Insight beyond compare

A highly accomplished journalist who brought his acute powers of observation to subjects ranging from world wars to the Irish American experience. A successful screenwriter who immersed himself in Hollywood’s bizarre and cantankerous creative process. A dyed-in-the-wool New Englander who wrote perceptively and noncondescendingly about the social and cultural rituals of the West Coast.

Those were among the reminiscences offered Wednesday by close friends and colleagues of John Gregory Dunne, who died of a heart attack Tuesday night while sitting down to dinner with his wife, Joan Didion, at the couple’s Manhattan apartment. He was 71.

“He had a voice, and he had talent and put them both to work,” said his brother, writer Dominick Dunne, speaking by phone from New York. “I just read his latest piece in the New York Review of Books, which will be his final piece. It brought back all his Hollywood years.” The piece is about a new book on the late actress Natalie Wood.

On the last day of 2003, Dunne’s loved ones tried to put his literary life in focus even as they struggled to come to grips with his unexpected death.

Dominick Dunne said that his brother and sister-in-law both had been greatly concerned about their 37-year-old daughter, Quintana Roo, who has been seriously ill. He said the couple had just returned from visiting their daughter at a New York hospital when his brother suffered the fatal attack.

“After they came home, they were sitting down to dinner and he keeled over and died,” said Dominick Dunne, who said his brother had a pacemaker. “I just think it’s the strain. He has been so upset about his daughter. He cried the other night on the phone. He was in a highly emotional state. Of course it just never occurred to me that this was going to happen. When Joan called me just before 11 o’clock last night, I thought she was calling about Quintana. She said, ‘John’s dead.’ ”

On both coasts Wednesday, other friends and acquaintances of the “Didion-Dunnes,” as the couple were called, paused to reflect on the man and writer they had known. Hollywood producer/director Jon Avnet, who worked with Dunne and Didion when they worked as writers on “Up Close and Personal,” recalled the collaboration warmly. The film, which loosely dramatizes the life of TV reporter Jessica Savitch, starred Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer.

“The experience for John, Joan and myself, by the end of the movie had turned into a kind of romance,” he said. “Together their work ethic, their wit, their uncompromising nature, was singular. And we basically created a friendship that lasted every day since we started the shooting of the movie. And the initial relationship was very problematic, as John described in his book.”

Indeed, “Monster: Living Off the Big Screen,” Dunne’s humorous and frankly harrowing book about the eight years he and Didion spent working on “Up Close and Personal,” managed to be unsparing about behind-the-scenes Hollywood, without bitterness and without recycling any of the jilted-lover cliches that other East Coast writers have heaped on the film industry.

Reviewing the book for The Times in February 1997, author Michael Crichton wrote: “The book is a remarkable narrative -- part memoir, part diary, part confessional -- that tells more about the experience of writing for Hollywood than any other book ever written. It is also a very funny horror story.”

David Freeman, a screenwriter and novelist, said that Dunne’s writings brought “an unusual moral intelligence” to “writing about a subject that is often seen only with cynicism.

“He saw Hollywood whole, and was able to speak of it in a clear-eyed way that could be both true and funny and also revealing not only of the movie business but really of the country,” Freeman said. “John’s great subject, really, was America.”

Stylistically ambidextrous, Dunne crossed back and forth from fiction to nonfiction throughout a long writing career encompassing a wide array of passions.

“One of his subjects that he was especially brilliant on, I think, was about war,” said Barbara Epstein, co-editor of The New York Review of Books, to which Dunne was a frequent contributor. “He was absolutely full of feeling and knowledge and understanding of the experience of war.”

During the course of a marriage that spanned parts of five decades, Didion and Dunne split time between New York and California. In a 1988 interview with The Times, Dunne remarked of his sometime adopted home, “Los Angeles is the one city in my life that I have ever truly loved. I don’t think I will ever love a city like that.”

“He sort of enjoyed everything about” Los Angeles, said his friend, Calvin Trillin. “When they lived in Brentwood, there would be sort of a New York intellectual consulate. There were always people coming by.”

Author Gore Vidal praised his friend of 30 years as a “splendid writer” and a “glorious gossip, curious about everybody and everything, he knew everything.”

As for Dunne’s 1969 book “The Studio,” a candid look at Twentieth Century Fox, Vidal said it is “as good a look as we’re ever likely to get of the movie business.”

When asked what he would miss about Dunne, Vidal replied, “Well, I shall miss his company, yes.” He paused for a second. “That is a condition of death, isn’t it?”

Times staff writer Scott Timberg contributed to this report.