by Maureen Orth
“When I saw in the papers that Harry de Wildt is denying ever having met Andrew—I mean, not only can I laugh at that, but it was an exciting moment for me,” Steven Gomer says. “I smacked Andrew on the shoulder and said, ‘Oh, my God, look over there, it’s Harry de Wildt!’ And he said, ‘You’ve never met Harry de Wildt?’ And I said ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Want to meet him?’ And I said, ‘No, no, no! Stop! Don’t, don’t, don’t.’ And he said, ‘No, he’s a good friend of mine.’”
Andrew took Steven over, and Steven says he will never forget the moment: “Harry was surrounded by gods—these smooth, bronzed, hairless blonds, six foot plus, tightly clothed, Matinique- and Versace-laden Adonises, and Andrew introduces him to me, and I’m just thinking, What must be going through Harry’s mind? You know, Who’s this schmo you’re bringing here to pay homage to me?” Harry de Wildt and Andrew, it seems, went back a long way.
One night in the fall of 1990, Steven Gomer was in the Midnight Sun late when Andrew walked in dressed in a tuxedo. Steven greeted him by saying, “Andrew, how many people come into a bar to get a Miller Lite dressed in their finest Italian suit?”
“Oh, I just saw Capriccio at the opera,” Andrew answered, adding, “I was with Gianni Versace.”
“Oh, I was using my entertainment coupons at buy-one-get-one at the local movie theater,” Steven countered.
Andrew laughed.
FOR ALL ITS cosmopolitan savvy, San Francisco can become positively gushing when it comes to visiting celebrities. Gianni Versace had been invited to design the costumes for the San Francisco Opera’s production of Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio, which opened on October 21, 1990. He and his boyfriend, Antonio D’Amico, arrived from Milan for the premiere, and San Francisco’s gay community was all atwitter that Versace was in their midst. There were parties surrounding the opening. The Opera Guild threw an official fund-raiser at the Inn at the Opera, a motel near the Opera House, and there was a party backstage after the opening.
Versace, who had been openly gay for some time and one of the biggest gay personalities out at the time, would also have a chance to meet members of the local gay community informally. He would come to the weekly Saturday night dance at the Colossus, a cavernous gay disco on Folsom Street. When Val Caniparoli, a choreographer with the San Francisco Ballet, who was helping escort Versace around, gave passes to Colossus’s VIP room to Eli Gould, and Gould invited Andrew to come along, Andrew was ecstatic. He told Eli and Doug that he had been in Italy several times and knew the country well. He told Eli that he had met Versace before. When it became known that their friend Val would be working with Versace, Andrew claimed that he already knew the designer: “I know him. I’ve met him before.” Andrew, it turns out, had never been to Italy.
That night, Eli and Andrew entered the Colossus dance area and went to the VIP room to await Versace. The designer walked in with an entourage, including Antonio D’Amico and Val Caniparoli, who quickly introduced him to a few people. After about fifteen minutes of chitchat and waves of young men eager to meet him, Versace began to survey the room. He noticed Andrew standing with Eli, cocked his head, and walked in their direction. “I know you,” he said to Andrew. “Lago di Como, no?” Versace was referring to the house he owned on Lake Como near the Swiss border. Reportedly he would often use the Lago di Como line when he wanted to strike up a conversation with someone.
Andrew was thrilled and Eli couldn’t believe it. “That’s right,” Andrew answered. “Thank you for remembering, Signor Versace.” Then Andrew introduced Eli to Versace, who made polite talk about whether they had seen the opera. (They hadn’t.) Eli and Andrew then drifted back down to the dance floor.
Versace visited Colossus three times during his stay. Whether it was that night or on another occasion, Los Angeles lawyer Eric Gruenwald, who was also in the Colossus when Versace was there, remembers meeting Andrew as well. Gruenwald had grown up in La Jolla, so he and Andrew discussed their hometown. Gruenwald didn’t believe that Andrew had all the credentials he claimed, and he never saw Andrew again, but for years afterward he would tell the story of what Andrew had said about meeting Versace. Andrew told Gruenwald, “He came up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m Gianni Versace.’ I told him, ‘If you’re Gianni Versace, then I’m Coco Chanel!’”
During Versace’s stay, Doug Stubblefield was walking on Market Street to another gay club when a big white chauffeured car pulled up alongside him. Inside Doug recognized Harry de Wildt, Versace, and Andrew. To show off, Andrew had the car come to the curb, and Andrew and Doug had a conversation. “It was very Andrew to do that, have the car pull over,” Stubblefield says.
The next morning, Phil and Lizzie were still in bed when Andrew came bounding into their bedroom. Flushed with excitement, he started jumping up and down on the bed. “You won’t believe who I just went clubbing with!” he exclaimed. “Gianni Versace, his boyfriend, and Harry de Wildt! I’m so excited!” Phil Merrill also remembers Andrew repeating the “If you’re Gianni Versace, then I’m Coco Chanel” line.
“Basically,” says Merrill, “there was this sense of ‘I’ve finally met one of the people who’s like a god to me.’” Artist Julian Schnabel and designer Karl Lagerfeld were also in that category, says Merrill, “but Julian Schnabel didn’t get talked about as much.”
Although Harry de Wildt admits having known Versace at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and having had lunch with him during his stay for Capriccio, he says, “I categorically deny Mr. Versace, Mr. Cunanan, and I were in the same car.” Nevertheless, it became kind of a running joke between Eli Gould and Doug Stubblefield that they both observed Andrew with Versace, and from then on, whenever anyone doubted Andrew’s veracity, they would both say, “Ah, but remember he really did know Versace!”
7
Hillcrest
BY THE SUMMER of 1991, Lizzie and Phil had decided to move to Sacramento. Lizzie wanted to be between Lake Tahoe and the San Francisco Bay. She was also going to try her hand at real estate there, hoping to avoid a downturn that had infected the usually buoyant Bay Area housing market. Sacramento was no place for Andrew. The California capital gets extremely hot during the summer, and Sacramento has none of the cosmopolitan glamour of San Francisco.
So Andrew returned to Rancho Bernardo to live with his mother in a small, $750-a-month, two-bedroom apartment. It was in a white stucco complex with faux Spanish windows across a busy boulevard from a strip mall. The living room opened onto a balcony overlooking a golf course. Their apartment was on the upper of two levels, and neighbors were at close quarters. Andrew decided to reenroll at UCSD, where his sister Gina had recently graduated. Once again he picked history as his major.
Although Andrew excelled at art history, knowing not only when many of the old masters painted but at what time of day and where they had hung, he never studied much. He got a job as a clerk at the Thrifty Drug Store in the mall across the street, a job he held for three and a half years. His mother babysat for two families and was a faithful member of her local parish church, San Rafael, up the hill, just a few blocks away.
At home, Andrew portrayed himself to neighbors and people who knew his mother as a poverty-stricken student, unable to afford the education he really wanted. Neighbor Hal Melowitz recalls, “Andrew talked poor in Rancho Bernardo. His mother was overjoyed when he was able to obtain financial aid to go back to school.” Melowitz, a psychiatric social worker, understood how delicate MaryAnn was and befriended her. He remembers that she was under a psychiatrist’s care and had suffered several nervous breakdowns, the first at age thirty-three, “when her husband broke a chair over her.”
Andrew seemed indifferent to his mother, who chain-smoked, talked incessantly, and constantly threatened suicide. He forbade her to enter Thrifty Drug. “Andrew would become violent if I went into the drugstore,” MaryAnn says. “He would fly into rages,” says Melowitz. At one point in 1993 Andrew lost control of his anger completely and slammed his mother against the wall so hard th
at she fractured her shoulder and had to wear her arm in a sling. When she went to the emergency room, Andrew warned her that if she ever told anyone he’d kill her. Father L. V. Bourgeois, the parish priest, was upset and blamed it on drugs. “It’s not normal behavior for a son.” Despite the violence, MaryAnn clung to Andrew. According to Melowitz, “You’d need a crowbar to pry her away from her son.”
Andrew, meanwhile, would party for days and then come home to crash. He demanded that MaryAnn remain absolutely quiet while he slept, often late into the afternoon. In order to comply with his wishes, she took the phone off the hook so that the ringing wouldn’t bother him; she spoke in a whisper and cooked whatever he wanted, whether she could afford to or not. “Even if she had only fifteen dollars to her name, if he wanted steak, he got steak,” says a friend of Gina Cunanan’s. Andrew contributed toward rent and food, but MaryAnn, who referred to Andrew as the Prince, had to rely on Melowitz to drive her twelve miles to the military PX in Miramar to get her prescriptions.
“Andrew would wake up, take care of his personal needs, sit down, and eat,” says Melowitz. “He had no interest in her. It was never ‘Mom, how do you feel? What do you need? Thanks for preparing the food.’ It was ‘Don’t bother me, I’m outta here.’” Nevertheless, MaryAnn would unfailingly ask Andrew when he was coming home, what did he want to eat, and when. “She was very smothering,” says Melowitz. “It was an infantilization of him, no two ways about it.”
No matter how squalid Andrew’s days were, however, at night, the impoverished clerk from Rancho Bernardo would speed south down Interstate 15 in a big old LTD he usually kept out of sight, past La Jolla, past Sea World and the zoo, to hit the bars of Hillcrest, not as Andrew Cunanan on financial aid but as Yale-educated Andrew DeSilva, Mr. Congeniality, big-time spender, and heir to any number of fortunes—parking lots, car dealerships, sugar plantations, New York real estate, even a mattress distribution warehouse. Melowitz says, “He was a real Jekyll and Hyde.”
To pull off the deception, Andrew was aided by the circumstances of his surroundings and a new friend. When he first got back to San Diego, Andrew began to hang around a gay fraternity comprised of young men from UCSD and San Diego State. One of the people he met on campus was a handsome, green-eyed surfer named Robbins Thompson, who was deeply in the closet. Robbins surfed on the professional circuit and did not want anyone to know his sexual preference; since surfing was judged subjectively, he felt anything that made others feel they had an edge would hurt his career.
Robbins loved the high life and came from the kind of exotic background Andrew wished was his own. Robbins was a Mormon and also a quarter Jewish, and he had grown up in the Moslem world. His mother was a onetime beauty queen, and his father had run a prosperous oil business in Lebanon until the violent political unrest that took hold in Beirut in the mid-seventies forced him to flee. He lost everything in the process. Robbins says his father spent his fortune in ransoms in order to get his family and his employees out of Lebanon alive. Then the family lived on a sailboat in the Caribbean for a few years before settling in Newport Beach, California. Robbins remembers Nicole Brown Simpson and her sister, Denise, from his high school days.
Robbins, who was six years older than Andrew, had largely given up pro surfing tours by the time they met, and was taking computer classes and trying to start up a contracting business. He was ready to come out, but only on the gay-party circuit. Like many gays who deal almost exclusively in the straight world and fear being unmasked, Robbins kept everyone, both straight and gay, at emotional bay; he needed someone who was a lot more outgoing to help him navigate the largely unknown territory of gay society.
Andrew and Robbins were perfect for each other. One was brazen and witty, the other, a vivacious, elusive hunk with the added cachet of the surfer mystique. At first they were lovers, but neither of them was much on sentiment. Robbins says, “We soon figured out that wasn’t going anywhere, so we decided to become best friends.”
Best of all, Robbins was not bothered by Andrew’s lies. He focused more on what Andrew, who was extremely intelligent and very amusing, could do for him. Together they began a good-times roll with the rich older gays of La Jolla and San Diego, some uptight and closeted, some not. Andrew, who was conversant on many subjects he picked up from his reading, immediately hit it off with Lincoln Aston, a wealthy, sixty-year-old architect who had once been married. Lincoln was cultivated and possessed exquisite taste, but he had a fatal weakness for attractive young men. “Lincoln,” says Robbins, “was a lech.”
Lincoln and a couple of older Bishop’s graduates took Andrew up. Soon Andrew and Robbins were going to parties with very prominent, closeted people. In San Diego, where gay wealth doesn’t shout, these were often staid affairs. “We’d have cocktails and then either go out to dinner or have dinner there. They were very civilized and upper-class parties,” Robbins says. Other men with money Lincoln knew were not so discreet, and they sprinkled their gatherings with “pool boys—clothing optional.” Others hosted “video parties,” where ten male escorts would be hired to liven up the party and eventually strip, and everything would be videotaped.
There was always a party, wild or not. Robbins remembers going with Andrew to a gathering at the home of David Copley, the adopted son of the owner of the conservative San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper and heir to the Copley newspaper fortune. Andrew would always hold forth on politics and the news of the day, and he managed to penetrate the highest circles. “But he was not a socialite,” says Chris Fahey, who knew Andrew for five years in Hillcrest. “Andrew went to a party at David Copley’s and hung around with older rich guys. He was among them. He was among his betters.”
Dr. William Crawford, a distinguished retired navy doctor who at one time had been one of six national test pilots for the navy, met Andrew at this time. Crawford and others quickly realized that Andrew would have to have been at least ten years older than he was in order to have done everything he claimed he’d done. Andrew, recalls Crawford, told him he was getting his Ph.D. in history. “He said he spent eight months to two years on a kibbutz. When you added that on, plus several years in San Francisco in the textile business, I said, ‘Andrew, you haven’t been alive all those years.’ I knew it was invented, but it was not relevant to our relationship, which was delightfully correct, sophisticated, and enjoyable. He was wonderfully easy. We would match wits.”
“You’re the only one to keep up with me,” Andrew once told Crawford, who says, “It was like keeping up with the celebrated jumping frog.”
Andrew even told Crawford, an anesthesiologist, that he had worked from time to time as a pharmacy technician. “I didn’t press how he knew drugs.” Crawford was more concerned that Andrew was wasting his good mind on a frivolous life. “Andrew, all that brain power and it’s sitting there idle.”
“I enjoy my life. I like it this way,” Andrew answered.
“Andrew, do you have a money machine somewhere?” Crawford asked on another occasion. “He allowed as that he had a trust. I said, ‘When do you take possession?’ He said, ‘Oh, it sort of possesses me.’ He was very deft at changing the subject. As a physician, I’ve never looked at my friends clinically. Andrew was consistent as Andrew, but not his stories.”
Andrew and Robbins were new faces, zippy and fresh. Who cared if every little “i” was dotted or every “t” crossed? “Andrew told the truth. It was hidden in lies,” Robbins insists. “You could see the truth of who or what he was describing if you took away all the dressing and embellishments around it. It was like a code you had to go through.” Robbins most often was unique in that he understood the code. “Just sat back and watched the show.”
Indeed, as the years progressed, the act was refined, and Andrew even used the circumstances of Robbins’s life to pump up his own. Robbins spent a lot of time in Baja, California, where one local gringo was a convicted murderer, a former Hell’s Angel who had spent twenty years in prison for killing a guard during a r
iot. He once asked a friend of Robbins’s if he wanted his ex-girlfriend “offed” after she had betrayed him. That was just the sort of story Andrew lapped up. Andrew, who seemed to possess an inordinate fascination with violence, then bragged about his underworld connections, particularly a guy in prison he knew who could arrange to have people killed.
Aiding Andrew was the large transient military population of Hillcrest, a steady stream of newcomers whom he could entertain and eventually recruit for more sinister activities. Andrew was attracted to young military types, and gays with fetishes for uniforms found Hillcrest a bonanza. It was common knowledge that the military tests for HIV every few months; therefore, the gay military population is considered healthy and safe. “Going out to gay bars in San Diego is almost like being in an enlisted-men’s club,” says Steven Zeeland, author of Sailors and Sexual Identity and The Masculine Marine. “There is such an overwhelming military presence.”
Once a year, for example, after the annual military dress ball, marines in full dress uniform can be seen drinking at one of the Hillcrest’s most popular bars, Flicks, which is co-owned by Tim Barthel, a handsome ex-marine. Barthel says 30 percent of his clientele is military. Based on serving in the Marine Corps and running a gay bar for a number of years, Barthel estimates that at least 20 percent of the U.S. military is gay; official estimates are much lower.
San Diego also attracts teenage runaways and other homeless kids who bus in from all over the country and become easy pickings for unscrupulous predators in a still uptight town where it’s expedient to operate in secret. San Diego’s longtime reputation for right-wing politics and its large military numbers meant that many of the men who had no qualms about being openly gay in Hillcrest were still firmly in the closet once they stepped outside that neighborhood.