Taubman, Alfred (Sotheby's Chairman) - The Rich...
The Rich and the Damned
July 2002
After the sentencings of Sotheby’s chairman Alfred Taubman and C.E.O. Diana Brooks, the author took his seat at the Moxley murder trial. There he found plenty to curl his hair, from photos of the victim to the ongoing campaign to pin the crime on Michael Skakel’s tutor.
I had fully expected to be back in the South of France at this time, staying at the Hôtel du Cap in Antibes, attending the Cannes Film Festival, and making a side trip to Monte Carlo to check on the late Edmond Safra’s nurse Ted Maher, at the Monaco prison where he continues to languish. Instead, I am spending my days in Norwalk, Connecticut, attending the trial of Michael Skakel, the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, who stands accused of the vicious murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley 27 years ago. After all, it was my 1993 novel, A Season in Purgatory, that put the spotlight back on this long-dormant case.
Before Michael Skakel’s trial began, I went to the sentencing of Alfred Taubman, the former chairman of Sotheby’s, the auction house, and a week later to the sentencing of Diana “Dede” Brooks, the former C.E.O. of Sotheby’s, whose trial for price-fixing with Christie’s, the rival auction house, ended with Taubman’s being found guilty, after Brooks had testified against him. Christie’s got off scot-free, although there are rumors that Sir Anthony Tennant, the former chairman of Christie’s in London, with whom Taubman had a dozen meetings, is being ostracized in England, where price-fixing is not an extraditable crime. Even though the enormously popular Taubman was found guilty of price-fixing by the jury, and the general perception of people in his social circles—however much they may continue to love him—is that he is guilty, he himself firmly insists on his innocence, and anyone who thinks otherwise automatically becomes his enemy. I saw him a few nights before the sentencing at a mutual friend’s house for dinner, and he frosted me when I went up to speak to him, even though I had written sympathetically about him in this magazine. He was angry, I was told the next day by one of the people handling his public relations, because I had written that he had been found guilty. He declined to make a statement at the sentencing when Judge George Daniels gave him the opportunity, and he was rebuked by the judge in turn for failing to show remorse.
On the evening we dined in the same house, Taubman’s wife, Judy, who is not everyone’s cup of chamomile in that part of New York society that gets written about in the fashion and social press, spoke to me in a haughty manner, without looking at me, and said that Alfred’s lawyers did not like it when he was reported as having been “out in society” while the case was still in court. Her superior manner ticked me off. “She’s been hanging out with too many duchesses,” I wrote later that night in my journal. I asked her if she was going to be in the courtroom on the day of the sentencing. On the advice of her husband’s lawyers, she had not attended the trial or shown up to hear the verdict. She said no, she was not going to the sentencing, and she was quite emphatic. Why?, I asked. Again, she said, it was on the advice of Alfred’s lawyers, and besides, there would be too many photographers taking her picture. I told her I thought she should be there. I felt it was a terrible time for Alfred Taubman to be alone, and she could hardly have an adverse effect on the jury, as the lawyers feared, because the verdict had already been arrived at. I’m sure that what I said did nothing to change her plans, but change them she did. On April 22, the morning of the sentencing, she arrived in the courtroom with her extended family.
This is what I wrote in my journal that night:
Then the glamorous Judy Taubman walked into the courtroom from a door to the left of the judge’s bench, which jurors had used during the trial. It was her first appearance in the courtroom. She was perfectly dressed in beige, looking both stylish and understated. All eyes were on the international social figure. She looked straight ahead, making eye contact with no one. She was surrounded by family members, who filed into the front row in what appeared to be a prearranged order of seating. There was Alfred’s son William and his wife; Alfred’s daughter, Gayle Kalisman, who had been so lovely to her father during the trial, and her husband, Dr. Michael Kalisman; Judy’s daughter, Tiffany, and her husband, Louis Dubin; then Judy; and then another of Alfred’s sons, Robert, and his wife. You almost couldn’t see Judy, although she was the main attraction.
A reporter from the Detroit Free Press named Jennifer Dixon, who had flown in the night before to cover the sentencing for Taubman’s hometown paper, leaned over the photographer Jill Krementz and asked me, about Judy’s dress, “Would you call that color taupe?”
“Beige,” I replied.
“Yves Saint Laurent,” added Christopher Mason, who was sitting on the other side of me. On such matters, I have learned during the trial to go with Christopher. He is writing a book on the Sotheby’s-Christie’s scandal called When the Gavel Falls, and he knows more about the ins and outs of this story than anyone else.
Then Alfred Taubman entered the courtroom from the same door. He is still massive, and wonderfully tailored, but there was a look of defeat on his face that I had not seen earlier. Before he took his seat, he went to the first row and walked down the line of his family members. Everyone rose and kissed him. When he got to Judy, she looked at him with a loving smile and stood up and kissed him on the lips. Her moment had come, and she rose to it.
Judge George Daniels, whom I had admired enormously throughout the trial, is a very dignified man and a very smart one. He had been inundated with 90 letters from some very important people, including Henry Kissinger, Queen Noor of Jordan, President Gerald Ford, and Barbara Walters, asking, sometimes imploring, him not to send Taubman to prison, in view of his multiple good works, age, and health. I read all of them, and I was largely unimpressed. They felt as if they had been solicited, not offered from the heart. They were all typed too uniformly. I was really moved only once, and that was by the letter from one of Taubman’s grandsons, saying how much he would miss his grandfather. It brought tears to my eyes. Judy’s letter had moments of warmth in describing her marriage, but it would have had a stronger effect if it had been in her own handwriting, on her own notepaper, instead of being typed like a legal document.
The letters certainly didn’t move Judge Daniels. When Taubman was asked to stand, the judge spoke quite harshly to him: “Price-fixing is a crime whether it’s committed in the grocery store or the halls of a great auction house.” He went on, “[Mr. Taubman] has neither acknowledged responsibility nor shown any remorse.” It had been a serious mistake for Taubman not to make a statement, but one of his advisers told me later that Alfred had felt it would be an acknowledgment of guilt. Daniels sentenced him to a year and a day in prison and fined him $7.5 million. Taubman is to report on August 1, and he will be eligible for parole after 101⁄2 months. The photographers outside the courthouse did not pounce on Judy as she had feared. In fact, in one photograph published in the New York Daily News, one of Taubman’s public-relations people, Laura Murray of Westhill Partners, was identified as Mrs. Taubman.
A week later Dede Brooks was sentenced in the same courtroom by the same judge. She too had had letters on her behalf asking for leniency, one of them from Mayor Bloomberg. A large contingent of her family and friends showed up in court. Early on she had pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Taubman. The hope now was that her possible three-year sentence would be reduced, and it was. She got no jail time, but she got three years of probation, including six months of house arrest. She also got a fine of $350,000 and was ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service. Though Brooks apologized to all the people she had hurt, Judge Daniels chastised her severely, saying, “You have traded your title of C.E.O. to be branded a thief.… The notoriety you have gained will outlive you.”
On May 21, Alfred Taubman filed an appeal for a new trial, claiming that Judge Daniels had withheld crucial material from the jury.
At a benefit dinner for PAX, the gun-violence prevention organization, at Cipriani in New York, where I was given an award, I made a speech about guns and violence. It gave me a chance to blow my stack over the fact that it’s easier to get a gun license than a driver’s license. I talked about how the infamous Menendez brothers produced a stolen driver’s license for identification to buy the two 12-gauge shotguns they used to shoot their parents to death. A few nights later I spoke to a very dressy crowd at the Plaza for the Freedom Institute, an alcohol-and-drug-counseling center in New York I had once attended which greatly enhanced my life. I did my drunkalogue about my down-and-out years. When I speak about that time of my life, I always say thanks Upstairs that I’m still here.
I flew out to Los Angeles for one night to attend Billy Wilder’s memorial service at the Motion Picture Academy on Wilshire Boulevard. Billy was 95, and most of his director friends are dead, but he had kept up with the young directors and actors he admired, such as Cameron Crowe and Curtis Hanson, and Kevin Spacey and Billy Bob Thornton, as well as with such members of the Old Guard as Sidney Poitier, Tony Curtis, Stanley Donen, George Schlatter, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., Larry Gelbart, and Jerry Moss. Billy Bob Thornton was wearing a knitted stocking cap, and I couldn’t imagine what his connection to Billy was. He said he had once worked as a waiter at a New Year’s Eve party at Stanley Donen’s house in Bel Air, passing a tray of fish heads, by which I assumed he meant caviar. He said that when he served Wilder the director asked him if he was an actor. He said yes. Billy asked him if he could write. He said yes. Billy told him he would make it faster as a writer than as an actor, because his looks weren’t exactly movie-star quality. When Thornton won his Academy Award for writing Sling Blade, he thanked Billy Wilder. Billy had no idea why, so he phoned Thornton, who reminded him of the incident, and they became friends.
Later there was a dinner for 30 at Le Dome on Sunset Boulevard. I sat next to the brilliantly funny Elaine May, who is having a serious romance with Stanley Donen, who had given one of the best eulogies. Kevin Spacey, who had delivered much of his eulogy in a Billy Wilder–type German accent, briefly sat on my other side. That day Robert Blake had tried to get released on bail on the grounds that he was dyslexic and couldn’t read the thousands of pages of paper his lawyer had sent him. The judge denied his request. Spacey told me he had recently attended an acting class conducted by the famous teacher Milton Katselas in order to watch a certain scene. He looked behind him, and there was Robert Blake, who winked at him in recognition. Blake’s eyes looked haunted, said Spacey. A few days later, Blake was arrested for the murder of his scam-artist wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.
Defense attorneys never want the jury to see the death pictures of the victim in a murder trial. “Prejudicial!” they always cry out, but they usually lose the argument, and rightly so. It’s important for a jury to see what an alleged killer is accused of having done. I remember looking with horror at the face of Kitty Menendez, with her jaw, tongue, teeth, nose, and eye blown off, and at the face of Nicole Brown Simpson, with her neck slit from ear to ear and all the gore underneath showing. I felt the same way looking at the pictures of the dead Martha Moxley. That sweet child’s head and face had been beaten to a pulp with such force that the shaft of the steel golf club had broken into pieces, and with one sharp end she had been stabbed through the neck. Her skull was broken. There was damage to her brain. Martha had long blond hair, and the shaft took a large clump with it into her neck. When the hair came out on the other side, it looked like a six-inch piece of string. Her jeans had been pulled down, and her killer had rolled her panties down. No trace of semen had been found, and there had been no penetration. When the pictures were being shown, the only member of the Moxley family to remain in the courtroom was Cara Moxley, the wife of Martha’s brother, John. She had tears in her eyes. Rushton Skakel Jr., Michael’s brother, didn’t look at the pictures on the screen, but Michael and Julie, their sister, did. The police chief of Houston, to whom the police chief of Greenwich, unused to murder cases, had sent the pictures for comment back in 1975, described the murder as “overkill.”
This is the third trial where I have heard the famous forensic scientist Dr. Henry Lee, whose testimony as a member of the defense team of O. J. Simpson helped lead to an acquittal, tell the same joke. Perhaps “shtick” is a better word than “joke.” I heard him employ it at the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in Palm Beach as well as at the Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles. It invariably makes him the darling of the jury. He pretends to forget someone’s name and then says, in a Charlie Chan voice, “You people all look alike to me.” No one enjoys his humor more than he does.
This is a rich-people trial. Michael Skakel has a bodyguard, named Kris Steele, who also works as a bodyguard for the singer Michael Bolton, who happens to be a friend of Skakel’s million-dollar lawyer, Mickey Sherman. During breaks, Skakel goes outside with the guard and chats with Julie or their brothers Rushton junior, Stephen, and David. Michael’s other brothers, Tommy and John, have not appeared yet. Nor have any of the Kennedys, as had been heralded. But some of the childhood friends who were present at the Skakel house on the night of the murder, and who are appearing as prosecution witnesses, greet the Skakels, including Michael, with double-cheek kisses and little screams of “Hi” and “Hello.”
Andrea Shakespeare Renna, an old family friend, told the jury in a boarding-school voice, “I went to Sacred Heart with Julie Skakel.” Although she had kissed Michael warmly outside before she took the stand, as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, she was not to be deflected in her statement that, when several Skakel brothers left in the family car that night to return a cousin to his house in another part of Greenwich, Michael Skakel was not in the car—as had always been believed—thereby placing him in the vicinity of the murder, which occurred sometime after 9:30. Julie Skakel, she recalled, drove her home at 9:45 to meet her 10 o’clock curfew. She insisted that Michael was still in the house. Mickey Sherman, who is expert at confusing prosecution witnesses in his cross-examinations, was rebuffed at every turn by Renna. She would not change her story. She had a clear recall, and she wasn’t going to let Sherman push her around. Years ago, I knew her parents, Frank and Debbie Shakespeare. They later divorced, and Debbie died. Frank Shakespeare was at one time a division president at CBS and served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal and the Vatican under President Reagan. Rushton Skakel Jr. and his cousin James Dowdle later testified that Michael had been with them watching a Monty Python movie.
One of the main characters in this complicated story is Ken Littleton, the live-in tutor of a number of the Skakel brothers, whose first night on the job was the night of Martha Moxley’s murder. He was sleeping in the master bedroom of the house, for Rushton Skakel, the children’s father, was away on a hunting trip. Littleton had graduated one year earlier from Williams College, and he was teaching at Brunswick School, a private boys’ school in Greenwich, where he coached football and other sports. He had every reason to look forward to a distinguished career in academia. Then he met the recently widowed Rushton Skakel and took on the proposed tutoring job in addition to his regular teaching job. His subsequent life has been utterly ruined because he was present that night in the Skakel mansion. He’s been a drunk and a drugger. He’s been in jail. He’s been questioned and re-questioned by police and detectives. He is currently on six medications for a bipolar condition, meaning manic-depression. Like poor Ted Maher in Monaco, the low man on the totem pole, with no assets to his name, Littleton would be such a convenient person to blame the Moxley murder on—just another life that doesn’t matter. But even the Sutton Agency, the private-detective firm to which Rushton Skakel paid nearly $750,000, hoping to deflect suspicion from his family, couldn’t pin the crime on Littleton, though it would have been greatly to the Skakels’ advantage to do so. On the stand, Ken Littleton, now 50, said that he had not met or even seen Martha Moxley on the one night their lives overlapped, and I believe him.
He also said on the stand that when he returned to the Skakel house the next day from teaching at Brunswick School there were 15 or 20 “suits,” meaning lawyers and consultants, in the house. That made me think of Chappaquiddick and the arrival of important people to figure things out. One of the suits, Littleton said, told him to take some of the Skakel children, including Michael and Tommy, up to a weekend ski house the family had in Windham, New York.
With the single exception of the excellent Newsday reporter Len Levitt, who has been covering this case with passion for years, I don’t think there’s anyone in the media who knows Dorthy Moxley, the mother of the slain girl, as well as I do. I met her in 1991, when she was living in Annapolis, Maryland, where she had moved from Greenwich after having been given the runaround by the majority of the Greenwich police force and having finally come to the conclusion that her daughter’s murder would remain permanently unsolved. I totally admire Dorthy Moxley, and over the years she and I have become friends. Therefore, I feel very safe in speaking on her behalf when I say that, much as she wants justice for her daughter, she doesn’t want it to come through a person who has been tricked into a confession.
I am a big defender of the police, but I was utterly appalled by the strategies of Detective Frank Garr and Chief of Detectives John Solomon, who, by using Dorthy Moxley’s name and saying that she needed closure, in 1992 talked Ken Littleton’s ex-wife, Mary Baker, into helping them obtain a sham confession from Littleton outside of Boston in a Howard Johnson motel room which they had bugged. The trick was to have Baker tell Littleton that he had in a drunken blackout confessed to her that he had killed Martha and driven the shaft of the golf club through her neck. In fact, Littleton had never made such a confession to her. (Garr admitted to this on the stand, but Solomon denied having encouraged Baker to lie.)
In court, Mary Baker gave some cockamamy excuse for why she had participated in this deception, as well as in taping hundreds of telephone calls with Littleton, all of which he was unaware of until the trial began. In one of the taped conversations, according to the printed transcript, Littleton said, “I think Michael did it.” The judge would not allow that line into evidence, but I talk it up everywhere. “Spread the word” is my motto.
Mary Baker testified that she had only wanted to bring closure to Dorthy Moxley, whom she had never met. When the police asked her to get some of Littleton’s DNA, she stole his hairbrush and gave it to them. I would be less than truthful if I didn’t say that I loathed Mary Baker after her hours on the stand, and I have a feeling that the jury did too. Granted, Mickey Sherman is only doing his job—and doing it very well—of confusing the issue and creating the reasonable doubt that could very well be Michael Skakel’s salvation.
Dorthy Moxley was enraged when her former friend and neighbor Mildred “Cissy” Ix, who had once asked Moxley to drop the case because the Skakels had “suffered enough,” took the stand and recanted testimony she had given the grand jury under oath—that Rushton Skakel Sr. had told her Michael had said to him that he was so drunk on the night of the murder that he might have killed Martha. When Rushton Skakel, the 78-year-old patriarch of the family, took the stand, he continued his “crazy act” of not being able to remember anything clearly, including the name of one of his own children or even what happened on September 11 of last year. As he was helped out of the courtroom by members of his family, John Moxley, Martha’s brother, said, “He’s crazy like a fox.”
Getting out to Norwalk, Connecticut, from New York each morning is a pain in the neck, but the Norwalk courthouse has the most commodious courtroom I’ve ever been in. There’s plenty of room for the media, as well as for the Skakel and Moxley families and their friends, not to mention all the curious people who arrive just to watch the proceedings. This five-week trial is now in its second week, so there will be lots more to report in the next diary.
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/2002/07/dunne200207