Just about every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace has provided a different possible answer to the question of why? Did Andrew Cunanan murder five men because he was a sociopath, or because his heart was broken? Was he lashing out because he’d failed at life, or did he see his killing spree as a way of attaining immortality? (If so, unfortunately, he was correct.) Was he a victim of widespread homophobia, or the living embodiment of it? Should we blame his fragile, mentally ill mother or, as last night’s penultimate episode, “Creator/Destroyer,” suggests, his defrauder dad?

We’ve heard so much about Modesto “Pete” Cunanan in the season’s first seven episodes that his appearance this week qualifies as a reveal. Andrew mentions this mythical figure in the crucial, if also fantastical, scene from the pilot where he and Gianni have a heart-to-heart at the San Francisco Opera. By then, a few years after we leave him in “Creator/Destroyer,” he’s perfected his story about the pineapple plantations and the boyfriend and Imelda Marcos. Now we know that Andrew learned to lie so shamelessly from his father, whose entire life was a con.

Pete grew up in the village of Baliuag, in the Philippines. As we hear him mention in his Merrill Lynch interview, he began his career in the US Navy. In 1961, he met Andrew’s mom, MaryAnn. Although he was a short, squat man 11 years her senior, she fell for him immediately. As she recalls to Maureen Orth in Vulgar Favors, “He was dressed in a white tuxedo, and I thought he looked like a Filipino Errol Flynn.” By the time they married, the same year they met, MaryAnn was six months pregnant. The kids we see in the episode are all ostensibly the products of that union—although Pete, who was constantly paranoid that his wife was cheating on him, maintained that their blonde, blue-eyed elder daughter, Elena, wasn’t his.

From here, the show’s timeline gets messy. It’s true that the Cunanans bought their first home, in the working-class San Diego suburb National City, for around $12,000, or roughly $90k today. Andrew was born two years later, in 1969. But when he was four, they moved to a fancier house in middle-class Bonita. Paid for with an inheritance MaryAnn received after her father died, the new place would have cost more than $550,000 in 2018.

The mini-mansion they bought when Andrew was a teenager was a third, even more expensive, home—the one we see them move into at the beginning of “Creator/Destroyer,” except that Versace suggests that he was just a precocious ten- or 11-year-old at the time. (Shout out to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a classic novel of wealth, war, and homoeroticism that Andrew started obsessing over after he caught the equally beloved 1981 PBS miniseries.)

His dad did, in fact, give him the master bedroom and buy him a sports car before he was old enough to drive it. There’s a peculiar, uncharacteristically context-free passage in Vulgar Favors where Orth notes, “People have wondered whether Pete and Andrew could possibly have had an intimate relationship while Andrew was growing up,” then reports that, “Pete is not upset by the question. He coolly takes a drag on his cigarette, and says no.” And that’s the end of that.

In any case, it was MaryAnn’s idea to send Andrew to La Jolla’s exclusive Bishop’s School. Although he hid his sexuality from his family, at school he cultivated a gregarious, pretentious, preppy, and extremely effeminate persona inspired by the aristocratic, queer Brideshead character Sebastian Flyte. He dated older men who showered him with gifts—including one named Antoine, who supposedly paid for that insane red leather suit Andrew wears to the house party. (That Antoine was a married closet-case is pure speculation on the show’s part.) The details about his yearbook, in which classmates voted him “Most Likely to Be Remembered” and he captioned his senior photo “Après moi, le déluge” (“After me, the flood”), an ominous quote attributed to either King Louis XV or his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, are accurate.

Meanwhile, Pete had retired from the Navy in 1977, earned his bachelor’s degree and MBA, and entered a stockbroker training program at Merrill Lynch. He left two years later, going on to work at five other firms between 1981 and 1988. One former employer told Orth that Pete had stolen money from clients, including at least one nonagenarian like the elderly woman we see him talking to on the phone, at many of those companies. “There is no disclosable disciplinary action with the [National Association of Securities Dealers] on record,” Orth writes, “but Pete was let go more than once.” There was never any dramatic FBI chase, but Pete did secretly sell the Cunanan home and flee to the Philippines. MaryAnn spiraled, her kids dropped out of college, and Andrew spent five uncomfortable days in his dad’s homeland. As Versace suggests, he’d bought in to Pete’s lies about their prosperity as much as anyone else.

The connection to Gianni Versace’s childhood, in a rare dive into the designer’s history that actually works on the show, is obvious. Versace’s mother, Francesca, really did want to be a doctor before yielding to the sexism of the the family’s Southern Italian home city of Calabria and starting a prosperous dressmaking business instead. In her book House of Versace, Deborah Ball writes that Franca had opened her own shop by age 20. That Andrew’s beloved dad bought his son everything he wanted and encouraged him to see himself as special, while Gianni’s beloved mom preached hard work and taught him to sew, is too telling a contrast to ignore.

There were other important differences between Cunanan’s and Versace’s beginnings, of course. The Assassination of Gianni Versace has been taken to task for erasing Andrew’s biracial identity. Although she praises Ryan Murphy’s decision to cast Darren Criss, a half-Filipino Glee alum, in the starring role, Slate critic Inkoo Kang points out that, “A few character details here and there suggest Andrew’s racial self-hatred and the prevalence of anti-Asian racism within the gay community, but the relative sparseness of these implications is all the more noteworthy in contrast with the richly developed portrait of the decade’s homophobia.”

Last night’s episode goes a long way toward justifying the omission. Murphy and writer Tom Rob Smith aren’t blithely erasing Andrew’s Filipino identity so much as depicting the way he denied his Asian-American side because he was ashamed of his father. In an interview with Vulture, Smith said, “It’s interesting that [Andrew] excludes his own racial identity, which is why you don’t get to it until a later part of the episodes, because he lies about it.” Pete’s story, which highlights how he talked his way into the overwhelmingly white world of banking and implies that racism kept him from excelling there, is the story of the role Andrew’s nonwhite heritage played in his life. By the end of the episode, he’s rejected his dad, left the Philippines, and applied for a job with a Filipino drugstore owner whose modest success elicits only condescension from Andrew.

So! Next week is the series finale. No telling what can be expected. There isn’t much left to tell about Cunanan’s life before the murders, so maybe Versace will flash forward to the period immediately after them, when Andrew was on the run again and Donatella was struggling to carry on her brother’s company as the family mourned. Maybe, like the premiere, it will alternate between that story and the characters’ pasts. Either way, it should be an exciting final chapter of such an elegant, if misunderstood, season.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Finally Introduced Andrew Cunanan’s Dad

I wasn’t into “Ascent” the first time I watched it. Like the first two episodes of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, this one felt unfocused and overcrowded. The timeline was confusing: Am I crazy, or do we see Andrew Cunanan hanging out with Jeff Trail long before episode five has them meeting? There were too many characters, too many settings (San Diego, San Francisco, Milan, New York), too many moods. Writer Tom Rob Smith was trying to establish too many relationships too quickly. The juxtaposition of Cunanan’s life with Versace’s still felt forced.

On my second viewing, though, what had looked like a sloppy mess started to reveal its surprisingly purposeful structure.

The scenes in Versace’s studio, where an ailing Gianni attacks Donatella for her lack of ambition, then patiently collaborates on her first dress, then throws a tantrum when she asks him to tone down his designs to attract customers, are fairly simple. We watch her become a celebrity, as the garment they made together draws a crowd of photographers at Vogue’s 100th anniversary gala in 1993. (As you can see here, the real dress, with its sheer bodice, was even more risqué than it looked on the episode. And the Times article that compared “the Versace woman” to a dominatrix actually came out before the event.) In the end, when Gianni is sick again and Donatella takes the reins of the company, she’s not only confident, but loyal to her brother’s outré vision. This is the myth of how Gianni created Donatella in his own image.

Cunanan’s story is creation myth, too—and the fragmented way in which it’s told subtly elucidates the differences between him and his final victim. Versace is the same person all the time: moody, stubborn, arrogant, defensive, but also brilliant, hard-working, nurturing, and inspiring. As we see in “Ascent,” which finally provides some insight into what he was like before he became violently unhinged, Cunanan adopts a different persona for everyone he meets. “What are you?” asks the woman at the escort agency. This is a crass query about his race and ethnicity, but when applied to Cunanan’s personality and behavior, it’s also one of the show’s central questions.

For his mother, he’s an angel and a monster and her only hope in the world, the golden child who promises to take her “sky high, where they all look down on us” but fractures her shoulder when she tries to hold him to it. For Lincoln Aston (more on him later), an older man with voracious appetites, he’s a charismatic connector. For Norman Blachford, a quieter friend of Aston’s, he’s the dream of a person to call home again, after the death of his longtime partner. But Cunanan steals that idyllic vision from David Madson after their first night together.

We get to see Cunanan both lovestruck and as the beloved. He lets Aston and Blachford fight over him the night he snares them at the opera. They woo him with money, luxurious homes, and their adoration. Then he turns around and does the same with Madson when they meet—buying him a drink, inviting him to sit with his impressive friends, taking him back to a suite Aston paid for in the Mandarin Oriental. Even when he’s falling for someone, as he appears to be for Madson, Cunanan sees romance as transactional. If he can dazzle Madson with the smoke and mirrors of his lifestyle, maybe they can live happily ever after. As a result, we see Madson becoming entranced with the hotel room rather than the man who brought him there.

This depiction of their relationship tracks with the impression Maureen Orth gives in Vulgar Favors, the book upon which The Assassination of Gianni Versace is based: Madson was reportedly attracted by Cunanan’s lavish spending. He accepted expensive gifts from his future killer despite his confusion about where all that wealth came from and his ambivalence towards his long-distance boyfriend. Orth judges Madson a bit harshly for this; she’s frustratingly tough on Cunanan’s gay friends and lovers throughout the book, framing them as fame whores, drug addicts, perverts, and, at best, materialistic, superficial flakes. It’s worth wondering whether money would play such a central role in her story if the couples in question were heterosexual. Still, the way the show (which does substantially moderate Orth’s judgmental tone) draws important parallels between Cunanan’s simultaneous romances without smacking us in the face with them is really skillful.

Anyway, this isn’t a big episode for fact-checking—as I mentioned, the structure makes it hard to tell exactly how long a period it’s supposed to cover, but its representation of the characters and their relationships with Cunanan is solid. There is one character who deserves to be explored in greater depth, though…

Lincoln Aston

Aston’s death, in the same episode where he’s introduced, might have come as a shock to anyone who thought the murder portion of this program had ended weeks ago. But it’s a true—well, mostly true—story, down to the name of the killer, Kevin Bond. And there’s more to it.

As Orth reports, Cunanan met Aston sometime after Cunanan left San Francisco and returned to his mother’s house in 1991. The heir to an oil fortune, Aston had once been married and was now enjoying a second youth as a gay man in his 60s. Like Madson, he was an architect. While he patronized the arts and hosted classy soirées for an elite circle of older men, Aston also had ties to a wilder group who threw parties with “pool boys” and escorts. He and other men in his clique were often spotted out with Cunanan in San Diego’s gay neighborhood, Hillcrest, though Orth heard conflicting reports as to whether Cunanan was blatantly exchanging sex for money.

One of Orth’s sources claims Aston was trying to free himself from Cunanan’s clutches around the time he was murdered, on May 19, 1995. Although the scene where Aston calls Cunanan out on his San Francisco tryst is fiction—Cunanan actually met Madson for the first time about six months after Aston’s death—mutual acquaintances did confirm to Orth that Aston had caught onto his young companion’s lies before the end of their relationship.

So, what was going on in that bizarre scene where Cunanan quietly lets himself into Aston’s house, watches Kevin Bond kill Aston, and then advises the killer to run? Could Cunanan possibly have had anything to do with that crime?

Apparently not. Orth writes that, “Because Andrew bragged to people that he had been with Lincoln the night of his death and had found the body, many in Hillcrest still believe that he had something to do with his murder.” But when San Diego police reopened the case, after Cunanan had become a fugitive, they couldn’t find any evidence to connect him to it.

Thankfully, the story doesn’t have quite as bleak an ending as Blachford and Cunanan’s conversation towards the end of the episode suggests. Although they predict that gay panic will be sufficient to get the confessed killer off the hook, after pleading guilty to the crime, Bond was convicted of second-degree murder and received a sentence of 15 years to life.

Also? In case you didn’t catch it in the episode, when Cunanan convinced Blachford to relocate from Phoenix to San Diego, the hilltop mansion Blachford bought was Aston’s former home.

Episode Seven of ‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Is a Creation Myth

If you believe people can be monsters, devoid of the tiniest drop of humanity, then surely you would place Andrew Cunanan in that category. I’m not certain I agree; it’s too easy to dismiss everyone who commits a beastly crime as evil, delusional, or a sociopath. Cunanan may well have been all three of those things, but he was also a person with dreams and desires whose life went disastrously awry. And The Assassination of Gianni Versace would be empty crime porn if it didn’t try to understand why he ended up at Versace’s villa with a gun in his hand.

Now that the show’s reverse-chronological timeline has gotten past Cunanan’s five murders, writer Tom Rob Smith faces the difficult task of discerning his motives—a particular challenge because he didn’t live long enough to be interrogated or interviewed about his killing spree. This week’s episode opens a year before Andrew broke bad and follows him until that final flight to Minneapolis. Its title, “Descent,” pretty much captures his trajectory during that year.

Andrew is loving life at the beginning of the hour, swimming naked at a mountaintop mansion with an ocean view, in La Jolla. The home, we learn, belongs to his sugar daddy, Norman Blachford (Michael Nouri). Meanwhile, Andrew is trying to impress a long-distance boyfriend, his future victim David Madson. “Who are you trying to be?” his old friend Lizzie asks at his birthday party. “Someone he can love,” Andrew replies. (Is it fair to say he loved Madson? I’m not sure love was part of his emotional repertoire—what’s more important is that he wanted Madson more than anything else in the world.) But by the end of the episode, Andrew is broke, has lost both men, and is crying his mother’s tub as she bathes him. This is what hitting rock bottom looks like.

At this point, the show’s timeline gets a bit confusing. The previous episode alternated between scenes set in 1997, just before Andrew killed Jeff Trail, and flashbacks to 1995, when Smith has them meeting for the first time (even though they actually met years earlier). “Descent” begins at the midpoint between those two moments, the top of a long slide into desperation. So it’s worth taking a second to break down who the new characters are and what roles they played in Cunanan’s life before we get into Smith’s interpretation of his motives.

Norman Blachford

Before he was a murderer, Cunanan was a kept boy. His intelligence, social connections, and knowledge of the arts made him a sort of courtesan to the older, wealthier gays in San Diego (Vulgar Favors author Maureen Orth compares him to a geisha). At the time, Cunanan was calling himself Andrew DeSilva and had adopted a cover story designed to win the sympathies of these men: Before coming out and being disowned by his rich parents, he’d been married with a daughter.

Cunanan had certainly courted other men from this circle by the time he met 58-year-old Norman Blachford in 1994. Blachford had made his fortune selling sound insulation. He’d just lost his partner of a quarter-century to AIDS and was cautious about letting a new lover into his life. Cunanan persisted. In July 1995, he moved into Blachford’s home. (You can read more on that period here.) As part of their arrangement, Blachford bought Cunanan an Infiniti, made his credit card payments, and gave him $2,500 to spend each month. It’s unclear how often they slept together; Cunanan claimed their relationship was platonic, and the bedroom they shared really did contain twin beds, but acquaintances told Orth that was impossible.

The dual birthday parties in “Descent”—a snoozefest for Blachford’s friends and a blowout for Cunanan’s—actually took place in August 1995. That insane scene where Cunanan orders Trail to wear a pair of Ferragamos, give Cunanan another pair as a present, and lie about his occupation, though? Cunanan didn’t meet Madson until a few months after that party. Otherwise, the incident reportedly happened more or less as written.

Cunanan’s arrangement with Blachford started to dissolve the next summer, ostensibly over the Mercedes SL 600 (a $125,000 car) we see him demand in the episode. Smith sticks close to the facts here, too: When he walked out, Cunanan expected Blachford to come crawling back to him, but was instead forced to find a cheap apartment of his own.

By then, his relationship with Madson had also deteriorated. He made a last-ditch effort to win Madson back, in April 1997, during an expensive weekend trip to Los Angeles—where, fun fact, a friend of Madson’s introduced them to her pal Lisa Kudrow. As we see in the episode, despite Cunanan’s extravagance, the gesture failed. (When Madson says to Cunanan, “I get the feeling that you don’t have many great nights with people,” it’s the show’s most honest moment to date.) Madson insisted to Cunanan that he only wanted to be friends. In “Descent,” he ruins his final chance with Madson by feeding him a new, unbelievable life story—and it’s pathetic. The truth is, by then, they’d already broken up, and Madson was dating other people.

The scene where a desperate Cunanan pounds on Blachford’s door at night is fiction. But Cunanan did place one last call to Blachford, the day he killed Jeff Trail, acknowledging that they were through and to announcing an upcoming move to San Francisco. “Blachford was somewhat puzzled by the call,” Orth writes. “He already knew that Andrew was leaving.”

MaryAnn Cunanan

This week’s American Horror Story moment came courtesy of “Orange Is the New Black” and “The Sinner” actress Joanna Adler, who plays Cunanan’s mother in high Grand-Guignol style. That scene where he’s curled up in the tub and she’s promising him “I’m gonna make you smell like you again” is as fantastical as it looks. The last thing Cunanan is known to have done in San Diego was throw himself a farewell dinner party. But that’s not to say that the real MaryAnn Cunanan was so different from the bizarre character we meet in “Descent.”

As you may have suspected, MaryAnn was never the sophisticated publisher Andrew talks up to Madson. The daughter of Italian immigrants, she was born in Ohio and moved to California at 19. She soon married Pete Cunanan, the father of Andrew and her three other children (all of whom we’ll likely learn more about later). Awed by his precociousness, the couple were as indulgent of young Andrew as we’ve seen his character suggest throughout the show. MaryAnn remained loyal to him even after his death, insisting that he wasn’t capable of killing five people.

Orth describes MaryAnn as “very fragile, by turns garrulous and stupefied, teetering on the brink of total emotional meltdown. Mainly, she seems to be all sweetness and light, but her mood can swing at any time.” She’d been seeing a psychiatrist for years before her son’s murder spree and subsisted on disability payments; you can see the exterior of her humble National City, CA home in this article. A devout Catholic, she’d give away what little money she had—although, when Andrew was little, she spent wildly and used sex to wheedle big purchases out of Pete.

Andrew’s Motive

Does the terrible year that plays out in “Descent,” plus everything we’ve seen in previous episodes, add up to a believable motive for Andrew? Well, it’s clear he’s got very little left to live for by the time he flies to Minneapolis—no Madson, no Blachford, no Trail, no money, no success. If you’re already abusing drugs and have always lacked a moral compass, that loneliness and desperation might well be enough to turn your thoughts toward violent crime.

Then there’s his belief, one that’s pretty rich for a kept boy, that everyone uses him. In a strange, red-lit vision of an encounter with Gianni Versace, Andrew announces, “I happen to believe that I’m the most generous person that ever lived,” before demanding, “What could be more generous than spending everything on other people and being left with nothing? What could be more generous than finding soulmates for other people and ending up alone?” Cunanan really did feel this way. Orth reports that he dropped a ton of money on his friends, that he often set them up on dates, and that he assumed people only spent time with him for those reasons.

Shakier is this idea that Cunanan killed Versace because he was obsessed with the designer and his achievements. That’s the argument underlying Cunanan’s dream, in which he attributes Versace’s success to luck and seems to get off on the powerful man taking his measurements. The designer may have been on Cunanan’s mind as a target; a friend who drove him to the airport told Orth that he’d gone on about his hatred for Versace, a man who he said “came from nothing” and made his reputation through “hard work.”

Cunanan’s supposed resentment toward high achievers is Orth’s fixation. While it makes sense that Smith would pick up on this argument, the extent to which he uses it to keep Versace in the story is a bit much. Did Cunanan make Versace collages and tell his mom that he traveled the world with the designer, making opera costumes? Probably not. I get that Smith is painting Versace as the light to Andrew’s darkness. But the approach flattens out both characters—and Cunanan’s story is absorbing enough to make the embellishment feel kind of unnecessary.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Questions Andrew Cunanan’s Motives in Episode Six