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Book excerpt: “The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir” by Griffin Dunne
Penguin Press
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In Griffin Dunne’s new memoir, “The Friday Afternoon Club” (to be published June 11 by Penguin Press), the actor-producer-director who grew up in Hollywood in a literary family writes of a life of bold-faced celebrity, tragedy, and well-told stories.
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Kelefa Sanneh’s interview with Griffin Dunne on “CBS Sunday Morning” June 9!
“The Friday Afternoon Club” by Griffin Dunne
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The morning I was born, Dad was a wreck. Having gotten Mom safely to Doctors Hospital, he was told that she required an emergency C-section, and to sit in the waiting room until he was called. Five hours later, he’d gone through a pack of Luckies, and after making a nuisance of himself to every nurse who passed, he went to buy more smokes at a deli across the street. Walking back to the lobby, he saw the surgeon who was to perform the C-section about to step into a cab. He ran to him and practically grabbed the doctor by the lapels.
“What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“My wife! Is she all right?”
“Which one is your wife?”
“Lenny Dunne, for God’s sake!”
“Oh, Mr. Dunne, my apologies, didn’t anyone tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“We did the C-section hours ago. She’s fine. Baby’s fine. Someone should have told you, but it’s been a crazy day. I’ve done three since.”
More relieved than pissed, Dad let the man get in his taxi. Before it pulled away from the curb, the doctor yelled out the window, “Oh, and don’t worry about the foot!”
On the long walk back to the maternity ward, Dad pictured me growing up in a wheelchair or with a prosthetic leg, but while my right foot did curl inward when I was a newborn, it turned itself out by the time I could walk.
From the moment I was born, my father told me I was always trying to get somewhere else. My first word was taxi. I had a toy suitcase that I’d carry around the living room and raise my hand to hail a cab, yelling, “Taxi, taxi,” as if late for an important meeting. Elizabeth Montgomery, who later played Samantha in Bewitched, was my first babysitter. She was a struggling actress with a small part in Late Love when she met my mother, and though Elizabeth was her employee, my mother and she became close friends. Elizabeth once told her, while changing my diapers, that I had a bigger dick than her husband. That marriage was, needless to say, short-lived.
There is a kinescope from an early episode of the Today show in which Arlene Francis, also from the cast of Late Love, interviews my mother, billed as the “typical New York housewife,” while a camera follows her on a routine day. (The daughter of a rancher who went to Miss Porter’s was hardly a relatable housewife, but somehow Dad got her the gig through his connections at NBC.) There wasn’t much content in the early days of morning talk shows, so this segment is a mundane, fifteen-minute blow-by-blow of the life of a young family. It begins with Dad heading to work like a character out of a John Cheever story, while Mom does household chores, runs errands, and takes me to Central Park to feed the ducks. At one point in the clip, she enters a shoe store on Lexington Avenue and leaves me in my pram on the sidewalk, as if we lived in Grover’s Corners.
When she tries to lay me down in my crib at the end of the day, I nuzzle into her neck, not wanting her to leave. Anyone tuning in that morning would have seen a little boy who loved his mother more than anything in the world. When the camera cuts back to Mom in the studio, having just watched the segment she narrated, she looks lost in the moment, as if still savoring my affection. Arlene Francis ends the interview by saying to her viewers, “We wish Lenny, Nick, and Griffin all the luck in the world as they begin their bright future.”
As it turned out, we were going to need it.
An excerpt from “The Friday Afternoon Club,” published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Griffin Dunne.
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“The Friday Afternoon Club” by Griffin Dunne
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Sen. Thom Tillis says “the scope” of Helene damage in North Carolina “is more like Katrina”
As recovery missions and repairs continue in North Carolina more than a week after Hurricane Helene carved a path of devastation through the western part of the state, the state’s Republican Sen. Thom Tillis called for more resources to bolster the relief effort and likened the damage to Hurricane Katrina’s mark on Louisiana in 2005.
“This is unlike anything that we’ve seen in this state,” Tillis told CBS News’ Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday morning. “We need increased attention. We need to continue to increase the surge of federal resources.”
Hurricane Helene ripped through the Southeast U.S. after making landfall in Florida on Sept. 26 as a powerful Category 4 storm. Helene brought heavy rain and catastrophic flooding to communities across multiple states, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, with North Carolina bearing the brunt of the destruction. Officials previously said hundreds of roads in western North Carolina were washed out and inaccessible after the storm, hampering rescue operations, and several highways were blocked by mudslides.
Tillis said Sunday that most roads in the region likely remained closed due to flooding and debris. Water, electricity and other essential services still have not been fully restored.
“The scope of this storm is more like Katrina,” he said. “It may look like a flood to the outside observer, but again, this is a landmass roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts, with damage distributed throughout. We have to get maximum resources on the ground immediately to finish rescue operations.”
Hurricane Katrina left more than 1,000 people dead after it slammed into Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in August 2005, flooding neighborhoods and destroying infrastructure in and around New Orleans as well as in parts of the surrounding region. It was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. in the last 50 years, and the costliest storm on record.
The death toll from Hurricane Helene is at least 229, CBS News has confirmed, with at least 116 of those deaths reported in North Carolina alone. Officials have said they expect the death toll to continue to rise as recovery efforts were ongoing, and a spokesperson for the police department in Asheville told CBS News Friday their officers were “actively working 75 cases of missing persons.”
On Saturday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released $100 million in emergency funds for North Carolina to rebuild the roads and bridges damaged by the hurricane.
“We are providing this initial round of funding so there’s no delay getting roads repaired and reopened, and re-establishing critical routes,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “The Biden-Harris administration will be with North Carolina every step of the way, and today’s emergency funding to help get transportation networks back up and running safely will be followed by additional federal resources.”
President Biden previously announced that the federal government would cover “100%” of costs for debris removal and emergency protective measures in North Carolina for six months.
With North Carolina leaders working with a number of relief agencies to deal with the aftermath of the storm, Tillis urged federal officials to ramp up the resources being funneled into the state’s hardest-hit areas. The senator also addressed a surge in conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Biden Administration’s disaster response, which have been fueled by Republican political figures like former President Donald Trump.
Trump falsely claimed that Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent in the November presidential election, were diverting funds from Federal Emergency Management Agency that would support the relief effort in North Carolina toward initiatives for immigrants. He also said baselessly that the administration and North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, were withholding funds because many communities that were hit hardest are predominantly Republican. Elon Musk has shared false claims about FEMA, too.
“Many of these observations are not even from people on the ground,” Tillis said of those claims. “I believe that we have to stay focused on rescue operations, recovery operations, clearing operations, and we don’t need any of these distractions on the ground. It’s at the expense of the hard-working first responders and people that are just trying to recover their lives.”
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