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

by Robert Hofler

  The firing, the fight, the night-before sex. It looked like Basichis did it, except he had a great alibi. He was at home with his wife watching baseball on TV when the murder occurred. And better yet, Morgan’s schizophrenic gay roommate, Marvin Pancoast, confessed to the crime.

  Dominick knew the ghostwriter of Alfred’s Mistress from his Hollywood days. Gordon Basichis recalled their association with little fondness. “I had a project,” he said, “a book I was going to option with another guy, and he knew Nick, and I went to his apartment, one of those older apartments in Beverly Hills south of Wilshire. He didn’t look like he was doing well. This was in the mid-1970s.”

  A decade later, Dominick was doing very well at Vanity Fair and Basichis was trying to sell a memoir that publishers did not want. The two men talked, and before long Dominick got what he wanted: a copy of the unpublished Alfred’s Mistress. Maybe he could help get it published. “I had all the information from Morgan directly. No one else had that access,” said Basichis.

  The book looked like the kind of smoking gun that Vanity Fair readers would come to expect of a Dominick Dunne article. There was only one problem: Dominick claimed that Basichis’s book shot blanks, making it clear why ten publishers had rejected Alfred’s Mistress.

  Dominick delivered a full-throttle pan of the unpublished book in Vanity Fair but did acknowledge how one scene caught his interest: for Vicki Morgan’s final meeting with a dying Alfred Bloomingdale, she spent $1,000 on her “Betsy table” of flowers and decorations. Dominick wrote that it “made crystal clear the complicated nature of their relationship.”

  The scene also provided Dominick with what would arguably be the most poignant moment in An Inconvenient Woman, published five years later.

  “Nick borrowed from it freely. Under the guise of some collaborative effort. That was his MO,” said Basichis.

  Face to face, before “A Woman Who Knew Too Little” hit the newsstands, Dominick praised Alfred’s Mistress to its ghostwriter. Basichis, in turn, returned the favor by taking Dominick into his confidence to reveal that there were no Vicki Morgan sex tapes. They were a ruse to throw off reporters, in his opinion. “You could write some batshit thing about sex tapes and then if you explode it out, it didn’t matter that you couldn’t substantiate it,” said Basichis. “That’s the seminal fact in terms of how journalism changed.” Not to mention courtroom tactics.

  Dominick and Basichis did agree on one thing: someone other than Pancoast murdered Morgan. “The blows were extremely well placed, just enough to kill somebody,” said Basichis. “It wasn’t where someone became extreme and lost all control, as they would in a crime of passion.”

  Dominick never bought the defense’s theory that Basichis held down Morgan’s dog while a hit man bludgeoned her, and then someone hypnotized Pancoast into taking the rap. To discredit such a scenario, Dominick reported that the courtroom erupted in “giggles” when the defense presented such speculation.

  The jury deliberated only four and a half hours before finding Marvin Pancoast guilty of murder in the first degree. If Arthur Barens tried at the trial to implicate others in the crime, thirty years later he was not defending his erstwhile client, now dead. “Pancoast had confessed to another murder. Pancoast was a sick man. . . . His perception of reality was screwed. To a degree he was intoxicated with the celebrity the case gave him,” said the attorney.

  The trial warranted one article in Vanity Fair, no more. The subhead for “A Woman Who Knew Too Little” said it all: “Dominick Dunne reports from the murder trial in Southern California on a B-movie cast and a plot as trashy as her ending, the Marvin Pancoast/Vicki Morgan trial.”

  Dominick, however, knew there was another, better story there. All he had to do was artfully stir in soft facts, and hard suspicions, that would never get by the Vanity Fair lawyers and embellish the story with characters inspired by powerful people he knew in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Years later, after he had written several best sellers, Tina Brown identified Dominick’s real shrewdness as a writer of fiction. “Dominick has been quite clever to keep the novels going, actually, because in a way, very often, the frustration of nonfiction is that you can’t really write what you know to be true if it isn’t supported by a fact,” said Brown. “So in a way, his novels are a kind of clearinghouse for all his instinctual knowledge of the subtext of all the things he’s writing about—all the emotional stuff that frequently can’t come out in a factual piece.”

  Dominick did just that with Mrs. Grenville. He would also do it five years later when he finally got around to writing An Inconvenient Woman and before it, People Like Us, his third novel. The only difference was his prototypes. Everybody who inspired his Grenville characters had passed away. The characters in his next two novels would be based on famous individuals who had the disadvantage, when it came to their good name and reputation, of being very much alive.

  8

  Von Bülow and Comas

  The disappointing commercial and critical reception of The Winners shook Dominick’s belief in his talent. Editors like Betty Prashker and Tina Brown restored it. If he had any doubts about Mrs. Grenville, a third high-powered female executive took his self-confidence to a whole new level.

  Even before publication of the novel, Lorimar optioned Mrs. Grenville for a TV miniseries. It was not feature-movie interest, but, as Dominick kept telling friends, “Novels aren’t being turned into movies anymore. They’re being turned into TV movies.’”

  A publishing mole “sneaked” Sue Pollock the original twenty-five-page proposal of Mrs. Grenville. On the lookout for material to be adapted to television, the Lorimar vice president did not have to read the finished novel. “I knew with Betty Prashker being the editor that Crown would get behind it and it would be a best seller,” said Pollock.

  In time, Dominick would refer to it as the novel “that changed my life.” But he did not know that until it happened. Before the novel hit the bookstores, Crown Publishing retitled it The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and Lorimar announced it would be turned into a two-part miniseries for NBC. A veteran book publicist met Dominick at LAX to take him on a round of press interviews in Los Angeles.

  “I’ve read a lot of books,” Judy Hilsinger told him, “but this is one of my favorites. It’s going to be a big best seller.”

  “Really?” asked Dominick.

  According to Hilsinger, “He didn’t know what he had in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles.”

  Dominick knew, however, what to do with the book’s massive royalties. (His books would go on to sell over three million copies worldwide.) First, he bought a one-bedroom penthouse apartment with terrace at 155 East Forty-Ninth Street in Manhattan, down the block and across Third Avenue from where Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn lived next door to each other in brownstones. He also went back to using Scotty Bowers’s escort service whenever he visited Los Angeles: “two or three times a week, depending on his needs,” said Bowers. On the East Coast, he flew Cal Culver up from his B&B in Key West to party with him in New York City. And he set out to repurchase some of his more beloved pieces of furniture from the Spalding Drive garage sale. At the top of the list was his old fireplace fender, which Wendy Stark generously overpaid for when he needed her $800. She did not want to sell it back, but they came to an agreement: he could repurchase it for the original $800, and upon his death, she could buy it from the estate for the same $800.

  Dominick did not remain humble or surprised about his literary success for long. After he recovered from the euphoria of his novel being turned into a miniseries, Dominick took an immediate and intense dislike to what Lorimar and NBC were doing to The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. While Ann-Margret was a good ten years too old to play the arriviste Ann Grenville, the actress made the wise choice to dine one night alongside a Lorimar executive who took an uncommon interest in her dramatic cleavage and practically promised her the role over crème brûlée. Dominick held his tongue on that casting decision. He had rejected Ann-Margret for P
lay It as It Lays but made that decision before knowing the actress’s manager. He now considered Ann-Margret a friend because Allan Carr was a friend. Dominick, however, openly objected to some of the older actresses being considered for the role of Ann’s contemptuous mother-in-law, Alice Grenville. Loretta Young turned it down, finding the story too unsavory for a good Roman Catholic like herself. The dueling sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine both wanted to play the snooty dowager. “De Havilland lobbied hard for it,” said producer Preston Stephen Fischer. When Claudette Colbert emerged as the producers’ clear favorite, however, Dominick said he much preferred his friend Lauren Bacall and found an easy ally in Liz Smith, who planted an item in her syndicated gossip column, saying Bogie’s widow would be cast.

  “Bacall didn’t have the requisite class,” said the film’s director and supervising producer, John Erman, “and the Liz Smith item caused problems with Claudette, who’d already been approached.” Dominick and Liz Smith lost that battle, as did Bacall. Erman cleverly “circumvented” the Smith item by giving journalist Robert Osborne the news that Colbert would play Alice Grenville. His exclusive scoop broke on the front page of the Hollywood Reporter, shaming Liz Smith and creating acrimony at the Reporter, where its aging Broadway Ballyhoo columnist Radie Harris thought Erman should have hand-delivered her, not the upstart Osborne, the big tip.

  Dominick also hated the Grenville script. He wanted his friend Mart Crowley to write it, but the network wanted someone with experience writing long-format television. The Boys in the Band may have broken new ground in the theater, but it was not a miniseries. The TV executives wanted and got Derek Marlowe, who had written two miniseries. “Derek knew about society and being an outsider,” said Sue Pollock. “He wrote a great script.”

  Dominick thought Marlowe wrote a terrible script and dashed off a type-written seven-page, single-spaced letter to John Erman, listing a number of problems. His complaints ran the gamut, from the use of the word “drapes” (old money never uttered the word) to spending a dime to make a phone call (it cost a nickel in the 1940s) to the word “the” in front of El Morocco (it did not belong there) to having Billy Grenville drink alcohol from a flask while driving (Dominick complained that John Sweeney had been a drunk driver, and besides, it would destroy sympathy for the character).

  Erman knew Dominick’s fierce determination. “We’ve got to fix this,” he told network executives. “Nick’s on everybody radar, and if he comes out against the movie, it’s not a good thing.”

  Others involved with the production thought Dominick’s real problem was not the script. Having once been a producer, Dominick desperately wanted to bring The Two Mrs. Grenvilles to the TV screen under his own aegis.

  Fortunately for Lorimar and NBC, Dominick got somewhat sidetracked. The production of the miniseries, which shot in London, took place as the second Claus von Bülow trial convened across the Atlantic Ocean in Providence, Rhode Island. (The first trial ended on March 16, 1982, with von Bülow found guilty of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny.) Dominick briefly visited the UK production of The Two Mrs. Grenvilles but could not stay long, needing to fly back to the States for the trial, which began on April 25, 1985. He complained to reporters in Providence that the TV people in London “don’t like rich people. They don’t understand rich people.”

  Reporters were not the only ones who got an earful. Dominick also groused about the direction of the TV movie with an agent-friend, who, in turn, gave him a few tips on being a real journalist. “He asked me what a lede was,” said Lucianne Goldberg. “The reporters at the trial kept talking about their lede, and he didn’t know what they were talking about.” The agent, who had represented many writers in her long career, told him it was jargon for an article’s opening paragraphs. Dominick and Goldberg were not the most likely phone buddies. They met through a mutual friend “who liked to put people together. That was about the time that Tina Brown had adopted Dominick and wanted to get the story of his daughter’s murder,” said Goldberg. Like any good dealmaker, she needed to remain in touch socially. “But I had kids in college, I was busy with my career, and didn’t have time to get out every night the way Dominick did. He was nuts about going out.”

  On the phone every morning, Dominick and Goldberg chatted about daily newspapers’ top stories; then he would go out at night and report to her the next day. “He came back with all the dish, which I thought an enormous advantage, because I didn’t have to go to the parties. He told me who left with whom and came with whom. ‘Did you know so and so?’ It was one of those relationships,” she said.

  Dominick told Goldberg everything. They shared opinions, even though the two rarely met face to face. It was not unlike his daily phone chats with Joyce Haber at the Los Angeles Times. Goldberg did not have a daily column but was a very plugged-in literary agent, who, in the following decade, would come to verbal blows with Dominick over her ties to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. An arch-conservative, Goldberg never thought much of Dominick’s liberal politics, but they shared a similar black-and-white concept of justice. Each knew instinctively that Claus von Bülow had tried to kill his wife, and with the second trial, he was attempting to buy himself an acquittal with the expensive counsel of Alan Dershowitz, the attorney who had successfully wangled the appeal.

  Dershowitz viewed Sunny von Bülow’s coma not as attempted murder but the direct result of an upper-class tragedy: “these rich women who drink too much and take injections,” he said. “Dominick knew that world.” The two men engaged in long talks about the case, and Dershowitz laid out the medical evidence and how the incriminating bag with the insulin-crusted syringes could have been planted in a closet at Clarendon Court. Dominick remained unconvinced. “Dominick never saw a defendant who was innocent,” said Dershowitz. “He looked into Claus’s eyes and saw a murderer.”

  Dershowitz left out the word “rich.” Dominick never saw a rich defendant who was innocent. He considered himself an expert on the rich and, more important, he liked them, except when they were murdering people and then buying justice with overly clever lawyers. His knowledge of the wealthy not only helped him write The Two Mrs. Grenvilles; it gave him a distinct advantage over other reporters at the second von Bülow trial. Among the press corps, only Dominick really understood the high society world of New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Only he knew why von Bülow acted and dressed the way he did. Joyce Wadler covered both von Bülow trials for New York magazine, and she had never seen anything like the fustian outfits the defendant wore in court.

  “There was a cuff of some sort,” Wadler recalled. She asked Dominick, “What is that?” According to the New York reporter, “Nobody else in that crowd of reporters knew.”

  “It was the cuffs,” explained Barbara Nevins Taylor, a reporter for WCBS. “Von Bülow wore these strange European suits with cuffs on the sleeves. That was a style that Dominick identified for all us reporters.”

  Those sartorial details fascinated Dominick. Other reporters considered them trivial or just did not care.

  “I don’t love rich people,” Wadler noted. “If they want to kill each other, it’s like the Mob.” One trial about Claus von Bülow attempting to murder his wife was enough for her. The second trial almost sent Wadler into a coma since she had little sympathy for the victim. An heiress and socialite, Martha “Sunny” Crawford used her considerable wealth to marry a destitute prince, Alfred von Auersperg of Austria, and followed that first failed marriage with a more disastrous one to the Danish financier Claus von Bülow.

  “Sunny von Bülow was this woman who had wasted her life, been born with every advantage, then had drug and drinking problems,” Joyce Wadler surmised. “She just seemed to be neurotic. I didn’t care for [Claus]. These two ridiculous people.”

  Adding to the couple’s preposterousness was a very high-profile mistress. In the beginning, Andrea Reynolds watched the trial from the relative privacy of the CNN van parked outside the Providence courthouse
. Charles Feldman manned the cable network’s satellite station and gave von Bülow’s latest girlfriend access there in turn for her giving on-air interviews on how the defendant had reacted to the day’s proceedings. Feldman also got to know Dominick and what he thought of the dramatic trio. “Dominick found them to be a sordid lot, except for Sunny, whom Dominick had great sympathy for,” said Feldman.

  In addition to thinking von Bülow a killer who bungled the job, Dominick labeled the defendant a big phony. “He made fun of the ‘von’ in his name with great disdain; it made Claus sound more aristocratic than he was,” said Feldman, “and he was not a fan of Andrea’s, who was quite taken with Dominick.”

  According to the CNN correspondent, Dominick possessed a very complicated attitude toward people like von Bülow, one fraught with insecurities about his own upbringing and ancestry. “Dominick craved acceptance,” said Feldman. “On the one hand, Dominick had a degree of disdain for that segment of society; on the other hand, he wanted to be accepted by them. And he enjoyed being known as someone who was kind of a priest and he could move among them and they would tell him secrets.” Dominick often joked about his resemblance to a defrocked priest and thought it was why people felt comfortable confiding in him.

  While there were reporters who knew more about the law, none knew more about the high society world of the accused. “Like many of the journalists there, I did come almost to consult with him about what to me was an alien world,” said Feldman. “Dominick was a guide to that world.”