Episode 3: ‘A Random Killing’
This episode, which lacks any Versace (Gianni or Donatella), felt to me like the freshest so far in “The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” the second season of “American Crime Story.”
We are introduced to several new characters, chiefly Lee Miglin (Mike Farrell) and his wife, Marilyn Miglin (Judith Light). Their portrayal of a Chicago couple who have made the best of a 38-year marriage despite the lie at its center is both plausible and moving.
Marilyn, a feisty former dancer, has become an entrepreneur who sells her fragrances and cosmetics on the Home Shopping Network. “Perfume is about our bodies talking to each other without words,” she tells viewers.
Lee is a commercial real estate developer, a Catholic who keeps a religious altar in his home where he prays for God’s forgiveness for his sexual attraction to men, and says he has done his best to resist temptation.
It’s all slightly campy, but these two, whose relationship could easily have been portrayed in a mawkish or ridiculous way, came across to me as deeply sympathetic. God only knows how many marriages between ambitious women and closeted gay men were created (and endured, even now) during the decades-long rights revolution in the United States that culminated with the full striking down of sodomy laws, in 2003, and the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage, in 2015. How did these couples manage these lies, while striving to lead lives of decency and integrity?
Like the series over all, this week’s episode is not told in chronological order. It is 1997. We follow Marilyn from a work trip in Toronto back to her home on Chicago’s Gold Coast, where she quickly notices that things are not as they should be. Two passing friends dial the police. Marilyn sits in the kitchen, her polished nails dancing on the granite countertop, as a bloodcurdling scream is heard from the garage: Lee’s mutilated body has been found.
“I knew it,” Marilyn says under her breath.
Flash backward, a week earlier: Marilyn and Lee are at a fund-raising luncheon for Gov. Jim Edgar, Republican of Illinois.
She introduces her husband in terms so admiring as to be gushing: “So often we are told the American dream is dead. Except I say: Look at my husband, Lee. One of seven children. The son of an Illinois coal miner. He began his career selling premixed pancake batter out of the trunk of a beat-up old car. And today Lee manages 32 million square feet of commercial property across the Midwest.”
Later, at home, Marilyn moisturizes her face and removes her cosmetic eyelashes. It would have been easy for the episode’s writer (Tom Rob Smith) and director (Gwyneth Horder-Payton) to have this moment be the one when the mask of a happy marriage is removed, its ugly face revealed.
In some ways that happens: In a quiet moment before the mirror, Marilyn applies a drop of perfume down the front of her silk robe, her eyes hollowed out with longing. In another room, Lee takes a call from Andrew Cunanan, dialing from a pay phone, and when Marilyn asks who is calling, he lies and says it’s a business call. But the marriage is not merely a sham. When Marilyn asks Lee what he plans to do while she is away on business, he sounds down. She asks him to accompany her.
“I like it when you’re there,” she says, and she means it.
It is their last meaningful encounter.
With Marilyn away, Lee opens his door to the serial killer, who happens to be in town. Lee shows him his plans to build a 125-story, 1,952-foot Sky Needle, which would have been the world’s tallest building.
The conversation does not go well. Andrew thinks the main point of having a building taller than the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) is to surpass the latter structure’s observation deck. Andrew also urges Lee to name the tower for himself, something the self-effacing developer has no intention of doing.
They kiss — “It feels like I’m alive,” Lee says — and Andrew boasts: “Escorts don’t normally kiss, do they? I am not like most escorts. I am not like most anybody. I could almost be a husband, a partner.”
I found this reference to marriage anachronistic, and puzzling, and not for the first time in this series. In earlier episodes, Gianni Versace’s partner, Antonio D’Amico, tired of their hedonistic lifestyle, proposes, and Cunanan tells a friend — falsely, we believe — that Versace once proposed to him.
I’m certainly not making light of commitment or the desire for it. But I’m puzzled by the use of words like “husband” and “proposed.” They don’t seem true to my own memories of the late 1990s, when gay men were more likely to speak of boyfriends, partners and companions, and they seem strangely ahistoric.
My next quibble with this episode is more prosaic: the killing of Lee Miglin, in his garage, by Cunanan is so grisly and sadistic as to be difficult to watch. I’ll spare the details, but the monologue Cunanan delivers before delivering the coup de grâce bears note:
I know that you’re not wearing your hearing aid, so I am going to speak very loudly and very clearly so you can understand. I want you to know that when they find your body, you will be wearing ladies’ panties. Surrounded by gay porn. I want the world to see that the great Lee Miglin is a sissy. Soon the whole world will know that the great Lee Miglin, who built Chicago, built it with a limp wrist. The cops will know, the press will know, your wife will know, your children will know, the neighbors will know. Tell me something, Lee: What terrifies you more, death or being disgraced?
The monologue raises the question: Is Cunanan motivated by self-hatred, a desire to expose hypocrisy, or both? His use of homophobic language suggests self-hatred, but his focus on disgrace suggests some kind of crusade. It is not, of course, a crime to cross-dress, or to look at porn. This mutual failure of recognition — murderer and victim seem to agree on one thing, that to be gay is a disgrace — is perhaps the saddest moment in this series so far.
The rest of the episode is a tour de force by Judith Light, whose portrayal of a wife in denial is simply magnificent. She offers a brisk inventory of what’s missing from the house — a Lexus, $2,000 in cash, two leather coats, two suits, “some inconsequential pieces of jewelry,” rare gold coins and a dozen pairs of socks — as she reaches the conclusion that the killing must have been a random and opportunistic robbery.
Told by the Chicago police superintendent about the gay porn found next to the body, Marilyn surmises that “they must have belonged to the killer,” but goes on to say: “I’m not interested in his intentions. Find him, catch him, but don’t talk to me about what or might not be going through his mind.”
She adds: “Dollars, jewelry, socks, suits — that’s all I’ll allow that man to steal from me. He won’t steal my good name. Our good name. We worked too hard making that name, and we made it together.”
For an ambitious woman born in the 1930s to have a husband who is fully supportive of her professional aspirations might indeed, as she suggests, have been “a fairy tale life.” “How many husbands believe in their wives’ dreams?” she asks her Home Shopping Network viewers — and us — later in the episode. “How many treat us as partners, as equals?”
Left unsaid: Perhaps his being gay allowed him to be such a supportive partner.
Compared with all this, Cunanan’s murderous escapades seem mundane. He flees to New Jersey, and the police failure to capture him after a radio station reveals that investigators have been tracking his movements by car phone. In search of a new car to steal, he stops at a cemetery, where he marches one of the groundskeepers into a basement and makes him get down on his knees.
The man begs for mercy, but his plea is cut short. And for the first time in this series I was so disgusted by this killer’s lack of remorse that — for a moment at least — I didn’t want to keep watching.
At least most of carnage is out of the way. Six more episodes, two more bodies to go.
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