Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Certain faculty found Andrew bright but not truly intellectual; he could snow people with his uncanny recall of detail and trivia, but skimmed a lot of surface rather than developing his powers of synthesis.

  He was an avid reader of magazines, particularly magazines that gave glimpses into the chic world he wished to inhabit. Reading GQ one day, he came upon an article about men’s clubs in England that got him thinking. Soon he and Matthew Rifat, with Dr. Mower, formed the Gentlemen’s Club, an excuse to spread out the school’s linen and silver in Mower’s classroom for lunch on occasional Mondays, when the three would discuss the arts and philosophical issues. Rejecting the usual cafeteria fare, Andrew or Matthew would go to a nearby French deli and bakery for brioches and Brie to bring to these elegant repasts. There, Andrew could fantasize about a life where he would never have to get his hands soiled with the hoi polloi. Now he, too, had a club to belong to. The lunches ended with the boys’ sophomore year, but Andrew showed up to pose for the Gentlemen’s Club picture for the next two Bishop’s yearbooks.

  The twenties and thirties in France and England were favorite points of reference, particularly because Andrew thought of them as “gay eras.” He loved to throw French phrases around, but he never bothered to learn to speak French, or any other foreign language, though he often claimed to speak several. He thrilled to Victor/Victoria, the Julie Andrews gender-bending movie set in the Paris of the thirties: “Poochie, I’m horny,” he would greet Rachel Rifat in the school corridors, copping a line of the movie’s dialogue. He adored equally Chariots of Fire, the Oscar-winning ode to the 1924 British Olympians. And so enthralled was Andrew by the PBS series Brideshead Revisited, based on Evelyn Waugh’s novel recalling his louche days at Oxford in the twenties, that he pictured himself as Sebastian Flyte, the rich, handsome, affected, Catholic aristocrat. In emulation of Flyte, Andrew took to carrying a teddy bear he named Bully around Bishop’s. He also loved to imitate the book’s lisping aesthete, Anthony Blanche, quoting “The Wasteland”: “I, Tiresias, have foresuffered all … Enacted on this same d-divan or b-bed, I who have sat by Thebes below the wall, And walked among the l-lowest of the dead …”

  “Andrew’s personality developed as a pastiche,” says Rifat. It was any life but his own. Once again Andrew was exhibiting the traits of classic narcissism. “Narcissists get hung up on their image. In effect, they cannot distinguish between an image of who they imagine themselves to be and an image of who they really are,” writes psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Lowen. “Narcissists do not function in terms of the actual self image because it is unacceptable to them.”

  In the early spring of his freshman year, Andrew threw a tantrum when he had to miss a class outing to see the opera Carmen because he was sick. To make him feel better, his father went out and bought him a brand-new sports car, a Nissan 300ZX Turbo. Although Andrew was only fourteen and couldn’t drive, the car was his. His father later bragged, “It was the first one that came out in San Diego.”

  When Andrew told Rachel that he had got the car, he also confessed to her that he was gay. Rachel wrote in her diary, “I can’t believe it. I’m blown away.” Although he wasn’t her boyfriend, she told Andrew she hoped he was kidding. He said he wasn’t. Rachel asked him, “What does it feel like to kiss a girl?” Andrew said, “It’s the same as if you were kissing a girl. It feels awful.” Except for his family, whom he managed to keep away from the many activities for parents at the school, Andrew eventually wanted everyone to think he was gay, and his behavior grew increasingly outrageous and flamboyant. “We thought, it can’t be real—it’s so out there,” says his classmate Anne Murray. The Bishop’s faculty not only tolerated Andrew’s conduct but stressed the virtues of kindness and civility. Some faculty members later confided that he was the first openly gay person they had ever known.

  Andrew quickly realized that playing the “flaming fag” got him the renown he was so desperate for. When anyone called him a sissy, Andrew would rejoin with lightning speed, “You want some?” His classmate Jonathan Miner recalls, “If people jabbed him about being gay, he always had a comeback. Ultimately it got him attention, so it didn’t bother him.” His classmates were divided. While many liked him, describing him as suave, generous, and genuinely concerned for people, certain other classmates found his behavior sad and pathetic. “Whatever he was looking for, he was getting it, and he just got progressively worse—louder and more exaggerated,” recalls one. “You could hear him halfway down the hallway, and he was fun to be around, just the same way a train wreck or a streaker is fun to be around,” says Matthew Rifat. “It’s outrageous, it’s a mess, and it’s fun to watch.”

  Despite their cash-flow problems, Pete and MaryAnn mortgaged the house in Bonita and rented it in order to buy a $189,000 town house on Via Embeleso in Rancho Bernardo, a retirement community twenty-seven miles northeast of La Jolla. The four-bedroom split-level, which MaryAnn referred to as a mansion, had a combined living and dining room with a small galley kitchen. Andrew told the Rifats he was mortified that the kitchen floor was linoleum, not tile.

  Pete practiced pistol shooting in the backyard, which was covered with cement. Andrew told friends that Pete’s target practice was to keep his bona fides with the Filipino Mafia. The Rifats remember the house as having an almost “tomblike silence,” because Andrew was usually buried in a book when he was at home. The house, barely furnished, had ostentatious white carpeting throughout. Andrew would explain that it was one of many houses the family owned. He let the Rifats know that the Cunanans were really very rich back in the Philippines.

  Nothing indicates Andrew’s status within the Cunanan family more than Pete’s decision to give his youngest son the master bedroom in the new house. Pete figured Andrew needed more space, and Andrew promptly moved in. “I told him I’d have to come in to use the closet,” Pete says. MaryAnn says that she slept in the maid’s room and Pete slept on a couch. By this time Pete and MaryAnn were no longer sharing a bedroom or much else in their lives, except an interest in Andrew and, to a lesser extent, his sister Gina. Andrew told friends that he thought his brother and sisters were jealous of him, “because I can get what I want and they don’t.”

  Andrew had stopped mentioning his hope of getting an appointment to Annapolis. Despite his intelligence, he chose not to compete for the upper reaches in his class standings. Rather than apply himself in order to ensure acceptance at a prestigious college, which he felt was his due but for which he would need to earn a scholarship, Andrew preferred to give the impression that he was above it all and was breezing through.

  He didn’t run for office or work on the school paper, but in the one sport in which he competed when he was a junior—cross-country running—he made the All Academic Team for scholars and athletes sponsored by the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper. He made the team mainly because he had a 3.65 grade point average.

  Andrew was more remembered for his stunts—for always being the first one to take his shirt off during running practice and at school dances. In the class standings he remained in the top twenty. Andrew received an A from Dr. Mower in his History of Art Advanced Placement course, easily remembering the factual details of individual paintings, but experiencing difficulties in comparative essays and interpretation of periods. He also received an A from Dr. Mower in Philosophical Ethics, proving that at least once in his life he was able to grasp moral principles. But they seemed to have fought a losing battle against his predominant weaknesses.

  “Andrew desperately wanted the type of intelligence, insight, and judgment that Dr. Mower had, but he wanted it instantly,” says Matthew Rifat. “He wanted to experience the arts, culture, important people. But his longing by-passed intelligence, insight, and judgment to become histrionic: Look at me, I’m flamboyant, I’m entertaining to be around—take me out to dinner. Andrew was extremely interesting to talk to and to observe—basically that was the role he played. He had no value apart from that. He didn’t have common sense or busi
ness sense, so he couldn’t get what he wanted.”

  In his last two years at Bishop’s, Andrew broadened his range of friends, seeking out a more worldly crowd, a few of whom were called “the druggies.” Drug and alcohol use were common among a certain set at Bishop’s, and as soon as Andrew could drive he began staying out late and telling stories about cruising Balboa Park, a well-known gay hangout. He spoke of an older boyfriend named Antoine, who gave him presents. Nobody at Bishop’s ever saw Antoine, though. Eric Simon says Andrew smoked pot and took ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms. Others say he also snorted cocaine. Andrew loved to think of himself as moving among the glamorous but screwed-up “spoiled youth” personified by the drugged-out rich kids in Bret Easton Ellis’s novel and subsequent movie, Less Than Zero. He liked the concept of “live fast die young.” (Ellis’s bisexual protagonist eventually destroys himself.)

  “He was a master of cover-up stories for his family,” says his classmate and close friend Stacy Lopez, one of the few people to whom he spoke openly about his family. He told her his mother was “a mess” and neurotic and barely mentioned his siblings, except to note their jealousy. Perhaps because of his parents’ vaunted expectations and his Catholicism, Andrew could never bring himself to tell them what he made a point of telling the rest of the world: that he was gay. Instead, Andrew at sixteen “loved money” and boasted of “the men who take care of me” to Stacy. “I never thought he prostituted himself. I thought it was more men gave him gifts and stuff, which I used to tease him about all the time—‘Ah, you got yourself another sugar daddy.’” He also told Stacy that he enjoyed being “the feminine one in the relationship.”

  The high point was a tight red leather suit that Andrew proudly showed off to Stacy, crowing, “Antoine bought it for me.” Although there were some boys in his class who would later adopt a gay lifestyle, no one at Bishop’s then would dare wear a tight red leather suit. To add to his reputation for outrageousness, and to introduce the element of danger, Andrew also began bringing a gun to school. He kept it in his car and showed it to several of his classmates, sometimes telling them his father gave him the gun for protection.

  Andrew lied so often and so compartmentalized his life that no one could see his life as a continuum. Even the classmates who thought they had him figured out saw only a part of him. But they wouldn’t have had to be very astute to pick up the underlying anger and envy that drove him. Disturbing signs were there. Andrew always wanted more. On his senior-class ski trip, he was accused of stealing money from a condo where a group of his friends was staying. He denied taking the money and nothing was ever proved, but people wondered.

  As high school came to an end, everyone in his class was consumed with going to college. Curiously, Andrew said nothing. His college boards were a respectable 1,190, but not high enough to win scholarships to top schools. His grades had suffered in his senior year; he had a C– in both Shakespeare and Algebra 2. Nevertheless, he got a glowing recommendation from Bishop’s: “Andrew is a true intellectual with a ready sense of humor and a concern for others. He relates very well to adults, discourses brilliantly about culture and history and is capable of profound thought. He is independent, occasionally self-indulgent and at times only interested in pursuing areas that truly interest him. A fascinating individual in every way, Andrew can’t help but enliven a college campus! … All of us applaud his originality, his fascination with ideas and his imagination.”

  Applause aside, Andrew’s father was so overextended at this point that Andrew must have begun to realize there would be no money for him to go away, so he evaded the subject of what his next step would be. “He was a master of vagueness,” says Stacy Lopez. By his senior year, Andrew had also gotten coarse. He would go around saying that his “two favorite things” were sex and defecation. “There’s nothing like a good crap.” His gestures and his laugh became edgy. Matthew Rifat remembers being slapped on the back by Andrew in an ostensibly hale-fellow-well-met way, but the whack was so hard as to be jarring, and Andrew would grab Matthew’s arm the same way.

  Throughout high school Andrew was never reticent about the lifestyles of the rich and famous he wished to experience, but he had no plan for how to get there. Because he was surrounded by success and wealth and had a great longing for the finer things, he tried to convey that he was already in the upper reaches. But since he wasn’t willing to work, and he was frantic to be noticed—to the point of secret fury at times if he was not taken into account—his outsized behavior escalated, as if fueled by simmering anger.

  “Anger powered him through his insecurity,” says Matthew Rifat. “Andrew would erupt, basically—whether he was going to laugh, or arrive at a party in a red jumpsuit, it was Andrew erupting onto the scene.”

  When they were still young boys, Andrew and Matthew had a conversation about their goals in life. Andrew was clear that he wanted to be someone people would remember. “There was no specific goal in terms of ‘I want to become president of the United States and people will remember me because of that.’ It was more ‘People will remember me because of my behavior rather than any achievement, because of my personality.’ It was important for him to have a spot in the minds of people who impressed him.”

  When senior year ended, Andrew knew he was being left behind. He never again communicated with Dr. Mower. From then on, he was listed among the Bishop’s “lost alumni,” never submitting a forwarding address to the school’s alumni newsletter. Interestingly, for the boy who tried so hard to belong, Andrew chose not to write anything to go next to his graduation picture in the Bishop’s Class of 1987 Miradero Yearbook, as all of his classmates did. Nevertheless, his classmates voted him “Most Likely to Be Remembered.” Under his picture, Andrew even declined to reveal where he was born—National City was not a place he would rush to claim. Instead, grand as ever, Andrew quoted the powerful spendthrift mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour: Après moi le déluge.

  4

  Pete

  THE SAME MONTH that Andrew graduated from Bishop’s, Pete was fired from his stockbroker’s job at Crowell, Weedon & Co., and the family began to slide deeper into debt. Andrew’s sister Gina was enrolled at the University of California at San Diego. In September, Andrew followed her there and chose history as his major. Pete was suddenly faced with putting two children through college, but to hear him today, one would never guess that he had suffered serious financial setbacks at the time. “In the U.S. money and power and Wall Street mean upward mobility—hey, hey, that’s the name of the game. I was making money and living a very very comfortable life,” Pete says. “I gave seminars in a country club. Can you imagine me giving seminars in a country club? I paid $2,800 for dinner on my expense account—hey, you got to prime the pump. Big deal: You spend $3,000 and get orders for $30,000 in commissions.”

  Pete apparently let Andrew think that he was doing a lot better in business than he really was, and he continued to indulge him at every turn. “As Andrew got older, I was able to give him a lot of good things—except one thing: This marriage I was into was very unhappy,” Pete says. Pete told Andrew that he should enroll at Georgetown University and become a diplomat and a philanthropist. As a result, Andrew acquired a strong sense of entitlement without any foundation to support it.

  Andrew, always the con man at school, was himself being conned at home. “Pete always wore expensive suits, would buy expensive cars and expensive homes, and I think Andrew believed this was all for real,” says Ronald Johnston, who worked with Pete at four different firms. “Andrew was led to believe by his father that he could attain anything he wanted to attain. And I know his father spoiled him rotten and gave him everything that he could possibly want.”

  The truth was that Pete was becoming increasingly desperate. Johnston continues, “He had very definitely a pattern of spending over his head—spending over his income capabilities. I think he was constantly trying to get out of debt.” Nevertheless, when Johnston bought an expensive Alfa
Romeo coupe, he recalls, “Pete had to go out two weeks later and buy one as well.”

  During the nine years Pete Cunanan worked as a licensed stockbroker, from 1979 to 1988, he was employed by six brokerage houses; he never stayed more than two years at any job. Some of the companies where he worked no longer exist, and the National Association of Securities Dealers guards the confidentiality of brokers’ records prior to 1989 very strictly. There is no disclosable disciplinary action with the NASD on record, but Pete was let go more than once.

  Although he began at the top of the line with Merrill Lynch, and was then recruited for Prudential Bache, by the time Andrew graduated, Pete was in the outer tier of brokerage houses. From the mid-eighties, in fact, he had been struggling to keep up. After one of his terminations—in 1987, for “lack of productivity”—Pete next landed a job at Trademark Investment Services, Inc., a small San Diego outfit that Johnston had founded with James Rattan. Johnston then sold his share to Rattan, so it was Rattan who later had to contend with clients’ complaints that allegedly stemmed from Pete’s previous work for other firms.

  “He had been accused of taking clients’ money,” says Rattan, a former naval officer. “I don’t know the exact amounts, but he had been doing this apparently for quite a long period of time. He had done it at several major securities firms.”

  Johnston, who had supervised Pete previously, says he was not aware of anything untoward. But Rattan and his secretary, through intercepting Pete’s calls and mail, discovered numerous apparent misdeeds. “We started getting funny little phone calls. Usually people who are taken don’t want to admit it,” Rattan says. “After talking to these people, we’d find he’d taken them to the cleaners for five thousand to ten thousand dollars. He was stealing.” The securities industry requires you to put authorized products on your sell list. He was selling unauthorized securities. One client was in her nineties.