The Last Love Song (39 page)

In the spacious kitchen, she hung a copy of a Karl Shapiro poem she had long loved. Its verses celebrated the West's ability to renew itself: “It is raining in California, a straight rain / Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough.”

Sometimes at night, she thought she heard rattlesnakes outside her bedroom window. Peering through the glass, Dunne scanned the nearby dry wash with a flashlight and told her it was nothing. A leaky faucet. Paper in the wind.

*   *   *

Physically surrounded by the scars and adornments of a changing story—Old Hollywood flaking under the New—Didion roamed the vicinity with wary fascination. It was yet another Lost Domain. The boarded-up consulate across the street epitomized for her not just the transformation of the block but also the country's fickle moods. In her essay “The White Album,” the example she would offer of a story we once told “in order to live” began “The princess is caged in the consulate.” Every morning from her smudgy windows, she could see the terms of this story. Fairy tales had fled the neighborhood along with trust when California locked its Amerasian children inside filthy internment camps.

And
now
look where we were: Just a few blocks away, a genuinely classy (if eccentric) American folk hero, Howard Hughes, hid inside a tacky Art Moderne house with chicken wire webbing its windows while kids tripping out of their heads trashed the street outside. Bette Davis had been ousted by the Mamas and the Papas. The young singers shared rooms on Franklin Avenue, up the block from the Dunnes. Since March, when their single “California Dreamin'” topped the record charts, they had been greeted in the press as New Hollywood royalty. Their presence in the neighborhood attracted groupies, hangers-on, Scientology advocates, strangers of every sort, and promoted a
no ownership
ethos. Free love, free food, open doors: Rock 'n' rollers hiked the Hollywood Hills chanting these generous mantras. In Laurel Canyon, nearby, there “were more pop stars than you could count,” said Michelle Phillips, one of the group. “Everybody knew everybody … [W]herever you could fit a little wooden house … there were friends dotted over the hillside and right up to the edge overhanging the great, wide, shimmering city.” Where old money had once run horses in the hills (Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Maurice Chevalier), one-hit, three-chord wonders now buzzed the rocky ravines on little tabs of acid. Even the gurus of freedom worried about where this “lifestyle” might lead. Phillips saw a “lot of thin, insipid girls … Flower Children, we called them … moving in and out” of people's rooms. Her fellow Mama, Cass Elliot, would soon buy a house and sling pillows all over the floor for “masses of friends and ‘well-wishers.'” She was “pretty consistently ripped off,” Phillips said. “People used to write on her walls: messages, loving graffiti, pestilent stuff. Problems arrived inside the house wearing pants or shorts or nothing at all. Cass was so easy to intrude upon.”

Intrusion was the rhythm of Franklin Avenue. One day, Didion came upon a stranger in the entrance hall to her house. “What do you want?” she asked him. He said nothing until he saw Dunne on the stair landing. “Chicken Delight,” he blurted. Didion had ordered no food and his hands were empty. He drove away in an unmarked panel truck. “It seems to me … that during those years I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks,” Didion wrote, “panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.”

If the new spirit of
anything goes
attempted to slip through her foyer, the spirit of the past sent dusty clouds through the open door of her basement. She wondered what all those
New Masses
said about the history of her house. One day, Dunne asked their landlord about the magazines. He was a friendly middle-aged fellow named Dan James, a distant relative of Frank and Jessie. In the thirties and forties, he said, he had been a member of the Communist Party. He had become political working in the Oklahoma oil fields—some of those old Okies were pretty damn radical!—and began to attend Party meetings once he'd made his way to Hollywood. He met Charlie Chaplin and worked as a screenwriter on the set of
The Great Dictator.
Oh yes, he said, Franklin Avenue had seen plenty of raucous Party squabbles.

Susceptible to vertigo even on a good day, Didion was dizzied by the strange contradictions of her street, the odd and frightening loveliness of her house. She sought distraction by driving to area theaters and sitting through biker films. Lately, they had become a popular, if derided, movie subgenre. Right away, she saw that they, too, were a mix of old and new: the Beat sensibility married to the code of the Hollywood Western. Yearning lay at their core: longing for freedom and simple principles by which a man could live (and they were
all
about men). The acting was atrocious, the cinematography amateurish, but the landscapes in which they unspooled, the broad, open vistas, were stunningly gorgeous. Didion's reactions to the movies were as paradoxical as the films themselves. She saw them as markers of the time—the anguish of valuing an old way of existence while craving a new style of life. On the one hand, they represented everything she feared: a further dismantling of the Lost Domain, Old Paint made roadkill by a Harley. On the other, she enjoyed their decadent textures, familiar to her from Old Sac, from her days slumming in valley gas stations.

While biker movies filled L.A. theaters, Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office in Sacramento: another contradictory image. Old Hollywood's last gasp; the grinning cowboy had trounced Pat Brown on the promise of halting the changes taking place. Just as Communists had once infiltrated the film industry, he said, Reds were now ruining California's college campuses.

In November 1966, at a Los Angeles dinner honoring the governor-elect as well as the regents of Berkeley, H. R. Haldeman, later Richard Nixon's chief of staff, toasted Reagan as “the man who will bring a big breath of fresh air to the university.” Seated at one of the tables, Clark Kerr knew right away that one of the new governor's first acts would be to fire him as university president. Reagan saw him as weak for not punishing student protestors more harshly. Shortly after dinner, one of the regents whispered to Kerr a sentence Didion might have swiped as a motto of the years she'd spend on Franklin Avenue: “Before this is all over, you're going to be covered in blood.”

2

Didion worked in the mornings in a nearly empty bedroom with piles of books and a chair. She kept her needlepoint handy in case she got stuck on a piece. Down the hall, Dunne typed his notes from Delano and began to shape them into a narrative. He still had no book contract, but he hoped to get more than a
Saturday Evening Post
article out of the grape strikes. Back in February, when his agent, Carl Brandt, had sent his observations on Chavez's movement to editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, most responded negatively, citing the difficulty of selling a book on such a dry-dust topic—it wasn't “big ticket,” one said. Henry Robbins agreed, but he admired Dunne's writing and he'd fallen under Chavez's spell. He wanted to see something happen, and he encouraged Dunne to think beyond the boundaries of a magazine piece.

Dunne was scheduled to fly to Houston at the end of January to cover the first
Apollo
launch for
The Saturday Evening Post
. Didion had her assignments for the magazine, too, and she'd been tinkering with the start of a novel. But between going to Ralph's Market to shop for the baby each day and feeding her, she didn't feel much like a writer. Besides, a torched VW in San Berdoo wasn't remotely as glamorous as a domed baseball diamond or rockets to the moon.

Three or four days a month, migraines sidelined her. She'd spend a day in bed, leaving Quintana in the care of her teenage nanny. She took Dexedrine and drank gin and hot water to dull the pain. In retrospect, she'd see this period as a “troubled time,” but she also noticed that major stressors—plumbing disasters, accidents—didn't cause her paralysis. “Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache,” she said. “It comes instead when I am fighting … a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up.” Key here is “work.” The headaches were related to her writing and her sense of herself as a writer. Armed with this insight, she was able to massage her malady—she “learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it … as more friend than lodger.”

In late December, while Dunne stayed behind to work on his Chavez story, she took Quintana to her parents' house in Sacramento. Everyone agreed the baby was a charmer. “Delano?” Didion's mother said when Didion told her about the project. “Nobody wants to read about Delano. Modesto, maybe.”

Alone one morning in the Franklin Avenue house, Dunne walked downstairs and found the dining room filling with water. A pipe had burst. The ceiling had turned to soggy plaster. The following day, he returned from a trip to the grocer's and sensed immediately that something was wrong. Had another pipe split? No. “The door on the Victorian commode had been wrenched off its hinges, and the desk drawers in the living room were thrown open and the contents strewn on the floor,” he said. Every room had been cased. “Is there anyone in this house?” he called. He touched nothing—the out-of-date passports, the expired New York apartment leases, carbons of letters he “wished [he] had never written,” scattered across the floor—and called the police. Three hours later, officers arrived. Bored, they told him a similar break-in had recently occurred down the street; it was probably some kid looking for drug cash. Luckily, nothing major was missing. They dusted for fingerprints while Dunne smoked and made himself a drink. There wasn't much they could do, said the cops. Dunne glanced anxiously out his windows. “I had never noticed so many strangers on the block,” he said.

*   *   *

In early January 1967, Dunne sent Brandt and Robbins a rough draft of the magazine version of his strike story. Robbins thought it a “superb job of reporting,” with a strong “visual sense of what it's like in the fields.” He was eager to give Dunne “comments and suggestions for expansion.” He wanted to see a book, if only he could convince his colleagues at FSG. Meanwhile, Brandt had been busy stirring up interest in Dunne. Dick Kluger at Simon & Schuster, unaware of Robbins's involvement with the writer, wrote Dunne on January 4, “I keep waiting and hoping to hear about Cesar and Company. Can you, will you, advise what, if anything, has happened to the project?”

For a few days, at least, the grapes would have to keep, as Dunne tracked
Apollo.
On January 27, two days prior to his scheduled trip to Houston, he drove to the North American Aviation plant in Downey, California. There, engineers had designed the
Apollo
capsule. He crawled inside a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft. He ate some of the astronauts' food—it was even worse than the K rations he'd been served in the army. He was told there were seventy-eight cubic feet per man inside the cramped capsule—plenty of room, as the average male coffin had only twenty-eight.

The engineers' confidence made him giddy. In no time, moon shots were going to be routine, they said: “You can run a Greyhound bus line up there.” By 1985 we'd be making round-trips to Mars.

What if something went wrong inside the spacecraft? Dunne asked. No problem. The survival factor clocked in at 99 percent.

Two days later, on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, fire swept through the
Apollo 1
capsule, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. Dunne canceled his Houston trip. He happened to be driving on the Hollywood Freeway when he heard about the fire on the radio. He recalled the engineers' swagger, their armor of invulnerability—almost of immortality, they seemed to think. He said the
Apollo
disaster “was as if Achilles had fallen down the cellar stairs.”

*   *   *

In March, Quintana turned one. Almost coincident with her birthday, both her parents were about to secure major book contracts.

Robbins had convinced Roger Straus to approve a three-thousand-dollar advance for the grape story (Dick Kluger, at S&S, was furious, feeling he'd been played). Delighted, Dunne listed possible titles. He fancied
In Dubious Battle
but feared Mr. Steinbeck might object.

Robbins wrote to say, “And now that you're with FSG—how about bringing your charming wife along?”

Didion had taken their daughter to Sacramento, to celebrate Quintana's birthday with Frank and Eduene (and to distance herself from the fact that she was not writing much). In her parents' house, surrounded by her grandmother's hand-painted teacups, she felt protected; sheltered from deadlines, contracts, proposals. As a child, she'd been in a rush to grow up and go away, but now she liked to return and luxuriate, briefly, in the illusion that the world had not changed—that it
would
not change for her daughter.

She lit the candles on a large white cake. The adults drank champagne while the baby plowed through strawberry-marshmallow ice cream. Later, warm and content, sleepy, Didion pressed her face against Quintana's through the thick, fat slats of the crib.

*   *   *

Squelching his anger at Dunne over the Chavez dealings, Dick Kluger wrote to ask if he'd like to propose a book on the space program. Dunne declined; eventually, both Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer produced books on the astronauts.