I didn’t have much time to write the blog posting below about Dominick Dunne yesterday — right after I put those few notes together, I had to come up with the 24-inch obit/tribute that ran in the newspaper and online this morning (see link below). “Nick” Dunne was one of my favorite interviews because he was always so quotable and so funny.
Remember that old game people used to play about which celebrity you would want to be stuck with in a semi-private hospital room for a few days?
In my case, it would boil down to two people — Dunne and Alan King — the smartest and funniest show biz insiders I’ve ever met. In both cases, I did multiple features over the years just because I knew I would have a great time doing the interview and come back with a good story for the paper.
Like Dunne, King was what folks in show biz call a “hyphenate” — although he was best known as a comedian, King also was a terrific actor and a producer of film, TV and theater projects.
I felt the same pang when Dunne died yesterday that I felt when King died in 2004. No more hilarious stories about the ups and downs of life in L.A. and New York. No more master classes in how the business of show really works.
Today the internet is full of tributes to Dunne written by reporters who had the same experience with him that I did. Terrific interviews followed by nice personal gestures.
The only challenge with Nick was to boil down the two or three hours of wide-ranging talk in his Hadlyme living room into a reasonably tight and lucid Sunday book feature.
Back in the 1990s, Dunne was focused on his novel writing so I did “Book Beat” columns when “An Inconvenient Woman,” “A Season in Purgatory” and “Another City, Not My Own” appeared.
We had another great session when his fantastic photo memoir “The Way We Lived Then” appeared in 1999. Nick knew everybody who was anybody in Hollywood and the Manhattan smart set, so you could just fire a name at him and he would reel off personal anecdotes.
For years, Dunne talked about the book that Crown will finally publish this December, a magnum opus that he told me in the 1990s would be in the style of one of his all-time favorite writers, Somerset Maugham.
Dunne had trouble with the novel on two fronts — after the O.J. trial made him into a multimedia star, most of his time was spent on television projects and covering other show biz trials. But I think he put the novel aside for another, more technical reason — the terrible mistake he made in killing off his alter ego character Gus Bailey at the end of his poorly received 1997 novel, “Another City, Not My Own.”
Dunne told me a few years later that he regretted killing Gus — who had been his observer/stand-in in most of the novels he wrote. Nick said he was toying with the idea of simply pretending Gus had not died at the end of “Another City” and using him again as a narrator guide in “A Solo Act.”
This was years before the producers of the James Bond and “Star Trek” franchises decided to “reboot” their series — i.e. acting as if the earlier movies had never been made.
Dunne asked me what I thought about the idea of restoring life to Gus. I told him it was a great idea. I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that I believed most of “Another City” had been a major miscalculation — a weird fictionalized version of his own coverage of O.J. in which real people mingled with made-up characters — and that few people would make it to the final chapter.
When Dunne found out he had cancer a few years ago, he decided to finish the novel that had been hanging over his head so long. In the press coverage today, Crown reported that the book was no longer being called “A Solo Act.” When it lands in stores in December, the novel will have the title ”Too Much Money.”
Here’s hoping Nick found a way out of his creative dilemma and that the book will end his amazing career on a high note.
(http://www.connpost.com/ci_13211116?source=rv).
