Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson discuss the third of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which focuses on the murder of Lee Miglin and is the first episode to not feature Versace. This week’s featured interview is two time Tony winning actress Judith Light who discusses playing Marilyn Miglin for a single episode.
It’s May of 1997 now, and we fade up on a Canadian Home Shopping Network host giving us some biographical background on Marilyn Miglin, who started out as a dancer and transitioned into cosmetics when the hot stage lights kept melting her face. Her face here belongs to the great Judith Light, still her gloriously bad-ass self beneath an era-appropriate immobile inverted ziggurat of Executive Lady Of A Certain Age hair. Marilyn’s co-host introduces Marilyn’s new line, Pheromone, a direct – and, for the show’s metaphorical purposes, convenient – choice of brand name, and Marilyn is pretty pleased with her grand unifying theory of fragrance: “Perfume is about our bodies talking to each other without words.”
Marilyn’s not able to talk to anyone at her house, though; later, she’s at an airport pay phone, getting the machine. “Lee, I don’t know where you are,” she says, frowning; evidently she expected him to pick her up, but she can’t wait any longer. I mostly note the bit of dialogue above because of the Edie McClurg levels of Chicago torque on the word “are.” The camera studies Marilyn’s expensive jewelry as she says she’s going to catch a taxi…
…and then, when the taxi’s dropped her off, the expensive-looking exterior of the Miglins’ townhouse. Marilyn and her array of bags stand in the manicured mulch beside the sidewalk, apparently expecting Lee – and even if you haven’t “read back” on the case and Cunanan’s non-Versace victims, you’ve probably figured out based on passing mentions of Miglin in prior episodes (and, you know, having watched TV before) that Lee is Marilyn’s husband, and is dead – to rush out the front door full of apologies.
This does not happen, although Marilyn gives Lee ample time to correct his oversight when she flings the front door open and stands expectantly on the stoop. Nothing. She bustles inside with her things and calls, “Lee?” as the camera ensures we note the long vistas of the house; the predominantly pale-neutral color scheme of the décor; and the museum-esque tidiness of the rooms before cutting to a pint of chocolate ice cream melting insolently on the counter. Marilyn is brought up short by this, and returns to the front door to look warily inside. Passing neighbors pause to check her okay. “Something’s wrong,” she asserts, and the neighbors follow her inside. Spotting the ice cream, the Coke can beside it, and Marilyn’s clenching at them, Mr. Neighbor seems to agree that something’s off here, and tells the women to wait outside and call the police.
Mr. Neighbor begins his walkthrough of the house, calling for Lee. I find it odd initially that he doesn’t stop to salivate over the Miglins’ built-ins
but that’s because he’s spotted the “centerpiece” before I have: a ham with a butcher knife buried in it, left unwrapped on the desk in the study. Mr. Neighbor climbs the stairs to the master bedroom – more white, cream, and pale gold – and finds a disorderly master bath with a telling ring of mung around the bathtub. Next, an ankle-height shot set-up watches Mr. Neighbor hustle down the stairs to the basement; behind the door he opens with some trepidation is a chapel, and it too is messy. He has nothing to report to the women waiting at the front steps, but CPD is pulling up, and they do their own walkthrough, discovering bloody clothes in the bathroom and asking if anyone’s checked the garage. Mrs. Neighbor offers to go with the uniformed officer.
Inside, Marilyn sits, rigid, and drums her fingers in an odd way, almost like she thinks she’s supposed to have a nervous tic under the circs but isn’t really feeling it. She stares at The Telltale Ice Cream.
Mrs. Neighbor was told to stay in the alley, but sticks her head into the garage to report that the Miglins’ Lexus is missing. The uniform frowns and walks around the end of what looks like a vintage Corvette, then stops.
Inside, Marilyn hears Mrs. Neighbor’s wail of horror, and flinches. We push in on her as Mrs. Neighbor rushes into the room behind her and brings up short. As if to reflect the falling apart of everything, the cosmetics titan’s lipstick is feathering as she whispers, “I knew it.”
After the title card, it’s one week earlier, at a fundraiser for Jim Edgar for governor. The Miglins exposit for us via telling their tablemates that they’re devoted not just to one another but to one another’s careers – he helped her paint her first storefront – and Lee gives Marilyn the credit for their successes. Lee is played by Mike Farrell, who’s had some later-in-life roles the last few years in which he’s impressed; I’m thinking particularly of the Law & Order: SVU with Brenda Blethyn and Clea DuVall. I’ve been waiting for him and Light to show up in this season, because I like them both, and I like that the less “famous” victims are given a decent amount of the script’s attention and dimensioning here. With that said, by the time the groundwork of the marriage and the Miglins’ rise is laid, it’s nearly 20 percent of the episode’s runtime gone, and I wonder if this shouldn’t move a little faster. Anyway, after Edgar jokingly asks Marilyn never to run against him, Marilyn gives a lovely speech introducing Lee, but also about him, that he was one of seven coal miner’s kids who started out selling pancake mix out of his trunk. He’s a real-estate mogul, but also her partner in every sense, a great father and “a perfect husband.” Well: yeah. In the wings, Lee looks thoughtful as Marilyn calls him “the American dream.”
At home, Lee observes that the dinner seemed to go well, and thanks Marilyn for her effusions: “I wasn’t expecting that.” She’s heading upstairs, but stops to ask if he remembers what color they painted the Oak Street store she mentioned earlier. “What color?” he stalls. “That was years ago.” “We painted it pink,” she says, regarding him for a moment before going up. His smile fades; he closes his eyes and sighs briefly. Not sure what’s intended here, although I will say that you remember the color of every paint job you do yourself, especially if you are an impatient painter who sucks at it, like me. I’m not saying I detour past the paint-chip display at Lowe’s to flip off Benjamin Moore’s Harvest Gold every time I’m at that store? But I’m not saying I don’t. Forest Truffle can also suck it, while I’m up. So yeah, to me it’s somewhat striking that he’s failing this test, if in fact that’s what it is, and I don’t know why she’s administering it – he’s inattentive? she’s concerned about his mental acuity? we’re supposed to take something symbolic from the “pink” aspect?
Upstairs, Marilyn slathers her face with cold cream and begins taking her face off. I kept thinking of the end of Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close wiping her mouth so roughly.
Marilyn removes her lashes and, almost absently, dabs behind her ears and at her cleavage with scent while staring at her denuded face in the vanity mirror.
In the study, Lee’s on the phone: “No no, it’s just so unexpected!” He doesn’t seem alarmed when Marilyn comes in, looking curious, and tells the caller, “Those arrangements are fine! …And not before that time.” He adds that “we can discuss this at the office,” and hurries the caller off the phone; pretty good cover, but it’s obviously Cunanan on the other end. Marilyn cocks a brow: “Who was that?”
Cut to a sweaty Cunanan hanging up a pay phone, and to me realizing how…restful, for lack of a better word, the episode has felt without him up to this point, even knowing we’ve just seen Miglin scheduling his own death.
The man himself pads into the bedroom, where Marilyn is already installed with a sleep mask. He peers over at her, then covers her hand with his. She regrips so it’s more handholding, less protection.
As a red Jeep approaches Chicago, Marilyn gets ready to leave for Toronto. She asks what Lee’s plans are, while she’s away; he talks about finishing her “accounts,” catching up with a Paul…he’s sort of vague, and half-staggers to sit down on the stairs, concluding that he’ll go to work, it’s what he does: “Isn’t that what I always do?” Concerned, she sits beside him and asks what’s going on. “If you’re in one of your blue moods, why don’t you come with me?” she says. She likes it when he’s there. I like it when an actor commits to an accent; Light is currently in the middle of Pennsylvania somewhere, I think? The Chicago leaks out of the performance pretty steadily, sad to say, and by episode’s end she’s firmly back in Judge Donnelly territory…speaking of SVU. Anyway: Lee seems surprised to hear that Marilyn likes him to come along; bemused, she says of course she does. He tells her he’s very proud of her: “You know that, don’t you?” She surreptitiously checks her watch and asks if he wants to come or not; he heaves a sigh and considers it for a split second, then says no, he’s “being silly.” He gives her a kiss and helps her gather her things.
Andrew Cunanan pulls the red Jeep into a parking garage, cranks the seat back, and settles in for a nap as Astrid Gilberto’s “A Certain Sadness” starts up on the soundtrack and, at the Miglinhaus, Lee seats himself at Marilyn’s vanity with a couple fingers of bourbon and stares at himself in the mirror…then dabs some of her Pheromone behind his ears. He sips his drink and steels himself.
Later, he heads downstairs to the basement chapel and lights a candle. Kneeling before the cross, facing the picture of Jesus, he shakes his head and crosses himself. His eyes fill. “I try,” he tells his God. “I. Try.” It’s quite affecting, and yet my eye is drawn over to what appears to be a conversation pit in the back of the shot.
Very odd juxtaposition that must be true to life or they’d have scotched it as distracting.
Cunanan parks around the corner and heads to the Miglinhaus. Inside, at Cunanan’s knock, Lee zhuzhes himself sartorially and mentally at the hallway mirror, then answers the door and hurries Cunanan inside, presumably so neighbors don’t see him admitting a young gentleman at night. He hugs Cunanan warmly. Cunanan stands kind of limply; his eyes are a blank as he stiffly raises his arms to return the hug.
Cunanan’s stuffing a huge sammich into his piehole as Lee makes small talk: he didn’t expect Cunanan to be in town. What brings him to Chicago? “Work,” Cunanan grunts, departing the kitchen with the sandwich and no plate or even a paper towel to catch crumbs. Trash. Tellingly, Lee makes sure to wipe the counter before hastening after Cunanan, hesitantly telling him that “a little warning” would have been “useful,” as it’s dumb luck he’s alone in the house. Cunanan asks when Marilyn’s back; Lee naively tells him. “We have some time!” Cunanan chirps. Lee, whose combined eagerness and lack of street smarts are killing me right here, asks if he can stay the night. Cunanan, through a mouthful of sandwich, garbage-persons, “Can you shut the blinds?” Lee goes to do just that.
Lee’s in the study, getting out some drawings and saying he’s wanted to “share this” with Cunanan for a while. Cunanan leans in the doorway, rummaging in his bag for his gun, and as Lee is laying out the drawings, we go to a first-person-shooter POV as Cunanan levels the gun at the back of Lee’s head. “The Skyneedle!” Lee nerds sweetly, and whether Cunanan is touched by his enthusiasm or thinks it’s too easy a shot, I don’t know, but he stashes the gun back in his pack as Lee goes on about it being the tallest building in the world once it’s built, 125 stories, 1,952 feet. This was a real project; it was never built. The Freedom Tower would have made the conversation we’re about to hear irrelevant in the second place, but: Cunanan confirms that the idea is to build it right near Sears Tower, with an observation deck that will look down on the Sears Tower’s – thereby pretty much putting the Sears Tower out of business, at least from a tall-building-tourism standpoint. Lee never thought of it like that. After a pause, Cunanan snorts, “Please. That’s exactly how you thought of it.” Lee shrugs that, actually, he saw himself mingling amongst the families visiting it, and eavesdropping anonymously on their excitement.
But this version of pride in accomplishment is alien to Cunanan – as are actual accomplishments, really, which is why he has to shit on it, asking if it’s ever going to happen. Has he broken ground on the project? Lined up the financing? Not yet, Lee admits, and Cunanan makes a lemon face and booms, “The Miglin Tower!” No no no: it’s the Skyneedle. It’s supposed to inspire people to “reach up – it’s about that, it’s not about me.” Here again, though, Cunanan’s narcissism and his rage at those he perceives as “better” than he makes him unable to tolerate a loftier explanation, and he sputters that it’s the tallest building in the world, it’s the Lee Miglin Tower! Why else is Lee showing him these plans? That he cares about Cunanan and wants to share something he’s stoked about isn’t something Cunanan can register; to him, it’s a power play, and he brats that he doesn’t want to spend the whole night “listening to how great you are.” Lee looks at him with confusion as Cunanan continues snitting about the “great Lee Miglin Tower,” inspiring schoolchildren for eons to come, but instead of suggesting that, for a guy who clearly hasn’t bathed for several large states’ worth of driving, a “the customer is always right” approach is not just indicated here but required, Lee just says they don’t have to talk. “No, we don’t,” Cunanan says, more agreeably, but he’s not done being a twat, smirking that he knows what Lee’s doing: he’s trying to impress Cunanan – to convince himself that this is “more than a business transaction,” that there’s a genuine attraction there. Lee confines himself to pointing out that Cunanan could pretend, too. Cunanan keeps that fatuous challenging smile pasted on, then leans in for a passionate kiss, during which the camera dwells unnecessarily on Lee’s wedding band. Lee’s never been kissed like that, has he? No, Lee says, fairly trembling with desire. “It feels like I’m alive!” Oh, Lee. Cunanan points out that “most escorts” don’t kiss, then crazies that he’s not like most escorts; he’s not like “most anybody.”
Well, that’s true, strictly speaking. “I could almost be…a husband. A partner!” Lee kind of cringes, which probably won’t help him, as Cunanan goes on, “I could almost be. I really could, almost.” He’s probably trying to elevate his own status in the transaction, but Lee misunderstands, thinking he’s rubbing it in more, and says he knows it’s not real; he’s not a fool. But Cunanan makes it seem soreal. “Good,” Cunanan whispers, delighted, then proposes they “go out.” Where are they going? To make a mess, Cunanan says, leading Lee to the garage, and he doesn’t want Lee to worry about it.
In the garage, he shoves Lee up against the wall. “I’m in control now.” Lee seems a little concerned, but mostly titillated, and the proportions don’t change when Cunanan open-up-and-say-ahs a gardening glove into Lee’s mouth. Lee’s little moans of excitement make this particularly difficult to watch, especially when he reaches for Cunanan but is pushed away so Cunanan can search the tool table for masking tape. As Cunanan carefully wraps Lee’s head, Lee starts to look more puzzled than turned on, and when Cunanan’s done, Lee is lowered to the floor and bound with an extension cord while Cunanan burbles about Lee’s dominance in the outside world and submission “in here.” The torture is actually listening to Cunanan blather on about inverting the natural order, in my opinion, never more than when Cunanan smugs that Lee likes “being pathetic, don’t you.” It’s really that Cunanan doesn’t like it and can’t escape feeling it, so he has to humiliate Lee fully, crawling up his body and throttling him for a few seconds, then breaking Lee’s nose with the heel of his hand. Lee emits a muffled wail. Blood leaks out from under the tape as Cunanan announces that he’s killed two people very close to him, hard though it surely is to believe of “intellectual Andrew,” “well spoken, well dressed.” Snort. Cunanan makes a point of blaring into Lee’s ear that he knows Lee isn’t wearing his hearing aid (one more tiny humiliation before the final string of big ones), so he’ll speak very clearly: when “they” find Lee’s body, he’ll have ladies’ drawers on and be surrounded by gay porn, so that “everyone will know” the “great Lee Miglin is a sissy.” This isn’t about Lee at all, of course; it’s about Cunanan feeling like he doesn’t exist, and as Lee continues to groan, Cunanan winds up by asking tearfully which Lee fears more, “death, or being disgraced?” Lee sobs. Cunanan sits back and says, as if realizing it for the first time, “You know, disgrace isn’t that bad – once you settle into it.”
He gets up and heaves a bag of Quikrete over to Lee, panting, “Concrete can build. And concrete can kill.” So on top of everything else, Cunanan’s a C-plus writer. Roger that. He heaves the bag over his head and slams it down on Lee’s torso, then shoves it off, grabs some kind of screwdriver from the pegboard, and stab-falls onto Lee’s chest.
Later, Cunanan tools through the house, almost artfully spattered in blood. He whomps the ham down on Lee’s neatly arranged Skyneedle plans and crams meat into his mouth. Expressionlessly, he picks up the drawing of the building and tears it exactly in half, right through the tower; cut to him burning it on the chapel’s altar. The hold on the shot of the hellish flames oranging his face and dancing in his eyeglass lenses is maybe a little long.
CPD Superintendent Rodriguez marches through the press scrum at the front of the townhouse, not acknowledging questions about whether Lee knew the intruder. The crime-scene techs pause at the sight of the boss, but he tells them to carry on as he looks down on Lee’s corpse, now crimson with blood thanks to torture (apparently with a handsaw) and surrounded as “promised” with porn magazines. Rodriguez’s question about “the underwear” lets us know the rest of Cunanan’s threat was also carried out. Rodriguez sighs as the lead tech says Lee had no defensive injuries to his hands, but every single rib is broken, and says he wants no leaks; the official story is that “an elderly gentleman has been killed.”
Elsewhere, Marilyn is straightening family pictures on the mantel as a guy in a suit – presumably J. Paul Beitler, Lee’s partner – quavers that “this” had nothing to do with their business. Marilyn’s like, duh, of course it didn’t, and as Rodriguez enters, doffing his hat, she begins listing with grim determination everything Cunanan took: money, leather jackets, suits, the Lexus, the “unusual” gold coins Lee gave as gifts, a dozen pairs of black socks. It was a “robbery,” no question. Rodriguez keeps his face impassive in this gust of denial, and also when Marilyn announces to Beitler that she knows who SupRod is; she didn’t call 911, she called a police commander she knows. “We’re all here for you,” SupRod merely says, and as Beitler’s face works in the back of the shot, Marilyn announces, “Lee was alone in the house. He was vulnerable. It was an opportunistic attack.” The burglar could have snuck up on Lee, if he didn’t have his hearing aid in!
Beitler hangs his head as SupRod suggests talking later. “Talk now! Why not!” Marilyn says. SupRod gently broaches the “homosexual pornographic magazines” near Lee’s body. Marilyn barely reacts, blinking and saying they must belong to the killer. SupRod has an almost reflex cop response to that theory, observing that that would mean the killer brought the magazines with him – i.e., knowing his target/that he would need them; having been invited. It took me a minute to register the implication, but Marilyn’s right on top of it, and is not having it, gritting that she’s not interested in the murderer’s “intentions.” Catch the guy; don’t talk to her about what might “or might not” be going through his mind. “I understand,” SupRod says. Marilyn squints: “Do you.” SupRod, now a little worried: “I believe so.” Marilyn, without breaking eye contact: “Dollars. Jewelry. Socks. Suits. That’s all I’ll allow that man to steal from me.” He won’t take her good name – their good name. They worked too hard making it, together.
Rodriguez is likely relieved to escape into the crime scene, then, confirming that Cunanan not only took a bath and shaved, but appears to have slept over. He clenches, looking at the bed, as the lead tech says, “He must have known that Marilyn was coming home.” He clenches again when he finds two of his detectives chowing sandwiches in the downstairs hall, and politely informs Marilyn – who is seated beside her son, Duke, and now wearing a different suit, so the timeline here is a bit shuffly – that she doesn’t have to feed his officers. She chirps that a neighborhood restaurant wanted to help, and donated the food. Then she introduces Duke as “a Hollywood actor!” (hee/aw), and mommily upsells his career as an abashed Duke is like, “‘Aspiring,’ Mom.” He does mention he’s in Air Force One, but notes on Marilyn’s proud “He plays a pilot!” that there are a lot of pilots in the film. Heh. Miglin Jr.’s film career didn’t go much of anywhere, possibly because the murder of his father took him off track, possibly because most film careers…don’t; Cunanan apparently suggested to several people that he and Duke knew each other and were working together, a contention the Miglins have firmly denied.
We cut away from this awkwardness to a uniform finding Cunanan’s Jeep, festooned with parking tickets, around the corner. She peers in to see a map of Chicago and a copy of Out Magazine, and runs a plates check. A hit comes right back: it’s stolen, and linked to the homicide of Jeff Trail. And there’s more good news in terms of leads, as two detectives tell SupRod at the cop shop, namely that Lee’s car phone turns on whenever the car is turned on, which lets them track the car’s location. Based on the pings to date, it looks like he’s heading to New York. SupRod wants this intel kept in a cone of silence – the FBI, them, that’s it – and the three of them exult that wherever Cunanan goes, “we got ‘im.” (Ron Howard, wearily: “They don’t.”)
NYC’s Versace storefront. Cunanan, attired in one of Lee’s suits, I guess? Although Mike Farrell is much too tall for them to fit him properly, but that’s one of those things fictionalized narrative never gets right about borrowed clothing – anyway, he regards himself smugly in the shiny sign on the door and goes in to do some browsing. There’s a home-goods display set up on a dining-room table, and as he’s about to pull up one of the chairs and leaf through South Beach Stories by Gianni and Donatella, the chair makes an echoey skrronnnk along the floor. Darren Criss nails the jumpy “did anyone see that” reaction on Cunanan’s part; it’s just a perfect, tiny smackdown of the striver, satisfying to a viewer who has come to enjoy Cunanan’s discomfiture but also a nod to the hundreds of these tiny mortifications that may have contributed to his becoming a monster. A graffiti-ish rendering of Gianni in the book shifts the soundtrack from peppy retail jazz to the foreboding strings of Cunanan’s madness.
SupRod asks the assembled at the Miglinhaus if they’ve heard of Cunanan. Marilyn says no; who is he? He’s an escort, SupRod tells them (Beitler looks nauseated, and I honestly can’t tell if the actor is just trying to register in a scene dominated by Judith Light’s charisma; if we’re supposed to deduce that Beitler either knew for sure or strongly suspected that Lee may have had extracurricular desires; or if he didn’t know but is now homophobically revolted). Cunanan is wanted in connection with two homicides in Minnesota. “What does this have to do with Lee?” Marilyn asks. Cunanan stole a Jeep from one of the victims; it was found a block from the Miglinhaus. SupRod puts a mugshot of Cunanan on the coffee table. Marilyn says confidently she’s never seen him before; Duke looks uncomfortable, though it’s hard to know how to take that. The camera pushes out from the side of Marilyn’s face to focus on Duke’s, and on Duke hanging his head, as SupRod says reluctantly that they have to understand the case is no longer solely a CPD matter, that the FBI is now involved. Marilyn says all they care about is catching Lee’s murderer. Beitler stares straight ahead, clenching his jaw. Marilyn looks at him and at Duke all, “…What?”
Outside, SupRod is told that Cunanan’s on the move, but the cell phone towers have tracked him to outside Philadelphia. PPD and the FBI are “closin’ in.” SupRod looks over his shoulder at the living room and mutters, “I hope they’re ready.”
Beitler lets himself into the master bedroom just in time for Light’s Emmy reel, as Marilyn updates her blush and snaps that she knows what they’re saying about her. Why hasn’t she cried? Where’s the grief, the emotion? She didn’t love him. “How could a woman who cares so much about appearances appear not to care!” Beitler, probably thinking about the “allegations,” sighs that people say all kinds of nasty things at a time like this. “Especially at a time like this,” Marilyn adds, when you’re weak, when you’re down. She scrabbles around on the vanity top for a lip pencil and snaps, “How dare they say our marriage was a sham,” and points at Beitler’s reflection with the lipliner: “Lee and I – shared our whole – lives.” Breaking down, she talks about the adventures they shared, and how he rescued her when she was lost. “I…loved him,” she weeps. Beitler approaches and puts a hand on her arm. “I loved him very much!” Marilyn claps her hands to her face and starts smearing around the makeup she’s just been carefully touching up, and gasping through a possible panic attack, she snarks, “There. Is that better? Am I a real wife now?” She stumbles to the window and sits on a stool to say that they had a fairytale life, makeup straggling across her face, and as much as I always love Light and as much as I appreciate the script underlining the emotional wreckage Cunanan left in his wake (as all murderers do), the scene is quite stagey – like, there’s really no point to the blocking except to move Light around, and there’s really no point to those theatrical kinetics or whatever, because this is filmed. Light can move this ball by herself, you don’t have to block her like this is the Penfield Academy production of Mother Courage. Just run the camera.
Exhibit A: “We didn’t even fight,” delivered with an almost ashamed glance at Beitler, as if to acknowledge that that could be construed as a lack of passion. See? Light has this well in hand. She chews her upper lip with her lower teeth as she says that Lee never lifted a finger (to her, I believe she means). “But I will,” she says, getting up and crossing back to the vanity – again, for no apparent reason except that The Big Book Of Scene Anatomies appears to have called for it. There’s no “family connection” to “this Cunanan,” she says. “We’ve never heard of him.” Beitler looks stricken some more as Marilyn fairly orders him, “It was…a robbery. A random killing.” She begins to straighten up the vanity top.
It’s not so neat at the cop shop, as one of the detectives has to tell SupRod that Philly radio is running a story about the car phone, and that they’re tracking the signal, which means Cunanan will know they’re onto him – at which time the episode director leafs through TBBOSA to “Reaction Blocking, Frustrated,” drops a fingernail onto “shove everything off desk while shouting angrily,” and nods. And that’s what SupRod does. Come on, guys.
Cut to the Lexus, where Cunanan hears said report; hilariously starts whanging the receiver of the car phone on the console; then screeches over to the shoulder to wrench the antenna off and hurl it into the underbrush. Which is not sketchy at all, except it totally is, and a passing car’s passengers give him a “tf you doing” look. He pulls out again, then quickly heads into the entrance of Fort Mott State Park. (It’s in Pennsville. If you think of the state of New Jersey as a grandma in a rocker – this is the image our eighth-grade earth-science teacher always used; don’t know why it’s a grandma – Pennsville is at the southwestern tip of the state, basically Nana’s nipple.) He parks, and scans the families in the parking lot for targets/prospective carjackees…or waits for the park to empty out of extraneous witnesses, which appears to have taken a while. Cunanan finally sees an older lady who looks likely, and has his gun out, but then her husband appears and Cunanan thinks better of it. Enter the red truck, and a ponytailed caretaker stopping to pick up the mail. This is William Reese, the caretaker of the on-site Civil War cemetery. Cunanan scrambles back to the Lexus and follows Reese into the cemetery, and I am not a botanist, but I’m pretty sure this sort of tree is not native to Jersey.
Let me know in the comments, but if I’m right, it seems strange they wouldn’t just get permits for a local graveyard. Anyway, Reese parks next to the chapel building and heads inside, stopping to remove a weed from the flowerbed near the door as Cunanan is parking along the other side of the building. Reese is settling in in the office when Cunanan comes in, gun drawn, and says pleasantly that Reese should stay calm, nobody’s going to get hurt: “I’m here to steal your truck.” He asks for the keys, but tells Reese not to reach for them and to get away from the desk. Then he asks if there’s a downstairs. There’s a basement. “Can I lock you in there?” “Door’s got a lock, yessir,” Reese semi-answers.
The “basement” is in fact properly – and fittingly, alas – a crypt.
Cunanan orders Reese onto his knees. Reese tries to humanize himself for Cunanan, mentioning his wife and son and that he’d sure like to see them again, but Cunanan is Cunanan, and shoots Reese mid-sentence. He looks around at the crypt with that Starman blankness, then heads upstairs, grabs his backpack from the Lexus, and peels out in the pickup.
Back to the set of CHSN, where the co-host from the opener extends the HSN “family”’s deepest condolences and explains to viewers that Marilyn’s husband was brutally murdered. Marilyn says she had to “think long and hard” about coming back, but believes Lee would have wanted her to: “You see, his name is on these bottles too.” He was her legal counsel, her accountant, her best friend. He believed in her, she says, wiping her eyes, then wonders how many husbands really believe in their wives, treat them as equals and partners. “We were a team,” she quavers, caressing a bottle of perfume, “for 38 years, and I miss him very much.” The co-host asks if she’s able to go on. Marilyn nods, pulling herself together and remembering a piece of advice she got from a friend who hosted a TV show: “Just think of the little red light as the man you love.” Push in on Marilyn, staring sadly at the red light, then closing her eyes.
Sarah D. Bunting’s old-school recap would like to avoid ‘hamming it up’ wordplay here, but as American Crime Storyinvestigates Lee Miglin’s demise, it does make some melodramatic choices.
“What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced?”
If I were to pose a similar question to Andrew Cunanan, it would be this: What terrifies you more, never amounting to anything or everyone knowing about it?
Andrew Cunanan is obsessed with big, important men. Being one, being perceived as one, taking them out, and taking them down by revealing some secret shame. It’s hard to imagine that Andrew Cunanan could exist in this way if he didn’t hate himself. He clearly hates himself for many reasons, but chief among them are the fact that he isn’t a somebody and the fact that he’s gay.
Ryan Murphy is walking a fine line here: queer characters, real and fictional alike, are far too often portrayed as psychopaths, murderers, craven perverts. But this case, in the careful hands of someone who knows those tropes all too well, reminds us that Andrew’s failings are his alone, while simultaneously showing how the same self-hatred that causes him so much shame and causes others so much hatred or fear is exactly what made his victims vulnerable in the first place. It’s what kept investigators from catching Cunanan sooner. Versace is equally as attentively loving to its victims as it is attentively horrified by its spree killer.
The strength of American Crime Story is that it lets us visit all these other worlds in such a way that suggests there is a fully-fledged show happening about each one, and we’re just briefly visiting it where our two paths overlap. We might imagine that in a parallel television universe, there is another limited series starring Marilyn, focusing on her second act as a self-made cosmetics mogul in the male-dominated 80s, after her career on stage, all the while married to her steadfast husband Lee.
Everything about Lee Miglin is heartbreaking, and Mike Farrell plays him beautifully. He clearly just wants to be loved and seen for who he is. He struggles with what he sees as a sin, as shameful base urges. His basement shrine – and it does feel like his, not theirs as a couple, right? – is extensive. Candles and portraits are one thing, a custom kneeler is another. His prayer – “I try, I try, I try” – shows a man struggling to fit a mold that will never be his and hating himself every time it doesn’t work. He has lived a whole, successful life, but it’s as someone else. Lee represents so many other men, who loved their wives but were not in love with them. Men who could never fill the void that comes along with denying who you really are.
This is the most brutal episode of the installment so far, although I expect to say that a few more times before we’re through.
The bitter cruelty with which Andrew toys with Lee makes it all the more devastating. I kept finding myself thinking, but he’s going to murder him. Surely that’s worse? And it is. Oh, it is. The impending murder hangs over the first half of the episode, building stress in our bodies as we wait for the inevitable, knowing it will be ruthless and cruel. And yet. There is something heart-wrenchingly sadistic to playing with your food before you eat it. We can never know for sure what went on between Lee and Andrew, aside from a few key facts. But we know they spent time together. We know this was not their first meeting. While the lines were almost certainly different, it’s hard to imagine that the gist of their encounter was much different than what Ryan Murphy posits here.
It’s darkly impressive that an episode with such unvarnished violence can still garner gasps from an act as simple as ripping a sketch down the middle and burning it. Only a well-drawn character can elicit such emotions, and here I mean Lee. We’ve only just met him, but we feel his pride in his Sky Needle, the unbridled joy he would experience in touring it anonymously, overhearing the laughter of children as they saw the view from his own creation. When Cunanan destroys the drawings, he is desecrating Lee’s life’s work. He is desecrating Lee.
This episode was built on tension, more so than the previous ones. It feels like at any moment, the Miglins’ kindly neighbor will turn a corner to find the Miglin’s pristine white home covered in blood. Or that any one of Andrew’s sudden outbursts will turn on a dime into murder. You worry about Lee’s dignity and privacy, and Marilyn’s, when their neighbor inevitably discovers Lee’s body in a compromising position.
This was our first episode without Gianni, anything or anyone from his world. It’s a wise choice, particularly since the last episode was weighed heavily toward Andrew, and the Gianni storyline felt shortchanged, less impactful. I’d rather see a better story about Gianni later on than feel like dribs and drabs of his life are shoehorned in. Besides, I can’t imagine that we would feel as completely drawn in to the world of the Miglins without spending as much time with them as this episode does.
I want to call attention to Marilyn, played with strength and empathy by Judith Light. This is a stunning performance, and she had a tall order to fill. From the get go, there’s a tenseness to her body, a stiffness to her affect. She doesn’t say a word, but we know that she knows that something is wrong. Later on in the episode, Judith is able to show Marilyn’s steely reserve while somehow revealing her inner turmoil: the depth of her grief, her unwillingness to rethink the true partnership that was her marriage, her loyalty to Lee and the dignity she felt he deserved. Her choice to process Lee’s murder as a random killing is completely understandable.
As the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story opens, we see neither Gianni Versace nor Andrew Cunanan. Instead, writer Tom Rob Smith and director Gwyneth Horder-Payton introduce us to Marilyn Miglin. Miglin is a home-shopping icon and the head of a beauty product empire — worthy of a TV show in her own right. Considering the legendary Judith Light is playing her, you might expect Ryan Murphy and co. have suddenly decided to add another star to the mix.
But as much as Marilyn dominates the narrative this week, this is still not her story. We’re still in Cunanan’s; Lee Miglin, Marilyn’s husband (played by Mike Farrell), was his third victim. In flashes back-and-forth, we see both how he died, and how Marilyn handles the immediate aftermath of his murder.
When Marilyn has to go out of town for work, she asks an innocuous question of her husband: “What are your plans for when I’m away?” His struggle to answer — his reach for any possible thread of what he’s doing — depresses him mightily. “I’m going to work, like I always do,” he says, sitting, dejected, on their stairs. She asks if he wants to come with her: “I like it when you’re there.”
This takes Lee aback. “You do?” he asks. As depicted by Light and Farrell, the Miglin’s relationship is one of mixed signals and unspoken secrets. There’s clearly love there, but that’s only half the battle.
See, Lee’s real plans for when Marilyn is away are to meet up with a younger man he knows: Andrew Cunanan. There’s great hesitance within Lee for this meeting. As he goes to let Cunanan in, he freezes in front of his mirror and adjusts his sweater. He then lets out a deep sigh as he can’t quite get it right. The clothes are right; the fit is uncomfortable. Lee is a misfit in his own life, and meeting with Cunanan is his chance to try and find a better fit.
The Cunanan we see here is more aloof than prior. With Versace, he was trying to be the best version of himself. With Lee, he’s sloppy and distracted. This is, we know from history, the Cunanan who has recently killed two men. He can’t even muster the energy to pretend to care about his newest victim.
Unlike most of the episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Darren Criss’ Cunanan has relatively minimal screen time. Light takes center stage, particularly during the time after her husband’s death.
In fact, Marilyn wants Cunanan dropped from Lee’s history. She’s wounded to learn of her husband’s relationship with an escort, but her interest is in preserving his memory, not damning him in death. She wants there to have been nothing intimate between Lee and Cunanan, no connection. “We’ve never heard of him,” she insists icily. “It was a robbery, and a random killing.” It’s what she needs — not just as someone who cares about how things look, but as a widow who wants her relationship with her husband preserved as she remembers it.
In a powerhouse scene, Marilyn applies her makeup while monologuing about her husband’s murder. “I know what they’re saying about me,” she says, applying her face with an unsteady hand. “Why hasn’t she cried? Where’s the grief, the emotion? She couldn’t have loved him. How could a woman who cares so much about appearance appear not to care? … How dare they say our marriage was a sham? Lee and I shared our whole lives. We shared all kinds of adventures. We rode in hot air balloons. When I was lost in the desert, he rescued me. How many couples can say they have that kind of romance? I loved him. I loved him very much.”
She says those last lines through heaving sobs as Light allows Marilyn’s grief to overcome her. “There, is that better?” she spits. “Am I a real wife now?”
Marilyn’s plight is a sympathetic one. She knew her husband as one man; his death is revealing him to be another man entirely. Trying to make those ideas compatible is harder than merely erasing the parts of Lee that trouble her. Unfortunately, this reaction is rooted in internalized homophobia, both within Marilyn and the community at large. Her fear is not just that her husband was hiding secrets; it’s that the secrets would ruin his reputation — ruin the idea of their marriage. And so, she chooses to hide Cunanan’s motive.
Ultimately, it’s this lingering homophobia that keeps the real motive behind Lee’s death a secret — a recurring thread through this season of American Crime Story. We often think of homophobia as personally restrictive, a threat that keeps gay people in the closet and terrified of bullying, discrimination, and even assault. But homophobia is also structurally restrictive: For Marilyn to be secretive about her husband’s sexuality means one piece of the Cunanan puzzle was left out. The same goes for how the police wouldn’t canvas the gayest parts of Miami for Cunanan in the previous episode: Hate stands in the way of justice.
Personal and structural homophobia come together in next week’s episode, “House by the Lake.” Personally, it’s my favorite episode of anything that Ryan Murphy has ever done; think “Looking for the Future,” but so, so much darker.
Horror loses its bite when we learn too much about the villain. It’s not just that the unknown is always scarier than the known, it’s that we can’t help but develop a grudging empathy for a killer the more we get to know them. After Monster laid bare Aileen Wuornos’s many tragic tribulations before her serial killings, it became easy to forget she was a terrifying death-bringer for certain innocent people. Or in fiction, was there ever a bigger blunder than Rob Zombie attempting to explain Michael Myers’ childhood to us in the Halloween remake? Shockingly, finding out that The Shape had been bullied as a child completely robbed him of his terrifying, shark-like unknowability. But what happens when the reverse occurs, and a complex, borderline sympathetic villain is suddenly stripped back and streamlined into a dark void? Horror returns.
Three episodes in and it’s clear that Gianni Versace himself is only a side character in what is ultimately the horror saga of Andrew Cunanan’s crimes. But where the premiere introduced Cunanan as a verbal, witty, clever, and deeply troubled person motivated by jealousy and longing, this week reframed him as a straight-up horror movie slasher. His motives were opaque and unpredictable, his methods bizarre and hard to explain. I was terrified. Is there a chance the American Crime Story subtitle contains a typo? This week The Assassination of Gianni Versace was suddenly much closer in tone and effect to Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story. Which is to say, “A Random Killing” was one of the most disturbing episodes of TV I’ve seen in a while. Let’s talk about it!
We began with two women hawking perfume on the Home Shopping Network in the mid-’90s.
The perfume was ingeniously called “Pheromone,” and its mastermind was one Marilyn Miglin, the IRL baroness of a Chicago-area beauty empire. She was played here by the great Judith Light, who had been mercifully freed of her Transparent wig and personality. Judith Light was INCREDIBLE in this episode, which — though it was about the two murders Cunanan committed prior to Versace’s — centered the story around this woman and how she coped when her husband was murdered.
After her husband failed to pick her up from the Chicago airport, Marilyn arrived at her ominously empty house and recruited some neighbors to help check the place out. But from the long, tense tracking shots of the all-white, fancy home, we knew something was wrong. A stranger had been there. But what kind of maniac would leave ice cream out on the counter? The police definitely needed to be called! (Also there was a corpse in the garage.)
We then flashed back a week and met Marilyn’s husband, Lee, a well-respected and enormously successful commercial real estate developer. Right away we could tell the two adored each other, but in a married-my-best-friend kind of way. Lee was probably not interested in doing sex with Marilyn, but they definitely held hands in bed. We should all be so lucky!
Anyway, while Marilyn was away on her work trip, guess who swung by for a visit? Yep, Andrew Cunanan dropped in unannounced, and we gathered that Lee had hired Cunanan as an escort in the past. And though Lee clearly tried to be a gentleman toward his young companion, Cunanan took matters into his own hands. And in this case those matters were duct tape, a bag of concrete, and eventually a screwdriver.
Aside from brutally murdering older men, Cunanan loves to give a speech while doing so. In this case he monologued about how Lee was a powerful man attempting to build the tallest building in the world, but now Cunanan had power over him. So whereas we mayhave believed that Cunanan’s murders had been opportunistic, or methods for him to gain quick cash and stolen cars… It was now clear he was excited by the idea of destroying powerful men as a way of elevating his own status. Dark, dark stuff. And this extended sequence of torture and murder was one of the less pleasant things I’ve ever seen on TV. Poor Lee.
Rather than show you all that violence, let’s just settle for this image of Cunanan stabbing a honey-glazed ham! Think of it as sort of a metaphor for what had just happened in the previous scene.
Anyway, back to Marilyn. Her whole thing was, she was a sharp, professional woman who wanted the investigation undertaken in the most efficient manner possible. She verbally itemized every item Cunanan had stolen from their home, and vehemently denied any knowledge of why Cunanan had surrounded her husband’s corpse in gay porn rags. The killer must’ve brought them, duh.
I also liked this strange moment when the investigators were asking Marilyn questions but she just wanted to talk about her son’s burgeoning movie career. It’s almost poignant how in the midst of this tragedy she was still trying to maintain her composure as a strong businesswoman and image protectress.
But of course, eventually she crumbled and gave a moving (and convincing) speech about how much she loved her husband, and that it HAD been a genuine marriage, despite whatever his leanings were. They’d been best friends and partners and each other’s support systems. And it goes without saying that Judith Light’s work was devastating in this episode. Hope she still has space on her mantel for more trophies, because dang.
Meanwhile, Cunanan was driving around in Lee’s stolen Lexus, and browsing local Versace boutiques, which in my opinion is foreshadowing. But he soon realized that the built-in car phone was giving his location away whenever he passed a cell tower. It was time to find some new wheels!
And unfortunately for the poor undertaker who drove by Cunanan in a pickup, red was Cunanan’s favorite vehicle color!
Next thing we knew, he was following the man back to his mortuary, leading him into the basement at gunpoint, and then, well, you know. Truly heartbreaking. I have to be honest with you, I am not a fan of Andrew Cunanan.
We then ended with this moving scene, when Marilyn Miglin returned to the Home Shopping Network airwaves and memorialized her husband while clutching a bottle of her perfume. And while the juxtaposition of mixing pathos with consumerism could have been a salient satirical point, Judith Light’s pained emotions made it just simply devastating. In a series ostensibly about one famous murder, it’s clear Cunanan destroyed so many more lives than just Versace’s.
“A Random Killing” also served to make the point that many of the gay-related details of Cunanan’s crimes were swept under the rug in order to maintain reputations. Marilyn Miglin actively sought to prevent the press from knowing that her husband had known Cunanan prior to the murder, and while one can understand the protectiveness a victim’s family might have, it was this kind of public discomfort with gay men that hobbled Cunanan’s swift apprehension. Just another frustrating element to what has become an increasingly American horror story. (Get it? Like the show.) Great, if deeply unpleasant, stuff.
Judith Light has become so… poignant. When did that happen?
A couple of months before he shot Gianni Versace, Andrew Cunanan tortured and murdered Lee Miglin, a real estate mogul in Chicago. He was found by his wife, Marilyn. And that’s where we begin the third episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
In real life there was and still is considerable mystery around the connection between Cunanan and Miglin. In the episode, it’s not clear how they met, but when Marilyn (Light) takes off on a business trip, Miglin (Mike Farrell) goes to a chapel area in their home and prays for forgiveness for what he’s about to do. “I try,” he says plaintively. “I try.” Then he goes upstairs to meet Cunanan. It’s clear it’s not the first time, and it’s implied that he has a history of indulging in male escorts occasionally—it’s slightly less clear whether Marilyn knows this, but it seems like it.
There’s a chilling moment where Miglin greets Cunanan with a very heartfelt hug and we see Cunanan just standing there like a rock. Of course we know what’s about to happen, but that only heightens the tension as Miglin shows Cunanan drawings for a new project and Cunanan responds with derision, becoming increasingly passive-aggressive and belittling before taking Miglin into his garage and, as he did in “Manhunt,” wrapping his victim’s head in tape. It seems like silencing successful older men might be the emerging through line in Cunanan’s killing spree. But it goes deeper than that, too, and deeper than mere psychopathy. Cunanan makes it fairly clear that he knows he’s a psychopath. “This is who I really am,” he tells the gagged and bound Miglin.
The scene of the murder unfolds excruciatingly slowly, as Cunanan tells Miglin he’ll be wearing women’s underwear when his body is found and that everyone will know he’s gay. “What frightens you more,” Cunanan asks, “death, or disgrace? Disgrace.” He then crushes Miglin’s body with a bag of concrete—the use of a building material is clearly part of the “disgracing” of a man who builds things. After further defacing his victim’s body, he goes back upstairs, takes Miglin’s drawings, and burns them in the chapel. At this point I’m wondering if anyone could possibly outdo Darren Criss in a Terrifying Stone-Cold Stare competition; the guy’s just mesmerizingly scary. You get a sense of fathomless rage, deep self-loathing coupled with narcissistic grandiosity, and a desperate desire to be more than what he knows he really is.
Then we spool forward, to the Miglin home surrounded by policemen. Marilyn is almost bizarrely dry-eyed and brisk as she rattles off a list of things stolen by the killer, including Miglin’s Lexus (which has a phone in it, so Cunanan can be tracked) and a number of other items, including rare gold coins (now we know where the murderer got the one he pawned in Miami). When the officer broaches the subject of Miglin’s body being surrounded by gay porn magazines, it becomes clear that Marilyn has not been in the dark about this. She sharply informs the officer that she doesn’t care what was going through the killer’s mind, she just wants him caught. “I will not let him steal our good name,” she says. “And we built that together.”
Cunanan drives to New York City, where he is drawn by the windows of… yep, the Versace atelier. (By now, even the shot of his foot walking across the mosaic tile floor’s gorgon-head logo is completely ominous.) Unfortunately, someone’s leaked the fact that the police are using Miglin’s car phone to track Cunanan, and he hears about it on the radio, resulting in another execution, this time of a complete stranger whose truck he then steals.
But as great as Criss’ performance is, this episode belongs to Judith Light. As Marilyn Miglin she is incredibly nuanced. Obsessed with appearances yet unapologetic about what’s underneath. Cold, but brimming over with barely containable emotion. Defensive, but wide-open. Dignified and brave and oblique and sad, prideful and angry yet strangely resigned. It’s a beautiful performance and she absolutely owns the camera in every scene she’s in. Especially the last one, in which she goes back to her shopping-channel TV program (she’s created a perfume called “Pheromone,” which has a whole twisted poetry of its own if we consider her as a woman whose marriage might have been extremely perfunctory at the sexual level) and says she wants to go back to work because her husband was and still is part of everything she does. She says a friend of hers who had a TV program had once given her some advice about being in front of a camera: “Imagine that little red light is the man you love,” she says, staring straight at the lens, faintly smiling, eyes lit with unshed tears. It’s a phenomenal cut-to-black ending.
Meanwhile the wheels, literal and figurative, are now spinning toward the death of Gianni Versace.
In the hands of actors Judith Light and Mike Farrell, the tragic story of Chicago power couple Lee and Marilyn Miglin in this week’s episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story makes viewers forget the titular fashion icon altogether. “A Random Killing” tells the story of Andrew Cunanan’s third murder in 1997, three months before he shot Versace on the steps of his South Beach mansion. As depicted in the episode, Cunanan was a paid escort who had a relationship with the real-estate mogul (Farrell) and killed him while his wife Marilyn (Light), the founder of a beauty empire, was away on a business trip.
Ahead of the episode’s airing, Vulture spoke to Light about her riveting performance as Miglin’s widow, who is still alive today. Light also spoke about the inner work she does before taking on new characters, how she views the Miglin’s family’s denials that Cunanan and Lee knew each other, and why working on American Crime Storymeans so much to her.
You haven’t worked with Ryan Murphy before. What was the casting process like? I have not and I always had wanted to. It came up through another friend of mine, who I had done a play for in New York and actually won the Tony for [Other Desert Cities]. It was Jon Robin Baitz. He said, “There is this part and I think you should do it because it’s amazing,” and because it’s so timely in terms of what I talked about in my advocacy for years — the LGBTQ community. He thought I had to change my whole schedule [for it]. So it comes from having amazing, wonderful friends.
Did you remember anything about Andrew Cunanan or how Versace died? Was that something you paid attention to? Yes, I had followed it. I had been in a way upset about Versace, of course, who I believe was an extraordinary talent. But that this could happen so blatantly and so easily, and as we all know now, how the world is so easily taken down in so many places. I mean, there was just something yesterday in Kentucky, and so we find that people have this kind of accessibility to firearms and if their mental incapacity or whatever drives them unconsciously in their psychological damage, this is so, so easy. We live in a world where we can find ourselves unprotected and needing to be safe, so I followed this story and I thought this is just incredibly demoralizing on so many different levels. It’s disheartening, I think. As human beings, we can operate at a higher level and oftentimes you see a situation like this and we don’t.
I’m originally from Miami and I remember Versace’s murder well, but I had forgotten over the years that Cunanan was a spree killer. I don’t think I knew anything about the Miglins. Did you? No, I actually didn’t. My parents lived in Pompano Beach and that was partly my connection to it and my connection to Miami, but I didn’t really know or read about what had happened prior to Cunanan and the process of his killing spree.
Did you learn about Marilyn Miglin when you started to talk with Ryan Murphy about the role? Yeah, that was what informed me. I didn’t know anything about it, and then I read Maureen Orth’s book [Vulgar Favors: the Assassination of Gianni Versace] and so I knew more about it from that, so it was like a process of education.
How did you prepare? I spent a lot of time just reading the book, reading over the script, which I thought was extraordinary, and also talking to Gwyneth Horder-Payton, the director. I talked to the producers about what they were wanting and what they were seeing and what they needed. Also, whenever I work on any part, I always do the kind of homework that takes me into the depth of a person’s dynamics and psychology.
What does that homework entail? I sit with myself, looking at what drives someone. It’s a very intense process that I go through and I also allow myself to see places in myself that are similar to a character. But it’s a deep sort of investigative process, and I also work with a woman named Ivana Chubbuck and she’s a wonderful coach. We talk a lot about the character. So, that’s the kind of thing that I do. Once I go somewhere, I really tend to spend a lot of solitary time and immerse myself after having researched and spent time with other people who support me in the homework. When you have a great script, that also makes a difference because that gives you the map, the landscape of where you’re going.
Did the fact that Marilyn is a real, living person change your approach in trying to figure out the character? No, I think you just have to go from what’s given in the script and in the story. You know, we’re careful and we’re deferential, but I didn’t think it was purposeful to speak to her.
Did you watch videos of her? No, I really didn’t want to. Ryan was very specific about what the look was. He had translated all of that to the makeup and hair people and what they wanted to see. I am doing a representation in a piece, so it’s not, for me, it isn’t helpful. In another case, it might be, but no.
What was important for you to convey about Marilyn Miglin? That she loved this man deeply and was completely devoted to him. He was a man who allowed her to be all that she could be, and she was, in many ways, a woman ahead of her time. And she had a man who supported her in her endeavors. She is a great businesswoman and he was a great businessman, and they had a very connected, deeply loving relationship.
The scene when they return from the banquet and he thanks her for introducing him was very sweet. It showed their genuine admiration and affection. That’s exactly right. That was something that was really a top note that both Mike Farrell and I wanted to focus on and play.
Do you think Marilyn knew about Lee’s secret life? I don’t know. I can conjecture, I can speculate, but I think it’s problematic to do that because we don’t know. One of the things that I find so fascinating about psychology and human nature is we go through the world thinking that we know something, and our unconscious is driving us to do different things. When there is a real person involved, I can’t speculate about what her unconscious is or what she knew. And so, it’s like I’ve said so many times before in so many different interviews — Freud said 100 years ago, consciousness is an extraordinary event. It is not an ordinary event. And so, we’re talking about whether someone knew or not. Maybe unconsciously that’s possible, but I don’t know. And I don’t think that actually matters.
What I think matters is the dynamic that was going on and the overall context of this series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. There was this young man who was clearly very disturbed and his psychology was very problematic, who had been discounted on so many levels and had different aspects to him that drove him to do this. All of these pieces, and I think some of Ryan’s purpose, was to show what homophobia in a culture does to people. How a culture makes people stay in the closet, and how that’s what took place. How this young man was so desperate to be someone else, not own himself, that he came to do these terrible acts. And I think what’s valuable about this piece is that we’re talking about a level of homophobia that is still in our culture today.
We see that in Versace’s story too, during the conversation he has with Donatella about coming out to the Advocate. And she doesn’t want him to. Remember, this is the height of the AIDS pandemic. Only two years before, in 1995, did they come out with the protease inhibitors that were beginning to save people’s lives. That’s only two years before that, and you’re talking about a culture that was discounting and dismissive and vilifying the LGBTQ community. That’s so much of the top note of what I think this story is about. It’s like, lest we forget, this is still going on. These kind of people and their vilification of this community, a community that is so extraordinary. So this piece is a pay attention moment, and that’s why I’m so proud to be a part of it.
What did you find most challenging about playing Marilyn? That’s an interesting question to ponder. I have to say, the script is so great, it’s all there, and then I got to work with Mike Farrell, who’s so connected and such an extraordinary artist, and all of the people that were put together on the show — the only thing I found really challenging was having to figure out how to change my schedule. It wasn’t the work. I have great admiration for her. She’s an incredible businesswoman. She’s an incredible person. She was out there in the business world in a major way, early, early on. She found a partner who supported her efforts. I mean that’s pretty fantastic, talking about today and really making sure that women are paid equally and operating at a high level in the workplace. I have great respect for her.
The Miglin family has maintained that this was a random killing and have denied that this aspect of Lee Miglin’s life existed. But the show presents it as fact that he had a transactional sexual relationship with Andrew Cunanan and that eventually led to his murder. Did it give you any pause to tell that story, given the family’s denials? I want to be very careful about this because I know people want to talk about that. That is their business. That is their life. That is the way they choose to hold this. It is not my business as an actor in this very important story to challenge what they feel, what they want, or what they feel they want to talk about, and I think it’s very important to keep sacred people’s choices.
I hear you. But I’m wondering how you worked it out for yourself. How do you tell the story as an actor, knowing what the family has said? Does that impact you in any way? They’re two different things. I’m given a script. I’m an actor. This is the part I’m given to play and it is my job to tell the story in the best way that I can so that it is illuminated from the page to the screen. That’s my job. My job is not to get involved with the family and their stories and what they believe or what they don’t believe. I don’t get involved in that. I have a very different job. I have a very separate job, and my job is to do what I’m given to do.
I was really taken by the clicking of the nails when Marilyn waited for the police to search the house. She was perfectly still except for her nails. Did Gwyneth ask you to do that? It was written into the script, and when you have a writer like Tom [Rob Smith] and you have those directions — again, it’s a road map. It’s the landscape that he was giving us in that moment about who this woman is, how strong she is, how stalwart she is, how she is not going to let her emotions take her over, and it tells you the story in action rather than in words. I just thought that was so powerful. It also shows you her detail to beauty and to grooming. Her whole business is a beauty business and you see that. Those nails tell you a whole story about this person. I think that’s brilliant writing. It’s just extraordinary to me.
In the last scene, Marilyn is back selling at Home Shopping Network and she tells that story about pretending the camera’s red light is the man she loves and closes her eyes. Did you choose to end that way? Or was it in the direction? It’s so interesting that you ask about that because I don’t remember whether it was Gwyneth Horder-Payton, the director, or me. I think I may have done it at one point and she liked it, or I did it and then she cut the scene there, but I think that it was a combination of both of us. That’s a very emotional moment, so I don’t always remember what happens in those moments.
Do you remember how you were feeling? That was a very beautiful, poignant moment. Yes. There’s the sorrow, there’s the loss, there’s the knowing that you have to get on with life. So much of what happens for me when I play a character is that a lot of different things are going on all at one time, and I don’t know how to separate them out. But I know that if I’m emotionally connected, there’s a lot of other things that are going out on a lot of other levels, and I think that’s what helps people feel something when they watch it. So some of the things that I was feeling were the loss, the moving on, the need to take back a life that had been ripped from me in that moment, and knowing that my husband would have wanted me to move on.
Just like in the scene where Marilyn says that she knows everyone is judging her because she hasn’t cried, then she eventually breaks down and says, “Am I a good wife now?” Tell me about working on that powerful scene. Was that a very long day? I had flown in because the Emmys were the night before and I had been nominated for an Emmy, and then the next day was that scene that we had to shoot. You really have to know the words for a scene like that because the way it was written by Tom Rob Smith — who is an extraordinary craftsperson — one thing led to another emotionally. I had to work on it long and hard to get everything down because you can’t not know the words in a scene like that. You really have to be not thinking about that, but thinking about everything else. Gwyneth Horder-Payton, the director, was really available to talk about it, to make sure that it was what she wanted, how she saw it, how I saw it, how we could shape the scene. Also, when you do your own part of the scene and they shoot you, you have to be able to keep giving the level of emotion to other people who are in the scene, and so it was a very long day. The level of satisfaction we all felt by the end of it was so deep and so powerful that we were exhausted, but it didn’t feel like it was painful work. It was exciting and vibrant and thrilling and it changed as we went each time, and it was a lot, but incredibly satisfying.
This episode, which lacks any Versace (Gianni or Donatella), felt to me like the freshest so far in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the second season of “American Crime Story.”
We are introduced to several new characters, chiefly Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) and his wife, Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light). Their portrayal of a Chicago couple who have made the best of a 38-year marriage despite the lie at its center is both plausible and moving.
Marilyn, a feisty former dancer, has become an entrepreneur who sells her fragrances and cosmetics on the Home Shopping Network. “Perfume is about our bodies talking to each other without words,” she tells viewers.
Lee is a commercial real estate developer, a Catholic who keeps a religious altar in his home where he prays for God’s forgiveness for his sexual attraction to men, and says he has done his best to resist temptation.
It’s all slightly campy, but these two, whose relationship could easily have been portrayed in a mawkish or ridiculous way, came across to me as deeply sympathetic. God only knows how many marriages between ambitious women and closeted gay men were created (and endured, even now) during the decades-long rights revolution in the United States that culminated with the full striking down of sodomy laws, in 2003, and the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, in 2015. How did these couples manage these lies, while striving to lead lives of decency and integrity?
Like the series over all, this week’s episode is not told in chronological order. It is 1997. We follow Marilyn from a work trip in Toronto back to her home on Chicago’s Gold Coast, where she quickly notices that things are not as they should be. Two passing friends dial the police. Marilyn sits in the kitchen, her polished nails dancing on the granite countertop, as a bloodcurdling scream is heard from the garage: Lee’s mutilated body has been found.
“I knew it,” Marilyn says under her breath.
Flash backward, a week earlier: Marilyn and Lee are at a fund-raising luncheon for Gov. Jim Edgar, Republican of Illinois.
She introduces her husband in terms so admiring as to be gushing: “So often we are told the American dream is dead. Except I say: Look at my husband, Lee. One of seven children. The son of an Illinois coal miner. He began his career selling premixed pancake batter out of the trunk of a beat-up old car. And today Lee manages 32 million square feet of commercial property across the Midwest.”
Later, at home, Marilyn moisturizes her face and removes her cosmetic eyelashes. It would have been easy for the episode’s writer (Tom Rob Smith) and director (Gwyneth Horder-Payton) to have this moment be the one when the mask of a happy marriage is removed, its ugly face revealed.
In some ways that happens: In a quiet moment before the mirror, Marilyn applies a drop of perfume down the front of her silk robe, her eyes hollowed out with longing. In another room, Lee takes a call from Andrew Cunanan, dialing from a pay phone, and when Marilyn asks who is calling, he lies and says it’s a business call. But the marriage is not merely a sham. When Marilyn asks Lee what he plans to do while she is away on business, he sounds down. She asks him to accompany her.
“I like it when you’re there,” she says, and she means it.
It is their last meaningful encounter.
With Marilyn away, Lee opens his door to the serial killer, who happens to be in town. Lee shows him his plans to build a 125-story, 1,952-foot Sky Needle, which would have been the world’s tallest building.
The conversation does not go well. Andrew thinks the main point of having a building taller than the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) is to surpass the latter structure’s observation deck. Andrew also urges Lee to name the tower for himself, something the self-effacing developer has no intention of doing.
They kiss — “It feels like I’m alive,” Lee says — and Andrew boasts: “Escorts don’t normally kiss, do they? I am not like most escorts. I am not like most anybody. I could almost be a husband, a partner.”
I found this reference to marriage anachronistic, and puzzling, and not for the first time in this series. In earlier episodes, Gianni Versace’s partner, Antonio D’Amico, tired of their hedonistic lifestyle, proposes, and Cunanan tells a friend — falsely, we believe — that Versace once proposed to him.
I’m certainly not making light of commitment or the desire for it. But I’m puzzled by the use of words like “husband” and “proposed.” They don’t seem true to my own memories of the late 1990s, when gay men were more likely to speak of boyfriends, partners and companions, and they seem strangely ahistoric.
My next quibble with this episode is more prosaic: the killing of Lee Miglin, in his garage, by Cunanan is so grisly and sadistic as to be difficult to watch. I’ll spare the details, but the monologue Cunanan delivers before delivering the coup de grâce bears note:
The monologue raises the question: Is Cunanan motivated by self-hatred, a desire to expose hypocrisy, or both? His use of homophobic language suggests self-hatred, but his focus on disgrace suggests some kind of crusade. It is not, of course, a crime to cross-dress, or to look at porn. This mutual failure of recognition — murderer and victim seem to agree on one thing, that to be gay is a disgrace — is perhaps the saddest moment in this series so far.
The rest of the episode is a tour de force by Judith Light, whose portrayal of a wife in denial is simply magnificent. She offers a brisk inventory of what’s missing from the house — a Lexus, $2,000 in cash, two leather coats, two suits, “some inconsequential pieces of jewelry,” rare gold coins and a dozen pairs of socks — as she reaches the conclusion that the killing must have been a random and opportunistic robbery.
Told by the Chicago police superintendent about the gay porn found next to the body, Marilyn surmises that “they must have belonged to the killer,” but goes on to say: “I’m not interested in his intentions. Find him, catch him, but don’t talk to me about what or might not be going through his mind.”
She adds: “Dollars, jewelry, socks, suits — that’s all I’ll allow that man to steal from me. He won’t steal my good name. Our good name. We worked too hard making that name, and we made it together.”
For an ambitious woman born in the 1930s to have a husband who is fully supportive of her professional aspirations might indeed, as she suggests, have been “a fairy tale life.” “How many husbands believe in their wives’ dreams?” she asks her Home Shopping Network viewers — and us — later in the episode. “How many treat us as partners, as equals?”
Left unsaid: Perhaps his being gay allowed him to be such a supportive partner.
Compared with all this, Cunanan’s murderous escapades seem mundane. He flees to New Jersey, and the police failure to capture him after a radio station reveals that investigators have been tracking his movements by car phone. In search of a new car to steal, he stops at a cemetery, where he marches one of the groundskeepers into a basement and makes him get down on his knees.
The man begs for mercy, but his plea is cut short. And for the first time in this series I was so disgusted by this killer’s lack of remorse that — for a moment at least — I didn’t want to keep watching.
At least most of carnage is out of the way. Six more episodes, two more bodies to go.
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