The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Today, C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, in a posh area of the city known as Land Park, seems an oasis of seriousness and calm just off a busy boulevard, its tall windows reflecting rows of Italian cypress trees flanking its walls, its red tiled roof sloping low over Art Deco and California Mission detailing in the building’s tan stone and dark brown woodwork. McClatchy marked “a very tedious time in my life,” Didion said. How could she not want to heave whenever she walked across the plaque in the front entrance (passing two ridiculous stone lions on either side of the steps), proclaiming McClatchy’s devotion to “Truth-Liberty-Tolerance” and its loyalty to the “Native Sons of the Golden West”? How frequently could she repeat, in class, the products of our Latin American neighbors? Must she recite, once more, Euripides: “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet”? Did she have to hear, again, a local band butcher “How High the Moon” at some damp, dreary dance, and then walk home alone in the fog?

  Worst of all was phys ed (“Sex Class”). There, she had to listen to the Nice Girls insist it was wrong to kiss boys “indiscriminately” because that was “throwing away your capital.” Given the boys she met at McClatchy, Didion didn’t think it was possible to kiss “discriminately.” If you were “indiscriminate enough to kiss any one of them you might as well kiss them all,” she decided.

  Often, in her room, she lay in the dark with a cold washcloth over her eyes. The discomfort of her periods heightened the throbbing migraines. In public, she’d try to deny the pain. She’d sit in a classroom with tears on her face. The “pain seemed a shameful secret,” she wrote, “evidence … of all my bad attitudes, my unpleasant tempers.”

  She still loved stage acting but was offered little range in local productions because she was so tiny. At school, and at a small repertory theater downtown, she took children’s roles—including that of Babette in Lillian Hellman’s wartime melodrama, Watch on the Rhine. At one point in the play, a character says, in Babette’s hearing, “The Renaissance Man is a man who wants to know … what made Iago evil?” Didion remembered this reference to Iago and would use it, many years later, to open her second novel, Play It As It Lays.

  Eugene O’Neill was a favorite. “I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked,” she said. “I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch all day and read Eugene O’Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.”

  She memorized speeches from The Member of the Wedding and Death of a Salesman. She tackled Moby-Dick but “missed that wild control of language. What I had thought were discursive [passages] were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn’t get the control in it.” On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy knocked her out. She locked herself in her room one weekend and read it to the end. She was amazed to learn that a story’s accumulating power did not always grow from a spectacular style. Suspense was a necessity. And Henry James’s sentences, so intricate and complex, nearly paralyzed her. “[He] made me afraid to put words down,” she said. One of the “discouraging things is that every word you put down limits the possibilities of what you have in your mind. [James] somehow got all of the possibilities into every sentence”—those multiple qualifications!—“and I really did not think I could do that.”

  From James, Didion learned how the mind decodes existence, sifting possibilities, balancing what it fears with paradoxical recognitions of pleasure. For a young reader, this was a new revelation of what fiction could do. No other form of human thought could touch it.

  * * *

  Her fears now had less to do with collapsed bridges than with changes in her body and awareness that others responded to those changes. She became obsessed with news stories about Suzanne Degnan, a six-year-old on the North Side of Chicago who had been kidnapped from her bed by a college boy, hacked up in a sink, and scattered into the city’s sewer system. The gory details recalled aspects of the Donner Party stories, but there was nothing natural about this tragedy. Though the victim was only six, the crime seemed to have something to do with sex, with female and male and the unpredictability of that mix.

  Didion’s notebook jottings—the ocean walkers, the romantic suicides—were doom-laden and dark, her imagination drawn to extremes that needn’t have been but were, toward mysteries of human impulses at their starkest. The sea strolls and kidnap stories had pioneer elements, traces of the outsider, the wayward and the lost, the emptiness and promise of back roads and branching trails, but the choices weren’t as clear (take this cutoff or don’t?) and the consequences less obvious than cannibalism (hacked up and scattered into the sewer system?). Self-invention, yes, manifest destiny—but reckless now. Mean. No sacrifice, no courage, no glory. The most celebrated of Didion’s early essays mimed epic struggles reduced to splintered glimpses of modern American tragedies.

  And, in part, her evolving imagination had to do with the adolescent’s penchant for thrills. Donner Pass had become a popular spot for juicing and joyriding. At fifteen and a half, Didion earned her learner’s permit, attacking the roads in an old Army jeep her father had gotten at auction. On weekends, she’d drive friends up switchbacks in the Sierra, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and back again, six or seven hours, buzzed by alcohol and flirting, risking wrecks or DUIs. On some nights, the fog was so thick, she could see the road only if one of her friends got out and walked in front of the headlights along the highway’s white center stripe. She was experiencing a new sort of narrative: the aimless American road story.

  On simmering afternoons, she drove to the family cemetery and sat undisturbed, listening to country music on the radio, staring at the chipped monuments and dreaming up sad new stories. The boneyard was more companionable than the dusty house sickly sweet with dying flowers, her father’s legal papers scattered on tables, countertops, chairs.

  At some point during this period, the family moved into a new residence at 500 Hawthorn Road, near the present Fair Oaks Boulevard, a secluded three-bedroom house built in 1935. Didion also spent many days in her stepgrandmother’s splendid neoclassical home at 2000 22nd Street—“a great house” with “proportions … a little different” for Sacramento, she said. That is, it was extremely large and slightly off-kilter, with pedimented dormers and balustrades. Didion discovered new hangouts. The Guild Theater in Oak Park. Vic’s Ice Cream. The Crest (formerly the crumbling old vaudeville house the Hippodrome). The Woolworth on K Street, where teens gathered for food and sodas. The nation’s first Tower Records. The first Shakey’s Pizza. Boys took Good Girls—those who would “do it”—to the Starlite Drive-In. The Nice Girls went to the Senator Theater downtown. Didion loved the smell of paint in her uncle Bob’s hardware store, the Duncan yo-yos and palm-size flashlights he sold to little kids. In the rear, Rosie Clooney warbled “This Old House” on a big old radio. Occasionally, Didion and her friends sneaked over to the West Side and ate spicy tacos with their fingers.

  She loved gas stations. There was the grand old Shell at Seventh and L, the men in white uniforms and bow ties; the O’Neil Brothers’ five locations in town, offering “crankcase service” and “vulcanizing.” Okie boys, Arkies, slouched around the hot, oily lots wearing T-shirts and greasy jeans, smoking, talking cars. Scary, intriguing—the kinds of boys Bill Clinton would remind her of years later. “They had knocked up girls and married them,” Didion wrote, driving all night to Carson City for a five-dollar ceremony “performed by a justice of the peace still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles.”

  In the evenings, she liked to sit in the grass out by the Garden Highway (this area would become a primary setting for Run River), watching the sun set over waterfront ranches. Already, she knew the ranches were about to disappear, their lots subdivided and sold.

  6

  “In a g
entle sleep Sacramento dreamed, until perhaps 1950, when something happened,” a young Didion wrote at the height of her place-bound romanticism. “What happened was that Sacramento woke to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better or worse, its character.”

  “That’s a false portrayal of the city,” Rob Turner told me. Mel Lawson, a longtime Sacramento High School teacher who knew Didion as a girl, agreed. “I don’t see any loss of character, only change,” he said. Before World War II, “this was essentially a town of shopkeepers, retired farmers, state workers, salesmen, operators of small plants like dairies, sheet-metal works, lumber yards and such. No big industries.” What Didion meant by loss of character, he thought, was the erosion of the city’s old power structure. In the old days, “it was fairly easy to pinpoint who was in it,” he said. “One with any degree of perception had to be in Sacramento only a short time to know pretty well who ran the place,” including “Joan’s Aunt Genevieve [sic].”

  At McClatchy High School, despite her shyness, Didion didn’t always need a hall pass to get where she wanted to go. If she wasn’t the most popular girl in school, she was the kind of girl the most popular girls in school wanted to hang with. She was pretty and smart, with a pageboy haircut and high-collared blouses; her writing skills and ambitions were already apparent. People felt better about themselves around Joan Didion. She was funny. Quick.

  Looking back, she liked to say she didn’t do well in high school. She was frail, she’d say. Always frail. Isolated and uninvolved. Several times a month, her migraines were debilitating. She had her family’s tendency toward silence. Constantly, she questioned herself. But in yearbook pictures, she beams, appearing robust, her face full, almost chubby.

  She was a member of the Rally Committee (by no means the smallest on the team, male or female), and wore a bulky white sweater with a big McClatchy M on the front. She served on the Sophomore Ball and Junior Prom committees. She was a Student Council member. She joined the Science, Press, and Spanish clubs. She worked on the yearbook, The Nugget, and the school newspaper, The Prospector.

  She got an after-school job with the society desk at The Sacramento Union, for which, she was thrilled to learn, Mark Twain had once written. “I wouldn’t call [it] reporting,” she said of her first professional stints. “People wanted reports of their upcoming weddings in the paper the weekend of the wedding. And so they would send you accounts of what the bridesmaids were going to wear and stuff like that, and you would write it up.” On her own, Didion was learning it was possible to write about California in a nonboosterish way, as Josiah Royce had in The Feud of Oakfield Creek, a novel based on the Sacramento squatter’s strike of 1850, and as Frank Norris had in The Octopus.

  It’s hard to imagine what she might have sent The Nation (apparently, the manuscript has been lost), but she did submit a piece and received a prompt rejection. Already she felt the tension between making a name for herself at home and succeeding in the bigger world. In later years, she enjoyed recounting an anecdote involving one of her great-aunts and her mother. “We were talking about some people that we knew, the Johnston family,” Didion said. “And my great-aunt said, ‘That Johnston boy never did amount to anything.’ And my mother said, ‘He won a Pulitzer Prize.’ It was Alva Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize when he was working for a newspaper in New York. And my great-aunt did not even look up. She was playing solitaire, and without even looking up from her game, she said, ‘He never amounted to anything in Sacramento.’”

  7

  On April 25, 1952, she arrived home from school and found a letter waiting for her. She dropped her sweater and books on the hallway floor. The letter said:

  Dear Joan,

  The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education.

  Sincerely yours,

  Rixford K. Snyder,

  Director of Admissions

  Didion reread the letter, trying to will a revision of it. Then she ran upstairs to her room, locked the door, and wept into an old robe on the floor of her closet. All of her friends who had applied to Stanford had been admitted. She had a “sharp and dolorous image of … growing old” in the house, she wrote later, “never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square.” She went into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and briefly considered swallowing several old codeine and Empirin tablets from the medicine cabinet. She pictured herself gasping in an oxygen tent while a sorrowful Rixford K. Snyder hovered over her in the ICU.

  Perhaps the worst humiliation was knowing that the question of getting into the “right” school, “so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile,” had never come up in conversations with her family. There was no stronger indication that, for all its history and influence in old Sacramento, the Didion family’s “social situation was static” now. Later that evening, when she told her father her disappointing news, he simply offered her a drink.

  PART TWO

  Chapter Four

  1

  In 1953, Frank Didion was referred to Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco for study, tests, and treatment following what his daughter discreetly called “manifestations of … tension.” These manifestations included emotional withdrawal, heavy drinking (mostly bourbon highballs), and long silences. He littered the house with blueprints of shopping malls he would never build. He exhibited intense xenophobia, insisting the name Didion was not French, despite his family’s origins in Alsace-Lorraine; the French were untrustworthy. His daughter remembered him staying at the hospital for “some weeks or months.” (The year before, an executive order had given the Veterans Administration the “responsibility for hospitalization for those members or former members of the uniformed services”—like Frank Didion—“who had chronic diseases.”)

  The hospital changed its spots frequently as military culture evolved. Initially, it developed from rows of tents erected to treat sick and wounded soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War in 1898. Just after the turn of the century, a three-hundred-bed facility was completed, and by 1918, Letterman was the army’s largest general hospital. Its medical staff pioneered the use of several orthopedic devices (including the “Letterman Leg”), physical therapy treatments, and—fortunately for Frank Didion—experiments in a field only then being recognized by the military, psychiatry. At the time, according to the army’s Office of Medical History, the “modern concept of personality development was not widely known or accepted.” The military had only vaguely identified trauma as a legitimate medical condition, such as “alienation” or “nostalgia,” a “species of melancholy, or a mild type of insanity, caused by disappointment, and a continuous longing for the home.”

  On weekends, Eduene would leave Sacramento, pick up her daughter at the Tri Delt house in Berkeley, where she was attending the University of California, and visit Frank at the hospital. They’d go to lunch. He’d only eat oysters. At area parks, he loved to watch pickup baseball games, and he liked to walk from Golden Gate Park back to the Presidio in the evenings. Didion recalled strolling with him, once, across the Golden Gate Bridge (and worrying later that a depressed person should not be allowed to walk alone across a precarious and foggy path). On Sunday nights, the ladies left Frank in the hands of the “mind guys”—his name for his doctors.

  The “mind guys,” many of whom were occupational therapists, untrained in psychiatry, had at their disposal a hydrotherapy plant in one of the building’s basements. When made available to neuropsychiatric patients in a “scientific manner,” it produced “most satisfactory results,” according to a Surgeon General’s report. The
acronym ADL—activities of daily living—became familiar to the patients, the idea being that patients needed to be as independent as possible in their personal routines. “Reality Testing Situations” (work assignments, social planning, ordering bread from the Alcatraz bakery) were encouraged. Generally, psychiatric patients were given what the hospital termed a “Total Push Program,” consisting of strenuous physical activity, recreation, and work. They were accompanied at all times by a physician. Talk sessions with psychiatrists were rare, as there was a shortage of trained doctors (most carried caseloads of thirty or more). Frank did later tell his daughter a particular “woman doctor” had been very helpful to him, prompting him to discuss the loss of his mother.

  Probably he failed to quit bourbon highballs during his hospital stay, as each Friday afternoon the Letterman Officers’ Club opened its doors to doctors and patients for a happy hour. There, among old adobe walls, waves of wounded GIs from Korea rolled toward the bar, some on gurneys. At sundown, flags were lowered, trumpets blared, and cannon were fired.

  Frank was not restricted to neuropsych. He could leave the S-1 Ward any time he wished, wander uphill from Crissy Field to the main gate, and catch a trolley or the Muni no. 45 into San Francisco, though he did not much care for the city. The hillsides were canopied with orange California poppies and eucalyptus trees swaying in cool ocean breezes, lizards and salamanders scurrying among ice plants. These long walks, away from family, away from the amputees and the tuberculosis and malaria sufferers in the wards, may have done as much as anything to ease his “tension.”

  Years later, his daughter’s writing would teach readers to seize the odd detail. Here’s an odd detail about the Letterman General Hospital: James Alexander Hamilton, a graduate of Berkeley and of Stanford’s medical school, received his training there; a former chief of the assessment services of the OSS, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, Hamilton would one day establish a drug-testing laboratory at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a male-only state prison. Briefly, Letterman housed Dr. James E. Ketchum, who would go from San Francisco to the Edgewood Arsenal’s Medical Research Laboratories in Maryland, where, as chief of the Psychopharmacolgy Branch, he was “given pretty much a free hand,” he said—along with a large congressional budget—to pursue mind-control experiments on human subjects using LSD, THC, and a long-acting atropine compound called BZ.