The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She conceded that Wenner would probably want a more investigative and fast-breaking report on the Hearst story, but her interest was in California life as revealed and exposed by the events. She said she and her husband would probably do the reporting together but that she would write the piece because he was working on a book (True Confessions—also based on a legendary California crime saga).

  On the same day Didion sent this letter to Wenner, her agent, Lois Wallace, wrote James Silberman at Random House, pitching a nonfiction book by Didion on the “California experience,” based on the notes she would make for Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Wallace said Didion had long wanted to write a history of California; she had proposed a book called Fairy Tales to FSG on the subject, but she had abandoned it because she didn’t want it to be “autobiographical” and she couldn’t find the proper frame.

  Tania was now her way in.

  “The Patty Hearst trial is one in which the history of California is called as a character witness,” Wallace wrote. The Western “mentality” is “what has produced Joan’s family, the Huntingtons, the Nolans, and the Hearsts.”

  The “events of [the] trial [will] bring the forces about which Joan has wanted to write into dramatic play.”

  * * *

  How could a daughter of luxury turn into a bank-robbing guerilla doll?

  What makes Iago evil?

  Narratives emerged, on air and in print, to try to explain this latest California quake. Since the JFK killing, conspiracy theories had become a dominant narrative mode in America, and gained particular traction in the West, in the wave of mass slaughters à la Manson, the revolutionary bombings, the savage murders in the canyons and the hills, the incidents of cannibalism.

  One of the most popular radio shows in San Francisco during this period was Dialogue Conspiracy on KLRB-FM, hosted by Mae Brussell, the daughter of a Beverly Hills rabbi and the granddaughter of the founder of the I. Magnin department stores (among Didion’s favorite spots to shop). Profoundly disturbed by the Kennedy assassination, Brussell read all twenty-six volumes of the Warren Report, concluded it was a government whitewash of a widespread high-level plot, and became a dedicated conspiracy researcher. What made her so compelling, and her theories hard to dismiss, was her thoroughness, her reasonable tone, and her close reading skills, certainly on a par with anyone who had come out of the Berkeley English Department.

  When asked, “Who is the SLA and why did they kidnap Patty Hearst?,” Brussell replied that Cinque was the nation’s first black Lee Harvey Oswald, a patsy trained and motivated by the government to stir up radical groups, giving authorities an excuse to (at the very least) expand domestic spying and (at most) impose martial law. This view was shared, of course, by most of California’s radical groups, and by Lake Headley, whose private investigations into the SLA led him to conclude that Cinque had turned against his government trainers, signing his death warrant. “He’ll be killed, probably in a shootout,” Headley said: They can’t allow him to talk. Of course, this is precisely what happened.

  Credible reports in mainstream newspapers, including Hearst’s, listing activities of the CIA’s Operation CHAOS (illegal covert actions aimed at neutralizing groups and individuals deemed a threat to national security), lent credence to Brussell’s suspicions, even the most outlandish, as when, for example, she claimed that the death of every major rock star—Jim, Jimi, Janis, Cass—could be traced to the CIA’s determination to eradicate “an art form that has been … one of the most important cultural revolutions in history.”

  In the end, Didion, tracing her own distant connections, attended the Patty Hearst trial for only a few days.

  Yet again she postponed her book on the “California experience”; finally, it would take the death of her parents, her freedom from their views of the state, to give her the confidence she needed to approach the material properly.

  But she did write an essay on Hearst, “Girl of the Golden West.” The title was an obvious play on her earlier Lucille Miller piece about Western romance and the violence it can spawn. It was not an attempt to answer the “Why” of Patricia Hearst; instead, it said the “Here and Now” of her was inevitable: her “abrupt sloughing of the past has, to the California ear, a distant echo, and the echo is of emigrant diaries. ‘Don’t let this letter dishearten anybody, never take no cutoffs and hurry along as fast as you can,’ one of the surviving children of the Donner Party concluded her account of that crossing.” Didion would repeat this quote in Where I Was From. For her, Hearst’s statements—“Don’t examine your feelings. Never examine your feelings—they’re no help at all”—proved that “Patricia Campbell Hearst had cut her losses and headed west, as her great-grandfather had before her.”

  At her trial, where she was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in prison, Hearst “seemed to project an emotional distance, a peculiar combination of passivity and pragmatic restlessness,” Didion said. (Hearst’s prison term was commuted by Jimmy Carter; years later, she was pardoned by Bill Clinton.) Didion knew she exhibited Hearst’s qualities, just as she shared the young woman’s family background. Perhaps the similarities were so close, she could penetrate no further beyond stitching general connections.

  “Girl of the Golden West” is not one of Didion’s finest performances. It concludes with a shrug (“This was a California girl, and she was raised on a history that placed not much emphasis on why”). The essay expresses an uncharacteristic faith in coincidence: Didion “happened” to keep an issue of The San Francisco Bay Guardian recounting the end of the trial, she said; one day, many years later, she thumbed through the paper to find, as well, an article on a “minister … compared at one point to Cesar Chavez, [who] was responsible, according to the writer, for a ‘mind-boggling’ range of social service programs … [T]he minister of course was the Reverend Jim Jones.”

  Didion makes nothing of this coincidence. She mentions it only to illustrate the insanity of San Francisco in the mid-1970s. If the Mae Brussells were suspicious of the world, and constructed narratives to explain it, Didion was suspicious of the narratives we use to explain the world. In her writings of the 1980s, on Miami and El Salvador, she would walk a little closer to Brussell’s side of the street (by then, she would see, for example, that Operation CHAOS began with CIA debriefings of disgruntled refugees from Castro’s Cuba who were seeking revenge and perhaps retribution from an American president they perceived as a traitor) but for now, “I never ask” would be Didion’s pat answer.

  2

  In considering—and not quite hitting—the real story of Patty Hearst, Didion felt sure the periphery was the key. She looked for an out-of-the-way anecdote, seemingly insignificant, channeling all of California; the pioneer experience in its modern manifestations; the historical imperative; the chain of forces shaping Tania: a verbal image as immediately impactful as the spread legs, the carbine, and the cobra.

  She was after this same effect in Play It As It Lays, a “fast novel,” a method of presentation allowing us to perceive Maria in a flash.

  A snake book.

  A poetic impulse, surpassing narrative.

  Somewhere on the edge of the story.

  She remembered an anecdote that Lewis Lapham of Harper’s magazine told her. He’d heard that Abigail Folger had been called home by her family to attend a wedding rehearsal dinner a year before she became one of the victims in the house on Cielo Drive. She was twenty-one at the time. She showed up late at the rehearsal, stoned and wearing an inappropriate dress, trying to remember what she had to do to be a daughter.

  Didion thought this the best story she’d heard about the Manson case—perhaps the very best story about the 1960s.

  * * *

  Not quite hitting it.

  Along with the usual challenges of thinking straight, composing carefully and well, she faced certain off-the-page impediments to her writing during this period. In the summer of 1973, Henry Robbins had a heart attack. At fort
y-five, his life had started to unravel. In the spring of that year, FSG had made him editor in chief. One of his first acts was to sign Didion for a nonfiction book, with an advance of sixty thousand dollars, payable in two installments. Presumably, this was the ill-fated Fairy Tales, which not even Patty Hearst could save.

  From the stress or the headiness of his new position, Robbins had more arguments with his colleagues. He began an affair with a publicist in the office. He told friends his wife had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was difficult to live with. By this point, his two children were attending private schools; his $25,000-a-year salary wouldn’t stretch. As an independent—and during a publishing downturn—FSG was strapped. In fact, Roger Straus ordered a salary freeze and threatened pay cuts for the company’s top officers. He pressured his editors to drop their “marginal titles” and pursue “Godfather type-book[s].” This raised Robbins’s hackles even further.

  As he lay in the hospital following his heart attack, doctors told his girlfriend he was “touch and go.” Once he recovered, he told buddies his illness had “frightened the whiskers” off him. He “had to try a new life.”

  Dick Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, got wind of Robbins’s restlessness and made him an offer. S&S was still retooling after the departure of Robert Gottlieb, who’d taken Joseph Heller and his best literary authors to Knopf. Snyder said he’d make Robbins an executive editor and vice president, and he’d almost double his salary. Robbins knew Snyder cared little for literature; he was a far more commercial and unabashedly crass businessman than Roger Straus, but in the end, Robbins said, “[f]inancial considerations are very important.” With a bottle of champagne delivered to his house, wrapped in best wishes from S&S, the deal was settled.

  What this meant for Robbins’s authors was unclear. Didion felt extremely anxious. She had not published a book since 1970, and Fairy Tales was not snapping into focus. To make matters worse, before she could work things out, Robbins’s defection became public. A reporter named Sarah Gallick published a short column in Harper’s magazine saying “such major writers as Joan Didion and Donald Barthelme … wanted to follow [Robbins] to S&S, [but] Roger Straus was refusing to release them from their contract option clauses.” So “here is Henry Robbins at S&S, receiving a high salary, and he has no big authors.” Nevertheless, Gallick said, “Didion, with the help of her agent, Lois Wallace, has managed to ‘leap over the wall.’”

  Straus, fearing serious damage to FSG’s reputation, swore to his colleagues, “None of [my] authors”—Didion, Donald Barthelme, Tom Wolfe, Grace Paley, Walker Percy—“are leaving Farrar, Straus. Over my dead body.”

  He did manage to wheedle most of the writers into staying, but Didion proved to be a tougher bird than he was. Through Lois Wallace, she told Straus she had come to see Robbins as a “surrogate father” and couldn’t possibly separate from him. She offered to repay the thirty-thousand-dollar first installment on her nonfiction book. She invited Robbins to be a guest in her house for an extended period, a clear signal to Straus where her loyalties lay.

  By now, she had begun the novel that would eventually become A Book of Common Prayer. Straus invited Wallace to his office, “to our part of town where the rents are low and the literary aromas are vintage,” to discuss the possibility of buying the novel in lieu of the nonfiction book. Straus said the novel would satisfy the existing contract. Wallace knew Didion still wished to go with Henry Robbins. She set up an auction for the book among five publishers, clearly designed to give the edge to S&S and to knock FSG out of the bidding. To no one’s surprise, Robbins got the novel as well as a contract for a nonfiction collection tentatively titled Dream Time Magic. The combined advance equaled $210,000.

  Straus felt betrayed. He threatened legal action. But then he backed off, fearing the financial risks. At no point was he ever ugly with Didion. In fact, a year after the dust had settled, he wrote her a lovely letter, expressing his hope that “the new novel is going well,” reiterating that “we are very big admirers of Didion at Union Square West, and if the time came when you would like to discuss publication of a book with us, we should like to have that happen.”

  He was savvy enough to realize Didion was “not the kind of writer that should be put on the block.” He told Wallace’s business partner “there was no way she’d earn back her S & S advance: Not good agenting!”

  He was right. Eventually, S&S proved to be a snake pit for both Robbins and Didion. Though there was never any question she would follow her editor wherever he went, this was a move she’d often regret.

  3

  How did Edith Wharton do it?

  Her summer house was always full of guests.

  She wrote a novel a year, working every morning.

  Didion read a biography of her, and came away “terribly impressed.” “I just couldn’t see how it could be,” she said. Wharton’s guests “would be served breakfasts in their rooms, then work on their letters or whatever until noon, and then everyone would gather in the garden and Wharton would appear and an excursion would be planned for the afternoon … The degree of order she must have had! I’ve thought about it a lot. For one thing, the telephone didn’t ring, but still, the degree of organization required to live that kind of life…”

  Didion could only dream of it. The guests in her Malibu house took no excursions except down to the beach, where they drank and wondered who would make a movie of the Patty Hearst story, and who would play Patty. It was like the fevered speculation, a few years earlier, about Roman Polanski: To which high-flying bidder would he sell the rights to his murdered wife?

  It turned out, in a few years the Dunnes’ friend Paul Schrader would make the Patty Hearst movie, and Natasha Richardson would play the lead role. Around the time of Hearst’s trial, the Dunnes got to know Tasha, “an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings,” Didion said. Tasha’s father, Tony, the distinguished theater and film director, was renting the former home of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace on Kings Road in Hollywood. He had become a good friend of the Dunnes, so when Tasha came to visit from London, where she lived with her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, he introduced her to Quintana and her parents. Instantly, Quintana saw Tasha as a role model. She began experimenting with makeup—something it took Didion a while to notice.

  The Wharton summer-house effect was impossible to achieve on warm, lazy evenings when actors, producers, and directors circled one another, working the room. One night, Didion threw a party for around sixty people. She made Mexican chicken; the house smelled of onions and peppers. She hired bartenders and caterers to set up the buffet. She wore a batiste dress, bought in the children’s department at Bonwit Teller (her weight was still down, ever since her visit to Cartagena). According to Sara Davidson, a guest at the party that night, Warren Beatty prowled the house, telling people he wanted to do “some gynecological detective work. I’m a combination gynecologist and detective.” At one point, Davidson said, he pulled up a rattan chair, facing Didion on the couch, “opened his knees and pressed her knees between his. ‘This is it for me,’ he said. ‘This is all I want, right here. I’m happy.’” Didion fidgeted. Beatty looked at his watch and said, “I don’t have to be on the set until ten Monday morning.”

  Didion said, “This is not … feasible.”

  Did Wharton have to put up with such nonsense?

  One thing she might have envied was the long, slow drive, much of it skirting the coast, into Los Angeles and back—about forty miles each way. On these journeys, with Dunne at the wheel, Didion spun ideas for her novel, speaking into the wind, testing her husband’s reactions. The Southern novel she had once envisioned had given way—but not completely!—to the hallucinatory setting of the Panama airport, which would not leave her mind. But now she also wanted to write about San Francisco—the SLA shenanigans had tugged her attention back to the Bay Area. Novels would be so much easier to write if she started with plot instead of s
etting, but apparently this was never going to work for her.

  So one night in the car, she just decided “to make it all one book”—New Orleans, San Francisco, Central America—she’d “fold in all the various elements so that it would be like seeing more colors than you can possibly take in with one look.”

  Offhandedly, Dunne suggested the title A Book of Common Prayer. “Maybe because he thought it would take a lot of prayer to get such a project off the ground,” Didion said.

  * * *

  Off the ground they went, taking Quintana, to Chicago, Cleveland, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo. Chasing rock stars.

  John Foreman, whom Dunne had met his sophomore year at Princeton, when Nick took him with Grace Kelly to a party, was a producer now, and he loved the rock ’n’ roll movie idea. The Dunnes had worked with him on a number of aborted “deals,” including a thriller set in an oil field, an idea hatched one day when Dunne thumbed through the annual report of a defunct oil-drilling outfit in which he’d invested. He was in over his head on that one, never even wrote a treatment, but the beauty of A Star Is Born was that the picture could be the vehicle for a sound-track album. The right package, here, needed only a slender thread to hold it together, and the Warner Bros. music people could do the rest. It was rumored that Carly Simon said no to the project because the story of a self-destructive rock singer and his beautiful partner was too close to the life she actually lived with James Taylor; certainly, Warner Bros. liked Simon, whose career was soaring, but they wanted nothing to do with Taylor, whose trajectory had veered into a ditch following constant drug abuse. No matter. They could get Elvis. They could get Liza Minnelli. Whoever.

  To prepare for writing the screenplay, the Dunnes hit the road to learn about the rock ’n’ roll business: “[T]hree weeks of one-night stands in the armpit auditoria and cities of the land,” Dunne said.