The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

Detective Johnston gently informed my mother that her daughter had been strangled by a man named John Sweeney. At this moment Dominique Dunne was still alive, though she had been placed on life support at Cedars-Sinai hospital. Glancing once more at Mom’s wheelchair, the detective asked if there was anyone she’d like to call.

That’s another thing Johnston noticed about my mother that was unusual in his line of work: even when told that her daughter was on life support, she was unfailingly polite. After delivering the news to my father, he handed her back the phone. “Nick,” she said, “I need you.” “I’ll be on the next plane.”

“I can’t tell if I’m dreaming now or what,” he said after relaying his conversation with Johnston. I’d had two hours of sleep and the taste of cocaine still lingered in the back of my throat, so it took a moment to focus. “Wait…did you say homicide detective?” I asked, bolting out of bed. “Griffin, get over here now. I need you.” I was twenty-seven years old but never felt more like a lost little boy.

I remember her telling me that it was the first surgery of its kind, and though the boy died soon after, the operation was considered as much a success to medicine as the brief flight of the Wright brothers was to aviation. That made perfect sense to me and was the first time I considered that failure could also be looked upon as success, an insight I would draw on for encouragement when faced with future disappointments. But at the time, I just thought how cool it was that an old lady kept the bullet from a dead kid. It wouldn’t be until I was in my sixties that I found out, to my dismay, that the operation was a total success and the boy lived to a ripe old age.

When Dad came home with a medal, he sensed a grudging respect from his father, but after dodging incoming artillery, he no longer feared his Brooks Brothers belt or even cared what he thought. I once asked him if he ever felt like shoving that medal in his father’s face, yelling, “What do you think of your sissy son now, old man?” He said he didn’t feel that, because after many years, he’d finally let go of his anger toward him. I’d grown up hearing him rage against his father, but if he was feeling sanguine in that moment I didn’t want to spoil it, and I let the answer slide.

His hands were shaking, but he managed to pull something out of his blazer pocket. It was the Bronze Star. “Did you know your old man was given a medal of honor?” Then he told me how he got it: the two wounded soldiers, the bombardments, Hank, being called the Golddust Twins, the squeezing of his two fingers. His voice cracked and then found its footing, and cracked again throughout his telling. I thought of getting out of my seat to hug him but didn’t want to interrupt his flow. “I don’t know where that came from, Griffin,” he told me. “That impulse to run toward the enemy for those guys, but Hank and I didn’t give it a moment’s thought. I can’t believe that was me…but it was. I did that. That was me…” I picked up his medal and he watched me. The ribbons were crisp, the colors still vibrant, and the thick bronze metal weighted with the gravitas it deserved. I pictured my father as a boy half my age and two inches shorter, surviving in conditions I knew only from novels by Vonnegut and Mailer. How could I have been surprised that he would defy an order to retreat to save a wounded comrade? His reporting had brought him death threats and blackmail attempts. He was an Irish terrier in a Turnbull & Asser shirt, who struck fear in the hearts of those who had it coming. An image crossed my mind so absurd that I smiled. As Dr. Dunne tries to beat the sissy out of my father, the defiant little boy yells out the last line of Now, Voyager: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the...

Howard asked Nick (Dad’s nickname) if his gal, Lenny, could stay the night at his mother’s house on Albany Avenue. The couple took the New Haven Railroad (with Griffin wheels), and my father met them at the station. The moment Nick laid eyes on Lenny stepping off the train, he was a goner.

After showing Lenny the guest room, my grandmother pulled Dad aside and whispered, “That is the woman you are going to marry.” I don’t know how his best friend Howard felt when my parents did just that a year later, but the two men remained close to the end of their lives.

Mom had something else in common with Mrs. Kennedy: they both had come home empty-handed from the maternity ward. Twice. In 1955, the year I was born, Jackie miscarried a boy and, a year later, delivered a stillborn little girl the couple had planned to name Arabella. A few years after that, Mom lost two little girls, the first stillborn, the other an infant named Dorothy who lived for only twenty-four hours.

She looked to her belly and noticed it no longer blocked the sight of her toes. She could tell by her surroundings that she was no longer in a maternity ward and knew, without asking, what had become of Dorothy. “Get him out of here” were her first words. For a moment, neither the priest nor my father knew which of them she meant. “Him,” she said, pointing at the priest. “Get him the fuck out of here.” Dad had never heard her say the word fuck, let alone in the presence of a priest. Mom was so unfailingly polite that you’d think she might consider disrupting her own last rites, even if not dying, to be the height of rudeness. Parking attendants and bellhops were so charmed by her courteousness that they often refused her tips. But this two-bit priest, who represented the same God who’d killed Dorothy and left her for dead, was the last straw. Mom swatted the New Testament out of his hand and didn’t stop shouting until he left.

“These things happen, Griffin. Bad things we don’t want, but sooner or later, they happen to everybody. Even your mommy. Even the president. Even his wife.”

He’d been made vice president of Four Star Television, named after its four elegant stars, David Niven, Dick Powell, Charles Boyer, and Joel McCrea.

Our first week on Walden, Johnny Stompanato, strongman for gangster Mickey Cohen and boyfriend of Lana Turner, was stabbed to death around the corner. As the sirens wailed, my father woke to have a “looky-loo” in just his bathrobe behind the yellow tape that wrapped the crime scene. He knew who Stompanato was because mobsters fascinated him almost as much as movie stars. When he’d lived in New York, he used to sneak into open-casket viewings at the Campbell Brothers Funeral Home to peek at whichever Genovese capo had recently been clipped.

Dad returned home at the crack of dawn to shake my mother awake to hear his theories and motives about an actual murder that had happened only a block from where they slept. He predicted, even before the Los Angeles Times or Confidential magazine hit the stands, that Lana Turner did the stabbing, but her teenage daughter, Cheryl Crane, would take the fall since she was too young to go to prison. His excitement bewildered my mother, neither of them realizing that his fascination with crime stories would one day make him famous.

My imagination was shaped by the television shows I watched, and the soundstages I wandered onto when visiting my father at his office at Radford Studios Center. He produced a series called The Big Valley, starring Barbara Stanwyck, a once great but now aging movie star whose time had come to surrender to the boob tube. She played the tough matriarch on a large ranch who thought nothing of stringing up cattle rustlers on her land. When I pictured the woman who lived in the house before us, I imagined Barbara Stanwyck tossing a rope over the sturdy pipe in the basement to hang herself instead of a horse thief.

Barbara Stanwyck

Mom nodded and held Dominique up to him, and when he kissed her, she opened her eyes and smiled as if waking from a wonderful dream. In that moment a connection between them was born and, in me, a worry that I might never be included.

Dad’s love for my mother was unabashed. He never missed the chance to tell me how beautiful she looked when she entered the room, or how smart and well read she was, how lucky he was to have married such a “class act.”

Only Billy Wilder paid me any mind. In a clipped Austrian accent he said, “I think you gotta work on your act a little more, kid.”

The actor I most worshipped was Sean Connery, though I only knew him as 007. The day he came to a pool party at our house, I was starstruck. I couldn’t believe James Bond was doing laps in our pool, and was just as surprised to see on his head a huge bald spot that must have been covered with a toupee for the movies. In an effort to impress 007, I jumped in the deep end before I had mastered a decent dog paddle and sank like a stone. I saw the reflections of people smoking and drinking from below, like an underwater Hockney painting, oblivious to my efforts to reach the surface. I was certain I would drown and not be found until Tuesday, when the pool man came. Suddenly, in one swift motion, a hand lifted me by the butt and placed me at the pool’s edge. “A wee bit early for the deep end, sonny,” said James Bond.

The only star who would never disappoint me was John F. Kennedy.

Over time, I received two very nice responses from the president’s secretary, Mrs. Lincoln, who married a descendent of my second favorite president, and though I lost the first one, the second one read: Dear Griffin, The President wanted you to know that he wishes you all the very best on your upcoming birthday and hopes you have a wonderful party. He also thanks you very much for the paddle. Sincerely, Evelyn Lincoln Personal Secretary to the President

“Dad told us on the way home to pretend we did to get back at you for refusing to go to church. I remember he was really pissed.” 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. But prolonging the whopper about my meeting the Kennedys was a bridge too far, even for me. That day in the coffee shop, I parted with that synthetic memory like passing an old lover on the street without saying hello, and never told that story again.

Within the decade, Joan would be famous for taking positions contrary to popular opinion, accepting the vitriol that followed, and not straying from an inner strength she called “character.”

Inner strength called character.

“A Shot in the Dark. Hilarious,” I’d once told him. “The Pink Panther, I heard it’s a piece of shit.” “You heard wrong. I also saw Goldfinger last week. Amazing. Did you know the girl they painted gold died?” “I’m more of a Dr. No man.” “You’re crazy! This Bond is much better. You know Sean Connery saved my life?” “You’ve brought that up more than once. You’re a worse name-dropper than your father.” We had established early on a sort of Irish Rat Pack shtick, where ribbing and gossip was our currency. The delight we took in each other’s company would in time torment my father, but in those early years, Dad was proud to see his smart-ass son keep pace with his little brother.

At one of Dad’s parties, John met Richard Zanuck, president of 20th Century Fox. John earned the studio head’s trust to write the first behind-the-scenes account of what goes on in a dream factory. He hung out on the set of the disastrous Doctor Dolittle, sat in on story meetings for future disasters, and pinpointed, in brutal detail, a time when studio executives had no idea what their young audience wanted to see. The result was The Studio, a scathing and hilarious takedown of 20th Century Fox in 1968, their worst financial year. Zanuck not only didn’t take offense at the book but gave John his first screen-writing assignment. John would later write several more screenplays for Zanuck, who, by then, no longer took my father’s calls.

The two best friends I grew up with until sixth grade were named Cody and Gunnar. (Yes, our names were Griffin, Gunnar, and Cody, and we paved the way for children who would later be christened Blanket, Apple, and Moon Unit.) Cody’s dad was Jack Palance, who played the psychopath that gunslinger Alan Ladd kills in the 1953 Western Shane. Gunnar’s dad was Howard Keel, who played everyone from singing lumberjacks to Wild Bill Hickok. Gunnar

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. 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.

Lovely

“What’s up, kiddo,” he said after a while. “Why do you treat him like that?” I asked. “Who?” “Alex. It’s as if you don’t even like him.” My father blushed a shade of shame, looking into the mirror of the medicine cabinet for a time before answering. “It’s because he reminds me of me.” Maybe he saw in his sweet, sensitive son the same little boy whose father beat him with a Brooks Brothers belt. The same little boy who was so alien to his father and brothers and sisters that they couldn’t have cared less about the plot of Becky Sharp.

That summer, Mom dated a pilot who was also stationed at North Island, and the house we rented was next to the landing strip where F-4s and B-52s took off and landed around the clock. For a boy my age, it was a warmonger’s dream come true. I worshipped the pilot because he would tilt the wings of his fighter jet in greeting when he flew over our house. My best friend in Coronado was a kid whose father was in the catapult crew aboard the carrier USS Coral Sea awaiting orders to go to Vietnam. We’d bicycle on our Stingrays to the naval base, wave to the MPs in their guardhouse, and wander around the Coral without ever being questioned. One night, when the pilot was over for dinner, I asked him a million questions about combat and the sound barrier and if he liked the Monkees song “Last Train to Clarksville,” which was playing on the radio. He turned to my mother and said, “What’s it going to take to get this little runt out of here?” Stunned with humiliation, I went upstairs and had a good cry. My mother dumped him on the spot and back he went to his base, because when it’s over, it’s over.

“ ‘Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.’ Anaïs Nin said that, which is what we are going to create. Take off your clothes.”

Reading my thoughts for the second time that night, she said, “Age does not protect you from love. But love protects you from age.” “Anaïs Nin?” “Yep.”

I was in love for the first time and hated every moment. I hated spring with its stupid budding flowers that took forever to bloom, testing my patience for summer when I’d finally see Naomi again. As it turned out, my wait was a waste of longing because by the time I returned home, she’d traded up for a much older boyfriend and I never saw her again.

Years later, Frederick moved to Los Angeles to teach acting, and we lost touch until one night he called me in New York to say he was dying of AIDS. I wept uncontrollably. As he consoled me, instead of the other way around, I heard yelling and chaos on his side of the call and asked where he was. Frederick said he was in an AIDS ward of the county hospital as simply as if he were at our old table at Joe Allen’s again, probably just to comfort me. His SAG insurance had long run out because he hadn’t worked in years, a curse put on many of the actors in Boys for playing gay men too convincingly. 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.

He looked as sad as a bankrupt earl watching tourists parade through his castle.

I had grown up around celebrities all my life, but until Slouching Towards Bethlehem came out, I’d never been related to one. The book was way above my head, but my powers of observation were keen enough to know my aunt was famous when I saw a billboard on the Sunset Strip advertising her book.

Earl and John were best friends who constantly feuded, swearing never to speak again and never lasting more than a month before they fell into each other’s arms in apologia. I was happy to see him at the party and assumed that they’d patched things up from their last quarrel.

While Charlie and I were telling him about our evening drive past the house on Cielo, Murray’s friends joined us. Tor was an actor-wrestler who had made a couple of pictures with Ed Wood. He was bald and so large that he took up two places in the booth. Tor had come “this close” to getting the part of Oddjob in Goldfinger, until, as he said without malice, “they decided to go ‘Chink’ with the role.”

Tor Johnson

One night when I was home from my first year at yet another all boys boarding school, this time in Colorado, Alex stood in front of the TV, where my family permanently migrated for dinner, to make an important announcement during the commercial break: “I love Carrie Fisher.”

By the time we got to her house, tears were rolling down our faces, and neither of us could get out of the car. “You’re fucking crazy, Carrie,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “Is that going to be a problem?” “Not at all,” I said. When we finally collected ourselves, she hopped out and thanked me for an “enchanted evening.”

Best friends become best friends suddenly, and without knowing that’s what’s happening until it happens. One insignificant day, only weeks after our Mr. Toad’s wild ride, I looked at Carrie and realized she would be in my life for a very long time. Before I failed Spanish, I remember the teacher describing the eve of fluency as when one night you dream in the language and suddenly can speak it the next morning. That is what it felt like when Carrie and I realized we were best friends. To the exclusion of everyone around us, we established our own Sanskrit that baffled the locals and established our reputation alongside the great pairings of all who came before us: Stan and Laurel. Sturm und Drang. Pork and Beans. Griffin and Carrie.

At night, I was taking acting classes from Charles Conrad, whom my father suggested because he once hired him years earlier to coach Gardner McKay, the star of Adventures in Paradise. Dad had discovered him, literally in a coffee shop, and persuaded him to play the lead even though he had no acting experience or even interest in acting. Charles Conrad was highly thought of among working actors, though his lack of respect for the written word was suspicious. His technique was to have the students bring in scenes without studying them beforehand, and when performing, look down at the line and “throw it out with whatever you are feeling at the moment.” So even though Tennessee Williams wrote that Stanley is crying out to Stella to forgive him, if Brando wasn’t feeling it, he might “throw out” the name Stella as if he’d just asked a bartender for a beer.

Torey stood at the bottom of the stairs, the stairs where I’d first seen him, and said, “I know you are curious who you are, Griffin, and though I might be able to answer that, I doubt you will believe me until you find out for yourself. So I’m going to go upstairs. You want to join, that’s great, if not, tonight was really fun, and safe drive home.” I stayed seated in my chair for a good five minutes, though I already knew what I was going to do. With the solemn dignity of Sydney Carton ascending the guillotine in A Tale of Two Cities, I climbed the staircase with purpose, step by step, to sleep with a guy for the first time. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. Torey kicked me out of bed, not unkindly, after I’d let him do stuff to me and I’d done stuff to him, all to no great effect. “I hate to break this to you, Griffin,” Torey said as I put on my pants. “I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to be a homo.” “Well, nobody’s perfect,” I said, quoting the last line of Some Like It Hot, a reference Torey actually got.

This may come as a huge surprise, but within six months, Tanya and I wanted to divorce.

Tanya’s dad got a guy I would later recognize sitting behind Oliver North at the Iran-Contra hearings. He told the judge with a straight face that his client was seeking half my yearly salary as a shipping clerk at Williams-Sonoma, which at $2.50 an hour over twelve months came to $2,600. Tanya was not present, so the judge looked at Iran-Contra, then at me sitting at the table with Yellow Pages, and took his time to collect his thoughts. “You know,” he began, “I’ve sat on this bench for thirty years, and in all that time, I have never had more ridiculous people in my courtroom. You will not get a penny from this boy. Divorce granted.”

“You remember that movie we watched, Suddenly, Last Summer?” Mom asked in a strange turn of subject. “The one where Katharine Hepburn’s son was eaten by little Mexican boys?” Alex asked, a touch confused. “The only movie Montgomery Clift sucked in,” I offered. “Everybody was so creepy,” said Dominique. “True,” Mom said thoughtfully, “but I liked the line ‘There is a word for a widower, but no name for a mother who lost a child.’ ” Mom went somewhere inside herself for a moment, but soon came back.

“Oh, cool,” we all said in unison. “No, not cool. Nothing about my motorized chair is cool, nor is it a toy to be played with. I will need it to get around this house, and I’m telling you kids to stay off it.” We murmured in agreement but managed to break it the first week. The initial transgression might have been my imitation of Robert Redford riding a chairlift in Downhill Racer, or Alex pretending he was Dante descending into hell, but Dominique’s impression of Katharine Hepburn gliding down the staircase to meet Monty Clift was definitely worth getting yelled at.

“I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves on the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me,” wrote my aunt Joan in her essay “Goodbye to All That.”

The enormous wood-paneled courtroom was empty, save for the judge, the two arresting officers, and a tired A&P security guard who wished he’d never met me and just wanted to go home. I kind of felt sorry for him when the judge refused to press charges and chewed him out for wasting the court’s time. “This city is broke and I barely have enough time to sentence rapists and muggers, and you bring me this shit!” he bellowed. I was in bed by five a.m. and strapped in my ballet belt at seven thirty, sharing my adventure with a rapt audience who called me the Cheez Whiz Kid for the rest of the year.

The Neighborhood Playhouse was a two-year course, but the second year was only for students who’d been invited back. My poor attendance to classes I considered unworthy of my time or delusional talent meant there would be no second year for me. I was humiliated and angry at myself for being so arrogant. My behavior toward my dance teacher, the one I had brought to tears, filled me with shame. I had much to learn from a woman who had danced with Martha Graham to original compositions by Aaron Copland, and I blew it. 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.