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Growing Up With Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, in the Land of Make-Believe
In his memoir “The Friday Afternoon Club,” the Hollywood hyphenate Griffin Dunne, best known for his role in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” recounts his privileged upbringing.
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THE FRIDAY AFTERNOON CLUB: A Family Memoir, by Griffin Dunne
Dominick Dunne’s byline was one of the last to sell magazines. Reporting with elegance and tenacity on the trials of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers and two Kennedy cousins for Vanity Fair in the go-go ’90s and early ’00s, Dunne was, as his son Griffin writes in a warm and perceptive new memoir, “an Irish terrier in a Turnbull & Asser shirt.”
Affable, forever bounding back after various messy scrapes, Griffin seems more of a mutt. As a child he longed for a German shepherd as a companion. He likens one of the snobbish poodles his father brought home instead to George Sanders in “All About Eve.” Movies ruled the Dunne roost. When Griffin’s mother, Ellen, needed a motorized wheelchair after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, she invoked Katharine Hepburn in “Suddenly, Last Summer.”
To celebrate their 10th anniversary, which directly preceded their divorce, his parents hosted a star-strewn Black and White ball that inspired Truman Capote’s — to which they weren’t invited.
Ellen was the half-Mexican heiress to a rail car wheel company; Griffin’s aunt by marriage was Joan Didion. For years Joan’s husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and John’s brother Dominick didn’t speak, and the description of their reconciliation as old men, after a coincidental meeting in the waiting room of a cardiologist’s office, is one of this book’s many well-wrapped little gifts.
Another is Didion refusing to laugh when John and Dominick mock the young Griffin after his bathing suit exposes a testicle, “poking out like a lonely grape.” You can easily imagine both these scenes acted, which makes perfect sense, as the author’s motley IMDB profile includes 14 directorial credits, including a 2017 documentary about his aunt. He has a gingerly attitude toward fame, having witnessed its costs firsthand.
Griffin was “raised in the land of make-believe,” he writes, and not just because Dominick started as a stage manager on “Howdy Doody” and produced “The Boys in the Band” and “The Panic in Needle Park” (before he was excommunicated by the beautiful people for insulting the powerful agent Sue Mengers).
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