Was Andrew Cunanan born or made a serial killer? This is the question that American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace poses with Wednesday’s episode, “Creator/Destroyer,” when it flashes back to Cunanan’s childhood and his relationship with father Modesto “Pete” Cunanan—a stockbroker who abandoned the family after allegedly “misappropriating” $106,000 when Andrew was a college freshman. (The episode contrasts Cunanan’s youth with Gianni Versace’s childhood, showing how the fashion designer was raised by a dressmaker mother in Reggio Calabria, Italy, who—because her parents had quashed her own childhood ambition of becoming a doctor—was determined to nurture her son’s professional dreams.)
Up until this episode, Cunanan has been a confounding character study—equally proud and lazy, a pathological liar who was capable of occasional generosity before his descent into drug use and murder. According to series writer and executive producer Tom Rob Smith, though, the key to understanding Cunanan’s trajectory is his father, who provided the template.
“I don’t think you can understand Andrew without understanding his dad,” Smith told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “His mom is a key figure, too, but his dad really offers the template for Andrew’s life. His dad had this spectacular rise—he came to America from the Philippines and served in the U.S. Navy. I think he worked through night college to get his trader’s license and got this extraordinary job working at Merrill Lynch in San Diego. It was this amazing ascent, and then he burnt out.”
According to Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth, whose book Vulgar Favors: the Assassination of Gianni Versace is the basis for American Crime Story, Pete had a special relationship with the youngest of his four children.
“Of all the children Pete has, he put so much attention toward Andrew, maybe because he thought Andrew was so good-looking,” Andrew’s godfather Delfin Labao told Orth. “It was not healthy. His father spoiled Andrew, made him feel he’s got to be somebody and, maybe that rang a bell in his uncertain mind, that that was what life was about.”
In addition to instilling that expectation, Pete embedded his son with bravado, materialism, and, even if Andrew didn’t realize it at the time, the compulsion of a pathological liar.
“By seventh grade, Andrew had developed a line of patter and a penchant for telling stories based on what he had read, and embellished for effect,” reported Orth. “The disturbing grandiosity that would mark his personality had already begun to take hold.”
Andrew was a precocious child and his parents spoiled him—even giving him the family’s master bedroom in high school. (Pete, who had a fraught relationship with his wife, MaryAnn, slept on the couch.) When Andrew was a freshman in high school, Pete even bought Andrew a brand-new sports car after his son was forced to miss an anticipated field trip—to the opera—because he was sick. Andrew was only 14 years old and did not have a driver’s license.
“Andrew, always the con man at school, was himself being conned at home,” wrote Orth. Ronald Johnston, who worked with Pete at four different firms, explained, “Pete always wore expensive suits, would buy expensive cars and expensive homes, and I think Andrew believed that was all for real. Andrew was led to believe by his father that he would attain anything he wanted to attain. And I know his father spoiled him rotten and gave him everything that he could possibly want.”
By the time that Cunanan graduated high school, though, Pete was cycling through a series of jobs and reportedly shady deals to combat his growing debt.
Explained American Crime Story writer Tom Rob Smith: “[Pete] committed what looked to be fraudulent trading activity. He moved down through various trading houses—smaller and smaller ones until he was finally caught. He had all of this fraud that was just circling him, and finally he runs to Manila.”
In 1988, when Cunanan was a freshman in college, Modesto took his cut of a deal that he was putting together, sold his cars and the family’s two “heavily mortgaged homes, and disappeared.” Per Orth, “Their family had literally had their home sold out from under them. MaryAnn was reportedly left with $700. . . . The experience was clearly shattering for Andrew, whose image of his dad as a powerful and reliable protector was smashed.”
Afterward, Andrew flew to the Philippines and tracked down his father—where he found the person he once believed to be a mythic figure living in squalor.
“When Andrew saw the crude poverty in which his father was living, a driving madness took over his mind,” one of Andrew’s teachers told Orth. Smith also believes that Andrew’s trip to the Philippines was a critical turning point.
“I think at that point, if Andrew had accepted that his dad was a fraud, embraced it on some level, and said, ‘This is what life is . . . complicated,’ he’d come back to the States having learned from the experience,” said Smith. “He could’ve done something interesting with his life. Instead, he comes back and continues his lies, telling people, ‘My dad is rich,’ and keeping up that pretense. To me, though, that was the break[ing] point in his brain. At that point there’s no going back.”
“Andrew goes through the exact same trajectory as his dad,” explained Smith. “He had his own rise—finding these wealthy affluent-older men that he’s living with. He ended up in a multi-million-dollar condo in La Jolla, this beautiful paradise, [living with Norman Blachford, a man who loved him.] He’s given an allowance. Traveling to the South of France. And he throws it all away because he can’t tolerate the notion that he is a kept man . . . he leaves and moves into a small place in Hillcrest, and descends through crystal-meth until he’s lost everything.”
Pointing out the similarity of father and son’s arcs, Smith explained, “His dad flees to Manila and restarts his life, but Andrew has nowhere left to go. So he goes to Minneapolis and has a breakdown. When you look at the shapes of their lives, that was absolutely the key of Andrew.”
So how, then, did Cunanan’s father Pete process the news that his son had not only mirrored his descent—he had done so in deadly fashion?
By shopping a documentary that would serve as a star vehicle for himself. Two months after the murders and his son’s suicide, the Los Angeles Timesreported that Cunanan’s father Pete had already recruited a Philippines filmmaker, relocated to Los Angeles, and apparently alerted press of the project. Director Amable “Tikoy” Aguiluz VI made it clear that, in spite of Andrew being the focus of the media interest because of the murders, Pete still narcissistically saw himself as the star of the story. “I’m telling [the film] from the father’s point of view—a father who knew Andrew until he was 19—and his discovery of his son all over again,” Aguiluz told the L.A. Times.
As for whether Pete thought his son was guilty of the murders, he told papers, “This was a deep cover-up.” Rather than share sympathy for the victims and their families, he teased a potential F.B.I. conspiracy—“Hopefully, we’ll come up with some plausible explanations when we run the movie.” When speaking to Orth, Pete further revealed that he was asking for $500,000 for the rights to a film and book deal; thought it could make over $100 million at the box office; and even had an actor in mind to play his son.
John F. Kennedy, Jr.
“Their mannerisms are very, very close, almost the same,” Pete explained. “I watch John Junior very carefully. The guy has a lot of moxie in him—that dignity.”
In comparison and retrospect, Cunanan’s oft-told delusion of knowing Gianni Versace suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
Get Vanity Fair’s HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Julie MillerJulie Miller is a Senior Hollywood writer for Vanity Fair’s website.
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