Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “Your estrangement from your brother is pretty well known on both coasts, Gus,” said Warren.

  “It is?”

  Message left by Gus Bailey on Grafton’s answering machine:

  Hi, Grafton. It was great visiting you on the set yesterday. I’m glad you had to shoot Saturday, or I would have missed it. I wish my Season in Purgatory miniseries were shooting on Saturdays. I haven’t been to the set once. It was really a wonderful experience for me, standing there and watching you direct a picture. I felt really proud of you. I was remembering the first time I took you to a set when you were a little boy. I was at Fox at the time, producing Adventures in Paradise with Gardner McKay. I almost fainted when I turned around and saw Steven Spielberg watching you direct yesterday. Obviously, he was there to see Kate Capshaw, but it was so unexpected to be face-to-face with him. I always remember how nice Steven was to Becky when she made Poltergeist for him. She always talked about him. I had a great chat with him, all about O. J. Simpson, of course. He reads all my O. J. articles in Vanity Fair. Do you know what he told me? He said he hates to walk onto other directors’ sets, because it usually freaks out the director, but he said you just said, “Hi, Steven,” and went back to work. I enjoy hearing my kid get compliments.

  Listen, am I right in guessing that the plot of this movie you’re making has to do with the night that your mother and I broke up? Charlie Wessler kind of hinted that to me the other night at Orso. I remember that party so well that you were shooting yesterday for your movie. Malachy and Edwina gave it when they lived in that huge falling-down house on Franklin Avenue. I think it was for Otto Preminger, the director. And Janis Joplin came, just like in your movie. They’d just written a picture for Preminger, who wore a Nehru jacket with a gold chain and a cross around his neck. You were too young by far to have been at that party, but you brought Mom, because we had split. It was a very sad night. I was very stoned, that much I remember. I’m rattling away, and your tape is probably about to run out.

  One other thing. About Arizona. I still haven’t recovered from what we went through those five days. I probably couldn’t tell you this face-to-face, and you’d probably turn me off if I did, so it’s nice we have tape machines to talk into. You were great over there, Grafton. You were commanding, in charge, calm during crises, and hilariously funny at the most inopportune times. Everything a brother can do for a brother you did. Your mother was proud of you, too. I had to laugh when you hugged me good-bye in Tucson and said, “See ya at the next family catastrophe.”

  Oh, by the way, I think Kate Capshaw will be wonderful as Peach.

  24

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

  Every day there are new and provocative stories about the principals in the case, which seem to appear with almost choreographed timing. Recently, in a story on Johnnie Cochran in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, it was revealed, very deep in the article, that Cochran’s first wife, Barbara, twice accused him of assaulting her, in 1967 and 1977. The 1967 declaration for a restraining order read, “My husband violently pushed me against the wall, held me there, and grabbed me by the chin. He has slapped me in the past, torn a dress off me, and threatened on numerous occasions to beat me up.” With the prosecution opening its case on the issue of domestic violence, the timing could not have been worse. The first wife refused to deny the charges in the magazine, as Cochran had said she would, but she said that she was happy for Johnnie’s success. Subsequently she announced that she is writing a tell-all book about their stormy marriage. Then it appeared elsewhere, in Cindy Adams’s New York Post column and on one of Geraldo Rivera’s television shows, that Cochran had a hitherto-unreported twenty-one-year-old son from an affair he had with a Caucasian woman during the time he was married to his first wife.

  In one of the great tacky episodes of all time, Cochran’s first wife and his white mistress, who goes by the name of Patricia Cochran, joined forces on Geraldo to let Johnnie Cochran have it on the day after he tried to convince the jury that important evidence at the crime scene had been moved or contaminated by the Los Angeles Police Department. Patricia Cochran told Geraldo, “Before they selected the jury, I asked him, ‘Johnnie, what are you going to do?’ And he said, ‘Sweetheart … just give me one black person on that jury—that’s all I ask, one,’ and he could get a hung jury.”

  The portly and witty Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the business manager for the Rolling Stones, leaned across the luncheon table on the terrace of his house in the Hollywood Hills and said, “Oh, Gus, do, please, tell H.R.H. that hilarious story you told the other night at Connie Wald’s about Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister, the one who necked with her boyfriend in the courtroom, in full view of the jury.”

  H.R.H. meant Her Royal Highness. To Rupert’s right was Princess Margaret, the sister of the Queen of England, who was visiting Los Angeles to raise funds for the British Museum. To her right was Gore Vidal, the author. Then came Lady Anne Glenconner, a lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret. Gus was seated next to her. On his other side was Lady Anne Lambton, who had recently come to Hollywood to seek a career in films. Then came Michael York, the film star, and, finally, Wendy Stark.

  For thirty-two years, since a weekend party he and Peach had attended at Lord Plunkett’s country house in Kent, England, Gus had been meeting Princess Margaret once a year or so at various lunches and dinners in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The chilliness he had felt from her on that initial weekend at Lord Plunkett’s, when she was married to Lord Snowdon, had never dechilled in the subsequent years. Each meeting was a new beginning, with no references to past encounters. Each conversation was uphill and unrewarding. In the last several years, he had learned to say, on introduction, “Very nice to see you, Ma’am,” and then scoot off to the other side of the room to chat with Lady Anne Glenconner, about whom Gus had once written in Vanity Fair, when she and her husband gave a costume ball on the island of Mustique.

  The object of the lunch on the flower-filled terrace was to amuse the princess. Prince Rupert told a witty story. Gore Vidal told a wittier one. But the conversation kept coming back to O. J. Simpson, about whom the princess seemed to have no interest whatsoever, although everyone else at the table did. Lady Anne Lambton said she and the British actor Rupert Everett watched the trial all day, every day on television and wouldn’t miss Geraldo Rivera’s nightly show on the trial for anything in the world. Michael York said that the guru at his wife’s ashram in India was up to date on the trial in Los Angeles. Gus asked Rupert if the story was true that A. C. Cowlings had told Keith Richards backstage at the Rose Bowl exactly what had happened on the night of the murders.

  “Good heavens, I haven’t heard that, but I’ll certainly check it out. Tell the story, Gus,” prompted Rupert.

  “You’ve sort of ruined it, Rupert,” said Gus. “You’ve given away the punch line.”

  “Oh, no, no, tell it, Gus,” insisted Rupert. “It’s such a funny story.” He turned to the princess. “You’re going to love this story about the trial, Ma’am, the O. J. Simpson trial. As you can see, people over here talk of nothing else.”

  The princess’s eyes rested on Gus as she waited to be amused. Reluctantly, Gus told the story. The princess didn’t find it amusing, as Gus had known she wouldn’t, and gave him no reaction. There was the usual moment of silence that follows a flop joke.

  “What were you doing there?” asked the princess, in her snappish tone of voice, as if he had confessed to being in an improper place.

  “Doing there, Ma’am?” asked Gus.

  “At that trial,” said the princess.

  “That’s how I make my living, Ma’am,” said Gus.

  “It’s such a bore,” she said, turning her head away from Gus, dismissing his topic, waiting for a new topic more to her liking to be introduced.

  “It’s not boring to me, Ma’am,” said Gus quietly.

  There was a brief silence. Other subjects were introduced, such as Princess Diana.
“The only one who’s behaved properly in the whole mess is Camilla Parker-Bowles,” said one of the English ladies. “She’s never said one single word to the press.”

  “Unlike a few others I could mention.”

  When Gus got up to leave, he ran into his friend Wendy Stark in the hallway. “You’re not leaving, are you?” asked Wendy.

  “I did my tap dance,” said Gus.

  “We’re not supposed to leave until after H.R.H.,” said Wendy. “Protocol, you know.”

  “Good luck. Do you think she was enough of a pain in the ass? ‘Such a bore,’ ” said Gus, imitating her vocal tone and facial gesture perfectly. He and Wendy laughed. “She could stand a few charm lessons from Princess Diana, if you ask me. I’m off. I have an interview.”

  “Where are you going?” asked Wendy.

  “My friend Tom Murray, the sports announcer on Channel Eleven, has arranged for me to meet Anthony Davis,” said Gus.

  “Who’s Anthony Davis?” asked Wendy.

  “Anthony was a big football star at USC right after O. J.,” replied Gus. “He even looks like O. J. He said he can’t walk in Brentwood because people think he is O. J. The only thing is, he doesn’t like O. J. very much. He thinks he turned his back on his own people, and he wants to talk to me about him.”

  Gus was having dinner at Drai’s with Michelle Caruso of the New York Daily News and Harvey Levin.

  “I don’t care what F. Lee Bailey said on David Frost’s show about O. J. wanting to take the stand, Cochran will never let him take the stand,” said Michelle.

  “All of America would stop work to watch him,” said Gus. “It would be a great moment in the history of television, watching him lie on the stand.”

  “They’ll drop it in the press that he wants to take the stand, like F. Lee did on David Frost the other night, as if that shows the public that O. J. has nothing to hide. But it’s all bullshit. Johnnie’s too smart to ever put him on,” said Harvey.

  “The thing about it that’s probably true is that O. J. does want to take the stand,” said Gus. “It’s in his nature. He’s a showman. He’s used to the cheers of the crowd. He understands the art of dazzling, whether it’s making an eighty-yard run, or talking a police officer out of giving him a ticket, or hitting on the prettiest girl at the party. It’s a performance he could play directly to the twelve people who count the most in his life at the moment.”

  “Schiller told me O. J. doesn’t know how to give a simple answer,” said Michelle. “You ask him a question and he’ll talk for fifteen minutes without stopping.”

  “Marcia could make mincemeat out of him,” said Gus.

  “The defense brought down these two tough female prosecutors from San Francisco, who did practice cross-examinations at the county jail with O. J. over the past weekend,” said Gus.

  He was sitting at the dinner table of the television mogul Norman Lear and his wife, Lyn, high up in Mandeville Canyon, after watching a breathtaking sunset from their terrace. As always, when in posh circumstances, Gus noticed the beautiful details in the house, which had recently been completely rebuilt, after having suffered extensive damages in the earthquake. There were fourteen for dinner. Waiters in black jeans, white shirts, and black ties expertly passed the caviar pie, the crown roast, and the lemon soufflé. Other than paying compliments to the hostess on the delicious meal, they all talked of nothing but O. J. Simpson, and they were all of one mind. The bad guys were winning.

  Gus was in a loquacious mood and held the floor for much of the meal. He told them about Truman Simpson’s keeper who had tried to sell him a drug addict story. He told them that O. J.’s father had been a drag queen who had died of AIDS. He talked about the loyalty of O. J.’s sisters.

  Howard Weitzman, who had been Simpson’s first lawyer, and his wife, Margaret, were also at the dinner. Gus and Howard had seen each other a few days earlier on the ninth floor of the Criminal Courts Building, where Weitzman had been summoned by the defense team, who wanted to put him on the stand as a defense witness.

  “Johnnie wanted me to testify that Vannatter wouldn’t allow O. J. to have an attorney present at his taped interview, which was bullshit,” said Howard. “After I left Gus in the corridor, I went into the empty courtroom, and there were Johnnie, and Shapiro, and the bunch, and I said to Johnnie, ‘You guys are out of your minds if you put me on the stand with what I know.’ Johnnie knew that I meant what I was implying.”

  “They would have been nuts to put Howard on,” said Margaret Weitzman. “I still remember that first day after the murders, when Howard and I went over there to Rockingham to pay our condolence call, and there was blood right on the driveway.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Howard, snapping his fingers, as if he had just remembered something he had forgotten in his story. “Johnnie also said they were pissed at some of the things that Margaret was saying around town about O. J. at all the parties.”

  Everyone at the dining table laughed.

  Margaret, elaborately ignoring the laughter, asked, “What was that you were saying, Gus, about the two lady lawyers from San Francisco?”

  “From what my mole on the defense tells me,” said Gus, “the legal ladies got really rough with O. J., which is what they were being paid to do, to give him an example of what Marcia Clark would be like when she was cross-examining him. Nobody’s supposed to know this took place, but I manage to work it into the conversation whenever I go out to dinner. From what I hear, O. J. didn’t do so hot. He got angry a few times, which would be a disaster on the stand. That’s what Marcia would try to make happen if she ever got him on the witness stand. She’d find a way to enrage him. He already hates her.”

  “It’ll never happen, Gus,” said Weitzman.

  “I know it won’t, but I wish he would take the stand, for the sake of my book. In the novel, I’m going to have the entire country stop work so they can watch O. J. Simpson testify, and I’m going to write it so that he lies and lies in response to every question that Marcia Clark asks him. But I’m going to have him look fabulous—wearing one of his great suits—while he’s telling the lies. He’s going to be confident and poised. I’m going to have him be a better liar than the Menendez brothers, and those guys could lie. I’m going to have him lie even when he’s caught out in a lie. I’m going to have him lift lying to a new level.”

  “Has anybody optioned this book yet?” asked Norman Lear.

  “Up for grabs, gentlemen,” joked Gus. “Call Owen Laster at the William Morris Agency.”

  Gus was having lunch in the cafeteria with Larry Schiller, who had become Gus’s authority on matters pertaining to Simpson.

  “Before I came out here to the trial, I was talking to a lawyer in Connecticut I’d heard about who had been in Las Vegas on the weekend of the murders, staying at the Mirage Hotel,” said Gus. “He freaked out when I called him. ‘I don’t want to get involved, Gus. Don’t mention my name,’ he said. There’re so many guys who know stufi who don’t want to get involved. You see him on Court TV from time to time, doing legal-pundit stuff on the trial. What he finally told me was that he got to talking to this beautiful young woman by the pool, where they just happened to be side by side on lounge chairs. She was in a bikini, dark glasses, covered in suntan oil. It was Paula Barbieri, but the name meant nothing to him at the time. In conversation, she told him about this guy in Los Angeles that she’d just broken up with the day before. He didn’t know the guy she was talking about was O. J. Simpson. But, while he was there listening to the story of her breakup, she was paged over the public address system—there’s a call for you, Miss Barbieri—and she went to take the call. When she came back, she said—words to this effect—‘Remember that guy I was telling you about, the one I just broke up with? His wife was just murdered.’ ”

  Schiller nodded. “Paula was all through with O. J., after he wouldn’t take her to Sydney’s dance concert,” he said. “I think Paula wanted Nicole to see her walk in there with O. J. So she broke up wit
h him and went to Vegas.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that if Paula hadn’t broken up with O. J. and gone to Vegas, Nicole and Ron might not have been murdered?” asked Gus.

  “Many times,” said Schiller.

  “Paula rushed back to him from Las Vegas after the murders,” said Gus. “Denice Halicki told me she stayed with O. J. in Kardashian’s house right up to the freeway chase.”

  “True,” said Schiller. “And she was always there when the lawyers talked to O. J., both at the house and in jail, reading her Bible and listening. She knows a lot.”

  “Have you heard the story that she doesn’t wear underwear when she visits O. J. in jail?” asked Gus.

  “Where do you hear all this stuff, Gus?” asked Schiller, laughing.

  “It’s jailhouse gossip from a guy I know who knows a guard in the sheriff’s department,” said Gus. “Like when O. J. confessed to the murders to Rosey Grier and the guard overheard. You’re right. I could write a helluva sex scene in O. J.’s private visitors’ room, without any touching. They’d be looking through the glass at each other talking over telephones. There’s no guard, only a lawyer, Nicole Pulvers. It’ll be a dirty-talk scene, with a climax, of course. The lawyer will read her law books all the way through it, oblivious to everything but the law, even screams of passion.”

  “I think this trial is getting to you, Gus,” said Larry. “I think you’re flipping out.”

  “Joe McGinniss thinks so, too. He told me that the other night. He said I was too manic on television on Geraldo’s show. I can’t wait for this trial to end. I hope I’m not flipping out. Hey, look at the time. I have to get back up. Jex always tries to keep me out if I’m even ten seconds late.”