Leave it to Dominick Dunne to die in good company. He certainly lived among the best and the brightest. When news leaked out that Nick Dunne had died yesterday, after a two-year-long and stoic battle with bladder cancer at 83, the announcement seemed overshadowed by the fact that Senator Ted Kennedy had expired the day before. But what struck me was a much odder coincidence — the startling fact that Dominick Dunne had died so close on the heels of the anniversary of Truman Capote’s death 25 years ago. (Dunne died early on Wednesday, August 26; Capote died at 59 on August 25, 1984.)

I can’t imagine a more fitting irony for Dominick Dunne since so much of his literary career was a reflection of, if not a deliberate response to, the life of Truman Capote. The similarities are striking. First off, Dunne’s most famous (and best) novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles was based on the notorious Woodward murder scandal which Capote had mined for his career-killing novel Answered Prayers. It was the gossip and innuendo in an excerpt from it in Esquire, “La Cote Basque,” which got Capote into all that hot water, then left him hanging like forgotten laundry out in the cold.

The enfant terrible of cafe society was dropped by his adored “Swans” for having allegedly stabbed them in the back by exposing their deepest and most cherished secrets. Capote was washed up. He never finished that novel. But Dominick Dunne, in a way, did. He wrote the Grenvilles novel which picked up where Capote left off. And Dunne did it with a true storyteller’s panache, spinning a captivating yarn of high society intrigue, sexual obsession, greed and murder. It was a formula he mastered in his subsequent romans à clef: People Like Us; An Inconvenient Woman; A Season in Purgatory (ironically, set in a Kennedyesque world of ruthless sex and politics). In The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, which was made into a marvelous mini-series starring Claudette Colbert and Ann Margret, below, Dunne paid homage to Capote by creating a narrator named Basil Plant who bore a striking resemblance to the author of In Cold Blood. And yet, Dunne was also that character. He was the man on the outside looking in, absorbing, documenting, and ultimately chronicling. He was the secret sharer. The confidante. The man everyone trusted.

Dunne’s parallels to Capote were not just on the literary scene. Dominick Dunne craved the spotlight just as much as Capote, and surrounded himself throughout his wildly checkered life with just as many socialites and celebrities. Dunne even threw his own “Black and White Ball” in Hollywood that rivaled Capote’s legendary fête at the Plaza. Dunne always claimed he had the idea first (although his was a far less grand affair). He celebrated its memory in his nostalgic, somewhat tongue-in-cheek coffee table book of photographs The Way We Lived Then. That was part of Dunne’s charm. He never tried to exaggerate his importance or his cachet. In fact, he never let you forget what a miracle it was for him to even be a part of the great cavalcade he was witnessing firsthand.

The differences between the two were equally remarkable. Dunne was a pragmatist. Capote was a dreamer. Dunne was ambitious. Capote was a shameless schemer. Dunne was a journalist. Capote was one of the literati. If Dunne sold more copies than Capote it was because he was a born entertainer. He had a skillful commercial streak. Dunne might sacrifice subtlety to achieve his message. He could be blunt and even crass. He snorted when he was bowled over with laughter. But he was always a gentleman who didn’t take himself too seriously. Capote, on the other hand, was deluded by his genius. He didn’t see when he was being tacky or self-destructive. And yet, like Dunne, he was a gentleman at heart. Watch the Dick Cavett interview when Capote is attacked by Groucho Marx, who makes tactless homophobic jibes at his masculinity. Capote, who could be as bitchy as the next queen, rose above the fray and came across as a better person for it. Dunne was also like that. He never forgot the struggles he’d endured. And was generous and kind to everyone. He was known to never pass a beggar on the street without giving a dollar or two. He knew that “there, but for the grace of God, go I.”

Born in Hartford to a prominent Irish Catholic family (his father was a well-known heart surgeon), Dunne went on to be awarded a Bronze Star for saving the life of a fellow soldier during the Battle of the Bulge. Graduating from Williams College, after the war, he moved into the then-emerging world of television, working as a stage manager on The Howdy Doody Show. He worked with and befriended Humphrey Bogart during the TV production of The Petrified Forest which also starred Lauren Bacall and Henry Fonda. Fascinated by Hollywood, Dunne spent a number of years as vice-president of a film studio, then began producing on his own, including Panic in Needle Park, starring Al Pacino in his screen debut; Boys in the Band, and Play It As It Lays. (Dunne, seen rehearsing on a TV production with Elizabeth Montgomery, at right.)

His big break as a writer came unexpectedly in the early 80s. Tina Brown had just taken over Vanity Fair magazine and was injecting a great deal of spice and sex into its mix to rid it of its former reputation for being a bathroom-read for aging pedants. One of her first and most important coups was getting Dunne to write a trenchant and emotionally devastating account of his daughter Dominique’s murder. The young star of Poltergeist, she had been brutally slain by a former boyfriend. Dunne attended the subsequent sham trial in which her slayer got off with a slap on the wrist. His essay about his reaction to this second crime entitled “Justice” took the world by storm.

The article ignited the public’s imagination like a lightning strike. People knew he could write (he had co-written The Winners, above, with Joyce Haber, a sequel to The Users) but no one knew he could write with such passion and pathos as he did in this unsparing attack against injustice. It was a difficult piece for anyone to write, and in the hands of a lesser man, it might have seemed like an exercise in narcissism at a time when he should be mourning. (Dominique Dunne, right, in a scene from Poltergeist.)

But Dunne had a genius for getting to the heart of a tragedy or a crime and exposing the human element that everyone could relate to. This would serve him well later when he got his own crime show on Court TV. He was not a fussy writer, not a “writer’s writer.” That terrain belonged to his talented and then more successful brother John Gregory Dunne, married to Joan Didion, who was the darling of the literary world at that time. But Dominick Dunne’s heartfelt screed was a call to arms. It was as potent in some ways as Emile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!”

Dunne’s career took off in a completely new direction. He finished the novel he had put aside, which became The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, he wrote hilarious and scathing accounts of the rich and infamous, most notably the Von Bulows, Imelda Marcos, Joan and Jackie Collins, the louche ladies who luncheon in Palm Beach, and screen diva Elizabeth Taylor. Many of these juicy tales were compiled in Fatal Charms, and The Mansions of Limbo. Then came the suite of bestsellers and his column in Vanity Fair, which was the first thing everyone turned to when an issue arrived. Dunne seemed to top himself with each new assignment. He was the only journalist to make sense of the wacky Menendez Brothers trial.

His recounting of the O. J. Simpson case blazed a bright new trail in crime journalism. He may have crossed a few lines of journalistic integrity. Dunne became a central figure in the story. He was no longer covering it, he was creating it. But no one else told it like it was in such brutally honest and compelling prose. He became for many of us a voice of reason and sagacity amid the tumult and insanity. Even if you thought the entire case was preposterous, you couldn’t help but be mesmerized by Dunne’s blistering reportage.

I first met Dominick Dunne when I saw him sipping water at the fountain in the corridors of Vanity Fair. I introduced myself, and lobbed a few compliments his way. I was somewhat in awe even then. But he immediately treated me like a colleague, not some lowly upstart. And we proceeded to get to know each other over the years during lunches at Mortimer’s or at cocktail parties thrown by the likes of bons vivants Diego del Vayo, George Trescher, Sean Driscoll and countless others. Across Manhattan, Dominick Dunne was inescapable. I also got to spend a memorable weekend with him at his beautiful house in Hadlyme, Connecticut. (After The Party, his documentary memoir, left.)

I turned the tables on him when I interviewed him for Quest magazine just after his crackling novel People Like Us debuted, and had gotten him into some very deep hot water. Women’s Wear Daily had done an expose of the book, hinting that Dunne’s penchant for modeling characters on real life people had raised some high society hackles. He had been snubbed by the very same social X-rays who had turned their backs on Capote. “It likened me to Truman Capote in a pejorative way,” he told me. “They said I had bitten the hand that fed me. Well, that just ain’t true.” He related how gossip columnist Aileen Mehle (aka “Suzy”) had “curled her lip” at him on two occasions. And how one socially prominent lady who had invited him to accompany her to a swank dinner party had called to say she felt compelled to ask her hostess’s permission first. Dunne declined to attend. But most of that brouhaha was smoke and mirrors, and to cynical eyes, very good publicity. The furor died down as soon as the book hit the bestseller lists. Those who were annoyed at what they perceived to be unflattering thumbnail sketches of themselves in its pages were now gloating over their new-found notoriety. And Dunne’s defense of that book went a long way to damping the detractors.

People Like Us owed more to Trollope than to Capote. “I based it on The Way We Live Now,” Dunne told me, “which is a picture of London in the 1850s. When I read it for the first time, I was struck by how incredibly similar it is to life in New York today. In it, there’s a billionaire character named Augustin Melmott who is this gross, cigar-smoking, incredibly rich man who comes out of nowhere, yet sets himself up in the biggest house in London. I thought, Jesus, this could be any of the people who have appeared in the ’80s, who are enormously rich and heading up the charitable, social and financial worlds of New York.” People Like Us also dealt with AIDS and the hypocrisy of the upper crust set who might donate large sums to AIDS charities but disown their children simply because they were gay. Dunne was not afraid to take risks with his books. He often tackled thorny issues with a fervor and zeal that were actually ahead of their time.

Nor did he shy away from controversy. In A Season in Purgatory (later made into a TV-movie with Patrick Dempsey, left), there is a rather shocking subplot involving homosexuality and a now famous gay sex scene in the upstairs bedroom between the narrator and the male protagonist who killed the young girl at the heart of the story (the book is based on the Martha Moxley case which Dunne had helped to reopen). When I ran into Dunne at the book party for it, I blurted out that the book was such a great read that I had read it “all in one blow.” He laughed, smiled and said with a wink, “I”m not surprised.” That was Nick Dunne in a nutshell. Witty, candid and charming.

Dunne and I also shared another invaluable bond. He, like I, was sober. He had recovered from years of drug abuse and alcoholism and had put his life and family back on track. This was perhaps the firmest link we had. “I went out on my ass,” he told me.”I was a drunk and a drugger. You name it, I did it.” And thanks to what he always referred to as his “Higher Power,” he stuck to it. Even at the end of his life, when the party was winding down, and Dunne knew he was deathly ill, he never lost his sense of humor or his gratitude for his good fortune. He never forgot the depths to which he had fallen, and luckily never faltered, or lost his way, unlike Capote who fought similar demons but who was ultimately undone by them. Life was an endless party to both men. But Dominick Dunne never overstayed his welcome.

I’m still getting suggestions from friends for other examples of mispronounced French words, including a true classique: the Fontainebleau Hotel, above, in Miami which everyone and his grandmere pronounces as “Fountain Blow.” Even I do. And pourquoi pas? It’s as American as, well…Miami Beach.

All of which reminds me of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, Surfside 6, which aired on ABC in the ’60s, and was produced by Warner Brothers. Starring Troy Donahue, Van Williams and Lee Patterson as three humpy detectives who just happen to live together on a houseboat across the street from the Fontainebleau, it captivated a generation of viewers who longed for fun in the sun, Coppertone tans, Pepsodent smiles, castles in the sand, and gorgeous boys and girls in skimpy bathing suits.

Sitting down with a TV dinner while watching Surfside 6 was the closest thing many poor souls trapped up North during the long winter months had to sampling the good life of sunny Florida. Thanks to a TV channel called aptly enough “Good Life,” which has recently rerun the series (and to my brother who steered me to it), I was able to experience once more Surfside 6’s uniquely scintillating pleasures.

What is it about this short-lived show that makes me watch it over and over again? It certainly isn’t that mind-numbing theme song (above). I must have been a mere infant when it first aired on national television in 1960-1962. No doubt the three leading men had something to do with my interest. Even at the ripe old age of five I knew a hunk when I saw one. And Troy Donahue certainly qualified for that status. He’d been a leading man in the 50s, starring in such Hollywood soap operas as Imitation of Life, Parrish and A Summer Place.

He was at the height of his fame when he signed on to this series. But the glory days did not last long. And it’s obvious watching episodes now that he is not always at his best here. He sometimes looks bedraggled and distracted. Rumors of drugs and drinking plagued him for years. But he was clearly the main attraction and appeared in more episodes than the other two. He later moved over to the sister series Hawaiian Eye, playing hotel director Philip Barton.

Lee Patterson played the goody-two-shoes role, the buddy always there in a pinch. He was not quite as dazzlingly handsome as his co-stars, but he never failed to land a female when he threw out a line. He may have been the best actor of the trio as well, and often the bulk of the dialogue seemed to land squarely on his ample shoulders. He did, however, have a tendency to wear the loudest clothes, including several polka dot bathing trunks, that gave him a kind of goofy appeal.

But from the get-go my money was on Van Williams, who filled out his bland, one-color bathing suits rather snugly and was often shown shirtless. He had the best body of the bunch. Van had already made his mark in a previous series, Bourbon Street Beat, set in New Orleans. In fact, his character, Ken Madison, was a carry-over from that show. Van Williams (born Van Zandt Williams in Texas, 1934) would not have won many awards for his dramatic skills in Surfside 6. He tended to act entirely with his jaw, and what a finely chiseled and sturdy jaw it was! But it gave him a kind of uptight, highly wired, clenched-teeth approach to emoting that seemed to belie the laid-back lifestyle of houseboat living.

What was up with that ménage à trois in the first place? It seems ludicrous in hindsight that three sexy dudes would live alone on a boat in a canal by the ocean. Surely they would have had girlfriends and shacked up with them, one on one. And who did the decor on that houseboat? Billy Baldwin? Some details are straight out of Town & Country magazine. There’s an oven built into the brick wall surrounding the fireplace. What kind of houseboat would have a working fireplace to begin with?

Perhaps to rid the series of its vague aura of homoeroticism, a fourth character was added: Diane McBain as Daphne Dutton. Imagine a cross between Nancy Drew and Gidget and you get the idea. Beautiful and funny (think Lee Remick and Elizabeth Montgomery) McBain delivered the goods. But she was never romantically involved with the three houseketeers. In fact, she was a kind of Vestal Virgin, a good-as-gold mistress of intrigues who was merely a device to keep the creaky plots zipping along.

I had a special place in my heart for Margarita Sierra as Cha Cha O’Brien. This was the height of Cuban chic, not long after Castro’s coup d’état, and television execs were especially keen on catering to a Hispanic audience. Margarita could often be found singing and dancing at the Boom Boom Room in the Fontainebleau. Sadly, she died at 27, after heart surgery, a year after the show was canceled.

Van Williams, of course, went on to greater fame in the hit series The Green Hornet, opposite Bruce Lee as Kato. Unfortunately his handsome features were too often covered by a green mask. He made few appearances after that show, making his mark in other arenas. A shrewd businessman, he invested his earnings in real estate and made a killing as an entrepreneur. He owns a large ranch in Oahu, Hawaii.

Where does this obsession with Surfside 6 get me? Not very far. I might find a few photos here and there on eBay, or catch an episode or two on one of the online video sites. But I’m holding out for a deluxe DVD set, with commentary from Van, the Man, himself. Until then, I’ll continue to surf the web, trying to recreate my youth, one cheesy TV show after another.

I don’t normally like to post knee-jerk reactions to the news of celebrity deaths. There are far too many graveyards in the blogosphere where eager hearse chasers leave bunches of thorny roses in honor of recently deceased stars for me to compete with. But every now and then a figure passes away who touched my life, albeit briefly, in a singular way. Such a figure was Ruth Ford, who was 98. I first met her thanks to Vanity Fair magazine which hired me to do an interview with her for my column on “Curious Collectors.” The column was not a great success and it did not run for very long. (I had had much more success with my earlier “Conspicuous Coffee Tables” column.) And Ruth Ford was an odd choice for the series since her collection consisted of a vast number of paintings by Pavel Tchelitchew, many of which belonged to her brother, the writer Charles Henri Ford, who had lived with Tchelitchew for many years.

But nothing could stop me from doing it. Ruth Ford was a glamorous figure to me. I knew of her work in several B-movies, and of her work on Broadway as Estelle in Sartre’s No Exit and Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun. Plus she lived in the Dakota, that somewhat gloomy edifice on the edges of Central Park where John Lennon and Rex Reed also lived. The Dakota had been the setting for Rosemary’s Baby, starring that other famous Ruth, Ruth Gordon. It has an eerie fascination for me. I had always wanted to get inside. I was not disappointed.

Walking into the apartment, which seemed to occupy an entire floor and wound around like a labyrinth, I was immediately struck by how dark everything was. Most of the shades were drawn. Heavy curtains further obscured the light. The atmosphere reminded me of some Victorian mansion in an old Hollywood horror film. The Spiral Staircase, in particular, sprang to mind. Miss Ford, who at this time had to have been in her 70s, appeared like a ghostly mirage, draped in exotic fabrics and lavish Oriental jewelry. The space reeked of incense and dust. She was a slight figure. Her famous dark hair had now become grayish blond (at least that’s how I remember it, and I vaguely recall it was hidden behind a turban). She stared into my eyes and spoke with a dramatic actressy voice, but one that was graced with laughter and amusement. She was seductive and charming, and I immediately felt welcome, but not necessarily at ease. (Ruth Ford, fitted by Balmain, below.)

From the moment she took my hand, it was obvious who was in charge. I rarely got a question in edgewise as Miss Ford led me on an extended tour of the apartment, showing me posters and fliers from various shows she had appeared in, digging out old photographs and family albums of her youth in Mississippi while regaling me with name-dropping reminiscences of her days in the sun on the stage. It was clear after just a few minutes that we weren’t going to be talking much about Tchelitchew, and we barely glanced at the paintings (of which there were dozens on the walls, on easels, and leaning against each other on the floor.) The interview was about Miss Ford and Miss Ford alone. (I later learned that she was eager to sell some of the Tchelitchews, but the market for his style at that time, mid-80s, was in decline.)

As our interview drew to a close, and photographs had been taken, a man entered the apartment. He was even older looking than Miss Ford, with a shock of white hair and a half-crazed expression that made one think either he had just escaped from a lunatic asylum or was the next recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was her brother Charles Henri Ford. (If the Times obit is correct and Ruth was 98 when she died, then she was in fact Charles’s older sister. He was born in 1913. Charles, below, shot by Cecil Beaton.)

I must admit at that point in my young career, I was not fully aware of his accomplishments, although his name was familiar to me. But he rectified that immediately by inviting me up to his apartment a few days later where he showed me back issues of the surrealist art magazine View which he had edited, as well as many poems, paintings and sketches he had done. He lived in what he described to me as a “valet’s room” on the top floor. It was a fraction the size of his sister’s pad and I was surprised that there were no Tchelitchews in it. Instead, it was spare and ascetic, a monk’s cell. Charles was a whirlwind of energy, despite his advancing age. He reminded me of the saintly lama that Ronald Colman meets towards the end of Lost Horizon, and considering Charles’s fascination with Tibet and Nepal, this was not entirely by accident. His young companion, a Nepalese, joined us for tea. We passed a pleasant afternoon. As I was leaving, Charles gave me a copy of his “coffee table book” Spare Parts, signing it with a flourish.

Later, after my article appeared, Ruth Ford (shown, above, modeling for the artist Armin Hansen) called me and invited me over for tea. I did not go. There was something vacuum-like in her need for constant stroking that made me wary. I had already devoted a great deal of my earlier life to taking care of my mother, a bewitching narcissist, with mental problems, whose need for attention was titanic. I felt the same way about Ruth Ford. She wooed you with mountains of charm, but left me with that sinking feeling you’d be lucky to escape with your life.

I did run into her several times at museum openings, cocktail parties and sometimes on the street, since I lived just a few blocks away. I have always chided myself for not getting to know her better. My fear of being subsumed by her Sunset Boulevard persona was unwarranted. I could have handled it. I had, in fact, managed to be quite friendly with Diana Vreeland who was known to be “difficult.” But Mrs. Vreeland had created her formidable personality through sheer force of will. While Ruth Ford, whom Sondheim (according to the obit in the Times) considered a great “salonniere,” was more dependent on the famous names surrounding her. She had been married to Zachary Scott, who played Monte Beragon in Mildred Pierce, opposite another fiery larger-than-life presence, Joan Crawford, below. And later in the 70s, Ruth Ford was the companion of Dotson Rader, whose books on the rebellious 60s were favorites of mine.

I did, however, keep up with Charles. He was, I soon discovered, the author with Parker Tyler of The Young and Evil, one of the best, and most important, early gay novels. Written in 1933, it was published in Paris by Olympia Press. And soon became a much-sought-after collector’s item. Later it was reprinted in paperback, with a Tchelitchew cover, and it was in this edition that I read it and realized what a genius Charles Henri Ford really was.

One irony of the Ruth Ford story for me is that when I wrote the column about her Tchelitchew collection, I included a throw-away line about the artist being “the lover” of Charles Henri Ford. My editor insisted that I take that out. It might get us in trouble, he argued. “In trouble?” I asked incredulously. “Everyone knows they were lovers. They lived together until Tchelitchew’s death in 1957.” This was the 80’s, for God’s sake! (Detail of Tchelitchew’s The Bathers, below.)

Faced with what I considered homophobic censorship, I bristled and refused to change it. But I was overruled, the change was made (”lovers” was replaced by “friends”) and a lingering resentment on my part for having to couch my terminology in order to “pass” at Vanity Fair caused me to be less accommodating in the future, and might even have “queered” my position with the magazine. There were other factors, of course, but I don’t think that it was a total coincidence that my contract was not renewed a year later. I went off to write for other magazines where I could let my hair down fully, including Out which became a mainstay of my writing career in the 90s. I noticed with some amusement today in the New York Times obituary that now, in 2009, the Times had no problem with calling Tchelitchew Charles’s “lover.” We’ve come a long way, baby. And somehow I think that Charles’s fascinating sister, Ruth Ford, would have approved.