Money, Murder, and Dominck Dunne by Robert Hofler
I never knew that Dominick Dunne had this whole other career as a TV and movie producer until I read Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion, The Last Love Song, a few years ago. He was almost as big of a character in that book as Didion and her husband (and Dominick's brother) John Dunne. I knew he started writing about crime after his daughter's murder, but I guess I assumed he'd been some other kind of journalist before that.
Dunne always seemed like a fun, bitchy personality who had always had the latest gossip, or at least a funny story about something that happened years ago between him and various famous people, while also having a deep undercurrent of sadness and self-loathing. I thought Hofler did a fantastic job of laying out his life, aided in no small part by Dunne's son Griffin Dunne.
He clearly did not like Joan Didion, who I feel a little protective of, as a fellow native Californian and someone whose shyness has routinely been mistaken for coldness for my entire life. I've known more than a few people from the Sacramento Valley in my time, and a lot of them are just really abrupt and reticent; Didion herself talks about this in Where I Was From, saying her mother would routinely end phone calls by just hanging up in the middle of a sentence. I also get the feeling that Didion was very fond of Dunne's ex-wife and probably thought he did her dirty, marrying her for her money and social connections, then cheating on her with a series of gay hustlers. Really, it's a miracle he didn't a) get AIDS, and b) give it to his wife, although they probably divorced a bit too early for the latter scenario.
Still, I had to laugh at his mean nicknames for John and Joan: "Big Time" and "Frail". The latter a reference to Didion's thin build and barely audible voice; the former a mocking reference to Dominick's belief that John had rode his coat tails into Hollywood, where he proceeded to write a series of profitable but shlocky screenplays.
Still, I'm not sure Dunne is in a position to talk much shit, given that his last producer credit was on the famously troubled Elizabeth Taylor movie Ash Wednesday, the plot of which is described as "A woman attempts to win back her philandering husband by getting a facelift". How is that the plot of an entire movie?