The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Griffin struggled academically in school and was diagnosed with dyslexia in sixth grade. His poor performance in school was blamed on his dyslexia and the effects of his parents’ divorce, though Griffin was secretly unaffected by the latter. Nevertheless, he was sent away to Fay School for Boys in Southborough, Massachusetts, an extremely strict boarding school. In his first week there, Griffin was ordered to kneel on the floor for 30 minutes for crying after lights out, despite another boy having been the true culprit.

Griffin had heard of incidents of sexual abuse enacted by older students upon the younger boys, but the only run-in of this kind that he experienced was with a teacher. Mr. Silver, then a man in his thirties, caught Griffin feeding licorice to his dog. Silver summoned Griffin to his rooms, berated him, and touched Griffin’s penis over his clothes. When Silver asked Griffin if he enjoyed the touch, Griffin answered that he did not, and he was summarily dismissed from Silver’s room.

Griffin’s second year at Fay, when he turned 12 years old, saw him entering puberty. Not only did he discover masturbation, but he also began to fantasize about falling in love. During one of his trips home, Griffin made a new friend, Charlie, whose mother was also a divorcée like Lenny. Unlike Lenny, Charlie’s mother went on dates quite frequently, leaving Charlie and Griffin, along with Charlie’s 16-year-old sister, Debbie, plenty of unsupervised time during sleepovers at Charlie’s.

Griffin was attracted to Debbie, who, along with her friend Naomi, thought it was “adorable” that Griffin had never had sex and enjoyed graphically describing sexual acts to excite him. One day, when Charlie and Naomi were at school, Griffin was alone at home with a cranky Debbie, who had recently broken her leg. Bored and frustrated, Debbie offered to perform fellatio on Griffin. This never happened, however, as Griffin had accidentally left a lit cigarette on his bed and started a fire. The fire department needed to be called, and Debbie, whom Griffin had to painfully drag downstairs and out, passionately declared that she hated him.

Naomi, on the other hand, adored Griffin and would talk to him for hours on the phone even when he was back at his own place. The day before Griffin returned to Fay, Naomi arrived unexpectedly, announcing that she wanted to “deflower” Griffin. The two had sex multiple times with Naomi’s guidance, and they continued to correspond by letter even when Griffin was back at school for the spring term. However, by the time he returned in the summer, Naomi had moved on to a much older boyfriend, and he never saw her again.

Griffin met John Derby for the first time when they were both picked for the starting lineup of their peewee football team; they would eventually become best friends. John’s father had died by suicide two years prior, and his mother later married Henry, a man with an alcohol addiction. John’s mother was Henry’s eighth wife, and Henry sent John off to boarding school soon after the wedding.

Griffin witnessed Henry’s violent, intoxicated outbursts firsthand when he went over to John’s to spend a weekend there. Following an altercation with Henry, a hysterical John confided in Griffin that he hated Henry and asked for Griffin’s help to kill him. Griffin agreed, believing that John was only half serious. The boys hatched a plan in which they would call Henry to their room and provoke him; while he was distracted, John would club him over the head with a poker. When the time came, John lost his nerve; however, Henry realized what his stepson had been about to do, and he speedily left their room without a word.

Two years later, John’s mother died of cancer, and John’s older brother began taking him in for holiday breaks. John and Griffin made a pact that once they left Fay, they would ensure that they went to the same high school together.

When Griffin came home the summer after his last year at Fay, he discovered that Lenny had begun drinking with a new group of men, all of whom were gay and addicted to alcohol. Griffin despised these men because of their subtle condescension toward Lenny. One evening, Griffin witnessed them laughing at her for accidentally burning her hair with a cigarette, and he turned them out of the house for good. From then on, he became Lenny’s drinking partner, and she confided in him all the secrets of her marriage to Nick. This is how Griffin definitively learned about his father’s sexuality and affairs with men. Honored to have been trusted with Lenny’s confidence, Griffin kept the secret of his knowledge even from his father.

After Nick and Lenny divorced and stopped entertaining, John and Joan soon became the new “it” couple in Hollywood, hosting numerous parties. Joan invited Lenny and Griffin to one where Janis Joplin would be in attendance, aware of Griffin’s love of the singer. Griffin begged his mother to pretend that they weren’t attending the party together, and Lenny acquiesced on the condition that Griffin leave without complaint the moment Lenny signaled to him. Unfortunately, Griffin never got to meet Joplin since she was due to arrive much later at the party and Lenny shepherded Griffin home at a reasonable hour.

Once when they were 14, Charlie convinced Griffin to borrow Lenny’s car for a joyride in the middle of the night. In the middle of their nighttime drive, they passed by several police cars parked around Benedict Canyon: The news of Sharon Tate’s murder had broken just earlier that afternoon.

Shaken and unsettled, the boys returned the car to Lenny’s and went for a walk to an all-night coffee shop that they often frequented, located at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Some of the regulars overheard the boys talking about Tate, and the boys relayed the story of their nighttime drive to their rapt audience. However, a disturbed Griffin left out one true detail: He had actually known one of the men murdered in that house—Jay Sebring, who used to cut Nick’s hair.

Until they were old enough to drive, Charlie and Griffin would frequent the coffee shop and make their way to the hotel lobby, trying unsuccessfully to pick up dates. The coffee shop was eventually shut down and turned into a bookshop, and after Griffin got his driver’s license, he never had a reason to visit the hotel again.

When Alex was 14, he announced to the family one evening that he was bringing home a girl named Carrie Fisher, whom he was in love with. Alex warned Griffin not to flirt with her, and Griffin promised his brother that he wouldn’t. Although he kept his promise, Griffin discovered that he had a natural rapport with Fisher, and the two struck up an instant connection. They soon became best friends, which, in one way, killed Alex’s chances with Fisher, as it became obvious that she would be in the Dunnes’ lives for a long time.

When Fisher was a sophomore at Beverly Hills High, Griffin was at Fountain Valley in Colorado Springs, gaining a reputation as an actor after a standout performance as Jerry in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story. The next semester, he was cast as Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, and faculty and students alike were mesmerized by his showings at rehearsals. However, the night before opening, John Derby convinced him to smoke a joint together. The boys got caught, and they were both expelled, as Griffin refused to take the headmaster’s offer and say that John was the only one smoking.

After his expulsion, Griffin cashed in his ticket back to Los Angeles and decided to hitchhike home instead. It was guilt, rather than loyalty, that saw him agree to smoke with John and then not rat him out—he and John had been drifting apart, and Griffin had known that they would end up going their separate ways after school. Once back in Los Angeles, he announced to Lenny that he wanted to go to New York and become an actor, and she promptly agreed to his plan.

Griffin’s plans were inadvertently put on hold for a year, however; he had struck up a relationship with a girl named Tanya, who was a senior at Fisher’s high school. Fisher had introduced the two earlier and had even flown Griffin out to LA and put him up at a hotel one weekend so that he and Tanya could sleep together. Once Griffin returned home following his expulsion, the two became an official couple and impulsively got married in Tijuana one Saturday. Lenny and Nick were angry and hurt at their son’s decision, but while Lenny always hated Tanya, Nick eventually warmed up to her. Griffin and Tanya ended up divorcing within six months.

One day, while still married, Tanya and Griffin dropped in on Nick unannounced and found him in an embrace with a man. Nick pretended that Torey, the young man in question, was his valet, despite their relationship having become clear to everyone present. Tanya later teasingly suggested to Griffin in private that perhaps he was attracted to men, too. This question had already crossed Griffin’s mind, and on another occasion, when both Nick and Tanya were out of town, he visited Torey alone. The two men did LSD together before Torey invited Griffin to sleep with him, but after trying for a few futile minutes, Griffin realized that he wasn’t sexually attracted to men after all.

In fall 1974, as Griffin was preparing to finally move to New York after being accepted into the Neighborhood Playhouse, Lenny announced to her children that she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She had found out a year ago, but her symptoms were beginning to worsen. A year later, Lenny was in a wheelchair and had to move out of the two-story house on Walden into a smaller version on Crescent Drive. Dominique moved with her into a guest cottage in the back, and she joined an acting class. She started a tradition, called “the Friday Afternoon Club” (168), where she would host parties in the backyard every Friday for her friends from acting class and other friends. George Clooney, Miguel Ferrer, and Tim Hutton were among the members of the “FAC.” Dominique would always wheel Lenny out in her wheelchair to join the party for a bit, and “soon life at the little house took on the easygoing vibe of its predecessor on Walden, where friends came and went” (168).