The old saying “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” is, in fact, not all that old, and not really a saying. It was written by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for an advertising campaign in 2003, nearly thirty years after John Gregory Dunne traveled to Sin City and broke its now golden rule by telling what happened. Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, which came out in 1974 and has recently been reissued by McNally Editions, is his chronicle of his descent into “the uncanny beauty and desolation of the place,” writes Charlie Lee in our May 28, 2026, issue. In contrast to Vegas’s marketing, “Dunne found something about the city strangely soothing—its transience and uniformity, the feeling that people were not living in the moment but in the long aftermath of whatever the moment had been.”
Lee is a literary critic and senior editor at Harper’s. He has previously written for the Review on novels by Ed Park and Victor Heringer, and his criticism has also appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.
In writing about Dunne’s Vegas, Lee identified the great obsession of the man’s life: money. “I defy you to find a writer, a good writer, living or dead, who has talked about money as incessantly and with as much impenitent relish as John Gregory Dunne. He lived, it seems, for the grubby little details.” In that spirit, I wrote to Lee to discuss Dunne, New Journalism, and the grubby little details of the writing life.
Chandler Fritz:Were you happy with the fee you received for this review?
Charlie Lee: Oh, I’ll never be happy. That’s the conclusion you come to if you read enough Dunne. A lot of his best work is about the Hollywood studio system—he wrote all these process pieces about how a certain movie did or didn’t get made, how the contracts were hammered out, who walked away happy and who got screwed. The sheer density of dollar figures on the page is dizzying. You almost get a contact high.
I should say: Dunne was obviously obsessed with money (Didion was, too), but I don’t think that’s only because he liked being rich. For one, he was often funny and self-deprecating on the topic. (After a heart surgery, Dunne said, “Do you know how long I was out on the operating table? Five hours and thirty-seven minutes. I know this because the anesthetist charges by the minute.”) And he clearly just enjoyed all the nice, chewy language you get to use when you talk about this stuff: “buck-a-word,” “basis points,” “back-end profit participation,” that kind of thing. His ear was tuned to whatever perverse poetry might be found in a phrase like “extraordinarily profitable fiduciary rapport.” Maybe this is going too far, but it seems like he thought about money in almost metaphysical terms, as if it made up the very structure and texture of reality. How much money someone has, how they go about getting it or getting rid of it: this doesn’t just tell you something about who they are, it is who they are. The world is made of the cash that flows through it. That’s his slant.
You write that Dunne’s choice to marry Joan Didion was “possibly the best decision an ambitious young writer and high-society aspirant could have made in the year 1964.” I don’t think the same could’ve been said of marrying John Gregory Dunne. What do you think she saw in him?
I mean, who knows. It seems like they understood each other to an unusual degree, but a marriage is a black box. I’ll happily speculate, though. They both show up constantly in each other’s work. There are lines in Didion’s essay “On Self-Respect,” which she wrote after they met but before they were married, that remind me of Dunne: “If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.” Or: “People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me.” Dunne had many faults, but I don’t think he had many illusions about himself. Maybe Didion admired him for that.
There’s this story in Vegas about how Dunne discovered his voyeuristic tendencies. When he was young and living alone in New York City, he used to spy on the woman in the apartment across the street. He’d watch her eating meals, getting dressed, having sex. “I told no one except the girl I was later to marry,” he writes. “She came back to my apartment with me one night and we sat and stared, neither of us saying a word, until exhaustion finally took us to bed with each other for the first time.” I have no idea if this is true. I hope it is.
I often feel that writers working in the New Journalism vein were self-conscious about being failed novelists. Do you get the impression Dunne felt this way?
That’s true of a lot of journalists of the era, but I wouldn’t call Dunne a failed novelist. His reputation has dwindled in recent years, and not without good reason—there’s a lot of ugliness in his work, especially his attitude toward women. When I told people I was writing about John Gregory Dunne, I often had to follow up with, “Joan Didion’s husband.” (On multiple occasions, this was met with some version of, “Oh, the guy who died!”) But he was hugely successful in his day. True Confessions, his 1977 noir novel based on the Black Dahlia murder, was a best seller even before the De Niro/Duvall adaptation came out.
Many of the pleasures of that novel are similar to those you find in Dunne’s nonfiction, especially the grubby fascination with corruption and dealmaking, even at the smallest possible scale. Here he is describing a corrupt cop eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant: “A meal on the cuff and a twenty in a fortune cookie and Frank would let the Mah-Jongg game in the back survive for another month. Live and let live. It was the same with Frank’s suits. He knew the head of security out at Warner Brothers and Crotty would buy Sidney Greenstreet’s old suits after every picture for a dollar each.” Dunne’s feel for these types of petty conspiracies conveys a richly detailed, cloistered social world, usually in some Irish Catholic urban enclave. Some writers have a talent for describing families; his was for neighborhoods.
That said, I do think that Dunne, for all his success, had a terrible case of status anxiety. Nobody who talks about going to Princeton as much as he did can be entirely without insecurity.
You mention that Dunne used the profits from his screenplays to fund books like Vegas. Why do you think this kind of writing—reportorial, novelistic, confessional—was more meaningful to him than writing for Hollywood? After all, A Star Is Born made him a lot of money.
Dunne was suspiciously adamant about this: screenwriting is not writing. He and Didion turned out great scripts, but I think he viewed those moments at the desk as just one small part of the screenwriter’s job. The rest was all sausage-making. “Finish a book and there is a sense of accomplishment,” he once said. “Finish a script and the shit starts.” He compared it to working at Time magazine, where it didn’t matter who first put pen to paper—the final product was unrecognizable, and could only really be said to have been written by Time itself. He thought screenwriting should be done only by people who primarily either write books or direct movies, because you’re only really making art if you have a degree of creative control. Without that, you’re just someone’s employee. (“Writing scripts and not wanting to direct them is like wanting to be a copilot,” he once wrote.)
Why do it at all, then? I like the answer Dunne gave to this question in 1974, the same year that Vegas was published: “Because the money is good. Because doing a screenplay is like doing a combination jigsaw and crossword puzzle—it’s not writing, but it can be fun—and because the other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand. I never did that at Time.”
Las Vegas has obviously changed a lot since the 1970s. Did reading Dunne’s book make you want to visit more or less?
Dunne’s book made me a more selfish and venal person. I’d go if the money was good.