Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  Gus had first met Harvey fifteen years before, when Harvey covered the trial of Lefty Flynn in the Santa Monica courtroom. Back then, before Gus understood about reporters and journalists, he thought Harvey was too aggressive in his questioning during the family’s period of grief, but he came to admire him for the outrage he felt over the outcome of the trial. Each placed the blame squarely at the foot of the judge. By the time they met again years later at the Simpson trial, Gus had become a seasoned courtroom observer, and Harvey had become a star investigative reporter for KCBS. They greeted each other like old friends. They saw things the same way. They hated to see killers walk free or receive only a tap on the wrist.

  Harvey usually picked up Gus late Sunday afternoon at the Chateau Marmont in his convertible BMW, and they planned what they were going to say on the air on the drive to the KCBS studio on Sunset. They moved in different circles, and each liked to hear the O. J. gossip the other had picked up. Harvey liked to hear Gus’s stories of the parties he had been to and the people he had met that week.

  “The other night at Sue Mengers’s house, her gay black butler was passing the peas, and he told me that he was very disappointed in O. J.’s body when he saw those pictures of him stripped down to his Jockey shorts,” said Gus.

  “Stop it!” said Harvey.

  “I couldn’t stop laughing when he told me,” said Gus.

  “Was Nicholson there?”

  “I sat with him in a corner for about forty minutes talking about the case,” replied Gus. “He knows every detail. I have another tidbit for you you’re going to like, but we can’t use it on the air.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Ito’s written another fan letter,” said Gus.

  “No!”

  “The other night I went to dinner at Marje Everett’s house. Do you know Marje? She used to be the head of Hollywood Park. She lives across the street from Ray Stark. She’s a great friend of Nancy Reagan, Merv Griffin, Elizabeth Taylor. She loves music, and she likes people to stand around the piano after dinner and sing. Sometimes Van Cliburn’s there, and he plays. Or Johnny Mathis. Sometimes Jo Stafford sings. Candy Spelling knows the lyrics to practically every song ever written. The other night David Foster was playing the piano. You know David, don’t you? The composer? Nice guy. I just met him recently. Beautiful wife, Linda Thompson, who used to be Elvis Presley’s girlfriend. I was sitting on the piano bench next to him. Johnny Mathis was singing “Always,” standing by the piano. When he finished and everyone was clapping, David said to me, ‘Gus, I had the nicest letter from Judge Ito the other day.’ ”

  “No!” said Harvey.

  “Yes. Naturally, my ears perked right up. ‘Oh?’ I said, casually, like I wasn’t riveted, which I was. David more or less had the letter memorized. He’s going to fax me a copy. It went something like this—I had him tell it to me twice: ‘Dear Mr. Foster, Over last weekend, when Mrs. Ito and I were driving in Arizona, we decided to play some of the new CDs that our friend Arsenio Hall sent us, and one of them was yours.’ ”

  “Unbelievable,” said Harvey. “You wouldn’t tell this on the air tonight, would you?”

  “I told you I wouldn’t. Ethics, you know. There’s more to the letter that I can’t remember, about how pretty the music was, that kind of thing.”

  “I like the Arsenio Hall name-drop,” said Harvey. “I hope you’re going to use it in your book.”

  “Of course. And I know a thing or two about name-dropping,” said Gus. “Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Harvey, that between Laura Hart McKinny and her tapes, Detective Mark Fuhrman and Captain Peggy York, a courtroom full of lawyers who don’t like him, and a jury that’s started to, that Ito should still find the time to write a fan letter to David Foster about his new album, which he and his cop wife played last weekend while driving in Arizona?”

  “Unbelievable. Now, what are we going to talk about tonight?”

  “I want to talk about the hostility that’s building each day between Johnnie Cochran and Chris Darden,” said Gus. “Cochran knows how to push Darden’s buttons, and Darden falls for it every time. Cochran treats him like an Uncle Tom in front of the jury. Chris is really in a terrible position in this trial, being a black prosecutor trying to put a black sports hero into prison for life without parole. I heard that he got booed in his church last Sunday because he’s part of the prosecution team, and he’s a very sensitive guy. That’s got to be hard to live with while this trial is going on. And on top of all that, his brother’s dying of AIDS. Did you know that? That’s what I thought I’d talk about, not the AIDS part, but the rest, about getting booed in church. Shapiro got hissed at the temple. Did you hear that?”

  16

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

  The opening night of the opera is a great social event in any city, and Los Angeles on May sixth was no exception. All the swells and all the music buffs turned out. Black-tie. Big dresses. Big jewels. Big stars. That kind of night. Baroness Di Portanova of Houston, the Countess of Dudley of London, and Nan Kempner of New York added a touch of out-of-town glamour to the already-glamorous occasion. The Founders Room was packed to the rafters during intermission. Champagne flowed. The candlelit Grand Promenade was the scene of the party afterward.

  The opera was Verdi’s Otello. Plácido Domingo sang the part of Otello, the dark-skinned hero, and June Anderson was Desdemona, his fair, blond wife. Sometime during the second act, husbands began to turn to wives, and wives to husbands, and whisper, “It’s like O. J. and Nicole.” The scene onstage and the tragic denouement seemed eerily reminiscent of the terrible events that had occurred in Brentwood a year before. Obsession. Jealousy. Suspicion. Spousal abuse. Rage. Violence. Otello’s hands. Desdemona’s throat. Murder.

  “The jury should see this,” said Mrs. Marvin Davis, the wife of the billionaire oil-and-real-estate tycoon.

  “June!” said Gus, rising, when June Anderson, dressed in silver, made her diva entrance into the Grand Promenade for the party that followed the opera. “You were great!”

  “Gus!” replied June. “I was wondering if you’d be here.”

  They kissed on each cheek.

  “I wouldn’t have missed this,” said Gus.

  “I told you back then in Las Vegas when we got those gold plate awards that I’d be in Los Angeles to sing Otello with Placido,” said June.

  “You did indeed,” replied Gus. “I remember the conversation distinctly, and I remember that I said, oh, no, I wouldn’t be in L.A. then. I said it wasn’t a place I liked to be. But here I am, and here I’ve been for months.”

  “Apart from the trial, how has it been for you, being here?”

  “I keep running into people who used to be in my life, before the deluge,” said Gus. “People who stopped speaking to me when I was down and out now say things to me like, ‘You know, Gus, I always knew this was going to happen to you.’ ”

  “Do you call them on it?”

  “Of course not; it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s the way of the world. The person that I am now has very little to do with the person they used to know when I lived here.”

  A committee member approached, papers in her hand. “Miss Anderson, I’ve been asked to escort you to Mayor Riordan’s table, and the Marvin Davises have asked that I bring you by their table on our way to the mayor’s table.”

  “I’ll be right there,” replied June. She returned her eyes to Gus to finish their conversation, as she pulled the matching stole of her silver dress over her shoulders, indicating with a gesture that the air-conditioning was too cool. “Finish, Gus.”

  “So I’m glad I came, even though I told you that time in Vegas that I never wanted to come back here,” said Gus. “I’m glad the trial’s taking so long, even. Wherever I go out here, I keep bumping into my past. By the time I cool, I don’t want to have any unfinished business in my life.”

  “I don’t think you’re about to cool, Gus,” said June.

  “And isn
’t this a much too serious conversation for an opening night, when I’m monopolizing the star while Mayor Riordan and the Marvin Davises are waiting for her?” said Gus.

  “Do you remember us watching the freeway chase at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas?” asked June.

  “Do I remember?” said Gus. “I’ll never forget that night. I’m using that scene in my novel—the two of us in the suite watching the freeway chase while they’re waiting for us downstairs to give us our awards. You don’t mind being a character in my novel, do you?”

  “Mind? I’m thrilled,” said June.

  “What a lot has happened since that night.”

  “I read your coverage of the trial every month, and I see you on television with Dan Rather on Friday nights,” said June, “Hung jury, I hear you predict each week.”

  “Yes, hung jury, that’s what I say every week, like a mantra. Tonight everyone in the audience was seeing the similarities between Othello and Desdemona and O. J. and Nicole. There was literally a buzz going through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Could you feel the audience reaction on stage?”

  “Oh, yes,” said June.

  “Only Othello had the class to commit suicide,” said Gus.

  June laughed.

  “Othello didn’t hire a bunch of expensive lawyers in Venice to help him lie his way out of it the way O. J. has,” continued Gus. “Othello didn’t put his family through what O. J. is putting his family through: Poor old mom in the wheelchair and his sisters uprooted from their lives in another city. Think of how much work it has to be for them to pretend they believe his lies. Othello wouldn’t have done that.”

  “I see you haven’t changed your mind on his guilt since Las Vegas,” said June.

  “Hell no, I haven’t. I’m more convinced than ever,” said Gus. “It’s his blood at the scene of the crime that’s going to put him away, if there’s any justice in the world. But this case isn’t about justice anymore. This case is about getting a guilty man acquitted, no matter what they have to do to achieve it.”

  “Miss Anderson,” said the committee member who had been standing by waiting to escort her to the mayor’s table.

  “Listen, I’m tying you up here, and you’re the star of the evening. Your fans are all waiting, glaring at me, in fact,” said Gus.

  “I want you to meet Placido,” said June.

  “I talked trial with Placido for half an hour one night at the Marvin Davises,” said Gus.

  The next day Gus had lunch in the cafeteria of the Criminal Courts Building with the television superstar Barbara Walters, who was out from New York to observe the trial for several days, and his great friend Cynthia McFadden, who was reporting on the trial for ABC. Walters was lining up post-trial interviews for 20/20. McFadden and Gus had covered the William Kennedy Smith trial and the Menendez brothers trial together, and they both had houses in Prud’homme, Connecticut, which they had not been to for nearly a year.

  “I think we can say we’re sitting with the biggest star in the cafeteria today, Cynthia, and it’s a pretty star-studded day, with Sydney Biddle Barrows and Heidi Fleiss to our left, and the entire Dream Team except Bob Shapiro to our right,” said Gus.

  “Barbara practically caused a mini-riot just now coming down on the elevator,” said Cynthia. “ ‘May I have your autograph, Miss Walters?’ ‘May I have your autograph, Miss Walters?’ ”

  “Oh, stop it, you two,” said Barbara.

  “I heard you had dinner with Kato Kaelin,” said Gus.

  “How did you hear that?” asked Barbara.

  “Gus has unimpeachable success when it comes to who’s where for dinner every night,” said Cynthia.

  “They weren’t exactly hiding out,” said Gus. “You can’t go to Spago and think you’re not going to be reported on when you’re Barbara Walters and America’s most famous houseguest, Kato Kaelin. Two people called me from the restaurant. What did you think of him?”

  “He’s cute,” said Barbara. “You can’t help liking him.”

  “I bet you’ll get more out of Kato than Marcia did when he was on the stand,” said Gus. “I think it was a mistake for her to get pissed off at him and declare him a hostile witness.”

  “He said she wasn’t ever nice to him when they met before he took the stand,” said Barbara.

  “I never thought Kato was one of the bad guys,” said Gus. “He’s a Hollywood type we all know, a freeloader, but not a bad guy. My feeling about him has always been that someone scared the you-know-what out of him before he took the stand.”

  “Like who?” asked Barbara.

  “I don’t know who exactly, but I remember all the people connected with the defense who called Kato the day after the murders, when he was staying at Grant Cramer’s apartment in West Hollywood,” said Gus. “O. J. called Kato several times at Grant’s. Shapiro called him there. Skip Taft, O. J.’s business manager, called him. Cathy Randa, O. J.’s assistant, called. All the team players. They were working out the story line of the murder night. I happen to know for an absolute fact that on the night after the murders, O. J. and Shapiro had Kato in a corner in the kitchen of the Rockingham house questioning him and questioning him, trying to get the alibi set. You ought to talk to Grant Cramer, Barbara. He was one of Nicole’s boyfriends after she split with O. J., and he introduced Kato to Nicole.”

  “I thought I was the only one who knew about Grant Cramer,” said Cynthia. “How do you know him, Gus?”

  “He was in the miniseries of An Inconvenient Woman. Played the hustler. And I used to know his father and three of his mothers when I lived out here,” said Gus.

  “You’ve got Hollywood connections, Gus,” said Cynthia.

  “The point of all this is that the story Kato Kaelin told on the stand and the story that Kato Kaelin told Grant Cramer when he moved into his place the day after the murders weren’t quite the same,” said Gus.

  “You’re going to use that in your novel, aren’t you?” asked Cynthia.

  “Hell yes. It’s already written,” said Gus. “I have the character based on Kato say to the character based on Shapiro, ‘But that’s not the way it happened, sir. O. J. and I didn’t go to McDonald’s. We went to Burger King, and we bought crystal meth from Ron X, and I paid with O. J.’s hundred-dollar bill.’ And then I have O. J. say, ‘No, no. This is the way it happened, Kato.’ ”

  17

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

  What’s happened to the Brown family? They almost never come to court anymore. Occasionally Tanya, Nicole’s youngest sister, and her fiancé, Rico, come by, but the family as a unit has not been seen for weeks in their section of reserved seats. To my way of thinking, it is a mistake for them not to come. The Goldman family, particularly Kim, Ron’s sister, and Patti, his stepmother, almost never miss a day, and they pay strict attention, even during the boring parts. In many people’s minds, Kim Goldman has become the conscience of the trial. On the other side of the aisle, the Simpson family are equally constant in their attendance. You have to say this for the Simpsons, no matter how you feel about the guilt or innocence of the defendant: They’re a united family in their support of O. J., and they’re respected by everyone. When Carmelita Durio, Simpson’s sister, wheeled her mother, Eunice Simpson, who was dressed from head to toe in purple, into the courtroom one day, everyone stepped back to let them pass.

  Gus attended a dinner at the Police Academy in Elysian Park in downtown Los Angeles, where several hundred police officers and their wives were honoring Capt. Frank Gartland, the second in command to police chief Willie Williams. Gartland was celebrating his fortieth year with the L.A.P.D. Scattered around the room among the police officers were all the members of the prosecution team—Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, Bill Hodgman, Hank Goldberg, Cheri Lewis—who were treated by all as the celebrities they had become, as well as Suzanne Childs from the district attorney’s office. Gus was seated at the head table, as the guest of Captain and Mrs. Gartland. Just before the gue
sts were asked to quiet down for the invocation by Monsignor Gerald O’Hagan, he ran into Pattijo Fairbanks of the D.A.’s office, with whom he had become friends during the Menendez trial.

  “I had a bit of an ick with Juditha Brown the other day,” said Gus.

  “Tell me,” replied Pattijo.

  “I am bewildered, utterly bewildered, by the fact that they hardly ever show up at the trial,” said Gus. “How could they not go to the trial anymore? It’s the last business of their daughter’s life.”

  “Two murders do not make a dysfunctional family functional,” replied Pattijo, who had been in the department for years and had seen it all. Gus took out his green leather notebook to write down what she said. “Don’t you dare quote me on that, Gus.”

  Gus put his notebook away. “I called Juditha and asked her why they’d stopped going.”

  “Oh? And what did Juditha answer?” asked Pattijo.

  “She said, ‘It’s my least favorite place to be, Gus,’ and I replied, ‘Of course it’s your least favorite place to be, but you should be there all the same, Juditha. The jury should see that Nicole had a family and that her family is devastated by her loss. The Goldmans are there every day. No matter how tough it is, they take it.’ ”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘I have Nicole’s children to take care of, Sydney and Justin. This is a terrible period for them.’ And I answered, ‘I know. I understand that, but you also have three daughters. Their presence in the courtroom would be of greater value to the outcome of the trial than touring the country to raise money for battered women.’ ”

  “I bet she didn’t like that,” said Pattijo.