Gore Vidal Vs. Dominick Dunne

Independent.Co.UK ^ | 4/14/02 | Andrew Gumbel, in Los Angeles

[glorygirl]

This was a showdown that had to happen sooner or later. Dominick Dunne, the pop novelist and society commentator, and Gore Vidal, the high-brow novelist and society bitch, are both gentlemen of a certain age who make it their business to attract attention to themselves through public insult.

Not coincidentally, they have known each other for donkey's years and are, in their separate ways, inveterate snobs. Also not coincidentally, they both write for Vanity Fair, the thinking person's gossip rag, whose editor, Graydon Carter, has willingly played host to their recent outburst of mutual animosity.

Despite Vidal's well-documented record of starting sparring matches, both verbal and physical (Norman Mailer, anyone?), on this occasion it was Dunne who dug his claws in first, by way of the monthly social diary he has been writing for VF for the past year.

The two men had been at a Beverly Hills dinner party together and, as Dunne related in the magazine's March issue, Vidal chilled the company to near-freezing point with a reiteration of his belief – first laid out in the pages of Vanity Fair last year – that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was not without merit in his critique of American society.

He then launched off on a disquisition about class in America, and the fact that the best observers of class seem to be of Irish origin. "Why do you suppose Irish Catholics are all such social climbers?" Dunne quoted Vidal as saying to him. "Is it because their mothers were all maids? Oh, I don't mean you."

Fast forward to the latest edition of the magazine and there, in the letters column, is a magnificently indignant Gore Vidal insisting he was misquoted – he suggested the below-stairs lineage gave Irish Americans a unique perspective on class differences, not a desire for social climbing – and repaying Dunne with some insults of his own. He marvelled at his "years of climbing about the jungle gym of American society" and wondered what it was that fascinated him so about the crimes and misdemeanours of the idle rich. "I can see how murder would attract the professional interest of the late Agatha Christie, who made puzzles for our delight. But Diarist is more interested in who got what money and in Celebrity, particularly his own."

Dunne shot straight back: "That's about as bitchy a letter as I've read in a long time, Gore. Very '50s. It's right up there with your witticism that Truman Capote's death was a good career move."

Were one to adjudicate between the two men, it wouldn't ultimately be much of a contest. Gore Vidal has a suavity, a depth of analytical prow-ess and a breadth of intellectual interest that Dominick Dunne cannot hope to match.

He can also argue his way from Beverly Hills to his Italian retreat in Ravello and back again, leaving everyone in his wake utterly breathless. Dunne, on the other hand, has made a career of name-dropping, and supposedly probing investigations into high-profile celebrity crime cases (OJ Simpson, the vanished Chandra Levy and murdered Monaco banker Edmond Safra, to name but a few) whose most striking aspect is invariably the author's uncanny ability to insert himself into the centre of the story.

In fairness to Dominick Dunne it should be said he has one very strong reason to be interested in crime and punishment: his daughter Dominique, an actress, was murder- ed by her ex-boyfriend, who received what he regarded as a pitifully light sentence.

None the less, as The Washington Post's Peter Carlson said: "It's insane to attempt to parody the prose style of Dunne because nobody can write a Dunne parody better than the ones he writes himself." Long before Vidal called his bluff, Dunne's column became one of the great absurdities on the American cultural landscape. When he wasn't busy cruising on Barry Diller's yacht or discussing radiation treatment for prostate cancer with Michael Milken and Rudy Giuliani, he was playing the society sleuth.

Butlers and waiters regularly whisper dark secrets in his ear. At a "country barbecue" last summer, an unnamed woman sidled up to him and confided she had been Lily Safra's dental hygienist for 13 years. As he pumped her for information about the widow of the slain banker, she confided: "Lily had tiny little teeth, but she took very good care of them."

Next to such inanities, nothing Gore Vidal has said can really compete, not even his contentious defence of Timothy McVeigh. Bitchy? Perhaps Vidal did the readers of Vanity Fair a service, after all.

[BunnySlippers]

Dominick Dunne is fun to read. He readily admits he was washed up until he began writing about crime (beginning with the trial of his daughter's killer). But Vidal is just vile and always has been. In the last few years he's gone completely off the deep end.

[ruoflaw]

I cannot stand Gore Vidal...he has a reputation as a mean argumentative drunk and he was even escourted out of the White House during a Kennedy gala. I like Dominick Dunne.. and always have and his nonfiction is even better then the fiction he writes...He is fun to read.

[jackbill]

Can anyone by the name of Gore have any redeeming qualities?