Dear Readers,
Forgive me, but I want to print what I hope may be of interest – my funeral oration for the late writer Dominick Dunne. This was given Thursday at St. Vincent Ferrer Catholic Church on Lexington Avenue at 2:30 in the afternoon:

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The Irish took a bad hit recently – Frank McCourt died, Farrah Fawcett expired, Teddy Kennedy left us, and then there were Walter Cronkite and Don Hewitt. Not exactly Irish, but they could have been! 

Of most meaning to some of us, however, was the departure of our darling Dominick Dunne – a son of Hartford, CT, a talented, good-hearted, spiritually influenced human being who recognized his own frailties, and ours, and was one of the greatest gossips and companions I’ve ever known. He came to chronicle some of our most turbulent times in a manner most Proustian, if you will. He became a social commentator in a field of his own creation — the treacherous intersection of power, money, fame and justice.   

Dominick — still in the clutch of the success he brought upon himself, by becoming his own invention as a writer and a gadfly — had fought the good fight. He persevered valiantly over his illness the last few years, and when I saw him in the hospital shortly before the end, instead of acting as if he were dying, he amused me by sitting up, pointing to his gorgeous flowers from Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera and then — exclaiming that Nora Ephron had personally sent him her new movie on Julia Child — he gave me an explicit critique of the film. He was Dominick, to the very end.

When I suggested I might visit his beloved house in Connecticut to bring him anything he needed from there, he said yes, yes! He wanted his bronze star. And so – he got it. This was, I guess, the validation that he wasn’t the big sissy his father had so chided and beaten him over in childhood. And though he could never quite believe the story of his own bravery in World War II and how he carried an unknown soldier to safety under fire, Dominick wanted to believe in himself. Even in the recent documentary about him, he was, throughout, expressing doubts. Asking: Had he done his best covering the Phil Spector trial?  I thought so. I told him I equated him with the Hound of Heaven – ever pursuing down the ages. We all know of course that it was his darling daughter Dominique’s murder, with all its attendant injustice, that had turned him to the unending pursuit of those he felt had outraged the law and society.  

I had some satisfaction in introducing him about a month ago at the fund-raiser for The National Center for the Victims of Crime, the organization created by Sunny von Bülow’s daughter. I said that night that Dominick was with us in full fettle wearing his best Turnbull & Asher shirt and tie while two of his most implacable enemies, OJ Simpson and Phil Spector, were wearing orange jumpsuits in prison. Dominick rose up, nodding to me and to himself, to make his speech, pleased with the eventual justice of it all.