But that one-sentence quote was it. He never secured an in-depth interview with the victim’s mother, in part because his wicked sense of humor may have offended the woman. It happened the day the prosecutor read from Lana Clarkson’s journals and diaries. Dominick proved to be a less than sympathetic audience and grew tired of the “endless woe-is-me” entries. At one point, he turned to the other reporters. “You know, it sounds like she could be a real pain in the ass,” Dominick said. Only then did he realize that Donna Clarkson sat near enough to hear his wisecrack. Dominick did a comic double take. “Sorry, Mom!” he whispered.
There were other moments of levity. Everyone in court, including Dominick, had a good laugh when it was revealed how Clarkson first greeted the big-haired, Edwardian-attired Phil Spector. When he asked to be seated in the VIP section at the House of Blues, Clarkson put on her best hostess voice to say, “I’ll seat you here, ma’am.”
There was also the day Jody Gibson came to court. Better known as Babydol or the Hollywood Madam, she testified about Clarkson being one of her top call girls. That revelation aside, Babydol received a major reprimand from the judge when she used her moment on the stand to shamelessly plug her book, Secrets of a Hollywood Super Madam.
Dominick and Babydol spoke cordially and at length in the hallway afterward, an encounter that shocked Linda Deutsch. “How in the world do you know that woman?” she asked. Dominick shrugged. He was not averse to letting the AP reporter think he was a Babydol customer. In fact, he had previously met the Hollywood Madam in the makeup room at CNN when they were both going to be interviewed for a Larry King Live segment on Paris Hilton.
Dominick’s encounter with Spector’s current wife proved equally noteworthy. When he ran into Rachelle Spector outside the men’s room, she joked, “Did you wash your hands in the toilet?” Her wisecrack referenced the prosecution’s claim that Phil Spector might have cleaned his hands in a toilet, hence there being no blood deposits in the sink’s drainage pipe.
Dominick identified with high-profile “broads” like Babydol, Heidi Fleiss, Faye Resnick, Rachelle Spector, and even Elizabeth Taylor, who, decades earlier, rocked the world with her extramarital affairs and rapid-fire marriages. These women reflected Dominick’s own often racy walks on the wild side.
Despite his cancer, despite his age, despite his hurt feelings about Vanity Fair, Dominick worked tirelessly and around the clock. While most out-of-town reporters stayed at the Westin Bonaventure, an easy walk to the Superior Court House in downtown Los Angeles, Vanity Fair continued to provide a car service to ferry Dominick back and forth to the Chateau Marmont, a ten-mile trip that could take an hour in rush-hour traffic. Unlike previous trials, however, Dominick could no longer keep the driver waiting. There were cost cutbacks at the magazine, and Dominick needed to be prompt after a day in court. Sometimes he missed the scheduled pick-up time.
Late one afternoon, defense attorney Bruce Cutler heard Dominick on his cell phone, trying to call a driver to take him back to the Chateau Marmont from the courthouse.
“Come with me,” said Cutler. “I’ll take you.”
The offer surprised Dominick. In his first Vanity Fair article on the Spector trial, he exposed his initial dislike of Cutler, calling him that “John Gotti lawyer,” and later said he had “a Mafia-type reputation.”
Then Dominick met Cutler, and Cutler offered him a ride. It rarely took much to get on Dominick’s good side. Later, the two men enjoyed several meals together, every lunch arranged by reporter Peter Hong. The Los Angeles Times maintained its own press office, complete with kitchenette, in the downtown courthouse. Bruce Cutler did not ask the Times reporter for a favor. Rather, he ordered Hong, “You need to make me lunch every day. I don’t want to go to the cafeteria. Ham sandwich, wheat bread, cheese. Can you do that for me?”
Cutler knew reporters and the lengths they would go to get a story. “It gave me great access,” said Hong, and since he filed on a daily basis and Dominick filed long-lead stories, he invited Vanity Fair’s writer to attend his office-prepared lunches with Cutler. Dominick asked for only one addition to the menu. “Fritos,” he said.
“He really liked Fritos,” said Hong.
In the beginning, Dominick saw Cutler as the man who kept guilty Mafia people out of jail, and threw him into the pit with defense attorneys representing murderers like John Sweeney and Claus von Bülow. But they found common ground.
“Bruce Cutler was a military groupie the way Dominick was a celebrity groupie,” said Hong. Dominick often introduced himself by speaking of his abusive father and how Dr. Richard Dunne only came to respect him when he won the Bronze Star during World War II. “And Bruce would just be rapt when Dominick talked about that.”
Dominick, in turn, genuinely began to identify and worry about Cutler’s position on the defense team. “The trial wasn’t going well for Cutler,” Hong recalled. “There was this rift in the defense team and they’d shut Bruce out.” Dominick considered the Spector trial a low point for Cutler and began to see his own past downfall in Los Angeles reflected in the attorney’s present-day failure there. “When Dominick was at that age, that’s when he had his real crash and he was very concerned about Bruce,” said Hong.
Dominick often remarked, “Bruce must feel like a real failure. He’s really failed, hasn’t he?”
Cutler’s big problem was his disagreement over the defense team’s major strategy. “They wanted me to argue things I didn’t believe in,” he recalled. “I didn’t think Lana committed suicide. They went off on a tangent. I wouldn’t be a part of it.”
He and Dominick concurred on that point. “I do not believe that a beautiful woman commits suicide by shooting herself in the face,” said Dominick.
Cutler left the defense team in August, about a month before the trial ended. Dominick no longer used the words “John Gotti” or “Mafia” to describe him. They had shared too many lunches, too many laughs and confidences. Dominick wrote in one of his follow-up articles on the trial, “Beneath Cutler’s boisterousness, there is the heart and soul of a very gentle man.” And he included in his softer, newly revised portrait an anecdote about the attorney helping a “terribly crippled older woman” down the stairs of the courthouse.
“Dominick got to know me and realized I was more than an underworld lawyer,” said Cutler.
Peter Hong and Dominick also bonded, over what the reporter described as “a midlife crisis.” Dominick talked a lot about his own fraught middle-age, when he switched from producing to writing. Hong was forty-three years old at the time of the Spector trial and “frustrated” with his own career at the Los Angeles Times.
“I’d spend five minutes on the phone in some pretty heated exchanges with editors,” Hong recalled. “Dominick, on the other hand, would ask to use the phone to call his editor, and he’d close the door and be in there for thirty, forty minutes.” When Dominick emerged from the Times office, Hong remembered his looking “quite shaken.” Things were not going well at Vanity Fair. He told reporters that Graydon Carter was jealous of him. At the most recent Cannes Film Festival, Dominick reveled in how everyone greeted him with kisses, but noted that few celebrities recognized the magazine’s top editor. He had heard that Carter approached Tina Brown about writing a regular column for Vanity Fair, and Dominick made it clear he would not continue writing for the magazine if that ever happened. He and Brown might be friends, but this was his career. He and she shared too many of the same sources, Dominick believed. Carter denied every approaching Brown about writing such a column. “I thought of it, though,” he acknowledged.
Dominick looked to prove his worth at the magazine by being more than a reporter at the Spector trial, and, in fact, made a serious attempt to be a sleuth-like participant. He had heard from one of Spector’s girlfriends that she taped a conversation with the defendant in which he admitted to the murder. The confession reportedly took place in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Dominick waited for the tape’s deliver
y and was joined by two undercover cops at his suite in the Chateau Marmont. But the woman with the tape never showed up.
Dominick did manage another kind of coup, much more in keeping with his famed behind-the-scenes access. During the trial, he spoke to Phil Spector’s adopted sons Gary and Louis. Judge Larry Paul Fidler had placed a gag order on the family, but that did not prevent Dominick from following the two sons on a trip back to their childhood home in Beverly Hills.
A caretaker there greeted them. At the time, HBO was renting the house for its series Entourage. It looked the part: a historic Beverly Hills manse with seven bedrooms and a sixty-foot living room that, as the Spector sons recalled, their boyhood friends were never allowed to visit. Dominick may have had an abusive father, but compared to Phil Spector, Dr. Richard Dunne was a veritable Ward Cleaver. The two sons were often locked in their rooms. “We didn’t have free roam of the house,” said Gary Spector. They did get to eat in the kitchen, that is, until Phil began an affair with Nicole Zavala, with whom he had twins, Nicole and Phillip Jr. “They ate in the kitchen,” said Gary. “We ate in the pantry. We were treated like guests in the house.
It deeply upset Dominick that Phil Spector had “started to shut down,” according to Gary, when the younger adopted son was about eight years old. During the tour, Dominick mentioned his own long estrangement from Alex and how much he regretted it.
He admired the two brothers’ faces of neutrality at the trial, and how careful they were not to influence the jurors. However, they did discuss off-the-record Phil Spector’s claim that he was not in the room at the time of Clarkson’s death. Gary had to ask, “How do you know she was standing up if you weren’t in the room?” There were also discrepancies in the angle of the gun shot, whether Clarkson was seated or not, since she was considerably taller than Spector. The shadow effect of the blood spray also raised doubts. Gary thought they could have been created by his father’s hand. “It was hard to remain neutral. I was watching both sides,” he said.
Speaking to Gary and Louis Spector helped Dominick complete his portrait of the killer, but more important for him was the often-forgotten face of Lana Clarkson. Beth Karas, also covering the trial, drove him to the cottage that Clarkson rented on the canals of Venice, California, and they spoke to the landlady. “Dominick was upset by the defense’s position that it was a suicide,” said Karas. “In Lana’s cottage, her taxes were spread out; she was in the midst of doing her taxes. She had bought seven pairs of Mary Jane shoes so she could stand on her feet for eight hours at the House of Blues.” Dominick also abhorred the defense team’s declarations that, as an actress, she was “a failure, as if she deserved to die,” he said.
Dominick convinced himself the jury would find Spector guilty. He said so during the trial. Spector used the C-word a lot, and whenever it was spoken Dominick could see the jury recoil. He also really liked the foreman, called him “brilliant,” and noted with admiration how the man “filled thirteen notebooks” during the trial.
To Dominick’s shock, it turned out to be a hung jury, and on September 26, 2007, Judge Fidler declared a mistrial. Upset over there being no conviction, Dominick leveled most of his anger at the jury’s foreman, and went on a rampage against the man on TV and in print. And it did not stop there.
He and Linda Deutsch occasionally received invitations to soirees at the Los Angeles home of actress Helen Mirren and director Taylor Hackford. Journalists and film people populated the convivial get-togethers, and after the Spector trial, the famous movie couple asked Dominick and Deutsch to speak to their guests about the nonverdict. Basically, according to Deutsch, “it was Nick railing on” about the foreman who had bought the defense’s suicide theory. At one point during their talk, Deutsch joked, “Nick, don’t hold back!”
“I think the wrong guy was the foreman,” Dominick continued undeterred. “He had an agenda, this guy. He was picky. The whole trial he was writing. You can’t go on the science of it. You’ve also got to go on the emotion.”
During the trial, Dominick was caught on tape, saying, “I think the foreman is really smart. He takes lots of notes.” After that same foreman led to a hung jury, Dominick wrote, “I’m quite proud that my own opinion of Juror No. 10, the foreman in the deliberations, altered much earlier than when he became by far the most disliked member of the jury, having personally forged the hung jury that ended this trial.” As with Ted Maher at the Safra trial, Dominick was not about to admit he had been wrong.
Included in his Vanity Fair condemnation was an apocryphal story about the foreman’s son and how much the boy hated broccoli. Dominick wrote that the son could not leave the dinner table until he ate all the loathed vegetables on his plate. Reportedly, another juror stopped trying to bring the foreman around to the majority opinion to convict Spector when he heard the tale of the uneaten veggies. As Dominick saw it, a foreman incapable of changing his mind about his son’s broccoli was also incapable of changing his mind about a murder conviction. It was vintage Dominick Dunne reporting.
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Clinics and Sondheim
Dominick enjoyed working with Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley on their documentary. He refused them only one major request. His son Alex had been visiting him in Los Angeles during the trial. Just as the Spector sons revisited their home in Beverly Hills, so Alex and Dominick made a trip back to the Georgian house on Walden Drive. The filmmakers wanted to interview Alex on camera, but Dominick would not allow it. “It’s too raw,” he said of their newly reestablished relationship.
For the After the Party documentary, Graydon Carter graciously consented to give an interview to de Garis and Jolley despite his differences with Dominick. On camera, he dismissed the Gary Condit brouhaha, saying, “If over fifteen years you have one spat, I don’t think it’s that bad.”
Carter later explained the contretemps in greater detail. “Dominick knew that Vanity Fair bore no responsibility. But Si [Newhouse] wanted to support him in the case. He told me he wanted to cover any shortfall if he had to settle with Condit. But he didn’t want to be obligated because the story had nothing to do with the magazine,” noted the editor.
Dominick always said he would be fine if Carter would only apologize for reneging on his promise, in his opinion. A friend who took Dominick’s side in the controversy had to wonder, “If Vanity Fair didn’t promise to cover his legal fees and Nick had simply lied about it, why would the magazine continue to employ such an unreliable reporter?”
Dominick’s interview on the subject in After the Party was not as forgiving as Carter’s blithe “I don’t think it’s that bad.” He repeated his “I talked to Si in Vienna” line and went on to add, “That was the end between me and Vanity Fair.”
Kirsty de Garis interpreted Dominick’s “the end” remark as referring to his friendly working relationship with Graydon Carter, not the end of his writing for the magazine. Indeed, in 2007, the year of the documentary’s release, Dominick signed a Vanity Fair contract for six articles, earning him $300,000, with another $75,000 for each additional article of between 4,500 and 5,000 words. Few writers would consider such a lucrative contract “the end” of his relationship with a magazine.
The documentary After the Party was not without its flubs. In his on-camera interview, Griffin Dunne said the Christmas cards from the 1960s were based on Lord Snowdon’s portraits of the royal family. After viewing the finished film, his father corrected him, saying they were based on Cecil Beaton’s portraits of the royal family. It was the kind of mistake Dominick prided himself in not correcting when, earlier in the documentary, he repeats the Oregon anecdote about a woman mixing up the order of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands. “Let it go, let it go,” Dominick says on camera, thinking he had made a major personality breakthrough on his retreat to Oregon in 1979. A quarter century later, in an atavistic urge to be precise, he chose not to overlook his own son’s mistake regarding the two British photographers.
The documentary, when released, als
o provoked an angry phone call from Sue Mengers, who asked Griffin Dunne, “Is your father dead yet? . . . I wish he was dead. I hate that fucking asshole.” The agent resented the scene in which Jean-Claude Tramont was again held up to ridicule for having called himself Jack Schwartz once upon a time. In telling his fat-girl story, Dominick always forgot to add that Mengers’s dead husband’s mother’s maiden name was Schwartz!
And no, Dominick was not dead yet. The producers of the TV show Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice often filmed him at his Connecticut home, where he was shown from above the waist in his signature Turnbull & Asser shirts and ties. Below the waist, off screen, he often wore pajamas, slippers, and a catheter. With his health now in serious decline, he preferred life in Hadlyme. When he bought the saltbox/Colonial house in 1990, he immediately covered its “shitty brown” exterior with white paint and named the place Clouds, after the hilltop mansion owned by the fictitious billionaire couple Pauline and Jules Mendelson in An Inconvenient Woman. He also bought a racing-green Jaguar XJS convertible, which he affectionately named Audrey after Connie Wald’s best friend, Audrey Hepburn. People considered him a notoriously bad driver, and they much preferred eschewing trips in Audrey to having drinks in the spacious backyard at Clouds. A white Victorian gazebo rested on a stretch of land cutting dramatically into the wetlands of the Connecticut River on Whalebone Cove. The previous owner created the promontory before environmental restrictions were imposed, and in the process destroyed the nesting grounds of many snapping turtles. Dominick always feared the reptiles would take their revenge to stage a march one day across the sprawling five acres of his property. “But it never happened,” said Tim Lovejoy, a neighbor.
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 35