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An Elegant Soap Opera
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17037 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1990 |
2,817 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
AN INCONVENIENT WOMAN
Dominick Dunne
New York: Crown, 1990
458 pp., $ 19.95
First, in 1985, there was Dominick Dunne's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles based on, or - to put it more exactly - inspired by, an incident involving Ann Woodward, a former showgirl who in 1955 shot and killed her husband, a scion of New York society. That became a television miniseries starring Ann-Margret and Claudette Colbert.
In 1988 came his best seller People Like Us, about the outrageousness of New York nouveaux riches and their desperate struggle to make it in Manhattan society. The book kept a lively current of speculation going for quite a few nights around the tables in Mortimer's, the East Side's favorite restaurant for fashionable folk, presented as Clarence's in the novel. Late last spring, that novel was turned into a miniseries starring Eva Marie Saint and Ben Gazzara.
Now in the summer of 1990 comes An Inconvenient Woman. This time Dunne is gunning for Los Angeles, a town he does not remember in the kindest way. This book, too, has been presold for a miniseries, to ABC, for a reported $500,000.
Embarrassing Murders
Once again, Dunne has found his inspiration in the headlines and faits divers of popular journalism. In 1982 the circumstances surrounding the death from heart failure of California millionaire Alfred S. Bloomingdale proved singularly embarrassing to people in high places. To Nancy Reagan, for one, then first lady, whose closest friends included his widow, Betsy Bloomingdale.
The embarrassment was certainly compounded eleven months later when Vicki Morgan, Bloomingdale's mistress of twelve years kept with an $18,000 monthly allowance, was bludgeoned to death. She was killed by her roommate, a "homosexual-schizophrenic-alcoholic on the fringes of show business," as Dunne described him in an article in Vanity Fair.
There was much talk at the time that the woman had been killed and her murderer framed by someone seeking audio and videotapes made by Morgan that were not only incriminating to Bloomingdale (who was given to sadomasochistic games with S. Morgan) but purportedly features high-placed people in the
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