The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  It seemed everybody knew somebody who had slept with, sold drugs to, or partied with the victims; in days to come, the people claiming to have been invited to the Cielo house that night exhausted the Hollywood A-list. Actor Steve McQueen said the L.A. sewer system was full of expensive drugs the day the news broke, as everyone, fearing visits from the cops, flushed their stuff.

  Roman Polanski accused John Phillips of being the killer.

  Michelle Phillips slipped a pistol into her purse. “Darling, put the gun away,” a friend had to tell her one night at the Daisy.

  Suspicion spread like the tear gas on Sunset.

  “It was the most bizarre period of my life,” Michelle Phillips said. “It could have been anyone, as far as I was concerned. The last conversation I ever had with Sharon was about wallpaper for her nursery.” Tate was eight months pregnant the night she was killed.

  Didion was not alone in harboring “a kind of conflicting sense that … they [the victims] had somehow done it to themselves, that it had to do with too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

  “[This] investigation has caused a lot of people a lot of pain, because a lot of people feel they’re guilty or they have something to hide about something, and go through enormous emotional wringers. This is what Cass is hysterical about,” William Doyle told LAPD lieutenant Earl Deemer on August 30.

  Early reports about the crime “were garbled and contradictory,” Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album.” “One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

  Nick Dunne was surprised. He had last seen Sharon Tate at a party at Tony Curtis’s house. “His rose garden was lovely,” Nick said. “As I remember it all these years later, there were gravel pathways between the beds of roses and boxwood borders. At one point that night, I went out into the garden and there was Sharon, all alone, walking on a path by the white roses in full bloom. She was pregnant, and dressed in something white and billowing. It was like a scene in a movie watching her. She made me think of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.… We talked about old times at [Jay Sebring’s] barbershop, and the marvelous turns her life had taken. I was smoking a joint, and she took a few tokes.… She was joyous about having the baby, and she had never looked more beautiful.”

  Nick had been in New York, producing The Boys in the Band, when Lenny called to tell him about the killings. He flew home immediately. “People were sending their children out of town for safety, and ours were going to my mother-in-law’s ranch outside San Diego,” he said. He remembered that “Steve McQueen packed a gun at Jay Sebring’s funeral, where he gave one of the eulogies.”

  “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended on August 9, 1969,” Didion wrote, adding to the press’s overheated valedictions. It was really only the crowd at the Daisy whose sixties had come to an end, but this fact slipped at a certain point; the media managed to superimpose Manson’s face, with his crude swastika etched between his eyes, over psychedelic images of flowers and peace signs. Manson became a cult doll for the press, a penny-ante pimp inflated into a symbol for the national psychosis. But at ground level, in the community most directly affected, Didion’s reporting got right to the point: “The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

  * * *

  If the California narrative was an apocalyptic romance, the East maintained its sentimentality. A week after the Tate-LaBianca murders, on August 15, 16, and 17, the Woodstock Festival—officially, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—in Bethel, New York, took place; it was valorized by Time magazine as the “greatest peaceful event in history,” a fulfillment of the sixties’ loftiest ideals.

  Expectations for peaceful assembly were admittedly low after the previous year’s Democratic National Convention, and there was delicious irony in watching the antiwar crowd raise its arms toward food and medical supplies airlifted onto mud-soaked fields by the U.S. Army.

  But for the purposes of our narrative, we need to look past the Peace and Love, past Janis and Jimi, and the naked bodies packed like rabbits in a box, to a five-piece rock band from Woodstock, who often played with a larger musical collective called the Bummers, a “Commedia dell’Arte style group of cowboys and Indians.” The Bummers performed folk rock at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, produced an Off-Off-Broadway musical called The Golden Screw, and regularly appeared at the Woodstock Sound-Outs, annual mini-festivals held just south of Route 212 on the Glasco Turnpike. The Sound-Outs began in 1967 and became, according to Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, “kind of the spark for the Festival.” The Bummer’s drummer was a young man named Gerry Michael. He played a variety of styles, backing performers such as Bonnie Raitt, Paul Butterfield, and Juma Sultan, who accompanied Hendrix’s band at the ’69 event.

  Gerry Michael was not a symbol of anything, neither apocalypse nor hope. He deserves quick note, at this point, only because he figures prominently in a later part of Didion’s story. In 2003, Gerry Michael, then a widower in his fifties, would marry Quintana Roo Dunne, whom Michael’s son said he met in a bar, and who would die just over two years later (the official cause would be “acute pancreatitis”).

  * * *

  “I wanna dance.”

  * * *

  The rock poet Ed Sanders covered the first Manson trial for the Freep (as everyone called the Los Angeles Free Press), straining to grant Manson a presumption of innocence: Like Sanders, Manson had long hair. Sanders’s attitude countered that of the mainstream press, which had already convicted Manson because he had long hair.

  Dozens of reporters (and prosecutors) hoped to advance their careers with this story; among the many journalists given access to members of the Family in prison rooms, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, or the offices of the Freep (recently bombproofed after a series of threats from right-wing, anti-Castro partisans) was Joan Didion. She spent several evenings interviewing Linda Kasabian at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Kasabian had been the “wheel person” for the killers on the two-night murder run. At the time, she was the mother of an infant. How could the mother of an infant involve herself in the senseless killing of a woman who was eight months pregnant? If any writer could have understood Linda Kasabian, it was probably Joan Didion, who had spent the past year clipping from newspapers stories of children burning to death in supermarket parking lots and who was writing a novel ending with a woman passively watching a friend commit suicide.

  “In fact we never talked about ‘the case,’” Didion wrote. “We talked instead about Linda’s childhood pastimes and disappointments, her high-school romances and her concern for her children.”

  6

  Two of Nick’s children, Alex and Dominique, stood frightened and confused next to their grim-faced uncle and aunt the night their father got arrested at LAX. Nick had arrived from a vacation in Mexico. Didion and Dunne had agreed to pick him up, and took his kids along to greet him. Someone tipped the airport police that he was carrying a “lid” of grass. They strip-searched and handcuffed him in front of his family in the Western Airlines waiting room. “I was at the time the vice president of a studio [Four Star, a television company owned by David Niven, Dick Powell, and Charles Boyer] and possessed the haughty attitude that came with the job, an attitude that did not endear me to the arresting officers,” Nick said. “Outside, there was a police car with a screaming siren and flashing red lights, waiting for me.… Manson himself couldn’t have drawn a bigger crowd than I did that Sunday night at LAX. There was a very tall cop on either side of me, each with a hand in my armpit, and they lifted me off the floor with my feet dangling.” He seemed a sad clown in his Brooks Brothers blazer and Gucci loafers. “The cops insisted on calling me Mr. Vice President in mocking voices.”

  He stayed overnight
in a Venice jail. The following day, Didion and Dunne bailed him out, saying nothing. He had endangered the Needle Park project. It was a hard-enough sell without being wrapped in the trade papers’ gossip columns. Worse, he had humiliated them—and his kids—in public.

  For several months, in the midst of the Manson craziness, his slippage had exceeded everyone’s darkest fears. Most mornings he ate alone in a coffee shop called Nibblers, on the corner of Spalding and Wilshire. Sometimes the faded old movie queen Norma Shearer came in for breakfast, and without acknowledging he knew who she was, he’d talk with her about good Old Hollywood, when MGM ruled the world and kept us all safe.

  One day, when his pot bust was about to come to trial, he got a call from Sid Korshak’s buddy Beldon Katleman. “He said he wanted to see me right away. It was an order, not a request,” Nick said. Katleman owned Gary Cooper’s old house in Holmby Hills. He was wearing a terry-cloth robe when Nick arrived. He told Nick to join him in the steam room. There, he said, no one could hear them. “What kind of trouble are you in?” he asked. “Who’s the judge?”

  Weeks later, all of Nick’s charges were dropped. “Who the hell do you know?” asked one of the arresting cops, outside the courtroom. “Why don’t you assholes drink instead of using dope?”

  Later, Katleman explained his generosity to Nick: “When I first came to this town from Vegas, nobody ever spoke to me at parties, but you did.”

  7

  On November 14, 1969, Didion finished drafting Play It As It Lays. The following day, she and her husband and their daughter flew to Honolulu.

  George Hunt, the managing editor of Life, had recently offered her a regular column—perhaps at the prompting of Jim Mills—and she thought she might start by writing something about Hawaii. Shortly after she accepted the offer, Ralph Graves replaced Hunt. Graves had decided to shake up the staid old magazine. He hired Norman Mailer to cover the moon landing. On the cover of the June 27, 1969, issue, he had run a picture of a young man in military uniform, with the caption “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were photographs of 242 soldiers killed the previous week, and the quietly devastating statement “The numbers of the dead are average for every seven-day period during this stage of the war.” This was new territory for a publication associated with unquestioning patriotism.

  Dunne warned his wife that working for the editors of a Luce outfit would be like getting “nibbled to death by ducks,” but they had, she said, promised “to put me out in a world of revolution, which sounded really attractive.”

  Two days before the couple’s departure for the islands, Seymour Hersh released an article through the Dispatch News Service, picked up by thirty-five American newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Milwaukee Journal. The article began, “William L. Calley, Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname ‘Rusty.’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.’”

  Hersh had tried to interest Life and Look in the story, but he failed. Previously, The New York Times had buried deep inside the paper a two-paragraph AP piece based on a press release from Georgia’s Fort Benning mentioning, almost in passing, the charges against Calley. It had taken the military establishment almost a year to acknowledge that the massacre in My Lai was not precisely the “outstanding action” Gen. William C. Westmoreland had called it.

  Pressure on the army to investigate the incident grew after a former door gunner from the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, who had flown over My Lai and witnessed the carnage, sent a letter to thirty congressmen imploring them to look into the matter. Most legislators ignored him, but Barry Goldwater and a pair of others urged the House Armed Services Committee to strong-arm the Pentagon.

  “These factors are not in dispute,” Hersh wrote. “There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation … You can’t afford to guess whether a civilian is a Viet Cong or not. Either you shoot them or they shoot you … Calley’s friends in the Officer’s Corps at Fort Benning, many of them West Point graduates, are indignant. ‘They’re using this as a Goddamned example,’ one officer complained. ‘He’s a good soldier. He followed orders.’”

  When she learned these facts, Didion phoned her editor at Life, Loudon Wainright. His wife said he’d have to call her back.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. “He’s watching the NFL game,” Dunne told her. “He’ll call you at halftime.”

  When he did phone, she said she wanted to do her first column from Saigon. He said no. “Some of the guys are going out,” he told her, then suggested she stay put and just introduce herself.

  Seething, she went for a walk on the sand, but it didn’t calm her down. Each afternoon, the talk on the Kahala beach was all about Ted Kennedy and that girl who’d drowned in his car. Nationwide, the adults were misbehaving. As a result, the children, mostly young women, were dying.

  “Where did the morning went?” Quintana asked Didion one day, still on mainland time, expecting the sun.

  * * *

  Day by day, Hersh’s reports, picked up now by all the major papers, detailed the event at My Lai. He quoted Sgt. Michael Bernhardt: “It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it.… They were setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them up. They were going into the hootches and shooting them up. They were gathering people in groups and shooting them. As I walked in, you could see piles of people, all through the village.”

  In an interview Didion could have gotten, Gen. Fred C. Weyand said, “The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things’—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives … [W]e should have made the realities of war obvious to the American people before they witnessed it on their television screens.”

  For Didion, My Lai was another case of betrayal by romance. Before leaving for Quang Ngai Province, Calley and Charlie Company had joined the First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry for training at Schofield. James Jones had endeared the base to her. She always visited it whenever she flew to Hawaii. Now it was poisoned ground.

  “There was a lot of illusion in our national history,” Reinhold Niebuhr said, around this time. “[I]t is about to be shattered.”

  Didion was the chronicler of shattered romance. She needed to be in Saigon. Loudon Wainwright had suggested she introduce herself. Well, okay. She’d give Life’s readers one hell of an introduction.

  Betrayal was very much on her mind.

  “I had better tell you where I am, and why,” she wrote. “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the winds … My husband switches off the TV set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes and brush the baby’s hair … We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

  “Maybe it can be all right,” she says she said to him.

  “Maybe,” he replied.

  Dunne took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo to give Didion time to finish the piece. Then he edited it and went with her to file it at the Western Union office. “At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it,” Didion wrote later. “That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.”

  Life’s readers did not know what to make of such an apparently candid piece. Many of them wrote to complain that the magazine’s new columnist was no Little Miss Sunshine. The editors began to wonder if they’d made a mistake. They “didn’t get it. [Didion’s] pieces [in Life] made such an impact—not just on people who were literary.… I know housewives who had [her column] over the sink,” Dan Wakefield said later: You mean it’s okay to admit you think about divorce?
To think of yourself, when the world’s grappling with so many crises?

  “I am not the society in microcosm,” she had said. And yet …

  Even more than with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion was about to become Joan Didion, the woman who wrote the books, the woman in the books, in narratives of fact and fiction.

  She had introduced herself properly.

  “It was a big shock to find myself in a certain kind of limited public eye” because of that divorce column, she claimed. “I thought I was always going to be writing these books that I would finance somehow, that no one would ever review or read.”

  On December 31, Henry Robbins wrote to Jane Fonda: “We saw you on the David Frost Show last week and were terribly pleased to hear you speak so excitedly about Joan Didion’s piece in Life magazine … Joan has just completed a new novel, Play It As It Lays, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing in the spring. If you were impressed and touched by her Life article, you’ll be positively overwhelmed by this forthcoming book. We were.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  1

  Quintana had no coat. She wore a bright frangipani lei in the cold Connecticut air. Shivering on the runway at Hartford’s Bradley Field, she told her mother it was okay, that children with leis don’t wear coats. She was glad to be staying with her dad’s mom for a while. Her last few days in Hawaii had been cooped up and crazy, first because an earthquake had struck the Aleutians, threatening tsunamis in Honolulu, and second because the tsunamis didn’t come, leaving the family to suffer its tensions with no hope of distraction. She couldn’t go to the beach. Her parents were awfully careful with each other, and quiet.

  They dropped her in West Hartford because of their movie project. Nick had cut a production deal with Joseph E. Levine at Avco-Embassy, an independent studio responsible for The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge. The Dunnes intended to go to New York to see Needle Park.

  Friends in the city were stunned to run into them at a party. People made embarrassed allusions to the Life piece. “‘In lieu of divorce. In lieu of!’” Didion told them, and laughed.