Dominick Dunne and Edward Kennedy: two American lives with a second act

When Andy Warhol said that in the future we shall all have 15 minutes of fame perhaps he should have considered the case of Dominick Dunne and added that even this 15 minutes might not happen if we die at the wrong time.

In August this year, the death of the renowned special correspondent for Vanity Fair and best-selling author who chronicled the trials and behind the scene affairs of American high society barely made a blip on the international news radar, with his death coming one day after that of Senator Edward Kennedy. Yet Kennedy and Dunne shared more than the same era in American history. They both made significant contributions to American public life. Kennedy, who was both blessed and burdened by his famous family name, used his long service in the Senate to enact legislation that impacted the lives of tens of millions of Americans. Dunne’s fame came later in life when the personal tragedy of his daughter’s death led to him covering other famous trials for Vanity Fair.

Both men also endured personal tragedy and battles with addiction. The personal tragedies of Edward Kennedy were many and started young - he lost the first political heir in his family, his brother Joe Jr, and a sister Kathleen, in airplane accidents when he was only a child and the family also endured the botched lobotomy of his sister Rosemary. Then there were the assassinations of John and Robert in the 1960s. The “Kennedy curse” continued to haunt the family with a number of the next generation also dying young, most famously JFK Jr in yet another airplane accident and earlier one of Robert’s 11 children, David Kennedy, from a drug overdose.

Dunne too endured death in his close family; first, the deaths of two children within days of being born, followed by the suicide of his younger brother Stephen, and then in 1982 the murder of his own daughter Dominique at the age of 22. The rising young actress was strangled by her ex-boyfriend and died later in hospital.

Kennedy and Dunne also shared an ill-fated love of alcohol (in Dunne’s case this extended to drugs). Despite denials of alcoholism by Kennedy, his heavy drinking and sexual escapades made the headlines regularly during the turbulent period between his two marriages in the 1980s. While there were regular reports of binge drinking, it was rarely suggested that drinking affected Kennedy’s performance in the Senate where he, in fact, seemed to be carrying out his duties with ever increasing dedication.

For Dunne, however, addiction to both drugs and alcohol forced him to abandon a successful career in Hollywood. In the new industry of television and then in film, Dunne rose through the entertainment industry ranks. He moved with his family to LA but never felt he belonged in the film industry. As he said “I didn’t have a defined place, and I didn’t even know what defined place I even wanted. So I went the drug-and-drink route all the way.”

A stint behind bars for drug possession was the final straw. He retreated to the woods of Oregon where he conquered his demons and began a new career as a writer. His brother John Gregory Dunne was already a successful journalist and writer and his sister-in-law was feted novelist and commentator Joan Didion. In fact before his Hollywood career had imploded, Dunne had produced their screenplay for the movie The Panic in Needle Park. Dunne’s relationship with his brother had its strains over the years but they did reconcile before John Gregory Dunne’s sudden death in 1985.

Perhaps the most spectacular similarity between these two very different men is the fact that both their lives could, and often have been, dissected into two quite distinct acts. For Kennedy the first period was as the underachieving understudy to his brilliant brothers. The second act, with presidential ambitions finally vanquished, was as the “lion of the Senate”. For Dunne the first act was a promising Hollywood career spectacularly destroyed. The second act began slowly with his gradual emergence as a writer. A chance meeting then saw the tragic death of his daughter become the segue into his successful career spanning almost 25 years at Vanity Fair.

For Kennedy, the second act of his life as one of America’s most tenacious and successful Senators was born out of two incidents - one undoubtedly tragic and the other, in the end, welcomed with relief. The first - the Chappaquiddick incident as it became known - saw Kennedy accidently drive his car over a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard after leaving a party late at night. Kennedy escaped but the young woman who was his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, died. Kennedy did not report the accident until the next day and was sentenced to two months in jail which was reduced to a suspended sentence. The incident, overshadowed at the time by the first landing on the moon, still effectively meant an end to any short term presidential ambitions.

Finally, Kennedy succumbed to the pressure to run for president in 1980. Noted political commentator Joe Klein was there to see him finally “liberated from ambition” with his loss at the New Hampshire primary. It had been an abysmal campaign by both Kennedy and his team, probably best summed up by the fact that in a TV interview he appeared to be unable to answer the simple question of why he even wanted to be president. Kennedy’s truthful answer probably would have been because he was supposed to, but as Klein noted, “Well, that was the truth, but it wasn't an acceptable answer”.

What Klein recounts is that once Kennedy knew he was going to lose, he became much more relaxed. Klein recalls that “The nomination was clearly lost, but he continued to fight on, stubbornly, disastrously for the Democratic Party, but he actually seemed to be enjoying it, for a change. He gave the speech of his life, “The Dream Will Never Die”, at the Democratic Convention that year, and began the far more satisfying Second Act of his life.”

This second act - as orator extraordinaire and accomplished back room negotiator of legislation in the Senate - in the end saw him make the most long lasting contribution of any member of the Kennedy family. Senator John Kerry “did the math”: JFK spent 1,000 days in the White House, Bobby campaigned as president for 88 days but Edward Kennedy spent more than 17,000 days in the Senate.

Kennedy almost went under after a decade of partying and womanising climaxed with his nephew being accused of rape after a big night out that had included his uncle. Kennedy not only weathered the ensuing media storm but also turned his life around with a new marriage to Victoria Reggie, the daughter of long-time family friends. The steadiness of the partnership helped Kennedy return his focus to the Senate and go on to the most successful period of his career.

For Dunne, the second act of his career appropriately began as Dunne himself said with “the sort of coincidental meeting that is a signature of my life”.

He was at a friend’s house in New York having dinner the night before leaving for LA for the trial of his daughter’s killer. Seated alongside him at dinner was a young Englishwoman. Her name was Tina Brown. Later Brown would become possibly the world’s most glamorous and certainly one of its most influential editors through her stint at Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. In the kitchen that night though, Dunne recalled that “She was not remotely famous. She wasn’t even glamorous then.” The next day Brown rang Dunne and arranged a meeting. She told Dunne she was in negotiations to become Vanity Fair editor and she asked him to keep a daily journal of the trial and then come and see her when he was back in New York. She got the job, he wrote the article.

It caused a storm upon publication and began Dunne’s long time association with the magazine. He was 59. His new career as a writer achieved two goals. Through his extraordinary coverage of trials of well known figures such as O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow and Phil Spector, he was able to be an advocate for victims; a role he had first experienced as the hapless father at his own daughter’s trial. And for Dunne, who had started out observing the rich and famous in television and film nearly 40 years before, in his other gig as regular diarist at the glamorous Vanity Fair, he could remain the keen observer and the brilliant listener with whom people unerringly shared their secrets.

There are other similarities for these two larger-than-life figures of American public life - they were both from large Irish Catholic families on the East Coast, they both lived long lives, they were both taken by cancer, they both had time to say goodbye. There are curious intertwinings too: Dunne’s brother had written a novel The Red, White and Blue said to be largely based on the Kennedys and after Dunne’s 1993 book, A Season in Purgatory, helped revive interest in the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, a Kennedy relative. Michael Skakel, was convicted for the killing in 2002.

Dunne considered himself a lucky outsider and came to enjoy the fame that came his way particularly after the heavily televised trial of O.J. Simpson. At his funeral - which he had been preparing for nine years - he was eulogised as a great father, gossip and faithful friend.

After Edward Kennedy’s death, President Obama - who was endorsed by Kennedy in the primaries - said, “His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected on millions of lives”. Civil and women’s rights, the rights to vote, and health and education all enjoyed Kennedy’s support during his long tenure in the Senate, and he was a passionate advocate of Obama’s healthcare reform.

In August America lost two remarkable men: one who wore the burden of fame from his early years and found a way to rise above it, another who took fame on with relish later in life. Both men were motivated by the individual tragedies of their own lives to move beyond the bluster of the Senate and the gossip of the dinner party and to ultimately to disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted claim that “there are no second acts in American lives”.