Tag: vanity fair

American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson

At this point TV viewers tuning in to Season 2 of American Crime Story will have sensed that something’s up. Promotional materials promised a glitzy, pulpy dive into the high-fashion world of the Versace family and a grisly murder in sunny Miami. But after two episodes with nary a Versace in sight (don’t worry, they’ll be back), audiences must have realized that producer Ryan Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith actually had a different—and, in my opinion, better—show in mind. The star of Episode 4 is not any of the A-list names like Penelope Cruz, Ricky Martin, and Darren Criss or even one of Ryan Murphy’s regular players like Finn Wittrock. Instead, the breakout here (and, perhaps, of the series) is 30 year-old Australian newcomer Cody Fern playing Andrew Cunanan’s second, most personal, and misunderstood victim: David Madson.

Speaking with Vanity Fair’s podcast Still Watching: Versace, Fern admits that this episode and American Crime Story as a whole represent a bait and switch in order to get audiences to care about Cunanan’s less famous victims and the plight of gay men, more broadly, in the 90s. In this episode specifically, Fern and Smith are determined to redeem Madson who was, for so long, erroneously accused of being Cunanan’s accomplice rather than an innocent casualty.

Last month at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour, when asked about the slightly deceptive title The Assassination of Gianni Versace, both Ryan Murphy and Tom Rob Smith were quick to defend it. The People vs. O.J. Simpson, they pointed out, wasn’t a show primarily about O.J. Of course, they’re right. Along with a searing look at racism, sexism, and the rise of reality TV in the 90s, the main takeaway from American Crime Story’s first season was the redemption of maligned prosecutor Marcia Clark.

Madson, of course, is not nearly as well-known as Clark and that, Fern argues, is what makes Season 2 even more extraordinary. “Everyone was ready for this to be a huge, splashy, fashion drama,” Fern tells Still Watching “but [Ryan Murphy] really honors the victims who came before. Four people who aren’t fashion designers but who had a family and were loved and were brought into the sordid world of Andrew Cunanan and went down because of it. [Their] stories are equally as vital as Gianni Versace’s. For Ryan to really focus on those stories is incredibly brave and does great justice to those people.”

Madson’s mysterious role in Cunanan’s murder spree baffled law enforcement for over a year (and beyond). Why would an innocent man go on the run with a killer and stay with him for six days? For a detailed breakdown of the main clues and theories swirling around Madson’s role at the time, you can go here. But for Smith and Fern, Madson’s driving concern in his final days was clear: internalized gay shame. It’s true that American Crime Story had to do a lot more theorizing than usual in this episode—with both Cunanan and Madson dead there is no way to know exactly what happened on their six-day journey. (We do know, however, that Aimee Mann never serenaded them in a Minnesota dive bar.) Smith tells Still Watching: Versace: “There’s a dilemma [with this episode]. You are, ultimately, joining dots rather than dealing with transcribed or videotaped evidence. I tried sticking to the fundamental truth which was that a) Andrew was a liar and was trapping David and b) David was full of love and ambition and wasn’t involved in the killing in any way.”

Fern admits those six days on the run were the most fascinating to him. “What the series deals with is not only how the police bungled the investigation because of homophobia at the time, but also this internalized of gay shame. David is dealing with a shame that’s been following him around his whole life.” As the show depicts, Madson was out to both his immediate family and his Minneapolis friends and co-workers, but what the episode theorizes is that he wasn’t ready to to be out to an entire world of strangers.

Smith calls David the hero of Episode 4 and used his own life experience as a gay man to extrapolate what Madson might have been feeling. He tells Still Watching:

Andrew’s cleverness is that he plays on a very deep-seated fear which we’ve always felt as gay men and women that if somehow you open the door to our private lives, everyone looking in is going to be shocked and appalled and we’ll be disgraced and exiled. Now, suddenly, by killing Jeffrey in that apartment that lingering nightmare becomes true because David knows that if he opens the door to that apartment the world is going to be shocked and appalled. They’ll think he was involved somehow. It’s going to be very hard for David to extricate himself from the trap that Andrew’s sprung around him.

Smith’s efforts to redeem Madson entirely in the span of an hour may have resulted in a bit of white-washing of this particular character. The real Madson was a bit older than Fern (and a good deal older than the baby-faced Fern looks here). According to Maureen Orth’s well-researched book Vulgar Favors, Madson was a beloved but forcefully charismatic person who dated a good deal and was hardly the Midwestern babe in the woods this series would sometimes have him be.

Neither Fern nor anyone in the cast reached out to the surviving family members of Cunanan’s victims while filming the series—though Ricky Martin, at least, has since been in contact with Versace’s life partner Antonio D’Amico. It was conscious choice they made as a group out of sensitivity to such a great loss. However, the Madson family, specifically, was at the forefront of Fern and Smith’s minds as they constructed this episode. “There was a cloud of suspicion over David,” Smith explains. “The police declared him to be the killer at first and the parents really struggled to clear his name. Such a gross injustice.” Episode 4 of American Crime Story rescues Madson not only from ignominy, but from anonymity as well. Anyone watching this episode and Fern’s irresistibly vulnerable performance won’t soon forget Andrew Cunanan’s second victim—even if he didn’t have a name you’d find on a fashion label.

And as Fern points out, the reverse chronology of American Crime Story acts as another kind of redemption for David Madson. It’s no spoiler to say that Fern as Madson will return for a few more episodes as the season spools back in time and we learn how he and Cunanan first met and fell in love. “There was something nice about leaving this man, David Madson, with a moment of beauty rather than a moment of terror,” Fern explains to Still Watching. “The way we remember David in the series is not the way we see him in Episode 4.” Smith notes that by the end of this hour of television “there’s a sense of David being an inspirational figure rather than someone who people have forgotten.”

To find out more about the true story of David Madson and Andrew Cunanan, you can listen to the full interview with Smith and Fern as well as past guests Maureen Orth, Ricky Martin, Max Greenfield, and Judith Light by subscribing to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes air every Wednesday night.

American Crime Story: Gay Shame and the Redemption of David Madson

American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo

There has been a lot of talk during this season of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story about what is fact and what is fiction. The source material, Maureen Orth’s Vulgar Favors, was meticulously researched—but there are still gaps in the story of Andrew Cunanan, as well as areas in which the show’s creators took some artistic liberty (such as the fantastical onstage conversation between Cunanan and Gianni Versace in Episode 1).

But of all the tales American Crime Story has to tell this season, the six days Cunanan and David Madson spent on the road required the most artistic invention. With both men dead, neither Orth nor anyone else could uncover what, precisely, occurred during that harrowing trip from Madson’s Minneapolis loft to his final resting place. Wednesday’s episode, “House by the Lake,” leans into that challenge by delivering the most surreal installment of the series—punctuated, midway through, by the appearance of singer Aimee Mann. Film lovers may recognize her most immediately from her soundtrack work on 1999’s Magnolia, while music lovers know from her solo career and as lead singer of the 80s band ‘Til Tuesday. Here, though, Mann appears in a Minnesota dive bar, crooning out a classic 1984 hit from the Cars: “Drive.” In what is, writer Tom Rob Smith tells Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, the most pivotal moment of the episode, Madson tries to escape out of a bathroom window as Cunanan listens, emotionally, to Mann croon. Producers Brad Simpson and Alexis Martin Woodall spoke with Vanity Fair about how Mann’s unsettling musical homage to David Lynch came about.

Vanity Fair: Where did the idea to include Aimee in this episode come from?

Brad Simpson: During the development, one of the things that [writer and executive producer] Tom [Rob Smith] and I talked about—because we had been watching some David Lynch stuff—is the use of music Lynch’s movies, and how well he uses pop music. Tom said, “I think I’m gonna try something like that for the show.” He’d come up with this idea that [Andrew and David] would stop at a roadside bar, and there would be somebody singing—a sort of woman who had a great voice. There was a backstory to her. Maybe she thought she could make it out of this area of this town, but life didn’t work out, and she’s got this sort of weathered, great voice and is stuck there.

We talked about who we could get to play this. Somebody who was first known in the 1980s, who had a strong voice and you could buy as somebody who would live in this landscape. When we went to Ryan [Murphy] for suggestions of who could it be, he instantly said, without a beat: “Aimee Mann. Send her the pages, tell her we’re gonna figure out the song, but it has to be her.”

Alexis Martin Woodall: Brad and I started brainstorming music … we knew we wanted it to be something that was very familiar, but that you hadn’t heard of in a while—so you could emotionally connect with it, but it felt fresh. I got really stuck on one that I was so excited about, [by] Phil Collins. [Aimee] called and said, “Look, I think this song is beautiful, but I don’t think that I’m gonna do justice to this song.” So she’d come back with “Drive,” and it was really funny, because Ryan has loved that song, Brad loves that song—

Simpson: It was a mix tape staple for me.

Woodall: So she recorded a demo for us and sent it our way, and I think right then Brad and I got really excited. Because a demo from Aimee Mann is a little piece of musical genius.

Simpson: I was the guy—I was the ‘Til Tuesday fan in high school.

Woodall: If you’d seen his haircut, you’d really know he was a ‘Til Tuesday fan. Brad and I went out with her producer Paul Bryan—who is a genius, and I don’t use that word lightly—to his studio on a Saturday morning. We all talked about what the goal was, which was that we play it under. It’s not a star turn. We don’t turn the light on and say: “Ladies and gentleman, Miss Aimee Mann!” We just let the actual atmosphere take over, and then you get that there’s someone really legit on stage. Within two hours, we had something that you and I were just kind of flawlessly excited about, right? It was fast.

Simpson: In that scene, David is reconciling himself to the fact that he’s trapped with Andrew, and Andrew has a moment where he thinks he has lost [David]… . The song itself, once you hear the lyrics—hopefully not in an on-the-nose way— the lyrics to “Drive” can really have that double meaning.

Yeah—the lyrics “you can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong” seem pretty appropriate here. I wanted to ask for your take on what Darren Criss is giving in that scene as he listens to the song. We see Andrew overwhelmed by emotion—what emotion do you think that is?

Simpson: When Tom was writing it, I think he wanted to have two things going on. It’s a turning point in the episode. For David, he’s looking out the window of the bathroom and realizing that he’s trapped with Andrew. Maybe he could climb through the window and maybe he couldn’t, but he returns to Andrew. One of the things that’s happening for Andrew in that scene—and it’s one of the few times so far that we’ve seen any real emotion—the way Dan Minahan directed [Darren] to play it, and the way that Tom had written it, was the idea of: you’re watching the singer, David’s gone to the bathroom, and you’re feeling this sense of loss. You think he may have escaped. But either way, there’s an undercurrent of dread that you may have lost him no matter what. Darren wanted to get psyched up and do it in one take—you know, the slow push in that ends with him crying. And we gave him the space that he needed, and just did the long, slow push into the tear, and then he follows up with such joy.

This episode, which happens to be my favorite of the season, has these great surreal qualities, invoking shows like Twin Peaks or The Leftovers. I think the presence of someone as famous as Aimee Mann—even though she’s playing a character—in a random Minnesota dive bar really delivers a disorienting shock.

Simpson: And that is the David Lynch. When we were developing [the season], we talked about different episodes in terms of movies… . There’s a later episode which has nods to American Gigolo. David Lynch had made Wild at Heart, he made The Straight Story, he’s made movies about people moving across the country, he’s made movies about people who exist in the margins… . We talked about the way Lynch used Julee Cruise for the songs in Twin Peaks, the way that he used Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, and the idea was to reconfigure a pop song much in the same way Lynch does… . We love Aimee Mann, but I think obviously there’s gonna be a whole group of people [unfamiliar with her] for whom it’s just, “Oh my God, that’s somebody with a beautiful voice.”

Woodall: Yeah. Totally anonymous.

You’re right. Not everyone is going to expect frogs to come falling out of the sky when Aimee Mann starts singing. Between this moment and “Pump up the Jam,” this is a great episode for music.

Woodall: I’ve always said that Andrew Cunanan’s favorite songs on shuffle is what we’re doing in the series. He would’ve been 15 in 1984, and there was a really cool darkness in that time period in the New Wave… . What would he have been listening to? What was popular when he fell in love with David? What was popular when he met Versace?

American Crime Story: The Truth Behind that Surprising Musical Cameo

Versace: The Mysterious Murder of Lee Miglin

Two months before Andrew Cunanan killed Gianni Versace, another murder was already making national headlines—the savage killing of Lee Miglin, a self-made real-estate tycoon. Authorities did not immediately link Cunanan to the killing—his third murder in a spree that spanned from Minneapolis to Miami. Even so, the real-estate developer’s affluence, his position as a philanthropic society fixture alongside his Home Shopping Network empress wife, Marilyn Miglin, and mysterious circumstances made the killing the focus of intense media interest.

On May 4, in the toniest neighborhood of Chicago, Miglin was murdered at the property he shared with his wife while she was out of town on business. The Chicago Tribune reported that Miglin’s body “was discovered in a detached garage, tucked under a car and obscured by a trash can. Miglin’s feet were bound together and his face was carefully wrapped in masking tape, except for a hole for his nose, sources said. The masking tape was soaked in blood, as were Miglin’s shoulders and chest, sources said.”

“The murder was brutal and had grisly, ritualistic overtones: Miglin’s hands and feet were bound, and his body was partially wrapped in plastic, brown paper, and tape,” wrote Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth.“His ribs had been broken, and he had been tortured with four stabs in the chest, probably with garden shears. His throat had been cut open with a garden bow saw. According to friends, however, the autopsy revealed no sexual molestation.”

When Miglin’s 96-year-old mother, Anna, heard these details, she told press that her son had “died a worse death than Christ.”

Perhaps even more mysterious than the murder scene, however, was the condition of the Miglins’ home when Marilyn returned to it. According to Orth, the murderer had slept in Miglin’s bed, eaten a ham sandwich in the library, shaved in the bathroom, and bathed in the bathtub. The killer, it appeared, had been in no hurry to leave the duplex—and when he did, he is said to have helped himself to as much as $10,000 in cash and several of his victim’s suits. These details, along with the facts that Miglin did not have defensive wounds and there were no signs of forced entry in the home, suggested that Miglin might have known his killer, or immediately acquiesced to a threatening intruder.

In her book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Orth included more details about the crime scene: that a tube of hydrocortisone cream was found under Miglin’s body; he was wearing Calvin Klein bikini underwear, jeans (with an open zipper), and just one Ferragamo black suede shoe. His ankles were bound by an orange extension cord, his chest was weighed down by two bags of cement, and “the wrapping of Miglin’s face resembled the latex masks Andrew seemed so intrigued with from watching S&M pornography.”

Once police found Cunanan’s stolen Jeep parked around the corner from the Miglins’ home—linking Cunanan to the crime—they discovered several other clues inside: a copy of Out magazine and a tourist pamphlet.

With the benefit of hindsight, Orth’s book, and additional research, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story writer Tom Rob Smith views Miglin’s murder as being uniquely reflective of Cunanan’s personality.

“The murder of Lee Miglin is full of Andrew’s monstrous thoughts about how he’s furious with the world and how he’s attacking both the reputation and the successes of Lee Miglin,” Smith told Vanity Fair. “And that again is spoken to by the women’s clothing, the pornography left around the body of Lee Miglin. In the same way that terrorists try to talk to the world, Andrew’s trying to talk to the world through these monstrous acts.”

“Lee Miglin really was an extraordinary embodiment of the American dream,” added Smith. The future mogul sold pancake batter out of the trunk of his car before finding real estate.“I found it very inspirational reading about his journey from being the seventh child of a coal miner who was worth nothing, earning his way into the heights of Chicago society through tenacity and brilliance and the amount he gave back.”

Speaking about the extremely violent nature of the murder, Smith reasoned, “If you can’t communicate to the world through creation, you communicate it through destruction. And that’s how a very clever, genuinely clever young man who had never hurt anyone ended up doing this horrific, horrific thing. The process seems much closer to radicalization and terrorism than it is to the pathology of a serial killer.”

In the aftermath of the murder, reporters and authorities tried to find a link between Miglin, who appeared to have been happily married for nearly 40 years, and Cunanan. Cunanan had a history of being “kept” by wealthy older boyfriends, and was rumored to have worked as an escort. Was Miglin one of the men Cunanan rendez-vous-ed with during his days on the “sugar daddy” circuit?

Authorities also questioned Miglin’s surviving son, Duke, a handsome actor at the time. According to Orth, Cunanan had casually name-dropped Duke—and an unnamed “rich family in Chicago”—on several occasions in his lie-filled conversations with family and friends. There were suggestions that Cunanan could have known Miglin: one of Miglins’ neighbors told Orth that she saw Miglin during the weekend of his murder “with a young man with dark features wearing a baseball hat.” A sex worker also told Orth about being hired twice by a man named “Lee”—whom the worker believed to be Miglin.

Investigators suspected a relationship between killer and victim as well.

“Why would Cunanan go to Chicago, find Miglin, and torture him without some motive?” investigator Todd Rivard of the Chicago County Sheriff’s Department asked Orth, testing the logic of the killing being random. Gregg McCrary, senior consultant of the Threat Assessment Group and former supervisory special agent of the F.B.I.’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, added, “I’d say it’s highly probable that [Cunanan] knew Miglin. Would this guy let some stranger in off the street? The answer is no. Either [Cunanan] knew of the guy or knew his son. The idea that he just picked him up off the street and stalked him and tortured him and then killed him is bizarre—not the most likely scenario.”

As recently as last year, however, Duke Miglin maintained that there was no connection between his father and Cunanan before the murder.

“There was no relationship whatsoever,” Duke Miglin told ABC, adding that any reports to the contrary were “very hurtful, very painful, for me personally … there were attacks on me as well that I really didn’t appreciate. And I still don’t.”

Even reporters at the time were left stymied, like John Carpenter, the lead reporter on the story at the Chicago Sun-Times. “To me, what everybody always felt was that it was clearly somebody who knew that Marilyn Miglin was away for the weekend,” Carpenter told the Chicago Sun-Times this week. (Miglin’s family has maintained that the killer could have known Marilyn was out of town by listened to a voicemail she left for her husband, alerting him of what time she would return to Chicago on Sunday.)

Though the family maintains that the murder was random, the creators of American Crime Story clearly believed differently—as evidenced by Wednesday’s episode, which suggests Cunanan and Miglin had a romantic relationship.

American Crime Story executive producer Brad Simpson said this week that the episode “dramatize[s] what we believe happened that weekend starting from the established facts of the crime scene. Based on the evidence, we believe that Lee and Andrew did know each other, and [that] Andrew’s attack, as with all his victims except for William Reese, was targeted and specific. We used Maureen Orth’s book and consultancy, as well as the FBI records and the statements from witnesses inside the records for research and background.”

When asked whether she felt any conflict over the series depicting Lee Miglin as gay—in direct contradiction to the message the Miglin family has stuck with since his death—actress Judith Light who portrayed Marylin in the episode told Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast: “I don’t contradict it. That’s not my business. That’s for other people to talk about and to discuss…I would never, ever add anything to a dynamic of people who are suffering through a tragedy.”

Actor Mike Farrell, who plays Miglin, said that “a further manifestation of the horror of” the murder is “a kind of inability or unwillingness to accept what I think is a very real and very natural part of this man’s life.”

In the aftermath of the murder, Miglin’s wife, Marilyn, worked through her grief by throwing herself back into work—appearing on the Home Shopping Network just three weeks after the funeral.

“I just agonized over it, but I was determined to not let adversity affect my life, so I got on that plane feeling more alone than I ever felt in my entire life… I decided that I would hide in front of the camera,” Marilyn told press in 1998, explaining why she returned to work so quickly.

A former model and dancer who built a $50 million cosmetics empire and earned the nickname “the Queen of Makeovers,” Marilyn was firm in her refusal to believe the rumors about Lee, saying, “We don’t even think about it. We know who we are and what we stand for.”

Speaking about her unwillingness to let her husband’s murder destroy her, she told the paper, “I will not let one evil force run my life … I won’t acquiesce to that.” As for the fact that—like Donatella Versace in the aftermath of her brother’s murder—she did not show the world she was mourning, Marilyn said, “Weeping publicly wouldn’t have been good for me or my family … someone had to take charge.”

Versace: The Mysterious Murder of Lee Miglin

Inside Gianni Versace’s Final Fashion Show and the Battle With Sister Donatella

Just nine days before Gianni Versace was fatally shot outside his Miami mansion, the designer had been in Paris, debuting his haute-couture fall-winter collection in extravagant style at the Ritz. Models including Naomi Campbell, Amber Valletta, and Stella Tennant, dressed in body-clinging chain mail and silk jersey gowns, descended from a double staircase and strutted down a glass catwalk that had been erected theatrically over the neoclassic swimming pool.

The second episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, “Manhunt,” flashes back to Versace’s last fashion show, revealing the creative tensions simmering between the designer and his sister shortly before his death. According to one biographer, however, the stress-filled showdown hours before the fashion show was even more volcanic than what’s being shown on television.

As depicted on American Crime Story, the siblings clashed backstage over the women they wanted showcasing the collection. Donatella had booked models with skinny, “heroin-chic” builds—including Karen Elson, the fair-skinned, flame-haired up-and-comer Donatella selected to wear the collection’s climactic piece: the wedding dress.

Archival photos on Getty show Elson in the Versace atelier being fitted with the piece—a slinky, metallic-silver baby-doll dress, accessorized with a veil emblazoned with a silver Byzantine cross. But on the show day, the collection’s marquee piece was reassigned to a proven supermodel and Gianni favorite, Naomi Campbell.

“Gianni never liked [Elson],” explained Deborah Ball in her 2010 book, House of Versace: The Untold Story of Genius, Murder, and Survival. “‘Why are you so pale?’ he used to demand of Elson, in Italian. The British girl looked blankly at him. ‘Why don’t you go get some sun?’”

Ball reported that, during rehearsals the day before the show, Gianni erupted in front of his sister and Elson, who had never before walked a runway.

“He bristled as he watched Elson nervously descend the stairs and walk the runway. Gianni didn’t like her lopey, horselike gait, and he raged at Donatella for having suggested the girl in the first place. So he substituted Naomi, who did him proud as she sauntered by in the wedding dress […] Elson burst into a fit of tears, while Donatella wore a stony look on her face. Gianni’s ruling showed he didn’t trust her with key decisions.”

(Elson, who returned to the Paris runway for another Versace couture collection in 2016, diplomatically told Vogue that year, “I remember [Gianni] being very tender and sweet to me. It was daunting, as every supermodel on the planet was there and I was the ‘new girl’ at school, so to speak.”)

Clashing was nothing new for the Italian siblings. Earlier in 1997, Donatella’s husband at the time, Paul Beck, told Vanity Fair contributor Cathy Horyn that it took him five years to get used to the “Versace verbal dynamic.”

“I thought somebody was going to kill someone,” Beck said of witnessing their first fight. “I had to leave the room … And the argument would be over something like where to put the sweaters in the new boutique on Via Monte Napoleone.”

But as the tensions escalated within the Versace empire, so did the fights. Gianni had long been the creative genius and workhorse behind the fashion house, counting on Donatella as his muse and critic. For Donatella, who was more of a brand ambassador in those days, her ability to stand up to Gianni was part of her value.

“I thought of myself as the one who really was able to tell Gianni the truth, because with a big designer, nobody is able,” Donatella told New York magazine. “That’s the big threat for a big designer.”

As Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth wrote in her book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History, Donatella stepped up to help manage the company when Gianni fell ill in 1994, and was being groomed to take over the fashion house. The relationship fractured unexpectedly when Gianni recovered several years later and attempted to reclaim his position.

“We know that Gianni was very, very sick in 1994—he was struggling to walk to the news stand in Miami,” explained Tom Rob Smith, who wrote Wednesday’s episode. “He was working closely with Donatella to [prepare her] to take over the company. There was this real sense that she was his heir, and then, unexpectedly, he gets better. That is a very tricky situation for anyone—if you’re about to be given control of something and then that control is suddenly modulated.”

Gianni and Donatella “acknowledged friction during the winter and spring of 1996, when Gianni disagreed with her choices for an advertising campaign and she seemed to overstep her bounds,” reported Orth in her book, which is the basis for the FX series. The siblings were struggling to find a power balance and share footing in the spotlight. Ball claimed that Gianni’s decision to change his will in September 1996—leaving his shares of the company to his niece Allegra, rather than his brother or sister—was done in secret and fueled by his frustration and resentment towards his siblings.

“That tension you see in the final fashion show … You feel like Donatella felt she was no longer subservient to her brother,” continued Smith. “She was his equal. It’s hard in those creative industries to have parity. Someone ultimately has to make the final decision. So you start splitting everything up—you could have some models, and he could have other models. They had different styling on the models and different ideas. It didn’t really coalesce as well as a singular vision might have.”

The aesthetic disparity between brother and sister Versace was so apparent during this particular runway show that American Crime Story costume designer Lou Eyrich told Vanity Fair that she took special care to craft a dozen looks for the series that represented Gianni and Donatella’s different ideals.

“Gianni had a more colorful look, so the creams and the pinks and the yellows and the reds were Gianni,” Eyrich explained of the costumes she attributed to Gianni. “Donatella’s models, meanwhile, were more waif, heroin-chic models who wear all black and had the heavy eye makeup. It was important to show the difference between the designers’ visions at the time.”

In spite of the tensions simmering behind the scenes, Versace’s final fashion show was widely praised. Even though the house faced fresh competition from flashy rivals like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen, Versace got first billing in the Associated Press’s write-up: “Gianni Versace reigned supreme with his ‘King of the Night’ pool runway.” Joan Kaner, then the fashion director of Neiman Marcus, was quoted as calling the collection “terrific, sexy, and modern.” The New York Times, meanwhile, acknowledged the disjointed feel of the collection, writing, “for every dress that took the idea too far, there was one where the idea worked.”

“When Gianni died, things were unresolved with Donatella, and how awful must that have been for her,” added Smith. “For Gianni to die and to think, ‘What were we even fighting about? Models?’ It was utterly trivial.”

Indeed, Donatella has said in the years since her brother’s death, “My brother was the king, and my whole world had crashed around me.”

By 2012, though, 15 years after the murder, Donatella had found the strength to keep her family’s company afloat and develop her own identity as a designer. She was finally able to look back at the defining details of her brother’s final collection—the ones that she hadn’t necessarily liked at the time: the Byzantine crosses he applied to his dresses and the slinky silver-metal mesh he had specially created—and incorporate them into her 2012 fall-winter collection.

Speaking to The New York Times about finally having “the courage” to face and find inspiration in Gianni’s final fashion show, Donatella said, “I can look at it now with a smile … I remember my last moments with Gianni, the rehearsal, the show. But finally I have freedom. I am not afraid.”

To find out more about the true Versace story, the series itself, and everything between the two, subscribe to Still Watching: Versace on Apple Podcasts or your podcast app of choice. New episodes, including behind-the-scenes interviews, air every Wednesday.

Inside Gianni Versace’s Final Fashion Show and the Battle With Sister Donatella

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Still Watching: Versace

Ricky Martin spoke with Vanity Fair’s Still Watching: Versace podcast about his devastating turn in the show’s premiere.

American Crime Story: How Ryan Murphy Transformed Ricky Martin’s Real-Life Pain into Stunning TV

This post contains frank discussion of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story premiere: “The Man Who Would Be Vogue.”

Though he’s been in the spotlight for 35 years now, former Menudo member and “Livin’ La Vida Loca” singer Ricky Martin has always presented a comfortable and familiar on-stage persona. White teeth glinting, eyes sparkling, hair styled to perfection—when you see a showman like Martin, be it in Vegas or on Broadway, you know what you’re getting. But in the first Ryan Murphy-directed episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Martin gives his fans something they’ve never seen from him before: despair, and lots of it. The Puerto Rico-born Martin plays Antonio D’Amico, longtime lover of Gianni Versace, who—spoiler alert, if you ignored the title of this series altogether—dies on the front steps of the lavish house he and Antonio shared in the show’s opening scene.

Martin spends the rest of the episode grief-stricken and covered in Versace’s blood. In a striking, wordless, and unscripted moment, Martin lets his eternally optimistic mask slip off entirely and he’s fantastic. The gleaming smile gone and eyes sagging with exhaustion, Martin—wearing the personal grief of his own decades spent in the closet—stares at himself in the mirror. “I guess Ryan wanted to use and take advantage of that vulnerability,” Martin said in a new interview for Vanity Fair’s American Crime Story companion podcast, Still Watching: Versace. Approaching Martin after nine hours of filming both the discovery of Versace’s body and a confrontational police interrogation scene, Murphy said, “Rick, come on, let’s go to the bathroom. I want you to stand in front of the mirror. Wash your hands because you’ve been covered in blood for the last 10 hours and give me whatever you can in front of the mirror.” In that moment, Martin says, he was “exhausted, drained, and really sad.”

From the age of 12, Martin lived his life in the public eye—first as an earnest boy bander for the Latino pop group Menudo, and eventually as a worldwide solo-singing sensation. But until the age of 38, the Catholic-raised Martin kept the truth about his sexuality a secret. He tells Still Watching that he felt an “internalized homophobia,” which similarly plagued both Gianni Versace and his assassin: Andrew Cunanan. Martin describes those decades as “the most uncomfortable and saddest times of my life. I thought my emotions were evil because that’s what they told me. You’re not supposed to feel like this.” In past interviews, his familiar, comforting smile always in place, Martin has spoken of undiagnosed depressive periods that lifted significantly when he took to his own Web site in 2010 and came out of the closet.

Murphy’s choice of Martin for this role is genius casting for a series that explores the warping, damaging effect of closeted sexuality and aspirational lifestyles. Martin represents, for many, the epitome of the closeted 90s. Barbara Walters, who has expressed few professional regrets in her life, admitted in 2010 that she had pressed Martin too hard on the quasi open-secret of his sexuality in 2000, calling her line of questioning “inappropriate.”

The singer was living in Miami during Versace’s late-90s South Beach reign, and though the two never met—“I had a Giorgio Amani campaign at the time,” Martin explains—he was frequently invited to attend parties at the Versace mansion. As an out and proud designer, Versace was an anomaly even in the gay-friendly world of fashion. Though Versace’s open sexuality did nothing for Martin at the time (“on the contrary I was so locked in a closet”), the singer relates to the example Versace set, having done the same for many of his own fans in 2010. “No one knows how easy it is to come out until they do it.”

Martin finally showed up to the Versace house 20 years later, when, for two weeks last spring, American Crime Story moved into the designer’s old home on Ocean Drive (now a hotel) in order to meticulously re-create the scene of the crime. Martin said he “lived” as Antonio the entire time he was in that house—and unlike most of his co-stars, Martin was able to talk to the real person who inspired his performance.

Adopting a dramatic Italian accent, Martin tells Still Watching of Antonio’s initial disappointment with some photos that had leaked off the set: “Ricky! I never wear a green shirt!” But that early pushback from D’Amico turned into a close dialogue between Antonio and Martin, the man who would become him. Versace’s longtime partner answered Martin’s most difficult questions in painstaking detail, to the point where Martin was able to come armed with, perhaps, more firsthand insight than anyone else in the cast. “Everything that you see,” he says, “is based on the communication I had directly with Antonio D’Amico.”

The research Martin did paid off, as did his close friendship with Edgar Ramirez the actor playing Gianni Versace—whom Martin enthusiastically calls his “brother.” But Murphy’s stroke of genius in turning Martin’s real-life emotional exhaustion into theater is what delivers up the episode’s most arresting image. And Martin, who so bravely shared a closely guarded secret with his fans in 2010, shares yet another truth in the American Crime Story premiere: the traumatic toll that secret life took on him, even as he smiled broadly and shook his bon bon for all the world to see.

American Crime Story: How Ryan Murphy Transformed Ricky Martin’s Real-Life Pain into Stunning TV

How to Make a Versace Miniseries Without Help from Versace

Re-creating the world of slain designer Gianni Versace for FX’s new season of American Crime Story was a unique challenge—especially without the support of the headlining brand itself. Costume designer Lou Eyrich had only five weeks and a limited budget to collect as many authentic 90s Versace pieces as she could for the nine-episode series—which tells the story of both Gianni’s killer and the designer’s decadent final days. Several episodes also flash back to milestone moments during his and his sister Donatella’s ascent, as they became the sexy couturiers of Madonna, Elton John, Courtney Love, and more.

“There were days when there were one, two, three, four, five of us from the costume department just sitting at computers on eBay and Etsy and First Dibs, calling high-end vintage stores across the states, just trying to locate whatever Versace we could get our hands on,” says Eyrich. “We were collecting at breakneck speed.”

For the pieces that were unavailable or simply too expensive for the American Crime Story budget—like the sensational gold-studded black-leather gown Donatella actually wore to the 1996 Met Ball—Eyrich had to get creative, speedily producing outfits that were both respectful of and representative of the luxury brand’s designs, yet different enough from the originals that their production was legal.

“We tried to re-create the Met Ball dress as closely as we could,” says Eyrich of the gown, which features prominently into Donatella’s character arc. “All of the hardware is cast in gold. The hardest part was finding the leather that would drape similarly. And then we had to find the actual Versace boots and belt that she wore with the dress, which we were able to find in Miami.”

Another scene that necessitated scoring real Versace designs was the house’s July 1996 fashion show, which on the series features six models wearing Gianni’s designs and six models wearing Donatella’s designs. At the time, brother and sister Versace had different tastes, in both fashion and models, which was evident to anyone in the audience.

“We watched and watched and watched and watched footage of that fashion show over and over,” says Eyrich, who narrowed the actual collection down to 12 representative looks. “We carefully chose which we were going to re-create … Gianni had a more colorful look, so the creams and the pinks and the yellows and the reds were Gianni. Donatella’s models, meanwhile, were more waif, heroin-chic models who wear all black and had the heavy eye makeup. It was important to show the difference between the designers’ visions at the time.”

Speaking about the challenge of approximating these designs legally, Eyrich explains: “We tried to follow their silhouette, so that our costumes would come off looking similar, but not exact. So we changed little details… . We also wanted to make sure that we wouldn’t offend Versace in any way… . We didn’t want to make the designs look cheap, or made for TV. We really wanted to show the couture aspect of the House of Versace and live up to the designer’s name—the way everything moved so beautifully on the runway. For us, it was about both choosing the right fabrics and making sure that the models had the right gait—the model casting was very important to that scene.”

Penélope Cruz, who stars as Donatella, was also concerned with being respectful of the brand and the designer—whom she counts as a friend. “Penelope wears a lot of Versace to events and had a lot of input, simply because she was very invested in the character and sensitive to portraying Donatella in a truthful and special light,” Eyrich says.

While paging through scenes with Eyrich, the actress told her costumer that she was partial to a 90s Versace collection with a black-leather western motif—with studded pants, leather cuffs, gold top stitching and buttons, and fringe. Eyrich, who was prepared to have someone construct an ensemble from scratch, ended up lucking out by finding a vintage Versace top with fringe in Cruz’s exact size in downtown Los Angeles.

While working on past projects, Eyrich says that she has pulled Versace designs for characters and moments that were “flashy, body-conscious, and fashion-forward.” Working up close and personal with so much Versace on this particular project, however, gave her a new appreciation for the fashion house—one she hopes audience members will also walk away with. “Seeing all the pieces in hand and the detailed couture work, like the drapes, I actually fell in love with the brand and what they created. I’m in awe of what they created and Donatella’s cleverness. I found a whole new love for the brand of Versace by the end of the show.”

How to Make a Versace Miniseries Without Help from Versace

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Is Knotty, Uneven, and Captivating

A consuming sadness presides over the new installment of FX’s American Crime Story anthology series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Where its predecessor, The People v. O.J. Simpson, easily traded in searing sociopolitical timeliness, The Assassination of Gianni Versace has less obvious topicality. It’s the grim story of Andrew Cunanan, the spree killer whose final act before committing suicide was to gun down famed fashion designer Gianni Versace outside his palatial Miami Beach home in 1997.

Wealth and status and the particularly American hunger for them are themes evoked by this shocking murder tale, a random nobody snuffing out the life of a rich and powerful man in an effort to best him and become him. But beyond that, the story would seem to have less scope than the trial of O.J. Simpson did—less relevance to American life, not enough urgent bite to sustain a nine-episode television series.

And so producer Ryan Murphy and the writer Tom Rob Smith (of the similarly probing and despondent London Spy) are forced to get both more granular and more expansive, placing Cunanan’s crimes and Versace’s legacy in a more abstract cultural context. They’ve tried, ardently, to figure out what this murder, and Cunanan’s other murders, might mean in some bigger sense—if they mean anything at all. What they’ve come up with is erratic, arresting, often deeply unsettling. And, yes, bitterly sad.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace is not the detailing of a murder spree as much as it is a taxonomy of gay tragedy. It illustrates the maiming effect of the closet and the ways a society’s codified reverence for money and clout can badly entangle with private yearnings forced into the margins, into the dark. I’m not quite sure I buy all of its despairing theses, but The Assassination of Gianni Versace still grips like a vise—and a vice—as it descends into hell.

It is hell, really. Spending eight hours (I’ve not seen the last episode) with Andrew Cunanan is exhausting, miserable. A sweaty-suave con man and likely sociopath guided by quixotic visions of luxury, Cunanan is a user and an annihilator, circling the abyss in a decaying orbit. He’s Tom Ripley without any of the floppy charm. That charm is supposed to be there, I think, but the way he’s written and the way he’s played by Darren Criss—taking a major role and really going for it—make it near impossible to feel. Which isn’t a criticism, exactly. The show does at least convince you why some of its characters are taken by this swanning, ridiculous climber, even if we in the audience know what horrors he’s capable of.

We know because we might already be familiar with the story (Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors is the primary source here), but also because The Assassination of Gianni Versace mostly works in reverse chronology. It opens with Versace’s murder, then inches back into Cunanan’s life as we meet his previous victims—before presenting something of a sympathetic origin story, in a ballsy move that surprisingly pays off.

This harrowing dissection of a killer’s trajectory is offset by a less compelling peek into the world of Versace (Edgar Ramirez), his sister Donatella (a terrific Penelope Cruz), and his lover Antonio (Ricky Martin, a nice surprise). While Smith’s script tries to draw parallels between Cunanan’s thwarted conniving for the gay American (or Italian) dream and Versace’s achievement of it, it doesn’t quite land. I love watching Cruz glide around a mansion smoking cigarettes and looking pained, but it all feels like it’s borrowed from a different, more fabulous, less searching series.

The true meat of the show is its attempt at diagramming the pitfalls of the gay experience in the 1990s, looking at AIDS and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in particular, and more diffusely surveying a community bonded by loneliness and secrecy and no small amount of buried shame. This is at once a grindingly pessimistic outlook on gay existence and a horrifyingly relatable one. Especially striking and awful is an episode centered on David Madson, the young Minneapolis architect who was the second person killed during the spree. The episode is flat-out devastating, with the excellent newcomer Cody Fern playing Madson as a quiet and kind man whose friendliness is cruelly exploited and punished by Cunanan. It’s not really a political episode, per se, not like the subsequent one about first victim Jeff Trail (Finn Wittrock, also great), who, in the show’s telling, whose career in the Navy was compromised because he was gay. But the Madson episode still cuts right to the heart of the show’s sorrowful idea, its rendering of Cunanan as a malevolent force created of a collective gay longing and oppression.

Was he, though? What, exactly, was Cunanan a byproduct of? The penultimate episode of the season puts forth some possible answers to that question, in the form of Andrew’s father, Modesto (a commanding, creepy Jon Jon Briones), a Coen Brothers–esque doomed huckster who dotes on his son well beyond what is healthy. Maybe it was just because I’d been sitting with this story for seven hours at that point, but this episode kinda sold me on its theory of how and why Cunanan eventually broke, ensnared as he was in an unyielding dream bored into him, quite terribly, by his father.

In the show’s estimation, Cunanan’s rapacious pursuit of social entrée was perversely linked to his craving for love, for companionship, for the validation and confirmation he thought a romantic partner could provide. And yet, in the show, Cunanan is almost comically incapable of finding and securing that; he’s too carried away, too delusional, too selfish. “No one wants your love,” a character angrily spits at Cunanan in one episode. It’s a shattering line, expressing Cunanan’s worst fear, and maybe so many of our own. Such malfunction, such hideousness is implied in that blunt curse: to be not just unlovable, but to be past that, where the love one merely offers up is vile and unneeded, laughable and easily dismissed.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace swaps People v. O.J.’s knotty legal systems for these dense psychological ones, turning Cunanan into a manifestation of a common gnawing worry: that we are silly and without worth, that we are abhorrent in our desire. It’s something queer people have been hearing for centuries—and for our whole individual lives.

Of course, in making a show about him, FX is essentially giving this murderer the glory he so wanted, which gives The Assassination of Gianni Versace a tinge of the problematic. Adjacent to that, I’m sure there will be plenty of people who find something too outsize and effortful about Criss’s performance. But to believe the series (and Orth’s book), Cunanan was just this kind of over-articulated showman, a desperate (and drug-addled) wannabe sophisticate who used his innate smarts to spin a tenuous, dangerous fantasy. I think Criss renders that cataclysmic energy pretty well—even if he is maybe too pretty for the role.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace has a narcotic pull. Its shifting sense of scale is dizzying as Criss insouciantly flings from extreme to extreme, from prevarication to peril. Smith has written a fraught, deeply personal piece that, in doing its noble best to be compassionate, somehow makes victims and villains and horrors of us all. I can’t imagine what straight people will think of it, if they even watch it. And I’m nervously anticipating the varied reaction from gay viewers.

To me, the show is both balm and menace, lurid exploitation and primal scream. The series doesn’t have the seismic, prestige heft of People v. O.J.,and it doesn’t share its forebear’s piercing intelligence. But in its messy and obliterating swirl, The Assassination of Gianni Versace does something ambitious and rattling. It frames a gay disaster as an intrinsically American one, binding personal values with national ones, tethering one sense of self-worth to another. In this particular assessment, Andrew Cunanan was not all of us. But he was certainly of us: a son who spun away, a brother who disappeared in all his mad scramble to be seen, taking with him five other lives, now enshrined in tragedy and forever unfulfilled.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Is Knotty, Uneven, and Captivating