He was enabled by drugs. His job as a pharmacy clerk had had its advantages. He stole prescription drugs and sold them, and [Maureen Orth] posits that this way he slid into becoming a major dealer of crystal meth.

Saturday, May 22, 1999

By Maureen Orth

HarperCollins, 254 pages, $36.50

If there ever was a sadder tale than the brief, frantic life of Andrew Cunanan, it belongs in fiction. Murderer of the fabled frock designer Gianni Versace and four other men (two, perhaps three, of them former lovers), in 1997 he became the first gay serial killer to be tracked across the United States in a Lexus by an FBI terrified of repeating the O. J. investigative slip-ups, and by tabloid TV and print media thrilled into new realms of hysteria. He killed himself at 27 in a Florida houseboat owned by a gay nightclub owner, after the largest failed manhunt in history. Maureen Orth, in the aptly titled Vulgar Favors , and Gary Indiana in Three Month Fever , have cashed in on this modern passion play.

Orth, a Vanity Fair contributing editor and wife of Tim Russert, NBC's Washington bureau chief, is a charter member of the chattering classes and a riveting writer. This is her first book, and while it doesn't read quite like an extended magazine piece, it does fall into the trap of "he said, she said" -- or in this case, "he said, he said, but he said, then he said." Orth introduces so many members of the gay community, and quotes them so relentlessly, one thinks one has fallen into a particularly gossipy high school where everyone is mired in vanity and narcissism and self-hatred. Everyone fabricates, everyone whines a lot, everyone hates everyone else except when they are en- gaging in brutal sex with prostheses, rubber, whips, clamps and really bad chemicals.

Orth's book -- unwittingly, one hopes -- reads like an ad for the shoot-'em-all wing of the Christian right, and while detailed to the point of queasiness, never really shows us why Cunanan became a killer, other than laying the whole blame at the feet of the pernicious drug, crystal methedrine.

Gary Indiana, a downtown Manhattan journalist for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, in contrast, weaves an absorbing, though necessarily ill-founded, hybrid of fiction and reporting, using Cun-anan's reported words to construct his inner life. Indiana is a hypnotic writer, almost literary. He loves words, uses them beautifully and he enters into his hypothetical version of Cunanan's life with energy and commitment. By the end of the book he is Cunanan's champion, which is unnerving, although his compassion is impressive. Read in concert with Vulgar Favors , which performs a check on Indiana's infatuation, Three Month Fever offers some insight into who this pitiable character was and why he did what he did.

As reported by Orth and inhabited by Indiana, Cunanan was the fourth child of first-generation immigrants, by far the most brilliant, IQ-testing 147 as a boy, and all the resources and hopes of the family were laid on his shoulders. He was ambitious, a born social-climber who loved art and design and all the good things in life, and he had an imagination that was, from the beginning, overreaching.

He knew he was gay from a very young age, but could never come out to his parents. He felt it would destroy his Italian-born mother, a woman so terrorized by the insecurity of immigrant life that she took refuge in a masochistic relationship with Jesus, spending most of her time on her knees ignoring her family. His Filipino father, who was equally ambitious but nowhere near as smart, was cashiered out of the brokerage business for stealing from clients.

Fighting his way up the social ladder as a scholarship student at his tony private school in San Diego, Calif., Cunanan became a fantasist and a social convenor who bought friendships with all the money his family had left. He reconciled his own ambition, his closeted sexuality and his family's achievement imperative by deciding he would become a kept man, preferably kept by a closeted, waspy prince of industry who looked like Tom Cruise. Therefore, he took Sebastian Flyte of Brideshead Revisited as a model; he carried a teddy bear, courted elderly gay men, boosted designer clothes from department stores and refused to spoil his looks with difficult, boring study. He developed an encyclopedic connoisseur's knowledge of wine, food, objets d'art, interior design, celebrities, show tunes, opera, painting and the holiday haunts of the rich and foolish. Pretty heady stuff for a junior clerk at Thrifty's Drug Mart, his only known job.

He finagled his way into Gamma Mu, a gay club that hosts "fly-ins," $3,000-a-pop parties that enable older closeted men to meet boys like Cunanan. For several years he was the paid companion of a 70-year-old man who gave him an allowance and a luxury car and showed him off as a clever, pretty trophy who, as everyone realized, was a pathological liar but a good time nonetheless. The relationship ended, mostly because Cunanan demanded a $200,000 Mercedes and was cheating on his protector with two or three waspy young men who looked like Tom Cruise. All three immediately dumped the newly vulnerable and perennially needy Cunanan, and he went haywire.

He was enabled by drugs. His job as a pharmacy clerk had had its advantages. He stole prescription drugs and sold them, and Orth posits that this way he slid into becoming a major dealer of crystal meth. The use of the drug -- up some 600 per cent in the United States in the past five years -- is called tweaking, and it's a bad bad thing; if Orth is to be believed, it is almost more poisonous to the gay world than the HIV virus, "bringing to the fore practices long confined to the seamy underbelly of gay life." According to Orth, pre-pubescent children drugged with "Special K" (a particularly effective date-rape drug) are kidnapped, tied up and abused for hours, and gang bangs and brutal sadomasochism are endemic.

A languid participation in these activities blunted Cunanan's already tenuous hold on reality. Meth and pornography go together, and he became obsessed by extra-hard porn and porn stars. He decided he liked inflicting pain. He shot up adrenaline-laced testosterone. He mainlined downers. He owed $40,000 on his American Express card. Rejected by all his lovers, with no job or opportunities, losing his looks and getting fat, he decided to go out in a blaze, punishing everyone who'd taken his gifts, laughed at his jokes and ignored the tortured soul that he was. Versace, as the emblem of the fatuous money-and celebrity-crazed life of the gay bar scene, was his ticket to the fame he could never otherwise reach, which his childhood had taught him to expect.

If nothing else, Orth and Indiana indicate that Cunanan's killing spree was enabled by a subculture that celebrated a demonic sexuality based entirely on physical beauty and lack of emotional affect. Not one of Cunanan's thousands of friends was able to reach the person behind the creature. Both books form a worrisome indictment of the sexual marketplace in the gay world, and one is certain they are, at least in part, overwrought and overstated. If not, Armageddon is close upon us.