The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She couldn’t stand it. She wouldn’t go. New York had palled for her, altogether. “[One day] I stopped riding the Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years—the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who always got off with me at Grand Central—looked older than they once had,” she wrote in “On Keeping a Notebook.”

  She felt bone-weary. How had that happened? When? Everything that had seemed within her reach, the curiosities around every corner, the heady smells of “lilac and garbage and expensive perfume,” drifted away from her.

  And what about this marriage of hers? One Monday morning, she ducked into Saint Thomas Church—perhaps for relief from the crowds, all those fur-wrapped ladies walking their toothy little terriers. In the nave, she saw a book by James Albert Pike, If You Marry Outside Your Faith. The bishop said it was an error to marry outside your faith and that a person had a moral obligation to annul such a godless union and forget any promises she may have made in the heat of her wrong.

  It was the kind of thing Noel might have said to her as a joke—not really joking.

  Stunned, she fled the church.

  Come on, come to Norman’s party.

  How could she miss the parties, even the bad ones? The putrid wine, the stupid talk. Ad agents. Democrats. Rejected novelists, convinced they’d find their muse in central Mexico. Everyone was scrabbling to find a niche.

  “[I] could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings, and … could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries,” Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” “I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East.”

  * * *

  Paralyzed, maybe. But she got to a lot of movies. She had a regular film column now in Vogue. “Goodbye to All That” portrays her as full of despair during this period, but the column reveals that she was also having a good deal of fun at the filmmakers’ expense. Her persona on the page was lighthearted, confident, and sassy. Of the movie Captain Newman, M.D., she said, “Its main liability is its script, the drift of which is that the mind has no mountains, no cliffs of fall, which can not be painlessly eroded if you’ll only just lie down there and let Gregory Peck (M.D.) and Angie Dickinson (R.N.) shoot you a little more sodium pentothal.”

  In fact, she may have been having a better time than her husband. It seems he could not count on dinner. At work, he was bored out of his skull with the Common Market and the financial distress of tiny monarchies. One day in April, he called Didion to ask if she’d mind if he quit his job at Time. Go ahead, she said. Absolutely. He could freelance. She could freelance.

  He asked for a six-month leave of absence. To maintain cordiality, and to keep the door open in case the freelancing didn’t work out, he wrote Otto Fuerbringer a note. They’d had their disagreements, he said, but he’d greatly valued his years at the magazine. Fuerbringer replied, “What disagreements?”

  * * *

  It’s clear from Didion’s movie reviews that, for some time, she had considered (or toyed with) joining the business of Hollywood. “I could sit through [this movie] only by wondering who in the screening room was involved with whom, and what they fought about,” she wrote in March 1964 (the movie was The Guest).

  “What a Way to Go is supposed to have cost six million dollars, which averages out to about a million and a half a laugh,” she figured.

  A few months later, she wrote, “Although I assume that someone, somewhere, lived through the fall of 1963 quite unaware that down on the west coast of Mexico, in Puerto Vallarta, John Huston was making The Night of the Iguana, the notion suggests a detachment so sublime as to border on the schizophrenic.” Actually, what “suggests … detachment” is Didion’s unironic belief that every individual on the planet was hanging on the latest scrap of gossip about the motion picture industry.

  Had she wandered down to Horatio Street some evening around six or seven o’clock, ducked into Jimmy Baldwin’s apartment at number 81, and sat with the people there, including her friend Dan Wakefield, she might have been reminded, in a galvanizing way, that not every writer in New York put a sizable advance in front of a love of words. She might have been shaken out of the fashionable weariness and insider professionalism glutting Condé Nast. If only briefly, she might have stopped dreading others’ success and dreaming of flight to Tinsel Town.

  But to most of Si Newhouse’s toilers, Horatio Street was terra incognita. From a distance, Baldwin’s bourbon-and-Bessie-Smith ethos echoed the Beats, though this was a grievous misconception. The Beats were dilettantes to many of the writers squeezed into Baldwin’s hot and airless rooms. “Everyone’s sitting around—all the white people—with this kind of deference and worship and fear [of Baldwin],” said the novelist Lynn Sharon Schwartz. “And he was slightly hostile but that was okay … it was a very, very tangled and delicate situation.” The racial tension could not be separated from the literary—or human—camaraderie. “He was sounding off about … injustice, and very well, and we were all feeling guilty,” Schwartz said.

  “The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors!” Baldwin might shout. “My right to live here … how is it conceivably a question now?” Something was certainly at stake here—socially, literarily—but, you know, didn’t it smack, somehow, of the Nation of Islam? What was happening in this country? Better to work late in the Graybar Building, dream of a Goldwater White House, watch the secretaries pack up their lipstick at the end of the day, and stare at the elevator lights.

  * * *

  Or better to go to the movies.

  It seemed to Didion that American filmmakers had lost their bread and butter. The fine noir dialogue punching up so many black-and-white underworld pictures had been stolen by the French.

  “Who’d you call?” “The cemetery, just in case you get careless.”

  When was the last time Hollywood had come up with something that fresh? French directors were making a much better job of it now than the West Coast studios.

  Hollywood seemed to have mistaken seriousness for dim-wittedness. Movie stars were movie stars “precisely because we know them so well,” Didion wrote—what moron decided they should vanish into their roles and actually act?

  But the bottom line was this: “She knew exactly what she was doing and she knew how to get it done,” said Dan Wakefield. That’s why she studied the pictures so closely. “She’s one of the smartest writers I know in terms of money. She and Greg couldn’t earn enough from their books to live the way they wanted to live, and they wanted to live well.”

  She couldn’t build shopping centers; the ocean-dream had sunk; so “she knew they’d have to work for the movies.”

  Wakefield wasn’t surprised to get a letter from her one day saying she and Dunne had decided to go to Los Angeles for six or seven months. They would sublet their place. On April 24, 1964, she wrote that she was going to get tan and she would try not to be her “creepy self.”

  In Los Angeles, Dunne’s brother Nick worked in television. He could connect them. Westerns had come to the small screen—just when the great John Ford seemed to have forgotten how to make them.

  * * *

  She was really in the doldrums now, eager to move but not quite ready. She had to pay off Con Ed, disconnect the phone, make the final rounds of parties.

  Anxiety crept into her movie reviews. “[S]ome things just aren’t as funny as they once were,” she wrote. She couldn’t relax enough to enjoy the goofiness of The Pink Panther. For her, the movie’s sole achievement lay in staging “the only seduction ever screened … with all the banality of the real thing.”

  Presumably, her husband still wasn’t getting many dinners at home.

  * * *


  “Goodbye to All That,” a brilliant elegy to youth, romantic idealism, and the New York of Didion’s apprenticeship, is an example of the author working her brand. Nothing in the piece is not true, but it highlights her vulnerabilities to the exclusion of everything else. This strategy reinforces the themes of naïveté and loss. It is why the essay is effective. But because Didion purports to be writing about herself, the reader is invited to ask if the piece fully reflects who she was at the time—in spite of the fact that Didion never intended full disclosure.

  For her, all appearances to the contrary, confession was not the point of the essay. Yet for a reader, even a sympathetic reader willing to grant Didion her intentions, the issue is unavoidable. This is the paradox of autobiography, a paradox Didion pushed to extremes.

  “Goodbye to All That” is in no way diminished by the biographer’s curiosity. The essay suggests she left New York in 1964 in the grip of a melancholy breakdown: “[T]here was a song on all the jukeboxes on the [U]pper East Side that went ‘but where is the schoolgirl that used to be me,’ and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that.” Biography helps us recognize that nostalgia had been Didion’s primary emotional register since she was a child. This was nothing new. New York was not over for her. The option to return after six months remained wide open.

  Too, Didion nursed a contrarian streak. At Berkeley, she had defied her teachers’ expectations of going to grad school. Now she would thumb her nose at those insisting a writer had to be in New York. “If you weren’t in New York, you were nobody,” said Jill Schary Robinson. “We were all made to feel that way.”

  So Didion would leave.

  It was a counterintuitive move, given the solid career she had established in Manhattan—though, there again, she was not in danger of losing much at this point; she would continue to write movie and book reviews for Vogue over the next couple years from her home in California. The risk had more to do with America’s perception—by which I mean the view of establishment critics—as to art’s true center. Harold Rosenberg wrote, “If New York is the site from which art history is launched, to be present there would seem indispensable to the creation of an art that matters. One who fails to respond to the New York note is considered to be an exile from both past and future.” Artists of any sort, including writers, who opted for “regionalism,” he said, were engaging in a “revolt of geography against history.”

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  CAUTION: CONSTANT LAND MOVEMENT.

  Signs warning visitors of the ground’s erratic instability ring the Harden Gatehouse at Portuguese Bend, where Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne settled in June 1964. Here, at the southern tip of Los Angeles County’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, domelike hills rise more than 430 meters above the sea, rolling, falling steeply. The topsoil slides—always—sheeting the coast with bentonite, a clay mineral made from weathered volcanic ash capable of absorbing vast amounts of water, losing its cohesiveness, and destabilizing the surface even further. Geologists posit the area’s first major landslide at about 37,000 years ago. In our time, the land began to lose its grip again in 1956, initially shifting five inches a day over a two-year period. The danger did not stop real-estate developers from building more than 150 homes by 1961, digging seepage pits and installing septic systems in the trembling earth. When cracks began to appear in the houses’ foundations, outraged home owners filed the nation’s first class-action suit incurred by a geologic event, suing the County of Los Angeles, alleging that the landslide was caused by the construction of Crenshaw Boulevard. The court found the county liable even though it failed to establish negligence. Meanwhile, the land went on eroding.

  Modern development began on the peninsula in 1913, when a New York investor named Frank Vanderlip envisioned a community of horse ranches on land first taken by the Portuguese from the Gabrielinos-Tongva Tribe and then stolen by U.S. entrepreneurs. Thus, the history of Southern California.

  Didion’s new home, the Harden Gatehouse, at 5500 Palos Verdes Drive South, was built in 1926 by Vanderlip’s sister, Ruth, and her husband. A grand villa had been planned for the forty-eight acres of coastal land abutting the house’s grounds, but the Depression quashed that vision. This would be the first of the spectacular abodes Didion and Dunne would occupy in the Los Angeles area from 1964 to 1988. “Joan definitely had the real estate gene from her family,” said Josh Greenfeld.

  “Joan put an ad in the paper saying that a writing couple was looking for a house to rent,” said Dominick Dunne. “A woman replied, offering an attractive gatehouse on an estate on the sea at Palos Verdes and explaining that the main house had never been built, because the rich people who commissioned it went bust. The lady wanted $800 a month. Joan said they were prepared to pay only $400. They settled at $500.”

  This lady was the wife of Dick Harden, Ruth’s son, who would become Didion’s new landlord. Dunne found him eccentric and unpredictable, likable (he’d leave strawberries and baskets of sweet peas on their doorstep), but often uncomfortable to be around.

  The Tuscan-style house, on a lot of just under two acres, initially had four bedrooms (it now has five) and a large living room with a stone fireplace and vaulted ceilings—over five thousand square feet. In Didion’s day, blocky brown wooden beams curved over arched doorways and rectangular columns painted adobe tan or white, defining the rooms. The tiled floors were cool and dark. Rounded windows opened onto the sunset and salt-scoured willows glittering with reflected light from granite outcrops curving down to the shore. A swimming pool has since been built where Didion kept a wisteria box garden. The house was angled toward the ocean, with a view of Catalina Island, away from the public road, which was always under repair. Pieces of marble, imported for the never-built villa, lay scattered among tall palms on the lawn. A low wall topped with sloping red tiles surrounded the property.

  At the entrance to the drive stood an imposing stone arch draped with ivy; in it was set a ten-foot-high wooden gate trimmed with fleur-de-lis spikes and a ship’s bell jutting out from the wall.

  At twilight, peacocks cried. They roamed the grounds aggressively, displaying their blue-green grace. Of an evening, Didion and Dunne would sit with iced drinks on a tiled back terrace, watching the peafowl prance. Hummingbirds and flycatchers flitted in and out of peach trees and low-hanging olive limbs. Glare from the Point Vicente lighthouse (said to be haunted by a woman whose lover had been lost at sea) raked the rocks below.

  Sometimes the couple walked the shoreline, spying wreckage from the Greek freighter Dominator, sunk in a storm in 1961, just off Rocky Point. Occasionally, Dunne walked Didion down to the beach, among jagged tide pools teeming with hermit crabs, sea urchins, starfish, and anemone. They’d go swimming, skirting kelp beds by a submerged reef in Abalone Cove and timing the waves just right—“Feel the swell! Go with the change!” Dunne would shout—to be swept into a cave along the shore. Didion was afraid but exhilarated, reminded of shooting the rapids of the American River in Sacramento.

  For shopping, laundry, and other errands, Dunne preferred the nearby village of San Pedro to the tonier community center, with its Spanish Mission–style houses and landscaping by the Olmsted Brothers, some eight miles distant. San Pedro, built on a foggy, shallow waterfront dubbed by its Portuguese discoverers the “Bay of Smokes,” was a sleepy town of bars, former canneries, and shuttered whorehouses once catering to personnel at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station and at the LA-55 Nike missile battery where Crenshaw dead-ended. The missile site was more successful as a movie backdrop in sci-fi films than as a defense against phantom Soviet bombers.

  On Liberty Hill, at Fourth and Beacon, Upton Sinclair had been arrested for reading from the Bill of Rights during a 1920s longshoremen’s strike.

  In his rented Chevy II Nova station wagon, Dunne cruised past scrap yards, the box houses of day laborers and shipbuilders, Croatian and Sicilian restaurants, and taverns such as TJ’s and t
he Dew Drop Inn. San Pedro had always welcomed a diverse population, including, recently, army private Jimi Hendrix and a grifter from West Virginia named Charlie Manson, looking to pimp local girls.

  Dunne itched to uncover the tainted lives inside the bars’ moist, dark walls (that old Catholic teaching!). He’d gaze across the harbor to the Port of Los Angeles, at Terminal Island’s oil tanks, freight cars, cargo berths, container ships belching low-grade bunker fuel into the air: fish, sulfur, rotting plankton. He began to understand the pleasures of driving: spying from just behind the wheel, sealed from the world’s meanness, girded by speed.

  On Friday mornings, he’d step out of bed and into the old Crane shower with its stainless-steel handle, wash quickly, and then wake his wife, who’d be sleeping, he wrote, in “her blue Dacron crepe nightgown.” They’d brew coffee, sip a cup or two, and head north in the station wagon, circling the peninsula, toward Palos Verdes Estates. Friday was the day The New Yorker arrived at Portuguese Bend, sometimes as much as three weeks after the issue’s appearance in the East.

  To get to Chavez Ravine, they’d take the Pasadena Freeway. Beverly Hills, where Nick lived, required them to negotiate the Harbor Freeway and the San Diego Freeway. When they returned to the Bend late at night, often the fog was so dense, Didion would leave the car, walk along the road’s center stripes, guiding Dunne home, just as her high school friends used to get her down from Donner Pass.

  * * *

  It was a “nutty idea that we could write for television,” Didion said in an interview in The Paris Review in 2006. “We had a bunch of meetings with television executives, and they would explain to us, for example, the principle of Bonanza. The principle of Bonanza was: break a leg at the Ponderosa. I looked blankly at the executive and he said, Somebody rides into town, and to make the story work, he’s got to break a leg so he’s around for two weeks. So we never wrote for Bonanza. We did, however, have one story idea picked up by Chrysler Theatre. We were paid a thousand dollars for it.”