Is dominick dunne gay
Americans have always been fascinated by wealthy people.
We all want to be rich, after all; as someone once said, “The Merged States is a nation of temporarily distressed millionaires.” So, in lieu of actually being rich, we obsess about them. The prosperous used to be celebrities for no other reason than being rich. It’s always been fascinating to me that in our so-called “classless” society (which was part of the point; no class privilege, everyone is the alike in the eyes of the law) we obsess about the rich, we want to perceive everything about them, and we lap up gossip about them like a kitten with a bowl of cream. I am constantly amazed whenever I watch something or read something place in Great Britain, because that whole “royalty and nobility” thing is just so stupid and ludicrous (and indefensible) on its meet that I don’t understand why Americans get so into it; the fascination with the not-very-interesting House of Windsor, for one. We fought not just one but two wars to rid ourselves of royalty and nobility…yet we can’t get enough of the British royals, or the so-called American aristocracy. (Generic we there, I co
Published in:May-June 2017 issue.
Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne:
A Life in Several Acts
by Robert Hofler
Wisconsin. 352 pages, $26.95
IT WOULD BE HARD to imagine a gayer life than the one led by Dominick Dunne. Growing up in Hartford (across the street from Katherine Hepburn), he was not only called a “sissy” by his father but beaten with a riding crop, Dunne said, to get the “incipient fairyism” out of him. It was seeing Now, Voyager at sixteen that convinced him that, like Bette Davis, he could find a better life.
His idea of the latter was not confined to just the movie stars he idolized, however. He was a social climber as well, an admitted snob, and a tremendous gossip who, like Truman Capote, used stories about the rich and known to be accepted. Although he won a Bronze Star during World War II for going back to retrieve a wounded soldier and, after the War, married and had children, he also hired hustlers, picked guys up off the street, did drugs, and used the services of Scotty Bowers (whose memoir Full Service (2012) detailing his years of supplying men to closeted movie stars was reviewed in these pages). He even produced the movie of
Dominick Dunne, Writer of Wrongs
The success of the HBO TV series Succession and the recent feature film House of Gucci are proof that the wretched excesses of the fabulously wealthy never lose their audience appeal. Nobody knew that surpass than the late novelist and journalist Dominick Dunne. He spent the last 30 years of his life chronicling the lives (and deaths) of America’s uber-privileged. He did so as a journalist for Vanity Fair, where he covered celebrated courtroom trials, and he also did it in novels such as The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, People Like Us, A Season In Purgatory, and An Inconvenient Woman, all of which were bestsellers.
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He was part of an astonishingly talented clan of creative artists. His brother, John Gregory Dunne, was a successful reporter and novelist. John’s wife, Joan Didion, is an even more successful news writer and novelist. The couple also collaborated on several screenplays, including one for the wildly successful 1976 version of A Luminary Is Born, which starred Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Dominick Dunne’s daughter,
Two recent items focused on gay men in the closet, though in two quite different ways: Dominic Dunne (1925-2009), the subject of a recent biography (Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Experience in Several Acts by Robert Hofler); and James Beard (1903-1985), the subject of a recent documentary film (America’s First Foodie: The Incredible Life of James Beard). Dunne, who died 40 years after Stonewall, nevertheless spent a lifetime cringing in the closet. Beard, who died only 15 years after Stonewall, was an exuberantly gay bloke to everyone who knew him, but his acquaintances and employers and the media built a protective closet around him, one that he decided to break out of publicly only at the end of his life — so that the world was robbed of an example of a male lover man of amazing talent, living a rich, full existence. (Dunne was, to my mind, no kind of model of how to live a life.)
For what it’s worth, neither man was flagrantly flamboyant, but I pegged them both the first time I saw them talking about their lives and work.
The visuals:
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You can see Dunne in an interview here. Beard you can view in two versions of the documentary: the Kickstarter v