THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB: A Family Memoir, by Griffin Dunne
Dominick Dunne’s byline was one of the last to sell magazines. Reporting with elegance and tenacity on the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers and two Kennedy cousins for Vanity Fair in the go-go ’90s and early ’00s, Dunne was, as his son Griffin writes in a warm and perceptive new memoir, “an Irish terrier in a Turnbull & Asser shirt.”
Affable, forever bounding back after various messy scrapes, Griffin seems more of a mutt. As a child he longed for a German shepherd as a companion. He likens one of the snobbish poodles his father brought home instead to George Sanders in “All About Eve.” Movies ruled the Dunne roost. When Griffin’s mother, Ellen, needed a motorized wheelchair after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she invoked Katharine Hepburn in “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, which directly preceded their divorce, his parents hosted a star-strewn Black and White ball that inspired Truman Capote’s — to which they weren’t invited.
Ellen was the half-Mexican heiress to a rail car wheel company; Griffin’s aunt by marriage was Joan Didion. For years Joan’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and John’s brother Dominick didn’t speak, and the description of their reconciliation as old men, after a coincidental meeting in the waiting room of a cardiologist’s office, is one of this book’s many well-wrapped little gifts.
Another is Didion refusing to laugh when John and Dominick mock the young Griffin after his bathing suit exposes a testicle, “poking out like a lonely grape.” You can easily imagine both these scenes acted, which makes perfect sense, as the author’s motley IMDB profile includes 14 directorial credits, including a 2017 documentary about his aunt. He has a gingerly attitude toward fame, having witnessed its costs firsthand.
Griffin was “raised in the land of make-believe,” he writes, and not just because Dominick started as a stage manager on “Howdy Doody” and produced “The Boys in the Band” and “The Panic in Needle Park” (before he was excommunicated by the beautiful people for insulting the powerful agent Sue Mengers).
Terrorized by his own father, a respected heart surgeon who whipped him with a Brooks Brothers belt and called him a sissy, Dominick grew up to be a Catholic, closeted gay man with lofty professional and social aspirations in Hollywood and New York, and a near-pathological prankster. The Dunnes were forever in the shadow of the Kennedys — even in death, to which Ted beat Dominick by one day, seizing precious obituary space in the media.
Once, after little Griffin refused to attend Sunday mass at “Our Lady of the Cadillacs,” as they nicknamed their Beverly Hills church, his parents and siblings bragged of encountering Jack and Jackie there. Griffin repeated the story to all his friends, embellishing that he’d met the then-president himself, until he was 19 and studying to be an actor, when he found out from his brother Alex that he was telling “a lie based on a lie.”
False fronts were integral to Dunneworld, until tragedy stripped it bare. This was the fatal strangling of Griffin’s sister Dominique, herself an actress, at 22 in 1982, by her ex-boyfriend, a sous chef at Ma Maison, the chic restaurant where Joan and John liked to dine. “Give me your talent,” the distraught and down-on-his-luck Dominick whispered to her when she was on life support at Cedars-Sinai.
This and several other anecdotes have been told before. But “The Friday Afternoon Club,” which is titled after a carefree regular gathering Dominique Dunne hosted that had included the young George Clooney, offers a new, acute angle. Particularly on the horrible circus of the ex-boyfriend’s murder trial, where evidence is suppressed, the poorly toupeed defense lawyer quotes from Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” and a gangster extra on the set of “Johnny Dangerously” offers to have the accused whacked. When Tina Brown suggests Dominick keep a journal of the proceedings for eventual publication, Griffin notes warily that “he seemed all too ready and willing to use Dominique’s trial as a springboard for his own midlife metamorphosis.”
While Dunne père was discreet to the point of dissembling — he concealed his romantic relationship with Norman Carby, an artist and friend of Dominique’s, for decades — Griffin counters with abundant frankness about his own sexuality (including one exploratory tangle in the sheets with a man).
He writes graphically of his own deflowering; how he passes on the favor to his friend Carrie Fisher; of the almost-hand job he gets in the back seat from someone’s wife when hitchhiking, as everyone used to do before the Manson murders; how Tennessee Williams grabs his testicles when he’s waiting tables at a dinner party — for better and worse, people always seem to be making a run at Griffin’s crotch — and Martin Scorsese’s wrath when he violates an order of celibacy during the filming of “After Hours” (1985), perhaps Dunne’s best-known performance.
Much of “The Friday Afternoon Club” is a privileged young man’s search for a place in the showbiz court to which he was born: prep school harassment; going to jail after shoplifting from an A.&P.; feeding sad camels popcorn as a concessionaire at Radio City Music Hall; dropping Timothy Leary’s finest acid. Sean Connery, then playing James Bond, saved him from drowning! Bob Denver from “Gilligan’s Island” had a temper!
But there are pockets of real depth, too. In the end it’s not Bond who saves Griffin from drowning, but — happy Father’s Day — Dominick Dunne, whose long-held secrets included a Bronze Star.
“My fragile identity at that time was tied to a father who couldn’t throw to third and gave me two French poodles named after famous homosexuals,” Griffin writes. “What I secretly longed for was to have a father like my hotheaded uncle. It took me many years to understand what it meant to be a man, and by then I realized I’d been raised by one all along.”
THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB: A Family Memoir | By Griffin Dunne | Penguin Press | 400 pp. | $30
