with bladder cancer. Courageously, he has defied even an emergency visit to the hospital to keep on the job, notebook in hand.

But there is something sad about the spectacle of Dunne, tired and mottled but still fussily dressed in imitation of the old-line Yankee Grandee he isn't really, sitting just inside the door

to the courtroom, granted special dispensation by the judge to hurry in and out to meet his medical needs along the corridor.

For a quarter of a century Dunne has had no equal as the chronicler of the dark side of wealth and fame, the crime reporter to the glossy world of Vanity Fair magazine.

His monthly diary roams from one fabulous case to the next: Patrick Smith, the Kennedy cousin accused of date-rape, and William Skakel, the Kennedy cousin accused of