Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Read online

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  MONEY, MURDER, AND DOMINICK DUNNE

  A Life in Several Acts

  Robert Hofler

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

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  London WC2E 8LU, United Kingdom

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  Copyright © 2017 by Robert Hofler

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Hofler, Robert, author.

  Title: Money, murder, and Dominick Dunne: a life in several acts / Robert Hofler.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016041574 | ISBN 9780299311506 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dunne, Dominick. | Journalists—United States—Biography. | Trials (Murder)—United States. | Celebrities—United States. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PN4874.D846 H64 2017 | DDC 070.92 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041574

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31158-2 (electronic)

  To

  anonymous sources

  No one loved them, or used them, more than Dominick Dunne

  Writers are always selling somebody out.

  Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem

  Contents

  1. Father and Sondheim

  2. Marriage and Puppets

  3. Mengers and Disaster

  4. Begelman and Purgatory

  5. Capote and Suicide

  6. Didions and Murder

  7. Bloomingdales and Videotapes

  8. Von Bülow and Comas

  9. Novels and Payback

  10. Kennedys and Cover-Ups

  11. Menendez and Lies

  12. O.J. and Parties

  13. Princess Diana and Breakdowns

  14. Skakels and Wills

  15. Fuhrman and Libel

  16. Apologies and Memoirs

  17. Safra and Paranoia

  18. Editors and E-mails

  19. Spector and Sons

  20. Clinics and Sondheim

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Filmography

  Index

  1

  Father and Sondheim

  In 1993 Dominick Dunne was already famous for saying “he did it” whenever it came to a high-profile murder case involving celebrity, money, and privilege. He almost always sided with the prosecution against the defendant, and he did so with the same passion and unbridled partiality he honed a decade earlier when, making his debut in Vanity Fair magazine, he covered the trial of John Sweeney, the Ma Maison sous chef who strangled to death Dominick’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, actress Dominique Dunne.

  Erik and Lyle Menendez were on trial for double murder in 1993. The two young men and their two middle-aged victims were not celebrities, but they were wealthy, lived in Beverly Hills, and had ties to the movie business. Even more newsworthy: the victims were Erik and Lyle’s parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez. The brothers loaded and reloaded their 12-gauge Mossberg shotguns fourteen times in the TV room of the family mansion at 722 North Elm Drive. Why so many bullets? Was it rage? Or an act of self-defense? Or both?

  There was no doubt that Erik and Lyle had murdered Kitty and Jose on August 20, 1989, as the couple sat watching The Spy Who Loved Me on a VCR. The big question of the sensational Menendez trial was whether the father had sexually abused his two sons. Dominick said he believed without a doubt that Jose Menendez never molested his sons. He said it before the trial began, and he said it twelve years later when interviewed for a documentary based on his life, titled Dominick Dunne: After the Party. “I never ever believed for a second that he sexually abused them,” he told the camera.

  Actually, Dominick did believe the two sons’ accusation against Jose Menendez, and he believed it for more than a second. He believed it for the better part of a day. September 11, 1993, was Lyle Menendez’s first day on the stand in his own defense, which was based on his claim that he and his younger brother committed double murders because they feared for their lives after years of incestuous sexual abuse. Experts call it the imperfect self-defense.

  The Menendez trial had been going on for a month when Lyle, age twenty-five, finally took the stand that Friday. Preceding him there were thirty-two witnesses for the defense who portrayed the two victims as miserable parents. Among other offenses, friends and relatives told the court that Kitty Menendez made her sons sleep in pet-ferret feces to punish them and Jose Menendez had once called his son Lyle a “dummy” in public.

  Dominick had grown restless, and he was not the only one in the courtroom tired of hearing the litany of parental offenses—some major, many minor. Finally, Judge Stanley M. Weisberg of Los Angeles Superior Court put an end to it. “We’re not talking about a child custody case here,” said the judge. The defense had scheduled many more such witnesses to bad-mouth Jose and Kitty, but Weisberg refused to hear them and ordered the lawyers to call one of their two defendants to testify instead.

  Once Lyle took the stand, his lawyer, Jill Lansing, asked him, “Did you love your mom and dad?”

  “Yes,” said Lyle.

  “On August 20, 1989, did you and your brother kill your mother and your father?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Did you kill them for money?”

  “No,” he said. Lyle’s first tears began to appear.

  “Did you kill them because you wanted to pay them back for the way they had treated you?”

  “No,” he said. Audible sobbing now joined Lyle’s tears.

  “Why did you kill your parents?”

  “Because we were afraid,” he whispered. When Lyle went on to describe why he and Erik were afraid, he sometimes spoke through his knuckles, as if his hand could prevent him from saying the words that were unspeakable. At other moments, he put his head in the sleeve of his dark blue sweater to cry.

  “He raped me,” said Lyle.

  “Did you cry?” asked his lawyer.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you bleed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you scared?”

  “Very.”

  “Did you ask him not to?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you ask him not to?”

  “I just told him, I don’t . . . I don’t . . .”

  According to Lyle, Jose Menendez thought of their sex together as a kind of male bonding ritual. Lyle was only six years old when first raped
, and he said being anally penetrated made him feel he was “the most important thing” in his father’s life.

  The most heartbreaking moment in his testimony, however, came later when Lyle talked about his younger brother. He revealed his father also had sex with Erik, and that he, in turn, replicated that sexual abuse by taking his kid brother into the woods to molest him there in a similar manner. In the courtroom, Lyle looked away from his lawyer, and leaning forward on the stand, he faced Erik for the first time during his testimony. “I don’t understand why, and I’m sorry,” he apologized to his twenty-two-year-old brother.

  Erik and Lyle were not the only ones crying in the courtroom. Several jurors and reporters also wept. Dominick was not one of them. His eyes dry, he nonetheless looked ashen, upset. He shook his head. “I wonder if I’m wrong. Could I be wrong?” he asked the young reporter sitting next to him. Shoreen Maghame was covering her first big murder trial, for the City News Service, and she and Dominick sat next to each other most days in the Van Nuys, California, courtroom. They generally agreed about what transpired there, but unlike her friend from Vanity Fair, she could never be certain that the Menendez boys lied about their father.

  Out in the hallway, Dominick repeated his “I wonder if I’m wrong” statement to another reporter. This time, he added, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I believe this. I think he’s telling the truth.”

  Unlike Maghame, reporter Robert Rand agreed with Dominick about almost nothing that happened during the Menendez trial. In fact, Court TV had hired Dominick and Rand to disagree, and late every Friday afternoon throughout the trial the two journalists presented opposing weekly rebuttals on camera. Crime watchers had never seen anything quite like it. The Menendez trial was only the second trial for which the cable network presented gavel-to-gavel coverage, the first being the ten-day William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991. On Court TV during the months-long Menendez trial, the daytime coverage titillated more than any soap opera on the tube. It was Robert Rand for the defense and Dominick Dunne for the prosecution, with Terry Moran moderating.

  In the hallway, Dominick repeated himself a third time, “I may be wrong.”

  Rand knew his colleague’s fervently antidefense position, especially with regard to the Menendez sons, and any journalist’s natural instinct would be to question such a dramatic reversal. But the two men kept to their agreement never to discuss the day’s events before they went head-to-head on TV. “We wanted to keep it spontaneous,” said Rand.

  The Menendez trial represented everything Dominick loathed about the criminal justice system in America. It was all about a couple of wealthy brats using their money, their father’s hard-earned money, to buy themselves justice and, in the process, ruin the good reputations of their victims. Dominick saw the same thing happen to his own daughter, Dominique. The defense raised unsubstantiated charges of abortion and drug use against her, and then, in Dominick’s opinion, the killer got his rich boss to pay for his defense.

  Dominick made it clear why he supported the prosecution in almost every case. The Menendez trial, however, proved more personally complicated for him than any other of his career. Like Jose Menendez, he, too, had raised two sons in the rarefied hot-house environment of money, privilege, and celebrity that is Beverly Hills. Dominick repeated what one of his sons told him: “Dad, I knew lots of kids in Beverly Hills who’ve talked about killing their parents.” Dominick said the comment shocked him, and he repeated it despite the fact that both his sons later denied ever having said it. And there was something else disturbing to Dominick about the case. He said he found himself identifying with one of the young killers and confessed to being “fascinated” by him.

  Erik Menendez was the handsome son, the likable one. Erik overcame a severe childhood stammer, as did Dominick; and much more significant, Dominick believed Erik to be “homosexual,” a word Judge Weisberg was averse to being used in court to describe the younger defendant.

  The Menendez trial compelled Dominick, for the first time in his life, to write and publicly talk about the physical abuse he experienced as a child at the hands of his own father. He linked that abuse to what happened to the younger Menendez son. “I think the hate that Erik had was with his father’s inability to accept the way he was. Something had to trigger it off,” Dominick said of the double murders. “I always had the theory that Erik was gay. I’m sure [Jose] called his kid all the terrible faggot, fairy names. I never ever believed for a second that he sexually abused them as the lawyers said he sexually abused them. But he was abusive in the way my father was abusive to me.”

  In the twentieth century, the concept of what it meant to be homosexual changed almost as much as the words to describe and degrade it. The word “sissy” in the guarded 1930s when Dominick was a boy had been replaced by “faggot” in the less circumspect 1980s of Erik Menendez’s youth.

  “He mimicked me,” Dominick said of his own father, Richard. “He called me a sissy. ‘Sissy’ is a tough word. It may not sound tough, but it’s words that hurt. It lingers.”

  The word “sissy” fastened itself to Dominick’s consciousness because it labeled his greatest fear about himself. He was not a real boy. He was a girl trapped in a boy’s body.

  Dr. Richard Dunne Sr. was not the only one who thought it or said it. An uncle told Richard that the six-year-old Dominick “ought to have been a girl.” A friendly Italian barber told his mother, Dorothy Dunne, the same thing: “He ought to have been a girl.” What remained burned in Dominick’s memory is that neither parent disagreed with that opinion; no one came to his “rescue” to claim the real little boy within.

  “I never felt I belonged anywhere, even in my own family. I was the outsider of the six kids,” said Dominick.

  In time, when he was well into old age, Dominick would put a humorous spin on his outsider status. He claimed that he came late to developing his verbal skills, and when he finally did speak, his first words to his mother were those of a prissy aesthete: “Your dress is awfully cute, Mom, but your shoes are a little bit dirty.”

  An old man can laugh at his youth. He cannot laugh at it when he is living it.

  “My opinion of myself was nothing!” Dominick stressed. What hardened the prison walls of his effeminacy is that Dominick was only one year younger than his older brother, Richard Dunne Jr., who loved sports and was good at playing them. The bedroom the two brothers shared at 1720 Albany Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut, said everything Dominick and his family knew to be true. Richard was a real boy because he covered his side of the bedroom with pictures of famous athletes; Dominick was a sissy because he preferred pictures of beautiful movie stars. Even the high school yearbook at Hartford’s Kingswood School told the tale of these two Dunne brothers. It gave Richard the nicknames Tarzan and Big Dick for his prowess at football, hockey, and other rough-and-tumble sports. The yearbook editors were too kind to reprint any of Dominick’s nicknames.

  He did not play sports. Dominick was short and smaller in build than his older brother, and while these two Dunne boys shared strong Irish features, Richard’s face in photographs is more open, rarely tense. Dominick’s falls into a natural wariness whenever he is not smiling.

  His escape became the movies and putting on puppet shows for the neighborhood kids. One puppet play he wrote and staged told the story of two girls, Molly and Polly, who traveled west in a covered wagon. It deeply embarrassed Dr. Dunne that any son of his would be writing for the theater, much less plays about two girls.

  What Dr. Dunne failed to understand is that sissies, as well as girls, can be tough and very resolute in their pursuits: putting on puppet shows and watching movies provided Dominick his only relief from being called a little girl, on the one hand, and being compared to Big Dick, on the other. What Dominick could not escape, even in the imaginary worlds of film and theater, were the frequent beatings he received. They were not the sexual abuse that Erik and Lyle Menendez claimed. But they were abuse just the
same.

  In her book The White Album, Dominick’s sister-in-law Joan Didion recalls a verse that Dorothy Dunne framed and put in the foyer of her Connecticut home. It asked God to “bless the corner of this house,” as well as “each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.”

  Didion wrote that Dorothy’s verse gave her a “physical chill” whenever she read it. Paranoia came naturally to Didion, who never took an immediate liking to strangers. For Dominick, it was not strangers whom he had to fear. “Something about me drove him crazy,” Dominick said of his father. Publicly, Dominick would never admit what that mysterious something was. Privately, he knew. As he wrote in a letter years later, it was his “incipient fairyism” that his father despised, “and it became his business to rid me of same.”

  Dr. Richard Dunne was a respected heart surgeon, and if a phone call from the hospital happened to interrupt his thrashing Dominick, he took the call, gave his medical advice, and then went back to the chore at hand: “beating me with a riding crop so I had welts on my ass and thighs,” Dominick claimed. “I got to a point where I told myself I will never let him make me cry.”

  Instead of shedding tears, Dominick decided to do something about the little boy inside himself—the little boy whom his father hated and people said was actually a little girl. As he wrote years later in his private journal, the young Dominick Dunne decided to “invent another person,” and he would spend the remainder of his childhood and the first half of his adult life trying to become this other person. Looking back at what he created, Dominick had to admit, “I was a fake.”

  When a child decides to be another person, which aspects of his personality does he keep, if any, and which does he set out to destroy?

  The little boy inside Dominick did not give up without a struggle. He sentimentalized his self-induced transformation by turning it into a religious calling. “I would have made a perfect Christ child,” he wrote. Dominick also developed a very severe stutter.