Vulgar Favours

by Maureen Orth

  Pete would allegedly sell nonexistent stock and take the money. Rattan says he reported Pete’s actions to both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Association of Securities Dealers, but not all of the records can be verified. Records do show that Trademark reported to the NASD that Pete had taken $26,750 from one customer—$1,220 as a personal loan, which he was supposed to pay back from the sale of his property, and the remainder as an investment in a convenience store. But Rattan was never able to confront Pete directly to tell him he was fired—he had already stopped showing up at the office.

  While Pete was at Trademark, he indulged in some of the same kind of ego enhancement that his son did. For example, he went by the title Pete Cunanan, M.D. “I asked him what the M.D. stands for, and he said Maintenance Director,” says Lee Swift, who sat next to Pete for two years. According to Swift, Pete’s reach vastly exceeded his grasp. He remembers Pete’s last big deal—a half-million-dollar pay-telephone underwriting scheme that never panned out. “You know, he took the money, cashed the checks, and ‘See you later!’”

  MaryAnn later accused Pete in a lawsuit of embezzling over $100,000, which Pete laughs off by saying, “The securities business is the most regulated industry there is.” Pete claims there are no court records of any wrongdoing on his part, adding, “She made it up.” When pressed, he asks, “How could I be a failed broker? I was nominated in the 1986 California Who’s Who among stockbrokers.” Although such books are often published to draw investors, no such book can be found.

  After the crash of October 19, 1987, working in the market became more difficult, and during the first half of 1988, with Andrew and Gina at UCSD, Pete was trying to put his pay-phone deal together. “He was going to be the underwriter. He didn’t have the expertise to do it,” says Swift. In the two-month period beginning in July 1988, Pete, realizing that Rattan was becoming suspicious, allegedly took his spoils from the deal and sold his Alfa Romeo and his heavily mortgaged houses in Bonita and Rancho Bernardo. Then he disappeared.

  James Rattan told Lee Swift to call Pete’s house to find out where he was. MaryAnn professed not to know. “Nobody knew where the hell he was,” says Swift. “I think he left in a hurry. I think once he had that money in his pocket, he got the hell out of here.”

  Pete Cunanan fled to his native Philippines on a tourist visa.

  The family had literally had their home sold out from under them. MaryAnn was reportedly left with seven hundred dollars, even though she had financed the down payment of $41,000 for the house in Bonita. In California, a community-property state, after twenty-seven years of marriage she was entitled to half of everything. All Pete left was his navy pension check—$650 a month. Today he remains unapologetic for abandoning the family the way he did, and bitter that MaryAnn used the money to live, insisting that it was supposed to be for Andrew’s education. “She took it all.”

  The family tried to hide the shameful secret of Pete’s departure, which precipitated a major downward spiral in MaryAnn’s emotional health. She needed psychiatric help and made multiple suicide threats. Andrew and Gina dropped out of college. The family was set adrift. The experience was clearly shattering for Andrew, whose image of his dad as a powerful and reliable protector was smashed. “If Pete did not get into trouble financially, I think he could have stuck it out with his family,” Andrew’s godfather, Delfin Labao, says. “But he played a big stake and lost. He abandoned his family, and they were heart-broken.”

  Soon, however, Andrew followed his father to the Philippines, but he stayed only five days. His father says he spent most of the time “sweating in a motel room,” since he was unused to the intense humidity of the tropics.

  Pete at the time was planning to look for buried treasure, but Andrew wanted no part of his father’s diminished life. Pete says Andrew had an airline ticket and $900 when he left the Philippines to return home. From then on, Andrew’s stories about how rich the Cunanan family was in the Philippines, and how many sugar plantations they owned, became ever more fanciful. In Andrew’s imagination, his father—an enlisted man who had once taken flying lessons but had not earned his pilot’s license—now became a Filipino general who flew then dictator Ferdinand Marcos around. Even Andrew could fly.

  “When Andrew saw the crude poverty in which his father was living,” says one of his teachers from Bishop’s, “a driving madness took over his mind.”

  5

  Berkeley

  WITH HIS FATHER gone, Andrew found his tenuous moorings cut out from under him. Unused to fending for himself, he was bereft and increasingly unstable. By forcing so much concentration on status, Pete had nearly obliterated whatever genuine sense of himself Andrew may have had. But Andrew had one more ticket to ride before having to yield to the grim truth that he was broke, that his father was a con artist, that his mother was sick, and that he would have to work his way through school if he wanted a college education.

  How unfair it must have all seemed to a spoiled teenager brimming with secret anger and self-pity. But once again Andrew found a way to sustain the pretense. He decided to accept the hospitality proffered by his rich and spacey debutante friend Liz Coté, who was about to be married and live in Berkeley, just across the bay from the most liberated gay community in America, the Castro district of San Francisco. Andrew would be able to live comfortably for nothing, and he would be on the cutting edge of gay life.

  Through Lizzie, Andrew could also cozy up to the carefree affluence he so desperately wanted but could never attain by himself. Lizzie was used to having her way. She rode horses and drove a brand-new BMW; she was only too happy to take Andrew out to dinner, because he entertained her. Lizzie was the niece of Emmy and Raymond “Bud” Coté, a prominent, wealthy couple from Rancho Santa Fe, an enclave of million-dollar-plus houses north of La Jolla. Set among palms and eucalyptus groves, with Mercedes parked on winding driveways, Rancho Santa Fe was the place Andrew would later call home even though he had never lived there. (In March 1997, shortly before Andrew began his murder spree, Rancho Santa Fe gained its own notoriety as the site of the mass suicide of the cult members of Heaven’s Gate.)

  Andrew and Lizzie had first met through the Rifats—Lizzie had made her debut one year after Rachel, and Matthew had escorted her to her debutante ball. Lizzie did not attend school; she was a born-again Christian who was being reared as their daughter by the Cotés. Bud Coté, a car dealer and developer, and Emmy, an active socialite and arts patron, presided over a household where one observer said the two most important questions were What did you eat for dinner last night? and What are you wearing?

  Lizzie loved the idea of having a retinue. She and Andrew mixed with a young crowd once described as “fresh enough, if used.” Fascinated with the ideas of sexual license, self-destruction, and drug abuse in a group of screwed-up, spoiled rich kids, Andrew was once again reminded of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, whose protagonist is forced to pay off his drug dealers by moon-lighting as a gay prostitute. Straitlaced though Lizzie was, she and her faithful sidekick Andrew constantly referenced the self-preoccupation and hollow materialism of the novel and the film based on it. To Andrew, who rapturously identified with Ellis’s fictional world, it was all terribly chic.

  Lizzie lived in a big house with a dining room painted in red car enamel. Emmy favored red leather Chanel suits. With the Cotés, therefore, Andrew was definitely in the pink, though without any political connotations. The Cotés’ Rancho Santa Fe garden was the site of former president Jerry Ford’s son Jack’s wedding reception, which Bud described as “a wingding” and a “hell of a deal.” Longtime Grand Old Party supporters, the Cotés threw a big bash for out-of-state delegates in 1996, when the Republican National Convention was in San Diego.

  Among the Cotés’ close friends from Rancho Santa Fe were a very rich, quiet couple named James and Marne DeSilva, prominent San Diego art collectors. The DeSilvas, who had collected for years and now lent their Lichtenstein, War
hol, and Johns to museums, had endowed the Stuart Collection of outdoor sculpture at the University of California at San Diego. (Stuart is James DeSilva’s middle name.) As a student at UCSD, Andrew constantly passed Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Sun God,” a giant open-winged bird commissioned by the DeSilvas, which became the university’s unofficial mascot. Emmy Coté was the founder and president of the Colleagues, a Stuart Collection support group, and Andrew, who was considered Lizzie’s “poor friend,” met the DeSilvas through the Cotés. Jim and Marne DeSilva thus became enshrined in Andrew’s imagination as his inspiration. He eventually usurped their name and, without their knowledge, turned them into his proxy parents.

  At first he used the DeSilva name just to book dinner reservations, believing that Andrew DeSilva would get a better table than Andrew Cunanan—a not uncommon Filipino name in California. Later, when Andrew moved back to San Diego, where no one in the gay community knew him as Cunanan, he would use DeSilva as his own last name. He borrowed other parts of the DeSilvas’ life as well. Mrs. DeSilva once roomed with eighties rocker Deborah Harry at the Golden Door spa in Escondido, California, an incident that made an indelible impression on Andrew. For years afterward, he would brag in the bars in Hillcrest that “my mother spaaed with Debbie Harry” and that he himself dined with Debbie at least once a year.

  While he was still at Bishop’s, Andrew had taken boyish delight in assuming other identities, and he never got over it. When he arrived in Berkeley at the end of 1988, he would go out at night and try to get people to swallow that he was “Count Ashkenazy.” He didn’t really care whether they actually believed him or not, as long as they went along with the conceit. And while many found this charade harmless fun, psychologist Elizabeth Oglesby, who came to know Andrew well, as her next-door neighbor and house-sitter, didn’t think it was funny at all.

  “This whole conflict of ‘Who am I?’ He had no opportunity to form a cohesive ego, so the whole thing is image: Am I being projected? Accepted?” Oglesby concluded that Andrew’s family dynamic worked against his ever forming a coherent internal structure. There was too much chaos, given his mother’s illness and his father’s volatility. Shame and image replaced security and identity. Ultimately, Oglesby says, “Andrew had this thing about humiliation and wanted to be something his family wasn’t.”

  When Andrew met this new neighbor, he was very impressed. Elizabeth Oglesby had grown up in Asia, and her house in the steep and leafy Montclair section of the Oakland hills, near the Berkeley line, was filled with Asian antiques, which were later destroyed in a fire that swept the area in 1991. Andrew was delighted when she told him that she thought Eurasian people were beautiful. He told her that his father was a rich plantation owner in the Philippines and big in the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic fraternal order. “You know my middle name is Phillip, as in Prince Philip.” Oglesby was not fooled.

  “He thought if he acted it, he would be it,” she says of Andrew’s many guises as a trust-fund baby. “I don’t think he had a clue that anything was deeply wrong. I would say he was a borderline personality who goes in and out of psychosis. He wasn’t reality-based. He didn’t understand some of the most basic things in life: You go to school if you want to achieve in this world. You have to work. People with severe narcissistic character disorder think, If I am already that in my mind, therefore I am entitled to be that.” Such a frame of reference might have worked had Andrew adopted a totally ironic stance, especially since he was so entertaining. But he wanted to be taken at face value.

  “Andrew confided in me to a large extent,” Oglesby continues. Although he didn’t tell the truth about his family, he told her that he didn’t get along with them and that he had basically rejected his parents. “He said his mother was ‘mentally not there.’” Oglesby tried to comfort him over pieces of cake from his favorite bakery, Il Fornaio. “He wasn’t a physically striking individual. Even at that time he seemed to be such a tragic person. There was this desperate person starving to get the slightest bit of approval, dying to have that smile of reinforcement. He was so animated, so hyper. I remember one night he was going on and on, and I must have been tired. When he saw me tuning out, he looked devastated. Rejection was a big thing to Andrew.”

  Interestingly, Oglesby did not consider Andrew brilliant, merely “very good with trivia. He was preoccupied with the accoutrements, the looks.”

  The reason Andrew lived next door was that Lizzie had decided to get married. She was not yet nineteen when she wed Philip Merrill, a computer writer in Berkeley, who had grown up in New York and was ten years older than her. They were supported mostly by her family, and once Lizzie bought the house in Montclair, Andrew became the permanent houseguest because Phil thought it wasn’t a bad idea for Lizzie to have a friend or two her own age to amuse her. Andrew was more than willing to fill the role of obliging courtier and to live in beautiful surroundings rent-free. Phil and Lizzie bought and then remodeled three houses in Montclair and the Berkeley hills, which they then sold for a profit. All Andrew’s food was paid for, and he was able to borrow their car whenever they didn’t need it. He began living with Lizzie and Phil several months before their marriage at San Francisco City Hall in March 1989. He was their best man.

  Andrew and Lizzie would buy $150 worth of magazines and spend an entire day going through foreign-language editions of Architectural Digest and debating the merits of different kinds of moldings and bathroom fixtures. If Andrew had time, he would usually try to fit in a daily sunbath. At night he would go out on his own or stay home and read. “Frankly, it was great if she had this guy who was harmless to have around and who would talk to her for hours about color tones and whether this dumb-looking Napoleon-era table clashed with the room, because they were doing a dumb neoclassical thing instead of a good neoclassical thing,” says Philip Merrill. “I was just feeling like the wife watching football, to a certain extent: I guess I could get interested in this, but I’m not interested yet.”

  Andrew and Lizzie made dollhouses and subscribed to a dollhouse magazine. Lizzie was a miniaturist, and Andrew was fascinated with furnishings. His grandest creation was a ruined French château of the post–French Revolutionary era, complete with blackened windows.

  Oglesby didn’t think the friendship was very healthy. “Andrew had a real issue with boundaries. Frequently, he didn’t know where he ended and the other person began. When he became close to someone, he became that person. It used to make my skin crawl. I didn’t like to see them together.” Andrew, she felt, was sickeningly servile while Lizzie prattled on, “impressed with her own family’s success. They talked about ‘the social set of San Diego’ over and over, what powerful movers and shakers her father and brother were. Liz could get any sum she wanted from Dad. That didn’t happen for Andrew. While superficially he’s getting the feeling of being among the elite, he couldn’t support it in concrete terms.”

  On several occasions, for a few months at a time, Andrew got jobs as a temp in San Francisco, commuting to the city on the Bay Area Rapid Transit. Once, he worked in a big downtown bank and bragged that he was able to see some of Jim DeSilva’s financial records. Andrew was not above smuggling out of the bank the financial documents of rich people who interested him. His working days were numbered, however. A few weeks after Lizzie and Phil were married, Lizzie announced that she wanted to have children. Their daughter was born in early 1990, and Andrew became at once the godfather, the full-time companion, and the sometime nanny. He and Phil evidently took to parenting a lot more naturally than Lizzie did.

  “He had a gift for taking care of children,” says Merrill. Phil and Lizzie, who were supercautious about whom they would leave their baby with, had no qualms about Andrew, who cared for the little girl frequently and gave her, her father says, “a naughty sense of humor.” Andrew photographed the baby and made an elaborate album with a running narrative. When Phil and Lizzie had a second child, a boy, in 1992, Andrew took care of Grimmy for the two days Lizzie was in
the hospital. In 1995, Andrew was asked to be the little boy’s godfather.

  Yet, for all his candor about his sexuality at Bishop’s, and as close as he felt to Lizzie and her family, Andrew would never admit to Lizzie and Philip that he was gay. Just as he skirted the question with his own family, he also danced around it with them, declaring a possible bisexual preference, a profound respect for the church, and an occasional outrage at open homosexuality. “We walked around the Castro last night looking at fags,” he’d tell Phil. His remarks got to the point of sometimes being politically incorrect, but if Phil said anything, Andrew would get “cocky and grand” and treat the whole subject cavalierly. But Andrew knew when to back off if he became too obnoxious, and as a result he was allowed to stay on with the family.

  “HEY, LISTEN TO this,” Phil said one day when he and Lizzie and Andrew were riding in the car together. He read them a passage from a pulp thriller, of two detectives discussing why the bad guy they are pursuing may have used a .40 caliber weapon. The idea of using an unconventional .40 caliber, the detectives conclude, was arrived at either because the killer was very stupid or because he was making a statement—leaving a .40 caliber calling card. “If I ever killed anybody,” Andrew said casually, and perhaps prophetically, “I’d use a .40 caliber gun.”

  Guns fascinated Andrew. Although he rarely brought up his father to Phil and Lizzie, who knew the truth, when he did, he would be cryptically admiring of Pete’s ability to handle guns. Andrew would transform Pete’s target practice in the cement backyard in San Bernardo into Pete’s role as a kind of dashing James Bond figure. A couple of times he let the pain flash through, however, by referring to his father, with a thin smile and a grimace, as an embezzler.