The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  “house on a hill above Sunset”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 210.

  “I lost three years”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 223.

  “I thought we both would cry”: ibid.

  “You want today to see flowers”: ibid.

  “The fire had come”: ibid.

  CHAPTER 25

  “Poor dope”: Lines from Sunset Boulevard cited in Ryan Reft, “A Dive in the Deep End: The Importance of the Swimming Pool in Southern California,” posted at kcet.org/socal/departures/columns/intersections/a-dive-in-the-deep-end-the-importance-of-the-swimming-pool-in-southern-california-culture. I have drawn upon Reft’s insightful observations for the opening section of this chapter.

  “Water in a swimming pool”: David Hockney quoted in Christopher Simon Sykes, Hockney: The Biography, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 2011).

  “control of the uncontrollable” and “pool is, for many of us in the West”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 64.

  “apparent ease”: ibid.

  “John in his office” and “room was cool”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 24.

  “we’ll have a better life”: Sara Davidson, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion (San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).

  “white Americans”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 173.

  “quintessential intimate stranger” and Dunne’s subsequent quotes about Simpson: ibid., 172.

  “If you don’t know Los Angeles”: Rodney King quoted in Aisha Sabatini Sloan, “A Clear Presence,” June 17, 2013, posted at guernicamag.com/features/a-clear-presence/.

  “All the time we were living at the beach”: Didion quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California,” New York Times, June 10, 1979; available at www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?pagewanted=all&_r=O.

  “to shed their leaves”: Dunne, Regards, 174.

  “newly arrived”: 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.

  “cain’t” and “youse”: Davidson, Joan.

  “You don’t know White Trash”: Dunne quoted in ibid.

  “I’m going to have a ‘me’ decade”: Didion quoted in ibid.

  “Kids grow up”: Tim Steele in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “Writers do not get gross”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 163.

  “In those days, public schools”: Tim Steele, in conversation with the author, April 29, 2013.

  “This place never changes”: Kakutani, “Joan Didion.”

  “[W]e encourage them to remain children”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights: (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 53.

  “She was already a person”: ibid, 41.

  “It bothered her father”: Jeff Glor, interview with Joan Didion on Author Talk, CBS News, January 28, 2012; available at cbsnews.com/video/author-talk-blue-nights-by-joan-didion.

  “just to show you” and the quotes from Quintana’s novel: Didion, Blue Nights, 49–50.

  “Some of the events”: ibid., 50.

  “Day-to-day living”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 186.

  “I sold my West Highland terrier”: ibid., 187.

  “Desperate to save myself”: ibid., 188.

  “I had heard the word[s]”: ibid., 199.

  “He did tell me that a lady”: David Jasper, “Camp Sherman Gets a Visit from Dominick Dunne Documentarians,” Bend Bulletin, September 23, 2007; available at bendbulletin.com/csp/mediapool/sites/BendBulletin/News/story.csp?cid=1491.

  “There were 150-foot-high pine trees”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 201.

  “You’re dead meat”: ibid., 206.

  “licked [his] wounds”: James H. Hyde, “Dominick Dunne: An Inveterate Connecticut Yankee Tells Us About His Remarkable Life,” posted at newenglandtimes.com/dominick_dunne/dd_index.shtml.

  “All that bullshit”: ibid.

  “But remember this”: Truman Capote quoted in Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 210.

  “I felt sure”: ibid.

  “I fed them a lot of popcorn”: Scot Haller, “According to Critics and His Famous Female Fans, Griffin Dunne Does His Best Work in After Hours,” People, September 30, 1985; available at people.com/people/article/0,,20091842,00.html.

  “It was like seeing three of my characters”: Ann Beattie quoted in James Atlas, “How ‘Chilly Scenes’ Was Rescued,” New York Times Book Review, October 10, 1982; available at www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/28/specials/beattie-chilly.html.

  “A terrible resentment”: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” originally published in Vanity Fair, March 2004; reprinted in Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 189.

  “epiphany” and “long, artful” letters: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 19.

  “I had the uneasy feeling,” “Fuck you!” and “[M]y note”: ibid., 19–20.

  I wake and feel the fell of dark: Gerard Manley Hopkins cited in ibid., 23.

  “bleakness”: ibid., 19.

  “played life on the dark keys”: ibid., 18.

  “wanton and insensitive”: ibid., 19.

  “mutual disaster”: ibid., 20.

  O the mind, mind has mountains: Gerard Manley Hopkins cited in ibid., 23.

  “under Roger’s gaze”: Boris Kachka, Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 223.

  “lot of publishing houses”: ibid., 219.

  “I think his opinion”: ibid.

  “[W]e are all terminal cases”: John Irving quoted in Margi Fox, “God of Books,” Literal Latte, Summer 2009; available at literal-latte.com/2009/06/god-of-books/.

  “Because of [Henry’s] importance”: ibid.

  “Henry’s orphan sister”: Didion, After Henry, 19.

  Robbins’s real sister: Fox, “God of Books.”

  of all the speakers at the service: ibid.

  “I would be less than honest”: Roger Straus letter to Joan Didion, August 8, 1979, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  “benign climate”: Davidson, Joan.

  “It’s part of the exaggerated politeness”: Dunne, Harp, 91.

  “children with bright scarlet rashes”: Didion, After Henry, 139.

  “11,573 Vietnamese”: ibid., 142.

  “Mes filles, mes filles!”: ibid., 143.

  “[The] events of the last few years”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 211.

  “I had no money”: ibid.

  “She stayed by my side”: ibid., 213.

  “I’ll never forget that”: Hyde, “Dominick Dunne.”

  “It was smaller than the cabin”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then, 213.

  “Simon & Schuster”: Lois Wallace letter to Anthony Sheil, November 30, 1979, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  “montage”: Lynn Marie Houston and William V. Lombardi, Reading Joan Didion (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood Press, 2009), 81.

  “smells of the Sixties”: Didion, The White Album, 58.

  “Something [about the new Getty Museum]”: ibid., 75.

  “learning” and “unremittingly reproachful”: ibid.

  “set the natural child in each of us free”: ibid., 76.

  “pay for any” and “flouting”: ibid., 77.

  “large numbers” and “as its founder”: ibid.

  “On the whole, ‘the critics’”
: ibid., 78.

  “equipped early”: ibid., 129.

  “If I could believe that going to a barricade”: ibid., 208.

  “Her nervous system is a San Andreas Fault”: John Leonard, “The White Album,” New York Times, June 5, 1979; available at www.nytimes.com/menu/archive/pdf?res=F20F10FA3L5A12728DDDACO894DE405B898BF1D3.

  “In her relatively self-effacing preface”: Martin Amis, “Joan Didion’s Style,” London Review of Books, February 1980, 3–4.

  “adolescent” and subsequent quotes from Didion’s Woody Allen piece: Joan Didion, “Letter from Manhattan,” The New York Review of Books, August 16, 1979; available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/aug/16/letter-from-manhattan/.

  “When I am asked” and subsequent quotes from this article: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect,” The Nation, October 1979; available at writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html.

  “I knew I wasn’t going to get a break”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-Span 2, 1992.

  “I was sorry”: ibid.

  CHAPTER 26

  “I have a feeling”: Ronald Reagan quoted in Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 43.

  “The gruesome quiet”: Hannah Arendt quoted in Joan Didion, Miami (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 159.

  “Get him off his feet!”: Bob Colacello, “Ronnie and Nancy,” Vanity Fair, July 1998; available at www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1998/07/ronnie-and-nancy199807.

  “You know, we need more money for the campaign”: Bob Colacello cited in Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (PBS documentary); available at pbs.org/newshour/nancy-reagan.

  “There was a lot of ideological fervor”: Joan Didion in conversation with Michael Bernstein, the Revelle Forum at the Neurosciences Institute, University of California at San Diego, October 15, 2002.

  “is not going to have sources”: ibid.

  “these are books”: Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 194. Of Didion’s assessment of Woodward, Carl Bernstein said, “I’ve had two good friends who have attacked Bob’s work—Joan Didion and Renata Adler. I let them both know they were wrong. Whatever the criticism of Bob’s methods in terms of getting too close to sources, there’s a context that ignores his contributions. We know more about the presidencies from Nixon through both Bushes than we ever would have because of Bob’s work.” Bernstein quoted in Alicia C. Shepard, “People and Politics: Woodward and Bernstein Uncovered,” The Washingtonian, September 1, 2003; available at washingtonian.com/articles/people/woodward-and-bernstein-uncovered.

  “critical reading faculty”: ibid.

  “ghost resorts”: Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 13.

  “is to plunge directly”: ibid.

  “I’m not sure that I have a social conscience”: Didion quoted in Jemima Hunt, “The Didion Bible,” The Guardian, January 11, 2003; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/12/fiction.society.

  “expressed interest in having one or both of us”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” The Paris Review 48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion.

  “desperate to go” and “he’d been in Beirut”: 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.

  “making a concerted and significant effort”: Joan Didion, “‘Something Horrible’ in El Salvador,” The New York Review of Books, July 14, 1994; available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/jul/14/something-horrible-in-el-salvador/.

  “woke up in the middle of the night”: Garis, “Didion and Dunne.”

  “What’s she doing here?”: Paul VanDevelder in conversation with the author, February 21, 2013.

  “large sunglasses and sun hat”: John Newhagen to the author, April 2, 2013.

  “We all wore T-shirts”: Paul VanDevelder in conversation with the author, February 21, 2013.

  “concerted and significant effort” and “revise”: Didion, “‘Something Horrible’ in El Salvador.”

  “have credibility”: ibid.

  “Consider the political implications”: Joan Didion, Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 72.

  “The consciousness of the human organism”: Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 234.

  ammunition manufactured: Mark Danner cited in Didion, “‘Something Horrible’ in El Salvador.”

  “El Mozote entered the thin air”: ibid.

  “only six years” and “most of us”: ibid.

  “I was just panicked”: Didion quoted in Garis, “Didion and Dunne.”

  “But it’s the only way”: Dunne quoted in ibid.

  Maria Ynez Camacho: Matthew Specktor to the author, June 5, 2013.

  “repeated instructions”: Didion, Salvador, 77.

  “[W]e went out to the body dump” and Didion’s description: Garis, “Didion and Dunne.”

  “Nothing fresh”: Didion, Salvador, 20.

  in the military zone: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 94–95.

  pocket notebook: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  “noble words”: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness cited in Didion, Salvador, 12.

  “the models and colors”: ibid., 14.

  “is the given of the place”: ibid.

  “mechanism[s] of terror”: ibid., 21.

  “names are understood locally”: ibid., 63.

  “refining … artistic expression”: “Bennington College Summer Program Expands Horizons,” posted at iberkshires.com/story/4171/Bennington-College-summer-program-expands-horizons.html.

  “great ability”: Quintana Roo Dunne quoted in Jill Krementz, How It Feels to Be Adopted (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 58.

  “terrific”: Christopher Dickey to the author, June 3, 2013.

  Michael Korda: Korda cited in a letter from Lois Wallace to Anthony Sheil, October 4, 1982, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  “gratifying to write something so topical”: interview notes, Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  “color”: Didion, Salvador, 36.

  “According to the text”: Sandra Braman, “The ‘Facts’ of El Salvador According to Objective and New Journalism,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 13, no. 2 (1985): 82.

  “She attended to information”: ibid., 84.

  “geographic source of news”: ibid., 82.

  “participated in informal and formal social gatherings”: ibid., 84.

  “Bonner and The New York Times”: ibid., 87.

  “disjointed”: ibid., 83.

  “[c]ollecting facts”: ibid., 87.

  “the passage of bureaucratically recognized events” and “perpetual frontier”: ibid., 88–89.

  “diction that won’t be outflanked by events”: Terrence Des Pres cited in Noel Valis, “Fear and Torment in El Salvador,” Massachusetts Review 48, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 122. Valis’s meditation on El Salvador proved enormously helpful to me in composing this chapter.

  “what is quite literally at stake” and subsequent quotes from Scarry: Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 23, 145, 306.

  saying she had just received three copies: Joan Didion letter to Michael Korda and Lois Wallace, August 8, 1987, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

  “I’m crazy about Miami” and subsequent quotes from the Atlas profile: James Atlas, “Slouching Towards Miami,” Vanity Fair, October 1987; available at www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/1987/10/joan-didion-on-miami.

  “underwater narr
ative”: Didion, Miami, 38.

  “liquidity”: ibid., 31.

  “cognitive dissonance”: ibid., 99.

  “[I]n 1959”: ibid., 13.

  “disposal problem”: ibid., 83.

  “teeming, incomprehensible presence”: ibid., 55.

  “healing process”: ibid., 202.

  “That la lucha had become”: ibid., 20.

  “social dynamic”: ibid., 47.

  “women in Chanel”: ibid.

  “most theatrical possible”: ibid.

  “provisional,” “individuals,” and “affect events directly”: ibid., 13.

  “largest CIA installation” and “who left Miami”: ibid., 93.

  “As it happens”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 157.

  “You can’t just leave a body”: ibid., 158.

  “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11.

  “granddaughter of a geologist”: Didion, Democracy, 18.

  “write anything down”: ibid., 12.

  “[c]olors, moisture, heat”: ibid., 16.

  “The light at dawn”: ibid., 11.

  “Call me the author”: ibid., 16.

  “I began thinking”: ibid., 17.

  “When novelists speak of unpredictability”: ibid., 215.

  “In the spring of 1975”: ibid., 71.

  “family in which the colonial impulse”: ibid., 26.

  “various investigations into arms and currency”: ibid., 217.

  “nothing in this situation”: ibid., 233.

  “sudden sense of Inez”: ibid., 234.

  “flotsam of some territorial imperative”: ibid., 228.

  “When I started thinking about the novel”: Joan Didion, “Second Thoughts: Tyranny in the Tropics: Joan Didion on a Novel That Began with an Angel and Ended with Saigon,” The Independent, October 29, 1994; available at independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/books-second-thoughts-tyranny-in-the-tropics-joan-didion-on-a-novel-that-began-with-an-angel-and-ended-with-saigon-1445563.html.

  “weeping”: Christopher Bollen, “Joan Didion,” V Magazine; available at christopherbollen.com/portfolio/joan-didion.pdf.

  “[I]f man should continue”: Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), 309.