JOHN GREGORY DUNNE, 71 Journalist, novelist dies of heart attack

He was successful writing fiction and nonfiction.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
John Gregory Dunne, the journalist, screenwriter and novelist who chronicled the Hollywood movie industry in his book "The Studio," then went on to write for film, died Tuesday evening as he sat down to dinner with his wife, author Joan Didion. He was 71.
Dunne died of a heart attack, according to his wife. Longtime residents of California, the couple lived in New York City at the time of his death.
Dunne's first books were works of hard-hitting journalism: The first, "Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike," appeared in 1967 and followed Chicano labor leader Cesar Chavez. His second, "The Studio," was published in 1969 and detailed the inner workings of Twentieth Century Fox. In 1974, "Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season" explored the author's depression after a nervous breakdown.
Dunne found equal success in fiction. He chronicled the tormented sensibilities of the urban American Irish Catholic experience in "Dutch Shea Jr." and "The Red, White and Blue." He did much the same in "True Confessions," but in the style of a detective novel.
Describing the process
A native of Hartford, Conn., and the brother of writer Dominick Dunne, John Gregory Dunne once described the literary process this way: "Writing is manual labor of the mind -- like laying pipe."
Dunne was born May 25, 1932, the fifth of six children of Richard Edward Dunne, a surgeon, and Dorothy Burns Dunne.
Dunne received his preparatory education at Portsmouth Priory School in Rhode Island, an elite Catholic boarding school attached to the Portsmouth Priory, a Benedictine monastery. He graduated from Princeton University in 1945 with a bachelor of arts degree. After two years in the Army, he moved to New York City, where he worked for an advertising agency and a major trade magazine before beginning a five-year stint as a staff writer with Time magazine.
In New York, Dunne met Didion, a native of Sacramento, Calif., who was writing merchandising and promotional copy and editing features at Vogue magazine. After five years of close friendship, the two moved into an apartment together in 1963. They married a year later.
Three months after their marriage, the couple took leaves from their jobs to visit Southern California. Dunne became "an instant Westerner," and they decided to remain in Los Angeles and make their living by free-lance writing.
Eventually, Dunne and his wife collaborated on screenplays. Their first such project was the screenplay for the Cannes Film Festival award-winning "Panic in Needle Park," co-produced by Dunne's brother, Dominick.
Dunne is also survived by his daughter, Quintana Roo.