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JH: Well he was one too.
DD: Of course. So few people know that about
him. He went to Andover. He loved the gray flannels and he really
got a kick out of it, and so, he said something to me once, and
I said to him, “You know, Bogie” he let me call him Bogie. Anyway,
he said, “We’re having a party on Friday night. Please come.” You
know that in those days there was a real social order and that somebody
at my level didn’t go to parties like that. It was—of course, I thought
every night was going to be like this—it was every movie star you
ever heard of. Judy Garland sang, and Frank Sinatra sang, and Lana
Turner—his next door neighbor—comes in. Spencer Tracy was there.
David Niven was there.
By that time I was married, and I called my wife and I said, “Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra,” and I said, “I want to live here. I want to live here.”
It
was after our second child was born that we moved. I waited until
he was born, and I moved and got the house and then Lenny came out about two months later with the boys—one of them was
an infant, and Griffin was one-and-a-half.
Peter Lawford and I, whom I knew from stage managing and TV, had become friends, and he was married to Pat Kennedy. He married Pat Kennedy on the same day I married Lenny, and our weddings were both next to each other in The New York Times. Remember in those days, they used to have the whole story about the wedding.
JH: Lenny came from Arizona. What brought her East?
 DD:
She went to Farmington school [Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut],
and then she went to Briarcliff. And then she was a model and she
lived at the Barbizon Hotel in New York. It was just for women. It
was perfect for that era. No men allowed upstairs. It was a fashionable
place for girls from good families.
JH: And you ran into her on a train platform in Hartford?
DD: That’s where I met her. My roommate all
through Williams—and then we took an apartment together—was a guy
called Howard Erskine, who’s still my closest friend in life. He’s
the godfather of one of my kids. I’m the godfather of his daughter,
you know, we were ushers in each other’s wedding.
Well, he had met this girl called Lenny Ellen Griffin, and he was producing his first Broadway play and it was with Elizabeth Montgomery and Cliff Robertson and Arlene Francis. It was called Late Love, and it opened in Hartford. He has this girlfriend who lives in this hotel for women, and he wanted her to come up to Hartford for the opening, but her family was so strict that they wouldn’t let her stay in a hotel in Hartford, and he said, “Can she stay with your mother?”
My mother had to write a letter to her parents—it was like that. Imagine how we are today. I just went as the friend of Howard—who’s in the rehearsal—to pick up his girlfriend, and she stepped off that train and I fell in love with her. It was the most amazing thing. It happened just like that.
JH: Did she feel the same way?
DD: We were engaged in three weeks.
JH: So she stepped off the train, then what?
DD: We went out...she kind of knew Hartford because she went to Farmington, and we went to my house, and my mother was leaving the house—I don’t know where she was going—and I introduced them outside the front door. Lenny went in the house, and my mother said to me, “That’s the girl you’re going to marry.” It was just amazing.
JH: And you had already fallen for her at the train platform. This was really kismet.
DD: It was amazing, and my roommate, whose girlfriend she was, was never angry about it in any way. He said, “Well, you know my family wouldn’t have let me marry her if she was a Catholic.” In those days, that was a big deal.
JH: How did she feel about it when you said, “We’re moving. We’re going to California?”
DD: Well, I mean she went along with it.
JH: Was she excited when you made that first phone call?
DD: Yeah, yeah.
JH: Was she as interested in celebrities as you are?
 DD:
No, probably not. She was a very popular figure in Beverly Hills
and at the Santa Monica house. We moved into the house that the
Lawfords moved out of; Harold Lloyd’s beach house. It was
our first house, and the Lawfords moved down the beach. They bought
the Louis B. Mayer beach house. We were right near each other. Peter Lawford was a fabulous
guy and he went downhill. He had a very tragic end of his life.
JH: He married into the wrong family?
DD: Of course, he did. He was a wonderful person and they ruined him...they ruined him.
JH: Especially Joe, because Joe didn’t like him because he was British.
DD: And he was an actor, and Joe never thought he was good enough for Pat. I once saw Joe be so mean to Peter—inexcusable to shame Peter in front of his friends.
JH: He was treated as a dolt and he wasn’t. And then he was in between the family and Sinatra when the president [John F. Kennedy] would not land at the helipad that Sinatra built for him.
DD: Bobby talked Jack out of it because of the Mob connection, and Peter took the hit.
JH: I know he did and boy was Sinatra an SOB about it.
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