The Last Love Song (90 page)

Technically, the challenge was to find a proper form for American social history (in so many ways, the story of California was the story of America, just as an individual's life could illustrate the cultural life of an era). “All of the great English fiction was social history,” Didion said, “but I came to feel that it was impossible to write social history in America because it didn't have a unified audience. There wasn't a universally accepted social norm, so it was much harder to write.” She believed that fiction was no longer up to the task—or its
readers
weren't. “I think specifically novels [have been devalued now] because people don't understand unreliable narrators, for example; they believe that anything the narrator of a novel tells them is supposed to be the truth. They read a novel as if they were reading nonfiction. They literally do not seem to grasp the difference.”

Some
aspect of unreliability had always been essential to Didion's literary voice, even in nonfiction: The act of witnessing suggested the need to observe precisely because one did not know what was happening. And it was in the shivering core of this vulnerability, mixed with the loss of her parents' world, that the voice of
Where I Was From
began to emerge. Some of what she knew, she knew from history, she would say. Some of what she knew, she believed. Some of what she knew, she didn't know, because she had believed it once and now no longer did. It was a voice she had first tried with full confidence in fiction, in
A Book of Common Prayer,
following Conrad's example: “[T]he not quite omniscient author.”

Take a deep breath. Read aloud the first sentence of
Where I Was From.
It announces the book's intentions; it offers a tone of elegy and remembrance as well as of historical accuracy, of intimacy and objectivity; it has the sweep of the continent: “My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Scott was born in 1766, grew up on the Virginia and Carolina frontiers, at age sixteen married an eighteen-year-old veteran of the Revolution and the Cherokee expeditions named Benjamin Hardin IV, moved with him into Tennessee and Kentucky and died on still another frontier, the Oil Trough Bottom on the south bank of the White River in what is now Arkansas but was then Missouri Territory.”

The voice's expansiveness enabled Didion to move fluidly from the diaries of the pioneers in her family to pioneer history in general; from the dreams of those who'd made the crossing to the disappointments of their ancestors; from California's intellectual traditions to her personal educational progress; from the state's self-delusions to the lies of its developers, and the fairy tales she'd been sold like so much hardscrabble.

“California likes to be fooled,” said a character in Frank Norris's great American novel,
The Octopus.
This was Didion's conclusion, too, and the central point she wanted to make.

2

Throughout
Where I Was From,
Didion guards against nostalgia—the romantic yearning for a lost domain, which she felt had curdled
Run River
—but it was hard for her not to suspect that some fatal tipping point had now been reached, that at last what was good about California had been irretrievably trashed.

Her fear was most apparently realized in the state's latest trade-off: public schools for private prisons, another example of California's “willingness to abandon at a dizzying rate,” Didion thought. “I mean, the notion of taking care of other people who might or might not be troubled, which people all over the world do, seems not to have entered into [the state's thinking].” And the legislature's reckless dismantling of the once “amazing” U.C. system of higher education: “Well, it is hard to know how you get out from under that,” she said.

Toward the end of the book, she revisits “towns I knew, towns I thought of as my own interior landscape, towns I had thought I understood, towns in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys”—towns now so “impoverished in spirit as well as in fact that the only way their citizens could think to reverse their fortune was by getting themselves a state prison,” building and staffing it in lieu of adequately funding their schools.

On the one hand, “[w]e were seeing nothing ‘new' here,” she said. “We were seeing one more version of making our deal with the Southern Pacific. We were seeing one more version of making our bed with the federal government.”

On the other hand, we might well be witnessing an irreparable tragedy. In Delano, where once the community had tussled over the picking of grapes, the fight was now over whether to build a second detention facility near the ten-year-old North Kern State Prison, contracting the work out to the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, all for the sake of a few low-paying local hires. Cesar Chavez had died in his sleep in 1993, at the age of sixty-six, an embittered and increasingly marginalized icon of California's flickering promise in the 1960s. That promise seemed to have devolved into America's war on drugs, a desire to fill as many prison beds as possible, add more, and get communities like Delano to pass bond measures in the misguided hope that a new private jail would enrich the county.

“[W]hen the families of inmates move into a prison town, they not only strain the limited resources of local schools and social service agencies but bring emotionally stressed children into the community and school system,” Didion wrote. “‘The students are all very high risk,' a school official … told
The Los Angeles Times
. ‘They come from single-parent homes. They're latchkey kids, often on AFDC. It's very obvious they're from a whole different area. It creates societal conflicts. The child does not fit in.'”

And here was the real heart of
Where I Was From.
Once again, Didion was writing about displaced children.

Motherless now, fatherless, she was the mother of an adopted girl with no attachments to her ancestors.

The long, rolling cadences of history and heritage in the book's overture vanish in the coda, in a single fierce line: “It was only Quintana who was real.”

Quintana, living in a Golden State of Abandonment.

When critics accused Didion of “saying goodbye to California” with this book, of giving up on the place, she was astonished. They had mistaken her sorrow for anger. She said, “It's a love song, as I read it.”

Now that she had written it, she might finally be at peace with laying her parents to rest; she might finally relinquish her California driver's license (with her New York address on it). In one sense, the book is “about being older,” she said, and the knowledge accruing from that.

Which was what? an interviewer asked.

Didion's answer made her sound like a child once more, heeding her mother's warnings. “Be a better person,” she said. And then, as if the weight of all her losses was borne in upon her—her father's false-cheery calls for a drink, her mother's sad indifference, the valleys' rage to incarcerate the state's kids: “[N]obody can ever be nice enough.”

 

Chapter Thirty-six

1

Didion tried to be cordial to Nick if they happened to attend the same party somewhere. Dunne wouldn't talk to his brother at all, but Didion would pause to say hello before spending the rest of the evening clear across the room from him. She felt helplessly motherly toward these two misbehaving boys. Nick seemed to cultivate friends and enemies in distinct counterpoint to his brother and sister-in-law—snubbing Leslie Abramson and courting Nancy Reagan, whom he'd met when he was back in L.A. covering the O. J. Simpson trial. Certain occasions brought the family together, as when Dunne's nephew Tony, son of his older brother Richard, began dating and then married Jimmy Breslin's daughter Rosemary. At dinners and gatherings celebrating the young couple, the Dunne family put on its Irish, a clannish front in case these noisy outsiders, the Breslins, burst onto the scene with the slightest condescension. “My father likes nobody,” Rosemary wrote in a memoir entitled
Not Exactly What I Had in Mind
(1997). From a distance, Breslin was wary of the Dunnes; he feared his daughter “was dating some anemic offspring of a famous parent.” He disdained “children of successful parents who do nothing but live off their famous or rich names and associate with others of similar stature and discuss how difficult it is being who they are as a way of explaining why they can't get real jobs,” Rosemary said. The fact that Tony designed movie sets and had spent time at Hazelden didn't help matters. Also, as journalists, Jimmy Breslin and Dominick Dunne couldn't have been more different. Nick, “the chronicler of the society set”—and Breslin, “who [said] in all his years as a newsman the people he need[ed] to talk to always live[d] on the sixth floor with a broken elevator.” But Nick could be a charmer when he wanted to, and he hit it off with Rosemary's cantankerous dad. Both men loved a good story. Rosemary said her father admired Didion and Dunne, “an extremely rare occurrence.”

The Dunnes embraced Rosemary. A journalist and a screenwriter, she was smart and funny, and Didion respected her stoicism. Since her early thirties, she had suffered a rare autoimmune blood disorder. She was constantly anemic, often crippled with headaches; the long-term prognosis was sketchy. Didion impressed Rosemary as “someone with a center made of steel”; she was “fiercely protective of those she loved.” Dunne took a particular interest in Rosemary's writing. Eventually, he became her “number one fan,” calling her early in the mornings to congratulate her on magazine columns she'd published or to encourage her as she polished a script for the TV series
NYPD Blue.
She felt “lucky” to have them in her life.

By the early 2000s, Nick, his luck on the skids, may have wished he could join Breslin on a busted elevator, stuck between floors somewhere. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001; he was still fighting with his brother; he was engaged in a very public feud with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and former congressman Gary Condit was suing him for defamation, reportedly for eleven million dollars.

The trouble was, Nick could never resist a story about a young woman's tragic ending. Over and over, he tried to rewrite Dominique's narrative. Hence, his spat with the Kennedys. The tension between them spanned fifty years, of course—the Dunnes' “steerage” roots had planted in Nick a jealousy of the wealthier Irish family; the jealousy grew as he tried to work his way into the upper class, managing to attend Bobby's wedding to Ethel Skakel (“I remember being dazzled by the beauty of the Skakel estate,” he said); the jealousy shaded into rage as Nick witnessed “Joe Kennedy be so fuckin' mean” to his Hollywood pal Peter Lawford; and the rage became vengeance when Nick saw an opportunity to pile his justice crusade on the back of Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy's.

Here's how it happened. In 1975 in Greenwich, Connecticut, Martha Moxley, a fifteen-year-old neighbor of the Skakels, was bludgeoned to death by a golf club later traced to the Skakel home. For lack of further evidence, the murder went unsolved. Nick was convinced that either Michael or his brother, Tommy, both teenagers in the mid-1970s, both with a history of emotional problems, and both of whom had evinced sexual interest in Martha, had killed her. The case became even more personal for him when he learned that Martha and Dominique had each been murdered on October 30.

In 1993, Nick published a novel entitled
A Season in Purgatory,
an obvious retelling of the Moxley affair, switching the murder weapon to a baseball bat.
Purgatory
renewed public interest in the Moxley case. Nick took the further step of acquiring a private investigator's report in which Michael Skakel's alibis on the night of Martha's killing conflicted. Nick passed this report to former L.A. cop Mark Fuhrman, late of the O. J. Simpson trial. Fuhrman published his own book,
Murder in Greenwich,
in 1998, implicating Michael Skakel in the girl's death. Shortly thereafter, the Connecticut state's attorney brought Skakel to trial. He was convicted and sent to prison.

Robert Kennedy Jr. blamed Nick—a “pathetic creature”—for railroading his innocent cousin. “The formula that Dominick Dunne has employed to fulfill his dreams has done damage to a lot of people,” Kennedy said. “Dunne wants to write about two things, both of which are easy to sell: high-profile crimes and famous people. So he's forced to try to make connections between his high-profile protagonists and the crimes.… If you look at how he couches his accusations, it's always ‘Somebody told me this.' ‘An anonymous source said this.' So he's not saying it's true, but the average reader misses that nuance.”

“I don't give a fuck about what that little shit has to say,” Nick remarked of Kennedy to Chris Smith, a reporter for
New York
magazine. “That fucking asshole. This pompous,
pompous
, POMPOUS man. I don't care what he has to say. He's not a person that I have any feeling or respect for.”

Nor did he respect Congressman Gary Condit, whose young D.C. intern, Chandra Levy, disappeared in May 2001. Months later, her remains turned up in Washington's Rock Creek Park. Condit, married and much older than Levy, told police he'd had a “friendship” with the girl but refused to elaborate, publicly, on the nature of their relationship. Investigators did not tie the congressman to her death (he was later exonerated), but tabloids cast suspicion on him, and Nick took an interest in the case. It would embroil him in another byzantine affair. In December 2001, before Levy's body was found, Nick went on radio and television with a bizarre story about a lead he'd been given in the investigation. He claimed to have met a “horse whisperer” who once worked for a Dubai sheikh who, in turn, procured young prostitutes for Washington power brokers when they visited the Middle East. The horse whisperer said Condit was a frequent guest at Middle Eastern embassies in Washington and “let it be known that he was in a relationship with a woman that was over, but she was a clinger. He couldn't get rid of her.” Nick said Condit “created the environment that led to [Levy's] disappearance. And she shortly thereafter vanished.” Nick said he had it on good authority that she'd been thrown from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean.