Why Goldwyn Wore Jodhpurs

David Thomson

• The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper by Dominick Dunne
  Crown, 218 pp, £17.99, October 1999, ISBN 0 609 60388 4
• Gary Cooper Off Camera: A Daughter Remembers by Maria Cooper Janis
  Abrams, 176 pp, £22.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 8109 4130 9

There came a time in the middle and late 1970s when Dominick Dunne knew he was washed up. For most of his life he had been trying to get into Hollywood by acting as more than he was. Or without pausing to ask what he was. As a stage manager for NBC TV he’d been picked to work on their 1952 production of The Petrified Forest – with Humphrey Bogart repeating his classic 1936 role, Henry Fonda doing Leslie Howard, and Lauren Bacall as Bette Davis. The show went well. Bogart, always a bit of a snob, and once chucked out of Andover, was impressed that Dunne had been to Williams College. He invited the nobody kid to a party at his home in the Holmby Hills. Dunne knew he was out of his element there, but he took it all in: Judy Garland and Sinatra singing ‘impromptu’ with a hired piano player. All the stars. ‘Before the night was over,’ he writes, ‘people jumped in the pool in their party clothes. I jumped in, too. I wanted to be a part of it. I thought to myself, this is how I want to live.’