Pellicano, Anthony - "You’re Nobody till Somebo...

You’re Nobody till Somebody Bugs You

May 2006

A computer-hacking scandal has ensnared banking heir Matthew Mellon, ex-husband of Tamara Mellon, who built the Jimmy Choo shoe empire. After flying to London to talk to Matthew and Tamara, the author heads for Oscar-week Hollywood, where Topic A is the wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano.

by Dominick Dunne

It’s easy to be flip about a man who is usually referred to in newspaper articles and gossip columns as “the scion of one of America’s wealthiest banking and oil families,” especially if the references have to do with cocaine, girls, parties, yachts, rehabs, divorce, and money. Stories about one such man have been more serious in tone, however, since he was arrested by the British police on a strange-sounding charge: conspiracy to cause unauthorized modification of computer material. The man in the jam is Matthew Mellon, of the fabled Mellon family, the great-great-grandnephew of Andrew W. Mellon, a head of the Mellon banking firm, a secretary of the Treasury, and the philanthropist largely responsible for the building of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. His mother is a Drexel, from another prominent banking family. Both sides are what the English call good goods, with plenty of bucks and breeding, not to mention a Roman Catholic saint, Mother Katherine Drexel, who was canonized in October 2000 by Pope John Paul II for her work with Native and African Americans.

I am fascinated by the Matthew Mellons of this world, so as soon as his case hit the papers I got on a flight to England. Nicky Haslam, the London man-about-town, had his driver, Nash, pick me up at Heathrow and take me to Claridge’s, where he waited while I showered and changed so that he could then take me to Annabel’s, probably the most famous, longest-running nightclub for the smart set in the world, where Charles Finch, the agent, producer, and son of the late actor Peter Finch, and his gorgeous wife, Sydney, were giving a party for actors being honored the following night at the BAFTA Awards, the British equivalent of our Academy Awards. Everyone from Anna Wintour to Oscar-nominated Rachel Weisz was there—it was that kind of party.

“What brings you here?” asked Charlie Finch, at whose table I was seated.

“I’m interested in this mess Matthew Mellon is in,” I said.

“There’s his ex-wife, Tamara, over at that table, across from Jake Gyllenhaal,” said Charlie.

Tamara Mellon, a phenomenon in the business world, was the subject of a major profile in Vanity Fair by Evgenia Peretz in August 2005. In 1995, Tamara had gone into business with her neighborhood cobbler, Jimmy Choo, backed by her wealthy father, the late Thomas Yeardye, a colorful fellow who had been engaged in the 1950s to Diana Dors, the British version of Jayne Mansfield. Tamara knew what rich young women like her wanted, and she targeted that audience. The business, known as Jimmy Choo, took off into the stratosphere, and the shoes soon became the preferred footwear of smart ladies everywhere, despite—or perhaps because of—their hefty price tag. Somewhere along the line Tamara Mellon bought out Jimmy Choo, but she kept his name for the company. She reportedly cleared $100 million when she sold her majority shareholding in 2004. She was not yet 40.

In 2000 she married Matthew Mellon, whose father had committed suicide when Matthew was 18, and who inherited $25 million when he turned 21. Though there were 13 more trusts to come, Matthew was brought up by his mother in New York City to think that he wasn’t one of the rich Mellons. “Playboy” is an old-fashioned word, but it captures the antics of the young heir, who experienced all the drawbacks of too-much-too-soon trust-fund kids. As a student at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, he rented a 10-bedroom house for parties and fun.

Matthew and Tamara were married at Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough, in the presence of 300 friends. They lived in grand style in Belgravia and had a daughter named Araminta, who is now four and always referred to as Minty Mellon. Matthew began his own shoe business for men, called Harry’s of London, after a Mellon relation, and it was relatively successful. Built like sneakers, the shoes cost about $400 and had rubber soles with a stork logo, taken from the Mellon-family crest. But Matthew, who had a history of drug problems, eventually fell back into his old bad habits—disappearing, acting up—and the fairy-tale marriage fell apart in 2003.

I introduced myself to Tamara and said, “I talked to your mother in Beverly Hills yesterday. She gave me your number. I’m here to write about your former husband.”

“I’ll be happy to talk to you,” she replied, smiling and friendly, “but I shall have only the loveliest things to say about Matthew.”

I liked her answer. I liked her. It seemed clear that any animus between them at the time of their divorce had ceased.

The next morning, my phone rang. Before I had had a chance to contact Matthew Mellon, he was contacting me, obviously having heard from Tamara that I was in London to write about him. He said that he had just returned from India, where he and his beautiful girlfriend, Noelle Reno, had attended the week-long jet-set wedding of Vikram Chatwal, a 34-year-old hotel mogul, and his bride, the model Priya Sachdev. One of the first things he went on to say was that he had been clean and dry for two and a half years.

After we chatted for a bit, he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I didn’t. “Do we know each other?,” I asked.

“In 1994, after I overdosed in Los Angeles, you and [he named the son of a famous film star] took me to my first 12-step meeting, at Cedars Sinai hospital one Sunday morning.”

I was definitely in Los Angeles at that time, covering the O. J. Simpson trial, and I was a regular at the Sunday-morning meetings at Cedars Sinai, and the movie star’s son was a friend of mine. But I didn’t remember our taking Matthew Mellon to a meeting.

I knew that there was going to be a hearing on his case at the Bow Street Magistrates Court the following Thursday, and I knew that he was one of 18 people being charged with various offenses, but I told him I did not understand the charges. He invited me to go to his lawyer’s office the next day and said the lawyer would explain everything. The lawyer’s name was Ian Burton, and his handsome office was in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. When I saw Mellon there, I didn’t recognize him, but I realized that if he had just come out of an overdose the last time we were together he probably hadn’t been looking his best. The guy in Burton’s office had the air of a 30s movie star. Reeking of class, he was gracious, graceful, spoiled, and slightly bemused. He was beautifully dressed—gray suit and custom shoes, shirt, and tie—and he looked and acted rich, without a trace of nervousness to suggest that the next morning he would be in the dock. “You’re having lunch on Friday with Pavlos and Marie-Chantal at Cipriani, aren’t you?” he asked me across the conference-room table. He was talking about H.R.H. Crown Prince Pavlos of Greece and Princess Marie-Chantal, who had called me out of the blue earlier and asked me to lunch, clearly in order to bring me together with Mellon.

The lawyer explained that 18 people were to be charged, and that Mellon did not know any of the others. In other words, he was not part of a gang of criminals, which is how it sounded in the newspaper accounts I had read. Some of the accused are former cops, charged with running a crooked private-detective agency, tapping telephones and hacking into computers, sometimes with criminal intent.

Wiretapping seems to be the crime of the moment. Not since the O. J. Simpson trial has Hollywood, for instance, been so riveted by anything as it is by the upcoming wiretapping trial of Anthony Pellicano, the notorious Los Angeles private eye, which threatens to cause the downfall of a number of powerful people in the film industry. I actually once hired Pellicano, to follow John Sweeney, the man who had strangled my daughter, after he got out of prison. I liked Anthony, and we stayed in touch. He phoned me to say good-bye the night before he went to prison four years ago.

I arrived early on the morning of the hearing, and the courtroom was already crowded. Mellon didn’t look as though he belonged with the other 17 defendants. He was the last to be called to hear the charge against him read aloud and to hear the judge set the date for his next court appearance. Should he be convicted, he faces five years in jail, but that is highly unlikely. He claims that he didn’t know the private-detective agency he hired was involved in wiretapping or computer hacking. He simply wanted to obtain information about the status of his wife’s fortune, which is not in itself illegal, and he did not use the information for blackmail or any other criminal act.

Outside the courthouse, where photographers were waiting to get his picture, Mellon turned to me and said, “Noelle and I will probably see you at Barry and Diane’s picnic lunch the day before the Academy Awards.” He was referring to media mogul Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg. He added, “Alex von Furstenberg is one of my best friends.”

While I was in London, I did some catching up. One night I had a drink at Claridge’s with the West End impresario Michael White, who told me he was meeting another friend there after me. It turned out to be the model Kate Moss, who’s been in the papers so much lately, and she was witty, very friendly, absolutely wonderful. We all had Diet Cokes and a few laughs over our checkered pasts. The new theater critic for The Catholic Herald is Claus von Bülow, whose 1985 trial for the attempted murder of his wife, the heiress Sunny von Bülow, I covered for Vanity Fair. He has been living in London since his acquittal. On a day when Mark Bolland, one of the great public-relations geniuses, was on the front page of every British newspaper, I had dinner with him at Harry’s Bar. During his five controversial years as the deputy private secretary to Prince Charles, his function had been to improve the Prince’s public image after the death of Princess Diana. He is credited with selling Camilla Parker Bowles to a reluctant British public and with creating the strong father image of Charles with Princes William and Harry. Now on his own, Bolland represents some of the richest people in the world. The night we dined, the Prince of Wales was in the process of suing The Mail on Sunday for publishing some of his private diaries, written in 1997, when England was turning Hong Kong over to the Chinese. Bolland was with the Prince in Hong Kong when he described Chinese leaders as “appalling old waxworks” in one diary entry the newspaper later published. In his suit, the Prince claimed that the diaries were private, and a court judgment later barred the newspaper from publishing more extracts. Bolland, who revealed that as many as 70 people received copies of the diaries, appeared as a witness for The Mail on Sunday and told how he had leaked things to the press at the Prince’s request. Harry’s Bar is very popular with swanky people, not the sort of place you’d go if you were in hiding, so I was struck by Bolland’s casual aplomb all during dinner. When he dropped me off at Claridge’s later, I said, “I’ll see you on the 11 o’clock news.”

The night before I had left for London, I attended a dinner for 90 in the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant given by Barbara Walters and Don Hewitt to honor the film Good Night, and Good Luck,about the late Edward R. Morrow, and the three principals were there: George Clooney, who directed and played CBS producer Fred Friendly; David Strathairn, who played Murrow; and Frank Langella, who played CBS president Bill Paley.

I am a great admirer of Clooney, who was nominated for three Oscars: for directing Good Night, and Good Luck,for writing the screenplay, and for best supporting actor, in Syriana. Although I knew his aunt Rosemary Clooney back when I lived in Beverly Hills, and his cousin Miguel Ferrer, Rosie’s son by José Ferrer, was a friend of my kids’, I had never met George. He was clearly the star of the evening—funny, glamorous, modest, the way old-time stars were, like Clark Gable, whom he resembles.

I was seated next to the widow of Fred Friendly, and at one point someone came up behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders. I turned around, and it was George Clooney. I jumped up and said something like “It’s so great to meet you” and congratulated him on his nominations. He nodded me through my gush, and then said, “I’ve got something I want to tell you. Over the years I’ve been in rooms where you have been, but the moment was never right. This probably isn’t the right time either, at a party, but there you were, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

His eyes burrowed into mine, so intently that several people who came up to speak to him withdrew without interrupting. “I was a friend of Dominique’s,” he said, speaking of my daughter, who was murdered in 1982. “We were in acting class together. She was 22. I was 21. There was a group of us in class. We’d do scenes together and hang out together. Dominique was the first one in the group to get a picture—Spielberg’s Poltergeist. We knew she was being stalked by Sweeney. I hated him. We used to look out for her. She was afraid. Once, I was with her at a mall near La Cienaga, and I spotted him. We ran. I don’t think you knew this, but I gave a deposition before the trial about his stalking patterns.”

I was stunned. Twenty-four years later it was still as fresh in his mind as it was in mine. I couldn’t think of a word to say, I felt such a closeness to him. I finally said, “Can I hug you, George?”

“Sure,” he said, opening his arms. Then, turning to go back to the party, he said, “She would have been a star, Dominick.”

Isay this every year after Academy Awards week, but it really is the most fun time to be in Los Angeles and see Hollywood ritual at its best. I had lunch one day in the Polo Lounge with Kathy Griffin, known for her television series My Life on the D List, and she is the most hilarious person I’ve met in a long time. In a town filled with beautiful-looking people, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, or the von Dillers, as they are affectionately called, get the cream of the crop year after year at the outdoor picnic lunch they have in honor of Graydon Carter the day before the Oscars. A main topic of conversation at the picnic was the Pellicano case, and several of the key players in the upcoming trial who are thought to have used the wiretapping skills of the detective were among the guests. That always spices up a party. Adding to the glamour of the afternoon was Matthew Mellon, in white trousers and an orange sweater, having a good time with his girlfriend, Noelle Reno.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2006/05/dunne200605