Grenvilles”), convinced his aunt to sit down in her Manhattan apartment and talk about her early successes and devastating late-life tragedies. Born in Sacramento, the descendant of pioneers who crossed the Donner Pass in the 19th century, she helped redefine journalism in the late 1960s and 1970s.ĭunne, who is also an actor (“After Hours”) and the son of novelist Dominick Dunne (“The Two Mrs. To everyone else, she is Joan Didion, the celebrated author whose memoir of grief, “ The Year of Magical Thinking,” won a National Book Award in 2005 and whose essays on California culture, in particular “ Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” an account of the destructively aimless San Francisco hippie scene, made her a celebrity. “It was pretty easy to pick up chicks in that thing,” Dunne, 62, tells The Post. He received first editions of her books as Christmas presents and, as a teenager, went to her parties where you would find “homicide detectives next to Warren Beatty next to Christopher Isherwood.” She let him drive her banana-yellow Corvette Stingray.

I'm 40, he's 82 - yet somehow, we were boys again.To Griffin Dunne, she is Aunt Joan. “I'm very excited about this Coronation,” I confessed to Sir Bill Cash. For the duration of the Westminster reception, His Majesty's Rolls was parked outside the Speaker's door, and some of us gathered shyly to take a look, imagining ourselves at the wheel, honking the horn. How serenely sensible the monarchy seems compared to this chaos - what an immutable, unshakeable touch of class. Put another way, it has proved that what Britain needs is a dose of conservative economics - a conclusion reached by everyone except the Tory Party. If the Government has “proved one thing”, he concluded, “it’s that a high tax, low growth economy doesn't work”. It sounded as if he were interviewing himself, and both men were losing the argument. It’s one thing for a politician quietly to meet the focus groups and feel out a new position, but Starmer actually does his triangulating in real time and out loud - such that he started by telling us that “those with the broadest shoulders” should pay the most and then explained that the tax burden is insanely high, so they shouldn’t pay more. He revealed that he has since looked into it and (this'll shock you) it would “cost a lot” for no benefit.Īs for his evolving views on tax. He once called for nationalising utilities.

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