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L.A. Confidential
By Leonard Gill
DECEMBER 1, 1997:
What is there to add to Dominick Dunnes long-awaited book on the
(his phrase) O.J. Simpson floor show? Its been out now for
just under a month, the hard-core audience for it is reading it
or has read it, and the authors been popping up, worn but willing
to rehearse the same points one more time, on every talk show
known to man. So youd have to be living under a rock to not know
that Another City, Not My Own is not, in fact, another O.J. book.
What it is is a novel in the form of a memoir, and to make sense
of and the need for that curious formulation, youll have to start
making sense of Dominick Dunne. God knows, the man himselfs been
trying to for years.
He left Los Angeles 15 years before the murders of Nicole Brown
Simpson and Ron Goldman, an alcoholic graduating into cocaine and a self-described
B-level producer on an A-level social list. Drink and drugs
didnt do him in, though. A string of box-office bombs culminating
in the camp classic Ash Wednesday starring Liz Taylor was sufficient
that, and the murder of his daughter in Hollywood, the light
sentence handed her assailant, and (good lapsed Catholic that
he is) the divorce, but not separation, from a wife who later
developed multiple sclerosis.
Dunne moved to a cabin in Oregon, dried out, wrote a failed novel
of Hollywood, returned to New York, converted a true murder case
among the rich and famous into the smash-hit novel The Two Mrs.
Grenvilles, and became Vanity Fairs reporter-of-choice when it
came to covering low-life mayhem among high-society WASPs on the
East Coast. Glamorous, gossipy Los Angeles, the dream city from
Dunnes childhood, had become for the adult Dunne the nightmare
city of personal failure and family tragedy.
The Menendez boys and O.J. Simpson brought Dunne back to L.A.
and kept him there for two years, but this time as a celebrity
in his own right with a prize seat in court and a prize seat at
L.A.s more sought-after tables. In Another City, Not My Own,
however, it isnt Dunne who occupies those seats but his fictional
counterpart, Gus Bailey: Gus the loser-turned-up-winner, Gus the
insiders insider, Gus the name-dropper, Gus the hobnobber, Gus
the betrayer of confidences, and Gus the victim of his own celebrityhood
when he meets his match and his Maker in the books shock ending.
For a man whos built a career on tracking unearned fame and unpunished
crime, its a thoroughly ironic and particularly grisly way to
go. Or is it a just comeuppance and gruesome self-sentencing?
Its no secret that Dunne thought Simpson guilty as hell from
the start and that the authors courtroom reaction to the verdict
appeared to be equal parts blow to the stomach and blow to the
heart. The Goldmans wept; Dunne underwent cardiac arrest. But
at least he survived to start in packing hours after Simpson walked
out a free man. Time, distance, and a certain subsequent, fashionable
bloodbath have apparently convinced Dunne that he pack in Gus
Bailey too. The book, let it be said, is impossible to put down.
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