Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “Oh, I didn’t know that,” said Gus. “Listen, thanks for the call, Danny.”

  * * *

  After checking his car with the parking valet, Gus walked into the marble-floored lobby of the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City. The lobby was vast, a city block long. He looked around for a likely location where a secret rendezvous might occur between strangers and headed toward a sunken bar area, down several steps, where people were sitting on bar stools. He stood at the top of the steps next to a potted palm, on display, since he was the one to be found. As he usually did at a new location, he pulled out his green leather notebook and wrote a quick description of where he was. Good for detail in the book later, he wrote.

  “Gus?”

  He looked up. He thought she looked just the way someone with the name Julie Coolidge should look. “Julie,” he replied, putting out his hand.

  “I’m Danny’s friend.”

  “I jumped to that conclusion,” said Gus. “How do you know Danny?”

  “I’m doing a coffee-table book on stills from Gone With the Wind, which his father produced, and he’s been an enormous help.”

  “Did you by any chance go to Smith?” asked Gus.

  “Yes. How in the world did you know that?” she asked.

  “You have that look. Listen, it probably isn’t the best idea to sit at a table in this bar. Too many people. Too much noise to talk over. Especially if we’re going to look at crime-scene pictures.”

  He could see that Julie was nervous.

  “I see a lonely patch of marble planters and two chairs over there by the elevator bank,” said Gus.

  They headed in that direction.

  “I read you. I watch you on TV. I agree with you about this case,” said Julie when they were in place.

  “Danny told me,” replied Gus.

  “O. J.’s so guilty, and I have a feeling that he’s going to get away with it,” said Julie. “I’m a photographer by trade, but I have a job in this photo lab in Culver City for rent money.”

  “I know. Who came to see you?”

  “Two men. I don’t know their names. They weren’t any of the people you see on television, like Carl Douglas or Kardashian. These were new faces to me. I felt they were probably private investigators. They needed prints made in a hurry. I couldn’t do it while they waited the way they wanted me to. There were too many. I said that I would work late that night and they could come back in the morning. When I saw the pictures that night, I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I almost fainted at some of the pictures of Nicole and Ron. I had no idea it was quite as bloody as that. But there’s this one particular picture I want to show you. It’s of Ron Goldman’s watch. Look at the time. It says ten o’clock.”

  As Gus leaned forward to take the batch of photographs that Julie removed from a manila folder in her tote bag, his attention was diverted by a woman with a Botticelli hairstyle who passed by his chair on her way to the elevator bank.

  “My God,” said Gus, looking at the woman. Following several feet behind her was a man with a beard.

  “What?” asked Julie.

  “Do you see that rather harried woman in the yellow formless dress?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “That’s Laura Hart McKinny, followed by her unhappy-looking husband,” said Gus. “She’s the woman who has the tapes where Detective Marie Fuhrman says the N word forty-something times.”

  “The screenwriter. I’ve read about her,” said Julie.

  “A screenwriter who’s never sold a screenplay, as Peter Bart just pointed out in Daily Variety. She’s O. J. Simpson’s savior. This woman’s tapes are manna from heaven for the defense. They are the blockbuster Johnnie Cochran promised the court that they would be. She was on the stand Friday, and she’s going to be back on the stand Monday. Want some good dish?”

  “Sure.”

  “Laura Hart McKinny and Fuhrman were lovers. That’s what hasn’t come out. I have a source on the defense team who lets me listen to the tapes nights at his house in the San Fernando Valley. Not just the ‘nigger-nigger-nigger’ stuff, which Cochran rightly called a blockbuster. I listened to this one tape where Fuhrman’s playing the guitar while he’s talking to her, and at one point in the song he says, ‘I have to take a leak.’ Hello? I said to my source, ‘That sounds like they know each other pretty well. Do you think they were having an affair?’ He didn’t know. So I called my friend Anthony Pellicano, the famous private investigator, who’s a great friend of Mark Fuhrman’s. I said, ‘Anthony, tell me, were Fuhrman and Laura Hart McKinny lovers?’ He replied, ‘For six months. Mark broke off with her when he met Caroline, whom he’s now married to.’ In my frame of reference, that puts Laura Hart McKinny into the wronged-woman category, which would make me question her motives in this case. Apparently Chris Darden has love letters that she wrote to Fuhrman.”

  They watched as Laura Hart McKinny and her husband got on the elevator and then returned to the photographs.

  “Do you ever talk about anything else?” asked Julie.

  “Almost never,” replied Gus. He returned to the pictures of the crime scene. “It makes me feel faint to look at these pictures of Nicole lying in all that blood. Don’t let it slip your mind that his kids were upstairs while this slaughter was going on. I wonder why they haven’t made more of the fact that Nicole was barefoot.”

  He shuffled through the stack of pictures. “Oh, my God, look at this one. There’s O. J. stripped down to his Jockey shorts, and that’s Dr. Henry Lee on his knees in front of him with a Rolleiflex camera. This has to be the inside of Kardashian’s house in the valley. This must have been taken before the freeway chase. You’ve got to give Shapiro his due. He brought in the big guns like Dr. Lee and Dr. Michael Baden to be expert witnesses on O. J.’s team practically the day after the murders. He certainly recognized a guilty client when he saw one.”

  “What exactly is an expert witness, Gus?” asked Julie.

  “Some people call expert witnesses whores of the court,” replied Gus. “Let me explain it this way. Dr. Michael Baden was paid a hundred thousand dollars by O. J. to say that it took fifteen minutes to kill Nicole and Ron, so therefore O. J. couldn’t possibly have done it and still make his plane to Chicago. Got it?”

  “Got it,” replied Julie.

  “Could you get in any kind of trouble if I wanted to print this picture of O. J. in his Jockey shorts and Dr. Henry Lee on his knees in front of him in Vanity Fair?”

  “Benny,” called out Gus to Benny Baker when he saw him getting coffee in the cafeteria. “When court’s over, could you bring your car around to where my car is parked in the lot? Don’t ask me to explain it. You’ll understand.”

  Carolina Herrera, true to her word, had sent a huge box of fragrances, powders, creams, and lotions representing all her products as gifts for the sisters of O. J. Simpson. Each was beautifully wrapped in silver paper.

  “I couldn’t very well take these up to the courtroom to give to you without causing a bit of a media incident,” said Gus as he began handing over the boxes out of the trunk of his car to Benny and Shirley Baker, who put the packages into the trunk of their car.

  “Who is this lady who sent us these things, Gus?” asked Shirley as she smelled the scent of powder through the silver wrapping paper.

  “Her name is Carolina Herrera, She’s a famous dress designer in New York, and all these packages are from her line of cosmetics,” said Gus.

  “Why would she send them to us?” asked Shirley.

  “I saw her when I was in England last week. Naturally, she asked me about the trial, as everyone does. I started telling her about you and Carmelita. I said I admired you, the way you’re dealing with what you’re going through. She was very interested in hearing about you.”

  “This is very nice of her,” said Shirley.

  “She even thought of you, Benny,” said Gus. “Here’s some Herrera sh
aving soap and aftershave.”

  “Gus, if you’d get me the address, I’d like to write Carolina Herrera a thank-you note,” said Shirley.

  Gus was sitting in the backseat of a limousine with the beautiful model Cheryl Tiegs, heading down Sunset Boulevard for the premiere of Waterworld and the party afterward. “Come on, Gus. It will do you good to get out of the courtroom. We’ll be Kevin’s guests. They’re sending a car, tickets, the works. I’ll pick you up at the Chateau. Oh, it’s black-tie,” Cheryl had said when she called to invite him. Kevin was Kevin Costner, the star of the controversial film that had cost so much to make. “You’ll like Kevin.”

  “I met him the other night at Barbara and Marvin Davis’s,” said Gus.

  “I’ve been wanting to tell you about this friend of mine who’s a friend of O. J.’s. A really good friend for a long time. Golf buddies, like that. He also knew Nicole.”

  “This guy doesn’t live in Marbella, does he?” asked Gus. “He didn’t get a call on the night of the murders, did he?”

  “No, different guy. He went to visit O. J. in jail the other day for the first time. He said he looked O. J. right in the eye and he asked him, ‘Did you do it, O. J.?’ And O. J. said, ‘No, man. You know I never could have done that. I loved Nicole.’ ”

  “My heart is breaking,” said Gus.

  “You know what, Gus? My friend didn’t believe him. And O. J. knew he didn’t believe him. He could see it when their eyes met. He’s not going back to visit him again.”

  “His con-man performance doesn’t seem to be working on some of his friends the way it did in the beginning,” said Gus. “Right after his arrest, all of his buddies met in Shapiro’s office, and O. J. spoke to them on a speakerphone from jail and swore to them one by one that he didn’t kill Nicole, and they all believed him, and some of the guys even cried at the injustice of his being in jail. But loyalty goes only so far when murder is the issue. I heard Alan Austin also stopped going down to jail to visit him. Do you know Alan? He owns that building in Beverly Hills where the Giorgio Armani shop is. Years ago, when I was under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox as a television producer, Alan was under contract at the same time as an actor. Later he became a great friend of O. J.’s. Used to play golf with him all the time. As a matter of fact, he was playing golf with O. J. at Riviera on the morning of the murders. He’s the one who told me how O. J. blew up at Craig Baumgarten on that morning during the game. He said O. J. got so angry at Craig, he kind of lost it. Alan absolutely refused to believe that his friend could ever have done such a thing. He was blindly loyal, but I hear that lately he’s stopped going down to jail. He said every time he asked O. J. about the blood—how come his blood was at the scene of the crime—O. J. never could give him a straight answer.… Hey, look up ahead, Cheryl. Klieg lights. Fans in the bleachers screaming for the stars. Army Archerd doing interviews. This is a real old-fashioned Hollywood premiere, like Peach and I used to go to when I was still in the business.”

  “Get ready, Gus. We’re going to have to walk past all those cameramen and photographers when we get out of the limo. Look, there’s Kevin in the car ahead of us.”

  Message left on Grafton Bailey’s answering machine:

  Grafton, it’s Dad. I’m mortified. I just heard on Entertainment Tonight that it’s your birthday today. I never thought I’d get to the point where I’d hear about my son’s birthday on television. Please forgive me. I am consumed with this trial. It has taken over my life. It is all I think about, or talk about, or even dream about. I have friends who have died while I’ve been here, and I haven’t written condolence notes yet. I think it’s great you got Kate Capshaw and Uma Thurman for the movie. Zander’s in Nogales with Mom. Give him a call. Anyway, happy birthday. Are you going to be at Carrie Fisher’s party Saturday night? I hear Chris Darden and Gil Garcetti are going. No word yet on Marcia Clark.

  * * *

  “Did I ever tell you this, Gus?” asked Harvey Levin, ready to launch into another story about the case. “It fit right in with what you were saying the other night. About two weeks before the trial started, I was in Shapiro’s office in Century City. This was before Johnnie Cochran took over. Shapiro was still in charge. He did the same sort of thing with me that he did with Jeffrey Toobin, when he leaked to Jeffrey the stuff about Detective Mark Fuhrman’s racism. He was playing cutesy. I was asking him questions about the defense strategy, and he said, ‘I would never be a source, but if you should happen to see anything in my office.’ He took a sign and turned it around. There, in a childlike spidery handwriting, were three possible defense strategies. Number One: O. J. didn’t do it. Number Two: Contamination of the evidence. Number Three: Conspiracy to frame. That part was all fine, but I kept looking and saw that it was signed Henry Lee. I said something like, ‘Is that Dr. Lee’s handwriting?’ and Shapiro said, because I apparently wasn’t supposed to have seen the signature, ‘That’s not what I was showing you,’ and then he kicked me out of his office.”

  Gus was having dinner in the garden of Roddy McDowall’s house in North Hollywood. Elizabeth Taylor was to have been there, but she had backed out at the last minute. The others were Mart Crowley, the playwright, and Gavin Lambert, a writer who was working on a biography of Nazimova, the great stage actress who became a great film star. They talked about Natalie Wood, whom they had all loved. They talked about Waterworld, which they had all hated. They talked about Don Ohlmeyer, the president of NBC West Coast, who had just pulled the plug on Gai-Jin, a miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel, which Roddy had flown to Japan to shoot.

  “This guy Ohlmeyer goes to visit O. J. in jail several nights a week,” said Gus.

  “And he canceled my pilot,” said Roddy.

  “Do you know anything about the Frogman pilot at NBC?” asked Gus.

  “Only that O. J. Simpson had the lead, right?”

  “Exactly,” said Gus. “One of Ohlmeyer’s conditions for making the pilot was that O. J. have the lead. What I’ve heard is that they had a technical adviser who taught them how to use knives to kill.”

  “Am I right in remembering that the cops at O. J.’s house after the murders watched that tape of the pilot?” asked Roddy.

  “I read that, too,” said Gus. “The thing is, there’re no copies of that pilot anywhere. They must have destroyed all the copies so the prosecution couldn’t subpoena them.”

  “Who was at Sue Mengers’s last night, Gus?” asked Mart.

  “Gore Vidal. Jack Nicholson. Like that,” said Gus.

  “What did Gore have to say?”

  “He said he thought Marcia Clark was getting very Roz Russell,” said Gus.

  Gus was sitting in a box at the outdoor Greek Theater watching Johnny Mathis’s concert with Nancy Reagan, Marje Everett, and Merv Griffin. At the suggestion of the Secret Service, they remained in their box during the intermission.

  Gus, leaning toward Nancy Reagan, picked right up on the conversation he had been having with her about the trial when the overture started an hour earlier.

  “Johnnie Cochran acted as if it was an impertinence on the part of the detectives outside the gates of Rockingham to have even suspected that such an eminent person as O. J. Simpson might be the killer,” said Gus. “What kind of damn fools would they have been if they didn’t suspect him? In any crime of this nature, the husband, the lover, the ex-husband, is always a suspect, and Fuhrman had been to the house before when O. J. beat in the window of Nicole’s Mercedes with a baseball bat.”

  “What about the DNA?” asked Nancy. “Isn’t that supposed to put him away? Didn’t you say it’s better than fingerprints?”

  “I’ve begun to think the DNA isn’t going to have any effect in the long run,” said Gus, shaking his head. “It’s too difficult to understand. I figure that if I can’t get it, they’re not getting it in the jury box, either. The more information you give a jury, the more you confuse them. My take on Barry Scheck’s strategy on DNA, about which he knows a great deal
, is that he talks brilliantly over the heads of the jurors, knowing they’re not understanding what he’s talking about, so that in the long run they’ll dismiss the importance of it.”

  “Gus is going on a rampage again about the trial,” said Merv Griffin.

  “I know. It’s become my sole topic of conversation,” said Gus. “Talk about something else.”

  “How was Diana?” asked Nancy.

  “That’s right, I forgot,” said Gus. “You had her and Prince Charles at the White House, didn’t you? I remember those pictures of her dancing with John Travolta.”

  “That was quite a party,” said Nancy.

  “I couldn’t get over how friendly she was,” said Gus. “She thinks O. J. is going to get acquitted.”

  * * *

  Gus and Marcia Clark were at Suzanne Childs’s house in upper Bel Air. “It’s strictly an off-the-record night, Gus, just us,” Suzanne had said when she asked him for dinner in court a few days before.

  “Do you remember that night I met you at Ray Stark’s before the trial began?” asked Gus.

  “With Betsy Bloomingdale and all those fancy people. Of course I do. You and I were the only ones who sat all the way through Legends of the Fall,” answered Marcia. “All those movie moguls tiptoed out during the picture. I couldn’t get over that.”

  “There was a guy there that night named Alan Greisman, who used to be married to Sally Field,” said Gus.

  “And you read in the tabloids that I’m having an affair with him. Right?” said Marcia.

  “Right.”

  “Listen, Gus, I had dinner with the guy exactly once. We had dinner at a little Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills, and we talked about our divorces, and that was it. And the tabs have built it up into a hot affair.”

  “Par for the course,” said Gus.

  “This is not exactly the time in my life for romance,” said Marcia. “I happen to have other things on my mind, like O. J. Simpson.”

  “As they say, the price of fame,” said Gus.