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 Second Acts
August 26, 2009. Dominick Dunne died peacefully today at his home here in New York after a two year battle with bladder cancer. He'd been homebound only during the last week and a half of his illness. He was steadfast, stalwart and uncomplaining throughout the whole ordeal. In the end he was surrounded by loving friends and family. We published the following on Dominick on Monday morning's NYSD, repeated here.
As I write this, my friend Dominick Dunne lay close to death, having been given his last rites at his home here in Manhattan. Dominick has been very ill for more than two years with Bladder Cancer. He has handled his illness with unrelenting courage. He has not allowed it to hinder his daily life for a moment more than required. When he was feeling his worst, if you happened to call him to inquire about his health, he’d say: “don’t ask me about that, tell me a good story.” Story. The dish. Dominick loved that; it was his popcorn at his screening of the Great Game of Life. |
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| Eastern skies at sunset over Roosevelt Island, 7:15 PM. |
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Close friends have been visiting him although he has been very weak, and “slipping away,” as one friend reported. I’ve wondered what he must be thinking, if it is possible think under those circumstances. Because Dominick was always thinking, and listening, and taking it in.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “there are no Second Acts in American lives.” Dominick Dunne, who most assuredly was a admirer of Fitzgerald’s work, has been the prime example of disproving that idea. Fitzgerald would have been astonished too.
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| Dominick at last year's Fete de Swifty. |
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Dominick got into Show Business right after he got out of the Army (having graduated from Williams). A family friend who was interviewing him for a job, after learning about his interests, suggested he work in the brand-new medium of television and made a connection for him. This was New York in the early 1950s. He’d thought he might become what today’s audience knows as the Mad Men.
His first job was working in that new medium, television, as an assistant on the Howdy Doody Show, a very popular live marionette show that aired on NBC five days a week at 5:30 to 6 pm. It was the first television show that any American boy or girl who was born after 1948 -- seeing television for the first time -- saw.
After Howdy Doody Dominick got a job as a production assistant on “Robert Montgomery Presents,” an hour live drama that ran once a week. Robert Montgomery was a very popular movie star from the late 1930s into the 1940s. A suave Cary Grant type (his daughter Elizabeth Montgomery later had a great television career playing Samantha Stephens in “Bewitched”). “Robert Montgomery Presents” often produced hour-long adaptations of famous movies.
One of Dominick’s jobs on the show was to run lines with the actors before their (live) performance on camera. One of those actors was Humphrey Bogart who obviously took a liking to the kid who was very conscientious about his work assisting actors.
Bogart, who was one of the top Hollywood stars of his era, asked Dominick if he’d ever been to California. “No.” Hearing that, he said to him, “well one of these days, kid, you’re going to end up there, so when you do, let me know you’re coming.”
Shortly after that informal invitation from on high, Dominick was sent out to Los Angeles to work on a telecast that was being done from Los Angeles where he ran into Bogie (his universal nickname) who invited him to a cocktail party he and his wife Betty (Lauren Bacall) were having at their house in Beverly Hills. |
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| Dominick with Mica Ertegun |
Dominick Dunne with Marie Brenner, Suzanne Goodson, Iris Love, and Barbara Walters |
That cocktail party was a life-enhancing incident that remained emblematic of Dominick’s entire career both in production and as a writer. It was a seminal moment, earliest vision of his future although of course, he wouldn’t have believed it at the time.
The die was cast. Dominick, the kid from West Hartford, Connecticut, the Ivy League graduate, now Nick Dunne, now working in television, had arrived at the place where he was destined to begin.
The Bogarts’ party had a guest list that read like a fan magazine’s fantasy of a Hollywood party. Furthermore, all these stars, these matinee idols and movie queens, at home with Bogie and Bacall, were real people, and nice (or behaving themselves).
NIck was a boy from West Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a prosperous man, an Irish Roman Catholic businessman. West Hartford in those days (late 1920s through the 1940s) was an enclave of the Hartford elite, many of whom worked in the insurance industry of which Hartford was the center in the world. It was also a New England community sporting the haut bourgeois WASP-ishness of those times. |
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| Dominick with Ann Richards and Casey Ribicoff |
Dominick with Billy Norwich, Elizabeth Peabody, and Cynthia McFadden |
Dominick had the distinct advantage of being brought up in a well-to-do family whose position was also the object of prejudice. The Dunnes were Roman Catholics, what’s more, Irish. They were not looked down upon, but only because they were prosperous enough to stand eye-to-eye. Like the Jews, they were regarded as déclassé or otherwise ignored. This kind of snobbery, which seems so arch and artificial today, was felt/known/acknowledged, and often with bitter prejudice or inferiority.
For a would-be writer, it was a boyhood just this side of Scott Fitzgerald and not without its unsung glories. Dominick learned early about the vagaries and absurdities of the human condition. And also the striving and strivers. It would be a long road but he later would discover what it meant.
As a young man he had a quality – often referred to as “sensitive” or “delicate” – which did not hold him in good stead with his stern and macho father. He recalled being beaten for not having the qualities that defined manhood for his father. Nevertheless, he was a sociable child, a bright boy, curious and given to fantasies about Hollywood and movie stars. |
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| Dominick with Paul V. LiCalsi Henry Schlieff |
Dominick with son, Griffin |
Dominick’s career in Hollywood developed in a way that would have impressed his Williams College classmates. He was essentially a producer, executive and otherwise, working in television. Television in those days (50s, 60s, 70s) was increasingly prosperous but still, in the entertainment community’s consciousness, not the same as the movies. A Movie Star was the center of the universe. A television star, although very popular and highly paid was not the center of the universe. People who worked in television were peripheral in the grand scheme, and placed thusly on the social scale.
During this time, Dominick married a very attractive and bright young woman named Lennie, the daughter of a very wealthy family in the Southwest. The young couple had three children, two sons and a daughter. The community came to know him as an ambitious, upper-mid-level television excutive, and she had money. As a young couple, that was more than enough to all but the top tier. So they got around, they entertained and they were popular. |
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| Dominick and Michael Gross |
Dominick with Lady Victoria White and Robert Evans |
Years later in a photographic book of recollections about those early years in Hollywood, he recalled a party he and Lennie had where the theme was “Black and White.” The Black and White Ball. A last minute guest of a couple who were on the guest list was Truman Capote. Capote loved the party and took the idea for his most-famous party of the century. He didn’t bother to invite his erstwhile hosts, however.
Dominick was slighted but by then he’d lived in Hollywood for quite some time. Twenty years later and after Capote, a ruined man, had died, inspired by his story Cote Basque 1965, Dominick wrote The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, a huge bestseller that brought him fame and fortune that never diminished.
In those early years of the marriage the Dunnes were not so popular that the “A” group invited them. Lennie’s money could only do so much in a town where you’re only as great as your last picture. Dominick’s professional career while active, was not spectacular.
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| Dominick with Enid Nemy |
Julie Baumgold, Dominick Dunne, Norma Baumgold, and Lily Kosner |
That career which must have started out with a spark and a sparkle, over time -- twenty/twenty-five years later -- had lost its thrust and Dominick had lost his mojo. In retrospect it was a powerful mid-life crisis. In his late forties, a career in shambles, a marriage deteriorating, ambitions thwarted and life-questions going unanswered, the man’s life had come undone.
In the early 70s, his producing career null and void, he was hired to ghost-write a book for Joyce Haber, the Hollywood columnist. It was to be a sequel of her highly successful “The Users” (which ironically ultimately destroyed her professional career). Tragedy also paid a call. Lennie Dunne was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis which in time made her a partial invalid. The marriage also broke up. Leaving a spouse with a chronic degenerative disease, a spouse whose charm and money contributed greatly to her husband’s career did not set well in the peculiarly Puritanical community known as Hollywood. Dominick was far from the sympathetic.
Then their daughter Dominique was murdered by a boyfriend she was trying to break up with. This marked an all-time emotional low in the man’s life. Dominick Dunne by his late forties was, in his terms of his beloved Hollywood, washed up. Not only washed up but also a member of that nebulous category of: Never Quite Made It. |
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| Dominick with Leila Hadley Luce |
Dominick with Colette Harron |
Dominick with Christopher Mason |
Dominick Dunne, known far and wide more casually as Nick Dunne, was well aware that he was on the losing end and it wasn’t going to get better. Drugs, whatever sex, booze and more of the same, he finally got down so low that he joined a 12-Step program. The rest is his history, told many times and more accurately than I can.
He was fifty-six when Vanity Fair re-started publishing. He was fifty-nine when Tina Brown became the magazine’s editor-in-chief, and sixty when he published his own first novel, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, based on the 1955 Woodward murder case. Tina Brown and the two Mrs. Grenvilles made him a star. I say this measuredly because Dominick was flummoxed as well as mesmerized by the phenomenon of Stardom, and he never got over it.
It’s probably fair to say that Dominick Dunne is the Anthony Trollope of the last half of the American century. Murder was a common theme in his work. Murder and the universal injustice. The OJ Simpson trials made him a popular celebrity in a way commensurate with movie stardom. He couldn’t walk down the street or go into a hotel or airplane or restaurant anywhere in America, and often in Europe, where he wasn’t recognized and acknowledged and lauded and applauded. And he reveled in it.
I remember walking down Madison Avenue in the low nineties one autumn afternoon, coming from a luncheon at Eleanor Lambert’s apartment. |
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| Dominick with Mario Buatta and Hilary Geary Ross |
Dominick with Diane Lane |
We were chatting about something when two women stopped us to introduce themselves to Dominick. “Oh Mr. Dunne, we love your books, we love you, oh thank you Mr. Dunne.”
Dominick thanked them profusely, and very sincerely. And after they’d continued on their way, he was left dumfounded, awestruck, trying to take it in. The Love. They really love me! (thank you Sally Field). He couldn’t get over it.
I saw that happen a number of times when I was in his company. Anywhere, from out of nowhere, someone or some group would go up to him and tell him how much they loved him and loved his books. His response was most gracious, bright-eyed, if awed; bemused and pleased like a child is pleased by a fatherly pat on the head. |
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He and I were never close friends. We share mutual close friends, and so we were always aware of each other’s lives and dramas. On his 80th birthday there was a big cocktail party for him at the Union Club and there were hundreds in attendance.
Obviously they weren’t all friends, in the sense of deep and abiding relationships, but there were a number of people there with whom he’d been friends for thirty, forty, fifty years. A lifetime of long friendships explains a man.
His friendships were varied. Men and women of varying ages and talent and wit, from all walks of life. He loved his entrée to the more glamorous aspects of New York, London, Hollywood and Paris. He loved the red carpet that his celebrity could assure. |
| Dominick with Emilia Fanjul |
Dominick with Liz Smith and James Brady |
He loved the invitations and access to the grand happenings, celebrations and dinners. It was always brand-new to him, like the first time back in New York helping Bogie runs his lines. He loved the access to the sotto voce and the gossip.
His career as a writer made him rich as well as famous. He lived comparatively modestly with a comfortable apartment here in town and a comfortable, expanded saltbox country house near Old Lyme. His work took him all over the world and brought him an even wider array of friends in high places.
The man who in his mid-forties was losing hold of his life and himself, who was given to partying and an aimless Hollywood walk-in-the-clouds existence and indiscreet bitchiness, had been graced. |
| Dominick with Casey Ribicoff, Peter Rogers, and Tita Cahn |
The two Nicks: Pileggi and Dunne |
He was finishing his final novel in the past few months. Several years ago on one of his travels he was introduced to a psychic who gave him a reading. She told him that his next book would be his last. He decided that she meant he was going to give up the arduous task of completing a novel and stick to his work with Vanity Fair with his monthly column and other assignments. By now he was entering his ninth decade. He remained energetic with his bi-coastal, international travel and work. But he was also well aware of his mortality. This last book took him more time than he had anticipated. Health began to figure in the equation. Some think it was because he was negotiating with fate and the gods.
Dominick’s great success later in life was enhanced by the wisdom he’d gained from his own hard knock experiences. The grandiosity and the ego-inflating that fame and fortune often brings and keeps around long after its self-by date, never took hold of Dominick.
After his divorce and his sowing his oats in what for him must have been the wildest of ways, drugs and alcohol as accomplices, he had the sheer fortitude to take the tiller and not only change course but also uncover his ability to create a great literary career for himself and his millions of fans. Those last words would have astonished him, just like those two ladies on Madison Avenue. “You really think so?” he asked (knowing the answer of course), starry-eyed. |
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| From The Writer's Desk by Jill Krementz: A personal tragedy in my own life brought me into contact with the American justice system. It has drawn me ever since. Each book I have written has been based on an actual crime that occurred in the world of America's rich and powerful. Justice, or the lack of it, has been my particular obsession--people get away with things, or people who go unpunished or unpunished from the prosecution that would be the fate of a less privileged member of society. After covering so many high-profile trials, I have become cynical enough to know that acquittals often have little to do with innocence. They have to do with megabucks defense attorneys who outclass by far the bright young 3-years-out-of-law-school prosecutors the state so often puts forward. Sometimes I feel the overworked prosecutors do not have the same passion to convict that defense attorneys have to acquit. I am interested in cover-ups. |
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This last chapter in his life, which began a few years ago as he was beginning his last novel, has been deeply taxing and painful and uncomfortable and debilitating, and otherwise ignored by the man who insisted on getting on with his life. In the last few months he has shown up at dinner parties and restaurants at moments when friends thought it might be too hard for him. And when he was present he never let on to any difficulties. He wanted to talk about what was going on and who was going on and how and why. He was fascinated. Endlessly.
His illness began to have a visible effect on his physical stature but never his mind or his energy. He traveled to Germany and to the Dominican Republic for stem-cell treatments, and was there when Farrah Fawcett was also there for treatment. All of it was interesting for him, fascinating, no matter how difficult and painful the process. It may be that he complained about his hurdles to his closest friends but I am certain that he never sought sympathy or felt the need for it. He was soldiering on, full speed ahead, his ship moving into its final voyage. Many will miss him, many will hear his voice in their mind’s ear, for a long long time. Longer than he would have ever imagined. |
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| Photographs by DPC/JH/Patrick McMullan |
Comments? Contact DPC here. |
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