A single week off-schedule for American Crime Story, and I find myself identifying with the killer, Andrew Cunanan, as soon as it returns. This might be what is commonly called “Stockholm Syndrome.” It might also be good television—who can know for sure? What I do know for sure is that in this week’s episode, the sixth, there are no killings: we’re in 1996, a year before the first of Andrew’s murders, and it is his birthday. Present at the party are three future victims: Jeff Trail, David Madson, and Lee Miglin. Cunanan is living in an airy and palatial San Diego mansion as the guest and sugar baby of an older man named Norman Blachford, posing as his art consultant, his interior designer, and a man he definitely isn’t fucking.
“What a volatile mix you are,” one of Blachford’s friends sneers at the psychopathic toy-boy, catching him admiring his reflection after snorting some restorative cocaine. “Too lazy to work, and too proud to be kept.” As it turns out, both Cunanan and Blachford have been circling each other, so that what appears to be a mutual agreement is in fact a kind of double bluff—a meet-cute orchestrated by the younger man has ended, one year later, in his older lover hiring an investigator to expose the truth about Cunanan’s low-rent past. He is not, in fact, Andrew DeSilva PhD, but a college dropout. He once worked at a Thrifty drugstore, and his mother’s name is MaryAnn. The kind of total reinvention he’s attempted is not for the lazy, nor the proud: it’s hard and dirty, sometimes shameful work.
“A 1997 Washington Post profile noted that Cunanan was ‘a multilingual sophisticate who knew exactly which older men he wanted to meet,’” according to a piece at Newsweek probing the veracity of this week’s episode. Likewise: “Nicole Ramirez-Murray, a columnist for the San Diego Gay and Lesbian Times, said that if an older man was interested in orchids, ‘Cunanan would go out and buy every book available on orchids and soon he would be talking about the subject as if he had studied it all of his life.’”
Not being interested in orchids, or in older men who happen to be interested in orchids, I instead spent the show’s long week off-air with Zadie Smith’s most recent book, Feel Free. One of the essays therein happens to be “On Attunement,” which contains as elegant a summary of the specific hell of being undereducated in an overeducated room as I have ever read. (Like ending up in any restaurant where the meal requires several sets of cutlery, or being asked about my schooling and my parents’ jobs, this is my idea of a nightmare.) “I have known many true connoisseurs,” Smith writes. “They never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, [or who] have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters…I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential.”
Whatever Cunanan’s anxieties, he’s unafraid of homework. He is capable of posing as a man who knows about interiors, or orchids, or fine art; he can decode a wine list. How perversely freeing it must be to be a sociopath, and not to answer with the truth about your Podunk school, your parents’ jobs, your status as a former or a current rube: how weirdly punk to simply live the lie, and lucky to believe it.
After the Blachford live-in lover job implodes, our killer-autodidact heads to L.A., meeting David Madson for the kind of hotel dinner that requires—in my personal opinion—far too many forks. Asked about his family, Cunanan recounts the fiction that his father was a powerful stockbroker who travelled back to the Philippines to run a string of pineapple plantations, and his mother was a New York literary maven who brought lobster dinners to him at the school gates.
He looks as though he has convinced himself, despite not having managed to fool David. He is glassy-eyed with joy, half there and half lost in a manic fugue. When Madson leaves and Cunanan returns to squalor, takes up crystal meth, and ends up both hallucinating an encounter with Versace and returning to his family’s dumpy condo for an eerie, Norma/Norman Batesian exchange with mother MaryAnn, the lie seems necessary. Connoisseurs, most often, do not grow up poor with overbearing mothers. Real sophisticates are rarely bathed, as adult men, by loony parents. Saying that there was no killing in this episode was hardly accurate —it’s this sixth hour’s grim nadir that forces Cunanan to kill off, systematically, the last remaining sane, humane parts of himself.
Versace’s Killer Makes Being a Sociopath Look Like Freedom
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