Our desire for scandal and salacity from the lives of the rich and famous is well catered for these days, thanks to battalions of celebrity magazines and gossip sites, but no one did it better than author and journalist Dominick Dunne, who died yesterday aged 83.
Dunne's own life story is so extraordinary it reads like a work of fiction: a Bronze Star for bravery during the second world war was followed by an (initially) stellar career as a producer in Hollywood, where he and his wife would socialise with the stars of the day – Rock Hudson, Mia Farrow, Dennis Hopper – but drugs and alcohol became a large part of his life, and after he made the film Ash Wednesday, he fell from grace.
Moving to the mountains of Oregon, he began to write. The first novel was panned, the second, The Two Mrs Grenvilles, became a huge bestseller – its combination of socialites and murder and vast amounts of money was irresistible. I remember lapping it up: being light years away from the lives of his characters just made them all the more delicious.
"Lying on the floor, face down on the rose border of an Aubusson rug, was a golden-haired woman in a satin-and-lace nightgown. She was dead," the novel begins. "More than a day dead. Perhaps even two. Had she been alive, she would have told you, whether you asked her or not, that the Chinese bowl had once belonged to Magda Lupescu; that the escritoire had once belonged to Marie Antoinette; that the vermeil clock had been given to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria by the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria that the Aubusson rug was a gift of the Belgian court to the Empress Carlotta of Mexico. That they were ill-fated women was of less consequence to the deceased than the sense of luster she acquired when repeating the history of her possessions." How could that fail to enchant an English teenager? It certainly captured me, right from the start.
The Two Mrs Grenvilles set Dunne firmly onto his next career path: top-selling novelist. Other books followed, all featuring his trademark combination of crime and high society – A Season in Purgatory sees the patriarch of a rich Irish Catholic family cover up his son's crime of passion because he wants him to become president, scandal dogs the pages of People Like Us and An Inconvenient Woman. Another City, Not My Own, is his fictional revisiting of the OJ Simpson murder trial, which he covered as a ringside witness for Vanity Fair.
"Yes, yes, it's true. The conscientious reporter sets aside his personal views when reporting events and tries to emulate the detachment of a camera lens, all opinions held in harness, but the man with whom this narrative deals did not adhere to this dictum, at least when it came to the subject of murder, a subject with which he had had a personal involvement in the past," he writes in that book of his alter ego, Gus Bailey.
His personal involvement was a tragic one, which shaped his life: his daughter died after she was attacked by her former boyfriend. Dunne's reporting of the trial of her killer was his first piece for Vanity Fair, for which he went on to cover many other murder trials, including that of Phil Spector. "I realised the power writing has, and it has also helped me deal with my rage," he told the New York Times in 2000. "It gave me a lifelong commitment not to be afraid to speak out about injustice."
Maybe Dunne's books were trashy, but they were the best kind of trashy – way better than the likes of Jackie Collins or Dan Brown – and anyway, I for one believe we all need a bit of trash in our literary diet. I'll be looking forward to the appearance of his final novel, Too Much Money, which is apparently due in December. And here's hoping he gets the 100-strong choir singing Cole Porter's Anything Goes that he told the Times – only in February – he wanted at his funeral.
