Moguls, Monsters and Madmen, page 19
He took me into the coach house, opened a filing cabinet and showed me unpublished crime-scene photos from the O.J. Simpson trial so graphic and gruesome they will remain in my head till the day I die. I’m talking about Nicole Brown Simpson’s decapitated head barely attached to her torso. I wondered: Why is he showing me these? Is he testing me? I decided, no, he was proud to demonstrate the access he had attained when he occupied a front-row seat at the O.J. trial. I stared, mesmerized, as he flipped through these bloody photos as if through pages of a Town & Country magazine. He’d seen it all.
Dominick showed me another set of photos, which I believe were a test. They were from the trial of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who killed their mother and father, then went on a binge with their parents’ money. The brothers had admitted their responsibility for the murders, but claimed their father had sexually abused them—a defence that failed to sway the jury. The photo Dominick lingered over was of Lyle Menendez, sitting on a rock, modelling white Calvin Klein underwear.
Dominick commented, “Would you look at Lyle’s body. Isn’t that marvellous? He could have been a successful model, couldn’t he, Barry?”
Dominick had a feminine way about him, and though he didn’t come out as gay while we were filming, he did five years later, during the making of a documentary by an Australian team, to which he also agreed because he was so hungry to be immortalized. I was invited by the New York Times to a private screening of that film, which Dominick was, by then, too ill to attend. After Dominick’s death, two weeks later, his son, Griffin, confirmed that his father was bisexual, though he had been celibate for twenty years, perhaps to keep his secret.
Dominick Dunne was born on October 29, 1925, into a privileged, close-knit, Hartford, Irish-Catholic family, the second of six siblings. His father was a prominent heart surgeon, his mother an heiress. It was what Dunne called a “Big Deal family.”
During a Hollywood sightseeing trip, nine-year-old Dominick stared out the window of a bus that toured the neighbourhoods where the stars lived, soaking in the glamour, and decided that’s where he belonged. Years later, while he was building his career as a moderately successful Hollywood studio executive, he had a whirlwind love affair with heiress Ellen Griffin. They were married in 1954, and had three children: actor-director Griffin; Alex, a teacher; actress Dominique.
Hollywood was a fast-paced ride in which Dominick described his role as that of “a B-level producer on an A-level social list.” They packed their chic parties with the who’s who of Hollywood: Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Kirk Douglas, David Niven, Liz Taylor, Gore Vidal, Paul Newman, Loretta Young, Audrey Hepburn, David O. Selznick. As the ’60s drew to a close, Dunne found himself in a losing battle with his addiction to star-studded parties, cocaine and alcohol. He hit bottom in 1973, while in Italy producing Ash Wednesday, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda, with Richard Burton also on location.
“You couldn’t get any more glamorous than that,” he said. “All sorts of intrigues were going on, and we were all drunks except for Fonda. It was over for me after that movie.”
Dunne’s consuming addictions cost him his career, his marriage, his social status and his glamorous life. “I left Hollywood like a whipped dog. I was drinking, snorting, doing anything anyone could think of that I wasn’t supposed to do.”
Dunne decided to go cold turkey. “For six months, I lived alone in a one-room cabin in Oregon. I had been the kind of guy who went to a party every night, along with a party on my way to the party, and another on my way home from the party. Now, there I was, living in silence. All the Hollywood crapola had ended. I came to terms with who I was, and why my career was destroyed. It wasn’t the fault of all those people I used to blame. I had created my own downfall.”
By 1982, Dunne had reinvented himself as a successful novelist, writing about the high society that had snubbed him. Life was good again. And then, a phone call delivered horrific news. His twenty-three-year-old daughter, Dominique, had been strangled to death by her boyfriend, a celebrity chef at Ma Maison, an A-list L.A. restaurant.
Dunne was devastated. “I was very close to her, truly close. The last word she ever said to me the night before her death, on my birthday, was, ‘I love you, Daddy.’ She had been making a movie in Hollywood, while I was in New York, and she knew I always wanted to know what was happening on set. The hospital kept Dominique on life support, and we went as a family to say goodbye—my former wife, with whom I’d remained close, my two sons and myself. We talked to her, and if you’ve had a child murdered, you have thoughts of revenge. I even went through moments of thinking I would hire an assassin, though I knew I never would. Instead, I kissed her head, and I asked, ‘Give me your talent.’”
He was battling despair in the aftermath of his daughter’s death when he received an invitation from Tina Brown, then editor of Vanity Fair, to write about his daughter’s murderer’s trial. That struck Dunne as exactly right. His power—his revenge—lay in his ability to expose evil to public gaze. “Through the lowest point in my life, came this whole new career as a columnist for Vanity Fair. I came to think of Dominique as my guardian angel, so that any time I was in trouble, I’d say, ‘Honey, help,’ and I would feel that she was there.”
The Los Angeles trial shocked Dunne anew. “What I realized was that the rights of the victims do not equate with the rights of the killer. The man who killed my daughter had a history of violence against women, but that was kept from the jury. It was the most unfair, unjust trial. Every day, for nine weeks, I sat in the front row of the courtroom keeping notes . . . four feet away from my daughter’s killer.”
The killer who, when convicted, would serve only three years in prison.
Dunne’s first article for Vanity Fair was called “Justice.” It was passionate and gripping and it caused a sensation. His obsession with the rich and famous was now driven by a purpose beyond envy. Dominick Dunne was, at last, in step with his destiny.
Dunne signed an exclusive contract with the magazine and channeled his rage into stories about privileged and wealthy people who cheat, steal and sometimes kill. His subjects included the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers and Claus von Bülow, who was accused of attempting to kill his wealthy wife. He also published eleven novels that explored the kinds of lives his articles reported on, including the bestsellers The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and People Like Us.
“I became a victim’s advocate,” he told me. “The O.J. Simpson verdict shocked America. After a trial that lasted a year, the jury arrived at its not-guilty [verdict] in a couple of hours—there was something shameful about that. The defence had a jury consultant whose sole job was to watch the jurors, day by day, for signs anyone might be leaning towards a conviction, and then they would find a way to get rid of that person. Only rich people can do that. To win an acquittal, it came down to lawyers sitting around a table, and thinking up falsehoods to fool the jury. When I left the courtroom the day of the verdict, a CNN guy said, ‘Dominick you gotta go on TV.’ I should never have agreed. I was too upset. When legal analyst Greta Van Susteren said, ‘Well, the jury has given its opinion,’ she made me so crazy that I took off my microphone and threw it at the cameras. I mean, I went nuts. I knew O.J. was guilty before the freeway chase, just as I knew that Lyle Menendez was responsible, though not necessarily Erik, for his parents’ murder, six months before he was arrested. It was his cockiness as he walked out of his parents’ memorial service. I had a feeling about that, and I go with my feelings. So far, I’ve been right every time.”
Given Dunne’s unshakeable righteous anger, I was surprised when Johnnie Cochran, Simpson’s lead defence lawyer, agreed to be interviewed for my documentary. I knew Cochran had a big ego, but his relationship with Dunne was so combative during the trial that I thought he might have had enough. Dunne made faces whenever the defence scored a point during the trial, then stepped out of the courtroom and up to his pulpit each evening on Larry King Live to expound his views to over one million viewers. After that, he would pour more scorn on the O.J. defence team in his Vanity Fair articles.
I interviewed Cochran in Toronto, where he arrived impeccably dressed and smoking a cigar. To my surprise, he was generous in his appraisal of Dunne. “Every trial needs a Dominick Dunne to cover events. I thought he was very entertaining.”
He continued in the same vein. “If you’ve already figured out a trial’s result, how you report the facts in between gets a little muddled. When Dominick Dunne wrote about ‘justice,’ it was justice as he saw it. He is who he is—a strong personality with strong, strong views coloured by the incomprehensible loss of his loved one. He felt his daughter’s trial produced an outrageous result, which pretty much coloured everything he did afterwards. In this country, if you think about victims’ advocates, you think about Dunne, and if you’re on the defence, you know any article he might write would be an attack against you. That’s what he lived for.”
As for the trial itself, Cochran continued: “Clearly money plays a role in any trial, celebrity also plays a role. The prosecution kicked off nine out of ten black jurors. They just kept doing it, so we had to deal with whoever was left. We started out with twenty-four jurors, including twelve alternates, and we ended up with only fourteen. It wasn’t black and white, as Dunne would have it. There were shades of grey, but he believed in what he was doing, even when misguided. He carved out his own niche, catering to the rich and famous, and interpreting justice for them.”
Long before I did the Dominick film, Eddie Greenspan used to rant to me about Dunne being a shill for the prosecution. The fact that this completely biased individual had direct access to the media made Eddie’s resentment boil over. When Eddie heard about my documentary, he told me he wanted to be in it.
While Cochran was conciliatory, Eddie was furious. “Mr. Dunne proved both mean-spirited and dangerous in his lack of respect for the judicial system. ‘I, Dominick Dunne, will decide who is guilty, who is lying, who’s telling the truth.’ No matter how rich and powerful a defendant may be, the state is richer. The state has more people, more money to throw at the rich and powerful, than the rich and powerful can possibly throw against the state. A trial is not a play where people at the end stand up and applaud. In court, if the jury doesn’t ‘applaud,’ your client may go to jail for life, or even lose his or her life. It’s real.”
Hollywood producer David Brown felt that Dunne’s lack of legal training gave him an advantage as a reporter. “Dominick didn’t have to hide behind legal niceties. He was fascinated with power, the corruption of power in particular and the ability of power to get away with things. That became his signature. Dominick was above gossip. He was a diarist. He was able to capture the essence of people. His own story was also one of great regeneration.”
Larry King’s response to my request for an interview was as surprising as Johnnie Cochran’s, but in the opposite way. He was dismissive and quite cold. We met in L.A.’s famous Nate ’n Al’s Deli, where King regularly held court. He looked like a caricature of himself: very gaunt, in shirt and jeans with his signature suspenders and bad hair-dye job. Equal to his reputation for having been married a hundred times was his reputation for never preparing for Larry King Live. It was always, “Okay, so who’s on tonight?”
When he defended Dunne, he seemed to offer a defence of his own style of reporting as well. “We live in an age of spit it out! Learn it now! Fast! Cover it tomorrow! Go here! Go there! Dominick Dunne put his audience right into the courtroom. He knew justice from the perspective of a wounded man. He was not an expert on justice, and he was the first to admit to his bias. If the evidence in the O.J. trial had been presented differently, that jury might have voted differently. However, a lot of people told me that if they had been on that jury, they would have voted ‘not guilty’ based on the prosecution’s presentation. Remember, the audience saw a lot of stuff the jury never saw. The DNA witnesses were all thrown out, and the judge lost control of the trial.”
Graydon Carter, who became editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair after Tina Brown, valued Dominick Dunne as one of America’s most popular feature writers. “The age range of people reading him went from young to old. Nick peppered his stories with social and Hollywood tidbits like candy drops along a path through the forest, but he was always taking you somewhere, because at the core of everything was his fight for the rights of people who had lost their rights. People would come up to me at parties, imagining they could be the next Dominick Dunne, because they knew about society, but Nick brought something much more complex, and much more soulful—a large part of which, unfortunately, stemmed from the murder of his daughter. He found a voice, and he stuck with it, full-time—I mean, he never let up. That was his life.”
Another key to Dunne’s success was his access, not only to those in high social circles, but in every walk of life. As he told me, “A lot of people think I am this great investigative reporter, but the fact is, people seek me out. I have these incredible coincidental meetings happening almost daily.”
Dominick’s son Griffith verified the claim. “My father was like an Alacrity spy. People would contact him, and he would get so excited about that. He was a great listener, and he’d talk to a complete nut, giving him the benefit of a doubt.”
The late New York Times writer David Carr described Dunne as a cat who sat quietly, licking his paws and waiting. “Over time, you would feel compelled to tell him things. With his combination of fluff and substance, he mirrored perfectly what Vanity Fair is about. Dunne left the gravitational pull of journalism, and moved into another business, which was the business of being famous, and he did a really good job of it. He was a black belt in dropping names, and as shallow and as silly as that seems, it gave him adjacency to either brilliant or dark people whom we all found fascinating.”
Dunne’s sartorial flare, his A-list connections and his writings about violent crime sometimes drew comparison to the critically acclaimed, openly gay novelist Truman Capote. Capote too, was the darling of New York high society. That is, until he wrote too cruelly, scandalously and invasively about his famous friends, especially Barbara “Babe” Paley, married to CBS founder William S. Paley. Their humiliating rejection of him led to his steep decline into drugs, alcoholism and isolation.
As David Carr continued, “Capote stepped over the line and got clobbered, banished from a society which he loved and which provided him with his living. When Dominick wrote his novel People Like Us, he wasn’t actually writing about ‘us.’ He always maintained an outsider’s stance so that when he sat down at his computer, he served as the messenger from a party to which most of us commoners would not be invited. Unlike Capote, he did a good job of revealing just enough to sell books, but not so much that he wouldn’t be invited back. If Capote was the skunk at the garden party, Dominick Dunne was the perfumed skunk.”
Dunne’s own take on Capote echoed Carr’s. “Let me tell you exactly what I think of Truman. He became too much a part of the world he aspired to. Instead of keeping some distance, he did a very stupid thing. His ticket to New York’s inner sanctum was Babe Paley, and after he embarrassed her, she never spoke to him again.”
During our post-interview conversations, Dunne taught me his secret for being a sought-after party guest: “Always come armed with the best stories to entertain the other guests.” Of course, that was simple for him because of his access. He called it the Dominick Dunne Roadshow. “You prepare your stories for a party the same way as you select your wardrobe,” he explained. “You know your audience, you rehearse and then you tap dance for your host and the other guests.”
This backfired once at a dinner party where Dunne enraptured his audience with details of the ongoing O.J. trial. Only afterwards did he learn that one of the catering staff, hired for the evening, was one of O.J.’s sons. To Nick’s credit, he felt awful about that incident.
As a victim’s rights advocate, Dunne was at the top of his game when pursuing justice on behalf of the Moxley family after the partially nude, bludgeoned body of their fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, was found in their backyard, on October 30, 1975. Suspicion fell upon the Moxleys’ neighbours, the Skakel brothers, Thomas and Michael. The murder attracted worldwide attention when the media reported that the two boys were the nephews of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, widow of Robert Kennedy.
In 1993, after almost two decades with no arrest in that case, Dunne wrote a roman à clef, A Season in Purgatory. With the certitude he always brought to the cases he wrote about, he was convinced that he knew the identity of Martha Moxley’s killer: he was sure it Michael Skakel. More significantly, he became the driving force in having the case reopened in January 2000, resulting in the arrest, trial and conviction of Michael Skakel.
As David Carr confirmed, “Whatever side Dunne picked, you couldn’t write him off as a dilettante. He was like a dog on a meat bone, and he stayed with it. The Moxley story is a testament to his durability.”
This is an accolade Dunne accepted. “I worked so hard on that case for so many years, and put so much of myself into it. Martha Moxley and my daughter Dominique were only a year apart in age, and both were murdered on October 30, though in different years. In 1991, I sought out Dorthy Moxley, mother of Martha Moxley, who was so media shy that she wouldn’t let me go to her house. When I met her in a coffee shop at the Baltimore/Washington Airport, I asked her, ‘Why did you leave Greenwich? Now there’s nobody fighting for you.’ She said, ‘Every time I looked out the window into the Skakel house, I was sure someone in that house knew who did it.’”
