 JH:
When you were in the cabin did you stay in touch with your children
by correspondence or phone?
DD: Letters. They were thrilled. My children were so supportive of what I had done. And when I sold everything, my daughter Dominique had by then started to act and was making money and she helped me with the sale. She was so wonderful, and my last month’s rent—a thousand dollars—Dominique paid from her first paycheck. I’ll never forget that. She was divine.
JH: The outpouring for her on the Web is truly extraordinary. There are numerous sites, updated to current date, about people just putting their thoughts about Dominique up there. I was really impressed by how she is still alive in the hearts of those people.
DD: You know the other night I was at the theatre. I saw The Boy from Oz with Hugh Jackman. Beyond! Beyond anything! Jackman is brilliant—a couple of times in a lifetime do you see this kind of star.
I’ve had prostate cancer and you pee a lot. The ache is just terrible. At the intermission, I said to the people I was with, “I gotta go.” There’s a double line of people waiting. There must have been 90 ahead of me. I was just dying. I walked up the stairs to the front of the line just to see how long it was, and there was this guy who was about fifth in line. He was about six feet three. Big guy. He had a big head of hair. He reaches out and pulls me in front of him. I said, “I can’t do this. People hate it.” He said, “Mr. Dunne, if you’ve ever noticed white flowers at your daughter’s grave, I’m the one who puts them there.” A urinal became available and I ran to it, and I never saw the guy again.
JH: She is alive in the hearts of the people who found her fascinating.
DD: Isn’t that incredible?
 JH:
She had more friends than anybody of the group of Hollywood kids who were
just coming up and starting to make big splashes in movies, and
I was just amazed. They have videos of her on the Web, they have photographs
of her up there with her friends.
There is, I would say, a unique and compelling hatred of John Sweeney [Dominique’s murderer] on all of those sites and different versions of what happened that night.
But this outpouring is something for you to be very proud of because she is still revered by a great many people. Did you think that she had star quality?
DD: Oh, I did.
JH: I saw her in Poltergeist and was enchanted by her and we watched the miniseries V, and were disappointed to read that she had been a major character in the series when she was killed. How did you feel about her going from movies to TV? Did it make any difference in your mind?
DD: No. No.
I just feel that my whole second life has been directed by her. Completely, absolutely.
JH: She had poise, not only on screen but in life as well. You said of her that she could deal with sophisticated people, yet she wasn’t sophisticated herself. And you meant by that that she was a laid back person who didn’t get starstruck herself?
DD: Yeah, yeah.
JH: Your account of her trial was the basis of your first novel about murder. I admire you for going to the trial and writing it. You must have been incensed when this happened.
DD: Unbelievably.
JH: Had you ever met John Sweeney?
DD: Oh yeah.
Yeah, and I never liked him, and she thought it was a snob thing
because he was a chef and not a kid from Hotchkiss, you know what
I mean? She thought that’s why I didn’t like him, but that wasn’t
it at all. I just didn’t like him. My son, Alex, was the first one
who saw a sign that scared him.
It was aweful sitting in that courtroom sitting
a few feet away from [Sweeney].
JH: What did Alex see?
DD: They were at PJ Clark’s, and Sweeney had gone into the men’s room and a guy recognized Dominique from Poltergeist, and she had had this line in Poltergeist, “What's happening?” And the guy says, “What happening?” And she was laughing when Sweeney came out. Sweeny grabbed the coat of this guy, and Alex thought it was terrifying.
JH: Did his family ever apologize to you about this?
DD: No.
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