Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

by Robert Hofler

  Being a sissy, as it turned out, was not the only thing Dominick learned to despise about himself. Named after a grandfather, Dominick Burns, he recoiled from the family’s humble ancestry. Born poor in Strokestown, Ireland, Burns escaped the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century to move to America, where he quickly parlayed his success at being a butcher-grocer into founding a bank, the Park Street Trust. Despite his newly earned wealth, Burns never saw any reason to give up working behind the meat counter, much to the embarrassment of Dominick, who preferred having a banker, not a butcher, for a grandfather. Dominick’s younger brother John Gregory Dunne described Dominick Burns as having gone from “steerage to suburbia” with all due speed. It was an understatement. In his American transformation, Burns earned so much money and gave so much of it away to Catholic charities that Pope Pius XII made him a papal knight. The city of Hartford even named a grade school after him, the Burns School, which continues to function as an elementary school at 195 Putnam Street.

  While Dominick hated his father, he had reason to love his maternal grandfather, whom he and his five siblings called Papa. (John Gregory Dunne spelled it “Poppa.”)

  “He had an enormous influence on my brother and me,” Dominick recalled. “Early on, he taught John and me the excitement of reading.” The Dunne children took turns spending Friday nights at their grandparents’ house, and not out of pure affection. Papa paid them fifty cents apiece to listen to his readings of poetry and the classics. “We would hate to do it, hate to be bored. . . . But of course, it sunk in,” Dominick admitted.

  The Dunne side of the family was not shabby either. The father who gave Dominick regular whippings did well enough as chief surgeon at St. Francis Hospital to raise his family of six children with the help of three servants in a seven-bedroom stone manor that came with a six-car garage. Their neighbors were equally blessed: across the street from the Dunnes lived the family of another well-to-do man of medicine, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, father of actress Katharine Hepburn. Although the Dunnes and the Hepburns lived nearby on the same street, they rarely socialized, and the reason why had everything to do with another thing Dominick did not like about himself.

  “We were a strange family in that we were rich Irish Catholics in an all WASP town,” he explained. “We were in the clubs. We were in the private schools. We had the summer houses, you know all this, but we were never quite there.” The Dunnes were, he added, “only tolerated by the Protestants,” who were very much there.

  A friend explained Dominick’s inferiority complex and its link to his family. “They weren’t the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Du Ponts,” said Joseph Hardy. They were not even the Kennedys, although the Dunnes worked hard to assimilate. Like most of the Protestants in their neighborhood, they voted Republican, and it took Dominick and his brother John a couple of decades to outgrow that conservative political affiliation. In 1960 Dominick headed up a group called Catholics Against Kennedy; John gave his future mother-in-law the complete works of John Birch as a Christmas present in 1963; and a year later, the newly wedded Joan Didion joined the Dunne brothers to vote for Barry Goldwater for president.

  While neither of them ever voted for a Kennedy, the Kennedys nonetheless became a fixation for both Dominick and his younger brother. According to John, the Massachusetts clan held to a credo of “don’t get mad, get even,” where the Dunnes of Connecticut believed “get mad and get even.” In other words, unlike the Kennedys, the Dunnes had a chip on their collective shoulder for having no political clout or connections and being merely moderately wealthy. For Dominick, it instilled in him an acute sense of inferiority, one reinforced when he fell “madly in love” at age twelve, he claimed, with a young girl who was neither Irish nor Catholic but very, very rich and socially connected. Lydia Ingersoll was the first of many heiresses whom Dominick would come to adore and rely upon for emotional, if not financial, support. The Ingersoll family just happened to be the wealthiest in West Hartford and lived in a gray stone mansion on Prospect Hill. It was quite a hill. John Gregory Dunne called Prospect Avenue “a social barricade as intimidating as the Atlantic.”

  Dominick, for one, did not hesitate to jump over it, but his leap up to Prospect Hill came at a price. Out of self-defense, he adopted the Ingersolls’ sense of entitlement. It was a prerogative that would serve him well, and very badly, in his adult life, because unlike Lydia he did not come to it by birth. Entitlement for Dominick had to be pursued with the focused ardor of a martyr.

  Compared to Lydia’s life, everything else seemed “second best,” Dominick declared, and that included being Irish Catholic, merely well-to-do, and having sisters who did not attend posh girls’ schools like Farmington or Foxcroft. The servants in Lydia’s Prospect Hill mansion were, like Dominick, Irish Catholic, and many of them he recognized as being patients of his father. “It was very upstairs-downstairs Connecticut-style,” said the novelist Luanne Rice, a distant relative of the Dr. Richard Dunne family. Having grown up in the working-class neighborhood of Frog Hollow in nearby Hartford, Rice avoided daily contact with the very wealthy and the class distinctions that such intimate exposure would instill in some of her cousins living on Albany Avenue in West Hartford.

  For Dominick, those class distinctions were ubiquitous, and never did they make him more uncomfortable than, at a dinner party, when Lydia served her young friends an entrée other than fish. The offending meat in question that Friday night was either lamb or chicken, depending on when in his life Dominick told the story. Whatever the meat, if he ate it he knew he would go to hell. And worse than that eternal firestorm, he worried that the servants would tell their doctor about the mortal sin his son had committed up on Prospect Hill. The good doctor would have no choice but to beat the wickedness out of him. Like a saint dispensing miracles at Lourdes, Lydia came to Dominick’s rescue when she ordered her Irish Catholic servants, “Perhaps an omelette for Mr. Dunne.”

  When Dominick was an adult and writing a journal, even then he did not understand the “equation between” his attraction to proper young heiresses like Lydia Ingersoll and his attraction to the adult men he met in restrooms at the park and the local movie theater. But the two desires, the one exalted and the other unspeakably base, were linked and he pursued them with “the same fervor,” he noted. Writing as a middle-aged man, he looked back at his difficult, conflicted youth to label himself a “park pervert,” even though he was the child and his sex partners were the adults. He described himself as always the aggressor, always the active partner. Dominick claimed to have been only “nine or ten” when he first began performing acts of fellatio on anonymous men in public restrooms. Then again, Dominick tended to remember being younger than he actually was at crucial moments in his life.

  He recalled seeing Now, Voyager when he was “twelve or thirteen,” and the “movie changed my life,” he said. If Bette Davis as the homely, emotionally crippled Charlotte Vale could overcome an abusive parent, so could he. Dominick saw the movie five times in as many days. The only problem with his story is that Warner Bros. released Now, Voyager in 1942 when Dominick was sixteen years old and attending Canterbury School, a Catholic prep school in New Milford, Connecticut. Being off a few years regarding his age is a small wrinkle in the story, which Dominick told often. Had he also been older than the “nine or ten” he claimed to be when he first performed oral sex on adult men in restrooms? More significant is that Dominick wondered if he willed himself to be a homosexual “to spite” his father.

  “I was so unhappy because of the abuse I took from my father,” he said. “That film showed me that it was possible to totally change your life, as Bette Davis did in that movie.” He responded viscerally to Now, Voyager’s Cinderella story of how an ugly girl transforms herself overnight into a beautiful woman. “It made such an impression when she walks off that boat—I can still see it,” he said. “She is this new person, and I thought, ‘That could be me!’” Only a certain kind of man ever identified with
Bette Davis. Or at least, ever admitted it.

  Seeing Now, Voyager was not the only reason the teenage Dominick wanted to escape the lovely hilltop campus of Canterbury. In his youth, he was forever escaping something—his father, Canterbury School, and before it, Kingswood.

  At that Hartford school, his brother Richard not only excelled at sports but also got accepted to Yale. Dr. Dunne knew that Dominick, with his average grade point, would never follow Richard to an Ivy League school, and so he tried to rectify the situation by enrolling his second son in a prestigious prep school away from home for his junior and senior years. There were disappointments in leaving Kingswood. Dominick would never experience the honor and privilege of walking across the school’s Senior Green, a spacious lawn separating the chapel from the complex of four small stone cottages housing the classrooms. The Senior Green held an almost sacred significance for the younger students because only boys in their final year at Kingswood were allowed to walk across the carefully mowed grass there.

  Canterbury School, however, had its advantages. In wartime America, the hour-long train ride to New Milford (“New England Begins Here”) from West Hartford meant that Dominick would no longer be living with his father. No one at Canterbury would know to compare him to Big Dick. And best of all, the prep school appealed to his aspirations, because its alumni included children from those families that never sent their sons to the more provincial Kingswood—sons like Sargent Shriver, Rushton Skakel, and John F. Kennedy, all of whom had graduated from Canterbury in the previous decade.

  Shriver, Skakel, Kennedy. Would sons from those truly wealthy, long-established Catholic families become Dominick’s friends at Canterbury? The problem with being an outsider in one’s own family is how a young man clings to that status, consciously or not, throughout his life. Which is why, unlike the other students at Canterbury, Dominick felt compelled in his senior year to leave the school’s hilltop campus with its stupendous views of the Adirondacks and escape to visit New Milford.

  “We never went to town,” said Clifford McCormick, a classmate who graduated from Canterbury with Dominick in 1944. “Our whole life was up there on the hill. We were busy. It was preparing us for the Ivy League schools.”

  Dominick made a habit of leaving the Canterbury campus midday. “I remember risking expulsion every afternoon by sneaking into the town of New Milford, Connecticut, during sports period to read the latest accounts in the New York Daily Mirror and the New York Journal-American at the local drugstore to read all about the Wayne Lonergan murder case,” Dominick recalled.

  Good Catholic boys like Clifford McCormick did not read about Wayne Lonergan. Good Catholic boys at Canterbury were jocks and studied hard to get into Harvard or Yale. And they did not read about Wayne Lonergan for one very good reason: the young Canadian was a sexual pervert who brutally murdered his wealthy American wife and mother of his one-year-old child.

  Dominick, on the other hand, read everything he could find on the Lonergan murder. The Journal-American, among other newspapers, kept him well informed. He even studied its prose, which he would one day mimic in his own writing. The newspaper both cautioned and teased its readers, “Throughout the pattern of the Lonergan murder case are woven the deep purple threads of whispered vices whose details are unprintable and whose character is generally unknown to or misunderstood by the average normal person.”

  Dominick wanted to emulate the handsome, Catholic, and very middle-class Wayne Lonergan, who ingratiated himself into café society by first becoming the lover of William O. Burton, heir to a brewery fortune, and then marrying his beautiful daughter, Patricia Burton, in 1941. The seventeen-year-old Dominick could only speculate about some of the “deep purple threads,” but there was no misinterpreting Mrs. Wayne Lonergan’s oft-published quote about her new husband, a quote that came to light only after he had murdered her. Patricia said of Wayne, “If he was good enough for my father, he’s good enough for me.”

  In happier times, Patricia and Wayne Lonergan partied at the Stork Club and El Morocco. He looked equally smashing in swim trunks, a tuxedo, or, when the war began, his Royal Canadian Air Force uniform. The couple even had a baby together. But when they separated in July 1943 and she cut him out of her will, he wasted no time strangling and then bludgeoning her to death with not one but two candlesticks in the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment.

  Despite the intrigue of such sordid details, risking expulsion from Canterbury had to compete in Dominick’s mind with trying to graduate from Canterbury. When the Lonergan murder took place on October 23, 1943, Dominick was less than a week away from his eighteenth birthday, which meant he would be drafted to serve in World War II that coming February.

  Clifford McCormick found himself in a similar situation. “There were four of us at Canterbury who were going to be eighteen that fall. We would have been drafted midterm. The draft was grabbing everybody they could,” he recalled. To allow such men to receive their diplomas in January, Canterbury and other schools allowed those turning eighteen to study during the summer. Four Canterbury students, including Dominick and McCormick, attended summer camp on the shores of Lake Wassookeag in Maine where they took intensive courses in math and science, neither of which were Dominick’s preferred subjects. “He excelled in English and social sciences,” said McCormick. “I think it was difficult for him that summer.”

  That autumn was even more punishing: McCormick got accepted to Yale; Dominick did not. “The headmaster, Dr. Hume, had a strong relationship with all the Ivy League schools, and he recommended me highly,” said McCormick. The same could not be said for Dominick. Correspondence between Dr. Nelson Hume and Dominick’s father show how much Dr. Richard Dunne wanted his son to follow him into medicine and study at Yale. (He wanted the same for his son Richard, who did go to Yale but pursued a career in insurance instead.) Hume, however, did not write an enthusiastic letter of recommendation for Dominick. Instead, he pointed out in his letter to the admissions officer at Yale that while Dominick’s academic performance had improved markedly at Canterbury, he ranked only in the top half of his class and he tended not to participate in extracurricular activities.

  At the end of January 1944, Canterbury held a graduation ceremony in its gothic-style church for those four students going into the service. Clifford McCormick, like Richard Dunne Jr., would be accepted into a naval academy and never see combat. “Nick, however, went right off to Europe and the war,” said McCormick.

  In between Canterbury and the war, Dominick endured six weeks of basic training at Indiantown Gap in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, followed by a rough Atlantic crossing on the Mariposa. Dominick did not make friends at Canterbury, but he met a good one in the army. He and Hank Bresky bonded over their prep-school upbringing and sense of humor, which was macabre, at least under the extreme violence to which they were soon subjected. Their first night in England they listened to buzz bombs drop, and neither of them could sleep nor stop laughing, even though both teenagers were “scared shitless,” Dominick wrote a friend.

  About a month after D-Day (June 6, 1944), he and Bresky arrived in Germany as part of the Ninety-Fifth Division, where they did not engage in much combat but required security clearance due to the clandestine nature of their duties. As forward observers, they routinely went behind enemy lines to search out the daily whereabouts of troops on both sides of the conflict.

  Four years earlier, the Axis forces had captured Metz, France, and that autumn the Allied forces, including the Ninety-Fifth Division, received orders to take back the French garrison town. They called it the Battle of Metz. (Dominick sometimes identified it as the more famous Battle of the Bulge, which followed the Metz conflict.) In letters home, Dominick apologized for being so vague about his whereabouts, but it was army orders. He could write, however, how he had been able to pick up a Nazi helmet for his youngest brother, Stephen, despite his feelings of guilt regarding battle souvenirs. A common saying in the war was that “the English are fighting for the
king. The French are fighting for their land. And the Americans are fighting for souvenirs and the hell of it.” Hank Bresky told Dominick all he wanted to take home to America was a “bad memory.” Dominick agreed. But he did send news of his bringing back a helmet for his kid brother.

  His other younger brother, the twelve-year-old John Gregory Dunne, wrote him the latest Hollywood gossip. Among other news, John let Dominick know that the singer Dinah Shore gave birth to a “colored (nigger) baby” and George Montgomery had no choice but to sue her for divorce.

  Much more meaningful were the letters from his father. Dr. Dunne wrote how much he enjoyed reading about Dominick’s wartime experiences in Europe, and advised him to consider being a writer. His thoughtful words both surprised and touched Dominick, because it had always been his interest in the arts and his writing a play about Molly and Polly that the doctor criticized as being effeminate.

  His father’s old “sissy” comments, unfortunately, followed Dominick overseas. What he did not write to his family was the constant verbal abuse he took from a sergeant in his division. It reminded him of the names his father called him at home. Those attacks on his manhood ended abruptly, however, when Dominick and his friend risked their lives to perform a surprising act of extreme bravery.

  During the Battle of Metz, Dominick and Hank Bresky received orders to retreat even though two fellow soldiers had been badly wounded in the field near the town of Felsberg. A lieutenant told them, “Sorry, my orders are to retreat. We have to leave them behind.”

  Dominick and Bresky ignored the command. “In the darkness, Hank and I looked at each other and we ran back toward the Germans. Some extra thing came into my being. It was black night. There was artillery over our heads,” Dominick recalled. He could never forget one of the soldiers he rescued. “He bled all over me. He reached out and squeezed my hand to say thank you. I don’t know if he lived.”