The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

During one of my trips home from school, I had made a new friend named Charlie, who lived in a duplex apartment south of Wilshire, an area those living to the north called “the other side of the tracks.” Charlie’s mother was an attractive divorcée, new to the singles scene, who managed a clothing store during the day and dated prosperous bachelors in the evening.

When we hung up, I next called the production manager of a movie I was producing called White Palace. We were days from shooting in St. Louis, and we hired Frederick (on paper) for a nonexistent part that would work long enough for his SAG insurance to kick in. The next day he was moved into his home in the care of a hospice nurse, who took care of him until he died.

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. Of the original cast of The Boys in the Band, five out of the nine actors died of AIDS-related causes.

Years later, I came across a quote of Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille that is still tacked on the corkboard in my office. I read it for inspiration and self-assurance, and as penance should I miss another opportunity to learn from someone: 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.

Mom told me about a book she’d just finished about the black plague in the Middle Ages that she simply adored called A Distant Mirror by her favorite historian, Barbara Tuchman.

Dotson Rader,

Dotson was boyishly handsome and, while a student at Columbia, had made ends meet by cruising Port Authority Bus Terminal as a male hustler, adventures he would later recount in a wonderful book called Gov’t Inspected Meat and Other Fun Summer Things.

There was a time when I believed that being able to afford a late-night taxi home was when I’d truly “made it” in showbiz. This might seem a low bar for success, but any New Yorker who’s waited on a subway platform at four in the morning in the late seventies knows of what I speak.

The room was dark, save for a night-light in the corner that was just bright enough to illuminate every feature of Hannah’s face. She lay content in my arms, as if she’d finally arrived at the place she was meant to be. We looked at each other for the longest time, until her gaze wandered up toward something unseen that had entered the room. I felt it too. A presence had joined us, and I knew at once it was Dominique. A rush of warmth washed over me, and maybe over Hannah, too, because she made a tiny sound that might have been her first giggle, or could have been her way of saying hello to her aunt. “Oh, Dominique,” I whispered, “look what I have. Isn’t she beautiful?”