E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Years ago, mostly for a lark, I made a short 'art' film (now listed on the Internet Movie Data Base) called Bad Marion's Last Year , a cheesy takeoff on the Alain Resnais film 'Last Year at Marienbad.' It featured two then-hot actors from the Andy Warhol social circuit: Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn and jazz singer Asha Puthli, along with 'Boys in the Band' star Frederick Combs, complete with a guest appearance by then-producer Dominick Dunne. The real star, however, was a rich ingenue from the Manhattan-Hamptons elite: Gillian Fuller, who kindly loaned us her father's vacant Southampton mansion for the occasion (mind you, this was in January). Gillian played herself: a bored rich girl with nothing at all to do other than pick up boys (Combs--never mind that he was gay) and bring them home to take drugs and get bored together. Enter the two Warhol girls as righteous angels, determined to either make Gillian see the error of her ways, or be carried of...

Back in my carefree New York days from the late Sixties to mid-disco, I got to know Nick Dunne in an environment with which he had far more comfort and self-confidence than I. Or so I thought. He was from a more privileged background than I, certainly: an upper class upbringing in a home in which his elder brother (like my own) was already an accomplished author, and his grandfather was what I would later call "Old Money" (the original title of my first book). He had this in common with the Kennedys as well, ironically, given they would become his prime targets later on. The setting where we first met and got to know one another was in the Hamptons, at the home of then Park Avenue ingenue Gillian Fuller (actually Gillian's mother's 'dog house,' as she called it at the time). But what we had in common was a well-hidden sense of not belonging--not just there in Southhampton, but anywhere. I was there shooting a short "art" film that winter weekend in 1...