My novel about love, betrayal and chess in New Orleans: The Pride and the Sorrow

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

A brief survey of the short story: who was Saki?


Chris Power
Monday September 14 2009
The Guardian
--
What a strange bird Saki is. His stories, written between 1900 and his death at the Somme in 1916, bear the hallmarks of Oscar Wilde and Henry James, are as funny as Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh, possess plotting exquisite enough to bear significant elaboration but rarely last longer than three pages, and are brought off with a wonderfully light touch, while presenting a disturbingly chilling portrait of humankind.

Hector Hugh Munro's pen-name refers either to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, which is spoken of disparagingly in more than one of his stories, or a type of South American monkey. I prefer to think it was the latter: not only did Saki have an abiding love for animals, but his mischievousness and capability for sudden viciousness are traits that seem, at least to my limited zoological knowledge, eminently monkey-like.

Saki's stories form a connective tissue between Oscar Wilde's 1890s and Evelyn Waugh's 1920s. His settings - garden parties, country house weekends and gentlemen's clubs - are typically Edwardian, but their wit, polished to a stunning brilliance, is underpinned by a satirical urge that is pitiless, and at times seemingly malicious.

Indeed, if Saki's talents for humour and plotting weren't so pronounced his fiction's procession of vapid hostesses, venal politicians, sour endings, macabre incidents and the blithely murderous could potentially make for a dismal repast. Instead, the world he renders is at once horrific, recognisably our own and yet for the most part a thoroughly enjoyable - or at least stimulating - one in which to linger.

What both appeals and repels in Saki's writing is his utter and absolute lack of sentiment, which makes his skewering of society thrillingly acerbic. But the feeling one has when reading the stories is that his characters are as nothing to him. If they do receive some sort of esteem from the author it's primarily because they prove themselves adept at exploiting the weaknesses of others. There are many arch and satirical writers in English letters, but few of them are as relentlessly cold as Saki.

After a short time spent as a policeman in Burma (footsteps in which George Orwell would later follow) and the publication of a history of Russia that no one read, Saki turned to fiction in 1900 with a series lampooning Westminster politicians (a habit he happily never grew out of). While his stories cover a wide range of subjects and styles, the two characters to whom he most often returns are Reginald, a controversy-loving, foppish libertine, and Clovis, a slightly more fleshed out variation on the theme.

These two characters and their companions, particularly Bertie van Tahn, whom you could easily imagine having just come from lunch with Bertie Wooster whenever he crosses the path of Clovis, operate in the Wodehousian mode. Through boredom they generate scrapes, or help others escape scrapes, and in the process some element of polite society or public morality is shown to be ludicrous.

It should be noted that Jeeves and Wooster didn't make their debut until 1917, the year after a sniper's bullet put an end to Munro in a shell crater, but to call Wodehouse's creations "Sakian" would, for reasons of reputation and literary fame, be perverse. There's every reason for Saki devotees to believe this might change, however. Firstly because anyone who loves Wodehouse and hasn't read Saki is missing a trick, and secondly because, as Will Self noted in a 2007 documentary, "Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant."

Another thing that recommends Saki to the modern reader and perhaps explains why he remains somewhat obscure is his ability to shock. Nestling in the gloomier crevices of his work are macabre pieces the horror of which the century since their composition has done nothing to dilute. Some take straightforward domestic shape, such as The Reticence of Lady Anne, in which a put-upon husband tries to patch up an argument with his wife, not realising that she is sitting in stony silence because she is dead. Others, including the pagan-themed The Music on the Hill, appear to take their cues from Munro's near contemporary MR James.

Even when Saki is not writing explicitly "horrific" stories, however, the unease is present. His stories are more subtle variations on what William Burroughs, writing of Naked Lunch, described as the "frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork". Or as VS Pritchett put it, "Saki writes like an enemy. Society has bored him to the point of murder. Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear."

--

guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009



Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Even More Mamet: ‘Oleanna’ Headed to Broadway!

Even More Mamet: 'Oleanna' Headed to Broadway - ArtsBeat Blog - NYTimes.com


June 30, 2009, 1:00 pm

Even More Mamet: 'Oleanna' Headed to Broadway

By Dave Itzkoff
Oleanna

Craig Schwartz
Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles in "Oleanna" at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

How much David Mamet can a single theater season accommodate? In addition to his coming pair of one-act plays at the Atlantic Theater Company and the Broadway debut of his new play, "Race," Mr. Mamet's play "Oleanna" will be revived on Broadway in the fall. The production, which is transferring from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, stars Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles as a college professor and a student who accuses him of sexual harassment. In a news release, publicists for the Broadway production said that it would run at the Golden Theater, with previews to begin on Sept. 29 and an official opening scheduled for Oct. 11. It will be directed by Doug Hughes ("A Man for All Seasons"), who directed the Los Angeles production, and produced by Jeffrey Finn. This is the first time that "Oleanna" will be performed on Broadway, as well as Ms. Stiles's Broadway debut.

1 Comment

  1. 1. July 1, 2009 1:46 am Link

    I think Bill pullman is a wonderful actor. And I am very glad Oleanna is coming to New York since the big apple is much closer to Maryland where I live tthan Los Aneles

    — eleanor kohn

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    Chess on film - the history of chess in movies!

    Chess on Film
    By Dylan Loeb McClain

    --

    As one of the oldest and most ubiquitous of games, chess has appeared in movies almost since people started making them. While there have been some movies where the game played a central role, even advancing the plot, the game is usually a bit player.

    When chess appears in films or on television, it often gives the actors something to do while they talk, and the subtext seems to be that their characters must be intelligent if they can play the game. Of course, it is a proxy for strategy and conflict, so it appears in advertising, sometimes in surprising places, as in this recent advertisement for the National Basketball Association playoffs.

    Often chess is included in a film because it is a favorite past time of one of the principals making the movie, as for example in the films of Stanley Kubrick, who loved the game and sometimes popped into the Marshall Chess Club on West 10th Street in Manhattan.

    Now an Italian man named Lucio Etruscus has put together four compilations of clips from films and television shows in which chess appeared. The compilations are set to music and can be found here, here, here and here.

    Chess also seems to be fertile ground for people who want to try their hands at animation. There are quite a few animated clips on YouTube that use chess pieces, but this one is particularly remarkable.

    14 Comments

    1. 1. May 23, 2009 10:32 am Link

      Interesting entry, I enjoyed the four "Chess Rhapsodies" with some of my favorites: "Searching for Bobby Fischer", "The Luzhin Defence", etc. But I didn't see one, "2001: A Space Odyssey" with HAL beating the human crew member. Here is the game:

      http://www.chess.com/article/view/2001-a-chess-space-odyssey

      As an amateur animator, I also enjoyed the claymation. Here's another modern show with a chess sequence, "The Wire" (caution, some bad language):

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1HUlTKvDUI

      "The King stay the King" - D'Angelo

      — Steve Kennedy
    2. 2. May 23, 2009 6:26 pm Link

      can anyone shed any light on two questions of chess and movie history? the character james bond was created by ian fleming. long after fleming died in 1964, it became widely known that during the second world war he was a very successful british intelligence operative who was well aware of the breaking of the german enigma codes by british codebreakers building on the efforts of the poles. this was one of the most important allied secrets during the war. fleming worked with the codebreakers and conceived operation ruthless. this was a plan to obtain an enigma machine that was not actually carried out for technical reasons, but very likely contributed to the plot for the movie U-571. it is surely no coincidence that a number of james bond plots revolve around equipment for breaking codes.

      the british codebreakers included cho'd(hugh) alexander, harry golombek, stuart milner-barry and many other chess players. alexander was a legend in british intelligence and after WW II he headed their codebreaking unit for decades. it is widely believed that he was not allowed to play chess in eastern europe because of fears that the russians would kidnap him.

      some years ago i read in an earlier edition of david kahn's codebreakers that while playing in a tournament somewhere alexander learnt that bronstein was also a codebreaker. bronstein was spelt differently in kahn's influential book, but i have to believe that he meant david bronstein.

      which gets us to my questions of chess and movie history. in the 1963 bond movie 'from russia with love' one of the villains is the GM kronsteen, smashing a hapless opponent in a tournament game. this is a miniscule part of one of the clips referred to above, but can also be seen here.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoGFj_NH36c&feature=PlayList&p=34572FC90076E847&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=12

      it turns out that kronsteen's win is based on spassky-bronstein, USSR championship 1960.
      http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1034110&kpage=4

      my questions:
      - was david bronstein a codebreaker for the soviets?
      - was the spassky-bronstein game chosen with this knowledge, with the loser on the opposite side of alexander?

      — L
    3. 3. May 24, 2009 4:22 am Link

      "The Seventh Seal," by Ingmar Bergman (1957) has scenes of Max von Sydow playing against the Grim Reaper.

      — Dan
    4. 4. May 24, 2009 9:50 am Link

      One of Satyajit Ray's film is titled `Chess-Players'. Its two protagonists are chess-addicts, who do not realise that British are playing another game of chess, to acquire the north-Indian state of Awadh.

      — Kapil
    5. 5. May 24, 2009 11:17 am Link

      chess the "game" is for retards…chess is actually a simple BINARY SCHEMATIC which shows in 3 dimensions the formation of numbers and letters.
      because of the limitations of a 2 dimensional surface, the flat board 99% of people miss the realization that chess is far more than a "game"which it is not.

      here is the equation…
      wave pulse by the square root of N to the 6thpwr denoting the movement of an electron in PI around a line of concentric force,56 radians persecond.
      for math purposes the line of concentric force is shown down the middle.
      here are some clues for you..the king moves one space each direction thus making a mathamatical arc of 180 degrees…the queen moves any number of spaces any direction….
      in engineering male is sending female is recieving since the electron moves in PI the line of concentric force is a receiving force thus the female or queen can appear ANYWHERE within PI potentIally..hence any number of spaces any direction……………………………………

      ever READ ABOUT a so called CHAKRA this equation explains it and the origin of chess/the SQUARE OF MERCURY

      an old cathode ray tube uses the same basic equation to produce an electron beam
      .
      CHESS IS TV…………………………………..

      — judge alan
    6. 6. May 24, 2009 11:32 am Link

      Chess, which was invented in India, has been intrinsic to the country's literature as well as films for a very long time. One of the most compelling examples of the game as a literary device as well as a movie theme is "The Chess Players" or 'Shatranj ke Khlidai' based on the book by the great Hindi writer Munshi Premchand and made into a film by the redoubtable Satyajit Ray.

      The game here is both a metaphor as well as an actual act of apathy and indifference by the two players in the face of the British confiscation of a a major king's domain.

      — Mayank Chhaya
    7. 7. May 24, 2009 3:05 pm Link

      I forgot to mention a good resource, the book "Chess in the Movies" by Bob Basalla. Wtih over 2000 movies summarized in about 400 pages of small print, it is pretty much the "Oxford Companion to Chess", except for movies. An example of what you can find is "Chess Fever", a 1925 Soviet silent comedy about the 1925 International Chess Tournament in Moscow. I haven't seen it yet, but with a star turn by Capablanca himself, it sounds pretty funny.

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015673/

      Amazon has it as part of a three movie collection of Soviet silent films.

      — Steve Kennedy
    8. 8. May 25, 2009 5:35 am Link

      see this, one of the best animations using 'chess' - my favourite!

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kgg9Dn2ahlM

      — frodolk
    9. 9. May 25, 2009 2:57 pm Link

      if you've ever tried to write a film script by yourself, it is very much like playing chess against yourself…

      — eve shebang
    10. 10. May 28, 2009 10:11 am Link

      Thanks for quoted me! It's an honor for me that my little videos are cited here ;-) Greetings from Italy!

      — Lucio Etruscus
    11. 11. June 4, 2009 10:17 am Link

      Another great chess video on YouTube:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0U-WnfPhWU

      — Catbus
    12. 12. August 24, 2009 2:51 pm Link

      I do not know if this is in Etruscus's collection, but a novella in which chess was absolutely central is Schachnovelle by Arnold Zweig, which has been translated into English as The Royal Game. This book was the basis of the 1960 movie Schachnovelle (German title), Brainwashed (English title), with Kurt Juergens and Claire Bloom.

      — Steve W
    13. 13. September 2, 2009 7:21 pm Link

      I really liked your article on how chess is used in the movies and also in advertisement. I love the game of chess, since the day my great grandmother taught me how to play. I have a blog on collectible chess set, if you would like to read it and give me your opinion on it. "collectiblechesssets.blogspot.com"
      thank you on agreat article

      — brian conn
    14. 14. September 7, 2009 9:26 pm Link

      I really liked your article on how chess is used in the movies and also in advertisement. I love the game of chess, since the day my great grandmother taught me how to play. I have a blog on collectible chess set, if you would like to read it and give me your opinion on it. "collectiblechesssets.blogspot.com"
      thank you on agreat article…

      — Asner

    About Gambit

    In its 1,500-year history, chess has imbedded itself in the world's culture and vocabulary. Ideas, terms and images from the game have long been used as proxies for intelligence and complexity. But chess is more than a diversion. Thousands worldwide play professionally or earn a living by teaching it to children. The Internet has transformed the game, making it easy for players anywhere to find an opponent day or night. Chess computers, originally developed to test the bounds of artificial intelligence, now play better than grandmasters. This blog will cover tournaments and events, trends and developments. Reader comments and questions will be more than welcome.

    --

    Archive

    Chess of the Times

    They're No Fun to Learn, but Endgames Lead to Wins
    By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

    Serious players must master basic endgames. Figuring them out during a game is difficult, if not impossible.

    Age Showdown Where Players Are Considered 'Older' at 33
    By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

    At the NH Hoteles tournament's generational battle, the older team won for the first time in four tries, but three of its members were in their 30s.

    200 Years of Charging Knights and Kings in Check in Zurich
    By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

    This month, Schachgesellschaft commemorated its anniversary with a series of events including two open tournaments and a round-robin, rapid chess competition.

    Once a Prodigy, a 44-Year-Old Englishman Is Still the Standard-Bearer for His Country
    By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

    Thirty years after making his debut on the international tournament scene, Nigel Short is one of the top two players in England.

    Highly Skilled Competitors in Real-Life Mating Games
    By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

    As more women enter the top tier, there are more marriages among ranked players.

    --

    Recent Posts

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    New chess world rankings released, but they may not matter as much as they once did.




    "Queen to Play" - film review - checkmate!

    Film Reviews
    Queen to Play -- Film Review
    By Frank Scheck, April 27, 2009 05:39 ET



    Bottom Line: Some good moves, but no cinematic checkmate.
    More Tribeca reviews

    NEW YORK -- Chess as metaphor for life is the theme of Caroline Bottaro's French drama starring Sandrine Bonnaire as a maid who rediscovers herself thanks to her newfound love for the game and Kevin Kline as the misanthropic recluse who teaches her. While "Queen to Play" boasts an admirable dramatic subtlety and several strong performances, its overly familiar ideas and lugubrious pacing, as well as the fact that chess is not exactly the most cinematic of subjects, will make it a tough sit even for dedicated art house audiences. It recently received its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival.

    Bonnaire plays Helene, a chambermaid at an upper-class Corsican hotel who's dealing with financial problems, a rebellious daughter and a less than ideal marriage to a handsome but not particularly sensitive blue-collar worker (Francis Renaud).

    When she sees a glamorous, barely clothed couple (including Jennifer Beals in a cameo) intensely playing chess on their balcony, it stirs something within her. She promptly buys a set, but her husband proves to be an unwilling player. Spotting a board in the home of Dr. Kroger (Kline), for whom she moonlights as a cleaning person, she implores him to tutor her in its intricacies.

    Kroger, who has barely spoken to her in all the time she's worked for him, initially rebuffs. But sensing her passion, he eventually agrees, and the two begin weekly sessions in which the pupil soon starts overshadowing her teacher. By the time she's allowed to participate -- in underdog "Rocky" fashion -- in a local tournament, all the principal characters have undergone life-enhancing emotional changes.

    That the film works to the degree that it does is largely due to the sensitive performances. Bonnaire delivers a beautifully modulated turn, delineating Helene's liberating transformation in quietly powerful and convincing fashion. Kline, in his first entirely French-speaking role, intriguingly underplays as the mysterious Kroger, and Francis Renaud strongly conveys the husband's complicated feelings of disdain for his wife's new obsession and concern for his marriage.

    Production: Mon Voison Prods
    Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Kevin Kline, Francis Renaud, Jennifer Beals, Valerie Lagrange
    Director: Caroline Bottaro
    Screenwriters: Caroline Bottaro, Caroline Maly, Jeanne Le Guillou
    Producers: Dominique Besnehard, Micher Feller, Amelie Latscha
    Director of photography: Jean-Claude Larrieu
    Editor: Tina Baz
    Production designer: Emmanuel de Chavigny
    Music: Nicola Piovani
    No MPAA rating, 96 minutes

    Queen to Play -- Film Review

    By Frank Scheck, April 27, 2009 05:39 ET


    Why are we still reading Dickens?

    Jon Michael Varese
    Friday September 4 2009
    The Guardian
    --
    It seems that you cannot turn a corner this year without bumping into Charles Dickens. So far we've seen the release of four major novels based on the Victorian icon's life: Dan Simmons's Drood (February), Matthew Pearl's The Last Dickens (March), Richard Flanagan's Wanting (May), and Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress (July). Earlier this year BBC1's lush new production of Little Dorrit was nominated for five Bafta awards in the UK, and 11 Emmys in the US. Newspapers and magazines have run stories on his relevance to the current global economic crisis. And with the Christmas season now only four months away, it seems that there is no getting away from him any time soon.

    As someone who teaches and writes about Dickens, the question of why we still read him is something that's often on my mind. But that question was never more troubling than one day, nearly 10 years ago, when I was standing as a guest speaker in front of a class of about 30 high school students. I had been speaking for about 20 minutes with an 1850 copy of David Copperfield in my hand, telling the students that for Victorian readers, Dickens's writing was very much a "tune-in-next-week" type of thing that generated trends and crazes, much as their own TV shows did for them today.

    Then a hand shot up in the middle of the room.

    "But why should we still read this stuff?"

    I was speechless because in that moment I realised that, though I had begun a PhD dissertation on Dickens, I had never pondered the question myself.

    The answer I gave was acceptable: "Because he teaches you how to think," I said. But lots of writers can teach you how to think, and I knew that wasn't really the reason.

    The question nagged me for years, and for years I told myself answers, but never with complete satisfaction. We read Dickens not just because he was a man of his own times, but because he was a man for our times as well. We read Dickens because his perception and investigation of the human psyche is deep, precise, and illuminating, and because he tells us things about ourselves by portraying personality traits and habits that might seem all too familiar. His messages about poverty and charity have travelled through decades, and we can learn from the experiences of his characters almost as easily as we can learn from our own experiences.

    These are all wonderful reasons to read Dickens. But these are not exactly the reasons why I read Dickens.

    My search for an answer continued but never with success, until one year the little flicker came ? not surprisingly ? from another high school student, whose essay I was reviewing for a writing contest. "We need to read Dickens's novels," she wrote, "because they tell us, in the grandest way possible, why we are what we are."

    There it was, like a perfectly formed pearl shucked from the dirty shell of my over-zealous efforts ? an explanation so simple and beautiful that only a 15-year-old could have written it. I could add all of the decoration to the argument with my years of education ? the pantheon of rich characters mirroring every personality type; the "universal themes" laid out in such meticulous and timeless detail; the dramas and the melodramas by which we recognise our own place in the Dickensian theatre ? but the kernel of what I truly wanted to say had come from someone else. As is often the case in Dickens, the moment of realisation for the main character here was induced by the forthrightness of another party.

    And who was I, that I needed to be told why I was what I was? Like most people, I think I knew who I was without knowing it. I was Oliver Twist, always wanting and asking for more. I was Nicholas Nickleby, the son of a dead man, incurably convinced that my father was watching me from beyond the grave. I was Esther Summerson, longing for a mother who had abandoned me long ago due to circumstances beyond her control. I was Pip in love with someone far beyond my reach. I was all of these characters, rewritten for another time and place, and I began to understand more about why I was who I was because Dickens had told me so much about human beings and human interaction.

    There are still two or three Dickens novels that I haven't actually read; but when the time is right I'll pick them up and read them. I already know who it is I'll meet in those novels ? the Mr Micawbers, the Mrs Jellybys, the Ebenezer Scrooges, the Amy Dorrits. They are, like all of us, cut from the same cloth, and at the same time as individual as their unforgettable aptronyms suggest. They are the assurances that Dickens, whether I am reading him or not, is shining a light on who I am during the best and worst of times.

    --
    guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2009



    Friday, September 4, 2009

    The Ten Commandments of Blogging

    Published in Pimp My Novel: September 3, 2009
    --
    1. I am thy blog. If you're an author, you should already have a blog. If you're not yet published, now is the time to start.

    2. Thou shalt have no other blogs before me. We all love reading blogs—we wouldn't be here if we didn't—but yours comes first. Write your own posts before you spend all afternoon reading someone else's.

    3. Thou shalt not make of thyself an idol. Keep your ego in check; you always want to portray yourself positively in your blog. Your reputation is all you've got in this business, and if you earn yourself one as a likable person as well as a great writer, you're a golden calf.

    4. Remember thy Schedule and keep it, wholly. You don't have to write a post every day, but keeping a regular schedule is a courtesy and a sort of unwritten contract between you and your readers; they'll know when to expect new content and will come to appreciate and respect you for that.

    5. Thou shalt honor thy agent and thy publisher. You couldn't have done this without them. Give props where props are due.

    6. Thou shalt not commit character assassination. Everyone has authors or critics they don't like, sometimes personally. Don't pull an Alice Hoffman. And, I guess, don't try to kill anyone in real life, either.

    7. Thou shalt not commit adultery, but thou shalt pimp thyself. No one sells you like you do. Facebook, Twitter, &c. The more pervasive your presence, the more likely it is that people will buy your book.

    8. Thou shalt not plagiarize. Always quote. Always cite your sources. Always link back to them if they're on-line.

    9. Thou shalt not deceive thy audience. Never post anything you don't believe is true, and be sure to provide links to any research you've done. Always be sure to clarify whether a point you're making is an opinion or a fact.

    10. Thou shalt monetize. I don't do it because I don't consider blogging a part of my livelihood, but you, as authors, should consider self-promotion as part of the job. Let Google or whomever run a few relevant ads on your blog and make a little cash on the side. (Unless you've got a large readership, though, it probably won't be much.)
    ---
    Copyright 2009 Pimp My Novel


    Tuesday, September 1, 2009

    Alice Hoffman Goes Ballistic on Twitter!


    Alice Hoffman Goes Ballistic on Twitter | Market My Novel
    Source: marketmynovel.com





    Dominick Dunne, Chronicler of Crime, Dies at 83

    Published in The New York Times: August 26, 2009
    --

    Dominick Dunne, who gave up producing movies in midlife and reinvented himself as a best-selling author, magazine writer, television personality and reporter whose celebrity often outshone that of his subjects, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.

    The cause was bladder cancer, a family spokesman said. The spokesman had initially declined to confirm the death, saying the family had hoped to wait a day before making an announcement so that Mr. Dunne’s obituary would not be obscured by the coverage of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s death.

    In the past year Mr. Dunne traveled to the Dominican Republic and Germany for experimental stem-cell treatments to fight his cancer, at one point writing that he and the actress Farrah Fawcett, who died in June, were in the same Bavarian clinic.

    He sprang to national prominence with his best-selling novels “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” in 1985 and “An Inconvenient Woman” in 1990, both focused on murders in the upper realms of society. He later chronicled high-profile criminal trials and high society as a correspondent and columnist for Vanity Fair magazine.

    He achieved perhaps his widest fame from his reporting of the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1994 and 1995 and later as the host of the program “Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice,” on what was then Court TV (now TruTV).

    Last year, as a postscript to his Simpson coverage, Mr. Dunne defied his doctor’s orders and flew to Las Vegas to attend Mr. Simpson’s kidnapping and robbery trial.

    Mr. Dunne’s magazine career was weighted toward the coverage of sensational murder trials. He made no secret of the fact that his sympathy generally lay with the victim, and he was vocal about what he considered the misapplication of justice.

    Sympathetic Stance

    He never hesitated to admit that his sympathetic stance stemmed from the murder of his daughter, Dominique, by John Sweeney, her ex-boyfriend, in 1982. Ms. Dunne, a 22-year-old actress, was found strangled, and Mr. Sweeney, who was found guilty only of voluntary manslaughter and a misdemeanor for an earlier assault, served less than three years.

    “I’m sick of being asked to weep for killers,” Mr. Dunne often said. “We’ve lost our sense of outrage.”

    During the trial, Tina Brown, who was the editor of Vanity Fair at the time, suggested he keep a journal. The account, “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer,” was published in Vanity Fair in 1984.

    “He never pretended to be objective in covering trials,” Graydon Carter, the current editor of Vanity Fair, said Wednesday. “He was always writing from the point of view of the victim because of what happened to his daughter, and he had a riveting way of knowing, almost like Balzac, what to tell the reader when.”

    Mr. Dunne went on to cover the trials of Claus von Bulow, Michael C. Skakel, William Kennedy Smith, Erik and Lyle Menendez, and Phil Spector, as well as the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

    “I realized the power writing has, and it has also helped me deal with my rage,” he said in an interview with The New York Times for this obituary in 2000. “It gave me a lifelong commitment not to be afraid to speak out about injustice.”

    Mr. Dunne’s brother was the writer John Gregory Dunne, the husband of the writer Joan Didion. He died in 2003.

    High-Profile Clashes

    Mr. Dunne’s speaking out led to a lawsuit for slander filed by Gary Condit, a Democratic congressman from California, over remarks Mr. Dunne had made on national radio and television in 2001. Mr. Condit had been scheduled to testify in a deposition about his relationship with Chandra Levy, a federal government intern who disappeared in May 2001 and whose body was found in a Washington park in 2002.

    Mr. Dunne quoted a man who asserted that he had heard that Mr. Condit had talked about his relationship with a woman whom he had described as a clinger. Mr. Dunne said this had created an environment that led to Ms. Levy’s disappearance. Mr. Condit’s suit, originally seeking $11 million in damages, was settled for an undisclosed sum and an apology. A later suit by Mr. Condit was dismissed.

    Mr. Dunne also clashed with the Kennedy family about his involvement in the 2002 trial of Mr. Skakel, a first cousin of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Mr. Skakel was sentenced to 20 years to life in the murder of Martha Moxley in 1975. Her body was found beneath a tree on her parents’ property in Greenwich, Conn.

    In 2003, in a 14,000-word article in The Atlantic Monthly arguing that the case against his cousin was flawed and had left reasonable doubt, Mr. Kennedy accused Mr. Dunne of intimidating prosecutors and helping to drive the news media into “a frenzy to lynch the fat kid.”

    Mr. Dunne said in The Times interview that he had also been a source of information for a book that Mark Fuhrman was writing about the Skakel trial. He had met him when Mr. Fuhrman testified during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. “I had some hot information about Skakel,” Mr. Dunne said, “and I knew Fuhrman would bring it to attention.”

    Mr. Dunne, known as Nick to his friends, was a ubiquitous figure in both American and European society. He attributed his success to his being a good listener. “Listening is an underrated skill,” he said in discussing his interviews with political figures and celebrities like Imelda Marcos, Elizabeth Taylor, Diane Keaton and Mr. von Bulow.

    At Michael’s restaurant in Manhattan, a favorite gathering spot of the news media elite, Mr. Dunne could often be found at his regular corner table receiving admirers. Even as his health declined, he would show up in his trademark round glasses and a Turnbull & Asser shirt, with the proper white collar and large blue stripes.

    With his appetite for gossip, a short stop at his table would usually yield some nugget. And the story would almost always start with, “Do you know what I heard?” and end with “Can you believe that!”

    ‘A Rotten Athlete’

    Born in Hartford, Dominick John Dunne was one of six children of a fourth-generation Irish-Catholic family. His father, Richard, was a heart surgeon, and although the family was well-off, his childhood was not happy.

    “I was a rotten athlete, I liked puppet shows and I was kind of a sissy,” he recalled in The Times interview. “Something about me drove my father crazy. He mocked me and often beat me with a wooden coat hanger, and although we belonged to WASP clubs, we were never a part of things. We were like minor-league Kennedys.”

    Drafted into the Army during his senior year in high school, Mr. Dunne fought in the Battle of the Bulge and won both his father’s admiration and a Bronze Star for crawling past Nazi sentries and carrying back a wounded soldier. After his Army service, he attended Williams College, where he and a group that included Stephen Sondheim started a theater.

    After graduating in 1949, he moved to New York, where he became stage manager for television shows and later an assistant to the producer of “Playhouse 90.” In 1954 he married Ellen Griffin, who was known as Lenny and with whom he had two sons, Griffin and Alexander, in addition to Dominique.

    By 1957 he was in Santa Monica, Calif.; a year later he was producing at 20th Century Fox and living in Beverly Hills. By the 1970s he was a vice president of Four Star Television and produced “The Boys in the Band,” “Panic in Needle Park” and other films.

    Dominick and Lenny Dunne became famous in the industry for their parties, the most memorable of which was a black and white ball, held in 1964 to celebrate their 10th anniversary. The guests included Nancy and Ronald Reagan and Truman Capote, who two years later used the idea for his own ball of the same name, at the Plaza Hotel in New York, a renowned event to which the Dunnes were not invited.

    “My jobs never qualified me for the strata of Hollywood we moved in,” he recalled. “I always kept scrap books and saved everything. On some level, I knew it was not going to last.”

    It didn’t. Devastated when his wife asked for a divorce — “She was the real thing, and I became a fake,” he said — he declined into “a hopeless alcoholic,” he admitted, and started to use cocaine. Returning from Mexico, he was arrested for drug possession at the airport in Los Angeles.

    But his drinking continued, and though none of his films were box-office smashes, the denouement came in 1973 with the widely panned “Ash Wednesday,” a picture he produced starring Ms. Taylor. Compounding that failure was the publication in a trade newspaper of a joke he told, while he was drinking, about a Hollywood power broker.

    “I kind of knew it was going to be my swan song,” he said of the remark. He became a nonperson in the industry.

    At one point he sold all his possessions including, for $300, his dog, a West Highland terrier. He went on unemployment, all the while terrified that his friends would see him in the line.

    In 1979, approaching his mid 50s, he left Los Angeles. “I got into the car and didn’t know where I was headed,” he said in an interview. “I drove north, stopped for a flat tire in Oregon and stayed there in a one-room cabin for six months.” There he started to write for the first time. The book was a novel of Hollywood, “The Winners.”

    A New Chapter

    He moved to New York in 1981. Reviews of “The Winners” were scathing, but his editor, Michael Korda, advised him to go in another direction.

    “He told me there was nothing people liked more than reading about the rich and powerful in criminal situations,” Mr. Dunne said. “It was, like, ‘Boing’ in my head, and I made a genre out of the thing. I wrote ‘The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,’ about a social family whose son married a showgirl who was then accused of murdering him. Two million copies were sold and that book utterly changed my life.”

    Other books followed, among them “People Like Us”; “A Season in Purgatory,” based on a rich Catholic family and murder; and “An Inconvenient Woman,” about a social couple and the murder of the husband’s mistress.

    In 1999 he published a memoir, “The Way We Lived Then, Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper,” studded with photographs of the famous.

    His increasing prominence as a reporter, writer, author and television personality made him a staple at fashionable dinner parties and social events.

    “All the people who dumped me years before were now giving dinner parties for me,” he said during Mr. Simpson’s trial. “And I went.”

    Although he had been divorced for two decades, he remained devoted to his ex-wife, who learned she had multiple sclerosis in 1972, until her death in 1997. He is survived by his sons Griffin, an actor and director of New York, and Alexander of Portland, Ore.; and a granddaughter, Hannah Dunne.

    In 2000, Mr. Dunne was found to have prostate cancer. Six years later he was being treated in a hospital when, he said, he decided to leave. Disconnecting himself from the medical instruments attached to him, he walked out and took a taxi home.

    “It caused a lot of commotion at the hospital,” he said. “But I was convinced I was going to die, and the room was not the right setting for my death scene.

    “I stayed home for five days and did everything the doctor told me to do,” he added, “and a week later I flew to Europe.”
    ---
    Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

    Why'd He Do It? Post-Mortem of a Grisly Death

    BOOKS
    Books of The Times: Why'd He Do It? Post-Mortem of a Grisly Death
    By JANET MASLIN
    A sickening account of a murder and suicide that riveted post-Katrina New Orleans.

    Zackery Bowen appears on the cover of “Shake the Devil Off” as a lanky, handsome guy in a baseball cap, sitting in the French Quarter of New Orleans and staring at the camera with the insouciance of an off-duty movie star. In one hand he holds a wine glass. In the other hand he holds a kitten.

    No word on whether the kitten escaped Zack unscathed. But the soused-looking woman sitting next to him in this same photograph, Addie Hall, did not fare well. She wound up the victim of a murder that was grisly even by New Orleans’s high standards. Let’s skip the particulars except to say that “Gal Pal Gumbo” was The New York Post’s headline for a story about Addie’s grisly murder, and that one of the most pleasant assertions that Ethan Brown, Zack’s biographer, can make on his subject’s behalf is that rumors of Zack’s cannibalism were simply not true.

    At this point it might be reasonable to ask why Mr. Brown decided to write a whole book about Zack, who wound up jumping off a roof after he messily dispatched Addie. One answer is that Mr. Brown happened to be in the neighborhood. He and his wife were celebrating their wedding anniversary in New Orleans in the fall of 2006, just as Zack and Addie and their story’s gory details became the talk of the town.

    When Mr. Brown learned that Zack had endured a trifecta of earlier nightmares — military service in Kosovo, military service in Baghdad and then Hurricane Katrina — he wondered if this was not the story of a true American tragedy. So he decided to delve (his word, though wallow would be more accurate) into the sad particulars of Zack’s unrelentingly seedy life.

    In his hagiographic “Zeitoun” Dave Eggers uses the Katrina ordeal of a single brave man to embody the transcendent decency that helped Abdulrahman Zeitoun survive a terrible ordeal. “Shake the Devil Off” is the flip side of that story. It becomes a bottom-feeding account of boozy, mindless cruelty despite Mr. Brown’s strenuous efforts to give it the moral heft of a war story and to paint Zack as a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder.

    This is not to say that Zack didn’t suffer, or that his suffering was not in some way emblematic of other veterans’ experiences. It’s to say that Mr. Brown, who reports this story with a heavy hand, tin ear and salacious eye, doesn’t make it matter.

    “Shake the Devil Off” is filled with inarticulate testimony about who Zack was and how he got that way. When his father became a bartender at strip clubs, Zack’s mother says, “I was like, ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.’ ” The crushing disappointment of Zack’s failure to become homecoming king at his California high school in 1995 is duly described.

    So is the mating call (“Ya’ll want a shot of Jägermeister?”) with which 18-year-old Zack wooed Lana Shupack, the 28-year-old stripper who would become his wife. Once Zack enlisted in the 709th Military Police Battalion, Lana and her co-workers kept Zack supplied with strip-club photos that did not boost his morale.

    The sections of the book that are about Zack’s exposure to war are no less perfunctory. The book explains how the spunkiest, most patriotic member of Zack’s unit, a young woman standing barely 5 feet tall to his 6 feet 10 inches, became an early casualty, and how this and many other losses around Zack hurt him. “He was happy-go-lucky and then he was just depressed,” one Army friend recalls. Zack’s size-17 ill-fitting boots and hammertoe troubles also become part of Mr. Brown’s story.

    Bristling from a “general (under honorable conditions)” military discharge (instead of the “honorable discharge” his commander had recommended), which he found deeply unjust, Zack returned to New Orleans with a zest for bartending and not much else to sustain him. Then he met Addie, who is described here as having been a wonderful person except on those occasions when she wasn’t and whose abusive, alcohol-fueled “spells” were well known to those around her.

    Yet Zack and Addie found something to make them flourish: the evacuation of New Orleans during Katrina and their decision to wait out the storm (“We’re bartenders so we’re well stocked”) in what Mr. Brown calls a “poststorm Shangri-la.” The storm that caused surreal misery for Mr. Zeitoun and his family was a kind of aphrodisiac for Addie and Zack.

    “They liked the lifestyle we had during the hurricane,” a friend reports. “They liked camping out. They liked not having to work. They liked not having the responsibility of paying bills. They didn’t like the change back to normalcy.” But the flood waters retreated, taking with them some of Zack’s sanity. Still, he retained the ability to compartmentalize that he had developed in the service, to the point where he could calmly make notes about Addie’s decomposing body after having killed her during one of their frequent fights. Zack could forget all about Addie, go out bar hopping, pass out in a drunken stupor and only then remember that he had a girlfriend problem.

    “Shake the Devil Off” sees all this as part of a tragic arc. And it spares no occasion for voyeurism. Once the story is over and Mr. Brown still has pages to fill, he assails the United States government policies regarding war, Katrina and veterans’ rights.

    He watches television. (He is angered by Michael Moore’s high-handed hurricane talk on Keith Olbermann’s show.) And he resorts to domestic details of his own. The news that one of his dogs threw up in the back seat of his car at the time of Hurricane Gustav is one of the less sickening parts of Mr. Brown’s story.
    ---
    Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy

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