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

by Robert Hofler

  At the Vanity Fair party, Dominick did feel embraced by other editors, employees, and contributors. Several told him how much they missed seeing his byline in the magazine. The last four issues of 2005 went to press with no Dominick Dunne article. There had been offers from other magazines to contribute, but Dominick wanted to continue writing for Vanity Fair. It was his home. He had been a professional writer for more than twenty years, and almost all of his work had appeared under the imprimatur of either Vanity Fair or Crown Publishing. Despite his thinking he had received a cool reception from Graydon Carter, the editor phoned to chat two days later. Dominick was touched. So much of his life had been spent searching for acceptance. He just wanted to belong and be appreciated, very appreciated.

  His short phone talk with Carter produced immediate results. In 2006 there were more articles from Dominick Dunne published in Vanity Fair. Few, apparently, met with the editor’s approval. This time there was no phone call to talk over their differences. Near the end of the year, Dominick met with Carter in his office at 4 Times Square in midtown Manhattan. To his surprise, the magazine’s chief attorney, Rich Bernstein, was also present. Dominick repeated to family and friends what happened that day: When he walked into Carter’s office, seven recent issues of Vanity Fair were spread across a table, each of them opened to one of his columns. According to Dominick, Carter did not like any of them, except for one, which, in the editor’s estimation, was all right. Not great, but all right.

  Dominick felt like he had just been whipped by his father. Carter’s critique nearly shattered him. He thought of himself as the magazine’s most popular writer, its greatest asset, even if he had heard reports that certain people on the staff said he was only read by “old people.”

  Dominick left Carter’s office humiliated but unbowed. There in the hallway he saw Wayne Lawson. Dominick later told people that his editor was smiling, as if complicit, as if he knew the meeting’s discussion points. Dominick would go on to call Lawson the magazine’s Uriah Heep, a reference to the character in David Copperfield that Charles Dickens used to epitomize obsequiousness.

  Dominick fully expected Lawson to defend him against Carter. Dominick somehow forgot that Lawson, in addition to being second-in-command on the editorial staff, was also a company man who had learned long ago not to side with a reporter against his boss. Smart editors’ allegiance is never with the freelancer, especially with a loose-cannon writer who might repeat at a moment’s notice something said in confidence. Dominick accused Lawson of being disloyal and put those sentiments in an e-mail. Greatly compounding the offense was his decision to send the e-mail not to Lawson but to Carter.

  “There were unfriendly e-mails,” said Jack Cummings. “He let me read one with bad language. It was brutal. When Dominick got the zinger right, no one got it more right.”

  Cummings advised Dominick not to send the e-mail.

  “I already sent it,” said Dominick.

  “I thought you were showing me to ask my opinion.”

  According to Cummings, Dominick and Lawson never sat down to talk about the e-mail explosion. “And under all this hurt was deep respect and love, and it never got resolved,” he said. Instead of apologizing, Dominick took the contretemps even one step further. He made it well known that Wayne Lawson’s name had been removed from his hallowed list of honorary pallbearers.

  Dominick and Lawson, who had worked together for more than twenty years on dozens of articles, as well as his books, never spoke again. “Dominick’s close relationships at the magazine were with Tina and Wayne,” said a Vanity Fair employee, “not with Graydon.” Regardless, Dominick possessed the clout to demand and get a new editor. Anne Fulenwider was precisely the kind of young, stylish, and attractive woman on whom Dominick doted, in the vein of such trial reporters as Barbara Nevins Taylor, Shoreen Maghame, and Beth Karas. After working with her on one assignment, Dominick told his assistants that Fulenwider as an editor was “just fantastic.”

  Wayne Lawson had his detractors. Most of them were writers who had seen his mercurial side, who had been on good terms with him then suddenly banished over a disagreement or, more likely, a less-than-stellar piece of writing.

  Working on the inside at Vanity Fair, Matt Tyrnauer knew a different man. “Wayne Lawson saved everybody’s ass,” said the contributing editor. “He had the magic touch. Wayne was the master of making those people’s reporting into really great journalism. He could take all the information and fragments and synthesize it into something coherent, this shiny Vanity Fair package. Dominick was lucky to have him.”

  Lawson was not the only important editor with whom Dominick parted ways. For more than five years, Crown’s Betty Prashker patiently waited for Dominick to finish his novel A Solo Act. In February 2006 she wrote him a note, saying that the novel read well, but not to be depressed, and please, do not think of killing off Gus Bailey again. All he needed to do was finish the last few chapters. When they disagreed over how to end the book, Dominick told his assistants and others that Prashker was “too old” and asked Crown for another editor. The publishing house gave him two, Tina Constable and Suzanne O’Neill. They, however, could not speed up his writing process. Dominick, who wrote six novels in fifteen years, had completed only one book in the last ten, the short picture-laden memoir The Way We Lived Then.

  A Solo Act would bring the Gus Bailey character back to life after Dominick had him murdered by Andrew Cunanan in Another City, Not My Own. But Dominick struggled finishing the new novel because it was “so personal,” said his assistant Jack Donahue. He intended to have the Gus Bailey character come out as a gay man. Donahue asked why he wanted to expose something about himself that he spent his whole life hiding. “So people don’t talk about me when I cool,” Dominick replied.

  Bailey’s sexual orientation was not the only homosexual theme Dominick planned for A Solo Act. Wrapped around his alter ego’s own journey is the circuitous story of two other gay men, one of them an old “walker” who passes on his contacts with wealthy widows to a young callous protégé, who abuses the calling. Otherwise, Dominick envisioned A Solo Act as another roman à clef, about the mysterious death of a billionairess’s husband in the tiny European principality of Andorra. The tempestuous widow, Perla Zacharias, tries to expose Bailey as being homosexual to stop him from writing about her nefarious activities, hence his confession. Not even Graydon Carter’s edict would prevent Dominick from writing about what he wanted to write about. As Dominick often put it, “Don’t use the real names, then you can’t be sued.”

  In addition to getting new editors, Dominick also reached out to a new agent after Owen Laster retired. He knew David Kuhn from the young man’s editor days at Vanity Fair, and Kuhn had recently set up his own agency, Kuhn Projects. Even though Dominick could not finish A Solo Act, Kuhn thought it time for his new client to begin work on another book.

  The agent wrote a one-page outline for the proposed autobiography and, regarding the 1960s, asked Dominick in the memo if he had been “out” in his Hollywood heyday.

  Dominick told his new agent, “I’m ready to tell the story. I don’t have anything to lose and a lot to gain by telling my story.” Kuhn believed Dominick was going to be “totally frank with himself” in the book.

  Dominick thought his new agent and his new editors would resolve his problems. Indeed, the new lawyer Paul LiCalsi did make the Condit lawsuit go away, although not miraculously. While both parties never disclosed the sum Dominick agreed to pay in 2006, it came to $1 million, according to his correspondence and assistants.

  Despite the huge sum, Dominick felt relief. He did not have to sell his house in Connecticut, and there would be enough money to leave an estate for his granddaughter. All the new people around Dominick, however, could not resolve his biggest fear. For the last decade, he had been obsessed with his own death. Often, before he boarded an airplane, he would send his son Griffin notes on changes he wanted to make in his funeral arrangements—who would speak
, who would be the pallbearers, what music would be played. On a trip to London, he attended the funeral of Daily Mail diarist Nigel Dempster and heard a one-hundred-member chorus singing “Anything Goes.” The Cole Porter tune immediately went on Dominick’s funeral list of must-dos. It would be just the way he wanted to kick off his own final rites.

  As he aged, he had only more reason to be obsessed by death. While he had won the battle with prostate cancer, he experienced a heart-attack scare in July 2006, necessitating an overnight stay at the hospital, and found himself deeply paranoid at two in the morning. Panicking, he tore the IV needles out of his body and, dripping blood all the way, made his way back to 155 East Forty-Ninth Street. “What the fuck have I done?” he thought as soon as he walked into his apartment. He quickly phoned Norman Carby at his home in Hawaii. “You’re the only person I could call,” he said, referring to the six-hour time difference. That early-morning phone call was followed by a far more frantic one from his son after the hospital notified Griffin that his father had escaped.

  Dominick was not an easy parent to control. Neither his weakened heart nor his paranoia prevented him from leaving for Europe only three days after the hospital getaway. On a whirlwind tour, he visited his actress granddaughter, Hannah Dunne, at the Edinburgh International Festival in Scotland, where she was performing. He then attended the seventieth birthday party of the Spectator columnist Taki in London. And from there, he flew to Monaco to attend Ted Maher’s latest trial, regarding his imminent release from prison. Again, he stayed at the Hotel de Paris, this time on his own dime, since Graydon Carter had no interest in the trial and Vanity Fair was not covering his expenses.

  Dominick also did not stop when doctors told him he had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. He started on yet another regimen of chemotherapy but soon disbanded that treatment to try a more experimental kind. When people lied to him to say he looked great, Dominick quipped, “It’s the stem cells.” He harbored horrible memories of being burned in the groin by the radiation treatments for prostate cancer. He did not want to go through ten weeks of vomiting after taking chemo. “I’m too old for this,” he said. “I don’t have enough time left. They say they’d give me antinausea pills, but I’m already taking too many pills. I hate pills.”

  That was what he said publicly. To friends, he was scared. He had beaten cancer once; it was unlikely he would beat it a second time, not at his age. Dominick told Michael Griffith, “I never thought it would end like this. I always thought I’d be assassinated by Lily Safra.”

  19

  Spector and Sons

  What Dominick needed more than anything except a new bladder was a good, lurid murder trial. Phil Spector gave him that gift in late winter 2007. The legendary record producer, better known at the millennium for his wild outfits and big wigs than his 1960s pop hits, had been charged with shooting Lana Clarkson in the Alhambra, California, estate he called his Pyrenees Castle. The mansion’s name was the least of Spector’s peculiarities, and Dominick looked forward to exposing every foible and eccentricity, which included the defendant’s violent history of brandishing firearms in front of unsuspecting females. All those women survived, except one: Lana Clarkson met Spector on February 2, 2003, at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, where she worked as a hostess. She died early the next morning, a gaping gunshot wound to her face. Clarkson had made the fatal mistake of accepting a famous stranger’s invitation to visit his Castle. Spector denied any responsibility, calling it an “accidental suicide” in which the victim “kissed the gun” before shooting herself.

  Dominick fully expected his coverage of the Spector trial to be his last for Vanity Fair. He wanted to write three installments and then go out in a “classy” way with the last article, in which he would thank everyone at the magazine for his quarter century of work there. Graydon Carter may no longer want him, he believed, but it gratified Dominick that yet another team of filmmakers, Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley, were interested in his life. Their documentary would tell his story but focus on the upcoming Spector trial.

  Dominick took an immediate liking to de Garis, a former model. She fit the mold. “Dominick doted on young, very attractive, and stylish women,” said Jack Cummings. He also liked her title for the film, Dominick Dunne: After the Party, which he considered much more appropriate than the previous documentary’s title, Guilty Pleasure.

  At the Spector trial, held in the Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, Dominick reconnected with a young Court TV reporter. He and Harriet Ryan had met briefly at the Skakel trial but did not become friends. When Dominick had asked about her previous assignment for the cable network, Ryan mentioned having covered another trial. No one rich or famous was involved, she told Dominick.

  “Oh, I don’t do poor-people crime,” he said.

  She thought, “What a snob!”

  “But I later learned that wasn’t the case at all,” said Ryan. Her time with Dominick on the Spector trial exposed another, kinder side of the man.

  Several homeless people spent their days in those hallways at the Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. Ryan found herself constantly washing her hands. “It’s a rough and tumble place,” she said. One day, she noticed an old man beelining his way toward her and Dominick. His suit was threadbare, his mustache untrimmed, his toupee on backward. “I just wanted to move to the elevator,” Ryan recalled. Dominick, however, did not shy away.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Dunne,” said the man, introducing himself. “I just want to tell you I’m a big admirer of yours. Do you have a second? I have some information.”

  It surprised Ryan how much time Dominick spent with the man. Later, in the elevator ride down to the street, he told her, “We’re going to meet up later. He has all kinds of great information about Spector.”

  “Dominick got a lot of calls from powerful people,” said Ryan. “But he was also open to speaking to the maid’s sister down the street or the second cousin who was no longer in touch with the family of the killer. He didn’t see them as losers or hangers-on. He saw them as sources, and he treated them all with respect.”

  The Spector trial began on March 19, 2007, and continued for the next five months. “It went on longer than anyone expected,” said the media-relations person Allan Parachini, or, as he called himself, “the court flack.”

  In the beginning, there was the usual hoopla of a big celebrity trial. Phil Spector was not O.J. Simpson. But it also was not just another murder trial. Spector gave it a freaky pizzazz. “There were a number of reporters from all around the world,” said Steven Mikulan, a reporter for LA Weekly. And then there was the writer from Vanity Fair. “He was the gray eminence there, and it was ‘Oh, Dominick Dunne is going to be covering this!’” His mere presence certified it being an important trial.

  As usual, Dominick entertained the other reporters with firsthand Hollywood gossip. Griffin Dunne and his first wife, Carey Lowell, had divorced, and his granddaughter, Hannah, now lived with her mother and new stepfather, actor Richard Gere. Dominick told the story that the Pretty Woman star asked Hannah not to leave her cans of Coke on his Buddhist altar. Dominick enjoyed saying, “Hannah’s mother is now married to Richard Gere, so I was talking to Richard Gere . . .” Peter Hong, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, noted, “For most people that kind of fascination wears off, but with Dominick it was like he was proud of his son for having married a woman who went on to marry Richard Gere.”

  Dominick thought the Spector trial got off to a good start. In a pretrial motion, he cheered when the judge ruled that four women who claimed “Spector had threatened them with guns in the past” would be allowed to testify before the jury. Spector’s repeated gun-wielding showed a pattern of behavior, and Dominick never forgot how John Sweeney’s repeated physical abuse of women was not allowed as evidence in that trial.

  But there were also major disappointments. Dominick may have been the most famous reporter at the trial, but his status did not gain him entry
to Spector’s Castle, where the lethal shooting took place. When the jury went to the mansion in Alhambra, every reporter on the case, including Dominick, wanted to be on the guest list, but only one received an invitation: the AP’s Linda Deutsch, who had been very partial to the defense, unlike most of the press corps.

  “The L.A. Times threw a temper tantrum about it,” said Ciaran McEvoy, who wrote for the City News Service. The editors at the Los Angeles Times, angry that their reporter had not been allowed access, published an article that liberally quoted Dominick. “The idea that the defense and the defendant are deciding which of the media can go to the house is absolutely outrageous to me,” he said. It made no difference. Dominick and others had to wait outside the Castle for Deutsch to exit to give them her observations. According to the AP reporter, the jurors wanted to know the volume of the water’s splash in the courtyard fountain. Could Spector’s driver, Adriano Desouza, have heard the gunshot with all that splashing noise as he sat waiting in his boss’s Mercedes-Benz, the windows rolled up, the car radio blaring?

  Despite there being nineteen phones in the Castle, only Desouza thought to call 911 on his cell phone when Spector came out of the house, holding a .38-calibre Colt Cobra and shouting, “I think I shot somebody.”

  In addition to being refused access to the Castle, Dominick endured other letdowns. He always prided himself on his access to the families on both sides of a murder trial. In his Vanity Fair column, he wrote of wanting to talk to Lana Clarkson’s mother, Donna. She never missed a day in court, and he admired her dedication. But the major sit-down interview with the mother failed to materialize. He approached her outside the courtroom one day and quickly got her to refute the defense’s claim, voiced by Jennifer Hayes and other so-called friends, that Lana committed suicide at the Castle. “I had never heard the name of Jennifer Hayes until this trial,” she told Dominick.