Griffin Dunne

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:54We'll be right back.

1:00at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change, and certain restrictions may apply. You are listening to Ruthie's Table 4, in partnership with Montclair. In the past weeks, a phrase has been said to me over and over again. Ruthie, you are going to love Griffin Dunn. Of course, being an independent spirit wishing to make up my own mind, I've been listening to Griffin's interviews, watching his films, and most of all, reading his beautiful new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, with stories of growing up in a family full of storytellers. Cooking a recipe is also about telling a story. Eating together is telling a story.

1:39Going to a food market in Naples is telling a story. When Griffin told his brother Alex he was going to write a book about their family, he responded, you can say anything you want, but say it from a place of love. Today, Griffin and I are going to talk about food and family, food and friends, food and memories. So, we have a recipe for Tagliarini with Veal Ragoo, which you chose from all our books. Yes, I did. The ingredients are 100 grams of pancetta, 600 grams of veal minced, 25 grams butter, one red onion, one small leek, one celery heart, and two cloves of garlic, one teaspoon thyme and sage, 300 milliliters of chicken broth, 150 milliliters of milk, peel of half a lemon.

2:37Finely chop the red onion, leek, celery, and garlic. Heat the olive oil in a heavy pan over a medium heat. Fry the pancetta for five minutes. Add the butter, onion, leek, celery, garlic, and thyme, and season with salt and pepper. Fry for 15 minutes, stirring often. Add the veal and sage and cook until the veal is no longer pink. Stir in the hot broth, milk and lemon peel, and bring to a boil. Simmer for one hour until most of the liquid has evaporated. Set aside in a pan of boiling salted water. Cook the tagliarini until al dente. Drain and combine the pasta with the sauce. Serve. That's a story in itself.

3:28That's a story. It's a story in itself. We have Sean, our head chef, who's here to tell us about this wonderful pasta. Well, actually, what we did, instead of this exact recipe, we actually substituted white wine rather than milk. Oh, I'm shocked. That's okay. Because we do it in different ways. But meat sauces are quite nice in the summer, because they always remind you of your summer holidays in Tuscany. Don't you think how you're kind of on a hot, obviously it's not a hot day today, but if it was a hot day, you might find that kind of replenishing to have something like that. I feel very replenished, and it's kind of cold outside.

4:06Also, when you think about American, where we grew up, spaghetti and meatballs, bolognese sauce, it's quite heavy, and it's kind of the tomato and meat and meatballs and the pasta, and this is very delicate. It's much more light. It's delicious. Okay, so going to the beginning of the beginning, what was the food like in your house? Your mother was Mexican? My mother was half Mexican. My grandmother was fully Mexican. Was she present in your life, your grandmother? Very much. She married my grandfather. My grandfather wooed her away from a man in Mexico City. He was a banker, a very prominent man.

4:49So he went to Mexico and fell in love with her. Yeah, he was in Mexico City, and he was coming to Nogales, where my grandmother lived. And she fell in love with my grandfather. And to make sure that the wedding would be called off, because he was on his way to marry her, there were about 25 to 30 stops from Mexico City to Nogales. Where is Nogales? Is it north? It's right on the border of Arizona and Mexico. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was on the Mexican side, and she was so worried that he would show up. So she sent a telegram to every stop from Mexico City all the way to Nogales, of which there were about 30.

5:24Yeah. And every time there was a stop, they'd go, Telegram for Señor Gomez. Do not come to the wedding. Stop. The wedding is called off. I planned to marry Thomas Griffin. Wow. And finally he had a stack of about 28. And then he went. He got the hint. He did get them. He got them all. And then he turned and went back to Mexico City, a single man. Wow. And my grandmother married Tom Griffin, who was from a very prominent family in Chicago. They had the Griffin Wheel Company. And the Griffin wheels were on every Pullman car in America. But he didn't want to be in that business. He wanted to be a rancher.

6:08And he came to Arizona as a young boy. He had pulmonary problems. And he came back. And he left somebody at the altar, too. A lot of scandal in my family. and settled on a ranch. And he was sort of cut out of the will, and it was quite a scandal that he left this society woman on the altar in Chicago. So when I was growing up, food was not really a priority. My mother, except for the meal that we had almost every day, was always cooked by our housekeeper, a woman named Carmen, and she made frijoles and rice. So she was Mexican as well. She was Mexican. We grew up on rice and beans and we loved rice.

6:54We never, to this day, I'm never tired of rice and beans. If I cook for myself, I always make rice and beans. It's just a stable of our diet. But do you think your grandmother, she sounds like she came from a probably privileged family as well. She did. So maybe she didn't go in the kitchen either. She did not. She was, her family were, going back generations, were like real estate barons. They had silver mines. But when the Mexican Revolution happened, Pancho Villa, they were on the wrong side of the revolution. They were aristocrats. And that's how they ended up in Nogales on the Arizona side.

7:29He drove them out and took all their holdings. But then my grandmother's side of the family, they built up their real estate business and ended up owning a lot of property in Nogales. When I did an interview with Alfonso Cuaron, you know Alfonso, he was saying that the Mexican class structure was that when you had more wealth. So in America, if you have more wealth, you have bigger houses, bigger cars, more cars, bigger refrigerators, bigger everything. And he said in Mexico, with greater wealth, you didn't have bigger everything, but you had more domestic stuff. Yes. My mother liked the comfort of how she grew up.

8:05In those days when you hired someone to cook and look after your children, they stayed in your lives. She was such an old Carmen who cooked for us. She was so old by the time she finally retired. Did you feel quite connected to her then? Oh, yeah. It was just so comforting. She was the one who would spank us. She was the one who would discipline us. Did she have children of her own? She did not. She would always go, whenever we were exacerbating her patients, she'd go, ay, que muchacho este. What does that mean? Oh, you horrible little boy. You know, you're driving me crazy. So your grandmother spoke Spanish, obviously.

8:45Did your mother grow Spanish? My mother spoke Spanish. And you do. Well, to my regret, I had a bucket list. One was to write a book. I did that. And the other was to finally master Spanish. Yeah, recently. I have a problem. Being in California, Mexican Spanish was the language of domestics. and I think my father was a bit of a snob at that period in his life before he evolved. So we weren't really encouraged to speak Spanish. In fact, when I started school from the first grade, they had us take French. Yeah, yeah. And here I had, you know, so I spoke a pigeon Spanish that I learned from Carmen.

9:25Wow. And so what else, going back to the food, do you ever sit down for a family meal? No, no, we would have meals always in restaurants when we ever ate together. We never sat at a table in our home. Never. And we would go to a place on Sunday nights. There were three restaurants. One was called The Bistro, the other was called Chasen's, and the other was The Brown Derby. And our favorite was Chasen's, and we'd have to get dressed up, and it was every Sunday night. And we'd be there, and you'd see Alfred Hitchcock at one table and Mr. and Mrs. Jimmy Stewart at another, and it was a very, you know.

9:58Did people move around? Well, it was very social. But everybody had their own sort of table. But my brother and sister and I loved Chasen's because they made a dish called a butterfly steak. I can imagine it's opened up. They open it up, and it's just covered in butter. And it was so delicious. And we would always go on about the butterfly steak. Yeah. Do you think they put the butter on it so you'd get it, and then there would be a lump of butter on it that would melt over the steak? You'd see the lump, and then you'd see it spread. And it would just, and you could cut, you could rest the knife on top of the steak, not even apply pressure.

10:33It would just sort of cut. And there was a bathroom at Chasen's, the men's room. And I think one of my earliest, I guess, sort of, not to overshare, but earliest erotic memories of this place was there was in the bathroom at the urinal was a picture of a man drowning in bosoms. Oh. He was a tiny figure, and then he was just surrounded by bosoms. I bet that picture isn't there anymore, is it? No. In fact, Chasen's went out of business. Oh, did it? And they had an auction. Oh. And I found out too late, but I wanted to know what happened to the bosom picture. I wanted to have that bosom picture. Yeah, I wonder where it is.

11:12I don't know who has it. Maybe it's gone to the Metropolitan Museum. Yeah, I don't know if it's worthy of that. As a relic of times that have changed. So you go to Chasen's. Did you go to other restaurants? Or did you, was it just, I mean, other restaurant meals? Or were you in school Monday to Friday and then Sunday night you went to a restaurant? Monday through Friday we would sit at the table and be served, just my brother, sister, and I, the rice and beans. And, you know, we had another unusual thing. We had a pantry in our house, just to show you how irreverent we were about food. we had stacks and stacks of Spam in a can.

11:53And when I would go for lunch, they would make to school, and our lunch bags were Spam sandwiches. Now, they're disgusting, Spam, but I happen to love that taste. It probably tastes like dog food. Oh, yeah. If you like dog food. When they entertained, would you be sort of like sitting on the stairs watching these sparkling dinner parties? You got it, exactly. And, you know, then there would be the moment at the beginning of the party before the adults really got hammered and got kind of wild. You know, we'd be called down and we'd, you know, my brother and I would have matching bathrobes. And my sister wore like one of those little caps you see in like Dickens, a nightgown.

12:39And we'd say goodnight. And my brother and I would bow. And my sister would curtsy. and the adults would go ooh and ah. It was a little spectacle that was terribly embarrassing to us. You know, years later, Dennis Hopper used to come to our house. This was well before Easy Rider. And years later, I'm doing a movie with Dennis, and it's after work, and we're smoking a joint. And he kind of looks off, and he goes, I was just thinking about you kids coming down and bowing and curtsying to us all. I think that was the saddest thing I ever saw in my whole life. And it was weird, you know. But where do you think that came from?

13:20Because I was just thinking your mother grew up on a ranch and your father had left all that. So I wonder where that, it's not as if they came from European royalties. No, but my father at this point in his life was very materialistic and very much sort of the production designer of his life. with the right material things for the house. And I think he fashioned us on the photographs of the royal family of Cecil Beaton. I mean, he would say as much. And he was a fantastic photographer. He had a Hasselblad. And every summer we would pose for these deadly serious Christmas card pictures, these three glum-looking children in suits with this sort of pastoral background, the art design in our backyard, and send them out as Christmas cards to families in New York, London, Los Angeles, and they were beautiful.

14:24Did you ever go to other kids' houses and see the family, like fridges and people sitting around with their parents? And did that? Totally different kind of. It was confusing. Totally different kind of things in about half. But other parents were equally sort of superficial, you know, and their priority, particularly in that generation, their main focus was themselves. You know, they were not like the kind of parent I became and most every parent I know where you just encourage every little thing they do and you notice and you want to know where they go and where, you know. Yeah, I think that, do you have grandchildren yet?

15:01No. That's really nice, I do. And one of the things I always say is that the really great thing about having grandchildren is the children, but also just seeing your kids as parents. Yeah. And I just look at them and I think they are, you know, I thought we were pretty good, but they are amazing. One of the happiest things I was able to do for my parents was give them a child. Yeah. They loved being grandparents. They did. So maybe that skipped a generation. They were better grandparents than parents. So much better. It was so much easier. You have less responsibility. And my father would just spoil my daughter, Hannah, rotten.

15:38And she'd go, listen, kid. My dad always had a funny, dark sense of humor. He goes, listen, kid, when I cool, I'm going to leave you so much money, which is a terrible thing to tell a little kid, by the way. And my mother was, my mother had MS, multiple sclerosis. And so she was unable to, you know, she was in bed confined and could be moved to a wheelchair. But the look on her face when I brought my daughter and I put her on the bed. And my daughter was, you know, an infant. But she recognized that this lady sitting up in bed was someone important. And she, which she'd never done with anyone, she just crawled to her.

16:29And did your parents, they didn't like to cook or have a domestic life of food. Did they love food? Was your mother very thin? She looked so elegant in these photographs. I know. But you think they liked to drink, right? They liked to drink. That they did. But did they like to eat? I don't think so. My father was, you know, Irish Catholic, and I think they ate the staple of, you know, whatever. Again, more the Irish cook would make. They called cook, what is cook serving. And it was all like comfort food. I know my dad loved meatloaf. He'd go on it in chicken pot pie. As a matter of fact, when I was married to Hannah's mom at our wedding, dad said, I'm paying for the whole thing.

17:11I'm going to take care of this. He was very proud and excited. And he told the wedding planner that he hired he wanted chicken pot pie. And the wedding planner already had a chicken dish prepared, and he shows the menu of what's going to be served and he goes, where's my chicken pot pie? He went, well, it just seemed redundant because we have chicken pie art. And he went, I said I want a chicken fucking pot pie. That's how much he loved chicken pot pie. I empathize with that. Why not? Yeah, that's what he wanted. Yeah, yeah. But you had, did you go to boarding school? I did. Yeah, so was that a wrench going away?

17:44It was a school very much based on English boarding schools. So no heat, bad food and cruelty. Bullying, terrible food. Yeah, cruelty. There was corporal punishment. Sorry for the British people here, but that is kind of the ethos of most. I think it's better now maybe, but that was. It does not. But, I mean, we were literally flogged. It was called SWATS. Where was it? It was in Massachusetts, a town called Southboro, Mass., called Fay, which wasn't a lot of fun to go back to L.A. and say, I'm home from Fay. You know, there were children as young as seven years old. I was 11, and it was a novelty to be a kid from L.A., to be going to school in Massachusetts at such a young age as well.

18:28But the food at that school was slop. We're all dressed in coats and ties for dinner, and we couldn't eat. There was a ceremony before we could eat of some kind of homily would be said. And then we'd just eat and just stuff ourselves. It was just everybody ate. It was like being at a trough. And if you put your elbow on the table, the headmaster had an enormous silver spoon. It must have weighed about five pounds or something. And if he saw a kid with his elbow on the table, he'd throw the spoon at him. Throw it. And at one time hit a kid in the mouth and knocked his tooth out.

19:14the river cafe cafe steps away from our restaurant is now open in the morning an italian breakfast with cornetti ciambela and crostata from our pastry kitchen in the afternoon ice cream coupes and river cafe classic desserts come in the evening for cocktails with our resident pianist in the bar. No need to book. See you here.

20:03Anime is the only machine washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy. Liquid simply slides right off. Designed for custom comfort, our high resilience foam lets you choose between a sink and feel or a supportive memory foam blend. Plus our pet friendly stain resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Get up to 60 % off plus free shipping and free returns.

20:38Shop now at washablesofas.com. Authors are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Parking shouldn't slow you down. ParkWiz gives every driver a shortcut. Book ahead, save up to 50 % and skip the hassle of circling the block. Park smarter, park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. So let's go back. So you left home all domestic, sort of domestic life at home and school. Did you go to college or did you go straight into film? I was a bit of a discipline problem. I was kicked out of school. Oh, were you kicked out of that school? Yeah, I was kicked out of 10th grade.

21:17Then I became an actor and moved to New York. In 10th grade? No, I spent a year in Los Angeles before going. And I was held back a year also because I was a dyslexic, poor student. Are you dyslexic? Yeah. Yeah, my husband's dyslexic. Yeah. Do you spell? You can't spell or memorize? No, no. I have a terrible time with math, but I became a voracious reader once I was out of school. Yeah. Once I wasn't concerned. And also probably when you were in school. I don't know, my husband was much older than you, but he was in school probably in the 40s or whatever, and they didn't know what dyslexia was.

21:57So he was beaten because he couldn't memorize a poem. I mean, they would just say, you have to learn this poem, and if you can't, then he was also flawed. I know just what he went through. I was treated as, you know, stupid. Stupid. Or lazy, yeah. No, mostly stupid and sort of mentally handicapped. And I had to be held back a grade. and, you know, I'd get pitying looks or just be called stupid. But, you know, before then, I had one more. You mentioned Europe. One of my mothers, before she became, you know, unable to walk, and she was quite healthy, when I was 13, my brother was 11 and my sister was 8, she took us to Italy.

22:43It was her dream. And she wanted to show us. We went to Italy and England and France. And we took the Michelangelo, the ocean liner. And there began our journey. And there I realized, oh, my mother really does love food. And she would take us to these restaurants and go, oh, my God, this is so good. They're so good. You know, I was a bit of a mischievous kid, and I would always kind of sneak out. And when we were in Venice, I snuck out when everybody was asleep, I assumed. And I met these girls, and I told them I was much older. And we kind of walked through the streets and the canals, and I rescued them from some harassing Italian guys.

23:32And we were walking through, and I think I told them I'm traveling on my own. I'm, like, much older. And all of a sudden, in one of the canals we're in, a boat passes by. It's a police boat. And I hear, Gryffindor, Gryffindor. And the girls go, isn't that your name? I went, yeah. No, that was your name. I thought you were telling me some Italian phrase. No, no, it was my name. Oh, my gosh. And my mother woke up and saw I wasn't there, and she called the police. Good for her. The Venetian police. So she did have a maternal instinct. And I got totally busted. And I had to get on the, we all got in the thing, and there's my mother at the dock practically with a rolling pin in her hand.

24:15And they went, oh, so you're traveling with your mother. I went, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, another memory I have of that place is she was dying to show us the Vatican and the Sistine Chapel and the Michelangelo. And so we're in line. This is in the 60s. and she's wearing a miniskirt, as most women wore. And we're in line to get the tickets. And one of the guys, I forget what they're called, but the guards with the hats and the little swords in their hands, one of them came over and shamed my mother about what she was wearing and talked to her, even though I didn't speak Italian. He talked to her like she was some prostitute or something.

25:00I mean, my mother was mortified. So we went back to the hotel. She changed. And her attitude by the time we went to the Vatican, her attitude about being a Catholic and being proud of showing us this had totally changed. And we would see the displays of all the gold and the crowns, and she would just say, this was all stolen. This was all from poor people, gave donations to buy this ridiculous extravagance. And I think a part of her, you know, lost her faith. So her father and Mexican mother were Catholics. Yes. So she was raised as a Catholic. So she did have, I mean, you tell, she did, wanting to expose her children to Europe and choose the restaurants and give you good food.

25:51Absolutely. It was one of her dreams. She wasn't the party going, I mean, there was the party going person. My mother was very different than my father those years. Oh, you think that was the. Oh, yeah. She was not, you know, my father was the ringleader of gathering of who's coming to the parties and where we're going to go and the emphasis on celebrity. And my mother wasn't really like that. She went along with it. But when they divorced, that was one of the main reasons. She just didn't want to be the hostess socialite, you know, anymore. And, you know, when they divorced, my father had to do some real soul searching.

26:26And he loved my mother, and he called her his wife right all the way through, decades after the divorce. And all of his priorities changed, you know, and he went, he lost all of his money. He couldn't get a job anymore in the movie business that he loved, and he burned every bridge from, you know, from drinking. And he drove up the coast in a little Ford automobile. He used to have a Mercedes that he treasured. His car broke down in a little town in Oregon, and he lived in a cabin in Oregon for a year, got sober, and wrote these long, single-space typed letters to his children. And they were like workshops for him to find his voice.

27:12And that's really the groundwork for how he became a writer and shed all of that superficiality. And his priorities completely changed. And he really found himself. He found his voice and what his purpose was in life. He's a great writer. And became a great writer.