Tag: maureen orth

American Crime Story: What We Know About Gianni Versace’s Mysterious Illness

*Spoilers: Scene descriptions for episode 2 below

In the second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, the fashion designer is shown in a Miami hospital in 1994, trying to hide his identity as he watches two sick men lie in bed next to each other in a room. He then speaks with a doctor, which is partially overlaid on a shot of blood being drawn, who tells Gianni that the drug therapies are complex and difficult. The show never comes right out and says what illness Gianni has been diagnosed with, and this is a major point of contention between the show’s version of events and what the Versace family claims is true.

The show seems to be implying that Versace was HIV positive, established by the shot of the two very gaunt men in their side-by-side hospital beds. But the family has always denied that was the case. Their explanation for Versace’s illness and recovery is always that he had cancer. In a 2006 interview with New York Magazine, younger sister Donatella said that Versace’s reclusiveness in the mid-1990s was because of ear cancer.

“He was sick with cancer in his ear before he was murdered. The last two years of his life, Gianni was hiding — hiding up in his apartment in Via Gesù — because his ear was so big,” said Donatella. “It was impossible to do a surgery because of the position, because to do a surgery, part of his face was supposed to drop… . But then it was declared cured six months before he was murdered. We celebrated; we drink Champagne and everything. Six months later, he was killed.”

However, in Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, on which the FX series is based, the author maintains that she was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that Versace was HIV positive.

“I was told on the record by the lead detective on Miami Beach that he had heard from the medical examiner who did the blood work that he was [HIV positive],” Orth told The Hollywood Reporter. “And it also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach, that’s pretty [solid].”

But the Versace family said in a statement that Orth’s book is “a sensational story” full of “contradictions” and “hearsay.”

“In making her lurid claims, [Orth] ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr. Versace’s family, who … were in the best position to know the facts of his life… . Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth,” the statement reads.

Either way, Tom Rob Smith, who wrote the scripts for The Assassination of Gianni Versace, says that the point isn’t what illness befell Versace; it’s that he recovered and was living life to the fullest when he was senselessly murdered.

“What I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death and still clung on,” Smith told The Hollywood Reporter. “He really fought for life. Life was very important to him. Contrast it with someone who gave up and someone who was beaten by circumstance. And what’s interesting in some of the reactions was, ‘Oh, he’s the killer. He must have AIDS.’ Actually, Andrew [Cunanan] didn’t have it.”

American Crime Story: What We Know About Gianni Versace’s Mysterious Illness

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

The Versace family has now issued two statements denouncing FX’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. But the producers and stars all maintain that the second season of FX’s Emmy-winning anthology is a respectful portrayal of the famed fashion designer, who was gunned down by wanted killer Andrew Cunanan on the steps of his Miami mansion in the summer of 1997.

“The primary thing is that we are celebrating Versace,” writer Tom Rob Smith tells The Hollywood Reporter. “We are exploring why he was a genius, why he was important, the impact that he made, and why it was such a loss when he was murdered — both on a personal level in terms of all the people that loved him, all the people that admired him, and on a cultural level as well. It’s a show that celebrates and admires him.”

The family’s main point of contention seems to be the portrayal of Gianni Versace as HIV-positive, which reporter Maureen Orth contended in her book Vulgar Favors. (The season is based on Orth’s book and reporting.) Orth, who covered the hunt for Cunanan for Vanity Fair at the time, was told on the record by a Miami Beach detective that blood tests done after Versace’s death confirmed his HIV-positive status. Orth, for her part, told THR that more than a decade later, she stands by her reporting.

“I was told on the record by the lead detective on Miami Beach that he had heard from the medical examiner who did the blood work that he was [HIV-positive],” Orth said. “And it also goes along with other people who told me that he was very weak at one time and he needed [partner] Antonio to help him walk, and they came over to his house when he was having breakfast and he had 27 bottles of pills in front of him. Now, does that mean they’re for HIV? But the blood thing from on record from the Miami Beach, that’s pretty [solid].”

The Versace family has blasted the FX drama as a “work of fiction” and Orth’s book, saying that the FX series relies on a book they say is “full of gossip and speculation.”

“Orth never received any information from the Versace family and she has no basis to make claims about the intimate personal life of Gianni Versace or other family members. Instead, in her effort to create a sensational story, she presents second-hand hearsay that is full of contradictions,” the family said in a statement. “Orth makes assertions about Gianni Versace’s medical condition based on a person who claims he reviewed a postmortem test result, but she admits it would have been illegal for the person to have reviewed the report in the first place (if it existed at all). In making her lurid claims, she ignores contrary information provided by members of Mr. Versace’s family, who…were in the best position to know the facts of his life…. Of all the possible portrayals of his life and legacy, it is sad and reprehensible that the producers have chosen to present the distorted and bogus version created by Maureen Orth.”

Showrunner Ryan Murphy responded to the family’s criticism, telling THR that Donatella Versace’s actions seemed to indicate she wasn’t entirely displeased with the series. “Donatella Versace sent Penelope Cruz [who portrays her in Versace] a very large arrangement of flowers when she was representing the show at the Golden Globes,” he said. “I don’t know if she is going to watch the show, but if she did, I think she would see that we treat her and her family with respect and kindness, and she really is sort of a feminist role model in my book because she had to step into an impossible situation, which she did with grace and understanding.”

But regardless of Versace’s status, the fact that he overcame a serious illness and was excited about his life provides a sharp contrast to the desperation of Cunanan’s outlook.

“To me if you look at just the facts of his illness, he did get very sick at that time, and he did recover at the time of the new [HIV/AIDS] drug therapy. So it does seem to fit that,” Smith said. “But even all that aside, what I found most amazing about it is this is a guy that came so close to death, and still clung on. He really fought for life. Life was very important to him. Contrast it with someone who gave up, and someone who was beaten by circumstance. And what’s interesting in some of the reactions was, ‘Oh, he’s the killer. He must have AIDS.’ Actually, Andrew didn’t have it.”

Cunanan (played by Glee alum Darren Criss) shot Versace as he returned from his morning walk to the newsstand, something the designer did regularly when he was staying in Florida — even when he was sick.

“Gianni did the walk to the magazine store in Miami often. Once he did it when he was so sick he could barely make it that couple of blocks. He was carrying the magazines back, and he couldn’t even hold them. That morning [of his death] when he walks, he’s so alive again. It’s really powerful to think that he must’ve been like, ‘This life is great,’ and he can do that walk and carry the magazines. And then Andrew comes up,” Smith said. “It’s really terrible when you look at those two. I thought that was a really powerful part of his story, so that was why we did it.”

Edgar Ramirez, who plays the late designer, did not contact the Versace family for both legal and personal reasons when he was preparing to take on the part in theMurphy-produced drama.

“What this family went through was a horrible tragedy, and I would understand [not wanting to discuss it], had it been my case to be contacted to talk about something that caused so much pain and also was infused with so much misrepresentation, prejudice, and so much stigma and confusion,” Ramirez told THR. “I was lucky enough to have people who were very very close to Gianni to talk to me and to open to me. They were the ones that were very generous to me.”

Ricky Martin, who plays Versace’s longtime partner, Antonio D’Amico, did speak to the man he portrays, and said he now counts the designer among his friends. But before they spoke, he simply wanted to get a small amount of justice for Versace’s murder, a crime he says shouldn’t have even happened in the first place.

“There’s so much injustice,” he told THR. “Why did we allow it to happen when this killer was on a killing spree for weeks, killing gay men? He was on the list of the FBI’s most wanted. He was not hiding. Why did it happen? Just the fact that we are still dealing with this level of ignorance frustrates me.”

As a gay man, he wanted to bring the story not only of the homophobia that contributed to Versace’s death, but the struggle he faced in his life.

“The fact that someone as successful and as powerful as Gianni Versace was struggling to come out of the closet, it was like, give me a break,” Martin said. “That was in 1997, but I know now in 2018, there are men and women that are still struggling with this kind of fear, of their career going to collapse if they come out. Everybody’s going to hate them at home if they come out. It is sad. But it was important for me to be vocal about how unjust life is for some of us. I’m so lucky, but it’s not right. Something needs to be done.”

How FX’s ‘Versace’ Tackles Homophobia and the Family’s Main Point of Contention

Darren Criss on Playing Andrew Cunanan In The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

dcriss-archive:

In 1997, I read a newspaper article about a 27-year-old gay man from a posh private school in La Jolla, California, who was on the lam, wanted for four murders in three states. Vanity Fairassigned me to profile him, and the issue with my story in it was almost at the printer when news broke that Andrew Cunanan, the man I’d been tracking, had gunned down the fashion designer Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion. Suddenly, Cunanan—and the spectacularly failed manhunt for him, which ended with his suicide eight days after Versace’s murder—was a national obsession, and I re-wrote my article, then expanded it into a book, Vulgar Favors: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Both are now, in turn, the basis of Ryan Murphy’s The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, set to premiere on FX on January 17.

Cunanan, who was driven to his murderous deeds by the desire for fame and revenge, would have relished being portrayed by Darren Criss, who shares his striking good looks, his outgoing charm, and his half-Filipino heritage. But the similarities end there, obviously, and Criss is empathetic enough to understand that, for all its juicy details, the Versace saga is an epic story of real-life suffering. “My heart is really sensitive to the people who experienced something so horrible that I’m trying to breathe life into,” says Criss, 30, who grew up in the Bay Area and previously worked with Murphy on Glee and American Horror Story series will be told in reverse, tracing Cunanan’s path backward from the Versace murder, through his previous killings, all the way to his childhood growing up as the gifted and spoiled son of an accused-embezzler father and a victimized, mentally ill mother. Versace’s lush life contrasts with Cunanan’s descent into drugs, and his double life in the gay demimonde and in the closeted upper class.

Cunanan, Criss says, was “someone who had the potential to do so much more. How does that person become synonymous with something so sad, violent, or scary?” He adds, “It’s a story about the have and have-not—the ultimate creator and the ultimate destroyer.”

Darren Criss on Playing Andrew Cunanan In The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story

Orth brings Versace murder to TV, recalls night Tim Russert might have talked to his killer

PASADENA, Calif. – When Maureen Orth was approached by a producer to option her book, “Vulgar Favors,” for a television series, her lawyer wasn’t exactly encouraging.

“He said ‘you know, Maureen, this isn’t worth the paperwork,’ ” Orth recalled in an interview here. “ ‘These things never happen.’ ”

So she hired an agent to do the paperwork.

The result is the nine-episode FX miniseries, “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” which premieres at 10 p.m. Wednesday and stars Darren Criss (“Glee”) as serial killer Andrew Cunanan, Edgar Ramirez as the fashion icon, Penelope Cruz as his sister and Ricky Martin as his partner.

A consultant on the series, Orth has no complaints about the stylish FX production, led by producer-director Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.”)

“These people are just top notch,” said Orth. “I am in the Class A League here.”

Orth, who dedicated her 1999 book to her late husband, South Buffalo legend Tim Russert, their son Luke and her mother, addressed how it became a series almost 20 years later.

The book, whose title was taken from a Richard Strauss opera, began as a Vanity Fair article that Orth was writing about Cunanan before Versace became his fifth victim in the middle of 1997.

“I saw a picture in the Sunday New York Daily News of a good looking kid in a tuxedo and it said ‘serial killer suspect,’ ” recalled Orth. “And I said, woo, that doesn’t sound like the usual serial killer. I had never done a murder story or a crime story before so I thought I would try my hand in that.”

She spent two months in San Diego, Minneapolis and Chicago researching the four murders Cunanan committed before murdering Versace.

“At the time I was doing the article he had not yet killed Versace,” said Orth. “He was on the lam.”

She believes Cunanan, who knew she was doing the story for his favorite magazine, once called her Washington, D.C. home.

“The very first thing in the book is a phone call that Tim picked up unfortunately and not me,” recalled Orth. “It might have been Cunanan. It was some guy asking, ‘Is Maureen Orth there? Is Maureen Orth there?’ And it was 1 o’clock in the morning and Tim of course, said, ‘I think it is that guy,’ and instead of handing me the phone, asked him ‘Who are you?’ And click.”

While Vanity Fair was fact-checking Orth’s article, Versace was killed in Miami.

“I think Tim was the first person to call and say somebody shot Versace,” said Orth. “Somebody said, ‘Do you think this might be your guy?”

Orth said the police wouldn’t release the shooter’s name because they were trying to put together a lineup.

“That was the beginning of all these miscalculations that gave him time to escape,” said Orth.

Her editor determined Orth would do the story if it was Cunanan and another reporter would do it if it wasn’t. She got confirmation that it was Cunanan at a movie premiere.

“I had to crawl past John F. Kennedy Jr and his wife and make a pay phone call and ask ‘Is it Cunanan?’ ” she remembered. “I was the only one in the world that knew he actually met Versace because one of his roommates told me. I said to Tim, ‘Ohmygod he knows Versace.’ They met at the San Francisco Opera.”

“At the time it happened, I probably knew more about Cunanan than anybody else in the world,” she said.

Cunanan’s background makes the story more compelling. His IQ was 147 and he graduated from a good school.

“His first victim was his best friend, the second victim was the guy he was in love with and the third victim was the older man in Chicago and supposedly married and very Catholic,” she said. “I believe he came to represent all the older men he had had in his life – he was an escort and companion for. The fourth murder was a murder of convenience because he needed the car.”

Orth said his stolen getaway car was in a public Miami garage for four of the five weeks he was on the lam and he was living in a flea bag hotel, hustling at night and going to gay discos.

“He always had this obsession about Versace,” said Orth. “Because like Versace, Andrew was always gay and out his whole life.”

“He was a narcissist, a con artist and liar and he felt extremely entitled. He didn’t want to work for a living. And Versace seemed to have everything that he himself felt he deserved. Fame, recognition … I think Versace embodied everything Cunanan wanted to be. However, he wasn’t willing to work for it.”

Orth understands critics’ question whether this series will prove as popular viewing as the first “American Crime” story about the O.J. Simpson murder case, which she wrote in her book hurt future law enforcement investigations.

“They are completely different,” Orth said. “O.J. was far more known to American people than Versace was. It is really comparing apples and oranges. There are equally compelling characters in this tale with very complex lives. This one has a lot of glitz and glamor in it.”

She said hopes American viewers get a few things out of the series.

“It shows the pain of being in the closest that was so often prevalent 20 years ago,” said Orth. “That is no longer the case as much. The lying and the sadness that was pervasive. Cunanan was able to exploit that and get away with things.”

“It teaches you the lessons of doing things for fame and money and material things are not what counts in life obviously.”

She dismissed some criticism here that the series makes Cunanan likable because she feels being erudite, well-read and having good taste made him that way.

“I found that specious,” she said. “He was an incredibly charming personality. He wasn’t just simply a calculating evil personality, and that’s why he was able to gain the confidence of really lovely, sort of salt-of-the-earth, Midwestern guys and the people that he hung out with… So he had quite an interesting personality that was apart from the deep evil that lurked underneath.”

She praised Criss’ performance.

“I think Darren did a beautiful job of being both creepy and charismatic at the same time,” said Orth. “That’s the tragedy. Cunanan had all these gifts that if he chose to employ them for the good he could have been a big success. But he wasn’t willing to.”

In other words, Criss’ performance is worth the paperwork all by itself.

Orth brings Versace murder to TV, recalls night Tim Russert might have talked to his killer

FX’s Versace murder drama visceral and terrifying

FX’s widely celebrated O.J. Simpson “American Crime Story” focused on the theatrics and hijinks of the celebrity athlete’s televised murder trial and the colorful characters involved.

Don’t expect any such amusement from “Crime Story’s” second season, which details the murder of fashion icon Gianni Versace in the summer of 1997 and the events leading up to him being gunned down.

While viewing the first four episodes, I didn’t smile once. What I did feel was stunned, sad, chilled, mortified and thoroughly sickened, as if someone had delivered a hard punch to my gut.

The drama is breathtakingly beautiful at times, inviting us into the opulent, glamorous and often decadent world of Versace (Emmy-nominated Edgar Ramirez, “Carlos”), his handsome longtime partner Antonio D’Amico (Ricky Martin) and his fiercely devoted sister Donatella (Oscar-winner Penelope Cruz), a realm made even more dreamy by pastel-washed Miami.

But that’s only the backdrop. This new nine-part “American Crime Story” is primarily a no-holds-barred depiction of the horrific crimes of sociopath Andrew Cunanan (Darren Criss, “Glee”), his calculated killing of Versace, the gruesome slayings that preceded it and the effect on the various victims’ friends and families.

“Every season of this show will have a different tonality,” co-executive producer Ryan Murphy told TV critics at a recent FX press session in Pasadena, California. “The first season was very much a courtroom pot boiler. The second season that you’ve seen is a manhunt thriller.

“I loved that this was not glamorizing the Cunanan story, and we never want to do that on this show,” Murphy added. “I really loved how we laid into everybody who was affected, not just the people who were killed, but also the relatives, the siblings. I think what (Cunanan) did was very, very destructive, and the reasons why he did it — the homophobia of the day, which still persists — is something really topical.”

What both series have in common is they’re topical and reflective of the day.

“With ‘O.J.’ we looked at sexism and racism, and we are doing the same with this season,” Murphy said.

As for the drama’s honesty, the Versace family recently decried it as “fiction.” However, journalist and author Maureen Orth, whose book “Vulgar Favors” served as the basis for the drama, stands by its authenticity.

“I would say my sourcing in the book is 95 percent or more on the record, and I talked to over 400 people, and so, so many things that you might think were made up aren’t made up,” Orth said.

As indicated before, it’s not an easily digested story: Each of the murders is terrifying, as is Cunanan’s manipulation and shaming of his victims.

However, it’s portrayed with such realism and emotional commitment by its magnetic and meticulous cast that you are hooked instantly and will want to see it through to its conclusion.

The stars met with us to share their feelings about the characters they play and how being part of such a sad, brutal and disturbing series affected their lives.

Murphy said Ramirez was the only central cast member who didn’t instantly say yes when approached.

The actor eventually was convinced, however, and said he came away surprised by what he learned about Versace the man: “How family oriented he was and how strong those family ties were and how important they were in his life. And how rather subtle and intimate and private he was in comparison to the public perception of the House of Versace.”

“He was rather a quiet person that would go kind of shy, you know, extroverted, but shy at the same time,” Ramirez said. “And he would go to bed rather early and wake up rather early and had more the demeanor and the life of a craftsman than like a larger-than-life celebrity. So that’s something that even to me was very surprising.”

Martin, known best as the Latin pop star who gave us hits such as “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” said he had a conversation with his character, D’Amico, to assure him that his relationship with Versace would be “treated with utmost respect.”

“I told him, ‘I will make sure that people fall in love with your relationship with Gianni. That is what I’m here for. I really want them to see the beauty and the connection that you guys had.’”

He also got the biggest laugh during the FX press session. “I peed a little bit,” he said when he learned Donatella would be played by Penelope Cruz.

As for Criss, people who’ve seen him in lighter roles, such as the singing-dancing Blaine in “Glee,” no doubt will be astonished by the intensity of the actor’s performance here, particularly when the sadistic side of Cunanan comes out.

However, Criss made sure he also found something likable about Cunanan, such as his charm, to turn in a fleshed-out portrayal.

To preserve his sanity through filming, he said, the role “didn’t come home with me. I know a lot of people who jump into these kinds of things, and it really consumes their whole lives. And maybe that’s just the kind of person I am, but my alibi of how that, sort of, works is I think what saved me is that Andrew compartmentalized so many things in his life: emotions, people, experiences. He could disassociate, and likewise, I could sort of disassociate.”

FX’s Versace murder drama visceral and terrifying

Andrew Cunanan and the Assassination of Gianni Versace, Revisited

When Andrew Cunanan gunned down Gianni Versace on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion on the morning of July 15, 1997, I had just gone through the final fact-checking of a long piece I had written for Vanity Fair on the 27-year-old spree killer, still at large after taking his fifth, and most famous, victim. This was the pre-Google era, when shoe leather and landline phones were still the predominant tools of journalism. My two months of reporting had taken me to San Diego, San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis; the story was ready to be sent to the printer.

What had originally caught my interest was this handsome, young murder suspect who reportedly had a genius I.Q., friends everywhere, and graduated from a prestigious private school in La Jolla, California. I had never reported a murder story before—so unraveling Cunanan’s double, triple life with the help of dozens of his friends and associates, who led me through his haunts in the Hillcrest area of San Diego, then and now a gay enclave, and beyond, was fascinating. My first night in San Diego, for example, started at a male wet T-shirt (and below) contest and ended at a drag show.

Cunanan, a witty, lazy, narcissistic con artist and perpetual liar, sometimes a kept boy, sometimes a drug dealer, knew the most refined closeted corners of wealth from San Diego to San Francisco just as well as he knew the roughest leather bars. In the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, he was a connector for young, closeted military officers stationed in San Diego. His first victim, Jeff Trail, in fact, was an Annapolis graduate and once his best friend.

I knew Cunanan followed Versace’s career, just as I knew he was an avid reader of Vanity Fair. But until the murder, and my subsequent reporting—which became the book, Vulgar Favors: the Assassination of Gianni Versace, on which the upcoming season of FX’s American Crime Story is based—I was unaware of just how deep his antipathy and anger were that Versace was a famous gay icon and he was not. Yet in 1997, Versace—who pioneered the use of supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Carla Bruni and the courting of celebrities to sit in the front rows of his shows, which were more like rock events—was more middle-of-the-pack couturier than the household name he’d always dreamed of becoming. It took his murder, the infamous blood stains on the steps of his Miami villa, and, perhaps most of all, Princess Diana attending his funeral in Milan with Elton John, to change all that.

Versace’s killing meant calling the piece back, taking it apart on an impossible deadline and trying to stay ahead of what rapidly became the No.1 story in the country. The media circus was on; in this pre-social-media time, Cunanan’s murder spree was an early harbinger of someone willing to do anything—perhaps even to kill—to become famous. I was the one who broke the news the next morning on the Today show, from the D.C. airport on my way to Miami, that Cunanan and Versace had indeed met before, when Versace had been in San Francisco to design costumes for an opera there. Cunanan’s roommate had mentioned it. When I landed in Miami less than three hours later, 14 TV crews were lined up waiting to interview me.

Eight days after Versace’s murder, after the largest failed manhunt in U.S. history at the time, Cunanan was found on a particularly infamous blue houseboat with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his head. (Chillingly, the bullet that Cunanan put through his own skull traveled exactly the same trajectory as the bullet he put through Versace’s brain.) Immediately after Versace’s murder, spooked celebrities like Sylvester Stallone and Madonna,who had invested in property in South Beach, stayed away and put their places up for sale, as did the Versaces. Casa Casuarina is now a boutique hotel renting rooms for $1,000 a night. The houseboat mysteriously sunk five months after Cunanan was found; its shady owners disappeared to Germany.

It’s hard to underestimate the influence that the O.J. Simpson trial, then still very recent history, had over the investigation. Local district attorneys and homicide detectives in several different states feared that they might botch a case based on circumstantial evidence and end up with the not-guilty verdict, causing them to be overly cautious and lose valuable time in pursuing Cunanan. Much has changed since then. When Cunanan committed his two murders in Minneapolis, there were 11 openly gay members serving on its police force—then a liberal number. But the detective assigned to the Jeff Trail case proved to be particularly insensitive and inept. Today, the Minneapolis police chief is a lesbian. The F.B.I. that was so clueless in how it pursued Cunanan during the five weeks he was on the Most Wanted list—he hid in plain sight around South Beach before killing Versace—that it instituted a new outreach nationally to the gay community, largely in the beginning stages of realizing its social power, and is now light-years ahead in political sophistication.

But my biggest surprise was when I visited San Diego last spring for a Dateline broadcast. I went back to Flicks bar in Hillcrest, Andrew Cunanan’s favorite hangout, where he arranged many of his assignations for whatever he was peddling on any given night. Some of the regulars from his time were still regulars today, but now with paunches and wearing baggy Bermudas—hardly buffed anymore; just regular, middle-aged white guys. The new business that had moved in next door: a baby store!

What hasn’t changed much is celebrity justice. Versace’s family was allowed to cremate his body and take it back to Italy before the Miami police had a chance to do more than a cursory investigation. The police were not allowed to interview any members of the family. In Chicago, the powerful family of real-estate tycoon Lee Miglin, Cunanan’s third victim, was intent that Miglin’s murder be considered “random,” and that Miglin not be suspected as having previously crossed paths with Cunanan—sparing the family from the insinuations that would have come with such an association. The Chicago police never issued an official report.

And today’s world, of course, is by no means less sensational or filled with delusional seekers of fame. It is certainly more so. In his yearbook, Cunanan wrote about himself “après mois, le déluge”; he was voted least likely to be forgotten. In the eighth grade, he dressed as Prince Charles and had his mother bring lobster to school for a lunch date with a classmate dressed as Princess Diana. Entertainment journalists at T.C.A. last week often asked if such seemingly fantastic biographical details were true. They are. Cunanan was so filled with rage and so intent on becoming famous that he was willing to kill for it. Who knows? Today, he might have found an outlet in that anger and hate by trolling Versace on social media.

Andrew Cunanan and the Assassination of Gianni Versace, Revisited

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Vulgar Favors: the Book Behind the Show with Maureen Orth

Joanna Robinson and Richard Lawson are joined by Katey Rich, deputy editor of VanityFair.com to discuss how the book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History inspired the upcoming season of American Crime Story and further informs those curious about Cunanan. This week’s featured interview is Maureen Orth, author of Vulgar Favors, who discusses how her Vanity Fair story on Versace’s killer prepared her to write the definitive book in his four-state killing spree culminating in the death of famed designer Versace. 

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