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

  It was that rare example of producer and director wishing their star had complained earlier in the process about the script. “I don’t think Elizabeth ever read Ash Wednesday [beforehand],” said Peerce. “She’d read a page and recite it back to you verbatim, total recall. I’d never seen anything like it. She knew the script was no good, but she never questioned it.” Until it was too late.

  Dominick continued to play sycophant to Elizabeth Taylor, performing little tasks to keep her happy—like dashing off telegrams to Paramount Pictures to tell them not to send her any more bouquets of carnations. She hated carnations. She thought carnations were bad luck. He suggested they send bouquets of roses on a daily basis instead.

  It did not make any difference. Taylor never arrived on set on time, even though her contract stipulated a very leisurely work day, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. “But she never worked until after 4:00 p.m.,” said Peerce. Missing hours of production time due to an incensed priest was not a typical work day on the Ash Wednesday set. A typical day began with Taylor showing up two or three hours late. Her tardiness continued even when Henry Fonda arrived at Cortina d’Ampezzo. For their first scene together, she showed up later than usual. Her acting assignment that day did not require much—a walk across a dining room filled with dozens of extras. Among them were Dominick’s daughter, Dominique, visiting on spring break, and the Burtons’ adopted daughter, Maria, another spring break visitor.

  On Fonda’s first day, Taylor walked on set shortly after noon. Rather than taking the time to greet her famous costar, she instead made an abrupt, puzzling announcement, “If there’s going to be anything grotty, I’d better have Richard here!”

  Dominick could not imagine what could be grotty (i.e., unpleasant) about her walking across a dining room. But, as usual with Taylor, he did as she told him. Dominick fetched Burton.

  “Richard, what do you think?” the star asked her husband.

  Burton looked around, and seeing nothing grotty told her, “Frankly, I agree with Larry and Nick.”

  The couple, on the verge of divorce, often used the cast and crew to wage war on each other. Upset by his wife’s chronic lateness, Burton asked Henry Fonda to speak up and complain. “That’s not my job. I’ll have no part of it,” said Fonda. Other times, Burton defended his wife and lashed out at how Dominick and Peerce treated her. In a letter to the two men, he wrote how they were dealing with a “bombe plastique” that could go off at any moment if they were not careful.

  Dominick told Joel Schumacher that he felt he had a “great connection with Elizabeth.” However, he also “felt the need to cater to her.”

  Ultimately, it fell to the director to discipline. When Taylor showed up one day with her usual male entourage, Peerce waved them away. “You go!” Then he pointed at her. “You stay.” The star did not speak to the director for two full weeks. “That’s some way to make a movie,” said Peerce.

  When Taylor was not creating problems, it was Burton’s turn. He housed a volatile temper, especially when drunk, which was often. During one early morning breakfast, Dominick burst into the actors’ caravan of trailers. He was frantic. “Where’s Helmut?” he asked. As usual, the actor was listening to the new hit single “Alone Again, Naturally,” which held some special significance for him. He played it endlessly. Baxter continued reading Bleak House, and Fonda went back to his hobby, painting miniatures.

  “Helmut,” said Dominick, “you’ve got to come down! Immediately! We’re taking you to another hotel! Richard is on the way with a gun!”

  Taylor’s daughter, Liza Todd, had made the mistake of developing a schoolgirl crush on Berger, and her adoptive father did not much like it. “Richard couldn’t bear the fact,” said Baxter.

  Dominick threw Berger into a taxi and had him chauffeured down the mountain to the Hotel de la Poste.

  After Dominick succeeded in saving Berger’s life, Burton did indeed arrive at the caravan of trailers. He carried no firearms but he was angry and, of course, he was drunk at ten in the morning.

  “Where is he?” Burton screamed. “That queer, Helmut!”

  Baxter explained that Berger had departed to another hotel. “He’s queer. Doesn’t it make your flesh crawl?” asked Burton.

  “I’m queer,” said Baxter.

  “But you’re Welsh!”

  “You couldn’t have Liza in safer hands,” said Baxter. “Helmut’s wonderful with her.”

  Liza Todd’s affection for Berger also disappointed Dominick, but for an entirely different reason. His daughter and Liza were about the same age, and he hoped they would “become chums,” said Baxter. It would have helped to solidify his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor. “But the two girls didn’t become friends.”

  When Burton was not threatening Berger, he took to berating his wife. In one scene, the actors needed to improvise a game of bridge. Taylor got confused and asked, “Four of what? What am I supposed to be saying here?” She did not play bridge.

  Burton, on the other hand, was an expert. “You stupid cow! Just show your big tits!” he yelled from behind the camera. During another altercation, Dominick watched as Burton called Taylor a “cunt” in front of her children.

  Stupid cow or movie star, the actress caused the executives at Paramount Pictures to step up their complaints about the lack of footage coming from Italy. Dominick tried talking to his star about her tardiness. “Oh, what now?” she complained.

  “Elizabeth, this can’t go on,” he told her. But, of course, it did. Taylor enjoyed boasting that she had kept the Queen of England waiting twenty minutes, Princess Margaret thirty minutes, and President Josip Broz Tito an hour. “They can damn well wait for me a few minutes!”

  When Taylor was not late, it was something else. During production on Ash Wednesday, she came down with the measles, missing even more days of work. Obviously, MGM had protected the actress even from contracting a childhood disease.

  “Elizabeth was bright,” said Larry Peerce, “but her biggest problem was she was born and raised in the aegis of the big studio, the Louis B. Mayer father syndrome.”

  Some father.

  Taylor did not just dislike being on a movie set. She hated it. Off hours with vodka in hand, she enjoyed regaling the Ash Wednesday cast with horror stories from her childhood days at MGM, like the time she filmed a Lassie movie with her friend Roddy McDowall and the producer used unbleached corn flakes to simulate snow. When they turned on the fans to blow the brittle pieces of corn, McDowall and Taylor flinched as a hurricane of dry breakfast cereal hit them in the eyes. MGM took care of that problem by having the two children’s faces anesthetized with multiple shots of Novocain.

  Dominick sympathized. “But you’ve got to understand, Elizabeth, this isn’t MGM,” he said. The old studio system, however, had controlled her life for so long that she never learned to cope with the vagaries of life like a normal person.

  Taylor turned to alcohol, usually vodka or champagne, and it did not help that Dominick had made a deal with Dom Perignon to feature it prominently in the film in exchange for plenty of screen time. Larry Peerce recalled seven hundred bottles of the champagne being delivered to Cortina d’Ampezzo. When Taylor was not chronically late, she was trying to get her costars chronically drunk.

  Between takes for their big bedroom scene, she asked Helmut Berger, “Do you want a little champagne?” It was not even noon yet, and she continued to ply him with the complimentary Dom Perignon until he was drunk and Peerce had to stop the work day before lunch.

  Taylor’s champagne days, however, were some of her more productive ones on the set. More problematic were her whisky or vodka days. On those days, she carried her own glasses—that is, Raymond Vignale carried her glasses. They were huge sixteen-ounce goblets. Her work day began with a cry to her butler, “I want a Bloody Mary, Raymond baby. I need a bloody!”

  That was Vignale’s cue to fill one of her sixteen-ounce glasses with vodka, a weak splash of tomato juice, and one small ice cube. At one
o’clock, it was time for lunch, which entailed three or four glasses of wine and required Giancarlo to redo her makeup. An assistant would arrive to break up the two-hour lunch: “Elizabeth, we’re ready.”

  “Yes, I’m coming,” she replied, irritated, taking at least another half hour. Back on set at three o’clock, she then ordered, “Raymond baby, how about a Jack?”

  Out came the jumbo glasses, one ice cube, a little soda, and a lot of Jack Daniel’s. It was when Dominick knew that Peerce had about half an hour to get something of Taylor on film.

  “Our careers, Nick and mine, were disappearing as Elizabeth and Richard lived out this human tragedy,” said Peerce. The drinking on set was contagious. “Nick was drinking prodigiously at that time; we all were. Drinking was a way of life, but Nick could pile them on.”

  Dominick continued to get phone calls and telegrams from Paramount, telling him, “Get that fat pig on set!”

  Meanwhile, Taylor received cables from Paramount, telling her, “You look beautiful in the rushes!” And the studio kept sending her roses as other bills piled up, including ones for Richard Burton’s request that the studio serve a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner for the entire company in the month of May at the expensive Miramonti. Paramount was not happy and neither was the Miramonti staff, which had looked forward to departing in April for more lucrative summer jobs at the Lido in Venice.

  Dominick ultimately stopped taking any telephone calls, not the best way for a producer to ingratiate himself with the studio. Cast and crew who wanted to reach him had to get on their hands and knees to whisper in his hotel-room keyhole, “It’s me. I need to see you.”

  It was Elizabeth Taylor, ironically, who gave Dominick the bad news. “You know, this is going to be your last film,” she told him.

  The expenditures on Ash Wednesday and its low grosses were only part of the problem. Other producers have survived worst defeats. What they did not have to weather was a one-line joke “that was funny when I told it; it was not so funny when it was reprinted in the Hollywood Reporter,” said Dominick.

  After a disastrous autumn screening of the movie in Los Angeles, Dominick repeated one more time his story about Jean-Claude Tramont being Jack Schwartz from the Bronx. But in this latest retelling, he added a quip about the zaftig agent Sue Mengers, whom Tramont had recently married: “One day, if the true story of this film is ever told, it should be called When a Fat Girl Falls in Love,” said Dominick. Even an insult about the agent’s weight was not enough, so he embellished the anecdote further. He said he was writing a book about the making of Ash Wednesday and calling it When a Fat Girl Falls in Love. He was not writing such a book, but he thought it sounded funny. At the time.

  On the eve of the film’s premiere, Marvene Jones retold Dominick’s story in the November 13, 1973, issue of the Hollywood Reporter. She reported his joke as if it were fact, telling her readers, “Dominick Dunne didn’t just produce Ash Wednesday and while away his leisure hours on location. He compiled a diary which he’s turning into a book titled When a Fat Girl Falls in Love, not so loosely based on Sue Mengers (she’s becoming overexposed) and her Ash Wednesday writer-husband, Jean-Claude Tramont. Ohhh what he wrote down! IFA will arrange the pulishing [sic] contract, and also for a film. . . . Starring Cass Elliot?”

  Paramount’s Robert Evans read the item. He phoned Dominick to inform him, “You’ll never work in this town again!” For his part, Evans did not remember the conversation but admitted, “It’s possible. Sue was a great friend of mine.”

  In the years to come, whenever Dominick told the fat girl anecdote, he put Evans on the phone with his right-hand man at Paramount, Peter Bart—as if to add an audience to his insult and injury. “We never made calls together,” Bart said of his tenure at Paramount with Evans. “I was never on the phone with him.”

  According to Bart, who later became Variety’s editor in chief, there were two potential box-office bombs in the works at Paramount in 1973: Ash Wednesday and John Schlesinger’s film adaptation of The Day of the Locust. Ash Wednesday was Evans’s baby, and Locust was Bart’s.

  “I felt Ash Wednesday was a ridiculous exercise,” Bart recalled. “I never had a meeting on it. But Evans got his revenge. Bob stayed out of The Day of the Locust completely, and got his revenge on me.”

  Although Dominick continued to disparage Tramont whenever he told his Ash Wednesday story, Bart knew another man.

  “Jean-Claude shouldn’t have tried to be a director or screenwriter,” said Bart, “but he was a substantial and brilliant financial guy. Today you’d call him a financial adviser, and good at it. I think he made Sue Mengers a lot of money.” Also defending Tramont was the agent’s biographer, Brian Kellow, who wrote that Jean-Claude Tramont was, indeed, born in Belgium and given that name at birth. Kellow surmised that Tramont might have later changed his name to Jack Schwartz in order to assimilate when he and his mother moved to America.

  Tramont died of cancer at age sixty-six in 1996, and while he enjoyed a substantial career beyond the film business, it is also true that his girlfriend-turned-wife, Sue Mengers, did help to end Dominick’s career in Hollywood.

  Unwittingly, Elizabeth Taylor may have thrown the knockout punch to Dominick’s career by repeating the fat girl anecdote to any number of hairdressers, makeup artists, stylists, and other fashion sycophants who, in turn, told it to Marvene Jones. The Hollywood Reporter columnist made a frequent habit of quoting, if not shamelessly plugging, such sources in her fawning coverage of the movie star.

  Dominick was not Mengers’s only victim. “She destroyed Nick, she tried to destroy me,” said Larry Peerce, “and then she wanted to be my agent. She was a very complex human being. Such craziness with that woman.”

  4

  Begelman and Purgatory

  Once again, he was broke, and worse, Dominick thought he would never produce again in film or television after the Ash Wednesday debacle. He had no choice in 1974 but to accept a midlevel position at a new division of RCA. Tom McDermott, a former boss at Four Star, got him the job “as a favor,” said friends. Working at Spectavision took him several steps down from being the producer of an Elizabeth Taylor movie, but it paid the rent, if not his kids’ tuition at private schools. Lenny shouldered that responsibility.

  Dominick still had a few parties to attend, not as many as before, but a few. On nights with nothing better to do, Dominick put on his satin dressing gown and green velvet monogrammed slippers and got drunk. He also smoked some grass, sniffed a few lines of coke, maybe dropped a little acid, and carried on imaginary conversations with two of his favorite authors. He wrote in his journal that Noël Coward and W. Somerset Maugham encouraged him to be a writer. In Dominick’s midnight imagination, never did the two ghosts arrive to visit on the same evening at Spalding Drive. Dominick knew better than to make himself the third wheel at such a party, but in separate late-night tête-à-têtes, Noël and Somerset repeatedly told him he had real talent.

  Dominick’s days were somewhat less fanciful than his nights. The job at Spectavision involved watching lots of old movies and making recommendations to RCA on which classic titles should be put on video. His new office could not compare to the one at Four Star; regardless, Dominick believed in making a good impression. Although not spacious, the office needed to appear sophisticated in a way that belied his real status at the company. He thought some original art on the walls might help and asked friends for recommendations of young, talented, and, most important, inexpensive painters. He interviewed several such artists, and one of those was a twenty-four-year-old named Norman Carby. Dominick bought two drawings. “They were illustrative, ink on acrylic wash,” Carby recalled. “They were of buildings.” Dominick liked the art. He also liked the dark, bearded, handsome, and six-foot-five young man, and invited him to dinner. Carby turned out to be as pleasant and good natured as he was tall. Despite his being very much in love with Frederick Combs, Dominick began an intimate relationship with the artist that w
ould continue, often long distance, for the rest of his life.

  “Dominick told people that I met him through Dominique, but that’s not the truth,” said Norman Carby. “We met that day in his office. Later, he introduced me to Dominique and she and I became very good friends. I was also very close to Lenny.” Dominick thought people would be less suspicious of his relationship with the young painter if he said they met through his daughter rather than it being a chance encounter. A fringe benefit of dating Carby was that Frederick Combs also found Dominick’s new boyfriend attractive, and on a couple of occasions the three of them slept together. Those were the only times Dominick enjoyed sex with Combs, who always refused a “one on one,” as Dominick described it.

  Although he and Carby never lived together, they became a couple at about the time that Dominick lost his mother. Dorothy Dunne passed away in December 1974. Dominick said his mother “didn’t come into her own until after my father died.” His brother John wrote that their mother’s life “had been a tomb of secrets.” At the end of Dorothy’s life, she proved more forthcoming with her younger son. When John told of problems in his own marriage, she said divorce was not an option for a Roman Catholic but “drink” and “drugs” were. Dominick wanted to talk to her about his father, and why she never intervened to stop the beatings. “That didn’t happen,” Dorothy replied. “Why do you say these things?”

  As Dominick’s friends in the entertainment business abandoned him, one manager stayed loyal and never failed to invite him to his parties—of which there were many in the 1970s. Being a very successful Hollywood manager, Allan Carr made sure to keep an extremely diverse talent roster that included Ann-Margret, Dyan Cannon, Cass Elliot, Marvin Hamlisch, Rosalind Russell, and Peter Sellers. Curiously, as Dominick’s status in Hollywood declined, the flamboyant Carr, who wore colorful caftans to cover his morbid obesity, turned himself into the town’s major party-giver, a latter-day Elsa Maxwell in the post–Charles Manson Hollywood. To facilitate that transformation, Carr bought Ingrid Bergman’s legendary Hilhaven Lodge in Beverly Hills, built an Egyptian-themed disco in the basement, and made sure to feature cutting-edge, if not downright raunchy, entertainment at his parties. With groups like the gender-bending Cycle Sluts in performance at Hilhaven, Carr turned his homosexuality into a fanciful calling card in an era when David Geffen dated Cher and Elton John took a wife. His parties were not so much A-list as they were A-to-D list with plenty of pretty, willing young men and women thrown into the drug-spiked punch.