The Mansions Of Limbo Part 1

THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO.

by Dominick Dunne.

THE RICH ... THE ROYAL ... THE RUINED ...

In Venice an Australian heiress is about to marry the prince of her dreams when, the night before the wedding, he elopes with the best man.

In Geneva, beneath a red-and-white-striped marquee, princesses, baronesses, and businessmen wildly overbid and overpay for the jewels and love tokens of the late d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor.

In New York City a brilliant and controversial photographer who has taken the s.e.xual experience to the limits in his work enjoys his last showing at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In a great house in the South of France an alluring countess becomes a mythic figure on the French Riviera ... when it is rumored that she's killed all four of her husbands.

In a quiet garden in Jordan the beautiful, intelligent Queen Noor al Hussein, the American fourth wife of King Hussein, contemplates the precariousness of her throne since the advent of the Gulf War.

THE MANSIONS OF LIMBO.

"Awesome ... If you missed any of these [in Vanity Fair], or even if you didn't, buy this book now. Don't put it off.... This book is a key to America. It has a Renaissance intensity. It shows us the Wheel of Fortune, the Wages of Hubris. It points out the horrid and satisfying truth that the higher you climb, the more inexorably you fall."

-New York Newsday.

"Captures the greed, egomania and personal excesses that ripped away at America's social fabric during those long 10 years."

-Buffalo News.

"Highly entertaining and razor-sharp."

-Liz Smith.

INTRODUCTION.

Years ago, reading a book whose t.i.tle I no longer remember, I came across a sentence in which the words "the mansions of limbo" appeared. I was struck by those words. I loved the sound of them, and they have always stayed with me. In my Catholic youth, I learned that limbo was a blissful repository for the souls of infants who died before they were baptized, a community whose perfection was marred only by the fact that they were denied the sight of G.o.d. As I grew older, the meaning of limbo broadened to signify a state of privileged oblivion with a missing ingredient. When I began to put together the pieces from Vanity Fair that make up this collection, I tried to find a unifying factor in the kind of people and situations I write about, and the words that I read so long ago returned to me. However, I could never find the book in which I read them. Neither could scholarly friends or Bartlett's Quotations reveal their source. So I have simply usurped the words to make up the t.i.tle of this book.

Not all, but most of the people I write about here soared in the decade of the eighties, a period in which the fortunes of the rich seemed limitless, and our information about them equally limitless. We knew, often with their cooperation, everything there was to know about them: how much money they were worth, how much they paid for their houses, their paintings, their curtains, their dresses, their centerpieces, and their parties. They acquired and acquired, and climbed and climbed. One man earned $550 million in a single year. The cost of another man's new house reached nearly $100 million. Perhaps it was bliss for them, but, certainly, it was bliss with a missing ingredient. Toward the end, some of the luminous figures went to jail for fiscal irregularities. The marriages of others began to disentangle. And a horrible new disease was killing the innocent in appalling numbers. Then the decade ended.

Has any other decade ever ended so promptly? On the twelfth stroke of midnight on December 31, 1989, it was over, finished, done with, history. The sixties, as they will always be remembered, were reluctant to go. The sixties continued to dance to the music of time until the fourth year of the seventies, before allowing that patient decade to define itself. But people were sick of the eighties, sick of the criminal improprieties of Wall Street, sick of the obeisance to money while the homeless occupied more and more sidewalk s.p.a.ce in our cities. People wanted the eighties to be finished. And yet, for as long as it lasted, there was a hilariously horrifying fascination in watching the people who overindulged in extravagance, especially the ones who fell so resoundingly from grace and favor. Twice I went to prisons, one in Lucca, Italy, the other in Bern, Switzerland, to interview financial figures whose life-styles and careers had only recently blazed on the social and financial pages. In Venice an Australian heiress almost married a prince in an international social event, but the heiress was not really an heiress and the prince turned out to be a steward on Qantas Airlines, who eloped with his best man the night before the wedding. In Geneva I watched rich people, mad for instant heritage, stand on chairs and wildly overbid and overpay for the late d.u.c.h.ess of Windsor's jewels at an auction staged by Sotheby's in a circus atmosphere worthy of P. T. Barnum. Once I was the lone American on a sailing ship of English aristocrats and minor royals on a cruise through several tropical islands in the Caribbean, a n.o.bleman's odyssey culminating in a bizarre costume ball on the sands of an island mansion where grand ladies wore tiaras and men adorned themselves with plumes, pearls, and white satin. On Lake Lugano, the beauty queen fifth wife of the man with the second largest art collection in the world, after that of the Queen of England, brought about the transfer of her husband's famed artworks from Switzerland to her native Spain in hopes of obtaining the t.i.tle of d.u.c.h.ess from the Spanish king. In New York, a great photographer, who recorded with acute precision the dark side of the netherworld as it has never been recorded before, took my picture only a short time before he died. In a Beverly Hills mansion, a film mogul and his wife were brutally slain gangland style, and, seven months later, their two handsome and privileged sons were arrested for the crime, after a ma.s.sive spending spree with their new inheritance.

All the pieces do not fit into the pattern of the late decade. There are the eternal figures like the singer Phyllis McGuire, once the mistress of the gangster Sam Giancana, in her Las Vegas mansion, and the actress Jane Wyman, the only divorced wife of a United States president, who have defied time and continue to fascinate. There is Lady Kenmare, the chatelaine of a great house in the South of France, who flourished in international society in the thirties, forties, and fifties as the rumored murderess of her four husbands. And, finally, there is the beautiful and highly intelligent Queen Noor of Jordan, the American fourth wife of King Hussein, who sits on a precarious throne between Israel and Iraq during the war that will define the new decade.

Dominick Dunne.

New York, 1991.

NIGHTMARE ON ELM DRIVE.

On a recent New York-to-Los Angeles trip on MGM Grand Air, that most luxurious of all coast-to-coast flights, I was chilled to the bone marrow during a brief encounter with a fellow pa.s.senger, a boy of perhaps fourteen, or fifteen, or maybe even sixteen, who lounged restlessly in a sprawled-out fashion, arms and legs akimbo, avidly reading racing-car magazines, chewing gum, and beating time to the music on his Walkman. Although I rarely engage in conversations with strangers on airplanes, I always have a certain curiosity to know who everyone is on MGM Grand Air, which I imagine is a bit like the Orient Express in its heyday. The young traveler in the swivel chair was returning to California after a sojourn in Europe. There were signals of affluence in his chat; the Concorde was mentioned. His carry-on luggage was expensive, filled with audiotapes, playing cards, and more magazines. During the meal, we talked. A week before, two rich and privileged young men named Lyle and Erik Menendez had been arrested for the brutal slaying of their parents in the family's $5 million mansion on Elm Drive, a sedate tree-lined street that is considered one of the most prestigious addresses in Beverly Hills. The tale in all its gory grimness was the cover story that week in People magazine, many copies of which were being read on the plane.

"Do you live in Beverly Hills?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Where?"

He told me the name of his street, which was every bit as prestigious as Elm Drive. I once lived in Beverly Hills and knew the terrain well. His home was in the same general area as the house where Kitty and Jose Menendez had been gunned down several months earlier in a fusillade of fourteen twelve-gauge shotgun blasts-five to the head and body of the father, nine to the face and body of the mother-that left them virtually unrecognizable as human beings, according to eyewitness reports. The slaying was so violent that it was a.s.sumed at first to have been of Mafia origins-a hit, or Mob rubout, as it was called, even in the Wall Street Journal. The arrest of the two handsome, athletic Menendez sons after so many months of investigation had shocked an unshockable community.

"Did you ever know the Menendez brothers?" I asked the teenager.

"No," he replied. They had gone to different schools. They were older. Lyle was twenty-two, Erik nineteen. In that age group, a few years makes an enormous difference.

"A terrible thing," I said.

"Yeah," he replied. "But I heard the father was pretty rough on those kids."

With that, our conversation was concluded.

Patricide is not an altogether new crime in the second echelon of Southland society. Nor is matricide. On March 24, 1983, twenty-year-old Michael Miller, the son of President Ronald Reagan's personal lawyer, Roy Miller, raped and clubbed to death his mother, Marguerite. In a minimally publicized trial, from which the media was barred, Miller was found guilty of first-degree murder but was acquitted of the rape charge, presumably on the technicality that the rape had occurred after his mother was dead. The judge then ruled that young Miller, who had been diagnosed as schizophrenic, was legally innocent of murder by reason of insanity. "Hallelujah," muttered Michael Miller after the verdict. He was sent to Patton State Hospital, a mental inst.i.tution in California.

On July 22, 1983, in a Sunset Boulevard mansion in Bel-Air, twenty-year-old Ricky Kyle shot his father, millionaire Henry Harrison Kyle, the president of Four Star International, a television-and-movie-production firm, in the back after awakening him in the middle of the night to tell him there was a prowler in the house. Several witnesses testified that Ricky had confided in them about a longstanding desire to kill his father, who was alleged to have been physically and mentally abusive to his son. The prosecution argued that Ricky was consumed with hatred for his father and greed for his fortune, and that, fearing that he was about to be disinherited, he plotted the ruse of the prowler. With the extraordinary leniency of the Southern California courts for first-time murderers, young Kyle was sentenced to five years for the slaying. Expressing dismay with the verdict, Ricky's mother told reporters she had hoped her son would be spared a prison term. "I think he has suffered enough," she said. Ricky agreed. "I feel like I don't deserve to go to prison," he said.

And then there were the Woodman brothers, Stewart and Neil, accused of hiring two a.s.sa.s.sins to gun down their rich parents in Brentwood. Tried separately, Stewart was convicted of first-degree murder. To escape the death penalty, he incriminated his brother. Neil's trial is about to start.

Further elaboration is not necessary: the point has been made. One other case, however, on a lesser social stratum but of equal importance, under the circ.u.mstances, should be mentioned: the Salvatierra murder, which received international attention. In 1986, Oscar Salvatierra, the Los Angeles-based executive of a newspaper called Philippine News, was shot while he was asleep in bed, after having received a death threat that was at first believed to be tied to the newspaper's opposition to former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. Later, Arnel Salvatierra, his seventeen-year-old son, admitted sending the letter and killing his father. In court, Arnel Salvatierra's lawyer convinced the jury that Arnel was the victim of a lifetime of physical and psychological abuse by his father. The lawyer, Leslie Abramson, who is considered to be the most brilliant Los Angeles defense lawyer for death-row cases, compared Arnel Salvatierra to the tragic Lisa Steinberg of New York, whose father, Joel Steinberg, had been convicted of murdering her after relentlessly abusing her. "What happens if the Lisa Steinbergs don't die?" Abramson asked the jury. "What happens if they get older, and if the c.u.mulative effect of all these years of abuse finally drives them over the edge, and Lisa Steinberg pulls out a gun and kills Joel Steinberg?" Arnel Salvatierra, who had been charged with first-degree murder, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and placed on probation.

This story is relevant to the Menendez case in that the same Leslie Abramson is one-half the team defending the affluent Menendez brothers. Her client is Erik Menendez, the younger brother. Gerald Chaleff, with whom she frequently teams, is representing Lyle. On an earlier burglary case involving the brothers, Chaleff, who gained prominence in criminal law as the defender of the Hillside Strangler, represented Erik. It is rumored that Abramson and Chaleff are each being paid $700,000. Psychological abuse is a constant theme in articles written about the brothers, and will probably be the basis of the defense strategy when the case comes to trial. There are even whispers-shocker of shockers-of s.e.xual abuse in the Menendez family.

Jose Enrique Menendez was an American success story. A Cuban emigre, he was sent to the United States by his parents in 1960 at age fifteen to escape from Castro's Cuba. His father, a onetime soccer star, and his mother, a former champion swimmer, stayed behind until their last properties were seized by Castro. Young Jose, who excelled in swimming, basketball, and soccer, won a swimming scholarship to Southern Illinois University, but he gave it up when he married Mary Louise Andersen, known as Kitty, at the age of nineteen and moved to New York. He earned a degree in accounting at Queens College in Flushing, New York, while working part-time as a dishwasher at the sw.a.n.k "21" Club in Manhattan, where, later, successful and prosperous, he would often dine. Then began a career of astonishing ascendancy which took him through Hertz, where he was in charge of car and commercial leasing, to the record division of RCA, where he signed such high-earning acts as Menudo, the Eurythmics, and Duran Duran. By this time he and Kitty had had two sons and settled down to a graceful life on a million-dollar estate in Princeton, New Jersey. The boys attended the exclusive Princeton Day School and, urged on by their father, began developing into first-rate tennis and soccer players. Their mother attended every match and game they played. When Jose clashed with a senior executive at RCA in 1986, after having been pa.s.sed over for the executive vice presidency of RCA Records, he uprooted his family, much to the distress of Kitty, who loved her life and house in Princeton, and moved to Los Angeles. There he leapfrogged to I.V.E., International Video Entertainment, a video distributor which eventually became Live Entertainment, a division of the hugely successful Carolco Pictures, the company that produced the Rambo films of Sylvester Stallone as well as some of Arnold Schwarzenegger's action films. Jose Menendez's success at Live Entertainment was dazzling. In 1986 the company lost $20 million; a year later, under Menendez, Live earned $8 million and in 1988 doubled that. "He was the perfect corporate executive," I was told by one of his lieutenants. "He had an incredible dedication to business. He was focused, specific about what he wanted from the business, very much in control. He believed that whatever had to be done should be done-with no heart, if necessary."

The family lived at first in Calabasas, an upper-middle-cla.s.s suburb of Los Angeles, inland beyond Malibu, where they occupied one house while building a more spectacular one on thirteen acres with mountaintop views. Then, unexpectedly, almost overnight, the family abandoned Calabasas and moved to Beverly Hills, where Jose bought the house on Elm Drive, a six-bedroom Mediterranean-style house with a red tile roof, a courtyard, a swimming pool, a tennis court, and a guesthouse. Built in 1927, rebuilt in 1974, the house had good credentials. It had previously been rented to Elton John. And Prince. And Hal Prince. And a Saudi prince, for $35,000 a month. Erik Menendez, the younger son, transferred from Calabasas High to Beverly Hills High, probably the most sn.o.bbish public school in America. Lyle was a student at Princeton University, fulfilling one of the many American dreams of his immigrant father.

They were the ideal family; everyone said so. "They were extraordinarily close-knit," an executive of Live Entertainment told me. "It was one big happy family," said John E. Mason, a friend and Live Entertainment director. They did things together. They telephoned one another several times a day, about tennis matches and girlfriends and the results of exams. They almost always had dinner together, which, in a community where most parents go to parties or screenings every night and leave their children to their own devices, is a rare thing. They talked about world events, as well as about what was happening in Jose's business. On the day before the catastrophic event, a Sat.u.r.day, they chartered a boat called Motion Picture Marine in Marina del Rey and spent the day together shark-fishing, just the four of them.

On the evening of the following day, August 20, 1989, the seemingly idyllic world that Jose Menendez had created was shattered. With their kids at the movies in Century City, Jose and Kitty settled in for a comfortable evening of television and videos in the television room at the rear of their house. Jose was in shorts and a sweatshirt; Kitty was in a sweatshirt, jogging pants, and sneakers. They had dishes of strawberries and ice cream on the table in front of the sofa where they were sitting. Later, after everything happened, a neighbor would report hearing sounds like firecrackers coming from the house at about ten o'clock, but he took no notice. It wasn't until a hysterical 911 call came in to the Beverly Hills police station around midnight that there was any indication that the sounds had not been made by firecrackers. The sons of the house, Lyle and Erik, having returned from the movies, where they said they saw Batman again after they couldn't get into License to Kill because of the lines, drove in the gate at 722 North Elm Drive, parked their car in the courtyard, entered the house by the front door, and found their parents dead, sprawled on the floor and couch in the television room. In shock at the grisly sight, Lyle telephoned for help. "They shot and killed my parents!" he shrieked into the instrument. "I don't know ... I didn't hear anything ... I just came home. Erik! Shut up! Get away from them!"

Another neighbor said on television that she had seen one of the Menendez boys curled up in a ball on the lawn in front of their house and screaming in grief. "I have heard of very few murders that were more savage," said Beverly Hills police chief Marvin Iannone. Dan Stewart, a retired police detective hired by the family to investigate the murders, gave the most graphic description of the sight in the television room. "I've seen a lot of homicides, but nothing quite that brutal. Blood, flesh, skulls. It would be hard to describe, especially Jose, as resembling a human that you would recognize. That's how bad it was." According to the autopsy report, one blast caused "explosive decapitation with evisceration of the brain" and "deformity of the face" to Jose Menendez. The first round of shots apparently struck Kitty in her chest, right arm, left hip, and left leg. Her murderers then reloaded and fired into her face, causing "multiple lacerations of the brain." Her face was an unrecognizable pulp.

The prevalent theory in the days following the murders was that it had been a Mob hit. Erik Menendez went so far as to point the finger at Noel Bloom, a distributor of p.o.r.nographic films and a former a.s.sociate of the Bonanno organized-crime family, as a possible suspect. Erik told police and early reporters on the story that Bloom and his father had despised each other after a business deal turned sour. (When questioned, Bloom denied any involvement whatsoever.) Expressing fear that the Mob might be after them as well, the brothers moved from hotel to hotel in the aftermath of the murders. Marlene Mizzy, the front-desk supervisor at the Beverly Hills Hotel, said that Lyle arrived at the hotel without a reservation two days after the murders and asked for a two-bedroom suite. Not liking the suites that were available on such short notice, he went to another hotel.

Seven months later, after the boys were arrested, I visited the house on Elm Drive. It is deceptive in size, far larger than one would imagine from the outside. You enter a s.p.a.cious hallway with a white marble floor and a skylight above. Ahead, to the right, is a stairway carpeted in pale green. Off the hallway on one side is an immense drawing room, forty feet in length. The lone piece of sheet music on the grand piano was "American Pie," by Don McLean. On the other side are a small paneled sitting room and a large dining room. At the far end of the hallway, in full view of the front door, is the television room, where Kitty and Jose spent their last evening together. On the back wall is a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, filled with books, many of them paperbacks, including all the American-history novels of Gore Vidal, Jose's favorite author. On the top shelf of the bookcase were sixty tennis trophies-all first place-that had been won over the years by Lyle and Erik.

Like a lot of houses of the movie nouveau riche still in their social and business rise, the grand exterior is not matched by a grand interior. When the Menendez family bought the house, it was handsomely furnished, and they could have bought the furniture from the former owner for an extra $350,000, but they declined. With the exception of some reproduction Chippendale chairs in the dining room, the house is appallingly furnished with second-rate pieces; either the purchase price left nothing for interior decoration or there was just a lack of interest. In any case, your attention, once you are in the house, is not on the furniture. You are drawn, like a magnet, to the television room.

Trying to imagine what happened that night, I found it unlikely that the boys-if indeed it was the boys, and there is a very vocal contingent who believe it was not-would have come down the stairs with the guns, turned right, and entered the television room, facing their parents. Since Jose was. .h.i.t point-blank in the back of the head, it seems far more likely that the killers entered the television room through the terrace doors behind the sofa on which Kitty and Jose were sitting, their backs to the doors, facing the television set. The killers would probably have unlocked the doors in advance. In every account of the murders, Kitty was said to have run toward the kitchen. This would suggest, a.s.suming she was running away from her a.s.sailants, that they had entered from behind.

Every person who saw the death scene has described the blood, the guts, and the carnage in sick-making detail. The furniture I saw in that room was replacement furniture, rented after the murders from Antiquarian Traders in West Hollywood. The original blood-drenched furniture and Oriental carpet had been hauled away, never to be sat on or walked on again. It is not farfetched to imagine that splatterings of blood and guts found their way onto the clothes and shoes of the killers, which would have necessitated a change of clothing and possibly a shower. There is no way the killers could have gone up the stairs, however; the blood on their shoes would have left tracks on the pale green stair carpet. The lavatory beneath the stairs and adjacent to the television room does not have a shower. What probably happened is that the killers retreated out the same terrace doors they had entered, and went back to the guesthouse to shower and change into clothes they had left there. The guesthouse is a separate, two-story unit beyond the swimming pool and adjacent to the tennis court, with a sitting room, a bedroom, a full bath, and a two-car garage opening onto an alley.

There is also the possibility that the killers, knowing the carnage twelve-gauge-shotgun blasts would cause, wore boots, gloves, and overalls. In that event, they would have only had to discard the clothes and boots into a large garbage bag and make a dash for it. One of the most interesting aspects of the case is that the fourteen sh.e.l.l casings were picked up and removed. I have been told that such fastidiousness is out of character in a Mafia hit, where a speedy getaway is essential. There is a sense of leisurely time here, of people not in a hurry, not expecting anyone, when they delay their departure from a ma.s.sacre to pick the sh.e.l.l casings out of the b.l.o.o.d.y remains of their victims' bodies. They almost certainly wore rubber gloves to do it.

Then they had to get rid of the guns. The guns, as of this writing, have still not been found. We will come back to the guns. The car the killers left in was probably parked in the guesthouse garage; from there they could make their exit un.o.bserved down the alley behind the house. Had they left out the front gate on Elm Drive, they would have risked being observed by neighbors or pa.s.sersby. Between the time the killers left the house and the time the boys made the call to the police, the b.l.o.o.d.y clothes were probably disposed of.

On the day before the fishing trip on the Motion Picture Marine, Erik Menendez allegedly drove south to San Diego and purchased two Mossberg twelve-gauge shotguns in a Big 5 sporting-goods store, using for identification the stolen driver's license of a young man named Donovan Goodreau. Under federal law, to purchase a weapon, an individual must fill out a 4473 form, which requires the buyer to provide his name, address, and signature, as well as an identification card with picture. Donovan Goodreau had subsequently said on television that he can prove he was in New York at the time of the gun purchase in San Diego. Goodreau had once roomed with Jamie Pisarcik, who was, and still is, Lyle Menendez's girlfriend and stalwart supporter, visiting him daily in jail and attending his every court session. When Goodreau stopped rooming with Jamie, he moved into Lyle's room at Princeton, which was against the rules, since he was not a student at the university. But then, Lyle had once kept a puppy in his room at Princeton, and having animals in the rooms was against the rules, too.

What has emerged most significantly in the year since the murders is that all was not what it seemed in the seemingly perfect Menendez household. There are people who will tell you that Jose was well liked. There are more people by far who will tell you that he was greatly disliked. Even despised. He had made enemies all along the way in his rise to the high middle of the entertainment industry, but everyone agrees that had he lived he would have gone right to the top. He did not have many personal friends, and he and Kitty were not involved in the party circuit of Beverly Hills. His life was family and business. I was told that at the memorial service in Los Angeles, which preceded the funeral in Princeton, most of the two hundred people who attended had a business rather than a personal relationship with him. Stung by the allegations that Jose had Mob connections in his business dealings at Live Entertainment, allegations that surfaced immediately after the murders, the company hired Warren Cowan, the famed public-relations man, to arrange the memorial service. His idea was to present Menendez as Jose the family man. He suggested starting a Jose Menendez scholarship fund, a suggestion that never came to fruition. It was also his idea to hold the memorial service in an auditorium at the Directors Guild in Hollywood, in order to show that Jose was a member of the entertainment community, although it is doubtful that Jose had ever been there. Two people from Live Entertainment gave glowing eulogies. Brian Andersen, Kitty's brother, spoke lovingly about Kitty, and each son spoke reverently about his parents. One person leaving the service was heard to say, "The only word not used to describe Jose was 'p.r.i.c.k.' "

Although Jose spoke with a very slight accent, a business cohort described him to me as "very non-Hispanic." He was once offended when he received a letter of congratulations for having achieved such a high place in the business world "for a Hispanic." "He hated anyone who knew anything about his heritage," the colleague said. On the other hand, there was a part of Jose Menendez that secretly wanted to run for the U.S. Senate from Florida in order to free Cuba from the tyranny of Fidel Castro and make it a U.S. territory.

Kitty Menendez was another matter. You never hear a bad word about Kitty. Back in Princeton, people remember her on the tennis courts with affection. Those who knew her in the later years of her life felt affection too, but they also felt sorry for her. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and was becoming a pathetic one. Her husband was flagrantly unfaithful to her, and she was devastated by his infidelity. There has been much talk since the killings of Jose's having had a mistress, but that mistress was by no means his first, although he was said to have had "fidelity in his infidelity" in that particular relationship. Kitty fought hard to hold her marriage together, but it is unlikely that Jose would ever have divorced her. An employee at Live Entertainment said, "Kitty called Jose at his office every thirty minutes, sometimes just to tell him what kind of pizza to bring home for supper. She was a dependent person. She wanted to go on his business trips with him. She had June Allyson looks. Very warm. She also had a history of drinking and pills." Another business a.s.sociate of Jose's at Live said, "I knew Kitty at company dinners and c.o.c.ktail parties. They used to say about Kitty that she was Jose with a wig. She was always very much at his side, part of his vision, dedicated to the cause, whatever the cause was."

A more intimate picture of Kitty comes from Karen Lamm, one of the most highly publicized secondary characters in the Menendez saga. A beautiful former actress and model who was once wed to the late Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, Lamm is now a television producer, and she and her partner, Zev Braun, are developing a mini-series based on the Menendez case. Lamm is often presented as Kitty's closest friend and confidante. However, friends of Erik and Lyle decry her claims of friendship with Kitty, a.s.serting that the boys did not know her, and asking how she could have been such a great friend of Kitty's if she was totally unknown to the sons.

Most newspaper accounts say that Karen Lamm and Kitty Menendez met in an aerobics cla.s.s, but Lamm, who says she dislikes exercise cla.s.ses, gave a different account of the beginning of their friendship. About a year before the murders, she was living with a film executive named Stuart Benjamin, who was a business acquaintance of Jose Menendez. Benjamin was a partner of the film director Taylor Hackford in a production company called New Visions Pictures, which Menendez was interested in acquiring as a subsidiary for Live Entertainment. During the negotiation period, Benjamin, with Lamm as his date, attended a dinner party at the Menendez house on Elm Drive. Lamm, who is an effusive and witty conversationalist, and Kitty spent much of the evening talking together. It was the beginning of a friendship that would blossom. Lamm described Kitty to me as being deeply unhappy over her husband's philandering. She claims that Kitty had tried suicide on three occasions, the kind of at-home suicide attempts that are more cries for help than a longing for death. Kitty had once won a beauty contest and could still be pretty on occasion, but she had let her looks go, grown fat (her autopsy report described her as "fairly well-nourished" and gave her weight as 165), and dyed her hair an unbecoming blond color that did not suit her. Lamm suggested that she get back into shape, and took her to aerobics cla.s.ses, as well as offering her advice on a darker hair color. During the year that followed, the two women became intimate friends, and Kitty confided in Lamm, not only about Jose's infidelity but also about the many problems they were having with their sons.

Lamm said she met the boys three times, but never talked to them in the house on Elm Drive. She told me, "Those kids watched their mother become a doormat for their father. Jose lived through Lyle. Jose made Lyle white bread. He sent him to Princeton. He gave him all the things that were not available to him as an immigrant." Lamm finally talked with Kitty's sons at the memorial service at the Directors Guild. She was introduced to Lyle, who, in turn, introduced her to Erik as "Mom's friend." She said that Lyle had become Jose overnight. He radiated confidence and showed no emotion, "unless it was a convenient moment." Erik, on the other hand, fell apart.

Over the previous two years, the handsome, athletic, and gifted Menendez sons had been getting into trouble. Although a great friend of the boys dismissed their sc.r.a.pes as merely "rich kids' sick jokes," two events occurred in Calabasas, where the family lived before the move to Beverly Hills, that were to have momentous consequences for all the members of the family. The brothers got involved in two very serious criminal offenses, a burglary at the home of Michael Warren Ginsberg in Calabasas and grand theft at the home of John Richard List in Hidden Hills. In total, more than $100,000 in money and jewels was taken from the two houses-not an insignificant sum.

Jose dealt with his sons' transgressions the way he would deal with any p.r.i.c.kly business problem, said a business a.s.sociate, by "minimizing the damage and going forward, fixing something that was broken without actually dealing with the problem." He simply took over and solved it. The money and jewels were returned, and $11,000 in damages was paid. Since Erik was underage, it was decided that he would take the fall for both brothers, thereby safeguarding Jose's dream of having Lyle study at Princeton. Jose hired the criminal lawyer Gerald Chaleff to represent Erik-the same Gerald Chaleff who is now representing Lyle on the charge of murdering the man who once hired him to represent Erik on the burglary charge. Everything was solved to perfection. Erik got probation, no more. And compulsory counseling. And for that, Kitty asked her psychologist, Les Summerfield, to recommend someone her son could go to for the required number of hours ordered by the judge. Les Summerfield recommended a Beverly Hills psychologist named Jerome Oziel, who, like Gerald Chaleff, continues his role in the Menendez saga right up to the present.

Prior to the thefts, Erik had made a friend at Calabasas High School who would also play a continuing part in the story. Craig Cignarelli, the son of a prominent executive in the television industry, is a Tom Cruise look-alike currently studying at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Craig was the captain of the Calabasas High School tennis team, and Erik, who had recently transferred from Princeton Day, was the number-one singles player on the team. One day, while playing a match together, they were taunted by two students from El Camino High School, a rival school in a less affluent neighborhood. Menendez and Cignarelli went out to the street to face their adversaries, and a fight started. Suddenly, a whole group of El Camino boys jumped out of cars and joined the fray. Erik and Craig were both badly beaten up. Erik's jaw was broken, and Craig received severe damage to his ribs. The incident sparked a close friendship between the two, which would culminate in the co-writing of a movie script called Friends, in which a young man named Hamilton Cromwell murders his extremely rich parents for his inheritance. One of the most quoted pa.s.sages from this screenplay comes from the mouth of Hamilton Cromwell, speaking about his father: "Sometimes he would tell me that I was not worthy to be his son. When he did that, it would make me strive harder ... just so I could hear the words 'I love you, son.' ... And I never heard those words." To add to the awful irony, Kitty, the loving mother who could not do enough for her sons, typed the screenplay in which her own demise seems to have been predicted. In the embarra.s.sing aftermath of the burglaries, the family moved to the house on Elm Drive in Beverly Hills. Jose told people at Live Entertainment that he was upset by the drug activity in Calabasas and that the tires of his car had been slashed, but it is quite possible that these stories were a diversionary tactic, or smoke screen, created to cover the disgrace of his son's criminal record.

A further setback for the family, also partly covered up, had occurred the previous winter, when Lyle was suspended from Princeton after one semester for cheating in Psychology 101. Taken before a disciplinary committee, he was told he could leave the university voluntarily or be expelled. He chose to leave. This was a grave blow to Jose, who loved to tell people that he had a son at Princeton. Again taking over, he tried to talk the authorities at Princeton into reinstating his son, but this time the pressure he applied did not work. The suspension lasted a year. In a typical reaction, Jose became more angry at the school than he was at his son. He urged Lyle to stay on in Princeton rather than return to Beverly Hills, so that he would not have to admit to anyone that Lyle had been kicked out.

But Lyle did return, and worked briefly at Live Entertainment, where he showed all the worst qualities of the spoiled rich boy holding down a grace-and-favor job in his father's company. He was consistently late for work. His attention span was brief. He worked short hours, leaving in the afternoon to play tennis. He was unpopular with the career-oriented staff. "The kids had a sense of being young royalty," said an employee of the company. "They could be nasty, arrogant, and self-centered." But, the same person said, Jose had a blind spot about his sons. And tennis held the family together. Once, Jose took the Concorde to Europe just to watch Lyle play in a tennis tournament, and then came right back. However, for all the seeming closeness of the family, the sons were proving to be disappointments, even failures, in the eyes of their perfection-demanding father. Jose had apparently come to the end of financing his recalcitrant sons' rebellion, and there are indications that he planned to revise his will.

After the Calabasas debacle, Erik transferred to Beverly Hills High School for his senior year. His cla.s.smates remember him chiefly as a loner, walking around in tennis shorts, always carrying his tennis racket.

"A girl I was going out with l.u.s.ted after him," a student told me. "She said he had good legs."

"Was he spoiled?"

"Everyone at Beverly High is spoiled."

Like his father, Lyle is said to have been a great ladies' man, which pleased Jose, but several of Lyle's girlfriends, mostly older than he, were not considered to be suitable by his parents, and clashes occurred. When Jose forbade Lyle to go to Europe with an older girlfriend, Lyle went anyway. A person extremely close to the family told me that another of Lyle's girlfriends-not Jamie Pisarcik, who has been so loyal to him during his incarceration-was "manipulating him," which I took to mean manipulating him into marriage. This girl became pregnant. Jose, in his usual method of dealing with his sons' problems, moved in and paid off the girl to abort the child. The manner of Jose's interference in so personal a matter-not allowing Lyle to deal with his own problem-is said to have infuriated Lyle and caused a deep rift between father and son. Lyle moved out of the main house into the guesthouse at the back of the property. He was still living there at the time of the murders, although Erik continued to live in the main house.

Karen Lamm told me that in her final conversation with Kitty, three days before the killing and one day before the purchase of the guns in San Diego, Kitty told her that Lyle had been verbally abusive to her in a long, late-night call from the guesthouse to the main house.

From the beginning, the police were disinclined to buy the highly publicized Mafia-hit story, on the grounds that Mafia hits are rarely done in the home, that the victim is usually executed with a single shot to the back of the head, and that the wife is not usually killed also. The hit, if hit it was, looked more like a Colombian drug-lord hit, like the b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre carried out by Al Pacino in the film Scarface, which, incidentally, was one of Lyle's favorite movies.

Months later, after the arrests, the Beverly Hills police claimed to have been suspicious of the Menendez brothers from the beginning, even from the first night. One detective at the scene asked the boys if they had the ticket stubs from the film they said they had just seen in Century City. "When both parents are hit, our feeling is usually that the kids did it," said a Beverly Hills police officer. Another officer declared, two days after the event, "These kids fried their parents. They cooked them." But there was no proof, nothing to go on, merely gut reactions.

Inadvertently, the boys brought suspicion upon themselves. In the aftermath of the terrible event, close observers noted the extraordinary calm the boys exhibited, almost as if the murders had happened to another family. They were seen renting furniture at Antiquarian Traders to replace the furniture that had been removed from the television room. And, as new heirs, they embarked on a spending spree that even the merriest widow, who had married for money, would have refrained from going on-for propriety's sake, if nothing else-in the first flush of her mourning period. They bought and bought and bought. Estimates of their spending have gone as high as $700,000. Lyle bought a $60,000 Porsche 911 Carrera to replace the Alfa Romeo his father had given him. Erik turned in his Ford Mustang 5.0 hardtop and bought a tan Jeep Wrangler, which his girlfriend, Noelle Terelsky, is now driving. Lyle bought $40,000 worth of clothes and a $15,000 Rolex watch. Erik hired a $50,000-a-year tennis coach. Lyle decided to go into the restaurant business, and paid a reported $550,000 for a cafeteria-style eatery in Princeton, which he renamed Mr. Buffalo's, flying back and forth coast to coast on MGM Grand Air. "It was one of my mother's delights that I pursue a small restaurant chain and serve healthy food with friendly service," he said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian, the campus newspaper. Erik, less successful as an entrepreneur than Lyle, put up $40,000 for a rock concert at the Palladium, but got ripped off by a con-man partner and lost the entire amount. Erik decided not to attend U.C.L.A., which had been his father's plan for him, but to pursue a career in tennis instead. After moving from hotel to hotel to elude the Mafia, who they claimed were watching them, the brothers leased adjoining condos in the tony Marina City Club Towers. "They liked high-tech surrounds, and they wanted to get out of the house," one of their friends said to me. Then there was the ghoulish sense of humor another of their friends spoke about: Sitting with a gang of pals one night, deciding what videos to rent for the evening, Erik suggested Dad and Parenthood. Even as close a friend as Glenn Stevens, who was in the car with Lyle when he was arrested, later told the Los Angeles Times that two days after the murders, when he asked Lyle how he was holding up emotionally, his friend replied, "I've been waiting so long to be in this position that the transition came easy." The police were also aware that Lyle Menendez had hired a computer expert who eradicated from the hard disk of the family computer a revised will that Jose had been working on. Most remarkable of all was that, unlike the families of most homicide victims, the sons of Jose and Kitty Menendez did not have the obsessive interest in the police search for the killers of their parents that usually supersedes all else in the wake of such a tragedy.

As the C.E.O. of Live Entertainment, Jose Menendez earned a base pay of $500,000 a year, with a maximum bonus of $850,000 based on the company's yearly earnings. On top of that, there were life-insurance policies. An interesting sidebar to the story concerns two policies that were thought to have been taken out on Menendez by Live Entertainment. The bigger of the two was a $15 million keyman policy; $10 million of which was with Bankers Trust and $5 million with Credit Lyonnais. Taking out a keyman life-insurance policy on a top executive is common practice in business, with the company being named as beneficiary. Live Entertainment was also required to maintain a second policy on Menendez in the amount of $5 million, with the beneficiary to be named by him. Given the family's much-talked-about closeness, it is not unlikely that Kitty and the boys were aware of this policy. Presumably, the beneficiary of the insurance policy would have been the same as the beneficiary of Jose's will. In the will, it was stated that if Kitty died first everything would go to Jose, and if Jose died first everything would go to Kitty. In the event that both died, everything would go to the boys.

The murders happened on a Sunday night. On the afternoon of the following Tuesday, Lyle and Erik, accompanied by two uncles, Kitty's brother Brian Andersen and Jose's brother-in-law Carlos Baralt, who was the executor of Jose's will, met with officials of Live Entertainment at the company's headquarters to go over Jose's financial situation. At that meeting, it became the difficult duty of Jose's successor to inform the heirs that the $5 million policy with beneficiaries named by Jose had not gone into effect, because Jose had failed to take the required physical examination, believing that the one he had taken for the $15 million policy applied to both policies. It did not. A person present at that meeting told me of the resounding silence that followed the reception of that information. To expect $5 million, payable upon death, and to find that it was not forthcoming, would be a crushing disappointment. Finally, Erik Menendez spoke. His voice was cold. "And the $15 million policy in favor of the company? Was that in order?" he asked. It was. Jose had apparently been told that he would have to take another physical for the second policy, but he had postponed it. As an officer of the company said to me, "That anything could ever happen to Jose never occurred to Jose."

The news that the policy was invalid caused bad blood between the family and the company, especially since the immediate payment of the $15 million keyman policy gave Carolco one of its biggest quarters since the inception of the company. One of Jose's former employees in New York, who was close enough to the family to warrant having a limousine sent to take him from a suburb of New York to the funeral in Princeton, said to me, "The grandmother? Did you talk to her? Did she tell you her theory? Did she tell you the company had Jose taken care of for the $15 million insurance policy?" The grandmother had not told me this, but it is a theory that the dwindling group of people who believe in the innocence of the Menendez boys cling to with pa.s.sion. The same former employee continued, "Jose must have made a lot of money in California. I don't know where all that money came from what I've been hearing about and reading about."

Further bad feelings between the family and Live Entertainment have arisen over the house on Elm Drive, which, like the house in Calabasas, is heavily mortgaged: Approximately $2 million is still owed on the Elm Drive house, with estimated payments of $225,000 a year, plus $40,000 a year in taxes and approximately $40,000 in maintenance. In addition, the house in Calabasas has been on the market for some time and remains unsold; $1.5 million is still owed on it. So, in effect, the expenses on the two houses are approximately $500,000 a year, a staggering amount for the two sons to have dealt with before their arrest. During the meeting on the Tuesday after the murders, when the boys were told that the $5 million life-insurance policy had not gone into effect, it was suggested that Live Entertainment might buy the house on Elm Drive from the estate, thereby removing the financial burden from the boys while the house was waiting to be resold. Furthermore, Live Entertainment was prepared to take less for the house than Jose had paid for it, knowing that houses where murders have taken place are hard sells, even in as inflated a real-estate market as Beverly Hills.

Ads have run in the real-estate section of the Los Angeles Times for the Elm Drive house. The asking price is $5.95 million. Surprisingly, a buyer did come along. The unidentified person offered only $4.5 million, a bargain for a house on that street, and the offer was hastily accepted. Later, however, the deal fell through. The purchaser was said to have been intimidated by the event that occurred there, and worried about the reaction neighborhood children would have to his own children for living in the house.

The arrangement for Live Entertainment to purchase the property from the estate failed to go into effect, once the police investigation pointed more and more toward the boys, and so the estate has had to a.s.sume the immense cost of maintaining the properties. Recently, the Elm Drive house has been leased to a member of the Saudi royal family-not the same prince who rented it before-for $50,000 a month to allay expenses.

Carolco, wishing to stifle rumors that Live Entertainment had Mob connections because of its acquisition of companies like Strawberries, an audio-video retailing chain, from Morris Levy, who allegedly has Genovese crime-family connections, and its bitter battle with Noel Bloom, hired the prestigious New York firm of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler to investigate the company for underworld ties. The 220-page report, which cynics in the industry mock as a whitewash, exonerated the company of any such involvement. The report was read at a board meeting on March 8, and the conclusion made clear that the Beverly Hills police, in their investigation of the Menendez murders, were increasingly focusing on their sons, not the Mob. An ironic bit of drama came at precisely that moment, when a vice president of the company burst in on the meeting with the news that Lyle Menendez had just been arrested.

Concurrently, in another, less fashionable area of the city known as Carthay Circle, an attractive thirty-seven-year-old woman named Judalon Rose Smyth, p.r.o.nounced Smith, was living out her own drama in a complicated love affair. Judalon Smyth's lover was a Beverly Hills psychologist named Jerome Oziel, whom she called Jerry. Dr. Oziel was the same Dr. Oziel whom Kitty Menendez's psychologist, Les Summerfield, had recommended to her a year earlier as the doctor for her troubled son, after the judge in the burglary case in Calabasas had ruled that Erik must have counseling while he was on probation. During that brief period of court-ordered therapy, Jerome Oziel had met the entire Menendez family. Judalon Smyth, however, was as unknown to Lyle and Erik as they were to her, and yet, seven months from the time of the double murder, she would be responsible for their arrest on the charge of killing their parents.

On March 8, Lyle Menendez was flagged down by more than a dozen heavily armed Beverly Hills policemen as he was leaving the house on Elm Drive in his brother's Jeep Wrangler, accompanied by his former Princeton cla.s.smate Glenn Stevens. Lyle was made to lie on the street, in full view of his neighbors, while the police, with drawn guns, manacled his hands behind his back before taking him to the police station to book him for suspicion of murder. The arrest came as a complete surprise to Lyle, who had been playing chess, a game at which he excelled, until two the night before at the home of a friend in Beverly Hills.

Three days earlier, Judalon Smyth had contacted the police in Beverly Hills and told them of the existence of audiotapes in the Bedford Drive office of Dr. Oziel on which the Menendez brothers had allegedly confessed to the murders of their parents. She also told police that the brothers had threatened to kill Oziel if he reported them. Lastly, she told them that the two twelve-gauge shotguns had been purchased at a sporting-goods store in San Diego. All of this information was unknown to the Beverly Hills police, after seven months of investigation. They obtained a subpoena to search all of Oziel's locations. The tapes were found in a safe-deposit box in a bank on Ventura Boulevard.

Lyle's arrest was reported almost immediately on the local Los Angeles newscasts. Among those who heard the news was Noel Nedli, a tennis-team friend from Beverly Hills High who was Erik Menendez's roommate in a condominium that Erik was leasing for six months at the Marina City Club Towers, next to the condominium that his brother had leased with his girlfriend, Jamie Pisarcik. Erik was playing in a tennis tournament in Israel, where he had been for two weeks, accompanied by Mark Heffernan, his $50,000-a-year tennis coach. By a curious coincidence, Erik happened to telephone Nedli at almost the same moment Nedli was listening to the report of Lyle's arrest on the radio. It was merely a routine checking-up-on-every-thing call, and Nedli realized at once that Erik did not know about Lyle's arrest. He is reported to have said to Erik, "I hope you're sitting down." Then he said, "Lyle was just arrested."

"Erik became hysterical. He was crying, the whole nine yards," said a friend of Nedli's who had heard the story from him. This friend went on to say that the immediate problem for Erik was to get out of Israel before he was arrested there. Accompanied by Heffernan, who was not aware of the seriousness of the situation, the two got on a plane without incident, bound for London. There they split up. Heffernan returned to Los Angeles. Erik flew to Miami, where several members on the Menendez side of the family reside. An aunt advised him to return to Los Angeles and turn himself in. Erik notified police of his travel plans and gave himself up at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was taken into custody by four detectives. He was later booked at the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail on suspicion of murder and held without bond.

According to Judalon Smyth, and the California Court of Appeals decision, she had stood outside the door of Dr. Oziel's office and, unbeknownst to the Menendez brothers, listened to their confession and threats. Dr. Oziel has denied this.

Approximately a year before any of the above happened, Judalon Smyth told me, she telephoned Jerome Oziel's clinic, the Phobia Inst.i.tute of Beverly Hills, after having heard a series of tapes called Through the Briar Patch, which had impressed her. She was then thirty-six, had been married twice, and was desirous of having a relationship and a family, but she tended to choose the wrong kind of men, men who were controlling. The Briar Patch tapes told her she could break the pattern of picking the wrong kind of men in five minutes.

She says Oziel began telephoning her, and she found him very nice on the phone. She felt he seemed genuinely interested in her. After Oziel's third call, she sent him a tape of love poems she had written and called Love Tears. She also told him she was in the tape-duplicating business. She found his calls were like therapy, and she began to tell him intimate things about herself, like the fact that she had been going to a professional matchmaker she had seen on television. "I was falling in love over the phone," she said. "You don't think someone's married when he calls you from home at night."

Eventually, he came to her house with two enormous bouquets.

"The minute I opened the door I was relieved," she said. "I wasn't attracted to him. He was shorter than me, blond, balding, with a round face." She told me she was attracted to men who looked like the actor Ken Wahl or Tom Cruise. Oziel was forty-two at the time. "He kept trying to get physical right away. I said, 'Look, you're not my type. I'm not attracted to you.' He said he just wanted a hug. I said, 'Just because you know all this intimate stuff about me doesn't mean ...' "

"Finally I gave in. It was the worst s.e.x I ever had in my life. To have good s.e.x you either have to be in love or in l.u.s.t. I wasn't either. It was also awful the second time. The third time was better. I broke off with him four or five times between September and October. Then Erik Menendez came."

Although Dr. Oziel had not seen any members of the Menendez family since Erik's counseling had ended, when news of the murders was announced in August 1989, according to Smyth, he became consumed with excitement at his proximity to the tragedy. "Right away, he called the boys and offered his help." At the time, the boys were hiding out in hotels, saying they thought the Mafia was after them. "Jerry would go to where the boys were. He was advising them about attorneys for the will, etc. He had an I'll-be-your-father att.i.tude."

At the end of October, Smyth told me, Oziel got a call from Erik, who said he needed to talk with him. Erik came at four on the afternoon of Halloween, October 31, to the office at 435 North Bedford Drive. There is a small waiting room outside the office, with a table for magazines and several places to sit, but there is no receptionist. An arriving patient pushes a b.u.t.ton with the name of the doctor he is there to see, and a light goes on in the inner office to let the doctor know that his next patient has arrived. Off the waiting room is a doorway that opens into a small inner hallway off which are three small offices. Oziel shares the s.p.a.ce with several other doctors, one of them his wife, Dr. Laurel Oziel, the mother of his two daughters.