Review | How Griffin Dunne’s fairy-tale upbringing unraveled (2024)

Griffin Dunne knows how to tell a story. He’s an autodidact and raconteur who from an early age regaled family and friends — Carrie Fisher among them — with gossip and worldly takes on culture. Here he uses his authorial gifts — a filmmaker’s eye, photographic memory and way with a quip — to great effect, exploring how the seemingly charmed lives of the Dunnes unraveled.

Lenny was a charismatic heiress from Arizona by way of Miss Porter’s School for girls in Connecticut. She was drawn to Dominick’s sophistication, a departure from the men she encountered in Nogales, where her father ran a cattle ranch. In Manhattan, where Dominick worked as a stage manager for television, the couple hobnobbed with the entertainment elite. After an introduction from Frank Sinatra, Humphrey Bogart invited Dominick to L.A. to discuss a job opportunity. Upon his arrival, Dominick attended a party where he met Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner, and watched Sinatra sing a duet with Judy Garland. Dominick was enamored and accepted Bogie’s offer. The Dunnes moved to California with their sons, Griffin and Alex. A few years later, Dominique was born.

In 1960s and ’70s Beverly Hills, the Dunnes mingled with Tinseltown’s A-list. Griffin recalls getting fished out of the family pool by his idol, Sean Connery, who’d noticed the 8-year-old struggling in the deep end. “I saw the reflections of people smoking and drinking from below … oblivious to my efforts to reach the surface,” he writes. Suddenly “a hand lifted me by the butt and placed me at the pool’s edge.” The real-life James Bond admonished: “A wee bit early for the deep end, sonny.”

The outward glitter, though, disguised darker undercurrents. Dominick was desperate to impress and competitive with his brother, John Gregory Dunne. John and his wife, Joan Didion, were newly minted literary superstars. The tension between the siblings thickened over time. To onlookers, Lenny and Dominick seemed devoted to one another, but Dominick’s heavy drinking and affairs with men eroded their bond.

By Griffin’s account, he was a precocious prankster who early found that “if you dare to be sneaky enough, you will get away with anything.” Still, his boyish misdeeds landed him in enough trouble to get him kicked out of two boarding schools; he never graduated from high school.

Griffin confesses to wishing, as a young boy, that his father was more like his more macho uncle. He writes, “My fragile identity at that time was tied to a father who couldn’t throw to third and gave me two French poodles named after famous hom*osexuals.” He recounts a father-son baseball game Dominick volunteered for, to his son’s chagrin. On game day, Dominick was assigned right field, where it was thought he would do the least harm. But in the midst of play, Natalie Wood walked over “to keep him company.” The two bantered, unaware that Jack Palance was at bat. Palance smashed the ball; all watched as it sailed over Dominick’s head. When Dominick finally reached it after several boggled attempts, he threw it in Wood’s direction.

On the page — and one imagines, in life — Griffin skillfully deploys humor to soften life’s blows. And there were many blows to deflect. In the mid-1960s, when Griffin was 11, his parents divorced. In 1973, Lenny was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which eventually confined her to a wheelchair. Griffin’s brother, Alex, experienced crippling mental illness, which resulted in a suicide attempt and periodic institutionalization. Dominick’s successful run as a TV executive came to a crashing halt when, in a drunken rant, he publicly insulted the legendary talent agent Sue Mengers and was subsequently blackballed. And then, in 1982, just after Griffin finally landed a dream role as the star of “An American Werewolf in London,” his beloved sister, Dominique, herself on the cusp of fame, was killed.

At that point, Dominick was sober and determined to reinvent himself as a writer. At work on what would become the best-selling novel “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” he befriended editor Tina Brown, who pressed him to cover his daughter’s murder trial for Vanity Fair. Griffin was ambivalent about his father’s assignment, writing that “I was happy for my father. He had touched bottom and I wanted him to come back as the person he felt he truly was. … But his enthusiasm and excitement also unnerved me. He seemed all too ready and willing to use Dominique’s trial as a springboard for his own midlife metamorphosis.”

The Dunne family’s exploits and tragedies often split them apart, but after the murder trial, they were more closely bonded than ever, which Griffin recounts wistfully, still contemplating the fairy-tale aspects of his childhood amid the fraught. Griffin, the accomplished actor, producer and director, does occasionally take center stage. But in this account, aptly subtitled “A Family Memoir,” Griffin mainly occupies the role of son and brother — a bit player in his own story — allowing his larger-than-life parents and the life they constructed to take the lead. Now 69, a husband and father with a long string of professional achievements to his credit, Griffin can afford to let the light shine on his storied family.

His sister’s memory still haunts and comforts him. “The Friday Afternoon Club” ends with the birth of Griffin’s daughter, Hannah, in 1990. As he sat with his newborn in a hospital room, he writes, “a presence had joined us, and I knew at once it was Dominique. … ‘Oh, Dominique,’ I whispered, ‘look what I have. Isn’t she beautiful?’”

Leigh Haber is an independent editor, writer and publishing strategist who for 10 years ran Oprah’s Book Club.

A Family Memoir

By Griffin Dunne

Penguin Press. 400 pp. $30