Another City Not My Own Read online

  “DUNNE HAS A TERRIFIC EAR FOR DISH.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Entertaining … Before you scream, ‘Please, not another O. J. book!’ be advised that Dominick Dunne’s hybrid ‘novel in the form of a memoir’ is only partly about the Simpson trial. Its main subject, explored with humor and authority, is the arcane social life of America’s weirdest small town, Hollywood.… Dunne’s lingering rage, and not his great talent for gossip, is what drives this clever dispatch from a very creepy place.”

  —People

  “Dominick hasn’t lost a feather of his magic touch.… He reminds me of Truman Capote in his heyday, only better grounded, not bitchy and very down to earth.”

  —Liz Smith

  “Dunne bobs and weaves so skillfully from Veronica Hearst to Heidi Fleiss that his fiction (or is it journalism?) is something like delicate needlework.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “COMPULSIVELY READABLE …

  Names are dropped as seductively as Eve’s

  forbidden apple.”

  —Vogue

  “As searing social Commentary, Another City, Not My Own has the backbone of true conviction.… It’s when good and evil blur, when gossip sounds like truth, when schmoozing creates the framework of culture, that Dunne’s ‘novel’ … succeeds brilliantly.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A savory serving laced with the tangy gossip, keen reportage, crisp irreverence, and moral outrage that have become this Hartford native’s hallmarks as a premier celebrity journalist and bestselling novelist … His unabashed partisanship, bold individualism, moral fervor, and uncanny ability to sweep up fascinating bits and pieces of gossip coalesce and make him our best and brightest observer and sometimes acerbic critic of the rich and famous.… Dunne is dandy with a wonderfully viperish sting.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “Intriguing and absorbing.”

  —New York Post

  “JUICY, IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “The lyricism of Dunne’s prose transcends Hard Copyish titillation.… Part of Another City’s enchantment is that we never can be quite sure how much is true and how much is imagined.… Only a master such as Dunne could find a way to extend suspense and, on Another City’s last pages, conclude with a stunner that elevates an already exceptional book.”

  —Ft. Worth Star-Telegram

  “Luscious details … The ‘novel’ has a certain compelling charm. It is entertaining. It is a breeze to read. For all of its tragic veneer, it’s a hoot. But what is fact and what is fiction? Who knows!”

  —Cincinnati Enquirer

  “Fasten your seat belts.… Looks like Dominick’s done it again.”

  —W

  “If you’re drawn to the notion of Dish, here’s a feast.… Everything about this novel-memoir works. It’s wonderfully written, salacious, atmospheric.… As a novel, this book is gripping and entertaining. As a memoir, it is moving and honest. And as a moral tale, it cuts to the bone of the remarkable story of the O. J. Simpson trial, in which we were bombarded with an incalculable amount of imagery but found little truth.”

  —Newsday

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1997 by Dominick Dunne

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Portions of this book were previously printed in Vanity Fair.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-93240

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81509-5

  This edition published by arrangement with Crown Publishers, Inc.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  1

  Yes, yes, it’s true. The conscientious reporter sets aside his personal views when reporting events and tries to emulate the detachment of a camera lens, all opinions held in harness, but the man with whom this narrative deals did not adhere to this dictum, at least when it came to the subject of murder, a subject with which he had had a personal involvement in the past. Consequently, his reportage was rebuked in certain quarters of both the journalistic and the legal professions, which was a matter of indifference to him. He never hesitated to speak up and point out, in print or on television, that his reportage on matters of murder was cheered by much larger numbers in other quarters. “Walk down Madison Avenue with me and see for yourself how often I am stopped by total strangers,” he said in reply to a hate letter he received from an enraged man who wrote that he had vilified O. J. Simpson “through the pages of your pretentious magazine for two and a half years.”

  His name, as it appeared in print or when he was introduced on television, was Augustus Bailey, but he was known to his friends, and even to those who disliked him intensely, because of the way he had written about them, as Gus, or Gus Bailey. His name appeared frequently in the newspapers. His lectures were sold out. He was asked to deliver eulogies at important funerals or to introduce speakers at public events in hotel ballrooms. He knew the kind of people who said “We’ll send our plane” when they invited him for weekends in distant places.

  From the beginning, you have to understand this about Gus Bailey: He knew what was going to happen before it happened. His premonitions had far less to do with fact than with his inner feelings, on which he had learned to rely greatly in the last half dozen years of his life. He said over the telephone to his younger son, Zander, the son who was lost in a mountain-climbing mishap during the double murder trial of Orenthal James Simpson, “I don’t know why, but I keep having this feeling that something untoward is going to happen to me.”

  Certainly, there are enough references to his obliteration in his journal in the months before he was found dead in the media room of his country house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, where he had been watching the miniseries of one of his novels, A Season in Purgatory. The book was about a rich young man who got away with murder because of the influence of his prominent and powerful father. Getting away with murder was a relentless theme of Gus Bailey’s. He was pitiless in his journalistic and novelistic pursuit of those who did, as well as of those in the legal profession who created the false defenses that often set their clients free. That book, the miniseries of which he was watching, had brought Gus Bailey and the unsolved murder in Greenwich, Connecticut, which, to avoid a libel suit, he had renamed Scarborough Hill, a great deal of notoriety at the time of its publication, resulting in the reopening of the murder case by the police. Gus had fervently believed
that the case remained unsolved because the police had been intimidated by the power and wealth of the killer’s family, which extended all the way to the highest office in the land.

  “It was exactly the same thing in the Woodward case,” said Gus, who had written an earlier novel about a famous society shooting in the aristocratic Woodward family on Long Island in the fifties called The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. “The police were simply outdazzled by the grandeur of Elsie, whom I called Alice Grenville, and Ann Woodward got away with shooting her husband.”

  As always, when Gus’s passions were involved in his writing, he ruffled feathers. Powerful families became upset with him. He created enemies.

  “You seem to have annoyed a great many very important people,” said Gillian Greenwood of the BBC, as a statement not a question, in the living room of Gus Bailey’s New York penthouse, where she was interviewing him on camera for a documentary on his life called The Trials of Augustus Bailey.

  Gus, who was used to being on camera, nodded agreement with her statement. “True,” he replied.

  “Do people ever dislike you, the way you write about them?” asked Gillian, who was producing and directing the documentary.

  “There seems to be a long line,” answered Gus.

  “Does that bother you?” she asked.

  “It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose,” said Gus.

  “Does it bother you?” Gillian repeated.

  “Sometimes yes. It depends who, really. Do I care that a killer or a rapist dislikes me? Or the lawyers who get them acquitted? Of course not. Some of those people, like Leslie Abramson, I am proud to be disliked by.”

  “Yes, yes, Leslie Abramson,” said Gillian. “She told us you weren’t in her league when we interviewed her for this documentary.”

  Gus, who was a lapsed Catholic, looked heavenward as he replied, “Thank you, God, that I am not in Leslie Abramson’s league.”

  “What happens when you meet these people you write about? You must run into some of them, the way you go out so much, and the circles you travel in.”

  “It does happen. It’s not uncommon. Mostly, it’s very civilized. Averted eyes, that sort of thing. A fashionable lady in New York, Mrs. de la Renta, turned her back on me at dinner one night and spoke not a word in my direction for the hour and a half we were sitting on gold chairs in Chessy Rayner’s dining room. I rather enjoyed that. Sometimes it’s not quite so civilized, and there have been a few minor skirmishes in public.”

  “That’s what I want to hear about,” said Gillian.

  Gus laughed. “I seem to have annoyed a rather select number of your countrymen when I wrote in Vanity Fair magazine that I believed the British aristocrat Lord Lucan, who murdered his children’s nanny in the mistaken belief that she was his wife and then vanished off the face of the earth, was alive and well and being supported in exile by a group of very rich men who enjoyed the sport of harboring a killer from the law. Certain of those men were very annoyed with me.”

  “Oh, let me guess,” said Gillian. “You annoyed the all-powerful James Goldsmith, and he’s very litigious.”

  “Curiously enough, not Jimmy Goldsmith, who had every reason to be annoyed,” said Gus. “He chose to treat the whole thing as a tremendous joke. ‘Gus here thinks Lucky Lucan is hiding out at my place in Mexico,’ he said one night at a party at Wendy Stark’s in Hollywood, which we both attended, and everyone roared with laughter at such an absurdity.”

  “Who, then?” persisted Gillian.

  “Selim Zilkha, a very rich Iraqi who used to live in London, had dinner with Lucky Lucan the night before the murder, which I wrote about. Now he lives in Bel Air. He made a public fuss about me at the opening night of Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, when he chastised one of his guests, the Countess of Dudley, who was visiting from London, for greeting me with a kiss on each cheek. He referred to me by a four-letter word beginning with s that I can’t say on television.”

  “What happened?”

  “The countess, who was no stranger to controversy herself, told off Zilkha in no uncertain terms,” said Gus. “She said she’d kiss whomever she wanted to kiss and, furthermore, ‘Gus Bailey is an old friend of many years.’ ”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Another Lucan instance happened in your country,” said Gus. “Another of the men I mentioned, John Aspinall, a rich guy who owned the gambling club above Annabel’s where Lord Lucan was a shill, made a terrible fuss at a Rothschild dance in London. He wanted Evelyn to throw me out.”

  “Were you thrown out?”

  “Of course not. The way I look at it is this: If Lucan is dead, as they all claim, why don’t they just laugh me off as a quack? Why do I enrage them so?”

  Gus always said that the reason he knew so many people was that he had gone out to dinner nearly every night of his adult life. He was a magnet for information. “People tell me things; they always have,” said Gus in an interview he did for Harper’s Bazaar when A Season in Purgatory was published. “People tell me things they tell no one else.” There had been a time in an earlier career when he was thought to be an unserious person by people who mattered, because of his relentless pursuit of social life. In the overall scheme of things, as Gus came to realize, it was all part of the natural order; the earlier career in film and television had been merely a steppingstone for the vocation that he was meant to have. It was only the hindsight of years that brought about this realization. He came to understand that the failure and shame with which that earlier career ended were a necessity for him to have experienced in order to fulfill his vocation.

  He ran into great numbers of people on his nightly outings. The kind of people he knew, for the most part, were either the possessors of information or friends of the possessors of information. He had an inordinate knack for meeting up with the exact person who could put him in touch with someone who had the piece of the puzzle that he needed right at that moment.

  During the several years when the von Bülow case was the most discussed scandal in New York society since the Woodward scandal years before, when Ann Woodward shot and killed her rich young husband as he emerged from the shower, everyone who ever knew Claus or Sunny von Bülow had something to tell Gus about one or the other of them, when he was covering the trial for Vanity Fair magazine. “Claus cut Sunny off from all her old friends, Gus,” said the social figure Diego del Vayo when they were having lunch at Mortimer’s in New York. “The last time I saw Sunny was at Peggy d’Uzes’s funeral at St. James. We all wanted to talk to her. None of us had seen her, but Claus kept leading her to the limousine, away from us, so no one was able to speak to her, and as the car pulled away, she waved at me out the window, and our eyes met. She looked so sad. Poor Sunny.”

  “Newport’s split right down the center, Gus, as to whether Claus did or didn’t do it,” said Kay Kay Somerset at a dinner given by the Countess Lisette de Ramel at her house on Bellevue Avenue. “Most everyone’s on the children’s side, of course, Ala and Alex, divine kids, but there’re a few very powerful ladies who are strongly behind Claus. You simply can’t invite Mrs. John Nicholas Brown and Mrs. John Slocum to the same dinners; that’s how bitterly the town is divided.”

  “You know, Gus, if you’re interested, I could arrange for you to meet the children of Sunny von Bülow, Ala and Alexander von Auersperg,” said Freddie Eberstadt, one of Gus’s oldest friends, as the two were chatting in a corner one night at the apartment of Chessy Rayner. “Isabel and I went to Sunny’s wedding in Greenwich when she married Alfie von Auersperg. We’ve known Ala and Alexander all their lives, practically. They’re fabulous young people, not at all these druggy spoiled rich kids that Claus and his lady friend, Mrs. Reynolds, are spreading stories about. They’ve never spoken to anyone in the media, but Pammie Woolworth—I’m sure you know Pammie, Barbara Hutton’s cousin—Pammie’s one of Sunny’s very best friends, and she thinks Ala and Alexander will talk to you, because of Becky, and what happened to you and Peach.”

>   “Gus, would you like to come to Newport and spend the night at Clarendon Court?” asked Prince Alexander von Auersperg, the son of Sunny von Bülow. “I’ll show you the closet where we found the bag. You can see for yourself the bedroom where it all happened. Nothing has been moved or changed. It’s just the way it was that night. Even Mummy’s Christmas presents remain unopened.”

  “Hello, Gus, this is Andrea Reynolds. Claus and I were wondering if you could come to lunch this Sunday, when we’re all back in New York from this ghastly Providence, Rhode Island. It’s at one-fifteen. We’ll sit down at two. There’ll be about sixteen, depending on whether Ormolu and Fran will be in town. Nine Sixty Fifth. Yes, it’s the same apartment where Claus and Sunny lived. Now, I have a bone to pick with you, Gus. It is not true what you wrote, that I am wearing Sunny’s clothes and jewels.”

  “Come over for lunch today, Gus,” said Mollie Wilmot when they ran into each other on the steps of St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Palm Beach, Florida, after Sunday Mass. Mollie, who wintered in Palm Beach and summered in Saratoga, had gained a great deal of notoriety when a Russian tanker crashed into the seawall of her property on Ocean Boulevard. “Dimitri of Yugoslavia’s coming, and a few others you know.”

  Gus was then in residence at the Brazilian Court Hotel, while covering the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith for Vanity Fair. “Sunday’s a writing day for me, Mollie,” he answered. “My first article on the trial is due tomorrow, so I’m just going to have lunch in the room at the hotel.”

  “I live right next door to the Kennedy compound on Ocean Boulevard,” said Mollie.

  “You do?”

  “You’re perfectly welcome to stand on a chair next to the wall by my swimming pool, where you can see the whole backyard, where the rape happened, or didn’t happen, depending on which side you’re on, and everyone in town knows what side you’re on.”

  “That is irresistible,” said Gus. “Of course I’ll come. How much of the Kennedy family’s there?”