“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” may not hit the tear-down-the-sky heights of the previous two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, but simply not feeling like a letdown after those two magnificent hours is itself a victory. The grim tale of how the dehumanizing Clinton-era policy on gays in the military destroyed Jeff Trail’s dreams and helped place him in Cunanan’s crosshairs isn’t as stomach-churningly chilling and sad as the show’s depiction of the last hours of Lee Miglin and David Madson, to be sure. But the stakes wind up being just as high, as is the cost in wasted human potential and life.
“DADT” is one of the most temporally complex episodes of the series so far, bouncing back and forth in time and between protagonists. In out-of-order fashion, it traces the life of Jeff Trail from the waning days of his career in the military through the night he first meets Andrew to the hours after his murder, with special attention paid to his and David’s interactions with Cunanan in the days leading up to their killings. (Andrew has a blowout fight with Jeff and has his marriage proposal rejected by David. There’s also a polka bar.) Meanwhile, a side plot chronicles Gianni Versace’s decision to come out as gay in the press, with the support of his partner and to the chagrin of his sister.
But with Andrew himself pushed mostly to the margins and no threat of new murders hanging over our heads, it falls to Finn Wittrock to carry the weight of the episode as Jeff, investing the story of how institutionalized homophobia helped lead to his death with the same sense of tragedy and intensity as a serial-killer narrative. It’s a testament to his note-perfect casting — he simply has the exact physical and psychological mien of a military man, from the cadence of his voice to the way he walks around in his nondescript civvies — that he pulls it off.
With Wittrock’s Jeff as the bedrock, a thematic layering emerges that’s even more impressive than the time-shifting storyline. Throughout the episode, Jeff is painted as a parallel figure to both his eventual killer and his killer’s most famous victim. The comparison with Versace is as direct as possible: Writer Tom Rob Smith structures the episode by juxtaposing Gianni’s triumphant coming-out interview with the Advocate with Jeff’s anonymous, silhouetted testimonial in a CBS News special about closeted soldiers and sailors. Both interviews take place in hotels, though Versace’s is in the Ritz Carlton while Trail’s is in a seedy motel. Both men are also shown talking with their clearly beloved sisters, each of whom is deeply concerned about her respective brother. Donatella advises Gianni not to go through with the Advocate profile (I do wish they’d speak Italian with subtitles in their scenes together — trust your audience, Ryan Murphy! — but whatever), while Jeff’s very pregnant sister, herself career military, jokingly issues “a direct order as your commanding officer” for him to finally come out to their parents years after the recording session.
Jeff and Gianni’s fates following their respective interviews were as divergent as their accommodations and their sisters, yet Andrew finds something equally infuriating about both. His beef with Versace is obvious enough. The stalker-wall of newspaper and magazine clippings that Andrew maintains, many of them about Gianni’s life as an out and proud gay man with his longtime partner Antonio, indicates resentment. Why should this man have it all, while Andrew has to lie about fame and fortune and can’t find anyone who loves him back?
Jeff, by contrast, is a crash-and-burn case. The military’s discovery that he was gay has left him “a washed-up queer in a shitty job and a shitty condo, bitching about how you could have been somebody,” as Andrew cuttingly puts it. “You’re not wrong about that,” Jeff replies fatalistically — he won’t even bother to deny it. Of course, you’re not wrong to see shades of Andrew himself in that description, except insofar as he has no job and no condo at all anymore, not even shitty ones.
But it’s not self-recognition that drives Andrew to kill Jeff, or at least not self-recognition alone. Earlier, we see Andrew advise Jeff not to do the interview at all, unwittingly playing Donatella to his Gianni. Like Donatella, he’s concerned about career fallout for his friend. More importantly to Andrew, though, Jeff’s interview is pointless because he’s just some sailor and nobody special or famous. “Who cares what you have to say?” he asks incredulously, not even noticing the insult he’s delivering. He genuinely doesn’t understand why anyone would be interested in a non-mover-and-shaker’s thoughts on the topic, or why a non-mover-and-shaker would be interested in sharing them. “It’s something I need to do,” Jeff replies. “I can’t explain it any better than that.” For Jeff, it’s a question of honor: being true to himself, to the Navy, to his country, to the lifelong dream that binds them all together for him. He might as well be speaking an alien dialect for all Andrew is able to understand that kind of idealism.
So Andrew appears to first formulate murderous intent toward his former friend and protégé when he watches a VHS recording. The belief in a cause bothers him. Jeff’s stated belief that saving a fellow gay sailor from a vicious beating at the hands of their crewmates gave his own homosexuality away — leading to an attempt to carve away a tattoo that could incriminate him and a failed suicide attempt as well as his eventual discharge — bothers Andrew even more intensely.
It’s during this portion of the interview, where a stricken Jeff says “I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back and letting him die, just so people wouldn’t know about me,” that Andrew, wearing the white hat from Jeff’s uniform, points Jeff’s gun at the screen, starting to psych himself into the idea of murder.
Watching Jeff’s final confrontation with Andrew prior to the murder is painful, then, both because of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. “I don’t know what you stand for,” he shouts at Cunanan. “I don’t know who you are. You’re a liar. You have no honor.” Correct on all counts — possibly lethally, so if you figure this contrast in their outlook is a big part of what drove Andrew to kill. But when Andrew rightfully points out that he believed in and supported Jeff while his beloved Navy treated him like shit — “I saved you!” — Jeff bitterly retorts “You destroyed me. I wish I’d never walked into that bar. I wish I’d never met you.” He says he wants his life back, as if Andrew took it from him, instead of Bill Clinton and Uncle Sam. Andrew does take his life away, eventually, mere hours from that moment in fact. But in a sense, he was just an accessory after the fact. Jeff signed his own death warrant the moment he decided, in the face of society’s hatred, that some principles are worth fighting for anyway.
A fashion designer coming out as gay to The Advocate was a huge deal in 1995. Two years later, that designer was murdered.
In Ryan Murphy’s retelling of Gianni Versace’s murder — American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace — that 22-year-old Advocate interview comes to life, depictingjournalist Brendan Lemon, who also also broke several other coming out stories for The Advocate, sitting down with Versace.
Read the vintage interview, where Versace discussed his new book, the men in his life, and how Italian Vogue is full of “ugly boys,” below:
THE IMAGE MAKER
Known for his sexy designs, famous clientele (Elton, Madonna, and Sting) and his homoerotic advertising campaigns, Gianni Versace gives a glimpse into his private world of men. Brendan Lemon reports on the fashion front.
As I walked over to Manhattan’s St. Regis hotel to interview the Italian designer Gianni Versace, sexy advertisements for his jeans collection kept staring at me from the streetside phone booths. Ever since the ads began appearing earlier this year, I have had to ration the number of glances I tender in the direction of the posters’ muscular, marmoreal figures.
Advertised images of male flesh have not riveted me since the Greek-church shots displaying Calvin Klein’s underwear brightened city streets more than a decade ago. Both campaigns, I knew, had been photographed by Bruce Weber. But the association ran deeper than the man behind the camera: As Klein’s men embodied a kind of male-oriented fantasy of the ‘80s, when the buffed male torso seemed inescapably homoerotic, so Versace’s beautiful bodies seem to reflect a decade in which a penchant for this kind of advertising has begun to indicate something less automatically gay.
Not that Versace has ever shirked homosexuality. Richard Martin, curator of the Costume Institue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, says that “there is no question that Versace’s own out gay identity has been a part of this work. He is in the tradition of the avant-garde, which means that he is willing to risk a lot. And he doesn’t run for cover when his risks provoke outraged response.” But, Martin adds, the seemingly avant-garde Versace look — from the Luke Skywalker designs for the early ’80s (he started designing under his own label in 1978 — to the S/M runway displays of the early ’90s — no longer denotes Versace’s true place in the fashion universe. “Five years ago he seemed extreme, in both his men’s and his women’s clothing,” he says, “but now he’s a coin of the realm. He reads America in the ’90s better than anyone else.” And why is that? “Versace,” explains fashion jounralist Hal Rubenstein, “understands more completely than any other designer that men are about much more than what they wear to work.”
In his new book, Men Without Ties, Versace captures this brave new world of men and thier attire. The latest in a line of deluxe volumes that the 49-year-old designer has produced over the past decade, Men Without Ties features Versace’s unfettered approach to menswear, as filtered through the photographs of Weber, Herb Ritts, and Richard Avedon. The vision is entirely fresh, yet it also carries echoes of earlier generation, whose totems — Picasso, Cocteau, Buster Keaton — pop up in its pages.
The generational theme is sounded right away on the volume’s dedication page. Versace writes, “To the three Antonios of my life: my father, Antonio d’Amico, my nephew.” I begin the hotel-suite interview by asking the designer — a courtly figure with short white hair who lately favors jeans and bright-hued cashmere sweaters — to say a little about each of the book’s dedicatees.
“My father was a handsome man,” he replies proudly. “I was afraid of him and also a little in love with him.” Versace talks about long boyhood walks the two took together in the southern Italian town of Reggio di Calabria, where he grew up, When he goes on to mention his mother, the tone is more nuanced — and with reason: It was in her dressmaking atelier that he learned both the craft and the business of fashion.
Versace calls Antonio d’Amico simply “my companion,” and for once, the phrase connotes not some Jamesian spinster being trundled around Europe by a niece or some euphemism bestowed by New York Times obituary writers but a genuine term of endearment. D’Amico, who has dark Caesar-cut hair and a warm, flirtatous manner, sits in on the interview and chips in the occassional well-informed comment. As a higher-up in the Versace empire (whose various lines of menswear, womenswear, couture, fragrances, and licensees last year had combined sales of more than $650 million) as well as Versace’s intimate for more than a decade, he’s well-placed to do so.
It is d’Amico who knows every detail of the designer’s peripatetic lifestyle: the constant zigzagging from the business base in Milan to a restored neoclassic villa on Italy’s Lake Como to a highly decorative house in Florida (a required stop for first-time South Beach strollers) to a town house on Manhattan’s East Side. This last being furnished in gold-and-white Louis XV style and will be completed by year’s end, as will a large new Manhattan Versace store.
“Little Antonio, so blond, so macho” is how Versace describes is 4-year-old nephew, the son of his younger brother Santo, who oversees the family’s business affairs. Santo’s children and the sprightly son and daughter of Santo and Gianni’s sister, Donatella, and her American husband, Paul Beck, crop up frequently in the designer’s conversation: for someone so relentlessly associated with the trappings of rock and roll (Elton John, Sting, and Madonna are among his most visible clients) and the virtues of pagan excess, he has a surprisingly soft spot for children. One hyperbolic visitor to various Versace households swore to me that Versace and d’Amico tended the children and that only Donatella — whose love of nightlife causes d’Amico to dub her, affectionately, “the queen of the gays” — liked life in the limo. (If that’s true, she gets a lot of work done there: Donatella helps design both the Versus and the Istante lines.)
When I bring up the subject of his perceived limo-laden lifestyle, Versace laughs and says, “The truth is that I spend most of my time at home sleeping, watching TV, and working,” and then he returns the converstaion to Men Without Ties: “The book is about men and about their beauty, but it is also a reminder about my career. The roots of my fashion are very classic. People judge me avant-garde, people judge me rock and roll, and I am smiling. I am the most classically influenced of the Italian designers, which no one seemed to realize until the last year.”
Anyone flipping through Men Without Ties or staring at ads from almost any of Versace’s recent campaigns would have to be doltish not to detect these classical ideas in play. In fact, the fun of looking at Versace’s recent projects has been the feeling of freedom that the looking now imparts: You can at the same time muse about Roman marbles or about the poetry of Ovid and appreciate some model’s hot ass or thighs.
I mention this to Versace. “Conventionally,” he replies, “if you are a man who comments on a male beauty — say, a movie star like Kevin Costner — people immediately think you’re gay. But that attitude is changing. For the younger generation things are already very different. People are feeling freer to comment on all kinds of beauty without feeling that it types them one way or another. It’s great to feel that those of us who have fought for the right to enjoy all kinds of beauty will perhaps have made a difference. I say that even as I believe that recognizing beauty wherever and whenever it occurs is not just about the desire for sex.”
Versace’s category-transcending attitude strikes me as eminently refreshing and admirable. Unfortunately, not everyone is as evolved as he is. His American publisher, Abbeville Press, asked him to remove two photographs from the Italian edition of Men Without Ties before it would publish the book here. Both were full-frontal male nudes.
“The publisher is afraid, certainly,” Versace admits before informing me slyly that the Italian edition is available for purchase at most Versace stores in the United States. He insists, however, that the American edition, which includes ten pages not in the Italian version, perserves his vision of men’s fashion.
And just what is that vision these days? “It’s about comfort,” Versace replies, “about wearing what you like. It’s also about feeling elegant in a formal situation without having to wear a tie.” This does not mean, however, that anything goes. Versace insists on quality, on correct proportions, right down to the briefs. In fact, he deplores the new way of showing skivvies that has started showing up in fashion magazines here in and abroad. “The last Italian men’s Vogue is full of ugly boys, boys on heroin, in underwear. I guess they needed a new trend.”
Don’t expect any ugly boys to show up in a Versace campaign any time soon. (This is, after all, the man who helped make South Beach and skin synonymous.) Before I left his hotel that day, Versace let me leaf through an unoffical photo album of a Boston-area shoot Bruce Weber had just completed for his fall men’s campaign: 40 fresh-faced young men — and Claudia Schiffer. A couple of the shots — of seminaked boys enmeshed in a muddy rugby scrum — seem destined for bedside status. And one photo of a long-haired young hunk is so blindingly beautiful that I can already count how many phone-booth posters of him will be ripped off before Christmas.
As we continue to go back in time (are these backwards timelines hurting anyone else’s brain?), we learn more about the events leading up to the murders of Jeff Trail and David Madson – still not a satisfying “why,” in my opinion. The one thing Trail, Madson and Versace had in common, though, is the fear that they would be outed as gay.
Versace seems quite fearless about wanting to be interviewed by The Advocate, much to the trepidation of Donatella, who is afraid his outing will ruin their business. How could anyone not know Versace was gay, right? It was the ‘90s and “don’t ask, don’t tell” didn’t just apply to the military. Maybe we all knew, but back then celebrities didn’t feel comfortable confirming their sexuality, and not with great risk (Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s partner, Antonio, came out only 10 years ago).
Jeff Trail feels the real effects of “don’t ask, don’t tell” since he serves in the military. It is pure fiction if he feared he would be found out or if he contemplated suicide, but as this show sometimes does, it really isn’t about the facts as much as it is about tapping into the culture of the time when being gay in the military meant secrets, dread, and consequences. Who knows if Trail in fact felt this way? What does matter is that this was a common feeling amongst LGTBQ service people. It was the mood.
Just like Versace, Trail bravely goes forward with his interview with “48 Hours” too (it really happened). Even though his identity is hidden, it is still a major step for him to share his experiences. He’s not publicly coming out, but he is speaking up for military personnel hiding in their own proverbial shadows.
David Madson was “out” to his co-workers and his family (though that didn’t go well for him as we saw last week), but he still seems to be dealing with a great societal fear. When Cunanan proposes, he keeps protesting “it’s illegal,” not “I don’t love you.” I think that was a choice of the writers to show 1) Madson was sympathetic to Cunanan and was trying to let him down easy and 2) Madson is very concerned with what people would think. Cunanan shames him easily after Trail’s murder that he will be judged by the police if he reports it. Again, we don’t know what was actually said, but it’s not entirely wrong as Trail’s and Madson’s murders were originally thought to be a domestic dispute and it was not taken seriously that a serial killer was on the loose.
Then there’s Cunanan. Does he have an internal shame he’s not outwardly expressing? Is his self-hate the true reason for his murder spree? It’s still not clear if his anger stems from insecurities about his own sexuality, jealousy over the success of others, or his rejection by both Trail and Madson. The man is such an enigma I feel like we still may never know his heart – or lack thereof.
We’ve come a long way from the ’90s – gay military personnel now serve openly, a celebrity’s sexual orientation barely makes headlines and gay marriage is now legal. But it’s not over yet and if this show does not solve Cunanan’s case, it still gives us an insight into the LGBTQ community we may not have been aware of. And for that, it is valuable.
Next week, we continue our journey back in time to how Madson and Cunanan met and another speculative interaction between Versace and Cunanan.
OK: For anyone wondering if this show is going to become less heartbreaking over time? It’s looking like no.
Last week’s emotional heavyweight “House by the Lake” focused on the psychological torture and eventual murder of architect David Madson (Cody Fern). But the hint is that Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss) got to Madson via Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock), the man he bludgeons with a hammer in the first minutes of the episode, so we’ve been primed to expect this episode take us back to how Trail got wrapped up in this horrible spiderweb. The fifth episode of this series is the first not to have an actual murder in it, but trust me, it’s not going to make anything less painful.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is a layered meditation on uniforms and conformity, masks and unmaskings. It moves back and forth in time in a way that’s easy to track but a little hard to describe; there’s a logic to this episode that poets will recognize. It turns on symbol and metaphor at least as much as plot, and it has a lot of layers of commentary on…well, on the nature of identity when you get down to brass tacks.
Gianni Versace (Edgar Ramirez) arranges an interview in which he intends to come out publically. Donatella (Penelope Cruz) is annoyed (when is she not?) because she thinks her brother’s coming out might have a negative impact on sales. “Well,” her brother quips, annoyed, “we’ll still have Elton, no?” She blames Antonio (Ricky Martin). She tells Gianni it’s not only his decision; the company has to be taken into account. She reminds him (thanks, Sis) of how people stopped buying Perry Ellis’s clothes after he appeared on the runway so ravaged by AIDS his models had to help keep him on his feet. “Probably his most important show,” Versace remarks. He calmly makes it clear to Donatella that he’s done hiding, that after his own brush with mortality he intends to spend the rest of his life being who he is. Nothing in the closet here (except a lot of very loud print fabrics).
Meanwhile, Jeff Trail is working a manual labor job and loses it when a fellow vet asks why a career-track Annapolis graduate left the Navy. He has this friend-friend-plus?—an architect named David. They both get the news that Andrew’s coming into town. It’s not good news; they both have a past with him. Jeff takes evasive maneuvers, bunking with his pregnant sister, who urges him to come out to their parents. David’s left to deal with Andrew, who gives him a gold watch, proposes marriage, says he’s “a whole new person.” (He’s emphatically not a whole new person: Same sociopath, different day.) After David turns down his marriage proposal, he lets himself into Jeff’s apartment, rummages through his clothes, finds Jeff’s dress whites meticulously folded in a box along with his gun and a VCR tape. Wearing Jeff’s dress hat, Andrew watches the video, which contains interview footage that, as Jeff notes on camera, will probably end his career. The interview is about being gay in the military in the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era. “They know,” he says. “I saved a sailor’s life once, they were beating him to death because he was gay. I did a good thing, the bravest thing I’ve ever done. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve dreamed about taking that moment back, and letting him die, so they wouldn’t know about me.”
We flash back two years, to the incident described in the interview. Trail’s an officer with a good record and a bright future-until essentially outs himself by comforting the badly hurt and completely terrified victim of the beating in view of another officer. In the soul-searching that follows, Trail receives veiled and not-so-veiled threats, attempts an at-home tattoo removal, is given a truly freaky-looking “don’t ask don’t tell” primer presented in the form of a comic book, and attempts to hang himself but can’t go through with it. Eventually Trail goes into a gay bar. A young man in glasses notices him. “First time?”
“Is it that obvious?”
“There were clues,” Andrew Cunanan replies, and, in one of the show’s many brilliant moments of hideous inevitability, starts ordering rounds, being charming, and insinuating himself into Trail’s world. Jeff Trail is sincere and kind and bright and gorgeous and he has no idea he has just signed his own death certificate by letting one guy in one bar buy him a drink. But we do.
The two spend time together; for a while, Jeff feels that Andrew has helped him come to terms with his sexuality in certain ways. Andrew tries to undermine Jeff’s decision to go through with the interview (“So humiliating! Your face shadowed, your voice altered-like a criminal!”) but, like the wealthy couture designer in Miami to whom he will never know he is permanently connected, Jeff’s done wearing a mask. Done with being threatened, called “faggot,” and passed over for promotions. We see him drive to a motel for the interview, cutting the scene with Gianni and Antonio also walking down a (much more posh) hotel hallway to meet a journalist too. It’s a striking moment of contrasts and parallels. Two men, one famous, one a near-faceless piece of military machinery. One in sunlight, one in the shadows. One with a partner by his side, one alone. One a fashion designer, one a sailor. One is asked if he’s comfortable being “on the record” (yes) and the other asks for reassurance that the interviewer cannot be forced by military police to reveal his identity. They could hardly be more different. Yet the process—he reclamation of identity, the act of self-acceptance and helping to destigmatize something that shouldn’t be controversial but is, often violently so—is eerily identical.
Of course they do have one other thing in common, something neither of them will have time to realize: they will both be murdered by Andrew Cunanan.
We re-enter Minneapolis on the day of Jeff’s murder. He comes into his apartment, finds his dress uniform in a wrinkled mass on the bed and Andrew in his room. In the conflict that ensues Andrew’s still trying to tell Jeff the military doesn’t care about him, doesn’t want him but Andrew does. “You’re a liar,” Jeff says. “You have no honor.” Andrew keeps trying to manipulate and bait Jeff, but when Andrew tells Jeff how much he loves him, he gets an explosive “No one wants your love!” that we know before Jeff does has pretty much sealed his doom. Andrew zips his bag, and we get a glimpse of the gun Jeff doesn’t yet know he has stolen. He goes to David’s, interrupting a date. The other man leaves. David agrees to a talk.
Jeff meticulously presses and puts away his uniform. Then he gets a call from Andrew, with probably the only words that could possibly get his attention: “I have your gun.”
Jeff Trail’s sister delivers a baby girl. His answering machine slowly fills up with messages from his family, urging him to come and meet his niece.
Every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace poses a different question about Andrew Cunanan’s unlikely murder spree: How did he survive long enough to kill Versace? Why did a rich and powerful man like Lee Miglin invite an unhinged rent boy into his home? Why didn’t David Madson, a successful architect whose friends and family loved him deeply, try harder to escape? The answer is always the same: Homophobia. This week, it explains how Jeffrey Trail—a kind, bright and beloved young Navy officer—came to be friends with a monster.
“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” alternates between the weekend of Trail’s death in 1997 and two years earlier, likely because it was convenient to juxtapose his story with that of Versace’s Advocate interview. In truth, Maureen Orth writes in Vulgar Favors that Jeff met Cunanan and sat for an anonymous interview with 48 Hourssomewhere around 1992-93. “Whether people like it or not, there are gays in the military,” Trail told reporter Richard Schlesinger in the heartbreaking conversation. “They’re very top-notch performers. They know what they’re doing. You’re gonna weaken our national defense if you remove gays from the military. And you’ll never be able to do it 100 percent—it’s just whether or not you’re gonna continue to hunt us.” Schlesinger later recalled that Jeff “had absolutely nothing to gain by doing the interview. Yet he took the risk and spoke out. My colleagues and I left San Diego very impressed with Ensign Trail.”
Trail had grown up as the conservative oddball in a close, liberal Midwestern family. Friends and teachers remembered him as clean-cut and warm, with a strong code of ethics. Determined to follow two of his half-siblings into the military, he learned to fly in high school and matriculated at Annapolis; after graduating in 1991, he was assigned to Surface Warfare Officers School in San Diego and worked on the USS Gridley navy cruiser seen in the episode. That same year, he hooked up for the first time with a male student at San Diego State and began acknowledging his sexuality. Bill Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 1994 quickly became notorious, but Trail had enlisted amid the outright ban on gays in the military that preceded it.
It’s true that Trail was drawn to Cunanan in San Diego because he seemed so comfortable in his identity; in turn, Cunanan worshiped Trail’s wholesome good looks and navy pedigree. Trail’s sister Lisa told The New York Times, “When Jeff got a haircut, Andrew had to have the exact same haircut. When Jeff went to San Francisco and got a certain style of baseball cap, Andrew had to go to San Francisco and get the very same cap. When Jeff grew a goatee, Andrew grew a goatee.”
But they never dated, or by all accounts even slept together. Instead, Cunanan made himself indispensable by introducing his newly (somewhat) liberated friend to other gay men and treating him to expensive nights out. Trail hated drugs, and he wasn’t happy to hear that Cunanan was dealing, but his pity outweighed his anger. By 1996, Trail and David Madson—the most important people in Cunanan’s life, even though Madson had broken up with him and Trail had grown tired of his lies—both lived in Minneapolis. Cunanan visited the city often, despite the fact that both men were trying to distance themselves from him.
Is it fair to imply, as screenwriter Tom Rob Smith does, that homophobia killed Jeff Trail? Only in the sense that he might not have become reliant on Cunanan if he’d been free to come out in high school, at Annapolis, or in the military—which is certainly worth considering. But the flashback’s most disturbing moments—the scene where Jeff saves a gay soldier from being beaten to death, the suicide attempt—are nowhere to be found in Orth’s book. Trail did have a tattoo of Marvin the Martian on his left ankle, but neither the scene where he tries to slice it off nor the witch hunt that precipitated that act of desperation is part of the official record.
Trail left the military in 1996 after superior officers stuck him with the blame for an incident in which, unbeknownst to him, cans of lead paint were hidden on his ship before an EPA inspection. Perhaps he became the fall guy because his bosses suspected he was gay, or simply because his secret prevented him from bonding with them. Trail is a hero regardless for having the courage to appear on48 Hours when he knew it could have ended his career. Surely, the dignified Jeff we meet in American Crime Story, played by Finn Wittrock, is meant to stand in for the many queer soldiers who endured similar physical and psychological ordeals.
Even when they’re fabricated, the flashbacks in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” are some of the most affecting scenes in the series. Still, my concerns remain when it comes to fictionalizing a real, non-famous murder victim’s life to the extent that Smith does in these last two episodes. Furthermore, after two focused, immersive episodes I found all the temporal skipping around—from 1995 to 1997, from Jeff’s backstory to the Versace subplot—distracting. This season’s starting to feel rushed, and I wonder how different the show would be if it played out over ten episodes instead of nine.
Fact-Checking Lightning Round
Did Gianni Versace really come out of the closet in a 1995 Advocate profile? Not really. Even as a provincial teen, Gianni ran in gay circles. In the 80s, he installed his partner Antonio d’Amico in a position of power at Versace; they attended gay clubs, together and separately, all over the world and double-dated with Elton John. There were often naked men in Versace ads. In the spring of 1995, he published a photo book called Men Without Ties that might as well have been titled Men Without Shirts. So when Brendan Lemon (the reporter seen in the episode) profiled him for the July issue of The Advocate, he took Versace’s queerness as a given. The piece is still an interesting read, though; Versace introduces Antonio as his “companion,” and there’s an aside about Antonio—who, as we know, didn’t get along with Versace’s sister—calling Donatella the “queen of the gays.” Versace also offers thoughts on male beauty.
What was that about Perry Ellis? Poor Penélope Cruz, forced once again to deliver all the exposition. Considering that Gianni was for all intents and purposes out in the 90s, it’s hard to imagine Donatella begging him to stay closeted for the sake of the business. But the story she told about Perry Ellis is, unfortunately, mostly true. When he came out to greet the audience at the end of his fall 1986 fashion show, the designer had to be supported by two assistants. He tried and failed to walk down the runway. Forty-six-year-old Ellis died weeks later, and although his cause of death was listed as viral encephalitis, it was clear he’d been ill with AIDS. That summer, New York magazine published a sad and fascinating cover story investigating his life and death. Sales slipped after Ellis’s passing, as Donatella mentions, although a 1988 Times article suggests the culprit was “lackluster collections.”
What was supposed to be going on between David Madson and Jeff Trail? Your guess is as good as mine. We heard them arguing over whether Andrew “knew” about them. We heard Andrew accuse them of sneaking around behind his back. We saw a photo of the men together in Jeff’s bedroom. I’m not sure whether Smith wants us to believe they were secretly seeing each other or demonstrate why Andrew might have, in his paranoid state, decided that was the case. Either way, in real life, Madson was dating a few different guys when Cunanan arrived for his final visit, and Trail spent the weekend with a boyfriend, not his pregnant sister.
This week’s American Crime Story review takes a look at the latest episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Spoilers follow.
The Victims
Jeff Trail made a brief appearance last week before being brutally murdered. On this week’s episode, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, we get to see Jeff’s story. This episode isn’t so much about Jeff’s murder – we’ve already seen that after all – as it is about the heartbreaking trajectory of his brief life. If last week’s episode, “House By the Lake”, served primarily as a bait-and-switch moment to show us what this season of American Crime Story was really about, “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is the episode that truly underlines the thesis. It’s also the best episode of the season, without question.
First, however, we spend some time with Gianni Versace. In his first appearance after being absent for two episodes, Versace is in Italy in 1995. He tells his sister Donatella that he plans to come out during an interview with the LGBT-interest magazine The Advocate. Versace had never publicly spoken about his sexuality, and now, in 1995, he feels the time is right.
Donatella is not happy – she reminds Versace that they’re opening stores in countries where homosexuality is a crime, and she worries that the rock stars and actors and royalty Versace dresses may no longer want to be associated with the Versace brand. She also reminds Versace that when Perry Ellis was diagnosed with AIDS, people stopped buying his clothes.
This is the overall theme of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” – coming out of the closet can be devastating. The lives of Gianni Versace and Jeff Trail are contrasted this week, and despite their similar sexual preferences, the two men’s experiences couldn’t be more disparate. By episode’s end, Versace will have come out comfortably, whereas Jeff will end up the first casualty of Andrew Cunanan.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
What makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace such an ultimately heartbreaking season of American Crime Story is the way it takes the time to introduce us to its victims. Yes, the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were tragic, but we never really met them as characters last season. The show kicked off after they had already been killed.
Technically, Versace begins after its victims have been murdered as well, but the show’s backwards-moving narrative device has the power to resurrect these characters from the dead. Only to snuff them out again. “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is particularly brutal in this regard, because it spends almost its entire length introducing us to Jeff Trail; we want to stop the clock and keep him alive longer; stop him from showing up at David’s apartment to meet his cruel fate. But we can’t.
Andrew Cunanan arrives in Minneapolis four days before Jeff’s murder, and proceeds to bully his way into David and Jeff’s lives. David is sympathetic, but Jeff clearly wants nothing to do with him. Jeff is a former Naval officer working a dead-end job, filled with regret. When we meet Jeff here, we see him talking with a new coworker who was also in the military. When the new employee politely asks why Jeff left the Navy, he snaps. “I made the decision!”.
This leads to a flashback to 1995, two years before Jeff’s murder. Jeff is relatively happy with his life in the Navy, but he also lives with the fear that sooner or later, the secret of his sexuality will come out. This fear intensifies after he saves another gay sailor from being beaten by a group of other sailors. This one event triggers the path of the episode, as Jeff grows more and more intense and nervous that he’s going to be found out.
In one particularly disturbing sequence, Jeff learns that there’s a chance that another gay sailor is going to identify other homosexuals in the Navy. This sailor apparently doesn’t know names, but can recognize his sexual partners via their tattoos. This story sounds utterly made-up when you remove yourself from it, but for Jeff, in the middle of it all, it has a ring of truth. His solution is to try to cut a tattoo off his leg with a box cutter; an action that doesn’t go according to plan.
Later, Jeff’s paranoia reaches a fever pitch, and he attempts to hang himself. This, too, doesn’t go according to plan, and Jeff eventually ends up at a gay bar, where he first meets Andrew Cunanan. Once again, we want to stop the clock; to warn Jeff that befriending Andrew will be the biggest mistake of his life. But Jeff is alone, in need of comfort, and Andrew – in his own manipulative, sneaky way – can offer it.
During the course of the evening, Jeff tells Andrew he plans to conduct an interview with the show 48 Hours about gays in the military – an action Andrew thinks is a mistake. “The Navy are going to witch hunt you, Jeff,” he says. But Jeff feels he has to go through with it. The interview Jeff gives is brilliantly contrasted with the interview Versace gives to The Advocate. As Jeff meets in a cheap motel room in secret, hidden in shadows, Versace is seen in a well-lit, expensive hotel. His interview with The Advocate frees him, while Jeff’s 48 Hours interview simply makes things worse. There’s no catharsis here; no emotional weight lifted from Jeff’s shoulders. Instead, he recounts how he saved the gay sailor’s life earlier in the episode, and adds: “It’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done, and I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought about taking it back, just so people wouldn’t know about me.”
Back in 1997, in the days leading up to Jeff’s murder, the situation between Jeff and Andrew grows more and more radioactive. Andrew is in Minneapolis, under the assumption that he, Jeff and David will spend time together. But Jeff wants nothing to do with Andrew. We learn that Andrew once sent a postcard to Jeff’s father in a feeble attempt to out Jeff to his parents, which has only made the relationship between the two men more strained. Yet Jeff is still nice enough to let Andrew stay at his apartment for a night while he crashes at the home of his pregnant sister.
The idea is for Andrew to vacate the premises before Jeff gets home, but Jeff finds him waiting there, at which point Jeff’s rage simmers until he can’t keep it tamped down any longer. He accuses Andrew of ruining his life, and says that he wishes he had his old life in the Navy back.
“They don’t want you,” Andrew says. “They never wanted you. I want you.” When Andrew adds: “I loved you–”, Jeff snaps, cutting him off and shouting, “No one wants your love.” It’s in this moment you can see the wheels turning behind Andrew’s eyes. You can see the decision slowly forming; the decision to kill Jeff. Andrew realizes that he can no longer manipulate Jeff; no longer use his lies to bend Jeff to his will. In other words, Jeff has become useless to Andrew, and in Andrew’s mind, there’s nothing left to do but end his life.
“No One Wants Your Love”
Andrew is mostly in the background in this episode, and that’s for the best. After two weeks in a row of his excessively destructive behavior, the character has long overstayed his welcome. Darren Criss continues to do great work on the show, but it was wise for American Crime Story to shift the focus away from him this week.
The star of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” is obviously Finn Wittrock, who gives an honest, heartbreaking performance as the increasingly conflicted Jeff Trail. As a character, Jeff bottles up most of his emotions, and Wittrock does good work playing up all that simmering angst and rage. He’s even better when he lets the emotions come to a head and snaps, such as when he yells at a co-worker, or at Andrew.
Director Dan Minahan, who also helmed last week’s episode, goes light on the stylish touches this week. There aren’t as many dramatic flourishes in camera movement or placement, and that’s not a bad thing. Perhaps sensing that this week’s script, by Tom Rob Smith, was powerful enough as-is, Minahan knew it would be better to keep the direction subtle and let the actions speak for themselves.
We’re now moving beyond Andrew’s murders. The following episodes will travel back even further into Andrew’s life, and peel back the lies and deception to show us who he really was. One can’t help but think this makes The Assassination of Gianni Versace a front-loaded show, where all the true action happens in the first five episodes, and the back-half of the season is more subdued. Still, American Crime Story has a few more tricks up its sleeve.
Stray Observations:
– You can watch an excerpt from the real 48 Hours interview with Jeff Trail here:
– You can read the real Advocate interview with Versace here.
– While this episode is primarily focused on Jeff, the scenes we get with Andrew stand out due to Andrew’s desperate, unsubtle attempts at control and manipulation. At one point, Andrew and David go to a club to meet friends from David’s work, and Andrew spends the entire evening being loud and abrasive, constantly trying to get the upper hand.
After a quick hiatus from the Versace clan, Edgar Ramirez’s Gianni and Penelope Cruz’s Donatella return in this week’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. They’re still very much the secondary plot; the primary focus shifts to Darren Criss’ Andrew Cunanan and his first victim, Jeff Trail (as played by Ryan Murphy favorite Finn Wittrock). We see their first meeting at a gay bar, their quick friendship, and Jeff’s life lived in danger as a gay man in the military.
The title of the episode is “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” named for Bill Clinton’s infamous, unpopular policy to keep gays in the armed forces closeted. It’s obviously a reference to Jeff’s life as a Marine. But in some ways, it’s also a reference to Gianni Versace himself, who we see preparing to come out in an interview with The Advocate. Donatella would prefer her brother hew to the policy: She worries his coming out will jeopardize not only the brand, but his status in culture.
And so the two plots come together in dual interviews, which director Daniel Minahan cut together during the episode’s denouement. While Gianni talks to The Advocate, Jeff talks to a news magazine about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell — albeit while disguising his identity. The treatment of their coming out interviews couldn’t be more different: Gianni talks in a luxurious hotel room with his partner, Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin), by his side. Jeff talks alone, shrouded in shadow, in a cheap motel room.
The show presents two men, baring their souls in very different ways, to highlight their differences. But what ultimately works best about the episode is how it depicts coming out as a core, base act, and the circumstances around it as what changes the experience.
For Jeff, this coming out is a conditional one. Yes, he’s speaking about his experiences more honestly than ever. But he’s also an unknown to those he’s coming out to on television. They’ll know him only as a shadowy soldier, not a specific person. He’s revealing himself under a certain level of cover, a double-edged sword that provides him both protection and keeps him from being completely honest, and thus earning the catharsis that comes with such a reveal.
Compare his experience to Gianni’s: He’s known by everyone. Versace is a name — this interview will reverberate and help change his reputation. Donatella is right to worry; the ‘90s were a different time, and Gianni’s coming out is a major risk. But with that comes a chance to be truly honest, to free himself from the chains of the closet.
To be more known is to risk more, but to have a name is to feel true release. It’s no surprise that Gianni’s interview is presented as a clear triumph, but Jeff’s is played as a more ambiguous emotional beat.
There’s an additional element here, one I haven’t yet talked about in these essays: Gianni Versace, an Italian man, is being played by Ramirez, a Venezuelan actor. Historically, Gianni was not Latino. But as depicted on this show, he is, further deepening the visual divide between he and Jeff, particularly in a period story presented in 2018.
Obviously, this affected little in Jeff and Gianni’s real lives, but it’s an interesting payoff of the Ramirez casting. In the modern world, an attractive white man like Trail would be not only celebrated, but thirsted after heavily. A Latino man, by sole virtue of not being white, would come under far more scrutiny and fire during his coming out, especially online.
Of course, thanks to Cunanan, neither man lived to see this modern world — to see how coming out changed things. But it’s not an exaggeration to say that both of their coming out stories likely affected history: by Gianni being visible, and by Jeff helping raise awareness about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
Homophobia has been lingering in every episode of this season of American Crime Story, but “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” gave it the explicit attention it deserves. I appreciated seeing how Naval officer Jeffrey Trail (Finn Wittrock) met Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss), but this was definitely also the slightly more heavy handed, learn-something episode of this season. I might also just be salty because this is the first time the choice of having a jumpy timeline made things less suspenseful à la all the repetition of scenes in How To Get Away With Murder. Maybe some people like that blanket of understood sadness over everything (since we know Trail is going to be killed by Cunanan), but I can’t say I’m a big fan.
Wait, what did I learn though? For starters, I never knew fashion designer Perry Ellis died at 46, likely of complications from AIDS, although he denied he was sick up until the very end, which is truly a testament to the shame and stigma that especially surrounded the disease in the early ‘90s. What Donatella Versace (Penelope Cruz) mentions about the rumors that Ellis had contracted AIDS after he appeared too weak to take a final bow at his own show without assistance, is true. He also lost his long term partner to an AIDS-related illness, and his company was bought by a larger fashion company following his death. Two details I feel are worth mentioning because it means that his eponymous clothing line has actually been designed and run by other people for nearly my entire life when I had assumed he was alive and wearing expensive polos this whole time.
As dark as the ACS series is, I’m thankful that it offers the opportunity to highlight not-evil people like Perry Ellis or Gianni Versace’s (Edgar Ramirez) graceful or forgotten moments. Ryan Murphy has said that he was proud and admired Versace for his real-life coming out interview in The Advocate. It was moving to watch Versace decide to live his life without shame or apologies. I was a little emotional when he brought Antonio (Ricky Martin) to the couch because it felt almost like they were getting married with the interviewer as their priest.
It’s intentional that the name of this season is “The Assassination of Gianni Versace” because Murphy has been explicit that he sees Cunanan’s murders as politically motivated, since he went out of his way to out people and often humiliate them. The idea of sending a gay person’s parents a postcard (like the one poor Trail had to grapple with) is so obscenely inappropriate it makes my blood boil. In previous episodes, Cunanan exhibits internalized homophobia, but it seems to show in more emboldened ways with each passing episode. When Cunanan is talking with Trail, he says people will only see him as a “f*ggot,” and I’ll admit that I was shocked to watch the words leave the Glee star’s mouth.
The only moment that chilled me more than Criss’ use of the f-word was seeing Cunanan at the San Diego port bar because it forced me to reckon with the hard truth that predators walk among us in plain view all the time, and we just don’t know it. I also hate watching him be a Cheshire cat tormenting Trail while he’s still just a “baby gay.” I’m surprised that later in the episode, Cunanan took offense to being told he has no honor because dude has no honor.
It’s irritating to watch someone like Cunanan push the limits of regular friendship and hospitality so far with Trail and his ex David Madson (Cody Fern). Cunanan is also sometimes just bitchy and hearing him say things like “when I found you” makes me uncomfortable, because Cunanan has this manipulative way of acting like he “made” people, and that they owe him big time. He actually pushed it even further and says, “I saved you.” It feels like the most outright egomaniacal he’s been.This week was hard because people’s intuitions were right so often: Trail is done with him, Madson tries to cut down their amount of time together, and on and on. Trail and Madson knew Cunanan sucked, but you can’t report someone to the police for sucking. You can fall into a black hole wondering how things might have been different if he had reported his gun stolen to the police, but who would really do that to a former friend?
I hope the remaining episodes give us more time with the Versace family. Although they fight, they bother me so much less than Cunanan. The probable psychopath even manages to make eating cereal look evil. When Cunanan is looking down at his colorful bowl of Fruit Loops, an image of Allison Williams in Get Out flashed before my eyes. I’m torn because the more time this show spends on more normal people outside the Versace family, the more it seems grounded in reality. I almost couldn’t listen to Trail’s family’s voices on his voicemail. The final words of the episode were successfully realistic, and that much more disturbing.
June 1995, Milan. Gianni Versace “casually” informs Donatella that he’s “arranged an interview” with The Advocate. When she doesn’t react, he mumbles, “For gay readers.” “To say what?”, she asks challengingly. “That the built-ins on this season of ACS are as envy-making as your stereotypically Versace pink butterfly blazer is hideous,” Gianni does not say, although he could,
because these floor-to-ceiling jobs make me want to book a ticket to Italy like now. Mystifyingly, there is no sideways-rolling ladder with which to reach tomes on the higher shelves, but of course this isn’t the point of the scene; the point is that Gianni has never said in so many words that he’s gay, and that Donatella doesn’t think he should do so “to print, to publish.” Antonio D’Amico smirks as Donatella picks up her cigarettes and crisply points out that she handles publicity for the company. Gianni shrugs disingenuously that it’s not about her, but Donatella isn’t going for it: it’s about more than him. She’s annoyed that he didn’t consult her, and now he’s annoyed, clanking down his espresso cup and snarking, “What would you advise?” Yes, Antonio echoes, “What would you advise?” Donatella side-eyes him and theorizes aloud that it’s Antonio’s idea, that he wants to “be famous” as “Versace’s lover.” For 13 years everyone’s mistaken him for Gianni’s assistant, he grumbles, and Donatella snorts that apparently his pride is more important than the company. The sniping continues, Antonio saying he’s not trying to become a public figure: “I know my place. Unlike you.” Donatella cocks her head and asks at four degrees Kelvin, “And what is my place,” at which time Gianni bangs a chair and snaps, “Enough!” No more fighting over this: it was his idea.
He asks Donatella to walk with him, and she stalks after him with that weird colicky gait women get who wear too-high heels every day. He wants her support, but she notes that his company supports all the people working around them – and they have stores opening in countries where homosexuality is illegal. What if he’s denied a visa? What if the stores can’t open? Gianni is momentarily taken aback, and asks what she really thinks could happen. She says the rock stars, the actors, “the royalty whose endorsements we cherish” might not want to associate with the brand. Gianni shrugs, “Unless we keep Elton,” but Donatella doesn’t see the humor; he lives “in isolation,” and has forgotten what the real world is like. He tries to argue that the women they design for are “fearless,” and when Donatella says it’s not the same, he asks, “Is the brand Versace braver than the man?” She doesn’t have an answer for that, but when he stalks to the other side of the atelier, she follows, asking if he’s angry at her, or the world. She goes on to wonder what his “admission” will cost when they take the company public. Gianni says, not terribly forcefully, that she’s exaggerating, but she reminds him of Perry Ellis’s final show, Ellis dying of AIDS, too weak to walk on his own. “His most important show” in many ways, Gianni murmurs, and certainly it is as far as its value as a reference in this season of ACS – Ellis, who died in 1986, remained in resolute denial about his illness and that of his longtime lover, whom he had seen into the ground earlier that year; at that point in the life of both the epidemic and the culture, that approach was probably the default, at least for public consumption – but Donatella’s point is that, after that, people stopped buying Ellis’s clothes. “Some people,” Gianni says. Many people, Donatella retorts. Some, Gianni insists, and walks away from her again.
Why now, she wants to know. “Because I was sick. And I didn’t die,” Gianni says. It’s a miracle. He has a second chance now. Why is he alive – to be afraid? No. He’s here, and he “must use it.”
After the title card, we return to 1997 – four days before Jeffrey Trail’s murder. In a crappish motel in San Diego, Andrew Cunanan is seated in grimy underpants on a nubby chair surrounded by trash bags, prepping a needle full of drugs and grandly reassuring an American Express account representative that he just needs enough money to get to Minneapolis.
He’s going to visit his “two best friends,” one of whom owes him more than ten grand; then he can go back to being the best customer ever. As the Amex rep skeptically repeats that he’s asking them to extend his credit so that he can…repair his credit, the camera lingers pointedly on an expensive watch on the floor. Cunanan distractedly taps the needle to rid it of bubbles as the rep verbally eye-rolls that she has to consult her supervisor. Cunanan chirps that he’ll hold, and injects himself between his toes. I assume this is included to show both his alleged drug involvement and his much-ballyhooed ability to charm all and sundry, but I ran into some American Express credit trouble in college and was on the line with their reps almost daily, assuring them that my latest low-double-digit payment from my pizza-delivery job was winging its way towards them and please don’t make me declare bankruptcy as a 20-year-old. Like, if I convinced them to let me chip down my balance 13 bucks at a time? I’m…not that charming. This is eminently doable by civilians.
Cunanan gets up, surveys his closet, and starts taking down armfuls of suits and shirts, still on their hangers. Do people actually do this? It seems like an only-onscreen thing. In any case, the removal of the last armload of blazers reveals a mini-crazy wall consisting of the very Advocate article the Versaces were arguing about before.
That pic at the top left, that looks like IRL Cunanan, should maybe have been cut, no?
In a warehouse, Jeff Trail is hoisting heavy canisters onto shelves. Later, he’s not laughing alone without salad at a picnic table above the work floor when a co-worker joins him. Jeff notices the guy’s tattoo as an armed-forces design; the guy notices him noticing and asks if he served. He did, in the navy, and kind of overshares about the USS Gridley and how he’s sort of sad she got decommissioned. So he misses it? Every day. Why’d he leave? “I dunno,” Jeff grits, and admits he regrets it, but when the guy begins to say he was never going to become an officer, it gets awk in a hurry with Jeff interrupting that he was an officer, and adding that his brother and sister are both in the armed forces. “You married?”, the guy asks, probably concluding that it was Jeff’s spouse who wanted him to leave the service, then. Jeff parries that, but the guy asks again why he left, especially to work “in a place like this.” This place is okay, Jeff glares, but the guy’s like, but for an Annapolis grad?
Jeff, icily: “I made the decision.” The guy tries to smooth it over by saying his wife always tells him he asks too many questions, but Jeff just repeats over him, “I made the decision – okay?” The guy apologizes for offending him and offers to “leave it there,” but Jeff can’t, leaping to his feet and shouting again that he made the decision, loud enough for other co-workers to look up from their lunches.
After lunch, Jeff is loading canisters, zoned out, when he’s told “an Andrew called” – he says he’ll see Jeff at the airport.
That’s where we see him next, as he greets David Madson with a fond arm-squeeze. David didn’t think Jeff would come. Neither did Jeff, Jeff says disgustedly. David doesn’t get why Cunanan’s coming there, but Jeff’s like, he has nothing and no one and everything he’s told you is a lie. David gets that, right? David: “Do you even like him?”
Jeff sighs that Cunanan was “there for” him once, and he owes Cunanan, but it’s not the same. David feels “kinda sorry” for him. “Don’t.” He’s lonely. “For a reason,” Jeff says, adding that after this “for old times’ sake” weekend, he’s done with Cunanan. David’s like, he’s here for three nights, ugh, and Jeff says Cunanan can have his apartment, Jeff will stay with his sister, and not to victim-blame here, but if you don’t want to deal with Cunanan because he’s a grifter, you put him up in a hotel, not at your house when you can’t keep an eye on him and/or your belongings. Cut to Cunanan emerging from the crowd with a step almost Michigan J. Frog in its peppiness as Jeff asks David not to tell Cunanan where he is: “He’s so crazy, he might just show up.”
Asterisking this point is Cunanan’s desperately cheerful sing-songing of “The three amigooooos!” and overly handsy hug of David. He hugs Jeff next, choosing to ignore Jeff’s stiff reaction, and burbles about how much fun they’ll have this weekend: “It’ll be just like old times.” Jeff’s all, nah, and says he can’t hang out with them. Cunanan asks why not. “Aside from everything you’ve done?” David looks down as Cunanan feigns ignorance.
Jeff says he’s away ‘til Sunday at a sales conference, but he’ll be sure to send Cunanan a postcard. Cunanan lamely asks if Jeff’s “still annoyed” about the postcard he “accidentally” sent to Jeff’s dad signed “Drew, kiss kiss.” “I made a mistake!” David rolls not just his eyes but his entire head as Jeff brings out his keys, saying Cunanan can stay there tomorrow night. Cunanan doesn’t get why he’s not staying with David; David says without much conviction that he’s busy “seeing a friend.” “Wh-who, what friend?” Cunanan presses, but despite this inability or unwillingness to take a hint re: David wanting to get it in with, y’know, not him – or, more to the point, David’s obvious trepidation at drawing that line brightly, or at all – Jeff still hands Cunanan his keys, then walks off without another word. Again, I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Jeff Trail; nothing he did either doomed him or could have saved him, or any of the others. I’ve found myself in similar situations, feeling like it’s easier to just go along this one last time and then get down to the ghosting once s/he’s left town – especially when s/he’s presenting as a dishonest but not noticeably dangerous asshole. I have the benefit of a hindsight of which Jeff was deprived by Cunanan, as well. That’s the frustration: that it can’t be undone, couldn’t have been undone. Or that maybe it could have gone differently – if Cunanan weren’t so easily able to leverage the doors of the closet against his targets.
Sometimes they swing back and hit him, though, as we’re about to see when he and David return to David’s loft. David snuggles with Prints for a minute, and Cunanan takes the opportunity to fish that expensive watch out of the top of his duffel and make a big show of having “gotten” (read: stolen, we’ll no doubt see in a future ep) David something. “Open it!” he says with an antsy body twitch that is almost endearing, except that he’s horrid. David seems to know that it contains an emotional bomb as well as whatever’s literally inside, and is initially speechless at the sight of the watch. Cunanan has assumed that awkward stiff-armed stance again
as David struggles for words. I’ll note here Orth’s Vanity Fair piece’s assertion that, “though Madson was at least two boyfriends away from Cunanan by the end of April, he continued to accept gifts from” Cunanan. I still haven’t read Orth’s book, and perhaps she’s more nuanced therein, but I’m finding implied judgment in that locution, to the effect that David “shouldn’t” have taken gifts from a man he wasn’t involved with, because it sent mixed signals – or meant that David wasn’t a quote-unquote perfect victim, the saint the newsmagazines are always looking for. Well, it probably did send mixed signals, and David probably wasn’t perfect, because none of us is – but here again we see Cunanan’s victims a) not knowing what we know, because it’s not what anyone tends to assume, and/or b) accepting overly generous gestures from Cunanan because it’s less uncomfortable than rejecting him or questioning the gifts’ provenance. The scene we’re watching/cringing at here perfectly illuminates not only why Cunanan’s victims might have had over-the-top “presents” from the killer among their possessions, but why Cunanan for the most part continued to skate on outrageous behavior.
Behavior like…refusing to read the room, because when David snaps the watch box closed and pulls a nauseated face, then goes to refill Prints’s water bowl, Cunanan bustles over, picks up the box, and goes into cheesy-proposal mode. David’s response is a glorious “ehh-whennnnhhhh?!” look from Cody Fern
at which Cunanan has the presence of mind to stammer that he doesn’t have to answer right now, he can think about it “for the next few days.” David’s like, it’s against the law, so. Cunanan shrugs: “Who cares about that?” “Everyone,” David exasps. “Well, I…don’t!” Cunanan says, and Darren Criss throws in a tiny shoulder shimmy here that is so eloquent vis-à-vis Cunanan thinking this damn-the-homophobia-torpedeos declaration will win him his case. David’s like, again: no, “it’s insane,” and Fern’s unwittingly Australian inflection of “in-sein” is rather winning. Cunanan is hell-bent on ordering a sweet roll, however, and babbles that they can call it a commitment ceremony, then. David tries to explain that “it’s not – the term” as Cunanan Manson-lampses at him and blares, “Then what is it.” “The idea of you and me,” David finally is able to say. His expression unchanging, Cunanan pauses, then tells David to keep thinking about it over the weekend, and then “if for whatever reason it’s a no,” he can keep the watch as a thanks. …“Whatever reason,” indeed. Thanks for what, David asks, exhausted. For turning Cunanan’s life around, Cunanan duhs, then shares that he got a new job, a claim David doesn’t believe; as Cunanan keeps lying about his new condo in San Francisco, David wearily closes his eyes and nods to himself. “I’m a whole new person!” Cunanan desperates, fastening the watch onto David’s wrist. “And all I need – is someone to be a new person for.”
At his sister Laura’s gorgeously porched house, Jeff surveys the family pictures (including one of Laura in uniform) in the hall, then takes the linens he’ll be sleeping on from his pregnant sister; he doesn’t want to be any trouble. “It’s no trouble, I love that you’re here. Why are you here?” his sister asks, easing herself onto a sofa. Jeff admits he’s avoiding Cunanan. She snarks on Cunanan’s postcard “mistake” trying to out Jeff to their dad. Jeff says grimly that he’s not going to hang out with Cunanan, but Laura has Cunanan’s number and Jeff’s, telling Jeff he shouldn’t let Cunanan have “that kind of control” over him and that Cunanan “was threatening” Jeff with the postcard. Why doesn’t Jeff just tell their parents he’s gay himself? Jeff knows what they’re going to think. “They love you,” Laura snorts, which, no doubt, but also: easy for the het sibling who’s furnished grandchildren to say, even if she’s correct. Jeff changes tacks, saying it’s not the right time: they’re so happy about the baby. It’s her baby, Laura says, so as his superior officer she’s ordering him to do it. “I’ll think about it,” Jeff says. “You’ve thought about it enough,” Laura grumbles. Again: yeah, probably, and she’s not a bad guy here, but…you know. Your loved ones’ coming out is not about you. Jeff rolls his eyes, then tells Laura’s belly, “I’m looking forward to being an uncle, so. Much.” He smooches the belly – aw – and rests his head on it, listening…
…which makes the overlapping cut to the polka palace in the next scene pretty hilare and cuts the sadness nicely. Too bad we’re about to be marinating in uncomf. David and Cunanan climb the stairs into the joint, Cunanan babbling that it’s such an original idea, and it feels “special – memorable.” David quashes that line of thinking ASAP, saying it wasn’t his choice – his friend picked it. Said friend is his co-worker Melinda, who appears out of the crowd to greet David, and he introduces Cunanan as his “friend, Andrew.” “’Friend,’” Cunanan repeats with a full “this guy, amirite” head-and-shoulders eye-roll, and says he’s more than a friend. Everyone’s “…k” faces do not deter him from grabbing David’s wrist, still with the watch on it, and raising it to eye level to brag that he got it for David “to show how much he means to me.” He adds quote casually, “It’s worth ten thousand dollars.” Melinda says, “Wow,” and shoots David a quick, merry “by which I mean ‘wow, you’re gauche’” look. The silence in which nobody knows how to respond to Cunanan goes on for quite some time…
…and then we mercifully cut to David and Melinda polka-ing amateurishly and laughing a lot. Then it’s into slo-mo, and the distorting of the soundtrack, as Cunanan tries to arrange his face into a “isn’t this a hoot” shape but ends up Starmanning, as usual.
Later, David orders more beer and speculatively watches Cunanan from the bar as Melinda heroically tries to make conversation: “So what do you do?” Almost daring her to call him on it, Cunanan lies that he makes movie sets; he’s working on Titanic down in Mexico. “And you’re here for David?” “There’s no one I love more,” Cunanan confides, which at least is in the same area code as true. David returns with three steins, and Melinda fills him in, giving gorgeous “pfft” tone to “We were just talking about movie sets in Mexico!” “Mexico?” David says, glaring at Cunanan, who thinks for a second before grabbing David’s hands: “Let’s go dance!” Melinda watches them carefully as David gets free of Cunanan’s grasp and says he doesn’t need the whole weekend to think about it. “I can’t hear you, the music’s too loud!” Cunanan says through a desperately fake chuckle. David tries to repeat himself, but Cunanan’s sticking with the can’t-hear-you bit, bobbing frantically and shouting, “Let’s just dance!” They can’t get married, David says. “Even if we could – we can’t.” The smile drains off Cunanan’s face as David says he’s really sorry, he doesn’t know what else to say. He leaves Cunanan standing on the dance floor, other couples whirling around him. Oof.
At the loft the next morning, Cunanan is sitting, staring into space, still wearing the same clothes from the previous night. David comes out in a tee and boxers and asks if he couldn’t sleep. “No.” David half-rolls his eyes and goes into the bedroom to fish the watch out of his top drawer; the camera pans up to find Cunanan in the doorway, having Nosferatu’d his way into frame once again. David startles, then murmurs that “there’s something great” about Cunanan; he’s always thought that. He’s generous. But it’s not right to keep the watch, he says, handing the box to Cunanan. “I know money is tight.” Cunanan badly lies that it isn’t. David says it’s okay to ask for help instead of telling “all these crazy stories,” but Cunanan isn’t going to admit to anything, asking through another super-fake chuckle, “What crazy stories?” David girds his loins and runs down the list: he’s not making movie sets, he doesn’t have a condo in San Fran…he’s unhappy. He should let David help him the way Cunanan has helped other people. Cunanan looks genuinely baffled and fearful at this idea as David clarifies that he doesn’t mean by marrying Cunanan – that’s not possible, it’s not real. It’s not what, Cunanan prompts, giving him the Manson lamps. “Another crazy story,” David says reluctantly, and holds the box out for Cunanan to take.
Cut to both men heading for the elevator. As the door is closing on Cunanan, David stops it with his arm and guiltily says he can cancel on his “friend” for that night, if Cunanan needs to talk, “about anything.” Cunanan tries for cheery, but ends up sounding robotic as he says again that he’s starting a new life in San Francisco. “I need someone to share it with.” David pulls a “yeah, still a hard pass” face and says he’ll see Cunanan Sunday. Now it’s Cunanan’s turn to stop the door with his arm, and his face has darkened to one of Dawsonian accusation: “Is it Jeff? That friend you’re seeing?” David waits a beat too long before denying it. Andrew releases the door silently. David turns away from the elevator all “Fuuuuuu.”
It isn’t Jeff, but whoever it is, he’s cozy with David That Way when they return to David’s building – as Cunanan can see from his creeper stakeout spot across the street. When the other two head inside, he marches robotically across the street for a closer view.
From there, he heads to Jeff’s apartment. It takes him a second to get the lights working, but alas, almost no time after that to come across the photo of Jeff and David, Prints nestled between them, tucked into the frame of another photo on Jeff’s bureau.
The picture looks merely friendly, to my eye, but Cunanan is already paranoid about the possibility of a…"Tradson,“ I guess, and starts rifling through Jeff’s drawers. It’s not totally clear what he’s looking for – proof of a relationship; blackmail fodder a la what he unearthed at David’s in the previous episode – but when he pulls out Jeff’s Navy uniform box from the closet, it seems like it’s maybe both. Disrespectfully donning Jeff’s hat, he digs under the dress whites and finds an unmarked VHS cassette. It’s a news broadcast, interviewing active-duty servicemen about gays in the military, and the interviewee onscreen drops a few f-bombs as Cunanan keeps going through Jeff’s stuff, eventually finding the gun. He’s quite expertly loading a clip into the gun when he hears Jeff’s voice coming from the TV; it’s Jeff, in an identity-masking shadow, telling an interviewer that any gays in the military must serve in the closet. Cunanan kneels in front of the set and strokes Jeff’s darkened face as Jeff says his career is probably over anyway, because he saved a gay fellow sailor from getting beaten to death by his peers, which tipped off said peers that Jeff too is gay. Cunanan sights the gun at the TV. Jeff, near tears, confesses that he’s dreamt of taking that "good thing” he did back, letting the other guy die, so that the others wouldn’t “suspect” him. (This interview did take place, around the time Jeff met Cunanan; the segment of it I found doesn’t contain any mention of this incident.)
After the break, we’re in 1995 in San Diego, aboard the Gridley. Jeff heads below decks, and comes upon a fight, or rather one seaman punching another repeatedly in the face. Jeff pulls the puncher off, and the puncher says that “that f***** brushed against” him. Jeff helps the punchee, Williams, to his feet, and as the puncher is threatening Williams if he ever touches the puncher again, Williams knocks him down with a right cross and sneers, “I’m sorry – did I touch you?” Jeff scatters the combatants and their audience.
That night, a hand puts a bar of soap in a sock (we don’t see the item, but per my father, this is how barracks justice was handed down as of the sixties, so let’s assume), and Jeff awakens to hear the sounds of a blanket partyalready in progress. It’s Williams, no surprise, and the gag they’ve put on him is no match for his wails of agony. Jeff rushes over to break this up too, telling the participants to scatter or they’ll get written up, and helps Williams into the shower to clean up – and to convince him to go to a doctor, which Williams doesn’t want, because he’ll have to write a report and make a complaint. “You’re hurt, you need a doctor,” Jeff says patiently, but Williams hollers, “I need out! …Get me out. Get me reassigned. Please!” He’s near tears, and panting from the pain. Jeff cups his cheek. Williams meets his eye, then grabs his arm and pulls Jeff down onto the shower bench with him and cries on Jeff’s shoulder. Jeff nurturingly busses Williams’s head, and the generous comfort Jeff offers Williams is painful to watch, because you know no good deed goes unpunished, on earth as it is in American Crime Story, so of course Jeff glances up to see a NASCAR-looking dude giving them a disgusted glare from the doorway, then flip-flopping away.
The next day, Jeff goes through the lunch line and into the mess, and the shot follows him as he looks for a spot to sit, then locks eyes with NASCAR mustache guy from the night before. (The actor’s name is Ric Maddox, and I’d like to note that he has also played the Joker in a short film called Gay Batman. The sort of dialogue he has here can’t be an enjoyable day at the office, and Maddox is good, doesn’t sell it out with ham like he might want to.) Finn Wittrock gives us a flicker of “let’s get this over with” as he walks over and sits firmly down at the last empty seat at Mustache’s table. Mustache can’t wait to launch into a story about a guy getting caught at a “hook-up place for f**s,” asking if Jeff knows it. Jeff’s like, um, no, and Mustache goes on that the MPs went in undercover and busted the spot. Great use of your budget there, y’all. Jeff asks if the guy got discharged; Mustache says no, not if he agrees to name “every f** he’s ever blown,” but the guy doesn’t know names – so he’s going to provide a list of tattoos. Cut to a super-tight close-up on Mustache’s beady eyes as he asks with subtle relish, “Got any tattoos, Jeff?” Jeff glances around the table and chuckles all “FOH with that,” but…
…the next scene is Jeff in the showers again, this time with an exacto knife, his issued Zippo, bandages, and a Costco bottle of rubbing alcohol. This is painful to watch, but I have to wonder what kind of clandestine blowjobs everyone else is giving that they’d see, much less take note of, a tattoo on the calf. I mean, don’t the pants stay pretty far up in that instance? – unless that’s the point, that Jeff’s paranoia is that far-reaching (and perhaps justified). Anyway, he takes the blade to the Martian and starts carving, but only gets about a third of the way around before he has to stop.
The next day, we’re in a handheld shot of Jeff supervising other seamen, including the puncher from earlier, who glares at him. He’s told the captain wants to see him, and as he’s heading for the captain’s quarters through a warren of hallways, it seems like everyone he passes – and needs must nearly brush up against in these tight quarters – along the way is eyeing him suspiciously. He takes a quick breath and reports in to the captain, and maybe this got fixed for the air version, but we probably shouldn’t see what looks like a Studio City parking lot out the porthole.
Jeff is told to have a seat, and does, at which time he spots blood seeping through his pantleg from the tattoo wound – also apparently added in post, as it doesn’t move when Jeff’s leg does, so I assume they fixed that too. He tries not to freak out, but then the captain hands him a booklet entitled Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide On Homosexual Conduct Policy.
This comic book – yes, “comic book” – also existed, which might seem hard to believe if you haven’t served or don’t have family members in the service but is all too credible if you have/do. Like, the parachutist at the top right…"irony-free up-fuckery,“ is what my vet uncle would call this. Jeff too-quickly asks if there’s some reason the captain’s giving it to him. It’s being circulated to all officers; does Jeff not think it’s important? Jeff’s like, of…course, sure. Does Jeff have any questions? "No sir!” Jeff gulps. “You haven’t looked at it.” Jeff then grimly recites the section of the…Uniform Code? Not sure if that applies here, actually, but it’s the regulation that prohibits engaging in or even admitting to “homosexual acts.” The captain stares at Jeff, then asks if he knows all the regulations by heart. “Most, sir,” Jeff says, which tracks. “Open the book,” he’s told, so he does, staring dully at a page that overexplains what “Don’t Ask” means. The captain asks again if he has questions, and when Jeff answers again that he doesn’t, the captain goes on about a code of conduct, without which they’re “nothing.” “Nothing,” Jeff repeats. So they’re understood? “Yes, sir.”
Nighttime. Jeff’s in the shower again, this time poring over the comic. He pauses when he thinks he hears footsteps, then resumes, this time at the Don’t Tell portion of the book.
Daytime. He’s dressing in his whites, buffing his cap, shining his white shoes. I didn’t even write a note about the visual reference to Lt. Col. Markinson in A Few Good Men, because that character’s about to shoot himself, but maybe I was onto something, because then we’re back in the shower, Jeff standing in his whites on the bench and contemplating the belt he’s looped over a ceiling pipe.
Wittrock looks about twelve years old in this shot and it is buh-rutal. Jeff puts his head through and leans on the belt, but he can’t go through with this either, although it’s a harrowing couple minutes, and the mood isn’t lifted by his despair as he sags, crying, onto the shower bench.
He’s only slightly happier about the prospect of visiting a gay bar called Flicks, but he does it, albeit with baseball hat pulled fairly far down and a body language suggesting deep conflict. Company B’s “Fascination” blares in the bar as he hesitantly orders a beer and looks around at the men smiling, the men smoking, the go-go boy with the American-flag briefs smizing at him. Beside him is Cunanan, who spots him as a rookie immediately. “Was it that obvious?” “There were a few clues,” Cunanan smirks, and introduces himself.
Later, they’re yukking it up at a table with a few empties as Jeff reveals that he’s never gone to any gay bar before. Cunanan’s shaggy-dog joke about the bartender setting off fireworks that make the shape of Jeff’s name to mark the occasion wigs Jeff out momentarily, but Jeff sincerely thanks him for making the night un-humiliating. Cunanan preens that it’s his honor, and he feels like he’s part of Jeff’s history. He asks if Jeff is military, and murmurs that it must be hard. Jeff agrees that it is. Cunanan switches gears, saying rules require him to buy Jeff drinks for the rest of the night and insisting Jeff put his money away. Jeff smiles to himself. At the bar, Cunanan watches him fondly.
Another time, at the same bar, Cunanan asks how it happens that CBS wants to interview Jeff. They came to the base and canvassed the straight soldiers, Jeff says; his part is sharing “the other side.” Cunanan sputters that Jeff is crazy, they’ll kick him out, but Jeff says they’ll keep him in shadow so he can’t be identified. “How humiliating,” Cunanan breathes. Jeff doesn’t get it, so Cunanan notes that the bigots get to stand in the light, uniforms on, proudly; Jeff gets to stay in the shadows with his voice distorted, “like a criminal.” “Yep,” Jeff says grimly. Of course this is how Cunanan thinks of it, and that the Navy will witch-hunt Jeff, that nobody cares what he has to say and it’s not worth it, but it’s something Jeff needs to do. He can’t explain it.
He pulls up to a motel in his Jeep and gathers himself, then approaches one of the rooms.
Gianni and Antonio do the same, at a different hotel.
Jeff listens at the hotel-room door.
Gianni breathes, “My heart,” and puts Antonio’s hand on his chest to feel the hammering. “Mine too,” Antonio laughs. Gianni wonders how many interviews he’s done. Antonio puts Gianni’s hand over his heart and says he can’t count. “None like this,” Gianni says. They kiss. Gianni knocks.
Jeff shakes hands with his interviewer.
Gianni shakes hands with his interviewer. As he’s posing for pictures, Antonio stares into the middle distance; he’s snapped out of the reverie by Gianni coming over for help zhuzhing his shirt.
Jeff’s reassured that viewers will only see his silhouette, and that the MPs can’t make the interviewer reveal his sources.
Gianni’s interviewer confirms that Gianni understands he’s on the record.
Jeff explains that the military is his life; it’s all he ever wanted to do. Asked if anyone serving is out, Jeff says the majority are closeted, “and will always be closeted.”
Gianni interrupts his interview to introduce Antonio in so many words as his partner, and to ask if they can do the interview together. The interviewer smiles warmly, knowing what he’s witnessing, and says absolutely.
Jeff, meanwhile, isn’t so optimistic, saying that he thinks talking to CBS is probably the end of his career. But at the same time, his career probably died a long time ago, he says, choking up. They know. They’ve never promoted him, even though he’s a good sailor. “How do they know?” Jeff tells the story of saving Williams’s life. It’s slightly different from what we heard before in the phrasing, but we’re still seeing these two men, both struggling to do the right thing, and the hopeful version of the right thing. Both killed by a guy who couldn’t see any way to get love except to never tell the truth and to trade in shame instead of pride.
The day of Jeff’s death. He comes home to find his apartment in bad-guest disarray and Cunanan performatively eating Froot Loops, four of which he probably left in the box, because: dickhead. Jeff sees his uniform hat on the table, stares at Cunanan, and heads into the bedroom without a word as Cunanan scrambles to his feet. Jeff finds his uniform on the bed and stalks back into the living room: “You went through my stuff?” Cunanan non-answers that he was going to tidy up, but Jeff interrupts that he touched Jeff’s uniform. Cunanan was going to put it back: “So what?” “’So what’?” Jeff snarls. Cunanan’s eyes narrow as he says he doesn’t get why Jeff keeps it. Cunanan didn’t serve his country; he’ll never get it. No, Cunanan doesn’t, not after how the Navy treated him. “You’ve never believed in anything except yourself,” Jeff says, but Cunanan protests that he believed in Jeff, “didn’t I,” when the Navy didn’t? “Everything you gave me, the bars, the meals, the men, it means nothing – I want my life back!” Jeff says. He means his real life, as a soldier. Cunanan croons in an oh-honey tone that they never wanted him – Cunanan wanted him! Jeff’s like, pass, and says he doesn’t know who Cunanan is; he doesn’t stand for anything. He isn’t anything, he’s just a liar. “You have no honor,” Jeff finishes, heading back into the bedroom.
Now Cunanan’s pissed, and tries to take control of the situation/Jeff, sneering that Jeff’s not in the Navy anymore, “sweetie” – he’s a washed-up [slur] with a shitty job, in a shitty condo, “bitching about how you could have been someone.” This is Cunanan, really, not Jeff, but Jeff says he’s right about that. Cunanan attempts to pull rank by announcing grandly that, when Jeff walked into “that bar,” he saved Jeff. Jeff: “You destroyed me!” He wishes he’d never gone into that bar; he wishes he’d never met Cunanan. Cunanan switches gears, saying Jeff’s confused and can’t see it, but Jeff can see it: “I see it, I feel it, I hate it.” I think he means that what he sees and feels keep him from what he truly loves, serving in the Navy, but I’d hear arguments. In any case, Cunanan is still trying to work the tractor beam, putting his hands up to Jeff’s face and starting to say he loved Jeff so much, but Jeff swats Cunanan’s hands away, knocking him back a step: “No one! Wants! Your love!”
Cunanan Starmans out of the room, gathering his bag (with Jeff’s gun on top) and leaving without a word.
David is opening the door to let his “friend” out and finds Cunanan just standing there. Cunanan brushes in, in between David and the friend, without being invited in. “Andrew!” Cunanan parks it on the coffee table: “Yes?” David didn’t hear the buzzer. Cunanan didn’t want to bother (read: alert) David, so he “just slipped in behind someone else.” The friend’s like, yikes, and David has to whisper that he’ll call. He fastens his bathrobe tightly, and is about to get into it when Cunanan fake-haltingly mentions what David said “about needing help.” Can they talk tonight? “Sure,” David this-fucking-guys, and goes into the bedroom. Cunanan schemes.
Jeff irons his uniform and folds it neatly away.
While David showers, Cunanan calls Jeff to neener that he has Jeff’s gun; he borrowed it to protect David from a stalker who’s back in town. As Jeff is bitching at him about having a license and how the gun never leaves the apartment, Cunanan smiles smugly at the trap he’s going to spring. Jeff says he’ll come over and retrieve it, but he’s done with Cunanan – done. Cunanan tries to grade-school that Jeff said that already, but Jeff hangs up on him. Cunanan wanders into the area of David’s loft that’s under construction and eyes the hammer.
Jeff’s downstairs now, banging on the broken buzzer. Cunanan asks if David’s going to get the door, but this time, David asks if he’s joking, and Cunanan grumps that Jeff is “very hostile at the moment” and he’d rather not get into it with him in the foyer. As David’s letting Jeff in, Cunanan is selecting the hammer and taking up his lurking post. We see him hear Jeff say he never wants to see Cunanan again, and again here the dialogue is somewhat shuffled from what we saw last week, but it may air differently – or be a “what Cunanan ‘hears’ and what’s actually happening aren’t the same” thing. It doesn’t change the ending, unfortunately, and we cut from the door swinging shut and Cunanan rushing Jeff…
…to Jeff’s sister getting wheeled into labor, hollering in pain. Slow pan across Jeff’s empty apartment as his parents leave various messages about the labor and delivery; fade out on Jeff’s hat, neatly atop the uniform box, as Jeff’s parents inform him that he has a niece, and everyone’s healthy.
Spoilers through the episode “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The past two episodes of American Crime Story (executive producer: Nina Jacobson) Season 2 have introduced Darren Criss’s Andrew Cunanan’s first two victims. But given the backwards chronology of the show, some viewers may still be confused about the real life history between the three men. In The Assassination Of Gianni Versace, Jeffrey Trail and David Madson are depicted somewhat ambiguously as having been in a relationship with each other at the time of their deaths. The episode “House By The Lake” seems to imply that jealousy over this relationship is what motivated Cunanan to murder both men. But is this really what happened?
In the opening moments of the Feb. 7 episode, Andrew invites Jeff over to David’s apartment with the intention of murdering him. As David and Jeff are on the way up in the elevator, David nervously tells his friend, “He knows about us.” A few moments later, Jeff is dead. Given that the real Cunanan took his own lifebefore he could be interrogated by police, the world may never know his true motives for allegedly killing his five victims. As such, Versace writer Tom Rob Smith is forced to take some creative liberties to fill in gaps in the heavily researched narrative of Maureen Orth’s 1999 non-fiction book Vulgar Favors, on which the season is based. But the idea of a relationship between David and Jeff might be one of Smith’s biggest inventions, according to other sources.
In an article published four days after Versace’s 1997 murder, The New York Timesquoted Trail’s sister Lisa as saying, “Jeff had just started a new relationship.” Lisa alleged her brother was uncomfortable over Cunanan’s impending visit to Minneapolis: “Her brother, she said, feared Mr. Cunanan might insinuate himself in a way that would make trouble for Mr. Trail and his partner,” the article states. Although the piece never names Trail’s partner, it’s clear that it wasn’t Madson, since the article explains that Cunanan had to spend the night at Madson’s apartment because “Mr. Trail had gone out of town with his partner.” Ergo, Trail’s partner and the person Cunanan was staying with couldn’t have been the same person.
Indeed, Orth’s 1997 Vanity Fair article “The Killer’s Trail” — which formed the basis for Vulgar Favors — names Trail’s partner at the time of his death. “Trail had made it clear that he wouldn’t be around much the weekend of Andrew’s visit,” Orth wrote. “His boyfriend, Jon Hackett, a student at the University of Minnesota, was celebrating his 21st birthday, and Trail was taking him out of town Saturday night.” In fact, Orth’s account of the murders implies that Trail and Madson weren’t even that close; she states that the pair had only “casually” befriended one another after meeting in Minneapolis and realizing they both knew Cunanan.
But just because Trail and Madson weren’t dating — or reportedly even particular close — doesn’t mean Cunanan knew that. In fact, Orth claimed in her piece that a large part of the reason for his visit to Minneapolis was his paranoia over their relationship. “Cunanan had told a friend that he was uncomfortable having the two people he cared most about living in the same faraway city without him,” she wrote, getting up to who knows what in his absence.
So why does Versace (executive producer: Alexis Martin Woodall) include the line where David worries that Andrew “knows about” him and Jeff? Well, the Feb. 14 episode, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” might clear that up. Despite seeming to imply that they were in a relationship only a week before, the show makes no mention of such a connection between Jeff and David while exploring Trail’s backstory and the events leading up to his murder. In fact, David is shown inviting another man over to his apartment — although no mention of Hackett is made.
There are two possibilities that explain the “he knows” line in retrospect. One is that the scene is Andrew’s imagined version of events of what happened after David went to let Jeff in; he feared that his two closest friends were in a relationship, so that’s what the viewer sees. The other is that David simply wasn’t referring to Andrew knowing about some secret relationship — but rather, that he knew both he and Jeff were planning to cut Andrew out of their lives after that weekend, as is revealed in the opening moments of the Feb. 14 episode. Either way, the line seems designed to instill the same paranoia in the viewer that Andrew was feeling at the time, while clearing up the truth of David and Jeff’s relationship in the following episode.
Ultimately, Smith isn’t writing Versace to serve as a factual tell-all of the people involved in Cunanan’s killing spree, but rather to serve as a parable to highlight how life in the closet damages gay men in various ways. “If you look at the crimes themselves, they express various facets of homophobia,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview. He continued:
“You have the murder of Jeff, which is clearly about someone who should have had this brilliant military career. He was the perfect soldier, utterly dedicated, and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was just such a travesty. You have people who went to give their lives for their country and to say to them, ‘We don’t want your life,’ or, ‘Your life is meaningless to us’… It seems to me irrational and cruel, and it destroys people. And then you have a very different facet of homophobia with the second victim, David. You had this brilliant young man caught up in a murder, and so ashamed of who he is that he just can’t say to Andrew, ‘I need to go to the police now.’ Why doesn’t he break from that guy much sooner? It’s because he just knows, ‘If I go to the police, they won’t believe me.’ That’s heartbreaking.”
Versace will continue to explore the various ways in which homophobia contributed to the tragic events of this story in the season’s remaining four episodes.
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