August 30, 2009

We spent last week away, in far New England, in a place where it is always 1954. No tweeting, blogging, prose composition. Just sun,water, mountains, friends. This was the week that saw both Teddy Kennedy and Dominick Dunne shuffle off this mortal coil, so it was a good place - away from the noisy, and the froward and the vain (Dickens) - to reflect on two lives that mark, for me, the passing of an era.
The last time I spoke with Dominick, with whom I had an unevenly textured friendship going back almost forty years, was in June, perhaps nine weeks before he died. My publisher was pressing me to seek a blurb from Dominick, despite my admonitions that he was very sick, was in fact in Germany receiving treatment for his cancer, and I reluctantly sent him bound galleys. That would have been in May. I came home one day and Dominick - I never called him "Nick" any more than he would have called me "Mike" - was on my voicemail. He sounded worse than terrible. He couldn't do the blurb, just didn't have the strength, in fact, he said, "I think this may be it." I called him back immediately and got his voicemail. I left a message saying for God's sakes, all that matters is for you to get better, you must use every scintilla of energy for yourself. He called back a few minutes later; we chatted briefly; I told him I was praying for him.
The way we met was funny. It would have been around 1968-69, and I and a friend were on our way to Los Angeles for a weekend of fun and frolic. To make the flight pass more slowly, we had ingested some cookies baked in an upstate ashram that had a high cannabis content. By the time our flight was abeam Pittsburgh, we really no longer had need of an airplane. A bit later, it was suggested that he top off our exhilaration with a toke in the loo (we were upstairs in a 747.) The restroom door was locked when we got there, but a minute later it clicked open, and in a scene reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz, there was an enormous gust of marijuana snoke with a small figure in the middle. It was Dominick. We urged him to try what we had, and the three of us squeezed back into the small cabine and enjoyed a jolly puff.
As I say, ours was an uneven relationship. There was a bit of professional envy mixed in there, probably - make that certainly - more on my side than his. I didn't think much of his novels, and the world he wrote about for Vanity Fair didn't interest me. But I was also happy for him: he got the life and recognition that he craved, and he won the devoted admiration of thousands of fans and the deference of headwaiters. I think that when someone gets what they want, and get it more or less honestly, it's cause for a round of applause, even though it might not be what you want. It was a life that deserved a better ending.