“You married a protector,” Griffin Dunne tells his aunt Joan in the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, and she readily agrees. But her husband, John Gregory Dunne, only looked like the alpha.
“Michiko Kakutani came to Trancas to do a story on Joan for the Times,” said Josh Greenfeld, Didion and Dunne’s neighbor in the Trancas Canyon section of Malibu. “I told [Kakutani], ‘What you see in John, you get in Joan.’ He came on as tough and blustering, but he was soft. Don’t forget, she handled all their finances. She made brilliant real-estate deals. And that shyness—that weakness—was actually her strength because it got John to run interference.”
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