What I Learned from Dominick Dunne

The death of Ted Kennedy on August 26 led all the news cycles, as it should have. But because of that wall-to-wall coverage of Kennedy’s passing, I didn’t know until this morning that author Dominick Dunne had also died.

I met Ted Kennedy once, when he stayed at the Hotel Bel-Air, where I was a waiter. I remember he brought his own Beluga caviar to the hotel — something I’d never seen anyone else do — and ordered the fixings (toast points, etc.) from room service. As celebrity encounters go, it was barely a drive-by; we may have exchanged a dozen words, tops.

But, despite the fact I never met Dominick Dunne, he influenced my life in a strange but instructive way.

I had read a novel of his called A Season in Purgatory, in which the golden-boy son in a family much like the Kennedys murders a girl in his neighborhood and gets away with it. I didn’t realize at the time that the crime in the novel was based on the real murder of Martha Moxley in 1975 in Greenwich, Connecticut. Because I didn’t know there was a true-crime element, I didn’t know that one of the prime suspects was a cousin of the Kennedys named Michael Skakel. I just thought it was a powerful story about how rich people get away with doing bad things.

The hero of the novel is Harrison Burns, a former employee of the Kennedy-like family (a tutor, IIRC), who paid for his Ivy League education to keep him quiet about the murder. But 20 years later, his conscience gets the best of him, and he works with prosecutors to bring the murderer to justice.

My son was born in 1998, a few years after I read the novel. We named him Harrison partly because Dunne’s character in A Season in Purgatory stuck with me. He was a guy who was haunted most of his life by a mistake, but eventually did the right thing, at great personal cost. (In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, a member of the Kennedy-like family encounters the hero in a restroom and, to show his contempt, urinates on his leg.)

I’m not saying that’s the only reason we chose the name; mainly, we just liked it best of all the possibilities we discussed. But I thought of it because of the character in Dunne’s novel.

By the time Michael Skakel was convicted of killing Martha Moxley, I knew all about the real crime, and I also knew why Dunne was so relentless in his pursuit of justice for murder victims. His own daughter, Dominique, was murdered in 1982 by an ex-boyfriend, who served less than three years in prison.

Here’s the lesson I learned from all this:

I had been so moved by Dunne’s fictional account of a murder and its aftermath that, when Skakel was convicted, I assumed justice had been served. Then I read this massive article in Vanity Fair by Robert Kennedy Jr., which argues that his cousin hadn’t committed the murder, and was in fact railroaded by the courts because of Dunne’s relentless accusations. 

To this day, I have no firm sense of who actually committed that murder — the case against Skakel made perfect sense to me, until I read Kennedy’s rebuttal, which made even more sense. I hadn’t thought about any of this until today, when I learned that Ted Kennedy (who once employed Skakel as a driver during one of his re-election campaigns) and Dominick Dunne had died on the same day.

The lesson I take from all this: Some stories are just too good to be true, and the idea that a rich and politically connected family can cover up a vicious murder by one of its members is so frightening that we want to believe it could really happen. I’m sure it has many times in American history. But that doesn’t mean it happened this time. Maybe Skakel killed his neighbor, maybe he didn’t.

Dunne wrote a terrific novel, which obviously stayed with me many years after I read it. Had I known at the time that it was based on a true crime, I might’ve read it more critically. Maybe I would’ve enjoyed it less. I’ll never know, and it doesn’t matter.

What matters to me is that separating truth from fiction seems increasingly difficult these days. Fiction drives our political discourse to a degree that seems impossible in the information age. It’s not a new phenomenon — just to pick one example, the Spanish-American War was launched with the belief that a Spanish mine had sunk the U.S. battleship Maine, a premise that to this day hasn’t been conclusively resolved — but it seems that the more complex the world becomes, the more we take comfort in choosing certainty over ambiguity. 

The truth, however, is this: Certainty works much better in fiction than it does in real life. 

Tags: Tags: fiction, harrison, justice, life lessons, novel, true crime