When Dominick Dunne died in August of this year, he was in the last stages of editing his novel Too Much Money, out this week.
What’s interesting about the book isn’t its prose, which is execrable, or its story, which is ripped-from-the-headlines-of-rich-people-you-don’t-care-about. It’s that Dunne, who was two months shy of his 84th birthday, comes out of the closet in it.
Sort of. More precisely, he pushes his alter-ego Gus Bailey out, in this admission.
“Probably true, whatever you’ve heard,” Gus added as casually as he could.
“Heard?” Peter inquired.
“Oh you know, that I’m deep within the closet. . . . Well, maybe I am . . . in the closet. So what. . . . I feel quite relieved having said it. I’m beyond 80, you know. Mustn’t have any more secrets. Can’t die with a secret, you know.”
Dunne, who was long rumored to be gay, told the Times of London he was a “closeted bisexual celibate” in February. In the book, Gus, too, says he’s celibate. What’s sad is that a man who trafficked in gossip and rumor still felt that being gay was something to be hidden, a secret he should keep up until his 80s. Or maybe it’s not sad — maybe he finally felt like it was OK to come out (or have Gus come out).
I attended a big chunk of the first Phil Spector trial, and Dunne was there every day. I didn’t talk to him much — he was always surrounded by court groupies — although he was friendly, more friendly than a few of the web correspondents who shared the back row with me, where those of us with laptops were allowed. Near the end of the trial, the jurors were taken to Spector’s house in Alhambra for a walkthrough; only one member of the media was allowed, and we all decided on Linda Deutsch, the 40-year veteran of the AP. The photo above was taken by Steven Mikulan, then of the LA Weekly, as we all sat around waiting for the tour to finish. It was the most I talked to Dunne. We didn’t talk about sexuality — we talked about Connecticut.
I really liked him, but man, his book Too Much Money is awful. But maybe it’s good that he got something off his Gus’s chest. My review is in today’s LA Times.
