The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

by Griffin Dunne

Leo wrapped me in a bear hug and said, “Keep in touch,” though we both knew we never would.

The jury smiled at that, and I wondered if for the first time they might have admired my sister’s bravery. Norman turned to address them directly, as if to drive the point home. “Dominique was terrified that night, make no mistake about it, but she also had, like her brothers, a sense of humor for the absurd, and the irony of who she would portray the next morning made her laugh, even when still in pain after her assault. That was Dominique.” His words touched the heart of every juror, and when Adelson saw the Irish Catholic widow stifle a sniffle, he cut his losses. “No further questions, Your Honor,” he said. Norman joined us for lunch at the Ivy, and we showered him with praise. Mom told him that what he said on the stand gave her the only moment of hope since the trial began.

“So, I gather you and Dad kept in touch after the trial.” “Well, we had met years earlier when I helped Dominique sell all his stuff.” “Oh, I didn’t know you guys knew each other beyond then.” “I know you didn’t,” he said, betraying a slight bitterness in his tone. “We met at a terrible time for him, and I kind of helped him get through it. We’ve been a big part of each other’s lives ever since. Not that he’d have told anybody.” “Did Dominique know that you and Dad…” “Yes. She thought it was hilarious that she was the matchmaker.” That was so Dominique, to be entrusted with a secret and not even share it with her brothers. Though I admired her discretion, I was a little hurt, and thought Alex would have been as well, but not entirely surprised, because we both knew our sister would never betray the confidence of anyone she loved.

After uncorking a second bottle of wine, he decided I was ready to hear more. “I was with your father when you called to say you were kicked out of school. I was the first person he called when he found out Lenny had MS. I don’t know why I call her Lenny; we only met a few times when I painted the mural on her house. But your father never let me get near you boys. He told me everything you and Alex were up to, and he’d call me most nights in Oahu to report on whatever party he’d just returned from. I flew back when Dominique died, and he wept in my arms. But I was never allowed further into his life than that. It makes perfect sense that you know nothing about me and I know everything about you.” Norman’s tone approached the edge of anger, which I feared might wake Dad, but he was still out of it.

I was taken aback by a flash of anger about a cat he ditched almost fifty years ago, but let it go, because what I really heard was part of a deathbed confession. Dad’s cancer brought back memories filled with regret for his behavior from long ago, and now, with so little time left, he wanted to come clean about as much as he could remember. My flying to Germany wasn’t just to look after him in his frail health, as I expected to do, but was really to meet his lifelong companion and hear him rid himself of the last of his secrets.

In 1983, gay people weren’t being murdered for being out in the open. What was killing them was AIDS and the Reagan administration’s indifference.

Smythson notebooks,

I came across a notebook that must have been the diary Tina Brown asked him to keep during the trial. The date August 23 contained an entry that explained what was really going through his mind on the day of Norman’s testimony. 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. Katz has allowed him to pursue irrelevant lines of questioning for the purpose of destroying Dominique’s character and I believe he will do the same to me when Norman takes the stand in the morning. 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? What is the age difference between you and Mr. Dunne, who I believe qualifies as a senior citizen?” 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. This time I will really do it. I have no one to talk to about this so I beg you, my Higher Power, ...

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 It pained me when some of my intelligent women friends would embrace “Every Breath” as a “love song.” They thought to have a man so obsessed with a woman was sexy and romantic, where 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.

Then he told them about her trademark habit: bringing home stray dogs and cats wherever she found them. The house was full of strays, and each time she came back with a new one, her mother would protest, but only halfheartedly. The only stray Mrs. Dunne wished Dominique had never brought home was John Sweeney. He would be the stray that killed her daughter.

In closing, Barshop read a letter that Melinda had found while cleaning out the house on Rangely. It was written by Dominique to Sweeney, but whether she sent it or if he ever read it, we would never know. 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. At the end of Barshop’s reading, Adelson leapt from his seat and pointed at my brother. “Your Honor, Alex Dunne has tears in his eyes!” he cried out, presuming the judge would agree that the sin of his emotion would prejudice the jury. By then Alex had had enough. “I can’t go back there anymore,” he said to me as we left the courtroom. “I can’t be where Sweeney is.”

We buckled up for what we expected to be a brutal closing from Adelson, and he was as advertised. He found a way to again describe Sweeney as an “ordinary, reasonable person” three times, stealing from the playbook of corrupt politicians who believe if an accusation is denied enough times, it will eventually be believed. “This was not a crime,” he told the jury. “This was a tragedy,” a lie he’d been hammering home since the start of the trial. By now I had learned the hard way that in the judicial system, perjury is a crime, but when a lawyer lies for his client, it’s perfectly legal. He told the jury that what Dominique and Sweeney once had was “that old-fashioned thing: romantic love.” If he quoted Kahlil Gibran again, I thought I would leap off the bench and grab his throat. Instead he managed to do something even worse: he quoted made-up dialogue as if it were something Dominique had actually said: “I, Dominique, reject you, John Sweeney,” he cried out. “I lied to you!” At the break, Dad sidled up to Adelson and whispered in his ear, “You piece of shit.” Adelson turned on his heels so fast his toupee shifted, and ran back to the bench to tattle to the judge. When Dad told Mo...

I stepped onto the deco set where the actors and crew were ready to continue the scene. Keaton took one look and pulled me aside. “What’s going on?” he said. I told him about the disastrous verdict and got no further than that before he got up and went to Amy Heckerling, the director, and said, loud enough for all to hear, “Okay, we’re calling it a wrap. Griffin has to get home.” What he did that day remains one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me.

Before announcing the sentence, Katz delivered a shameful and cowardly about-face. 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.” Judge Katz then addressed Sweeney: “You knew of your capacity for uncontrolled violence. You knew you hurt Dominique badly with your own hands and that you nearly choked her into unconsciousness…. You were in a rage because your fragile ego could not accept the final rejection.” 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.” He called the punishment for the crime “anemic and pathetically inadequate.” Having got the verdict we felt he had guided the jurors into giving, he was now blasting them for giving it. He went on and on. It was as if he had suddenly become a different human being. However, all his eloquence changed nothing. The verdict remained the same: manslaughter. The ...

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.

I stayed in Los Angeles another week to attend an elaborate wrap party for Johnny Dangerously on the 20th Century lot. An entire soundstage was set dressed as a Prohibition-era nightclub, with floozies and gangsters hired to serve appetizers. It was a riotous celebration, only to be interrupted when I saw Joe Shapiro, the co–defense attorney for Ma Maison, standing near a singer, crooning “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goo’ Bye).” Harold Ramis, a director and lovely man I would come to know, brought him as a guest without realizing his role in our trial or my part in the film. I had a security guard throw Shapiro out of the party, and as he was being escorted off the lot, the cast I’d spent months with in fits of laughter surrounded me with love, and we danced the night away.

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.

I opened the issue of Esquire to John’s piece and dived in. It was an essay about his process of writing, how a book can sometimes be born of a sentence that comes to mind and then sticks around. In this case the sentence was “When the trial began, we left the country.” He went on to say that five months after he thought of that sentence, his niece had been murdered. Then, as an afterthought he wrote, “I do not understand people who attend the trials of those accused of murdering their loved ones. You see them on the local newscasts…I watch them kiss the prosecutor when the guilty verdict is brought in or scream at those jurors who were not convinced that the pimply-faced defendant was the buggerer of Jimmy and the dismemberer of Johnny.” It was clear he was mocking us for being so gauche as to attend a murder trial to honor my sister, to make her presence known to the jury, to remind them that there were people who loved her. Our trial received a great deal of press, and 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.

John was a master of epistolary assaults toward friends he’d fallen out with, or anyone he felt might have slighted him, and Joan always advised him to put the letter in a drawer to read the next morning before sending. I recalled and neglected her advice as I dialed a messenger for rush delivery of what I had just written.

He went on to explain, unapologetically, that he didn’t abandon us but left the country to protect Quintana from being called as a witness. What was less convincing was when he said the offending sentences in Esquire had nothing to do with our family, and only a narcissist actor would think so. (At least he didn’t say I was a bad one.) The insult was a swing and a miss, and I took his denial as a silent admission of regret. At

The only thing he asked of me before the start of shooting was that I not have sex until the picture wrapped. He wanted Paul Hackett, my character, to carry the tension of a young man who hadn’t been laid in so long that a subtext of unrelenting sexual frustration would come through in every frame. Eight weeks, I thought. Big deal, I can do that.

Let’s just say that that Saturday night I met someone in a club called Area and had what Carrie called “a fucking accident,” where you get drunk, fall down, and fuck ’em. When we picked up the scene on Monday, I massaged Linda, not like the trembling, sex-starved twerp I’d been on Friday, but with the flirtatious moves of Pepé Le Pew. “Cut!” Marty barked after one take. “Griffin, come here!” I followed him off the set to where he cornered me against a wall. “Did you get laid?” he demanded. My shame almost brought me to my knees. “Yes, I did, Marty, I’m so sorry.” “I expressly asked you to refrain from sex.” “I know, but I had a fucking accident.” “A what?” “Never mind.” “You bet never mind. Never mind the scene, never mind your disrespect for me, and never mind your lack of self-respect. You’ve fucked up the whole picture. I don’t think I can finish it now. I’m going to send everybody home.” “No, Marty, please! Let me just try it again. I’ll be better, I promise.” Marty might have been bluffing, but the lesson he taught me was that the terror on an actor’s face can sometimes look just like months of pent-up lust. The scene continued without a hitch.

Sometimes Dominique’s murder played a role in my decision-making. One time, while stone-cold sober, I was having dinner with a director who hoped to woo me to be in a movie I needed no convincing to agree to do, as the part and the script were perfect, but I played hard to get because that’s what movie stars are supposed to do. But then, as we were getting to know each other, he casually mentioned that he had mob contacts and almost hired a hit man to take out his wife during a messy divorce. He could tell by my expression that his small talk hadn’t gone over well. “Did you think telling me you were going to have a woman killed would impress me?” I said. I left him in the restaurant before our entrées were served.

“Men who beat women don’t just stop being violent. Their rage won’t allow them. And not just women. Did Sweeney tell you he lost his job in LA only a few months ago for beating up a busboy?” When it took her a long time to say “No,” I could tell I was getting through.

“That’s all I ask, Cathy. Just think whether you really want a guy who calls himself John Maura in your life. Think about how he took my sister’s life. Think about what he did to Lillian Pierce. Thank you so much for listening to me. I know it wasn’t easy.” Cathy’s father called a day later to say she’d broken it off with John Sweeney Maura, and thanked us both for our help. “It was Griffin who did it,” Dad said. “Your daughter might not have listened to me.” Yes, it was me. I did that. And if given the information, I’d track down every woman Sweeney ever had so much as a conversation with. But by the late eighties, I stopped keeping track of Sweeney, or his girlfriends, or where he worked to get him fired. Lugging around all that hate had become debilitating, and to my surprise, over time, it kind of burned out on its own. My body wanted to self-heal before I did and detected my hate as a cancer that would eventually kill me unless my own cells rebelled against it. 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. I wish only the worst for Sweeney but am most content that he rarely crosses my mind or intrudes on the memories I cherish of Dominique. I can let go of the hate, but...

The career-killing movie I perversely signed on to was about a man who talks to his penis, called Me and Him. The penis, of course, talks back, gratefully off camera, in a voice only my character could hear. Being number one on the call sheet, I had penis approval and total control over what my member should sound like. In a dreamworld, I wanted my dick to sound like Jack Nicholson. The casting director approached him, and for about ten minutes Jack actually considered prerecording all the penis’s lines before wisely turning it down. We settled on an actor with a gravelly voice who was available to be on set every day, leaving room should my dick and I decide to spontaneously improvise. Rebecca Miller, the daughter of Arthur Miller, and later a gifted writer-director in her own right, was hired as my love interest. The author of Death of a Salesman read his daughter’s talking-penis project and forbade her to be in the movie for her own good. The actress who replaced Rebecca would play a far bigger part in my life than just being my costar. When Carey Lowell was cast, our offscreen affair began the first week of shooting. After the picture wrapped, she went on to be a Bond girl in License to Kill, and I pined for her until she returned from Europe, and when she did, we picked up where we’d left off and fell truly in love. Three months into our bliss and reckless lovemaking, I accidently got Carey pregnant.

On our last day on Martha’s Vineyard, we sat in the kitchen quietly drinking our first coffee of the morning. “I want to do it,” I said out of the blue. “I was just about to say the same thing.” “So this is real?” “This is real,” Carey said, and then pointed to her belly. “Besides, something tells me it was never up to us. This kid wants to be born whether we want it or not.”

Back at the house, I grabbed a shovel from the garage, and Carey looked on as I dug a hole next to a rosebush high enough for Mom to see from her window. Then I laid Panda to rest. “Griffin,” Carey said, “she’s still in the garbage bag. You can’t put her in there like that.” “I know, but I can’t bring myself to look at her.” “I got it,” said my future wife as she gently untied the knot to the bag. Holding a frozen dead cat in her arms, she placed Panda back in the hole. “Welcome to the Dunne family,” I said. Thank God she laughed.

Smythson stationery,

Suzanne Lowell, Carey’s mother, even buried the hatchet with Dad for sending out the Smythson wedding invitations with his name as the headliner, ignoring protocol that the bride’s parents be listed first.

While on set, I must have checked my beeper every five minutes. I made Amy call it several times a day to make sure it worked. Psoriasis had come and gone most of my life, but now with the stress of waiting, it flared all over my body worse than ever. 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.

In the house we rented in Raleigh, I had a recurring nightmare that I’d taken our newborn to the supermarket and then, not realizing it, I’d left it behind in a shopping cart in the parking lot. Still trapped in the dream, I’d leap out of bed to go back to the supermarket, until Carey calmed me down. “You’re going to be a great father,” she’d whisper when I got back in bed. “Nothing like that is ever going to happen. When our baby is born, she will be impossible to forget.” “Or he.” “Or he.” Despite her confidence in me, I still lost wallets and passports, missed flights, showed up at parties on the wrong date. Not great traits, I secretly worried, for a grown man expected to raise a child.

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?”