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

by Robert Hofler

  On the elevator ride down to the lobby on Sixth Avenue, he cried in great heaving sobs.

  Dominick might have reserved a few of those tears for the novel that might have been. Korda wanted a best seller, and in doing so he cut the much better pages of what Dominick originally gave him. After his first novel, Dominick’s most vivid characters were always his narrators, whether it be his Truman Capote doppelgänger Boris Plant in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles or his own alter egos: the prep-schooled Harrison Burns in A Season in Purgatory, the best-selling author Philip Quennelle in An Inconvenient Woman, or the magazine reporter Gus Bailey in People Like Us and Too Much Money. When Korda cut Burnsy Harrison from the novel, he lost forever Dominick’s most exquisitely rendered portrait of failure and despair, not to mention one of the more scabrous views of the Hollywood pecking order described by Harrison in the opening-chapter party. Never again would Dominick Dunne unwrap his wounded ego and brutally offer it up for such public exposure.

  Otherwise, the year ended well. Dominique got cast in a TV series called Breaking Away. Griffin finished a ten-week shoot in Poland on The Wall and landed the lead in An American Werewolf in London, and Alex moved his Belle Lettres from Vancouver to Seattle, where he now lived. Dominick made a suggestion to his son about the magazine. “You need to put your name on it,” he said. But Alex rejected that suggestion. “The best magazine in the world didn’t have a masthead,” he said, referring to the New Yorker. While Dominick might want to compromise with his writing, his younger son had no such intention with Belle Lettres.

  Michael Korda made Dominick very happy by giving the novel, finished in early 1981, a new title. In an act of mercy and less clumsy syntax, he was calling it The Winners. But the title came with a caveat: to honor the Simon & Schuster contract with the original author, the book would carry the unfortunate subtitle The Sequel to Joyce Haber’s “The Users.” At least when people asked him the title of his book, Dominick could say “The Winners” and not mention the other part about the woman he hated more than plastic luggage.

  Dominick thanked his Medicis, Tony Kiser and Gillian Fuller, and said good-bye. At long last, he moved into his own Manhattan apartment to live and write. When Griffin came to see the studio at 9 Fifth Avenue in the Village, he looked out the window into an airshaft and told his father that he could not live there.

  “Yes, I think I can,” replied Dominick. And he did.

  6

  Didions and Murder

  Dominick dealt with the New York Times’ pan review of The Winners by seeing his reputation as half full. The Old Gray Lady deemed his novel worthy of being reviewed, even if she did call it “another unsuccessful try” at someone trying to write a Hollywood novel. “It was a flop,” Dominick noted, but went on to boast, “I did it! I did it!”

  Despite heaping praise on Dominick’s future as a writer, Michael Korda did not put Simon & Schuster’s money where his mouth was. He let another publishing house pick up the option on Dominick’s next book. At first, Dominick considered writing a roman à clef about the Reagans. He did not want to get political. The novel instead would be about Nancy and Ron’s “thoughtless spectacle,” as he described it; using the structure of the 1932 Broadway play Dinner at Eight, Dominick wanted to fashion a story about a president and first lady who have to cancel a party due to an international crisis. He liked the title Edwina Calder’s Brother-in-Law. It referred to the time when Joyce Haber, speaking to Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire, referred to him as “Joan Didion’s brother-in-law,” as if he had no better identity. The Reagan roman à clef, however, developed no further than a few sample paragraphs and a letter to agent James Oliver Brown. Unencouraged in that endeavor, Dominick began work on something he initially titled North Shore. The book’s editor was Betty Prashker, whom Dominick had met over lunch at the suggestion of Lucian Truscott IV during the David Begelman brouhaha. At their meeting, Prashker showed no interest in characters based on Begelman or Ray Stark, at least as presented to her by an unpublished writer. Two years later and now working at Crown Publishing, Prashker liked his new proposal for a second novel, North Shore, a roman à clef about the Ann and Billy Woodward marriage. That high-profile, tempestuous union ended abruptly in 1955 when she shot him with a rifle in their Long Island mansion. Was it murder or a horrible accident? Truman Capote had already created a scandal by retelling the violent death in his short story “La Côte Basque 1965,” published in Esquire magazine and reported to be a chapter of his long-awaited novel Answered Prayers. Rumor had it that Ann Woodward got her hands on an advance copy of Esquire, read the story, and promptly imbibed a cyanide tablet. Capote wrote a short story. Dominick would write a whole novel about it.

  Betty Prashker made one quick, bold decision when she assigned the novel. She wanted to call it Mrs. Grenville. Dominick approved the title. It had mystery. Who was the Mrs. Grenville of the title: Ann Woodward or her patrician mother-in-law, Elsie Woodward? After the homicide, that other Mrs. Woodward stood by her son’s wife and killer in order to avoid a press melee. The police did not charge Ann Woodward with murdering her husband, and Dominick liked that Capote never thought to write about the lesser-known, more elusive Mrs. Woodward in “La Côte Basque 1965.”

  Working on the new novel, he no longer battled writer’s block because he was no longer writing a book with Joyce Haber’s name on it. Dominick especially enjoyed researching the story like a real reporter would investigate an unsolved murder. That fact-finding might have been more arduous if not for another possible act of high-profile homicide among the wealthy and socially prominent. In winter 1982 Claus von Bülow stood trial for attempted murder, having been accused of giving insulin injections to his diabetic wife, Sunny, now comatose in a $700-a-day suite at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The smoking syringes had been found in a closet at the victim’s Newport, Rhode Island, estate, called Clarendon Court. Dominick knew that the Old Guard of New York would never talk to him about the Woodward murder if they knew he was writing a novel about it. But they thoroughly enjoyed gossiping with him about the debonair von Bülow, and how Sunny turned the Danish financier into her well-kept but resentful husband. Dominick found it easy to segue from Sunny and Claus to other high-society crimes, the Woodward scandal among them. Those rich old biddies on Park Avenue and Sutton Place had no idea they were actually being pumped for information about Ann, Billy, and Elsie.

  Unlike his time in Oregon, Dominick’s life became extraordinarily regimented in New York City. In addition to writing and researching his new novel, he attended AA meetings in Greenwich Village. In the 1970s, Griffin Dunne moved to the Village with hopes to lead a Damon Runyon kind of life. Instead, he became a movie star, so it impressed him that his producer-father from Hollywood was the one who ended up knowing “these Bukowski characters and crossdressers with hair nets.” Father and son would be having lunch or coffee at a sidewalk café and street people would call out to him, “Hey, Nick!” Griffin asked his father how he knew such colorful characters. “Oh, the rooms,” Dominick said. “I know them from the rooms.” He meant the AA meetings. Griffin called it his “favorite time” with his father.

  It was the time that might also have been right for Dominick to come out of the closet. He was living in the ultra-liberal Village, going to AA meetings there, populated with lots of other like-minded gay men. But for him, it was not the right time. It was the onset of the AIDS crisis. It was the time that famous homosexuals in the fashion and entertainment business sold their houses in the gay resort of Fire Island Pines and gave interviews to Playboy magazine. It was the time that Studio 54’s Steve Rubell, already infected with HIV, talked to New York magazine about the “empty” gay lifestyle and opened a new disco, the Palladium, which caused his good friend Bianca Jagger to comment on the club’s wonderful heterosexual ambiance. It was not the time when men on the verge of stardom chose to come out of the closet. For Dominick, it was not the right time.

  The phone call on Sunday, October 31, 1
982, came at five in the morning. Detective Harold Johnson of the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau phoned to tell Dominick that his daughter, Dominique, had been brutally attacked and was now in a coma at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. Dominick, in complete shock, managed to ask if Dominique’s mother knew. The detective said he was phoning from her house and put Lenny on the phone. She did not have to say more than his last name, “Sweeney.” Dominique’s ex-boyfriend John Sweeney, a sous chef at Ma Maison, had strangled her in a jealous rage outside his daughter’s house in West Hollywood.

  The Dunne family never truly embraced Sweeney. Dominique thought her father’s coolness toward her boyfriend was a “snob thing because he was a chef and not a kid from Hotchkiss,” but it was not that. Dominick just did not like him. And now that man had strangled his daughter.

  Dominick hated Los Angeles more than ever when his plane landed at noon that same day, only ten hours after he received the unimaginable news. Mart Crowley met him at LAX; Alex and Griffin would be arriving later. Every radio and TV station in the area carried the news since Dominique’s latest movie, Poltergeist, had been a huge hit and Sweeney worked under celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck at Ma Maison, one of the so-called power eateries in the city.

  When Dominick and Crowley arrived at Lenny’s house, several friends had already gathered there. Years later, Dominick would write what it was like to be in a house when someone in the family has been murdered: “No one’s total time can be accounted for. Shock prevails. People come, people go. They hug. They whisper. They weep. Conversations are going on all over the house—in corners, in hallways, in the kitchen, bedrooms, bathrooms, garage. Secrets are shared. Revelations are made. Speculation is everywhere. News bulletins on the murder are relayed throughout the house by those watching television.”

  Dominick made those observations in 1995, in the wake of what might have taken place in O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate the day after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found murdered outside her condo on Bundy Drive in Brentwood. But, of course, he was really writing about what happened in Ellen Griffin Dunne’s house on Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills the day after John Sweeney attacked Dominique.

  The doctors took her off life support on November 4, 1982. When Dominick wrote about those four days leading up to his daughter’s actual death, he thanked the “relay teams of friends” who took telephone calls, arranged for food and coffee, and managed every other detail of the Dunne family’s life. What he did not write about in that Vanity Fair article, “Justice,” was the behavior of his brother and sister-in-law, which, by the end of John Sweeney’s murder trial and the ensuing ordeal, would ignite a major feud that ended only a few months before John Gregory Dunne’s death in 2003.

  After the murder trial, people would occasionally ask Dominick about his famous sister-in-law. “You want to know what Joan is really like?” he would say and then tell variations of the following story.

  The day after the attack, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion arrived at Lenny’s house to offer their support before Dominique was taken off life support. Her critical condition never improved. She showed no brain activity and a bolt had to be placed into her skull to relieve swelling of the brain. Due to her precarious state, the family decided early on to use one phone line in the house to make calls and to keep the other line open in case the doctor or police called.

  Shortly after asking if there was anything she could do, Joan Didion retired to the master bedroom to place a call on the outgoing line. She closed the door. Later, needing to use the telephone, Dominick walked into his ex-wife’s bedroom. There, he found his sister-in-law on the bed, the phone clutched between her neck and shoulder, a pen in hand. Galleys of her next book, Salvador, littered the bed spread. She was on the phone with her editor in New York.

  Joan looked up at Dominick. There was impatience in her expression, her voice. “Yes?” she asked.

  Dominick told variations of that story to friends. Alex Dunne gave a slightly different version. “Alas, there was only one line in the house so no one else could call through to send their condolences to my mother while Joan was editing her piece,” he recalled. “But it is quite possible that Joan was not aware that was the only line in the house. And yes, my father was incensed but [I] do not recall him actually asking her to get off the phone so my mother could use the line, although he very well may have eventually done so. Very tense couple of hours there for a while.”

  That long phone call only marked the beginning. Almost all press reports on the crime referred to Dominique as the niece of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Her parents were not mentioned, which deeply upset Dominick. Lenny took a different attitude. “Oh, what difference does it make?” she asked. Later, when her mother, Beatriz, also complained about “the niece” references, Lenny finally relented, encouraging Dominick to do something. He immediately called the publicist Rupert Allan, the longtime partner of General Frank McCarthy. “It’s hurtful to us. It’s as if we had not only lost her but been denied parentage as well,” said Dominick. Allan turned out to be a very good publicist and took care of the problem, according to Dominick. Actually, the problem disappeared on its own as press interest in the case quickly dissipated.

  Dominick would later write that Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison, “became the interim object of my growing rage.” It incensed him that Terrail, a few days after the attack, told the Los Angeles Times that Sweeney was a “very dependable young man.” Terrail went on to tell the Santa Monica Evening Outlook that Sweeney would receive “the best legal counsel.” Dominick misinterpreted that four-word quote to write that Terrail himself “would obtain the best legal representation for [Sweeney].”

  After his daughter’s funeral, Dominick returned to a very different kind of life in New York City. He somehow continued to work on Mrs. Grenville. But he had changed because his view of Los Angeles and the world beyond had changed. Still in communication with his lady friend Linda in Santa Barbara, he learned that she was divorcing her husband, whom she married on the rebound after their “affairette.” She made plans to travel to Reno, Nevada, to obtain a quick divorce, and he gave her advice on hotels and restaurants there. He also asked about her house on the beach, and if it had survived the torrential rains hitting California that winter. He told her he felt no sorrow for all the homes in Malibu being ruined, especially those belonging to “third-rate rich people from the movie business.” He used to hate Los Angeles. He still did, but now he also found the place “terrifying.”

  Those feelings of extreme fear were compounded by the fact that he felt obligated, as Dominique’s father, to travel back to Los Angeles to be present at the trial’s preliminary hearings in February 1983.

  He was appalled at the “public relations campaign . . . started by the owner of [Ma Maison], Patrick Terrail, trying to create a groundswell of sympathy for the killer.” Terrail, for his part, denied ever seeing or speaking to Sweeney “after the night of the incident,” and the only quotes he gave the press were to the Los Angeles Times and the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. Those eight words—“very dependable young man” and “the best legal counsel”—were repeated endlessly in several news stories on the case.

  The preliminary hearings also incensed Dominick. In the courtroom, defense lawyer Marvin Adelson mistook Dominick for the father of the killer, not once but twice, in an attempt “to incite me to make some kind of slur on him in public,” Dominick believed. He also thought that another lawyer, Joseph Shapiro, was part of the defense team and paid for by Terrail. John Sweeney, in fact, relied on a public defender, Marvin Adelson. There was, however, a great deal of disagreement regarding the other attorney. According to Terrail, Joe Shapiro never worked for him in any capacity. “He was a customer at Ma Maison,” he said. Dominick insisted that Shapiro acted as the “legal counsel for Ma Maison,” a statement that eventually had to pass through Vanity Fair’s fact-checking department, one of the most rigorous in the publishing business.
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  This much is certain about Joe Shapiro. He ate many meals at Ma Maison, and so admired Sweeney’s cuisine that the two men became good friends. They even played on the same softball team. A member of the prestigious law firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine, Shapiro would later be chief negotiator with the French government on the $2.3 billion Disney theme park in Paris. He died of lymphoma at age fifty-two in 1999.

  In 1983 Shapiro did take a very active interest in the Sweeney murder trial but, according to Marvin Adelson, worked without pay. Whatever the truth, Shapiro’s participation angered Dominick. And when Dominick hated a person, he often attacked his looks. With Adelson, he mocked his toupee. With Shapiro, he said he looked like an ICM agent.

  Sometime after the preliminary hearings, Dominick told Lenny about a book he wanted to write. It was not another novel. It would be a nonfiction book about his experience of sitting through the trial of Dominique’s murderer. He had never attended a trial before, but it did not matter. He was not interested in legalese or points of order in court; this book would tell of a parent’s extreme anguish over having lost a child at the hands of a murderer. He could not think of another book like it. Lenny agreed and gave him her full approval to write such a book.

  In early May 1983, Dominick’s good friend Marie Brenner invited him to a Sunday brunch at her Manhattan apartment. Her guests included people Dominick would want to meet, like the Wall Street Journal’s David McClintick, one of the few reporters who did not seek Dominick’s help regarding the Begelman scandal, and Tina Brown, Brenner’s editor at the British magazine Tatler. Condé Nast had recently relaunched its Vanity Fair title to disastrous reviews under the editorship of a company stalwart, Leo Lerman, and Brown was in town to interview for the top job.