The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  In the summers, Didion pursued a tepid romance in Sacramento with a boy she referred to in letters to friends only as Robert or Bob. Robert’s uncle owned a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Bakersfield, and his family had large oil, cotton, and uranium shares. In Bakersfield, the Lincoln-Mercury dealers—Haberfelde, Kitchen-Boyd—were major power brokers, hosting lavish parties, establishing fine arts collections, and controlling city politics. Robert had declared his enduring love for Didion and hoped she would marry him once she graduated from Berkeley. He insisted Bakersfield’s future was boundless—Ford was about to introduce a new Continental sure to sell like hotcakes. For a starter home, the couple could purchase a modest ranch-style house in the suburbs, the type of acreage her father hoped to develop now that he was out of Letterman and dabbling again in real estate.

  * * *

  Four years after World War II, Americans had bought 21.4 million cars, 20 million refrigerators, 5.5 million stoves, and 11.6 million television sets. They had moved into one million new housing units. Simone de Beauvior, on the same trip to the States as her Berkeley visit, said the developing American suburb was “rigid,” “frozen,” “closed.” She decried the “serried rows of ranch houses, painted in pastel colors, each with its own picture window and its garden, each equipped with a deep freeze, oil furnace, and automatic washer, spring[ing] up in the wilderness.” But the nation was buying the dream.

  The dream was sold, hard, in Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle, and other magazines. Bob could use the glossy ads featuring well-coiffed wives in his courtship ritual. Ironically, in 1939, Mademoiselle had established a promotion encouraging college-age girls to delay keeping house and to pursue a professional path. It was called the guest editor program. Each year, twenty girls were chosen from fifteen hundred applicants nationwide to be flown to New York for a month to work with the magazine’s editors on an August college issue. To apply, students submitted work fitting the magazine’s needs in their personal area of interest: fiction, nonfiction, fashion, advertising. The girls got hands-on publishing experience and the magazine’s advertisers got firsthand feedback from its target audience.

  In 1953, Sylvia Plath was picked to be managing guest editor. She was two years older than Didion; otherwise, early on they would have competed for many of the same opportunities. In a letter to her mother, Plath summed up her experience at Mademoiselle: “I have, in the space of six days, toured the second largest ad agency in the world and seen television kitchens, heard speeches there, gotten ptomaine poisoning from crabmeat the agency served in their ‘own special test kitchen’ and wanted to die very badly for a day.” She fictionalized her New York adventures in The Bell Jar; had the novel been published in time (it appeared under a pseudonym in Britain in 1963 and in the United States in 1971), Didion would have had reason to be skeptical of ranch house kitchens, not to mention magazine work. In 1955, submitting an early draft of a short story, she applied for Mademoiselle’s guest editor slot in fiction and got it.

  2

  Didion’s first glimpse of Manhattan, from an Idlewild bus into town, was obscured by spring rain, but that fact was more exotic than her old penthouse dreams. It didn’t rain in Sacramento in the late spring or summer. Her dress was too thin. She’d known it the instant she’d stepped off the DC-7 in Idlewild’s makeshift terminal and sensed the moisture in the air—warm air tinged with mildew.

  It was May 1955. She’d just completed her junior year (temporarily excused from taking her finals). A national magazine had recognized her talent. Later, in “Goodbye to All That,” one of her finest early essays, she’d say “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty … is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary, has ever happened to anyone before.”

  The bus took her to the Barbizon Hotel for Women on the corner of Lexington and East Sixty-third Street: twenty-three stories of elegant Gothic Revival, Moorish, and Renaissance touches carved into coral brick and sandstone. Since 1927 a “women-only” establishment, whose patrons were expected to be pedigreed, stylish, and chaste, the Barbizon, said Vanity Fair, was “the city’s elite dollhouse.” Mademoiselle and other fashion magazines toasted it as the only place “ambitious, discriminating young women” would want to stay in New York: Anyone who was anyone wanted to be a “Barbizon girl.”

  Most of the hotel’s seven hundred guest spaces were tiny and spare. Didion spent her first night in the Barbizon with a sudden fever and a cold from the rain and the room’s freezing temperature. She did not know how to turn the air conditioner off. She was afraid to call the desk and ask someone to come up and help her because she did not know how much she should tip the hotel employees. So she wrapped herself in wool blankets and telephoned Bob. She told him she could see the Brooklyn Bridge from the window of her room. In fact, it was the Triborough Bridge. A single red rose and a work schedule lay on her pillow; the following morning she would meet the magazine’s editors and all of her fellow “Millies.”

  Among the other guest editors that year were Jane Truslow, who would marry Plath’s old boyfriend, Peter Davison; Janet Burroway, who would publish several well-regarded novels; Gael Greene, eventually a restaurant critic for New York magazine; and Peggy La Violette from Berkeley, with whom Didion was especially close.

  Greene and Burroway said they had only vague memories of Didion. She kept herself small. “I remember Joan as something between shy and scared. But you never know when ‘shy’ is ‘private,’” Greene said.

  “I would say, consulting a faulty memory, that I did find her a touch aloof, intelligent at an intelligent distance,” Burroway explained. But in no sense was Didion a “quivering creature.” “She struck me as a very self-possessed young woman. Of course, I was a quivering contradiction of ambition and clumsiness myself, so I may certainly have failed to recognize that in her.”

  Mademoiselle’s main conference room, on the sixth floor at 575 Madison Avenue, where the guest editors first got to know one another and received their initial assignments from the staff, had “one whole wall” fully mirrored, Burroway recalled. The other walls were decorated “in a black and cream wallpaper of Victorian ads, ladies in bustled dresses. This is where Betsy Talbot Blackwell [the magazine’s editor] greeted us that first day with her fur stole, cigarette holder, and ‘We believe in pink this year.’”

  Burroway shared with me several excerpts from letters she sent her parents from New York. They cover in detail the group’s activities and impressions.

  May 31: “Interviews with Mlle. editors, all of whom were nice and helpful except for Miss McNeil, Merchandising Editor, who is a very tough cookie and not about to be impressed.… Had lunch at the Ivy Room of the Hotel Drake.… French and gold-leaf ritzy, filet of sole 3.95, coffee .50, ice cream .70.… We’re going to Columbia campus tomorrow morning to have pix taken for the aug. issue. Gave us skirts, blouses, and shoes to wear. We have to give back the skirts and shoes, but I think we keep the blouses.”

  The photo shoot took place at 6:45 at Baker Field. The girls sat in the bleachers, squinting into the sun, wearing “man-tailored” long-sleeved cotton shirts with buttoned collars and woven stripes. Didion’s pageboy is immaculate, her smile easy and wide, her face turned to the right—her preferred pose. It framed a slight dimple in her left cheek. Jane Truslow would write in her guest editor column that whenever the GEs got together, “creative energy crackled like summer heat lightning,” but in these pictures the girls look sleepy and disoriented.

  June 3: “The magazine is funny … ½ the office is writing it & ½ advertising it—there’s even a dept. for publicizing Mlle. publicity.… Ridiculous.”

  “It was the first time I’d ever worked in an office,” Didion said, years later, “except for The Sacramento Union, which wasn’t a real office because it was The Sacramento Union.”

  By June 7, the drudgery of writing and rewriting dull copy, having it “ripped to pieces” by the editors in tedious group conferences was setting in. Burroway wro
te her mother, “All the GEs are disappointed and disillusioned, most of them more so than I.”

  June 9: “We sat in a 3-hour editorial conference rehashing ideas and style; then I took all the editorials and the conference notes, put each on a yellow card, shuffled and rearranged & tried to put them together to please everybody. It wasn’t easy.”

  In the evenings, back at the Barbizon, sitting around the lobby on Oriental carpets under antique English lanterns, the GEs gossiped about the magazine’s editors. One was Cyrilly Abels, the homeliest woman in the office, all the girls agreed. She wore wool crepe dresses clinging tightly to her bosom. She was unforgiving: She kept a box of Kleenex by her desk for girls who withered under her raw, critical gaze. Others included Polly Weaver; Rita Smith, the plump, alcoholic-splotchy sister of Carson McCullers (“Sistah has ruined my life!”) and crying shoulder for Terry Southern, who called her seven or eight times a day; the “ridiculous” Miss Blackwell, always wearing formal hats at her desk, given to cataclysmic coughing—she’d be into the vodka by noon each day, her glazed eyes fixed on the Georgian chandelier in her office. The GEs traded stories they’d heard about Barbizon legends—Grace Kelly dancing in the hallways in her nightie; Vogue models splitting finger sandwiches in the lobby with dumpy girls from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School; J. D. Salinger seducing Barbizon babes at a nearby drugstore and then sweeping them off to naughty Greenwich Village. Homesick, the girls talked about where they’d come from—Arizona, Indiana, Ohio. They admitted they loved and hated New York.

  In their monastic rooms at the Barbizon, the girls discovered ironing was unavoidable, even in the Big Apple.

  Didion’s view of Manhattan—a swirl of luxury, romance, and punishingly hard work—never wavered from her first impressions that summer (in her twilight years, she would choose to live in an apartment just blocks from Mademoiselle’s former editorial offices). Privately, she was delighted to be thousands of miles from Sacramento and her suitor, but for her profile in the magazine’s August issue, she wrote, “Joan spends vacations river-rafting and small-boating in the picture-postcard atmosphere of the Sacramento Valley.” Her “interests” included “almost any book published,” she said, and “publishing a book of my own.”

  * * *

  On June 14, staff paired the GEs with celebrities, fashion designers, and literati—among them, T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O’ Connor, Gore Vidal, and S. J. Perelman. The assignment was to interview these folks for a segment in the magazine called “We Hitch Our Wagons.” Didion was told to compose a brief profile of Jean Stafford. The session went much better than her Q&A with Auden back at Berkeley. “Certainly I was more socially anxious than Joan” during the interviews, Burroway told me. Stafford was big and wild-haired, friendly and relaxed. Didion sat demurely, prim beside her subject, wearing a long paisley skirt and a collarless blouse, tightly clutching a notebook. She was struck by Stafford’s claim that the short story “seems better suited to the age” than novels: “Novels seem to be almost irrelevant these days.” Stafford wrote three hours daily and believed getting a story accepted for publication was worse than rejection because it’s “such an exposure and you’re always convinced that the thing is terrible … only the thrill of knowing you’re writing as well as you possibly can makes it worthwhile.” Didion’s profile of Stafford marked her first appearance in a national magazine.

  * * *

  We “discover[ed] to our delight that the famous are fun to meet,” Jane Truslow chirped in her guest column. In a letter home, Burroway complained about a “disgusting cocktail party” at Miss Blackwell’s: “You wouldn’t believe so many famous people could be so dull,” she wrote.

  Joan Gage, another former GE, recalled “champagne and caviar” at Blackwell’s soirees, “a strolling accordion player, a view of Central Park, a side chair once owned by Lincoln that no one was allowed to sit on and a cork floor that was badly scarred by the spike heels we wore. In her bedroom, free books sent for BTB’s perusal [stood] in three-foot high stacks on the floor.”

  * * *

  The GEs completed most of their work for the magazine in the first two weeks of their stay. On June 24 they toured the United Nations. They sat in Dag Hammarskjöld’s chair: a crash course on world politics. The chair’s language button was locked on Russian. Then they got to sightsee and play, getting their hair cut (by world-famous stylist Enrico Caruso), going to dances on the roof of the St. Regis, going to the theater to see The Bad Seed, attending a fashion show at Trigere’s, visiting the ad firm of Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather, touring the press room of The New York Times and the NBC television studios, dropping by a private screening of Bob Fosse’s movie My Sister Eileen at Columbia Pictures. A photograph in the college issue shows Didion and a fellow GE “receiv[ing] instruction in skin care from beauty expert Mala Rubenstein.” The girls sit in front of big round mirrors, wearing towels on their heads, patting their faces in imitation of the looming Mala. Didion looks shrunken and pouty.

  The group attended a College Clinic at the Astor “where fashion scored a touchdown,” said Truslow. “Warner’s offered us new hope for a slim-hipped future by showing us their miraculous ‘Merry Widows.’” Everywhere they went, Mademoiselle “provided several escorts for each of us, not just one prince apiece.” “We were made gifts of, stuffed into, or ushered along to ogle the fashions,” Burroway said. “[S]tiletto, sheath, cinch … Underneath each of us wore the bra that conjured Amazons … stitched in stiff concentric circles to a point.”

  * * *

  “Goodbyes … were bad at the office,” Burroway wrote her mother on July 1. “I am feeling pretty generally overwhelmed.”

  For the return trip to California, Eduene had arranged for Didion to travel across the continent by train, including stops in Boston, Montreal, and Chicago. It would be an excellent education, Eduene said. En route, Didion wrote a series of letters to Peggy La Violette, who’d stayed in New York. However reticent Didion may have appeared publicly, the letters reveal a brash young woman sure of her intelligence and charm, impatient with most strangers, whom she considered commonplace and uninteresting. She was posing in the letters—the Barbizon girl loosed upon an unsuspecting world. But she was also certain of her ambition and talent.

  She left the Barbizon for Grand Central Station on the morning of Friday, July 1. Beneath the starry dome, she couldn’t persuade anyone to carry her bags or help her with directions, so she stood weeping in a bustling crowd. She was embarrassed to be crying so hysterically, but her tears brought action. A kind young man scurried over, took her bag, and helped her check it. (A few years later, she would write of a woman in Run River, “[she] was strong enough to make people take care of [her].”)

  On the trip to Boston, she was forced to sing Armenian folk songs with a circle of girls headed to an outdoor camp in the Massachusetts woods. Alighting in the city, she ate a sandwich at Schrafft’s, drank a bland milk shake, and found the experience so disagreeable that she was determined to phone her mother and demand an immediate flight home. Her letters to La Violette seethe with melodramatic impatience. At her hotel, she fell asleep fully dressed on her bed and did not wake until ten-thirty the following morning. After breakfast, feeling somewhat better, she took a subway to Cambridge and Harvard and walked around the Boston Public Garden. Later, as she was watching the swan boats, a man approached her and made several rude remarks. That was it: Boston, off the list.

  That night, she caught the Montreal Red Wing to Quebec and stayed at the Château Frontenac. The trip was trying. The train cars were sad and dirty, she said. A young man made passes at her and an older gentleman, worried about her traveling alone, offered to take her to his village so she could meet his family, especially his younger brother, who’d marry her in a minute, he said. She escaped to the dining car. She described the waiter to La Violette as an Uncle Tom. By now, she was beginning to feel like Daisy Miller, an emblem of American innocence in the Canadian outback.

  She wa
s thrilled to reach Chicago: tea at Marshall Field’s! She put on flats and walked the lakefront. She bought a collection of Katherine Anne Porter’s short stories and was pleasantly surprised by their complexity. Bob sent her a letter by special delivery. She couldn’t tell if he was clueless or canny in his cooing imprecations. She told La Violette she felt like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.

  Back on the train, she found the beauty of Colorado boring, but the flat, white, alkaline plains of eastern Utah, crossed by dried-up rivers, appealed to her “essentially monochromatic” personality.

  And then she was back in Sacramento, in the listless arms of her family.

  * * *

  She missed New York. She couldn’t stand being home. Downtown, stores selling paperback books were springing up on every block; other than that, everything seemed frozen in time.

  Bob pressured her to be queen of the Lincoln-Mercurys. Her refusals were neurotic, he said. He understood her better than anyone. He knew she loved him. She said the most terrible things to him, but her cruelty made him cling to her all the more.

  She needed to go to Berkeley to finish her finals, but she didn’t want to. Almost desperately, she took a summer job writing wedding notices for The Sacramento Union. Journalism? Her editor told her it consisted mostly of clipping and rewriting, with a different slant, articles from opposition papers (“County Board of Supervisors Lauds North Area Realtors for Plan to Raze Slum, Construct Howard Johnson’s”).

  She sat in the house, trying not to fight with her mother. Her bedroom was ugly. Why had she painted her walls “Pastel Cyclamen”? It hadn’t turned out: an awful pink, making her cringe. Her periods laid her low. She told La Violette she had regular headaches, and she implied they might be psychosomatic.