After Kennedy, its bidding adieu to Dominick Dunne

August 27th, 2009 - 6:50 pm ICT by IBNS  

By Samrat Banerjee

Aug 27 (IBNS) Author and journalist Dominick Dunne is at peace after fighting a lost battle with bladder cancer. His suffering is over. He was 83.

He passed away Wednesday in Manhattan, according to his son, actor-producer Griffin Dunne. He was 83.

During his decades-long career covering high-profile murders, profiling the famous and mingling with high society, Dunne became something of a journalistic-literary enigma, whose persona bristled with righteous indignation, while wielding the kind of lofty connections, aerial perspective and undiluted opinions that made him a combination Walter Winchell and Marcel Proust.

As fate would have it, Dunne’s death fell a day after Sen. Edward M. Kennedy passed away on Tuesday, just before midnight. Dunne had crossed paths with the Kennedy family several times during his career, and with dramatic repercussions.

A onetime intimate of Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, Dunne had revived interest in the 1975 Martha Moxley murder through his novel “A Season in Purgatory” and was instrumental in helping make the case against another Kennedy relative, Michael Skakel, who was eventually convicted of the crime. Dunne also covered the William Kennedy Smith rape case in 1991 for Vanity Fair, the magazine with which he was associated for many years.

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