14
GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE May 7, 1999
books
Attempt to see Cunanan's thoughts doesn't succeed
Three Month Fever
The Andrew Cunanan Story by Gary Indiana
Cliff Street Books, $25.00
Reviewed by Robert DiGiacomo
Three Month Fever, Gary Indiana's novelistic version of the "truth" behind Andrew Cunanan's 1997 murder spree, is one strange book. Part biography, part media critique, part diatribe, the work is Indiana`s attempt to
THRES
FEVER
CARY INDIANA
provide context and explanation to the tragic series of events two years ago that left six dead, culminating in the murder of fashion designer Gianni Versace and Cunanan's suicide.
I say "attempt" because the book, although at times compelling, doesn't quite succeed. It works best in Indiana's examination of
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Cunanan's life before he took that fateful trip to Minneapolis. Here, Indiana relies on the recollections of those who knew Cunanan in San Diego and San Francisco. What emerges is a portrait of the wannabe's wannabe, a young Filipino/Italian-American man of middle class background who misrepresented himself throughout his short life because he so desperately wanted to be seen as part of the white upper crust.
Cunanan, who often used the last name DeSilva, had a chameleon-like quality. He was kept by a much older man, yet he liked to flash cash around gay bars and pick up the tab for dinners with his acquaintances at trendy restaurants. He could be the life of the party, or not make an impression at all. He was usually salesman-smooth in his charm, but occasionally would erupt in anger and even violence when he could not control a situa-
tion.
"When he was in your face." Indiana writes, "he was amazingly in your face, and when he wasn't, you forgot him. He had a real life and a dream life and a secret life that was half real and half a dream, or perhaps just a little real and mainly a collage of wishes. Some people half-believed Andrew's stories, if they liked him, assuming some prosaic measure of reality behind his gilding hyperbole, and others, who didn't, thought him an unbearable fraud.”
Where the book gets really murky is when Indiana begins to imagine the thoughts, feelings and motivations of Cunanan, as he sets off on the trip to Minneapolis that would result in the death of his first two victims. This is the book's major flaw: Indiana's desire to know the unknowable. He is justifiably critical, contemptuous even, of the mainstream media's obsession over the "homicidal homosexual,"
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COURTESY OF MIAMI BEACH POLICE DEPARTMENT
A police officer swabs Andrew Cunanan's hands to test for gunpowder residue after he was found dead in a Miami Beach houseboat.
as Cunanan was dubbed by NBC News. Yet, Indiana's version of events is disturbing and sensational in its own right.
For example, Indiana speculates, partially based on police evidence, that, after killing his first victim, Jeffrey Trail, an old friend from San Diego, in an unpremeditated rage, Cunanan then kept hostage his second victim, former boyfriend David Madsen, in the same apartment with the decomposing body. After several days, Cunanan and Madsen drove to a remote lake, where Madsen was later found dead, shot at point-blank range in the back of the head.
"By Monday night, Andrew had ceased discussing his plans," Indiana writes. "Andrew was letting huge blocks of time rumble past, occasionally he said the word "food" like he'd just thought of it, he fixed Spanish rice while David sat leg-cuffed to the kitchen table. He said the word "Canada" and David knew Andrew's thoughts were turning towards Canada. That night Andrew played a bondage porno he'd brought... David in leg restraints, head in Andrew's lap, Jeff decomposing in the rug. Andrew stroked David's face with the side of the gun barrel."
Indiana also takes us behind the murders of the other victims, notably the third victim, Chicago businessman Lee Miglin, who, according to the author, had a personal connection to Cunanan that was not reported by the mainstream media. Allegedly, Miglin, who was married, and Cunanan knew each other well, and had shared the services of a male prostitute on several occasions.
Interestingly, Indiana doesn't devote much space to the killing of Versace, although he does dispute several basic tenets of the Cunanan story, as relayed by many media outlets: He doesn't believe Cunanan really knew Versace well, or that he had some kind of vendetta against the designer.
"It was assumed on the strength of fifthhand bar chatter culled by reporters that Andrew always wanted to be famous, it was inferred from this that shooting Versace was Andrew's last chance to become famous. It was suddenly chic to be 'targeted' by Andrew... It also became chic to claim a deep personal friendship with Versace, to infer that one might, but for a trick of fate,
have been with Versace at the very moment of his 'assassination"."
But here again Indiana, no stranger to fifth-hand bar chatter himself as evidenced by earlier sections of his book, indulges in a little exploitation of the late designer's image. It troubles him that the cult of celebrity has led to the martyrdom of the late designer, who lived in sybaritic splendor on famed South Beach, as a more important victim than the others. He includes verbatim a police report in which a prostitute who allegedly was brought to the Versace mansion for the designer and his boyfriend several years prior is interviewed.
Yet, in exposing the police hypocrisy of focusing on the designer's sex life when they had a spree killer on the loose, isn't Indiana only dragging the designer through the mud for no good reason? Did we really need to know about Versace's private sex life?
The book ends with Cunanan's supposed final thoughts: In Indiana's view, it was important for Cunanan to have control until the end; he set the scene for when the police discovered his body.
"He gave a lot of thought to how he wanted them to find him, rehearsed getting to the bed from other parts of the houseboat. He would look terrific on the black satin sheets. He had his gun all ready and he waited for a sign. When the sign came, and Andrew sprinted for the upstairs bedroom, he passed a poster. I SURVIVED HURRICANE ANDREW, it read. Yeah, well, I didn't, he thought, then went up and laid down and ate the gun.”
In this age of 24-hour cable news and instant Internet access to every kind of media outlet, we have more information available to us than ever before and yet we seem to know less and less. Hear the 911 tape, see the autopsy photos online, watch the victims or their families recount their personal nightmares on TV.
Three Month Fever is aptly titled in that it captures the media frenzy of our time and the intensity of Cunanan's final months.
Yet, it cannot accomplish the impossible, and explain why someone would do the unthinkable.
Robert DiGiacomo is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.
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