Dominick Dunne by Robert Hofler

Sounds like a fun read.

Dunne was a horrendous snob, but at least he knew it about himself.

He couldn't be that much of a snob. He wrote for Vanity Fair.

From Hofler.com:

Money, Murder, and Dominick Dunne: A Life in Several Acts

A revealing biography of the celebrity crime reporter, novelist, and notorious raconteur.

Dominick Dunne seemed to live his entire adult life in the public eye, but in this biography Robert Hofler reveals a conflicted, enigmatic man who reinvented himself again and again. As a television and film producer in the 1950s–1970s, hobnobbing with Humphrey Bogart and Natalie Wood, he found success and crushing failure in a pitiless Hollywood. As a Vanity Fair journalist covering the lives of the rich and powerful, he mesmerized readers with his detailed coverage of spectacular murder cases—O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, Michael Skakel, Phil Spector, and Claus von Bülow. He had his own television show, Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege, and Justice. His five best-selling novels, including The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, People Like Us, and An Inconvenient Woman, were inspired by real lives and scandals. The brother of John Gregory Dunne and brother-in-law of Joan Didion, he was a friend and confidante of many literary luminaries. Dunne also had the ear of some of the world’s most famous women, among them Princess Diana, Nancy Reagan, Liz Smith, Barbara Walters, and Elizabeth Taylor.

Dunne admitted to inventing himself, and it was that public persona he wrote about in his own memoir, The Way We Lived Then. Left out of that account, but brought to light here, were his intense rivalry with his brother John Gregory, the gay affairs and relationships he had throughout his marriage and beyond, and his fights with editors at Vanity Fair. Robert Hofler also reveals the painful rift in the family after the murder of Dominick’s daughter, Dominique—compounded by his coverage of her killer’s trial, which launched his career as a reporter.

Somewhere in this book is the revelation that Dunne always tried to keep quiet. It involved a joke he told about a powerful woman in Hollywood that ended his showbiz career and started his downward slide. I think it was about Sue Mengers.

Was he ever cute? he always looked like a well-dressed wizened elf for as long as i knew who he was.

His fiction was enjoyable and also the writing he did for Vanity Fair was a lot of fun. Now that Christopher Hitchens and Dunne are gone I still have a subscription but honestly I barely look at it anymore . I am definitely going to be reading this. Dominick Dunne was a complex and interesting person.

He's always intrigued me. So interesting, so inconsequential, I felt. Yet he was a lovely original addition to the society of our time, one who lived in public, warts and all.

Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Dunne. We enjoyed their vain peccadilloes, their talents, their public spats, their reportage from echelons we were not privy to.

Who do we have today?

Judge for yourself r6.

Stinkfish

Vanity Fair magazine died when they had Paris Hilton on their cover. They have been garbage ever since. There is only one store in my town that even has it for sale. No one ever buys it

R11. I remember that. I concur. Would you also say the New Yorker died when Tina Brown took over?

I always give him credit for writing several times about the most embarrassing moment of his life. He was so ridiculously fame obsessed that when he was at a Hollywood get-together for the queen of England, he kept repeatedly taking photos of her. He did it so much and so obnoxiously that finally she had to beg the host to make him stop. He lost face with his friends for irritating the queen, and he was also rejected as rude by the woman who was to him the most prestigious and famous person in the whole world--the person he most wanted to emulate--because of his neediness. He said he never got over the humiliation of that moment for the rest of his life.

Hehe thanks R13. Candidness is attractive, done well.

I ADORE DD, not because I think he's such a amazing human being, but for his gift of gossip. He REALLY had a flair for gossip, which is what made both his VF articles and show so fun! Who do we have now, seriously? Once in a while I find a gem in my VF but it's so rare.

I think it was fun because his gossip did what good gossip does: it makes us feel connected. That uptown-downtown east coast-west coast connect.

The last ten years has seen a decline in this I feel. Woody Allen doesnt speak to us any more. Candace Bushnell doesn't amuse us every week. Michael Musto has been fired from the Voice. Is Fran still out there? That adorably infuriating Christopher Hitchens is gone.

Maybe it's just me.

Love this thread

[quote] He lost face with his friends for irritating the queen, and he was also rejected as rude by the woman who was to him the most prestigious and famous person in the whole world.

Heh heh...one Queen putting another in the shade. I heard this story, not about the Queen, but about Princess Margaret being upset with his photos. Also Sidney Korshak. Two people that were never to be photographed candidly.

The book talks about when Lenny finally asked for a divorce one night when they were coming home from another party she didn't want to go to. Just prior to this she had just come back from a cruise with her brother and his boyfriend through the Greek Isles. Mart Crowley said, "She got wind of something concrete. She didn't see anything wrong with being gay. She just didn't want to be married to one."

Dunne said "I pulled the car over on Sunset Boulevard and cried." Not for his marriage. He knew that this would be the end of everything he valued -- the Mercedes convertible, the Beverly Hills mansion, and the beach house next to Peter Lawford -- all paid for with Lenny's money.

Youth:

Princess:

I remember the story being about Princess Margaret as well, r18.

Authors:

Dunne never talked to Crowley about his secret life though it was common knowledge. They helped each other out in jobs. Crowley eventually wrote "The Boys and the Band," with Dunne producing, and Dunne began a long relationship with Fred Combs, one of the stars.

Lenny Dunne was best friends with Natalie Wood. I wonder if Natalie told her it's not easy being married to a gay man.

With lover Frederick Combs:

Frederick:

Combs was so sexy in "Boys in the Band." I didn't realize that he and Dunne were lovers.

I used to play volleyball with Bob Hofler back in our younger days in the nineties. He used to look like Combs!!

Dunne gave Mart Crowley a six-month contract at Four Star Pictures to help him out between jobs, but it was Crowley who ended up helping Dunne out when it came to Bette Davis...

"I was sleeping on the couch in my cubby hole of an office" when Dominick ran in panic-stricken. He had just shown a veteran movie star the script, by Cy Howard, for a pilot titled 'The Bette Davis Show."

"No way!" Bette Davis told Dominick. "I'm backing out." Dominick begged her to give him the weekend to have the script rewritten. She harrumphed. What could be done in a weekend? Dominick told Crowley to do his stuff. Fast. "I need the script back by early Monday morning," he ordered. It was Friday.

Crowley hardly slept for the next three nights and bunkered down in his office at Four Star to rewrite "The Bette Davis Show." He even gave Davis's character, an interior decorator, a gay sidekick whom he envisioned being played by Paul Lynde.

Monday morning, before anyone arrived at the studio, Crowley slipped the script under Dominick's door and went home to crash.

Dominick hand-delivered the script to Bette Davis's home. A maid told him that the lady of the house was not there, but would he please wait in the foyer anyway. The maid then walked the script to another room, closing the door behind her. From within, Dominick soon heard Margo Channing's inimitable dry cackle of a laugh. Fifteen minutes later, Bette Davis appeared, beaming, pages in hand. "This is terrific. I've never laughed so hard," she said.

They renamed the show "The Decorator" and replaced Davis's gay sidekick with Mary Wickes. "Paul Lynde and Bette Davis would have been hilarious together," said Crowley. But CBS said no: the sidekick had to be played by an actress.

In tests, Davis had demanded more flattering lighting, and even had her neck painted a dark brown (!!) to create a shadow effect to hide her wrinkles. She also didn't understand the urgency of doing a TV series, asking for retakes and causing trouble.

The show premiered on a Monday.

"And by Wednesday the sponsor had already pulled the plug," said Crowley. They did not want to get involved with a temperamental star. Dominick had to keep the news away from Davis since they had two more days of shooting. "Bette would have freaked out if she knew," Crowley recalled. When she was told on the following Monday, Bette Davis did, as everyone expected. She freaked out.

"The Decorator" did not become the big success Dominick needed at Four Star. But Crowley would not forget the favor, and it was he who would give Dominick his second act in Hollywood.

Bob Hofler was a hottie!

Dunne pulled Frederick freaking COMBS???!!!!

Always preferred the elegant raunchiness of Edmund White to Dominick Dunne whom I considered minor, sometimes almost a hack, but diverting. As a "raconteur" (puhleaze!) and writer - competent. No Capote. No Vidal. Social climbing was just pathetic. Didion was a far bigger artist and even Didion's non-fiction isn't aging well.

After Dunne was fired by Four Star, he feared he'd have to give up the Beverly Hills apartment he rented after Lenny divorced him. That was when Mart Crowley returned the favor of "The Decorator" and made Dominick his executive producer on the film version of The Boys in the Band. Crowley parlayed the play's international success into a film contract making him producer-screenwriter and retaining the original Off Broadway cast.

"Dominick at the time was down and out and broke and he needed a job," said Crowley. "And I needed someone to do all the heavy technical dirty work and be a diplomat with CBS, which I was not. I flunked out of diplomacy school. All of the paperwork and money and all the phone calls with people bitching constantly. I didn't want to do that."

Dominick went to work. First he got cash-strapped Crowley a Diner's Club card, going to the top and getting Alfred Bloomingdale himself to give it to him. And there were perks too, for being executive producer. The job put Dominick in daily contact with his most profound infatuation to date. He had met Frederick Combs the year before when the actor performed in the original Off Broadway cast of The Boys in the Band, and Dominick fell in love, madly in love, with the clean-cut, preppy-looking young man in the play.

Howard Rosenman, a film producer who knew both men said, "I'd never seen that kind of obsession, one person for another, like Nick had for Freddy." Dominick managed to spend a great deal of time with Combs, which did not mean the affection was entirely reciprocated.

Combs was very popular, and not only with Dominick. "Freddy couldn't go to the corner for a bottle of milk without getting a blow job," said Crowley. But whether the actor had an intimate relationship with Dominick, Crowley never knew for sure. "That's the $64,000 question. But it's very unlikely. Freddy was one of those guys who liked anonymous sex with great-looking guys." Repeatedly, Crowley overheard Combs tell other men, "I like you but I'm just not attracted to you. I wish I was." Dominick was one of those men. "Nick was not Freddy's type at all," added Crowley.

Later Dunne would write rather masochistically in his private journal: "I suppose it was that I disgusted him physically that made him so indispensable to my life,"

fun book. LOVED Nick's writing in VF and his books. He went through a lot in his life. I was very sad he felt he had to be closeted......but ....choices.

[quote]With lover Frederick Combs:

Or not.

Another book where Nancy Reagan and her suction cup mouth shows up. Hofler claims the executives at Four Star asked Dunne to put Nancy in a Burke's Law episode, not because of her acting skills, which Hofler calls "not good, or even adequate," but because she gave blow jobs to just about anyone "on command."

VF died with DD and Christopher Hitchens.

He was a little overly impressed by the rich. Always going on about ormulu. What the fuck is ormulu? Well, I finally looked it up. It's a decorative design motif composed of cheap metal and painted gold to look expensive.

More from the book...

Most people working on the film did not know that Crowley based one of the play's characters on his producer-friend Dominick, but a few suspected. The all-gay birthday party is interrupted when Alan McCarthy, a college friend of the host Michael, makes an unexpected visit to the apartment. Like Dominick was at the time, the character is married but separated from his wife, and despite protestations of the men's gay behavior, McCarthy does not quickly leave the party.

Peter White, the actor who originated the role, wondered if the character was gay or straight. During rehearsals, Robert Moore directed him to play the "ambivalence, so that one-half of the audience thinks he is and the other half thinks he isn't." Crowley told him, "You decide and don't tell me." And Peter White never did. In return, Crowley never revealed to White the prototype for his character. When interviewed for this biography, White spoke of being "flabbergasted" at the news that Crowley based the Alan McCarthy character on Dominick Dunne. "You're blowing me away with this. My understanding is it was Mart's roommate in college."

Crowley also did not reveal the genesis of the character to Dunne. "We never talked about it," he said. "I never told him. Whether he knew it or not, I know he suspected." Some of the lines spoken by the McCarthy character -- "I'm not going to put up with this!" -- were in Dominick's standard repertoire of uptight retorts. "Nick got the vibe," said Crowley.

"Everybody knew the character was based on Dominick!" claimed Howard Rosenman.

Curiously, Alan McCarthy is the only character in the play Crowley chose to give a last name. "The character is named after two men I despised," said the playwright. "Alan J. Pakula, who was a closet case of some order, and the other is Frank McCarthy, who was General Patton's right-hand man. McCarthy was gay as a snake, and was the lover of Rupert Allan, a very famous and powerful publicist in Hollywood. They lived in separate houses in Beverly Hills that shared a common courtyard.

If Mart Crowley based Alan McCarthy on Dominick Dunne why didn't he cast Danny DeVito in the part?

R29 - What is Bob Hofler like? I have a crush on him. I looked him up and I think Hofler should ask Wikipedia to change his status from "corpse" to "among the living."

Robert Hofler has been an entertainment editor for decades at several publications, including Life, Us, and Variety. He is the author of The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson and Party Animals, as well as Sexplosion: How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos. The lead theater critic for TheWrap… MORE Born: January 5, 1899 Died: February 24, 1978, Rome, Italy

[quote]Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Dunne. We enjoyed their vain peccadilloes, their talents, their public spats, their reportage from echelons we were not privy to. Who do we have today?

Lens Dunham

The Decorator

[quote]Who do we have now, seriously?

So ... who's done Dunne?

Yeah, there are no fun people or smart fun magazines.

I guess there is just DL!

OMG... In "The Decorator" Bette has the same old Lincoln she had in Baby Jane!! I wonder if Crowley put that in for camp appeal.

But, even with Crowley's rewrite, it's still not very good at all. Davis seems like she's doing a characterization of herself. And I didn't see Dunne anywhere in the credits.

R42, he was one of the best volleyball captains in New York's Gotham league, in the sense that he was meticulous, calculating, and all in a good way. He always had a team dinner at his lovely apartment at the beginning of the season, which got everybody in to the team spirit thing.

He was so preppy looking back then, and sometimes the kind of guy who'd talk with his eyes closed, or rushed by fire island pines walk with his nose in the air, that at first I thought he was stuck up. But I couldn't have been more wrong. He was truly dedicated, and basically a big nerd who looked like a handsome devil.

I knew him when he was with Us, and he always had the best dirt, like having to sit through a Julia Roberts cover shoot while she was high on heroin (Hook days), etc.

Good times, both in the city and in Fire Island

I loved reading The Way We Lived Then years ago. The only two things I remember about it today are DD’s desperate Hollywood social climbing and his persistent hurt over Liz Montgomery’s dropping him when she ditched her partying lifestyle after divorcing Gig Young and settling down with Bill Asher.

Oh and , BTW, even if they weren't in the top competitive divisions of the league, I'd say his teams won 50% of the time. He knew the winning formulas, knew how to put a team together, and let's face it, he conducted himself like a winner!

I phrased that wrong.

50% of the teams that won their season in his division we're his teams:

Were

DD was abused and ridiculed by his physician father. Sure, he had privilege, but DD was self-loathing his entire life. I've always had a soft spot for him.

R49 I know what you mean about the eyes closed when he talks thing. There's an interview with him on Youtube. He's very articulate and I figured he's concentrating on what he's talking about. Does he have a husband? Handsome and shy. Just my type.

Damn r55, I knew him 25-26 years ago! He was single then but I wouldn't keep my fingers crossed...

I wish Mart Crowley would write a book. I'll bet he knows plenty.

Great post, R49. I could listen to you all day long!

I love this thread.

Me, too.

The piece he wrote about his murdered daughter was heartbreaking. It truly was a travesty of justice; her murderer got off with a tap on the wrist and the trial was a joke. I guess John Sweeney, the guy who killed is out there somewhere making nice dinners in some posh restaurants. He was a chef in a popular Hollywood eatery before he killed his girlfriend. He was a very sick, dangerous person, but he still had supporters. But that's Hollywood for you.

Every time I saw him speak of Danielle, he broke down in tears. Incredibly sad and senselessly murdered.

Are people sensibly or meaningfully murdered?

The Combs/Dunne story is so intriguing, because Combs's career never went anywhere. I wonder if he had really been Dunne's lover if Dunne could have done more for him.

And the problem with Dunne was not that he was ugly, necessarily, but that he didn't work out even for the era--his body has no muscle tone, and he has a sunken chest. I know people didn't go to the gym all the time back then like they do now, but he could have gone to the gym some 9like obviously Combs did).

I am always kind of fascinated by gay men like Dunne and Calvin Klein who are obsessed with fame and male beauty, and always wind up falling for the one man they cannot have. Klein repeatedly fell in love with straight models who would not sleep with him rather than equally attractive gay models. the same thing that drove their quest for fame drove their need to fall in love with men who would not have them: their self-loathing.

Here’s a funny tidbit from Gary Indiana’s novel “Resentment”, which features a thinly disguised Dunne.

“...the three of them [Dominick Dunne, John Gregory Dunne, and Joan Didion] can’t get through a paragraph without telling you which famous people they know, and what tony neighborhoods they’ve lived in, and how much money they have, and how well-connected they are. [Dominick] is blatant and vulgar about it, and [John Gregory] tries to give it a little ironic twist, whereas [Joan] has perfected the art of making her snobbery and name-dropping read like world-weary deprecation.”

I know Calvin Klein professionally and he was then a nice person and a focused businessman. I don't know much about his sex life and how terribly deluded and self-loading you assume he was. Just seemed like a gay man who married to create a public persona, "social" couple, nobody thought important but himself.

R65 yes thats it in a nutshell.

Dunne was goodkooking. But he could have worked out a bit as R64 said.

No mention here of that very bland woman Hope Langey[?].

Was she and EVERYBODY else in this thread Jewish?

Hope Lange was cute.

The Sue Mengers Story...

Dominick knew Mengers's boyfriend, Jean-Claude Tramont, from his days producing The Robert Montgomery Show at NBC. Back then, the man's name was Jack Schwartz and he lived with his mother in the Bronx . Dunne didn't bring it up when the three of them met in Paris but Tramont acknowledged Dunne. This irked Mengers.

"It was not that she did not know that his name had been Jack Schwartz. She did. What she hated about the encounter was that I knew," Dunne later remarked.

One good thing about Dunne's next film was that its screenwriters left him out of the picture. The bad thing was that Jean-Claude Tramont wrote the screenplay, and he could not write. Compounding the script problems was Mengers, whose recommendation to Paramount Pictures led to Dominick being named the producer on Ash Wednesday. It was a favor for his casting so many of her clients in Play It As It Lays. It was also a favor that would end his career in Hollywood.

Besides being a paying job, Ash Wednesday possessed one big plus -- at least for someone as chronically star-struck as Dominick.

"An Elizabeth Taylor movie!' he gushed. "That's a big deal." He decided to forget (as did Robert Evans, head of Paramount) that the actress had not made a hit movie in more than four years, and as her box-office clout shrank, her outrageous and costly behavior on and off set exploded.

Luchino Visconti was lobbying hard to get his boyfriend a part in Ash Wednesday. He entertained Dunne one night, showing him his new film "Ludwig," starring his boyfriend, Helmut Berger, whom the European press called "The Most Beautiful Man in the World." After the screening Visconti and Dominick chatted, and among other topics the legendary director launched into a complaint about today's young actors "who have everything handed to them."

Berger interrupted the older man. "You think it's easy fucking you every night? he asked.

Dominick could not resist casting such an actor. And this time Dominick got lucky, becoming one of Berger's many off-the-set conquests during production.

Jean-Claude Tramont tried to rewrite the script to Dunne's satisfaction but was not up to the job. He also turned himself into something of a joke on the set when he gave everybody gifts of T.S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday" and signed them "With best wishes, Jean-Claude."

Pretentiousness laced with lack of talent is never endearing, and to the amusement of his actors Dominick revealed that Tramont also qualified as a complete phony. "I'd known him when he called himself Jack Schwartz and was an usher at NBC when I was doing live TV," Dominick told them. Taylor also hated the script and thought less of the man who wrote it when her butler overheard Tramont launch into a scathing critique of the star's questionable taste in clothes. She told Dominick, "Get that asshole off the set!" He had two choices: alienate Sue Mengers, who helped get him the job; or alienate his star, who threatened to become even more intractable.

After a disastrous autumn screening of the movie in Los Angeles, Dominick repeated one more time his story about Jean-Claude Tramont being Jack Schwartz from the Bronx. But in this latest retelling, he added a quip about the zaftig agent Sue Mengers, whom Tramont had now married.

"One day, if the true story of this film is ever told, it should be called "When a Fat Girl Falls in Love," said Dominick. He even said he was writing a book about the making of the movie and calling it "When a Fat Girl Falls in Love." He was not writing such a book, but he thought it sounded funny. At the time.

When Robert Evans read the story in the Reporter, which was retold as fact, he called Dominick and told him. "You'll never work in this town again!""

LOL R56. So you guys never fucked?

I took my mother, a big Elizabeth Taylor fan, to an afternoon matinee of ASH WEDNESDAY. We were the only two people in the theater and could not believe how awful it was. IIRC Henry Fonda was in it too; the premise was something like Liz kept having plastic surgery in an effort to keep her husband, old fish face Henry Fonda. It didn't even have any camp value.

No, r72. Strictly social.

R73 you must be immune to camp. It had "Liz" Taylor. Helmut Berger! And Monique van Vooren. Filmed in Cortina d'Ampezzo when it was CORTINA and featuring "fur" and "turbans" and this:

R73, You can't be serious. "Ash Wednesday" was ultimate camp. I recall Rex Reed giving it a positive review.

I thought Ash Wednesday was just plain bad. Perhaps I missed the camp appeal.

yes it is just bad, but there is some camp value in the residual images.

R48, In the party scene near the end, Bette is wearing a replica of the black dress she wore as Margo Channing in the birthday party scene in All About Eve.

the asshole of all assholes. i spent a week on a bus in Russia with him.

Did not deserve to be related to Joan Didion.

I recall reading something about Dunne and Taylor getting smashed on the set and she said to him, "You know, this is going to be your last picture in Hollywood." He knew she was right.

Any details of his assholishness, R80?

Assholery? Assholism?

Cracks me up about John Dunne and Joan Didion, big time alcoholics, putting down Nick Dunne because he smoked pot.

Someone remarked on Dunne's weight loss at a memorial service he attended shortly before his death and he responded "Yeah, cancer will do that".

Fabulous R79. Yeah I caught that.

Helmut Berger then and now. (He's been married to a woman since 1994.)

When DD died, his NYC apartment on E 49th street was on the market. I walked by the building every day to and from work. It was a doorman building, but nothing very fancy.

His apartment was technically a penthouse, but it was small. The outdoor space looks nicer than the apartment. There was one bathroom that was only accessible from the master bedroom. Not a great set-up if you entertain for dinner often.

A nice bachelor pad but the decor is de trop.

Thanks R88. I loved getting to see his apartment!

Was that his decor?

[quote] There was one bathroom that was only accessible from the master bedroom. Not a great set-up if you entertain for dinner often.

Must be one of those "overcoats on the bed" parties. And some drunken old floozie burrows into them and passes out.

Liz was doing the strangest movies back then. Boom! Secret Ceremony. The VIPs. The Only Game in Town. X, Y and Zee. Hammersmith if Out. I never saw any of them.

He fancied himself a country gentleman back home in Connecticut.

Soulless decorator tasteful.

Mary it takes a fairy.

More an homage than a replica r79.

J'adore the Bette Davis Programme! Paul Lynde would have been all wrong, there's only so much camp you can squeeze in 30 minutes

R93, if you get the chance, try to see uncut / director's cut, whatever it was, of Secret Ceremony.

Actually R99, I realize now that I did see Secret Ceremony. I watched it all the way through and I liked it. Don't know if it was the director's cut. I loved Liz getting all dressed up by Mia.

[quote] I don't know much about his sex life and how terribly deluded and self-loading you assume he was.

Self-loading? Like a dishwasher?

I only watched a few minutes, but Bette's line, "YOU throw on a wig and jump into a pair of heels" was obviously written with Lynde in mind. As directed to Wycke, it falls flat.

Cool r100.

To be honest, it was the much maligned David Ehrenstein who steered me toward better versions. He had his great moments.

That could have been 15 years ago.

Been here too long

[quote]. . . launch into a scathing critique of the star's questionable taste in clothes. She told Dominick, "Get that asshole off the set!"

What the hell are they talking about?!

Please. Tell me. Where can I find a self-loading dishwasher?

[quote]"YOU throw on a wig and jump into a pair of heels" was obviously written with Lynde in mind. As directed to Wycke, it falls flat.

Right! I kept looking for little things in the script that sounded like Crowley and I missed that one. I bet that's one of the lines Bette was cackling over behind closed doors.

Mart Crowley must have been so pissed off when he saw the way the show came out.

It was sloppily put together. The taxi starts out as a '56 Plymouth and comes around the corner as a '64 Ford. Bette comes in too early on a line and they leave it in. They did do a good job of covering up her neck though, lol.

And people wonder why it's so easy for a drag queen to do Bette Davis.

Is Dominick Dunne: After the Party (documentary) any good?

I love his apartment! I could be perfectly happy there. The outside of his CT looks awful.

Griffin just did a great doc on his aunt, just out on Netflix.

Despite their issues , the family is considered Hollywood royalty. Seriously.

[quote] Hofler says Dunne was sucking off men in the public restrooms of his leafy Connecticut town at age nine.

So he was sexually abused as a child yet it's made to sound like he was a thrill seeking cockhound with a penchant for straight trade. Only a GAY man would characterize it like THAT.

Oh honey, he wasn't abused. He went looking for it. That was little Nicky in the third stall with the come hither look in his eyes. Come on. Don't tell me you've never sucked a dick in a public restroom.

I used to cruise a public restroom in my 30s. Very hot diverse crowd. And then there was Andy. He was 14 and I know because I talked to him. He was in prep school in my town. I saw him do all sorts of things with grown men. I never said anything because Andy wanted it. He wanted me and I said no. He waited but kept asking me every year and finally when he was 19 I said yes, more out of flattery and curiosity. I gave him a few dates in my house, though not a dirty toilet. God, was he an experienced pig by then. Beautiful skin and hole but wide open well used tunnel.

[104] Wow!

That pic of Liz showing off her pins in those daisy hot pants reminds me of this sexy/embarrassing pic of Dick.

And imagine my surprise when little Andy ended up being one of the top producers in the Bravo Channel with a gossip program of his own...

Huzzahs to R116.

Liz made "Night Watch" around that time, with Laurence Harvey. Similar plot to "Midnight Lace". Not a bad film and her performance was quite good. Hard to find and never shown on cable, not sure why.

Enough about Liz. Get back to me, bitches!

How did Dunne's wife's family make their money?

R109 Yes the docu is very good. My brother became a DD fan after watching it. I think anyone who was interested in old Hollywood would be interested in it.

r120 Mr. Dunne was always candid about his social climbing, and never more so than when describing his surprise at having succeeded in marrying Ellen Beatriz Griffin, called Lenny, an upper-class society beauty with a family fortune made from railroad wheels.

Lenny Dunne had attended Miss Porter’s School, took her holidays on a family ranch in Arizona and inherited the kind of quality objects — tall case clocks and China export porcelain — that people of her ilk once tended to acquire. Mr. Dunne once wrote of his wife that she “had the kind of class that people in those days called ‘good goods.’ ”

R23

Is this Hofler in any way guilty of 'The Pot Calling The Kettle Black' ?

They don't really sound top-drawer to me!

[QUOTE]Liz was doing the strangest movies back then. Boom! Secret Ceremony. The VIPs. The Only Game in Town. X, Y and Zee. Hammersmith if Out. I never saw any of them.

The Burtons did a lot of shit work to keep the money rolling in. Any producer who would put up her million dollar salary got Liz in a film. IMO her last decent movie was TAMING OF THE SHREW in 1967.

I don't remember where I read it, but towards the end of his life DD said he regretted the end of his marriage. It was entirely his fault and he missed his wife. She had been his best friend, they were the only two who knew the horror of having a child murdered. He said had she ever wanted to take him back he would have returned to her. She didn't want him back though so that was that.

R11 Bullshit. When Heavy Whalestein got Tina Brown to put Gretchen Mol on a Vanity Fair cover ,twice in one year that was the end of things.

R87 OMG. From beautiful to Whalestein like ugliness.

Helmet Burger is like the real life Beverly Lesley r87

He was no Joan Didion.

R55 and R56... yes, he's single. I run a luxury safari company and he's a regular client for many years... he's been single and travels alone ever since I met him about 10 years ago. Very nice guy once you get to know him, although can seem cold in the way a true New Englander might at first. Not sure where he grew up, but wouldn't surprise me if it was Maine or New Hampshire.

That Griffin Dunne didn't have much of a career. I think I've seen one one movie with him in it.

Didn’t Hofler write a book about Allan Carr?

He's got a bit of a Tim Kaine visage in r9's photo.

I liked Resentment...do you have any other ideas about who the other characters might be?

I didn't know about Alan J. Pakula being a fag. Well, he did get the pole in the end.

I used to wait tables and had the misfortune of waiting on Griffin Dunne a number of times. A peevish midget who had that rare quality of not ever getting the hang of dining in any restaurant without acting as if it took special skills. I mean I don't recall him being abusive, but merely the sort of tightwad at whom everyone rolled their eyes when he walked in.

Griffin Dunne did an episode of one of the L&Os where he played a really creepy adulterer who murdered one of his mistresses.

He was very well cast.

I thought Griffin Dunne was in The Grifters with Angelica Huston and then I realized it was John Cusack. I get them mixed up. Griffin has a well-stocked IMDB though. Not anything big. I wonder what his biggest film was. I honestly don't remember seeing him in anything.

It was "After Hours", #139.

A new book on a DL icon & for anyone who loves a bitchy juicy read

I'll have to read that R141. I love the sketch Tracey Ullman does with Hugh Laurie. They play a rich, married couple who are granted a visit by Princess Margaret. Laurie is so good in it.

I still think he was an interesting person and I enjoyed his articles and books. The book sounds dishy and I would like to read it though.

The best thing about Bob Hofler's books is that he knows we don't want to read the usual background info about his subjects which can bog things down. We want the dirt. And he dishes it out consistently throughout all his books. His sourcing is impressive and he always manages to come up with these fabulous, unheard-of tidbits that keep you turning the page.

I'm trying to think of someone in Hollywood who would be a good subject for the Bob Hofler treatment. Are there any actors out there with a scandalous past whose lives have gone unpublicized?

The interior in the NY place is staggering. Total old auntie. However, the terrace is great.

Griffin Dunne was in American Werewolf in London.

Someone bought Dunne's CT home, toned down the "bold" interior colors and added dormers. I think I liked it better before.

Yeah, I seem to recall Griffen 'stole' AWIL from star David Naughton. Dominque was in Poltergeist about a year after that, so both Dunne siblings made their names in prominent horror films of the early '80s.

I figure the Dunne kids must be well off now from their mother's estate and don't need the aggravation of trying to earn a living in film anymore.

Dominick talks about "The Way We Lived" when he and Lenny threw their Black and White Party. Truman Capote crashed the party with a group of friends and then threw his own very similar party in NYC . . . without inviting Dunne.

Years later, after Capote had lost all his friends, Alan Carr threw a party for him in a jail in East L.A. Dunne talks about the party as being a little depressing and at one point Capote was in one cell, Dunne in another, and they caught each other's eye. Dunne said Capote had a look of extreme sadness in his eyes, realizing his life then was so much "less than" it was before.

The Best of Times - by DD in VF.

Nick and Lenny's Beverly Hills home lit up for his black and white party. After the divorce Dunn received $80,000 from Lenny which was half the purchase price of the home. $160K wouldn't even be a down payment on it today.

[quote] Are there any actors out there with a scandalous past whose lives have gone unpublicized?

Most of them.

This was a juicy and fun read. But god Dunne was a tortured soul around his sexuality.

[quote] We want the dirt. And he dishes it out consistently throughout all his books. His sourcing is impressive and he always manages to come up with these fabulous, unheard-of tidbits that keep you turning the page.

And what am I? Chopped liver? I invented dirt.

I just put a hold on this book at the library. Thanks for starting this thread OP. I love a good gossipy read. I also am planning on reading his Alan Carr bio after.

Sure thing R155. And don't forget "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson." LOVED that one!

This Helmut Berger, R129?

I was a regular on Christopher Street in the early 70s when it was Cruise Central. One night I went to a party at Tom Tryon's house when he was dating the porn star Cal Culver, who was at the party. Sure enough Culver turns up in the Dominick Dunne book. Dunne paid him $60 for the best night of his life.

Sixty Dollars!!!!

Of course, that was then...

Griffin was also in another Madonna bomb, WHO’S THAT GIRL...a somewhat lame reworking of BRINGING UP BABY. She looked fabulous in it, but her New Yawk accent was subterranean.

Will so buy this, miss those wits like Dominick Dunne. Even when he'd go off the rails like that book where he fictionalized the O.J. case and used fake names and then ended it with himself being a victim of Andrew Cunanen on his murder spree. After seeing him stare at a piece of art too long (the truly rich don't do that, according to him) at a Beverly Hills dinner party. None of which happened, of course.

(It's also funny and a bit bizarre that he creates fictional names for people he had already revealed in another book or his magazine writing -- like Cheryl Tiegs in the back of a limo. I guess he had to do this charade to get away with the fan fiction with Cunanen at the end).

Thanks, OP, I am loving this thread. So many interesting tangents! And Ash Wednesday is one of my guilty pleasures but, then, I'm a sucker for any movie with Elizabeth Taylor in a turban.

Thanks for that interesting anecdote, R158. It seems like $60 was the going rate for any kind of engagement. According to Culver's Wikipedia entry, "Through one of his escorting clients, Culver landed a spot with the Wilhelmina Models modeling agency, commanding an hourly rate of US $60." Another interesting tidbit from that Wikipedia entry: "In 1972 [Culver] was cast in a short-lived Broadway revival of Captain Brassbound's Conversion. Star Ingrid Bergman described him as 'having the same kind and as much charisma as Robert Redford.'"

A scary part in the book is when Dunne was on his way to dinner with Tammy Grimes (whose apartment was used in The Boys in the Band.) Along the way, he stopped at a corner and was cruised by a hot guy. Dunne immediately invited the man back to his apartment. He found it odd that he asked Dunne to undress completely while the guy kept all his clothes on. The next thing he knew the man punched him in the throat, tied him up, put a paper bag over his head and started tossing lighted matches at him. Psycho! Dunne started praying and suddenly the phone started ringing and wouldn't stop. The psycho freaked, took what he could find from Dunne, and fled. Still tied up, Dunne managed to dial the phone with his nose. After reaching a nearby friend who wasn't home, Dunne had to ask the friend's boyfriend (whom he had never met) to come over and rescue him.

R155, Just purchased it on sale for $10.99 at amazon and downloaded it to my kindle.

Excellent R165. Trust me. It's a great read. All of his books are. Next, get The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson if you haven't already. And then, Party Animal about Alan Carr, if only for the part about the Rudolf Nureyev "mattress party"

[quote]I used to wait tables and had the misfortune of waiting on Griffin Dunne a number of times. A peevish midget who had that rare quality of not ever getting the hang of dining in any restaurant without acting as if it took special skills.

Wow, you'd think he'd be better in restaurants. Griffin says in the book that every Thursday (the cook's night off) they would go out to eat, and only at places like La Scala and the Brown Derby.

r167 Now you know why those places went out of business.

R168 - Probably what hastened their demise was Little Nicky Dunne and his Leica running around snapping photos of everybody.

I actually had a crush on Griffin Dunne a million years ago. Whaddya want? I was a kid.

[quote]Dunne managed to dial the phone with his nose.

I assume there was a pencil in his nostril.

He was a pretentious gay man r171. He used a Tiffany phone dialer.

[quote]I was a regular on Christopher Street in the early 70s when it was Cruise Central. One night I went to a party at Tom Tryon's house when he was dating the porn star Cal Culver, who was at the party.

DL at its best.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Only if the guests included Mary and Ethel r173.

The Brown Derby went under due to trashy tourists from New York bothering their celebrity clientele like Eve Arden and William Holden.

He called her Peach, right?

And Lucy! R176

And, yes, R176, the Derby never did recover from the, ahem, "Spaghetti Incident." What a mess.

Dunne was such a snob, I'm surprised he remained Roman Catholic. That Vanity Fair article makes it sound as if RCs were the cream of the crop in the industry, everyone going to Our Lady of Cadillacs

My brother married into a large Catholic family. And I have Roman Catholic stepbrothers. I don't think there's a divorce among them. It's like The Cardinal Sin right up there with suicide and "tempting a priest." I think there's something to be said for staying together, especially if you can go into a church, confess, say some Hail Marys, and get a hall pass.

[quote]And I have Roman Catholic stepbrothers. I don't think there's a divorce among them.

Well, if they are your stepbrothers, there's duplicity of some sort - through widowhood maybe? - from at least your respective parents:

I always get Griffin Dunne and Gabriel Byrne confused.

I guess when it came to "The Decorator" Bette Davis could take some small comfort in the fact that Joan Crawford also starred in a flop TV series the year before. It actually started out as "Royal Bay" as a series and then morphed into a TV movie called "Della" with Crawford in the title role. Della is a "reclusive wealthy woman, consumed by power and dedicated to protecting the future of her daughter Jenny (Diane Baker)."

"Della" makes her grand entrance at 2:50

R182 - OMG, you're right. I didn't even see that. My mother married a divorced Roman Catholic with four kids. So, uh, he's not in the club no more I guess.

R184 The music is so hilariously overwrought.

I love how the camera goes out of focus whenever it's just Joan.

R160

Dunne once mentioned that he became enthralled with storylines of great wealth mixed with scandal when he was young and the hot murder case was that of Wayne Lonergan, the gay onetime escort of wealthy old men. Lonergan had married the heiress daughter of one of his recently deceased benefactors; they had a son, were in the process of divorcing when he murdered her with a candleabra for having allegedly bitten his dick.

Dunne often took real life murder cases and used them for the basis of his novels: The Billy Woodward murder in '55 was the basis for THE TWO MRS. GRENVILLES; A SEASON IN PURGATORY was based on the Kennedys but combined the death details of both Mary Jo Kopechne and Martha Moxley who was murdered by Michael Skakel, Ethel Kennedy's nephew via her brother Rushton. AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN was based on the murder of Vicky Morgan who'd been the mistress of Alfred Bloomingdale.

This is the French Griffin Dunne

I know R186, right? Well you know they shot these old broads through industrial strength gauze. (Like Doris below.) They always look a little fuzzy around the edges.

I'm wondering what Diane Baker means when she asks Della why she invited the man up here. "Is he going to be one of your prisoners. " The camera freezes. Joan looks stricken. Then they cut to another scene.

[quote]I love how the camera goes out of focus whenever it's just Joan.

It was in my contract, dear.

[quote]I'm wondering what Diane Baker means when she asks Della why she invited the man up here. "Is he going to be one of your prisoners. " The camera freezes. Joan looks stricken. Then they cut to another scene.

I didn't make it that far, but I thought it was funny that the man, who looks like Joan's grandson, gives her the hot babe once over when they meet.

That must have been in Joan's contract, too..

Well at least Joan can tell Bette that her series had better production values. They used the big stage. They rolled in the big sets. I actually may watch all seven parts. She's kind of like the archetype for Joan Collins in Dynasty. And she's not terrible in it. She even looks sober. But I have to admit. In this promo shot she looks like a space alien.

The Joan Crawford Programme was not as entertaining as The Bette Davis Programme, but still has the same camp value. Looks and move more like a marionette show than an actual program. Still, how could Joan look at this and not know that it would launch a thousand bad drag queens?

So, r185, after getting married, your mom and stepdad were excommunicated and not allowed to have communion, if this all happened in the sixties or before.

Yes, R194, my mother, a Presbyterian, married my stepdad, a Roman Catholic. And it did happen in the late 60s. Um, what were we talking about, lol...

That your stepdad, for being divorced, was not able any longer to receive communion

Enough about nobodies' family trees.

r187 - Wayne Lonergan......

Griffin really seemed to idolize Joan Didion. He says from the time she came into their lives she was "the coolest." She drove a yellow (soon to be immortalized) Corvette and "people like Janis Joplin came to her house." I haven't seen the documentary he did on her but I watched parts of it. To tell you the truth, I never read Didion after Slouching Towards Bethlehem except for the book she wrote when John died, which was sad and awful. I felt like I was a psychotherapist and Joan was sitting on my couch free-associating. I have a funny feeling Griffin won't be doing a documentary on his father.

Dunne talks about being completely obsessed with the Lonergan case. The father passed him down to his daughter and he killed her. Dunne used to wait for the newspapers to arrive and pore over the pages. I wonder if he had a premonition death would stalk his life too.

I had never heard about Wayne Lonergan. What a wonderfully twisted story. The newspaper coverage at the time was, of course, wildly homophobic.

But it was interesting that the Lonergan's homosexuality was well known.

TWISTED SEX!

"A TAWDRY TANGO OF TITILATION!"

"Why is it that Irish Catholics are always such obsessive social climbers? Is it because their mothers were all chambermaids?... Oh, I don't mean you."

--Gore Vidal to Dominick Dunne at a luncheon, towards the end of both their lives

[quote] lot of gay men did back then, marry heiresses

I've sometimes wondered if I shouldn't have done this too. Lol.

[quote]lot of gay men did back then, marry heiresses

They still do. Ask Mrs. Anderson Cooper!

About 10 years ago, I was at dinner with friends in Los Angeles. Two tables away were Dominick Dunne and Bill Nighy (LOVE ACTUALLY, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN). Who knows why they were together or even how they knew each other. I was the only one who was more interested in Dunne than Nighy. I never approach celebrities unless I'm a huge fan, but a couple of my friends wanted Nighy's autograph for their kids (cringe). He couldn't have been nicer, but Dunne was kind of an ass and seemed kind of fragile and confused, but I guess he might have been ill at the time?

I still wonder what he and Nighy were doing together.

....

The book also mentioned that Dunne had a major crush on Mark Fuhrman from the OJ trial and their work together on the Martha Moxley murder.

Dunne wrote obsessively in his last years about the Edmond Safra death in Monaco and I remember being completely bored by that story. Who the Fuck cared? Reading this book, it's interesting to discover that VF's Graydon Carter had many fights with Dunne over the endless coverage and thought the writing uninteresting. Dunne was desperate to reclaim the glory of the Von Bulow-Menendez Bros.-OJ years and couldn't. He was basically finished.

La Scala is still in business, you clueless idiot.

^ There's no need to be rude

r210 Actually, that is a very, very interesting situation. His instincts were right. I think where he failed was he was too self-absorbed to write the piece properly, i.e. with a general audience in mind. I'd read other accounts, so it wasn't as boring to me; I knew what he was implying. He had to be very careful about how he worded it, so it came off as overly obtuse to the point of tossing it aside if you weren't familiar with the story.

I don't know when he was filmed for the documentary which is known as Celebrity: Dominick Dunne and Dominick Dunne: After the Party. It was released the year before he died at age 83. He can look a little grotesque in the film when he snarls his yellow teeth in close-up, but he is otherwise a cutie.

I also stopped reading him around the time of the Lily Safra trial too. He seemed to be losing it. And then there was the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy trial. He claimed to have spoken to some mysterious European horse trainer who implicated Condit and Dunne printed the allegation without doing the due diligence or necessary fact checking. Condit took him (and Vanity Fair) to court. The wheels were coming off for Dominick and his emotions began to get in the way of his reporting.

That heiress/gay man dynamic sometimes works out pretty well. I got an Oscar out of it!

Gosh, Monty's got more eyeliner on than Livvy.

"Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters."

[quote]Dunne wrote obsessively in his last years about the Edmond Safra death in Monaco and I remember being completely bored by that story.

Didn't DD develop a crush on the male nurse/suspect and, like before, refused to believe he was guilty. And then, didn't it turn out that he WAS guilty, or partially responsible, and it looked like DD had been betrayed. Can't remember how it all finished up.

He seemed to be trying really hard to bring Lily Safra down. He spilled a lot of tea about her background in preparation for . . . what? What did Lily Safra do to DD that made him hate her so much.

[quote]"Yes, I can be very cruel. I have been taught by masters."

The motto of every Datalounge regular.

R210

I too had no interest in the Safra case. Bore.

I also thought Mark Furhman was hot at the time although I would never have said that to anybody.

Mark Fuhman was hot. He’s also racist pig.

And Daphne's a man r222......

I worked with his daughter once a few years before she was killed. I'm sure that messed with his already odd mind even more, needless to say, but glad he didn't slip (it seems) on his sobriety. I really am looking forward to reading this book now.

Some people want to attach themselves to an avatar: "Don't look at me, look here at my image ideal".

It was a cozy company of actors hand-picked by their producer. Dominick had seen Keith Baxter on Broadway in the hit thriller Sleuth and wanted the British stage actor to play the gay photographer David in Ash Wednesday. For the role of the gigolo Erich, Dominick indulged in typecasting, giving the part to the twenty-eight-year-old actor Helmut Berger, whose sixty-four-year-old lover had lobbied hard for his current inamorato. The Italian director Luchino Visconti even went so far as to hold a private screening for Dominick, showing him his new film, Ludwig, in which Berger, again typecast, played the mad, decadent king of Bavaria. After the screening, Visconti and Dominick chatted, and among other topics the legendary director launched into a complaint about today’s young actors “who have everything handed to them.” Berger interrupted the old man. “You think it’s easy fucking you every night?” he asked. Dominick could not resist casting such an actor. Keith Baxter did not think the European press exaggerated when they called Helmut Berger “the most beautiful man in the world.” Not that Berger let such an accolade go to his head. He never played hard to get. “Helmut and I had an affair, which I soon regretted,” said Baxter, “because Helmut would stay out all night, hit the clubs, and then come banging on my door every morning at three o’clock. Dominick adored Helmut, but nothing came of it. Dominick was a very moral person, and he was very aware of his daughter and boys and Lenny.” Dominick, in fact, was simply more discreet than moral, at least when it came to the most beautiful man in the world. According to Dominick’s longtime partner, Norman Carby, Berger could count Keith Baxter and Dominick as two of his many off-the-set conquests during the production of Ash Wednesday. Whenever Baxter did not answer an early morning call from Visconti’s boyfriend, it was Dominick who benefited.

I cant get through Ash Wednesday. The surgery scene is nauseating.

Dominick Dunne's net worth at his death was listed as only $800,000 on one site and $81M on another. I wonder which one it was.

Griffin was shown to be worth $19M, so maybe DD did have that much.

R44, produced by Aaron Spelling, no less.

I'm pretty sure Griffin's money came from his mother

[quote]Must be one of those "overcoats on the bed" parties.

It looks like they would have had to have been, R92. Doesn't look like there was anywhere else to put them.

I think he had a huge crush on the Menendez brothers, too.

This thread is [italic] . . . delicious . . . [/italic]

Mariah, bolt the door.

I got this book from the library and have just about finished it. While it's pretty much what I expected, what bothers me the most is that it is replete with spelling, grammar and punctuation errors! It is published by the University of Wisconsin Press; don't they have editors or proof readers?! When you see things like "Johnnie CochranE" or "this was considered a PLUMB assignment", it cheapens the book. Most if not all of the best parts are already covered in this thread, as well as in the documentary AFTER THE PARTY.

I always enjoyed reading VANITY FAIR when Dunne and other writers like Kevin Sessums and Marie Brenner wrote for it. And I kind of agree with Liz Smith's opinion that after the OJ trial he "kind of went around the bend."

Dunne describes the humiliation of Peter Lawford and himself where, at a glittering A List party, nobody wants to be seen talking to them because everybody knows they were invited as last minute chair fillers.

Say what you will about Dunne, but I've gotta hand it to him. His honesty about his social decline in "The Way We Lived Then" is brutal.

I remember when he refused to cover the Scott Peterson trial because he felt it was beneath his social station. Ha!

DD's last book "Too Much Money" was awful. I don't know if anybody read it. It was about all that 80s junk bond money and the things it could buy. Instead of a plot, Dunne just copied the I. Magnin Christmas catalogue, substituting material objects for character development. Which in a way was apt since those people and their accouterments quickly disappeared, in their G550 jets, into oblivion.

I was pretty shocked to read the detail that Peter Lawford's remains were moved from Westwood Memorial Park due to "nonpayment of fees." Talk about a bad ending....! I looked at Find a Grave and it does indeed list Westwood as his "former" burial site, but no info on where his remains are now. In some coffee can maybe? Yikes!

As for Dunne, he is like Carlotta Vance; he belongs to a totally different era and was lucky to have captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s as he did. He made VANITY Fair magazine in that decade. Like most mags, it's just a shell of what it once was.

And the brother, John Gregory Dunne, was one prize asshole!

R239, After the cemetery evicted his ashes, they were returned to Lawford's widow and tossed into the Pacific Ocean.

Peter Lawford was Dunne-like in a way. A kinky bisexual who married well. I remember reading that one of his turn-ons was having his nipples cut with razors.

Peter Lawford's children were Kennedys. I wonder why, with all their dough-ray-mee, they didn't pay up. I gather he remarried after Pat Kennedy divorced him, but still.

I picked his nose.

"Lenny Dunne was best friends with Natalie Wood. I wonder if Natalie told her it's not easy being married to a gay man."

Prior to meeting Dominic , her previous BF was known as light on the loafers. Lesbian in denial, or mutual beard?

Was it previously mentioned in this thread that the book claims that Nancy Reagan was known as one of the most prolific cocksuckers in Hollywood, and that's how she got all of her roles?

[quote] Was it previously mentioned in this thread that the book claims that Nancy Reagan was known as one of the most prolific cocksuckers in Hollywood, and that's how she got all of her roles?

No comment.

Right over my head, r246, just like a stream of jism that somehow missed Nancy's mouth.

He and his wife's "white party" was legendary in a good way :)

I don't know if the book mentions this but Dominick Dunne had a famously bad case of halitosis.

Speaking of Domminick Dunne. That NYC socialite who appeared in two of his PP&J episodes Anne Slater died in her sleep on Christmas eve 2017. I'm surprised there wasn't a thread on her. She's the one with those blue tinted sunglasses. They were her trade mark. Anyone knew how old she was at the time of her death? Curious.

R224, what was Dominique like?

Hofler says Dunne was sucking off men in the public restrooms of his leafy Connecticut town at age nine. ---------------

Such Bullshit

Dominic was not truthful regarding his supposed celibacy. He and his boyfriend, Norman were intimate with each other till he died.

I'm reading the Dunne book by Hofler as I type this. The story about Dunne cruising restrooms at age nine came from Dunne himself, Hofler states that he thinks Dunne was more than likely a teen when the tea room stuff occurred. So far, the book is mildly entertaining, Dunne's brother & sister-in-law( John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion) come off really bad in it.

I THINK John was jealous of Dominic. His behavior after Dominique was murdered was appalling. Such betrayal. His younger son Alex was destroyed by Dominique’s death. They were both so close to each other. Alex suffered severe mental health issues after that.

More Dunne dish here kids

Thanks for the Bette Davis TV Show. She must have started her decline after this. She looked like a Skeleton appearing on talk shows. Quite pathetic. Don't know if this short TV venture is a good example, but her acting skills seem minimal.

R257 If you're judging Bette Davis's considerable acting skills from a failed TV pilot she made, then you're an idiot.

She looked like a "skeleton" in her last few years because she had had cancer and a stroke.