Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “Oh, my dear, the grandeur of it all,” said Gus’s friend Caroline Graham, commenting on the splendor of his placement.

  “O. J. Simpson has improved my social position,” replied Gus. It was a line that he often used these days. “People’s interest in O. J. is insatiable, even over here in the duchess set. I never used to be as well seated as I am these days.”

  “I understand you’re a writer,” said the Duchess of Marlborough, as she picked up Gus’s place card, squinted at it, replaced it, and finished her sentence, “Mr. Bailey.”

  “Yes.”

  “Evelyn said you’re at that awful O. J. Simpson trial in California,” said the duchess. “I don’t follow it. It doesn’t interest me in the slightest. They say he’s so famous, but I never heard of O. J. Simpson before. I couldn’t care less about football, and someone told me those movies he made were ghastly. I don’t understand why it’s getting all this attention. How long are you staying? Are you going to be in town next week? There’s an opening of my dog paintings at the Hahn Gallery on Albemarle Street.”

  After dinner, there was an unpleasant situation between Gus and one of the guests, the genesis of which dated back to long before the Simpson trial. It had to do with a previous murder in high places which Gus had written about. John Aspinall, the gambling figure and zookeeper, took great offense at Gus’s presence at the Rothschild dance when Mrs. Ford introduced the two men.

  “You mean this is Gus Bailey?” Aspinall asked, his face reddening with rage and a look of fury appearing in his eye.

  Aspinall had disliked an article Gus had written about Lord Lucan on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his disappearance from England, in which Gus had suggested that a select group of rich and powerful men were keeping the alleged murderer of his children’s nanny in stylish exile, with a reconstructed face. Perhaps in Africa, where Aspinall had a house, Gus had suggested. Perhaps on the coast of Mexico, where Jimmy Goldsmith had an eighteen-thousand-acre fiefdom. Perhaps in Old Prud’homme, Connecticut, where Lord Lucan’s sister had a New England saltbox.

  “If Lucky Lucan is dead, these guys wouldn’t get so excited and upset when I suggest he’s still alive,” said Gus, after Aspinall had gone off in search of the host.

  “Does that sort of incident happen to you often?” asked Mrs. Ford, who witnessed the encounter.

  It goes with my territory, I suppose,” said Gus. “There’re a lot of people I seem to piss off, like Aspinall with the red face who was just here. A lot of people at the O. J. trial aren’t mad about me, either.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “No, not really,” said Gus. “I always know the side I’m on. I don’t want to go to Johnnie Cochran’s house for dinner any more than I want to go to John Aspinall’s house for dinner. There’s a long list. The way I look at something like what just happened is, I can turn it into a really good scene in a novel.”

  * * *

  “Hello, Gus,” said Carolina Herrera, the New York dress designer and social figure, who had recently brought out a line of cosmetics. She and her husband, Reinaldo, who worked at Vanity Fair, were New York friends of Gus’s and had come over for the weekend of parties.

  “You’re the new Estée Lauder, I hear,” said Gus, greeting her. They hadn’t seen each other since the trial started.

  “Don’t I wish,” said Carolina. They kissed on each cheek. “How does it feel to be away from the trial for a couple of days?”

  “I feel guilty,” said Gus. “I’m so afraid I’m going to miss something. I called L.A. three times today just to check in, and I did two interviews on Sky Television, all about O. J.”

  “I read in one of your articles that you have become friendly with O. J.’s sisters,” said Carolina.

  “I have,” replied Gus. “They’re very nice people.”

  “Do they think he’s guilty?”

  “No, they firmly believe he’s not guilty. We never actually talk about did he/didn’t he do it when we’re together, but they must know how I feel, and I have to respect how they feel. I know they read my ‘Letters from Los Angeles’ in the magazine. They go to church. They have jobs. They’re good people. They didn’t do anything wrong. For their lives, they’re doing the right thing. He’s their brother, and they’re there to support him.”

  “That’s a difficult position for them,” said Carolina.

  “Sometimes I wonder how much O. J. was there for them before all this happened, but they were called into service to play family. My feeling is, not much. People I know who were friends of O. J. and Nicole and used to go to the house on Rockingham when they had parties tell me he never had his family around, just Nicole’s family.”

  “His daughter’s beautiful, isn’t she?” asked Carolina.

  “Arnelle. Yes, she’s beautiful. She’s the only one in the whole family who has O. J.’s looks. Arnelle and the daughter of Shirley and Benny, Terri, are first cousins, more or less the same age, but they’re not friendly. They don’t pal around together at the trial. It’s as if they’re from different social positions,” said Gus. “The poor-cousin syndrome.”

  “If I sent something to O. J.’s sisters, could you get it to them?” asked Carolina.

  The British writer Brian Masters heard Gus discuss the O. J. Simpson trial on Melvyn Bragg’s radio show the morning after the Rothschild dance and called him at Claridges. He said he was writing an article on Claus von Bülow, who had been living in London since his acquittal at his second trial of charges of attempted murder of his wife, Sunny, who remained in a coma at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York. Gus had covered the trial for Vanity Fair magazine.

  Using a camp-funny voice to lighten up the seriousness of what he was asking, Masters said, “As you are the only one living who still thinks he was guilty, would you give me a quote, Gus?”

  “Oh, no, Brian,” replied Gus. “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “I wrote everything I have to say about him,” said Gus. “It’s been years.”

  “Ten.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything against him,” said Gus.

  “How about something for him?”

  “Oh, no. I wouldn’t do that, either.”

  Over the years at Vanity Fair, Gus had interviewed or written about some of the most famous women in the world: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Imelda Marcos, Queen Noor, Audrey Hepburn, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others. Whenever Graydon Carter asked him whom he would like to interview the most, he always answered, “Diana,” meaning the Princess of Wales. “Fifty years from now, they’re not going to be writing books and musicals about Princess Margaret and Princess Anne. They’re going to be writing about Diana. She upstaged the British Royal family. The aristos hate her. The crowds love her. She’s a great character,” said Gus.

  The beautiful young Princess Diana walked toward Gus, smiling, welcoming, holding out her hand in greeting. “Don’t tell me they’ve let you out of the trial!” she exclaimed, acknowledging in that sentence who he was and what he did for a living.

  He replied, “Briefly, Ma’am,” taking her hand and bobbing his head in the appropriate manner.

  “I hear the O. J. Simpson trial is all anyone talks about in America,” she said. “They say people watch it on television all day long,”

  Although Gus was not unused to being in the presence of august beings, he suddenly found himself beset with shyness in front of the princess. He had not expected her to be so warm and friendly. He wanted to tell her how much he admired her, but he was momentarily speechless.

  As if she understood his dilemma, she asked him more about the trial. “Does it get boring, sitting there in the courtroom day after day?”

  He looked at her. He saw that she really wanted to know the answer. “Sometimes the legalities get boring, Ma’am. Sometimes Judge Ito lets the lawyers go on too long. But the event is never boring. For me, it’s like watching a movie as all these extraordinary people interact with one ano
ther. By the way, Judge Ito asked me to give you his regards.”

  “He didn’t!” said the princess, delighted.

  “He did. I had to get his permission to come so that I could keep my seat,” said Gus.

  “Have you ever talked to O. J. Simpson, just you and he?” she asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” said Gus. “No one can get near him. If I even tried to speak to him, I’d lose my seat, but his friend Robert Kardashian told me he reads what I write about him. We’ve looked at each other in the courtroom. One day our eyes actually locked fora long moment.”

  “And what happened?”

  “His eyes were wary at first, and then they softened, and I could see he was playing with me, like a cat with a mouse. I thought I could see the very beginning of a smile, as if he thought he was winning me over. I could actually feel the charm that everyone who knows him talks about. I thought to myself, in other circumstances than these, he would have won me over.”

  “If you could ask him one question, what would it be?” asked the princess.

  “I wouldn’t ask him about his blood at the scene of the crime, or the murder weapon, or the bloody clothes, or the cuts on his finger,” replied Gus. “He’s got all those answers down so pat he could pass a lie-detector test now. I’d ask him something that would throw him, something that would get him angry.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’d say, ‘Did you say anything to Nicole or did Nicole say anything to you before you slit her throat, or did you just grab her from behind?’ ” said Gus.

  “Would you like to hear what I think is going to happen?” she asked.

  “Of course,” replied Gus.

  “I think O. J.’s going to be acquitted,” said the princess.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that, Ma’am.”

  “Well?” asked Graydon. “How was she?”

  “She was so nice. She was so available in conversation,” answered Gus. “I thought it would be uphill, but it wasn’t for a minute.”

  “What were you and she talking about so earnestly?” asked Graydon.

  “O. J. Simpson,” said Gus, and they both laughed. “That’s all we talked about the whole time.”

  “What did she say?” asked Graydon.

  “She thinks he’s going to be acquitted. I always get a jolt when I hear people say that. Deep down I have this terrible feeling that she might be right, but I’m not at a point where I can deal with even the possibility of that thought.”

  “You’re not letting this trial get to you, are you, Gus?” asked Graydon.

  “It’s all I think of morning, noon, and night.”

  “Listen, you’re in London. Have some fun. Think about something else. You have a prize seat for dinner,” said Graydon. “Between Joan Collins and Princess Salima Aga Khan.”

  “I never used to get seats like that before O. J. came into my life,” said Gus. “You know something, Graydon? No one talks to me about anything except O. J. anymore. It’s like my career began with this trial. People just look at my face and start talking about O. J.”

  “It’s all the television, I suppose,” said Graydon.

  “Last night I was leaving Evelyn Rothschild’s dance at about one-thirty in the morning, and I couldn’t get a taxi on Kensington Gore for the longest time. Finally an off-duty taxi passed me on his way home. He went about half a block beyond me and then did a U-turn and came back. He lowered his window and then asked in a Cockney voice, ‘Where are you going?’ I said, ‘Claridges,’ and he said, ‘Hop in.’ I did. I could see him looking at me in the rearview mirror. Our eyes met. He said, ‘How’s the trial?’ ”

  “No!”

  “Yes. He recognized me from sitting next to the Goldmans in the courtroom. He watches the trial on Sky Television here in London. I couldn’t get over it. He wanted to hear everything, and I told him everything. By the time we got to Claridges, he was my new best friend.”

  20

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

  The infinite charm of Dr. Henry Lee, who is invariably referred to in the press as America’s foremost forensic scientist, is legendary, especially when he talks to juries—beguiling them, amusing them, instructing them, making them feel like mini-authorities on blood splatter and shoe prints. If he suggests to the jury that there might have been a second set of shoe prints at the crime scene on Bundy, which would imply an alternate killer to the defendant on trial, that’s probably what they’re going to believe, even though there wasn’t a second set of shoe prints. But, as they keep saying out here, he’s only doing his job. I have never been one to contribute to the hagiography of Dr. Lee, having seen him give a quite similar courtroom performance when he was an expert witness for the defense at the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in Palm Beach.

  Gus was having dinner with Harvey Levin and the Hard Copy reporter Pat Lalama at Eclipse.

  “You have to say this about Dr. Henry Lee, he had the jury in the palm of his hand,” said Harvey.

  “Dr. Henry Lee always has the jury in the palm of his Hand,” replied Gus. “Dr. Lee has taken charm to a new level.”

  “He bugs you, doesn’t he?” asked Pat.

  “In a word, yes,” replied Gus. “When he was on the stand in Palm Beach during the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, where he’d been hired by the Kennedys, he told exactly the same joke he told today on the stand, and the jury ate it up in Palm Beach just the way the jury ate it up today. He said, in a Charlie Chan singsong voice, ‘You people all look alike to me,’ and all the ladies on the jury were captivated. It’s shtick. It’s showbiz. Get the dopes on the jury to love you, and you can feed them anything.”

  “Do your imitation of Dr. Lee for Pat, Gus,” said Harvey.

  “Gus, it’s Danny Selznick, a voice from your past.” Gus was in his room at the Chateau Marmont, writing his “Letter from Los Angeles” that he had promised Wayne Lawson he would fax the following morning.

  “Hi, Danny,” replied Gus. Danny Selznick was the son of the great film producer David Selznick and the great stage producer Irene Selznick, who was the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, the founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. When Gus and Peach were married, they often saw Danny when they went to dinner at David Selznick’s house during his marriage to Jennifer Jones.

  “I’m calling from a pay phone on the highway in Martha’s Vineyard,” said Danny. “You’re going to think this is a very strange call after such a long time.”

  “I won’t think it’s strange,” replied Gus. “You should hear some of the calls I get.”

  “There’s a woman out there, who’s a friend of mine, who wants to meet you,” said Danny.

  “To what end?”

  “She reads you in Vanity Fair. She watches you on television. She agrees with you on everything. She has some information she wants to tell you about the case, something she knows,” said Danny.

  “And she called you in Martha’s Vineyard to have you call me here in Los Angeles?” asked Gus.

  “She knew I knew you,” said Danny. “She was nervous about calling you at the hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve gotten famous, Gus. It scares some people off.”

  “Tell her it’s only O. J. fame. It’s not real fame,” said Gus.

  “She’s a photographer, and she supplements her income by working in a photo lab in Culver City. Remember Culver City?”

  “Home of your grandfather’s MGM,” said Gus. “ ‘More stars than there are in the heavens.’ Isn’t that what they used to say about MGM?”

  “Now called Sony Studios,” said Danny.

  “Not by me,” said Gus. “I still say MGM.”

  “One of the private investigators for the defense stopped in the photo lab where she works awhile back, probably thinking it was an out-of-the-way place, to have some crime-scene prints made. It was about a six-hundred-dollar job, and he paid in cash.”

  “Interesting,” said Gus. “She wants to tell me about t
he pictures?”

  “She wants to show you the pictures. When she realized what they were, she made an extra set for herself. For which she could get fired, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  “Not to mention sued,” said Gus.

  “Are you interested?”

  “I’d say so, Danny.”

  “She doesn’t want to come to your hotel, because someone might see her there with you.”

  “Okay.”

  “She wants to know if you could meet her in the lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel on Sunday afternoon at three o’clock.”

  “I’m going to see Elizabeth Taylor at three. Could she make it at two?” asked Gus.

  “I’m sure she can.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She knows what you look like.”

  “Should I not know her name?” asked Gus.

  “Julie Coolidge,” replied Danny.

  “That’s a very Connecticut-sounding name,” said Gus. “You don’t hear names like that much anymore, especially in murder circumstances like these.”

  “Thanks, Gus.”

  “I find I rather enjoy all these clandestine meetings I go to, Danny,” said Gus. “It gives me faith in mankind that so many people want to come forward with information that might be helpful in convicting a killer. In no other case I’ve ever covered have I seen such passion as I have seen in this case, on both sides.”

  “Having any fun out there?” asked Danny.

  “Oh, sure. I go out every night. It’s different from the old days out here. By the way, I’ve seen a bit of Jennifer.”

  “Jennifer?”

  “Jones, your former stepmother. She looks great. I went to a dinner the Livingstones had for Andrew Lloyd Webber before Sunset Boulevard opened out here, and I sat next to Jennifer.”

  “We haven’t been close since Dad died,” said Danny.