Remembering Dominick Dunne

By: Exclusive interview by Kelly Carson | Photographed by John Hildebrand | October 13, 2009 |

How did you begin working at Vanity Fair?

My second book, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, was just this enormous success. It sold something like 2 million copies around the world. Just when I was feeling [like] I got a chance again, I met Tina Brown. It was the night before I was to come out here for the trial of the man who killed my daughter. Tina sat next to me at dinner that night, and she called me the next day and asked me to have lunch with her. I said, “You know I’m leaving.” She said, “Have lunch with me.” So I did. She said, “We all knew where you were going last night and nobody brought it up.” I couldn’t talk about it back in those days without collapsing. Tina said, “Keep a journal. I am about to be named the Editor of Vanity Fair. When it’s over, come to me, and bring me your journal.” And that’s how I got started in magazines. Tina saw something in me I didn’t know I had. I owe everything to Tina Brown.

Where were you when you learned of your daughter’s death?

After I left here and went back to New York, I sold everything I owned and I lived for a year on all the money I made from selling my furniture and neck ties. I was really broke after living rich all those years. I had this little room on West 9th Street in the back of a building and that’s where I wrote The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and that’s also where I got the call at five in the morning from a detective, Harold Johnston of the West Hollywood Police, to tell me that my daughter had been murdered. I said, “Does Mrs. Dunne know?” He said, “I’m at Mrs. Dunne’s house.” And then she got on the phone and said, “I need you.” And I said, “I’m coming. I’ll be there.” Terrible experience and time in our lives (pause).  Anyway, next.

How did you deal with the aftermath?

The death of my daughter was a life-shaking experience. I mean, what that did to me — it was like God took me and just shook me (He shakes the air). It was like he was saying, “Get serious.” I thought I would never get over that, and I guess you never do get over it, but on the other hand you go on and you expand by having gone through it, because that’s the worst possible thing that can happen to a parent – to lose a child and to lose a child in such a terrible way as that. To sit through the trial and sit this close to the man who strangled her and who dressed in a costume of a Catholic sacrosanct and read a Bible … the fakery of it all. But I did it and I didn’t freak out (He whispers), and it led me. I never thought I’d end up in trials, that that would be the big thing in my writing life, but that’s what came out of that.

In your book, Justice, you write about the last day you saw Dominique at Cedars Sinai Hospital and that you whispered into her ear, “Give me your talent.” What did you mean by that?

Let me tell you this first: On the night before she was attacked, which had been my birthday, she called me in New York. She was making a pilot for a new miniseries called V, and she knew I loved to hear everything that happened to her. So, she was telling me what happened on the set and what the makeup man said, and, you know, I love all that stuff and she loved to talk about it and no one would listen but me. And then she said to me, “I love you, Daddy.” And that was the last thing she said to me, and, you know, I have that. When I do my work as a victims’ advocate and I visit families, so often I hear, “If only I told her.” I never had to worry about that because I always told her. What was your other question?

Dominique’s talent. Did she give it to you?

I believe she has. My whole life has changed. The kind of person I was has changed. I think she led me into these courtrooms that I’ve spent so much of my life in, and I feel that she is my guardian angel. When I have those moments of “I don’t know what to do,” I say, “help.”

Your daughter and Martha Moxley (who was killed in 1975 in a case that attracted widespread attention because of its connection to the Kennedy family) coincidentally share the same murder date. Do you place any significance on that?

I didn’t know that until I wrote Mrs. Moxley a letter. It fascinated me that the same thing had happened to both of our daughters, but she didn’t know who murdered [Martha]. She was living in Maryland and she was so media shy at that time, she didn’t even ask me to her condo. We met at the Baltimore-Washington Airport café. And I asked her, “Why did you leave Greenwich? There’s nobody fighting for you.” By that time, I was a big, hot writer, and I had written three or four big, best sellers and they had all been made into miniseries. I said to Mrs. Moxley, “I can write a best-selling novel about your daughter’s murder and it would put the attention back on it, and something will happen.”

So then you wrote A Season in Purgatory which reopened the case, and Michael Skakel, a cousin of the Kennedy’s, went to prison for 20 years for Moxley’s murder?

Yes. That book became a best seller and it became a miniseries. Then CBS News did a seven minute segment on how a best-selling novel had reopened a long-dormant murder case. Ever since then, Bobby Kennedy Jr. has been on my tail. He talks so terribly about me, but it went to trial and I had a lot to do with that. I’m not trying to please Robert Kennedy Jr. I’m just trying to help Mrs. Moxley.

Have you ever known a psychic to solve a crime?

Well, I know that exists, but I don’t know any psychics. But, when I was 18 years old and I was a shy, sissy kid who had never made a team, I was drafted and sent overseas. On the night before I left, I was at Camp Devon in Massachusetts and I was wandering through the little town, and there was this cheap, little, gypsy psychic. Well, she wasn’t cheap (He laughs). But, you know, it was the crystal ball and the heavily rouged cheeks … and you wonder, if they know so fucking much then what are they living like this for, right? (He laughs again). She asked me if I had any questions and I said, “Am I going to be killed in the war?” She looked at me so strangely and then she looks into the ball. She said, “Oh no, you’re going to live a very long life. But you’re going to have a lot of setbacks in your life. The end of your life is going to be the best time. You’re going to be famous.” Every time I have a moment of despair, I think of that old woman.

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