Dennis McDougal, who covered Hollywood for the Los Angeles Times before writing biographies of Lew Wasserman, Bob Dylan and Jack Nicholson, died Saturday of injuries suffered in a car crash. He was 77.
McDougal and his wife, Sharon, 76, were driving from their home in Memphis to visit family in the Los Angeles area when their car was rear-ended on Interstate 10 near Palm Springs, his granddaughter Megan Cole Lyle told the Times.
The couple was airlifted to Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he died. Sharon McDougal died of her injuries two days later.
McDougal’s 1998 book, The Last Mogul, Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood, was ranked No. 59 by The Hollywood Reporter on its October 2023 list of The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time.
“McDougal conducted 200 interviews to determine how a man who came from nothing grew MCA into the world’s largest talent agency, ran the Universal studio and became the most powerful person in Hollywood history,” the entry notes. “Some aspects of his story are less savory than others, and the preface begins: ‘Lew Wasserman did not want this book published.’”
After the list was unveiled, McDougal appeared on a panel moderated by THR‘s Scott Feinberg at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood with other honored authors, among them George Stevens Jr., Cameron Crowe, Kim Masters, Leonard Maltin, Eddie Muller and Aljean Harmetz.
McDougal wrote 14 books, including 2002’s Blood Cold: Fame, Sex, and Murder in Hollywood, about actor Robert Blake and his murdered wife, Bonny Lee Bakley; 2008’s Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became the Biggest Movie Star in Modern Times; and 2014’s Dylan: The Biography.
He also authored 2001’s Privileged Son, a biography of former Times publisher Otis Chandler that Martin Smith, a former senior editor at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, called “one of the most clear-eyed histories of Los Angeles and the powers that built it that you’ll ever find.”
It was adapted into the 2009 PBS documentary Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times, narrated by Liev Schreiber.
Born in Pasadena on Nov. 25, 1947, and raised in Lynwood, California, McDougal served in the U.S. Navy and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UCLA before landing newspaper jobs in Palm Springs and with the Riverside Press Enterprise and Long Beach Press-Telegram.
He joined the L.A. Times in 1982, and his first book, Angel of Darkness, about Southern California serial killer Randy Kraft, was published in 1991. Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount, co-written with Pierce O’Donnell, came out the next year. In 1993, he left the newspaper to focus on books.
His most recent one, Citizen Wynn: A Sin City Saga of Power, Lust, and Blind Ambition, will be published in May. He was working on a book about his daughter Amy, who was found murdered in Mexico in 2020, at the time of his death.
Survivors include his children, Jennifer, Kate, Fitz and Andrea, and 15 grandchildren.
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