The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, child abuse, pregnancy loss, and child death.

In the early morning of Halloween 1982, Ellen “Lenny” Griffin Dunne received a visit from Detective Harold Johnston from the West Hollywood Homicide Division: Her daughter, Dominique Dunne, had been strangled by a man named John Sweeney. Shaken but still “unfailingly polite,” Lenny immediately called the father of her children, Dominick “Nick” Dunne, for help, who in turn called his oldest son, 27-year-old Griffin Dunne. Griffin, who had barely any sleep and was coming off a cocaine high, was immediately shaken awake.

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).