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

by Robert Hofler

  In a way, Dominick had come full circle with An Inconvenient Woman. Griffin Dunne summed up his father’s multi-act life. “What got him in trouble in Hollywood was his big mouth, getting hammered and telling stories out of school,” he said. “And what made him popular was telling the same stories and people wanting to have the stories told about them.”

  One of those publicity-prone people wanting to have their stories told was not Jerry Zipkin. He remained quiet about his Ezzie Fenwick character assassination in People Like Us. Pauline Mendelson in An Inconvenient Woman was another story. Zipkin lashed out after that book’s publication, making sure the fabled doors of his many wealthy, influential lady friends were slammed shut. Betsy Bloomingdale and Nancy Reagan, among others, continued not to speak to Dominick, but now they did so with even more deafening silence, thanks to their favorite walker.

  Dominick’s novels and Vanity Fair articles brought him fame, as well as an innocuous notoriety. Dominick’s greatest talent, however, was telling stories in private where he was unencumbered by lawyers, fact-checkers, or skittish editors.

  For homosexuals living in the twentieth century, gossip became the only libel-free means to know of each other, form a community, develop an oral history, get laid. And few practiced the art better than Dominick.

  When friends bought or rented a house in Los Angeles, Dominick told them the “real history” of the place—like the West Hollywood house that a golden-age movie star bought for his daughter when she married a homosexual. He told people about a decorator friend who enjoyed “full participation” sex with Gary Cooper, whom Dominick considered practically a relative because the actor’s daughter, Maria, was Dominique’s godmother. He told how the Dunnes’ nanny used to be the Reagans’ nanny, and they were “the worst parents.” He told people about Nancy Reagan’s expertise at fellatio, which included a story of her sitting between fellow actors Peter Lawford and Robert Walker and masturbating them both on a car trip to Palm Springs.

  David Patrick Columbia and two other friends listened to Dominick repeat his standard repertoire of stories one night over dinner. Columbia was new to Manhattan, there to begin his career as a society reporter. When Dominick finally took a breath between mouthfuls of gossip, Columbia thought he would contribute to the evening’s entertainment to tell a story about the recently deceased Natalie Wood. Columbia knew the producer Bonnie Weeks, who years before had been looking to replace Susan Sarandon in the Off Broadway play A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking. Weeks wondered if her “idol” Natalie Wood might consider the role, even though the movie star had never performed on stage before. To the producer’s delight, Wood showed interest in the play and agreed to meet in Beverly Hills. “And Bonnie ended up spending the weekend and Natalie kind of seduced her,” Columbia told Dominick and company.

  Dominick, rather than being amused, took quick offense. “You should watch what you say!” he told Columbia. “That is not true and she was a friend of mine. And it will get you into a lot of trouble!” On the one hand, Dominick was being protective of the memory of his friend Natalie Wood. On the other, “he was telling me who I was in the order of things,” said Columbia. “I was new.”

  10

  Kennedys and Cover-Ups

  Was America in the middle of a golden age of crime? Or was Dominick only making it look like one? The major problem with great murders is that, once they are committed, the accused take an eternity in gumshoe time to come to trial.

  Dominick occupied himself with happier but less newsworthy events in 1990. The publication of An Inconvenient Woman, as well as the royalties from his two other best sellers, gave him the money to buy a seven-room country house in Hadlyme, Connecticut. Even more gratifying, on April 12, 1990, he celebrated the birth of his only grandchild, Hannah, born to Griffin Dunne and his wife, actress Carey Lowell. In the years to come, Dominick would never miss an opportunity to tell close friends, as well as virtual strangers, how much he loved Hannah. “Nick repeated everything she said to me, told me about everything she wore,” said one of those friends, Tita Cahn. “He got such a kick and such a joy out of her. It was the traditional joy of being a grandparent.” He even took pleasure in watching how Hannah would leave home properly dressed for school. “But then she would put on a little lip gloss or add something to her outfit, once her parents were out of sight,” said Cahn.

  When Hannah was still a child, Dominick initiated a lovely annual ritual. Every Valentine’s Day he sent his only grandchild a bouquet of flowers with the message “from a secret admirer.” He never told Hannah he was that admirer.

  The early 1990s were significant in other ways. Those years quickly stripped Dominick’s love-hate affair with the Kennedy family of any respect or affection. “Dominick felt that the Kennedys thought they were above the law, and that burned him up,” said his assistant Jack Cummings III. “He put Jackie and her children apart. He considered them separate.”

  Not separate was everyone else in that rich Irish clan.

  His admiration of the Kennedys first took a hit shortly after he and Lenny moved to the West Coast in 1957, and Dominick watched as Joseph P. Kennedy and others in the family berated and mistreated Peter Lawford. It was Lawford who had to procure the Hollywood stars for John F. Kennedy’s sexual pleasure. It was Lawford who had to tell Frank Sinatra that the president-elect would not be visiting him in Palm Springs, as promised, but would be staying at Bing Crosby’s place instead. In his memoir, Dominick wrote, “Peter was ill-used by his famous and glamorous brothers-in-law. Get the girls, Peter. Get the blow, Peter. Tell Sinatra we can’t come, Peter.” What he did not write and what compounded the Kennedys’ cruelty in Dominick’s eyes was his strong physical attraction to Lawford, who died so broke in 1984 that his remains later had to be removed from the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery for nonpayment of fees. It was the same cemetery where Dominick had buried Dominique.

  In 1969 Dominick was not working as a journalist when Edward Kennedy drove his car over a Chappaquiddick bridge, causing the death of an intern, Mary Jo Kopechne. In 1991 he was working as a journalist for Vanity Fair when Patricia Bowman brought a rape charge against William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of the Massachusetts senator.

  The trial against Smith in West Palm Beach, Florida, lasted only ten days, but in those few winter days of 1992 the Kennedy family flaunted everything Dominick both envied and loathed about them: he envied their money and political connections and how the American public embraced them, and he loathed how they used their every advantage to shroud themselves in dignity and familial sanctimony. Worst, for him, was how the Kennedys exploited the Church to hide their patented licentiousness. Nor was it lost on Dominick that William Kennedy Smith’s “encounter” with Patricia Bowman would never have taken place if Edward Kennedy had allowed his nephew and son Patrick to remain in bed sleeping at the family compound in Palm Beach on March 30, 1991. Instead, the senator woke them because he needed a couple of drinking buddies to join him for a night of carousing, despite it being Good Friday. It was there at Au Bar, a local watering hole, where Smith met Bowman. Later, he brought her back to the family compound, where some kind of sexual encounter took place. Instead of taking any responsibility, the senator testified in court that the Kennedy family had gathered that holy weekend in Palm Beach not to party but to mourn the death of his brother Bobby and others. Dominick wrote in Vanity Fair, “The man who instigated the Good Friday incident by getting his son and nephew to go out drinking reversed the dynamic from a night of debauchery to one of sorrowing for dead relations.”

  Robert Rand, covering the trial for Paris Match and Stern, was never as sure as Dominick about Smith’s guilt. He found it to be a “he said, she said” case, which is why the jury deliberated for only a few hours before finding the defendant not guilty. Dominick, however, did his research. He spoke to several women who said they had endured similar encounters with Smith, and it infuriated him that the judge did not allow these women’s testimo
nies to be heard before the jury. Again, it brought back the crushing injustice of Judge Burton S. Katz’s rulings in the murder trial of John Sweeney.

  After Smith’s acquittal, Dominick indulged in a bit of TV slumming. He checked out Hard Copy, and the episode he watched delivered a bombshell: Smith might have been in the house neighboring the backyard where the fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley had been murdered in Greenwich, Connecticut, on October 30, 1975. It was not just any old house, either. It belonged to the very wealthy Rushton Skakel, who happened to be Ethel Kennedy’s cousin. Martha had been bludgeoned with a golf club. The police even found the same brand of golf clubs, Toney Penna, in the Skakel house.

  The Hard Copy rumor about Smith turned out not to be true. He was not in the Skakel house that night. No matter. It gave Dominick an idea for another novel. It had everything: an unsolved murder involving rich people with political connections, as well as a big cover-up. At least, that was the way he would tell it, since the murder case remained unsolved and Skakel’s two sons, Tommy and Michael, were suspects. At least, Dominick thought they should be prime suspects. In his fifth novel, A Season in Purgatory, the teenage scion of a powerful political family uses a baseball bat, not a golf club, to murder the girl next door when she refuses his sexual advances.

  Much as he researched the Woodward case, Dominick set about reading newspaper accounts of the Moxley murder and interviewing people close to the case. The first person he contacted was Martha Moxley’s mother, Dorthy, now living in Annapolis. She and her husband moved to Maryland after the murder because Dorthy could not bear to look across her lawn at the Skakel house every day. “I didn’t know who did it, but I knew that in that house someone knew,” said Dorthy Moxley. She never watched the infamous Hard Copy episode, but its erroneous story incited reports from other news outlets that she did see. “There had been a big exposé in the National Enquirer about Smith raping Patty Bowman in Florida,” Dorthy recalled. “And at the end of the piece there was a picture of my daughter and Tommy Skakel.”

  Dominick met Mrs. Moxley at the airport in Annapolis in 1992. He would later write that Dorthy questioned his motives; she was “publicity shy” and did not want to talk with him in her apartment. But that was not the case. “I thought it silly to drive him all the way back to my place,” she recalled. “It was easier if we just stayed at the airport for the interview.” Dorthy was neither skeptical nor hesitant. “At that point, I needed to talk to everybody and anybody who was interested in the case,” she said. “They had not started the reinvestigation.”

  Dominick told Dorthy of his own similar tragedy. Martha and Dominique were born only a year apart, and both were murdered on October 30, although in different decades. He later remarked, “Martha Moxley became a crusade for me because it reminded me of my daughter.” Dominick told Dorthy that he wanted to write a novel rather than a nonfiction book about the murder of her daughter, Martha. A Season in Purgatory would be his next book. “It will bring attention to the case,” he said. Dorthy had not read his novels, but she knew of them and readily agreed to cooperate in any way possible.

  The National Enquirer was not the only tabloid interested in creating some fire with the Hard Copy rumor. At the New York Post, city editor John Cotter recalled how years ago a reporter at the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time failed to get his investigative piece on the Moxley murder published in those two Connecticut newspapers. Cotter assigned an interview with that reporter, Len Levitt, who revealed for the first time in print that the Greenwich police in 1975 had actually found the murder weapon the day after the murder. The missing Toney Penna golf club came from inside the Skakel house, yet the police failed to obtain a warrant to search the premises. One month after the Post ran its Levitt interview in 1991, the Stamford Advocate and the Greenwich Time published the reporter’s original article, virtually untouched from what he filed years earlier.

  Two months after Levitt’s page 1 story appeared, the police chief of Greenwich held a press conference at the town’s police headquarters. It was August 8, 1991. They were reopening their investigation of the Moxley murder.

  Dominick arrived at the press event with Dorthy Moxley, who introduced him to Len Levitt. He congratulated the reporter on his belatedly published article and revealed that he, too, would now be writing about the murder. There was no competition, Dominick assured Levitt. His book would be a novel. Levitt, however, was dubious. Now that the case had been reopened, he rightfully saw himself as the most well-informed journalist on the subject and wanted to continue alone in his own investigation of the murder. Dominick, undeterred, suggested that through his own “upper-class connections” he might be able to help not only Levitt but the police.

  Levitt would later write, “Did Dominick think he could waltz into a fifteen-year-old murder case and help the police solve it like Hercule Poirot? Maybe that happened in Agatha Christie mysteries, but this was real life.”

  Dorthy Moxley did not care who got credit. What she wanted to happen was happening. Not only did the police reopen the case but Dominick talked to dozens of sources and turned those interviews and research into the best-selling novel A Season in Purgatory. “It stirred interest in the case,” she said, even though it diverged from the story on several points. “It paralleled the case.”

  For his fifth novel, Dominick resurrected the name Burnsy Harrison, cut from The Winners, and refashioned it into the slightly more dignified Harrison Burns, telling the story from that character’s viewpoint. Harrison Burns is clearly an amalgam of Dominick and a young tutor named Ken Littleton, who began his employment with the Rushton Skakel family the day of Martha Moxley’s murder. For that reason, Littleton quickly trumped the two Skakel sons as the major suspect. In the novel, the Burns character is not a tutor but a prep-school friend of Constant Bradley, being groomed for a major political career. The Bradley character kills the girl next door during rough sex play and forces Burns to help him dispose of the body. Twenty years later, a guilt-ridden Burns helps to expose Constant Bradley as the murderer.

  Dorthy Moxley liked that Dominick “didn’t say one thing about the Skakels” when promoting the book, even though he clearly harbored a deep hatred for the Kennedy family. During press interviews, he always tried to guide the reporter’s questions away from talk of the Kennedys. “It’s too easy to say that name,” he said. “This is a fictional family. There are no assassinations. There is no president. There isn’t a rape trial in the book.” At least that is what he told reporters.

  His real intentions, however, were not lost on Maureen Dowd, who reviewed A Season in Purgatory for the New York Times. She wrote, “Dominick Dunne takes all the most chilling character flaws of three generations of Kennedys and compresses them into one creepy plot line. If you can bear to read one more word, even with a gossamer veneer of fiction, about America’s royal and sorrowful Irish Catholic clan, and if you like Mr. Dunne’s dishy style of society vivisection, then you will probably enjoy his new tour of the toxic side of a golden American family.”

  Dowd was not the only one to make the Kennedy connection. In A Season in Purgatory, the Bradley family tries to rehabilitate the son’s very tarnished image by sending him off to do charity work in Brazil. Dominick was amused when, during his book tour, a reporter pointed out that William Kennedy Smith, now a doctor, had recently returned from Somalia after doing medical missionary work there. “How amazing you should pick up on that!” Dominick noted. “It is what I said, isn’t it?” Occasionally, he could not resist telling the truth about the real inspiration for his characters.

  On Dominick’s book tour, something far more significant happened than journalists pointing out parallels between the real Kennedys and the fictitious Bradleys. Dorthy Moxley recalled how “Dominick would go to a book signing, and then someone would come up and say, ‘I know something about the Moxley case.’”

  Len Levitt had to admit, “Little did I suspect that after his novel about the murder appeared people would flock t
o him with all sorts of tips.”

  Even more surprising to Levitt, Dominick never reneged on his promise to help him with his own ongoing investigation. “He was very helpful in terms of going out of his way to put me in touch with sources,” said Levitt. Then again, the more Levitt wrote about the real murder, the more it promoted Dominick’s fictional account.

  Dominick’s bookstore tour uncovered one very important piece of evidence. Dr. Kathy Morrall, a forensic pathologist, came forward at one book signing to show Dominick autopsy photos of Martha Moxley in her possession. Morrall told him, “Tommy Skakel was not the killer.” And a Greenwich resident, Paul Terrien, told Dominick there had been a cover-up. That was a bombshell. Paul was the brother of George Terrien, whose house Michael Skakel said he visited at the time of the murder. Paul Terrien’s version of events destroyed Michael’s alibi.

  Meanwhile, the police continued their own investigation. A detective, Frank Garr, looked into Michael Skakel’s time at Elan, a school for troubled (and wealthy) youth in Poland, Maine. His interviews with alumni who had been in therapy sessions with Michael tied him to the murder. There was also Garr’s interview with a Greenwich teenager, Andrea Shakespeare, who did not put Michael at George Terrien’s house the night of the murder. And most significant, Garr linked jeans found at the Skakel house to Michael, jeans carrying Martha Moxley’s long blonde hair.

  Garr believed Michael guilty of the murder but did not have enough evidence to bring the case to a grand jury. Garr was also running into resistance from his own superiors, who believed either Tommy Skakel or the tutor Ken Littleton should be the primary suspect.