Revisiting Lisa DePaulos 2001 feature about Robert Durst and the death of Susan Berman.
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But conversations with Susan were almost always filled with breathless drama.
If she was up, you knew it.
If she was down, you knew it.
Either way, you knew the details.
Kim felt guilty about that.
I have information thats going to blow the top off things, Susan told her.
What do you mean?
Well, I dont have it myself, said Susan.
But I know how to get it.
Well, be careful, for Gods sake, said Kim.
Susan promised they would talk more after the holidays.
It wasnt unusual for her to be about to get information; she was a journalist.
And she was working on three big projects two book ideas and a television pilot.
So Kim assumed it was something about that.
When she hung up, Kim thought to herself,Who cares who killed Bugsy Siegel?
At another point in the conversation, Susan said shed just talked to a psychic.
This, too, wasnt unusual.
Psychics were among the few things Susan had faith in.
Oh, Susan,Kim remembers thinking.
Susan would never have left Lulu unattended for so long.
Shed been dead for at least a day.
But no one talked about it, no one wanted to go near it.
It was too awful to contemplate.
But her friends adored her.
Everyone adored her in spite of them, not because of them.
And given what shed been through in her 55 years, they also understood them.
Susan had survived the Las Vegas mob of the 50s, and one unbearable loss after another.
Through it all, she was always Susan complicated, tormented, irresistibly entertaining.
As the years went by, that got harder and harder.
How can I go on?
she would ask her friends.
Or, her best-known half-threat: Im going to get into the bathtub with my hair dryer now.
Those who really knew her well didnt worry (too much) that shed ever take her own life.
Oh, no, says Kim Lankford.
That was not an option.
She would never want to miss how it would all play out.
When the news hit, her history as a gangsters daughter dominated the headlines.
Could she have been killed for some mob secret she was about to reveal?
IfIwere a gangster, says Markey, Id have encouraged her to writemore.
It was always Bobby this, Bobby that,wonderfulBobby, a friend recalls.
So she wrote to him in care of the Durst Organization.
They got there too late.
Suddenly, the Durst connection Was she killed because shed been harboring some secret about Bobby?
Was he sending her cash out of kindness, or to buy her silence?
piqued the interest of the national media.
If you were a friend, you were a close friend, as one put it.
Her father was the love of her life.
When she died, at age 39 Susan was 13 the death certificate said suicide by overdose.
Now shed been talking about investigating that mystery again.
Couldthathave been the big news she was about to get her hands on?
Some troubling, some hilarious, all intriguing.
Susan was somewhat mysterious to some of her closest friends.
And she had compartmentalized lots of relationships.
Different people got different pieces of Susans ongoing puzzle.
To some she seemed more upbeat than shed been in years.
Yes, shed been reduced to recycling chapters fromEasy StreetinLas Vegas Lifemagazine.
Susan always was optimistic, says another old friend, Stephen M. Silverman.
There wasalwaysa Major Project around the corner.
Berman also seemed to be finally resolving a war with her elderly landlady, Delia Dee Baskin Schiffer.
She said she knew Dee owned a gun.
She told several friends she was relieved it was all finally over.
But there were also indications that, below the surface, all was not well.
Oh, it was dramatic.
I thought, this is a person in trouble.
And Susan really was going through terrible times.
Of course, by the time she called me back, everything was fine in the world.
But she was not an easy person to get along with, okay?
I just cant take it anymore.
Death and love seem linked forever in my fantasies, and the Kaddish will ring always in my ears.
That changed after one too manyNew Yorkcolleagues asked if she was related to the notorious gangster.
I could be screwing my brains out, Susan would just barge in.
The only snag was theEasy Streetbook tour.
An absolute nightmare that required all this elaborate planning, remembers one colleague from that time.
She managed to escape:No fucking waywas she driving over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Susan was, as Silverman puts it, alotof work.
She was famous for fallings-out with people that could last for years.
But she also took no small pleasure in directing the lives of everyone in her circle.
You really want this guy, youre sure?
Okay, Ill get him for you.
But youve got to doeverythingI say, nothing more, nothing less.
Susan plotted the course of his breakdown with exquisite precision.
And he married her.
Despite all she learned about her father, Susan continued to worship the memory of Davie Berman.
It wasnt until she researchedEasy Streetthat she realized who those gin buddies were.
A month before her father died, he threw her a lavish 12th-birthday party at the Riviera.
Liberace sang Happy Birthday to her.
He would ask her to wear Chanel No.
5, she wrote, so he could smell the real world.
In 1981, a long excerpt fromEasy Streetappeared as a cover story inNew York.
Two months later, while standing in the Writers Guild script-registration line, she met Mister Margulies.
He was 25 and broke.
She was 38 and Susan Berman.
I know you, he said.
As she later wrote, he recognized her from the pictures on the back of her books.
Misters father had them all because he worked for Davie Berman in Vegas.
He loved your dad, Mister told her.
And there was love in the house, says Kim.
They were crazy about each other.
Bobby Durst gave her away.
Film producer Robert Evans toasted the couple.
Susan footed the bill.
Soon after, she bought a beautiful home in Brentwood.
The marriage lasted little more than six or seven months.
She called me crying and said, Its over, says Julie Smith.
I said, What, Susan?
She said, Hes been doing drugs again and hes been abusing me.
Susan was naive to the point of being puritanical about drugs, say her friends.
Despite the pain in her life, she never self-medicated.
I dont think she ever smoked a joint in her life, says Lankford.
The only alcohol she ever drank was a glass of wine at Passover.
They had already divorced when Mister overdosed, at age 27.
At the time, she believed they were reconciling, and his death led her to a nervous breakdown.
Did he meet the doom meant for me?
Stabiner talked her off the roof by reading her tarot cards and seeing great things in store.
In 1987, she met the man who friends say was the last real boyfriend in her life.
Paul Kaufman was a financial adviser with Hollywood aspirations and two young children.
They all moved into Susans Brentwood home (up the street from Nicole Brown Simpsons townhouse).
And for a while, he made her happy.
What made her happier were his children.
Mella and Sareb, now 24 and 26, consider Susan Berman their mother.
She held my hand through everything difficult in life, says Sareb, who works in the recording business.
She was the only person who was always on my side and never judged me.
Her relationship with Paul ended in 1992 around the time Susan went broke.
The bank took her house and she had to declare bankruptcy.
To finance it, they used Susans assets.
The musical never got off the ground.
Susan had another breakdown.
But Mella and Sareb would continue to be her children.
In 1992, a friend gave Susan, now penniless, use of a condo on Sunset Boulevard.
She and Mella also co-wrote an unpublished book manuscript, titledNever a Mother, Never a Daughter.
It would prove to be a strange and intense relationship.
Susan was the only writer Brenner represented; the rest were primarily struggling actors.
It was lost on no one that Nyle was a ringer for Mister Margulies.
Friends say Susan would call him constantly to help deal with her now-raging phobias.
When hed get fed up, shed tell him, Fine, leave.
At which point, according to her friends, Brenner would grovel and beg her to keep him.
He later told one of Susans girlfriends that she was like an addiction.
Her obsession led to several painful and humiliating experiences, but she couldnt let it go.
By the end of Susans life, many of her friends believed the relationship had gotten even more volatile.
But he did it.
Others say that in her last few days, she was upset about an incident that had happened recently.
Of course, she did fall.
On December 22nd, Susans last night alive, she went to dinner and a movie with Rich Markey.
Susan was particularly excited about a sequel she was planning toEasy Street,calledRich Girl Broke.
On the way home, she had a fit in the parking garage because someone in the elevator pressed5.
It was a normal Susan evening.
The police believe that she was killed the next morning, Saturday the 23rd.
Word first got out when Susans cousin Deni Marcus called and a homicide detective answered the phone.
The person who would have been notified first was Sareb, who lived nearby and talked to her daily.
But he was traveling in Amsterdam; it seemed as if everyone was away.
Even if she was laid up in the hospital, Sareb said, she would have called me.
In the last year, she and Mella had become estranged.
It bothered Susan terribly, and she worried endlessly about Mella.
At the same time, she had rewritten her will and cut her out.
She left the rights to at least one of her works to Nyle Brenner.
It wasnt until the following night that word began to spread to Susans close circle.
She was expected for Christmas dinner at a friends mothers house.
This year, she was bringing Nyle Brenner with her.
When she didnt answer her phone all day, her friends panicked.
Nyle drove to the house.
By this point, the police had already removed the body; they had also locked the house up.
Nyle apparently gave different accounts of what happened next to different people.
They said they were sorry to tell him that the woman next door had died.
Nyle told me, Well, of course my heart broke.
But I realized she was clumsy, she could have fallen down.
And I got back in the car and drove to Susies.
Most of Susans friends got word of her death from Nyle, who left urgent messages on their machines.
When Sareb got the news, he flew back from Amsterdam.
Nyle met him at the airport and spent the ride home telling him how difficult his mother was.
Things got stranger at the memorial service Sareb arranged for Susan in early February.
(Durst didnt show.)
This was the night that several people had what they later described as unsettling conversations with Nyle Brenner.
At least I wont have someone calling me three times a day, he said to one attendee.
She sucked me dry, he told another.
The cops have the hard drive to her precious computer, and sources say it is rich with clues.
No gun has been found.
Susan, with all her fears and neuroses, wouldneverhave let a stranger in.
The LAPD is keeping a tight lid on details about the case.
And friends say privately they fear it may never be solved.
Or worse: that it will, as one puts it, and it will be one of us.
Bobby Durst is included in that category.
Susan lived by a moblike code of loyalty.
She would never, no matter how desperate, rat out a friend, even if shedidknow something incriminating.
(If she could compartmentalize Davie the Jew, one friend noted, she could compartmentalize Bobby Durst.)
The answer to the question Who shot Susan Berman?
may well prove to be, None of the above.
As Liz Rosenberg puts it, She could have pissed off a total stranger.
Fortunately, it is on the second level, says Kim Lankford.
And theres nobody on the other side to annoy her.
We put all her favorite people in there, says Kim.
Couldnt fit everybody in.
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