Celebrity Gadfly Justice – A Look At The Life Of Journalist Dominick Dunne

“He may come off as gruff or abrupt, but he’s got a big heart. And he’s really happy to do this.” That’s what Dominick Dunne’s assistant said as we finalized plans for the author’s radio interview with me in 2002. I was hosting the afternoon drive talk show on WGCH in Greenwich, Connecticut and Dunne was covering the Skakel murder trial in Stamford for Vanity Fair and Court TV.

The Dunne interview was a big “get,” as Michael Skakel was on trial for the murder of his Greenwich neighbor Martha Moxley over twenty five years earlier in 1975 when they were both fifteen. It was big talk in town—and thanks to Dunne and disgraced O. J. Simpson cop Mark Furhman, who helped get the case re-opened with his bestseller, Murder in Greenwich—big news across the country, too. The fact that Skakel—already in his forties and bloated beyond his years—was a Kennedy cousin ( RFK’s widow Ethel is his father’s sister) only added celebrity cache to the case.

Dunne, who ironically died on the same day as Sen. Ted Kennedy—has long been a Kennedy family nemesis. He had covered the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in the early ‘90’s ( Smith was acquitted), and based his novel, A Season in Purgatory on the Moxley murder. I’m not sure if Ted Kennedy had any animosity towards the scribe, but Bobby Kennedy, Jr. has had a well-televised feud with him in the years following his cousin’s murder conviction.

When we did our interview—smack dab in the middle of the Skakel trial—Dunne had a queasy feeling that Mickey Sherman, Skakel’s charismatic attorney might get his guy a walk. “I hate to say it, but he might be creating reasonable doubt,” Dunne said, sounding crest-fallen He needn’t have worried. By the time prosecutor Jonathan Benedict finished his closing, the guilty verdict was all but assured ( Skakel is in prison, still awaiting another appeal).

Dunne was a true believer who took all his celebrated cases to heart. He wasn’t an impartial journalist, a charge –much to his critics’ chagrin—he would cheerfully cop to. After his daughter, Dominique, a promising twenty-two year old actress, was strangled by her ex-boyfriend John Sweeney in 1982, Dunne became sort of a celebrity avenging angel. Tina Brown, then the new editor of Vanity Fair was sitting next to Dunne at a dinner party the night before he was to fly to Los Angeles for the trial of his daughter’s killer. She urged him to take notes. And when he returned she discovered her first voice for the magazine. “Dominick had a voice that was so powerful, that spoke to you right off the page.,” she says in Dominick Dunne: After the Party, a documentary observing the famed observer and just out on DVD.

That first and toughest assignment launched Dunne’s new career. He had already had a flamboyant first act as a successful, then failed TV and movie producer, and penned a bestselling novel, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, based on the famous Woodward case in which showgirl turned socialite Ann Woodward killed her estranged husband and got off claiming she thought he was a burglar.

He went on to cover a slew of notable trials for VF, including the O.J. Simpson trial, the Menendez Brothers’ trials ( Erik’s high profile attorney Leslie Abramson is not exactly a Dunne fan, accusing him in After The Party, of making up “convenient facts,” and the Phil Spector trials. He did live to see Spector’s second trial end in a conviction for the 2003 murder of actress Lana Clarkson.

After The Party, directed by Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley , offers a fascinating glimpse at Dunne’s extraordinary life. Through grainy black and white home movies and interviews with Dunne, friends and a few foes, we get to be that proverbial fly on a famous wall. Dunne doesn’t need his son actor Griffin Dunne to remind him “Dad wasn’t easy to live with; he’s always been a work in progress.” Dunne readily admits his reckless social climbing cost him his marriage to the one woman he loved long after they divorced and she passed away. He didn’t need his pal producer Robert Evans to tell him of his final faux pas that ran him out of Hollywood.

He tells, with some relish, the story of Ash Wednesday (which is listed in many movie review books as a BOMB), the final film he produced. While it had a star cast with Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda, the script which was written by the husband of a powerful Hollywood publicist, was apparently lacking. Dunne made an infamous comment, “they should have called it ‘When a Fat Girl Falls in Love,’which appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Evans, according to Dunne told him at the time, that he’d never work in “this town again.” In Party, Evans laughs, claiming he might have said it, but he can’t remember.

With his career and marriage in the dumpster, Dunne took what little money he had left and at age fifty headed to the Oregon woods, where he holed up alone in a cabin for six months, trying his first hand at fiction, living off canned pork and beans and communing with nature. He moved to New York vowing to become a bestselling writer.

And he did it, He wrote eight bestsellers. His ninth book, a novel, Too Much Money—which he had just put the finishing touches on—will be out in December. His funeral service will be held in New York City on Thursday September 10. Fittingly his family requests, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the National Center for Victims of Crime. In After the Party, which I believe was filmed a year before he fell ill to the cancer that claimed his life, he was robust and full of the energy of a man half his age. If you check out his website: dominickdunne.net, you’ll see he was blogging well into August, tackling everything from news of his new book, revelations from Phil Spector’s prison experience and reflections on his own illness. His fans, including this one, are grateful to have tagged along for this remarkable ride. Rest in peace, Dominick, you earned it.

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