The Walter Winchell of the elites: the triumph of celebrityism in high-brow America.

• Author: Monroe, Piper
• Position: Dominick Dunne

The triumph of celebrityism in high-brow America

Wherever he is today, Walter Winchell must be positively pea green with envy. A pioneer in the field of celebrity journalism in the 1930s, Winchell gave John and Jane Q. Public the inside skinny on the stars of the society, sports, and entertainment worlds and was among the first to lump that new elite together. But Winchell plied his craft in an era when, although the general public devoured his work, the cultural and intellectual elite never paid him much attention. Name dropping and celebrity gossip sold, but it didn't win you much respect.

Today, all that has changed. No longer must one choose between the labels of scandalmonger and serious writer. And as the cult of celebrity informs every rung of the social, economic, and cultural ladder, the line between achievement and acclaim has been pretty much dissolved: comedienne Roseanne Barr can guest edit The New Yorker and actor Rick Moranis' prose can appear on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

But perhaps nowhere has the new status of celebrity journalism been better illustrated than in the reception of the most recent novel by Vanity Fair contributor Dominick Dunne. Another City, Not My Own is a fictionalized account of the O.J. Simpson trial as told by the author's alter-ego, Gus Bailey. Though subtitled A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, more than a few reviewers have made the obvious observation that Another City is, in fact, the exact opposite -- a thinly veiled, mostly true look at Dunnes personal experiences covering the Simpson trial. And, more specifically, all of the A-list celebrities he sat around gossiping with in the course of his reporting.

"Dunne's antennae are always tuned to the offbeat story ... He is magazine journalism's ace social anthropologist whose area of social study is the famous and infamous up close and personal." -- San Francisco Examiner

In simpler times, an "anthropologist" such as Dunne would have been called a gossip columnist. Far less interested in `"what" than "who," Dunne's book is a study in strategic name-dropping -- no connection to O.J. is too tangential if a persons star power is bright enough. And, not surprisingly, with the notable exception of the author, none of the names have been changed to protect the innocent:

Whoopi Goldberg said to Gus when he kissed her

on the cheek in greeting, "Gus, this is awful about O.J.

I can't stop thinking about it." She shook her head in

sadness. Harrison...