Books |
Dominick Dunne: The Two Mrs. Grenvilles
By
Published: Jun 29, 2020
Category:
Fiction
His mother was blueblood Society. His father was a bank president and a friend of the King of England. But privilege spoils. Blood thins. Their son Billy was tall and handsome. He was also weak and shallow.
Billy Woodward had a thing for showgirls. He married one of them — and, in 1955, after dinner with the Duchess of Windsor, she shot and killed him. Murder? Of course not; Ann Woodward had children, and her mother-in-law didn’t want them traumatized by scandal. Better to say that Ann mistook Billy for a prowler. Better that Ann never stand trial for murder.
But there are other ways to convict a killer. Rumor is one. Media is another. In 1975, Truman Capote lightly fictionalized the story and sold it to Esquire Magazine. Ann Woodward, ultimately shamed, overdosed on sleeping pills. “Well, that’s that,” her mother-in-law said.
It wasn’t. On the other side of the country, Dominick Dunne’s life was falling apart. It took him most of the next decade to put it back together — or, more correctly, to invent a new life as a journalist and novelist. You know him by his Vanity Fair pieces and his long crusade against rich defendants who could afford the best lawyers and, sometimes, get away with murder. And you know that every few years, he produced a novel that convicted a Society figure for a crime quite close to one you know all about.
I recently re-read "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," Dunne’s novel about Ann Woodward, the shooting of her husband, and her relationship with a writer who can only be Truman Capote. It was Dunne’s first novel, published in 1985. As a debut, it is spectacular, a tale rich in New York dish. What is easier to see now than it was when I first read it is that it’s also well plotted and artfully written — it may be popular fiction, but it’s a damn good read. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
It begins, as is correct with stories about the very rich, with things — the things of Ann Grenville’s life, seen as her body lies on her bedroom floor, rigid in death. Everything here, Dunne notes, had once belonged to someone else. After all, anyone with money can shop. This is a world of provenance. It’s not what you have; it’s who used to cherish it. And, by the same token, it’s not who you sleep with, it’s who he’s married to.
Two pages later, Ann is alive, and on a cruise off Alaska. Basil Plant (Truman Capote) is on the same boat, and thrilled to be. As he muses, “What is so enticing as the rich and powerful in a criminal circumstance?”
For a writer down on his luck — and here Dunne has merged his own history with Capote’s — Ann Grenville is a gift from the gods. “I have this ability to get people to talk to me,” Basil tells us, and as he recalls Ann’s story, he begins to hope that she will break her long-held silence and tell him everything.
“The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” is, as the title suggests, interwoven stories about two very different women — the socially and sexually avaricious Ann and her straight-laced mother-in-law, Alice Grenville. You will be fascinated by Ann. You will resist the charmless Alice. And then, at the end of the novel, you’ll get to revisit your judgments.
Shortly before her suicide, a lonely and broken Ann Grenville asks Basil Plant, “Do you call this getting away with it?” Because, of course, she hasn’t. [Neither, in real life, did her sons — both of Ann Woodward’s children killed themselves by jumping out of windows.] In the end, there are no secrets. Not, anyway, in a Dominick Dunne novel.
