Who is dominick dunne

Do you have a demo reel? Add it to your IMDb page. Find out more at IMDbPro ». How Much Have You Seen? How much of Dominick Dunne's work have you seen? Favorite Fictional Epic Leader? See more polls ». Known For. Playhouse 90 Producer. Addicted to Love Matheson. The Panic in Needle Park Producer. An Inconvenient Woman Writer. Show all Hide all Show by Hide Show Producer 9 credits. Show all 20 episodes. Producers' Showcase TV Series associate director - 12 episodes, - assistant director - 2 episodes, - - Ruggles of Red Gap Show all 14 episodes.

Hide Show Additional Crew 5 credits. Producers' Showcase TV Series stage manager - 6 episodes, - associate director - 2 episodes, - Our Town Show all 8 episodes. Hide Show Writer 6 credits. Hide Show Actor 7 credits. Dominick Dunne. We watched an episode of the television series Fame in which Dominique was the guest star, and then went out to dinner. At one moment when the four of us were alone, the boys teased Dominique about marriage, and she said, oh no, she was not going to get married, and I knew she meant it.

I was relieved, for although I could see that Sweeney was excessively devoted to her, there was something off-putting about him. The next morning Alex told me of an incident that had occurred in P. A film clip of that scene had been shown so often on television that the line was familiar to people all over the country. There was no flirtation; it was the case of a slightly tipsy fan delighted to be in the presence of an actress he had seen in a film. But when Sweeney returned to the table and saw the man talking to Dominique, he became enraged.

He picked up the man and shook him. Alex said he was scary. They had not yet arrived, so I sat at a table in the bar to wait for them. I finished one Perrier and ordered another, and was beginning to think there had been a misunderstanding about either the time or the place when they entered the restaurant.

It was a hot summer day, and Dominique looked marvelous in a starched white organdy dress, very California-looking. I was immediately aware that she had been crying, and that there was tension between them. The chef made a great fuss over Sweeney.

There was kissing on both cheeks, and they spoke together in French. I found Sweeney ill at ease, nervous, difficult to talk to. It occurred to me that Dominique might have difficulty extricating herself from such a person, but I did not pursue the thought. It was a lovely night, and we were at a window table where we could watch the fireworks. Sweeney told me he intended to leave Ma Maison.

He said he had backing from a consortium of French and Japanese businessmen and was going to open his own restaurant on Melrose Place, a highly desirable location in Los Angeles. In fact, I suspected there were bad feelings between them.

On that endless flight to Los Angeles I did not allow myself to consider the possibility of her death. She was making a pilot at Warner Bros. Five weeks earlier she had broken up with John Sweeney, and he had moved out of the house they shared in West Hollywood.

Two other daughters preceding Dominique died in infancy from a lung disease once common in cesarean births known as hyaline membrane disease. Dominique was all three daughters in one to us, triply loved.

She adored her older brothers and was always totally at ease in a sophisticated world without being sophisticated herself. She was a collector of stray animals; in her menagerie were a cat with a lobotomy and a large dog with stunted legs. After that she spent a year in Florence, where she learned to speak Italian. Twice she and I took trips to Italy together. Extravagantly emotional, she was heartbroken when Lenny gave up the family home on Walden Drive because her worsening condition had made it unmanageable.

I was not surprised when Dominique announced her intention to become an actress. Griffin, who is an actor and a producer, later said jokingly that one day she decided to become an actress and the next week she was on a back lot making a movie, and that from then on she never stopped.

It was very nearly true. She loved being an actress and was passionate about her career. By the time I arrived in Los Angeles at noon that Sunday, the report that Dominique had been strangled outside her home by her former boyfriend and was in a coma at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center was on all the news channels and stations. Mart Crowley, the author of The Boys in the Band , the film version of which I had produced, met me at the airport and filled me in with what little information he had got from Lenny.

It would stay that way from early morning until late at night for the next seven or eight days, during which relay teams of friends manned the telephones, screened the calls, handled the coffee detail, accepted the endless deliveries of flowers, made all the arrangements for our day-to-day living. All the television sets and radios were on for news bulletins. In the midst of this confusion sat Lenny in her wheelchair.

She was very calm. My relatives in Hartford called, and, as the news spread, so did friends in New York and London.

Was it absolutely necessary, I asked. Yes, he replied. All right, I said. I asked him when we could go and see her.

Not yet, he said. The boys arrived, ashen-faced. When the time came to go to the hospital, we were full of dreadful apprehension. It would be a terrible mistake to look at her this way. You must remember her as she was. That is what I would have to live with.

The four of us proceeded in silence through the maze of corridors leading to the intensive care unit on the fifth floor of Cedars-Sinai. Outside the double doors of the unit are printed instructions telling you to buzz and announce yourself. Several people were standing there, among them the actor George Hamilton. We exchanged greetings. George said his brother was also in the ICU, and that he had been there the night before when Dominique was brought in.

Another man introduced himself to us as Ken Johnson, the director of the pilot Dominique was working on. Waiting nearby was a young actor in the same film named David Packer, his eyes red from crying.

A nurse appeared and told us that after we had seen Dominique the doctors would want to talk with us. She said that no one but immediate family would be allowed in, and asked us to show identification. They were afraid the press would try to pass themselves off as members of the family. She warned us that it would be a shock to look at her, that we should be prepared.

I worried about Lenny and looked over at her. She closed her eyes, bowed her head, and took a deep breath. I watched her will strength into herself, through some inner spiritual force, in a moment so intensely private that I dared not, even later, question her about it. Of the four of us, she was the strongest when we entered the room. At first I did not realize that the person on the bed was Dominique.

There were tubes in her everywhere, and the life-support system caused her to breathe in and out with a grotesque jerking movement that seemed a parody of life. Her eyes were open, massively enlarged, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. Her beautiful hair had been shaved off.

A large bolt had been screwed into her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. Her neck was purpled and swollen; vividly visible on it were the marks of the massive hands of the man who had strangled her. It was nearly impossible to look at her, but also impossible to look away. Dad and Griffin and Alex. We love you. Her words released us, and the boys and I stepped forward and surrounded the bed, each touching a different part of Dominique. The nurses had said that she could not hear us, but we felt she could, and took turns talking to her.

We prayed for her to live even though we knew that it would be best for her to die. There is a small conference room in the ICU where we met periodically over the next four days to discuss her ebbing life. Edward Brettholz told us that the brain scan was even, meaning that it showed no life, but that it would be necessary to take three more scans so that, in the trial ahead, the defense could not claim that Cedars-Sinai had removed Dominique from the life-support system too soon.

This was the first mention of a trial. In the shocked state in which we were operating, we had not yet started to deal with the fact that a murder had taken place. Lenny, ill herself with a disease for which there was no cure, understood.

Gray Elrod, with tears in his eyes, said two patients in the hospital were waiting for kidney transplants. We then went in and said good-bye to Dominique for the last time before they took her off the support system. She was wheeled to surgery for the removal of her kidneys, and transplant operations took place almost immediately.

Her heart was sent to a hospital in San Francisco. Then her body was turned over to the coroner for autopsy. He made no comment about Dominique, whom he knew, as he knew us, and throughout the long ordeal that followed he did not call on us or write us a letter of condolence.

Since it was too early then to deal with the magnitude of my feelings for the killer of my daughter, Patrick Terrail became the interim object of my growing rage. Obtaining the best legal representation for Sweeney took an economy turn when a public defender, Michael Adelson, was assigned to handle the case. We heard from Detective Johnston that Adelson was highly acclaimed and doggedly tough. At the time of the murder Dominique was consistently identified in the press as the niece of my brother and sister-in-law, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, rather than as the daughter of Lenny and me.

At first I was too stunned by the killing for this to matter, but as the days passed, it bothered me. I spoke to Lenny about it one morning in her bedroom. She is a strong, uncompromising woman who has never not stated exactly what was on her mind in any given situation, a trait that has made her respected if not always endearing.

I called the publicist Rupert Allan, a family friend, and explained the situation to him. In years past this church was jokingly referred to as our Lady of the Cadillacs for the affluence of its parishioners. The housekeeper at the rectory told me the monsignor was in the church saying Mass. I waited in the front pew until he finished. Then I went back into the vestry with him and explained my reason for coming. He had read of the murder in the newspapers, and I thought I detected in him a slight hesitation over having the funeral of a murder victim in the Good Shepherd Church.

I explained to him that we had once been members of the parish, that Dominique had been christened there by him twenty-two years earlier, and that he had come to our home afterward to the reception. The memory was dim to him, so I persisted. He remembered Maria well, he said, the beautiful daughter of Rocky and Gary Cooper. He told me he had given Gary Cooper the last rites when he died, and had performed the funeral Mass. He said he had always hoped Maria would be a nun but that, alas, she had married a Jewish fella the pianist Byron Janis.

By now the church was a certainty. We discussed the music that I wanted played, and settled at eleven a. Saturday, November 6, for the funeral. He telephoned the church, and the church notified us. Griffin, Alex, Martin Manulis, and I went to the rectory late in the afternoon to try to straighten matters out. We waited endlessly, but the monsignor did not appear. The boys became impatient and began yelling up the stairs of the rectory.

Finally a priest with a heavy Flemish accent came down, but he did not seem anxious to get mixed up in an error that was not of his making. When we pointed out to him that pandemonium was likely to occur the following morning unless steps were taken, he cooperated in figuring out a plan.

As the wedding people refused to move their marriage up an hour, we agreed to have the funeral an hour later. It was too late to inform the newspapers, so we arranged for twelve ushers to be at the church at ten-thirty to tell people arriving for the funeral to come back an hour later.

He was accompanied by the defense team of Michael Adelson and Joseph Shapiro. As we watched, we all began to feel guilty for not having spoken out our true feelings about Sweeney when there was still time to save Dominique from him.

In the days that followed, her friends began to tell us how terrified she was of him during the last weeks of her life. I found out for the first time that five weeks previously he had assaulted her and choked her, and that she had escaped from him and broken off her relationship with him.

Fred Leopold, a family friend and the former mayor of Beverly Hills, told us during a condolence call that he heard from a secretary in his law office that John Sweeney had severely beaten another woman a year or so earlier.

We passed on this information to Detective Harold Johnston, who stayed close to our family during those days. Later that night, the eve of the funeral, Dominique appeared on two television programs that had been previously scheduled. Also on television that night was a film I had produced, never before seen on television, and another film my brother had written, also being shown for the first time.

We did not watch any of them. The day of the funeral, November 6, was incredibly hot. As the limousine pulled up in front of the church, I was deeply touched to see Dr. Brettholz from Cedars-Sinai in the crowd arriving for the service.

Lenny, her mother, Griffin, Alex, and I were in the first car. When the chauffeur opened the door for us to get out, a hot gust of wind blew multicolored wedding confetti into the car. The boys helped their grandmother out, and then we got the wheelchair out of the trunk and moved Lenny from the car into the chair. Because there were so many steps in the front of the church, we decided to take the wheelchair around to the back, where there was a ramp entrance for handicapped people.

The cameramen and photographers walked backward in front of us, shooting film. Lenny has extraordinary dignity. Dressed curiously for a funeral in a long lavender dress with pearls and a large straw hat, she made no attempt to turn away from the television cameramen.

They seemed to respect her, and one by one they dropped away. During the service the boys read a poem by Yeats, and Martin Manulis, who had brought me to California twenty-six years earlier to work for him on Playhouse 90, delivered the eulogy.

The episode had been dedicated to her on the air by the producers. We did not talk. We did not cry. We simply stared at the set.

She looked so incredibly young. She played a battered child. On my first day back in New York after the funeral, I was mugged leaving the subway at twelve noon in Times Square. I thought I was the only person on the stairway I was ascending to the street, but suddenly I was grabbed from behind and pulled off balance. I heard the sound of a switchblade opening, and a hand—which was all I ever saw of my assailant—reached around and held the knife in front of my face.

From out of my mouth came a sound of rage that I did not know I was capable of making. It was more animal than human, and I was later told it had been heard a block away.

Within seconds people came running from every direction. In his panic my assailant superficially slashed my chin with the blade of his knife, but I had beaten him. I had both my wallet and my life, and I realized that, uncourageous as I am about physical combat, I would have fought before giving in. Whoever that nameless, faceless man was, to me he was John Sweeney. If Dominique had been killed in an automobile accident, horrible as that would have been, at least it would have been over, and mourning could have begun.

A murder is an ongoing event until the day of the sentencing, and mourning has to be postponed. After several trips west for preliminary hearings, I returned to Los Angeles in July for the trial.

I felt strange in the car, too old by far to be driving it; I could always imagine her in it, young and pretty, driving too fast, her beautiful long hair streaming behind her. In the glove compartment I found a pair of her sunglasses, the ones she called her Annie Hall glasses. I had bought them for her in Florence when I visited her in school there. I took them out of the glove compartment and put them in my briefcase. Throughout the trial, when the going got rough, I would hold them in my hand, or touch them in the inside pocket of my jacket next to my heart, as if I could derive strength from her through them.

Alex was living on Crescent Drive with Lenny. Griffin and his girlfriend, the actress Brooke Adams, had rented a house in Malibu. On the Saturday afternoon before the Monday morning when the jury selection was to start, Lenny rounded us up at her house. She had received a call from a journalist friend of the family, who said he wanted to meet with us to deliver a message from Mike Adelson, the defense attorney representing John Sweeney.

We all had curious feelings about the meeting. At that point in the proceedings our relationship with the district attorney, Steven Barshop, was still very formal. We called him Mr. Barshop, and he called us Mr. We did not even have his home telephone number.

We decided in advance that no matter what was said to us at the meeting we would listen to the message and make no comment. He said that Sweeney was full of remorse and was willing to go to prison. Sweeney would plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter and would serve seven and a half years, but he wanted the assault charge, based on his attack on Dominique five weeks before the murder, dropped. We had been down the plea bargain road before.

Five months earlier, in February, after the preliminary hearing on the assault charge, a plea bargain had been offered to us by Adelson through the district attorney. I had also seen at the hearing what a ruthless player Adelson was in the courtroom. Later, in May, Adelson had reneged on the plea bargain and opened up the whole matter of the trial, which we thought had been put to rest.

Now, within two days of the beginning of jury selection, we were being offered, through a third party, another plea bargain, from which the district attorney had simply been excluded. I felt distrustful and manipulated. Doubts were put in our minds about the ability of Steven Barshop.

There was even a suggestion that Dominique was a participant in the crime. Neighbors would be called, we were told, who would testify that fights were commonplace between Dominique and Sweeney.

One prisoner reported that Sweeney had confessed to him that he thought he had the police believing he had not intended to kill Dominique, and another said that Sweeney had told him that Dominique was a snob, too ambitious, who deserved what she got.

The journalist talked a great deal about a lawyer called Paul Fitzgerald. In the months ahead I was never to meet Fitzgerald, but he was often presented in conversation as a sage of the court system, with detractors as vocal as his admirers. A former public defender, Fitzgerald was occasionally appointed as a conflict lawyer by Judge Burton S.

Katz, in whose courtroom the case was being tried. On that Saturday afternoon, before the jury selection had begun, Paul Fitzgerald was identified as the source of the information, reiterated again and again by the journalist who visited us, that Mike Adelson was a wonderful man.

It had not been my personal experience to find Mike Adelson a wonderful man. Twice during the February preliminary hearing he had addressed me in the corridor outside the courtroom as Mr. Sweeney, as if mistaking me for the father of the killer rather than the father of the victim.

No amount of laudatory comment, after those preliminary hearings, would ever convince me that Mike Adelson was a wonderful man. Mustached and extremely short, his head topped with a full toupee, Adelson made me think of an angry miniature bulldog. By , he was producing films. Another favorite Dunne story took place at the Daisy, a Rodeo Drive club popular with the Hollywood set.

His social ambitions ruined his marriage, and he began drinking excessively and abusing drugs. In , he was arrested for possession of marijuana. The final act in his self- destruction was when he told an offensive joke about the powerful Hollywood agent Sue Mengers and the Hollywood Reporter printed it. In , he left Hollywood and drove to Oregon. He decided to stay, stopped drinking and using drugs, and contemplated his failures.

One night he went to bed with a knife beside him, intending to kill himself, only to be jarred awake by a phone call telling him that his youngest brother, Stephen, had committed suicide.

He had gotten the idea a few years earlier, after a chance encounter in the Beverly Hills Hotel with a Washington Post writer who went to college with Stephen. The reporter came to Los Angeles to investigate reports that David Begelman, then head of Columbia Pictures, had been embezzling funds by forging the signatures of some of its top stars -- most notably Cliff Robertson -- on studio checks. I knew all the phone numbers. And I was furious that I had become a reject.

Then came the tragedy that would define the second half of his life: His actress-daughter, Dominique, 22, was strangled by her boyfriend, John Sweeney, a chef at a tony West Hollywood restaurant.

She asked him to keep a journal during the trial and come see her when it was over. Dunne wore his sympathy for victims of heinous crimes like a badge of honor. He reported the juicy details that others ignored -- how Menendez defense lawyer Leslie Abramson strode down a courthouse corridor giving the finger to the swarm of photographers following her and how fans sent bouquets to Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark.

He also was a wily analyst of character, revealing mores, conceits and other flaws through well-observed details and scenes in which he was as much a participant as a reporter. Reporters for major newspapers, including The Times, were relegated to the rear.

Privileged or not, Dunne worked very hard, always arriving at the courthouse early and recording every wink and nod.

He covered the proceedings by day and dined out on them at night, entertaining the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan and Princess Diana with stories from the so-called trial of the century. I want a little drama to it. I want something in the papers. Elaine Woo is a Los Angeles native who has written for her hometown paper since She left The Times in