A Word on Words; 1034; Dominick Dunne

we're going to hear the only reason the point this week nominating season mr john c chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center at vanderbilt university once again welcome to world works singing we're talking about a work of fiction it spun off the two bills both in fiction and writes fact welcome comic con for word on words and susan herder his hip the best seller lists panel that

makes you happy there are elements of a book that critics have looked that drawn comparisons analogies very specifically it is said that this rich roman catholic family is the kennedy family i'm sure that knowing that you've read about canavan for prompts lead beyond that some early in our jews are very close but i know the stories so well as a relief some other tragedies i can draw a line but do you worry that other people might not or is it designed to go both about what is not necessarily designed to draw those analogies but i am always been interested in writing about a rich powerful irish catholic family with a lot of children i grew up in this kind of family myself certainly not rich like the kennedys and all of the medical doctor

above but well to do well today what was my grandfather who made the money that the lineup it's even sent us and three generations later i mean my grandfather was a an immigrant from ireland potato famine poor arrived in this country at age fourteen really and school and got started out life as a butcher boy and about life as a bank president he had a true ratio alger life he was an enormous in him he was called dominic i'm named after him his last name was burns which and burns is the first name of the narrator of this book my grandmother's maiden name was harrison so it i have views her maiden name is in the narrators cockburn's harrison my grandfather and the greatest love of literature of anyone i've ever known and even though he had never gone to school past of age forty every saturday night my brothers and

i were sent to his house during our growing up years where he read dickens to us and reported that we use to haiti john that the time just hated and he'd pay isn't fit large fifty cent pieces which a lot of money in those days but it you know it my brother john gregory dunne and i both feel that are going into writing came as of as a result of that bus or gotten off the point here so i've always been into the the peculiar social position of rich irish catholics and in new england is something that has always interested me we grew up as the only irish catholic family in the country club were my brothers and i went to a private school for blue for boys and we were the only catholic kids there we were the ones that have fish on friday and used to make this embarrass and so forth and this same thing has always been true of the kennedy family you it's very hard to say rich

irish powerful family and not think of the kennedy's when there's a lot of kids there's a lot of tragedy and a lot lot more happens and so i'm certainly they're kennedy ask elements in this book there are no two ways about it but to say that this family is about in this book is about the kennedys is something that you know it kind of that annoys me those a year is it fair to say that some are tragedies in the dunne family also find their way all bleakley and you're writing it in the writing of this book which of course something of her family some of the deaths that have occurred it and i read the story of the murder then saw shortly after that interview that said such a murder really occurred some years back in connecticut against

this young heir to the throne is charged with the libretto they're rarely told her and i've tried in the us but this is the fictional way of the bradley well he's charged with this murder you know all that review has also drawn announced that it ever occur to you is a body at all that somebody who might not know but who with the rain the analogy can have a very close might assume that bombing done is raising the suggestion all at the book perhaps are intensely raises a suggestion that's a

young military family once on trial was in some way involved in that were ok well what you're talking about is week andy smith yes ok which is a trial that i covered i know him and even in palm beach ny divide leftist and get this all out on the table so that we this book is based on and murder of a girl called martha moxley and from an affluent family in greenwich connecticut almost eighteen years ago she was savagely brutally bludgeoned to death with the iron end of a golf club and the the golf club broke and that the shorter and was used then as a dagger and she was stabbed through the next year and it came out here at thacher she has never been of this murder of americans are ever for eighteen years nearly there have been three suspects and while one of the suspects was when i say next door neighbor these are large houses with large

ground seated between them was the next door house and the sun and that house is a member of a family called this cake or family and the main suspect of being in that particular family there's two other boys also who are suspects in is the nephew of ethel kennedy okay now when i covered the trial of willie smith in palm beach it this extraordinary thing happened the greenwich connecticut police requested from the palm beach police the hair and blood samples of willie's smith they had received a tip that willie smith had been in greenwich on the night of this murder and you know with this giggle cousins x number of years ago that i believe is a falsely i mean i don't i

cannot connect him their role i do not believe that he was there although there are people all along the way you say he was now outside i went back and talked to the greenwich police at the time and the answer for that is what got me interested in this in this story i went to see the mother mrs moxley dorothy moxley the mother of the slain martha moxley she had to move away she could not live next door anymore you know when there was this unsolved crime and there's this boy growing up and et cetera et cetera and so i have gotten to know where every novel i have written has been based on the crime that actually happened and then i have created a fiction around it that skirts the truth the tumors grenville's base based on the bumblebee edward gaze on an inconvenient woman based on the murder of a key morgan was the mistress of offer bloomingdale president reagan's grateful and and so forth and people like

us was based on a financial scandal not of the eighties in new york now but not a murderer but they've all been based on something and they construct the truth and and i asked mrs mark say what she is she had read all my books which she would think if i used used this case not end in my book it there in the crime is solved but the crime solved because constant bradley who was the young men the young arab as where in the family the handsome when all hopes our arrest in him for the health of the for this bill bradley family out he is the one who kills the girl is no mystery about that that happens early in the book the book is about the twenty year cover up he at school at his boarding school which michael milford which is based on the catholic boarding school can to brazil which i tell you were in which is where jack kennedy briefly wet nurses were sargent shriver well it's where all the rich

catholic kids go at that his school he meets a scholarship boy this harrison barnes and befriends him harrison bernard's and birds being the narrator of the story is going and the biggest player in the cover exactly because he gets or were sucked into the vortex on the night of the murray is nothing to do with that but he gets dropped into moving the body from one location to the other once you touch the body once you get it he has an accomplice and then the father kazin also pays him often takes care of and through i really carry coursing through our at some point he stopped at the mine but he still keeps the secret but he is a morally is a narrator who's morally compromised and who suffers whose life is almost rendered important cause of the security he carries whereas constant bradley has gone through his life wonderful things

happening to my marbles think it's it's like he never has given it a thought again and throw a circumstance harrison barnes meets the younger sister of constant kid bradley in an odd meeting they become lovers start an affair inge schmidt pulls him back into the friendship that these boys hadn't seen each other and it is when they see each other again that harrison realize he cannot keep a secret npr this economy has become very accomplished writer as a writer about justice about justice and has exposed other people other people while caring for his own sake well we had two ways to go on this program i could've simply talked about season periphery and avoided the fact that the relationship was the arabs in so far as i'm concerned i mean i've been from the kennedy family for so long you know that and i'm particularly a friendly smith but i got fascinated

by the story and i'm sure do that the question of the murder and is one that for people who know about the moxley tragedy might make the late even people who didn't read your coverage and for but you know what i had been on that eighteen city in the nineteen thirty in this book you know you're the first person who has said this team has done and i don't think it's something that is on my that's number one number two i also had another think it it and this is a really don't like talking about my daughter was murdered also and until the end and and that's why as if the tragedy in your own life i know robin i'm not a regulated and the fact is our game in the private part of my life i am in the on the board of the national victim center i work with and helped people who were going to go on through in homicides in their in their family i was so touched by mrs moxley i can't tell you when that and that and build the wrong wound of her life

that these three suspects are having a swell life for themselves and her daughters dead and nobody nobody is being called what i wanted to do john is i wanted to write a best seller and i did a conservative and i mean i got on the near times list like that and i have been on every national television have been on jay leno and viewed as name them all and i've been on a n and this was what and what i want to do is to put a spotlight on greenwich connecticut and honestly i think it is outrageous does cases never you know if these boys are innocent let's find out let's find out let's not just have it go on and on and on and i think i've succeeded here let me ask you about the fictional harrison barnes the narrator says it's a difficult from the eu to understand how emotionally he was able to live what amount to double life

focusing on justice using lying to expose all alone and knowing all the time that he had this secret and knowing also even before he's come back and when then this young man has high political ambitions that is the killer comes down and there's one of a limb constant rather high how do you have to grapple with that dilemma as soon as a writer of fiction how do you make it real and how do you make that very likable honest decent young man harrison burns except what amounts to an active along and lived with it and

still make it believable well i mean that was my taxes and then that was my task to do as a livable yet it and i found that interesting though i mean i found it that i i liked the idea of a morally compromised narrator of somebody who who who was telling you a story about morality who has a secret him be him himself that just appealed to me in the view of the complication of that appeal to me good ms harrison barnes aside from that dark side in that fictional gmo you know there was a lot of dominick dunne in an enhanced and certainly certainly and when you're writing and you know you really get away from you at any point in the writing of the story did you think you imitate him in one direction it will be gone and the cell oh that always happens to me you know before i start to write

it i do kind of an outline an end in which you know and i never stick to it i mean those things just things happen things happen i didn't you mean things happen in your head and in and in the manuscript not things happen like no uncertain term and it meant that the characters become different different things in the end the writing then then very often been a specially like minor characters that that i didn't think were going on mount anything served build up and end and become more import and in the end i was let that happen i know that the love affair with the going back in the family for tampa kind of had an idea because early on i mean there's a very nice really when they went when he was fourteen and he was seventeen it was a very nice relationship between the two of them and when he graduated from from from milford school at the

graduation he was as narration this question on to me nobody cared about him and only get yelled it at cannes you know like that and so you knew there'd be a payoff to it whether i knew it would be a love affair and i'm not sure i knew they'd meet again when you were a part of what this whole program is to analyze the way offers right and when you're working on a piece of fiction is an eight hour day job is there one hour in the day when the juices better doesn't appear to be getting that writer's block that sometimes the fears with work on us ali well i happen to be a person gets up very very early in the morning i get up at five thirty in the morning and i would really like not to get up at five thirty in the morning but i do get up at five and a specter write that

early but i start to write about eight and i find the hours between eight and twelve or my most productive hours and i guard those hours i live i live in new york but i also have a house in connecticut where i do most of my work and i can i stay there i i had this double life and then i write novels and i write for president for vanity fair magazine too and i usually spend the morning on the novels and then in the afternoon i i i work on the articles or else it but i never continue with their writing with the writing of the novel more than that i just get worn out i mean i get so concentrated i get kind of exhausted by the end of that time and then what you do one that when that time comes well ne yo in the news is just out there we'll have a wave because i don't give in to that i just don't allow that to

happen when i am stuck i go to my journal and i write about being stuck i read about it i don't know what to do in this the i don't know how to figure out how a constant does this and i didn't think of and it in and then i write and i put this all down i just i put out i think the important thing is to keep your words coming just keep words that i eventually get back and get back in the park i do interviews were even a lord you write your way back and i want my way back into it editors well i've been very lucky and then have an off of people submit your group of them have been an unlucky year well i have a bed you know vanity fair and tina brown is on the woman i did i like to jen reflect on her every day of my life i mean she changed my life tina brown bring this minute mini editor of the former very very obvious at the new yorker when she met me one night before she was so famous as she

is now and call me up the next day and said you know you got a ride from magazines and i said i just i'm only live writer by the way owns a movie producer and i said i'd just rooms first flock novel unidentified man i write anything and she said i could teach she's like she had this instinct about me she saw something in me i didn't know i had and so i'm very very grateful to her but under her mighty mite de de de editor vanity fair is a brilliant brilliant guy call wayne lawson and i rely heavily on him i regret that crown publishers a publisher of world a season in purgatory my editor for six books now has been battery pressure i get every hundred pages or seventy five pages i give in to her and then we talk and then we meet for lunch and shoots a tells me what's not working in and i am no longer with either when lawson or benny pressure i am not afraid to show them something that's rotten are some the two wrong i mean i know they're not gonna say we don't want a poem issue

anymore you know and and i need their feet back and i need to talk about and isn't that i'm necessarily except the idea that they give me what it spark something within me and at an end and do you ever resent <unk> sometimes johnny do well i mean i feel close enough to them we can even fights and it doesn't mean that we don't wanna go and have lunch together you know i inherited i have wonderful relationships with editors have a sitcom actor to rose from family or what or five and six the city has become the two brothers sitcom writers with such great success you and john gregory dunne well it's really any press he was a writer way before i'll show he was a writer and a friend stanley he'd start with time magazine and so for the new set a river distinguished life as a as a writer and then he married the great ms joan jett india and who has a name just to me a magnificent

writer it all has not been smooth between the semis will when i had and by when talking about her family apart but now it's okay again thank god but one night when i am i fading days in the movie business i was and i did a lot of good movies i became a drunk and answer for money that the air and in humans of your own positions that they believe an ad and say when i can interrupt my life in but you what you won it was going good for me and i was it was just to hear this voice and this season that this isn't fit meaning i don't i didn't really love the movie i didn't really love it and and and so like i had this bird's i wonder and so i'm actually a talked to john and joan and i showed him something my first effort well i mean they just

hated it and so forth and then but anyway as getting pretty severe robot and didn't a brilliant of knocking and now and then some happy between us and went in and we didn't talk for years but now we do and it and i treasure their friendship fact i just talked to them on the telephone last night and it's really nice and it's nice and nobody's jealous of anybody and i write differently from europe they write differently from each other i write differently for you know we're not competing for any further criticism for your work well you know what that's not even so when you know i gave that for the first time when i got my galley i called john and i said would you like to read it and he said yes and he did an end it it was very nice and we met and we talked about it and he told me a few things but it was in a constructive

way it wasn't that it was nice and very proud of that i mean i just feel it in life it's wonderful to be able to straighten things out that have gone wrong i am part of thing and often these days it's really successful villain which are doing right now i mean it is hitting the road and using the media to help tell the world and that there is a book out that says we're lives filled with writers we're told that nobody's reading absolutely everybody's writing a little bit about that whole process of well i mean writing is one thing but selling your writing for that were enough to you have to you have to so you're ready in and it's part of it and you know nothing annoys me more than to be in the green room of sound tv station in chicago are or somewhere

and then meet up with writers i know in new york who were armed moaning about how boring this all is i'll feel like that i mean i just get my mind into the thing and extend it's an honor to me look at all the books that come out to look at all of them and not every but often gets asked to go on one of these two or if i just get into it and have a good time you know i mean a lot of people and having a nice conversation with you this as a pleasant experience what we do and we're selling my book and what's so wrong about that will is often wrong about but i do hear some young people before we go on the air they tell me how unhappy they are to be here and then a neighbor had to be here and they complain all my books didn't show up in the store today when i went to the book for the book signing with three books there in five people or five books i know that when and it has been is really become an extension of the writers fascinating is something else there are you keep hearing that the people we look at tv and believe

this i believe is book readings readings of a new thing that we're going to read your book hundreds of people turned up for these readings i have also seen some of the most beautiful book shops that are new that are being built in boca raton florida and there's a book shoppe a liberties that is the best book shoppe i was ever again and the line was you're just loves monk talk about she was there an incredible incredible i think those are popping up all the country it's wonderful you do believe that there is a reading public out there and that we're not all some immigrants are a well to do to win and don't like a good story and i don't and i find that people want to come up and talk to me it is just about this but they said you know i love that well ultimately people like us reappears in this i copied them from trial and the palestine i will seek a gathering in the people from the previous you know them to get glimpses of them that it's got

like medieval france you know and tsai's cop that from him but the reviews you think all their yes i sure do and you enjoy the exchanges when i do i do i answer every letter they write me can do you really go for mothers what i do have a form letter i mean to but i mean if they get into a specific i always down the season in purgatory as then our guest on a word on where your host has been counseling involved in this program was produced in the studios of the louisiana it's both fb