Griffin Dunne’s memoir bobbed around the bestseller list after it was published in June, and though it’s since slipped off, my guess is the book will prove to have staying power.
Like the life of the family he portrays with such affection and humor, The Friday Afternoon Club is divided into two parts. The first and longest is a rollicking account of a charmed childhood in 1950s and ’60s Hollywood, followed by the struggles of a young boho actor in Manhattan. No reader will want the first part to end, I reckon, except to see what could possibly come next—which, unfortunately, is the second part, an account of the murder of Dunne’s sister and the trial of her murderer. A brief coda at the book’s close lifts us out of the heartbreak and drops us gently on the other side, with an account of the birth of Dunne’s first child. It’s the quick and lovely ending to a wise and lovely book.
Dunne was born to eccentric parents. The eccentricity was good for the memoir but bad for the marriage, which was doomed. Griffin’s father was Dominick Dunne, known as Nick, who became famous much later in life as a high-end gossip writer with a special taste for true crime tales. Nick Dunne was gay and, alas, the son of what used to be called a man’s man, who proved his masculinity by regularly trying to beat the homosexuality out of his firstborn. When the old bastard died, Nick Dunne celebrated by having sex with a boyfriend in the back seat of his father’s Buick at the local golf club. "This was only the beginning of the game of chicken he played all his life," writes Griffin Dunne.
Not the marrying kind, was Nick—or so you would have thought, at least in those pre-Obergefell days. But he was socially and romantically ambidextrous. After heroic service in World War II, for which he was awarded the Bronze Star, he fell for an heiress to a Western ranching fortune. Both were besotted with show biz, she as an actress, he as a producer of TV shows and eventually movies, and after a quick courtship and a few years in Manhattan they made their home in the movie colony and filled their lives with the endless pursuit of celebrity, and of celebrities.
It seemed to come naturally to Nick and the family. Serendipity entered in too. His best friend in college, for instance, was Stephen Sondheim, one of the great American artists of the last century. Griffin’s first baby-sitter was a young actress named Elizabeth Montgomery, soon to be known to the ages as Samantha in the TV series Bewitched. That name-drop alone would be titillating enough for most memoirists, but it is an illustration of Griffin’s gift for turning every anecdote up to 11 that he adds: "Elizabeth once told [my mother], while changing my diapers, that I had a bigger dick than her husband. That marriage, needless to say, was short-lived."
Other big shots wandered in and out of the Dunnes’ life and their Beverly Hills house: Humphrey Bogart, David Niven, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra. When young Griffin foolishly fell into the deep end of the family swimming pool, Sean Connery was there to fish him out. The neighborhood handyman was Harrison Ford, a decade before Star Wars. Griffin’s uncle John, Nick’s brother, married a young magazine writer named Joan Didion, and together they brought another constellation of celebrities, literary division, into the life of the extended family. Didion, of course, went on to become vastly famous herself as the most overpraised journalist of her time.
Celebrity, as you’ve probably read elsewhere, can be a fleeting thing, and many of the bright names that circulated in the Dunne family’s orbit have dimmed or disappeared altogether. It will mean nothing to most readers under the age of 30 that the pitcher on Griffin’s father-son little league team was Jack Palance; those over 60, on the other hand, remembering Palance as the scariest villain in the greatest Western, Shane, will feel a touch of awe and envy. (Even more so to learn that Tuesday Weld and Natalie Wood showed up to watch games.) Visiting his father’s office at a movie studio after school, Griffin would wander around the backlot lagoon where Gilligan’s Island was filmed and find the famously difficult Bob Denver—Gilligan in the flesh—overturning water coolers in hissy fits about script rewrites. Oddly, given the ardent sex drive that seemed to drive his adolescence (and beyond), Griffin makes no mention of Tina Louise. He might be a Maryanne guy.
The idyllic childhood didn’t last. Nick’s craven and obsequious bird-dogging of movie stars eventually proved too much even for his wife. The marriage split up and the children were scattered more or less to fend for themselves. Griffin moved to New York to break into acting and like so many actors before him discovered that his most marketable talent was for waiting tables.
Still the Dunne celebrity magnet worked its magic. Hired on as a "man Friday" to an aging Ruth Ford, an actress who had been one of William Faulkner’s longest-serving mistresses, Griffin tended bar at an intimate dinner in honor of Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. In the event it was more intimate than he expected. The guests spun him from one to the other like a piñata. "Every drink I delivered was rewarded with someone grabbing, patting, or fondling any of my body parts below the belt." The hilarity came to a crashing halt when Mrs. Ford sternly informed the guests that they were molesting Joan Didion’s nephew. "Young man," Williams said, "I … deeply apologize for my disgraceful behavior. Won’t you please sit with us." Sometimes an overpraised aunt can come in handy.
The good looks that so inspired Capote and Williams eventually brought Griffin leading roles in two exceptional movies, both classics of the 1980s: An American Werewolf in London and the harrowing masterpiece After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. Such fame as Griffin Dunne himself possesses today rests on those long-ago roles, but in time his acting career winked out, thanks to poor judgment, bad agenting, artistic ennui, and cocaine. Meanwhile the shattering murder of his sister Dominique, at the hands of a deranged ex-boyfriend, had the unexpected effect of bringing his family together despite a decade or more of estrangements. As Dunne notes, collective grief often has the opposite effect.
Nick Dunne even managed to turn his daughter’s death into a second career. At a Manhattan dinner party, he spilled her story to the magazine editor Tina Brown, who knew a ripping good yarn when she heard it and promptly signed him to write it up. This became something of a Dunne family tradition—Joan Didion’s final forays into bestsellerdom were ickily intimate accounts of the deaths of her husband and then her daughter. Remember to sign a release if you’re planning to die around one of the Dunnes.
It is testament to his gifts as a writer and storyteller that Griffin Dunne is able to render moments of horror and reconciliation with the same gossamer touch, the same eye for detail, that he applies to his comic misadventures. Clearly these charming tales, as addictive as bon-bons, have been rounded off, sanded down, burnished to a high sheen through decades of telling and retelling to strangers and friends, at parties and dinners, over drinks and other intoxicants. "Interesting, if true," Mark Twain is reputed to have said about some piece of gossip. Long stretches of reconstructed dialogue and incident in The Friday Afternoon Club are suspiciously precise, and suspiciously clever, including a dramatic, multi-character event that occurred when our narrator was all of three years old.
But there’s a second half to Twain’s alleged quote: "And if untrue—still interesting."
I think readers will forgive his obvious embellishments, even his inventions—assuming there are any. Questions of stenographic accuracy fade in the light of Dunne’s larger point—assuming there is one. The upshot of his memoir, if I read him right, is that even the most charmed life is stalked by inevitable shadow; in fact, to take the point further and mix the metaphor, the tragedy itself anchors the happiness and even, in some mysterious way, makes it possible.
This is an ancient and profound theme, one of the oldest there is, but not a common one nowadays, the tragic sense having become less popular with audiences since Aeschylus’ time. What a pleasant surprise to find it suggested so tenderly in such an unexpected package—and a bestselling one at that.
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
by Griffin Dunne
Penguin Press, 400 pp., $30
Andrew Ferguson is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.