Dominick Dunne

Dominick Dunne (1925- ) is an American writer and one-time television and film producer. He writes magazine articles for Vanity Fair and books of his own, the best known being “The Two Mrs Grenvilles”. You might remember him from the O.J. Simpson trial: he was the man with white hair who sat in the back wearing a bow tie and big round glasses.

Dunne is a sort of latter-day Anthony Trollope who writes about the rich and famous to show their human failings. He knows these people: he goes to their parties and to their murder trials. He has a good eye and knows how to tell a story. He is our fly on the wall.

He did not become a writer till he was 50. He had hit bottom in Hollywood. His wife had left him. His money was gone. He was a drunk. His world of Hollywood parties, the big house and a beautiful wife were over. He got in his car and drove north. He drove and drove until he got a flat somewhere in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. There he got a small place in the woods and dried out from years of drink.

All alone, he read the books he had brought with him in a bag. One was “The Way We Live Now” by Trollope. He fell in love. Dunne would make a new life for himself and become a writer.

He moved to Greenwich Village in New York and wrote a book. It was so good that the New York Times said it was bad. He knew he had made it as a writer.

Then came the worst possible thing, something worse than his own death: his daughter, only 21, was murdered.

On the night before he headed for California for the murder trial he sat next to Tina Brown at dinner. She was then little known, but she was about to take over Vanity Fair. She asked him to write about the trial. He has been writing for Vanity Fair ever since.

Living in New York in the 1980s he noticed how much it was like Trollope’s London of the 1870s. So he became its Trollope and wrote a book called “People Like Us”.

Dunne’s father was a rich doctor in Hartford, Connecticut and his mother came from a rich family. He cannot hear in one ear because his father once beat him for liking dance and stage instead of sports. Dunne grew up reading about film stars and dreaming of one day going to Hollywood.

After fighting in the Second World War he went to New York and later Hollywood and worked his way up in the world of film and television. He directed “Playhouse 90” (1956) and was the executive producer of “The Boys in the Band” (1970). He went to all the Hollywood parties and got completely caught up in it. Too caught up: he started drinking and doing drugs. That was when his world fell apart.

See also:

• story
• magazine
• film
• television
• New York
• New York Times
• Jamaica Kincaid – another writer who knew Tina Brown but did not like what she did to the New Yorker.
• Hollywood