Culture

Dominick Dunne: Vanity Fair Writer Dies at Age 84

by Amy Judd | August 26, 2009 at 01:18 pm

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Dominick Dunne, best known for his work with Vanity Fair Magazine, dies at the age of 84 on August 26th and fans of the magazine and his work will no doubt miss his witty, insightful articles.

He was a very successful writer and was very good at what he did, but Jesse Kornblulth of the Huffington Post, wants us to remember the Dominick Dunne before he became the darling of Vanity Fair and before he had fame standing behind him (he calls that Act II of his life.)

But at the end of Act I, Nick Dunne was a total loser --- and when he was on top again, he didn't try to hide that fact at all. You can see how brutally honest he was in the first minute of a documentary called Dominick Dunne: After the Party.

Fans of Dominick Dunne know little about his early life, that Dunne managed to hide quite well, as that was a time of insecurity, out of control ambition and the time when he drank and took many drugs and almost lost everything.

Dunne convicts himself.

"The reason I can write assholes so well," he says, looking right into the camera, "is that I used to be an asshole."

Dunne spoke about his father and how he affected his early life:

My father was this famous heart surgeon, a wonderful man...but there was something about me that drove him crazy. He mimicked me, he called me sissy. It may seem like nothing now but it's awful to hurt a child. It's a terrible thing. My opinion of myself was nothing...I believed I was everything he said.

Dominick Dunne served in World War II, but he was obsess with making it big in Hollywood, but when the rise to fame is so fast and so high, the fall can only be more painful.
Dunne lost everything, his marriage, his career and his savings, and retreated to a one-room cabin in Oregon at age 50 and put pen to paper to write his way back into history.

When his daughter was tragically strangled to death by a former boyfriend, Tina Brown from Vanity Fair asked Dunne to cover the trial for the magazine.

I had never attended a trial until my daughter's murder trial. What I witnessed in that courtroom enraged and redirected me. It wouldn't be necessary to hire a killer to kill the killer of my daughter, as I had contemplated. I could write about it.

Dunne was 59 when he signed a contract to work for the famous magazine.

Dominick Dunne will be missed in literary circles and in personal ones, and he certainly seems to have left an amazing legacy behind him.

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caj1

at 20:21 on August 26th, 2009

Dominick Dunne's "Act II" persona showed charm, intelligence, and a candid eye and voice on the people and criminal cases he chose to write about. I think he contributed a lot to our understanding of American culture in the '80s and '90s.