Crime writer Dominick Dunne wrote on the rich and famous

Published 10:11 pm Wednesday, August 26, 2009

NEW YORK — Author Dominick Dunne, who told stories of shocking crimes among the rich and famous through his magazine articles and best-selling novels such as “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” died Wednesday in his home at age 83.

Dunne’s son actor-director Griffin Dunne said his father had been battling bladder cancer. But the cancer had not prevented Dunne from working and socializing, his twin passions.

In 2008, against the orders of his doctor and the wishes of his family, Dunne flew to Las Vegas to attend the kidnap-robbery trial of football great O.J. Simpson, a postscript to his coverage of Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, which spiked Dunne’s considerable fame.

Dunne, who lived in Manhattan, was beginning to write his memoirs and, until close to the end of his life, he posted messages on his Web site commenting on events in his life and thanking his fans for their support.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter praised Dunne as a gifted reporter who proved as fascinating as the people he wrote about.

“Anyone who remembers the sight of O.J. Simpson trying on the famous glove probably remembers a bespectacled Dunne, resplendent in his trademark Turnbull &Asser monogrammed shirt, on the court bench behind him,” Carter wrote Wednesday. “It is fair to say that the halls of Vanity Fair will be lonelier without him and that, indeed, we will not see his like anytime soon, if ever again.”

Dunne was part of a famous family that also included his brother, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne; his brother’s wife, author Joan Didion; and his son Griffin.

A one-time movie producer, Dunne carved a new career starting in the 1980s as a chronicler of the problems of the wealthy and powerful.

He was as successful as a journalist as he was as a novelist and spent many of his later years in courtrooms covering high profile trials. Writing for Vanity Fair, he covered such cases as the William Kennedy Smith rape trial in 1991 and the trial of Erik and Lyle Menendez, accused of murdering their millionaire parents, in 1993.

“You’re talking about kids who had everything — the cars, the tennis courts, swimming pools, credit cards. And yet this happened,” he said during the trial.

Dunne and his wife, Ellen Griffin Dunne, known as Lenny, were married in 1954. They divorced in the 1960s but he wrote that afterward they remained close nonetheless. She died in 1997.