The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

“Hollywood was always a nepotistic society”: Tim Steele in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 18.

  “[It was] quite rigidly organized”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 33.

  “God, I love to look at movie stars”: Dominick Dunne: After the Party, directed and produced by Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley (Mercury Media/Road Trip Films/Film Art Docco, 2008), film documentary.

  “She was totally comfortable”: ibid.

  “People said they were climbers”: ibid.

  “[It] was the best place to be”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 30.

  “‘Get the girls, Peter’”: ibid., 198.

  “They were careless people”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 120.

  “Dancing 10:00 p.m.”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 114.

  “The freeway is forever!” and “go gargle razor blades”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 364, 352.

  “ribbons of freeway”: “Los Angeles in a New Image,” Life, June 20, 1960, 75.

  “space between [destination] points”: California Assembly Interim Committee on Natural Resources, Planning, and Public Works, Highway and Freeway Planning (Sacramento: Assembly of the State California, 1965), 22.

  “audacious lane changes”: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 163.

  “What was happening was”: Tim Steele in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “When the Old Hollywood fell apart”: Jill Schary Robinson in conversation with the author, April 23, 2013.

  “like a little neighborhood”: Marlo Thomas quoted in Todd S. Purdum, “Children of Paradise,” Vanity Fair, March 2009; available at www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/03/Hollywood-kids200903.

  “too beautiful for high school”: Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), 79.

  “unassuming little Beverly Hills restaurant”: Valerie J. Nelson, “Beverly Hills Restaurateur Kurt Niklas Dies at 83,” Los Angeles Times, August 20, 2009; available at articles/latimes.com/2009/aug/28/local/me-kurt-niklas28.

  “Compared to The Daisy”: Dan Jenkins, “Life with the Jax Pack,” Sports Illustrated, July 10, 1967; available at sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1080051.

  “evil”: Cindy Kadonaga, “The Daisy Discotheque: A Born-Again Nightclub,” St. Petersburg Times, June 11, 1977.

  “Oh, Mr. Dunne”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 131.

  “I was the amusement for Sinatra”: Dominick Dunne: After the Party, de Garis and Jolley, film documentary.

  “corner banquette”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 62–63.

  “Kosher Nostra” and subsequent references from Russo: Gus Russo, Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2006), 34, 282, 284, 285.

  “Along with his pal Lew Wasserman”: Tim Steele in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters”: Frank McShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 121.

  “We were forced to sit in a house together”: Joan Didion’s remarks at Kelly Writer’s House, University of Pennsylvania, March 31, 2009.

  “I had no idea how to be a wife”: Didion quoted in Sam Schulman, “The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion,” Commentary, December 2005; available at www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-year-of-magical-thinking-by-joan-didion/.

  “crapshoot”: John Riley, “Writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne Play It as It Lays in Malibu,” People, July 26, 1976; available at people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20066717,00.htm.

  “We needed … money”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”

  “like being trapped on a dance floor”: Joan Didion, “The Sound of Music: More Embarrassing Than Most,” Vogue, May 1965, 143.

  “It will probably be a big success”: Pauline Kael, “Cat Ballou: Lumpy, Coy, and Obvious,” Vogue, September 1965, 180.

  “This is an old-fashioned action Western”: Joan Didion, “The Sons of Katie Elder: Old-fashioned Action,” Vogue, September 1965, 76.

  “At the time I began working for Vogue”: “Conversation Between Joan Didion and Meghan Daum,” Black Book, December 12, 2004; available (2011) at www.meghandaum.com/about-meghan-daum/36-conversation-between-joan-didion-and-meghan-daum.

  “I was suffering a fear”: Joan Didion, Telling Stories (Berkeley, Calif.: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1978), 9–10.

  “no talent” and “no ability”: ibid., 10.

  a letter to the actor Buzz Farber: Joan Didion to Buzz Farber, November 28, 1964, Dobkin Collection, Glenn Horowitz Booksellers, Inc., New York.

  “[S]he had gone”: Didion, Telling Stories, 31.

  “When she heard the door close”: ibid., 25–26.

  “When she was almost asleep”: ibid., 26.

  “There’s a rush to opinion”: Anne-Marie O’Connor, “Joan Didion Re-enters Her Life,” Los Angeles Times, October 4, 2005; available at article/latimes.com/2005/Oct/04/books/la-bk-joan-didion-2005-10-04/3.

  “Well, of course”: Josh Greenfeld in conversation with the author, April 6, 2013.

  “you didn’t see other writers and editors”: O’Connor, “Joan Didion Re-enters Her Life.”

  “sense of impending doom”: Dunne, Quintana & Friends, 13.

  “Middle America”: ibid., 11.

  “Respect was grudgingly given”: ibid., 13

  “schmucks with Underwoods”: Jack Warner cited in John Gregory Dunne, Crooning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 200.

  “Show me a hero”: F. Scott Fitzgerald cited in Dunne, Regards, 18.

  “reciprocates carnally”: ibid., 19.

  a letter from Dunne to H. N. “Swanie” Swanson: John Gregory Dunne to H. N. Swanson, February 13, 1965. The letter is in the possession of Houle Rare Books in Los Angeles.

  “constructive criticism”: Dunne, Regards, 20.

  “We were coming out of [the Daisy]”: Dunne quoted in Leslie Garis, “Didion and Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage,” New York Times, February 8, 1987; available at www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/didion-dunne-the-rewards-of-a-literary-marriage.html/.

  “Basically the terminology is easy”: ibid.

  “If you’re going to be a whore”: Tim Steele in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “We were crazy about it”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievment.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.

  “[N]o one goes to a piano bar”: John Gregory Dunne, “Catching the Next Trend,” Esquire, April 1979, 10.

  “twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of free publicity”: Didion, After Henry, 228–29.

  “You want a different kind of wife”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 209.

  swallowed a phenobarbital: Didion makes reference to taking the medication in a letter to Mary Bancroft, March 30, 1966, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “planning meetings”: ibid.

  “white Saint Laurent evening dress”: Dunne, Regards, 244.

  “Outsiders … had to be thoroughly vetted”: ibid.

  when Nick Gurdin killed a man: ibid., 245.

  “Everything was changing”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 127.

  “The nanny would have the meal with the kids”: Dominick Dunne: After the Party, de Garis and Jolley, film documentary.

  “A series of such [military] encounters around the world”: Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,
” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society.

  “with the possible exception of Senator Goldwater”: Dunne, Crooning, 113.

  “repeated droll allegations”: ibid.

  “The stench of fascism is in the air”: Rick Perlstein, “1964 Republican Convention: Revolution from the Right,” Smithsonian, August 2008; available at www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1964-republican-convention-revolution-from-the-right-915921/?all.

  “The nigger issue”: Bruce Watson, Freedom Summer, cited at padresteve.com/2013/05/07/things-havent-changed-too-much-jackie-robinson-goes-to-the-1964-GOP-convention-and-freedom-summer.

  “A new breed of Republican”: Jackie Robinson cited at ibid.

  “The throng began tossing garbage”: Belva Davis, Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism (San Francisco: Berrett-Koeler, 2011), 4.

  “crypto-liberals”: Perlstein, “1964 Republican Convention.”

  “You know, these nighttime news shows”: ibid.

  “greatest campaign in history”: American President: A Reference Resource at millercenter.org/president/Nixon/essays/biography/3.

  “stagnate in the swampland of collectivism”: “Goldwater’s 1964 Acceptance Speech”; available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm.

  “liberal media,” “unspoken, unadmitted,” “like so much marsh gas,” and “[M]onkeys”: Joan Didion, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1968, 14.

  “By the early 60s”: Charles Taylor, “The Gipper’s Dark Side,” Salon, June 8, 2004; available at salon.com/2004/06/08/killers_4/.

  “fake”: Dominick Dunne: After the Party, de Garis and Jolley, film documentary.

  “Lotusland” and “You cook New York”: Dunne, Regards, 354–55.

  “On nights like [this]”: Raymond Chandler cited in Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 218.

  CHAPTER 12

  “Everything was getting wilder”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 139.

  “was not important”: ibid., 140.

  “were in the Mercedes”: ibid., 143–44.

  “multipaneled mirrored dining room”: ibid., 145.

  “stop-by”: ibid.

  “came by for a smoke” and other quotes about Morrison: ibid., 145–46.

  “Hot damn, Vietnam!”: Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 260–61.

  “mechanism held together”: ibid., 207.

  “There is a time”: ibid., 217.

  “Literature, poetry and history”: ibid., 225.

  To be is to be heard: ibid., 12.

  “right things”: Joan Didion, “A Social Eye,” National Review, April 20, 1965, 329.

  “most serious New York novel”: ibid., 330.

  “[it was an] unmitigatable fact”: Norman Mailer excerpt from An American Dream in The Time of Our Time (New York: Random House, 1998), 499.

  “[her] breast made its pert way”: ibid.

  “What a marvelous girl Joan Didion must be”: Norman Mailer’s letter to William F. Buckley (1965) cited in Adam Clark Estes, “Some Literary Advice from Norman Mailer,” The Atlantic, October 17, 2011; available at thewire.com/entertainment/2011/10/some-literary-advice-norman-mailer/43781/.

  “She’s a perfect advertisement”: Mailer quoted by Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “general erosion of technique”: Joan Didion, “Questions About the New Fiction,” National Review, November 30, 1965, 1101.

  “[I]mprovisation is no art but a stunt”: ibid.

  “real vacuity”: ibid.

  “follow or think”: ibid.

  “Everyone wants to tell the truth”: ibid.

  “well-dressed, high-strung young woman” and subsequent quotes about Lilith: Joan Didion, “Lilith: Emotional Slippage,” Vogue, November 1964, 64.

  “What makes Iago evil?”: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 1.

  “constitutional inferiority”: Joan Didion letter to Mary Bancroft, May 9, 1965, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “in certain ways” and subsequent quotes from “John Wayne: A Love Song”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 34, 37, 41.

  “Oh yeah”: Ben Stein in conversation with the author, June 6, 2013.

  “I have found my way around plenty of museums”: Joan Didion, “New Museum in Mexico: An Assault upon the Imagination,” Vogue, August 1965, 48.

  “Two months might be stretching that particular role”: ibid.

  “[S]he cradles herself”: Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,” Harper’s magazine, December 1971, 114.

  She told Mary Bancroft: Joan Didion letter to Mary Bancroft, May 9, 1965, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “traumatic blindness”: Kazin, “Joan Didion,” 114.

  “You don’t look like a migraine personality”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 171.

  “Mountain Greenery”: Joan Didion letter to Mary Bancroft, May 9, 1965, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “I had, [at this] time”: Didion, The White Album, 46.

  “Joan’s husband” and subsequent quotes from “On Going Home”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 165.

  “Joan and John were tremendous celebrity-fuckers”: Josh Greenfeld in conversation with the author, April 6, 2013.

  “fairy”: Joan Didion letter to Mary Bancroft, August 26, 1965, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “were strivers”: Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in conversation with the author, March 27, 2013.

  “Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All”: Christopher Isherwood, Liberation: Diaries 1970–1983, ed. Katharine Bucknell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012), 676.

  “spoke in [a] tiny little voice”: ibid., 272.

  “Those tragic and presumably dying women”: ibid., 601.

  “Well, it was obvious why Chris didn’t warm to Joan”: Don Bachardy in conversation with the author, April 23, 2013.

  “Harrison”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 27, 2013.

  “art groupie/art model”: ibid.

  “In every young man’s life”: Earl McGrath cited in Lili Anolik, “All About Eve and Then Some,” Vanity Fair, March 2014, 291.

  “Mostly, he was supported by his wild Italian wife”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 27, 2013.

  “Marilyn Monroe was [a] role model”: “Oral History Interview with Eve Babitz,” 2000 Jun 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  “I mean, it was built for, you know, peccadilloes:” Eve Babitz quoted in A. M. Homes, Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2002), 25.

  “When I was growing up”: Griffin Dunne quoted in ibid., 28.

  “Someday you will” and “because I wanted a baby”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 138–39.

  “like an all-out war zone”: Sgt. Ben Dunn quoted at sites.google.com/site/wattsriotsofla/the-riot/thumbnailCAOQQ512.jpg?attredirect=0.

  Noel Parmentel: All details of Noel Parmentel’s visit in August 1965 are from Joan Didion in letters to Mary Bancroft, May 9, 1965, and August 26, 1965, and from John Gregory Dunne in a letter to Mary Bancroft, March 30, 1966, Mary Bancroft Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

  “Black people had been taught non-violence”: Huey P. Newton, The Huey P. Newton Reader, ed. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 49.

  “goddamned elephant”: John Gregory Dunne quoted in “Exploring L.A. Through the Eyes of a Writer,” Los Ange
les Times, January 30, 1994; available at latimes.com/1994-01-30/opinion/op-18357_1_john_gregory_dunne.

  Parmentel disputes this: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “You were wrong”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 138.

  “The Old Duke” was gratified: John Wayne in a letter to Joan Didion, September 28, 1965, cited at the Web site for the 2011 October Personal Property of John Wayne Signature Auction #7045, “A Joan Didion Set of Correspondence, 1965.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “his ear to the ground”: John Gregory Dunne’s notebook, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

  “like driving four hundred miles on a pool table”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 115.

  “Cesar is a mystic”: John Gregory Dunne’s notebook, John Gregory Dunne Papers 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

  “It was rough in those early years”: Cesar Chavez quoted in Luis Valdez, Sister Mary Prudence, and Cesar Chavez, “Tales of the Delano Revolution,” Ramparts, July 1966, 6.

  “having or thinking about having”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 59.

  “[T]he next week I was meeting Blake Watson”: ibid.

  “on Palos Verdes Drive”: John Gregory Dunne, Vegas (New York: Random House, 1974), 9.

  “sat in a stall”: ibid.

  “[u]nable to have children of their own”: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society.

  “not strong enough”: John Gregory Dunne, True Confessions (New York: Pocket Books, 1977), 343.

  “incompetent” cervixes: John Gregory Dunne, The Red White and Blue (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 213.

  “a migraine attack”: Joan Didion, “A Review of The Soft Machine,” Bookmark, March 1966, 2–3.

  “In my beginning is my end”: T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1971), 13, 23.

  “L’adoptada”: Didion, Blue Nights, 60.

  “[e]ither birth parent”: California Family Code, Section 8700-8720; available at legalinfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fam&group=08001-09000&file=8700-8720.