Done & Dunne

It's the beginning of a new season, and we are shifting our focus back to the West Coast! Long before The Beverly Hills Hotel or the Chateau Marmont, there was The Garden of Allah... home to a whole artist community - of all types - from the 1920s to the end of 1950s. What started as the private residence of the famous silent screen star Alla Nazimova became a 30-year-long party on the Sunset Stri...

Investigators, we have made it to the end of this first Vanderbilt Family Values arc.  In this series finale, we cover a few loose threads from the previous episodes, as well as explore the hidden novelist inside of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, writing two novels with so much implied between the covers.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://a...

In this episode, we pick up our investigation continuing the story of Gloria Vanderbilt, from her teenage years to her death in 2019 at the age of 95.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Done and Dunne 39. Vanderbilt Family Values | International Incidents 1926-1934 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

In the first of a week of daily episodes, we resume with the Cornelius Vanderbilt II family, picking up in the year 1920. Reggie is going to find a new bride by 1923, Gloria Morgan. A child, also Gloria follows, and thus the wheels are in motion to get us to the 1934 custody battle for that child. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.co...

This week, it is a bonus episode from Done and Dunne Patreon! We explore Hever Castle, standing in the Kent countryside since the 12th century, and talk about its connections with two Tudor Queens - Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves, and as Astor too - William Waldorf Astor. Advertise with us ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priv...

Today, we begin our investigation into the storied Gilded Age American family, the Vanderbilts. We'll start with the second generation, where no one was shy about their wealth, with the lives of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt, and their seven children. It is a wild ride of 70 years of one family's history that encompasses weddings, divorces, deaths, and a na...

This week, we are going back to the East Coast, New York City in fact – to the toniest hot spot of all the swells in the Upper East Side – – a little place called Mortimer’s. What a scene – it was the scene for all the high society set for about a decade – from 1976 to 1998. Exploring the life and times of Mortimer’s proprietor – Glenn Bernbaum, and the swells that circulated throughout the Upper...

In this week's episode, we investigate the mysterious 1932 death of filmmaker Paul Bern, and explore the history of his Benedict Canyon home. The Harlow-Bern House would become significant to Dominick years later, when his friend Jay Sebring, who owned it at the time when he suffered his terrible fate at the hands of the Manson Family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...

Actress Lana Turner was one of the many famous faces who embraced Dominick when he first made Hollywood his home in the mid-1950s. His timing was impeccable; a few short years after the Dunnes moved to Los Angeles, Lana Turner was caught up in the scandalous killing of her gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato. Sources: The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper , by Dominic...

Welcome to a whole new year of Done and Dunne, darlings! In this episode, we introduce our season of Notorious, with Nick recalling his first visit to Hollywood, at age 9, and the lifelong mark it left on his imagination. Advertise with us ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19....

Done & Dunne's first anniversary is coming, and Alicia is hard at work on a new set of stories for the show's second year. Get ready for Notorious, starting February 14! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

In a crossover episode from another of her podcasts, Trashy Divorces, Alicia presents the real-life person behind The Two Mrs. Grenvilles’ character of Babette Van Degan, socialite Barbara ‘Bobo’ Sears Rockefeller. When Bobo died at 91 in 2008, the New York Sun remembered her with this headline: “Bobo Rockefeller, 91, Married Well, Divorced Better.” An ex-wife of both a Sears and a Rockefeller, sh...

In the third and final act of our coverage of the death of Billy Woodward, our investigation concludes with the aftermath from his shooting. From the Grand Jury to Ann's international life, there are a lot of bargains made and scores settled. Advertise with us ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Not...

Next up in our exploration of The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, we weave into the night of the shooting, as well as Elsie Woodward's background. Elsie is our first Mrs. Grenville, and understanding her past goes a long way to understanding all that came next. What won't Elsie do to protect her family's power and privilege? Advertise with us! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Se...

This podcast tends to take a somewhat dim view of Truman Capote, a longtime acquaintance and maybe sometimes frenemy of Dominick Dunne. But Truman had his bright spots, too. Today we're treating you to an episode of another of Alicia's podcasts, Love Letters to..., with a Love Letter to Truman's First Swan, Carol Saroyan Matthau. We'll see you Monday with more of The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Learn mor...

Welcome back to a whole new arc of Done & Dunne! For the next several episodes, we'll explore the facts and fictions of the 1955 shooting death of William Woodward, Jr., by his wife Ann, and the class-wide coverup that New York's fanciest families executed.  Dunne wrote 1985's The Two Mrs. Grenvilles as a thinly veiled fictional account of the whole sordid tale, which landed right in the sweet...

Dominick’s 1985 novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles marks the completion of his transition from Hollywood producer to writer and investigative journalist, and was an auspicious start to the second act of his career that made him a household name. Covering the events of the 1955 high society killing of William Woodward, Jr., by his wife, Ann, and the ways that the upper crust closed ranks to hide the sca...

The architect Stanford White (1853-1906) is credited with a host of landmark structures in New York City and beyond, but it was his sexual predation of young girls, especially the model Evelyn Nesbit, that led to his shockingly public murder and the 1907 "Trial of the Century" in its aftermath. Society figures, sexual secrets, professional jealousies, and courtroom dramas: if only Dominick Dunne h...

We met Alva Vanderbilt two episodes ago, and left her hosting the ball that would launch her into New York City's high society set in 1883. Today, we chart her rise, her brutal fall, and her audacious return to society's heights, as the mother of a duchess and a campaigner for women's suffrage. Advertise with us ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at...

This week on Done and Dunne, we are going to scoot through the 1890s from the Astor side of things, including warring cousins and their hotel legacy, the end of Ward McAllister and the 400, and the life, death and legacy of John Jacob Astor IV. Advertise with us ! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy N...

Hello fellow Investigators! I am so excited to share some huge news we've been cooking up here at Hemlock Creatives. Coming for you December 6, every weekday, is a new podcast dedicated to delightful and unexpected things. Narrated by me, Alicia, these 10 to 15 minutes episodes celebrate the people, places and events of the past. Check out the trailer and the first three episodes up now as a bonus...

This week, we take a turn in a whole new direction by wandering through high society in 19th century New York City. The Knickerbockers had their own peculiar ways, and the Queen Bee of all of them was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, who with the assistance of Ward McAllister, dictated the terms of the city's emerging elites with the creation and implementation of The 400.  But in 1883, a sassy southe...

In this edition of A New York State of Crime, Alicia illuminates a Dominick-adjacent story, that of the mysterious 1965 death of crime reporter Dorothy Kilgallen. Was her death an accident, a suicide, or the result of her investigation into the events surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Sources: The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media...