DOMINICK DUNNE
If you could only be one or the other, would you rather be a success when you’re young or when you’re old?
As much fun as there is in being a 25-year-old movie star, professional athlete or rock musician, it seems somewhat sad to spend the last 50 or 60 years of your life as a has-been, having people asking if you didn’t used to be someone. Life is a continual reinvention process, not a place to rest on your laurels.
Modern life seems to place more emphasis on the young achieving greatness than the old. But when you think about it, the idea of becoming successful at about the time you are entering retirement age is far more interesting. And who better to confirm this with than Dominick Dunne, who came into his own in his 60s, a marathoner leaving all the sprinters in his dust.
Many will recognize Dunne as the distinguished gentleman and Vanity Fair reporter who sat thru the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the Phil Spector trial. But there’s so much more to this never-say-die man.
Q. What did you want to be when you grew up?
A. Early on in my life, before puberty even, I knew I wanted a life with glamour and fame and money, although I didn’t have a clue how I was going to get there. My first career, in films and television, took me in that direction. My second career, in books and magazines, got me there. But my interpretation of glamour and fame and money is very different now.
Q. What can you tell me about your parents?
A. My father was a graduate of Harvard Medical School. He was a well-known heart surgeon. Mother was the daughter of a potato-famine Irish immigrant who became rich in the grocery business.
Q. Did either of them encourage you in your dreams?
A. No.
Q. What is the best and the worst advice you ever received?
A. The best advice came from Sanford Meisner, in 1949, when I was studying acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, in New York. He said, “Don’t be an actor, Dominick. That is not what you’re supposed to do. Go behind the cameras.”
The worst advice, which I chose to ignore, came from several New York friends: “Don’t move to Hollywood, for God’s sake. You’ll hate it.”
Q. Have you ever offered advice so good you’d like to share?
A. Yes, in a speech I gave to several hundred as yet unpublished writers at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, I said, “Write every day. Keep a journal of your life. Use it as a warm-up exercise for the book you are writing, in the way that a pianist practices scales every day.”
Q. How big a motivator has money been in your life?
A. Although I was down and out and broke when I started to write at age 50, money was never really the motivator for me, despite having subsequently discovered the pleasures of affluence. I knew there was something in my life that I was meant to do. Discovering what that something was has been my motivator.
Q. Is there anybody you envy?
A. I don’t think I envy anyone. I hate envy.
