Read The Last Love Song Online
Authors: Tracy Daugherty
“This isn't going to”: Sheila Heti, “Joan Didion,”
The Believer,
December 2011; available at
believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_didion
.
“And I didn't think”: ibid.
“I told them both I wished to God”: Dunne quoted in Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,”
New York,
September 2, 1996, 32.
“other man”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“She would never”: Didion,
Play It As It Lays,
137.
“two glands of neurotoxic poison”: ibid., 1.
“To look for âreasons'”: ibid.
“I might as well lay it on the line”: ibid., 5.
“[my name] is pronounced Mar-
eye
-ah”: ibid., 2.
“We had a lot of things and places”: ibid., 3.
“What makes Iago evil?”: ibid., 1.
“You got a map of Peru?”: ibid., 183.
“In the preface to her essays”: Segal, “Maria Knew What âNothing' Meant.”
“an ephemeral form of survival kitsch”:
Kirkus Reviews,
July 13, 1970; available at
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-didion/play-it-as-it-lays/
.
“hurt” and “shattering”: Herman Briffault letter to Henry Robbins, undated (July 1970), Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
“the heroine, like the author herself”: Henry Robbins letter to Herman Briffault, July 22, 1970; in ibid.
“high intelligence” and “When Maria speaks”: Segal, “Maria Knew What âNothing' Meant.”
“I can't believe”: Dan Wakefield quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold.”
“There was a certain tendency”: Keuhl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
CHAPTER 19
“This ⦠house on the sea”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 47â48.
“She still had parties”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.
“The hills are scrubby and barren”: Didion,
The White Album,
209.
“There are not only no blacks in Malibu”: John Gregory Dunne,
Harp
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 80.
“They were the most sophisticated people I knew”: Carolyn Kellogg, “PEN's Joan Didion Event Lacked Just One Thing: Joan Didion,”
Los Angeles Times,
October 15, 2013; available at
latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/le-et-jc-pen-joan-didion-event-lacked-just-one-thing-joan-didion-2013015,06823645.story
.
“[W]hat had started as a two-month job”: John Gregory Dunne,
Vegas
(New York: Random House, 1974), 231.
“look of the horizon”: Tom Brokaw interview with Joan Didion for NBC television, mid-1970s; available at
youtube.com/watch?v=4qrsozdFKSU
.
“a new kind of life”: Connie Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.
“Free the Strip!”: Mike Davis, “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,”
Labour / Le Travail
59 (Spring 2007): 212.
“I was so unhappy”: Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion.
“the finest woman prose stylist”: James Dickey quoted in Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,”
Harper's
magazine, December 1971, 113.
“One thinks of the great
performers
”: Mark Schorer, quoted in ibid.
“ripple”: Alfred Kazin's journal, posted at
theamericanscholar.org/the-passionate-encounter
.
“most interesting personality”: Kazin, “Joan Didion,” 112.
“People who live in a beach house”: ibid., 114.
“very vulnerable”: ibid.
“subtle,” “alarmed fragility,” and “many silences”: ibid., 116, 120.
“full of body language”: Alfred Kazin's journal.
“the academic-community-Moratorium”: Joan Didion, “On the Last Frontier with VX and GB,”
Life,
February 20, 1920, 22.
“mutilated the land”: ibid.
“not in a frontier town” and “cut free from the ambiguities of history”: ibid.
“Pretty healthy rabbit”: ibid.
“If you can't believe you're going to heaven”: ibid.
“[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit's cruel fate”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 181.
“We had a lawn”:
The Panic in Needle Park,
directed by Jerry Schatzberg (Twentieth CenturyâFox, 1971).
“Basically, we just reported”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park,
January 30, 2009; available at
digitalpodcast.com/items/1526291
. See also “Joan Didion Remembers âThe Panic in Needle Park,'” posted at
ifc.com/news/2009/01/joan-didion-on-the-panic-in-ne.php
.
“We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play”: Joshua Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds,”
Time Out New York,
January 22, 2009; available at
timeout.com/newyork/film/junk-bonds
.
“It was a fantastic script”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park
.
“I didn't see it as a happy ending”: ibid.
“I never found out what [he] saw”: Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds.”
“I'd seen Al four years earlier”: ibid.
“When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country”: ibid.
“[We were] a group of improbables”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park.
“âWe didn't have money for heroin'”: ibid.
“The thoroughness”: ibid.
“drunk and stoned”: Dominick Dunne,
The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper
(New York: Crown, 1999), 184.
“knew exactly how to launch a production”: Eileen Peterson, “They Dunne It Right!” Twentieth CenturyâFox press release, January 8, 1971, Dominick Dunne papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
“Neither of us likes to come back here”: Bruce Cook, “For the Dunnes, the Future Begins in L.A.,”
The National Observer,
March 8, 1971, 21.
“writing the film was great fun for us”: ibid.
“When a picture is shooting”: “Joan Didion Remembers âThe Panic in Needle Park.'”
“All loss is loss”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park
.
“I never thought this was a picture about drugs”: ibid.
“You can kill me now!”: Jeff Guinn,
Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 353. For details about the Manson trial in general, I have drawn on Guinn's excellent book.
“there is a minimum of client control”: ibid.
A young man in Berkeley: Ed Sanders,
The Family
(New York: New American Library, 1989), 418.
“Death is psychosomatic”: Guinn,
Manson,
354.
“You have created the monster”: ibid., 357.
“coverage of the Charles Manson case”: ibid., 362.
“Your Honor, the President”: ibid., 363.
“demure,” “pigtailed,” “author Joan Didion,” and “straight”: Yvonne Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial,”
Los Angeles Times,
August 4, 1970; available at
cielodrive.com/archive/?p=6660
.
“long is for evening”: Guinn,
Manson,
360.
“Size 9 Petite”: Didion,
The White Album,
45.
“little death”: ibid., 43.
“have two drinks”: ibid.
“You'll kill us all”: Guinn,
Manson,
360â61.
“In the name of Christian justice”: ibid., 371
“I am only what you made me”: ibid., 374â75.
“On August 13”: Sanders,
The Family,
419.
“You abandoned your child”: Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial.”
Didion and FSG received letters: Nathaniel J. Friedman to Henry Robbins and Joan Didion, February 11, 1971, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
Robbins replied: Henry Robbins letter to Nathaniel J. Friedman, February 26, 1971; in ibid.
“Pussy”: Henry Robbins letter to Victor Temkin, August 11, 1970; in ibid.
“The idea was”: Dunne,
Harp,
139.
“most interesting place[s]”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,”
The Paris Review
48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion
.
“weird stories”: Don Swaim's audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at
www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion
.
“This was a time”: Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion.
“gateway to the Caribbean”: ibid.
“triangulation of crossfire”: testimony of Perry Raymond Russo,
State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw,
February 10, 1969, posted at
jfk-online.com/pr01.html
.
“whole underbelly”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”
“had taken the American political narrative seriously”: Joan Didion,
After Henry
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 85.
“testimony of a number of witnesses” and subsequent quotes from the House Select Committee on Assassinations: excerpt, volume 10, House Select Committee on Assassinations; available at
mcadams.posc.mu.edu/544camp.txt
.
“one of those occasional accidental intersections”: Didion,
After Henry,
86.
“road glass”: Dunne,
Harp,
140.
“in the South they remained convinced”: Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 71.
In a letter to Marc Joffe: Henry Robbins letter to Marc Joffe, May 17, 1971, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
“I had a year's contract”: Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley, New York Public Library, November 21, 2011.
“Napalm has become âIncender-Jell'”: Mary McCarthy,
Vietnam
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 3.
“the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy”; John Gregory Dunne,
Monster: Living Off the Big Screen
(New York: Random House, 1997), 75.
“the antithesis” and subsequent quotes about this meeting unless otherwise noted: David Patrick Columbia, “Remembering John Gregory Dunne,” New York Social Diary, January 7, 2004; available at
newyorksocialdiary.com/the-list/2007/john-gregory-dunne
.
“if Otto thought”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.
“rage was never far beneath the surface”: ibid.
“grimy, roach-infested”: ibid.
“Studio executives”: John Gregory Dunne,
Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), 23.
“nice lesbian relationship”: Didion,
The White Album,
154.
“If he got angry with us” and “[W]ith elaborate politeness”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.
“Miss Universe contestants”: Dunne,
Regards,
50.
“I forbid you to go”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.
“My blessed cancer”: Trudy Dixon quoted by David Chadwick; available at
cuke.com/Crooked Cucumber/cc excerpts/zmbm_excerpt_from_cc.htm
.
“Trudy had been struggling”: Willard Dixon to the author, November 13, 2013.
“She was totally inspiring”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson,
Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion
(San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).
“every night to relax”: ibid.
“I didn't like [meditation]”: ibid.
“[W]e should not do [something]”: Shunryu Suzuki,
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
ed. Trudy Dixon (New York: Weatherhill, 2003), 53.
“In the beginner's mind”: ibid., 21.
“As it was in the beginning”: Didion quoted in David Swick, “The Zen of Joan Didion,”
Shambhala Sun,
January 2007; available at
www.lionsroar.com/the-zen-of-joan-didion
.
“personal God”: ibid.
“vast indifference”: ibid.
“I found earthquakes”: ibid.
“What I have made for myself”: Didion,
The White Album,
208.
“couldn't do that to him”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play
(New York: Vintage, 2007), 19.
“lit a joint”: Dunne,
Vegas,
231â32.
“I stopped”: Didion,
Where I Was From
, 218.
“the weather”: Dunne,
Vegas,
169â70.
“Halfway home”: Jonathan Yardley, “John Gregory Dunne,”
Washington Post,
January 22, 2006; available at
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011902698.html
.
“Frank E. Campbell”: Dunne,
Vegas,
13.
“[S]he was lonely and depressed”: ibid., 174â75.
“living with [a] piranha”: ibid., 11.
“It was like all those terrible parties”: ibid., 232.
“kilo of marijuana”: ibid.
“[w]hatever minimal impulse I had”: ibid., 246.
“When are you coming home?”: ibid., 269.
“bad season ⦠was over”: ibid., 287.
“He has on a blue work shirt”: Didion,
Blue Nights,
51.
“Don't let the Broken Man catch me”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 51.