The Last Love Song (87 page)

“You know the context, you remember the names.”

Didion certainly did.

Kakutani said it was “hard to buy” the sort of “history she believes in,” but Didion's experience with literary plotting had equipped her with insight into the kinds of affairs appearing, in outline, in the two-inch wire stories below the fold on page fourteen. Just as a writer must use the cards on the table and deal with what she's already said, so, too, “[i]f you put an assassination plot into play you follow it with an assassination attempt. If you stage an assassination attempt you put somebody out front. A front, an assassin. A front with a suitable background. A front who can be silenced in the assassination attempt.”

Cause and effect. Narrative. Playing out the hand.

Every gambler knows the game.

“I'm not sure I know what business [he's] in,” Didion's heroine says to her father about some shadowy character she's just met while traveling cross-country.

“Christ, what business are they all in,” the old arms dealer says.

2

Figuratively speaking,
Americans killing Americans to advance American interests
summed up the play during the years Didion reassessed Iran-Contra and covered political campaigns.

Of the Clinton impeachment proceedings, she wrote, “What … occurred was … a covert effort to advance a particular agenda by bringing down a president,” and to set up a patsy by naming “the citizens themselves as co-conspirators in the nation's moral degradation.”

The American people, acting as Lee Harvey Oswald, moved into the line of fire when the permanent political class in Hollywood, New York, and Washington decided it wanted Clinton gone and needed cover.

(“He came in here and he trashed the place, and it's not his place,” said journalist and Washington insider David Broder, unintentionally giving the game away.)

“The question of ‘impeachment' … had come up practically from the inauguration,” Didion said: the “idea of using the legal system to basically entrap” this outsider. When an investigation into Clinton's real-estate dealings came up empty, the impeachment plotters turned to the president's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to plant a smoking gun (or to finger a suspicious stain on a dress). And who was to blame for the country's “quandary”? “No analysis can absolve the [American] people themselves of responsibility,” said Don Eberly of the Civil Society Project (a nonprofit dedicated to “non-governmental institutions of American society as the indispensable foundation of public virtue”).

In fact, according to polls, most citizens—while not all enamored of Clinton—had sniffed out the foul scheming of the president's sanctimonious opponents. “He's the luckiest man alive,” Didion said. He was blessed with odious enemies.

She was not the only one to point out that the
Referral to the United States House of Representatives,
a tome listing Clinton's sexual transgressions by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, read like a soft-porn novel with “an unreliable first person narrator.”

It was hard to buy the masturbatory but holier-than-thou history promoted by the permanent political class. These were people “who don't have a very deep commitment to the rest of the country; in fact, none,” Didion said.

And any English major will tell you: You can't bring down a president, making “basic craft error[s].”

*   *   *

True to her contrary nature, she registered to vote so she could support Clinton during his second campaign in the face of what she saw as ongoing coup attempts by the Children of Reagan, California Dreamers who'd marched into the East demanding low taxes and real estate zoned for business.

Her voter ID, however, did not mean that she embraced “voting as a consumer transaction (the voter ‘pays' with his or her vote to obtain the ear of his or her professional politician, or his or her ‘leader,' or by logical extension, his or her ‘superior').” Given both major parties' crass appeals to the rabid fringes of their bases, their attempts to limit the actual number of voters in play and to corral them in gerrymandered districts, “choice” was a political fable: Only “sentimentally does ‘the vote' give ‘the voter' an empathetic listener in the political class, let alone any leverage on the workings of that class,” dominated as it is by vast wealth and armies of lobbyists.

Didion's view seemed validated in Florida in 2000 during the Bush-Gore recount. “It was a perfect thing from the parties' point of view,” she said, referring to “reducing the electorate to a few hundred voters and then fighting over them for 35 days.” She went on to say, “I don't think it had anything to do with the democratic process or with anything in our politics that came before.” The “fact that the 2000 presidential election in Florida could come down to only a handful of votes [was] still popularly presented as evidence that ‘every vote counts,' conclusive proof of the absolute power of the American voter.” Yet “what those days actually demonstrated, from the morning on Day One when the candidate whose brother happened to be governor of Florida lined up the critical Tallahassee law firms until the evening on Day Thirty-Five when the Supreme Court decided
Bush v. Gore
for the same candidate, was the immateriality of the voter against the raw power of being inside the process.”

She chafed at Cokie Roberts, a television pundit who'd stated, “I think people do think [what's happening is] political but they think that's okay. They expect the court to be political and—they wanted this election to be over.” What Roberts had done, Didion said, was make the case “of the permanent political class for order, for continuity, for the perpetuation of the contract that delivered only to itself”—precisely what it had been seeking to do during the Clinton impeachment proceedings. And if citizens complained about the way the election was being decided, once again they were morally deficient. The “‘rule of law' was repeatedly invoked” during the ordeal, Didion noticed, “although how a matter as demonstrably lawyered up as the Florida recount could … threaten the rule of law was unclear.”

*   *   *

Earlier that year, another Florida drama had riveted Didion's attention. In April, armed agents of the U.S. Border Patrol conducted a predawn raid on a small house in Miami to snatch a six-year-old boy named Elián González from his uncle. Protesters surrounded the home, screaming, “Assassins!” They threw bottles and rocks and were met with Mace and pepper spray.

Months before this, the boy had been found floating in the ocean by two fishermen, who turned him over to the Coast Guard. His mother had drowned in an attempt to escape from Cuba and come to the United States. Elián's father, in Havana, wanted him back, against the wishes of his brother. Finally, Attorney General Janet Reno ordered Elián's uncle to give him up. He did so only at gunpoint.

The episode reminded Didion of the Cuban exiles she'd spoken to in Miami while researching her book on that city. Many of them had come to the United States as part of Operación Pedro Pan (Operation Peter Pan) in the early 1960s, a series of airlifts, over a period of twenty-two months, evacuating more than fourteen thousand children from Cuba, under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Miami, to shield them from Castro's revolution amid rumors of indoctrination and deportation to Russia. Parents willingly relinquished their kids to the Land of Freedom. “Many underground operatives” in Cuba “made their participation” in U.S.-sponsored anti-Castro activities “contingent upon the safety of their children,” said historian Victor Triay. “For CIA strategists, then, the children's exodus was a preparatory gesture for what became the Bay of Pigs invasion.” In the decades of recrimination following the Bay of Pigs, the children of Pedro Pan wondered if they'd been tokens in some larger game. As Didion had written, “If you stage an … attempt you put somebody out front.” A cover. A chit. “A front who can be silenced…” Or who'll remain silent out of ignorance.

In the years since, presidents from Kennedy to Clinton had visited Florida, promising these displaced children a true and liberated home.

And now here was the latest leader, George W. Bush, appointed by his Supreme Court (with the support of Didion's old friend Anthony Kennedy). “He's a very mysterious figure to me,” Didion said of Bush. “[H]e operates a lot of the time behind the screen of everyone around him”—for example, the fleet of lawyers in Miami. “The extent to which he's operating at all we have no idea.”

On the campaign trail, he'd talked less about domestic goals or global vision than he did about supporting “faith-based” groups (nongovernmental institutions indispensable to public virtue), promoting “redemption” rather than “reform” in new urban policies, and his “personal transformation” at the hands of his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who had weaned him from his addiction to alcohol. From the White House, this teetotaler would work to change people's “hearts,” he told the children of Pedro Pan.

The president of Neverland.

 

Chapter Thirty-three

This calls for a drink,
her grandfather might have said.

But Quintana was either not drinking or trying hard not to drink during this period.

“It's been very up and down emotionally,” she told reporter Celia McGee, who wrote a Society column for the New York
Daily News.
On October 22, 1998, McGee inserted this item into her column: “At
Elle Décor
magazine … photography editor Quintana Roo Dunne, the adopted daughter of writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, was recently traced by one of her biological sisters. In contact with her birth family for the first time in more than 30 years, Dunne said, ‘It's quite a drama.'”

Here's how Didion recounted the drama in
Blue Nights
: “[O]n a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news arrived at her door, the perfect child [Quintana] received a Federal Express letter from a young woman who convincingly identified herself as her sister, her full sister, one of two younger children later born, although we had not before known this, to Quintana's natural mother and father.” It seemed Quintana's birth parents had decided to stay together after they'd given her up for adoption. Now they were divorced. The mother lived in Dallas, the father somewhere in Florida. Quintana's younger brother, estranged from his mother, lived in Texas. Quintana's sister, against her mother's advice, turned to the Internet to try to locate her lost sibling. She contacted a private detective, who said that for two hundred dollars he could find Quintana by accessing her Con Ed account. “The sister had agreed to the deal,” Didion wrote. “I cannot easily express what I thought about this. On the one hand, I told myself, it could hardly be a surprise. We had spent thirty-two years considering just such a possibility.… On the other hand, I told myself, it now seemed too late, not the right time.… There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or worse, finished.”

“Saturday delivery,” Quintana said when she showed Didion and Dunne her sister's FedEx note. She repeated this over and over, Didion wrote, “as if maintaining focus on this one point could put her world back together.”

*   *   *

Quintana had moved into a spacious apartment at 14 Sutton Place South. Nora Sheehan, a well-known publication designer (creative director and art designer for several magazines, including
Architectural Digest, WSJ Magazine, Travel & Leisure
), had hired her at
Elle Décor.
Quintana had become a regular in the “12-step recovery community on the Upper East Side,” according to Sue Kaufman, another member of that community at the time. “She was very, very class conscious,” Kaufman recalled. “Quintana could be an extremely gracious, kind and open person
unless
she felt that a person were one millimeter beneath her on the social ladder. In those cases, she was at best distant, and more regularly aggressively hostile.” She had gained weight and apparently still struggled with the quicksilver mood changes doctors had diagnosed as borderline personality disorder. “The scary thing about Quintana was that she could unpredictably go into a rage that always suggested the possibility of violence,” Kaufman said.

On her best days, “she was so excited to see you or talk to you every time you met or called,” said Amy Cooper, Quintana's intern at
Elle Décor.
“She had a big voice. I can still hear it: ‘Oh HI!' It was never Hey or Hi or Hello, it was always this really big, ‘Oh HI!' She was so nice. She had a big personality and was always friendly to everyone but didn't take any shit, either. We would sneak off a few times a day together and take smoke breaks in one of the magazine closets on our floor. I had only been living in NYC for a few months when I started there. I had no idea who her parents were until she told me and probably didn't realize until much later that they were such a big deal. Quintana was pretty humble about it. I think she wanted to make a name for herself on her own, not on her family name. She once had a party at her apartment where I met Joan, but I don't remember too much except how the hell could anyone afford an apartment with multiple bedrooms in New York!”

Quintana told Cooper she'd developed a “new thing” to keep herself occupied during her leisure hours: She'd buy blank journals and “paste a bunch of random funny magazine photos to the front and back.” Cooper shared with me one of Quintana's collages: On a journal's small front page, a tiny nude woman dangles from a tree limb above an outsized ape; the word
Bombay
and a lemon twist adorn the ape's head; in the sky float a pair of male and female lips. It's a hasty creation, just for fun, but it's visually dazzling, ample proof that Quintana had earned her place at
Elle Décor
with a unique and genuine talent.