Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 6

  “I need the script back by early Monday morning,” he ordered. It was Friday.

  Crowley hardly slept for the next three nights and bunkered down in his office at Four Star to rewrite The Bette Davis Show. He even gave Davis’s character, an interior decorator, a gay sidekick whom he envisioned being played by Paul Lynde. “Which was, after Cassandra at the Wedding, another indication of the way I was going,” he said. Monday morning, before anyone arrived at the studio, Crowley slipped the script under Dominick’s door and went home to crash.

  Dominick hand-delivered the script to Bette Davis’s home. A maid told him that the lady of the house was not there, but would he please wait in the foyer anyway. The maid then walked the script to another room, closing the door behind her. From within, Dominick soon heard Margo Channing’s inimitable dry cackle of a laugh. Fifteen minutes later, Bette Davis appeared, beaming, pages in hand. “This is terrific. I’ve never laughed so hard,” she said.

  All of a sudden, the pilot was a go again. Except for Davis’s gay sidekick. “Paul Lynde and Bette Davis would have been hilarious together,” said Crowley. But CBS said no: the sidekick had to be played by an actress.

  “Who can we get for Bette?” asked Dominick. “She’s so paranoid about her looks.”

  In tests, Davis had demanded more flattering lighting, and even had her neck painted a dark brown to create a shadow effect to hide her wrinkles. Crowley suggested Mary Wickes, who appeared in such Davis vehicles as Now, Voyager and The Man Who Came to Dinner. “She’s not intimidated by her,” said Crowley.

  “Wickes would be perfect,” said Dominick.

  And they were perfect together. Wickes did not get in the way and never tried to steal a scene. “But Bette couldn’t adjust to the rapid pace of television,” said Crowley, and she started acting like she was back at Warner Bros., demanding retakes and holding up production.

  Four Star scheduled a typical five-day shoot for the pilot, retitled The Decorator. “And by Wednesday the sponsor had already pulled the plug,” said Crowley. They did not want to get involved with a temperamental star. Dominick, however, had to keep the news away from Davis since they had two more days of shooting. “Bette would have freaked out if she knew,” Crowley recalled. When she was told on the following Monday, Bette Davis did as everyone expected. She freaked out.

  The Decorator did not become the big success Dominick needed at Four Star. But Crowley would not forget the favor, and it was he who would give Dominick his second act in Hollywood.

  In the summer of 1965, Lenny rented a house in Malibu so she and the kids could spend less time with Dominick. She also accepted a rich cousin’s invitation to vacation with him and his boyfriend on a yacht in the Greek isles. Alex Dunne recalled the day she arrived back home in Beverly Hills after being away from the family for two months. “Mom walked in the door with her sandals over her shoulder. We were all ‘Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!’ And she was real cool. ‘Hi, kids.’ And walked on. It was the first time for her to live her own life,” he said. Alex told the anecdote without resentment at either parent. “We had the nanny,” he explained.

  Lenny wanted out of the marriage, and Dominick did not see it coming. He and Lenny were driving home from a party “she didn’t want to attend” when he got the news. “She wanted to separate from me,” he wrote. Dominick pulled his Mercedes-Benz convertible over to the curb on Sunset Boulevard and started to cry.

  Griffin would later say that his father “lacked the substance she craved. . . . He was a very superficial guy. He needed those parties,” which had become “more important than his family. He lost his way.”

  Alex voiced a simpler reason for the breakup. “It couldn’t have been fun to be married to a gay man who couldn’t quite make up his own mind. I’m sure that was hard for my mom,” he said.

  Friends also put the breakup at the door of Dominick’s sexual orientation.

  “I think she found out something concrete,” said Crowley. “Because of Lenny’s disdain and utter turning on him, I think she got wind of something. She was so contained and there was so much anger going on in there.”

  She and Crowley were close. “Every year, Mart would give my mother a movie-related gift,” Alex Dunne recalled. One year, Crowley gave Lenny a sled with the name Rosebud printed on it; another year, she received a satin pillow, the name Rebecca embroidered in the slightly scorched satin. But having homosexual friends is different from being married to one.

  Crowley claimed never to have discussed Dominick’s sexual orientation with him. “Whatever I found out I found out from other people,” he said. “And sometimes way after the fact, and I was astounded because he had lied to me.”

  In his private journals, Dominick was honest, at least with himself. He wrote about Lenny having dinner guests at the Beverly Hills house and his taking the men to the Chateau Marmont afterward to have sex. He liked the hotel’s old Hollywood ambiance and would regale with stories about all the famous people he knew, from Gore Vidal to Paul Newman, who used to stay there on the fifth floor. But inevitably, Dominick would “regret” his infidelity as soon as he left the Chateau.

  At their rented Malibu beach house, Dominick invited his call boys to stay to have lunch. He called them his “masseurs.” It was a bold, repeated indiscretion that his sister-in-law Joan Didion observed and wrote about in her 1970 novel, Play It as It Lays, in which she based a closeted, substance-abusing movie producer on Dominick. And there were other more innocuous signs that Dominick was not a typical father with wife and kids. The family’s two pet poodles answered to Oscar and Bosie, named after Oscar Wilde and his callow lover Lord Alfred Douglas.

  Masseurs and curiously named poodles were not the only thing Dominick brought into his home.

  “The first time I dropped acid, I dropped it with Jay,” Dominick recalled. “He brought it over to my house on Walden Drive one time when Lenny and the kids were at her mother’s ranch.” It was Jay Sebring who also introduced Dominick to Sharon Tate, soon to be a victim, along with the haircutter, of the Charles Manson gang.

  Lenny had reason to be angry, and her sense of betrayal was evident not only to Mart Crowley. In the early days of their separation, Dominick often remarked how hurt he was that all her friends “despised” him. Lenny’s going to too many Hollywood parties was the least of her problems with the marriage.

  One of those “friends” met Lenny through Connie Wald, wife of the prolific film producer Jerry Wald. “Connie hated Dominick because he sold her his dog,” the novelist Susanna Moore recalled. “What kind of man sells his dog?” Mrs. Wald used to ask rhetorically.

  “People loved Lenny,” said Moore. “She wasn’t Fitzgerald-ish, but there was something lost about her, certainly in the marriage that caused her to be adrift. She had great charm and was funny and was used to people in power. Dominick had a camera with him and took pictures of everything, every meeting and party. It was intrusive. It wasn’t her nature.”

  With the breakup of their marriage, Lenny attempted to keep her anger away from the Dunne children, and devised a quick and seemingly easy plan to make their separation less traumatic. She would take the kids to Coronado Island off the coast of San Diego, giving Dominick a few days to remove all his belongings from the Walden Drive house. Not that Lenny was the most conservative parent. During their brief respite away from home, she and Griffin planned to make a stop at her in-laws’ place on Franklin Avenue in Los Feliz. It was a twenty-eight-room house, and John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion rented out its many bedrooms to artists and other writers, including the future novelist Susanna Moore. The couple did not charge high rents because, as Didion described the place, “paint peeled inside and out, and pipes broke and window sashes crumbled and the tennis court had not been rolled since 1933.” Much more significant to keeping the multiple rents low was the “senseless-killing neighborhood” in which the once-elegant mansion now stood. None of which kept Lenny away from a party where Janis Joplin promised to be a guest. Alex
and Dominique were a tad young, but Griffin, recently a teenager, could handle such an adult party, she thought. Mother and son both wanted to see Janis Joplin. Joan Didion recalled the rock star being at the party, which took place about a year before Joplin died of a drug overdose. “She had just done a concert and she wanted brandy-and-Benedictine in a water tumbler. Music people never wanted ordinary drinks,” Didion wrote.

  Self-destructive rock stars were one thing. What Lenny did not want any of her children to witness was an emotionally fraught scene between her and Dominick. Lenny planned for them to tell their three children everything in a most civilized manner after Dominick finished moving out.

  But “he totally changed the game plan,” Griffin recalled. Back together with his family at Walden Drive, Dominick began well, following his wife’s careful scenario, telling the children, “Your mother and I have decided . . .” Then he broke down. “Your mother wants to divorce me!” he blurted out.

  Lenny could only roll her eyes.

  Dominick would try to win her back, but she was not having it. “Nick forever referred to Lenny as ‘my wife,’” said Crowley. “And that drove Lenny up the wall.”

  She told people, “We are divorced. I am not his wife.” Dominick and Lenny’s separation was immediate, although the couple did not finalize the divorce for three years.

  In one respect, the separation left unaffected Dominick’s status in Hollywood. He was equally delighted and relieved when the Los Angeles Times’ gossip columnist kept both him and Lenny on her celebrated A-list. Joyce Haber had recently taken over for Hedda Hopper at the newspaper, where she promptly coined the term “A-list” to designate the town’s top echelon of stars, power players, and society ladies. Dominick knew of Haber long before she arrived at the Times. His brother John used to date Haber in their Time magazine days together. She was the kind of woman, said John, who had two opinions of men: either they were gay or they were rapists. Dominick knew never to cross Haber, and stayed on her good side by feeding her party news and other gossip.

  “There were a lot of calls from Nick Dunne in those days,” said Haber’s assistant Harry Clein, who later became a top Hollywood publicist. Dominick made a habit of phoning Haber the morning after a party they had both attended. Already a chronic alcoholic, she did not have a great memory, and Dominick helped her with his pointed observations, telling the gossip who arrived with whom and who left with whom. It was one way of staying on Haber’s A-list, even if most people in town thought he no longer belonged there.

  Feeding items to a columnist, however, could not save his job at Four Star, a company without any hits in the late 1960s. Despite his precarious position there, Dominick rented a three-bedroom apartment with maid’s room at 132 South Spalding Drive in Beverly Hills. “It was marvelous,” said Alex Dunne. “When we went to visit, each of us kids had our own bedroom. And there was a room for a live-in Chinese butler, but he didn’t last long.”

  Dominick drank and dropped acid to forget that his family no longer lived with him during the week. He had once criticized actor Michael Caine for smoking marijuana in his home. Now, by his own definition, Dominick was a “real pot head.” While vacationing in Acapulco, he led two lives, just as he did in Los Angeles. During the day in Mexico, Dominick purchased an ounce of marijuana from a boy selling it at a gay beach there. At night, he dined with actress Merle Oberon and went to the ballet with Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks.

  On the trip back to Los Angeles, Dominick considered stashing his marijuana in the airplane seat to avoid taking it through customs. On second thought, he wanted to smoke it when he got home, even though he had plenty of grass stored there. Besides, he looked “the picture of propriety” in his gray suit made for him by Angelo in Rome. Everyone else on the Western Airlines flight looked like a tourist; Dominick looked like a business executive and, as always, he flew first class. What did he have to worry about?

  No sooner did he get to customs than two men asked Dominick to follow them to another room. When he answered that he had no drugs, the undercover officers quickly searched him to find the marijuana in a suit pocket. They then stripped him and gave him an anal probe. Standing there naked, Dominick worried about his children. John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion were bringing Alex and Dominique to the airport. What if they saw him? Two officers carried Dominick under his arms through the airport to a waiting police car, its red light flashing. Fortunately, Joan and John had taken his children back home as soon as they suspected Dominick’s arrest and somehow made sure Alex and Dominique saw nothing.

  The couple bailed him out of jail the next morning, and Joan suggested he spend the next few nights at their house instead of returning to his Spalding Drive apartment. She feared Dominick might be suicidal; he feared the arrest would make the papers.

  Dominick received a surprise phone call from a man he barely knew, offering his help. He had met Beldon Katleman at a few Hollywood parties, but Dominick never invited him to his own home because of his ties to organized crime in Las Vegas. Worse, Lenny found him uncommonly vulgar, especially after Katleman paid her a crass compliment. Dominick also found it crass, but, unlike Lenny, he also found the remark funny, so funny he repeated it to his sister-in-law, who promptly paraphrased the line to read “What I like about your wife . . . is she’s not a cunt” and put it in her novel Play It as It Lays. Katleman, however, did not make the “cunt” remark in reference to Lenny. He said it to her face: “What I like about you is . . .”

  As instructed, Dominick went to Katleman’s house at 200 Baroda Drive in Holmby Hills to discuss his upcoming day in court. He knew the house well. It was a modernist glass, wood, and stone treasure formerly owned by Gary Cooper, whose daughter, Maria, was Dominique’s godmother. The place had changed. Gone were the English antiques and other signs of good taste. Dominick looked around. Everything seemed to have been doused in the color orange. Katleman lived with a starlet, and as soon as Dominick arrived, Katleman told the girlfriend to “beat it.”

  Katleman invited Dominick to join him in the sauna room. He asked about his arrest. Dominick lied. Katleman told him he did not want to hear the “bullshit” and to tell him the name of the judge who would be hearing the case. Katleman knew the guy and told Dominick not to worry. End of sauna, end of visit.

  Only Dominick’s lawyer was more shocked than he when the judge threw the case out of court. Afterward, the lawyer asked Dominick, “Who do you know?”

  Dominick phoned Katleman to ask him, “Why did you do that?” And Katleman explained, “Because when I went to parties and no one would speak to me, you always spoke to me.”

  In the following decade, Dominick would call himself “an architect of my own destruction.” But even the arrest at LAX did not change his ways. The only lesson he learned from his previous drug bust was to smoke his marijuana on the plane before he departed it.

  In 1970 the future novelist Michael M. Thomas sat on the board of Twentieth Century Fox and owned a small piece of the L.A. Rams. That year, he boarded a 747 flight from New York to Los Angeles to see his team play against the New York Giants, and he and a friend immediately broke out some cookies laced with marijuana to better enjoy the cross-country trip. “When we went for the loo to step up the cookies, and in the middle of this enormous cloud of cannabis smoke coming from the restroom was this little figure,” he recalled. It was Dominick Dunne, fresh from smoking a joint. “What till you see what we’ve got,” Thomas told this total stranger. “And we enjoyed the rest of our marijuana in the loo and went back to our seats.”

  Shortly before he lost his job at Four Star, Dominick ran into Mart Crowley at a party in Malibu. The Royal Ballet of England, of all things, was being honored in Lalaland. “I’m worried about you,” Dominick began. “You’re drinking and not working.” Dominick drank as much as Crowley, but at least he had a job. At least for a few more months. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Crowley replied. “I’m busy. I’m writing a play.”<
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  “Great. What’s it about?”

  “It’s about a bunch of gay guys getting together at a birthday party.”

  That one-sentence synopsis almost knocked Dominick speechless, but he made an attempt at diplomacy. “Well, Mart, I think it’s great you’re writing a play. It’s good for you. It’s therapeutic . . .”

  Therapeutic? Crowley flinched. “It’s going to be terrific. It is terrific!”

  Trying to be supportive, Dominick asked about the play’s title. Crowley was not sure. He liked The Birthday Party, but Harold Pinter beat him to it. Then there was Somebody’s Children, but it sounded maudlin. “How about The Boys in the Band?” he asked.

  Dominick did not know what it meant. Crowley explained: it’s that line in A Star Is Born when James Mason tells an insecure Judy Garland, “You’re singing for yourself and the boys in the band.”

  While Dominick was not sold on the title, he knew for sure what he thought about a play with nothing but homosexual characters. “Just don’t let it throw you if it doesn’t get produced,” he said.

  What Crowley did not tell Dominick is that he based one of the play’s characters on him.

  Much to Dominick’s surprise, less than a year after their talk on the beach in Malibu, The Boys in the Band opened to rave reviews in New York City and proved such a hit that Crowley could easily afford his dream of living in Manhattan’s legendary Algonquin Hotel.

  On the West Coast, it was now Dominick’s turn to be the one out of work, having lost his job at Four Star and so hard up for money that he had to give up his live-in Chinese butler. In his journal, he wrote of receiving $80,000 dollars in “alimony” from Lenny, which he now spent to live. It was 50 percent of the estimated value on the Walden Drive house, where the rest of his family continued to live.

  3

  Mengers and Disaster

  When he had to let his butler go, Dominick feared he would also have to give up the spectacular Spalding Drive apartment. That was when Mart Crowley returned the favor of The Decorator and made Dominick his executive producer on the film version of The Boys in the Band. Crowley parlayed the play’s international success into a film contract making him producer-screenwriter and retaining the original Off Broadway cast. He lost only one battle: keeping the stage director Robert Moore. CBS Films insisted on someone at the helm with film experience.