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 awful 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.

DD: She didn’t like him either. We were all nice to him because he was from a poor family and all that. We all should have spoken up, but we didn’t.

JH: When you covered the trial, what did you think of the proceedings?

DD: The judge in that trial I blame totally, completely and utterly, for the way that trial turned out. The killer did two and a half years. It was a six-year sentence that was cut to three on the day of the sentencing, and the judge got lambasted in the newspapers, and then I wrote the article. That’s when I learned about the power that you have [as a writer]. I wrote that this judge summoned the photographer from People magazine, who was in the courtroom [to the bench]—the photographer thought he was going to be asked to leave. Instead, the judge tried on three different pairs of glasses to see which he would look better in in the photograph, and I wrote all this stuff.

Now that judge in the space of a year went from the superior court, to children’s court to traffic court to no court, and I know I’m responsible.

Anyway, years pass, and I go out for the OJ trial, and there’s a reporter there from The Malibu Times. The Malibu Times? I’ve never heard of that. It was the judge. I’ll never forget how much I hate him.

Then, one night during the OJ trial, I was on Larry King—I was on Larry King almost every night—and I got there late, and they told me to go to the green room and there the judge was. He was going to go on with me!

JH: Did Larry King know about your relationship with the judge?

DD: No. I walked out the door and said, "Get me the producer." I said to him, "I’m not going on." "But we’re going on in two minutes." I said, "Too bad. I will not go on with that man. I will not go on. That was the judge in the trial of the man who killed my daughter, and he’s responsible totally for the thing." He said, "I didn’t know." I said, "I know you didn’t know, but I’m not going to do it." So I go to the elevator, and Larry comes out. "Dominick, Dominick, you can’t go. You can’t go. It’s too late. You can’t go." I said, "Larry, I won’t go on with him. I’m sorry." He said, "I got rid of him. You’re a better guest."

JH: You and Larry have a great relationship.

DD: I love Larry. I was one of the people invited to be on his 70th birthday show.

JH: We haven't heard a great deal about your son Alex.

DD: Well, I’m going to tell you something. We’ve lost Alex in our lives. He has left us. I think the trouble started at the time of the murder. I think that they [Alex and Dominique] were the closest brother and sister I ever saw. He has just left us. We know where he is—Griffin and me and every friend of his, lifetime friends. I have not heard from Alex in five years. So that’s a bad thing.

JH: If you had a choice about what your readers read—if it had to be one or the other—would you want them to read your Vanity Fair pieces or your novels?

DD: How could you ask that? [Laughs.] I don’t know. I think the novels will always have a longer life span, and I love writing for Vanity Fair.

You know, I’ve had a hard time writing this novel [A Solo Act to be released soon] because I haven’t written one for several years. It was hard to get back into it. In the beginning, it was as if I was writing an article and changing the names to fake names, and there was nothing novelistic about it, and, so it took me quite some time to get back in, but I love the feeling when I’m writing a novel. I have a general idea of what’s going to happen and I let it happen. That’s why I spend so much time here and not in New York, because when you’re finally into it so that your novel is more important in your mind and more real in your mind than what’s actually happening, that is bliss.

JH: Do you find that once you get on a roll you don’t want to be interrupted by anything?

DD: That’s right.

JH: Do you outline your books ahead of time or do you let it come from you?

DD: I let it come right from me, but I have an idea where I’m going. If it takes me in another way, I go with it.

JH: Do you collaborate with anyone?

It's interesting. My daughter had this friend who is a painter, and three weeks before he killed her, Sweeney attacked her; hands around her throat. She got in her car and went to this painter’s house. Great guy. She had a friendship with him, and he hid her for several days. He photographed her neck, which was used during the trial. She had gone on Hill Street Blues and played a battered woman, and a lot of it was not makeup. A lot of it was what he [Sweeney] had done to her. But I’ve always been very grateful to this guy.

He moved to Hawaii. He’s a painter—very good—and once a year, he comes to visit his family in Chicago and he comes here, so I see him once a year over the Memorial Day weekend.

After all these years, this amazing thing has happened. I now read him my novels [as I write them]. It started with the articles. And then he said, "Don’t you remember that last month you said...?" and we’ve established this thing now. It’s unbelievable. I talk to him every day now, this guy in Hawaii, and I read it to him rough, and then I hear it, because you can’t read out loud to yourself. You gotta read to another person. And I have no embarrassment if it stinks, do you know what I mean? I don’t care, because once I hear it, then I can fine-tune it.

JH: What’s his name?

DD: Norman Carby. It’s an accidental thing that happened. Let life happen and go with it. Just go with it.

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