the two mrs grenvilles by Dominick Dunne

Times Literary Supplement 11 September 2009

Three years before this novel was first published, in 1985, Dominick Dunne’s daughter Dominique, a twenty-two-year-old actress, was murdered by her ex-boyfriend. Dunne wrote about the murder trial for Vanity Fair, and went on to cover other famous trials including those of O. J. Simpson, Claus Von Bulow and Phil Spector. Although he had already written two novels, it was only with the publication of The Two Mrs Grenvilles, which is closely based on the sensational Woodward murder case of 1955, that he felt he had established himself as a writer.

The Woodward family were seemingly unassailable in New York high society, but they were also cursed with self-destruction. In 1955, Ann Woodward, a former actress from Kansas, shot dead her husband, Billy, the heir to the family’s banking fortune, at their weekend estate. She said she had mistaken him for an intruder. Although Ann was cleared, she was ostracized by her set, and she was depicted as a murdering harlot in Truman Capote’s novel Answered Prayers. Learning that an extract from that book was to appear in Esquire, she committed suicide in 1975. Her mother-in-law commented: "Well, that’s that, she shot my son, and Truman just murdered her, and so now I suppose we don’t have to worry about that anymore". The woes of the family were not yet over, however: Ann and Billy’s two sons both took their own lives.

The narrator of Dunne’s account appears to be Capote, fictionalized as a writer called Basil Plant who is preparing his version of events for publication. Dunne calls the golden couple Billy and Ann, and even uses the surname Crowall, which was Ann Woodward’s maiden name. He also makes use of the odd accolade to Ann that she was "the most beautiful girl in radio", and emphasizes how much she admired Wallis Simpson, at whose house Billy and Ann had been at a party on the night that she shot him. Wallis Simpson was another woman whom a man of old money and blue blood made a great sacrifice to marry, and that, too, appeared to backfire, if not at so great a cost.

Exuberantly characterized as a reckless social climber, Ann is never accepted by her husband’s family, and is fiercely disapproved of by her mother-in-law Alice, the other Mrs Grenville, who did her utmost to prevent the marriage. Yet it is ultimately Alice who saves Ann, by using her influence to ensure that she is acquitted of Billy’s murder and that she is financially supported when it turns out that Billy has cut her out of his will. A conspiracy of silence binds the two Mrs Grenvilles together: Ann must protect herself and Alice must protect her family name. Dunne (who died on August 26) handles the story skilfully, revealing details but never sensationalizing the events so that they become overcooked and tawdry.

This review originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement