My uncle John brought his fiancée to meet my parents in the spring of 1963. John met Joan Didion in New York when he was working at Time magazine and she at Vogue. When Joan’s love for Manhattan had run its course—achingly described in her essay “Goodbye to All That”—John suggested they quit their jobs and move to Los Angeles. She needed no convincing.
He introduced her to my mother over the phone with hopes she might look at a house they’d found for rent in the want ads. The two women had only the tone of their voices to go on, but each recognized that the person on the other end of the line would be a significant part of their lives. Joan felt more at ease with the daughter of a rancher than with the Irish Catholics on John’s side, most of whom she felt disapproved of her. Mom was only too happy to look at the house for them, which was all the way in Palos Verdes, an hour’s drive from Beverly Hills. When she called Joan back with a positive review, John rented it sight unseen.
My parents invited John and Joan to lunch soon after they settled in Palos Verdes. Now that Mom was to meet her future sister-in-law in person, she was surprisingly nervous, puffing away on low-tar cigarettes and fussing over the table setting she’d arranged by the pool. My mother was a voracious reader, had followed Joan’s articles in Vogue and had consumed Run River, her debut novel, in one sitting. Joan was a “serious writer,” Dad explained to his children, “not like the hacks” he’d hired to write at Four Star. A novelist living in Los Angeles was then a novelty, and my parents showed more attention to the details of this lunch than they ever had entertaining Hedda Hopper or an out-of-town viscount. Dad made Alex and me change outfits several times before deciding we’d look most impressive in matching red swim trunks, each with a gold buckle.
When John and his fiancée arrived, I was in the pool and Dad ordered me out as if he’d seen a shark. Mom and Joan hugged on sight, relieved their first impressions of each other formed over the phone would prove correct. Dominique, Alex, and I fell into position according to size, like we were the Trapp family about to meet our new nanny. Dominique curtsied before Joan, who giggled, thinking it was a joke, which it was not. Dad always made Alex and me bow when meeting adults, but our wet swim trunks took the pomp out of that circumstance, so we just solemnly shook her hand.
“How do you do,” I said, as I’d been trained. Joan looked at me through sunglasses and smiled warmly. I was struck by how she was not much taller than me and just as skinny. I was too young to have a girlfriend, but I remember thinking, should I ever go steady, I’d want to be with someone who looked just like Joan.
“Umm, Griffin,” said John, “I think you got a little something sticking out down there.” From a broken seam in my trunks, a lone testicle had parted from its twin, poking out like a lonely grape. John’s and Dad’s laughter roared in my ears, and my face flushed hot with shame. The one way to rein in my embarrassment was to remain focused on Joan, the only person not finding me hilarious. She looked more embarrassed for the cackling Dunnes, telepathically conveying to me, I’m not with those guys.
Within the decade, Joan would be famous for taking positions contrary to popular opinion, accepting the vitriol that followed, and not straying from an inner strength she called “character.”
The house my mother had found for them was on a bluff called Portuguese Bend that looked over the Pacific. Not long after our lunch by the pool, I saw the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at the Cinerama Dome. To this day I have never laughed so uncontrollably in a movie theater. It opens with Jimmy Durante, slowly dying from a car accident, telling five motorists who stopped to help that he buried “three hundred fifty G’s under da big W.”
“The what?” the motorists ask, hoping to get more information.
“Undah da big dubuya,” he says in his last gasp of breath. He then kicks the bucket, and I mean an actual bucket that happened to be at his feet, sending it down a canyon, and me into a fit of hysterics. The five motorists then embark on a mad, mad road trip to find the money buried under the W. For weeks I would annoy anyone in earshot with my impression of Durante by croaking, “Undah da big dubuya.”
The first time I went to John and Joan’s house I nearly kicked the bucket when I saw, in their backyard, four slanted palm trees in the shape of a W. The same W where Jimmy Durante told the five lunatics he’d buried the cash.
“Look! It’s the big W, I tell ya,” I screamed in my best Jonathan Winters. “It’s the big W!”
“What are you going on about?” asked John.
“Those are the palm trees from the movie It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World!”
“Yeah, I heard they shot some movie here before we arrived.”
“Some movie? Some movie? Only the funniest movie on the face of the earth!”
“All right, calm down,” said John, far more amused than annoyed. My passion for movies tickled him, and we often compared notes on what we’d last seen.
“A Shot in the Dark. Hilarious,” I’d once told him.
“The Pink Panther, I heard it’s a piece of shit.”
“You heard wrong. I also saw Goldfinger last week. Amazing. Did you know the girl they painted gold died?”
“I’m more of a Dr. No man.”
“You’re crazy! This Bond is much better. You know Sean Connery saved my life?”
“You’ve brought that up more than once. You’re a worse name-dropper than your father.”
We had established early on a sort of Irish Rat Pack shtick, where ribbing and gossip was our currency. The delight we took in each other’s company would in time torment my father, but in those early years, Dad was proud to see his smart-ass son keep pace with his little brother.
By the midsixties, my parents were well immersed in the social frenzy of Hollywood, and for a time were the “it” couple, invited to every party and hosting their own, big and small, about twice a week. Dad compared himself and Lenny with Gerald and Sara Murphy, socialites who entertained the great artists of the Lost Generation on the French Riviera, and on whom Fitzgerald based Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night. Their parties were lively affairs with up-and-coming stars like Warren Beatty and Dennis Hopper, and old dependables like Joseph Cotten and David Niven. Dad always made sure to invite John and his serious writer wife, proud to introduce them around. John was then known as “Nick’s brother,” though by the end of the sixties, Dad would be known as “Joan Didion’s brother-in-law.”
John’s ambitions as a journalist were as cunning as my father’s for social climbing. His first book was called Delano, which followed Cesar Chavez through the Central Valley of California, organizing exploited grape pickers to strike. (The only time I ever saw John cross with my mother was when she set out a bowl of grapes from Safeway that had been picked by scabs.) Delano was serious reportage and well reviewed, but sold few copies. The subject that fascinated him next was not the social life of Hollywood, like his brother, but the business of Hollywood. He wanted to write about the people who decided what movies got made and, someday, write movies for them as well.
At one of Dad’s parties, John met Richard Zanuck, president of 20th Century Fox. John earned the studio head’s trust to write the first behind-the-scenes account of what goes on in a dream factory. He hung out on the set of the disastrous Doctor Dolittle, sat in on story meetings for future disasters, and pinpointed, in brutal detail, a time when studio executives had no idea what their young audience wanted to see.
The result was The Studio, a scathing and hilarious takedown of 20th Century Fox in 1968, their worst financial year. Zanuck not only didn’t take offense at the book but gave John his first screen-writing assignment. John would later write several more screenplays for Zanuck, who, by then, no longer took my father’s calls.
When I was a boy, I feared I might never become a man. Tonka toys bored me, and I didn’t collect baseball cards or even follow sports. I was the first in my third-grade class to like girls, and they liked me, but I worried my disarming personality meant that I might be made of more chick than dude. Calling people “sissies” and “fairies” was what rowdy boys did to anyone who wouldn’t double dare or agree that girls were stupid. I could throw those terms around with the best of them, but, deep down, I felt like the fearful kid who cuts the cheese in class and deflects his humiliation by blaming others.
At my elementary school, boxing was a mandatory sport, and a ring was set up in the middle of the playground. Starting from first grade, we were pitted against equal-size boys and duked it out without protective headgear. I hated boxing, but I hated pain more, which made me surprisingly aggressive in the ring. Yet even if I hit a kid with an uppercut so hard it made him cry, I still felt weak and unmanly.
Lassie was a TV show I followed weekly without fail, and I longed for Timmy’s country life and his loyal collie so much it pained me to watch. Instead of having a brave dog that would get me in and out of adventures, I had two groomed poodles with shaved chests and pom-pom tails. I’d pestered my father for a German shepherd, but what he brought home instead were a couple of snobs who loathed children. He even named them for us: the miniature poodle was called Oscar, after Oscar Wilde, and the standard was named Bosie, Wilde’s sobriquet for his doomed lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. I was too young to grasp the homosexual reference, but the sight of these silly fops mocked my idea of masculinity.
Whenever I tried to coax Bosie into a walk around the block, he’d look at me like George Sanders in All About Eve. Many years later, when it came time to put him down, he seemed eager to get to the vet, grateful to be rid of crass Americans who couldn’t tell the difference between a Burgundy and a Côtes du Rhône. If he could have written a farewell to us, I imagine his manicured paws would have penned the same words George Sanders left before overdosing on Nembutal: Dear World. I am leaving because I am bored. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.
The two best friends I grew up with until sixth grade were named Cody and Gunnar. (Yes, our names were Griffin, Gunnar, and Cody, and we paved the way for children who would later be christened Blanket, Apple, and Moon Unit.) Cody’s dad was Jack Palance, who played the psychopath that gunslinger Alan Ladd kills in the 1953 Western Shane. Gunnar’s dad was Howard Keel, who played everyone from singing lumberjacks to Wild Bill Hickok. Gunnar and Cody were brazen little fight promoters who taunted me relentlessly with the claim that either Howard or Jack could “lick” my dad with one hand tied behind his back. That both men were over six feet tall and Dad was only five foot four didn’t stop me from throwing his name in the ring for an anytime-anyplace throwdown. I became so competitive about how tough my father was that one day I casually mentioned that he’d recently been arrested for robbing a bank. The lie spread through the school like smallpox, and the principal called our house in concern. My father answered and couldn’t believe my whopper.
“Is that what you’d like…for me to be in prison?” he asked when I came home from school.
“No…”
“Is that something you would like me to do, rob a bank?”
I was speechless.
If my father being a bank robber was too much to ask, at least he could have been more like his tough Irish younger brother, who struck me as a fearless son of a bitch. Uncle John was one of the first journalists to report from Vietnam. He and David Halberstam whored around the Saigon Hilton and flew in country on Hueys while embedded with the army. He started fistfights with competing reporters in Manhattan watering holes and walked the streets of Watts during the height of the riots for Life magazine. My father, on the other hand, was producing a television show called Adventures in Paradise about a man who sailed through Polynesia in a shirt unbuttoned to his waist.
I don’t think Dad would have gone to my school’s father-son baseball game if I hadn’t told everyone about his bank robbery, but something about the lie reflected a lack of pride on my part that he wanted to disprove. The weekend before the game, he asked if I wanted to play catch in the backyard. I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d invited me to stick up a liquor store, which I would have loved, but his effort to connect through sports made me uneasy.
“Do you have a mitt?” I asked, as if that might end the activity.
“I thought you might have an extra,” he said.
“Yeah, but I’m left-handed.”
“Then fuck it.”
“No, wait.” I retrieved the extra mitt and handed it to him. “You can just wear it backward.”
He wore my left-handed mitt on his right hand with surprising aplomb. He was far less graceful when it came to catching anything with it. Grounders rolled gently between his legs, and even my softest lobs plopped out of his glove. Our practice came to an end when Bosie snatched the ball away from my father, unwilling to witness his incompetence a moment longer.
The day of the game, when it came time to pick teams, Dad was chosen last from the lineup of fathers. The Gunslinger and the Lumberjack were the first two picked. Positions were volunteered or assigned, and Dad was sent to right field, which I took as a minor comfort; only the rare left-handed hitter could manage to knock one out there. Also, as second baseman I could always drop back for a pop fly so he wouldn’t have to run in. My major concern was how Dad would do at bat, but by the fifth inning I relaxed a bit. He was walked once, then tapped a little grounder that looked like it was meant to be a bunt, and was respectfully thrown out at first. So far, so good. Besides, the dad who played Wilbur in Mister Ed got most of the attention at the pitcher’s mound for accidentally beaning the third-grade batter (whose father directed Green Acres) while the kid was taking a practice swing.
Who would have thought that the gunslinger Jack Palance was left-handed? He drew with his right in Shane, but I guess he hit left. I motioned for Dad to move even deeper into right field, but he was joking around with Natalie Wood, who’d brought him a hot dog to keep him company. By the time I got his attention, the crack off Mr. Palance’s bat could be heard all the way to the Warner Bros. Ranch, and the ball was headed straight toward right field. Dad threw down his hot dog and grabbed the glove from Natalie, who’d been holding it for him while he ate. He got his glove back on, but the ball had already sailed over his head, and my only hope was that he’d chase it down and throw it to me to connect to third, which Mr. Palance was approaching like a runaway steer. But every time Dad got to the ball, it wiggled just out of his grasp and coquettishly kept its distance.
The groans and laughter from the stands were so loud that he couldn’t hear my unconvincing encouragements of “You got this, Dad.”
When he finally reached the ball, Dad managed to drop it one more time before hurling it for some reason at Natalie Wood, who jumped out of the way. By then, Mr. Palance had reached home base on the heels of the vice president of Paramount and the guy who wrote The Nutty Professor.
When the inning mercifully ended, I walked back with my team to the dugout, where kids were doing imitations of my father throwing the ball.
“Well, kid, I guess I fucked that up.” Dad’s voice came from behind me. I turned around and slowed down so he could catch up and not think for a moment that I was embarrassed to be seen with him. I’d spent so much time before the game anticipating embarrassment that when the moment actually came, I wasn’t in the least embarrassed but felt…well, pride would be pushing it, but I was eager to challenge anyone who dared glance at my dad sideways. I looked around for Gunnar and Cody and readied my fist to punch them in their faces if they made even the slightest crack. I thought of a million lame insults about their fathers to use in a retaliatory attack. Had I known then what I know now, I could have said: Well, my dad’s a decorated war hero. What did yours do during the war?
My fragile identity at that time was tied to a father who couldn’t throw to third and gave me two French poodles named after famous homosexuals. What I secretly longed for was to have a father like my hotheaded uncle. 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.
My little brother, Alex, bubbled with a passion so foreign to the rest of us, we joked that an absinthe-swilling poetess must have left him in a basket on our doorstep. Even Dominique, from an early age, was old enough to know Alex wasn’t really abandoned, and wise enough to realize our brother was very different, not just from us but from everyone we knew. Alex’s little fingers could turn pages of books meant for adults, and his curiosity for all things was voracious. He was an open-faced sandwich of feelings, able to cry with joy and pain in equal measure, sometimes within moments of each other. Dominique and I were in awe of his intelligence and sensitivity, but secretly I thought feeling that much must be exhausting.
Another trait that made our brother seem alien was his complete lack of interest in seeking the attention or approval of others. He never envied our father’s praise for even the slightest of Dominique’s accomplishments or shared my compulsion to charm every stranger. If Alex had to choose to be noticed for anything, it would have been his capacity to love everyone and expect nothing. His ambition was to be cleansed of all ambition. Where this ascetic gene came from is a mystery Dominique and I wondered about for years.
From the earliest age, Alex was a gifted writer who wrote stories for an audience of only one. Whatever he composed, and whomever he gave it to, was for those eyes alone and not to be shared.
I once broke his trust over a story he gave me about a boy who loved a girl so much “the change jumped out of his pockets whenever she passed.” It was touching and hilarious and in a thoughtless moment I told my aunt Joan, no stranger to a good narrative, how brilliant it was and joked there might be some literary competition in the family. Later, when she asked Alex if she might read it, he looked at me in utter betrayal before coldly answering, “I don’t think so.”
“That was only for you to read,” he yelled as soon as we were alone.
“But it’s so good, Alex! Why won’t you share it?”
“I want it back,” he said. And when I gave it to him, he ripped it up in front of me.
Every eccentricity that Dominique, Mom, and I appreciated about Alex irritated my father for reasons that confounded and upset us.
When we ate with our parents, it was never at home and always in one of three restaurants: Chasen’s, the Brown Derby, or the Bistro. One night at Chasen’s, where we dined on Sunday nights, our father pointed out Jimmy and Gloria Stewart while Alex tried to recount the plot of Lord of the Flies, a novel he was currently enthralled by that failed to garner our interest.
“And these kids, all about my age, just hate this fat kid they named Piggy,” Alex went on, oblivious that our attention had drifted to Alfred Hitchcock being led to his table.
“And they carried these sticks of bamboo with sharpened tips, so they were like spears.”
“I’m going to have the chili,” said Dad. Then to Dominique: “You should try it, it’s what they’re famous for.”
“I know, Elizabeth Taylor had it flown first class to the set of Cleopatra,” Dominique said. “But you know I don’t eat meat.”
Dad roared with unabashed delight.
“So, all the kids suddenly get sick of Piggy because he cries too much and misses his mother, which is understandable.”
“I know, we saw the movie. Shall we order?” said Dad, cutting Alex off, he hoped for good.
“So, they surround him, with their homemade spears, and tell him to shut up, and one of them pokes him in his fat stomach, which draws blood—”
“Okay, we got it,” said Dad, his attention on the menu.
“And the sight of the blood excites the other kids, so they jab him, too, and more blood spurts out of him, and everybody laughs.”
“All right, Alex, enough, time to order.”
The cruelty of the young castaways caused my brother to choke with emotion. I put a calming hand on his leg, but there was no stopping him.
“And Piggy tries to get away, but he’s chased off a cliff and smashes on the rocks below—”
“Enough already. Jesus!” said Dad, loud enough to make the Jimmy Stewarts look over.
Alex didn’t say a word for the rest of the meal.
Dad’s indifference to his son bothered Dominique and me to such an extent that we decided that I, as the oldest, should tell him how hurtful he was being.
He wasn’t in his bedroom, so I knocked on the bathroom door. When no one answered, I opened it to see that Dad was in the shower. Before turning to leave, I noticed through the glass panel that his eyes were closed, and he was talking to himself. His face was contorted in rage. I couldn’t make out every word over the jets from the shower, but what I did hear was “You fucking asshole, I’m going to kill you. Oh yeah, well, fuck you too. Motherfucker…” I didn’t know adults talked to themselves, I thought it was just me, like when I called myself stupid for leaving homework on the bus or pretended to be a sportscaster calling plays from an imaginary pitching mound. But watching my father muttering in rage, I felt as if I were eavesdropping on a terrible secret coming from a confession booth. Ashamed and embarrassed (for him or myself, I wasn’t sure), I slipped out unnoticed.
When I was sure he was out of the shower, I knocked again, and he told me to come in. Dad wore a towel around his waist, and I took the time when he gargled and spit mouthwash into the sink to gather my courage.
“What’s up, kiddo,” he said after a while.
“Why do you treat him like that?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Alex. It’s as if you don’t even like him.”
My father blushed a shade of shame, looking into the mirror of the medicine cabinet for a time before answering.
“It’s because he reminds me of me.”
Maybe he saw in his sweet, sensitive son the same little boy whose father beat him with a Brooks Brothers belt. The same little boy who was so alien to his father and brothers and sisters that they couldn’t have cared less about the plot of Becky Sharp.