Another City Not My Own Read online

  “Willie’s staying there, and all the sisters—Jean, Eunice, and Pat. Ethel comes from time to time,” said Mollie. “You must know them, don’t you, Gus?”

  “I went to Ethel’s wedding in Greenwich, when she married Bobby, and Peach and I used to live next to Pat in Santa Monica when she was married to Peter Lawford. I suppose that qualifies as knowing them,” said Gus.

  “I’d say.”

  “It would be mortifying if any of them saw me peeking over your wall, but I’ll take the chance,” said Gus.

  “What happens when you see them in court?”

  “We pretend we don’t see one another.”

  “Oh, listen, Gus, is it true that Patty whatshername, the so-called rapee—”

  “Alleged is the word, not so-called,” said Gus.

  “Alleged. Is it true she called you at the Brazilian Court the other night after you’d gone to bed and wants you to interview her when the trial’s over?”

  “What time’s lunch?”

  “Say, Gus,” said his friend Anne Siegal one night during dinner at Mortimer’s, just before he left town to cover the Menendez trial in California. “Herb and I have this limousine driver in Los Angeles whom we use every year when we stay at the Bel Air Hotel. Rufus. Can’t remember his last name, but Herb will know. Not only is he wonderful, reliable, et cetera, et cetera, but—listen to this, Gus—he drove the Menendez brothers when they moved into the Bel Air Hotel a day or so after they murdered their parents. Apparently, those two orphans did quite a bit of partying and not too much grieving. Oh yes. Rufus will tell everything. He has some stories you wouldn’t believe about that Dr. Oziel, their psychologist, when the three of them were in the backseat of the limo. Call Herb’s office in the morning, and Sarah, Herb’s secretary, will fax you a copy of Rufus’s card.”

  “Say, Gus, I know this limousine driver in New Orleans who used to be a photographer in West Hollywood,” said Herkie Saybrook during lunch at Herkie’s club, the Knickerbocker, which Gus had called the Butterfield in People Like Us. “This guy, when he was still a photographer, took some, uh, not exactly nude, but semi-nude, not exactly gay, but semi-gay pictures of Erik Menendez before the murders, when he was still at Beverly Hills High and wanted to be a model. Apparently young Erik wasn’t quite as innocent as his lawyer Leslie Abramson would have you believe. Would you like me to put you in touch with him, or him in touch with you?”

  Gus always said yes to all the introductions that were offered to him.

  2

  When Gus was not living in a hotel room somewhere while covering a story for his magazine, he divided his time between a small penthouse that overlooked the East River in the Turtle Bay section of New York and a house in Prud’homme, Connecticut, situated on a cove off the Connecticut River. In New York, he was awakened each morning before six by the sound of the elevator man in his building dropping outside his front door the four newspapers he always read. A few minutes later, the boy from Manny Wolf’s delivered his two containers of coffee and a breakfast roll, and he settled into his favorite chintz-slipcovered chair in the living room for an hour of uninterrupted newspaper reading, which he often said was his favorite time of the day. On June 13, 1994, he was riveted by the headlines in all the papers.

  Nicole Brown Simpson, the former wife of the great football star Orenthal James Simpson, known to sports fans everywhere as O. J., had been found murdered on the patio of her condominium on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, California, along with a young man named Ronald Goldman, who had come to the condo to return a pair of glasses to Nicole Simpson that her mother had left behind earlier when the family dined at the restaurant where he was a waiter. Gus was mesmerized by the newspaper accounts and at seven turned on Good Morning America to watch the television accounts. A few hours later, calls started coming in from reporter friends in California with whom he had covered the Menendez trial.

  “Did you ever know O. J., Gus?” asked Shoreen Maghame of City News, who had sat next to Gus during the Menendez trial.

  “I didn’t, no.”

  “I thought you knew everyone, Gus,” said Shoreen.

  “That’s just a myth,” said Gus. “I used to see him at the Daisy years ago, but I never knew him. The Daisy was a big nightclub in Beverly Hills for years. Peach and I were charter members.”

  “I was sure you’d known him.”

  “I was never big with the sports crowd when I lived out there,” said Gus.

  “Can you remember anything about him?”

  “Not much. I remember him as being rather charismatic, a good-looking guy. People always stared at him and said, ‘There’s O. J.,’ but I was more interested in looking at the movie stars than at the sports stars.”

  “The Daisy was where he met Nicole. She worked there,” said Shoreen.

  “Lucky for him he was in Chicago when it happened,” said Gus.

  The next night, Gus sat next to Fernanda Niven at Patricia Patterson’s dinner party at Mortimer’s. Mortimer’s was a sleek watering hole on the fashionable Upper East Side of New York, which Gus had called Clarence’s in his society novel People Like Us, the book that had so offended the social figure Annette de la Renta and Jerome R. Zipkin, whom Gus had portrayed as Loelia Manchester and Ezzie Fenwick. At the time of the turmoil that Gus’s book had caused in New York society, Fernanda Niven had publicly stuck up for him when he was being denounced by Zipkin and others.

  By the night of Pat Patterson’s dinner, O. J. Simpson had returned from Chicago, had been briefly handcuffed oh the grounds of his Brentwood estate, and had hired the famed defense attorney Howard Weitzman, who had come to national attention several years earlier when, against all odds, he won an acquittal for the flamboyant automobile designer John DeLorean on what seemed to be irrefutable drug charges.

  “Gus, I’ve been dying to tell you this. I sat next to O, J. at dinner just a week or so before the murders,” said Fernanda Niven.

  “I knew this was going to be a good seat as soon as I looked at your place card,” said Gus. “Tell me everything.”

  “You know Louis Marx, don’t you? Louis and Noonie Marx? O. J. was on the board of Louis’s company, the Forschner Group, which imports the Swiss Army Knife, among other things. O. J. and Louis are great golfing buddies, or were until this. Louis says there’s no way that O. J. is guilty of these crimes. Anyway, after the board meeting, which had taken place that day, Louis and Noonie had a party at their apartment up on Fifth, and O. J. was there, and I sat next to him. He couldn’t have been nicer, and of course he was devastatingly attractive. He talked about Nicole. He said how upset he was that they couldn’t work out their problems, but it didn’t mean so much to me then as it does now.”

  “Interesting,” said Gus. “Keep going. I’m riveted.”

  “Then let me tell you what happened. On his other side was this heavenly little blond girl who was a friend of one of Louis and Noonie’s daughters—I can’t remember her name—and O. J. said to me, ‘I’m going to hit on her,’ or something like that, and it sounded innocent and cute. But he started coming on to her. I mean, she was only just past being a kid, and she didn’t know how to act, and he got very raunchy in his talk. He rolled up his tie over and over until it got up to the knot at his throat, and he dropped it, and as it unrolled, he said to her, ‘That’s what my tongue’s going to do to you.’ ”

  “That’s class,” said Gus.

  “The poor thing left the table and never returned, and I can’t say I blame her. I mean, it was unacceptable, what he did, but no one said anything, until later, after he was gone. You know how it is with stars.”

  “I never realized that O. J. Simpson was as famous as he seems to be,” said Gus.

  Gus had a friend named Lucianne Goldberg, whom he referred to as his “telephone friend.” They saw each other only a couple of times a year, but they talked every day, usually after they had read all the morning papers, and hashed over the news. Like Gus, Lucianne was a newspaper junkie. Like Gus,
she had contacts in high places. Like Gus, she was a font of daily information. They had met in Providence, Rhode Island, at the second of Claus von Bülow’s trials for the attempted murder of his wife, Sunny. They saw things the same way, although she had considerably less tolerance for President Clinton than Gus did. They both thought Claus von Bülow was guilty. They both thought William Kennedy Smith was guilty. They both knew the Menendez brothers were guilty.

  “What do you think?” asked Gus, after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

  “He did it,” said Lucianne.

  “Fuckin’ A,” replied Gus.

  * * *

  The next day, Gus was having lunch at the Four Seasons with Betty Prashker, his book editor, to discuss the progress he was making on his novel about the trial of the Menendez brothers, The Sins of the Sons.

  “I’ve brought along the chapter where one of the aunts of the Menendez brothers met with me in secret one Sunday night at Zev Braun’s house high up in the hills of Beverly Hills to tell me the name of the book the boys read in jail, where they got all the information about sexual abuse they said their father did to them,” said Gus. “It’s an interesting scene, I think.”

  “That sounds good,” said Betty.

  “All that crap that Erik said about his father sticking tacks in his ass for sexual gratification, it’s all in this book they read,” said Gus.

  “I wonder how they got that book in jail,” said Betty.

  “They probably had it mailed from Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard,” replied Gus.

  Just then, Louise Grunwald, a prominent figure in New York society who was married to Henry Grunwald, the former editor of Time, stopped by Gus’s table on her way out of the restaurant. Gus introduced her to Betty.

  “There’s something I’ve got to tell you, Gus,” said Louise. “You know Louis Marx, don’t you? Louis and Noonie?”

  “Kind of, not really,” said Gus. “They’re friends of Fernanda Niven’s. Friends of O. J.’s, too, I gather.”

  “You knew that O. J. was on the board of Louis’s company, the Forschner Group?” asked Louise.

  “I just heard that from Fernanda last night,” said Gus.

  “And you know that the Forschner Group makes Swiss Army Knives?”

  “I do.”

  “Did you know that at the end of the meeting all the board members could take any of the products they wanted to?”

  “No.”

  “And do you know what O. J. took?”

  “No, but I want to know.”

  “He took a bagful of knives,” said Louise.

  “My God,” said Gus. “This is fascinating.”

  Gus felt the quickening beat of his heart. It was a feeling he sometimes experienced when he heard the sort of story that aroused his interest. But he had a book to write about the Menendez brothers and shook the thought from his head.

  That night at dinner at Elaine’s, the famed restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that was a gathering place for the literary set, Gus repeated the stories he had just heard about O. J. Simpson. He rolled his tie up to the knot and let it drop the way Fernanda Niven told him Simpson had done to the pretty young girl at the party and repeated his line, “That’s what my tongue’s going to do to you.” He told his companions about the Forschner Group and the bag of knives.

  “But there’s more,” said Elaine Kaufman, the proprietor, who had come to sit at Gus’s table. “I heard that when O. J. left the board meeting in Shelton, Connecticut, where the firm is, he was picked up by a chauffeur who drove him out to Long Island to play golf with some guy in the garment industry.”

  “Apparently he’s an avid golfer,” said Gus. “Go on.”

  “The chauffeur says that O. J. waved one of the knives around in the back of the limousine and said, ‘You could hurt someone with this. You could even kill someone with this.’ ”

  “That would be a good scene in a book, wouldn’t it?” said Gus. “The football star. The chauffeur. The bag of knives. It’s called establishing the murder weapon early on in the story. Where did you hear all this, Elaine?”

  “You hear things here, Gus,” said Elaine.

  Two days later, Gus flew to Las Vegas, where he was to accept an award from the American Academy of Achievement. He was sitting in his suite at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, halfway dressed for the evening ahead. His dinner shirt and trousers were on. His blue enamel cuff links and studs were in place. His black tie was hanging untied around his neck. His just-pressed dinner jacket was still on the valet’s hanger. He was shortly to receive a golden plate from the Academy, along with an impressive array of Americans distinguished in the fields of the arts, business, public affairs, and science, but he was mesmerized by what he was watching on television, and it took precedence over the award he was about to receive.

  Sitting in another chair in the room, equally engrossed, was June Anderson, the opera star, whom he had sat next to on the plane from New York that day. Gus rarely got into conversations with people he sat next to on planes, but she had been frightened during a long period of turbulence, and he had spoken to her to distract her from her fear. They discovered they were both heading for the Mirage Hotel and the American Academy of Achievement awards ceremony.

  “What is this award we’re getting?” asked June Anderson.

  “I haven’t a clue. It’s very mysterious,” said Gus.

  From then on until they landed in Las Vegas, they talked without stopping. He told her he was writing a book on the Menendez case; She told him she was going to sing Desdemona to Placido Domingo’s Otello at the Los Angeles Music Center at the opening of the next season.

  “Will you be in L.A. then?” she asked.

  “Oh God, no,” replied Gus. “L.A.’s always been a complicated place for me to be. Good times. Bad times. The bad times were badder than the good times were good, if you get the drift. These days, I keep my distance from the place.”

  The front pages of the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post, all of which Gus was holding in his lap, were full of the news of the murders in Brentwood.

  “Don’t you think it’s strange that Nicole was laid out in an open casket at the wake, considering that she was nearly beheaded?” asked Gus, pointing to a picture in the Post. “The head was supposed to be hanging on by apiece of skin.”

  June shuddered. “I’m sure they put her in a high-necked blouse,” she said.

  “Well, I should hope so,” said Gus.

  He kept looking at the pictures of the wake. “Look at all these young, blond, pretty women; they’re all wearing very short black dresses and very big dark glasses,” said Gus. “They look like actresses going to a premiere and having their pictures taken, instead of a wake. Turn this way. Turn that way. They’re showing Jackie Kennedy–type stoic grief on their faces, just the right amount, and turning for their best angle to the photographers. I’m sure they’re saying things like ‘I loved Nicole. She was my best friend.’ ” They laughed. “Now look at this one. What do we think about her? Is she Polynesian, maybe? Something exotic.”

  The woman Gus was pointing to in the newspaper was called Faye Resnick. She was just out of a drug rehab—for problems with cocaine—for the funeral. She had talked with Nicole on the telephone shortly before the murder. Nicole had said to Faye on many occasions, as she had to almost everyone she knew, “O. J.’s going to kill me, and he’s going to get away with it because he’s O. J. Simpson.”

  June pointed to a photograph of O. J. Simpson at the wake.

  “I wonder what was going through that man’s mind when he looked at Nicole lying in the casket,” she said.

  “ ‘I won, you fucking bitch,’ ” said Gus.

  “Gus!” said June. There was shock in her voice.

  “I know, that sounds awful, doesn’t it? But all the same, it’s the thought that went through my mind, and you can’t censor your thoughts,” said Gus. “I happen to know a great deal about
men who beat women, and I’ll bet you any amount of money that is going to turn out to be the case here, you wait and see. Guys like that want to be the one to do the leaving in a relationship. Guys like that can’t handle being left. Even if they don’t want her anymore, they don’t want anyone else to have her.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?” asked June.

  “That sounds good in court, but it has nothing to do with what your initial instinct is. I’m willing to have my mind changed, but I bet I turn out to be right. I have an instinct about these things.”

  What engrossed Gus so completely on the television set in his suite at the Mirage Hotel was a freeway chase going on in Los Angeles at that very moment. A. C. Cowlings was driving his friend O. J. Simpson, the former football star now wanted by the Los Angeles Police Department for the double murders of his former wife and her friend, in the direction of Mexico, after Simpson had failed to turn himself over to the authorities, in a deal arranged by his lawyer, Robert Shapiro. Gus, enthralled, moved off the chair and onto the floor and walked on his knees to be closer to the screen. His mouth was hanging open in shock at what he was watching. A man in a white Bronco with a gun held to his head. On the lam from two murders. People on the side of the freeway holding placards that said GO, JUICE, GO, cheering on a fugitive.

  He turned to June Anderson and said for the first time words he would repeat in various ways over and over again in the year that followed: “Dear God, what is happening to us in our country when people cheer for a man to get away, to beat the law, to escape, when he’s wanted by the police for double murder?”

  “We better go down, Gus. The dinner will be starting,” said June Anderson, who was dressed and ready to go. She rose from her seat and picked up her gold-and-diamond minaudiere and a long chiffon scarf the same color as her dress. She threw the scarf around her neck with an operatic gesture that was not lost on Gus, who liked people who could carry off grand gestures, despite his total concentration on the television set.