Dominick (Nicky) Dunne was born in Hartford, Connecticut on October 29, 1925. He came from a wealthy Irish Catholic family. Dominick was the second of six children. His mother was Dorothy Francis Dunne and his father was a surgeon and chief of staff at the hospital, Dr. Richard Edwin Dunne.
Dominick claims that he always felt like an outsider in his own family. He was more interested in the arts and the glamor of Hollywood than in sports and other more masculine pursuits. His father did not understand this and verbally and physically abused Dominick.
Dominick enlisted in the US Army and fought in World War II, taking home the Bronze Star for bravery in action. He was only 19 years old. When Dominick returned from the war, he went back to school in Massachusetts and attended Williams College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1949.
In 1954, Dominick met actress and heiress Ellen Beatriz Griffin, known as Lenny, and married her six weeks later. They had three children, Griffin, Alexander, and Dominique. Children were raised and educated in wealth and privilege. Although Dominick and Lenny divorced in 1965, they remained closed.
In New York in 1957, Dominick began his career as a stage manager for The Howdy Doody Show and other live television plays. The Dunnes moved to Hollywood in 1957, where Dominick was vice president of a movie studio for several years. He then went on to produce movies on his own.
Dominick and Lenny met, mingled and had fun with the hoi poloi of the Hollywood scene. The Dunnes were well known for the elaborate parties they threw and the parties they attended.
Eventually things got out of control with drugs and alcohol. In a 1999 Time interview, Dominick stated, “When I had my fall from grace and lost everything, including my marriage, my home, my career, everything, I left Hollywood at 50, broke, drunk, drugged and was to a cabin in Oregon to put my life in order.
The result of this self-imposed isolation was a novel, “The Winners.” Dominick continued to write the rest of his life. When asked if writing was easy for him, he said that while writing was not easy for him, he would not call it a struggle either. He says it’s important to write every day.
Dominick became a contributing editor for Vanity Fair in 1984. One of his first assignments was covering the trial of John Sweeney, the man who murdered his only daughter, Dominique, the previous year.
Dominique’s mother, Lenny, became an advocate for victims’ rights and founded the organization “Justice for Homicide Victims.” Lenny was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1975 and died in 1997.
Dominick went on and wrote about many celebrity trials. Some of the most prominent are the trials of OJ Simpson and the Menendez brothers. He also became a presenter and contributor to truTV’s “Power, Privilege and Justice.” Dominick had no mercy for which he said, “He had the best justice money could buy.”
The Cambridge American History of Law says… “Dominick filled the niche with style, becoming one of the nation’s leading popular chroniclers of high-profile criminal trials and lawsuits involving celebrities.”
Dominick Dunne died of bladder cancer at his Manhattan home on August 26, 2009, at the age of 83. At the time, he was working on his latest novel, “Too Much Money.”
Dominic Dunne Books:
Novels:
The Winners (1982)
The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1985)
People Like Us (1988)
An Inconvenient Woman (1990)
A Season in Purgatory (1993)
Another City That Is Not Mine: A Novel in Memoir Form (1997)
Too Much Money (2009)
General:
Dominic Dunne: Three Complete Novels (1994)
Collections: The Limbo Mansions (1991)
Non-fiction:
Fatal Charms: And Other Tales for Today (1987)
The Way We Lived Then: Memories of a Well-Known Dropper (1999)
Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments (2001)