One on One. Craig Brown

his men onto the same newspaper columnist, Lee Mortimer, because Mortimer has written unflattering remarks about him. After Mortimer’s death, Sinatra is travelling with his friend Brad Dexter when he insists they drive to his grave. As he stands on the grave, Sinatra unzips his trousers and urinates on it. When Dexter asks him why, he replies, ‘This cocksucker made my life miserable. He talked against me, wrote articles, caused me a lot of grief. I got back at him.’

      ‘Frank always had to settle the score,’ explains Dexter.

      But Jackie Mason refuses to be silenced. ‘I love Frank Sinatra. You love Frank Sinatra. We all love Frank Sinatra,’ he says in his stage act for many years to come. ‘And why do we love Frank Sinatra? Because he’d kill us if we didn’t.’

      Like Mason, Dominick Dunne outlives Sinatra, enjoying a highly successful second career as a newspaper columnist and author with a particular interest in seeing that the guilty are brought to book. He never forgives Sinatra for his behaviour that night. ‘It showed the kind of power Sinatra had, to make a decent man do an indecent act. And you know, I am aware totally that his voice is one of the great voices of his era, if not the greatest. And to this day, I can’t stand the sound of it.’

      DOMINICK DUNNE

      URINATES WITH

      PHIL SPECTOR

      The Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, Los Angeles

       April 2007

      Forty-one years later, Vanity Fair magazine’s star columnist Dominick Dunne is covering the trial of Phil Spector, who is charged with the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson.

      Short of acting jobs, Clarkson had been working as a hostess in the VIP room of the House of Blues, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. She hadn’t recognised Spector when he entered, even addressing him as ‘Miss’, perhaps misled by his size – he is only five feet five inches – and by his voluminous candy-floss wig, only marginally smaller. ‘Mister,’ he had corrected her.

      This man, a fellow waitress had told her, was the famous 1960s record producer, ‘the tycoon of teen’, as Tom Wolfe once called him. He was known, she added, for his generous tips.

      After a drink (he left $450 for a $13.50 bar bill), Spector persuaded the reluctant Lana back to his Castle. ‘Just for one drink,’ she insisted. Travelling back in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, they watched a James Cagney movie called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

      They had only been in the Castle a short time before Spector’s chauffeur, waiting outside in the car, heard a gunshot. After some delay, Spector came out and said, ‘I think I killed somebody.’ The chauffeur called the police, who discovered Clarkson’s corpse on a white French bergère chair.

      ‘The gun went off accidentally! She works at the House of Blues! It was a mistake! I don’t understand what the fuck is wrong with you people! I don’t know how it happened. It scared the shit out of me!’ Spector screamed, as a policeman held him down. Later, he claimed Clarkson had picked up one of his guns and shot herself in the face.

      Ever since the man who murdered his daughter Dominique was given what he describes as ‘a slap on the wrist’, Dunne has had an abiding interest in reporting the murder trials of the rich and famous, among them O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow and the Menendez brothers. He is fuelled by outrage at the idea that money may buy an acquittal.

      He is already convinced of Spector’s guilt,^* and listens impatiently as Spector’s defence attorney complains, ‘The police had murder on their minds!’ He is unimpressed. ‘I should hope to God that the police had murder on their minds, with a woman less than an hour dead, shot in the face, bleeding from the mouth, her teeth all over the floor, life over, in a French bergère chair in the foyer of a castle, and an arrogant man in a house full of guns who had to be Tasered by police. I think that’s cause for having murder on your mind.’

      The trial has been going for just a few days when the court takes a break, and Dunne heads for the men’s room. It is empty but for a single man standing at the central urinal, which is lower than the other two, as though designed for little boys.

      Spector is wearing the Edwardian frock-coat in which he arrived at the court this morning. He has opened it wide to urinate, so that it billows out and blocks the remaining two urinals, one on either side. Dunne doesn’t quite know what to do, but decides to remain where he is. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to move his coat and free up a urinal, and I also didn’t really want to pee next to him, considering that he was on trial for murder just down the hall, and I was there to write about him. So I waited my turn in silence in the back by the sinks.’

      After he has finished peeing, Spector, who is today sporting a blond pageboy toupee, goes over to the basins, carefully rolls up his sleeves and elaborately soaps and scrubs his hands in hot water. Dunne is reminded of the way germophobes wash obsessively after shaking hands.

      As he dries his hands with a paper towel, Spector turns and notices Dunne. ‘Hi, Dominick,’ he says.

      ‘Hi, Phil,’ says Dunne. The last time the two men met was after Spector asked their mutual friend Ahmet Ertegun to arrange a get-together so he could pick Dunne’s brains about the O.J. Simpson murder trial, by which, like so many people, he was riveted.

      Dunne is not sure what to say next, particularly as Spector must know that he is not on his side: he is, in his own words, ‘a longtime victims’ advocate’. Yet Dunne still feels there is something likeable about Spector. Finally, it occurs to him what to say.

      ‘I went to Ahmet’s memorial service in New York at Lincoln Center last week.’

      ‘You went? Oh my God, this is the first I’ve heard about it from someone who went. I owe everything to Ahmet. He started me in the business!’

      Spector wants to know everything about it. Dunne runs through the famous names present: Eric Clapton, Bette Midler, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Oscar de la Renta, Henry Kissinger. ‘Mick Jagger mentioned you in his eulogy.’

      ‘Mick mentioned me?’

      ‘Nothing about this. It was about you and Ahmet and your friendship.’

      The two men return to the courtroom, Dunne to the public gallery, Spector to the accused’s chair. From their different vantage points, they watch as a woman testifies about how Spector held her at gunpoint; she is the first of four such witnesses.

      The two men never speak again, but a few days later, Dunne is handed a note thanking him for the programme from Ertegun’s memorial service. ‘Dear Dominick … I did so enjoy reading the words about our dear friend; and the pictures were a treasure. Thanks for thinking of me. Love, Phillip.’

      The trial comes to an end five months later, with the jury unable to agree on a verdict.

      At the retrial, Spector is found guilty and sentenced to a minimum of nineteen years in prison. He is sixty-nine years old. Three months later, Dominick Dunne dies of cancer, at home in Manhattan, at the age of eighty-three.