DOMINICK DUNNE, the best-selling novelist and Vanity Fairwriter who chronicled the misdeeds of the rich and famous with wicked glee – most memorably in his highly personal accounts of the trials of Claus von Bulow, the Menendez brothers and OJ Simpson – died on Wednesday at his home in New York. He was 83.
The cause of his death was bladder cancer, according to the Vanity Fairwebsite, where his death was announced.
Dunne had recovered from prostate cancer in 2001 but was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2008. Although ill, he covered Simpson’s recent armed robbery trial in Las Vegas, which resulted in a guilty verdict for which Dunne had waited more than a decade.
Covering the last Simpson trial capped an extraordinary career that had bloomed from tragedy. Dunne was a television and film producer for two decades until drugs and alcohol almost ruined him. He had started life over as a writer when his daughter, Dominique, was murdered in 1982.
Dunne wrote an article for Vanity Fairthat raged at the crime and the leniency of the killer's punishment. The story propelled its author into a new career reporting from the intersection of celebrity, society and scandal.
He filled the niche with panache, becoming, according to the Cambridge History of Law in America, “one of the nation’s premier popular chroniclers of notorious criminal trials and lawsuits involving celebrities”.
He wrote a column, Dominick Dunne's Diary, and hosted a court TV programme, Power, Privilege and Justice. Dunne became a celebrity in his own right, who openly sympathised with crime victims, skewered the perpetrators and rode in limousines to his front-row seat at their trials.
Dunne unabashedly declared his belief that Simpson was guilty of the brutal 1994 slayings of ex-wife Nicole and her friend, Ron Goldman. He disparaged Erik Menendez and Lyle Menendez, the brothers convicted of fatally shooting their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion. He slyly dissected Phil Spector, the record producer convicted of murder in 2009, whom Dunne called “a drama queen, albeit straight”.
When Dunne wasn't covering a sensational trial, he was writing intimate profiles of movie stars, socialites and newsmakers – "the only person writing about high society from inside the aquarium," former Vanity Faireditor Tina Brown once said.
Many of his subjects were friends from his previous life, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Gloria Vanderbilt. Others were friends of friends, such as former Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos, who gave him an exclusive interview shortly after she and her husband took up life in exile; and Lily Safra, an international jet-setter whose banker husband Edmond was killed in a suspicious fire.
Like author Truman Capote, another social chronicler, Dunne often bit the well-manicured hands that fed him. A friend of Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale of the department store fortune, he turned Alfred's relationship with his mistress, Vicki Morgan, into a roman à clefin 1990, An Inconvenient Woman).
Similarly, Dunne, a guest at the 1950 wedding of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel Skakel, turned his theories about the culpability of Ethel's nephew, Michael Skakel, in a long-unsolved murder into another novel, A Season in Purgatory(1993). Skakel ultimately was tried and convicted.
Dunne is survived by his sons, Griffin and Alexander, and granddaughter Hannah. Ellen Griffin Dunne, from whom he was divorced in 1965, died in 1997.
– (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)