“You must sing it again, Marvin, all the way through, from beginning to end, so we can listen to the lyrics, they’re divine” said the princess, clapping her hands.
“He’s caught you, darling, he’s absolutely caught you,” called out Ormolu Webb to the Jordanian princess, in her thrilling society voice. Everyone laughed. Ormolu was holding hands with her very rich husband, Percy.
When Hamlisch started to sing the birthday song a second time, Gus nudged Jason to follow him down the hall into the library, where they were alone.
“I’ve been going to a lot of this same kind of evening in Los Angeles,” said Gus. “Amazing how different the two cities are.”
“I thought you hated it out there,” said Jason.
“I did. I don’t anymore. What did you want to tell me?”
“Not here, Gus. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”
“Oh, come on, Jason. Tell me now,” said Gus, standing in the entrance looking down the hall. “No one can hear. They’re two rooms away. Everybody’s singing. Ahmet and Mica Ertegün have just arrived from some other party. Jamie Niven’s lighting up a cigar. The French guy is talking about a ball he just gave in Paris. John Richardson’s in deep conversation with Chessy Rayner, and Ormolu Webb and Firyal are checking out each other’s rings and bracelets. What can I tell you, Jason? It’s just another night out in New York society. Oops. What’s this? Do you see that young guy in the Versace dinner jacket who just walked in with old Bertie de Lessops?”
“What about him?”
“Those diamond studs he’s wearing used to be Doris Duke’s earrings,” said Gus. “Top that for unimportant information.”
“You sound like Aileen Mehle, Gus,” said Jason. “You should be doing social commentary.”
“I used to write that kind of stuff—about the ladies of Palm Beach, that sort of thing—but now I’m into more serious things, like crime, like guys who get away with murder, like Mr. O. J. Simpson of Brentwood, California, and the kind of lawyers who make up the stories that get killers acquitted, for instance that Detective Mark Fuhrman planted the glove at the house on Rockingham.”
“I know, I read your trial coverage in Vanity Fair,” said Jason, holding up his hand as if to forestall a ten-minute tirade on the subject of O. J. Simpson’s acquittal.
“I wasn’t about to do a seminar on the subject,” said Gus, laughing. “I’m more interested in hearing what you have to say.”
“You know Larry Schiller, don’t you?” asked Jason.
“Of course.”
“What do you think of him? I’ve met him before, with Norman Mailer, but I don’t really know him,” said Jason.
“A fascinating character,” replied Gus. “What about him?”
Jason thought for a moment before answering. “My company really wanted Marcia Clark’s book. We met with her right after the trial We liked her. You should have seen the commotion she caused when she came to the office. Every person from Alberto Vitale and Harry Evans down to the kids in the mailroom came out in the halls to get a look at her.”
“She’s a major star at the moment,” said Gus.
“We thought she had a great book in her, but the bidding got way out of hand. We dropped out at four-point-one million. Viking got her for four-point-three million,” said Jason. “An absurd amount of money.”
“I don’t blame Marcia for taking the four-point-three million,” said Gus. “I blame you guys in publishing for offering that amount of money for the latest celebrity’s book.”
“Let me finish here. Then Schiller appeared out of left field with a book proposal,” said Jason.
“Really?” said Gus, surprised.
“If even half of what Schiller tells me checks out, he’s got an incredible story,” said Jason.
“Schiller played a very dangerous game during the trial,” said Gus. “He ingratiated himself with Johnnie Cochran and Bob Shapiro when he put together O. J.’s book, I Want to Tell You. It was a brilliant public-relations bonanza for O. J. He could tell the public that he never, ever could have killed Nicole, that he loved her, that he loved his kids and missed them, and that he loved God. And he didn’t have to answer any embarrassing questions—like what was his blood doing at the scene of the crime. The only money that most of the Dream Team got paid was from Schiller’s book, so Johnnie Cochran arranged with Judge Ito to give him a seat in the courtroom with Shirley and Benny Baker, O. J.’s sister and brother-in-law. He heard everything.”
“So you know all that?”
“I was there, Jason. I watched the whole thing. All that stuff I wrote in the magazine each month about O. J. being a part of planning the defense strategy, talking on a speakerphone from his jail cell to Cochran’s office—I got all that from Schiller. He always had fantastic information.”
“I’m considering making a deal with Schiller today, for a lot of money,” said Jason.
“I assumed that was what you were leading up to—the deal, that is, not the amount of money,” said Gus. “That should be some book. He knows backstage stuff about the defense team that no one else in the media knows. Sometimes he tends to embellish reality a bit. I’d have a very good fact checker, if I were you.”
Jason leaned back on the green damask sofa and changed his position, putting his right leg over his left. “That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about. He has a source who was there from the get-go, with firsthand knowledge.”
“Who could that be?” asked Gus.
“That I won’t tell you.”
“Oh, come on, Jason, we’re in this deep, and the socialites in the drawing room are all being sociable.”
“Off the record?”
“Off the record.”
“Robert Kardashian.”
“Robert Kardashian?” repeated Gus, his voice registering his surprise. “It takes a lot to stun me these days, but you’ve just stunned me, Jason. I would think he would be afraid if he betrays O. J.”
“His name is never going to appear,” replied Jason. “Schiller will split his fee with him.”
“It’ll leak, Jason. You must know that,” said Gus. “Everything does leak in this story, except where O. J. stashed the murder weapon and the bloody clothes.”
* * *
“Harvey, it’s Gus. Have I got a scoop for you. I had to call someone or I couldn’t have gone to sleep. The only thing is, it’s off the record, because it could only have come from me, so you have to promise you won’t tell anyone. Schiller just made a book deal for a lot of bucks. But that’s not the scoop. Whom do you think is Schiller’s secret collaborator on the book? Kardashian! The killer’s best friend. No, I’m not kidding. It’s absolutely true. Wouldn’t you like to be in the media room at the house on Rockingham when O. J. hears that bit of information?”
Gus quickly discovered that he was unable to write his novel in New York, where he was invited out to dinner every night, and went. He was frequently commenting on television on the justice system in the wake of the unpopular acquittal of the former football star, or giving lectures, or speaking in tandem with Fred Goldman at the National Victim Center lunch in Fort Worth, or receiving the key to the city of Providence, Rhode Island, from Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., at a dinner where he received a standing ovation for his defense of the police in his trial coverage. He found that being a popular authority on O. J. Simpson was a delightful thing to be, but it took up almost all of his time. There was no time left for work. Everyone in the world seemed to have his unlisted telephone number.
“Gus, do you remember my sister, Sass? You met her at the Stephaich-Guiness wedding reception. From Hobe Sound? Sass Buffington. She’s coming to New York, and she’s your number-one fan of all time—she’s read everything you’ve written about the O. J. Simpson trial—and it’s her birthday, the big four-oh, and could you have lunch with us at Mortimer’s, please, just this once, Gus, it would be so wonderful, please. Sass will die happy.”
“I just couldn’t stand that Johnnie Co
chran,” said Sass Buffington at lunch at Mortimer’s. “Didn’t you think he looked hilarious when he put on O. J.’s knit cap during the closing argument? Froggie and I couldn’t stop laughing. All that fire-and-brimstone preacher routine, and the part about poor Mark Fuhrman being like Adolf Hitler. We couldn’t believe he’d say that. Now, listen, tell me, Gus, I promise I won’t tell anyone, I swear, but were Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden really having an affair?”
The next day Gus left New York for his house in Prud’homme.
Later, some people said that Gus had been hiding out in Prud’homme, but that wasn’t true. He made no secret of his whereabouts; Gayle King of WFSB in Hartford came to Prud’homme with a television crew to interview him before the miniseries of his last novel, A Season in Purgatory, about the Bradley family and an unsolved murder in Greenwich, Connecticut, went on the air. He even agreed to walk up the long driveway with Gayle in an establishing shot, in which the exterior of his house was shown very distinctly in the background. Inside, during the interview, his living room was so identifiable on television that Gus’s friend Mario Buatta, the decorator, called from New York to tell him the chintz on his living-room sofa was the same chintz that Mrs. Astor had in her library. It made Gus laugh. Finally, at this stage of his life, he was comfortably circumstanced.
As usual whenever he was interviewed about his upcoming miniseries, the interviewer talked more about the Simpson trial than about the miniseries of his book, or the case on which it was based, which was supposed to be the purpose of the interview.
“I’ll never forget the look on your face at the time of the verdict, when the camera panned to you,” said Gayle. It was a line that had been said to Gus over and over since the verdict. “We have a clip of it here as a matter of fact,” said Gayle King. The video of the moment of acquittal appeared on the monitor, and Gayle’s cameraman photographed Gus watching himself on the screen, at the shot he must have seen fifty times by then, of his mouth hanging open in disbelief after Deirdre Robertson, the court clerk, read that Orenthal James Simpson was not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.
Each time he saw it, he relived that moment. There, in his own living room, he could feel again his disbelief, his shock, and then the aching in his heart.
“Can you explain what you were feeling at that moment?” asked Gayle King.
“Shouldn’t we be talking about my miniseries on Sunday and Tuesday nights on CBS?” asked Gus, not wanting to relive the moment.
“But you were there, Gus. You were in the room at the moment,” said Gayle, pressing on.
Then, slowly, he began to speak. “I felt permeated by evil. I thought of the millions of dollars that had been spent, the lies that had been told, the cheating, the blackmail, the payoffs, the forgery, all that it took to make that moment of acquittal happen. Outrage seems to have gone out of fashion. I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy, Gayle. I still believe that killers should be locked up for life. They shouldn’t be walking around among us.”
To the surprise of some of his country friends, who were aware of his concern for safety after the death threats, Gus had even allowed his house to be open to the public for the annual Prud’homme Garden Club tour.
“It would help so much if you did, Gus,” said Tom Rose, who owned the antiques shop in Prud’homme. “The garden-club ladies could sell a lot more tickets if your house were on the tour.”
“Oh, all right,” he finally agreed, although the reason he had gone to his house in Prud’homme was to get away from distractions that kept him from doing what he should be doing, writing his novel about the Simpson trial. Two thousand people went through his house in Prud’homme on the day of the tour, and many of them signed his guest book on the hall table, which he had forgotten to put away.
Gus was not unfamiliar with death threats. Several years before, after the first of the two trials of the Menendez brothers ended in a mistrial, he had called the young killers world-class liars in a Vanity Fair article, and had mocked the women of the jury for falling for what he believed were false claims of sexual molestation made by the defense. The threatening call he had received was from a poor relation of the rich brothers named Otto Santoro, making Gus aware that the possibility of vengeful murder existed. The viciousness of the call astonished and frightened him, and he was momentarily silenced, although he had the presence of mind to switch on the tape recorder attached to the telephone in his media room, a device that he sometimes used when interviewing people on the telephone. Although he later claimed to his friends and his sons that he hadn’t taken Santoro’s call seriously, he had. He sent the tape to Judy Spreckels, who was an authority on the Menendez case, telling her to give it to the police in case anything untoward ever happened to him.
“Has there been any attempt by the Skakel family in Greenwich to stop the miniseries of your book?” asked Howard Erskine a week before the show went on the air. Howard was Gus’s oldest friend, from the time they had been roommates at Williams.
“Not that I know of,” replied Gus.
“You didn’t hear from their lawyer or anything?”
“I’m sure I would have heard from the network or my agent if such a thing had happened,” said Gus. “CBS has been publicizing it for weeks, every hour on the hour practically, announcing my name about five times on each commercial and saying it was based on a true story that happened in a prominent Connecticut Catholic family.”
“Amazing that you keep getting away with what you write, Gus,” said Howard. “I used to worry about you after the way you wrote about Claus von Bülow. Then I used to worry about you after the way you wrote about the Kennedys at the Willie Smith rape trial. You told me yourself about that nut cousin who threatened you after what you wrote about the Menendez brothers being such liars. And now you have all these death threats for saying a guilty man has been acquitted in the Simpson trial.”
“Do you have security in this house, Gus?” asked Colette Harron, a friend of Gus’s in Prud’homme,
“I have an alarm system, yes,” replied Gus.
“I mean, is there anyone who comes here and checks up on you?”
“The Bagwells and the Wagners both come by a couple of times a week. Why?” The Bagwells took care of the inside of Gus’s house, and the Wagners took care of the outside, and both couples had become his friends.
“You annoy a lot of people, Gus,” said Colette. “Your house is out in the open here. No neighbors. No dogs to bark. And your doors are always wide open. Anyone could walk in here.”
“From nightfall on, I always close all the doors,” said Gus. “I’m really quite careful. I barricade and bolt myself in nights.”
“Do you close your gates at night?” she asked.
“No. Too much trouble to walk down there at night, especially in winter.”
“You should get your gates electrified, Gus, and close them from the front hall without having to go outside. Push a button, that’s all. That’s what we did,” said Colette. “There’s a lot of nuts out there, and we all live at the end of long driveways.”
“I’ll look into that,” said Gus.
“Do you ever get scared, Gus?”
“I never used to.”
“But you do now?”
“Sometimes. I’ve been getting hang-ups lately,” said Gus. “You’re right about what you said. A lot of people do get angry at me. Last night there was a car parked down at the bottom of the driveway.”
“That could just have been some fan who found out where you lived on the garden-club tour,” said Colette.
“Probably. But it wasn’t the first time I saw it there.”
“Do you know anyone on the police up here?”
“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact. There’s a state trooper named Conrad Winalski who lives right here in Prud’homme,” said Gus. “I met him when I spoke about the trial at a fund-raiser for battered women at the governor’s mansion in Hartford last week. He told me he’s a b
ig fan of Mark Fuhrman’s.”
“You ought to tell him about that car,” said Colette.
“I will. I promise.”
29
In his journal, which he kept daily for years, Gus seemed to accept the inevitability that what was going to happen was going to happen. He even seemed to understand the logic and the perfection of it as a final exit for him in the story of his life, which he fully expected someone would write after his death. Privately, he had picked the one, but no overture had ever been made.
The first time he met the biographer A. Scott Berg, at Nancy Livingstone’s dinner for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber before the opening of Sunset Boulevard, Gus said, “When I lectured at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, I told all the fledgling writers to read your biography of Max Perkins if they wanted to know what writing was all about.”
“Thank you, Gus,” said Scott.
“When you described Perkins’s understanding of the young Fitzgerald’s talent before Fitzgerald understood it himself, I wanted to weep it was so beautiful,” said Gus. Subsequently, they sometimes met to talk.
“It used to be that out here movie people only talked about movies. Now they only want to talk about O. J.,” said Gus. “I never knew until I read in your biography of Sam Goldwyn that Frances Goldwyn and George Cukor were buried together.”
* * *
Following Gus’s return from the Simpson trial in Los Angeles, his friend Jimmy Davison said to him, “You should write your memoirs, Gus, like Gore Vidal did. If you don’t do it, someone else will, and whoever it is will probably concentrate on all the wrong things.”
Gus nodded. He knew what the wrong things were.
“I never knew about that Oregon part of your life until I saw it on the BBC documentary they played on the Arts and Entertainment channel the other night,” said Jimmy.
Another City Not My Own Page 34