L.A. CONFIDENTIAL

By JAMES COLLINS

Why didn't the prosecution introduce the freeway chase! Why didn't the prosecution introduce the freeway chase!" Dominick Dunne pounds the arm of a green damask sofa in his Manhattan apartment. It is the morning of what happens to be his 72nd birthday, and Dunne is talking about the O.J. Simpson trial with as much anger as if the verdict had been announced that day, not 2 1/2 years earlier. He goes on: "How could Marcia have been flirting with Cochran? What kind of message does that send to the jury?"

Imagine the best O.J. conversation you've ever had--and since you've probably had several thousand of them, this is saying something--and you'll have an idea what it's like talking to Dunne. The author of best-selling romans a clef about murder like The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and An Inconvenient Woman, Dunne became renowned for his coverage of the Claus von Bulow, William Kennedy Smith and Menendez brothers trials. He sat in the Simpson courtroom from the first day to the last, and each month produced a savvy, pungent report for Vanity Fair. Appearing endlessly on TV, he became an O.J. celebrity himself. Now, trailing even Simpson's niece, Dunne has finally produced his own O.J. book, Another City, Not My Own. Coyly subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, it is an almost entirely factual account of Dunne's experience covering the trial.

Using real names for everyone but himself, his family and a few others, Dunne brings on the familiar cast--Clark, Cochran, Bailey, Ito. Yet we also meet another set of characters--the rich and the celebrated with whom he socialized during the trial. On and on, the names pulse through the book: the Princess of Wales, Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Warren Beatty--each one desperate for Dunne to tell him or her the latest news from the courthouse. Part O.J. reportage and part gossip column, Another City, Not My Own also tells the story of Dunne's personal tragedies and redemption. Los Angeles was the scene of the strangulation of his 22-year-old daughter Dominique at the hands of an abusive boyfriend in 1982. It was also the city that he left years ago, a failed producer, an alcoholic and broke.

"I tried to write the book five different ways," Dunne says. "That's why it's so late. Then when I would talk about it, I would say, 'I was having dinner with Marcia Clark...' and people responded. I got the idea of telling my story." Excitable, charming, with a voice like Jack Benny's, Dunne sometimes sits on the sofa's edge as he talks. His pied-a-terre (he mostly lives in Connecticut) is decorated in the conventional style of an East Side gentleman, complete with bird prints on the wall. Asked why he called the hero Gus Bailey, Dunne says, "Gus is me, but I needed to get one step away. I tried using my name, and it inhibited me." The only important fabrications are appearances by Gianni Versace's murderer-to-be, Andrew Cunanan.

Even coming at this late date, Another City, Not My Own is thoroughly absorbing. Most of the material may be familiar, but the O.J. case is like a favorite gruesome fairy tale that you enjoy hearing over and over. "Daddy! Daddy! Tell us again about Lange and Vannatter!" Dunne does add detail and atmosphere, and recounts a few incidents that are fresh. In one of the book's most startling scenes, Barry Scheck, the defense lawyer who specializes in DNA evidence, takes Dunne aside and says that he is "haunted" by the Goldman family. "You know," Dunne quotes Scheck as saying, "in every job there are things to do that you don't want to do. I'm defending this guy." A few days later, Scheck reminds Dunne of the conversation and tells him briskly that he absolutely believes in Simpson's innocence

Scheck denies he ever said anything that suggested he felt guilty for defending Simpson. "I accidentally bumped into Kim Goldman," he says. "She reacted as if she had been hit by a cattle prod. I wanted Dunne to tell the Goldmans I would steer clear of them. I also said that they looked like good people and that I felt their loss." He insists the second encounter never happened. Told of Scheck's version, Dunne literally gasps and says he told a number of people about these exchanges at the time. "I was so moved by what he did," he says. "I think it makes him look good."

Thickly gilded with the famous, Another City, Not My Own might appear to be an exercise in name dropping, but let's be honest: there is something fascinating about hearing Elizabeth Taylor discuss Dennis Fung. What saves Dunne from seeming like an unbearable show-off is his good-spiritedness about his swell life--he makes it clear he is having a great time. Asked if he is feeding the maw of celebrity culture, he says, "I can only tell you this is an accurate portrayal of my life for that year."

Throughout Another City, Not My Own, Dunne has threaded his personal story. After arriving in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, he led an A-list social life but was a B-list producer, making The Boys in the Band, The Panic in Needle Park and the Elizabeth Taylor flop Ash Wednesday. "I hated Nick in the old days," says Sue Mengers, the most powerful agent in Hollywood at the time. "I thought he was superficial and arrogant." Dunne would agree.

While he and Mengers are now friends, Dunne attributes his downfall partly to a wisecrack he made about her and her husband. "I was blackballed after that," he remembers. "It was hilarious at the time." (He won't repeat it.) Mengers counters that she doesn't even know what the remark was. "How can you blackball a producer? It's ridiculous," she says. "You can't tell a star or director what to do. I wish I had had that kind of power. He uses it as a convenient excuse." Asked if people gloated over Dunne's fall, Mengers says something even worse: "There was no talk about Nick. People in Hollywood only talk about you if you are successful."

By the mid-'70s, Dunne's career and marriage were over, and his drinking and drug taking were out of control. "I remember being in a closet with someone who was shooting cocaine," he says, "and a voice said, 'Get out of there.'" He did get out of there, and spent six months in a cabin in Oregon, where he quit drinking and began to write. He moved to a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. "My entire life," he says, "was my room and the A.A. meetings on Perry Street."

Earlier, Dunne's wife Ellen, whom he remained very close to despite their divorce, had contracted multiple sclerosis. Then, shortly after his move to New York City, his daughter was killed. "If I had been drinking when that happened..." he says, his voice trailing off. His first novel failed, but his second, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, became a best seller; he covered the Von Bulow trial, and his second career was launched.

Now a phase of it is coming to a close. Dunne says Another City, Not My Own is his farewell to murder trials. For readers, that's too bad. What has marked his work is not his writing or his reporting but his moral fervor. To journalists the Simpson trial was a great story; to the attorneys it seemed to be a competition; to the public it was a mini-series. Certainly, Dunne relished the spectacle, but more than anyone else, he passionately attended to what the trial was really about--the slayings of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. Having seen the hand marks of his daughter's killer on her purple, swollen neck, Dunne knows the reality of murder. No writer could have used that knowledge with more decency or energy.