Dominick Dunne’s first book was “The Winners,” a sequel to gossip columnist Joyce Haber’s popular novel “The Users.” Released in 1982, “The Winners” was poorly reviewed, but, for Dunne, it wasn’t a bad start. Dunne went on to produce a best-seller: “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” (1985).
Like Truman Capote, another social chronicler, Dunne often bit the well-manicured hands that fed him. A friend of Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale of the department store fortune, he turned Alfred’s relationship with his mistress, Vicki Morgan, into a roman a clef, “An Inconvenient Woman” (1990).
In his 1999 memoir, “The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper,” Dunne recalled a party at Humphrey Bogart’s house where he mingled with the likes of Judy Garland and Spencer Tracy. “I was the only nobody there,” he recalled decades later.