In his new memoir,The Friday Afternoon Club,both acid and names are dropped.
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Griffin Dunneis at ease with himself in the way that people who have always been good-looking usually are.
Dunne has had an interestingly windy career.
He directed films including 1998sPractical MagicandThe Center Will Not Hold,the 2017 Netflix documentary about his auntJoan Didion.
We were clinically crazy, he says, taking a bite of his tuna nicoise salad.
Like, really crazy.
He grew up in Beverly Hills at 714 Walden Drive, surrounded by movie stars.
Sean Connery saved him from drowning in the family swimming pool.
He took Carrie Fishers virginity and smoked pot with Harrison Ford when Ford was just his Aunt Joans carpenter.
Dominicks brother, the writer John Gregory Dunne, was married to Didion.
Even lace-curtain Irish were not allowed in the blue-blooded country clubs, Griffin tells me at lunch.
That striving for status drove his father his whole life.
Joan was already well known by the time John introduced her to Dominick and his children in 1963.
She stirred up Dominicks insecurities from the start.
She saw a little boy being humiliated.
In 1965, just before Griffins 10th birthday, his parents split up.
There was also the fact that his father was quite obviously gay.
Griffin just wanted a German shepherd.
On a family vacation to Hawaii one year, Dominick brought his friend Don.
Griffin later realizes that handsome, athletic, funny Don was doing my dad.
Yup, definitely straight!
In 1972, his father flamed out of Hollywood.
A Paramount exec called Dominick and told him his career was over.
Sure enough, his phone stopped ringing.
Drunk, alone, blackballed, and broke, Dominick spent the rest of the decade spiraling.
His friend Truman Capote wrote him and said, This is not where you belong.
When you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to come back.
Buoyed, Dominick moved to Manhattan and rented a studio apartment in the Village.
Griffin was living in New York, too, trying to become an actor.
He and Fisher became roommates in the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street.
And besides, Fisher thought the movie was going to be a fucking disaster.
In 1981, he starred inAn American Werewolf in London,and things were going well.
Dominique was living in L.A. and also acting.
She got her first big role inPoltergeistplaying the sister who hops out of the Trans Am and screamsWhats happening?
Sweeney eventually beat up on Dominique, who broke it off with him.
Griffin, then 27, warned Sweeney to stay the fuck away from her.
Ten minutes later, Griffin writes, his hands were around her throat.
Told she would never recover, the family took her off life support five days after the attack.
A media circus ensued.
The trial began in the summer of 1983.
The defense played rough, smearing Dominique as a promiscuous party girl who had it coming.
Dominick was devastated and enraged.
Quintana was a wild child, Griffin tells me.
They left to protect their daughter, but that didnt mean we didnt feel betrayed.
There was so much resentment there.
Where did you go?
Why didnt you go?
She explained it to me.
It didnt fit in the doc.
Before the trial had started, Dominick had been invited to dinner by his journalist friend Marie Brenner.
I was Switzerland, and I made terrible attempts to pacify the situation, he says.
Joan was really caught in the middle as well.
Thats another thing we sort of had in common.
We would just look without ever having to say, like, Oh, these fucking Irish guys.
Not that he was entirely thrilled for his father either.
I wasnt crazy about the article when it came out, he says.
I was too close to it, and it seemed too personal.
He eventually came to appreciate all that his father had communicated in the magazine story.
The article itself became a template of who I am, he says.
Irish Alzheimers is when you forget everything but the grudges.
Miraculously, at the end of their lives, Griffins father and uncle were able to overcome theirs.
Turned out they shared the same cardiologist.
To which they both replied, Which Dunne?
The first person Joan called was Dominick.
(He died in 2009; she lived until 2021.)
Dad, he would say so many times, Thank God I walked into that office.
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