Hollywood Babylon
Dominick Dunne is a
ridiculous man, but in an interesting way. He is not, in the conventional
sense, a good writer. His prose lacks even the hasty, spasmodic felicities to
which we are resigned in the age of word processing. Here is a sentence from
the second page of his O.J. Simpson novel, Another City, Not My Own :
"That book [Dunne's own Season in Purgatory ], the miniseries of which he
was watching, had brought Gus Bailey and the unsolved murder in Greenwich,
Connecticut, which, to avoid a libel suit, he had renamed Scarborough Hill, a
great deal of notoriety at the time of its publication, resulting in the
reopening of the murder case by the police." Have we lost you? In this
sentence, "its" cries out for its parental noun like a little duckling left on
the wrong side of the road. "That book" is the referent, but other nouns rush
to and fro like big, scary buses. (Miniseries, murder, Greenwich, libel suit,
Scarborough Hill, notoriety.) Almost magisterial, almost artistic, is the way
this sentence begins to go haywire with the words "the miniseries of
which"--and yet not.
Dunne can
be ridiculed not merely for his aimless, dribbling style. What he calls a novel
is hardly deserving of the name. Another City, Not My Own reads like a
conflation of the author's first-person columns for Vanity Fair , the
sole difference being the substitution of "Gus Bailey" for "I" throughout, as
if by universal search-and-replace. Gus Bailey goes to the courtroom and
watches the trial everyone already knows by heart. Then he goes to Hollywood
parties and talks up each day's events with an air of tragic foreknowledge.
That's it. The tone is uneven: Dunne jerks from moralistic pronouncements on
O.J.'s guilt to smarmy name-dropping with the ease of an evangelical hack. The
litany of show-business and upper-crust names in the book is staggering. On
Pages 218 through 221, we find the following: Army Archerd, Kate Capshaw, Uma
Thurman, Carrie Fisher, Roddy McDowall, Elizabeth Taylor, Matt Crowley,
Nazimova, Natalie Wood, James Clavell, Sue Mengers, Gore Vidal, Jack Nicholson,
Johnny Mathis, Nancy Reagan, Marje Everett, Merv Griffin, Princess Diana,
Prince Charles, John Travolta, Suzanne Childs, Ray Stark, Betsy Bloomingdale,
and Alan Greisman ("who used to be married to Sally Field"). I've omitted names
of people directly connected with the case--Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, Judge
Ito--although Dunne has a way of making their names sound dropped as well.
So why is one inclined to forgive this book's faults? Dunne
is nothing if not charming. The flair for gossip that got him into thousands of
dinner parties also wears down the resistance of the reader. He is seductively
forthright about the failures in his life, about the fiasco of his career and
marriage in the Hollywood of the 1960s, and he is aware of the conditional,
codependent quality of his fame. He knows that his A-list aura at the time of
the O.J. trial owed everything to O.J. himself. He admits to being a "terrible
name-dropper." (Rather like O.J. admitting that he had his problems with
Nicole.) The act has more than a bit of camp about it--America attends to the
stern judgments of a male socialite. One has to smile at the role played in
this book by Andrew Cunanan, whose scenes are the only ones here that seem to
spring from Dunne's imagination. Cunanan shows up at a Hollywood dinner party
hosted by Ray Stark and populated by Kirk Douglas, David Geffen, and Marcia
Clark. Gus Bailey notices Cunanan right away, and asks Stark's daughter, "Who's
the Latino staring at your father's Monet?"
At the end
of the book, Gus and Cunanan meet again, and Gus dies. It's a loopy little
fantasy, belonging in the same genre as Dunne's classically overworked
meditations on the Menendez case in Vanity Fair . (For example: "If Jose
did stick needles and tacks into his son's thighs and buttocks, didn't Erik
bleed? Didn't Erik have scabs on his rear and thighs? I tried sticking a
thumbtack into my buttocks and I bled.")
I got a kick out of Another City, Not My
Own . I devoured it in the proverbial single sitting. But the book is
ultimately compromised and rendered stupid by the obliviousness of the author.
Dunne had the best seat at one of the great comic cultural cataclysms of recent
years, and he produced a weak, chatty book rather than a good, vicious one. He
relishes a few absurdities as they glide past--the accidental meeting of Nancy
Reagan and Heidi Fleiss in a hotel lobby, or the sight of African-American
servants wincing in the background as beautiful white people call O.J. the scum
of the earth. He writes this nifty dialogue for Anne Douglas (Kirk's wife) and
Barbara Sinatra: " 'I suppose everyone has said the N word at some time or
other,' said Anne Douglas. 'Frank said it this morning,' said Barbara Sinatra."
Dunne's own rage at the black man, however, goes unexamined. Ultimately, his
frothing is indistinguishable from the others'. That Dunne's own daughter was
killed by a man who later went free is not a sufficient distinction--victimhood
does not confer rectitude.
In his
own life and in the larger spectacle, Dunne flubs the bigger ironic notes. Take
this exemplary passage from a Vanity Fair piece: "Sometimes you have to
separate yourself from the trial and go back to real life. I left court 15
minutes early on July 11 so that I could get to Eva Gabor's funeral on time."
Does Dunne mean to make himself ridiculous, or is his sense of "real life" so
far gone? You're never sure. I'm afraid that regular attendance at the funerals
of Gabors is this man's idea of keeping it real.
So, Another City is a borderline case. It is a
shoddy, daffy piece of work, but it provides four or five fine vignettes of
Hollywood bedlam in the 1990s. Fortunately, there is another novel that renders
Dunne's quite superfluous: Gary Indiana's Resentment , published earlier
this year by Doubleday. It is, for the most part, a novelization of the
Menendez case, but the O.J. nonsense shadows it, and the whole incompetent O.J.
prosecution team seems to have been flown in for a last-ditch battle with the
forces of billable evil. Indiana has composed not just an autopsy of Los
Angeles trial spectacles but also a satire-before-the-fact of Dunne's
novel--possibly the first such pre-emptive strike in literary history.
Resentment is narrated, like Another City , by a grumpy writer who
lives at the Chateau Marmont hotel; at the same time, Dunne himself appears as
a character, as a columnist-novelist named Fawbus Kennedy who is variously
called "the kind of nothing this culture has been moving toward for decades," a
"third-rate middlebrow Depends ad," and a "pompous mediocrity of a type
unprecedented and decidedly unwelcome in this kind of grave proceeding." The
diatribe goes on and on and on, and it's funny precisely because it won't let
up. As Dunne makes nice with the truly rich and famous, compliments the likes
of Elizabeth Taylor and Nancy Reagan and Steven Spielberg, Indiana holds
nothing back, burns all bridges, settles scores with those who have merely
irritated him from afar.
Indiana,
an on-and-off novelist-playwright and a longtime writer for the Village
Voice , has accomplished more than the obliteration of Dominick Dunne.
Resentment also sends up urban gay novels and unravels the tangle of
reality and fantasy surrounding child abuse. But it's the precision of his take
on high-minded gutter journalism that makes Resentment the one post-O.J.
book likely to survive the remainderer's abattoir. Indiana manages
simultaneously to reproduce and cut to pieces the bad faith and false
consciousness surrounding these trials. He serves up in full the swiftly
rotting texture of , , the way every observer is drawn into the general inanity
and loses face in the act of . (Click on the underlined phrases for samples of
Indiana's vicious analysis.)
Dominick Dunne, in his book, tries to find the
meaning of events in relation to his own life and can end only with a scene of
queasily erotic murder-suicide. Indiana finishes with a general shudder, a
random Los Angeles earthquake, a "shallow-focus event unaccompanied by volcanic
activity." My God, someone has finally summed up the whole shebang.
