As I am thinking about Dominick Dunne on the day of his birth, I am reflecting on the similarities between Dominick Dunne & Truman Capote, one of my life long favorite writers. Both wrote about low acts in high society & they both craved celebrity. Capote labeled his later work- the Nonfiction Novel, & Dunne just called his books novels. Capote spent his last years doing very little writing, addicted to drugs & alcohol, appearing incoherent in public & on talk shows. Dunne was on the same track, but later in life he was sober, clear, & productive, but he was in the closet. Dunne probably wanted the literary attention that Capote received in his career, yet he outsold his writer family: brother John Gregory Dunne & sister-in-law Joan Didion. He must have been disappointed that he never entered the pantheon of literature. At the same time, he didn’t seem bitter. He was inside the fish bowl & yet always remained an outsider.
Capote’s society women rejected him after he published the roman e clef- Answered Prayers. Dunne continued to move in the world he wrote about despite an occasional snub. He did have enemies: the Kennedys, the Safras, & most famously- Congressman Condit. Dunne could get careless with facts, as Capote did, but most readers knew he was telling a larger truth; When you get to the top of society, there isn’t all that much there. This is the deeper secret Capote didn’t see.
I recently watched- After the Party in the Sundance Channel, which chronicles Dunne’s life. Listening to him talk, he seemed obviously gay. Earlier in his career, he was a television & film producer, & was the executive producer of the film version of Boys in the Band. Maybe those bitter queens spoke a truth to him that also drove him deeper into the closet. The documentary & his nonfiction writings make it clear that he cared deeply about his children & his former wife. It seems easy to dismiss a man torn like that, it seemed to be the way most people in Hollywood in the 1950s & 1960s handled such matters- “Oh, he just got married to cover up”, But, in a clever move, Dunne used his last novel to come out when his main character/alter ego reveals that he is gay.
His readers can only know a little bit about Dunne & his sexuality. In his interview with George Stephanopolous, Dominick’s son- Griffin Dunne, uses the terms gay & bisexual to describe his father. A few months before his death, Dominick told the London Times: “I am a celibate closeted bisexual.” It seems tragic when somebody has to deceive & experience shame for most of their life. To live in constant deception & shame distorts your life. Yet Capote, who was out of the closet most of his life, was full of self-loathing & in his last years, he led a miserable existence. Dunne, who speaks about his father mistreating him as a child for being a sissy, stayed in the closet his entire adult life. After success in Hollywood, he also became addicted to drugs & alcohol, but then found sobriety in rural Oregon of all places. He lived a life that he was drawn to & repelled by. For both authors, the shame of sexuality, open or not, propelled the men into a furious chase for recognition, celebrity & acceptance.
If society had been accepting of homosexuality, would both writers have never become successful writers? Was being an outsider what that made them?
It is a fitting irony for Dunne, since so much of his literary career was a reflection of a response to, the life of Truman Capote. The similarities are striking: Dunne's most famous novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles was based on the notorious Woodward murder scandal that Capote had referred to in his novel Answered Prayers. It was the gossip & innuendo in an excerpt from it in Esquire- La Cote Basque, that got Capote shunned by his celibrity friends & started his decline.
Capote was dropped by his adored society women friends, having allegedly stabbed them in the back by exposing their deepest secrets. Capote career was killed. He never finished the novel. But Dominick Dunne, in a way, did. He wrote the The Two Mrs.Grenvilles novel that picked up where Capote left off. Dunne did it with panache, with a story of high society intrigue, sexual obsession, greed & murder. In The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, which was made a rather good TV movie starring Claudette Colbert & Ann Margret, Dunne paid homage to Capote by creating a narrator named Basil Plant who was more than just a little the author of In Cold Blood. Dunne was also similar to that character. He was the man on the outside looking in, absorbing, documenting, & chronicling. He was the secret sharer. The man everyone trusted.
Dunne's parallels to Capote were not just on the literary scene. Dominick Dunne craved the spotlight just as much as Capote, and surrounded himself throughout his wildly checkered life with just as many socialites & celebrities. Dunne even threw his own "Black & White Ball" in Hollywood that rivaled Capote's legendary fête at the Plaza. Dunne always claimed he had the idea first. He celebrated its memory in his coffee table book of photographs- The Way We Lived Then (Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper). That was part of Dunne's charm. He never tried to exaggerate his importance,
He did noy shy away from controversy. In the TV movie of A Season in Purgatory with Patrick Dempsey in the lead, there is a rather shocking gay sex scene between the narrator & the Dempsey character who killed the young girl at the start of the story. The book is based on the Martha Moxley case which Dunne had helped to reopen & wrote about at length in Vanity Fair.
Even at the end of his life, when the party was winding down, & Dunne knew he was deathly ill, he never lost his sense of humor or his gratitude for his good fortune. He wrote about his mortality in Vanity Fair. He wrote about the depths to which he had fallen, unlike Capote who fought similar demons but who was ultimately undone by them. Life was an endless party to both men. But Dominick Dunne never overstayed his welcome. Today, on what would have been Dunne's 84th birthday, Hollywood friends & reporter pals gathered at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate Dominick Dunne's life.
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