By Miriam Cosic
MEMOIR
The Friday Afternoon Club
Griffin Dunne, Allen & Unwin, $34.99
Credit: AP
At 3am on Halloween in 1982, a tough Irish cop from the West Hollywood homicide division rang the doorbell at the home of Griffin Dunne’s mother. Her maid took him upstairs to Mrs Dunne’s bedroom, where he noticed the wheelchair, the collection of glass hippos, the overflowing bookcase, the rosebuds floating in a bowl, before he delivered the news that her daughter Dominique had been strangled by her former boyfriend and was on life support in hospital. He helped her ring her husband to give him the news. He’d done this kind of thing many times, but what he noticed about Mrs Dunne above all was how she remained unfailingly polite throughout.
This prologue to Dunne’s family memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, is a preview of what the book will become after he establishes the extent of his star-loaded childhood. Dunne – actor, producer and director – is the son of Dominick Dunne, originally a big-name producer who left it all behind to become a famous true-crime essayist. He is also the nephew of the even more famous writer John Gregory Dunne and John Gregory’s wife, the essayist and novelist Joan Didion.
Dunne loads the book’s early chapters with celebrity names. Sean Connery saved him from drowning when he was eight. He attended one of Didion’s legendary parties when he was 13, this one a launch for one of Tom Wolfe’s books, in the hope of meeting his idol, Janis Joplin. As a young adult, he shared an apartment with his best friend, Carrie Fisher. The irony must have been intentional when, on page 64, he quotes his uncle saying to him, after he mentions Connery’s prowess as a lifesaver yet again, “you’re a worse name-dropper than your father”.
Dunne’s paternal grandfather was Irish Catholic, his maternal grandmother Mexican Catholic. Their descendants were a worldly, sophisticated and argumentative bunch. His father and uncle rowed continuously, not helped when Dominick began to challenge John Gregory’s literary dominance, and Dunne follows it closely. As Griffin Dunne grows older in the pages of his memoir, his memories begin to mellow and to gain depth as well.
His father, Dominick, for example, was a successful and wealthy Hollywood producer, though he struggled for acceptance into the cinema world’s aristocracy. When his company failed and he lost both worldly possessions and friendships, he fled to a log cabin in the mountains of Oregon to find himself. A cliche, perhaps, but it was a remarkable success. He returned to his roots in New York and made a successful career switch.
Actor, writer and producer Griffin Dunne.Credit: AP
The family had had to make the heartbreaking decision to turn off their daughter’s life support system, and he and his wife were both terrified of the strength they would need to get through the murder trial that followed. He didn’t like to speak of Dominique’s death, fearing it would cheapen her memory, but he unloaded to Vanity Fair’s editor-to-be Tina Brown while sitting next to her at a dinner party. After hearing him out, she said to him: “I don’t have the job at Vanity Fair yet, but when I do, if you keep a journal every day of the trial, come and see me when it’s over and I’ll publish it.”
He did, which helped focus him, and she did. His piece was a success and was the beginning of his rise to fame as a true-crime writer. “That woman saw me, Griffin,” he told his son. “Tina knew I was born to be a writer.”
This is perhaps the most affecting narrative line in the book, but there are others. Griffin’s brother Alex, for example, was bipolar and the family struggled to support him until treatment finally kicked in. There is a lot of humour too. His shenanigans as a child can be funny, despite the tabloid-style entertainment gossip they are wrapped in, and his wordplay with Fisher and others over the years is hilarious.
While the history of his famous family – the deaths, the failures, the breakdowns – is revealing, his own intimate life as an adult remains hidden. His first starring role in a film, An American Werewolf in London, is covered well enough, and further professional developments are outlined glancingly. One needs to Google him, for example, if interested enough to find out that he was married to American actress Carey Lowell from 1989 to 1995. They had a daughter, Hannah Dunne, who is now an actor. He married Australian stylist Anna Bingemann in July 2009.
His aunt Joan Didion, who might be an attraction to reading the book, only merits a few mentions, though he made the 2017 documentary about her, The Centre Will Not Hold. The blokey aspect of some of his narrative – the focus on machinery, some of his references to the looks of women (though never professional women in his field) – might be appealing or an irritation. The negatives ease up. Though restless in some of the early chapters, this reader finally surrendered to fascination with the Dunne family story.
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