What an advocate. What a treasure. What an honest heart. No one else like him.Heart goes out to all his family Griffin, Alex and his only grandchild Hannah and to his "extended family" - Carey Lowell (Hannah's mom), Richard Gere (Hannah's stepdad) and the countless friends and fans...we are all lost without his ability to throw down in eloquent prose the anger and injustice and preference given to the rich and famous - as their peer - and make it make sense and get it seen, heard and sometimes acted upon. His access was unmatched. I don't think we'd have had some convictions at all without him.
From his first foray into writing back in 1982 with “The Winners” it was apparent that he could capture the essence of the people who were rich and powerful on paper. Even as a teen, you had to be really good to hold my attention. He kind of had the inside track, that rich wasn’t beautiful it could in fact be downright ugly and cruel. A favorite of mine, incidentally, was “An Inconvenient Woman.”
Soon we got to know another side of this producer-turned-writer: father in mourning who wanted justice. That perky teen brunette in Poltergeist was his baby girl Dominique, his namesake. Her ex-boyfriend killed her. He got involuntary manslaughter for it, and was out in three of a six year sentence. Well that event set it off, and for the rest of Dunne’s life. Soon came another book, not like the others: “Justice: A Fathers Account of the Trial of his Daughters Killer.”
Dominique’s murder really galvanized something inside of Dunne. I don’t know when he decided it, but it might have been just because Tina Brown asked him to write for VF on the topic of society crimes, or he might have been haunting courtrooms as a sort of a victims advocate before – but when he did start writing for Vanity Fair about the crimes of the privileged people, it was one of those things I know that I savored. It wasn’t just the story. It was the way he told it, the amazing fact he always knew someone in it and had so much access, the facts he was able to uncover like an even better Sherlock Holmes, and his sense of fair play. And the prose…the way he told a story was unmatched. For me he was always one of the main reasons to keep renewing that subscription for the last…God, 20 plus years!
I’d been missing him lately. It has been too long since I heard from this old friend in the pages of VF.
And now, nevermore will I read the likes of Dominick Dunne again. Some losses feel so personal. After all, I took him to bed with me countless times.
No one will be there to sit in the court rooms as a physical, human reminder of justice miscarried like a silent, impeccably-dressed Buddha. No one will be there to look accusingly at the judge, warning him to get it right. No one will be there to stare down a cocky jury and remind them just how serious their job is, that they’d better do the right thing.
I propose we hang his portrait in every courtroom in the land, since he can no longer be there, just so his form can watch out for us. What a fortunate man he was, he found his true calling - he was rich and he talked about the rich, but ultimately the message was NO ONE should get away with murder and he gave it a wonderful voice.