Noted novelist and Vanity Fair columnist, Dominick Dunne, has lived a life most people would find suitably fictitious, but hopelessly short on chance. It's packed with a remarkable range of diversity, adversity and a Blackberry with an endless list of the names and phone numbers of everyone who is someone in the world of celebrity. Yet as glamorous as it's been, it hasn't been all tinsel and glitter for Dominick Dunne. On the contrary, he has persevered through unimaginable suffering to emerge Phoenix-like to become one of today's true literary American icons. He exclusively recounted his extraordinary life to me in a remarkably revealing interview. For this indomitable soul, life has been like biking down a washboard dirt road"jarring, scary and impossibly thrilling. He's seen the world from envied pinnacles, and valleys so low they blister the imagination. He's a straight-talking Nutmegger who suffers no charlatans and lays bare the wicked. The latter he does with abandon. He seeks justice incessantly, a wearisome passion spawned by cruel and wrenching personal tragedy. His accounts of celebrity trials in novel form have been read by millions, and his many columns about the well known and well-to-do have been de rigueur for countless readers of Vanity Fair's cologned pages. Nick's roots and family are classically New England. His well-heeled parents"his father a famous heart surgeon, and his mother a prized debutante"were both Connecticutters. They were aristocratic, but lacked the necessary pedigree to be granted bona fides to be listed in the Social Register. As wealthy Irish Catholics, they found themselves ever on the cusp of a Hartford society whose true wink-and-nod acceptance they could never gain. Anxious to leave Hartford after World War II, during which he won a bronze star for heroism, Nick was drawn first to New York's TV lights, and then to Hollywood's garish lights. There he carved out a niche among movie stars and heartily indulged his obsession: celebrity. His fabled Hollywood life began as a fluke and mushroomed in stature to others' biting envy. An invitation to one of Nick and wife, Lenny's, parties was highly prized. But, as glorious as it was, it all ebbed badly, and the low tide that quickly followed reeked. Hollywood was and is a social bonfire. Dominick Dunne played with it and suffered third-degree burns to 100% of his psyche. It would become a large back-monkey; it's addictiveness both potent and consuming. And addiction to that led to dependence on alcohol and cocaine. That volatile mix in turn put loud, scandalous words"words derogatory, yet honest, about some well-known people--in Nick's mouth at well-attended cocktail parties. The Hollywood elite was not amused and it characteristically rejected him. Bitter, depressed and blackballed, Nick slumped into an old Ford and headed due north to the Cascade Mountains for wound licking, respite and introspection. But a flat tire intervened, and for the ensuing six months he lived in an Oregon cabin with no phone and no TV. More importantly, there was no booze, no cocaine and no Hollywood. During that half year, Nick reclaimed his life and essence, and re-sculpted his raison d'etre. He also vanquished the back-monkeys on his own with nothing to numb withdrawal's nagging sting. Ready to fledge for a new life, instead of returning to Hollywood, he headed to New York and Connecticut, where destiny was pouring the foundation of his future. Connecticut was"and still is today"Dominick Dunne's home. He has a New York apartment, the necessary perch from which to spy the glitter, but it's in Connecticut that he prefers to write his novels, and it's easy to see why. There's distinct serenity at his cozy and inviting house; a Corinthian oasis filled with books of all manner and description. Having endured what Nick has, a tailpipe hosing would seem the only painkiller to others more brittle. But not for him, not that he didn't mull it. His brother's suicide, however, stymied that notion. Instead, he broke through unthinkable gloom and despair to become one of America's most popular authors and columnists, and the reporter du jour on the Larry King Show during the O. J. Simpson trial. |
