Versace's Paradise

The Normandy Plaza Hotel has the sad pretension of a faded beauty whose best days are only a memory. It lies at the wrong end of Miami Beach, at Collins Avenue and 69th Street. The chic art deco hotels are a few miles south, on South Beach. The Normandy is garishly made up with a hot-pink exterior, purple trim and green awnings.

The lobby of the Normandy, with its peeling linoleum floor, is barren except for two soda machines, a deserted metal bar that hasn't served a martini or manhattan in decades and a few black-and-white photographs of Marilyn Monroe on the walls. Monroe once stayed at the Normandy. So did Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. The Normandy's most recent guest of note was Andrew Cunanan. He checked into the hotel on May 12 and left on July 14, the day before he murdered Gianni Versace.

"He was so well mannered," says Miriam Hernandez, the hotel manager. "He had a beautiful smile, and beautiful teeth."

Teeth are something Miriam would notice at the Normandy Plaza, whose guests tend to be missing teeth. Miriam herself is a soft-spoken Cuban woman with a sweet smile. She is about 60, with short gray hair worn like a stocking cap, and a faint mustache. She wears a chain with a cross around her neck.

"Sometimes the guests make me feel afraid," says Miriam. "But he was not a rough person. He was very gentle and nice." A man who is drinking from a can of beer stops at her desk for his room key. Miriam opens the cabinet behind her to get it. A semiautomatic pistol hangs from a nail on the back of the cabinet door.

Cunanan paid for his room in cash because the Normandy does not accept personal checks or credit cards. He did not give Miriam a $10 deposit to turn on his phone. He received no phone calls, no visitors, no mail. He talked to no one.

He never opened his curtains. He sat in his tiny room that smelled of Lysol and listened to the hum of his window air conditioner. He sat on a pink velvet chair at a kitchen table covered with linoleum, or he lay on a pink-and-blue polyester bedspread. He never cooked on the tiny, dented, rusted Fifties stove. He went out during the day to buy fast food, perhaps a pizza, a sub, a McDonald's hamburger, and some fashion magazines or a gay porno magazine. He returned immediately to eat and read. After he ate, he slept. When he woke at night to take a shower, he turned on the faucet and let the rust-colored water run out before he stepped in. After he dressed, he tidied up his room so neatly that the maid did not have to clean it. He went out late at night to Hombre and Twist and Liquid and Warsaw, gay bars and dance clubs on South Beach. He'd heard they were frequented by Versace.

But Cunanan got his information wrong. His timing was bad. That was the old Versace.

Versace lived four miles from the Normandy Plaza, on Ocean Drive, in Casa Casuarina, a restored 1930 Moorish castle patterned after the home of Christopher Columbus' son Diego in the Dominican Republic. It cost Versace $2.9 million, and more than $30 million to renovate in a style best described as gay baroque.

Casa Casuarina is the home of a Roman emperor--a Nero, not a Caesar. It is all decadent excess. It is a confluence of influences (Greek and Roman, for starters), with busts of Cupid and Pocahontas and Columbus and Confucius and Benito Mussolini. It is the mansion of a man whose philosophy of fashion was once summed up by his sister, Donatella, as, "Less is not more. Less is less." He once spent $3 million in two hours on furnishings for his Miami home. He was so excited by how much he had spent that when he returned home, he said, "I started to dance. I wanted to kiss myself."

In many ways, Versace's mansion typifies South Beach, a bouillabaisse of people of every nationality, race, religion and sexual persuasion. The district has a beach's laissez-faire lifestyle and a chic city's frenetic pace. At the same time there is palpable condescension toward anyone considered to be without style or beauty, which are the only moral virtues here.

Versace liked to throw lavish parties at Casa Casuarina for celebrity friends. There was no reason to leave his home at night, he once said, because it was the best place to be. He did occasionally venture out at night to a dance club, but mostly he found his pleasure in South Beach during the daylight and early evening, on the beach and the sidewalks, in cafés and restaurants and shops. He liked South Beach, he said, because it was the only place where he could relax. He moved effortlessly and usually unnoticed through the heavy human traffic, day and night.

"Everybody loves me," Versace said, and in South Beach almost everyone did love him. Except on the day of the murder. Before Versace left his house, the surveillance camera at the News Café picked up the shadowy image of Andrew Cunanan hanging around on the sidewalk, as if he were waiting for someone.

•

"South Beach was becoming what it is in 1988, three years before Versace came here," says Jerry Powers, publisher of Ocean Drive, the model and celebrity magazine that chronicles the lives of South Beach's beautiful people.

Powers is a balding man with thick eyebrows. He is someone else whose success is tied up with the life of the place. His first office, where he put together the premiere issue of his magazine, was over the News Café. One morning he looked out his window and saw Versace sitting below at a table. He hurried downstairs to introduce himself to "the maestro" and ask him for an interview. Versace told him to contact his PR people, but when Powers did, they said the maestro was too busy.

"I told Versace what they said," says Powers, "and he said, 'Come to my hotel, I'll give you all the time you need.' He even got us Claudia Schiffer for our first cover."

Conventional wisdom has it that Versace came to South Beach to relax. But he did do business there. "He got inspiration from the styles of the street kids," says Powers. "He saw the tans and the color of the water and the pastel colors of the buildings and it affected him. Before, he used mostly primary colors. And he could take it all in while letting his guard down. You know, in Italy they kidnap you for ransom. But America is a violent society. We had 18 homicides in Miami during the week of Versace's murder."

In the early Eighties South Beach was a decrepit stretch of crumbling deco hotels inhabited by retirees waiting to die, crack dealers, Mariel boat people, a few surfer dudes and some brave people who wanted to live a pleasant life on the beach.

Then German photographers discovered it as a beautiful, cheap locale to shoot their summer catalogs. They began to bring in their models, some of whom stayed to live here. The models attracted men and art directors. Today there are 20 modeling agencies on the beach, and at any given time 4000 young men and women work or wait to work as models.

The Michele Pommier Building at 81 Washington Avenue in South Beach is a silver art deco structure with a circular entranceway of glass blocks. Inside there are floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Michele Pommier herself sits at a glass table and the walls around her are covered with photographs of the beautiful people she represents. Pommier, a conventionally pretty woman of 50, opened her modeling agency in 1988. She says it was South Beach's first agency and it is certainly one of the most successful today.

Pommier says the models were the founding settlers of this American Riviera. "Claudia Schiffer used to Roller-blade down Ocean Drive five years ago," she says. Then came the clubs like Liquid and Bar None, the restaurants like China Grill and the local magazines like Ocean Drive.

"The magazines and the clubs find us," says Pommier. "The girls don't get work because they're in Ocean Drive. Ocean Drive needs the models to exist, not the opposite. The same with the clubs." And then, according to Pommier, came the celebrities. She included Versace in this list. "He introduced South Beach to the fashion world by making his home here," says Pommier.

Pommier's assistant enters the room with two mugs of coffee. She puts them down on the glass table. Pommier glares at the mugs, then at her assistant. "Don't we have napkins?" she says. The assistant leaves and returns moments later with napkins. No one trifles with Pommier, especially not the models and the media.

A few days later, at midnight, dozens of models crowd the VIP room of Bar None, waiting for Pommier to arrive. Most of the models are men. They lie back, insouciantly, on couches against the wall, deep in conversation. The women stand around looking over their shoulders for celebrities.

The male models are all handsome. The female models are exotic looking, but not conventionally pretty. They are dressed in retro outfits--short Qiana shirts that expose their navels, bell-bottom pants and platform shoes. They stand in that model's pose, stomach thrust forward, shoulders rounded like predatory birds on a branch.

Actor Peter Weller, who is in Florida directing an Elmore Leonard movie, Gold Coast, is on hand, sitting unnoticed in the VIP room. He stands, looks down at the bar, turns and waits for someone to recognize him. A model goes over to him and introduces herself. They talk intimately, with their faces close.

Well after midnight, a light appears at the entrance to Bar None. Pommier enters, followed by a television camera crew. The camera's light is so close to her face that she's the only person in the room who's clearly visible. "Extra [the TV show] has been filming me all night," she says. "First at the Forge, then at the China Grill, now here." She smiles. "See what happens when you put 'Michele Pommier' on an invitation?"

•

"We're still trying to answer the question of how Cunanan went undetected during his time in Miami Beach," says Alfred Boza, a Miami Beach Police Department detective and spokesman. "He was not moving about with impunity. Someone at Miami Subs recognized him and called us, but he was gone when we arrived. The problem is Miami Beach's congestion. Sixty percent of the people on the beach are not permanent residents. They're from Miami or New Zealand or wherever. The influx of strangers is so great and Cunanan's look was so average it was hard to pick him out. He fit the description of any number of Latins on the beach. In fact, we grabbed a guy at Versace's memorial service who turned out to be a Miami Herald reporter."

•

In the late afternoon sun, the beach is still crowded with sunbathers. Beautiful blonde and brunette women walk into the pale green water to cool off, then return to their blankets to sunbathe topless in thong bikinis. An older man with a perfect tan and a dyed blond ponytail tosses a Frisbee to his skinny boyfriend at the water's edge. The old guy, too, is wearing a thong, exposing his small, drooping ass.

Ocean Drive is crowded with exotic cars moving slowly north and south. The drivers and passengers lean out the windows and shout at pretty girls walking up the crowded sidewalk. The walkers stare at the people sitting at the outdoor café tables. The patrons stare back. Staring at people is the major activity on South Beach. It is less a place of conversation than it is a place to worship beauty.

At Wet Willie's, boys in bathing suits that show off their chiseled abs (chiseled abs for boys are big in South Beach), and their girlfriends in low-cut bikinis that show off their tiny waists and navels (navels for girls are big in South Beach), are getting rowdy as they drink. The girls sit on their boyfriends' laps, kicking up their legs and laughing loudly. Their boyfriends nuzzle their necks, shout from table to table and yell into their cell phones.

A little farther south, the outdoor tables of Café Milano are filled with a more chic clientele in their late 20s and early 30s. The crowd is dressed stylishly in Seventies retro for a late lunch. Café Milano is the kind of place Andrew Cunanan would have frequented, before he fell on hard times and had to eat subs in his room at the Normandy Plaza.

Inside, the restaurant's darkly wooded dining room is deserted, except for a few waiters in yellow shirts, sitting at a table, speaking Italian. The walls around them are decorated with faux Picasso prints and drawings.

"We opened in 1990," says Milano's owner, Massimo Barracca. "Versace was our first customer. He ate macaroni with mozzarella, tomatoes, basil and extra virgin olive oil. He would sit at a table with friends. Only at lunch. He was a lunch person, not a night person. He could go to late-night clubs in any city. He loved South Beach because it has such a large gay community. He could be himself here. He was accepted as a normal person. He felt free here. There's no real gay community in Italy. South Beach is just a village, though, like Italy in a lot of ways. A little city on the beach. It reminded Versace of Italy."

At the News Café, the sidewalk tables are filled with beautiful people and tourists who stare at the beautiful people. Inside, however, the small bar is deserted except for a gray-bearded man in a Hawaiian shirt watching Oprah on the television over the bar. Oprah's guest is Madonna, dressed in a pale-blue suit that makes her look fragile, like a suburban mother. It's a look Madonna has cultivated ever since her daughter, Lourdes, was born.

"So tell me," says Oprah. "What are you going to teach Lourdes about men?"

Madonna giggles like a girl, and blushes. The audience hoots, laughs and applauds.

A waitress walks by the TV and stops. "Oh, look! Madonna! I served her last week."

Oprah says, "What do you have to say about Dennis Rodman?"

The audience whoops and applauds and shrieks again. Madonna, looking quite stern now, waits until the noise dies down before she says, "I have no respect for a man who kisses and tells." The audience applauds her answer. People must have forgotten her documentary, Truth or Dare, in which Madonna exposes the foibles of her friends and her then lover, Warren Beatty.

Madonna was a friend of Versace's. They used to alternate New Year's Eve parties every year. One year, Versace sent only ten invitations to Madonna and she was insulted. So she boycotted the party.

The Versace Boutique is around the corner from the News Café. It is often deserted, except for a few muscleboys dressed in black, who stand with their arms folded across their chests at each of the four corners inside the store. They look like bodyguards, but what are they guarding? Versace's baroque prints?

Versace's reputation as an outrageous, risk-taking designer isn't really accurate. He was not a daring designer, but a timid one. His designs were derivative, influenced by classical Greek and Roman designs right down to his trademark Medusa's head. They were mathematically and geometrically plotted out, as if by an engineer. They were balanced, a rose on the left breast, an identical rose on the right breast. Then Versace colored them in with primary colors in the manner of a child compulsively unable to color outside the lines. Versace was a structured man, at least in his work, and, his friends say, in his life, too. That may be why he loved South Beach. It is unstructured. It is all soft edges blurring into one another. Its colors are muted pastels that bleed one into another. Life on South Beach is blurred with people of every class and race mingling in the same clubs and restaurants like paella, until they all become one.

•

"I'll bet everyone loves your hair," says Kevin, as he snips and cuts.

"Why?" asks the silver-haired man in his 50s.

"It's so thick and soft," says Kevin. Snip. Snip.

"Yeah, but it's gray."

"Oh, I have boys come in here all the time and ask me to put silver in their hair. It's to die for."

(continued on page 215)Versace's Paradise(continued from page 94)

Kevin gets some gel from his station and begins rubbing it into the man's hair. Kevin is tall and thin, with long blond hair cut like Prince Valiant's. He was Versace's hairdresser at Oribe, on the corner of Collins and Ninth. The walls of Oribe are decorated with giant paintings of naked mermaids.

"I was called to their Bal Harbor store one evening to do Donatella's hair," says Kevin. "She liked what I did so I was summoned to their house one day to do Versace's hair. He was down-to-earth. So shy. Which made me not nervous. After that, he got me this job with Oribe."

Kevin blow-dries the man's silvery hair, fixing it just so with his fingertips. "The murder was an awful thing," he says. "I'm afraid celebrities will be fearful about coming here now. They thought it was so free before."

The silver-haired man thanks Kevin for his haircut and goes to the front desk to pay his bill. The haircut costs $75. He leaves Kevin a $10 tip. The last haircut Andrew Cunanan got in South Beach, at Supercuts, cost him $11. He didn't bother to get a shave because after he murdered Versace he let his beard grow as a disguise.

"I heard they were going to sell the house," says Antonio Martucci in his accented English. "The family can't bear to live there now and be reminded everyday of the murder." Martucci is standing behind the bar of his restaurant, Farfalla.

"I heard Mike Tyson was gonna buy it," says a man, eating linguine with clam sauce at the bar. "The furnishings and everything for $45 million."

"I heard that, too," says Martucci. "But I don't think the family will sell it to him."

Farfalla is an old-world Italian restaurant in the middle of South Beach where Versace used to order pizza and, on occasion, stop for an early dinner.

"He'd come in at 7:30 P.M.," says Martucci. "He'd sit by the window with his boyfriend. He was a quiet person, not like a typical Italian. You know how we are--we scream. His sister, now, she wore lots of gold and talked a lot."

Martucci says Versace tended to frequent mostly Italian places in South Beach ("Not gay places," he says) because they reminded him of his birthplace, Reggio Calabria. Martucci points across the street, at an ice cream store, Cocco Fresco.

"After dinner he always stopped there for a gelato because the owner was Italian. But now it's owned by Middle Easterners." He shrugs. "Versace loved it here because he wanted to re-create Italy in South Beach."

After dinner at Farfalla and a gelato at Cocco Fresco, Versace liked to walk north on Washington Avenue so he could window-shop. On rare occasions, he'd stop in the gay bar Twist for a glass of wine. Cunanan stopped in Twist, too, the day before he murdered Versace.

It's an innocuous-looking bar, no different from any other bar except that its customers are all men. A blonde woman stops in not long after the murder. One of the patrons questions her.

"Are you lost?"

The woman says, "No."

"Then you must be a tourist."

"No." She looks annoyed.

"Don't you know what kind of a bar this is?"

"Yes, I know." She finally tells him she is there because she's doing research on Versace for a magazine article.

"Oh, yes, he stopped in here once or twice. Very quiet. Then he left. I heard the family is going to sell the house. I hope someone beautiful buys it." He shrugs. "But who cares?"

•

Andrew Cunanan also frequented the late-night dance clubs Warsaw and Liquid, which he'd heard Versace frequented. But according to Versace's friends and employees, the stories that made the rounds were not true. At one time, perhaps, but not after the mysterious change in his lifestyle that happened several years ago.

"He never went to such clubs," says a servant. "He would go only as a courtesy to guests. Oh, I'm sure he had a wild side when he was younger and it served him well."

"He used to go to clubs like Warsaw in his early years in South Beach," says Tara Solomon, the Miami Herald columnist known as "the queen of the night." But, she adds, "not after he got sick."

A few years ago, the press reported that Versace was suffering from a form of inner-ear cancer. It was also rumored he had AIDS. When he appeared healthier, he was quoted as saying he was thrilled to have more life to live. But he was different, more sedate, quiet. Perhaps Versace had come to feel uncomfortable in the world with which he had become identified.

South Beach club behavior is "freaky, unabashedly hedonistic and decadent," says Solomon. "The scene encourages uninhibited behavior that many people believe is spiritually bankrupt." Solomon has covered the scene for several years and has strong opinions. "You know, Versace came here to get inspiration. He drew as much from the beach as we did from him. South Beach existed before he got here and he just knew a good thing when he saw it."

Tara Solomon is a short, curvaceous, 40-year-old woman with unlined, ghostly white skin. She doesn't wear clothes, she wears costumes. And she doesn't much like Versace's colorful shirts. "I mean, you can't wear Versace every day," she maintains.

Solomon, dressed like Irma la Douce, arrives at Liquid at two a.m. "They're all so dark, loud, smoky and dirty," she says. "To strangers it's just another dark club. But dark places are appealing to celebrities because they can be anonymous in them." The music is deafening. Couples, mostly women (it's "girls'" night at Liquid), are dancing in the smoky darkness. Solomon moves around the dance floor to a banquette and sits down. Around her, girls in black leather and bustiers are kissing. Tough-looking Hispanic boys walk past, staring at the girls. The crowd looks as if it was plucked en masse from a Calvin Klein ad. One guy, shirtless, is wearing his pants so low around his hips that his assiduously ruffled pubic hair is showing. There's a pornographic cartoon playing on the wall behind Solomon. "These people come to distract themselves," she says, shouting to be heard. "That's what it's all about. Distraction and denial. They think that they're invincible. They reinvent themselves every night."

Tara sees Ingrid Casares, the club owner, who is famous as the gal pal of such celebrities as Madonna and K.D. Lang and Versace. Ingrid looks like a Latin Audrey Hepburn, with closely cropped black hair and big black eyes.

Recently she hosted a party for Lang, who had to share billing with RuPaul. Lang sat in the same banquette Tara is sitting in. She complained about the music.

"I hate fucking disco," Lang said. Then, 'Jesus, it's fucking cold."

When it was time for Lang to take the stage with RuPaul, Casares led her through the crowd. RuPaul was talking into the microphone. Finally RuPaul handed Lang the mike and she thanked the audience for coming and returned to her seat. A man asked her, "How does it feel to be upstaged by a no-talent drag queen?"

Lang said, "The fucking shit I got to do. Tomorrow I go to an AIDS benefit." She raised her eyebrows. "On Ivana Trump's yacht."

When Cunanan went to Liquid during his stay in Miami, he reinvented himself, too. He struck up a conversation with some drag queens, telling them he was working on a research paper for graduate school.

It's 3:30 a.m. when Solomon leaves Liquid for the short walk around the corner to the gay men's club Warsaw. The atmosphere inside Warsaw is not much different from Liquid's, except that all the clubbers are boys. The huge ballroom dance floor is packed with what Tara calls "genetically blessed and testosterone-filled boys," shirtless and muscular, dancing manically as if there will be no tomorrow. Solomon shouts above the din, "More people have a need to lose themselves than they do to find themselves." She walks past the stage where a lone, muscular guy, wearing only a gold lamé G-string, is gyrating and thrusting his hips at the dancers below him.

Tara goes to the upstairs bar and orders a drink. "They usually have amateur strip nights on Wednesdays," she says. "Just good clean fun." Tara prefers gay clubs to straight clubs, she says, "because I feel protected. Gay men are peacemakers. Gay clubs are also more uninhibited when it comes to sex."

One local straight bachelor says he loves to go to Warsaw with female dates because "when they see two men having sex it turns them on. They get so aroused, they're all over me."

Versace liked to go to Warsaw, too, before he "got sick." He would come with some "pretty young boys," according to Max Blandford, Warsaw's manager. Versace shunned the VIP sections and preferred to spend his time in the trenches with the wildly dancing boys.

•

It's 4:45 in the morning and there's still a line of clubbers trying to get into Liquid. The streets are crowded with young women and men, their eyes glassy, staggering down the sidewalks. In the street in front of Liquid, a policeman has handcuffed a man who is bent over the hood of his car. Across the way the 13th Street parking garage entrance is crowded with homeless men.

The 13th Street garage is where Cunanan parked the red Chevy truck he stole from William Reese, the man he killed in New Jersey. It's also where he ran to change his clothes after he murdered Versace.

At five a.m., the late-night clubbers wander down to the News Café for breakfast. The café is still playing loud dance music over its speakers. When the last of the late-nighters leaves after six o'clock, a woman with gray hair comes out with a hose and begins hosing down the tables, chairs and sidewalk. The stereo speakers switch to soft and soothing chamber music. The breakfast waiters begin to arrive.

The older, early-morning crowd begins to arrive a little later. Men in jogging shorts and flip-flops and women in spandex bra tops, shorts and sneakers sit down with their newspapers and order coffee. This is the crowd Versace was a part of when he left his mansion on the morning of July 15. He talked briefly with a waitress and began walking back toward his mansion at 8:40 a.m. He was unaware he was being followed by a disheveled, backpack-toting man wearing a white baseball cap, a white shirt and black shorts.

When Versace got to the stone steps of his mansion at 8:42 a.m., the man following him spoke to him, according to witnesses. Then the two men began to tussle. Versace tried to pull away from the man. The man pulled out a gun and shot Versace in the head. As Versace fell to the steps, the man aimed his gun at him and shot Versace a second time in the head. Then he turned and calmly walked away.

Inside, Versace's chef was preparing his breakfast (waffles and fruit). Antonio D'Amico heard the shots. He came running out the front door to find his lover dying on the steps. He screamed, "Gianni! Gianni!" Then he saw the killer walking away. He ran after him, shouting. The killer turned and leveled his gun at D'Amico. D'Amico stopped, backed off and ran back to his dying lover.

Inside the mansion, a servant was screaming into the telephone at the 911 operator, "A man's been shot!"

•

What did Cunanan say to Versace when Versace reached the steps to his house and began to open the wrought-iron gate?

Perhaps it was, "Gianni, it's me! Don't you remember?"

Versace turns to see a man who has fallen on hard times. Even if he had once met Cunanan when he had been a pampered young lover of older men, Versace probably would not have recognized him now. To Versace, this man was probably just another of those annoying people who accosted him because he was famous. "I refuse to be molested," Versace once said. "I put a do not disturb notice on my life." So Versace turns to the man and says, "No, I'm afraid I don't know you." He turns to go through the gate.

"But we met once. You must remember. You must!"

The stranger reaches out a hand to grab Versace's arm. To make him remember. To force him to stay there until he does remember. And when he does, when Versace's face breaks into a broad smile, and he says, "Oh, of course, now I remember. How are you? Come in. Come into my life," then the stranger's life will be righted again. He will return again to that privileged, indulgent life of his recent past.

But Versace does not remember. He tries to pull his arm from the younger man's grasp. In that instant, rebuffed again by a wealthy, older gay man, Cunanan becomes infuriated. Without thinking, without having planned it, he reaches for his gun. He points it at the older man's head and pulls the trigger, as so many spurned suitors have done in the heat of rejected passion.