by Maureen Orth
“We are the top. There is no place with better-looking people. You can be totally numbed to it,” says Brian Antoni, a lawyer and novelist who grew up in the Bahamas and now divides his time between New York and South Beach. “It was Versace’s ‘look.’ He loved the Cuban boys. I’ve been with people who are beautiful, and someone would come over and say, ‘Versace is interested in you.’ We all become like weird concierges, because we love the community, and everyone who comes down here thinks they deserve anything they want and you’re supposed to get it for them. You get twisted on reflected fame or glory.
“The town is almost like a border town. It can supply almost anything you want; it’s why it developed so fast. It’s like the Wild West—anything goes. First there were the slums. Then the models came—they were the parsley that attracted the Eurotrash and the rich, dirty old men and then the celebrities. It’s like a big Pac-Man game. Now little drag queens from the Midwest come with their little shoes and think they can be discovered here. It’s an alternative to Beverly Hills and becoming a movie star.”
For Andrew, Miami Beach was both familiar and sheltering. His dark looks were so commonplace that he could fit in anywhere, and the large, transient tourist population guaranteed anonymity. If one allowed for all the layers of splash and flash in Miami, there were remarkable similarities between South Beach and Hillcrest, in San Diego. Both places were warm and near the water, with miles of beaches to walk and hustle on. Both had large gay populations with comforting infrastructures; the two communities had been gentrified largely by gays. And both communities were easily covered on foot and full of bars, bookstores, porn supermarkets, restaurants, and newsstands—all the pausing points of Andrew’s universe.
It hadn’t always been this way. Built between 1923 and 1943, Miami Beach’s Deco district had fallen into disrepair and poverty by the 1970s and was inhabited mostly by elderly Jewish retirees. In the early eighties, thanks to Fidel Castro, the Mariel boat lift dumped thousands of Cubans in Miami Beach, a number of them criminals and undesirables. The dilapidated, boarded-up buildings rapidly became crack houses; crime soared 30 percent. But in 1984 the hit TV series Miami Vice began showcasing the pastel palette and striking backdrops of “the beach,” as it is called by natives. The beachfront property was cheap, so a few developers and gays began to rehab the neighborhood. As Miami Vice broadcast images of hip, cool South Beach throughout Europe—where the series still plays today—German catalogs began featuring their models in the creamy golden light and exotic flora of favorite local haunts. Gloria Estefan and her husband, Emilio, contributed the hot, hot, hot beat of the Miami Sound Machine. By the mid-nineties, Sylvester Stallone and Madonna, not to mention Versace, had bought mansions in SoBe.
For Versace, South Beach was a strategically located relaxation zone, which he had captured in a 1993 coffee table book, South Beach Stories. In recent years Miami has become the northern capital of the Latin American market, and potential banking possibilities are attractive. Many feel that Versace gave the community a certain validation. “Versace infused a huge dose of glamour,” says Tara Solomon. “Every new young city needs a mentor. Versace was that to us.” Versace first came to South Beach on his way to vacation in Cuba during the Christmas holiday in 1991. By then many members of Euro fashion and café society were spending holidays in South Beach. The tiny Century Hotel threw a famous New Year’s Eve party that attracted Paloma Picasso and Egon von Furstenberg. “In those days Claudia Schiffer Rollerbladed down Ocean Drive,” says Louis Canales, a walking Rolodex known as Mr. South Beach. At that time Canales was organizing the party to reopen the Versace boutique in nearby Bal Harbour on December 28, 1991, and the party blew Gianni’s mind. “It was le tout le monde,” says Canales. “Andre Leon Tally, Thierry Mugler, Claudia Schiffer—anyone who was anybody in town was there. Gianni said, ‘What’s it all about? It’s about South Beach!’”
One of the attractions for celebrities—apart from the wall-to-wall beauties of both sexes—was that no one there would tattle to the tabloids. “We have very short memories, so people under scrutiny all the time could come to South Beach and be themselves in a lush, happening environment,” says Canales. “It’s like being a bird-watcher and seeing a very, very rare bird and not scaring it away. Privacy was assured.” Tom Austin recalls, “When I first started covering celebrities coming here they thought they were in Nicaragua.” But then in January 1992, New York magazine ran an attention-getting cover that called South Beach “SoHo in the Sun.” “New York magazine came out, and it brought every Tom, Dick, and Harry, hustler, charlatan,” says Canales. “Grifters, hustlers, con artists had a deal. That started changing the scene.” Previously, Canales says, “the social scene was always as flat as the topography. All of a sudden there were newcomers who wanted a pecking order: who’s in, who’s out. Gianni didn’t create South Beach, but he understood South Beach, as he understood the value of publicity.”
The two were a fabulous fit. To Gianni Versace, South Beach “was like his fashions come to life,” says Tom Austin. “It’s the only place you can sunbathe wearing Versace. Where else could you, except L.A.?”
“Gianni Versace—he knew to be in the right place at the right time,” Louis Canales maintains. “People like Versace, Demi, Oprah, Madonna, Bruce Willis, they don’t take risks; they go to a guaranteed place. They don’t lend their names to places unless something is starting to happen. When it happens and you hitch your name to it—it’s safe.”
Yet many of the town’s realized fantasies, from architecture to personal reinvention, hide a chilling reality: the number of people who have come to South Beach to die. Like Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, who bused himself down to Miami because he wanted to die in the sun, South Beach has become home to thousands of HIV-positive men. Many are living off funds gained by leveraging their illness, having cashed in their insurance policies for less than their full value by selling them to investors who have gambled that the original policy holders will die soon. (As drugs to combat AIDS have improved, these “viatical” settlements, as they are called, have lost appeal to investors and become less common; one group of investors even ghoulishly filed a class action suit claiming companies underestimated life expectancy.) Meanwhile, a number of those who are ill rarely mention their condition. They may have come to die, but with their illness held in check by new medications, plenty of time to sunbathe and work out in the gym, plus steroids to reverse or forestall the effects of wasting, they no longer even look that sick. Then, blending in to the tanned and muscled vacationers keeping the clubs busy, they perpetuate the SoBe spirit of reckless joie de vivre.
The party never stops. After dancing at Warsaw on Fridays and Salvation on Saturdays comes the Sunday Tea Dance at Amnesia, where hundreds of Speedoclad men form conga lines while barrels of iridescent foam are poured onto the dance floor; for the thirsty off to the side are tubs filled with iced bottled water, also the preferred drink of the ecstasy clusters. Once the foam reaches waist level, the scene becomes group grope in the suds of a giant bubble bath. Then Mondays it’s Fat Black Pussycat party at Liquid with “gender illusionist” Kitty Meow. On Tuesdays there’s Twist, where you can sip Sex on the Beach. Wednesdays are Amateur Strip Night at Warsaw, Thursdays are free choice, etc. November brings the hautest of all the circuit parties, the White Party, an AIDS benefit, where many pay scant attention to behavior that can lead to contracting the disease. But who would spoil the party? The gay tourist industry is worth many, many millions annually to the economy of South Beach, and Miami, says gay columnist Eugene Patron, “has always been a city of escape.”
VERSACE’S RESIDENCE, THE Casa Casuarina (named after the only tree on the property) at 1116 Ocean Drive, not only saved the oceanfront from becoming another Bourbon Street, but also stood as a testament to another form of gay abandon. In 1992 Versace bought the old Amsterdam Palace, a run-down apartment building that had once been a grand Mediterranean villa. It had been built in 1930 to resemble the h
ouse in the Dominican Republic of Christopher Columbus’s son, Diego, for the grandson of the treasurer of Standard Oil, Alden Freeman. Versace paid $2.9 million for the property, which came with its own copper-domed observatory, and then scandalized the historic preservationists the following year by paying $3.7 million for the decrepit Revere Hotel next door and leveling it to build a patio and pool. However, the natives were impressed enough with their rich new neighbor that Versace managed to win over one of the leaders of the historic-preservation movement, who helped him run interference at city hall. After Versace spent more than a million for restoration, and another princely sum on furnishings, the fabulous Casa Casuarina emerged—a 20,000-square-foot, sixteen-bedroom paean to pagan excess which has been variously called “a flagrantly visible Xanadu,” “a high-camp tropical-fever dream,” and “a palazzo in drag” decorated in “gay baroque.”
Versace preserved the busts of Christopher Columbus, Pocahontas, Confucius, and Mussolini found in the courtyard; covered every available inch with Byzantine mosaics, Moorish tiles, Versace fabrics, Medusa heads (his logo), Picassos, and Dufys; and threw in hand-painted ceilings and a few murals. The effect is rather like the Sultan of Brunei meeting Louis XIV, if they both were drag queens stranded in Sicily.
In his ceaseless pursuit of celebrity and commerce, Gianni Versace made his embarrassment-of-riches lifestyle his greatest marketing tool, a braiding of living and selling. The family, the palatial houses, the artwork, the parties, the famous friends such as Elton John and Sting who came to sit frontside at his high-voltage shows, where he blasted their music and stacked his runway with supermodels guaranteed to attract the press—all were fodder for his branding. In fact, the multi-talented Versace, impresario as well as designer, shamelessly manipulated the media and gained a reputation for fusing fashion with a rock ’n’ roll sensibility, making it more immediate but somehow rougher. “Now you talk about Versace you copy my style,” rapped the late “gangsta” Tupac Shakur.
Versace freely admitted that his clothes were inspired by antiquity and sadomasochism, and that the woman who inspired him most was the streetwalker. “I don’t know how many people who believe that story have actually been to southern Italy and seen the whores,” British fashion historian Colin McDowell said in an interview, “but they’re no more magnificent or exciting than their sad sisters anywhere else.” Despite his nostalgie de la boue, Gianni Versace worshiped wealth and fame and art and coveted status as much as Andrew Cunanan did. His label, launched in 1978, metamorphosed into a global empire that sold not only expensive and flashy clothes that offered security to the up-from-the-street nouveau riche (epitomized by actress Elizabeth Berkley’s Las Vegas lap dancer, bragging in the camp classic Showgirls that she was wearing a “Versayce”) but also three hundred other products ranging from jeans to books to baby fragrances.
After a while, the garish blend of Versace high life and sales appeared to spew out automatically, like a personal twenty-four-hour news service, or a never-ending video fashion reel with a familiar cast of characters: his steely younger sister, Donatella, creative director of the company, the alter-ego muse with the platinum shank of hair out discoing night after night; her American husband, Paul Beck, in charge of Versace advertising and rumored to have once been Gianni’s lover (an allegation denied by the Versaces in Vanity Fair), at home with their young children, Allegra and Daniel; their brother, Santo, the company’s CEO, a former accountant who hovered in the background and whose 1997 conviction for bribing tax officials was overturned on appeal; Versace’s attractive and long-standing companion, Antonio D’Amico; the dressmaker mother and father who sold small kitchen appliances in interviews that gilded the designer’s humble childhood in Reggio di Calabria, at the very tip of the Italian boot. His takeoff at age twenty-five in Milan led, in quick succession, to the flamboyant shows that melded rock and fashion, the nonstop acquisition of antiquities and priceless Etruscan art, the over-the-top residences, and the exploitation of key relationships for mutual benefit. “By the time of his death,” wrote Holly Brubach of Versace in the New York Times, “he was more famous for the company he kept than for the clothes he designed.”
The model Janice Dickinson, former girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone, described in a British TV documentary how Versace courted the actor. “When I was at Stallone’s house, Versace sent out cases of china and sent over rooms of cushions and fabrics for the furniture, and trunkloads of clothes and wardrobe. I mean thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes for Sylvester—he courted Sly like you read about.” Stallone subsequently posed with supermodel Claudia Schiffer on the cover of a German magazine to launch Versace housewares. The two were nude except for Versace plates covering their private parts. “For reciprocity’s sake,” Dickinson continued, “Sly did pose naked for him with Claudia Schiffer in one ad, so I suppose Sly’s daily fee for taking his clothes off would be trunkloads of clothes and just pantries full of china. I mean, he courted him big-time.”
In a move widely noted in the fashion industry, in Europe, where he could get away with it, Versace provided and paid for top photographers to shoot pictures of him, his sister, and his clothes for magazine stories—editorial coverage given in exchange for ad pages. Somehow, the reasoning went, if he was seen on a glossy’s pages hanging out with Elton or Sting, designing for Elizabeth Hurley the famous black dress held together with safety pins, or making over Courtney Love’s image and upgrading her from the dregs of cheesiness, other aspiring nouveaus around the world would also snatch up anything with the name Versace on it.
“The average Joe walking down the street didn’t recognize the Gianni Versace the fashion crowd knew,” says Louis Canales. “The power of Versace was in his advertising money—the amount he spent guaranteed him editorial coverage and at the same time, to expand it, he’d multiply it by having Elton John or Sting around, so that at the same time the press was covering Versace, these stars are getting publicity and press they wouldn’t be getting otherwise. At the same time [they’re helping] open up new markets for buying his clothes. Latin America and the Far East are filled with spanking-new money. The Arab emirates are supposed to love his stuff. Like any fashion corporation, the lion’s share of the profits comes from fragrances and housewares. Versace needed the publicity so people felt they could afford the sunglasses.” Not one to miss an opportunity, Versace painted “Miami” on silk shirts and sold them for $1,200; his T-shirts sold for $200. His appetite for acquisition, like his appetite for publicity, appeared insatiable. He spent like a pasha, and sometimes he apparently overreached. At the time of his death, the Italian government was investigating how Versace had acquired some of his priceless collection of Etruscan art and ancient statues; if they were deemed part of the archaeological or cultural patrimony of Italy, the state maintained, they would belong in a museum.
Shortly before his death, Versace was further embarrassed when his greatest celebrity conquest, Princess Diana, abruptly pulled out of a charity benefit of Elton John’s that was to serve as the launch for Versace’s latest book, Rock and Royalty. Without any evident irony, Versace had cheekily posed himself and his siblings opposite a Snowdon portrait of Princess Diana and her two sons, as if to suggest that they were on a par and equal. “The ultimate impression left by the book,” wrote Andrea Lee in the New Yorker, “is the opposite of the stylish, irreverent romp that is intended: it conveys a diehard infatuation with rank and power and a tremendous yearning for status that was, it seems, a motivating factor in Versace’s success.”
That success was built on clothes that sought to turn upside down conventional notions of status and good taste. “[Versace] legitimized vulgarity,” the fashion critic Holly Brubach wrote. “The brazen colors and the baroque prints, the hodgepodge of motifs appropriated from antiquity, all smacked of ‘new money,’ and he reveled in them, flaunted them, threw them in the face of those who preached understatement. Until Versace came along, new money aspired to the conditions of old
money; he reversed the flow.”
TO SOMEONE AS consumed with a similar heated yearning as Andrew Cunanan, such a life would be enraging. The level of vulgarity would be an affront to his own narcissistic grandiosity; he would take umbrage at the forms of Versace’s ostentatious materialism.
What’s more, they were both southern Italians; Versace was Calabrese, Andrew was half Sicilian. They both came from port cities and deeply Catholic environments. They both started out at roughly the same economic place, although Versace did not have the privileges of a Bishop’s education. Yet here was Versace with a family he was proud of, from whom he never had to hide his gayness; a loving, longtime partner; and the riches of the world at his feet, including palazzos with views, which could be filled at will with beautiful boys. Except for the boys, Versace’s life sounded a lot like the life Andrew had wished for at age thirteen when he wrote down his definition of success in his application to Bishop’s. It was as if Versace had discovered the buried gold bullion that Andrew’s father was dreaming of excavating.
Hiding in his seedy hotel room, eating take-out, and venturing forth only after dark, Andrew would have had plenty of time to fume. From following Versace and reading about his opulent lifestyle in South Beach, Andrew knew that given the right day, he could probably reach out and touch him. In the Vanity Fair article about life at Casa Casuarina, one of the headlines read, “The Versace lifestyle is almost mind boggling in its grasp of the consumption ethic. The message: absolute freedom.” But everywhere Andrew turned, he was trapped.
28
Underbelly
“ANDREW WAS A hustler. I knew that from the moment I saw him. He was on the take. I set him up. He was very, very generous.” Ronnie is a sky-blue-eyed, forty-three-year-old Normandy Plaza resident with long, stringy blond hair, usually barefoot, who is gay, HIV positive, and living on disability. He saw Andrew almost daily while Andrew was hiding out in Miami Beach. Ronnie is outgoing and knows the street life around the hotel well. In 1997 he was sharing his room with a lesbian and generally stayed outside while she slept. He couldn’t help but notice the red truck with the South Carolina license plate parked out in front day after day; he’d first see it when he’d be sipping his tea on the porch of the hotel at 5 or 5:30 A.M. He often saw Andrew too. “This guy comes out every day in his baseball cap and sunglasses, at all hours. I would always speak: ‘Hey, how are you?’ He finally came up and said, ‘Where can I get some rock [crack cocaine]?’