The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

While in New York, Griffin called home once a week to talk to Lenny, whose mobility was steadily declining, and Dominique. Alex had moved to Vancouver and started a magazine called Belles-Lettres, while Nick had moved to a cabin in Oregon. The cabin didn’t have a phone, so Nick wrote weekly letters to his children. While Griffin and Dominique were worried about Alex’s alternating bouts of mania and despair, they agreed that Nick was doing better.

Nick’s move had been brought about by his downfall in Hollywood. The last movie he had produced was Ash Wednesday, starring Elizabeth Taylor, whose tardiness led to a significant budget overrun. Although Nick took on the extra costs himself, his increasing use of alcohol and drugs, coupled with a stray insult about a powerful Hollywood agent that made the papers, got him fired from Paramount.

Six years after being blackballed from Hollywood, with his finances increasingly precarious, Nick sold all his things in a yard sale. Dominique introduced him to a muralist named Norman Carby, who agreed to conduct the sale to save Nick the ignominy; Carby and Nick went on to become lovers, though Griffin would only learn of this much later. After the sale, Nick drove up the Pacific Coast Highway in the used Ford Granada that he’d bought after selling his Mercedes, with no destination in mind. He eventually ended up in the town of Camp Sherman, Oregon, where he lived for a year in a cabin resort. There, he began writing a novel that brought him a modest income, and he joined an Alcoholics Anonymous group that helped him get sober and start a new chapter of his life.

Griffin moved into an apartment in the East Village, paying rent from his salary as the personal assistant to “two grand ladies” (212). One of them was Susan Stein Shiva, whose father, Dr. Jules Stein, owned Universal Studios; the other was an older Southern actress named Ruth Ford. On one occasion, Griffin manned the bar for a small dinner hosted by Ford, some of the attendees being Truman Capote and playwright Tennessee Williams, author of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, among others. The men teased and groped Griffin all night whenever they got the opportunity, until Ruth finally stepped in and revealed that Griffin was Joan Didion’s nephew. Tennessee immediately apologized to Griffin and asked him to join them, and Griffin instantly forgave him.

While Griffin was an out-of-work actor at this time, Dominique’s career was beginning to blossom. She had guest starred in a number of television series and even been signed by a talent agency. Griffin and Dominique even received an opportunity to star in a movie as siblings but turned it down when they read the script and realized that they would have to play incestuous siblings.

At the age of 23, Griffin finally began to make some money, though not as an actor. Along with two friends he’d made, Amy Robinson and Mark Metcalf, Griffin co-produced a movie based on Ann Beatie’s book Chilly Scenes of Winter. Not only did the three friends manage to secure the rights from Beatie herself, but they also got Joan Silver to direct. John Heard and Gloria Grahame agreed to star in the film, and the three co-producers secured a multi-million-dollar budget from United Artists.

Although it reached cult status years later when it was rereleased, the movie was a flop when it premiered. Griffin blames the studio’s marketing decisions for this failure, as the film was renamed Head Over Heels and marketed as a rom-com. Nevertheless, it got Griffin noticed enough that he eventually landed a starring role in An American Werewolf in London. After shooting concluded in London, he flew to Sri Lanka on a whim to vacation by himself.

Both Nick and Alex experienced mental health challenges, and both experienced suicidal ideation at different points in their lives. Nick’s came to an end with the death by suicide of his youngest brother, Stephen. At this point in time, Nick and John’s relationship was strained: John and Joan’s professional and financial successes occurred alongside Nick’s decline, and John refused to loan Nick money to fly back for Stephen’s funeral. Nick managed to make it with his sister’s help, but he flew back straight after, soundly ignoring John.

After Stephen’s funeral, while Nick’s suicidal ideation ceased, Alex’s didn’t. He committed himself to a psychiatric hospital in Vancouver after attempting suicide, but he then escaped and fled to New York, where he stayed with Griffin. Griffin and Nick convinced Alex to check into another facility shortly after, but as soon as he was let out again, he stopped his medication entirely. Nick, on the other hand, wrapped up the book he had been writing in Oregon and moved to Manhattan, where he started work on an original novel: The Two Mrs. Grenvilles.

When Werewolf came out, Dominique had just begun shooting for Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist. Griffin visited her on set and met Spielberg, who was complimentary about both Griffin’s performance in Werewolf and Dominique’s talent.

Despite the attention that Griffin received after Werewolf, he stayed away from acting, subconsciously aware that he wasn’t ready for that kind of attention or fame yet, and continued producing. The next movie he worked on was Baby It’s You, in which a working-class boy is violently jealous of his upper-middle-class girlfriend, who has Hollywood aspirations. Around the same time, Dominique began dating a man named John Sweeney, who worked as a sous-chef at an exclusive restaurant called Ma Maison.

Dominique met Sweeney at Ma Maison when John and Joan took her out to dinner. Sweeney lied to her about having cooked one of the dishes she liked, the actual chef having been Wolfgang Puck. Griffin, Alex, and Nick all disliked Sweeney when they met him, but only Alex told her so. Griffin remembers, however, a moment of foreshadowing when Sweeney congratulated him on making Baby It’s You: Having watched its rough cut, Sweeney felt especially connected to its male protagonist.

All three Dunne siblings came close to violent deaths in 1982; two of them survived. On one occasion, Nick dropped by Alex’s house unexpectedly and spotted a hangman’s knot coiled on a table; he took it away immediately. A month later, Griffin got into a violent altercation in Hell’s Kitchen with an armed man, barely escaping with his life.

Dominique broke up with Sweeney after he became extremely possessive and violent, attempting to strangle her during an argument. She escaped to the home of Norman Carby, who sheltered her and documented her injuries. A month later, however, she called up Griffin, vacillating about whether to take Sweeney back; an irritated Griffin cut the conversation short, as he was on his way out to see Baby It’s You. Griffin meant to call back but didn’t; two days later, Sweeney showed up at Dominique’s and strangled her again.