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Summary
Author Notes
Dominick Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut on October 29, 1925. He served in World War II and was awarded the Bronze Star for rescuing a wounded soldier at the Battle of the Bulge. After receiving a bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1949, he worked as a stage manager for the Howdy Doody Show and Robert Montgomery Presents. He then directed Playhouse 90 and was an executive producer of the ABC drama Adventures in Paradise. He started producing films in 1970 including The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park, Play It as It Lays, and Ash Wednesday. His addiction to alcohol and drugs eventually lead to the end of his career as a television and film producer.
He beat his addictions and decided to become writer. He wrote several memoirs including The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper and novels including An Inconvenient Woman, A Season in Purgatory, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and Too Much Money. In 1982, his daughter was strangled by her boyfriend. Dunne kept a journal during the trial, which eventually became the Vanity Fair article Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of His Daughter's Killer. After that, he wrote regularly for Vanity Fair and covered famous trials such as those of Claus von Bulow, O.J. Simpson, and the Menendez brothers. He also wrote a column entitled Dominick Dunne's Diary and hosted the television series Dominick Dunne's Power, Privilege, and Justice on CourtTV. He died from bladder cancer on August 26, 2009 at the age of 83.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
For every striver who claws his way to the top of the moneyed heap, another must fall from grace to make room; in the work of late novelist and journalist Dunne (1925-2009), those falls are usually preceded by a vigorous shove. In his final novel, the players include grande dame Lil Altemus, banking heiress (and suspected murderess) Perla Zacharias, and flight attendant-turned-jetsetter Ruby Renthal, alongside journalist Gus Bailey (Dunne's minimally-fictionalized surrogate). A sequel to 1988's People Like Us based on Dunne's real-life experiences as a society crime writer, Dunne brings an expected level of intimacy to his unflattering look at New York's wealthiest citizens, incorporating his own spectacular Hollywood fall from grace and subsequent comeback, as well as his legal standoff with a congressman whom Dunne implicated in the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy. A fitting cap to Dunne's notable career, this novel is more parody than satire-populated by jeer-worthy caricatures hard to sympathize with-but proves to be a compulsively readable diversion, showcasing Dunne's razor wit and furious disdain for those who believe that laws apply to everyone but themselves. (Dec.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Review
A vindictive multibillionairess tries to suppress a seasoned raconteur's lust for life, not to mention his tell-all new novel, in this posthumous roman clef by Dunne, who died of cancer in August 2009. Dunne's narrator (and alter ego) Augustus Bailey writes for glossy gossip magazine Park Avenue and pens bestselling novels and "true crime" starring the globe's most glittering grandees. A born confidante, "Gus" attracts secrets like Beluga draws partygoers, but he can be a blabbermouth. On the radio, he blithely blurts a preposterous rumor implicating Congressman Kyle Cramden in the disappearance of Cramden's lovely intern, provoking an $11 million slander lawsuit. Gus, 84, fears the litigation will bankrupt the estate he hopes to leave his children. His only hope is Infamous Lady, his novel-in-progress, which dredges up the nagging questions still surrounding the death of ALS-afflicted superbanker Konstantin Zacharias in a fire at his Biarritz villa. Zacharias' widow Perla was never a suspect, and she'd like to keep it that way. Now the third richest woman in the world, Perla has the "too much money" of the title: enough to eliminate any threats to her reputation by far less civil means than lawsuits. Like having Gus tailed by a man in gray flannel, pressuring his publisher to scuttle Infamous Lady and digging up a bogus allegation of pederasty to blackmail Gus into settling the Cramden suit. Stress dampens Gus's joie de vivre, and he's no longer everyone's favorite bavardeur at society functions peopled by disinherited socialites, ex-convict financiers, centenarian doyennes and declasse divas. Gus's dilemmas find too-easy solutions, because Gus, as did, perhaps, his creator, realizes that imminent mortality trivializes one's worst fears, that life is too short not to speak truth to power, and that he'll be somewhere money and revenge can't reach when his last novel comes out. On full display here, Dunne's (Another City, Not My Own, 1997, etc.) jaded eye for the foibles of the ultraspoiled, his stylish wit and eavesdropper's earthey are among the many reasons he is sorely missed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Readers mourned Dunne's passing in August 2009, bereft at the thought of life without his keen novels and incisive Vanity Fair profiles of the rich and shameless. But Dunne grants us one more good read (which he would have greatly refined), a shrewd comedy of Manhattan's elite in the time of Bernie Madoff. As a farewell gesture, Dunne bestows his own traits, trials, and tribulations on Gus Bailey, who is privy to the juiciest gossip and writes about the megarich gone wild for a posh magazine and in risky romans à clef. But now his career is in jeopardy. How could he have fallen for that bogus story about a California congressman and his missing intern? And how far will the ferocious Perla Zacharias go to stop his novel about the suspicious death of her husband? This is a scathing critique of excess and insularity to decode and delight in, what with ruthless Ruby, the wife of an incarcerated financier; a Brooke Astor variation; extra men who escort women with too much money and too little love; and a hilarious scene involving pearls and pea soup. But Dunne's glittering high-society satire harbors sorrow at its heart as Dunne's burdened hero ponders his secrets and regrets.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A celebrity journalist whose divining rod tilted toward the criminally rich and the notoriously criminal, Dunne (who died last summer) went out with this Bronx cheer for the Madoff era: Any prominent male character of unparalleled wealth is either dead or in prison. Keeping their assets in showy circulation is a cluster of widows and trophy wives who maintain their places on the gameboard by blackballing arrivistes, poaching one another's servants and throwing bones to a ravenous pack of gay hangers-on. Never far from earshot is a columnist named Gus Bailey, whose travails are so nakedly akin to the author's that to call him an alter ego would be disingenuous. Dunne's swan song can be read as both a mea culpa and a feisty exercise in cafe society muckraking. But the mordant narrative is waylaid by back-story repetition, ostensibly inserted to point up the boomeranging nature of gossip in a closed culture. At his sharpest, Dunne nails the tireless sycophancy that informs this territory, as epitomized by a devoted extra man who reserves space in his suicide note to recommend a decorator to a socialite friend. "No one can distress walls," he writes, "like Ferdy Trocadero."