The life of Andrew Cunanan was shrouded in mystery, with few people truly knowing the man who murdered Gianni Versace.
In the premiere episode of American Crime Story, viewers were exposed to some of the many lies he told friends and strangers, along with a few shocking truths.
And none is more shocking than the fact that Versace and Cunanan had met at a San Francisco gay club in 1990, and by all accounts had a cordial conversation.
Seven years later, the friendly young man Versace met in The Golden Gate City would shoot him dead on the steps of his Miami mansion.
Scroll down for video
Operatic: The night Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan met is seen in the premiere episode of American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace (Edgar ramirez and Versace and Darren Criss as Cunanan above)
Recreation: The pair met in 1990 at the San Fransisco gay club Colossus according to two eyewitnesses, who spoke with Maureen Orth for her book Vulgar Favors (Ramirez as Versace above)
Deadly friend: Versace, who was in town designing costumes for openingf night of the opera, made his way over to Cunanan, and said: 'I know you. Lago di Como, no?' (Criss above as Cunanan)
The depiction of how Cunanan (played by Darren Criss) came to meet Versace (played by Edar Ramirez) in American Crime Story is fairly close to how it was presented in the source material for the series, Maureen Orth's book Vulgar Favors.
Orth spoke to two people who saw Cunanan with Versace at Colossus, a popular San Francisco gay club.
Versace reportedly stopped by the club for three straight weeks on Saturday nights while he was in the city designing costumes for the opening night of Capriccio at the San Francisco Opera.
And one at least one of those nights, and possibly two, he was seen chatting with Versace.
The first source Orth spoke to about this was Eli Gould, a friend of Cunanan's and high-profile lawyer who said he was with Cunanan the night he met Versace.
The two men were in the VIP section at Colossus when Versace walked in with his entourage.
He later made his way over to Cunanan, and said: 'I know you. Lago di Como, no?'
Slain: Cunanan would shoot Versace dead on the steps of the designer's Miami mansion seven years later after a cross-country killing spree
Final look: Versace was just 55 at the time of his death, and days away from taking his compnay public
Orth writes that this was how he would strike up conversations with strangers, and that Cunanan made no attempt to correct the famed designer.
'Thank you for remembering, Signor Versace,' said Cunanan, and he made small talk with the designer before Gould said the two went down to the dance floor.
Eric Gruenwald, another attorney, claims he too saw Versace and Cunanan speaking at the club one night, though it is unclear if that was the same night he was with Gould or another evening.
The rest however, was all a lie, with Cunanan's claims that he accompanied Versace to opening night of the opera and claims that the two had dinner together once a year nothing more than a fantasy.
That fantasy eventually turned fatal, and the aftermath of Versace's murder can be seen next Tuesday on American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
Television The Assassination of Gianni Versace review – a grim portrait of gay life 4 / 5 stars In his follow-up to The People v OJ Simpson, Ryan Murphy spins the designer’s murder into a compelling story of deceit, ambition and what it meant to be gay at the turn of the century Darren Criss in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Photograph: FX
The title of the new season of Ryan Murphy’s American Crime Story is tailor-made to drum up anticipation: “The Assassination of Gianni Versace”, it reads, invoking one of the most notorious murders of the 1990s.
Where the first installment of the anthology series – The People v OJ Simpson – was about exactly that, this time both the name and the promotional material amount to a shiny, sequined red herring. The assassination in question takes place in the very first scene of the series and, unlike the crimes of which Simpson was accused, there’s no ensuing legal battle that grips the country, collectively watching a White Bronco on the 405. So Murphy, television’s pre-eminent dramatist, quite literally flips the script. Versace doesn’t reach the heights of season one, and it’s slow to boil, but at it’s best it makes for thrilling, macabre, deliciously campy television.
Glitz, glamour and tragedy: how Gianni Versace rewrote the rules of fashion Read more
If The People v OJ took the gruesome murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and wove them into a fraught tale of racial politics, Versace uses its eponymous victim to tell a story about being gay in America: the seclusion and loneliness of the closet, the pain of stymied desire, the necessary accumulation of lies, and the confusion of a post-Aids-crisis, pre-Will-and-Grace world in which tolerance is nascent but skepticism still pervasive.
At the center of all this is Andrew Cunanan, who in 1997 went on a cross-country murder spree, killing Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese and, finally, Gianni Versace, on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion. Murphy, with Tom Rob Smith adapting Maureen Orth’s book Vulgar Favors, chooses to tell the story in reverse, a gambit that can be confusing but begins to pay off several episodes in. The desired effect is to watch criminality unfurl itself backwards, to show the origin story of a killer as perversely apathetic and strangely endearing as Cunanan. But the tactic is neither necessary nor particularly enhancing.
Cunanan is played by Darren Criss, the velvet-voiced Warbler of Glee fame. His portrayal is not convincing at first, but like everything in the series, it improves with time and exposure. As the closeted, bespectacled killer, Criss is clearly inspired by Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates and Malcolm McDowell’s Alex DeLarge; charm is conveyed through widened eyes, sweetness through an uptick in cadence, and homosexuality through a cock of the wrist or a wiggle of the hips, which is maybe why we should cast gay actors to play gay characters a little more often. But despite the capital-A acting, Criss is nothing if not dedicated, and he comes to embody Cunanan quite formidably by the time he’s gallivanting through gay bars telling people he’s a set designer on the upcoming movie Titanic.
AmericanCrimeStoryFX (@ACSFX) Darren Criss, Edgar Ramirez, Penelope Cruz, and Ricky Martin star in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. The next installment of Ryan Murphy's award-winning series premieres 1/17 on FX. #ACSVersace pic.twitter.com/ktM44SNzLw
What really makes this series excel is an inarguably stellar supporting cast. It’s impossible to turn away from Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace, wearing a black-laced veil as she confronts her brother’s corpse; Edgar Ramírez as Gianni is commanding and quietly tortured; Max Greenfield is superb as a South Beach junkie who crosses paths with Cunanan and makes it out alive; Finn Wittrock, playing a closeted naval officer after the signing of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, is the first of Cunanan’s victims; and Judith Light, in a single-episode cameo as the widow of the Chicago real estate developer Lee Miglin, is, well, Judith Light (read: brilliant). Murphy’s heavy-handedness is not to everyone’s liking, but he always manages to squeeze all the pulp out of his performers.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Penélope Cruz as Donatella Versace in a scene from The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. Photograph: Jeff Daly/AP
In following Cunanan’s deadly joyride, the show also takes us from Miami to Minneapolis to Chicago to La Jolla. One moment, we’re at the Versace mansion, as chiseled butlers serve orange juice on silver trays, and the next we’re in seedy motels and lakeside cottages as characters snort heroin and hunt quail. The contrast says as much about class as it does the geographical scope of the murders; Cunanan is both killer and liar, but more than anything he’s a striver, with Versace advertisements thumb-tacked to his wall and an expensive wardrobe mostly gifted to him by the older, rich men whom he dates and, in some cases, slays.
The smartest thing about the show is that, in stark contrast to the courtroom procedural style of The People v OJ Simpson, each episode plays like a standalone film. Versace’s name may be in the title, but Miglin, Trail and Madson get almost as much backstory, not to mention Cunanan, the only character who appears in every episode. Which is to say that, in the world of the show, queer lives mean very little to law enforcement; in the world of Ryan Murphy, though, they’re each deserving of attention, regardless of wealth or fame.
Even before its owner, Gianni Versace, was shot on its front steps, Casa Casuarina was a tourist attraction in Miami Beach. One of very few privately owned homes on glitzy Ocean Drive, it was an attention-grabber even for those who did not know who lived there: black iron gates trimmed in gold framed the Mediterranean-style mansion outfitted with elaborate balconies, and just enough visible glitz to promise even more inside.
But for all the historic importance implied by the name and the classic style, 1116 Ocean Drive was famous because of Versace—and may become even more so, now that the FX series The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which filmed in part in the actual Casa Casuarina, is premiering Wednesday. Notorious for its over-the-top style and the horrifying death that happened at its gates, Casa Casuarina has a fascinating backstory all its own—one that begins with a possibly closeted oil heir, comes dangerously close to Donald Trump, and ends with the opportunity for you, yes you, to sleep in Gianni Versace’s old bedroom.
For more discussion of American Crime Story and its real-life inspiration, subscribe to Vanity Fair’s new podcast Still Watching: Versace.
The mansion was originally commissioned by Standard Oil heir Alden Freeman in 1930, and was named for the only tree on the property, as Maureen Orth writes in her book about Andrew Cunanan, Vulgar Favors—or possibly, as the Miami Herald speculated last year, for the W. Somerset Maugham collection of stories The Casuarina Tree. Freeman, who had retired at 27 to travel the world, designed the house as a copy of the Dominican Republic home built for Christopher Columbus’s son Diego in the early 16th century. Freeman only lived in the mansion for a short time, in the company of his adopted son, Charles Boulton; according to Miami Beach historian Carolyn Klepser, interviewed by the Miami Herald, Boulton may have in fact been Freeman’s lover.
After Freeman’s death in 1937, Boulton sold the mansion for $100,000 to Jacques Amsterdam. He turned it into the Amsterdam Palace, a 24-room apartment building that, by the 80s, mostly rented by the month to artists and anyone else willing to live in what was, by then, a rundown South Beach. The Art Deco buildings that had defined the resort town’s heyday in the 30s and 40s were crumbling; preservationists struggled to convince city officials they were worth protecting at all. “Until recently, the city had the idea that nothing was worth saving in the Art Deco District,” Miami Beach redevelopment director Stuart Rogel told the Herald in 1987. “It looked old, it looked bad and we wanted to get rid of it. Now we realize we are sitting on top of a resource of immense value.”
Top, by Lynne Sladky/AP/REX/Shutterstock; Bottom, by Ken Hayden.
The legend of Versace’s arrival in South Beach leans heavily on chance. Versace told the Herald in 1993 that, passing through town on his way to Cuba, he asked a cab driver to show him something “fancy and fun” about South Beach. Then he fell in love. Speaking to The New York Times, Donatella Versace remembered walking though South Beach with her brother and stopping in front of the rundown Amsterdam Hotel. “Gianni just stopped in front of the building and said, ‘I want this house.’ Just like that, ‘I want this house.’ But it wasn’t a house; it was literally an apartment building, and people were living in it! I said, ‘Gianni, how are you going do that?’ It was 10 o’clock in the evening. He said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get the lawyers,’ and he did it, I don’t know how. Like many things in his life.”
The mansion had been given historic designation in 1979, and as The New York Times wrote in 1993, South Beach preservationists cheered Versace as the building’s savior. He ran into trouble, though, when he announced plans to tear down the adjacent Revere Hotel to make room for a pool and a garage. Built more than 20 years after Casa Casuarina, the hotel didn’t have historic designation, and plenty of Miami officials didn’t think it deserved it. “The Revere is not a very impressive building at all, and there is no one who can tell me it is,” Miami Beach mayor Seymour Gelber told the Times. “Personally, I don’t feel it is a great loss.”
Versace got his way—the pool is featured prominently in American Crime Story—and the bad blood seemed to dissipate quickly. In 1995, he accepted an award from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation for Meritorious Achievement in Residential Rehabilitation.
Courtesy of FX.
The mansion became a landmark, not just as an emblem of the new celebrity status of South Beach, but for the lavish parties Versace threw, and its famous houseguests— Madonna, Princess Diana, and Elton John are all frequently cited as some of the biggest names who spent the night at Casa Casuarina. “All of a sudden, what was going on in L.A. moved here when Gianni came here,” Donatella Versace told The New York Times in 2001. “All the fashion shoots were happening here. Music people, fashion people, actors—he attracted everyone here. He had that power. In the courtyard, right here, you’d see Italian architects, writers, Richard Avedon, Madonna, a mix of people.”
In 1997, Vanity Fair’s Cathy Horyn spent time with Donatella in her brother’s mansion; the issue containing that story, with Princess Diana on the cover, was on newsstands when Gianni was shot on July 15. (The opening moments of American Crime Story show him buying a copy at a newsstand down the street.) Horyn describes Versace as having “the most outrageous taste anybody has ever seen, but the underlying message is absolute freedom.” The dining room, she writes, has “marble and shell reliefs and scrolling mosaics running on for 30 feet.”
Bruce Weber’s photographs from the December 1994 issue of Vogue capture even more elaborate detail: the dining room turned into a pebbled grotto, Donatella Versace’s bedroom with a canvas painted in Milan on the ceiling, and the central courtyard featuring four busts, preserved from Freeman’s original designs, each representing a different continent.
Versace’s highly public death made his mansion a grim tourist attraction for several years, but Casa Casuarina’s strange story was far from over. By February 2001, Sotheby’s was preparing to auction many of Versace’s belongings; as Donatella told the Times, she had even made an effort to remove the Versace Medusa logos embedded within the house—at least, as many as she could. The property was sold to Peter Loftin, a telecom entrepreneur who, according to the Herald, began using the house to host parties for $10,000 a night, and later turned it into an invitation-only club with yearly dues of $3,600. (Loftin was already a member at Mar-a-Lago, owned by Donald Trump, who will show up again in this story soon). By 2005, the club had opened up to high-roller guests willing to spend up to $4,000 a night to stay in one of Versace’s former bedrooms.
The trouble for Loftin began in 2009, when Scott Rothstein, a Fort Lauderdale-based lawyer who had joined as a minority investor in the club’s restaurant, was arrested for running a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Later, the Casa reopened as a hotel, under the leadership of Barton G. Weiss, though Loftin remained the majority owner. That only lasted until 2013, when Loftin filed for bankruptcy and put the mansion on the market, with an initial, staggering asking price of $125 million.
By the time the building went to auction in September 2013, the asking price had been reduced to $75 million—but the spectacle was in full bloom. None other than Donald Trump was making a bid, sending Eric Trump to the auction because the future president, as he told the Herald, was busy touring a golf project with Jack Nicklaus. The auction earned the liveblog treatment from Curbed Miami, and the eventual winner was VM South Beach LLC, a company whose principal owners are the Nakash family—owners of Jordache. The final selling price? $41.5 million.
Under the Nakash family’s ownership, Casa Casuarina remains a hotel, one still hot enough to host Art Basel parties and charge over $1,000 a night for a room in one of its 10 suites. For all its opulence, though, the building’s value may be mostly in its infamy; according to the Herald, the Casa had an estimated 2017 market value of $23.4 million.
Get Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour Our essential brief on culture, the news, and more. And it's on the house. E-mail Address Subscribe
When Ryan Murphy, the producer of TV shows from "Glee" to "American Horror Story," began a new anthology series on celebrated criminal cases, his "The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story," a celebrity-filled recreation of the trial, received nine Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes.
And while the bloody murders at the heart of that case were never showed in the 10-part series that aired in 2016, the lavish new installment of the series "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story" that premieres tonight on FX begins with the blunt and brutal shooting murder of the design icon.
It occurred just over 20 years ago, on July 15, 1997, on the steps of opulent Casa Casuarina mansion on Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive. The influential 50-year-old designer was just returning home from a jaunt to get cigarettes and magazines. The perpetrator was Andrew Cunanan, a troubled 27- year-old with no fixed address, who was obsessed with wealth and fame, and was already on the FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted list when he arrived in Miami. He had killed four people in the four months before the Versace murder. Witnesses chased Cunanan, who shot Versace in broad daylight, but failed to catch him. The killer was found eight days later in a Miami houseboat, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, from the same gun he had used on three of his victims.
Darren Criss, who gained fame as a singer on Murphy’s "Glee," plays the killer Andrew Cunanan; Edgar Ramirez, the Venezuelan actor who earned an Emmy Award for his title role in the series "Carlos," is Versace. Penélope Cruz plays his sister Donatella; Ricky Martin is his partner Antonio D’Amico.
But is what happens over the nine episodes — which mostly goes back and follows Cunanan’s murderous trail — close to what actually happened?
Its producers are confident it is very close, as it is based on Maureen Orth’s 1999 book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History.
Vulgar Favors (FX American Crime Story Tie-in Edition): The Assassination of Gianni Versace Two months before Gianni Versace was murdered on the steps of his Miami Beach mansion by Andrew Cunanan, award-winning journalist Maureen Orth was investigating a major story on the serial killer for Vanity Fair. Buy
Though Orth is listed as a consultant on the project, she said last week in an interview, “I didn’t see the finished episodes until after they were completed.
“They weren’t asking me, ‘Did this happen or did that happen?’” said Orth.
“I would say my sourcing in the book is 95 percent or more on the record, and I talked to over 400 people,” Orth told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour panel last week. “And so, so many things that you might think were made up aren’t made up. They happened.”
One that comes up quickly is a flashback to a time when Cunanan met Versace seven years before the murder when Versace was called in to do costumes at the San Francisco Opera. Cunanan, a University of California, San Diego, dropout who was living in San Francisco’s Castro District, made it a point to meet the fashion icon.
“Cunanan was invited to a party to meet Versace,” Orth said during the press session. “And I talked to at least, I’d say, five different people on the record who went to the party, who saw them talking. And then I also talked to one of Andrew’s friends who claims that Andrew was riding around in a white convertible with Versace and Antonio one night and a kind of decadent socialite from San Francisco who was well known, and Andrew had him bring the car over to the curb so he could introduce and make them see that he was with Versace.”
These days, someone would take a selfie and post it on all manner of social media. And that’s the kind of celebrity proximation Cunanan sought, Orth says.
“Today you can be an Instagram star or YouTube star,” she says. “If he had been born later, maybe that’s what he would have gone for. But in order to be recognized, he wanted to be famous so much that he was willing to kill for it.
“He presages the Kardashians making a sex tape to become famous or whatever you do to become famous these days.”
“The story about him meeting Versace is told by Andrew and told in a flashback,” says "American Crime Story" executive producer Brad Simpson, “because we wanted to dramatize the story Andrew was telling and present it as ‘This is what Andrew said happened.’” Their meeting is presented as if it was something that Cunanan, an inveterate liar, might have made up. And as detailed as the book was, screenwriter Tom Rob Smith still had a challenge, Simpson says.
“A lot of the first-person accounts of what happened were not possible,” he says. “Maureen obviously had an incredibly researched book, but the people who knew Andrew, who were killed by him, can’t tell their stories.”
So, what transpires when his first victim Jeff Trail was murdered in Minneapolis in April 1997 or when his second victim, David Madson, was taken at gunpoint across several states a month later necessarily has to be imagined.
“We did the same on the 'O.J.,'” Murphy says. “We didn’t have access to what Marcia Clark said to Christopher Darden. We didn’t meet Marcia until we were done shooting episode six. So, we had no access to exact conversations and idealizations that took place on that show either.”
Murphy says he trusts Smith’s scripts, which he calls “very emotional and accurate at the same time.”
“You have these tiny points of truth, and you then try to connect the tissue between it.,” Smith says. “But I would never use the word ‘embellishing’ or ‘making up.’ It’s trying to join those pinpoints.”
But the family of the designer had less faith.
"The Versace family has neither authorized nor had any involvement whatsoever in the forthcoming TV series about the death of Mr. Gianni Versace," the family said in a statement last week. "Since Versace did not authorize the book on which it is partly based nor has it taken part in the writing of the screenplay, this TV series should only be considered as a work of fiction."
FX replied that like the "O.J." series, its new "American Crime Story" was based on a nonfiction bestseller that was “heavily researched and authenticated nonfiction” and concluded, “We stand by the meticulous reporting of Ms. Orth.”
For her part, Orth says of the Cunanan question, “He absolutely did know Versace. To what extent he had a relationship with him or was seen with him afterwards or anything like that, I don’t know.” Cunanan told more than one person that when the designer came up to him at the dance club Colossus in San Francisco in 1990 he said, “Hi, I’m Gianni Versace,” and Cunanan had responded with the brash line, “If you’re Gianni Versace, then I’m Coco Chanel.” Orth says, “He definitely said that line…Three or four people told me that.”
Simpson says it is important that the series remind the public of the importance of Versace “as this disruptor and as this creative genius.”
“I think Versace hasn’t been given due credit,” says Smith. “I think all you have to do is a simple research check and ask why hasn’t a great biography been written of Versace when you look at what a pioneer he was both in fashion and in sexual politics.”
In his day, Versace was not only a renowned designer, whose fashion house also produced makeup, fragrances, accessories and home furnishings, whose work was featured in films and theater, but he was also a friend of such stars as Elton John, Cher, Sting, Madonna and Eric Clapton. His friend Princess Diana attended his funeral. He was also a successful, gay icon at a time when there were fewer openly gay prominent people.
“Being declared a ‘Most Wanted’ didn’t happen until after the fourth murder,” Orth says, of Cunanan. And the FBI moved cautiously at the time, she adds, because “they were freaked by the O.J. trial. They were so worried that in a circumstantial evidence trial, how were they going to try it? What were they going to do? They had to cross every 't' and dot every 'i' and that gave him valuable time to get away.”
“This is the largest FBI failed manhunt of all time, and I couldn’t find podcasts on it,” Smith says. “Why has this story not been told? Why has Versace not been given credit as this genius, and why has the great story only been told by Maureen’s book? Why are there not multiple takes on this story?”
The nine-part “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” begins Wednesday, Jan. 17 on FX.
