The Truth About Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan’s Relationship

The first episode of American Crime Story Season 2, titled The Assassination of Gianni Versace, wastes no time in linking spree killer Andrew Cunanan with his final and most famous victim: Gianni Versace. The series opens with a sweeping sequence showing Versace looking out majestically from the balcony of his Miami mansion while Cunanan sifts through a shabby, sand-logged backpack on the beach below—immediately establishing the “have” and “have not” in FX’s grim fable. 

The premiere, “The Man Who Would Be Vogue,” is front-loaded with two encounters between Cunanan and Versace—one in the V.I.P. room of a nightclub, and one on the stage of the San Francisco Opera following a performance of Capriccio, for which Versace designed costumes.

Given Cunanan’s propensity for pathological lying and the dreamlike quality of these sequences, though, what is the truth about Cunanan and Versace’s relationship—and what are we meant to see as simply Cunanan’s delusion?

In 1997, Vanity Fair contributing editor Maureen Orth—who wrote the book on which The Assassination of Gianni Versace is based—was the first to report that Cunanan and Versace actually had met in San Francisco in 1990. Based on interviews with multiple witnesses to the interaction, Orth described how Cunanan and his friend Eli Gould met the fashion designer in the V.I.P. room of the nightclub Colossus.

The designer walked in with an entourage, including [Versace’s boyfriend] Antonio D’Amico and [Capriccio choreographer] Val Caniparoli, who quickly introduced him to a few people. After about fifteen minutes of chitchat and waves of young men eager to meet him, Versace began to survey the room. He noticed Andrew standing with Eli, cocked his head, and walked in their direction. “I know you,” he said to Andrew. “Lago di Como, no?” Versace was referring to the house he owned on Lake Como near the Swiss border. Reportedly he would often use the Lago di Como line when he wanted to strike up a conversation with someone.

Andrew was thrilled and Eli couldn’t believe it. “That’s right,” Andrew answered. “Thank you for remembering, Signore Versace.” Then Andrew introduced Eli to Versace, who made polite talk about whether they had seen the opera. (They hadn’t.) Eli and Andrew then drifted back down to the dance floor.

Meanwhile, another man—Doug Stubblefield—claimed to have seen Versace with Cunanan on a different occasion in San Francisco that fall. He says a chauffeured car containing the duo, plus socialite Harry de Wildt, pulled up alongside him as he was walking on Market Street one evening. “To show off, Andrew had the car come to the curb, and Andrew and Doug had a conversation,” writes Orth. But Harry de Wildt, “a sixtyish dandy . . . married to a younger, big-boned Hillman heiress,” denied that he ever met Cunanan, let alone traveled in a car with Versace and Cunanan. Tangling this complicated web of alleged interactions even further, another friend of Cunanan’s, Steven Gomer, told Orth that Cunanan had personally introduced him to de Wildt—and that the two seemed to go “back a long way.”
Gomer also told Orth that, on another evening, he ran into Cunanan at a different San Francisco haunt. Cunanan, who was wearing a tuxedo at the time, claimed to have just come from Capriccio, where he “was with Gianni Versace.” This stray remark seems to be the basis for the Versace scene in which Cunanan and Versace, surrounded by candelabras and sipping champagne, get to know each other on the stage of the San Francisco Opera. This moment, at least, has less of a basis in fact; as Versace co-star Ricky Martin tells Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, “We’re not making a photo; we’re making a painting. We add color, etc.”