Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts Page 7

  “We wouldn’t have gotten Billy Friedkin without Nick,” said Crowley. Dominick and Friedkin knew each other from their days at Four Star, and Friedkin had recently directed The Night They Raided Minsky’s and the film version of The Birthday Party. It was the Harold Pinter play that made the powers at CBS Films believe Friedkin, a future Oscar winner, could transfer yet another play about an unusually ominous birthday celebration to the screen. Dominick, at the time, was “down and out and broke, and he needed a job,” said Crowley, “and I needed someone to do all the heavy technical dirty work and be a diplomat with CBS, which I was not. I flunked out of diplomacy school. All the paperwork and money and all the phone calls with people bitching constantly—I didn’t want to do that.”

  Dominick’s duties on Boys included all those phone calls and paperwork but did not end there. He also took care of Crowley’s problem securing a Diners Club card, and on that matter, Dominick put into play his guest list for the Black and White Ball and other parties. He went right to the top, writing to Alfred S. Bloomingdale, the department store heir who had merged his Dine and Sign charge-card business with Diners Club years ago. The formerly cash-strapped Crowley got his piece of plastic from no less a person than the so-called father of the credit card.

  And there were perks, too, for being executive producer. The job put Dominick in daily contact with his most profound infatuation to date. He had met Frederick Combs the year before when the actor performed in the original Off Broadway cast of The Boys in the Band, and Dominick fell in love, madly in love, with the clean-cut, preppy-looking young actor, who played a clean-cut, preppy-looking young man in the play.

  Howard Rosenman, a film and TV producer, knew both men. “I’d never seen that kind of obsession, one person for another, like Nick had for Freddy,” said Rosenman. Dominick managed to spend a great deal of time with Combs, which did not mean the affection was entirely reciprocated.

  Combs was very popular, and not only with Dominick. “Freddy couldn’t go to the corner for a bottle of milk without getting a blow job,” said Crowley. But whether the actor had an intimate relationship with Dominick, Crowley never knew for sure. “That’s the $64,000 question. But it’s very unlikely. Freddy was one of those guys who liked anonymous sex with great-looking guys.” Repeatedly, Crowley overhead Combs tell other men, “I like you, but I’m just not attracted to you. I wish I was.” Dominick was one of those men. “Nick was not Freddy’s type at all,” added Crowley.

  Dominick bore the burden of his unrequited love; in fact, as he would later write in his private journal, it may have been the basis for his attraction to Combs. “I suppose it was that I disgusted him physically that made him so indispensable to my life,” he admitted.

  Most people working on the film did not know that Crowley based one of the play’s characters on his producer-friend Dominick, but a few suspected. In The Boys in the Band, the all-gay birthday party is interrupted when Alan McCarthy, a college friend of the host Michael, makes an unexpected visit to the apartment. Like Dominick was at the time, the character is married but separated from his wife, and despite protestations of the men’s gay behavior, McCarthy does not quickly leave the party. Peter White, the actor who originated the role, wondered if the character was gay or straight. During rehearsals, Robert Moore directed him to play the “ambivalence, so that one-half of the audience thinks he is and the other half thinks he isn’t.” Crowley told him, “You decide and don’t tell me.”

  And Peter White never did. In return, Crowley never revealed to White the prototype for his character. When interviewed for this biography, White spoke of being “flabbergasted” at the news that Crowley based the Alan McCarthy character on Dominick Dunne. “You’re blowing me away with this. My understanding is it was Mart’s roommate in college. I have no idea who told me that at the time. I did meet some of the prototypes for the other characters,” said White.

  Crowley also did not reveal the genesis of the character to Dominick. “We never talked about it,” he said. “I never told him. Whether he knew it or not, I know he suspected.” Some of the lines spoken by the McCarthy character—“I’m not going to put up with this!”—were in Dominick’s standard repertoire of uptight retorts. “Nick got the vibe,” said Crowley.

  So did other friends in their theater circle. “I heard about it,” said Joseph Hardy, who, at the time, was directing Woody Allen’s Broadway comedy Play It Again, Sam.

  “Everybody knew the character was based on Dominick!” claimed Howard Rosenman.

  Curiously, Alan McCarthy is the only character in the play that Crowley chose to give a last name. “The character is named after two men I despised,” said the playwright. “Alan J. Pakula, who was a closet case of some order, and the other is Frank McCarthy, who was General Patton’s right-hand man. McCarthy was gay as a snake, and was the lover of Rupert Allan, a very famous and powerful publicist in Hollywood. They lived in separate houses in Beverly Hills that shared a common courtyard.” Dominick knew Allan, and when tragedy struck his own family in the following decade, he would call the publicist to help with a major public-relations problem.

  Working in New York City on Boys, Dominick sublet an apartment in the East 70s. To enter the building, residents faced several locks, and to boost the security an elaborate alarm system required a code to be punched in to gain entrance. More than once, Dominick entered the wrong numerals, and a security team promptly came to the rescue. In addition to the sophisticated security, the owner of the apartment also splurged on the décor. Griffin Dunne once visited his father there, and when he returned to Los Angeles he told his mother it looked like a French bordello. At least that was the story Dominick told friends. “Griffin was thirteen going on adulthood,” said Rosenman, who sometimes babysat the Dunne children and claimed to have offered Dominick’s oldest child his first joint.

  One night, Dominick made plans to meet Tammy Grimes at nine o’clock at Elaine’s restaurant, twenty blocks away from his Eastside sublet. He knew the actress from the Colony in Malibu when he and Lenny rented a beach house there and Roddy McDowall gave weekend parties starring everyone from Rock Hudson and Sean Connery to Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld. Despite the distance to Elaine’s, Dominick decided to walk but did not get very far. At the corner of Madison and East Seventy-Ninth Street, he spotted a very attractive young man on the street. He cruised Dominick. Dominick cruised back. Dominick looked forward to seeing Tammy Grimes. Not only was she a good friend from the West Coast, but she also was a star, and somebody who always dressed like one. Dominick wanted very much to be seen with her at a high-profile spot like Elaine’s. But this young man on the street was so attractive and so available. “Basket, pecs, buns, you name it, this kid had it,” Dominick noted.

  Back at his sublet, Dominick undid all the locks. He entered the correct security code, careful not to notify a squad car. For some reason, the excessive security unnerved the young man. Inside the apartment, Dominick phoned Grimes to cancel. She was not happy, he could tell. The young man did not know Tammy Grimes from Barbara Cook. But when did Broadway trivia ever compromise hardcore lust? Dominick felt romantic. He lit candles. He poured wine. He rolled a joint and was so mesmerized by the young man’s great looks that he did not notice how theirs was a one-way conversation.

  Dominick, now forty-four years old, had grown a pot belly and was terribly self-conscious. Nor did it help that the pickup refused to remove so much as his shirt but proceeded to undress his host completely. Standing there naked, smoking a joint and holding a glass of wine, Dominick first felt a fist slam hard into his Adam’s apple. He lost his breath; gasping, he collapsed to the floor. Before he could regain control, the stranger tied Dominick’s arms behind his back with a telephone cord, put a paper bag over his head, and started throwing lit matches at him. Dominick’s mind turned to his children. He prayed they did not read about him in the newspapers, another of those “sordid gay murders.”

  Only the constant ringing of the telephone
saved his life. Or was it God answering his prayer that made his attacker leave? He had rummaged through everything, obviously looking for something to steal. Dominick did not know whom to call. He could not phone a straight friend. He thought of Howard Rosenman. He knew his phone number by heart, and with his arms still tied behind his back, Dominick used his nose to dial. Rosenman’s boyfriend answered. John Norton and Dominick had never met but knew each other’s names. When Dominick learned that Rosenman was out of town, he had no choice but to tell a virtual stranger about his dire predicament. Norton promised he would be right over and arrived within the hour. Blanche du Bois is not the only one who relied on the kindness of strangers.

  The summer they filmed The Boys in the Band stood out for reasons other than Dominick’s dangerous sex life. The Stonewall Riots took place, erupting in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, and lasting six days. “This unpleasantness in the Village. It was no big deal,” Mart Crowley recalled thinking at the time. In years to come, the standoff between the police and patrons of the bar would oft be cited as the start of the modern-day gay-rights movement.

  Later that summer, on the other coast, there was no mistaking the impact of what happened on August 9, 1969, when followers of Charles Manson slayed five people in the home of director Roman Polanski. Joan Didion wrote, “I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when [Lenny Dunne] received a telephone call from a friend who had heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang twenty times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory.” With her patented casual despair, Didion added, “I remember that no one was surprised.”

  Dominick remembered being more than surprised at what came to be known as the Helter Skelter murders. He knew two of the victims, Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate. Frantic, he flew back to Los Angeles the day of the Beverly Hills carnage to be with his family. Lenny had received the phone call about the Manson murders from her good friend Natalie Wood, often first with the local gossip in the movie capital. “Children were sent out of town,” Dominick recalled. “Ours went to my mother-in-law’s ranch.” It was not a long visit away from home for either him or his kids. Dominick needed to return to New York to finish The Boys in the Band, which had run a month over schedule and would not be completed until mid-September. The Dunne children went back to school despite fears. Everybody was traumatized, but in some ways, nothing changed for Dominick. Not even a mass murder in his family’s neighborhood could shake his determination to always make a good impression. On August 14 he wrote his brother Richard in Venice, California, asking if he could take a photograph of his three children for the family’s annual Christmas card. Dominick would have done it himself but needed to return to New York to finish Boys. In the letter, Dominick gave instructions to his older brother. He wanted Dominique to wear a long dress and the boys to be put in matching shirts and slacks but nothing too formal. He made only one unusual request: he wanted all three children to be photographed barefoot.

  A façade of normalcy again descended, but not completely. The Hollywood community bunkered down out of fear, and for an entirely different reason nothing would be the same for Ellen Griffin Dunne. When The Boys in the Band finished shooting, Dominick returned to his apartment at Spalding Drive. One evening, Lenny called to invite him to dinner at the Walden Drive house. With the entire family sitting around the dining room table, he could only wish that the five of them had enjoyed more times like this, rather than having the kids eat with a nanny while he made plans to run off to yet another party. Lenny finally told Dominick and her children the news. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The disease was not curable, and her condition would only deteriorate. In the following decade, Lenny had no choice but to sell the Walden Drive house and leave it in a wheelchair.

  The lavish parties that Dominick craved were unthinkable in the wake of the Manson murders. Even the West Coast premiere for The Boys in the Band the following winter was relatively subdued. On March 16, 1970, Natalie Wood invited the company over for drinks at her Beverly Hills home before the screening. Later, she and actress Diana Lynn hosted a small party at Scandia restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. Dominick spent the night “following Freddy around,” said Neil Koenigsberg, the film’s publicist. “Like a puppy dog,” added another observer. Dominick did not seem to notice the gossip he left in his wake. He had never been this public about his desire for another man. Combs and he even took vacations together in Haiti, Hawaii, and Cape Cod, and Dominick, as usual, brought his camera. Combs signed one photograph of himself at the beach, professing his love to Dominick. But as Crowley suspected, it was never an intimate relationship, at least not in the way Dominick wanted.

  Before Boys wrapped, Mart Crowley did what all screenwriters and producers do: he worried about his next project. Making one gay-themed film did not automatically lead to offers on other projects. In fact, the actors had difficulty being cast due to the suspicion that they were all homosexuals; the heterosexual Lawrence Luckinbill even lost a cigarette ad because, as he put it, “They don’t think fags smoke their fags.” Crowley kept fretting, “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.” Surprisingly, it was the formerly unemployed Dominick “who used his exec producer credit on The Boys in the Band to leverage The Panic in Needle Park, even before our film had finished,” said Crowley.

  Dominick looked forward to making a film with his brother John and Joan Didion, and the idea they all liked best was a film version of James Mills’s novel about a couple of young drug addicts on Manhattan’s rough Upper West Side. Didion summarized their film adaptation of The Panic in Needle Park, calling it “Romeo and Juliet on heroin.” It was the kind of short, snappy synopsis film executives loved and Didion delivered often in the coming years. The success of such an offbeat hit as Easy Rider opened the door for another low-budget drug-themed movie, and Dominick’s producer credit on Boys made him acceptable to studios. The positive buzz on Boys helped, too.

  Didion and the Dunne brothers’ ideas for casting their film were unorthodox but right in step with what Hollywood now deemed hip. They wanted Jim Morrison of the Doors to make his screen debut as the drug addict Bobby in The Panic in Needle Park. The Beatles scored with Help! and A Hard Day’s Night, and Mick Jagger had recently been cast in Performance, to be his screen debut. Casting Morrison made sense. Also, Didion and the Dunne brothers had briefly met the rock star, already notorious for his alcoholism and substance abuse. It would be brilliant type-casting, they all thought. Dominick knew Morrison from a party he threw to inaugurate his new bachelor pad on Spalding Drive. Morrison, completely stoned, became so entranced with the multimirrored walls of the apartment’s oval dining room that he got lost in its refracted image. Much to his host’s amazement, the rock star appeared to be fondling himself.

  Joan and John met Morrison under slightly more decorous circumstances. The Doors were recording their third album, Waiting for the Sun, at the Two Terrible Guys Studio near Sunset and Highland in Hollywood. Morrison showed up late, belligerent, drugged, and ready to set his much-inspected crotch on fire with a match. Didion, on assignment from the Saturday Evening Post, hoped to get an interview with the rock star. When Morrison proved incommunicative, she instead wrote an essay about the recording session for her book The White Album. She noted how the Doors talked to each other “from behind some disabling aphasia. . . . There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever.”

  Dominick, with his Boys in the Band producer credit in hand, secured a deal with Avco-Embassy. Although not one of the majors, the studio did have the recent distinction of having released The Graduate, which, together with Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider, revolutionized the Hollywood film industry. John Gregory Dunne had preternaturally charted that business upheaval in 1967 with his nonfiction book The Studio, which dissected Twentieth Century Fox’s box-office disaster Dr. Doolittle, an absurdly overproduced musical that held
no appeal for young audiences raised in the era of the Vietnam War. Didion, ever the cynic, held little hope for the alternative. She wrote how the new studio executives were “narcotized by Easy Rider’s grosses,” and criticized them for thinking “all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget . . . and this terrific 22-year-old kid director.”

  Didion thought nothing of biting the hand that greenlit The Panic in Needle Park.

  The movie may have boasted a budget under one million dollars, but that did not prevent Dominick from getting Avco-Embassy to put him up at the Volney Hotel, once home to Dorothy Parker, on East Seventy-Fourth Street in Manhattan. Since Joan and John were still working on the script, they took up residence at a much less desirable address, the Alamac Hotel, across Broadway and West Seventy-First Street from Sherman Square, home to more addicts than trees and better known as Needle Park. Living at the seedy Alamac, they thought, would be part of their research.

  John and Joan were on their way to being known as the Didions in Hollywood, much to his distress. Their friend Billy Hale, a major TV director (he later directed Dominick’s People Like Us miniseries), remembered the couple scouting Upper West Side locations for The Panic in Needle Park. “They went to Abercrombie & Fitch and bought all these jungle outfits. They were going into the heart of darkness. They took it very seriously,” he said. But not that seriously. The couple typically lunched on the other side of town at La Côte Basque.