The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

What slipped Dad’s mind was that a reporter from Variety, invited by the studio to publicize the movie, was seated at the end of the table. Dominick Dunne’s “fat lady” joke was quoted in Variety the next morning, Pacific Standard Time, and the vice president of Paramount called Dad’s room at the Majestic Hotel to say, “Nick, pack your bags and come home. You’re over.”

In pre-internet days, getting blackballed in Hollywood was very difficult to prove because there was built-in deniability. All it took was a phone call from Sue Mengers mentioning to the heads of the six major studios that none of her clients, many of them the most bankable stars in the world, nor any of the talent at her agency, ICM, would ever work on any picture Dominick Dunne produced. Sprinkle that with a little gossip about Dad’s drinking problem and incompetence as a producer, and a black ball starts rolling that everyone will deny exists. Calls are not returned, scripts are no longer submitted, and appointments are mysteriously canceled at the last minute.

I watched what people with power could do to a man who loved movies all his life, who had to pinch himself that he was actually making them. Knowing that a dream could be realized and then so casually destroyed scared the hell out of me.

In the last months of my father’s life, I found out what Dominque had known until the end of hers: Dad and the man he met at his yard sale would be lovers for over thirty-five years.

Dominique and I ended the roundup of our family’s woes with our usual dark humor and promised to speak the next week. Through no fault of our own, we had been chosen by divine genetics to be spared sickness and addiction, and nothing in our lives (so far) had troubled us like the misfortunes of our parents or our brother’s battle with sanity. Our dumb luck made us partners, with a mission to support them, plotting ways to make their lives easier.

After the yard sale, Dad drove his Granada up the Pacific Coast Highway, with no destination in mind except to head north, with hopes he’d left a town that could no longer kick the shit out of him. But the town had one more indignity in mind before letting him get away. As soon as he picked up a hitchhiker outside of Malibu, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. The passenger was “a total crazy person,” he wrote to me from Oregon, “with one false eye that stared straight ahead and one crazed eye of a man who would kill.”

When he finally reached an intersection, Dad pulled the car to the side and told the hitchhiker it was where he was turning off. That’s when the guy pulled a knife and told Dad to get out of the car. Everything he owned was in the back seat: Henry Fonda’s Louis Vuitton suitcase, some books he’d saved, and a typewriter he’d begun to write a novel on. Dad grabbed the keys out of the ignition and shoved the door open, running down the highway in terror. Realizing my father had outfoxed him, the lunatic chased him down the Pacific Coast Highway, knife in hand.

A young man Dad said was about my age was driving in the opposite direction in a camper and pulled him off the road and into his cab to safety. The highway patrol arrested the hitchhiker, and after questioning my father, told him he was free to go, but to expect to be called back to Ventura County to testify against his attacker.

The Granada got a flat tire in a sleepy town in Oregon called Camp Sherman. Dad had no idea how to change a tire and found a mechanic who could. He was tired from the drive and, intending to stay for the night, asked if there was a hotel nearby. The mechanic suggested a cabin resort called the Twin View. The owners, Joyce and Nick Osika, showed him to a knotty-pine cabin with a single bed and linoleum floors, where he would end up staying for a year.

Korda threw him a lifeline and a modest advance when it became clear that Joyce Haber, a gossip columnist who’d written a bestseller about Hollywood called The Users, had become a hopeless alcoholic incapable of delivering a sequel.

that my father knew a thing or two about avarice in Hollywood, thought him perfect for the job. Dad understood this was hardly a classy assignment but was grateful for the money and that someone like Korda believed he could be a writer. Gratitude was a word he’d come to appreciate since recently becoming sober, and a practice he lived by one day at a time.

when the chairman said to me, ‘Dominick, do you have anything you’d like to say?’ I started talking and couldn’t stop. I suppose in my whole life I never told so much about myself to anyone as I did to that group, two of them were Indians from a reservation. I suppose I figured, what the fuck difference does it make. Griffin, I had them spellbound. I told them all my poor stories that I was too ashamed to tell anyone else, and they were in hysterics, tears rolling down their cheeks. Then I talked about your mother, and the guilt I feel about her. I told them I’m writing a book I hated and I couldn’t write it. It was like I needed them and they needed me.

The man I grew up with based his self-esteem on what table the maître d’ at Chasen’s chose to place him at. The support he found from battered police dispatchers in a world not his own made me giddy with pride.

One afternoon in 1984, I sat in the back row of a near-empty Rialto Theatre in Times Square to see The Hotel New Hampshire. Rob Lowe and Jodie Foster played the incestuous siblings, and they had lots of scenes where they kissed with tongues and fiddled around naked under the sheets. I laughed out loud, alone in the dark, imagining that Dominique was sitting next to me, both of us rolling in the aisles at the sheer ridiculousness of us playing these parts. When I stopped laughing, I got out of my seat and left the theater before I started to bawl.

But this is your time to enjoy your much deserved success and this is my time to stay put and face where my life went wrong and figure out how to put it back on track. My plan is to write my way out of this mess and though I wouldn’t dare call myself a writer just yet, in time I will be, I just know it. That is who I’m supposed to be, and not the social gadfly who wasted so many years in a drunken fog giving parties for people who were never my friends.

The truth was that I knew the attention that came with stardom would stir a self-awareness I was ill-equipped to handle, so committing to the next level of success paralyzed me with fear. My personal character was still undercooked, and my ego wasn’t strong enough to handle the scrutiny of fame, yet I was just wise enough to know that if I rushed headlong toward it, I’d soon burst into flames and end up a has-been in rehab.

At that, he leaned down to hug me, and though I couldn’t see his face, I could feel his eyes getting moist. There is a nonfiction book called The Gift of Fear, written by a security specialist named Gavin de Becker, who also happens to be one of my oldest friends. The thesis of his book is that we are all capable of predicting an act of violence or a traumatic event in our future that can be avoided if we listen to the first impression of our instincts.

That Sweeney would one day commit an act of violence that would traumatize my family for the rest of our lives did not occur to me, but my uneasiness when we met was a “gift” I declined to accept.

Sweeney was telling me that Dominique’s privileged upbringing and ambition to be an actress threatened him to the point that he might one day be a threat to her, but I wasn’t listening.

she had kicked John Sweeney out of her life. Dominique had been confiding in me that their troubles began soon after they moved in together. She was seeing less of her gang from the Friday Afternoon Club because their burgeoning careers made Sweeney feel like a failure for still being a sous-chef at Ma Maison, which he took out on her.

“Griffin, sometimes I think he loves me too much,” she said, which I heard, but again, didn’t really take in. What got my full attention was when she told me in a later conversation about his first attempt to strangle her. That attack dispelled the last illusion she had about Sweeney, a point she drove home by leaving his bags on the front lawn and changing the locks to her house.

I didn’t know that the last words I would ever say to my sister would be “Dominique, I’m so sorry, but can I call you tomorrow? I’m running late for a movie.” I meant to call the next day but didn’t, nor did I the day after that, which was October 30, the date that Sweeney showed up at Rangely Avenue, holding a bag of Halloween cookies he’d just baked. Ten minutes later, his hands were around her throat.

Waiting for the light to change, my father saw a truck barrel down Seventh and run over a stroller with a baby inside, not twenty feet away. “The baby just exploded!” he yelled into the phone when he called me right after. “There were parts of it everywhere. Oh God, oh God,” he repeated over and over in horror.

my father believed in a higher power and never let a day go by without saying the Serenity Prayer, asking God to keep him sober and “accept the things I cannot change.”

I listened to him groan and sob like a dying animal, and thought about what his higher power had done for him lately: strangled his daughter, forced him to take her off life support and arrange a funeral eulogized by a monsignor who couldn’t pronounce the name of the girl in the coffin, and then made him an intimate witness to an exploding toddler. It was a miracle he hadn’t started drinking again, and I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.

When my father moved to New York in the 1950s and then Los Angeles in the early ’60s, you could be rounded up by the police for being in a gay bar. If your employers discovered your sexual orientation, you could lose your job, and if you happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, you could get killed.

Four years after my father died, I went to Austin, Texas, to visit the Briscoe Center for American History, where his papers were archived. I missed him and wanted to wade through the stacks of his Smythson notebooks, filled with handwritten reflections, and read early drafts of his articles and novels containing details that never made it to print, because I wanted to hear his voice. I came across a notebook that must have been the diary Tina Brown asked him to keep during the trial.

Adelson is a dangerous and wicked man who hates me as much as I hate him. I believe his hatred has led him to hire a detective to dig into my background and that my relationship with Norman has been discovered.

This loathsome and cruel man will expose our relationship to discredit his testimony and my character. “You have carried on a secret affair with the father of your close friend all these years? What kind of a friend does that make you? What kind of a father has an affair with the friend of one of his children?

The chances there is not at least one homophobic juror are slim, and I can already imagine the disgust the baggage handler will feel toward me. If Adelson uses my relationship with Norman to affect the verdict in Sweeney’s favor, I will kill myself. I will not be able to live with the disappointment Lenny and the boys will rightly feel toward me.

It turned out Adelson didn’t play that card in what must have been the longest day of my father’s life. If I went through his archives because I missed him, my trip to Austin only made me miss him more. I would have done anything to be able to hug him and say how sorry I was that he had to go through all that alone.

The peace I found living on the beach was intermittently shattered every time I heard “Every Breath You Take” by the Police, which topped the charts that summer and was impossible to escape. It was a sinister song about a man obsessed with a woman he would never let out of his sight. I heard a threat of violence in the lyrics, should the woman get the idea to leave him. Every move you make And every vow you break Every smile you fake Every claim you stake I’ll be watching you

I found the character Sting portrayed to be a sick fuck who would eventually kill the woman he’s singing to and every one of them if he had a chance. The popularity of “Every Breath You Take,” and its misinterpretation, reminded me how much domestic violence had changed my life, and how alone and misunderstood I felt by everyone but my family.

I am not permitted to do enough things on my own. Why must you be a part of everything I do? Why do you want to come to my riding lessons and my acting classes? Why are you jealous of every scene partner I have? Why must I talk about every audition when you know it is bad luck for me? Why do we have discussions at 3:00 a.m. all the time, instead of during the day? Why must you know the name of every person I come into contact with? You insist on going to work with me when I have told you it makes me nervous. Your paranoia is overboard…You do not love me. You are obsessed with me. The person you think you love is not me at all. It is someone you have made up in your head.

Katz excused the jury,” Melinda continued, “telling them that even though other people might agree or disagree with the verdict, they must not doubt their decision.” “That’s because he knew when the press finds out about Lillian Pierce, a rain of shit is going to land on his head,” said Charlie. Melinda plowed on. “And then Katz told them that justice had been served and thanked them on behalf of the attorneys and both families. That’s when Nick totally lost it.”

‘Not for our family, Judge Katz!’ I shouted. Lenny put up her hand to calm me, but I was too possessed with hatred to stop myself. My outburst enraged Katz, who said, ‘You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne.’ “ ‘It’s too late then,’ I yelled back. “Katz threatened to have the bailiffs remove me from the courtroom, and I said, ‘You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man’s history of violence against women. We’re leaving your courtroom. It’s all over here.’ And then I got Lenny and all of us walked out.” “The room was in stunned silence. You could have heard a pin drop,” added Melinda.

A rain of shit did indeed fall on Katz’s head. Papers around the country reported about the suppression of key evidence from Lillian Pierce. KABC radio ran an on-the-hour editorial blasting the verdict. Letters to the editor from outraged readers, as stories of John Sweeney’s history of violence against women became public knowledge, filled the newspapers. The Herald Examiner published a front-page article about the case: “Heat of Passion: Legitimate Defense or a Legal Loophole?”

Judge Katz’s dreams of appointment to the Supreme Court of California were dashed.

My father would later recount in Vanity Fair how the judge now rejected the argument that Sweeney had acted in the heat of passion. “I will state on the record that I believe this is a murder. I believe that Sweeney is a murderer and not a manslaughterer…. This is a killing with malice. This man held on to this young, vulnerable, beautiful, warm human being that had everything to live for, with his hands. He had to have known that as she was flailing to get oxygen, that the process of death was displacing the process of life.”

He said he was appalled by the jurors’ decision over Sweeney’s first attack: “The jury came back—I don’t understand it for the life of me—with simple assault, thus taking away the sentencing parameters that I might have on a felony assault.”

Having got the verdict we felt he had guided the jurors into giving, he was now blasting them for giving it.

The verdict remained the same: manslaughter. The sentence remained the same: six and a half years, automatically out in two and a half with half a year served.

You would think that a sudden death within a family would bring them closer together, but you would be wrong. One study found that 80 percent of couples divorce after they lose a child. The outliers to that statistic were my parents, who almost seemed to fall back in love after the loss of their daughter. “Do you know how much you have changed?” Mom once asked Dad while they were watching the news after a day in court. She meant since he’d been sober, self-exiled in Oregon, and was now the man she wished she could have leaned on when they were married.

There is little research for how often extended families turn on each other in the event of the sudden death of a relation, but if there were, my parents and the Didion-Dunnes would have been a case study. John and Joan timed their return from Paris with Quintana to the day of the sentencing. The animosity between my father and his brother reached new heights with every passing day John stayed in Europe. Even my allegiance had shifted during the trial, and it angered and hurt me that John never once checked in with my mother or me to see how we were holding up.

In March 1984, Vanity Fair published “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer.” Dad’s debut article about our legal odyssey and Sweeney’s light sentence caused such national outrage that Judge Katz was demoted to a lower court. Tina Brown knew from the moment his piece was submitted that Dominick Dunne had more than one story to tell, and she made him Vanity Fair’s star reporter.

My father’s success in John and Joan’s domain was another subject left unspoken during our dinners at Elio’s. I must admit that when the article was published, I wasn’t thrilled. It felt like an invasion of our family’s memory of a terrible time, and I thought his sharing our sorrow with the world distasteful.

Over time, the piece became a bible I’d share with anyone I thought might become part of my life. “You won’t know anything about me until you’ve read this,” I’d say before handing over the article. I now regard what my father wrote to be a powerful indoctrination of what a family, privileged or not, might experience when thrust into the justice system for the first time.

John was especially admired for his crime reportage, until his brother eclipsed his reputation for writing about sensational murders in the upper classes.

after the verdict, my mother and father used the media to express their outrage at having been betrayed by a judicial system they once believed in. Everyone who followed the trial was in awe of my parents’ composure and dignity throughout the process—everyone, it seemed, except my uncle.

As it turned out, it would take two heart attacks to break the spell of antipathy that held Dad and John in sway for decades.