|
JH: You were born in Hartford, Connecticut. Tell us about your early years and your family.
 DD: There’s a whole Irish Catholic thing that’s very important here. My grandfather, Dominick Burns, was a potato famine immigrant; 1860 something I think. He has the Horatio Alger story of all time. He never went beyond 14-years-old in school. He made his money in the grocery business and then he became a bank president, and he married well, as they say. My mother was of that union. She and her sister were of that union.
JH: Were you named after him?
DD: Yeah, yeah. I used to hate being called Dominick as a little kid in the waspy schools I went to. Of course, now, I just cherish the name.
JH: What was he like?
Dominick Burns was the most amazing man. His great
friend was the reverend Ogilvy, the Episcopal head of Trinity College
in Hartford. And their point of overlap was literature and poetry.
Both my brother (John Gregory Dunne) and I were literarily influenced
by my grandfather. Every Friday night, two of us had to go and spend
the night at my grandfather’s house with my grandfather. We would
just hate to do it; hate to be bored because he would read to us
from the classics. But, of course it sunk in. And he’d pay us 50¢,
which was a lot of money back then. This guy, who had no education—it
was just amazing.
JH: Did he write at all himself?
DD: No.
JH: Tell us about your father.
 DD: My father came from Derby, Connecticut, and he went to Harvard Medical School and became a very famous surgeon. He was the first—I think the first—to hold a human heart in his hands way before Debakey and all those people. He also removed a bullet from the heart of a black child, and the kid lived. When we were little kids, on Christmas, we always went to visit this kid whose life my father saved.
My father was the president of St. Francis hospital, at the same time that my recent neighbor, Miss (Katherine) Hepburn’s father was the president of the Hartford Hospital. They knew each other.
JH: What was your first recollection of family life?
DD: Well I suppose the old fashioned
thing of family dinner every night, except Thursday night. My father
and mother always went out to dinner on Thursday to the Bond Hotel
alone. It was their romantic night, and we were left with the cook.
But we always had a family dinner, and that’s gone out of style.
Family dinners are a really wonderful thing:“What did you do today”?
and “What did you do today”? and everybody knows.
We
were a strange family in that we were rich Irish Catholics in an
all wasp town. We were in the clubs. We were in the private schools.
We had the summer houses, you know all this, but we were never quite
there. It wasn’t until Jack Kennedy became president that Irish
Catholics became acceptable. Now, I cherish that. I think that has
given me insight in my writing about class.
JH: Were there any special traditions that your family had at Christmas?
DD: I believe not.
JH: Was there pandemonium?
DD: Yes, there was pandemonium and there were always aunts and uncles that we never saw except then.
JH: Were they spread throughout the Northeast or were they...?
DD: Saybrook—Saybrook, [Connecticut].
JH: Did you like school? What was your favorite subject in school?
DD:  Yeah.
I was always drawn to English and books. And I used to write plays
and they did them at Beach Park School. They did a puppet show based
on a play I wrote about the covered wagon—two sisters, Polly and
Molly, in the covered wagon. And that was fabulous.
Beach Park was the most wonderful school from kindergarten through sixth
grade. We all remember the kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Emhoff, and
the names of all of the teachers through the sixth grade. Just recently
I went and spoke at one of those retirement villages in Avon, Connecticut,
and about half of my class from Beach Park School is now in that
village.
Then, when I was at Kingswood, which was a boy’s
private school, all the kids in our group would hang out at the
Hartford Golf Club and we were all junior members. We were all friends.
I can remember that. It was lovely.
JH: There were no cliques per se then?
DD: No, not really. Maybe there were, but there are always some people closer than others. But it was just a group of people that were deeply fond of each other, and still are. A lot of them gone now.
JH: When did you actually start doing the
play writing?
DD: It was about the fifth grade. Just writing
plays for, then always putting out, puppet shows. It was a disappointment
to my father that I was always putting on the shows.
JH: But, that gave you an interest in theatre?
|
