Dominick Dunne Looks at the Dark Side

Crime writer Dominick Dunne passed yes­ter­day today at 83, his death over­shad­owed by that of Ted Kennedy. Above, we fea­ture Dunne remem­ber­ing his rather unpleas­ant rela­tion­ship with Frank Sina­tra. It’s a per­verse sto­ry, though told in a some­what humor­ous way.

Ini­tial­ly, I con­sid­ered fea­tur­ing anoth­er video, but it’s entire­ly too sad, espe­cial­ly for any par­ents among us. Back in 1982, Dun­ne’s daugh­ter, an actress, was stran­gled to death by her boyfriend. And, in this clip, Dunne reflects on his rela­tion­ship with his daugh­ter. A heart­break­ing bit.

As a side note, Dunne kept a diary dur­ing the tri­al of his daugh­ter’s mur­der­er. The account was even­tu­al­ly pub­lished in Van­i­ty Fair, and you can find it here, along with many oth­er major pieces that Dunne wrote for VF. Amaz­ing­ly, the mur­der­er was con­vict­ed and served less than 4 years. Mean­while, mil­lions who have ped­dled small amounts of drugs are doing con­sid­er­ably more time across the US.