Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records — and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis “made drool eyes at me.” He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

In anyone else’s hands, this would be your typical ho-hum let-me-tell-you-about-being-a-star-and-getting-laid routine. But there is something else going on in “Been There, Done That.” First, Eddie Fisher and his co-writer know how to put words together. The story is fascinating; the one-liners are funny; the vignettes are out of this world. Especially when he is telling us exactly what it was like to live with Elizabeth Taylor: “She was drinking and taking pills and passing out. She was constantly passing out. It was just awful; not awful enough to make me miss my life with Debbie, but awful.”

Once when he threatened to leave, Taylor swallowed an entire bottle of Seconol. “I tried to stay calm,” Fisher writes, “although it’s hard to stay calm when foam is coming out of your wife’s mouth.” Another time, he dared to venture the opinion that she should do something about her addictions. “Elizabeth, what would you think about going to see a psychiatrist?” he asked.

“As it turned out, not very much,” Fisher recalls. “She erupted. She started screaming at me … She got out of bed, totally naked, and ran down the stairs. I ran right after her. She got into her Cadillac and turned on the engine. It was crazy, this hysterical naked woman trying to drive while I ran alongside the car, holding on to her door. I was begging her to stop, telling her, ‘It’s not you, it’s me. I’ll go to the psychiatrist. I’ll go, I’ll go, it’s me …’”

There’s a genuine juvenile enthusiasm in “Been There, Done That.” It’s the sense of wonder that you or I would have if we woke up one morning as a star. And we get the feeling that Fisher’s still stunned that a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia could end up, all of a sudden, living “under the bank on the hill, where the money just rolls down.” With Elizabeth Taylor.

The tale of Elizabeth and Eddie — they called him “Mr. Taylor” — is enough to make a grown man cry … and, often, to laugh: “The one thing that it was impossible to ever forget when you were with Elizabeth Taylor,” he tells us, “was that you were with Elizabeth Taylor … She was smart and funny and beautiful. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Sexually she was every man’s dream; she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver.”

Fisher did not marry Elizabeth Taylor. Rather, he entered into a contract with her to let her run his life, and to be subject to her every whim, to deal with her incessant pill-taking, her endless boozing, her tantrums, her sulks, and her impossible Jezebel nature. “I had successfully made the transition from one of the country’s most popular singers to Elizabeth’s companion and nurse,” he writes. “I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap. I’d forgotten who I was … The only singing I was doing was around the house.”

And what did he do when he she ran off with Richard Burton? “I couldn’t stop loving her, and needing her. I missed her more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sit still, so I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I appeared on the television quiz show ‘What’s My Line’ as the mystery guest.”

Fisher’s final meeting with Taylor gives him a chance to reflect on what he had been to her — and what Burton was now to become: “We met at their suite at the Regency. I was surprised at how the balance of their relationship had changed. Elizabeth was in complete control, Burton had become almost docile and very domesticated … As Elizabeth and I were talking, he was performing all my old duties: He was picking up, giving her a pillow, pouring drinks. He had become her nurse. Maybe he was doing ‘Hamlet’ onstage, but in real life he was playing my role.”

Fisher’s first experience with drugs came from one Dr. Max Jacobson. He remembers the date with exactitude: April 17, 1953. And he didn’t stop for 37 years. Most of the famous people he knew — in show biz, in music, in politics — were doing it. Even John Fitzgerald Kennedy: “I had arrived at Max Jacobson’s office for my shot and found the place in an uproar. ‘Come wit me,’ he ordered. ‘I haf to see the President.’ I knew Max had very powerful friends, but the President? … With Max, anything was possible. Max could make night into day. Max with his filthy fingernails and his magic potions treating the President of the United States?”

According to Fisher, the president took Dr. Max with him when he went to Vienna for a summit meeting with Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. “Looking back on it, it’s amazing how we all just accepted the fact that the President was taking Dr. Feelgood with him to a meeting that would affect the entire world. The fate of the free world rested on Max’s injections. I can still see Max taking a little from this bottle, a little from that one, and ‘pull down your pants, Mr. President.’”

What sets Fisher’s tale apart from the thousand-and-one other I-Was-A-Star books is the fact that he is obviously no dummy. He’s someone who can tell us his funny-sad tale with wit and a certain amount of astute introspection. And occasionally, he will stop and make a cogent summary of the foolish things he’s done with his life: “By the time I was thirty-three years old I’d been married to America’s sweetheart and America’s femme fatale and both marriages had ended in scandal; I’d been one of the most popular singers in America and had given up my career for love; I had fathered two children and adopted two children and rarely saw any of them; I was addicted to methamphetamines and I couldn’t sleep at night without a huge dose of Librium. And from all this I had learned one very important lesson: There were no rules for me. I could get away with anything so long as that sound came out of my throat.”

Who would ever suspect that Eddie Fisher, the man who made so many awful records — songs he himself calls “bubble-gum” — the man who was shooting meth and cocaine for 37 straight years, the one who bungled several marriages with several of the most gorgeous women in Hollywood — who could ever guess that he would create an autobiography that is such a kick in the pants?

This is a man who, literally, got a shirt off of JFK’s back; one who loved the loveliest women of our time; one who hung out with all the stars and the mafioso kings; one who turned down part ownership in Caesar’s Palace (“I wanted nothing more to do with Caesar and Cleopatra”); the man who abandoned all his children, the man whose third wife would write, “I wish you good luck, good health and wealth and happiness in your own time on your terms — I do not wish you love as you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

Fisher is a man who shot up with the stars, and who ended up, in his most desperate days, travelling with “Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Review,” also known as “The cavalcade of has-beens,” along with Tiny Tim, Georgie Jessel and Donald O’Connor, “who was whacked out of his mind most of the time.”

When he was on top, he says, “I walked into theatres and championship fights without a ticket. I could make a phone call and have airplanes wait for me. Now I had to learn how to lead a normal life.”

Fisher is now 70. Surprisingly, he survived. He makes it quite clear that even now, his main regret is that he wasn’t able to hang onto his No. 1 shiksa, Elizabeth Taylor. This juvenile passion and his endless roll-call of sexual conquests are not very impressive. But we are impressed that Fisher is able, at this late date, to come up with a brand new act, one associated neither with his music nor his weenie.

Here we have a faded pop star who has, out of the blue, developed a brand new trick that he doesn’t even mention in his book: The ability to write winningly and well. “Been There, Done That” is self-deprecating, and droll — and sometimes very sad. But all the while it’s honest, and very, very good.

Halston’s influence on American fashion goes beyond his designs — he took an era, reupholstered it in Ultrasuede, dabbed “Halston” on its pulse points and made it his own. A new book, “Halston: An American Original,” by Elaine Gross and Fred Rottman — which features interviews with those who knew, loved and emulated him, as well as 225 photos, some from top fashion photographers — pays tribute to a completely original designer who, without any formal fashion training, changed the way the world dressed forever.

The first international fashion superstar — and possibly the best designer America has ever had — Halston was a master of detail, cut and finishing. His devotion to simplicity and elegance of line was so pure that he zealously avoided such frippery as zippers and buttons. More than construction, however, what Halston understood best was stardom — how to fabricate, showcase and exploit it — and how to hold people in its sway. In the mid-’70s, at the height of his success, Halston — an international legend and the king of New York nightlife — had the power to make women across the globe aspire to resemble hypertrophied drag queens wrapped in towels. He had the power to make Princess Grace of Monaco let herself be photographed in sky-blue Ultrasuede. He had the power to make the muumuu a must-have, because it was just about the only thing that still looked good on Elizabeth Taylor when she was expanding at a faster rate than the Crab Nebula. He even had the power to make it OK for dozens of Manhattan socialites to show up at Le Cirque wearing the same dress (the famed model No. 704, a knee-length, belted, Ultrasuede shirt, which the New York Times called a “status security blanket”) and think it simply divine.

“The herd instinct is the new chic!” wrote Eugenia Sheppard. “It’s like belonging to a club!”

Nowadays, when the Gap can get “everybody in vests” one month and “everybody in cords” the next, this may not seem extraordinary. But fashion and fame have changed since the late ’60s and ’70s. Ironically, Halston was instrumental — both through his designs and his business decisions — in bringing about the changes that would ultimately lead to his own demise. As much as Halston came to symbolize modernity in the ’70s, and as much as he would usher in the future of fashion, he was, in many ways, old school. He truly believed that “fashion is not made by designers, it is made by fashionable people.” He would never understand that eventually fashion would be made by business people, and that would be his undoing.

Born Roy Halston Frowick in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1932, Halston was voted “healthiest baby” at the Iowa State Fair. He always knew he wanted to be a milliner, and began creating hats — much to his family’s bafflement — at a very early age. Like Coco Chanel, who also began her career as a milliner, Halston always understood the importance of having well-connected friends. In Steven Gaines’ dishy 1990 biography, “Simply Halston: The Untold Story,” Halston’s brother Bob recalls: “In high school, my brother was driven around by rich girls in convertibles.” After moving to Chicago following an abbreviated stint at the Indiana University, Halston became involved with “Basil of the Ambassador,” a well-known celebrity hairstylist. It was through his stormy relationship with Basil that Halston first met milliner Lilly Dachi, who would eventually give him his first New York job. Within a year of arriving in New York and becoming the new best friend of several influential fashion magazine editors and publishers, Halston, as he now called himself, left Dachi’s studio to become head milliner for the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman.

By the time he was 30, Halston had already won his first of five Coty Fashion Critics Awards, and had managed to convince Bergdorf’s to sew his name onto the labels of his hats — a privilege the department store had never granted another designer. He designed the pillbox hat Jackie Kennedy wore to the presidential inauguration — which made him internationally famous.

In 1966, determined to quit hats and go into the ready-to-wear business (which he correctly saw as the wave of the future), Halston was surprised to find that many of the rich socialites and famous celebrities who absolutely adored him and thought him an absolute genius were unwilling to finance his dressmaking venture. He was eventually able to set up shop in 1968, thanks to an investment of $125,000 from a Mrs. Estelle Marsh of Amarillo, Texas — a distinctly unfabulous and, apparently, somewhat doughy lady whom Halston privately referred to as Mrs. Marshmallow. Out of necessity, Halston turned his then-unfashionable Madison Avenue locale into an exotic, orchid-strewn oasis unlike anything in the Garment District — and subsequently into the preferred hangout of ladies who lunch but don’t fund.

His first collection, which consisted of only 25 remarkably similar yet startlingly unique pieces, was such a smash that, the day after his first show, Halston was surprised to find Babe Paley (every designer’s dream client) parked outside his studio at 9:30 in the morning. Paley, for reasons of her own, was anxious to order a custom-made argyle pantsuit, but immediately. The show had clearly had an impact on the country’s premier trendsetter. At a time when fashion shows were still stiff and formal affairs in which models walked down runways holding numbered placards in silence, Halston had instructed his models to strut down the runway to music, holding up copies of “Valley of the Dolls.” The clothes they wore — casual, free, functional and strangely pajama-like — seemed to instantly embody the feminist and egalitarian spirit of the era.

By 1972, Newsweek was calling Halston “the best designer in America.” His name was everywhere — New Yorker cartoons, gossip columns, top-10 songs. He was everybody’s permissive and forgiving best friend — bingeing on sliders at White Castle with Liz, bingeing on scotch and coke on Fire Island with Liza. He became enamored of a bizarre, unintelligible and maniacal Colombian window dresser named Victor Hugo, who liked to give window mannequins submachine guns and have them act out “the Patty Hearst bank robbery scene.” Through Hugo (so called for his physical endowments, his literary ones being undoubtedly few), Halston soon met and befriended his perfect art-world counterpart, Andy Warhol. Like Warhol, Halston was now one of the most internationally recognized figures in the world. It was inevitable that they would become friends.

In 1973 — “the year of Halston” — Halston Inc. was acquired by Norton Simon Industries (a company in the business of buying brand names) for $12 million in stock and a yearly salary for Halston of $150,000, escalating to $500,000. It was an unprecedented deal for a designer, and the potentially negative implications of selling a company built around his own name, image and creativity were not immediately apparent to anyone. Halston believed that for a company to acquire — or even desire — his name without his talent would be senseless. Why would anyone even want to put the Halston name on something that he himself had not created or at least supervised? Other designers, such as the ubiquitous Pierre Cardin, were splashing their names across anything with a surface, from cigarette lighters to cars, but Halston refused to have his name on anything that had not bubbled up from the wellspring of his own creativity.

A case in point was the creation and launch of his signature perfume, “Halston,” which would go on to be the second-biggest-selling fragrance of all time (after Chanel No. 5). NSI also owned the dowdy cosmetics firm Max Factor and hoped that an association with Halston would bolster its image. Halston was less than thrilled about working with the company and fought one of the longest and most difficult battles of his life to retain control of every aspect of the creation of his first fragrance. Among the most bitter battles he fought centered on the fragrance’s bottle. Max Factor had wanted to present it in something rectangular and Chanel-like, and coyly call it “Halston Nights.” Halston, on the other hand, had wanted to use a bottle designed by his good friend, jewelry designer Elsa Peretti, and call it just “Halston.” (The Peretti bottle, globular and rather bean-shaped, was impossible to fill on a conventional assembly line.) But perhaps most egregious to the cosmetic company’s slow-moving marketing department was that Halston refused to have the name of the fragrance printed on the bottle at all. He finally conceded to printing in tiny letters on a strip of tape wrapped around the neck of the bottle, which would have to be forcibly removed when it was opened.

By the time the fragrance launched — and became an instant, runaway hit beyond anyone’s wildest expectations — Halston the superstar had almost completely replaced the sweet Midwestern boy who had come to New York and made good. His constant drug use prompted him to start wearing dark glasses at all times — even indoors at night. He held his cigarettes vertically aloft, and always traveled with an entourage of models in matching outfits known as “the Halstonettes,” who followed him like ducklings trailing their mother. Studio 54 had become his home away from home, and Steve Rubell and Bianca Jagger his new best friends.

Meanwhile, back at headquarters, the suits were getting restless. Pressured into entering into dozens of licensing agreements with the manufacturers of such sundry items as sheets, gloves and luggage, Halston, never one to delegate authority or share credit, found it increasingly difficult to fulfill his contractual obligations. Aside from perfume sales, his business, though glamorous, was not very profitable. When NSI asked him to sign a deal with downscale J.C. Penney, in which he would essentially become its in-house name designer, Halston surprised his bosses by cheerfully agreeing, with much lip service to his lower-middle-class, Midwestern roots.

The backlash was instant. Bergdorf’s dropped Halston’s collection, and many of his formerly faithful friends and clients began defecting to other designers’ camps. In 1983, the Wall Street firm of Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts orchestrated a leveraged buyout of NSI. Esmark Inc., a company with holdings as diverse as a chemical and fertilizer company and a bra and girdle company — as well as $6.3 billion in annual sales — bought NSI. Max Factor was spun off from Halston, making the design house even less profitable than before. Within a year, Esmark was bought by the megaconglomerate Beatrice Foods, a behemoth with $9.3 billion in annual sales. Rapidly becoming a smaller and smaller fish in an ever-growing pond, Halston didn’t even meet his last boss — the CEO of the company that owned his name — before getting locked out of his offices after throwing one too many coke-fueled hissy fits. He died in 1990, of AIDS-related causes, still trying to buy back his name.

Toward the end of “Simply Halston,” Gaines describes an anecdote Esmark’s CEO related to a group of Chicago stockbrokers after what had been, to him, a baffling encounter with the famous designer.

“He kept calling me ‘Mr. Kelly,’” the businessman recalled, “but I didn’t know what his real name was. What do you call him? Mr. Halston?” As for the absurdly grand office and the impossibly regal manner of a man whose influence was fading by the minute: “All I’ve got to say is that it was a very impressive office for a small amount of profit. It’s a long run for a short slide.”

What makes Halston’s rise and demise poignant is that it played itself out on the cusp of modern celebrity. What began as a classic Hollywood “boy from the boondocks hits the big time” rags-to-riches story ended like a scene out of “Wall Street.” Halston became a celebrity when celebrity required a certain degree of accomplishment and distinction. He was never able to understand how his name could be successfully disassociated from his work and turned into the brand to which he would become a slave.

So does he love them? Will he love them forever? Did he find paradise in his own dashboard lights? “Everyone wanted to touch them,” he admits to Time’s Joel Stein. “It gives you an idea how if you’re a woman and you have these great-looking breasts, everybody wants to feel them.”

He would know.

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The Gloved One’s loved one

“She’s a warm, cuddly blanket that I love to snuggle up to and cover myself with.”

– Peter Pan wannabe Michael Jackson on Elizabeth Taylor, the woman he calls “Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, the Queen of England and Wendy” all rolled into one, in the October issue of Talk.

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Queen for a day

Ricky Martin can say what he likes about wanting to settle down and start a family, but at least one famous drag queen’s not buying slick Ricky’s straight talk.

At New York’s Wigstock last weekend, potty-mouthed Lady Bunny took the stage for her penile revision of lil’ Ricky’s big hit, “Livin’ La Vida Loca.” Her version? More like “la Pinga Loca.”

“Hint,” said the carrot-munching entertainer to the wickedly bewigged crowd. “I’m not the first queen to sing this song.”

Bunny …! You’ve got some ‘splaining to do!

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Naked she came

“The nude scene was not in the script. It was Sharon’s suggestion.”

– Albert Brooks on Sharon Stone’s flashy turn in “The Muse.”

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Juicy bits

Hey, how come Marilyn always has to do the dirty work? Former veep Dan Quayle has retracted his own call for a candid confession from George W. Bush and left his trash-talking wife, who recently pronounced Dubya’s circumlocution “cute” and “sad,” hanging out to dry. “I think there ought to be a statute of limitations on this nonsense,” Quayle sniffed to the Boston Herald. “I could care less whether you inhaled or didn’t inhale back in college or whenever it was.” A (grammatically challenged) statement that’s somehow both cute and sad.

Middlebrow literary pretensions are out. Skin is in. Or so sayeth arbiter of bad taste Howard Stern. The raunchy radio host is hoping to out-endorse Oprah Winfrey with his new “Adult Movie Pick of the Month Club.” And Brian Gross, the aptly named spokesman for Vivid Videos, the porn peddlers behind Stern’s first pick, “Seven Deadly Sins,” says Stern’s support is already heating up sales. “Howard doesn’t endorse anything he doesn’t really believe in,” Gross tells Nothing Personal. “He has always enjoyed the Vivid product.”

File that under “Too much information.”

During the bizarreness that imbued much of Los Angeles while the Trial of the Century droned on, I’d been in rooms with Dominick Dunne, but I hadn’t actually met him until the day of the verdict in what many of us now refer to as O.J. 1. An Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, I’d been working since about 6 a.m. as a commentator in CBS’s treetop deck at Camp O.J., in the parking lot across the street from the Criminal Courts building. There, up on a skimpy platform that swayed with each early-morning breeze, I sat between a power-suited Latina politician, a blowhard talk-show host from Orange County and a black community activist/author. As “community voices,” we back-and-forthed with Dan Rather via satellite while waiting for the verdict to be read.

Like the rest of the world, I poised, stock-still, in the silence that preceded the forewoman’s reading. I watched the booth’s monitors as Simpson blinked in teary disbelief at his good fortune, saw his ex-wife’s family stare ahead in stony resignation, watched Fred Goldman try to console his anguished daughter and stifle her howls of outrage. And I tried to decide whether Dominick Dunne was going to collapse in a stroke on the spot. It’s an indelible picture: the petite, gray-haired man with his jaw literally dropped to his striped silk tie, mouth still agape as he looked around him at the weeping Goldmans on one side, the rejoicing Simpsons on another, the stone-faced Browns behind him.

A half-hour later, he staggered into the CBS booth for a brief chat with Rather. He was followed by an anxious young woman (an assistant? someone from CBS?) whose face said it all: Please God, don’t let him keel over on my watch! (The combination 90-degree heat of our Indian summer and the fairly arduous three-story climb up a rickety ladder to the booth made this more than hysterical conjecture: Dunne was, after all, 69 at the time.) As he did in his earlier ad hoc interview with CNN, Dunne repeated his conviction that the jury was “stupid” and “hadn’t done its job.” He was white-faced and trembling with outrage. Two years later, he still hasn’t recovered.

During the trial, Dunne enjoyed a prime, and much-coveted, courtroom seat. Visitors to Judge Lance Ito’s fiefdom and viewers around the world could see Dunne every day, leaning forward intently, staring through his signature tortoise-shell glasses, taking copious notes with his Mont Blanc, an angry, elegantly dressed guardian angel for victim’s rights. On weeknights, in the early evening, he was always making the media rounds somewhere or other. You could see him insisting on Simpson’s guilt with Geraldo Rivera (who was himself accused of having an intensely personal relationship with Denise Brown). Or savaging Simpson with Charles Grodin, whose blatantly false hairline moved when his eyebrows rose to make a point. Or pontificating to an eager Dan Rather in the regular Friday night trial wrap-up. At the end, Dunne’s East Coast society whine became as familiar to us as Walter Cronkite’s heartland bass had been a few decades before.

“I have a tendency to get too personally involved in these trials I cover, even emotionally involved at times,” Gus/Dunne warned the CBS producers when they asked him to contribute his weekly impressions of the trial and its participants. Apparently, the producers didn’t care (which makes one wonder how the news division got away with it, since news is — at least in theory — supposed to be reported impartially, from a journalistic remove), and Dunne proceeded to get as personal as he liked. He commented on how the families were holding up, what strategies the defense and prosecution might be making and how the trials were going. And, of course, on Simpson’s guilt.

After the early evening media rounds, Dunne spent his nights far removed from the gritty and often grisly details of what happened in the Criminal Courts building. Like the hoi polloi, what passes for L.A.’s haut monde needed a regular fix of trial-related gossip, too. So Dunne was invited to sup with the city’s glitteratti and give a brief talk afterwards — a kind of quid pro quo for the crème brûlée. He began to refer to this singing for his supper as his “floor show.” And he loved it. Oscar-winning actors, prominent directors, studio moguls and their ambitious society wives clamored to be seated near him at dinners in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills. He dined with Nancy Reagan, per invitation of ex-U.S. Information Agency chief Charles Z. Wick, to offer her a divertissement from caring for the Alzheimer’s-struck former president. He lunched with Elizabeth Taylor, who confessed that she “can’t staaaand … Mr. F. Lee Bailey,” as she flashed a sapphire bracelet given to her by another of Johnnie Cochran’s clients, Michael Jackson. (“‘Michael is not a child molester’” Taylor firmly admonished Gus when he made mention of Jackson’s legal woes, “as if she had said the same sentence over and over again in previous conversations.”)

His Simpson cachet even netted him audiences with royalty: Queen Noor admitted they watched snippets of the trial in Jordan, too, “but we’re not caught up in it the way everyone is here.” The late Princess of Wales charmed him with her sly humor and, early on, predicted a full acquittal with eerie prescience. Diana’s aunt-by-marriage, Princess Margaret, mortified him at brunch before a bunch of local swells and expatriate Brits when she sniffily declared the trial “such a bore” after one of his floor shows. (To which he could quite justifiably have responded: “Takes one to know one, Meg.”)

He was having a fine time dining out, staying in, exchanging confidences — which, much to the horror and outrage of his confidants, he consistently and promptly betrayed in his columns and by leaking choice tidbits to simpatico journalists — and looking forward to the day when Simpson would be publicly certified as the murderer of two people. His only problem was he was talking with people who held the same view that he did and who were telling him what he wanted to hear.

If Dunne had bothered to spend any time away from the rarefied cluelessness of the Platinum Triangle that comprises Beverly Hills, Holmby Hills and Bel-Air, he might have gotten a more rounded view of how other parts of Los Angeles saw the trial and its players. It’s possible that he hung out in the ‘hood and kept a low profile, but I never saw him at any of the community forums, strolling through the Baldwin Hills Plaza (a veritable treasure trove of man-on-the-street opinion working journalists frequently mined) or sitting in the pews of the city’s large black churches.

In his racially homogenous circles, Dunne was much like the guests at producer Ray Stark’s dinner party who interrupted their conversation to demand the opinion of Stark’s long-time black butler, Wilbur, “because I’m the closest most of them will ever come to knowing a black man.” Wilbur, like many blacks employed in white households, took a pass on voicing his true thoughts (“Oh, I’m not getting into this one”). Later, his employers would discover his opinions anyway when, at Dunne’s goodbye dinner, Wilbur and the black catering staff walked off the job after dessert but before the dishes were done: “They didn’t like the way you talked about O.J., calling him guilty after the jury found him innocent,” Stark’s daughter, Wendy, explained. “Oh well, at least we finished dessert and coffee before they left.” Nothing like having one’s priorities in the right place.

“This is going to be the O.J. legacy,” Dunne declared to the bemused Stark after Wilbur’s exit. “He’s divided the races. We’re back to where we were before Rosa Parks wouldn’t sit in the back of the bus anymore in 1955, and the civil rights movement started.” And in this irredeemably flawed analysis, Dunne is typical of much of white Los Angeles, indeed, of white America. The Simpson trial didn’t cause a racial divide. It merely illuminated — in the fashion that those huge lights the INS places at the Mexican border do — the magnitude of the problem. Black Americans have been aware of the divide’s existence for years. White Americans, post-Simpson, are reluctantly concluding the civil rights era didn’t fix “the race problem,” and are finally starting to measure, with dismay, the depth of that chasm. 1955 and 1995 are, in some very meaningful ways, too close for comfort. Simpson’s legacy is their shattered naiveté, their realization that the natives, while generally better off than they were 40 years ago, are still restless.

Dunne’s chronicle doesn’t examine any of the substantive reasons many people in the black neighborhoods I traveled through and spoke with (including my own) felt they couldn’t immediately subscribe to Simpson’s guilt: the obvious one-sided approach of the mainstream media, which reported on the trial even as it socialized with the Browns and Simpsons; the poisonous atmosphere between the LAPD and many of its black and brown communities, post Rodney King; the rush to judgment most of white America chose to make before all the evidence had been presented and considered; the scant coverage of those persons of color (and there were a substantial number of them) who thought it was possible Simpson had committed the murders and who wanted him punished as long as his investigation and trial were conducted by the book.

In the end, the book doesn’t tell us much we didn’t already know about this over-reported trial. Unless you think it’s signally important to know that pro football player Marcus Allen, good friend and supposed lover of Nicole Simpson, has, in several ladies’ humble estimation, the biggest penis they’d ever seen. (Nicole even nicknamed it: “Driftwood.”) Or that, mid-trial, the Brown family had to be cajoled to reappear in the courtroom and when they did, it was in the person of Nicole’s sister Tanya, who proceeded to neck with her fiancé in full view of the jury. Or that designer Carolina Herrera, feeling sympathy for O.J. Simpson’s family, sent beautifully wrapped gift packages of her fragrances to Simpson’s sisters, brother and mother. (They sent thank-you notes.) Or that Dale Cochran shops for Johnnie’s boxers at Sulka.

The last time I met Dunne we were guests on the Charles Grodin show, a few days after the trial. Grodin preceded the hour with a rambling soliloquy on race that encompassed everything from black jubilation over the verdict (“Black people feel this is wonderful — ‘Thank you, Jesus!’”) to his reaction to the Simi Valley King verdict a few years before to his feelings on anti-Semitism (“I never had to deal with [it]; I don’t look Jewish …”). Dunne and I blinked at each other. “What is he talking about?” Dunne muttered. We never found out. The rest of the hour wasn’t any less psychedelic. Afterward, we walked out to the parking lot together and chatted for a moment. He asked for my number, and placed it in one of his little green leather notebooks. “This is it,” he said, shaking hands, “I’m out of here.” Soon after, he flew back to New York to resume his life, and we tried to return to normal, or what passes for it here. We’re still struggling.

Like Truman Capote after his infamous “La Côte Basque 1965″ was published in Esquire, Dunne will, in all likelihood, find himself banished from some of the elegant homes he used to frequent — something, ironically, he’ll have in common with Simpson. Unlike Simpson, he will, in all likelihood, consider it a price well paid. (Hey, nobody ever promised getting even wouldn’t be expensive.) “This is my last murder trial,” Dunne promised a Baltimore Sun reporter during an interview.

“Grafton says if you ever do another … after this one, he’s going to have an intervention,” his fictional youngest son, Zander, says, half joking. That’s a promise Dunne should keep. For his sake and ours.

A few clunky attempts to “broaden” “Woolf” for the screen aside, Mike Nichols, directing his first film, has the right instincts — he keeps close to the abrasive immediacy of Albee’s language. Even better, he coaxes nearly miraculous performances out of Elizabeth Taylor (who won an Oscar for this) and Richard Burton. They both ooze a riveting amount of shabby-genteel, gone-to-hell glamour. That’s not blood running through their veins — it’s booze, spite, nicotine and fear. Taylor and Burton seem turned on by each other’s performances, and that fact not only puts wind in the film’s sails but helps undergird some essential truths about their relationship. “Martha and I are merely exercising,” George says to a hapless young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) who drop by for a nightcap and are sucked into the whirlpool of George-and-Martha agonistes. “We’re walking what’s left of our wits.” In other words, George and Martha’s intellects are all they have left. They rejoice in their can-you-top-this ability to mind-fuck each other.

Albee’s play has some problems that the screen version can’t avoid, notably the way Albee lards his theme about “truth and illusion” with some overly broad (and overly Oedipal) speechifying. But there is still something wildly entertaining about watching Taylor and Burton, two actors at the top of their craft, wickedly knock the crap out of each other — particularly now, when so many young filmmakers’ idea of snappy, intelligent, “adult” dialogue is sub-Tarantino riffs on the relative merits of, say, Doritos and Cheese Doodles. George and Martha may torment each other, but “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” is never torture to watch. “You have ugly talents,” George says, almost admiringly, to Martha. So does this movie.