Radhika Jones Reflects on the Dunne Family’s Full-Circle Moment

In October of 1982, at age 22, the actor Dominique Dunne was strangled at her home in West Hollywood by her former boyfriend, who had abused her before.

She lay in a coma at Cedars-Sinai for five days, with no hope of regaining consciousness, until her grieving family made the wrenching decision to take her off life support. The following spring, Tina Brown, who had come from London to New York as a special consultant to the newly relaunched magazine Vanity Fair, met Dominique’s father, Dominick Dunne, at a dinner party hosted by the writer Marie Brenner. Dunne was then working on a novel about a society murder (it would become The Two Mrs. Grenvilles), and that evening he spoke movingly about Dominique’s death and mentioned he was going to LA for the trial. Brown recounts their conversation in her memoir, The Vanity Fair Diaries:

“Marie told him he should think about keeping a diary. It might be a solace, a way to process the pain. I said if he did, it’s something I’d love to publish in Vanity Fair. His face lit up as if I’d just thrown him a lifeline.… He seemed buoyed up when he left the dinner, as if he’d glimpsed some redemption from all his suffering.”

“Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer” appeared in the March 1984 issue. Dunne instantly became a signature voice of the magazine, where he covered high-profile trials for decades, from Claus von Bülow to O.J. Simpson, as well as other remarkable splashes like finding Imelda Marcos in exile and reporting on the monthslong inquest into Princess Diana’s death.

Forty years after Dunne’s original dispatch from Dominique’s trial appeared, we are publishing another family member’s account of her killing—a heartbreaking excerpt from her brother Griffin’s forthcoming memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. Griffin, a director, producer, and actor, was in New York City when Dominique was attacked, and he remembers the last, inconsequential words he’d spoken to her on the phone a couple days before, and those devastating hours at the hospital, where the family had to enter through an alternate route to avoid the photographers camped out in front. In a cast of outsize characters, including his uncle John Gregory Dunne and aunt Joan Didion, Griffin reminds us of the intimacy of tragedy and its irrevocable effects on a family. He captures the surreal intertwining of oceanic grief and petty grievances that he, his parents, and his brother navigate as they begin to let go of their beloved Dominique. And he marks another death—the death of his prior self—when he writes that after losing Dominique, “whoever I’d be in the days ahead would never be the person I was.”

Also in this issue, we look back at a particularly celebratory Oscar night, with a lot of terrific movies on the slate and a revitalized Hollywood out on the town. At the VF Oscar Party, contributing photographer Mark Seliger set up his portrait studio to capture the night’s big winners and all the starry guests who came to toast them. We feature some highlights in these pages—and if you want a deeper dive, I humbly recommend our recent book collaboration with Mark, Vanity Fair: Oscar Night Sessions: A Decade of Portraits From the After-Party.

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Robert Kraft, a Massage Parlor, and an Unbelievable Story