28: The Two Mrs. Grenvilles | The Set Up

Done & Dunne

Hemlock Creatives

History, True Crime

4.7 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2022

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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 spot of his interest in high society's perfidy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BytHsxRJm0E&t=8s https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1985/7/murder-most-swank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Zt47V3pPw https://everything2.com/title/And+Justice+for+All%253F https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1939/03/05/592841492.html?pageNumber=199 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dun & Dunn. I'm Alicia, your hostess on this podcast journey, All Things, Dominic Dunn.
0:07.2	I am so thrilled to have you back with me for this next arc we are getting into within our New York State of Crime series.
0:14.1	It is time to deep dive into the two Mrs. Grenvilles and explore both the fact and the fiction within the Dominic Dunn, 1985, Ramona Clay.
0:24.8	You don't need to have read the book, y'all. We're going to get into it all. All the spiderwebs,
0:29.2	all the real things, all the fictitious things. And this case is right up Dominic's alley.
0:35.2	It is a suspicious death. It is high society. It is scandalous. It is shocking.
0:41.7	The death of Billy Woodward provides a peak inside the lives of the world of the very rich.
0:49.5	Dunn will say about this whole affair, it is where ambition led to tragedy and money-influenced justice.
0:58.4	Sounds like our man, Nick, right? Billy's 195 death is called the shooting of the century,
1:05.0	and his wife has quite a reputation, and Billy is from one of the finest families in New York. Everyone wants all the
1:14.3	lurid and scandalous details, including us. Let's investigate. I'm going to pick up with this Peter Buckley piece, remember from last week in our teaser, Murder Most Swank from Vanity Fair in July 1985. Peter Buckley writes,
1:47.2	This month, Crown is publishing Dominic Dunn's novel The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, the true and full
1:52.7	story, according to the acid-tonged-comodish narrator, Basil Plant, of an ambitious showgirl
2:00.4	who propels herself to society's top rung,
2:03.9	only to have the latter pulled out from beneath her when she shoots her husband.
2:09.2	The locations and many of the details are identical, but this is fiction.
2:15.2	This story is 30 years old and most of the people involved are long gone,
2:19.7	says the unacidic, affable, Dunn. A few key things here just in this opening paragraph,
2:26.7	investigators. Let's go back to that sentence, the acid tongue, Capoteous narrator, Basil
2:32.4	Plant. This is the only time in fiction work that Donna is not using his own pseudonym of Gus Bailey.
2:40.2	And it's his breakout novel.
2:42.2	Why is this?
	...

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