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	Sunday, August 15, 2004

When you're an old woman you can wear purple (Valentino blouses) and nobody cares if you have a waist. It's okay to wear white nursing hose to cover your varicose veins and carry a blue-white purse with a cream ensemble.

Betsey Bloomingdale is holding up pretty well, all things considered.



But seeing her picture today reminded me of Dominick Dunne's faaaabulous book, An Inconvenient Woman.

Like Dunne's others (e.g., People Like Us, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles), An Inconvenient Woman was a roman à clef -- a novel based on real events and people whose identities can be discerned if one knows the clef, or "key." In this case, Dunne's not-so-secret character models were Betsey and Arthur Bloomingdale, very dear friends of his...

...at the time.

Given that the novel essentially accused Betsey of murder-for-hire and characterizes her as a woman more interested in the quality of her catering than the death of her husband, one can understand why Dunne was no longer welcome at those brilliant soirées after it was published.

And yet...in his steaming heap of gossip and self-aggrandizement, Another City, Not My Own (I don't link because it's DREADFUL), Dunne tells us that Betsey made up with him after he became a media darling at OJ's murder trial. She simply had to display him at her dinner parties. (Dunne has his novelist alter-ego murdered at the end of this "memoir in the form of a novel." Entirely appropriate given the preceding narrative, sez I.)

Dunne's best book in my view is A Season in Purgatory, which was based on the Martha Moxley murder, for which Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was recently convicted. The novel is said to have played a significant role in reviving local interest in the case, and Dunne confessed to being almost unnerved at how close he got to the truth in his speculations about the crime.


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