The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Lenny Dunne, née Griffin, was the only child of Tom Griffin. Tom was born into a socially prominent family that manufactured wheels for train cars. On the day of his wedding, arranged to a woman from another socially prominent family, he ran away to Nogales, Arizona, where he carved out a new life for himself as a cattle rancher.

Griffin loved his childhood visits to Nogales, where he, his siblings, and a group of cousins would casually cross the border into Mexico on foot to visit a restaurant called La Roca. Once, after a particularly late night at the restaurant, one of Griffin’s cousins invited the musicians at the restaurant back to their place, and the musicians actually accompanied them “back through the turnstiles into the United States, no questions asked” (10).

Lenny’s mother, Beatriz Sandoval, hailed from a family that had been in Mexico for over 200 years but had to flee the country during the Mexican Revolution. They rebuilt their fortune in Nogales as well, where Tom met Beatriz shortly after he arrived in town. Tom pursued her relentlessly despite her engagement to an aristocrat from Mexico City, and Beatriz eventually broke the engagement off to marry Tom.

Lenny attended Miss Porter’s School for girls in Farmington, Connecticut, where she developed a love for theater. After a brief stint at the University of Arizona, she moved to New York, hoping to be on Broadway, but she didn’t find much success with this. However, she loved the city and loved children, so she set her sights on becoming a wife and mother instead.

Griffin’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Richard Dunne, was the first doctor ever to perform open-heart surgery. As patient and skilled a doctor as he was, however, he was equally brutal toward his son Nick, often beating him with a belt and calling him a “sissy.” Nick’s younger brother, John, never believed this to be true, partly contributing to the conflict between the brothers in their later years.

During Nick’s senior year at a boarding school run by Benedictine nuns, he was drafted into the Army. Nick was ridiculed and bullied in the Army for his lack of traditional masculinity. Despite this, he eventually came home a war hero: He was awarded a Bronze Star for helping retrieve two wounded soldiers from behind enemy lines, defying an order to retreat. The grudging respect he received from his father for this meant that Nick never feared him again.

To Griffin’s surprise, especially because his father enjoyed celebrating every accomplishment in his literary career, he only learned about Nick’s involvement in the war and his medal of honor much later. Nick told him about his experience in 2008 after watching Saving Private Ryan. Griffin reflects that his father’s war heroism shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as he showed this kind of courage even in his reporting, braving death threats and blackmail attempts when doing his job.

When Nick was working his first job, stage-managing a children’s show called The Howdy Doody Show, he met Lenny. Nick was smitten with her from the moment he saw her—this was the first time he had met a woman he was able to be himself with. He opened up to her almost entirely, although he kept his sexual attraction to men a secret from her. Nick and Lenny were married just a year later. Soon after getting married, Lenny became pregnant with Griffin, and she “readied their classic-six apartment on the Upper East Side for (his) arrival” (27).

Soon after Griffin’s younger brother, Alex, was born, Nick visited Beverly Hills for work. Starstruck by the city, he convinced Lenny that the family ought to move there. The Dunne family moved into a sprawling, seven-bedroom house, which Nick rented from the silent movie star Harold Lloyd, on the Santa Monica beach.

The Dunnes’ neighbors were Pat and Peter Lawford, President John F. Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law. Griffin was best friends with the Lawfords’ son, Christopher, and both boys worshipped the president and the first lady. Unbeknownst to Griffin, his parents had campaigned for Nixon before Kennedy’s election, even heading a caucus called “Catholics Against Kennedy” (36).

Mrs. Kennedy and Lenny did share some commonalities: Besides five-year-old Griffin thinking them to be the two most beautiful women in the world, both women had also lost two babies each. One of the babies Lenny lost was a girl they had named Dorothy, who had lived for only 24 hours. Griffin was the one who noticed the blood stain on Lenny’s back when she was still pregnant with Dorothy; being the only one around, he accompanied Lenny as she drove herself to the hospital, and he waited there while she was having surgery. Nick would later explain death to his three-year-old son and confide in him that he managed to see Dorothy before she was taken away. He also revealed to his son that “bad things” happen to everyone, even to the president’s wife.

A year after Dorothy died, the Dunnes moved into a house on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills. Not long after, Lenny became pregnant again for the fifth time; this time, however, she returned from the hospital holding a sleeping baby girl: Dominique.

Nick loved Lenny unabashedly and expressed this without reservation. When Griffin was seven, Nick took her along to shop for the perfect birthday gift for Lenny. They settled on a large sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds, which Griffin spotted, and together, they handed Lenny the wrapped box on her birthday. Lenny dawdled over opening it until an impatient Griffin finally yelled out the contents of the box and how he was the one to pick it. It was only later that Griffin realized that his mother’s reluctance to open the gift was because she didn’t want to “pretend to be grateful for a gift from a man she was thinking of leaving” (52). Even when she opened the box, she looked only at Griffin and thanked him for the beautiful gift.

Growing up, Griffin had a number of idols, with President Kennedy topping the list. One Sunday morning, Griffin didn’t feel like going to church for Sunday Mass and flat out refused to leave with the family; frustrated, Nick finally acquiesced and let Griffin stay home. However, upon their return and to Griffin’s agony, Alex and Dominique excitedly announced that the Kennedys were at church that day and that the Dunnes had sat right behind them.

Griffin, who habitually told “whopping lies” at school, began to tell his schoolmates the story of how he and his family had met the Kennedys at church. When Griffin was in third grade, President Kennedy was assassinated, and it almost felt like a personal loss. However, Griffin continued telling the false story of meeting the president for years later, until he finally confessed the truth to a group of fellow students at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York when he was 19 years old. Later that evening, Griffin called Alex and came clean to him, too, about his years of lying. He then discovered that the rest of the Dunnes had never met the Kennedys, either—Nick asked Alex and Dominique to pretend they did because he was angry about Griffin refusing to go to church.

John introduced his fiancée, Joan Didion, to his brother’s family in spring 1963, when they both moved out to California from New York. By this time, Nick and Lenny were deeply immersed in Hollywood social circles, and John and Joan were brought along to every party that Griffin’s parents were invited to. This allowed John access to producer Richard Zanuck and 20th Century Fox studios, a relationship that led him to write The Studio, “a scathing and hilarious takedown of 20th Century Fox in 1968, their worst financial year” (65). The success of the book meant that John was given numerous screen-writing assignments from Zanuck over the years.

As a boy, Griffin worshipped John and secretly wished that his father, Nick, was more like his seemingly tougher, hot-headed younger brother. To make his father seem tougher, he even lied to his friends and said that Nick had recently been arrested for robbing a bank. The story got around the school and back to Nick through the principal, who was shocked at his son’s “whopper.” However, sensing the lack of pride from his son, Nick attended the father-son baseball game at Griffin’s school shortly after. Despite Nick’s poor showing at the game, Griffin walked alongside his father after, not the least bit embarrassed. He reflects, “It took me many years to understand what it meant to be a man, and by then I realized I’d been raised by one all along” (70-71).

Alex was an exceptionally intelligent and sensitive boy from a young age, and Griffin and Dominique were both in awe of this. However, Nick seemed perpetually enraged by the eccentricities that endeared Alex to his siblings. After one evening at a restaurant, when Nick yelled at Alex to stop talking because the latter was recounting the story of Lord of the Flies at the table, Griffin decided to confront his father. When asked why he treated Alex like he didn’t like him, a shame-faced Nick admitted that it was because Alex reminded him of himself. Griffin believes that Nick was reminded of his own sensitivity as a young boy, which earned him beatings with his father’s belt.