The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  She remembered a party in an apartment on Bank Street in the fall of 1956, when she’d first arrived in New York. In retrospect, what most surprised her that night was meeting Democrats! A grad student from Princeton tried to seduce her by suggesting he had a “direct wire to the PMLA, baby”; a Sarah Lawrence girl cooed about J. D. Salinger—she could tell from his work he had a Zen-like ability to see into her soul. Now, one more Zen remark at a party and she’d scream. By the way! someone had told her recently. Miss Sarah Lawrence? She seems to have pledged her soul to an electronics engineer.

  * * *

  One hot June evening, Didion attended a party at Betsy Blackwell’s apartment for current and former Mademoiselle guest editors. It was the year Ali MacGraw became a GE; Didion would come to know her as Diana Vreeland’s assistant. Years later, she and MacGraw would renew their friendship in California. But that night at Miss Blackwell’s, Didion was not much in the mood to talk to anyone.

  A power failure had knocked out the air conditioning. Miss Blackwell was drunk. The new GEs were eager, bright, and giggly: dreaming of penthouses, Argentina, sable coats. “Jamesian distance” couldn’t calm Didion’s nerves. The parade had moved on without her.

  Chapter Eight

  1

  Didion gave notice at Vogue.

  Mademoiselle had been looking for a new college editor, someone to run the GE contest, read manuscripts, ride herd on the girls. Didion fit the bill. A former GE and now an old woman, she knew the ropes.

  She’d done a few freelance pieces for Mademoiselle, including a travel brief on Carmel. Her long hours at Vogue meant she struggled to meet Mademoiselle’s deadlines. Polly Weaver, the editor, had become impatient with her. Still, it was Weaver who recruited her to oversee the college issue. She admired the girl’s drive and knew she was juggling too much.

  So in mid-summer of 1959, Didion told the frumpy Miss Daves, Vogue’s managing editor, that she’d decided to leave. Miss Daves shocked her by making a counteroffer: “Feature Associate.” What would she say to that? She’d still be working with Allene Talmey, but she’d be writing articles instead of promotional copy. Her adjusted salary would top Mademoiselle’s bid. She’d be expected to start just after Labor Day.

  Didion had a new piece in the Mademoiselle pipeline, scheduled to run in January. After the big betrayal, she’d still have to work with Polly Weaver.

  She went to bed with a migraine.

  * * *

  Mademoiselle had asked her to return to her alma mater and report on “Berkeley’s Giant: The University of California.”

  On the brink of a new decade, the magazine was more playfully innovative than any of its competitors. While Luce publications predicted a stable period ahead, with prosperity and material contentment for all, Mademoiselle had grasped the Beats’ rumblings as an overture to mania.

  The magazine’s advantage was its freedom to explore subjects its peers wouldn’t touch. Words didn’t sell it. Readers bought Mademoiselle for the photographs and fashion bulletins, so the editors had considerable latitude in choosing fiction and assigning topics. In its pages, Didion found herself bumping up against the Beat writing she had so despised in college. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Podhoretz, François Truffaut, and Christopher Logue offered readers hopes and future fears.

  The January 1960 issue ran a feature called “Seven Young Voices Speak Up to the Sixties.” “Whatever one may think of them, certainly if more voices like these speak up, lively and idiosyncratic, we may look forward to the decade with cheerful curiosity,” the magazine declared. Later, Joyce Johnson remarked that this particular issue of Mademoiselle gave “several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five” a “map to a revolution.”

  Ginsberg wrote, “Everybody should get high for the next ten years.” Burroughs reduced America’s values to “plastic, all hues, inflatable and deflatable, for the Pause that Refreshes, helicopters and every kind of motor vehicle. Gadgets, contrivances in dazzling number and variety, all mute and odorless.”

  At Berkeley, Didion failed to see insurgencies. “Call it the weather, call it the closing of the frontier, call it the failure of Eden; the fact remains that Californians are cultivating America’s lushest growth of passive nihilism right along with their bougainvillea,” she said. The current crop of college kids was irresponsible, unmotivated, “totally unequipped,” marked by an “absence of drive.”

  In the library, or a sorority lobby, she did occasionally encounter vague disquiet. “Everyone I meet is the same,” one coed confessed to her. “I don’t know what I expected, but sometimes they make me tired.” This is hardly a foretaste of campus riots; with hindsight, it’s tempting to say Didion didn’t get what was brewing. She projected her own lassitude onto people she met and witnessed only what she wanted to see (her critics have always charged her with this). On the other hand, the coed’s remark shared page space with a column of ads urging girls to “get top jobs” as secretaries, trained by Katharine Gibbs, the Berkeley School, Grace Ball Secretarial College, Wood Secretarial School, Grace Downs, the Powers School for “poise and self-assurance.” Not precisely a map to a revolution.

  Instead of saying Didion missed the boat, we could just as easily—and more accurately—say she refused to buy “the times they are a-changin’” hype (already ubiquitous before the sixties began). Besides, her brother, Jim, was a Berkeley boy now, and fairly typical: happy-go-lucky, having fun. “We were all oblivious right up until the Free Speech Movement began in ’64,” the writer Larry Colton, a Berkeley alum, told me. “After that, it was impossible to ignore what was happening.”

  The changes Didion did record, she observed with detachment: “Berkeley has had a part in producing such diverse phenomena as Allen Ginsberg and the first atomic bomb,” she wrote. Howl and the Enola Gay: the word nihilism seems eerily on the mark.

  In retrospect, Didion’s piece is most notable for its accompanying photographs, taken by Ted Streshinsky, a man who would play a pivotal role in her career, and for homesickness, her obvious longing for the California air smelling of “eucalyptus and salt water and January’s first fruit blossoms.” She gave her readers a taste of the nostalgia flooding her first novel, a “yearning for California so raw that night after night, on copy paper filched from my office and the Olivetti Lettera 22 I had bought in high school with the money I made stringing for The Sacramento Union (‘Big mistake buying Italian,’ my father had advised, ‘as you’ll discover the first time you need a part replaced’), I sat on one of my apartment’s two chairs and set the Olivetti on the other and wrote myself a California river,” she said.

  2

  Glimpses of the future Didion are scattered like keepsakes throughout the pages of Vogue in the early 1960s, particularly in the “People Are Talking About” column. A collage of celebrity sightings, clues to cultural hipness, commercial trends, the latest politics, comments on fashion, hot movies and books, the regular feature consisted of unsigned snippets arranged to form an eye-catching layout. Mary Cantwell said it was a “nightmare” searching for interesting material month after month. Didion told Peggy La Violette it was one of the “silliest occupations going.” Nevertheless, the column forced her to suss out overlooked subjects or find new approaches to topics beaten to death. It gave her space to indulge her obsessions and turn them into cultural touchstones.

  Allene Talmey took credit for “People Are Talking About,” but Didion wrote many, if not most, of the pieces for it, beginning in 1960. Some bits are conspicuously hers; in other instances, it’s hard to determine whether she suggested or wrote a piece. In any case, the column shows us the parade of men, women, trends, and objects she watched back then: JFK and Jackie, “leading a rebellion in beauty”—after Jackie, the “insistence on a certain nose, a special profile, is dead”; spy movies, Dr. No, Fail Safe, The Manchurian Candidate; the launching of Telstar; Cuba; the humor, “neither topical nor punchy, but simply human,” practiced by
Woody Allen and a set of edgy new comics; the atomic bomb; Willem de Kooning; Greasy Kid Stuff, a “hair tonic marketed by a couple of college students in Miami”; the “sleepiness of the enlarged—like a spleen—television news” and “local reporters who rarely ask the singularly important sensible question”; Buckminister Fuller; the John Birch Society, about which Didion knew a thing or two from her mom; interstate highway signs: “Have Wife With Gun Must Travel”; Marilyn Monroe, a “profoundly moving young woman”—the “waste seems almost unbearable if out of her death comes nothing of insight into her special problems; no step towards a knowledge that might save, for the living, these beautiful and tormented”; Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave (who would play Didion onstage more than forty years later in The Year of Magical Thinking); Barbra Streisand; Warren Beatty; Henry Fonda, “looking like a man ridden … with desultory anxiety about fallout,” hugging his intriguing daughter, Jane; the construction of the Guggenheim; protest marches organized by “threatened” people dragging their “monstrous” children with them through shabby urban battlefields.

  It’s obviously Didion who, in the midst of movie star profiles and fashion news, pauses to call our attention to slang or some slice of professional jargon warping or enriching American speech: the “satisfying rightness of the baseball phrase ‘clutch play’ used in any season to describe an instantaneous heroic move”; the “double-talk adjective, ‘counterproductive,’ used by Washington officials to describe those ideas that sound superb but wouldn’t be”; “‘elliptical,’ a word necessary in describing a satellite in orbit”; “‘Flash,’ the word that replaces ‘Kick’ for anything that relieves monotony”—specifically, “flash” referred to the effects of LSD, as Didion would discover; and “zortz”—the word for “freshness in Los Angeles … as in ‘This thing’s got zortz.” Apparently, this last one didn’t catch on.

  Didion’s first “People” piece, in the November 1, 1959, issue, covered the Olympic Winter Games at Squaw Valley. The column is unsigned, but it’s clearly Joan Didion fretting about “developers blast[ing] miles of ski runs out of the forest.” Clearly, it’s Joan Didion on the streets of Reno observing “ranchers’ sons in Brooks Brothers suits and Stetsons … everyone speaking in the Oklahoma drawl, now the accent of the far West.” She told game-bound readers where to eat on the mountain passes, how to arrange a ski trip on Donner Summit. Of course she knew from her father about the prized casinos. Hotels? When choosing, parents, keep in mind that children like “their mountains” pristine, “as if the remnants of the Donner Party just limped through,” she wrote.

  In 1960 she turned her ear to campaign speeches. Among the speech writers she profiled were Herbert G. Klein, a “41-year-old Californian with a soothing touch” who wrote for Richard Nixon; JFK’s man, Theodore C. Sorenson, “a gentle-mannered, but hard-headed lawyer” capable of a “pungent phrase.” Didion’s study of public texts and the personalities behind them honed the skills necessary for her later pieces in The New York Review of Books, as well as for her novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted.

  She keyed in to the changing vocabulary of international violence—“the tripping sound of ‘plastique,’ which in Paris means bombs”—and displayed an early impatience with what would soon be called the “counterculture”: in “such Greenwich Village places as The Bitter End,” where Bob Dylan performed, young people “[go] in for sentimental binges” on “social problems,” she wrote, honoring songs such as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and “Times Gettin’ Hard, Boys, Money’s Gettin’ Scarce,” as though “everyone there [was] longing for the lovely Depression they were too young to know.”

  She tucked mini book reviews into the column, declaring Flannery O’Connor a “young writer with an uncompromising moral intelligence and a style that happily relies on verbs, few adjectives, and no inflationary details”; reiterating in public what she often said in private—that J. D. Salinger was “irritating”; warily praising William Burroughs’s “dope dreams” (while dismissing most of the Beats); noting, without comment, John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize; and absorbing Wright Morris’s meditations on “what it means to be a Westerner”—in Didion’s words, “unable to extricate the reality of the past from the myth of Manifest Destiny.”

  The young American writer who seemed to touch her most profoundly, in a surprisingly personal way, though his European-inflected sensibility couldn’t have been more foreign to her, was John Hawkes, whose The Lime Twig, she said, left her “helpless” and compulsive under the assault of its “imaginative brilliance,” unable to awake from its near hallucination and the rattlesnakes it freed in her mind. This was reading as dark eroticism.

  Late in 1961, she delighted in discovering a little-noticed, “engaging” book, I Want to Quit Winners, by Harold S. Smith Sr., who ran Harold’s Club in Reno and who, “exploring the vagaries of his career,” Didion said, “wrote precisely, ‘You play them as they lay.’”

  In certain pieces, we overhear Didion’s chats with Parmentel—when she writes glowingly of Barry Goldwater or complains of JFK’s “fence-sitting” or asserts that “our economy, and consequently our Federal revenues” would be better off if we would “scale down our steeply progressive Federal income tax rules.”

  * * *

  The column lets us follow her to the Thalia or Loew’s, theaters earning more money—at last!—from the films they showed than from candy bar sales: Maybe it was going to be a great decade for Hollywood.

  In Ingrid Bergman’s performances, Didion sees how “part of the boredom in some of her movies lies in her habit of withdrawing even in front of the camera. She becomes, then, as remote as though her emotional life was fainting” and suggests “an apparent hesitation on the shore of sex.” In these lines, written in 1959, we witness the initial (if unintended) conception of Maria in Play It As It Lays, published eleven years later.

  The seeds of other novels appear in the furrows of the white spaces in Vogue. On page 761, in the May 1960 issue, we find juxtaposed a reference to nuclear testing and a lengthy mention of Hawaii, both obviously written by Didion, and both central to the project evolving, twenty-four years later, into Democracy. That book’s collage structure gives its pages a sleek, spare look reminiscent of the “People” column.

  Naturally, Harvest Home (ultimately Run River), the novel she was writing while composing “People” each month, kept popping up in the pieces. In addition to the “blue sky” elegy in the Olympics travelogue, we find, one year before the novel appeared, a rant against the “forced breaking up of the big San Joaquin Valley ranches: the bitterly fought, possibly suicidal result of a land reform law which says that anyone receiving Central Valley Project water must dispose of holdings over one hundred and sixty acres.” The dying of the California ranches, and the loss of the social norms supporting them, is the novel’s primary tragedy.

  Vogue’s screed against California water laws is followed by a loving portrait of a proton magnetometer, a geologic instrument no doubt evoking for Didion her ancestor Herman Jerrett and his stoic life in the Sierra.

  * * *

  Her first signed article for Vogue, a gloss on jealousy (“passion for the documentation of irrelevant detail is characteristic of the afflicted”), appeared in the June 1961 issue. Similar pieces followed—meditations on nostalgia, emotional blackmail, and self-confidence. One of her best-known early essays, “On Self-Respect,” a centerpiece in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, made its first appearance in Vogue in August 1961. It came about, “improvised … in two sittings,” because “the magazine had a piece that had been assigned, and the title was on the cover,” she recalled. “And it didn’t come in! But the cover had already been printed.” She wrote the piece to a “character count,” since the pages had been laid out in advance. Covers, layouts, and her peers’ glacial work habits dictated much of what Didion wrote in those days.

  “She was better than all of them, far above those people in every way,” Parmentel says now. “A
lot of her colleagues at Vogue were jealous of her. This little nobody from Sacramento shows up in her little dresses and outshines them all. She’s smarter. Mannered. Better-bred. No bullshit.”

  She was starting to get noticed around town. In a gossip column in the August 1962 issue of Esquire, among mentions of W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Hugh Kenner, this little tidbit appeared (probably planted by Parmentel): “Joan Didion, the fantastically brilliant writer and Vogue editor … at 26, is one of the most formidable little creatures heard in the land since the young Mary McCarthy.”

  But she was working without a plan, except for Condé Nast’s month-by-month demands, and her editor put a heavy stamp on all her early pieces. It’s instructive to read Allene Talmey’s articles and learn, for example, that Didion’s fondness for withholding a telling detail until the end of a paragraph is a favorite Talmey move. We see it in a profile of various theater people: Talmey describes a suite of offices consisting of “beat-up desks and usually an old container for coffee on the radiator.” She concludes, “The only curiosity about all this is that these are the offices of the three producers.” In future essays, Didion ran with this syntax: the wry, slightly formal, asidelike quality of the final flourish.

  The nature of these early assignments—tossed to Didion at the last minute, randomly or because she was simply around to pick up the slack when others flubbed a deadline—gave her a reputation as a “personal” essayist. “A lot of people read these pieces and … people would come to me for, like, advice, and I hated it,” she recalled. Later, “I quit writing those pieces because I couldn’t take this Miss Lonelyhearts role.” At the start of her career, she couldn’t foresee she would end up, late in life, with readers once again seeking her advice—this time on grief and bereavement.

  Chapter Nine