I feel privileged to have worked with Dominick Dunne at Vanity Fair. I certainly don't expect to meet anyone like him again. He was a crusading crime reporter and peripatetic social chronicler who used his celebrity status as a magnet for tips and scoops. Everywhere he went, people told him things. In those days before social media, he was their best hope of getting the truth out. He'd spent the first half of his career in Hollywood, producing movies and partying with people like Jane Fonda, Kirk Douglas, and Lauren Bacall. He was 50 years old when—after torpedoing his own career by offending the wrong powerful agent, or so he always claimed—he left L.A. and turned to writing novels. His journalism career was forged in a crucible of tragedy, when Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, assigned him to write an article about the trial of his daughter's killer, who was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and served less than four years. That ordeal, and Dominick's conclusion that the courts were stacked against the victims of wealthy criminals, filled him with a righteous zeal that colored his coverage of other high-profile murder cases including, most famously, that of O.J. Simpson. But Dominick's talents were too Technicolor to confine to the courtroom. His lifelong fascination with rich, famous power players—and the people they trampled underfoot—made him an astute, and morally acute, observer of the world's most compelling and sinister figures, from the accused (and later acquitted) wife-killer Claus von Bülow to the exiled first lady Imelda Marcos. (If only he were here now to give us his read on Jeffrey Epstein's fishy demise.) When Dominick died, 10 years ago, I rushed home from a rental house on Fire Island to interview his many, many confidants for a reported obituary that ran in the November 2009 issue. That article, together with the more than 140 articles he published with Vanity Fair, can be found in our Complete Archive, and we're lifting the paywall on the sampling of links below for a limited time. (To enjoy full access to the Vanity Fair Complete Archive, consider subscribing today.) —Mike Hogan, executive digital director, Vanity Fair |
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