I always thought there were two Dominick Dunnes - one was a really heroic, principled, angry defender of the voiceless, especially women, killed in acts of brutality and violence. Martha Moxley. Nicole Brown Simpson. His daughter, Dominique. When he wrote about their cases, the injustices done to them, the protections afforded to men, especially men of wealth and power and celebrity, it was bracing.
The other Dominick Dunne seemed to be a starfucker of the worst order.
To read "Dominick Dunne's Diary" in Vanity Affair was to be awash in drivel. The name dropping was sycophantic, compulsive and bordered on tasteless. The insights were minor, the gossip, on nearly every level, banal. Even the sort of breathless wonder of "who will he mention next? Porfirio Rubirosa? Catherine Deneuve?" became rather a dull exercise of recitation of the Palm Beach/Monte Carlo/Bel Air circuit he seemed so overly impressed with, and so eager to please, if also to tease.
Dunne's story was a fascinating story of reverse accomplishments - his real celebrity prominence, the real culmination of his career, came very late. He took to writing late, made a success of it late. He is not a bad suggestion of the possibility of ultimate reinvention - you could, really, figure out how to make something of your life even at 60, or later.
Aside from eventually abandoning reading his column - the rewards of the occasional insight, or some private moment about Elizabeth Taylor, came at the price of too many of my brain cells - I was always struck by his novels, not necessariuly in a good way. When I was in college, getting home was a long enough slog that I tended to buy diverting trash to read along the way. That's how I wound up devouring The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. And because I loved trashy books adapted into trashy minseries, I watched far more of An Inconvenient Woman (starring Rebecca DeMornay and Jill Eikenberry) than one should ever have.
In both cases, I was struck again, by Dunne's relentless crusade against injustice, and his derivative attention to gossipy drivel. That's especially true of The Grenvilles, because it is basically an attempt to do, in a downmarket way, what Truman Capote always seemed to intend with Answered Prayers. And he did it by exploiting the story of Ann Woodward, who killed herself when a thinly veiled version of how she might have murdered her husband became part of La Cote Basque 1965. In one sense, it's a brilliant conceit: Woodward's story was never fully examined, and using a Capote-esque approach was a genius touch. But the result is grim: Dunne doesn't so much blow old WASP class notions as revel in them, and he paints his Ann Woodward - Ann Grenville - as a grasping embarrassment, whose ostracization by high society was entirely deserved.
Dunne's upper class instincts never really wavered; and really, his takedowns of the powerful - like OJ Simpson, and Michael Skakel - were of a piece with his overall attention to class; his contempt was often laced with judgment for them not meeting the class expectations of wealth and taste of which he seemed so enamored. His dissections of those old preppy notions of class were initially revelatory because few in his set really open up publicly about them. Inherent in those class conventions though is the kind of society that evaporated in the sixties and seventies - rigid notions of the "right people" (who, it should be noted, also rejected Dunne in middle age) which exclude minorities, disdain strivers, and relegate women to roles as decorative objects.
Out of that decidedly mixed bag of the two Dunnes, perhaps it's perfect irony that Dunne in death (he died yesterday) will be overshadowed by the family he disdained so much. I'm sure Dunne could have gotten a novel out of it. Or at least a column. And, you know... I'd have liked to read it.
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