The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  The good news was, Vazquez was on the verge of opening his new nursery, Zuma Canyon Orchids. That acreage had survived. “You want today to see flowers, we go down to the other place,” he told Didion.

  She thanked him and said she did not need to see the flowers. She wished him good luck and went to observe the spot where she had lived only three months ago. “The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which,” she said. “In any case it was no longer our house.”

  She stared out over the sea to her beloved flat horizon and then turned to survey the hills where, days earlier, as winds teased the flames into grotesque, writhing arms, a hawk had flown over the highway and exploded in midair.

  PART SEVEN

  Chapter Twenty-five

  1

  “Poor dope. He always wanted a pool … in the end he got himself a pool: only the price turned out to be a little high,” says the two-bit screenwriter Joe Gillis, speaking from beyond his watery grave. As his voice addresses us (really, it’s William Holden’s), we witness his fully clothed body floating facedown in a silent-film star’s deep end.

  The famous opening of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard portrays L.A. swimming pools as traps—deadly pits hollowed out by 1950s decadence. Between the movie and the news of Rodney King’s death in a backyard pool, in 2012, lies a series of images defining California through its best-known private luxury: Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate as an alienated sixties kid pulling on scuba gear and hiding from his parents at the bottom of their pool; punked-out skateboarders swarming concrete canyons emptied of water by drought and the escalating housing prices of the 1970s.

  In 1978, the year Didion and Dunne moved to Brentwood Park and Didion owned, for the first time, a backyard swimming pool, her friend the painter David Hockney created twenty-nine images out of pressed paper pulp, freezing the movement of light on chlorinated water and blue rain needles pattering placid surfaces. Previously, Hockney had painted the violence of a splash; bodies elongated by the aquatic refraction of light. He had rendered swimmers in an atmosphere so thick, they may as well have been torn from their earthly companions—those left grieving, searching for their lost ones in a cloudless crystal ball.

  “Water in a swimming pool is different from, say, water in a river, which is mostly reflection because the water isn’t clear,” Hockney said. “A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent, and drawing transparency is an interesting problem.”

  Of course, Hockney’s transparency was unnatural, formed by chemicals, maintenance, and what Didion called “control of the uncontrollable.” A “pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order,” she once wrote. “[W]ater … made available and useful … infinitely soothing to the western eye.” But this was peace bought by a terrible knowledge: our estrangement from the land.

  We inhabit a desert. Yet on lot after densely packed lot, we form artificial oases, kidney-shaped and heated. We suffer through drought. Yet annually over twenty thousand gallons of water evaporate from an uncovered pool. An unholy accommodation, with alienation the only possible result.

  Thus, Didion’s certainty that the “apparent ease of California life is an illusion,” even for those who can afford a backyard pool. Thus, the “interesting problem” of drawing, or freezing in writing, this particular “transparency,” which, like the California sunlight, conveys a certain pitilessness in its vibrancy.

  The Dunnes lived in the “apparent ease” of Brentwood for ten years, from June 1978 to the summer of 1988, at 202 Chadbourne Avenue, on the corner of Chadbourne and Marlboro. In the midafternoons one summer, just after four o’clock, Dunne liked to wade out into the shallow water, rereading William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice to study its structure. Didion would work in the garden, tending her roses, thyme, santolina, and feverfew—for which she had convinced Dunne to pay landscapers to tear out the back lawn—and then together they would retire into their library, wrapped in towels, make drinks, and watch a BBC television series called Tenko, about several English women imprisoned in Malaya during World War II. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion says they would work for a couple hours after the show ended each night, “John in his office at the top of the stairs, me in the glassed-in porch across the hall that had become my office.” Afterward, at around seven-thirty, they’d go out for dinner—often chicken or shrimp quesadillas at Morton’s, where the “room was cool and polished and dark inside but you could see the twilight outside.”

  For a while, they may have believed—certainly, they wanted to believe—that their rituals and daily cleansings enclosed them, like orchids in a greenhouse, protected from change and disturbance, as they’d tried to be in Malibu. Here in Brentwood—where “we’ll have a better life,” Didion assured Sara Davidson—the community felt just as insulated as Trancas had on its very best days. All the neighbors knew one another and recognized one another’s illegal Mexican help. Few African-Americans lived in the area, the most prominent being O. J. Simpson, about whom “white Americans could congratulate themselves with the spurious notion that they were colorblind, a conclusion made possible by Simpson’s conversion of himself into a white man’s idea of an acceptable black man,” Dunne wrote. Simpson was the “quintessential intimate stranger, the person we think we know because of his celebrity” (a condition the Dunnes knew something about). The retired football player, “famous for formerly being famous,” lived about a minute, by car, from Chadbourne Avenue, near the mayor, Richard Riordan, and the president of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz, in those days enjoying his fifteen minutes as “the most powerful man in Hollywood.” Dunne often saw Simpson at the Brentwood Mart, a series of one-story boutique stores where Dunne bought his books, newspapers, and magazines, got his hair cut, and sometimes ate ribs at the drugstore. Simpson’s appearance here—always wearing tennis outfits, always browsing USA Today—seemed an indicator of the transparency of affluence in L.A. society. But perhaps, like an artificial pool in the desert, it reflected a forced accommodation, an exception casting into greater relief the illusion of racial mobility.

  Rodney King, who had learned to swim as a child in the irrigation canals near his grandmother’s house in Sacramento, and who bought a house with a pool after receiving $3.8 million from the city of Los Angeles in a civil suit following his beating at the hands of five cops near the Children’s Museum, once said, “If you don’t know Los Angeles, it’s hard to explain how different it is from the pictures you see on television and in movies. No pretty palm trees and manicured lawns or any of that. No fancy boutiques or pretty buildings with shiny windows. All the big houses and Beverly Hills”—and Brentwood—“may only be about ten miles north, and the beautiful beach houses on the ocean in Malibu only about ten miles to the west, but those places may as well be a million miles away.”

  2

  It was a tough year to try to give up smoking.

  The house needed plenty of work: potting the orchids on the mantelpiece, placing the porcelain end tables and the lavender love seats just so in the den, angling the small wooden breakfast table exactly right, next to the Chickering piano. Above the piano Didion hung a framed aerial photo of Delano Vineyards. (Poor Cesar! Workers’ wages had dipped, and reports said he’d become quite paranoid, looking for scapegoats in his ranks.) She draped chintz over the black leather sofa her husband loved so much, an old gift from his mother; he felt almost mystical about it because one night, at a party in Malibu, a pair of guests, a man and a woman, former AP reporters who’d covered Vietnam in its worst period, and who hadn’t run into each other since their days together in Southeast Asia, sat on that sofa, staring into each other’s eyes and saying nothing all evening.

  The dining room curtains had to go: such strict, regular pleats! Didion was certain this geometric pattern set off migraines, the way the monotony of cookbook recipes could mess with her alpha waves. If only she’d been big-boned and fi
ve ten, she could have stopped the pains in her body and strong-armed the furniture until she felt more at ease in her surroundings. “All the time we were living at the beach I wanted a house like this,” she admitted to Michiko Kakutani. “I wanted a house with a center-hall plan with the living room on your right and the dining hall on your left when you come in. I imagined if I had this house, a piece of order and peace would fall into my life, but order and peace did not fall into my life. Living in a two-story house doesn’t take away the risks.”

  On the other hand, she liked the sloppy and even slightly dangerous placement of the child’s chair in the den, out in the middle of everything, covered with Quintana’s cheery old sun hats.

  She stuck her tennis racket in a closet: The lessons hadn’t taken.

  She scrambled through boxes to find the snapshot of Donner Pass she simply had to see on her study desk. While Dunne paneled his larger room with wood, she neatened her work space (so many books!—she couldn’t stand the weight of other people’s opinions staring down at her from the shelves).

  She arranged cut-glass bowls in the kitchen (where she did have a marble slab for rolling pastry dough), vases, settings of china and silver, reserving a special place for the Craftsman dinner knife she’d found among ice plants below her Malibu deck when county officials had come to conduct a geological inspection. The inspection was required before the Dunnes could sell the house and move to Brentwood. Apparently, the knife had slipped through the deck’s redwood slats one night. It was dull and scratched, its wooden handle pitted. Didion thought she might give it to Quintana when her daughter was older, a memento of her childhood at the beach—along with her baby teeth, saved in a satin jeweler’s box.

  Didion lined a room with her hurricane lamps, as though expecting domestic storms.

  A pest-control man told her she’d probably have a rat problem in her avocado trees out back. She deadheaded and groomed her lilies of the Nile, her agapanthus and blue starbursts. She spray-washed the balcony trellises, hosed off the brick patio. She paid arborists to trim the deciduous trees; Dunne said the trees seemed “to shed their leaves not seasonally but whenever they got nervous.”

  The neighborhood took lots of getting to know: its pacing, the timing of its lawn waterings, its morning and afternoon schedules. Recently, a woman across the street had backed into Dunne’s pearl-gray Jag, denting its side, as she’d pulled out of her driveway. (And now the damn Corvette needed a new transmission!)

  At a party one night, John Cheever told Dunne he loved visiting this part of town. Tudor homes, Colonial homes, white New England trim—the neighborhood reminded him of Connecticut.

  On the weekends, Didion mapped out her shopping routes—this area, west and sloping all the way down to the sea, was blessed with the best supermarkets in the world. Sometimes she drove out to El Mercado de Los Angeles, in the shadow of ratty billboards announcing daily flights to San Salvador. There, she’d pick up cheeses, chicken, and salsa. She was in the mood for chili these days.

  Among the market stalls, she moved past elderly men who wore only undershirts, past children tugging silver Mylar balloons on kid-sticky nylon strings. Brass bands blew competing tunes from the beer joints. Her neighbors had told her the “newly arrived” tended to gather at the market—undocumented families looking for work. If she needed extra house help, this was the place to come. Reliable help was hard to get.

  Sara Davidson reported visiting the Dunnes one day at their Brentwood home to introduce them to her new baby. She took along her nanny, a young woman named Mary, the daughter of a truck driver. Mary said “cain’t” and “youse,” visibly discomfiting Dunne. Later, when Davidson learned that Mary had been stealing from her, Dunne said he wasn’t surprised: “You don’t know White Trash.”

  Protection, insulation, control. “I’m going to have a ‘me’ decade,” Didion said. She’d hired a new housekeeper. Her personal secretaries and her niece Dominique, now twenty, were available for baby-sitting Quintana. Dominique liked to swim in the pool.

  One night, Didion thought it would be lovely to float candles and gardenias in the pool’s deep end for an outdoor party. She lit the candles and used a pool skimmer to arrange the flowers in pleasing patterns, but they all got sucked into the filter intake, and she drenched herself trying to pluck the soggy stems from the water. Through her clinging dress, her ribs in the mirror looked like the slender slats of a deck chair. Control was not so easy to establish.

  So why did she think she could handle tossing away her cigarettes? The conviction had struck her one day; by happenstance, she’d run into an old teacher of hers from Berkeley, Jim Hart. He told her his wife had just died of lung cancer. He said he missed taking walks with her. Right then, Didion decided to stop smoking. She told Dunne she was doing this so he wouldn’t pine for her on evening strolls around the neighborhood.

  Then she read about the Italian political leader Aldo Moro: When he was kidnapped by terrorists, press profiles of him stressed that he’d been a man of moderate habits, smoking only five cigarettes a day. Didion figured since the cigarettes didn’t kill him (his kidnappers shot him to death), she could afford to be moderate, too. From then on, five a day was her bargain with herself.

  3

  Quintana’s unhappiness caused the family’s greatest adjustment problems. Her laid-back life at the beach had not prepared her for the rigors of classes at the Westlake School for Girls or the rigid social order she had to plow her way into as an outsider. Westlake, enrolling about seven hundred students, many of them from Hollywood’s business and entertainment elite, occupied its current buildings at North Faring Road because the Janns Investment Company decided it would make a solid anchor for the Holmby Hills development. This pragmatic, profit-oriented ethos set the tone for all work and activity at the school. The kids wore conforming blue uniforms and hauled their parents’ attitudes into the crowded hallways. “Kids grow up and become aware of what their parents do, and they can be tough, Hollywood kids,” said Tim Steele. “They learn their parents’ ruthless business techniques and they learn about power, but they only know it as habit.” (Didion agreed: “Writers do not get gross from dollar one, nor do they get the Thalberg Award, nor do they even determine when and where a meeting will take place: these are facts of local life known even to children,” she said.)

  “In those days, public schools weren’t shunned they way they are now; it didn’t really matter where a kid went to school—public or private. All their parents were in the business, so the kids would meet and mingle,” Steele said. “I heard of schoolteachers teaching the sons and daughters of television producers and studio heads. If a kid was in danger of flunking, she’d threaten to have the teacher fired. That’s the way things got done in Hollywood. The whole damn business was like high school. And vice versa.”

  Didion rather enjoyed her vicarious return to school, reading Moby-Dick along with her daughter—she relished the assignments more than Quintana did: For the first time, she got what Melville was doing. Quintana wrote papers on Angel Clare’s role in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and on the nervous system’s responses to stress—often while eating alone off a TV tray in her bedroom.

  Meanwhile, her parents would be out at Ma Maison, dining with the “same old faces”: George Cukor, Jacqueline Bisset, Dustin Hoffman, Carl Bernstein. For Didion, the move to Brentwood was one more step toward securing the “last stable society.” “This place never changes,” Carl Bernstein told her approvingly one night at the restaurant. “No,” Didion said. “Time stands still here.”

  For her daughter, the “suburbia house” meant a terrible upheaval. Like Didion, Quintana was always haunted by the thought of a lost domain: the family she believed she would never know. Now the beach became a vanished world to which she could not quite return. Naturally, she visited Malibu friends and sometimes stayed overnight at Susan Traylor’s house; still, everything had changed in spite of her efforts to hold them steady, despite her mother’s denial of
time.

  “[W]e encourage them to remain children … our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear,” Didion would write in Blue Nights.

  Quintana tried to tell her who she was, indirectly, obliquely, with a dollop of irony—the family style.

  “It bothered her father: [Quintana] didn’t seem to want to read anything he’d written, or that I’d written,” Didion said. “When I asked her about it, she said, ‘When you read something, you form an opinion about it, right? I don’t want to form an opinion about my mother and father.’”

  But this was a mask, like saying, with a smirk, “suburbia house,” instead of shouting, I hate these little sitting rooms off each of our bedrooms. I can’t stand being so far from my friends. How could you bring me to a place like this?

  Of course she’d dipped into her parents’ writing—seen her mother’s fascination with trauma and terror, winced at her father’s knowledge of anal and oral sex. He was more clued in than his wife to the “person” developing under their roof, just as Quintana saw Dunne more clearly (shocked that he’d hidden so many “adult” subjects from her). As a result, they fought more bitterly than ever—over space, chores, schoolwork. After arguing with her father, she’d imagine her birth parents. In her mind, they were always young and smiling. She’d think maybe they’d be more gently understanding of her.

  She told her folks she’d decided to write a novel “just to show you.” In the prologue she wrote, “Some of the events are based on the truth and others are fictitious. The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The main character, Quintana, suspects she’s pregnant. She informs her parents. “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn’t even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn’t even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.”