Dominick Dunne couldn’t go along with the “dream teams” and the rest of the flim-flam, not after the murderer of his 22-year- old daughter got a three-year sentence. So he was there for the “inconvenient women,” all the way to his last big trial, when Phil Spector became the latest big shot to date a gal to death. Poor Lana Clarkson wasn’t a “legend” or a “troubled genius,” like Phil, just a one-time B-movie queen who wound up in a B-movie ending. As always, Dunne’s account had all the best detail:
“Sitting in the back seat of his Mercedes as they sped along several freeways to Alhambra, they watched the old James Cagney movie Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.”
An assistant of mine loved his fiction. “This is the way airport novels should be,” she said. Which is a good way of putting it. Any competent hack can do the brand names and the restaurants and the lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous stuff, but Dunne understood the subtler currents coursing just below the surface. He liked the parties and the gossip and the name-dropping; the movie stars and the dispossessed Euro-princelings and the Kennedy cousins. He was of them, but not one of them, not entirely. And so, notwithstanding who got top billing, there was a kind of symmetry in his and Ted Kennedy’s all but simultaneous expiry: a man who disposed of inconvenient women, and a man who ensured they weren’t forgotten. The Farrah Fawcett encounter was a good last name-drop, but it would have been a better story had it been the cancer-stricken Teddy—and the old brute, in some casual aside, had found himself spilling the beans on what really happened at Chappaquiddick that night. “I am the kind of person to whom people confess their secrets,” says one of Dominick Dunne’s narrators. “It has always been so with me.”
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