Another City Not My Own

by Dominick Dunne

  “Hi, Gus, this is Lauren Nadler from Day and Date. We want you to come on the show today.”

  “Hi, Lauren. I can’t. I’m packing. I’m getting ready to leave town in a couple of days. I’ve got a mountain of stuff I’ve collected during the last year. Besides, my magazine wants me to stay off television,” said Gus.

  “Why? You didn’t have any death threats, did you?” asked Lauren.

  “That isn’t it. It’s just that I’ve been on TV so much on all the shows, and I always get worked up and go overboard and say too much, and then there are calls to the stations to complain about me.”

  “That’s what we love about you, Gus,” said Lauren.

  “That’s what they all say, but I’m the one who gets in trouble, not the show,” said Gus. “When I was on Larry King last night, some lady from Maine called in and said I was a racist. I said, ‘Are you saying that because I think O. J. Simpson is guilty of the murders of which he was acquitted I am a racist?’ ”

  “I saw you on Larry’s show,” said Lauren.

  “If that is going to be the new criterion for racism, there are going to be an awful lot of racists out there,” said Gus.

  “How about today? Come on, Gus. It’s sort of an interesting dilemma that O. J.’s in. He’s virtually a prisoner inside his own house. He’s free, but he can’t go anywhere.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “He can’t go to a restaurant. He can’t go to the movies.”

  “What time’s the show?” asked Gus.

  “You’d have to be here at Television City by two for makeup.”

  “Will you send a car and driver for me?”

  “Gus, it’s David Margolick. Are you aware that Schiller’s livid with you? Aren’t you supposed to have breakfast with him tomorrow morning at the Beverly Hills Hotel before you leave? Forget it. He’s not going to show up. I never saw him so mad. What did you say on television yesterday?”

  “Oh, shit, did he see it?” asked Gus. “Three o’clock in the afternoon, I didn’t think anyone would be watching.”

  “Apparently O. J. sits in front of six television sets all day long listening to what people say about him,” said Margolick.

  “You mean O. J. saw me, too?” asked Gus.

  “The way I heard it from Schiller was that O. J. was sitting there watching the show with Schiller and Kardashian. The segment was called ‘A Prisoner in His Own Home,’ and you came on and said he’d been sneaked out of the house on Rockingham with a diversionary tactic to fool the media and that he went to see the movie Showgirls.”

  “Thank God I didn’t say anything about the disguise, or that he went to the Palm for dinner,” said Gus. “Go on. What happened?”

  “So O. J. says, Only two people know I went to see Showgirls, you, Kardashian, and you, Schiller. Which one of you told Gus Bailey?’ So Larry had to admit that he had, and O. J.’s really pissed at him.”

  * * *

  “Oh, Larry, come off it,” said Gus to Larry Schiller over the telephone. “It wasn’t like I said that he confessed to the murders. All that I said was that he went to see Showgirls. Oh, yeah, I told about the three-car caravan getting him out of there, and the fake press conference. All those experts were saying how trapped he was in his house, and something came over me, and I couldn’t resist telling it.”

  “I’m never going to tell you anything again, Gus,” said Schiller.

  “I’ll worm it out of you,” said Gus.

  “O. J. was really pissed at me,” said Schiller.

  “It’ll make a great scene in my novel, Larry,” said Gus. “You and Kardashian and O. J. sitting in Ohlmeyer’s house watching me spill the beans about him on television. I think in the book I’ll have him in the Hispanic-diplomat drag with the goatee and the fake glasses while he’s berating you.”

  “Your novel’s starting to sound like a comedy,” said Schiller.

  “That’s occurred to me,” replied Gus.

  “O. J. drove his Bentley to the Beverly Hills Hotel today to have lunch with this New York golfing buddy who was staying in a bungalow,” said Schiller. “He was making a right turn on Crescent Drive to park his car by the side of the hotel, and who do you think pulled up in the next lane?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Kim Goldman.”

  “Kim! Did she recognize him?”

  “They looked at each other, but she didn’t recognize him.”

  “I bet he got off on it,” said Gus. “I bet it’s a story he’ll tell to his golfing buddies. ‘You won’t believe who pulled up in the next lane at the stoplight on Sunset and Crescent. Kim Goldman, and she didn’t even recognize me.’ And there’ll be a lot of macho laughter at poor Kim. I’ll use it in the book,”

  “Kathy wants to have dinner before you go,” said Schiller.

  “I can’t. I’m taking Kim Goldman to Drai’s tonight with Shoreen Maghame and Cynthia McFadden, and tomorrow night my friend Wendy Stark’s having a farewell dinner for me, and the next day I’m off for New York. I’m going to miss you, Larry. Next to me, you gave the best murder gossip at the trial. I expect to be invited to your wedding at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. And you’re going to make a great character in my novel. Give my love to Kathy.”

  The time was approaching for Gus to leave Los Angeles and return to his life in New York and Connecticut, where he planned to write his novel on the Simpson saga. He found to his surprise, as his departure day grew closer, that he was sad to leave, although he understood that it was time. The show was over. He had felt spiritless since the acquittal. He almost decided to stop watching television after he heard the juror named Brenda Moran loudly declare to the cameras that domestic violence had no place in the murder trial and should have been tried in another court.

  “If I had had a rock, I would have smashed the television screen,” he said to Harvey Levin when he called to say good-bye.

  He did stop watching when he saw a clip of Johnnie Cochran telling the congregation at the Brookins Community A.M.E. Church in South Central that the defense had won because God was on their side.

  “Then there must be more than one God,” Gus said to Mart Crowley, when he called to say good-bye. “The God I believe in would never have been on the side of a man who killed two people and got away with it.”

  Sacha Newley painted his portrait for the book jacket of the novel he had not yet started to write, Another City, Not My Own, while he wrote his final “Letter from Los Angeles” for Vanity Fair:

  What I have suspected since I became involved with the Los Angeles murder trials of the Menendez brothers and O. J. Simpson is that winning is everything, no matter what you have to do to win. If lies have to be told, if defenses have to be created, if juries have to be tampered with in order to weed out those who appear to be unsympathetic to the defendant, then so be it. The name of the game is to beat the system and let the guilty walk free. If you can get away with it.

  The stench of O. J. Simpson’s acquittal grows stronger by the week as allegations of jury tampering abound, and reports surface concerning a flunked polygraph test taken by Simpson two days after the murders, in the company of two of his attorneys. Although the results are thought to have been destroyed, I am told that a copy exists.

  Gus had a farewell lunch with Nancy Reagan and Marje Everett at the Bistro Garden, which was shortly to close. Nancy had just returned from New York, where she had been at the time of the acquittal.

  “I was at the opera that night,” said Nancy. “At the intermission, I came out of the box, and Jeannie Williams of USA Today came up and told me they’d reached a verdict on the first day. I could think of nothing else. We went back in for Act Two. It was Otello. Plácido.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” said Gus. “Listen, I’m going to miss our Saturday-lunch club.”

  He made good-bye calls to his friends, old and new. He made farewell calls to the houses where he had regularly gone for dinner:

  He left a message on Roddy McDowall’
s answering machine. “Roddy, thanks for everything. You give the best dinners in town. Where else could I sit between Jennifer Jones and Sharon Stone at dinner and discuss O. J. Simpson on each side?”

  He left a message on Sue Mengers’s answering machine. “Sue, thanks for everything. You give the best dinners in town. Where else could I sit in a corner and talk to Jack Nicholson for an hour about O. J. Simpson? Love to Jean Claude.”

  He left a message on Tita Cahn’s answering machine. “Tita, thanks for everything. You give the best dinners in town. Where else could I sit on a bar stool between Sean Connery and Sidney Poitier and talk about O. J. Simpson?”

  He left a message on Mrs. Marvin Davis’s answering machine. “Barbara, thanks for everything. You give the best dinners in town. Where else could I sit in such utter splendor with Plácido Domingo and Kevin Costner and talk about O. J. Simpson?”

  He went down to the Criminal Courts Building to say good-bye to Suzanne Childs and Gil Garcetti. While he was waiting with Suzanne to go into Gil’s office, he nodded his head in the direction of Frances and said, “I missed seeing Chris Darden break down and cry in the press conference because she wouldn’t let me in.”

  “Come on in, Gus,” said Garcetti, opening his door.

  “Do you remember when Judge Ito sealed the testimony of the jailhouse guard who heard O. J. confess to the Reverend Roosevelt Grier that he’d killed Nicole and Ron?” asked Gus.

  “Yes,” said Garcetti.

  “I think you ought to figure a way to leak that sealed testimony to the media,” said Gus.

  “You know I can’t do that, Gus,” said Garcetti.

  “I can’t stand it when people get away with murder,” said Gus. “Have I told you O. J.’s furious with you because you called off the search for the real killer?”

  He left messages of farewell for Marcia Clark and Chris Darden. He gave his New York and Connecticut telephone numbers to his friends in the media. He called the Goldmans to say good-bye. “I’ll never forget Ron,” he said. He left a message for Denise Brown. “I’ll never forget Nicole,” he said. He went to the cemetery and left a bouquet of yellow roses on Becky’s grave.

  Later that night, Gus stood in the doorway of Wendy Stark’s house saying good-bye to Howard and Margaret Weitzman, who were the last guests to leave Wendy’s farewell party for him.

  “This wasn’t just a shipboard romance, you know,” said Gus. “Just because the trial’s over doesn’t mean the friendship ends.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. We’ll let you know when we come to New York, Gus,” said Margaret.

  “Dinner at ‘Twenty-one,’ ” said Gus.

  “I hate good-byes,” said Margaret.

  “Me too. Good-bye.”

  “The help quit,” said Wendy, when he walked back into the living room.

  “What do you mean, the help quit?”

  “The caterers. They didn’t like the way you talked about O. J., calling him guilty after the jury found him innocent,” said Wendy.

  “The jury didn’t find him innocent. They found him not guilty,” said Gus. “There’s a big difference.”

  “Don’t start on me,” said Wendy.

  “And they walked out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not Wilbur, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sick about Wilbur. That’s really upsetting,” said Gus. “I’ve been having long talks with Wilbur for years. You know what, Wendy? This is going to be the O. J. Simpson legacy. He’s divided the races. We’re back to where we were before Rosa Parks wouldn’t sit in the back of the bus anymore in 1955, and the civil-rights movement started. All this because of a black guy who turned his back on blacks after he became rich and famous. He only liked white women, white neighborhoods, and white country clubs.”

  “I’m glad you left that out of your speech,” said Wendy.

  “Right,” said Gus. “They might have dumped the crème brûlée they were passing right on my bald spot. I was wondering if I should modify my remarks. I thought to myself, Do I say what I believe to be true about the trial, or do I adjust my statements so that his supporters are not offended? I think it’s important to say that an acquittal should not be confused with innocence. You know what, Wendy?”

  “What?”

  “It’s a good thing I didn’t speak before dinner.”

  “At least we finished dessert and coffee before they left,” said Wendy. “Everybody got fed before you drove them out of my house.”

  “I’ll help you do the dishes or load the dishwasher, or whatever has to be done,” said Gus.

  “Screw the dishes. Gracie comes tomorrow. Let’s talk,” said Wendy.

  “I’m going to miss you, Wendy. I’ve gotten used to chatting every day again, like we used to when I still lived here.”

  “Are you sad about leaving?”

  “I am, yes. When I stopped living here in 1979 and moved to New York, I left hating Los Angeles. I don’t anymore. L.A. is a part of me just as much as New York is. I reunited with old friends here and made a lot of new ones. But it’s time for me to go. I’ve been away for a long time. I have to get away from murder. I have to stop talking about murder, all day every day.”

  “You have to write your book first,” said Wendy.

  “Oh, yes, the book. That’s the dark cloud hovering over me. Can I get it finished in time, that’s what I keep wondering,” said Gus.

  “In time for what?”

  “It’s late. I have to go. I’m on the eight o’clock plane in the morning.”

  They walked to the door and hugged.

  “That was nice, what you said about me in your toast, Gus,” said Wendy.

  “I meant every word. You always stuck by me, kiddo, even when I was down and out, and a lot of people let go. I’ll always remember that, you know,” said Gus.

  “Gus, you sound like you’re saying good-bye forever.”

  “That’s what I feel like at this moment. Don’t ask me to explain it. I don’t have an answer,” said Gus.

  “You’re not sick or anything, are you?” she asked.

  “You mean cancer, AIDS, heart trouble? No, none of the above. I’m in good health. God knows why I’m in good health. I never take care of myself. But I am.”

  “You’re just depressed about the verdict,” said Wendy.

  “I suppose,” said Gus. “I’m also depressed the help walked out of here tonight when they heard me talk. It’s probably because I said Simpson had no remorse, no scruples, and no ethics. That’ll do it every time, I guess. So long, honey. Kiss-kiss, as they all say in New York society.”

  28

  On Gus’s first night back in New York after a year in Los Angeles, his driver, Dov Ehrenfeld, met him at the airport, dealt with the excess baggage, drove him to his apartment in Turtle Bay, and waited downstairs while he went up to his penthouse, where he showered, changed into black-tie, glanced at the list of calls his secretary, Arthur Gorton, had left for him, and read the cards on several “Welcome Home” phalaenopsis plants that had been sent to him. When he reappeared in the lobby, Dov drove him up Park Avenue and across Central Park to the Dakota on West Seventy-second Street, where he arrived just as the twenty-six guests were sitting down to a birthday dinner his old friend Gil Shiva was giving for Princess Firyal of Jordan.

  As birthday parties go, it was a very swell affair. Unlike the casual look at most of the dinners in Los Angeles that Gus had attended over the last year, the New York look was more formal: Ladies wore long dresses and jewels. The waiters wore white gloves, and the guest list consisted of all the names that regularly appeared in Aileen Mehle’s society column in W, the same crowd Gus had written about in People Like Us. These were all people Gus knew, some for years, but he called only a few of them his friends. Still, he moved effortlessly among them, greeting this one, kissing that one, being greeted in return on his return to the city.

  “Hi, darling. Kiss-kiss,” said Kay Kay Somerset. “Was it awful out there?
Was it ghastly? Did you just hate being there? I don’t know how you stood it, every day in that awful courtroom. Oh, I hate that O. J. Simpson man. I just hate him. I had to let our cook go, Gus. She was so happy about the verdict, she was jumping up and down with joy in the kitchen, like those law students at Howard University. I was so damn mad at her I fired her right on the spot. Naturally, I forgot about the dinner I was giving the next night, so we had to have Chinese takeout, because I couldn’t get anyone to cater at the last minute. Actually, it turned out to be a great success. We called it our Dennis Fung dinner. Darling, did you see Gus? He’s back.”

  “You’re over there, Gus, next to Nan Kempner,” said Gil, pointing across the table. “Have you said hello to Firyal?”

  “Sorry to be late,” said Gus. “Hello, Firyal. Happy birthday.”

  “I’m sitting on your other side, and I intend to grill you about the trial,” said the princess as they kissed on each cheek.

  “I had such a nice fax from the palace in Amman when my son was missing,” said Gus.

  “Noor’s so good about things like that. It’s so American,” said Firyal. “You know Jason Epstein, don’t you?”

  “Jason, I didn’t see you,” said Gus. Jason Epstein was one of the great editors of the publishing business. He and Gus were more used to running into each other at literary parties than at social ones.

  “Gus, I can’t believe you’re here,” said Jason. “I was thinking about you today. There’s something I want to talk to you about. I didn’t know you were back from the trial.”

  “I just got back an hour or so ago,” said Gus.

  “It seemed like you were gone forever,” said Jason.

  “A year. What did you want to talk to me about?” asked Gus.

  “This party isn’t exactly the right place to talk,” said Jason, looking around. “Are you going to be in your apartment tomorrow morning? I’ll call you there.”

  After dinner, Marvin Hamlisch, the composer, sat down at the piano, after being introduced by the host, and played and sang a birthday song he had composed especially for Firyal’s party. The guests moved in around the piano to listen. Everyone laughed merrily and clapped enthusiastically at the charming song.