their farts,” he reported. And no Hollywood first family did he know better than the Starks. He thought their life resembled a novel. Gradually, he began to chart a plot connecting the movie producer and his family with Sue Mengers, whom he hated more than anyone in Hollywood. Mengers was so blatantly gross and the Starks were so colorfully eccentric—the way their servants wore denim outfits with the words “Camp Rastar” at the Stark ranch and the horses were named after dead movie stars who had once been their friends. (“They were named after friends, not movie stars,” said the Starks’ daughter, Wendy.) A novel would give him much-needed money, he thought.