Just the facts, in a style completely his own

Like any writer, John Gregory Dunne -- who died last week at the age of 71 -- relished the literary acclaim accorded his novels and critical essays.

On a lesser plane, he relished the reputation -- and handsome fees -- he earned working on screenplays in collaboration with his wife, Joan Didion. (“A film script,” he once said, “is built, not written.”)

But if you were John’s friend, as this writer was for more than 25 years, it was impossible not to notice that he always seemed proudest when he was acknowledged as one of his generation’s most formidable reporters, which is how he always thought of himself.

Dunne was a master of several writerly genres that matter -- the novel, nonfiction narrative, criticism and, increasingly in recent years, the essay. But whatever the form, his work always was grounded in a reportage so rigorous that it seemed a reproach to workaday practitioners of the journalistic craft. He had a wry suspicion of poetry and unapologetically disliked theater, in large part, one suspects, because its inherent artifice seemed to devalue the coin of the reportorial realm, facts.

John also had an Irishman’s sly love of gossip, even when it wasn’t malicious. Like most reporters of a certain age, he had spent irreplaceable hours standing outside locked doors, waiting for guys in suits to come out and lie to him. Whatever the cynical residue of that experience, it left him with an abiding faith in the value of the “back story.” So, whatever the topic, his gossip was always of a particularly fine quality, since he reported every anecdote as diligently as a story being prepared for publication.

His faultless ear for accurate dialogue was the product of a childhood stammer that never quite left him. His abiding love of reporting came from an even deeper place:

“The world is fundamentally divided between people who are utterly fascinated with the drama of their own lives and those who are completely uninterested in themselves,” he once said. “I am completely indifferent to the drama of my own life and that indifference has freed me to be truly interested in other people and their lives. Every really good reporter I’ve ever known enjoyed that same liberty -- a freedom from self-absorption.”

Dunne and Didion were famously devoted to one another and, over time, their friends found it nearly impossible to speak the one’s first name without the other -- always “John and Joan.”

At one time, there was a Hollywood insiders’ joke about meeting Didion and Dunne at a cocktail party:

“What did you two do today?” a friend asked.

“Oh, we worked, and then went for a walk on the beach,” Dunne replied. “Actually, we ran into Jesus. He’s come back, you know.”

“Really? Well, what did he say?”

“Oh, he loves Joan’s work.”

While it was Didion who once famously observed that “a writer is always selling somebody out,” Dunne drew a reportorial line around his wife and daughter, Quintana. Years ago, when the family lived in Malibu, John and Joan found themselves entertaining a visiting magazine writer on the night of Quintana’s grammar school Christmas pageant. They invited their guest to accompany them.

Seated in an auditorium mostly filled with the accomplished, celebrated and rich watching their children stumble through the usual grade-school theatrics, the visiting writer was overcome by the possibilities of the scene. Silently, her hand stole down into the oversized purse on the floor beside her chair. Her eyes remained fixed on the stage, as she gradually withdrew a notebook and pen.

Suddenly, Dunne’s arm shot across the adjoining seat and grasped the writer firmly by the wrist.

“My daughter,” he whispered, “is not material.”

That was another key to Dunne’s great strength as a reporter: He always was concerned with decency, though unimpressed with mere propriety. He detested sentimentality because he understood it’s what the Irish have instead of real feelings. In his life and in his work he was contemptuous of piety and concerned with morality in the way only seriously lapsed Catholics can be.

Twenty-one years ago, Tom Wolfe included selections of both Didion’s and Dunne’s work in his canonical collection of what had come to be called “The New Journalism.” One of the things Wolfe pointed out in his characteristically fevered introduction to that influential collection was that writers whose names had come to be associated with that movement had done more than adapt the stylistic conventions of narrative fiction to journalism. They also had created a deep kind of reporting, a sort of physical and existential immersion in the material at hand. That synthesis had, in turn, created a profound and urgent new prose genre.

“Many reporters attempting to write the New Journalism use an autobiographical format,” Wolfe wrote. “ ‘I was there and this is how it affected me’ -- precisely because this does seem to solve so many technical problems. The New Journalism has often been characterized as ‘subjective’ journalism for that very reason ... defined as ‘a form in which it is understood that the writer keeps himself in the foreground at all times.’ In fact, most of the best work in the form has been done in third-person narration with the writer keeping himself absolutely invisible, such as the work of Capote, Talese, the early Breslin, Sack, John Gregory Dunne, Joe McGinniss.”

To illustrate that point in the collection, Wolfe chose an excerpt from Dunne’s book about 20th Century Fox, “The Studio.” It was, Wolfe wrote, “one of the most extraordinary things ever written about the movie business.” Similar things later would be said of Dunne’s 1997 Hollywood book “Monster.”

“The Studio,” according to Wolfe, was “a triumph of reporting” and “the punch line of the following selection -- ‘What we had here was your typically sophisticated Friday night Minneapolis audience’ -- is typical of the rich dialogue that Dunne recorded. He got such material only by being on hand as key scenes in the studio’s own adventures took place. As a narrator, Dunne keeps himself invisible on the assumption, quite correct, I believe, that turning the reporter into a character would only be a distraction.... “

Among his generation of American writers no one located that pure act of reporting more centrally in his work and art than John Gregory Dunne. No one pursued reportage with greater principle nor to the greater delight or benefit of readers.