Griffin Dunne Recalls the Tragedy That Reshaped His Family

1982At 3 a.m., during the early hours of Halloween 1982, Detective Harold Johnston of the West Hollywood homicide division rang the doorbell of my mother’s house in the flats of Beverly Hills. Marina, her live-in housekeeper, woke to the sound and let the detective in. When she led Johnston into Mom’s bedroom, the lights were on and she was already sitting up in bed, bracing herself for news that is never good at that time of night. The first thing that caught Johnston’s eye was my mother’s wheelchair. He was a tough Irish cop who’d made countless house calls like this before, but never to a lady like Mrs. Ellen Griffin Dunne of 528 North Crescent Drive. He took in the wheelchair, the collection of glass hippos lining the shelves of an overstuffed bookcase, a bowl of rosebuds floating in water, and a black cat lying protectively on my mother’s lap, both of them waiting for the detective to get to the reason for his visit. The closest murder had ever come to this house was in the pages of the Georges Simenon novel on the bedside table.

Johnston gently informed my mother that her daughter had been strangled by a man named John Sweeney. At this moment Dominique Dunne was still alive, though she had been placed on life support at Cedars-Sinai hospital. The detective asked if there was anyone she’d like to call.

Though they had been divorced for 16 years, my father was the first and only person who came to mind. She reached for the phone but it fell to the floor, scaring the cat off her lap. Her hands trembled so much, she fumbled the numbers on the rotary dial. She gave up and handed the phone to the detective and told him Dad’s number in New York City.

“Thank you,” she said when he handed it back. “Nick, I’m here with a homicide detective named…I’m sorry, I forgot your name.…”

“Detective Harold Johnston. Would you like me to speak to him?”

“Yes, please. Thank you.”

After delivering the news to my father, the detective handed her back the phone.

“Nick,” she said, “I need you.”

“I’ll be on the next plane.”

After they hung up, Dad’s next call was to me at my apartment, three blocks from his.

“I can’t tell if I’m dreaming now or what,” he said after relaying his conversation with Johnston.

I’d had two hours of sleep and the taste of cocaine still lingered in the back of my throat, so it took a moment to focus.

“Wait…did you say homicide detective?” I asked, bolting out of bed.

“Griffin, get over here now. I need you.”

There was no scenario in 1982 where either Alex, Dominique, or I would have been spared a violent death. At that time and in different ways, the three of us were placed in situations designed to end our lives, though only two of us would survive.

We had wrongly assumed that the demons that haunted my brother Alex had been put to rest when he returned from Silver Hill. He listened to music without demanding credit from the artists and spoke no more of marrying pop stars. But just because he didn’t speak of it didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking it. He had learned that confiding in anyone about his divine powers could send him to a psych ward and had also learned how to live with the burden of his lonely secrets.

Before Alex moved to Pitt Street, he stayed at a rooming house I found for him only a few buildings from mine. One day Dad dropped by unannounced to invite him to lunch. Alex answered the door in a harried state, maybe adjusting to the surprise of his father’s sudden appearance.

“Let me get my coat,” he said, and then rooted through a cedar closet to find it.

While Alex cursed at the closet for hiding his coat, furiously sliding hangers from side to side, Dad saw a thick rope coiled on a table fit with a hangman’s knot. He grabbed it and managed to fit it into his overcoat before Alex turned around.

At lunch, Alex asked Dad how his book was going. The questions were intelligent and showed a real understanding of a writer’s process. Dad answered each one with a controlled calm, as if addressing someone strapped to a bomb, and hoped the suppressed panic in his voice would go unnoticed. He thought what a brilliant writer, or maybe an editor to other brilliant writers, Alex could have been if mental illness had not set out to waste his talent.

Dad couldn’t bring himself to mention the rope.

“Why?” I asked, when he rushed to my apartment after their lunch to tell me what happened.

“I don’t know. I was scared he’d be angry that I invaded his privacy and try to kill himself sooner. When I stole the rope, I thought maybe I’d bought some time. Maybe he’d see the rope was missing and take it as a sign. I don’t know, Griffin, I’m so scared. I don’t think your mother could take it.”

I didn’t bring up the rope to Alex either, because I was also scared. In fact, so many things scared me: I was scared I would lose him, the thoughts he lived with scared me, the waiting for something awful to happen scared me, and I was scared for my mother if he did such a thing. What Alex might or might not do was out of my control, and that scared me the most.

The grim reaper dropped in on me a month later.

It was the first day of rehearsal for a play I’d been cast in called Hooters, just like the name of the restaurant chain with the buxom waitresses. It was a coming-of-age comedy written by Ted Tally, the same author who wrote Coming Attractions, the play I was starring in when John Lennon was assassinated. (Ted went on to write more serious work, even winning an Academy Award for The Silence of the Lambs.)

I played an awkward teen who idolizes a tough kid who thinks himself a ladies’ man and coaches me on the art of getting laid. Frank Rich would rightly point out in his review for The New York Times that I was too old for the role.

After reading through the first act, the cast had broken for lunch, and everyone left feeling certain we had a hit on our hands. I asked the guy playing my idol if he’d like to get a bite, and we decided on a place a block away, on Tenth Avenue, in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen.

A beat-up old Chrysler from the ’70s rounded the corner where we stood at the curb, and as it slowly passed, the driver hocked an enormous loogie into my costar’s face. The phlegm hit him square on the nose and splashed in his eyes. I impulsively managed to get a good, strong kick on the car’s taillight. The Chrysler slammed on its brakes, and two of the largest guys I’d ever seen rushed toward me. The guy in the lead wore a “Born in the USA” T-shirt, and when his fist connected with my face, I swear I was thinking, I love Bruce Springsteen, he loves Bruce Springsteen, what is the problem? To my amazement, I didn’t go down and instead got him into a headlock that brought us both to the pavement. Then I thought, Oh shit, now what am I going to do? My hesitation gave him time to break my headlock, grab my hair, and pound my skull into the pavement, over and over, while punching me in the face between slams. The actor playing the tough kid was nowhere in sight. Finally the guy’s friend pulled him off, saying, “Stop it, you’re going to kill him.”

By now a crowd had gathered, though no one interceded. Despite the blood running from my nose and mouth and my loose teeth, a rush of adrenaline and rage brought me to my feet, and I chased Springsteen, who was walking calmly back to his car, and screamed, “C’mere, you motherfucker!”

Dominique with her mother, Lenny, following the funeral of Natalie Wood in 1981.COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE.

From the program for Dominick’s funeral, featuring Dominique as a baby.COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE.

His friend blocked my path and gripped me by the collar. In a quiet but chilling tone, he leaned his face into mine and said, “You are in real danger here. Stand down.” I believed him.

Someone in the crowd yelled, “He’s got a gun!” and we both turned around to see that Springsteen had yanked a pistol from the front seat and pointed it toward me.

His friend shielded my body and yelled at him to get back in the car, which he did. They drove off and the crowd went on with their business.

When shock later took hold, I couldn’t get over how stupid I’d been to go back to Springsteen for seconds. I felt not bravado but utter shame for toying with my life and almost causing my mother such grief.

In the early morning hours of October 31, 1982, I was finishing off the remains of a little baggie of coke in the bathroom at Café Central, an actors’ hangout on the Upper West Side. Hooters had opened 10 days earlier to tepid reviews, and not a night went by that I didn’t drop by after the show to commiserate with colleagues.

While I shuffled, coked to the gills, between the bar and the bathroom, in Pacific Standard Time Dominique was fighting for her life in the front yard of her house at 8723 Rangely Avenue. She was 22 days shy of her 23rd birthday.

A month earlier, to everyone’s relief, she had kicked John Sweeney out of her life. Dominique had been confiding in me that their troubles began soon after they moved in together. She was seeing less of her gang from the Friday Afternoon Club, a party Dominique threw every week for the actors in her acting class. Their burgeoning careers made Sweeney feel like a failure for still being a sous-chef at Ma Maison, which he took out on her. He would accuse her of flirting with any man she spoke to and tried to possess every moment of her time.

“Griffin, sometimes I think he loves me too much,” she said, which I heard, but again, didn’t really take in.

What got my full attention was when she told me in a later conversation about his first attempt to strangle her. That attack dispelled the last illusion she had about Sweeney, a point she drove home by leaving his bags on the front lawn and changing the locks to her house.

An argument had escalated the night before, what it was about or how it started I will never know. What is known is that he strangled Dominique to the brink of her blacking out, but somehow she managed to escape through an open window in her house to the safety of her VW Bug. Sweeney was so enraged that he caught up with her in the driveway and climbed on the roof of her car, demanding she get out. Dominique put the Bug in gear and took off, sending him flying to the curb.

She drove to Norman Carby’s house and banged on his door in hysterics. While trying to calm her, he saw dark purple welts around her throat, and as horrified as he was to see his friend so violently abused, Norman knew the attack should be documented and took pictures of her injuries.

“You want to hear something really fucked up?” she asked Norman later, climbing into the bed he had given her for the night. “Tomorrow is my first day of shooting an episode of Hill Street Blues.”

“I think that’s great. Work will take your mind off all this.”

“Except I’m playing a battered housewife whose husband tried to strangle her.”

“Well,” Norman said, “at least you won’t have to wear makeup.”

It was the perfect thing to say, and Dominique belly laughed for the first time since her escape. Feelings of shame and self-blame, familiar to every victim of domestic violence, began their hateful work on my sister’s sense of self. Even though she had taken decisive action by breaking up with Sweeney, doubt still plagued her. Dominique called me a month after their breakup, and the second-guessing in her tone annoyed me. She also caught me as I was halfway out the door to catch a new Woody Allen film called A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy. Dominique didn’t exactly say she wanted to get back together with Sweeney, or even that she missed him, but questioned whether she might have been too harsh and confessed she felt sorry for him. I checked my watch to recalculate what time I’d arrive at the Beekman Theatre if I left right then. I’d miss the trailers but might still make the movie.

In the interest of time, I decided not to tell her that, days earlier, Sweeney had phoned to see if I might help him reconcile with my sister. He was so delusional that he imagined I would actually act as their couples therapist and then told me I was the only person who really understood him, because I’d produced Baby It’s You, which he took to be his life story.

“That movie was not about you, and if you watched it carefully, you would have noticed that the sheik never strangled Rosanna Arquette.”

“Griffin, I am so sorry I lost it like that. I never meant—”

“Shut up. Touch my sister again and I will kill you.”

“If I ever did, I’d give you the gun to kill me,” he said, as if his passionate play on words would win me over.

“Stay the fuck away from her,” I said and hung up on him.

I also did not tell Dominique about that conversation because she might have found romance and genuine remorse in Sweeney’s brave gesture of calling her older brother.

I didn’t know that the last words I would ever say to my sister would be “Dominique, I’m so sorry, but can I call you tomorrow? I’m running late for a movie.” I meant to call the next day but didn’t, nor did I the day after that, which was October 30, the date that Sweeney showed up at Rangely Avenue, holding a bag of Halloween cookies he’d just baked. Ten minutes later, his hands were around her throat.

Dad’s call woke me from my late night at Café Central the second he got off the phone with Mom. I raced to his apartment in the early morning darkness. While he packed, I made his reservation for the next flight out. The plan was for him to go first and Alex and I would follow. It felt good to be useful, to speak to a ticket agent who didn’t know or care about anyone’s reason for departure. Her efficiency made my life seem normal, and I wanted to keep her on the line a little longer so it would stay that way.

Dad held up a dark suit and stared at it. “I don’t know if it’s bad luck to bring it.” He looked to me for an answer.

“I don’t know either.”

He rested the suit on top of the Louis Vuitton suitcase, the one Henry Fonda had given him decades earlier, back when he made movies, when he had money, when his daughter helped him pack on his last day in Cortina.

“I gotta get Alex,” I said.

We hugged, neither of us wanting to make a big deal about it, not wanting to give strength to our growing dread. The most Dad could muster was only “Oh, kiddo, what the fuck.”

I raced to Pitt Street, cursing my luck to have a brother who refused to own a phone. I climbed his piss-stained stairway and banged on his door for some time before he opened it. He looked startled, then fearful to see me.

“What?” he said, not wanting to know what the what was. “Alex, something happened to Dominique.”

“It’s Sweeney, isn’t it?”

We sat in the back of a TWA flight that wouldn’t arrive in Los Angeles until early evening. We declined the meal from the stewardess, ordering Cokes instead.

“Oh,” I said, before she left, “could you bring us some nuts?”

After a brief silence, Alex mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

“What?” I asked.

“I said, ‘Bring some shit for my fly.’”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

“It’s the B. Kliban cartoon that Dominique loved. A guy in a fancy restaurant sits across from a huge fly and orders gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône ’59, and then tells the waiter, ‘And bring some shit for my fly.’”

The joke didn’t make us laugh, but the image of our sister’s wicked grin was conjured in the private universe of our separate memories. In mine, I remembered her teasing me for having a crush on one of her friends.

“She wouldn’t give you the time of day,” she said about a girl who was dating the drummer in Huey Lewis’s band.

I held on to her mischievous smile in my mind’s eye for as long as I could, but it floated off.

There were photographers and news cameras in front of Cedars-Sinai, so someone from the hospital’s public relations found another entrance for us.

We announced ourselves to an ICU nurse who explained she couldn’t let us in until she saw our identification, because some members of the press had tried to pass themselves off as family to get a picture of Dominique on life support. Johnston was waiting for us and after gently greeting my mother introduced himself to Alex, Dad, and me. He seemed genuinely upset, even angered by our circumstance, and we liked him immediately.

Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Griffin on Christmas Day.COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE.

“You should prepare yourselves,” the nurse said and unlocked the door to the ICU for us to follow her to Dominique’s room.

The three of us slowly entered, far from prepared to see a swollen creature connected to a machine that wheezed an accordion-shaped bag up and down in sync with labored breathing. Dominique’s head was shaved and there were bolts boring into her skull. Her skin was the color of a bruised peach, and her eyeballs bulged like a cartoon character who’d put her finger in a light socket. An air tube, crudely taped into her mouth, was connected to the machine that made the hideous wheezing sound. We stood just inside the room, none of us sure what to do until Mom took control and wheeled over to her bedside. She took her daughter’s hand and said, “Darling, it’s Mom. I’m here with Dad and your brothers, and we love you.”

We joined Mom around the bed, each of us touching a part of Dominique’s body, a hand, a leg, stroking her cold skin, each of us overlapping, “We love you, Dominique. We love you so much. We’re right here.…”

We went to the hospital every day. Dominique was unresponsive, but once, when a doctor came to check on her, I felt her grip my hand for just a second.

“I just felt her move,” I exclaimed in excitement.

The doctor said it was only an electro-impulse. Her brain still showed no activity.

“If she comes out of it, will there be brain damage?” my father asked.

“Should your daughter recover, I’m afraid the damage would be massive and irreparable.”

The subtext was that Dominique would never recover, and at some point she would have to be taken off life support, but no one was ready for that conversation. A worse alternative than death would be for her to live out her life in a vegetative state, and the very thought was so painful, I suppressed it as much as possible.

“Please come back,” Dad would say, leaning close to her ear. Sometimes I had my doubts Dominique would come back, but Alex’s faith restored me. At the end of the day, when it came time for us to leave, Alex refused, and stayed all night reading her the poems of Yeats, and W.S. Merwin’s “Snowfall” over and over like chants, as if the recitation of high art might somehow awaken her.

Alex also stayed to avoid the steady stream of well-wishers bearing catered meals, booze, and comfort who continued to arrive at the house on Crescent Drive. Dad was staying with John and Joan, who had both been at our house every day, and on one of those days I caught Dad focusing his glare on them across the room. Shortly after Sweeney’s arrest, we were shocked to learn from the local news that Ma Maison had hired an attorney to defend their sous-chef. John and Joan were friends of the owner, Patrick Terrail, who knew Dominique as well, and Dad had already been stewing over the fact that Terrail never bothered to reach out to her parents with a word of sympathy.

On a morning when John and Joan were absent, Dad signed for a large orchid that had been delivered to them. To not peek at the card to find out who sent the orchid was simply too much to ask of my father. Dad opened the sealed envelope gently to leave no trace of his trespass. The card read, “My heart breaks for you, Patrick Terrail.”

He immediately called me in a rage.

“That fucker lawyered up to protect the killer and then sends John and Joan flowers! I bet they’re having lunch at Ma Maison right now.”

“I doubt that very much,” I said, but Dad wasn’t buying it.

He couldn’t very well admit to reading Terrail’s note but moved out anyway without explanation before John and Joan returned.

John called me soon after his brother’s abrupt exit to ask what happened, and I told him about the orchid and that Dad knew who sent it.

“I can’t control who sends us flowers, Griffin.”

“I know, but I gotta ask. Dad also thinks you still go to Ma Maison. Is that true?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Well, yes, I think we all are.”

“We would never set foot in that place and never will.”

Alex, Dominique, and Griffin on Crescent Drive with Brindsley the “rat catcher.”COURTESY OF GRIFFIN DUNNE.

I chose to believe him, but the unfounded accusation, the orchid, and the note from Terrail sent my brother and Dominique’s best friend, Melinda, around the bend. They vowed not to let this treason go unanswered.

On day four of Dominique being on life support, Rupert Allan asked if he could speak to me alone, and I followed him outside. Rupert was a publicist and old family friend whose clients had been Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, and Princess Grace of Monaco. He volunteered to field and deny the countless requests from the press to interview the Dunnes. His first order of business was to correct a misconception that was carried in all the papers that only added to my father’s anger.

“They all describe Dominique as the niece of John Dunne and Joan Didion,” he complained to Mom and her mother, who had just flown in from San Diego.

Mom had stayed close with John and Joan since her divorce from Dad and hadn’t the patience for his sibling rivalry. She didn’t know about the orchid from Terrail.

“What difference does it make,” Mom sighed, irritated to be reminded of superficial concerns that had troubled her ex-husband when they were married.

“Nick’s right,” said Gammer, my mother’s mother. “It makes it sound like she doesn’t have parents.”

Dad knew his mother-in-law could barely tolerate him and was surprised by her sudden support.

“All right,” Mom said after mulling it over. “Have Rupert take care of it.”

Rupert led me out of earshot from the house and took a long beat before deciding to speak.

“I don’t want to bother your parents with this, but when Dominique dies, a statement must be released to the press from the family. I’ve put something together that is brief and dignified that I wanted you to read before I show it to Nick and Lenny.”

I thought maybe I didn’t hear him correctly, or maybe misunderstood what he’d said. Or maybe he was the one who was confused.

“But Dominique is not dead. She’s still alive.”

“No, of course,” Rupert admitted, immediately regretting this conversation. But he plugged on. “I mean, when she dies, a statement must be in place. It’s how things are done.”

“You mean if she dies.”

An unexpected assault of tears ambushed me in the driveway. No one until then had ever said that Dominique would die, and I felt like a fool that it was so obvious to everyone but me.

“Oh, son, I’m so sorry to have brought this up. It was a terrible mistake. Please forgive me.”

His remorse was genuine, and I knew in that moment that he was just looking out for us, and that, of course, my sister would die. I went back inside the house, taking in all the people who’d been hugging me for days, telling me to keep strong, that Dominique was a fighter. Everyone looked different than they had only minutes earlier. What I hadn’t seen, but which was suddenly clear, was that Alex and I were the last to know that the past four days had been one long wake.

Something shifted within me, and I suddenly felt different as well. My perspective and personality took on a new formation not yet defined. But whoever I’d be in the days ahead would never be the person I was.

On November 4, 1982, five days after the attack, we went to Cedars-Sinai to give consent for Dominique to be taken off life support and to say our final goodbyes.

We gave each other privacy when it was our turn to say goodbye. There were no tears because the reality was too unreal to accept. We talked about this day being “the last time,” but it didn’t seem possible my sister would have no tomorrow. None of us could hear what the others said, but later, Dad told me he whispered in her ear, “Give me your talent.”

My family used to call the Good Shepherd church in Beverly Hills Our Lady of the Cadillacs because of the luxury cars in the parking lot and the hefty sums its well-heeled flock would drop into the collection basket.

“Dean Martin gave a hundred-dollar bill. Did you see that?” Dad would ask my mom on the drive home from church.

“The Joker sat right in front of us,” Alex once said, meaning Cesar Romero, who played the villain on Batman, our favorite TV show.

Griffin in New York in the mid-’80s.OLIVER MORRIS/GETTY IMAGES.

When the funeral cortege pulled up in front of the church, my pal and designated pallbearer Charlie rushed to our limousine before we could exit. “There has been a huge fuckup. The funeral is overlapping with a wedding that is just about to end. We have to wait until it’s over.”

From the limo, we watched a bride and groom descend the steps of the church under fistfuls of rice and suddenly stop, in utter confusion, at the sight of news cameras below, waiting to film the celebrities expected to arrive for the funeral. Once the wedding party and the mourners had passed each other on the steps, we finally made our move to go inside.

“That’s the mother! That’s the father!” shouted the photographers and cameramen as they swarmed us.

The rice from the wedding stuck to the wheels of Mom’s chair and crunched under our shoes.

“Oh no,” said my mother as Miguel Ferrer, Charlie, and a few more of Dominique’s friends came down the aisle carrying the casket draped in pink flowers. “She hated pansies. She hated the color pink.” Even the florists, whom Mom had used for years, fucked her over that morning. “That’s not what I ordered,” she said to no one in particular.

Martin Manulis, Dominique’s godfather and the man who brought Dad and his family to Los Angeles 26 years earlier to work for him on Playhouse 90, gave the eulogy and described her as “an infanta by Goya, only more beautiful.”

Alex and I read the Yeats poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” which was suggested by Joan. In halting voices, we barely managed to get through:

I will find out where she has gone, And kiss her lips and take her hands; And walk among long dappled grass, And pluck till time and times are done, The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

The monsignor, presumably sober, never bothered to pronounce Dominique’s name correctly, calling her “Dominick,” as if he didn’t even know the gender of the person he was eulogizing. Every time he said Dominick, Alex’s and my ears burned with rage and we blurted out, “Neek! Neek! DomiNEEK!” Heads turned our way but we didn’t care, and this time Dad didn’t try to halt our outbursts.

We continued for the burial at Westwood Memorial Park and gathered around a freshly dug plot only yards from where Mom’s best friend, Natalie Wood, had been laid to rest a year earlier. As Dominique was being lowered into the ground, a tour bus let out sightseers in front of Marilyn Monroe’s crypt.

The day after the disastrous funeral at Our Lady of the Cadillacs, Mom received a phone call from a woman who opened with the line, “Mrs. Dunne, I’m afraid you are now a member of a club that no one wants to belong to.”

On the other end was Doris Tate, mother of Sharon Tate, calling on behalf of a group called Parents of Murdered Children. Her daughter was eight months pregnant when she was stabbed to death by Charles Manson’s cult members, and she was calling to invite my mother to a meeting of her support group being held that night. Mom asked us if we would like to go, and Dad said he “wasn’t ready,” followed by a “no fucking way” from Alex, so I took her to the meeting at a church in Brentwood.

I wheeled my mother into a space a parent had made for her in a circle of other parents. Someone brought me a chair to sit next to her, but I felt I didn’t belong and was about to leave when Mom mouthed, “Please stay.”

The parents took turns sharing the brutal tragedies they had in common. Some had had children murdered years earlier, others endured fresher wounds, but all seemed grateful to have one day a week to speak to the only people who would understand their loss. My mother was shy even when talking to a group of more than five friends, let alone strangers, but to my amazement, she spoke up without prompting. She shed no tears and seemed almost eager to get it off her chest, but the disbelief in her tone made her story sound as if it had happened to somebody else. Physical affection never came easy to my mother, but when Doris Tate took her hand as she described her daughter on life support, Mom gripped it right back and plowed on.

In the silent anticipation of the next volunteer, a father whose son had been killed by a stray bullet in Compton asked if I’d like to say anything. I wasn’t expecting, or even emotionally prepared, to speak, but it felt rude to be the only one not sharing their feelings.

“I know everyone here is a parent, and from listening to all you have been through, I realize that to lose a child is very different than losing a sibling. It’s not more or less, it’s just different. Or maybe it is more, I don’t know.”

That’s as far as I got before I started to blubber. I felt like an asshole to be the only person in the room who cried, but my tears kept me from expressing an anger I had suppressed throughout the meeting. They seemed to be saying that the grief of someone who raised a child had greater meaning than mine, that of someone who had only lost a sister. I’m sure that was far from their intent, and thankfully, my weeping prevented me from expressing such a self-pitying remark.

On the ride back to Crescent Drive, I felt embarrassed by my display of emotion and hoped it wasn’t obvious. At a red light on Wilshire, Mom turned to me and said, “You were very brave, honey. I know how hard that must have been for you.”

“No, Mom,” I said. “You are very brave.”

After noticing that the crowds at the house had finally thinned but for Mom’s most die-hard friends, and knowing that she had made new ones, I felt the time was right to return to my life in New York. There were no understudies for Hooters, so the play had closed the day I left, and though I was back to being an unemployed actor, I couldn’t imagine ever having to pretend I was a teenager who felt awkward around girls.

Alex, Dad, and I hugged Mom goodbye and she assured us that she would be fine. As we were about to leave, she added, “Well, I guess I’ll see you all at the trial.”

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