The Last Love Song (23 page)

He had just broken up with a Catholic girl, who always said the Act of Contrition after sex in case she died in her sleep, when he realized what an unobstructed view he had into the apartment across the street and how bountiful that view could be. The tenant was a “large, good-looking woman of perhaps thirty, very tall, nearly six feet, long blond hair, well-proportioned figure,” he wrote. Every afternoon, she opened her window, “turned the stereo on loud, made herself a drink, took off her clothes and then stark-naked, using her drink as a baton, began to conduct Mozart's Concerto #5 in A-Major.”

She took his mind off
Time.
She changed his after-work routine. Now, instead of popping into funeral homes on the East Side “to see if anyone famous had died” or loitering around brownstone mailboxes, he rushed right home to his window: “She required total concentration.”

Possibly in
Vegas
he exaggerated his snooping habits, as befits (one supposes) a fictionalized memoir, but in interviews Didion confirmed his proclivities and affirmed how much she enjoyed playing along with him (Invisible Scarlet O'Neil).

His love of sharing adventures with her would reach its peak over twenty years later in Los Angeles when, researching locations for the movie
True Confessions,
based on his novel, he visited the L.A. morgue at two in the morning with two homicide cops. “There must have been five hundred bodies in there,” he said. “They're stacked in the cold room on Tiffany blue stretchers—you know, the light blue color of Tiffany boxes—five stretchers to a tier. The smell isn't too bad, but it's a little high, so you smoke a cigar. The whole thing just blew me away. It just blew my mind. I came home and woke Joan up and said, ‘Babe, this is something you've got to see.'”

*   *   *

In
Vegas,
Dunne laid out a scene in which he told Didion about the woman in the apartment across the street. The thing was, he hadn't seen her in a while and he worried about her. Weeks ago now, she'd left all her lights on (
four in the living room, three in the bedroom, two in the kitchen
) and they were beginning to sizzle out. What if something had happened to her? Perhaps one of those randy fellows he'd spied in her bed …

Didion urged him to tell the building's super. He waffled. How could he do that without revealing his addiction to
watching
? Didion prodded him: Maybe she overdosed. On what? Dunne asked.

“Don't be obtuse,” Didion said.

Shamed, Dunne went to the super. It turned out that the woman had eloped.

But that's not the point of the story. The point is, Didion pressured Dunne to confide in the super one morning in his apartment. She'd come home with him the night before. Together, they “sat and stared” at the missing woman's window, “neither of us saying a word,” Dunne wrote, “until exhaustion finally took us to bed with each other for the first time.”

*   *   *

John Gregory Dunne, born May 25, 1932 in West Hartford, Connecticut, always attributed his writing abilities (and his reporter's voyeuristic tics) to his childhood stutter. “I listened to the way people talked, becoming in the process a rather good mimic, and grew so precociously observant that my mother once complained that I never missed a twitch or a droopy eyelid or the crooked seam of a stocking,” he wrote. He also learned to express himself well on paper, fearful that if he was called upon to recite, the nuns in St. Joseph's Cathedral School would respond to his stammers with raps of the ruler. “The joke … was that the nuns would hit you until you bled and then hit you for bleeding,” he said.

He had been named after Archbishop John Gregory Murray of St. Paul, Minnesota, who had married his parents, but the nuns—Sister Theodosius, Sister Barnabus, Sister Marie de Nice—witnessed more devilry than angelic behavior from him.

The fifth of six siblings (“we divided into the Four Oldest and the Two Youngest”), he carried, along with the rest of his family, “a full cargo of ethnic and religious freight,” he said. Irish Catholics in a neighborhood of wealthy Protestants, they were made to feel like outsiders. Dunne grew up quietly resentful. Every Christmas, he felt humiliated when his mother made him line up with his brothers and sisters, “their faces scrubbed and shiny, to hand out oranges and shoes to the needy,” knowing the Protestant kids (the Yanks) made little distinction between those giving and those receiving the charity. His grandfather, a potato-famine immigrant, had been a butcher, and though eventually his labor nicely positioned the family (he worked his way up in the community, from “steerage to suburbia,” Dunne said, becoming a bank president), the neighbors never let the Dunnes forget they were nouveau riche, still living in Frog Hollow, the old Irish section. Once poor, always a pauper.

“[I was] slightly ashamed of my origins, patronizing toward the Irish still on the make,” Dunne admitted. In that time and place, class was everything. “Don't get mad, get even”: On public occasions, the community's leaders liked to repeat this key to success. For Dunne, the motto was “Get mad
and
get even.”

Didion always thought West Hartford was not so different from Sacramento, which is why she and John got along so well.

“Poppa,” Dunne called his grandfather. “[H]e had an enormous influence on my brother and me,” Dominick Dunne said. “It was as if he spotted us for the writers we would one day be. He didn't go to school past the age of fourteen, but literature was an obsession with him. He was never without a book, and he read voraciously. Early on, he taught John and me the excitement of reading. On Friday nights we would often stay over at his house and he would read the classics or poetry to us and give us each a fifty-cent piece for listening.”

Dunne's father became a heart surgeon. The family moved into a large house on Albany Avenue with a six-car garage. They hired “help”—not the “coloreds” the Yanks employed, but “wayward” Catholic girls from the House of the Good Shepherd. These girls worked until someone got them pregnant—“as my mother was the dispenser of Kotex, no missed period went unnoticed,” Dunne wrote.

With six kids in the house, family life was full of “sniper fire.” Like the nuns at school, the elder Dunne was a “quick man with a strap” and John's older brother Dominick—“Nick,” everyone called him—caught the worst of the old man's rage. Nick preferred staging puppet shows to playing sports or hunting. He liked Mrs. Godfrey's dance classes. His father would call him a “Sissy” and beat him with a wooden coat hanger.

When the old man turned on John, John made it a point not to cry. He'd giggle and his younger brother, Stephen, afraid of pushing their father to his limit, “would do my crying for me,” Dunne recalled. This seemed to be Stephen's role in the family. His mother used to say he “played life on the dark keys.”

Sometimes he'd ask Dunne if he ever felt depressed. Sure, Dunne said. The brothers agreed that Heath bars, Oreos, and a day in bed were the best cures for the “jits.”

“Greg,” John's classmates called him at school because there were so many Johns. Or “Googs”—an early nickname, origins lost.

When Dunne was fourteen, his father died of a ruptured aorta. He was fifty-one years old. In the morning, the boy kissed his father good-bye on his way to school, and when he came home that day, the first thing he saw were oxygen tanks on the back porch. The family placed the body in a casket in the living room and surrounded it with candles. At night, when the mourners had filed out of the house, Dunne crept downstairs in his pajamas and stood staring at his father's face. He waited for the fingers, wrapped in a rosary, to flinch, waited to hear a breath. “I listened for a heartbeat, as years later I would bend over my daughter's crib and listen for her heartbeat,” he wrote.

He was forced to mature swiftly. His training involved curbing the temper he'd inherited from his father. At the hospital, his father had fired interns and nurses in the midst of surgery if he felt they did not measure up to his standards. Already, Dunne knew
he
was just as exacting with people.

When his mother found a box of condoms in his room, she feared he would become sexually misguided with no man in the house. He had bought the condoms not quite knowing what to do with them, prompted by fantasies of the Polish girls who took business courses in high school “and worked in the factories of East Hartford and who were said to fuck.”

His mother sent him to Portsmouth Priory, an exclusive boarding school in Rhode Island. The monks were “very worldly,” he recalled. One day, one of them made him take down his pants and paddled his ass with a rubber hose because he'd played hooky. For the rest of his life, Dunne thought the fellow queer.

He liked the “pageantry” of Mass and he liked confession—“alternately rais[ing] and lower[ing] [his] voice every Saturday when [he] slipped into the confessional, a midget basso or a midget soprano depending on the week that was.” Like his future wife, he had a theatrical temperament.

He spent much of his time at Portsmouth Priory crafting short stories modeled after O. Henry's urban fables. One of his efforts concerned a burglar who left a Bible wherever he stole and who spent the pilfered money on his ailing mother's medical bills. Years of Catholic education had taught him to accept as a given the “taint on the human condition.” He filled his stories with losers, with down-and-outers.

Portsmouth failed to mute his sexual curiosity. According to
Vegas,
the older boys from New York talked about a club called the Lido in Times Square, and a pair of sisters, dime-a-dance hostesses there, who'd laid half the boarding school boys in the East. Like everything else, Dunne realized, sex boasts were all about class.

One evening, after sitting through rollicking tales of the Stork Club and La Rue, he was asked—challenged, really—by one of the cocky New Yorkers, “Where you from?” “Hartford,” Dunne said (after a long day of classes, dropping the
t
and
r
's in the manner of the lace-curtain Irish, “Ha-fod,” giving himself away). “I think I've heard of it,” the boy said with a nasal whine, signaling his fine breeding.

One weekend, Dunne managed to get to New York with a pack of hungry boys. Wearing his maroon school blazer, he bought a dollar's worth of tickets to the Lido. He stood and watched women smoke cigarettes. The women were too young to be as ravaged as they looked. “Though it was three years after Hiroshima and seven since Pearl Harbor, the only song on the jukebox seemed to be ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,'” he wrote. He returned to Portsmouth still a “cherry.”

His father had always insisted his children enroll in the best colleges in the East. The eldest brother, Richard, went to Harvard. Nick attended Williams. When John's time came, his mother and his aunt Harriet pressured him to realize his father's wish. “Hartford was a Yale town,” he said. His mother “had always wanted a son to go to Yale … [and] Yale was where the Yanks went.” But his anger at the Yanks' condescension had hardened into Frog Hollow defiance and he rebelled by going to Princeton. “I was just a tight-assed upper-middle-class kid … [with] this sense of Ivy League entitlement,” he said years later.

On his entrance essay, he wrote that in college he hoped to meet “contacts who might help me in later life.”

At Princeton, he developed a jaded sophistication, but the pose didn't free him of class resentments. Everyone he met was grooming himself for a vice presidency at Procter & Gamble (“Princeton in the Nation's Service”), except, perhaps, for his even
more
ambitious classmate, Donald H. “Rummy” Rumsfeld.

The boys all claimed to be sexual “swordsmen.” At parties in nightclubs in New York, he was reminded of the cocky Portsmouth kids and his awkward evening at the Lido. At one such affair, in his sophomore year, his brother Nick introduced him to a motion picture press agent named John Foreman, who was showing off a young actress, Grace Kelly. She had just appeared with Gary Cooper in
High Noon.
Later, Foreman would become a friend and professional connection; already, the Hollywood crowd Nick courted proved lucky for Greg.

Four days shy of his twenty-first birthday, Dunne “finally made contact” with one of the legendary sisters he'd been hearing about since Portsmouth, he wrote. He said he called her from a bar in Times Square, made his way to her Fifty-second Street flat, near the mobbed-up cafés, and paid twenty dollars to lose his virginity among Salvation Army chairs and a couch. The woman had Ivy League school pennants pinned to her walls, and a photograph of Princeton's a cappella choir, the Nassoons.

In 1954, Dunne graduated with a degree in history. At his mother's insistence, he applied to the Stanford Business School, but then he changed his mind and volunteered for the draft. Nick had been a war hero, earning a Bronze Star for saving a wounded soldier in Felsberg, Germany. “John was always fascinated by that period of my life,” Nick said, but if Dunne hoped to trump his brother's accomplishments, or simply compete with him, he was soon disillusioned. In basic training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, he learned the army was a “constituency of the dispossessed—high school dropouts, petty criminals, rednecks, racists, gamblers, you name it—and I fit right in,” he said. Before then, he had not spent much time with America's “white and black underclass.” He told George Plimpton, “I grew to hate the officer class that was my natural constituency. A Princeton classmate was an officer on my post [at Fort Carson, Colorado] and he told me I was to salute and call him
sir,
as if I had to be reminded, and also that he would discourage any outward signs that we knew each other. I hate that son of a bitch to this day. [Later] I took care of him [in print].”