What the 'Versace' Finale Got Right and Wrong
With Wednesday night's episode "Alone," The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story came to a close. As has been true all season, the episode was more about Andrew Cunanan than Gianni Versace, and focused mostly on Cunanan's final days in Miami, which he spent living in a houseboat. "Alone" nailed several minor details from real-life - the outfit Cunanan was wearing when he died, newscasters' repeated mispronunciation of his last name - but took some liberties in other, more narratively important areas. Here, a fact-check of the show's season finale.
FICTION: Andrew called his father from the houseboat.
In the episode, Andrew calls his father, who’s still hiding from his own criminal charges, in the Philippines, and tells him where he is. Though this could have happened, there’s no evidence that it did, except for Pete’s unverified assertion that he was regularly in contact with Andrew before his suicide. Pete's plans for a movie of Andrew’s life, however, were at least temporarily real, and he told Maureen Orth that he wanted it to be called by the title mentioned on the show: A Name to Be Remembered By.
FACT: Lizzie Coté taped a message asking Andrew to surrender.
While Andrew is hiding in the houseboat, he sees his old friend Lizzie Coté on television begging him to stop running. "Andrew, wherever you are, please stop what you are doing," she said, according to the Washington Post. "You still have a chance to show the entire world the side of you that I and your godchildren know."
FICTION: Cunanan killed himself just as agents were entering the houseboat.
It’s hard to tell exactly how much time is meant to be passing on the show, but it’s cut to look like the houseboat caretaker enters the boat, hears a shot (seen to be fired by Andrew, into the air), and then calls the police, who storm the boat soon after negotiations fail. As the team swarms the boat, Andrew shoots himself. But according to Vulgar Favors, the caretaker entered at 3:45 P.M. and heard a gunshot, which was possibly the gunshot that killed Cunanan. When the police finally entered the houseboat at 8:20 P.M., Cunanan’s body was cold and “appeared to have been deceased for several hours.”
FACT: Princess Diana and Elton John attended Versace’s funeral.
The episode used real footage from the funeral, which was also attended by Sting, Naomi Campbell, Giorgio Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, and Carla Bruni.
FICTION: Antonio D’Amico attempted suicide after Versace’s death.
One of the final shots of the episode is Versace’s partner Antonio loading up a tray with pills, then being found still breathing by a terrified maid. D’Amico has said that he fell into a deep depression after Versace’s murder, but has thus far not mentioned attempting suicide. “I had never been through a depression [before] and never saw a therapist as I was advised to,” he told The Guardian last year. “Why did I need to tell someone else what had happened when I knew I was this way because Gianni’s death had torn me in two? I was in a nightmare, I felt nothing and gave no importance to anything.”
FICTION: Some of the Marilyn Miglin scenes.
Perhaps because they just wanted a reason to bring Judith Light back, the show’s writers tie up some loose ends regarding Marilyn Miglin in the finale by weaving in scenes of her being briefed on the hunt for Cunanan. The day Cunanan killed Versace, she’s said to be in Tampa filming for the Home Shopping Network, and she refuses to leave despite a warning that Cunanan might know she’s there. HSN did film in Tampa in that period and Marilyn did film a segment there just three weeks after her husband’s funeral, but the tidiness of having her there on the day of the Versace murder appears to be an invention of the show. Her quotes about Lee being her prince are drawn from life, though. “I lived the life of a fairy princess and I had a prince for 38 years, and then one day my prince went to war and didn't come back,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1998.
FACT: More than two months passed between the murder of Lee Miglin and the suicide of Andrew Cunanan.
Marilyn repeats this a lot during her scenes, but that’s because it’s so crazy that it happened. Cunanan committed his first murder on April 27, yet the FBI did not find him until he was already dead.
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