Dominick Dunne and Edward Kennedy: two American lives with a second act

Kennedy almost went under after a decade of partying and womanising climaxed with his nephew being accused of rape after a big night out that had included his uncle. Kennedy not only weathered the ensuing media storm but also turned his life around with a new marriage to Victoria Reggie, the daughter of long-time family friends. The steadiness of the partnership helped Kennedy return his focus to the Senate and go on to the most successful period of his career.

For Dunne, the second act of his career appropriately began as Dunne himself said with “the sort of coincidental meeting that is a signature of my life”.

He was at a friend’s house in New York having dinner the night before leaving for LA for the trial of his daughter’s killer. Seated alongside him at dinner was a young Englishwoman. Her name was Tina Brown. Later Brown would become possibly the world’s most glamorous and certainly one of its most influential editors through her stint at Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. In the kitchen that night though, Dunne recalled that “She was not remotely famous. She wasn’t even glamorous then.” The next day Brown rang Dunne and arranged a meeting. She told Dunne she was in negotiations to become Vanity Fair editor and she asked him to keep a daily journal of the trial and then come and see her when he was back in New York. She got the job, he wrote the article.

It caused a storm upon publication and began Dunne’s long time association with the magazine. He was 59. His new career as a writer achieved two goals. Through his extraordinary coverage of trials of well known figures such as O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow and Phil Spector, he was able to be an advocate for victims; a role he had first experienced as the hapless father at his own daughter’s trial. And for Dunne, who had started out observing the rich and famous in television and film nearly 40 years before, in his other gig as regular diarist at the glamorous Vanity Fair, he could remain the keen observer and the brilliant listener with whom people unerringly shared their secrets.

There are other similarities for these two larger-than-life figures of American public life - they were both from large Irish Catholic families on the East Coast, they both lived long lives, they were both taken by cancer, they both had time to say goodbye. There are curious intertwinings too: Dunne’s brother had written a novel The Red, White and Blue said to be largely based on the Kennedys and after Dunne’s 1993 book, A Season in Purgatory, helped revive interest in the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley, a Kennedy relative. Michael Skakel, was convicted for the killing in 2002.

Dunne considered himself a lucky outsider and came to enjoy the fame that came his way particularly after the heavily televised trial of O.J. Simpson. At his funeral - which he had been preparing for nine years - he was eulogised as a great father, gossip and faithful friend.

After Edward Kennedy’s death, President Obama - who was endorsed by Kennedy in the primaries - said, “His ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws and reflected on millions of lives”. Civil and women’s rights, the rights to vote, and health and education all enjoyed Kennedy’s support during his long tenure in the Senate, and he was a passionate advocate of Obama’s healthcare reform.

In August America lost two remarkable men: one who wore the burden of fame from his early years and found a way to rise above it, another who took fame on with relish later in life. Both men were motivated by the individual tragedies of their own lives to move beyond the bluster of the Senate and the gossip of the dinner party and to ultimately to disprove F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted claim that “there are no second acts in American lives”.