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JH: Tina Brown [ex-Editor
of Vanity Fair] later became a best friend of sorts to you.
She was a remarkable person. Your first article for that magazine
was in her first issue of Vanity Fair was it not?
DD: I was in Tina’s first issue.
I met her the night before the trial of the man who killed my daughter.
Noted journalist Marie Brenner asked me to dinner Sunday night,
and she was living in Chelsea and there was this little English
wren there; you know not a glamorous woman as she gradually became.
I sat next to her at dinner.
There were ten of us and we were eating in the kitchen—a Tex-Mex dinner in the kitch—and I just got talking with her, and you know sometimes you just hit it off with someone. I didn’t know anything about her except she’d been at the Tattler, which was not like a big deal to me at the time.
 And
so the next morning, Marie Brenner called and said, “You know the
woman you met last night?” I said, “Oh yes, she’s great.” Marie
said, “She wants to have lunch with you today.” I said, “I’m leaving
tonight for LA.” And Marie said, “Do it!!” [Laughs] So I met her
at La Goulou restaurant, and she said to me, “You shouldn’t be wasting
your Hollywood stories at dinner parties. You should write them
for the magazine.” I said, “Well, Tina, I just started writing.
I’ve got a novel.” And she said, “It would take me ten years to
train somebody who knows as many people as you know and who can
tell stories the way you tell stories. Nobody spoke last night about
what you’re going through.” I couldn’t talk about it then. She said,
“We’ve all read about trials, but I’ve never read about a trial
written by a participant. Keep notes and then come to see me when
this is over.”
Keeping the journal got me through it. My piece,
Justice, came out and it was her first issue as editor,
so we started out together, and the week before it came out, she
took me out to lunch again, and this was at the Algonquin, and she
said, “Next week, when this issue hits the stands, every magazine
in New York will be after you, but you’re mine.” And I actually
said to Tina, “You got me.”
I had had a long drought, serious, and... I mean it was she who lifted me out of it. That article was a huge success. She sent me right out and then she started saying to me, “You have to put yourself into this article. I want to hear Dominick.” I was still not sure of myself. I’d lost my confidence, but she gave it back to me.
I think she’s wonderful. And later when she left, you know, again I cried. And she wanted me to go to the New Yorker [with her], and you know as much as I loved her, I had this thing about Vanity Fair. I just thought Vanity Fair and I were made for each other. We are made for each other.
She later said to me, “You know, I was so hurt when you didn’t come with me,” she said, “but you were right.” She always said my piece on the von Bulows—the von Bulow case—was the piece that set the style for Vanity Fair. And she said, “All that sort of unique way you have of telling the story, they would have taken that away from you at the New Yorker.”
JH: They were already established; had a style.
DD: Yeah, style, and she said, “You started a new one.”
JH: I was very amused to read that you went to the von Bulow house and sat on Sunny’s bed and asked Claus’ mistress if she was wearing Sunny’s jewelry. Did you really do that?
DD: Yes, yes, I did.
JH: Was she surprised?
 DD:
That was at the New York apartment, 96 Fifth Avenue, and it was
during the trial and they gave a lunch party and...both sides...I
went with Alla and Alexander, [Sunny's] son and daughter—I love them. The
trial was in Providence, and I went over to Newport with them in
the house where it had happened, Clarendon Court it was called.
[Back in New York] Claus’ mistress (Andrea Reynolds) gave this luncheon, she and Claus on a weekend off from the trial that was so...the butlers with white gloves, it was all Sunny’s dishes and Sunny’s glassware and Sunny’s...it was horrible. Horrible. And the next morning, he was back in the courtroom.
She [Reynolds] took me on at that luncheon because I had written that she was wearing Sunny’s jewels. And she took me into Sunny’s bedroom, and we were both of us lying on Sunny von Bulow’s—here's [Sunny] in a coma—we’re lying on her bed, and Andrea Reynolds is showing me all of her jewels, which she said were better than Sunny’s. I mean I do things in these situations that no other writer gets into, and then I get in trouble. But anyway...I couldn’t believe I was lying on Sunny von Bulow’s bed, with the mistress, looking at jewelry.
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