Dominick Dunne: FRANK SINATRA once paid a head waiter in Hollywood $50 to punch Dominick Dunne on the nose. The blow knocked him to the floor as Sinatra sat near by, smirking. Dunne, who has died aged 83, went on to become a controversial author, and acknowledged that "I write well about jerks, because I used to be one".
In the late 1950s and 1960s, he was better known in Tinseltown for the quality of his parties than the entertainment he produced, and the combination turned him into an alcoholic and drug addict. But at 53, he reinvented himself as a writer and his novels of the crimes of the rich and famous, all based on real cases, were combined with journalism, and sprinkled copiously with famous names. Again Dunne cheerfully confessed, subtitling his 1999 memoir of Hollywood, The Way We Lived Then, as Recollections of a well-known name-dropper.
What saved him from dismissal as a superficial raconteur was a commitment to exposing rich Americans as literally getting away with murder or, at the least, other serious crimes. In each case he reported – Claus Von Bulow, the patricidal Menendez brothers, the Greenwich, Connecticut murder of a teenage girl allegedly involving a Kennedy relative, the Florida rape acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, and the OJ Simpson double murder acquittal – Dunne broke American journalism’s rules by openly rooting for the victim and/or bereaved.
His commitment stemmed from a family tragedy. In 1982 his actress daughter Dominique Dunne, aged 22, was strangled by her former boyfriend, an LA chef. Despite evidence of previous battery, he served less than three years in prison for her murder. Dunne later described the experience in the first issue of Vanity Fairmagazine under its new editor Tina Brown, who encouraged his fledgling writing efforts after sitting next to him at a New York lunch.
She judged shrewdly. Dunne’s 10 books and journalism drew a wicked and uncannily accurate portrait of the over-privileged in the celebrity-obsessed late 20th century. Astonishingly, despite frequent breaches of confidence, or at least privacy, “Nick”, as he was known, sailed serenely through this social scene with his panorama of highly placed contacts and friends mostly intact.
Dominick Dunne was born the second of six children in Hartford, Connecticut, to an heiress mother and a prominent heart surgeon father. They lived in a mansion with servants, but, as an Irish Catholic in Wasp – white anglo-saxon protestant – country, Dunne always felt an outsider. He attended boarding schools but was called up in 1944 and fought in Europe as a corporal, winning a medal for bravery – though he seldom discussed it.
After graduating in 1949 from Williams College, Massachusetts, Dunne, obsessed with film stars and showbiz from childhood, found a job in New York in the television industry, first with a children's programme, then as stage manager for the Robert Montgomery Presentscelebrity show.
He met the guests and was, he recalled, "in heaven". He also married an heiress, Ellen (Lenny) Griffin, and in 1954 they moved to LA where Dunne worked on the Playhouse 90TV series. Soon they bought a house in Beverly Hills and from 1959 to 1962 he produced the popular South Seas television series Adventures in Paradise, but devoted more time to his Hollywood parties.
Among his guests and friends were Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, David Selznick, Kirk Douglas, David Niven, Truman Capote, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn and Gary Cooper. But Dunne began drinking heavily and taking drugs, once getting arrested at an airport in front of two of his children.
He began to produce films. The Boys in the Band(1970) was followed by two works with screenplays by his brother John Gregory Dunne and his sister-in-law the writer Joan Didion – The Panic in Needle Park(1971) and Play It As It Lays(1972), from the Didion story. Then came Ash Wednesday(1973), starring Taylor, which was a flop. His life began to deteriorate as his wife demanded a divorce. In 1979 he left Hollywood and never lived there again. "They'll forgive anything but failure," he recalled.
Dunne drove north, coming to a halt in Oregon's Cascade mountains. He rented a cabin and dried out for six months while writing a tawdry Hollywood book that was excoriated in the New York Times– "but reviewed!" he exclaimed. He returned to New York. His first publishing success was The Two Mrs Grenvilles(1985), about an infamous socialite murder. A Wall Street novel followed in 1988 and, two years later, he published An Inconvenient Woman, based on the murder of the mistress of the Diners Club millionaire Alfred Bloomingdale (somehow managing to remain friends with Alfred's widow, Betsy).
A Season in Purgatory(1993), based on the 1975 murder of a teenager in Greenwich, led to the arrest of her former neighbour Michael Skakel, nephew of Ethel Kennedy, and to his 2002 trial. During the 1995 trial of Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, Dunne became famous when his white hair and granny spectacles were centre-front in the courtroom.
The acquittal stunned him. His novel on the case, Another City, Not My Own, came out in 1997. In 2001 he published Justice, a collection of articles, and the following year he hosted a television show on his favourite theme, Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege and Justice.
Dunne’s enthusiasm for gossip got him into trouble in 2002 when Gary Condit, the disgraced former congressman from California, sued him for slander, claiming $11m. Condit was forced from office over his admitted affair with Chandra Levy, a doctor’s daughter who disappeared from her flat in Washington and was later found murdered.
Condit was never accused in the case (and an immigrant from El Salvador was eventually charged in April 2009) but Dunne suggested in broadcast interviews that Condit was involved in a plot that included dumping her body in the Atlantic. In fact her remains were found in a Washington park. Condit accepted an undisclosed sum and an apology.
When John Gregory Dunne died suddenly in December 2003, Dominick revealed that they had been estranged for years. He wrote that it was probably jealousy, but admitted that he had been jealous of his brother too. They reconciled not long before John’s death.
His two sons, the actor-director Griffin, and Alex survive him.
Dominick John Dunne: born April 9th, 1926; died August 26th, 2009