Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “Good God, that was years ago. I was doing an article for the magazine on Adnan Khashoggi, who owns an enormous villa in Marbella, although he was in the slammer in Switzerland at the time for some sort of financial malfeasance.”

  “I remember that article,” said Judy. “Didn’t Khashoggi get furious with you and threaten to sue or something?”

  “He did, yes, but we’ve made up. We had a rapprochement at the Bel Air Hotel, quite recently, as a matter of fact, when he came up to me at a party of Paige Rense’s and shook hands and engaged in pleasant chatter. Now he’s my new best friend.”

  They both laughed.

  “This guy who was in my office this afternoon is named Charlie McCracken. Does that name mean anything to you?” asked Judy.

  “No, but my curiosity is building,” said Gus.

  “Do you remember having lunch at the Marbella Club with Peter Viertel and Deborah Kerr and another man?”

  “I distinctly remember having lunch that day with Peter Viertel at the Marbella Club, and I remember for a fact that Deborah was not with us. Peter and Deborah were at that time very much in marital turmoil. It was the hot gossip of the Marbella smart set. He was involved with a married woman, and Deborah was at the house in Klosters at the time,” said Gus.

  “Maybe this guy’s full of shit,” said Judy.

  “It’s possible that Peter may have introduced me to somebody at the club, who turns out to be this guy in your office, but he didn’t have lunch with us. I was talking to Peter about Khashoggi, and I was taking notes. Who is this guy? What about him?”

  “He wants to see you. He asked me to set it up. I can’t tell if the guy’s for real or what. He said he’s a friend of O. J.’s and Nicole’s. Apparently, he knows something no one knows, but—”

  “But he doesn’t want to get involved,” said Gus, finishing her sentence.

  “How did you know I was going to say that?” asked Judy.

  “Because I hear it all too often. People have things to tell, sometimes important pieces of information, but they don’t want to get involved themselves. It makes me crazy, although I also kind of understand why they don’t want to get involved. The publicity is terrible. If you have anything untoward in your own background, as most of us have, it’s going to come out if you have to take the stand, even though it has nothing to do with the murders. I wouldn’t particularly relish having to be cross-examined by Johnnie Cochran or Carl Douglas, or have Barry Scheck sneering at me, minimizing my life on national television.”

  “Would you want to see him?”

  “Of course. What’s his name again?”

  “Charlie McCracken. He’s only in town for tonight and tomorrow. He wanted to have dinner with you tonight.”

  “I told you I have Michael Viner and three of the four hookers, and no guy-from-Marbella-with-whom-I-did-not-have-lunch is going to change that plan for this evening,” said Gus.

  “How about breakfast before you go to court in the morning?”

  “Can’t. I’m on Good Morning America at four-ten A.M., meaning I have to get up at three-fifteen, to discuss what happened in court today. I always come back to the hotel after the program and try to get in an hour’s sleep before I go down to court. So I don’t think it’s going to work out with your friend.”

  “He’s not my friend. I never met him before,” said Judy. “Apparently he had a phone call, or so he says, on the night of the murders that he wanted to tell you about.”

  “All of a sudden, I’m deeply interested,” said Gus. “Tell him to meet me in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont at ten-thirty tonight. Tell him I have to be up at three o’clock and only have half an hour to talk. Tell him to be succinct.”

  “Do you remember that day when we had lunch at the Marbella Club?” asked Charles McCracken. Gus and McCracken had settled on a sofa at the far end of the Chateau Marmont lobby, drinking Pellegrino water. He had found when meeting with strangers who wanted to tell him things that it was easier to terminate a conversation in the lobby than it was when they went up to Gus’s suite, where people tended to linger. McCracken was casually but expensively dressed in beige linen trousers, cream-colored silk shirt, loafers, and no socks. Later, Gus wrote about him in his journal, “McCracken looked like he belonged to all the best clubs in the world.”

  Gus, whose stock-in-trade was that he remembered everyone, didn’t remember him at all but pretended he did by nodding affirmatively. They talked about Peter Viertel. They talked about Deborah Kerr. They talked about Adnan Khashoggi. Then Gus looked at his watch, shuddered at the lateness of the hour, and called a halt to the chitchat.

  “Now, let me get this straight,” Gus said. “You had a call at your house in Marbella, Spain, on June 12, 1994, the night of the murders, from someone who was at Nicole’s condo on Bundy after the murders but before the police arrived?”

  “That’s right,” said McCracken.

  “And the caller was not O. J.?”

  “That’s right. You see, Gus, I’ve known O. J. and Nicole for years, like twenty, or something like that. I played golf regularly with O. J. And I know the Browns very well, Juditha and Lou and the sisters. That’s why I never thought O. J. was guilty, for the longest time. I always thought it was somebody else who had done it, but I’ve changed my mind since I’ve been here and talked to a few people, the Browns included.”

  “Was the somebody else you thought had done it the one who called you that night?” asked Gus.

  “This is what I can’t talk about at the present time,” said McCracken.

  “You knew about the murders in Marbella before the police knew in West Los Angeles?” Gus asked again. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s right,” McCracken replied.

  “If you’re not going to tell me, why did you want to see me?” asked Gus. “I fail to see the point of this nocturnal visit, as I have really learned nothing that is of any value tome.”

  “When the trial’s over, I’ll tell you then,” he said. “You’re the one I’d like to tell this story to.”

  “Big fucking deal,” said Gus. “If some of you people who know stuff that is pertinent to this case don’t speak up, this man who killed two people is going to walk. Listen, I have to go to bed. I have to be up at three to be on Good Morning America.” He started to get up. “Was it Jason Simpson who called you that night?”

  “No.”

  “Was it Al Cowlings?”

  “No. I can’t talk about it.”

  “Was it Marcus Allen?”

  “No.”

  “I know for a fact that Nicole was seeing Marcus Allen again. Faye Resnick told me, and I find her very reliable,” said Gus. “There are even some people who say that he may have been at the condo on Bundy at some point on the last day.”

  “I don’t know,” McCracken said.

  “It’s a funny thing about guys like O. J. They don’t blame their friend for fucking their ex-wife. They blame their ex-wife for fucking their friend. It’s a growing-up-in-the-projects sort of mentality, I guess,” said Gus.

  “Marcus got married at O. J.’s house after O. J. knew about the affair,” said McCracken.

  “That will be a good scene for my novel. O. J.’s reception for his ex-wife’s lover’s marriage to a beautiful blonde. It will be a terrific way to establish the house on Rockingham for what’s to follow,” said Gus. He got up to end the evening. “One of the three hookers I had dinner with tonight at Drai’s said Marcus Allen had the biggest dick she ever saw. It must be true. Faye Resnick said the same thing in her book. Nicole called it Driftwood, apparently. We had a very enlightening conversation, as you can see. My new best friend said Marcus tried to piss on her once, after he’d spent the night with her girlfriend in the next bed, but she said, ‘No way, Charlie.’ It’s a whole chapter in her new book, apparently. I had no idea that water sports, as pissing is known in the trade, were such a big deal with the movie stars. Good night, Mr. McCracken,” said Gus.


  “I’ll be in touch when the trial’s over,” said McCracken.

  Gus was standing at one of the three urinals in the men’s room on the ninth floor of the Criminal Courts Building. As he was finishing, Barry Scheck came in and stood at another. They nodded to each other. Then Gus walked over to the sink to rinse his hands.

  “Say, Gus,” said Barry. He looked straight ahead toward the wall in front of him. “Do you remember that conversation you and I had the other day?”

  “Of course, Barry,” said Gus, who had been astonished by the intimacy of the conversation that had occurred. He noticed that Barry’s voice was brisk, businesslike. The torment of Wednesday had vanished by Friday. Before he spoke, Gus knew what he was going to say. He had told someone on the Dream Team what he had said to Gus, and the someone had said, “Are you crazy?”

  “I just want to make it absolutely clear to you that I believe O. J. Simpson is totally innocent,” said Barry as he finished at the urinal and began to adjust himself.

  “Oh, Barry,” said Gus, mock disappointment in his voice, as he turned and left the men’s room.

  “You know, I wasn’t going to write that up, Joe, but I think I will now, after what he just said to me at the urinal,” said Gus to Joe McGinniss when he came out of the men’s room. “I’m no longer touched by him, like I was the other day. I’ve been thinking, Joe: In the novel, I’m going to have Scheck tell his partner Peter Neufeld—who doesn’t seem to like me much—that he told Gus Bailey how guilty he felt about the Goldmans, how he couldn’t look at them, and how he knew they hated him. I’m going to have Barry be as moved by the conversation as I was, when he’s telling the conversation to Neufeld. And then I’m going to have Peter Neufeld go fucking ballistic, up in their suite in the Bellage Hotel off Sunset. ‘What do you mean you told that fucking Gus Bailey you couldn’t look at the Goldmans? Can you imagine what he’ll do with that in Vanity Fair? That’s just the sort of bullshit they print! You tell him—’ That fight will lead directly into the urinal scene I just told you about. Got it?”

  “Gus, do you remember Bill Bixby?” asked Joe Torrenueva, as he was cutting Gus’s hair in his salon on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. Gus and Joe were old friends, from the days when Joe had worked as a trainee barber under Jay Sebring, the celebrated hairstylist who changed the way men’s hair was cut in the early sixties in Hollywood. Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner, and Warren Beatty were some of his clients, with whom he also partied. Jay was murdered with Sharon Tate, Abigail Folger, and a few of their friends, in the Charles Manson massacre at Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive in Beverly Hills in 1969.

  “Bill Bixby? The TV star? Of course,” said Gus. “I never knew him very well when I lived out here, but he was a very nice guy, as I remember.”

  “He left me money in his will when he died,” said Joe. “He was that kind of guy. Do you remember his wife?”

  “I think I do,” said Gus. “Wasn’t she French? She was very beautiful, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. French and beautiful. Her name was Brenda Benet. She and Bill had a little boy, whom they both worshiped. A beautiful kid, but he was sickly. He had a respiratory problem. He’d been in the hospital a lot. Then out of the blue, Brenda left Bill.”

  “Why?”

  “She fell madly, crazily in love with someone else. In a million years you’ll never guess who broke up their marriage.”

  “Who?”

  “Al Cowlings.”

  “What? Al Cowlings! All these guys keep showing up, don’t they? Just like O. J., Al had his beautiful blond wife,” said Gus.

  “They never married. I’m not completely sure she was divorced from Bill,” said Joe. “One time Brenda and Cowlings were going skiing in Aspen together, and Brenda wanted to take the little boy with them to teach him to ski, but Bill said no, absolutely not. He said the air was too thin in Colorado, and the boy shouldn’t go. Brenda said the child hadn’t had an attack in over a year, and she took him with Al to Aspen. A couple of days later, the little boy had a respiratory attack, and he subsequently died.”

  “Oh, what a terrible story,” said Gus.

  “Are you going to have a manicure, Gus? Kathleen’s free now.”

  “Okay, but go on, don’t stop. What happened?”

  “Brenda went into this tailspin of despair and guilt.”

  “Of course. That poor woman. Think of the guilt she must have felt. What happened to her?”

  “She killed herself.”

  “How?”

  “Shot herself in the face.”

  “This is a horrible story, Joe,” said Gus.

  “Bixby always said he could have imagined Brenda taking an overdose, but he couldn’t imagine that she would ever shoot herself in the face.”

  15

  In his “Letter from Los Angeles,” Gus wrote:

  A. C. Cowlings, who is called Al by his friends, remains one of the great mystery characters in this story. A former University of Southern California Trojan and National Football League player, Cowlings has been O. J. Simpson’s closest friend from their childhood days in the projects in San Francisco. Simpson’s first wife, Marguerite, the mother of Arnelle and Jason, had first been Cowlings’s girlfriend. Some people will tell you that Al’s a swell guy; others will tell you just the opposite. Cowlings was driving his old pal in the white Ford Bronco on the famous June seventeenth freeway chase, five days after the murders and one day after Nicole’s funeral. While crowds on the sidelines cheered for their hero’s safe getaway, Cowlings was calling all the shots, with one hand on the wheel and the other on a cellular phone. His best friend, who was holding a gun to his head at the time, was being transformed during that ride from a mere sports star into a criminal legend, part of the folklore of America, and Al Cowlings, always there for O. J., was helping to make it happen.

  Cowlings has mostly been out of the news since a grand jury elected not to indict him for aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. Recently, he surfaced again at the Los Angeles Airport, with a garment bag in one hand and an airline ticket in the other. A Chicago-based CBS television reporter named Bryon Harlan, who happened to be in Los Angeles to cover the Unabomber’s threat to blow up an airplane at LAX, spotted Cowlings and, good reporter that he is, attempted to interview him. The incident that followed was recorded on video by Harlan’s cameraman.

  “We’re from CBS News,” said Harlan, holding out a microphone.

  “I don’t give a fuck where you’re from, CBS News,” replied Cowlings.

  Harlan politely persisted.

  “Hey, I’m traveling, man! Get the fuck out of my face,” said Cowlings. He lunged forward, swung the garment bag at Harlan, and struck him.

  “You shouldn’t have hit me, man,” said Harlan.

  “No, I should have knocked your fucking head off. That’s what I should have done,” said Cowlings, walking away.

  For my money, Al Cowlings knows a lot more about these killings than he’s telling.

  “I went to the Palm for dinner last night,” said Gus during lunch in the cafeteria of the courthouse with his friend Cynthia McFadden of ABC News, with whom he’d covered three trials. “The place was packed. Who do you think was the biggest star in the room, sitting at the number-one table, with people streaming by from other tables to stare at him? Guess.”

  “Sinatra,” said Cynthia McFadden.

  “No, not Sinatra. Sinatra I could understand.”

  “Who?” asked Cynthia.

  “Al fucking Cowlings,” said Gus.

  “Didn’t you write something nasty about him?” asked Cynthia.

  “Of course. Several times. I said on television his best friend’s murders have made him somebody,” said Gus. “He was being somebody last night and eating it up.”

  “Did he recognize you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he speak?”

  “No. When he left, he had to pass right by my table, but he elaborately turned h
is head the other way, talking to some middle-level show-business executive he was with, with terrible cuff links, who was joyous to be seen with such an important person as A. C. Cowlings at the Palm. When he got to the front door to leave, he turned around and stared at me. He really gave me a dirty look, and then he went out the door.”

  “You should be careful, Gus. You’re too free and easy with your opinions about this case,” said Cynthia. “Some people are getting pissed off at you.”

  “So George Vernon tells me,” said Gus. “He said people in Chicago didn’t like the way I was covering the case.”

  “Who’s George Vernon?” asked Cynthia.

  “George-from-the-newspaper-nobody-ever-heard-of George,” said Gus. “People think he’s a defense plant in the media. I wish Cowlings had stayed a little longer. Tina Sinatra, Frank’s daughter, was there at another table. They still keep a caricature of O. J. Simpson up on the wall. When Tina became aware that she was sitting right beneath it, she stood up on her seat in the booth and draped her napkin over O. J.’s picture. There were cheers in the restaurant.”

  “I hope you’re going to use that in your ‘Letter from Los Angeles,’ ” said Cynthia.

  “Tina said I could. I asked her permission last night,” replied Gus. “I don’t want to get on the wrong side of the Sinatras. I’ve always had this problem with her father. Did I ever tell you about that?”

  The only person to whom Gus told the story about Judge Ito writing a fan letter to Helen Mirren was Harvey Levin, the investigative reporter for KCBS in Los Angeles who was covering the Simpson trial. Every Sunday evening, as a Los Angeles lead-in to 60 Minutes, Gus and Harvey did a wrap-up of what had gone on during the week at the trial of the century. Harvey handled primarily the legal aspects of the case, while Gus told the stories of what was happening to the personalities of the trial. Harvey had wanted Gus to tell the Helen Mirren fan letter story on the air, but Gus had declined.

  “Are you crazy, Harvey? I don’t want to lose my seat in the courtroom,” said Gus. “Ito already had Jerrianne Hayslett express his displeasure to me that I wrote in the current issue that the courtroom looked like a gangster’s wake because of all the floral tributes. Between Ito and Jerrianne, they’d have me back in Prud’homme, Connecticut, if I told about his fan letter to Helen Mirren. Jerrianne told me Ito watches us.”