PROLOGUE

I subscribe to the notion that rich people are more interesting when they do crazy things like murder, embezzlement, fraud, rape, or homicide; or when they act crazy or somewhat crazy like those with manic-depression, schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and any philias associated with rich people. If you read back on some of my posts, it wouldn’t be hard to tell what my obsessions and thoughts are. Along with Dominick Dunne, I know two other authors also subscribe to this notion, Alan Hollinghurst and Louis Auchincloss.

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INTRODUCTION

I first saw Dominic Dunne‘s novel, People Like Us, at my favorite thrift bookstore, Booksale, three or four years ago. I was intrigued by the synopsis so I decided to buy a copy. When I got home, I started reading it. I devoured the book. I finished it in one sitting. Since People Like Us, I started collecting some of his most famous bestselling novels and collection of essays. Just like the first novel of his that I read, the others that followed didn’t disappoint. His novels and writings, in retrospect,  became my standard of good storytelling, beautiful writing technique, journalistic integrity, and literary restraint.

His name became synonymous with O.J. Simpson, William Kennedy Smith, the Menendez brothers, and John Sweeney — people who allegedly, in their respective order, murdered his wife, raped and accidentally killed a teenage girl, committed parricide, and murdered Dominick’s own daughter. Their public trials were regarded as the The Trials of The Century, and Dominick Dunne always had the best view — the front row seats in all of them. His fixation with famous people committing crimes made him a star reporter for honestly writing about his opinions about the trial and the defendants on his column at Vanity Fair, and for courageously voicing out his personal verdicts and judgments on TV shows and news bigwigs like CNN. As a result, this made him the the toast of Hollywood’s and New York’s movers and shakers.

HE WAS ONE OF THEM

His work gave him access to the highest of American Society and earned him the adulation of his admiring society lady friends and the contempt and disgust of his powerful archenemies whom he criticized and portrayed in his satires. Coming from a privileged family and a WASP background worked even more to his advantage, as the parties he was invited to required a sense of security in oneself and refinement innate only to those who were born groomed for a life of endless socializing and small talk with narcissists and people who had never been denied anything.

Whether it’s an expository piece about the trial of his daughter’s murderer, John Sweeney and his first-row seat experiences at the O.J, Simpson trial for Vanity Fair, penning a novel about rich people doing the unspeakable and the unthinkable, or writing his memoirs infused with anecdotes of his friendships with Hollywood royalty like Elizabeth Taylor and Diane Keaton, first ladies like Imelda Marcos, society doyennes like Betsy Bloomingdale, European aristocrats like Claus and Sunny Von Bulow, and arms dealer heavyweights like Adnan Khashoggi, Dominick Dunne’s writings are always terrifyingly entertaining and scathingly honest.

For writing to be effective and good, they say, you must write about what you know and read about. Without a speck of doubt, Dominick Dunne wrote not only about who he knows or what he reads, he also wrote about who he knows and what books those people he knows read — successfully and eloquently did just that. He had wined and dined with names equivalent to power and status: Windsor, Von Furstenburg, Astor, Woodland, Hutton, Reagan, and Kissinger; some he reputedly repeatedly maligned. (Well, don’t they all say that?)

PAYING THE PRICE FOR BEING A WRITER

So, the questions remains: Would they have trusted him had most of them knew he was going to write about them? Maybe yes, maybe not. Still, he had to do what any good writer would have done: draw inspiration from real life and translate them into honest words, and then write them down onto the eager pages of white sheets of paper.

He lost friends along the way,  gained the animosity of others. He was good at dropping names, and sometimes he dropped those names strewn together in sentences like murder, scandal, adulteress, and fraud. He knew he would someday pay the price.  And pay he did.

For telling things unfiltered through his bespectacled and filtered eyes, Dominick Dunne paid a hefty price.

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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

I have read almost all of Dunne’s books save for three or four more. Here are a list of his novels that I’ve already read:

1. People Like Us 2. An Inconvenient Woman 3. A Season In Purgatory 4. Another City, Not My Own 5. Fatal Charms And The Mansion of Limbo 6. Too Much Money 7. The Winners 8. After The Party

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BIOGRAPHY

DOMINICK DUNNE’s Bio (excerpt from biograhy.com):

“Dominick Dunne was born October 29, 1925, to a wealthy family in Hartford, Connecticut. He worked in television in New York and later produced films in Hollywood. After a battle with alcoholism and drug abuse, he began writing novels. He wrote about the trial of his daughter’s murderer for Vanity Fair and then covered other trials for the magazine, including O. J. Simpson‘s. Dunne died in 2009.”