There were a half dozen regulars, and I was a child, so forgive me if I am leaving someone out, but in the core group, as I recall them, there were novelist Brian Moore and his wife, Jean Russell; there were journalist Barry Farrell and his wife, Marcia Farrell; there were my father, novelist and screenwriter Josh Greenfeld, and my mother, then a painter and later a writer, Fumiko Kometani; and then there were the hosts: novelists, screenwriters, and journalists John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion.
The routine on Sundays was that my younger brother, Noah, and I were loaded into our Mazda station wagon and driven out to Trancas, the stretch of Malibu on which John and Joan kept a sparse single-level house just down the sand from Brian’s own, slightly grander house. There were other guests who occasionally joined the conclaves but whose names wouldn’t register until much later: Harrison Ford, before his great fame, who was introduced to John and Joan by Barry; Frank Pierson, the director working with John and Joan on ; Lynn Nesbit, my father’s, John’s, and Joan’s literary agent; Dominick Dunne, John’s brother, a producer who would himself become a novelist and journalist; Earl McGrath, the gallery owner; the painter Francesco Clemente. I believe Warren Beatty made an appearance. But
