The Last Love Song (18 page)

If Didion sold her young self short, and critics gave her too much rope, the truth of her professional beginnings and subsequent fame is much more complex and fascinating.

Later, she understood how helter-skelter the process had been. “[In 1969] I was starting a column for
Life,
and we happened to be in Hawaii,” she told Meghan Daum in 2004. “I had to write my first column introducing myself, and right then the My Lai stuff broke. So I called my editor at
Life
and said I want to go out to Vietnam, but he said, ‘No, some of the
guys
are going out. You just introduce yourself.' And I was so angry that I introduced myself in a very un-
Life
-like way.” That is, she was, or appeared to be, uncomfortably personal in a formal column (we'll look at the column later). “
Life
at that time had eleven million readers and I got an awful lot of feedback, a lot of it negative, and a lot of it more responsive than I could deal with. Then
Play It As It Lays
came out shortly after, which was read as autobiographical, although it wasn't, and so between
Play It As It Lays
and that column, I was getting a lot of that [popular attention]. It was kind of a burden.”

She's not admitting how titillating it was, in 1969, for a woman to write about abortion, divorce, S&M, orgies, and drugs, especially if she appeared to be talking about herself. Women saw her as emotionally available; men fantasized more lurid access.

How crafty was she in choosing her subjects? How lucky? How did she get her breaks? How did the timing work? These questions can be answered only by studying her
Vogue
years, from 1956 to roughly 1966, though she contributed occasional columns after that. Until her relationship with
The New York Review of Books,
begun in 1973, her ties to
Vogue
formed her longest-lasting bond with a particular magazine. This commitment clicked when the slicks had power and she was a pup. In the meantime, the “advantages” of writing a novel at night, in secret, after a day in the fashion trenches were “probably … precisely the same as the disadvantages,” she reflected later. “A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.”

2

Didion upped her salary from forty-five dollars a week to sixty-five or seventy. “At
Vogue,
she worked hard because they knew how good she was and made her do all of the heavy lifting,” said Parmentel. Eventually, she “conned” the
Vogue
Promotion Department into thinking it was reasonable to expect only one ad every two weeks from a copywriter. The schedule gave her time to freelance for other magazines. She had an office, a telephone, and messenger service. Marshaling these resources, she fired off pieces to
Mademoiselle
and
Gentlemen's Quarterly.
The first one bit, not the second. At one point, she had six positive responses to queries she'd mailed, to places as diverse as
Commonweal, The Nation,
and
The Reporter.

Rosa Rasiel left
Vogue
for graduate school at Columbia. When she moved out, Didion spent a year living in the cellar of Mildred Orrick's apartment. Orrick was a well-known fashion designer celebrated for introducing dance leotards as items of casual clothing and promoting flared coats once wartime fabrics restrictions eased.

Eventually, Didion rented an apartment in the East Nineties, “furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away,” she wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” The apartment was a third-floor walk-up at 1215 Park Avenue, across the street from the Armory, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth streets. She had a fireplace, shuttered windows, air conditioning, high ceilings and white walls, one bedroom and a kitchenette, for $130 a month—a tough amount to make, even freelancing. She hung a map of Sacramento County on the living room wall to remind herself of water. New York had rivers, but they weren't … well,
rivers.

She bought Victorian walnut marble-top tables to add to the furniture she'd borrowed from her friend. To Peggy La Violette, she identified this friend as “Noel,” her “old love.” She remained involved with him off and on during her years in New York; exactly when she stopped considering him her “love”—if she ever
really
did—is unclear. (By now, Bakersfield Bob was history.)

Parmentel “has never been credited in Didion profiles because he has never (until now) agreed to go on the record about their relationship,” Linda Hall wrote in
New York
magazine in 1996.

For over a year I requested an interview with this mysterious man, whom Hall had described as a “hard-drinking, anarchic, verbal gymnast.” I got no answer, and then one day a charming voice on my answering machine said, “I owe you an apology. I didn't answer you 'cause I didn't want to talk to you, but everyone 'cept me thinks I
should
talk to you, so I will.” A year or so later, he invited me to his lovely house in Fairfield, Connecticut, for a lengthy chat. He promised to meet me at the railway station carrying a copy of
The White Album
so that I'd know who he was: “We'll ‘meet cute,' as in an old Hitch movie.”

Later, when we'd settled on his screened porch with glasses of white wine, he said he “hadn't wanted to think about Joan again after what she's been through,” but, once upon a time, he “knew her better than anybody in the world.”

*   *   *

Noel E. Parmentel Jr. was born in Algiers, Louisiana, an old Victorian-era section of New Orleans west of the Mississippi River, in 1927. His mother had worked for the Veterans Administration. Besides having rivers in common, a love of Victorian houses, and a parent in the army, Didion and Parmentel shared temperaments. “I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South,” Didion said. Parmentel was her man.

Except he was not so easy to understand. His friend Norman Mailer saw him as an “arch-conservative but a marvelously funny guy” (“I must love him, otherwise I'd kill him,” Mailer said). Historian Kevin Smant saw him as a “non-conservative,” a wolf in sheepskin prowling the
National Review
offices, and writer Julia Reed remembered her mother dismissing him as “drunk, of course.”

“[A]nyone who knew anything about New York … knew Noel,” Dan Wakefield wrote in
New York in the Fifties.
He “was the most politically incorrect person imaginable. He made a fine art of the ethnic insult, and dined out on his reputation for outrageousness. In print, he savaged the right in the pages of
The Nation,
would turn around and do the same to the left in
National Review
[he once called
The Village Voice
a ‘little Leftist don't-do-it-yourself affair'] and blasted both sides in
Esquire
—and everyone loved it.”

“Well, Dan had some fun with me in his book,” Parmentel said, “but it was accurate.”

After a stint in the Marines, Parmentel attended Tulane University and the University of Minnesota before heading for New York. “I could have gotten my Ph.D. at Columbia, but instead I got my education at the West End Bar—a much better choice,” he said.

Parmentel would pace Wakefield's “small, cluttered apartment on Jones Street, rattling the ice cubes in his glass of bourbon, clearing his throat with a series of harrumphs, and pronouncing who was a phony and who was not, like some hulking, middle-aged Holden Caulfield with a New Orleans accent,” Wakefield wrote. “Most people, in Noel's harsh opinion, were phonies but he delighted in discovering the few who were not.”

His search for authentic companionship took him down byways and into the back rooms of literary publishers, theater directors, and filmmakers—and to “about six parties a day. Too many,” he said. “Everything happens at parties, and that's how I met people. My wife finally filed for divorce, and who could blame her?”

In his white suits, he was a seductive figure, with a large frame and a “shock of light brown hair falling over his wide brow,” said Wakefield. He befriended Carey McWilliams and William F. Buckley Jr., Mailer, and the film documentarians Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker. Like Didion, he had a “conservative streak that was real,” said Jim Desmond, who worked as a cameraman for Leacock and Pennebaker. “He was no redneck, but he
knew
all those guys. He knew the stuff from the top right down to the crap. He could cross any class line there was. I mean, he took me
beagling
in New Jersey once!”

On a trip down South with Parmentel, the actor Sam Waterston learned “he'd been a rake-hell and a rogue in his youth, and it seemed to my innocent eyes that everyone who was anyone in the Garden District had been in love with him at one time or another.”

In New York, he was a raconteur, prankster, gadabout, and one of the city's finest writers. “His style … was that of an axe-murderer,” said John Gregory Dunne. Parmentel was perhaps the best
teacher
of young writers on the island. “[H]e was as close to a mentor as anyone I have ever known,” Dunne wrote. “I arrived in New York in 1956 [full of] right-minded and untested opinion. I met him at a party, he insulted the hostess and most of the guests, and left.… In the polite, middle-class Irish Catholic circles in which I grew up, a guest did not call his hostess ‘trash.' Neither did a guest, when introduced to a Middle-European count, say pleasantly, ‘Scratch a Hungarian and you'll find a Jew.'” Parmentel was “like a stick of unstable dynamite,” Dunne admitted, but he said Parmentel “taught me to accept nothing at face value, to question everything, above all to be wary. From him I developed an eye for social nuance, learned to look with a spark of compassion upon the socially unacceptable, to search for the taint of metastasis in the socially acceptable.”

When Parmentel met Didion, he knew right away she was no “phony.”

“As I remember it, Joan met Noel at a party we went to at John Sack's, courtesy of a college acquaintance, Steve Banker, who lived in the neighborhood and invited us to John's,” said Rosa Rasiel. Banker had gone to Harvard with David Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas, and Sydney Schanberg. John Sack had been a war correspondent in Korea.

“At the party, Joan and I got to talking about a gin mill in Berkeley I used to hang out at when I was a Marine,” Parmentel told me. “We hit it off. I could see right away that she was different and special. The
best
sense of humor. And a wonderful bullshit detector.”

Afterward, “Noel was around a lot,” Rasiel said. (He lived very near them, in a railroad flat on Ninety-third Street.) “From the beginning, he called Joan ‘That mouse.'” He became “Joan's eminence grise, her taskmaster,” she said. He convinced her that World War II did
not
start with Pearl Harbor. He took her to meetings of the Village Independent Democrats and to parties at Bill Buckley's or Alexander Liberman's. He taught her to be skeptical, in print, even of her most cherished ideals, as when he dismissed the young Republicans he met each week in the White Horse Tavern, and of whom he was quite fond, as “the acne and the ecstasy.”

“One evening, while Joan's mother was visiting New York, Joan invited me to dinner, I think as a buffer, since Noel was expected,” Rasiel recalled. “I don't remember whether he ever called or showed up. I do remember Mrs. Didion saying, when he was about half an hour late, ‘I don't know that I'd bother.'”

When Eduene
did
finally meet him, her sole pronouncement was, “He's too big.”

*   *   *

At first, Parmentel wasn't quite sure what to make of Joan Didion. “I never saw ambition like that,” he said. “Not ambition as in hanging out at Elaine's. I mean, Joan would work twelve hours a day at
Vogue
and twelve hours a night. It was ferocious. Flabbergasting. In the culture she was from, girls didn't go to New York and work like that.”

In California, her family's fabric was beginning to unravel. Her parents called to say her grandmother Edna had collapsed, unconscious, on the sidewalk in front of her house. That night, in Sutter Hospital, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Wistfully, as though hearing a distant radio through an open window somewhere, Didion remembered Edna's old stories: in wartime, working the line at the Del Monte cannery, weeping with a migraine; knitting cashmere socks for the Red Cross to send to boys at the front; spending afternoons in Sacramento window-shopping at Bon Marché, buying a cracked crab for supper, and taking a cab back home.

She left Didion fifty shares of Transatlantic stock. Her will instructed her granddaughter to sell the stock and buy something she wanted but couldn't afford—food, a hat, cocktails after work.

Didion hunkered over her typewriter. From the window of her office, high above Lex, she could see
TIME
and
LIFE
spelled out in signs above Rockefeller Plaza.

The next deadline was nigh.

*   *   *

“Action verbs!” yelled Allene Talmey.

Didion couldn't believe it: She had grown up reading this woman in
Vogue
, and now she worked for her. A graduate of Wellesley, Talmey had been at the magazine since the 1930s, after writing for
The Boston Globe
and the
New York World,
and editing for the old
Vanity Fair.

Each morning now, Didion walked into Talmey's office with several lines of copy. The editor wore a big ring; aquamarine and silver, it reminded Didion of her great-aunt Nell, and she sat mesmerized, trembling, as the ring flashed across her pages. With a blunt pencil, Talmey scratched out words. She would “get very angry,” Didion said. A previous apprentice had told Mary Cantwell, “The first few weeks [with Talmey] … well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and
weep.
My dear, the bathwater was pure salt.” Not everyone lasted with the fierce old editor, but those who did got a splendid education.