Griffin Dunne's Friday Afternoon Club reviews a Hollywood insider with an outside eye | Autobiography and memoir

For those who know the Hollywood world of the 1980s and its various satellites less well than me or am I talking about parasites? it may be helpful to begin this review with a brief biography of the book's author. Griffin Dunne: does this name mean anything to you? It probably should be, but let me elaborate anyway. Dunne is an actor (An American werewolf in London) and a producer (Baby it's you, After hours). His father was Dominick Dunne, Vanity FairHe was Tina Brown's star reporter, and his mother was Ellen Lenny Griffin, a close heiress to Natalie Wood. Her uncle was John Gregory Dunne, another writer, who in turn was the husband of Joan Didion, the famous author of non-fiction classics such as The White Album And Avachi to Bethlehem. Elizabeth Montgomery of Delighted was his babysitter. Truman Capote was a guest at his parents' 10th wedding anniversary party. Carrie Fisher was her best friend.

But Friday afternoon club, a memoir of Dunne's life until, at age 34, he had his first (and only) child, isn't just another celebrity Rolodex. On the one hand, there is the way it is written, so honest, funny and intelligent. Dunne manages everything and everyone with the scabrous aplomb of the foreigner, which he certainly is not; his tone is a bit Holden Caulfield (The Rye Catcher), and a little Benjamin Braddock (The graduation), with a few frozen chips thrown in, now picture me, shaking in my hand a delicious appetizer that could have come straight from one of his late Aunt Joan's notebooks (we'll get to those frozen chips later). What I mean is that on the page he's both lovable and infuriating: while he's a bit of a Tigger and gets bored easily, he's also no one's fool. Always the first to laugh at himself, he totally lacks self-pity.

What makes this all the more remarkable is the fact that at the heart of his book is almost unimaginable pain and suffering. With great audacity, Dunne gives the reader a detailed and very intimate account of the circumstances of the death, in 1982, of his actress sister Dominique, aged 22, strangled by her violent ex-boyfriend, John Sweeney, without ever allow it. this to derail the picaresque adventures he describes elsewhere. This combination should be as awkward as hell, but somehow it never is, perhaps because Dunne has known since he was a young man (he's 69 now ) that even when people are in the dark, they still tend to make jokes. and sometimes cry with laughter and he won't hesitate to do it. There is undoubtedly a reader who will find it strange and disconcerting that during the course of Sweeney's trial, Dunne spends the hours he is not in the courtroom stubbornly making a film and almost gleefully bumbling his way through through a sheet of LSD prepared especially for him by Timothy Leary. (a gift from the always thoughtful Fisher). But most will find it both invigorating and incredibly human. I know I did it. What a guy, I kept thinking as I devoured his book. And: what would his publicist think if I asked him to take him to lunch the next time he came to London?

Dunne seems to love lunch, in the same way he loves almost everything: if character is destiny, his nature is generous and grateful. But that doesn't mean he isn't also lucid. His account of Dominick Dunnes's fall from grace in Hollywood, where he first worked as a producer, is simple to the point of vivacity, and all the more affectionate (this lineage, which saw him sell all his possessions and live in a cabin in Oregon, was born from alcoholism and, perhaps, his secret gay life); He also doesn't hide how uncomfortable he is that the second act of his father, the kind of journalist who never left TV talk shows, happened only because he covered Sweeney's trial for several years. Vanity Fair. Fame, as he makes clear, is corrosive: it changes friendships; it feeds narcissism. His pen portraits of Sean Connery (who once saved him from drowning) to Tennessee Williams (who groped him at a dinner party) are as skillful on this point as his accounts of his own disasters; audience scrapes and hilarious bad decisions that follow him like a cloud of dust does Pig-Pen in Peanuts (yes, he really starred in a movie about a man whose penis talks to him).

Sweeney was only convicted of voluntary manslaughter, for which he served only three and a half years in prison, but his hatred eventually died down; that, or he lets go somehow. Elsewhere, however, forgiveness becomes a theme. I hadn't realized that Dominick Dunne was on such bad terms with his brother, an enmity that only grew when John chose to take Joan and their daughter, Quintana, to Paris for the duration of Sweeney's trial , on the grounds that they did not want Quintana to be called as a witness. witnessing a decision that puts them in a whole new light, I think (especially Joan, who was so praised in the last years of her life for her stoicism after the deaths of John and Quintana, that she started to take on the air of a medieval saint). There's something horribly freezing here. Later, John makes the situation worse by writing in the New Yorker of his inexplicable contempt for those who attend the trials of those accused of murdering their loved ones and yet, somehow, Dunne finds a way to rise above his own, without ever really falling out with his aunt and her uncle himself.

Maybe, I realize now, that's why his 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Center will not hold, is so good: while honoring its subject, a shiver arises from it, like from a lake in winter. Certainly, this is what makes Friday afternoon club (named after the meetings that Dominique organized in his pool house in Los Angeles) much more than the book you feared. It explains nothing except its own ridicule. But he doesn't need it. The reader draws their own conclusions: feasting on the glamour, laughing at the absurdity, shivering as the icebergs float silently before us.

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