The Last Love Song (66 page)

Charlotte waits, in vain, at the Boca Grande airport—as Didion once waited in Panama—for a plane that might connect her, somehow, to her daughter, Marin.

Grace, the widow of a wealthy man with financial stakes in Boca Grande, takes an interest in her fellow exile. Grace was raised in the American West, among transients in a hotel. She feels a kinship, a “common prayer,” with Charlotte (though the childlike Charlotte is far more naive): They're shaped by the same Blue Sky values, disappointed by greedy, ambitious husbands, adrift now in an unchartable world, their hopes blasted by forces they cannot see, much less confront.

Each night, as Grace rinses her hair, she is aware of Liberian tankers in the bay outside her window, shadows on “incorporeal” missions (Liberian registration is usually a false cover for clandestine ships—slipping the narrative as easily as they slip in and out of foreign harbors).

In
A Book of Common Prayer,
Didion has cast off the social satire of Edith Wharton with its love of surface contours—a residue of which remained in
Play It As It Lays
; she has moved beyond the Gothic insularity of Poe, beyond the arbitrary postmodern collages of many of her contemporaries, and into a Melvillean world of confidence men and shifting sight (early on, Charlotte writes a paper on Melville for a college professor who later becomes her husband; he gives her an F).

One night, at the Hotel del Caribe, where Charlotte lives on Boca Grande, the generator flickers out, and she sits “alone in the dark at the ballroom piano until three
A.M.
picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song.” (The scene recalls Didion's essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” where the melancholy father of a Berkeley frat boy tweaked a tune, hoping to find the happy chords of his past—the essay itself an echo of Didion's dad trying, throughout her childhood, to cheer himself up by playing ragtime piano.) The dance floor, site of so many fairy-tale triumphs, has gone black; still, the abandoned princess keeps trying to find the right structural rhythm, the one continuous line getting her to the end of the only song she was ever taught to play.

But the melody won't carry on the island of Boca Grande.

None of the usual rituals or forms, nothing on which Charlotte has depended in her temperate life, will suffice now. As Grace says, words—accepted definitions, explanations, points of contact—don't work here.

*   *   *

At the end of the novel, once Charlotte has died brutally as a result of her refusal to acknowledge the realities of political violence, Grace locates Marin “in a dirty room in Buffalo” to bear final witness, to tell the girl her mother “always kept [her] in her mind.” Marin, hardened by her radicalism, doesn't care—or pretends not to. In the end, she
does
break down.

The scene is a mirror image of the final section of Conrad's
Heart of Darkness,
when Marlow cannot tell Kurtz's intended the truth of what happened to her beloved in the wilderness. In Conrad, women, cosseted by strict social expectations, unaware of the world's primal darkness, must be lied to for their own protection. In Didion, women are exposed to the horror just as much as the men are; if they remain deluded, it's not because they haven't
tried
to see the truth. It's because, since Conrad's day, the truth has become a seven-headed cobra (Kalashnikovs, the TRIGA Mark III).

Says Grace, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”

No one could.

*   *   *

On August 7, 1976, Didion wrote Lois Wallace, detailing her expectations for a sales strategy in marketing the novel. She trusted Henry Robbins, but perhaps she had already seen that he would hit a wall at Simon & Schuster in attemps to promote literary fiction. Another editor at the house remarked that a novel called
A Book of Common Prayer
might well end up on the religion shelf. The comment upset Didion, not because she feared she'd have to change her title (she was not about to), but because it suggested a less than wholehearted approach to selling the book. There was no point in pushing a literary novel as a rousing good adventure yarn—futzing with the title made no difference. No. The way to sell a literary novel, Didion said, was to make it An Event. She believed the book had commercial potential if the reading public could be persuaded
hers
was the novel to buy this year, whether or not they read it: Its appearance was a Major Literary Milestone. Therefore, the sales possibilities lay entirely in S&S promoting the book as A Novel by Joan Didion, with her name in larger letters on the cover than the title. Sell the author and the author's importance more than the book itself.

The novel's rollout had to be handled with a kind of arrogant certainty, she said, and she expected Wallace to inject a shot of testosterone into the S&S sales staff.

Whether the letter was prompted by pure anxiety over Simon & Schuster, or genuine confidence after her successful lecture at Berkeley, Didion was sincere in her plan for selling the book. (And she seems to have gotten her way: On the cover of the first-edition hardback, her name, printed in all caps at the top, is bolder than the title.)

She closed her letter by announcing to Wallace that she'd just bought a red fox coat.

*   *   *

S&S's Dick Snyder
did
have a blockbuster mentality and little patience for the placid backwater of literary fiction. In 1974, after a few weak years, he'd resuscitated the company financially with a deal he'd very nearly declined:
All the President's Men,
by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the story of their reporting trail in the Watergate affair.

All the President's Men
became the
definition
of “blockbuster.” Now, just weeks before the official publication date of
A Book of Common Prayer,
the movie of the Woodward-Bernstein story, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, was gobbling up review space, pumping new life into the paperback, and generating buzz for this year's sequel,
The Final Days,
charting the end of the Nixon presidency. For the foreseeable future, Simon & Schuster would devote its best resources to selling
this
book. Tricky Dick had screwed Didion.

She bore no animosity toward Carl Bernstein, who had married her friend Nora Ephron in April. A charming rogue, he entertained Didion; she recognized he was probably the sort of man “capable of having sex with a venetian blind” (the reputation preceding, and surviving, his union with Ephron), but he never troubled her with his randiness or his gossip, and they got along fine. He admired her writing. The only potential awkwardness in their friendship occurred around certain others: Ben Stein, another new Didion pal, a former Nixon speechwriter (once rumored to have been Deep Throat), now trying to break into the movie business. Didion and Dunne were enormously helpful to him, introducing him to their picture agents. They were amused by his continuing support for Nixon. “I just think he was a saint!” he'd say. “[So] he was a politician who lied. How remarkable!” Probably not a good idea to herd him into the same room with Bernstein.

The other difficulty was Bernstein's partner. Woodward didn't particularly care for Nora Ephron or her social circle. “I just didn't have the natural connection with Nora,” he admitted. “I remember I heard Nora talk about some dinner and holding a discourse on the kind of lettuce that had been served. ‘Can you believe they served that kind of lettuce?' There was just this sense that she had been offended … it just wasn't the way I lived.” He'd never have made it in Old Sac. And—grateful as Didion was for his exposure of the used-car salesman muttering to himself in the White House at night—he didn't endear himself to her.

2

“I remember going to a party at Joan's house in Trancas. I did not like the party, but Joan was so incredibly nice. Couldn't have been more hospitable,” Ben Stein told me. “The people at the party were just uninteresting. I remember sitting at a table with John's brother Nick, and he was particularly uninteresting.”

“I wasn't invited [anywhere] much anymore,” Nick said. “In my journal of that period I recorded with names every snub, every slight. Already I had almost jumped in front of a train in Santa Barbara. At the last second I let it pass me. Already I'd had a major flirtation with a kitchen knife that I took to bed with me, as if I could make it happen in my sleep, thereby absolving me of any responsibility in the eyes of God, or so I thought. The love that I felt for Los Angeles turned to hate.” He knew it wouldn't be long before he'd have to abandon the community altogether. He was no longer a deal maker. That distinction belonged to his brother now.

Working the room, chatting people up, refilling their drinks, Dunne loved to pique his guests' curiosity, remarking coyly about his efforts on
A Star Is Born,
“Put it this way, it's our beads, but it's not our necklace.”

Didion would just smile, cook, arrange bowls of chicken salad on a table, and replenish the hors d'ouvres trays.

Sometimes, late in the evenings when the parties were winding down, when the chairs had been shoved aside to make space and it seemed that the largest piece of furniture in the room was the ocean outside, Nick's daughter Dominique and Quintana would walk through the house, grazing on leftovers, Quintana wearing a too-big sweatshirt, her skin lightly reddened from days in the sun. When asked what they'd been doing, the girls said they'd been working.

It was through her parents' work, before and during the long negotiations over
A Star Is Born,
that Quintana met Barbra Streisand's son, Jason. “I wasn't crazy about their playing in the cage with the pet lion cub, but I figured what the hell, this was Hollywood,” Dunne said.

In the latter half of 1975, Quintana spent a lot of time alone, or with Dominique and Susan Traylor, as her folks fiddled with the script for
A Star Is Born.

Their original screenplay was entitled
Rainbow Road.
“It should make us a lot of money,” Didion said at the outset. “In fact, we saw it basically as a picture about money.”

John Foreman took it to Jerry Schatzberg; the Dunnes were delighted to work with him again. Richard Perry, the music producer recruited by Warner Bros., found the screenplay unrealistic and trite. These people didn't know their rock 'n' roll. The Dunnes reworked the story (after screening
Seven Days in May
and
The Third Man
to remind themselves of scene composition and pacing;
The Third Man,
they thought, was the perfect movie).

Meanwhile, Sue Mengers took the screenplay to Streisand, who had an outstanding four- to six-million-dollar contract for a musical in which she would perform six songs. The contract called for the movie to be delivered by December 1976. Streisand detested the script. The man's part was bigger than the female lead's. This picture had no romance.

Streisand's latest boyfriend, Jon Peters, an illiterate hairdresser with dreams of producing movies, saw the script and asked Streisand to reconsider the part. “I had seen Barbra at the Cocoanut Grove … [W]hen [she] sang … the power she had—the magic in her fingers and face—controlled the entire room,” he said. He wanted to reproduce that experience on-screen, and he convinced Streisand he could do it. “Jon has a way of seeing me, he knows me as a woman, as a sexual being, and I'm tired of being just Funny Girl, a self-deprecating waif,” she said now. Peters bumped aside John Foreman as executive producer; Schatzberg fled the project.

Years later, in a book proposal distilling his life story, Peters (working with the writer William Stadiem) took complete credit for
A Star Is Born.
Speaking of himself in the third person, he said:

Jon's brainstorm was to do a rock 'n' roll version of
A Star Is Born …
Los Angeles had replaced London as the center of the rock universe, a universe in which Jon fancied himself a player who wanted to become a master. He also wanted to make Barbra over to be cool and hip, not just a Broadway icon. Here was his chance to have it all … Jon even found a script of the remake called “Rainbow Road,” by Hollywood's then most powerful and prestigious screenwriting couple, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The only problem was that Jon could not read it. His illiteracy was his darkest, most shameful secret … The showdown script meetings between the reformatory dropout [Peters] and the snobby intellectual Dunnes was the stuff of farce. The dropout won. He fired the Dunnes and went through draft after draft with the biggest scribes in the business.

Peters's memoir was never published. His assertions that the Dunnes were cowed by him and that he fired them do not square with the couple's recollections. Already, prior to Streisand's commitment, the Dunnes worried that “
A Star Is Born
was becoming a career” and they wanted to abandon it, Dunne said. Then, when Streisand came aboard, “[v]enality forced us to reconsider … with Barbra Streisand involved, we knew we weren't going to get poor.”

Soon Peters was referring to the project as “my film” and “my concept.” The Dunnes looked for a way out. He just wanted to shoot his girlfriend's ass. “We couldn't … quit, because then we would have been in breach of contract and lost our ‘points,' or percentage of the profits,” Dunne wrote. “Nor could we be fired, because then we would have left with our points intact, and the business people would have none of that. They wanted to give us some of our points back, which we refused to do until it was stipulated that we could leave without being in breach. It took eight weeks to negotiate this point.”

Meanwhile, Peters said he could direct. He said he could star in the movie. He said he could sing—“Put a band behind me, and I can sing. If not, shout around me.” Finally, the studio convinced him to let the veteran Frank Pierson direct the film. “The Didion/Dunne third draft script [was] by far the best—sharp and tough-minded,” Pierson said. But by now, Peters was adamant: The movie should be a thinly disguised version of his love affair with Streisand. She agreed. “People are curious: they want to know about us,” she said. “That's what they come to see.”