‘He was willing to kill to become noticed’
The first ‘American Crime Story’ series centred on OJ Simpson – now, Gianni Versace’s murder is on the agenda. Jane Mulkerrins reports
In the summer of 1997, Gianni Versace was at the top of his game. The company he had built from scratch from one boutique in Milan in 1978 was valued at $807 million, and had 130 stores across the world. In under 20 years, this son of a Calabrian dressmaker had transformed the industry with his brazenly sexy, luxury fashion and couture, breaking down the traditional barriers between conservative high fashion and popular culture.
The front rows of his fashion shows were filled with all of his A-list friends, including Diana, Princess of Wales, Elton John and Michael Jackson, while on the runway supermodels such as Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington walked for him. But on the morning of July 15, Versace was shot dead on the steps of his mansion on Miami’s South Beach by Andrew Cunanan, who it later transpired had also murdered four other men, at least two of them gay.
Cunanan, a notorious liar, was also gay but initially struggled to come to terms with it, and unable to find a job after dropping out of college, had taken to befriending rich gay men to fund a wealthy lifestyle he was unable to afford.
“It was a political murder,” believes Ryan Murphy, who is recreating the story in the second instalment of his American Crime Story series, The Assassination of Gianni Versace.
“[Cunanan] was a person who targeted people specifically to shame them. He wanted to out them and to have a form of payback for a life that he felt he could not live.”
The Assassination of Gianni Versace follows the extraordinary success of Murphy’s first American Crime Story series, The People vs OJ Simpson, an account of the trial of the former NFL superstar for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. It won nine Emmys and two Golden Globes for its unflinching confrontation with the police corruption, racism and Nineties celebrity culture that helped lead to OJ’S acquittal.
The second instalment – based on the book Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in US History, by former Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth – has been adapted by the British screenwriter Tom Rob Smith, who has flipped the story to tell it backwards, starting with Versace’s murder, in order to understand how Cunanan could have evaded arrest for so long.
“The idea behind American Crime Story was that every season should be not just about a specific crime, but about a crime that America is guilty of, something that implicates us culturally,” says executive producer Nina Jacobson.
With the OJ trial, the “cultural crime” was the racism of the LAPD, who were accused of attempting to racially incriminate Simpson. With Versace’s murder, Murphy and his team believe the crime is homophobia, including within the police who were criticised for not prioritising an investigation into Cunanan’s previous victims.
“It’s about the degree of shame and secrecy among gay people in America in the Nineties, in the wake of the Aids epidemic and the difficulty of living an authentic life,” says Jacobson. “It is very easy to think that the way it is now is the way it always has been. But there have been so many changes, in terms of visibility of the gay and trans community, compared to 20 years ago.”
Using Versace’s story as a base,
The Assassination of Gianni Versace weaves in other narrative strands that delineate specific aspects of recent history. The fifth episode, for example, examines the impact of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the US policy, introduced in Clinton’s presidency, that attempted to improve life for gay people in the military so long as they hid their sexuality, while openly banning gay people from serving. The episode zones in on the story of one former Marine who left the military because of his sexuality and became one of Cunanan’s victims after he spurned his advances. While that episode was being filmed, Donald Trump was revealing his new plan to ban transgender people from the military.
The series also serves as a dark comment on the celebrity culture that blossomed in the late Nineties, with Versace and his love for the spotlight right at the epicentre. “You see it in the frenzy when Versace is murdered,” says Jacobson. “Something that should be an outpouring of grief and horror is turned into a commercialised event. People were stealing X-rays, just to have a connection to a famous person.”
Cunanan, too, was obsessed with status and wealth. “One of his traits early on is this absolute infatuation with fame; he was willing to kill for it,” says Orth. “What he was willing to do to become noticed, I don’t see it as that different to making a sex tape, like the Kardashians, or becoming US president because you were a reality TV star.”
Filmed, in part, on location in the Versace mansion – a lush, colourful, wildly over-the-top property – the show has a particularly colourful dramatis personae. Edgar Ramirez plays the designer, and Ricky Martin his long-time partner, the former model, Antonio D’amico. Glee star Darren Criss is Cunanan, while Penélope Cruz plays the imperious Donatella Versace, Gianni’s sister, business partner and muse. It’s suffused with the same glossy eroticism that Versace epitomised.
There were tales of torrid parties and orgies behind closed doors, which Versace would task D’amico with arranging, and which are referenced, although not shown, in the show. Such assertions may go some way to explaining the Versace family’s statement that Murphy’s drama “should only be considered as a work of fiction”.
Martin, however, believes that such alleged details of Versace’s private life should not be deemed shocking. “There is nothing wrong with a relationship being open,” he says. “You have got to evolve. And if this is what is needed for the relationship to be more solid, then why not try it?”
While the series will no doubt rekindle interest in the personal story of Versace, his fashion legacy remains undimmed. To mark 20 years since her brother’s murder, Donatella launched the Versace Tribute Collection at Milan Fashion Week last September. But the clothes were overshadowed by the finale: five of the original supermodels – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Helena Christensen and the former French First Lady Carla Bruni – took to the catwalk. Social media lost its mind. Gianni would, no doubt, have heartily approved.