Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Media

Alt
Burn, sacred cow, burn!
Lefty weeklies turn on their idols. Plus: Ben is Dead dies, the 17th Annual Testicle Festival and the boy who said yes -- and lived.
By Jenn Shreve
[10/08/99]

Media
Kubrick's last film: An open and shut case?
"Eyes Wide Shut" is still roiling the waters. Brill's Content: The media sucks! Harper's: The critics suck!
By Sean Elder
[10/08/99]

Media
Crossing the Atlantic
Michael Kelly and William Whitworth talk about the changing of the guard at one of the nation's most respected magazines.
By Sean Elder
[10/06/99]

Media
Who wants to time-travel to 1357 France?
Michael Ovitz, onetime King of Hollywood, finds no takers for his new project -- a movie by Michael "Jurassic Park" Crichton.
By Nikki Finke
[10/05/99]

Alt
Wine, it's the other red fluid
Wine X's attempts at hipsterism evoke the not so subtle smell of oak barrel-aged fish. Plus: Geeks, freaks, fashion weeks and conspiracy theorists.
By Jenn Shreve
[10/01/99]

Complete archives for Media

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But Dunne -- bestselling novelist and "special correspondent" for Vanity Fair -- was by his own admission a "natural born star fucker ... before I'd even heard the term." His new book, "The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper," brings the pastime to a new level: The memoir is a cluster fuck of celebrity, crisscrossing (as he has) the worlds of Hollywood and New York, entertainment and society as effortlessly as a butterfly. Though the book offers plenty of evidence of his access to the lives of the rich and famous and features more recognizable names than Liz Smith's Rolodex, I can offer my own humble testimonial to his ubiquity in several social worlds, while attempting to drop a few names myself.

I went to Dennis Hopper's wedding party about four years ago. Actually it was the third reception held for his fifth marriage (to Victoria Duffy) and was held at the Manhattan home of artist Julian Schnabel. I had no business being there: An editor at a fashion magazine had invited me; they were going to run pictures of the fete and asked me to write a few words to accompany the photos. She canceled at the last minute (health reasons, as I recall) but still wanted me to attend. To make matters worse, Schnabel -- a man who is politely reputed to be temperamental -- did not want to see some fucking reporter standing around with his notebook out and did not want me bothering the guests. In short, I was supposed to blend. Tough when nearly everyone else in the room had their own A&E "Biography" special in their future.

From the art world there was Schnabel, of course, and David Salle, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, Mary Boone and more. (Hopper is a painter himself and an avid collector.) The Hollywood presence was mostly old school: Jennifer Jones (whose film career began in 1939), the late Roddy McDowell, James Coburn and a number of producers, directors and screenwriters. ("Most of my friends were working," Hopper told me later. "Working or dead. I guess it's about the same.") And for real literary chops there were both Allen Ginsberg (already looking wasted from the cancer that would take him) and Norman Mailer, who spent considerable time talking to each other.

But in the midst of it all there was one man who was getting what ceramic artist Ron Nagle would call "the full cheese," one guy everyone gravitated toward and paid obeisance to. Where a lot of these famous people seemed to know each other more through name-and-face recognition, this little white-haired guy in the owlish glasses seemed to know them all. He took all comers on with a handshake or a kiss and scanned the periphery with a practiced eye. (He made eye contact with me and did the shutter-blink of nonconnection: You're nobody.) It was Dunne, of course, and his presence there -- his importance there -- is a testament to his survival skills, his tireless mingling and scene-making and the fickle hand of fame that (as he has said of Hollywood) forgives every sin but failure.

Dunne can also be held responsible for a new level of celebrity journalism (which someone once opined is to real journalism what military music is to music). Not the kind that I wrote, a simple profile of a celebrity. Not even the kind abundant in magazines today in which a celebrity profiles a celebrity. No, what Dunne hath wrought is the sort of celebrity journalism in which the journalist himself is a celebrity by dint of knowing celebrities. (Examples can be found in the current issues of Vanity Fair and Talk, just to name a few.) It's a hall-of-mirrors trick and not an easy one to pull off: You have to have fucked a few stars yourself. And as Dunne makes abundantly clear in his breezy, occasionally alarming narrative, there is a definite price attached.

Next page | More beautiful corpses than a James Ellroy novel