Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: not mad, just disappointed
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime(s)
The 1982 murder of Dunne's daughter, Dominique, which led directly to Dunne's longtime tenure at Vanity Fair – but also all the cases and trials he covered for the mag that made Dunne a household name.
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The story
Dunne's son, actor/director Griffin, has a memoir hitting next month, so I treated myself (theoretically) with a more impartial, longitudinal study of his father's life, 2017's Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts. The forceful and concise title: promising! The author, Robert Hofler, a theater critic and Hollywood biographer: I looooved his Allan Carr bio, Party Animals, and gave it to at least half a dozen friends that holiday season, so, also promising!
Alas, I promise you that MMaDD is a weird mess – although that's almost certainly not Hofler's fault. I tried to find another way to say this on a website devoted to reality television, a genre whose villains never fail to blame "the editing" for making them look bad, buuuut: it's the editing. Or the lack of it.
Publisher's Weekly's review concurred, although not in so many words. PW liked the book well enough, saying it "teems with interesting stories," which it does, but adding that "the narrative sometimes stumbles on awkward sentences and chronological glitches," which it also does, big-time. Up to a point, the headlong-dash prose style works as a parallel to its subject, who was something of a weird mess himself a lot of the time, as were most of the murder cases he covered in such singular style for VF; he made messes, of his career and his personal life, before he stopped drinking…it is a lot of plot, Dunne's life (before he's even 20 years old, you've got a Bronze Star and a Hepburn across the street!), a lot of it is stranger than fiction, and the sense that you didn't quite catch everything Hofler just whispered to you in a crowded restaurant is appropriate.
To Hofler's credit, he gets allllmost everything in – the flops on Dunne's producer c.v., complete with Elizabeth Taylor misbehavior; how Dunne interacted with OJ Simpson at Simpson's other trials. But often, especially in MMaDD's second half, it's merely jumbled, and feels like neither Hofler nor his UW Press editor had control of it. Some of it is a line-editing problem: misspellings like "Angelinos" for L.A. residents, socialite and swan Marella "Angelli," and a typo I personally can't ever get past in true-crime writing, the "grizzly" crime-scene photo.
Earlier in the book, talking about Dunne's team-up with Mark Fuhrman on the Martha Moxley murder case, Hofler explains that a report "linked jeans found at the Skakel house to Michael, jeans carrying Martha Moxley's long blonde hair." Oh. …Wait: what? And then there's the Chapter 19 opener, a regrettable transition that even a junior editor should have blue-penciled: "What Dominick needed more than anything except a new bladder was a good, lurid murder trial." True on the merits (Dunne died of bladder cancer), but at the same time: come on, man.
The timeline in MMaDD gets badly snarled in a handful of places, and that too reflects the convulsive circumstantial progress of, for instance, the Moxley case through the system over the years – the course of true-crime justice never did run etc. and so on. But it's what Dunne did, prided himself on, and got famous behind, so it's all the more important to take a beat and untangle the threads for the reader. I read all of Dunne's work when it came out, and I couldn't figure out a PI-file chain of custody, so Hofler's editor should have spoken up on it: "I don't understand when X happened, or why we care about Y. Explain it to me in three sentences. …Perfect, got it, now write that down."
This didn't happen. The letters-page brawl between Dunne and RFK Jr. merited more than a passing mention; the Condit lawsuit needed a contained and straightforward explanation. Hofler is very concerned with reheating estrangement dish about Dunne and Graydon Carter, but it leaks into court-proceedings sections and is ambiguous in the first place.
As far as that goes, it's fine if Hofler is more interested in some chapters and cross-currents of Dunne's life than others. Party Animals wisely chose to focus on Carr's most memorably outré projects of the late 1970s and early '80s, and didn't dick around with a childhood nobody bought the book to learn about. But in MMaDD, Hofler is preoccupied with Dunne's sexual orientation – in a baffling, dated way that doesn't take long to become intrusive. I'm confident that Hofler, who appeared in the Scotty Bowers documentary I reviewed last year and has also written a book on Rock Hudson's "image cop" Henry Willson, doesn't have bad intentions with this. He is, I think, trying to follow a thread of identity, and multiple meanings of the word "act" as it pertains to Dunne's lives and loves.
I actually quoted an interview with Hofler about the Dunne book when I wrote about Dunne, Robert Blake, and Truman Capote, so I've got no kick with Hofler choosing Dunne's fraught residency in the closet as a sort of illuminating principle for the entire biography. I agree that it's in conversation with Dunne's work:
Dominique [Dunne]’s death illuminated the dark underside of the glitterati-intel industrial complex — that the public’s hunger for information would, in some lethal instances, not be satisfied merely by information, that selling on a promised erasure of the boundary between stars and civilians would, you know, erase the boundary between stars and civilians. Cut to not very many years later, and Dunne, manning a tollbooth that serviced both sides of that boundary, letting enough and useful secrets pass unsourced and keeping the rest in as a bulwark around the famosos. Or around himself.
"Blake, Dunne, and Capote," 3/13/23
Unfortunately, the net effect here is to suggest that Hofler doesn't think much of his subject. It's a lot of corroborating how fey other people thought Dunne was, how scathingly (...homophobically, let's just say it) Joan Didion wrote Dunne as a fictional character in Play It As It Lays, how many people had assumed Dunne was gay and for how long, coupled with appositives like "Such-and-So, a homosexual"...it just feels like the kind of overage of petty detail that disappears after the first draft...or it's supposed to.
MMaDD reads like Hofler hucked everything in his notes onto the page, making and remaking points about Dunne's double and second lives along the way, not taking a ton of care with chronology or spell-check or scotching snotty asides, because that's what you do when you assume your editor is going to wade in and shape it: not every crush Dunne had is relevant, it doesn't totally seem like Bob Colacello "trashed" Dunne so show better cites or cut it, Didion and John Gregory Dunne's high-handed shittiness to/about Dunne needs either its own chapter or a finer point put on it or both, etc. etc. Redundant observations here, glaring gaps there…it needed another pass, at least, to tighten it up and bring out Hofler's themes.
And that's not on Hofler. He did the research, he brought the receipts, and there is a good book in here. The editor just didn't quite find it. It's a shame, but you can get functionally the same story in a fraction of the time from Dominick Dunne: After the Party.