The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She wrote a profile of William Wilson Wurster, a prominent San Francisco architect and dean of Berkeley’s architecture school. He resisted the steel and glass of the International Style, dismissing van der Rohe’s “sheer, sleek” boxes in favor of local materials, indigenous shapes, and unassuming exteriors sensitive to the climate. He installed large picture windows in his houses, bringing the landscape into rooms as a central design element. For good or ill, the West had embraced suburbia, so Wurster did, too. In essence, he championed what Didion hoped to escape by writing about him: the California ranch house, with its automatic washers churning in the wilderness.

  * * *

  She submitted her essay in mid-March. On May 15, she heard she’d won first prize. She did not want to go to Paris (her mother had promised her Paris after the war, and Paris had turned out to be a lie). She wanted a job in New York. Jessica Daves, Vogue’s editor in chief, offered her a position at forty-five dollars a week, despite the fact that, during the interview, Didion had been running a fever of 102 and said even less than usual. She’d be expected to spend several months reading back issues, familiarizing herself with the magazine’s layout, interests, and style, in preparation for writing promotional copy.

  Bob did not believe she was going to leave. This was madness, he said. “[H]ell hell hell hell hell,” she wrote Peggy La Violette. She was sick of classes, sick of her sorority sisters, sick of the Ridge Road house. If she ever saw another Mondrian print, she’d heave. No one reacted when she told them, “Go to hell!” Her friends were used to her moods.

  Back in Sacramento, her mother puttered around not cleaning house; her father puttered around not earning a living—all pleasant enough in its paralyzing way, and perfectly routine. The family would eat in silence: roast beef or pork ordered from the Corti Brothers meat counter. Didion read alone in her bedroom, filched stationery from her father’s Air Force recruiting office (she figured if taxpayers had to foot the bill for military supplies, she was damn well going to use them), and returned to Berkeley not refreshed, precisely, but calmer, at least for a while.

  Her mother did not remember encouraging her as a child to apply for the Vogue contest. No matter. Her father knew it was a gamble, setting off for New York, a single young woman in a highly competitive field. Sometimes gambles paid off. His philosophy was simple: She can’t play if she’s not sitting at the table.

  * * *

  The trouble was, she had to graduate. She’d overlooked her Milton requirement.

  The English Department agreed to let her commute from Sacramento once a week during the summer to discuss with a professor the cosmology of Paradise Lost. This would earn her the needed credits. On Fridays, she caught a Greyhound bus through Richmond and Crockett, past the C&H sugar plant, or she took the City of San Francisco train. The food on the train was rancid, soups from hell, and the tinted bus windows made a “grayed and obscurely sinister light” of the fires of the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait, she said.

  Finally, on June 2, Professor Henry Nash Smith wrote her that he was returning her papers and turning in to the registrar a grade of A. He said, “I would like to tell you … how excellent I think your handling of the critical topics is. I believe you have truly remarkable abilities as a critic. Perhaps you have comparable abilities as a writer of fiction, but the story in the current Occident is the only piece of your fiction I have seen, and I am not sure I think it equal, as fiction, to the level you maintain in criticism.”

  Chapter Six

  In the fall of 1956, just shy of her twenty-second birthday, Didion felt her future lay in New York as a writer of fiction. She was aware of her naïveté. In the Vogue personnel office, filling out a profile sheet, she answered the question “What languages do you speak?” with “Middle English” and knew she was in over her head.

  The editors for whom she worked had no idea what it was like to survive on forty-five dollars a week. “I can remember asking if someone could get me a discount on a polo coat, because I needed a winter coat, and she said, ‘Oh sweetie, a polo coat is all wrong for you, put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands, she does wonderful things for small people.’ Put yourself in Hattie Carnegie’s hands! So I kept feeling even poorer than I was,” she said.

  She charged food at Bloomingdale’s gourmet shop (but when could she ever pay?).

  Women were required to wear hats in the office—a dress code Didion ignored. One day the company nurse, a “Miss K,” caught her in the coffee room to tell her, “You lose ninety per cent of your body heat in your head.” Didion understood. She’d been warned: Play the game.

  Didion said that the personnel director, Mary Campbell, a former gym teacher and Condé Nast’s personal secretary at one time, “would stop me in the hall to ask me if I’d called my mother, and if I said, ‘Not since last Tuesday,’ she’d say, ‘Come into my office right now and call her.’” Every morning, Nurse K “would line up little cups of phenobarbital for you if you came in nervous. You could take naps in Miss K’s office.”

  Rosa Rasiel, another aspiring young writer at the magazine, offered Didion space in the small apartment she shared with her sister Naomi on East Seventy-ninth Street. She was struck by Didion’s ambition: It was clear she didn’t want to write “commercial stuff, in any sense of the word,” and yet she wanted to be financially independent. She’d enter ad firms’ slogan contests, penning phrases—“Colgate toothpaste is as fresh as an apple in your mouth.”

  “I was trying to write a novel at night,” Didion recalled. “I did not see a career for myself on the staff of a magazine because I had no interest in the politics involved. I had no interest in dressing right and doing all of the things that you had to do if you were on a career track.”

  * * *

  In those days, New York subway seats were covered with a tight straw weave that would rip a girl’s nylons if she didn’t first smooth her skirt along the backs of her legs. It was hard to remember to do this on early mornings, groggy as she rushed to work. Didion washed her hair every day “in an era when no one did that,” Rasiel told Linda Hall for New York magazine. “She’d do it even in the dead of winter, and then she’d put on a black velvet cap that tied under the chin and go to work, and by the time she got there, her hair would be dry. And like most of us then, she had one pair of good shoes. But she would wear her sneakers and carry her shoes to work in a bag, long before anyone else did that.”

  Rasiel once asked Didion, “Doesn’t your hair freeze, going out in the cold with a wet head every day?” Didion “ruffled the ends of her semi-pageboy,” Rasiel said. “‘Well, this morning it did crackle a bit,’ she replied.”

  Sullen boys lined up each day outside the Lexington Avenue entrance to Grand Central Station, smoking and watching the women who went into the Graybar Building, where Vogue’s offices were. Despite her uneasiness with this, and with the magazine’s corporate ethos, Didion “liked being there,” she said. Her office mate Sue Delman, heiress to a shoe fortune, was pleasant and friendly (though the office itself, a cubicle with two desks beneath a cracked ceiling, brightened only by a travel poster Scotch-taped to the wall, depressed Didion). The smells of Madame Rochas, Disrissimo, and Arpege perfumes adrift in the corridors kept her floating, and the people couldn’t have been more colorful. Other staffers included Despina Plakias Messinesi, a longtime travel editor, who had once ridden a donkey to breakfast at the Ritz to call New Yorkers’ attention to a Greek war-relief effort; the mysterious Palma—a “Gorgon always called only by her last name,” Rasiel said—who essentially served as Jessica Daves’s bodyguard; and Mary Campbell, who didn’t give a damn about fashion.

  The office politics were morbidly entertaining (“The late fifties at Vogue … represented the madwoman’s last hurrah,” Mary Cantwell, one of the magazine’s writers, said). The secretaries were called “researchers,” so they wouldn’t realize they were secretaries. Neurosis was in, though the staff thought the fashion editors too shallow to be neuroti
c. The writers (the “verbals”) didn’t trust the photographers (the “visuals”), and the visuals thought the verbals were dowdy. “Well, it’s a look,” the editors would say wearily of a dress they hated but had to feature because the manufacturer advertised heavily in the magazine.

  After work, if she’d received a little money from home, Didion might walk with coworkers to a nearby Chock Full o’ Nuts for a toasted cream cheese sandwich, head to Barneys for a drink or to Henry Halper’s for egg salad, or go to the Thalia or the Beverly to catch an old movie.

  * * *

  One morning, assigned to study back issues, Didion dusted off February 1, 1941. She came across a piece by John W. Vandercook, “All Eyes on Hawaii.” Writing of Hawaii’s “façade,” he suggested its “nostalgic, Polynesian past, like a bee in amber, is somehow miraculously preserved, yet it is oddly not inconsistent with admirable hotel accommodation.” But the truth was, Hawaii hosted “the largest concentration of regular Army troops in the United States.” It was not quite the paradise it seemed. A maritime fortress, it was the Pacific coast’s “one sure sanctuary,” a place of “calm security,” Vandercook said: “Neither the Army nor the Navy is the least bit worried” about an attack.

  Didion wept. The irony was too great to bear and she missed the smell of the salt air, the sunshine, the fog, the thrill of Pacific distances. She was a stranger in New York. Her life here wasn’t real. Was she lying to Bob or herself when she told him on the telephone that she’d be in New York only until Christmas, maybe Easter—at any rate, no more than a few months?

  In “Goodbye to All That,” she says she’d stroll past the Seagram Building fountains after work, feeling their foamy spray on her face; she’d peer through the barred windows of brownstones, seeing sweaty cooks hunched over vast industrial stoves—surely on the floors above, beautiful women were lighting candles for dinner or drawing warm water for their children’s baths; she stopped at a fruit stand and stood, braced and chilled, eating a peach very, very slowly.

  Somewhere in this city, teeming with soldiers home on leave from Korea, lining up on Broadway with discounted tickets for the plays, there was a John Wayne just for her, or a Howard Hughes, reclusive and mysterious, offering glimpses of extraordinary worlds.

  No, her New York life wasn’t real. Someday she’d pay for these pleasures. She did miss her flat horizons. But she wasn’t sorry she’d come. After all, in her family, she was the latest in a long line of women given to “opaque bewilderment and moves to places not quite on the schedule.” Years later, she’d reflect, “I was never a fan of people who don’t leave home.… It just seems part of your duty in life.”

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seven

  1

  The woman we know from the books was about to emerge, but she felt she was “in a coma.” “I could quote a lot of English poetry—that’s what I did in college—and I could give you the house and garden imagery of a lot of English novels. You could have asked me what the Boer War was and I couldn’t have told you.”

  Didion’s selling herself short: She came to Vogue equipped with discipline, a passion for reading, a keen attentiveness, a grounding in the history of the West, and a sensitivity to quirky locutions. She came with an old-fashioned work ethic—you fought for your territory. She did not abide idleness or education for its own sake or the view that pragmatism sullied the soul.

  “[I was] a good deal of trouble,” she said, looking back. “[S]kirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts.” At Vogue, she was initially limited to promotional copy—“the kind that was sent to stores as advertising support”—thirty lines at most, usually eight or so, hacked at by her editor.

  Once a career has taken root, its seeds are hard to trace: In retrospect, its flowering seems inevitable. Surely, Joan Didion, piercing observer, fierce stylist, oddly sexy and reluctant pop icon, leaped fully blown into the hippie-dippie sixties, exposing our hypocrisies, our sloppy thoughts.

  In fact, when she first settled in New York, “She was a) hard to know, b) very shy, and people, being stupid as they are, underrated her,” said Noel Parmentel, who’d soon be a central figure in her life. “Practically everybody I knew underrated her. She just didn’t register on the screen.”

  “I … tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously,” Didion said. “I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.”

  An instructive aside: In 1973, John Gregory Dunne accused Pauline Kael of misunderstanding how movies are made, how careers unfold, how art gets done. In a letter to Kael warning her of his attack, he said, “I think you’re the best movie critic in America, but I’m not altogether sure that’s a compliment.” The problem, he said later, is that an “implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmmaking … prevails in all of Kael’s books.… Few critics understand the roles of chance, compromise, accident and contingency in the day-by-day of a picture.”

  Similarly, Didion watchers tend to ascribe to her levels of agency, guile, and foresight she just didn’t have. For example: Her early writing “captures the turbulence of a culture in upheaval,” one reviewer said; it “impose[s] some order on … American mayhem,” another wrote. Or as Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post’s former book review editor, said, she “had her eyes on the nation” and “dared” to say what she saw.

  These assessments—like the claims I made in the prologue to this book—aren’t wrong, but they suggest a deliberative approach simply not present in Didion’s daily writing of the 1950s and early 1960s. Her first important essays, written across several years for various assignments, composed in volatile emotional weathers, and under varying editorial strictures, did not come ready-made from a Vogue dress pattern—length, width, and color all laid out. Nor did their appearance make Didion an instant star, coaxing fire from her Smith Corona, the way Jimi Hendrix pulled flames from his Stratocaster.

  If Didion sold her young self short, and critics gave her too much rope, the truth of her professional beginnings and subsequent fame is much more complex and fascinating.

  Later, she understood how helter-skelter the process had been. “[In 1969] I was starting a column for Life, and we happened to be in Hawaii,” she told Meghan Daum in 2004. “I had to write my first column introducing myself, and right then the My Lai stuff broke. So I called my editor at Life and said I want to go out to Vietnam, but he said, ‘No, some of the guys are going out. You just introduce yourself.’ And I was so angry that I introduced myself in a very un-Life-like way.” That is, she was, or appeared to be, uncomfortably personal in a formal column (we’ll look at the column later). “Life at that time had eleven million readers and I got an awful lot of feedback, a lot of it negative, and a lot of it more responsive than I could deal with. Then Play It As It Lays came out shortly after, which was read as autobiographical, although it wasn’t, and so between Play It As It Lays and that column, I was getting a lot of that [popular attention]. It was kind of a burden.”

  She’s not admitting how titillating it was, in 1969, for a woman to write about abortion, divorce, S&M, orgies, and drugs, especially if she appeared to be talking about herself. Women saw her as emotionally available; men fantasized more lurid access.

  How crafty was she in choosing her subjects? How lucky? How did she get her breaks? How did the timing work? These questions can be answered only by studying her Vogue years, from 1956 to roughly 1966, though she contributed occasional columns after that. Until her relationship with The New York Review of Books, begun in 1973, her ties to Vogue formed her longest-lasting bond with a particular magazine. This commitment clicked when the slicks had power and she was a pup. In the meantime, the “advantages” of writing a novel at night, in secret, after a day in the fashion trenches were “probably … precisely the same as the disadvantages,” she reflected later. “A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.”
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  Didion upped her salary from forty-five dollars a week to sixty-five or seventy. “At Vogue, she worked hard because they knew how good she was and made her do all of the heavy lifting,” said Parmentel. Eventually, she “conned” the Vogue Promotion Department into thinking it was reasonable to expect only one ad every two weeks from a copywriter. The schedule gave her time to freelance for other magazines. She had an office, a telephone, and messenger service. Marshaling these resources, she fired off pieces to Mademoiselle and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The first one bit, not the second. At one point, she had six positive responses to queries she’d mailed, to places as diverse as Commonweal, The Nation, and The Reporter.

  Rosa Rasiel left Vogue for graduate school at Columbia. When she moved out, Didion spent a year living in the cellar of Mildred Orrick’s apartment. Orrick was a well-known fashion designer celebrated for introducing dance leotards as items of casual clothing and promoting flared coats once wartime fabrics restrictions eased.

  Eventually, Didion rented an apartment in the East Nineties, “furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away,” she wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” The apartment was a third-floor walk-up at 1215 Park Avenue, across the street from the Armory, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth streets. She had a fireplace, shuttered windows, air conditioning, high ceilings and white walls, one bedroom and a kitchenette, for $130 a month—a tough amount to make, even freelancing. She hung a map of Sacramento County on the living room wall to remind herself of water. New York had rivers, but they weren’t … well, rivers.