Dominick Dunne, Celebrity Journalist & Crime Writer, Is Dead at 83.

Dominick Dunne, the ultimate self-made American man, died today following a long battle with bladder cancer. He was 83.

Dunne rose to public consciousness in the movie business. He was a producer at the very end of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, though not a very prolific one. He was attracted to glamour; indeed, when he was a child, he had a picture of Michèle Morgan, a French actress, on his wall. His favorite movie was ‘Now, Voyager’, starring Betty Davis.

“The idea that a camp movie like Now, Voyager became my most important movie was because she became someone different from what she was. I found it so fascinating. She had that awful life — that mother, she was fat and unattractive. She came back, she was different. I thought about my own life, ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’.”

But paradoxically, he never quite felt at home when surrounded by the rich and famous. In the midst of hot-dog parties and Malibu sunsets, Dunne said he “never could figure out [his] place” in that social strata:

“I always felt I was there more on a pass than reality. I would produce this movie with Elizabeth Taylor (‘Ash Wednesday’) and have a glamorous time in Europe. But I was never a producer in charge. I didn’t have the balls to go to the front office and say ‘I want this’.”

Nevertheless, it was a successful time, and not just for Dominick, but also for his brother John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. In the early 1970s, they formed a film company called ‘Dunne-Didion-Dunne’. John and Joan wrote, while Dominick produced. In Vanity Fair, he would later write about the experience:

“Our first picture was The Panic in Needle Park, for Twentieth Century Fox, based on a Life-magazine article by James Mills about heroin junkies. I remember sitting in the projection room and watching the dailies for the first time. In the darkness, John and I looked at each other as if we couldn’t believe that two Hartford boys were making a big Hollywood-studio movie on location in New York City. [...] The picture was picked as an American entry to the Cannes Film Festival, and we all went over and had our first red-carpet experience. The film won the best-actress award for a young beginner named Kitty Winn. There were cheers and huzzahs and popping flashbulbs. It was a thrilling experience for all three of us. The following year John and Joan wrote the screenplay for Play It as It Lay which was based on Joan’s best-selling novel of the same name. [...] That was our last film together. John and I came away from that picture not liking each other as much as we had after the first. Then Joan and John made a mint on the movie A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand, which was an enormous success, and in which they had a share of the profits. I remember being at the star-studded premiere in Westwood, when Streisand made one of the great movie entrances. And there were John and Joan, up there, having arrived, being photographed, getting celebrity treatment. Was I jealous? Yes.”

There followed a low-point in Dunne’s life when film-projects sputtered away, and his relationship with his wife, Lenny, had ended, perhaps for good:

“The problem with that marriage was me. She had really loved me. She was great . . . I f***ed that up.”

Dominick Dunne turned to drink and drugs. He was arrested for “carrying grass” when he got off a plane and John and Joan bailed him out. But this was only the beginning, as Dominick wrote:

“When I went broke, they lent me $10,000. A terrible resentment builds when you’ve borrowed money and can’t pay it back, although they never once reminded me of my obligation. That was the first of the many estrangements that followed. Finally, in despair, I left Hollywood early one morning and lived for six months in a cabin in Camp Sherman, Oregon, with neither telephone nor television. I stopped drinking. I stopped doping. I started to write. At about three o’clock one morning, John contacted me [...] to tell me that our brother Stephen, who was particularly close to John, had committed suicide.”

The funeral deepened the rift between the brothers. Shortly afterwards, while living alone in a miniscule New York apartment, he learned that his daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, had been murdered. His friend Tina Brown suggested he write about the trial for Vanity Fair, which would, in fact,  give Dunne the tools he would to turn around the remainder of his life. Dunne witnessed Dominique’s murderer, an ex-boyfriend named John Thomas Sweeney, get a six-and-a-half year sentence in 1983, and saw him released for good behavior after two years. A burning sense of injustice propelled him into print. He began writing “with a passion” he had never felt before. Dominick wrote four best-sellers in a row, all of which were made into mini-series. He was also a rising star at Vanity Fair. Was John jealous?

“Yes. Our books came and went, but we never mentioned them to each other, acting as if they did not exist. There was no resemblance between our writing styles. His novels were tough and dealt with low-life criminals. My novels were more socially rarefied and dealt with high-life criminals. There were difficult periods. Sometimes we maintained civility, despite bad feelings on both sides. Sometimes we didn’t.”

After a further disagreement about the character of the defence attorney Leslie Abramson, (John liked her… Dominick did not), the brothers did not speak for six years. They did not speak again until they met in hospital. Dominick was in for prostate cancer, and John has having his heart monitored. Later, John called and said “Let’s all go to Elio’s and laugh our asses off.”

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When Dominick was a child he was bullied by his father, a renowned surgeon:

“I remember the maid knocking on the door and saying, ‘The hospital is calling, Dr Dunne.’ He stopped the whipping, picked up the phone, gave the hospital the relevant instructions, came back and picked up right where he left off.”

When he came home from the war with a Bronze Star, having rescued two soldiers who would otherwise have been abandoned, none of the family mentioned it. Even then, according to Dominick, John was “the glamorous one”. It took a family friend to tell Dominick that they were proud of him. “I felt like an outsider in my own family,” he later claimed. However, the memory of the rescue stayed with him:

“The last thing I saw was this guy reaching out, and squeezing the first two fingers of my hand — his way of saying thank you. I’ve never forgtten that: several times in my life I’ve been in scary situations I’ve looked at my fingers and said to that guy, his spirit, ‘Help me’. “

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Dominick Dunne is perhaps best known for his journalistic work. In the pages of Vanity Fair, he has covered every major celebrity murder trial worth mentioning. His keen eye for detail, his inability to be swayed by legal alchemy, and his take-no-prisoners approach have made him famous. When he was a child, he had a picture of Michèle Morgan on his bedroom wall. He remained, for his entire life, fascinated by the shenanigans of the upper-class. However, it was his own life, in all its misfortune, that proved to be an important catalyst. His bravery lay in his ability to persevere where others would not, and in his honest depictions of humanity where you would least  expect to find it- not just the jewelry of the rich and famous, but their secrets and their motives. He described the urges and emotions of murderers: greed, jealousy, love; in doing so, he articulated insights into ourselves.