Hunt a killer starstruck movie#
Hunt a killer starstruck full#
Hunt a killer starstruck trial#

Hunt a killer starstruck trial#

trial as Vanity Fair’s star columnist, the guest every A-List hostess who once ignored him must now have at her dinner party. society as a drunken failure returns years later to cover the O. The latter makes Hofler’s book one of those redemption stories dear to American hearts-the man rejected by L.A.

Simpson, Phil Spector, Michael Skakel) provided Dunne a second career as a reporter for Vanity Fair-after being told by his agent, following Dunne’s hitting bottom in Hollywood, “I can’t get you a picture.

Another is simply the incredible violence in American life, the string of tabloid murders whose subsequent trials (the Menendez brothers, O. Another is Dunne’s (and our) obsession with celebrity. Robert Hofler, whose other books include The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, has found in the subject of Dominick Dunne several strands that make up a fascinating portrait of American culture from the 1950s to the present. And yet, Dunne was in the closet almost all his life, terrified that he would be outed as a homosexual, until he died of bladder cancer at 83 in 2009. One of the honorary pallbearers at his funeral was his classmate at Williams College, Stephen Sondheim. His longtime companion was a painter named Norman Mabry who was there for him during his final decline. He produced the films The Panic In Needle Park, Play It As It Lays, and Ash Wednesday. He took part in The Advocate Experience, a program run by David Goodstein in the 1970s to help gay men feel more at ease with their identity. that inspired Capote’s more famous version in New York two years later. Inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady, he gave a Black and White ball when he was living in L.A. He loved antiques, fine furniture, expensive clothes, and grand hotels.

Hunt a killer starstruck movie#

He even produced the movie of his close friend Mart Crowley’s groundbreaking and still unsurpassed play about gay life, The Boys in the Band, fell in love with one of its stars, Frederick Coombs, and had sex with the star of The Boys in the Sand, Cal Culver (“one of the most extraordinary afternoons of my life”) for 65 dollars.

Hunt a killer starstruck full#

Although he won a Bronze Star during World War II for going back to retrieve a wounded soldier and, after the War, married and had children, he also hired hustlers, picked guys up off the street, did drugs, and used the services of Scotty Bowers (whose memoir Full Service (2012) detailing his years of supplying men to closeted movie stars was reviewed in these pages). He was a social climber as well, an admitted snob, and a tremendous gossip who, like Truman Capote, used stories about the rich and famous to be accepted. His idea of the latter was not confined to just the movie stars he idolized, however. It was seeing Now, Voyager at sixteen that convinced him that, like Bette Davis, he could find a better life. Growing up in Hartford (across the street from Katherine Hepburn), he was not only called a “sissy” by his father but beaten with a riding crop, Dunne said, to get the “incipient fairyism” out of him. IT WOULD BE HARD to imagine a gayer life than the one led by Dominick Dunne.