Book review: Glamor and tragedy intertwine in Griffin Dunne’s memoir ‘The Friday Afternoon Club’

Actor and producer Griffin Dunne grew up in New York and Los Angeles with celebrities everywhere. Her father, Dominick Dunne, a television executive and film producer when Dunne was young, liked to rub shoulders with the rich and famous. Her uncle, journalist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, married writer Joan Didion and they became a Los Angeles power couple.

Growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, he attended seemingly endless parties with Sean Connery, Warren Beatty and many others, even Judy Garland. The celebrity hobnobbing continued when Dunne moved to New York to try to become an actor. On his 27th birthday, Susan Sarandon brought him Timothy Leary’s premium LSD. He lived with his best friend Carrie Fisher until she had success with “Star Wars”.

But tragedy was always brewing beneath the surface of Dunne’s seemingly idyllic life. Even as he began to make a name for himself as a producer and then an actor in films like “An American Werewolf in London” and Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” his mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, his brother struggled with mental illness, and his my father moved to rural Oregon to battle his substance abuse issues.

But the greatest tragedy occurred in 1982, when his sister, Dominique Dunne, herself a promising actress with a role in “Poltergeist,” was murdered on the lawn of her home by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Dunne’s family attended the trial every day, which ended with a light sentence for Dunne’s killer. Griffin’s father later chronicled the trial for Vanity Fair, launching his second career as a writer and novelist.

In a light-hearted style, Dunne chronicles how his family overcame the good times and the bad – despite inter-family squabbles – coming together as a family when it mattered.

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