It is no secret that Griffin Dunne is a first-rate actor and director, but now we know he is a superb memoirist. The Friday Afternoon Club is everything an autobiography should be: beautifully written, highly perceptive (to a sometimes painful degree), candid, observational without being judgmental, and touching in unexpected and genuine ways.
The book’s subtitle, “A Family Memoir,” is apt, since Dunne writes as much about his parents (his mother, Lenny, and his father, Dominick Dunne), his aunt and uncle (Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne), and his sister, Dominique, who was murdered in 1982, as he does about himself. The book ends with the birth of his daughter, Hannah (the mother is Carey Lowell), and it is a cathartic moment for father and reader alike.
JIM KELLY: Your book is one of the most candid memoirs I have read. The soul of the book is about a tragedy that should never befall any family, and that is the murder of your sister by a former boyfriend. Every detail is heartbreaking, but the trial itself infuriated me given the judge’s incomprehensible decisions on excluding key evidence and the favoritism he showed to the defense attorney. If you saw the judge today, after all these years, what would you say to him?
GRIFFIN DUNNE: If I saw the judge, I probably wouldn’t bother saying anything because I know what he would say. He would most likely remind me that the reason he did not let the jury hear the testimony of the killer’s previous girlfriend, who he had twice hospitalized for breaking her nose, puncturing her eardrum, and collapsing her lung with his blows, was because it would have been irrelevant to my sister’s murder as the assaults the witness described on the stand were not what he was on trial for. He might even cite the recent overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s conviction by New York’s highest court because victims of his earlier abuses were allowed to testify, much like the witness in our case, about crimes which never led to charges being filed.
Why a defendant’s previous history of violence can legally be kept from a jury, or ruled as “prejudicial,” is a loophole that will confound me to the end of my days.
J.K.: The trial took not just a terrible toll on your family but also caused a deeply angry split between your family and your uncle and aunt, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. Part of it was due to a mean prank played on Dunne and Didion by your angry brother, Alex, after the trial, but it is not surprising that there would be tension beforehand given the fact that both brothers were tilling the same creative fields in Hollywood. Did you notice any tension as a child?
G.D.: No, their relationship only reached toxic levels when I was a young adult. Up until then, I remember the two men as very close. I remember them roaring with laughter on the tennis court and having a blast making Panic in Needle Park, which Dad produced and John and Joan wrote.
J.K.: There is a wonderful scene where the brothers reconcile in, of all places, the office of a Manhattan doctor they shared without knowing they did! They talked every day after that, until your uncle died of a heart attack. You also grew quite close to your aunt in her latter decades, and I wonder, given her own gifts about writing about her family, if you gained insight into how to approach your memoir.
G.D.: One of the qualities I tried to emulate from my father, aunt, and uncle was the honesty they shared with readers about themselves. John wrote a novel called Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season that was a hilarious, brutal, thinly veiled account of a terrible period in his life. My father has written frankly about his addictions and weakness of character when he was a young husband and father. Joan wrote many personal essays and in one even contemplated divorcing John, which she gave to him to edit.
When it came my turn to look inward and put it on the page, I realized I had no better teachers than the writers in my family.
J.K.: You are quite funny about your film career, which takes up only a small part of the book and frankly does not do justice to your talent as an actor. I loved that you considered Tim Burton as director of After Hours before Martin Scorsese signed on, and that he had asked you, then single and approaching 30, not to have any sex during the eight-week shoot so as to exude a kind of pent-up frustration for the screen, a promise you made and promptly broke. Scorsese was furious and threatened to walk off the film. Er, as the star and producer, how scared were you at that moment?
G.D.: I was sickened to have disappointed Marty, and yes, so terrified by his reaction that I had “ruined the film” that I immediately dialed right back into Paul Hackett’s desperate longing to get laid. I realized later that his anger was a great piece of direction because he knew that my expression of fear would look the same as when I quivered with sexual desire. Another great directing tip I witnessed was when he told Rosanna Arquette before delivering a monologue about her lover’s suicide, “I don’t think you should laugh during this, do you?” Rosanna said, “Of course not!” and then proceeded to giggle hysterically during the take. Just what Marty was after.
J.K.: After Hours is one of those films that does not hit it big right away (Pauline Kael called you a “second-rate Dudley Moore,” which you recount with sly relish) but then becomes, deservedly so, a classic. How often do you run into people today who want to talk about the film and downtown New York in the 1980s?
G.D.: I would say that rarely a day goes by without someone bringing it up. It’s one of those films that grows in appreciation with each passing year. Even though SoHo and Tribeca bear little resemblance to what they did back then, I can’t tell you how many people have told me they moved to New York because of After Hours. That the film would be a recruitment tool for Manhattan never occurred to us.
J.K.: I love the fact that of all of what you call “this isn’t really what I do for a living” jobs during your struggling-actor days, your favorite was being a popcorn concessionaire at Radio City Music Hall! You fed popcorn to the camels used for the Nativity shows! You hung out with Rockettes at drag bars!
And during all this, your best friend and roommate Carrie Fisher went off to England to shoot a film with what she called “a really stupid script” and came back still as your roommate but now also as Princess Leia and soon a big star. You said your friendship with Fisher changed after that, and I wonder if there are any lessons about Hollywood and the demands of stardom that you gleaned from your friendship with her.
G.D.: It’s a very common and painful passage in a young actor’s life to compare their career to someone more successful. I don’t know that you ever get truly past that because there will always be someone farther along than you, but at some point, if you want to survive, you realize such thinking is self-destructive and only holds you back from your purpose. It got in the way of Carrie’s and my friendship for a while, and that was on me, but like our careers, that too survived.
“Even though SoHo and Tribeca bear little resemblance to what they did back then, I can’t tell you how many people have told me they moved to New York because of After Hours.”
J.K.: You have so many girlfriends in this book that I lost count. There is one scene, however, in which you, young and worried if you had inherited a gay gene from your dad, decide to have a brief encounter with your dad’s lover, after which he says, “I hate to break this to you, Griffin. I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to be a homo.” (By the way, did I mention your memoir is candid?) You obviously loved your dad very much, and his gayness did not seem to bother you even as a child, but how difficult do you think it was for him during his lifetime?
G.D.: I think for a boy growing up in the 1930s, to feel same-sex attraction must have been cloaked with unimaginable shame. My father’s father only reinforced that shame by calling him a sissy, followed by regular beatings with a belt. He grew up in a time when such desires not only made you an outcast but could get you arrested or even killed. To have lived in secrecy while raising his children and married to a woman he truly loved filled him with such loneliness, I found it painful to write about.
J.K.: You talk about yourself with so much lightness and humor that it makes the reader wonder if you have many regrets about how you have lived your own life so far. And if you do have regrets, how do you manage not to let yourself get beaten up by them?
G.D.: “Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention … ” (Those I tell my shrink.) I used to be filled with regret for turning my back on the heat from my acting career to produce movies I not only wasn’t in but envied the actors who were. Yet while writing the book, and looking back at my life and work to date, I came to embrace the variety of different film projects I was involved with as either an actor, producer, or director, and that I chose to take any opportunity that filled my passion to come first, without an endgame in mind. Not to gild the lily, but when I finished the book, and looked at my life choices, I did it “My Way.”
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at AIR MAIL