All's Fair

Vanity Fair contributors, by the book

Not all magazine stories these days find their way to Hollywood. A few become inspirations for major books, such as the three fall publications written by Vanity Fair contributors Dominick Dunne, Gail Sheehy, and Sally Bedell Smith. Each book began as a much-talked-about story in this magazine, and each grew into an indelible portrait of an unforgettable personality: Sheehy on Hillary Clinton, Smith on Princess Diana, and Dunne on, well, himself.

In 1992, when Bill and Hillary Clinton were selling two-for-one in the White House, Sheehy had a hunch that Hillary was the more interesting of the two. Seven years later, it appears that she was onto something. In Hillary's Choice (Random House), Sheehy addresses such confounding questions as: What keeps Hillary from walking out? Is her marriage to Bill a Machiavellian arrangement based on ambition? Or is Hillary a 50s throwback in feminist's clothing? Sheehy traces Hillary's life—from her childhood in a lily-white Chicago suburb that slept through the 60s to her identity crisis at Wellesley, to her first love affair. Behindthe-scenes detailed reporting during the Lewinsky affair and the impeachment trial reveals Hillary's personal drama. Sheehy's discovery? In spite of the chaos, the story of Bill and Hillary is indeed "a love story" (albeit one brimming with power plays), fueled by a woman with a stunning self-perception. "She thinks of herself," says Sheehy, "as the Catcher in the Rye."

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Angel" and "monster" are typically overblown

(and unhelpful) epithets used to describe the late Princess of Wales. Smith distances herself from both the rhapsodic and the skewering views in the exhaustively researched Diana in Search of Herself (Times Books), by far the most sober and

evenhanded look at the most mercurial personality of our time. The author, who felt that "nobody had stepped back and tried to put all the pieces together," offers a startling conclusion: Diana's outward charm and inner torture were not products of royal marriage.

Rather, they betrayed a borderline-personality disorder whose patterns emerged throughout her entire life. Even followers versed in Di-nutiae can expect new details. Those surrounding her later romances—with the wealthy Islamic-art dealer Oliver Hoare and the dashing Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan—shatter the myth that Diana became a "new woman" once she had shed her royal ties, and answer the question Smith herself had: What did Diana see in Dodi?

In The Way We Lived Then (Crown), Dunne has created what might seem to be a paradox: a coffee-table book that is also a tale of personal destruction. Illustrated with memorabilia culled from 16 leather-bound scrapbooks he kept in the 1960s, when he was a Hollywood producer, Dunne's memoir reveals a starstruck young man swirling in an A-list fantasy. The Beverly Hills home he shared with his late wife, Lenny, would become the center of gravity for everyone from David Niven and Peter Lawford to Natalie Wood and Lew Wasserman. With the eye of a crack reporter and the ear of a tireless, first-rate gossip, Dunne recorded it all: Judy Garland clearing out his medicine cabinet, Warren Beatty playing the piano at the home of director Vincente Minnelli, and the crowning moment of Dunne's Arrival, his 1964 black-and-white ball, attended by Truman Capote two years before Capote's own Black and White Ball. As candid as Dunne sounds when recalling his vigorous social climb (it is not for nothing that the book is subtitled Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper), he is a virtual open wound when it comes to reliving his "deluge." "There was no nuance of failure that I did not experience," writes Dunne, chronicling his downward spiral, which included divorce, alcohol and drug abuse, and an arrest for marijuana possession. Dunne admits, "1 had a lot of tears, quite honestly, during the writing of this." But his attitude toward having bared it all could only be that of a man in the midst of a brilliant Act II: "I

thought, Why not?"

EVGENIA PERETZ