My Dishy Phone Calls With Dominick Dunne
The social chronicler’s longtime friend, playwright and novelist Jane Hitchcock, on the literary advice she gave him, their marathon phone calls, and how she made him her muse.
I killed Dominick Dunne and we laughed about it. In one of my books, I created a fictional character called Larry Locket, who was based on Dominick. Larry gets done in by the villainess, and when Nick called me up to tell me he wanted to give the book a blurb, he was laughing, “Jane, when I say ‘You kill me,’ I didn’t mean for you to take it so literally!”
Dominick was like Trollope’s Duke of Omnium in that there wasn’t enough of him to go around. He was the most engaging, amusing, and sympathetic man. When he was hot on the trail of a great story or great gossip, he would get this wonderfully sly edge in his voice, followed by a little laugh and the words, “You know, you know what I’m saying?” Nick was always saying something about someone, in life and in art. He was a born storyteller, a fierce friend, and an even fiercer enemy. When he perceived injustice, he became a literary Javert, relentlessly hunting down the miscreants with his pen.
I first met Nick at a dinner party in New York in the 1970s. We sat next to each other and immediately hit it off. He was incredibly open about his life. He told me about his addiction and near-suicide. We talked about the people we knew in common and about writing as a kind of salvation. He was writing a sequel to Joyce Haber’s The Users, but he wanted to write his own stories. He came to visit me several times in East Hampton, where I had a house. At the time, he barely had train fare.
