The Water Winchell of the Elites

...Dunne’s antennae are always tuned to the offbeat stoqr . . . He is magazine journalirm’s ace social anthropologist whose area of social study is the famous and infimous up close and personal...

...Today, all that has changed...

...The New York Times Book Review For one who embraces the cult of celebrity, part of the goal - and the payoff - is achieving celebrity status yourself...

...le is one of those writers who seems effortlessly to collide with copy...

...or: “‘I go on Michael Jackson’s radio show several times a week...

...Newsday Perhaps the ultimate triumph of Dunne’s book is the paper-thin layer of irony he weaves into his glamourfest...

...San Francisco Examiner In simpler times, an “anthropologist” such as Dunne would have been called a gossip columnist...

...Robert DeNiro and Francis Ford Coppola were telling stories about OJ...

...or: Gus loved to talk about old times...

...You know Gore, don’t you?’ “DO I know Gore...

...THE WALTER WINCHELL OF THE ELITES The triumph of celebrityism in high-brow America BY PIPER MONROE WHEREVER HE IS TODAY, Walter Winchell must be positively pea green with envy...

...Harvey Levin of KCBS and Pat Lalama of “Hard Copy” went to Eclipse...

...Heiresses unload their @e stories in elevators...

...Top that...

...Tina Brown Whatever one thinks of Dunne’s approach to writing, one of the most striking things about it is its embrace by the same elite that once scorned the Winchells of this world...

...He shook hands with Liz Tilberis, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar...

...Mart Crowley, dinner at Orso...

...Sometimes it can be achieved through stilted dialogue: ‘‘I’ll be going out there myself...

...David Margolick of The New York Times and he went to Cicada...

...He kissed Fran Lebowitz, the honoree, on both cheeks, complimented her on her tuxedo, and got her to sign his book...

...At other times, the description of an actual event is manipulated to highlight the magnitude of the author’s A-list status: Gus moved on into the room...

...I mean, I met him a couple of times, at closed-circuit games and boxing matches, stuff like that...

...is too tangential if a person’s star power is bright enough...

...The Billy Wilders would be coming...

...Far less interested in “‘what” than “who,” Dunne’s book is a study in strategic name-dropping - no connection to OJ...

...That night, he went to dinner at Drai’s with Dan Abrams, the young commentator on the Simpson trial for “Court TV!’ Being sought after for media appearances, however, is an entirely different matter, significantly enhancing one’s celebrity cachet: “That evening, after taping a segment for ‘Rivera Live,’ Gus was in his suite . . . I’ or: “We watch you [Gus] on Larry King and Dan Rather...

...Though subtitled A Novel in the Fomz of a Memoir, more than a few reviewers have made the obvious observation that Another City is, in fact, the exact opposite - a thinly veiled, mostly true look at Dunne’s personal PIPER MONROE is the pseudonym of a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas...

...He posed for a picture for his friend Heather Cohane, who was the editor of Quest...

...Simpson trial as told by the author’s alter-ego, Gus Bailey...

...Shirley Perlman of Newsday and he went to Morton’s...

...But perhaps nowhere has the new status of celebrity journalism been better illustrated than in the reception of the most recent novel by I.’anity Fair contributor Dominick Dunne...

...And, more specifically, all of the A-list celebrities he sat around gossiping with in the course of his reporting...

...He hugged his friend Jesse Kornbluth, the writer, on whom he had based the character of Bernie Slatkin, who married and then divorced the richest girl in New York in his book People Like Us...

...said Gus...

...Wanted men hail the same taxi...

...No longer must one choose between the labels of scandalmonger and serious writer...

...experiences covering the Simpson trial...

...or: “DO you remember that lunch that Franc0 Zeffirelli gave at the house on the Via Appia Antica, and Hiram Keller shocked all the titles when he jumped in the pool nude...

...And, not surprisingly, with the notable exception of the author, none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent: Whoopi Goldberg said to Gus when he kissed her on the cheek in greeting, “Gus, this is awful about O.J...

...Dominick] Dunne is a genius...

...I can’t remember exactly when,” she said...

...Martin Manulis, dinner at Morton’s...

...Linda Deutsch of Associated Press, lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunday with Elaine Young, the Beverly Hills realtor, and The0 Wilson, the great crime reporter...

...When I was twenty years old, I met Anais Nin at Gore’s house in Guatemala, and she took me away with her to Acapulco...

...Name dropping and celebrity gossip sold, but it didn’t win you much respect...

...But Winchell plied his craft in an era when, although the general public devoured his work, the cultural and intellectual elite never paid him much attention...

...I didn’t really know him...

...I’m not really the celebrity hound I seem,” his prose winks knowingly, “but isn’t it fun to play along...

...While hanging out with other (perhaps more serious) reporters isn’t as eye-catching as dining out with Liz Taylor, it does let readers know you are, in every way, in the loop...

...Marvin Davis, dinner for Placid0 Domingo...

...Harrison Ford, who before he became a star had once done construction work on the house that Gus’ brother Malachy and his wife, Edwina, rebuilt in Malibu, said he knew Simpson...

...Movie stars confide to his answering machine...

...Such acceptance is perhaps best illustrated by The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and of course Vanity Fair lining up to weigh in on the value of Another City as both prose and social commentary...

...He knows every story there is to tell, precisely how it happened, and why...

...Dunne’s exalted position in the media world is something he also takes pains to share in his book...

...Tita Cahn, dinner at her home...

...DO you remember that night in Rome when Elizabeth [Taylor] got so furious at Andy [warhol] when she discovered he had a tape recorder hidden under her mink coat on the banquette and was recording every word she said...

...or: ‘“I’m going to be on ‘Good Morning America’ and we go on the air at 4 a.m., so I have to get back to the hotel ...’ said Gus...

...And alongside the winks, of course, there’s the veiled threat: If you don’t play along, you’re a humorless Puritan...

...Mary Jane Stevenson of “Court TV” and Shoreen Maghame of City News...

...Harry’s publishing Gore Vidal’s memoirs, and we’re going to give a party for Gore at L’Orangerie...

...Janet DeCordova, dinner at Chasen’s Sunday night...

...le the reviews were not entirely positive, the fact that Dunne has reached the point where such high-brow publications, as a service to their A-list readerships, feel compelled to address his work gives it the stamp of elite legitimacy...

...Another City, Not My Own is a fictionalized account of the O.J...

...Simpson...

...Gus liked to have dinner with the reporters so that they could spend the whole time talking about the case...

...Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, said, “O.J...

...I can’t stop thinking about it...

...A pioneer in the field of celebrity journalism in the 1930s, Winchell gave John and Jane Q. Public the inside skinny on the stars of the society, sports, and entertainment worlds and was among the first to lump that new elite together...

...The true measure of Dunne’s worth then is how many of the beautiful people recognize him as one of them...

...Conveying this importance within the confines of a narrative can pose something of a challenge...

...just did a television pilot called ‘Frogman’ for NBCI’ Though Dunne makes a modest effort to work the names casually into the prose, at times all pretense at narrative must be abandoned to achieve maximum name density: ‘You get more messages than anyone in the hotel,” said Mario Maldonado as he handed Gus a fistful of messages at the front desk...

...Reunion of the Menendez reporters at Orso on Third Street Friday night...

...And as the cult of celebrity informs every rung of the social, economic, and cultural ladder, the line between achievement and acclaim has been pretty much dissolved: comedienne Roseanne Barr can guest edit The New Yorker and actor Rick Moranis’ prose can appear on the op-ed pages of The New York Times...

...She shook her head in sadness...

...To their shame, much of our intelligentsia has flocked to Dunne’s whispers...