The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Didion had known Brown ever since she’d gone to Berkeley with his sister Barbara.

  Dunne loved the fact that “Jerry rubs people the wrong way. He drives them truly around the bend. They get rabid, and it tickles me.”

  Few observers gave Brown a chance at the presidential nomination. Besides making people crazy, he faced a primary process designed by the Democratic Leadership Council to position the party more centrally. The DLC had invented Super Tuesday, packing primaries in the Southern states in order to front-load the voting against candidates perceived to be too liberal. The council felt it imperative to shake off the Vietnam-era image of the party—certainly, it wanted no replay of Chicago.

  Which is why the Clinton team was tying up the Dunnes’ telephones and fax machine, trying desperately to “reason” with Governor Brown.

  That he had the Clintons so exercised as late as July was testament to his passion and the passion of his volunteers. In December 1991, the Dunnes had arranged a luncheon for Brown, inviting all the publishers, editors, and writers they could get—Carl Bernstein, Calvin Trillin, Barbara Epstein, editors from Esquire, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and The Village Voice. Didion did not consider it a conflict of interest to host a candidate while covering the presidential race for The New York Review of Books. Dunne said most of the guests patronized Brown, writing him off in advance. Then he won Maine and Colorado, and beat Clinton in the Connecticut primary. “What did you know?” Dunne’s friends began to ask.

  “If he gets New York, he gets the nomination,” Brown’s staffers said.

  Right before the New York primary, in April, Brown named Jesse Jackson as his running mate—a mistake, said many of his aides, especially considering the large number of Jewish voters in New York. Jackson had enraged the Jewish community, broad-brushing Manhattan as “Hymietown.”

  “He’s apologized [for that]. He feels terrible,” Brown said. He’s a “powerful leader who inspires and draws people to vote who’ve never been involved.” He stuck by his choice.

  On the day of the primary, he and his supporters watched returns at the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union, Local 1199, which had endorsed him. Once the television networks declared Clinton the winner, Didion extended her arms to Governor Brown, who tried to remain upbeat. He squeezed her hands.

  Dunne told him that most of the Irish help in their building had supported him. Small consolation.

  Later, at a disconsolate reception at the Royalton Hotel, staffers generally agreed: The Jackson deal sank their man. “There’s an old saying in the Talmud,” said one of Brown’s old friends. “A person can acquire the world in one moment, and can lose the world in one moment.”

  This whole venture has been “an experiment,” another man countered. “No one’s run a campaign before on a hundred bucks a person. The other candidates have all dropped out and we’re still here. That’s the bottom line.”

  By May, Clinton had clinched the party’s nomination, and in July, when Brown rode into Penn Station on a train, a rather sparse crowd greeted him. He would not be president, but he was still competing to be heard. Clinton and Gore, he said, must do more than simply claim, “We’re change agents, we’re a new generation.” The Democratic Party platform was “full of gooey and imprecise language.”

  2

  The building’s doormen were used to escorting celebrities to apartment 5A. In December 1990, the Dunnes had hosted Natasha Richardson’s wedding to producer Robert Fox. Fifty guests attended, including Tasha’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, fresh off the Concorde from London after performing the previous night in a production of Three Sisters. The actor Rupert Everett heard the couple had had a “blinding fight” two days before and nearly called the whole thing off. But on the eve of the wedding, when Tasha, Quintana, and their girlfriends drank with Everett and Fox at the Wyndham Hotel “before leaving for their hen night,” all seemed well again. Still, Tasha’s father, Tony, appeared to anticipate disappointment for his daughter. At breakfast before the wedding, he joked that as part of his toast later he would recite from Romeo and Juliet: “A gloomy peace this morning with it brings, the sun for sorrow will not show his head.” He seemed melancholy, Everett said, “slightly breathless and utterly compelling.”

  Richardson was also ill. Within a year, he’d be dead of a neurological infection resulting from the AIDS virus.

  “I never knew anyone who so loved to make things, or anyone who had such limited interest in what he’d already made. What Tony loved was the sheer act of doing it,” Didion said, and she admired him for it immensely. The previous fall, in Spain, he had directed a twenty-one-minute adaptation by Didion and Dunne of Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” for an HBO film project entitled Women and Men: Stories of Seduction. The short starred James Woods and Melanie Griffith as the American and the girl. In the Dunnes’ version of the story—unlike Hemingway’s—the man is a writer and he asks the woman, explicitly, to get an abortion: “As far as I know I only have one life to live, and by God, I’m going to live it where it interests me. I have no romantic feelings about home or family or any other baggage,” he says (in what is plainly Dunne’s syntax). It’s clear the woman believes she’s being asked to sacrifice her child for the sake of literary ambition. She can’t stand knowing that the man will turn all of this into a story someday. But that’s what writers do.

  The adaptation of “Hills Like White Elephants” was one of several screenwriting jobs the Dunnes kept their hand in during this period, for infusions of cash and for the purpose of protecting their health insurance.

  Dunne’s old friend John Foreman brought him a script idea: a picture based on the life of the late television correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch. One afternoon, Didion met with a Disney producer who’d expressed interest in the project. She came away despondent—not because she was hurting, having recently dropped a heavy tabletop on her leg, shearing off most of her skin from her right knee to her ankle; not because she couldn’t get a cab and had to walk fourteen blocks in the snow; but because, this being Disney, the producer wanted to know “what is going to happen in this picture that will make the audience walk out feeling uplifted, good about something and good about themselves.”

  Savitch had been “a small-town girl with more ambition than brains,” said Dunne, “an overactive libido, a sexual ambivalence, a tenuous hold on the truth, a taste for controlled substances … [and] a certain mental instability.” She died at thirty-six in a freak drowning accident.

  It did not seem likely that Disney would make this movie. The days of Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy were over.

  * * *

  Didion had other reasons for despondency: Tony Richardson had not looked good to her. She did not want to think about her motivation for tackling further screenplays. And her father, in his mid-eighties, was failing. His sadness had turned largely to silence. Between script rewrites and frequent discussions with Bob Silvers over possible angles in her coverage of the presidential primaries, she spoke often to her mother and brother on the phone. Occasionally, Frank would get on the line. She never knew what he’d talk about—or why. Once, he told her California had gotten too cold ever since the state had built all those dams.

  “This calls for a drink,” he used to say on almost every occasion, good or bad.

  It certainly did.

  On top of everything else, Didion remained convinced that Simon & Schuster had never been on the up-and-up when reporting her royalties. And they obviously didn’t know how to sell her. Only Salvador and The White Album had earned back their advances. Some of her books had gone out of print. They weren’t available in paperback. Her foreign sales had declined. She was locked into contracts now for a new essay collection and a novel; these contracts bore an extra forty-thousand-dollar burden, in addition to the advances, for the canceled Fairy Tales agreement. She felt she was being punished. She wanted to leave S&S.

  In January 1991, she had offered to return
the money advanced to her and to terminate the outstanding contracts. Her editor, Michael Korda, said a compromise might be possible. Perhaps she could deliver the essays and they could cancel the fiction. But then nothing happened and she believed the company was stalling.

  On March 26, 1991, she wrote Dick Snyder a chilly letter suggesting that he did not respect her, that he only wanted to wield power over his authors—and besides, her husband had just had a piece of his heart replaced. She’d endured enough.

  Snyder responded with an equally frosty note. He said they’d been friends for many years, so they could be frank with each other. There was no possibility of releasing her from her contracts. He looked forward to publishing her next book. He’d heard John was feeling much better, and that made him happy.

  Didion turned her anger on her agent. Wallace, she thought, should have been able to handle this situation. Maybe her husband’s agent, Lynn Nesbit, could do a better job. She phoned Wallace to tell her so.

  Another Didion drama—Wallace had seen plenty of them. But this one was serious, and she was hurt by it. She had represented Didion for twenty-four years, and brilliantly, and this was her reward.

  * * *

  In the event, the contract for the essay collection proved impervious. Didion gathered pieces she had written for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and New West, and in the spring of 1992, Simon & Schuster published her third collection, After Henry. The title, the introduction in praise of Henry Robbins, and the book’s dedication were slaps at S&S. “This book is dedicated to Henry Robbins and to Bret Easton Ellis, each of whom did time with its publisher,” she wrote.

  The previous fall, S&S had canceled its contract to publish Ellis’s novel American Psycho—which was on the verge of being shipped to stores—when Time and Spy magazines revealed the novel’s gleefully sadistic contents. Dick Snyder and Martin Davis, the chair of Paramount Communications (Paramount was S&S’s new owner), tried to position themselves as moral arbiters; in fact, their last-minute actions made it appear they had no idea what was in this book they were supposed to publish. They had failed to communicate with their editors and were now afraid of the book’s reception. The Authors Guild accused Paramount of censorship (Alfred A. Knopf wound up publishing Ellis’s novel). Snyder’s decision, during the period he was refusing to renegotiate Didion’s contracts, further convinced her that she and her publisher “were on different channels and have different ideas about what and how to publish.” She told The New York Times, “The dedication speaks for itself.” “I don’t think there’s anything in that dedication that Simon and Schuster doesn’t already know.”

  After Henry was a less personal collection than Slouching Towards Bethlehem or The White Album. Didion’s prose style and sensibility remained powerful and distinct, but taken together, the essays proved how thoroughly, in recent years, she had evolved into an accurate analyst of cultural pathologies rather than a mere stunned witness to them. Narrative continued to be her central obsession. She read the wordings of politics, the legal system, and the media as closely as she’d read the paragraphs of Henry James or Joseph Conrad. If there was a weakness to her approach, it lay in her emphasis on public figures’ deceptions without fully exploring the social realities these figures addressed. Still, Constance Casey, reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, was moved to say, “I’d never thought of Joan Didion as dependable before. But after reading these 11 pieces of superior reporting and criticism, I now think of her as a writer who can be relied on to get the story straight.” Even Kirkus, so often critical of Didion in the past, applauded: “[S]he’s truly one of the premier essayists of our time,” its reviewer said.

  The America profiled in After Henry was a country of stupid moments staged by its leaders for public consumption (Michael Dukakis tossing a baseball with staffers on an airport tarmac to prove he was a “regular guy” deserving of the presidency), a media machine in thrall to the celebrity subjects it covered and susceptible to bottom-line thinking poisonous to investigative reporting (the content of the Los Angeles Times was now mostly determined by “marketing people,” a “deliberate dumb-down” of the paper), and major cities whose citizens were convinced they were being “systematically ruined, violated, raped by [their] underclass.”

  The common denominator in all areas of American public life was the angry craving in everyone to find, wherever they looked, “an exact representation of their own victimization.”

  3

  The presidential primaries had made one thing clear: The cultural conversation in 1992 was all about the 1960s. “Governor Moonbeam” was cast as a California hippie whose radical ideas couldn’t possibly be taken seriously. Bill Clinton exhibited the narcissism of the Free Love generation—and he played rock ’n’ roll saxophone, for God’s sakes!

  More seriously, political figures on the Right, such as Robert Bork and Marvin Olasky (who would become an unofficial adviser to George W. Bush), were presenting, as a given, America’s Gomorrah-like fall from God’s grace as a consequence of rock music’s “subversion of authority” and of 1960s immorality in general, including equal rights for women (a view “not far from that of the Taliban,” Didion wrote).

  Sixties condemnations came wrapped in religious rhetoric, hopelessly smudging political and spiritual practices. In response to the Republican Party’s efforts to tie New Deal liberalism to Sodom, the Democratic Party decided, in the words of one of its strategists, that “the old-time religion just won’t work any more,” meaning the party had failed to win five of the last six national elections because of its commitments to the working class, immigrants, minority communities, reproductive rights, and income equality. Time for a change. Party leaders must not speak of “entitlement” now, but of “empowerment”: Like the Republicans, the Democrats shifted their rhetoric to the right. The result would be new policy approaches—for example, the end of “welfare as we know it.”

  Clinton’s people wanted him to move away from the Democratic Party’s “Vietnam base” and position himself as a “Reagan Democrat.” Clinton announced, “The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal, in many ways it is not even Republican or Democratic. It is different. It is new.… I call it a New Covenant.” (This phrase was considerably better than his earlier try, “The Third Way,” which, Didion noted, “sounded infelicitously Peruvian.”) The New Covenant was a plan to “reinvent government”—in other words, a management reorganization, in which old bureaucrats would be eliminated at the hands of new bureaucrats brought in explicitly to eliminate the old bureaucrats. Lest anyone be confused as to what this meant for the American people, the Covenant was a “new choice based on old values.”

  Its implementation (that is, raising enough money from a wealthier donor base than the party had usually attracted) meant reducing political language to coded messages aimed specifically at this shiny new donor type. So, as per guidelines to party officials from Democratic pollsters: “Instead of talking about Democrats lifting someone out of poverty, describe the party’s goal as helping average Americans live the good life; [instead] of saying Democrats want to eliminate homelessness and educate the underclass, talk about finding a way for young couples to buy their first home.”

  Just change the language—as the government in El Salvador had done to cover its bloody tracks.

  Meanwhile, rather than pointing out the emptiness of this linguistic shell game, and breaking down the policy ramifications, the media were busy dreaming up dramatic narratives to entrance readers and viewers. The presidential election was a horse race. Who’s ahead? Who’s falling behind this week?

  A “crisis” was more heart-pounding, therefore easier to pitch to an audience, than a complex “structural malfunction,” the probing of which would require intelligence and patience by both commentators and listeners (as in the Savings and Loan debacle). A program featuring two relatively uninformed people yelling at each other, purportedly from the Left and the Right, but really from within
the financial package offered to them by the television network, was cheaper to produce than a program about something, based on committed investigative reporting.

  “At Madison Square Garden in New York from July 13, 1992, until the balloons fell on the evening of July 16, four days and nights devoted to heralding the perfected ‘centrism’ of the Democratic Party, no hint of what had once been that party’s nominal constituency was allowed to penetrate prime time, nor was any suggestion of what had once been that party’s tacit role, that of assimilating immigration and franchising the economically disenfranchised, or what used to be called ‘co-opting’ discontent,” Didion wrote. “Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter got slotted in during the All-Star Game. Jerry Brown spoke of ‘the people who fight our wars but never come to our receptions’ mainly on C-SPAN.”

  * * *

  On December 22, Lois Wallace wrote Didion to say how sorry she was to have heard of Frank Didion’s death, after a short stint in a nursing home. The loss of a parent is never easy, she said, even if that parent was old or unwell.

  The business between Wallace and Didion was done.

  * * *

  Three months after her father died, Didion flew to California to speak at a University of California’s Charter Day ceremony. She picked up her mother in Monterey and drove to Berkeley with her. The plan was to spend a relaxing few days at the Claremont Hotel following Didion’s talk.

  In Where I Was From, Didion writes that her mother seemed confused as they motored up 101. “Are we on the right road?” she asked. Didion assured her they were. “Then where did it all go?” Eduene replied.

  “She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964,” Didion wrote. The “familiar open vista[s] had been relentlessly replaced” by “mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed.”