The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  1

  In her early twenties, Didion was already grieving the passing of an old way of life. She worked that grief into her first novel. By now, she recognized and admitted to friends that she was “[d]istinctively dolorous by nature.” Most of her friends did not know how to react to this. Noel Parmentel and Greg Dunne were just about the only ones who had “perfect pitch for [her] absurdities.” On her twenty-third birthday, in 1957, Parmentel had altered a jacket of Henry James’s The Tragic Muse. It now read The Tragic M(o)use. He slipped the jacket inside a Henri Bendel box along with a gray plastic rodent sporting a red ribbon on its tail and left the box outside her door. For the rest of the day, it was hard for her to play the “East End Avenue Ophelia.”

  On another occasion, this time within a month of Jack Kennedy’s election to the presidency, she sat with a friend in an uptown movie theater, weeping as John Wayne, in the role of Davy Crockett, told a Mexican beauty, “A man’s gotta live,” and, “Republic is a beautiful word.” She could not stop snuffling “by the time the battle was done, and Wayne lay on the cold, cold ground, bleeding as no one has bled since Janet Leigh in Psycho.” At that point, the “last white woman walked out of the Alamo … She had soot on her face, and she was carrying her child, and she held her head high as she walked past Santa Anna into the sunset. So conspicuous was my sniffling by then that you could scarcely hear the snickers from my neighbors, a couple of young men from Esquire, both of whom resembled Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.,” Didion wrote.

  These lines appeared in National Review. Though broadly humorous, the anecdote makes clear that, for Didion, the coronation of the handsome young Democratic president signaled America’s decline—the country was an ashen-faced white woman with nowhere to go, surrounded by dark-skinned hooligans. Meanwhile, those nasty liberals from Esquire laughed as the fortress fell: “They don’t make ’em like Duke on the New Frontiers.”

  Parmentel had introduced her to the folks at National Review. In its pages, mostly in book reviews, she expressed her dismay at the straying of the nation and perfected the tone of lament that would center her first novel.

  Fictions of domesticity and suburban blah by Sloan Wilson and John Updike prompted this from Didion: “There was once a day when we not only expected men to disappear but allowed them to do it with grace (Daddy’s gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap his baby bunny in), to escape without cracking up: men on the run opened the China trade, struck silver in the Comstock, followed dirt roads to sell pots and pans and trombones.” No more. Duke, we hardly knew ye!

  John Cheever hit the proper note for her in stories of “lost money and lost families”: “I suppose that Cheever and my mother and I belong to the last generations in America with a feeling for the unbearable pull of the Chinese fan, the Canton fish plates; I am told that this sense of inextricable involvement with the past occurs infrequently even in my own generation,” she wrote. “All of this means, perhaps, that Cheever is the matchless chronicler of a world that my children will never understand, a world caught in the ruins of a particular stratum of American society that somewhere along the way, probably during the 1920s, lost its will.”

  Perhaps most explicitly in a review of Evelyn Waugh’s The End of the Battle, published in March 1962, we hear Didion pondering the roots of her literary sensibility: “Every real American story begins in innocence and never stops mourning the loss of it,” she declares. “[T]he banishment from Eden is our one great tale, lovingly told and retold, adapted, disguised, and told again, passed down from Hester Prynne to Temple Drake, from Natty Bumppo to Holden Caulfield; it is the single stunning fact in our literature, in our folklore, in our history, and in the lyrics of our popular songs.” But mourning the loss of Eden leads to dolor. Now, in the mid–twentieth century, with the recognition that reclaiming Eden is impossible without forking over a theme-park admission fee, the only escape from dolor is a “sense of the absurd, the beginning of a kind of toughness of mind; and to win that particular victory is to cut oneself irrevocably loose from what we used to call main currents of American thought.” This is so because “hardness of mind is antithetical to innocence, it is not only alien to us but generally misapprehended. What we take it for, warily, is something we sometimes call cynicism, sometimes call wit, sometimes … disapprove as ‘a cheap effect,’ and almost invariably hold at arm’s length, the way Eve should have held that snake.”

  Said as only a whip-smart California conservative surrounded by Camelot’s press agents could say it.

  This sophisticated and poignant struggle to find an effective American voice could not be pried from her conviction, formed in childhood, that “there are no more great journeys and possibly no more great vows.” As she worked to finish her first novel, she wondered if it was still worth it, at this point in America’s life, “to trouble to write a novel at all.”

  * * *

  The National Review offices clashed vigorously with Vogue’s. From a woman’s world to a world of (mostly) men; from mirrored conference rooms to residential apartments redesigned as editorial bull pens but retaining the claw-foot bathtubs of their former lives. The rooms overlooked a dingy inner courtyard filled with trash (one morning, a tenant on a floor above pitched his old bedsprings out the window, startling Whittaker Chambers, who had just started at the magazine). Loose toilet paper rolls shared desk space with Underwood typewriters, pinned-together galley sheets, a broken coffee machine, and notes about the proper use of an en dash or when to lowercase the word Federal. Takeout boxes from l’Armorique, Billy’s Steakhouse, and Nicola Paone’s littered the floors around scattered pages from Human Events, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Communist Daily World. Over the clacking of the Underwoods, raised voices debated whether fluoride was a Commie conspiracy or a conservative horror story, whether Robert Welch, of John Bircher fame (and one of the Review’s initial investors), really had accused Dwight David Eisenhower of being a foreign agent, or—later—whether Goldwater’s statement “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” was code for his support of the John Birch Society. By that point, William F. Buckley Jr. had declared the Birchers the lunatics of the Right and had distanced the Review from their libertarian rhetoric.

  The Review recruited Didion because it was “(correctly) perceived to be too New York–East Coast oriented,” according to Priscilla Buckley, WFB’s sister and the magazine’s managing editor. Didion’s Western perspective was a plus. Also, though conservative, even libertarian, in her outlook, she was politically rough. “What was important to Bill in editing National Review was that the writing be distinguished,” said Priscilla. “It seemed to him more important that a writer write beautiful prose than that the writer be a movement conservative. Indeed some of the people we published never were conservatives. Young John Leonard certainly was not.… Some started out as conservative, or perhaps as nonpolitical, and ended up as flaming liberals, Garry Wills, Joan Didion and … John Gregory Dunne among them. What they had in common was that all of them were prose stylists. And National Review profited from their skills, at least for a while.” In fact, Ms. Buckley thought Didion did some of her very best work for the magazine: “[H]er prose, while always careful, was more relaxed, even impish” in the Review, funnier than it would be later, she said.

  Didion was quite comfortable in this world of men. It was her father’s world—a world of hierarchy and “orders,” no bullshit—and her father had always been her biggest supporter. “My God, did he love and appreciate his daughter,” Noel Parmentel said. “He liked me because I’d introduced her to people like the Buckleys and helped her get where he thought she belonged. He was unhappy, inwardly, but he had that kind of fierce male loyalty. And Joan—he thought she could do no wrong.”

  In the early 1960s, the Grand Central subway line was in particularly poor shape. The cars were dirty and badly ventilated; the lights went out fr
equently. Traveling to the Review’s offices was hard on Didion, but some days she appreciated NR’s relaxed chaos better than the chicer spaces of Vogue. She was tired of the gossipy intrigue in the hallways of Condé Nast. S. I. Newhouse had purchased Vogue and Mademoiselle and moved Mademoiselle into new offices in the Graybar Building. In the reorganization, many venerable editors left, voluntarily or otherwise, including Cyrilly Abels. It both amused and depressed Didion that even with a new staff, the ethos at Mademoiselle—“hysterical smallness”—didn’t change. Occasionally, Didion still wrote pieces for Mademoiselle and grumbled that, given her druthers, the editors wouldn’t cut her fingernails, much less her paragraphs. As for Vogue, it took a “good deal of unpleasantness” to finally get her name on the masthead.

  Vogue alluded to politics as lightly as possible. Presumably, it took no sides. It presented its glamorous models against shadowy social backdrops—a floating vacuum catered with gin and canapés. National Review rolled up its sleeves and took a swing at just about everybody. Going back and forth on the dirty subway cars, Didion shuttled between these poles.

  She took assignments from Commonweal and The Nation. “Nothing if not eclectic!” she’d quip to friends. She waffled between dismissing her freelance pieces as trivial and wanting to collect some of them into a book. She dreamed of calling the book The Sweet, Swift Years, after a line by William Saroyan: “I just turned a corner and the sweet, swift years were gone.”

  Didion’s years in New York had exposed her to sophisticated media centers working to standardize journalistic expression. She had come from California with a different view of the press. Personalized advocacy was the norm at The Los Angeles Times under Harrison Otis and Harry Chandler; the paper did not report on California life as much as dictate it. Didion never questioned this stance, and it fit with the folks at National Review. At the same time, at the fashion magazines, she was learning to be more nuanced (she started at Vogue in a media atmosphere just coming to terms with the ruins of McCarthyism). Into this mix, she also brought her academic experience, a love of literary style. Her doggedness and ambition came from feeling herself an outsider with no possibility of being admitted into the club—as Nick Carraway said of himself, Gatsby, Daisy, and Jordan, “[We] were all Westerners and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

  In the years ahead, the marriage of the Western press’s PR savvy (using “news” to promote personal agendas) and the Eastern press’s risk-averse professionalism (pursuing profits from multiple sectors with a pretense of objectivity) would create modern American politics, image-driven, filled with verbal codes. Didion, familiar with the turf on both coasts, and a skilled reader of texts, was perfectly primed to interpret the age.

  2

  In her pale blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building, Didion would sit staring at the twilight, wondering if Noel would show that night. She’d start a letter to her mother and not finish it (cheerily, Eduene had informed her that her brother had joined the Fijis at Berkeley and was living it up!). She’d thumb through an old issue of Variety. She’d watch the secretaries stand in the hallways playing with their makeup cases. Finally, she’d ring for the elevator.

  The store windows on her walk home were padlocked and dark. She avoided the furniture outlets. It wouldn’t do to look at furniture. Furniture was for families.

  A series of short stories she wrote in the 1960s, cross-checked against details in her letters as well as slices of life in the “People” column, let us walk her home on these late evenings after work. The stories, which Didion admitted contained raw, undigested material from notes at the time, notes full of “everything I saw and heard … rough and inchoate,” revealing “what I actually had on my mind … in New York,” obsessively repeat experiences, scenes, patterns of behavior. The details are vivid, always the same, and are echoed, again, years later, in Play It As It Lays.

  As one of her acquaintances puts it, most of these details concern “a romantic figure in … white suits, the doomed hero who all the women fall for”: Noel Parmentel “is in all of her fiction.” Years later, an angry Parmentel would agree. He would threaten a lawsuit against Didion for writing about him in a direct, “hostile,” and unvarnished manner.

  Her short stories about those years are uncharacteristically impressionistic. They capture her general feeling instead of offering a day-by-day accounting of facts. When reminded of the stories, particularly of their world-weary atmosphere, Parmentel could not recall specifics, but he agreed that the sketches were probably accurate. “That’s what we did then. We went to parties,” he said. “I was tall and single! Full days every day and full nights every night. I drank too much. Everybody drank too much. Sometimes I was over the top. But oh! What a memorable time it was!”

  * * *

  Waiting in her apartment after work were the chapters of her novel, fluttering limply in the air-conditioned breeze. She couldn’t face them. A couple days of cool morning fog had made her long more than ever for the smell of eucalyptus. She’d pour herself a bourbon on the rocks and sit in the dark. After a while, maybe she would or maybe she wouldn’t hear “Honey chile!” and a pounding at her door. He sounded like an Atlanta radio station. Depending on how much he’d had to drink, he’d fall into her bed still wearing his raincoat and ask her to hold him, or he’d insist they go to a party. If they went—somewhere in the East Sixties, say, where he knew a girl, a girl with really pretty legs, or a place down by the Frick—it would always be the same: At first, everyone would be enchanted by his noisy arrival and then, after a few drinks, he’d insult someone and none of them could wait for him to leave. He’d drag her to another gathering and they’d wind up on someone’s busted-spring couch at dawn, stale-mouthed, too hungover to fight.

  “In ‘Goodbye to All That,’ she says she stayed up all night with Noel—he’s unnamed in the piece—and called on a friend at four in the morning to go to the White Rose Bar. That was me,” Dan Wakefield said. “They knew I was always up for that.”

  Maybe afterward, Noel wouldn’t show for days.

  The stories “Coming Home,” “The Welfare Island Ferry,” and “When Did Music Come This Way? Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?” document a vexed dynamic.

  She would press a suit coat he’d left in her closet—a kind of magical gesture to draw him back to her, or she’d have his dirty shirts and the striped bedsheets laundered. He’d have to come back for his shirts. Late one evening, he’d call to say he was someplace uptown, an important appointment, and he’d be there in forty minutes—no, fifty … maybe a couple hours—or maybe she could meet him in a bar down in the Village. She’d throw her raincoat over her nightgown and rush into the streets. Over beers, he’d tell her she needed more color in her face. She needed to see people. She only wanted to see him. A little later, she’d be the one suggesting they stop at a party. He could use a mood lift, the excitement of new people, she said. New people? He’d met all the new people. He’d already slept with most of them. He owed them money.

  The story about sleeping with all the “new people” got “attached to me,” Parmentel admitted, because “Oleg Cassini—he was always with Grace Kelly or Jackie Kennedy—made a joke once that he went to a party and realized he’d slept with everybody in the room. I was repeating that story.”

  Some mornings, walking to work, Didion would spot young mothers coming from the Donnell Library, wheeling home Winnie-the-Pooh books in baby carriages. She tried to imagine the women’s lives. Cut daffodils in vases on dining room tables, lacquer trays, checkbook registers perfectly up-to-date. And the babies. It was hard to believe any of the femmes du monde at Condé Nast would ever have babies. Most of them were trying not to.

  Throughout the day, every day, there was sobbing in the ladies’ rooms. There were “rumors of abortions, all of which seemed to have been performed in Hoboken,” Mary Cantwell said. “Fetuses were swimming in the sewers of New Jersey.”
Sometimes, after miscarriages, fetuses were quietly disposed of by doctors in the old Doctors Hospital, which was also pegged as a drying-out center for many editors when word got out that if you didn’t catch them early in the day, they wouldn’t be able to hold a coherent conversation with you.

  One morning, one of Didion’s colleagues told her she needed an abortion and she’d heard the district attorney’s office had found her name on a “party girl” list making its way around town. She made a deal to rat out the good-time racket in exchange for the DA’s arranging a legal D & C at Doctors Hospital. Didion would use this incident in a scene in Play It As It Lays.

  It wasn’t Doctors Hospital, but at Columbia-Presbyterian on East Sixty-seventh Street where Didion took her anxieties. An internist there whose mother-in-law had once been editor in chief at Vogue calmed her whenever she came to him frantic because her period was a day late. Blue Nights mentions the day he told her she’d need a ticket to Havana, his way of saying her rabbit test indicated an abortion might be in the cards and he would arrange it.

  But there’s a revolution in Cuba, Didion protested, uncomprehending.

  The doctor misted plants on the bookshelves in his office. There’s always a revolution in Cuba, he told her. Within days, she started bleeding. All night she cried—from relief, she thought. Then she realized she wanted a child.

  In the mornings, now, the baby carriages near Donnell Library made her ache. On the evenings when Parmentel didn’t arrive, she’d cut baby-food ads out of the paper and tack them to the wall beside her bed. In Blue Nights, she calls her sudden longing for a child a “tidal surge.” She’d stare at the babies’ eyes and imagine the children were hers. She’d burrow into blankets and squeeze her pillow.

  * * *

  It was clear. She needed not to attend more parties but to assert control, the control of a woman who could keep a checkbook.

  Maybe they’d feel better if they got married, made some plans, she said to Parmentel. He demurred. Or he’d turn the talk from babies to sex.