The Last Love Song (77 page)

The power of photography—and the nature of pornography—was much on his mind at the moment, because ever since his night in the L.A. morgue, he'd possessed a photocopied “Murder Book,” an official “history of an investigation, containing police reports, forensic photographs, [and] autopsies.” The homicide detective who guided him through the morgue gave him the original book and said he could keep it for twenty-four hours. Dunne photocopied it, thinking it might provide useful details for some future writing project.

The book covered an unsolved murder from 1944. It contained a forensic photograph of a naked girl on a gurney in the morgue. Her body had been battered. Someone had draped a doily over her pubic area—“an absurd daintiness,” Dunne said, almost the most horrific thing in the picture. He kept returning to the photo: The girl was only seventeen, just a little older than Quintana, and she had gone to the same school Quintana now attended.

 

Chapter Twenty-seven

1

Quintana had added no new chapters to her novel, but she
had
hung a second Jim Morrison poster on her bedroom wall. The first, a shot of him bare-chested, his arms spread, and brooding under all that gorgeous hair, proclaimed him “An American Poet.” You could count his ribs in the light of the desk lamp, perched just below the poster, right above her bulky electric typewriter. In the second poster, Jim looked less like a rock god, more approachable, just an everyday sort of guy, sweet-faced, someone your mom might have talked to (Quintana's had!).

Now he was dead.

These days, she was taking tons of pictures—of friends, of Malibu, where she still would have preferred to live—tacking them to felt boards on her desk. The desk was her neatest spot. Sometimes, after school, she could walk into her room, sit in her desk chair, wearing the white pullover blouse and the sleeveless sweater she'd worn to classes that day, her hair still nicely combed, straight down over her shoulders, stare at her pens and pencils all perfectly arranged in little metal containers, and imagine herself a young professional, a person with possibilities and places to go.

Otherwise, and elsewhere, things were a mess, but it was important not to show it. Anna Connolly, who'd known Quintana since seventh grade, said, “In truth, she and I were not behaving in ways appropriate to our age—but she was always dignified.” They'd retreat to Quintana's sitting room, where she kept her stereo and books and her
Panic in Needle Park
poster, and they'd play Led Zeppelin records. “Directly across the hall, facing her door, was the door to Joan's office, which I recall as being closed most of the time. Whether Joan was in there or not, I can't say,” Connolly told me. In most of her memories of the Chadbourne house, Quintana's parents are absent. “It's likely they were there (or one was), but I also feel they left us to enjoy ourselves on our own. The flowers, the pool, the kitchen … I do remember going with her parents to Trader Vic's at least once, and I was impressed by her father, as he seemed important to me.”

Generally, Connolly and Quintana “spent a lot of time at the Beach Club, on PCH near the Santa Monica Canyon,” Connolly said. “I was not a member, and I'm not sure if she was, but we were there a lot.”

Everyone knew how easy it was for underage kids to get drinks in most of the exclusive clubs along Palisades Beach. This was a strip where no one over twenty-two ever seemed to go. Even the bouncers in the bars appeared too young to drive.

Quintana was marvelous company in places like the Beach Club: She had a jolly laugh, a generous smile, and big blue eyes. She charmed everybody. And she was a good, loyal friend. Connolly would never forget Quintana's inspiring support of her when they first met and the “mean” girls in seventh grade were tormenting Connolly. Quintana “would not speak to any of them anymore,” even though they had been friends of hers; she “showed real character,” Connolly thought.

*   *   *

Jerry's was a well-known liquor store in Brentwood where the skate rats liked to chill after dark. Teens would gather in front of the store and ask young customers to buy them sixers of Mickey's Big Mouth.

But this was child's stuff. “There were always open bars at Hollywood parties where the kids of parents in the business could get drinks,” said Tim Steele.

“I knew a lot of privileged kids in L.A. with problems—obviously, I
was
such a kid,” said Matthew Specktor, a young Los Angeles novelist and a good friend of Anna Connolly's. “As for Quintana…” He's careful, as are so many of Quintana's old friends and acquaintances when discussing her. “I think our upbringings were pretty similar—we ate with similar cutlery, so to speak.” (He remembered well the Dunnes' Salvadoran housekeeper.) “I don't know what Quintana's problems were, but I've heard tell there were some real drug issues, right?” The important point, he told me, was that “the problems of that era, the problems
I
had, regardless of their relative intensity, were inseparable from the city's atmosphere, which is what Didion is in large part describing” in her work. He recalled a holiday party he attended when he was fifteen, where a screenwriter cut lines of coke on a table directly in front of him and his mother, and no one thought anything of it. The screenwriter was “agitated because he owed the studio a draft on Monday morning and just then—Thursday night—he hadn't written a single word. It was all part of the same picture: the drugs, the movies, the horror—whatever not-quite-nameable thing Didion was pointing at.” This was Quintana's world.

And then she'd visit Malibu—reminded of the world she'd lost. The stark white light. The smell of hibiscus. She'd stroll happily along the beach, near a bluff leading up to the Pacific Coast Highway; she'd run her fingers across a thin branch of oak leaves or roses, and her fingertips came away gray, covered with thick, rich pollen.
This
was her home.

It's not that the social scene here was necessarily easier to negotiate than the one in Brentwood; it's just that she'd been better prepared for it before being plucked away to suburbia. In fact, Malibu could be “socially vicious,” said Karl Greenfeld. A “surfers-rule, no-fat-chix ethic” was “strictly enforced.” Those who weren't “blond, strong, handsome, fast, and harsh enough turn[ed] invisible” or became “victims of that gang of surfers and skateboarders who rule[d] our teenage wasteland. Brewing just out of sight [was] a subculture of fear and kid-on-kid violence.”

“Karl knew some of the same people Quintana did—those beach community people,” said his father, Josh. “It's astonishing how fast kids grow up on the coast.”

Karl recalled his adolescence as a “haze of marijuana smoke,” Cheap Trick records, and a lot of “crappy, low-grade THC.” He recalled the students' cars in the school parking lots as finer than those of the teachers (Quintana drove to Malibu now in her own car, shiny red, with a vanity license plate, QROO). He recalled a lot of single-parent households and absentee moms and dads—yet it was
those
parents who passed Proposition 13, “lowering property taxes and gutting California's public schools.” He also recalled a lot of family cats being locked out of empty houses during the day, eaten by coyotes.

Then there were the parties in the houses of people whose parents were away—stereos cranked to the max, playing the Sex Pistols, Triumph, the Dead Kennedys. Kids pumped fists in the air and chanted along with the Clash: “I'm so bored with the U … S … A!” The children of celebrities pretended to
disparage
fame, or rather, “mainstream popularity,” said Matthew Specktor. “De Niro was cool, or Kubrick—you know, it was about a certain art house credibility.” The backroom dope deals, the backroom sex.

Josh Greenfeld said he heard a persistent rumor that a well-known movie star, a star about whom “everyone had stories—and they were probably all true,” had “deflowered” Quintana. Just another Hollywood rumor, but it wouldn't go away. In any case, what was certain, he said, was that “Quintana had a hard time of it. Everyone knew that.”

It's not precisely clear when Didion began to take her daughter to specialists, but at a certain point, she saw Quintana “wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia.
Let me just be in the ground,
she had kept sobbing.” In
Blue Nights,
Didion writes, “She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.”

The specialists diagnosed Quintana's “depths, shallows, [and] quicksilver changes” as manic depression or OCD, and finally as “borderline personality disorder,” often a medical catchall for people whose moods lurch unpredictably from sadness to hostility without visible provocation. “Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients,” clinical psychologist Marsha Linehan once said. “They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin.”

Doctors could not advise Didion whether the core of Quintana's problems was genetic or environmental, a result of family dynamics, or a combination of all three, but in any event, Didion did not trust what they were telling her. “I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis' led to a ‘cure,' or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility,” she wrote. The wallpaper in Quintana's sitting room may as well have been malarial yellow, straight out of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story.

“Let me just be in the ground.… Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.”

2

On November 17, 1982, Susanna Moore wrote Quintana a condolence note. She said she understood sudden, crushing loss—her mother had died when she was very young. This had not granted her any particular wisdom. No one could say anything to ease the pain. But she wanted Quintana to know that she had been thinking of her.

What is heartbreaking about Quintana's response—a rather perfunctory thank-you note—is the paper on which it's written. Like her mother, Quintana had ordered personalized letterhead stationery—but underneath her name, in bold Colonna MT script, the paper was ruled like a grade-school notebook, and Quintana's handwriting, in pencil, wavered from dark to light.

The occasion for this exchange was the murder of Quintana's twenty-two-year-old cousin, Dominique. On the evening of October 30, Dominique's former boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, a chef at Ma Maison, strangled her for nearly three and a half minutes in what he later claimed was a blackout fit of rage. Dominique, who had just appeared in her first feature-length motion picture, Steven Spielberg's
Poltergeist,
had lived with Sweeney for several months in a one-bedroom house in West Hollywood, but then she began to fear his temper, his nasty jealousy of her friends, whom he considered snobs (he had been born to a poor family in Pennsylvania's coal country). She broke up with him. On the night police arrived at her residence and found Sweeney hunched over her unmoving body in the driveway, he said, according to a police department spokesperson, “I killed my girlfriend.”

*   *   *

Nick got a call at five in the morning, in his tiny Manhattan apartment, from Detective Harold Johnston of the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau. The detective told him his daughter was near death at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Lenny came on the phone. “I need you,” she said.

“What happened?” Nick asked.

“Sweeney.”

“I'll be on the first plane.”

Nick had met Sweeney some months earlier at a lunch with his daughter and her boyfriend; he had sensed the man's simmering tension and Dominique's unhappiness. Later, on the telephone, she told her father, “He's not in love with me, Dad. He's obsessed with me. It's driving me crazy.” Her brother, Alex, couldn't stand the guy, and Lenny knew Dominique feared him. Dominique had told her this in tears one night, after she'd fled to the house of a friend of hers, an artist named Norman Carby, to hide from Sweeney.

Nick and Griffin caught a TWA flight to LAX and drove straight to Lenny's house on Crescent Avenue in Beverly Hills. She had moved from the residence on Walden, the place she'd shared with Nick when they were married, because she needed a smaller, more negotiable space. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She was confined now to a wheelchair.

“The news is not good,” she told Nick. The doctors had mentioned “brain damage.” The hospital phoned to ask “permission to insert a bolt into Dominique's skull to relieve the pressure on her brain.”

Sometime over the next couple days, Didion accompanied Lenny to the ICU. Dominique lay still, encoiled in tubes, her eyes, enlarged, staring at nothing, her hair shaved off. Didion had known Sweeney a little. He had gone to her house with Dominique to stay with Quintana on a couple occasions when the Dunnes were away.

It was like giving the Broken Man the key to your front door.

“She looks even worse than Diana did,” Lenny said, holding her daughter's limp hand. She was remembering Diana Lynn Hall, who had died in this ICU following a stroke—Diana, who had encouraged Didion to phone Blake Watson, setting in motion the adoption process leading her to Quintana.

When Lenny mentioned Diana, Didion understood what she meant. She was saying that Dominique was going to die.

If the girl was being kept alive by machines, did this mean she was already technically dead? As opposed to what—
really
dead?

Technical life?

“It's not black and white,” one of the residents told them.

This exchange, slightly shaded, made it into
Democracy:
“It's not necessarily an either-or situation.” “Life and death? Are not necessarily either-or?”