The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Not long ago, for a New York magazine profile (“[Didion’s] place in American letters is secure, if not easily summarized”), she’d been asked to do a photo shoot in a West Nineteenth Street studio, quiet and dark, while a rainstorm roared outside. The spooky conditions seemed appropriate, for now she was being asked to reincarnate the poses of the fashion models she used to watch while sitting on Irving Penn’s floor. A photographer told her to look pensive. She should place her fingertips on her forehead and gaze into the middle distance. She’d spent the day laughing at herself, feeling surrounded by shades.

  Once, while walking along Fifty-seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth, she had noticed “quick sunlight dappling, yellow leaves falling (but from what?…) … a shower of gold, spangled, very fast, a falling of the bright.” She never experienced this light effect again. She wondered if she’d suffered a small seizure or stroke. She became convinced that she’d been given an “apprehension of death.”

  Similarly, years earlier in California, she’d dreamed of an ice island, a jagged bluish white, glittering in sunlight. She awoke, certain she’d witnessed death. Neither of these visions frightened her. “[O]n the contrary,” she wrote, they were “transcendent, more beautiful than I could say, yet there was no doubt in my mind that what I had seen was death.”

  Over there just now! By the entrance to the park, next to a horse-drawn carriage, a man with heavy, gray Polish features. A flash of her dead old life in Hollywood: Roman. Quintana had complained a few months earlier that they wouldn’t let Polanski go to the Oscars.

  Didion did not want to think about death or about the passing of time or about Roman, her co-godparent to Susanna Moore’s daughter—Susanna, whose ex-husband, Dick, had died of cancer the year before, but not before giving a deathbed interview to Peter Biskind about Hollywood’s glory days.

  In Hollywood, an interview was as good as a confession. Last rites. Cut!

  The bridge to the glory days had burned long ago—with a lot of dear old friends trapped on it.

  Susanna’s daughter, fatherless now. These fragile little girls.

  Quintana had said blithely one night at dinner that if she died, she wanted her organs to be donated. Dunne said he wanted his to be, too. Didion could not abide this conversation. Her loved ones, packaged like cut-up fryers in a frozen-food section.

  And now, in front of the Gap store, who was this? A wisp of a girl. Trembling, unsteady on her heels, big, thick sunglasses pinching the bridge of her nose … looking up and down the street, perhaps, for her errant Southern knight.

  Fifty years ago. Say hello to your future.

  What do Episcopalians always say at the graveside? “In the midst of life we are in death.”

  2

  “Let’s do it,” Quintana whispered (Gary Gilmore’s words in front of the firing squad, as Quintana must have learned from her mother).

  For her wedding, on the afternoon of July 26, 2003, she had chosen a simple long white dress and veil; a frangipani blossom tattooed just below her left shoulder was visible through the tulle. She wore her hair braided thickly down her back, as she had as a child. Woven through the braid were waxy stephanotis flowers (Didion could not help but recall the poisoned vines in Brentwood, once the new owner of their house had sprayed the Vikane). When Quintana knelt at the altar, the red soles of her satin shoes flashed at the spectators.

  The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where Didion had interred her mother’s ashes, had had its cornerstone laid in 1892, the year Ellis Island opened. The church’s founders built a section surrounding the high altar called the Seven Chapels of the Tongues to commemorate the city’s immigrants.

  A Poet’s Corner, on the north side of the nave, celebrated American literature, with plaques honoring Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, among many others. The space lifted the secular to the plane of the sacred. It was where Didion and Dunne wished to be placed at rest.

  For their daughter’s wedding, they stepped past the peacocks in the courtyard and through the great bronze doors cast by Barbedienne of Paris, the same metalworker who cast the Statue of Liberty. Just inside the entryway, facing the nave, they stood in the tessellated light of the great rose window.

  “I remember how unhappy John was that day,” Josh Greenfeld told me. “He didn’t want a formal wedding. I think Joan and John probably wanted better for Q, but Gerry was a nice guy.”

  The children of Gerry’s stepdaughter wore leis, at Quintana’s request. At the reception, she had wanted pink champagne, a peach-colored cake, cucumber and watercress sandwiches, like the ones her mother had served at her birthdays in Brentwood.

  She and Gerry planned to fly to St. Barths for their honeymoon. Didion and Dunne, both aware that neither was terribly healthy, made arrangements to go to Honolulu. What Didion looked forward to the most was the takeoff and landing, when Dunne would hold her hand. He always held her hand.

  That evening after the ceremony, Quintana phoned them. “Wasn’t that just about perfect,” she said.

  3

  In the early fall, Dunne insisted he wanted to go to Paris. Didion argued with him. They didn’t have enough money for another trip right now. They had too much to do. She had just begun researching a proposed book about Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers. Dunne said he had a feeling that if he didn’t go to Paris in November, he’d never go again. It infuriated her to be blackmailed into indulging his moroseness. “That settles it then,” she said, “we’re going.” They spent two nearly silent days, but in the end, they did go to Paris in November. He did seem cheered, somewhat. He decided their joint epitaph should be “They Had a Good Time.” They stayed at the Bristol and walked through the Jardin du Luxembourg in the rain. At Saint-Sulpice, Dunne received Communion. (Episcopalians “took” Communion, he informed his wife, resurrecting an argument they’d had for forty years; Catholics “received” it. This was an essential difference in attitude.)

  Back in New York, he was amused one night by a CBS television movie about the Reagans. It never aired; Reagan supporters claimed it was politically biased, and the network caved to their protests, but Dunne got to see an advance copy of the film. In one scene, Nancy Reagan, lounging in a bubble bath, complained about being interviewed by “Joan Didion,” whom she called a “hack” and a “bitch.”

  His amusements didn’t last long these days. He griped he was not having fun. He told his wife one night, “You were right about Hawaii.” She didn’t know what he meant by this; she assumed he was referring to her old desire to buy a house in Honolulu. All she could remember now were their fights at the north shore of the island, the Punaluu-Hauula side, where the traffic got heavy and they’d get irritable, knowing they’d never make it back to the Kahala for lunch. She’d suggest going over to the Pali and eating at the Mekong instead. At which point he’d burrow deeper into his grumpiness and declare he was absolutely disinclined to eat Thai.

  Regularly, he chastised himself—and implicitly her—for not emulating that great old couple they’d met in Indonesia back in 1980. Joe and Gertrude Black were their names. He saw them as exemplars of service to their fellow Americans in far-off corners of the globe, giving lectures and teaching political science. Compared to Joe and Gertrude Black, perhaps they had “fritter[ed] away” their lives.

  Didion felt particularly dismayed by his mood one day when he shrugged off a note she’d made for him the night before. They’d been out to dinner. Normally, he carried with him, wherever he went, three-by-six-inch note cards on which to jot down ideas as they occurred to him. He’d forgotten the cards that night and had asked her to record a detail. When she gave him the slip of paper the following day, he said, “You can use it if you want to.” This sounded like surrender.

  Just as, a few days earlier, on her sixty-ninth birthday, he gave her what sounded like encouragement to go on without him. It had snowed all day that day. Great white clumps cascaded off St. James’s slate roof across the street. Dunne was sitting in front of the
fire. He pulled from a shelf a copy of A Book of Common Prayer. He said he wanted to find a particular passage in the novel to see how she’d accomplished something technically. He read aloud to her. “Goddamn. Don’t ever tell me again you can’t write,” he said, closing the book. “That’s my birthday present to you.”

  She cried.

  * * *

  On December 24, Didion wrote a short Merry Christmas e-mail to Susanna Moore, who was traveling in Florence. Didion said she envied her friend. New York was quite dismal; everyone was down with a terrible flu. For instance, Quintana had a fever of 103 and was going to miss the big Christmas Eve dinner.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  1

  Of the deaths of her husband and daughter, we have primarily Didion’s accounts, in the bestselling books The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011). Characteristically, Didion stippled these volumes with vivid incidents and medical terminology, yet many readers came away not knowing precisely what happened to Quintana. Nora Ephron’s sister, Amy, writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books, offered a typical response: Quintana “fell into a kind of semi-conscious state induced by an infection that turned into septicemia (I think—it’s not really clear exactly what occurred).”

  This confusion beset her parents, as well.

  “How does ‘flu’ morph into whole-body infection?” Dunne was obsessed with this question. He could not grasp the possibility. (Much later, Didion thought Quintana had contracted a particularly malignant strain of a previously unidentified avian flu, which news sources claimed had reached North America in 2003, but this was merely a hunch. “There really was no explanation given … [but] I’m convinced that’s what killed her,” she said.)

  By Christmas Day 2003, Quintana’s fever had not dropped and she called her mother in the morning complaining of having difficulty breathing. Didion could hear her labored, shallow inhales over the phone. Gerry Michael took his wife to the emergency room at Beth Israel North, the old Doctors Hospital, where Vogue girls had gone to rid themselves of unwanted fetuses. Quintana was found to be dehydrated, and her pulse rate was over 150. Her white blood cell count had crashed. Doctors gave her Ativan and Demerol, said she was suffering from “walking pneumonia.” It was “nothing serious,” they said, but just to be on the safe side, they’d admit her to the sixth-floor ICU.

  That evening, her temperature spiked to over 104 degrees. She became agitated. Doctors increased her sedation. Her breathing trouble had worsened and she was intubated. Soon it became clear that she was not capable of breathing on her own. She had first confessed to “feeling terrible” seven days earlier. “I was in town to take Quintana and my dad to my sister’s in Canada for Christmas,” Sean Day Michael recalls. “I remember her shuffling out of her bedroom into the living room and saying, ‘I think I have pneumonia.’ The first time she went to the doctor’s they sent her home—it was just the flu.” This was on Monday, December 22. She was told to drink liquids and stay in bed.

  So, here is one clear instance of what happened to her: Initially, doctors misdiagnosed her.

  In the sixth-floor ICU, on the morning of December 26, internists discovered pneumonia in both lungs. It was growing. Her blood pressure had dropped, indicating septic shock, a body-wide inflammation caused by infection (often from bacteria picked up in the hospital) and, in severe cases such as Quintana’s, complicated by organ dysfunction.

  In her books, Didion does not address the possibility that years of alcohol abuse may have compromised Quintana’s ability to respond to disease. Following the publication of Blue Nights, plenty of innuendo on this topic infected the Internet. Vile rumors concerning Quintana’s drinking went viral, mostly from people who knew nothing at all about Quintana and whose purpose seemed to be to condemn Didion for obscuring her daughter’s behavior. Didion kept silent about all this, but her view is not hard to imagine. She might point out, quite rightly, that to discuss her daughter’s hospitalization in light of her alcoholism would be to pass judgment on Quintana (much the way a defense lawyer, representing a murderer in court, blames the victim instead of the real killer) and that, in judging Quintana, we are deluding ourselves: She’s responsible, we think; that could never happen to me.

  Which is to miss the point entirely.

  Doctors don’t really know what causes such systemic infections, and yet they happen all the time.

  On this issue of Quintana’s culpability, perhaps Sean Michael offers the best perspective. “Do I think her lifestyle contributed to her death? Absolutely,” he says. “I think a nun’s lifestyle contributes to her death, even if it’s only getting run over by a truck” in front of the convent.

  * * *

  “She’s still beautiful,” Gerry Michael said one night as he and Didion and Dunne were leaving the ICU.

  They had held her swollen hands. They had wept silently as the tubes burbled. Didion had brushed back her daughter’s sweat-soaked hair; looking out the window, she could see ice floes on the East River. Dunne leaned over to kiss his daughter’s face, near the corner of her fever-cracked lips. “More than one more day,” he whispered. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explained that this was a reference to Richard Lester’s film Robin and Marian. “I love you more than even one more day,” Maid Marian says to Robin Hood after she has dosed them both fatally with poison, ensuring their eternal union.

  In the cab back home, Dunne could barely speak.

  A few nights later, after a visit to the ICU, he called Nick. He “sobbed about his daughter,” Nick said. “I had never heard him cry.… ‘It was like watching Dominique on life support,’ he told me.”

  The following evening, December 30, Dunne pulled on a scarf and an old red Windbreaker from the Up Close & Personal movie shoot, and he and his wife took a taxi to the hospital. An ICU doctor told them they still didn’t know “which way this is going.”

  Afterward, in the cab, the Dunnes considered going out to eat, but they decided to return to the apartment instead and have a salad by the fire. Dunne said everything he had ever done was worthless. The new novel was worthless. His new article for The New York Review of Books—on Gavin Lambert’s biography of Natalie Wood—was worthless. “Why did I waste time on a piece about Natalie Wood?” he said. He said again, “You were right about Hawaii.”

  And then he said, “I don’t think I’m up for this.”

  Didion knew he meant dealing with Quintana’s illness. “You don’t get a choice,” she told him.

  It was after eight o’clock when they reached home. Dunne tossed his scarf and jacket on a chair. Didion laid a fire (all the fires they’d shared! especially on those cold, cozy nights on the coast at Malibu). She got him a Scotch. Fitfully, in the last few days, he’d been reading a bound galley of David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? He pushed the book aside, along with a copy of The New Yorker, and set down his drink. Didion walked into the kitchen to start dinner. She set a table in the living room, near the fire, and lit some candles. Dunne asked for a second drink. He was talking to her about World War I, how it had colored the entire twentieth century; he asked her if she’d used the same Scotch in his second drink, because he didn’t think it was a good idea to mix two different kinds.

  And then he wasn’t talking anymore.

  Didion looked up. He slumped, his left hand raised. She said, “Don’t do that.” He didn’t respond. She walked over and tried to lift him in his chair, thinking perhaps he had choked on some food. He tumbled forward, hitting his head on the table, and dropped to the floor.

  * * *

  Later, Didion said she remembered Quintana’s dreams about the Broken Man—how she’d cling to the fence if he came for her. Somehow he’d gotten in. Into the apartment. Into the ICU at Beth Israel North. So far, Quintana kept hold of the fence. Her father had let go of it.

  2

  In contrast to her account of that evening in The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she said she didn’t
fully grasp what had happened until after the EMTs arrived from New York–Presbyterian, until after they had worked Dunne over on the living room floor with defibrillating paddles, until after they had transferred him to the hospital and she had followed in a second ambulance, to be met by a social worker, Nick said she told him on the phone, later that night, “The minute I got to him, I knew he was dead. The medics worked on him for fifteen minutes, but it was over.”

  At the hospital, she had been escorted into a curtained cubicle, where Dunne lay on a gurney. His face was bruised and a tooth was chipped from when he’d hit the table. Someone asked her if she wanted a priest. She said yes. Someone else placed in her hand her husband’s cell phone, watch, credit cards, and money clip.

  The person who most needed to know what had happened lay intubated and unconscious in an intensive care unit several blocks away.

  Didion took a taxi home and walked into the silent apartment. The fire’s embers glowed. The dinner sat untouched. Syringes lay scattered on the floor, left by the EMTs. A little blood darkened the space beneath the table. Dunne’s scarf and Up Close & Personal jacket still lay across the chair where he had tossed them. His blue terry-cloth robe lay across a sofa in the bedroom. She remembered she used to have, tacked to the bulletin board in her office, an index card listing, in connection with a movie she’d been working on, the amount of time the brain can be deprived of oxygen before damage or death results.