John Gregory Dunne: A voice that echoes long past last call
Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne
Thunder's Mouth, 403 pp., paperback, $16.95
Imagine walking into a dark-wood hotel bar or a neighborhood saloon and the first thing you hear is this voice -- not loud, but commanding. The guy behind the bar is going on about having worked in the movie business and at a big-name magazine, about living in California, and about the Kennedys and O. J. Simpson and other figures of fame or infamy. He serves up his inside info while dropping names of celebrated neighbors, colleagues, friends.
His language is erudite, but his manner hard-edged. And you listen, because even when he repeats himself or contradicts himself, even when he turns self-serving or vengeful, you hang on the words of this loquacious Ivy League tough guy, not wanting to miss the next inside bite, shrewd perception, or sharp turn of phrase.
That's one way to experience this nonfiction collection, ''Regards," by John Gregory Dunne, the novelist, journalist, and screenwriter who died in 2003 at age 71. The theme that emerges most consistently in the book's 29 selections, which first appeared between 1965 and 2004 in eight publications, is that this guy is here to challenge the illusions and myths that comfort and delude too many people.
Dunne's most frequent subject is that world of illusion and myth called Hollywood -- not the place, but the industry. His most frequent message is a complaint: that film writers such as himself are considered all but dispensable. As he says at one point, ''A 'writer of distinction' has always found that distinction in work other than screenwriting."
That message is most evident in the book's first section, ''Gone Hollywood." Halfway through its six selections his writer's lament echoes redundantly among sometimes excessive details. The pieces' purposes are often unclear, leading to flat, unsatisfying endings.
But in the fourth entry, ''Hessians," Dunne delivers an incisive and entertaining take on power and pretension, offering insights on business and craft from screenwriters including Robert Towne and William Goldman, and finishing with a stylish revelation.
Dunne opens the piece with a salacious tale from a Hollywood funeral -- not an unlikely move for someone who, in the essay ''Death of a Yale Man," describes himself as friend Calvin Trillin's model for a fictional character who is a ''pathological gossip."
Gossip alone is a low-grade pleasure. Place it on a foundation of ideas and surround it with smart writing, and gossip is mitigated, if not elevated. Even when admittedly exacting some in-print revenge -- ''I believe scores are made to be settled," Dunne announces in the essay ''Laying Pipe" -- what can seem petty also can provide insight into a writer's mind and character.
Using a reporter's skills and a writer's authoritative voice, Dunne turns gossip into inside information, shining light into the shadows behind every illusion and myth. He goes after myths of, among others, the Kennedy family, Hollywood, Cesar Chavez, Jackie Robinson, the O. J. Simpson trial, and California. With an intellectual passion, he defends -- even exalts -- California (where he lived for many years), denying that it is culturally inferior to the East, particularly New York, though he ends with a stylistic non sequitur on the Golden State: an oddly uncerebral ''I love it."
Dunne reveals little of himself in these pieces, except in the manner of his writing and the topics he chooses to explore. Even when he writes about his daughter (and only child), Quintana, the emotions are muted, perhaps sidetracked by the issue of Quintana's adoption, which today --29 years after the piece first appeared -- seems far less interesting than how the Ivy League tough guy really feels about being a dad. He opens up the most in the title essay, eulogizing his close friend and fellow journalist Barry Farrell, with whom Dunne says he spoke on the telephone every morning at 9:15.
Dunne seems to not give a damn whether a reader will like what he has to say. He's the bartender who tells you that you're boring, you're drunk, you're a liar -- but in the next sentence will praise you for a different trait. He admires David Halberstam, another writer-friend, for his relatively terse books on sports, but only after describing his longer, weightier works as ''eight-hundred-page baggy monsters."
Of course, liking what Dunne has to say is less interesting than trying to figure him out. The son of a Connecticut surgeon, Dunne began as an insider, and went on to Princeton -- to cultivate ''contacts," as he later confesses (with professed ''eternal shame") to having written on his entrance essay. Not until the book's final entry, a Paris Review interview, can we understand his paradoxical persona, if not character, when he credits his two-year Army stint for ''knock[ing] out of me" his ''sense of Ivy League entitlement."
The interview also suggests why Dunne is so fixed on all this disrespect for the film writer (even after bragging about his six-figure payouts): Film writers have little power or control. They are Hessians, hired guns. They belie the notion that the world of movies is full of glamour. In Hollywood, it seems, Dunne was no longer dispensing from behind the bar; he was clamoring just to order a drink, or waiting outside in the hotel lobby or on the sidewalk, with few people to listen to him.
Dunne likely would have appreciated paradox for its complexity, making it another ally against the simplistic perspectives of illusion and myth. Myth is illusion with better public relations. In this collection, they often meet their match in a voice that you still can hear long after last call.
David Maloof is a writer living in Western Massachusetts. 
