Family SecretsGriffin grew up in a family whose illustrious life defined them. But beneath their fame were the secrets that shaped his world.
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Now that I knew my father's secret, I kept it from him as he did for me, and.
Joined my parents and their subterfus. The heir of secrecy was the oxygen I breathed, and the lies I told in school were fodder for the petty crimes I'd continue to commit.
That's Gryffin Dunn, actor, producer, director, writer, and author of The Friday Afternoon Club, A family memoir. Griffin's is a story about growing up in a storied storytelling family. His father was the best selling writer Dominic Dunn. His aunt was none other than the great Joan Didion. His uncle was the writer John Gregory Dunn. It was a family that lived at the intersection of Hollywood fame and literary glory. A family who has had his share of shiny stardom, along with a heavy dose of tragedy, ambition, privilege, ascents, and falls from grace. It is also, at its core, a story about secrets and how they shape us. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Miami Book Fair.
Tell me about the landscape of your childhood.
Well, I was born in New York. My father was in live television. He was a stage manager for a show called Howdy Duty, and he did felthy things with his puppet right before on the air too. And he moved his family, my mother and myself later my brother, to Los Angeles, and we lived in a house in Santa Monica and then to Beverly Hills. And my father was from childhood enamored with celebrity and movie stars, and you know, he's very, very social, and so my childhood was very kind of regimented. That was the priority, particularly most parents at that time. The priority was to be not a parent, but to be in society and giving parties. And my father's sort of quest for celebrity. He could never believe as a movie fan that all these celebrities would come to his house and drink his booze. And on certain big parties, my brother, sister and I would would be in our bathrobes and my sister would wear a little Dickens like nightcap and we would come down and bow and my sister would curtsey to the guests and they'd all go ooh, that's so cute and then send us back upstairs, or if it was a big party, we'd be checked into a hotel. So it was like, you know, half being a kid and half being part of the guests, you know, part of the family.
Tell me a little bit about both of your parents, as close as you can to being a kid, you know, how did you perceive each of them when you were at that stage.
In your life.
Well, I have a quote from my father, who was very ended up, a very different man than the child I grew up with. And I remember once saying I was angry at him about something and he said, what can I say, kid, I'm just a work in progress. So he was very much a work in progress when I was growing up. So my impression at that time was my father, who was not terribly athletic, maybe even accused of being a touch feminine, who loved movie stars and wanted everything to be just so, you know, production design wise. As a kid growing up, he was kind of an embarrassment. I kind of wanted my friends, my best friends, their fathers who were movie stars, you know, one was Jack Paletz who almost killed Shane, and the other was a guy named Howard Keel who was played Lumberjacks. And then there was my dad. So a part of me was a little embarrassed about, you know, his masculinity, and it was I was such a kid I felt identified by it. I remember one day I came to school and told everybody my father was arrested for robbing a bank, which everyone believed. And my father, you know, got a call from the principal, you know, going Nick, oh, you're out of jail. You know. My dad said, is that something you'd like me to do? Rob a bank? And I kind of it? Did you know? We later played baseball. We threw a mit around a ball around for a baseball game, a father son baseball game.
Wasn't that a direct outgrowth of absolutely?
You know, he understood that that.
Was a kind of cry for help in some way. And then it became let's throw a baseball around. And he didn't have the right glove, and he used your like, was he a lefty or you're a lefty?
He was a righty. I was a lefty, and so he was. When we were practicing, I had an extra Mi. He would wear it on his other hand and I would throw him the ball and it would just hit the mitt and then pull up to the ground. You know, our family dog was so embarrassed that he took the dog to the ball away from us. But I put him in right field. He was the last one chosen of the fathers, and I put him in right field because it was very rare that a lefty would would be at bat. And my worst nightmare came true, which there was a lefty. It was Jack Palant, by the way, and it went right toward him and he wasn't paying attention. He was like talking to Natalie Wood and eating a hot dog and it went sailing over his head and it was such an embarrassment to me. But you know, he walked back after finally we got up a bat and he said, sorry, kid, I know I fucked that up. And it made me want to just hug him. And I was looking for my friends. I was ready to punch their face if they said anything because he was just so disarming. You know, it just really touched me.
It's such a complicated stew of things, right to on the one hand, see your father and in some way have a sense of embarrassment because you're a kid, and what kids want, kids want to be like other kids. Yeah, and also to know that there's something so real and genuine about him. He was owning who he was and kind of saying, you know, sorry.
This is what she got, it's what you got.
As Griffin grows up, he spends more and more stories the lie about his dad robbing a bank. That was just the beginning.
I became a real fiber, a real kind of liar. And my parents we went to church, a Catholic church in Beverly Hills. We called our Lady of the Cadillacs because of the extravagant cars that were in the parking lot. And one day I just decided, I'm not going to go to church. I don't want to do it. And my dad is going, come on, get in the car, get in the car, and I went, I'm not going. I don't know what possessed me to say I'm not going. And during this time I had a real, i no delusional, relationship with the President John Kennedy, and I used to write him letters and once I heard back from his secretary, Missus Lincoln. Her name was and I used to think about them time. Anyway, I said, I'm not going to church and dang mine help fuck it.
It.
Gets in the car with my brother and sister. And then when they drive back, my brother and sister comes screaming into the living room. We just met the Kennedys. We sat next to the Kennedys and we met them. I thought, Wow, God must be really pissed and how could he do that. I was bereft and I could not I couldn't live with the fact that my brother and sister met the Kennedys and I didn't. So I went to school the next day and I told everybody I met the Kennedy's and uh, you know, it was old stage thing. I would like tap them, mister President, I'm Griffin Dunn. And he turns to jack and goes, oh my god, Jackie, this is a little boy who wrote that letter. And I started to tell this over and over. And I'm in the middle of, you know, starting school the neighborhood playoffs with all my new actor friends, and I'm starting to tell this story and I and he turned to Jackie, you go, and I go, wait, I didn't meet the Kennedys. I'm making all this up. I don't know why I never met. And I'd start to have like a breakdown about it. He goes, Okay, nobody's saying you did. And I called my brother and I said, you know, I almost told this story again. I've been, you know, feasting off your experience and lying that. He goes, what are you talking about? At that time? You guys all met the Kennedys, and I never did. Wait a minute, we didn't meet the Kennedys. Dad told us to say we met the Kennedys. So I've been telling a lie on top of a lie, you know, for eighteen years or.
So, a lie on top of a lie. And what do lies do? Really? They shift both our inward and outward narratives. When we lie, after all, we're keeping a kind of secret. We know we're lying, and even if we're doing it really, really well, even if, as in Griffin's case, we're an excellent actor, still we're aware on some level that we're bringing other people into our own fabrication, and that knowing is a very lonely place to be. Griffin's childhood was lived in a house that pulsed with secrets, and as children. Our lived experience is all we know of the world.
As we were growing up, we had this, you know, we were presenting one image. It was sort of based on the Kennedy family, you know, this winning family of two boys and a little girl and a young, handsome couple and just with great social grace, and that this loving couple was a loving couple was the first sort of secret that you don't feel as a kid, but you know, and you don't know that your father has actually got a sort of see secret life, that he's closeted men who had to keep this a secret, particularly at this time in his standing in the industry and socially, to be you know, exposed or out of the closet would have been a terrible verdict with terrible consequences, and especially growing up as a little boy and knowing that you know that your preference is not heterosexual, and so he had that shame. But you know, you don't know you're thinking feeling shame. There's just something in the air. There's an atmosphere that you kind of grieve, and you know, my mother. The other thing we didn't know was that my mother was terribly ill. She was getting sicker, and sicker, and she eventually was diagnosed with MS as having MS. But she took that pain and also the unhappiness of her marriage, and probably the knowing and keeping the secret of my father to herself, not even talking to him about it. So it makes a a a rather thick atmosphere that you know, you kind of grow up and it results in you know, in my case, led to me lying, telling these FIBs. I know the Kennedys, I got a lion, I have a baby lion at home. I you know, I mean, just crap and just fall out of my mouth.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. When Griffin is eleven, he becomes a self described discipline problem and is sent off to an all boys boarding school in Massachusetts. This was very unusual in his family's milieu to send a kid to boarding school at that age on the other side of the country, and the school was strict, really strict. It was there that Griffin prof not only his lying, but his stealing as well.
I could look at someone in the eye and I could just tell a total untruth and my pulse would never rise. I'd have the pulse of a serial killer. And all of that was I could trace to the untruths in the I don't know the facade that I was growing up with.
And at the same time, there was this moral center, you know, at the core of the serial killer facade.
I did have a sense of morality and empathy. I always had that, even though I didn't know quite about like my dad's secrets, I kind of suspected it, so I always had real sympathy and love for him. I related to that much more than the social gadfly. That was something real. And I then went to another school, all boys, God forbid. I went to school with girls, and I was That's when I found acting. And I was playing at Yago in Othello, and the night before I was to do the performance, my best friend, who was I gravitated toward acting. He gravitated toward drugs, and he came in. He went, man, we don't get high anymore and you're just a joe actor, And he gilded me into taking a hit a pot and teacher comes in. I smell smoke and I go no, and this plume comes out and it was immediate expulsion. And I was taking to the headmaster that very night, to his home and he wants to cut a deal. I mean, he looks at me as like a fundraising tool of the future, and he said, if you rat out John my friend, you can do iago and just say he was the only one smoking. And I don't know. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it, and I got kicked out of school. And that was the last I ever set foot in the school again. You know, it was in the tenth grade. It would have been eleventh, but I was held back because I was dyslexic. So you know, I went and into the adult world feeling very uneducated, which led to another fib that I went to college, which I never did. But I did catch up on my reading somehow. Being dyslexic, I was told, you're kind of a dummy, and we feel sorry for you. But once I got out of school, I didn't have that pressure. So I had to catch up with my own lie and read the books I would have read, and then I became a voracious reader.
Literature is perhaps the only art form that can offer us direct access to inner lives other than our own. We approach books as maps of sorts, guideposts to help us navigate how we live inhabit a world of imaginative empathy and understand how others live. So it makes a lot of sense, especially that those of us who have grown up with family secrets are drawn to reading. Read to feel less alone, to peer into the windows of other people's homes, to see what we recognize and what we don't. Griffin is nearly twenty when he moved to New York to start his career. He's waiting tables, going to acting school and auditioning. Sounds like a fairly typical experience, but there's more to it. His parents are now divorced, and Griffin isn't only getting to know himself during this time, he's getting to know his dad too.
When I first moved, he'd actually gone into self exile. He'd lost all of his money, he'd sold all of his belongings in a garage sale, and all the people that he invited to his home and they all haggled with him over ashtrays and end irons and stuff, and he left quite humiliated. So when I was in New York beginning my career, he had driven up the coast of California into Oregon and lived in a cabin right in front where his car broke down, and he lived there and then really grew character. He was at that point in his life and I was just beginning my life as an actor. But it was also, you know, an incredible I wanted to live in New York. From the moment I first laid Iceland, I knew. I just was counting the days, and I created a narrative of really kind of a magical New York. You know, I wasn't getting acting work, but I worked at Radio City Music Hall, feeding in the popcorn concession are and I had a little paper hat and one of my jobs was to refill the popcorn and the Nativity scene. They had a zoo downstairs, and I would feed the camel's popcorn and wander around to the catacombs and Rockefeller Center. And my roommate at the time was my best friend, Carrie Fisher, who eventually said, I got this part in a movie that's really stupid, and so I got to go to England. And so she's like working and I'm as an actress and I'm working as a waiter and a popcorn concessionaire. So it was kind of great, and she was, you know, in a Broadway show before in the chorus, and I would go around backstage and I knew all the stage hands and see them throwing snow for the you know, the dancing scenes of the debut, Reynolds dancing under a snow. So it was all, you know, it's just the New York I wanted, you.
Know, Griffin, it's striking me that it's so much about what things look like and what things really are. I mean, there are all of these layers to that where I mean, when you were living with Carrie Fisher in the Day's Artists Building and you would go to the restaurant in the Cafe Days Artists Building on West sixty seventh Street in New York City, the very expensive, very expensive restaurant, the may Treads thought that you were, you know, I don't know, a viscount or a lord, and and you know treated you as such and you didn't dissuade him. There's constantly these things that are kind of turning on their head. So tell me, like what was your relationship with your father like during those years, and when did you actually come to know, you know, sort of the truth of his sexuality and which you kind of always knew all along, but didn't know. Again, this being kind of about the secrets we.
Keep from our sh sure well, growing as an individual, you know, and finding out who you are. And I always hope to find that, but never have to go through the journey of finding myself that my father did. I've never seen such public humiliation. And he really he took that pain and that humiliation and his secrets and he learned from it. And he lived in this cabin and he wanted to be a writer and expressed itself in these single space letters, just pages and pages that were confessional and him really getting at the root of who he was and how he got to this point in his life. And he was also it was a workshop for finding his voice, a voice that he would eventually find as a very well known writer. So here I was really getting to know him now. He never talked. We'd never once had a discussion about being closeted or not. I didn't feel the need to have that conversation. I think he always assumed his sons knew. I know my sister knew because when my dad was having this garage sale, the lowest point in his life, my sister, who was starting out as an actress, and immediately started working and was making more money than him by far. Out of the gate. She brought her her friend who was older than her but younger than my father, a guy named Norman, and he helped, you know, so Dad wouldn't have to touch the money and everything. He tagged everything with Dominique and did all the bartering for him. My sister, who was one to really knew how to keep a secret, she saw what was going on, and I never knew anything about it.
On November fourth of nineteen eighty two, Griffin's sister, Dominique, age twenty two, was brutally murdered. She was a beautiful, talented young actress at the start of what was going to be an exceptional life, and she died at the hands literally of her ex boyfriend. This tragedy struck at the very heart of the Dunn family, who attended the media circus of the trial every day. Nick took notes at the trial. His rage and grief funneled into Pristine's sentences and razor sharp observations that later became a piece for Vanity Fair. At the trial, Griffin was struck by a peculiar distance Nick seemed to be keeping from Norman. It would be years before he would find out why.
Norman was a witness at the trial of Dominique's murder for the murderer, and that's the next time I saw him. And then as my father has cancer, he's at an experimental stem cell treatment place in Germany, and I fly there to be with him, and I knock on his door. When I arrived, I'm in the room next door, and the door opens and there is Norman, the guy from the trial, and my dad, who's quite ill, goes, you remember Norman from the trial. Well, they'd been lovers for over forty years. My dad was very weak, he was very pale. He was in and out of sleep, and Norman and I sat ordered a bottle of wine and we talked. We brought me right up to speed from the time they first met, and that Dominique was the only one who knew and she thought she was tickled pink that she set this relationship. But she never told us, She never told her brothers, she never told anyone. So that's how I found out.
It's such an amazing story, and I think, like some of the work of becoming an adult, you know, that is an ongoing work in progress is coming to know our parents as people, you know, people that aren't our parents, people who had lives before us, and you know, during our lives that aren't just about about us.
And it was so striking and so moving.
And you're thinking back to Dominique's trial and your father kept his distance from Norman in this very you know in a way that you noticed and then understanding those years later that he must have been absolutely terrified that their relationship was going to come out on cross examination of Norman. And you describe it as the longest day of his life.
Which I was not aware of. I didn't know, of course at this time, that my father and Norman knew each other and kept in touch. But Norman was the very first person on the when my sister was attacked, when Dominique was attacked the first time by the same man whould eventually killed her. He tried to strangle her. He did strangle her, but she escaped and had scars on her throat and rushed to Norman's house, who had the wherewithal to take pictures which were used in the trial. And then Norman was called as a witness to recount that night and every day in this courtroom was a was criminal to the way our family was treated by the judge, by the defense attorney. We could not get a break. It was relentless and our only day of a victory, a small one that it was. Was Norman's testimony, how his composure he kept under this hostile little defense attorney, never losing his composure. And and at one point he was pointing at the blow ups with the pictures of Dominique's throat in her face, and at one point she's smiling, Well, how do you explain if this is so serious, why is she laughing? And he said, well, Dominique is an actress. And the next day she was playing the part of a battered housewife and she said, well, at least I won't have to go into makeup. It was real victory for us that day. But my father was oddly distant. He didn't come to the lunch we all went every day where we just you know, hugged Norman and thank Norman. And I didn't find out till years later when I started to write the book, and I was I got to the part about, you know, covering the trial, that I went to the Brisco Center in Austin, where my father's papers were kept, and I found out, you know, in his diary, an entry I'd never seen that He was terrified that day that this defense attorney was going to out him as a man who would date have an affair with his daughter's best friend and make that a meal and persperge his character. And that he wrote, if I have done anything that will affect the outcome of this trial in the favor of the killer, I'm going to kill myself. And I never knew. I just never knew, you know, the pain, Wow, horrible that day must have been for him. I never knew that, but it made sense.
Before Nick passes, he has one more reveal for his son. He tells him that he had fought in the war and says it was just not something he ever felt he needed to share or say. Griffin is floored to learn that his dad was indeed braver than Jack Palance and all the actors playing war heroes, that he was a war hero, the real deal.
It just says so much to his character. You know, at that time, he was in the mid nineties, By that time, he was famous. He always wanted to be famous, and here he was famous. And you know, he loved He was a joy to see enjoying his success. And you know, he would recount a cab driver who recognized him. Or one time he was at the chateau and he's taking an elevator. He calls and leaves a voicemail. I took the elevator up with Bono. Bono knows who I am, and it was just a delight. So we would always tell you everything, or I got to get another reward. But one day he saw saving Private Ryan and he calls me up and he says, get over here, get over here. Now, I got to talk to you. And I thought I had to do with the recent cancer diagnosis, and so I rushed over and he said, you ever see Private Ryan. I went, yeah, I did. He goes, you know I fought in the war, and I realized, you know, I'm kind of a history buff. I never really thought about him, even in a uniform, let alone on the way. I just never thought about it. And he goes on to tell me about this night that he and another person in his platoon whose masculinity was also in question, and they were humiliated and mocked in their group. They were called the gold Dust twins, and he tells about a knight in the Arden Forest during the Battle of the Bulch where his platoon retreats under fire and they both see two wounded American soldiers, not even from their platoon, behind enemy lines and counts this incredible night and how scared he was, but how brave he was. And then he takes out this metal and he goes, you know, your old man won the bronze Star. That was another moment. And what it struck me is it's like, that's character. That's the real shit that he kept to himself.
That he didn't need to brag, he didn't need to named, he didn't need because that that fucking happened, and he wanted me to know. And like many veterans of that time, like many veterans of ward, it'll take a certain thing that to loosen it up, this memory, and it was in this case it was private Ryan, but it was also just something that was real that he kept to himself.
There are secrets we keep, the ones that shape us and those who love us. But then there's also a kind of quiet, knowing a moral rectitude, one that bides its time. Can we ever know another human being? No? Matter how close to us a parent, a lover, a child. We can valiantly try, we can let people in, open ourselves to others, but ultimately our inner worlds are like those nested Russian dolls that are nestled one inside the next until we get to the tiniest one, hard as a kernel, a piece of bedrock, truth, a gift. Here's Griffin reading one last passage from his marvelous memoir.
Dad took inventory of the ongoing disrepair in his ex house. The green satin sofa they bought New York as newlyweds was stained with red wine, and the white drapes hid Bosey's dried turs and smelled of cat piss. And the painted flats of the English gardens, left over from the Black and White Ball, still hung in our picture window, their colors long since washed out by the sun. He looked as sad as a bankrupt earl watching tourists parade through this castle. Clinging to small talk, he asked me how school had been, and I considered telling him how I had been flogged and fondled, but didn't have the heart in Dunn family tradition. I kept it pleasant and my Secrets.
Close Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family seat you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder. And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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