The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

“You are not going to fucking believe who just recognized me in the elevator at the Chateau Marmont…the rock star Bone-O! Bone-O knows who I am. Do you believe it?”

Elizabeth Montgomery, who later played Samantha in Bewitched, was my first babysitter. She was a struggling actress with a small part in Late Love when she met my mother, and though Elizabeth was her employee, my mother and she became

close friends.

If it wasn’t for Humphrey Bogart, we’d never have moved to Los Angeles. Playhouse 90 was going to do a live remote show of The Petrified Forest from Hollywood, and Dad was needed to stage-manage the broadcast. Bogie had specifically asked that my father be hired, based on a recommendation from Frank Sinatra, who’d worked with him earlier in New York.

So, all that time, I was telling a lie based on a lie. This should have come as no surprise, as I had been brought up on stories told by people who loved to tell stories. I would become a person who played fictional characters on the stage or screen in other people’s stories, raised by a family who wrote books and produced movies about people with stories to tell. My father’s fake heart attacks were no more real than his glass eye or my family sitting behind Jack and Jackie at Our Lady of the Cadillacs. They were stories, not lies, and encouraged to be repeated.

You’re a worse name-dropper than your father.”

(Years later, while I was smoking a joint with Dennis Hopper, my high was killed when he said, out of the blue, that our good night act was the “saddest thing” he’d ever seen in his life.)

I have not forgotten how a five-minute phone call and ten minutes’ worth of paperwork can change the remainder of a man’s life.

I returned to our booth to find Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski, and Warren Beatty seated around my girlfriend like three wolves sniffing a baby lamb.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.

I’m Ramona, heavy on the Moan.”

“Well,” he said when he was all cried out, “if I haven’t started drinking by now, I think I never will.”

A kid in his twenties doesn’t walk around feeling “grateful” when times are good; that comes later, when you’ve truly had the shit kicked out of you and can’t believe you’ve been given a second chance. I was too young to understand gratitude for living the dream, and if I did, my performance would never have been free or spontaneous.

People far more enlightened than I am say that forgiveness is a choice that frees us from the bondage of hate, and that to forgive is the purest form of love. I choose not to forgive or forget, and as long as I’m no longer bound by hate, I’m happy with the

quality of love I have for my family and friends, even if it falls short of its purest form.

Richard Dreyfuss, who for some reason never liked me, would slap the scalp flakes off my shoulders and say, “That’s disgusting, man.” He was by then sober, and I was always tempted to remind him of the night he snorted coke off a Bob’s Big Boy statuette at Carrie Fisher’s after his shitty review in Othello.