The Last Love Song (47 page)

8

All fall, at Hollywood parties, presidential politics topped the talk. Only here, it seemed, could the result be uncertain.

The liberal hopefuls reminded Didion of Las Vegas wedding couples she'd witnessed outside the twenty-four-hour chapels, stumbling, drunk and impulsive, into a dream of happily ever after. The A-listers would gather in the hills above the Strip, past the old Mocambo, at Sammy Davis Jr.'s house for Hollywood “political action” parties, where, Didion said, “political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad).” While Hollywood gentry debated the finer points of the war or expressed continuing support for the grape strikes or discussed whether or not William Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner
promoted racism, the disaffected children of the people who used to sip the Mocambo's vodka tonics and dance to Old Blue Eyes were throwing bottles at cops in front of Ciro's while the Byrds floated eight miles high.

One night, at a party in Bel-Air, Didion met Nora Ephron, a fine young journalist (she was ever sharp, and yet the
Newsweek
staff put her to work in its
mailroom
!). They'd become great friends—they agreed that writing never helped them understand a damn thing. Didion was also introduced to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. That night, Didion wore the dress in which she'd married, the backless silk dress she'd bought the day JFK was shot. Polanski spilled a glass of wine on it. The red stain seemed portentous, and would come to seem more so; only half kidding, one of Didion's friends began to call the area around Franklin Avenue the “senseless-killing neighborhood.” Even in a year of chaos—perhaps
especially
in a year of chaos—people sought symbols and narrative links, though Ephron and Didion could have told them not to bother.

Just that October, a few miles from Didion's house, in Laurel Canyon, a former silent movie actor, Ramon Novarro, had been murdered in his home by a pair of self-described hustlers looking for stardom or cash or
something
they felt Novarro had promised them. (A hustler, said one of the killers, is “someone who can talk—not just to men, to women, too … There are a lot of lonely people in this town, man.”)

Two blocks from the Dunnes' home stood the Black Dahlia house, resembling a Mayan temple. The couple had heard rumors that, in the forties, in the basement of the house, a prominent L.A. physician had tortured and sliced in half an aspiring actress, Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia, presumably because of the color of her hair). The doctor's son, Steve Hodel, suspected his father of the murder, and suggested a connection between the Hollywood killing and the dismemberment, years ago, of Suzanne Degnan in Chicago. Dunne would base some of his novel
True Confessions
on details from the Black Dahlia case.

Crazy violence was becoming a way to reckon time in California—normally difficult, said Eve Babitz, “since there [were] no winters.” There were just “earthquakes, parties, and certain people. And songs.” But the best-by date had passed. Most of the songs, overproduced, too smooth, had started to blur: “The Byrds and the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas … sounded as though they came out of a Frostie Freeze machine pipe organ.”

This was also true of the prose in the corporate press. Politics. Crime. All part of the Great American Muzak.

Late in 1968, the
Los Angeles Times
named Didion one of its Women of the Year, along with Greer Garson and Nancy Reagan. Didion was celebrated for her achievement as the author of
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
—for becoming Joan Didion. As she would later write in her essay “The White Album,” she was performing, day by day, barely up to the task. She was just like her mother, improvising, wearing her red suede sandals, her cashmere leggings, hoop earrings, and big enameled beads.

The newspaper editors placed her among Leaders, Pillars of the Community, Centers of the American Family.

“We hear sirens in the night,” Richard Nixon had said back in August, asserting
his
vision of leadership. “We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other.” No matter. “Tonight I see the face of a child.… [H]e's an American child.… He is a poet.… He is everything we ever hoped to be and everything we dare to dream to be.”

American children, raised by Women of the Year.

Because of them, Nixon said, “I believe that historians will recall that 1968 marked the beginning of the American generation in world history.”

*   *   *

In the crash pad next to the house, a couple had taken to making love on the lawn, in full view of Quintana's bedroom window.

“Where you was?” Quintana, wearing fuzzy pink slippers, asked her mother whenever Didion returned home from a party or a shopping trip.

In the evenings, Quintana bounce-stepped onto the tennis court. “I remember watching her weed it, kneeling on fat baby knees, the ragged stuffed animal she addressed as ‘Bunny Rabbit' at her side,” Didion wrote, heartbroken, a few years after her daughter had died.

 

Chapter Seventeen

1

The “snake book.”

Blood and champagne.

This is how the era would end.

Nora Sayre reports that, during the Nixon presidency, Air Force One was stocked with “an adequate supply” of the president's blood type “in the likelihood of attempted assassination,” and “cases of American champagne for toasting his hosts at a reciprocal banquet.” “That vast jet, pounding through the skies full of blood and bubbly, stayed with me as a symbol for peace-keeping” during this period, Sayre wrote.

“Mommy's snake book” was Quintana's name for Didion's second novel,
Play It As It Lays.
When the novel appeared in 1970, it came in a bold jacket designed by the distinctive book artist Janet Halverson. A rattler's silhouette curled across the stark white cover, its forked tongue flicking a small setting sun. Didion worked hard on the book throughout 1968 (making extensive notes) and 1969 (composing the chapters). Quintana's earliest memories of her mother's industry nestled in the reptile's coils. The creature charmed her mom, dragged her away in the drafty old house. Didion would sit on the sun porch—the smell of aloe wafting through the windows—and say she needed to work. In the evenings, when there wasn't a party, she'd light votive candles and set them on the living room windowsills. She'd sip bourbon and reread the pages she'd written that day.

Quintana danced to the eight-track player: the Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Want to Dance?” “I wanna dance,” Quintana shouted. Years later, in
Blue Nights,
to convey an ache of innocence, Didion would sketch scenes of her daughter talking back to the song, but she didn't note that the Mamas and the Papas were sometimes guests in her daughter's house.

“Turn! Turn! Turn!” Quintana sang with the Byrds. To everything there is a season. This was the season of Mommy's snake book. Her mother would say she needed to work. Quintana would say the same about herself when Didion asked her to do something.

*   *   *

It was also election season. You couldn't go to a restaurant without hearing Nixon's name.

One night, the Dunnes had dinner with Jim Mills, author of
The Panic in Needle Park
. He was an associate editor at
Life. The Panic in Needle Park
had begun years earlier as an article and photo essay for the magazine. But when the Dunnes met him, hoping to option his book for a picture, he wanted to talk politics.

LBJ had just gone on television to announce a temporary bombing halt in Vietnam. Mills insisted that the American people were overly sensitive to the word
nuclear.
Many lives could have been saved in Southeast Asia if the United States had nuked it, he said. Didion had once considered this position, but her time with Dunne had tempered her views, and the couple thought Mills slightly cracked. Didion had decided not to vote in this election—the thought of choosing the lesser of two evils appalled her.

But the movie looked like a go. Mills was receptive. Along with Nick, the Dunnes agreed to put up $1,000 for a year's option against $17,500 and 5 percent of net profits. Didion would write a film treatment. Nick thought he could find further financing, maybe at Fox (Dunne's time there had taught him that the studios were down, not out; you needed a studio to get
anything
done, and they operated with brute efficiency—around town, people called Disney “Duckau”).

Mills's story line was relentlessly grim, but Didion had learned the art of the pitch. What's the picture about? “Romeo and Juliet on junk,” she said.

*   *   *

Dunne was eager to finish his
Dolittle
project. Nothing about it surprised him. “Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind,” he'd say later. “What makes it bearable are those moments … when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in
The Studio.
My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.”

He could barely lug his carcass to another studio meeting. He couldn't stomach another working dinner at the Daisy, glancing at the glazed wall mirrors (strategically placed so everybody could stare at fellow diners without appearing to strain), listening to the studio heads discuss dubbing a picture in Israel:

“What do they speak there? Yiddish?”

“I don't know. Hebrew maybe.”

“What's ‘pussy' in Hebrew?”

He groaned at the mountains of caviar honoring
Hello, Dolly!
now that the Wardrobe Department had determined Babs's dress was sufficiently functional.

He'd had enough of the studio's divine eminence. All he wanted now was a book party in New York. (Presumably, FSG had thrown the promised bash for
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
.) Dunne told Henry Robbins he wasn't really pressing for a party, but just for kicks, he wondered, How many people might I invite?

What
really
nagged him was fear that
The Studio
was not a worthy follow-up to
Delano,
and
Delano
had vanished with little notice. Meanwhile, his wife had become the muse of the sixties. Even so, critical acclaim for
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
had not translated into robust sales. New American Library refused to make a public offer for the paperback rights (eventually, Dell would extend a $1,250 advance). Literary success could be as gloomy as failure.

2

“It is the season … of divorce,” Didion had written of the cheating couples in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” At the end of 1969, shortly after discussing in print the possibility that she and her husband might separate, she would refer to her own “season of doubt.”

“We communicated in nuance,” Dunne wrote.

Let's take a look.

At the end of “Los Angeles Notebook,” in the final section of
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
, Didion sits in a piano bar in Encino. Piano bars in Encino, she writes, are where people “tell each other about their first wives and last husbands.” She does not say what she was doing there alone. She
does
say she went to a pay phone and called a friend in New York. He asked her why she was there. She replied, “Why not?”

In
Play It As It Lays,
Encino is the faceless part of L.A. where Maria's domestic dreams die in a bloody pail. (“Didion's description of Maria's abortion and her subsequent horror at the waste, the fetus in the pail … is all too true,” wrote the critic Barbara Harrison.) “You familiar with this area, Maria?” asks a doctor's go-between in the novel. “Nice homes here. Nice for kids.”

Adding his own nuance to the mix, Dunne often told friends at parties during this period—sometimes joking, sometimes not—that his marriage was a week-to-week affair.

Contributing to their difficulties at this time were the stresses of writing, money, lots of drinking, Dunne's quickness to anger, and Didion's “theatrical temperament”—especially, it seems, in 1969, and again three years later, when, Didion wrote, “John and I were having a fight [and] he took it out on Quintana. She cried. I told her she and I were leaving, she and I were going to LAX, she and I were flying away from him.”

Without placing blame on either party, one of the couple's old friends said Didion should have taken Quintana and gone to live with Frank and Eduene. Didion's sufferings, whatever their causes, were as intense as Maria's tensions with her husband in the novel.

“Did they have trouble? Oh, yes. And all those stories you read in the paper about Joan's reclusiveness? I don't understand why you'd think they're true,” Eve Babitz told me. “Maybe it was John shouting over her. And she preferred it. John could be the idiot and she didn't have to be. He pounded down doors, and that's why Quintana hated him. Joan would never leave him—
he
got to be the obnoxious one. She thought staying with him proved she had character.”

In November 1969, after a particularly cloudy period, Didion wrote of an attempt at reconciliation: “We … refrain from mentioning the kicked-down doors, the hospitalized psychotics [presumably, when she was diagnosed at St. John's] and the packed suitcases.”

“Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life, just let it go,”
Didion wrote years later, invoking the echo of Dunne's voice.

When
Play It As It Lays
was published, Didion acknowledged suffering severe marital setbacks. “Anyway, John and I stayed together,” she told an interviewer. “A lot of marriages are surviving infidelity around the country … [it] isn't really that important except as a betrayal.”