Versace’s Medusa: Andrew Cunanan

VERSACE’S MEDUSA: ANDREW CUNANAN

C. T. Patrick Diamond

© 2015 by C. T. Patrick Diamond

Sydney, Australia

All rights reserved

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The cover image of The Head of the Medusa is a portrait by Caravaggio (1596) that is now in the public domain.

Although suggested in part by actual events, this story is an imaginative work of fiction. Whenever recognizable figures, actions, dates, places, and sources are introduced, their treatment is wholly fictional. The incidents and details that I have created for dramatic effect are not to be taken for actual historical ones. Except for proper names, the characters, places, plot, and exchanges as presented here are all products of my imagination. Any real similarity to actual persons living or dead is unintentional. No hurt or disrespect is intended. To deal with the pronoun problem, I have used masculine forms. This is simply to disencumber the text. Again no disrespect or exclusion is intended.

DEDICATION

To those 30 million people who have died of AIDS

and to those 35 million who were estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS in 2013.

Some 70 percent of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We need to take care of each other.

[Satan] with his horrid crew

Lay vanquisht, rowling in the fiery Gulfe

Confounded though immortal: But his doom

Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought

Both of lost happiness and lasting pain

Torments him [and me].

(Milton)

The what: murder on the doorstep

At 8:45am on Tuesday, July 15, 1997, the feast day of St. Bonaventure, Gianni Versace was returning from a three-block walk to the News Café, a favorite meeting place for celebrities in South Beach, Miami, Florida. Open 24/7, the umbrellas and pavement tables of the popular restaurant make it an ideal spot for people watching or for staking out a crime scene and stalking a victim. On that morning, Gianni sported a low key, grizzled morning-after look: unshaven with thin receding hair still gelled from the night before.

He had been watched by Andrew Cunanan, a more recent regular, sitting quietly and, unusually for him, where he did not attract attention. The younger man was wearing Calvin Klein sunglasses and a dark cap pulled way down. He had quickly downed a second heart-jolting Kick Ass espresso so he could again tail Gianni back towards the Casa Casuarina.

According to Wensley Clarkson, the author of 21 books, including so-called true crime stories and unauthorized biographies, as of Tom Cruise and Andrew Cunanan, Versace was wearing a loose white T-shirt, black shorts with a silver studded belt, and sandals, and holding a brown paper bag under his left arm. Containing copies of Vogue, PeopleBusiness Week, Entertainment Weekly, and The New Yorker. So like the pack of magazines and newspapers he regularly had taken to his mother when she lay gravely ill in the Moderna clinic. As Versace was about to find out, although Franca had already passed away, her hold on life would eclipse his by eight years. Gianni was as old as he was ever going to be. He would not be a victim of disease or misadventure but rather a scapegoat sacrificed to ensure the success of my conspiracy against all men. A consummation that I had long planned and not just wished for.

Despite Miami’s reputation as a dangerous city, Gianni was a real-life celebrity who refused to live all walled-in and surrounded 24/7 by ironclad security. He had dismissed his bodyguards and unplugged his mansion’s security system. And had allegedly not taken sufficient precautions to avoid brushing up against me in person. But here’s the thing. The main secret of this story and that of every holy book is that men have created god and heaven, as well as devils and hell, in their own image. Men make up their own monsters and then fear them for what they reveal about themselves.

Because men have endowed me with an omniscient or a god’s-eye viewpoint, my dual psycho-biography of Gianni and Andrew will be different from Clarkson’s best-selling romp of 270 pages about the same series of events. An homage in part to The Washington Post, this and his other books have sold more than a million and a half copies in all. Although no one, least of all ourselves, can fathom who we each are when considered as a whole, I recognize that part of me is deeply envious of the achievements of others. And especially those of Gianni with his love of life and acknowledged touches of genius. Andrew was also jealous of Versace but mainly of his princely lifestyle. He represented all that Cunanan would never become.

But then I resent the successes even of alleged B-listers including Dominick Dunne, the bestselling crime author and a previous scribe for Vanity Fair. In the very first row of the second rate like myself and W. Somerset Maugham, the novelist-playwright, who had borrowed the title for his best seller, Of Human Bondage (1915), from Spinoza, the philosopher who denied god’s providence while affirming the strength of man’s emotions. As a closeted gay medical student, Maugham had been scared witless by the show trials of Oscar Wilde in the Old Bailey and by the prison sentence that the Irish poet-playwright-novelist-critic received in 1895.

Gianni did not usually go out alone for the papers and magazines but it was a beautiful sunny morning in Miami and he was in high spirits. Looking forward to the opening in Rome of his next women’s fashion show and to catching up with all the breaking celebrity news about who was wearing what with whom. Wondering what tasty morsels of gossip might lie in wait, he started back up the smooth marble steps of his grand palazzo at 1116 Ocean Drive, South Beach.

Smiling as he fondly relived his former triumphs as when Elizabeth Hurley had worn his black evening gown, held together with several oversized gold safety pins, to the British premiere of Four weddings and a Funeral in 1994. That dress had launched her career in spectacular style with a sultry siren look. And when he named a handbag after Diana, the Princess of Wales, as the Lady Di. Medusa embossed and no less revealing in its own way. Symbolic of how she chose, for as long as she could, not to look or face the fact that there were always three in her marriage. An open secret. Life is a perpetual evasion of reality. Men are always haunted by the dilemma posed by the double-headed Medusa-truth and its reverse, the so-called affirmative lie. Choosing to be positive or negative, courageous or cowardly.

Gianni took his bunch of keys, attached by a silver chain to a belt eyelet, out of a right hand pocket. A gift from his adoring mother when he was leaving for Milan. He distractedly put the large iron key into the lock of the black protective gates. Their wrought iron panels were bordered with the Greek key pattern that had appeared in countless Roman mosaics and Versace fashion designs: pairs of interlocking, mirror-imaged L’s. Both panels featured a diamonded, full-faced Medusa, his iconic logo and a creature of mine in a distant time and place. Chains of snakes softened into uncoiling metal hair. The face of authority, fascination, and deadly attraction.

At that moment, Gianni and a dark stranger were about to make nonstop screaming headlines around the world, as had Perseus and the Medusa long ago. According to Greek legend, reef coral was first stained pink when the Greek hero rested the monster’s severed head on the beach and blood spilled down into the Red Sea. As Gianni’s soon would trickle down the coral marble stairs of his grand entrance. Men are always forced to follow the worse although they can see the better before them.

The who: Princes among men

Using the words of The Rolling Stones’ (1968) anthem, Sympathy for the Devil,

Please allow me to introduce myself . . .

Hope you guess my name.

As a Satanic Majesty, the nature of my game was that I had planned Gianni’s public execution to demonstrate and celebrate the inescapable truth that life here on earth is totally without meaning. As well as being your narrator or voice-over, my full-time position is that of a Prince from Hell who mentored not only Andrew Cunanan on how to kill but also Niccolo Machiavelli on how to instruct worldly Princes. The beginning of political theory. For self-protection, it is best to provide Princes with counsel, both enigmatically and oracle-like, about how, for example, to wage unrelenting war. Taking his but really my own advice, I always effect my preservation rather than my ruin by never neglecting what is done for what ought to be done. I will use any ends to secure my mission and my Master’s glory.

Within my own circle, I openly sanction the use of cruelty, perfidy, murder, or any other means, provided only that they are used with sufficient intelligence and secrecy to reach my ends. As my proxy, Andrew managed to follow that agenda but failed to appreciate that self-preservation trumps all other motives. He was also sacrificed to gain maximum media exposure and to secure lasting fascination as to men’s reasons.

I know that, like dead young poets and musicians, dead fashion icons and serial killers are more saleable and of greater interest than dead laborers. Everyone wants to know the guilty secrets of celebrities and I will be sharing some of mine with you here. Not just about how I am one of that horrid crew but also about what really happened after I recruited Andrew Cunanan into an unlikely ménage à trois with me and Gianni Versace. As you see, I always put myself first, as a matter of precedence. And I always feature as a character in my own works and commentaries as here. Prone to taking the longer view and so using always. Mine is a public and a private need for revenge. Setting unrights to right.

Although Gianni and Andrew were also dedicated to the art of being me, they both got screwed by me. But our relationship never amounted to anything like that kind of threesome. A namedropper and always having to have the last as well as the first word, I am the only one who can tell the whole story. About what happened after I primed the antagonist for what was to come by first lighting the blaze when, as a 19-year-old, he was in the Philippines and desperate for sex with men. I was the agent provocateur, setting the entire sequence of events in motion.

An improbable trio: me out of the firey Gulfe and man’s heart of darkness; Gianni out of Italy with its love of fashion-art, the pornography of pain, and the underworld; and Andrew out of the Pacific New World (the Philippines, San Diego, and San Francisco) that had first been raped by the Conquistadors and then ended up as Uncle Sam’s whore. Cunanan was also the wrathful creature of a frenetic media cycle, even as his killings brought its homicidal homosexual overkill urge to climax. Remember that, in all of this, as a spirit with all his guile/ Stir’d up with Envy and Revenge (Milton), I am not to be trusted. And that, like Iago, I am not what I am, playing a cunning gay deceiver in this American drama. Able to assume different forms and voices—some insinuating and others more literary. Take it or leave it as