A Hollywood Family's Grudges

In Griffin Dunne's memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club-about growing up the son of Dominick Dunne and the nephew of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion-both acid and names are dropped.

- Shawn McCreesh

GRIFFIN DUNNE IS at ease with himself in the way that people who have always been good-looking usually are. Even at 68, his salt-and-pepper hair is thick enough to be pushed back, and he comes across as whatever the opposite of tightly wound is. When we meet for lunch at Cafe Mogador, around the corner from his apartment in the East Village, I can still see a trace of the hapless Paul Hackett he played in After Hours, the 1985 Martin Scorsese movie about a night out in Soho that goes spectacularly sideways. It's clear from reading Dunne's new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, that he is quite familiar with life going sideways.

Dunne has had an interestingly windy career. He's been an actor in movies-he co-starred with Madonna in Who's That Girl in 1987 and tells a funny story about the not-so-tame mountain-lion extra in the film-and on TV, most recently in The Girls on the Bus, playing a newspaper journalist loosely based on David Carr. He directed films including 1998's Practical Magic and The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 Netflix documentary about his aunt Joan Didion. Which brings us back to the real subject of his book: not his career but his messy, tragic, famous, feuding Hollywood-Irish family.

"We were clinically crazy," he says, taking a bite of his tuna niçoise 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. Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Roman Polanski all hit on his girlfriend at the same time ("Like three wolves sniffing a baby lamb," he says). He took Carrie Fisher's virginity and smoked pot with Harrison Ford when Ford was just his Aunt Joan's carpenter.