The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Portsmouth failed to mute his sexual curiosity. According to Vegas, the older boys from New York talked about a club called the Lido in Times Square, and a pair of sisters, dime-a-dance hostesses there, who’d laid half the boarding school boys in the East. Like everything else, Dunne realized, sex boasts were all about class.

  One evening, after sitting through rollicking tales of the Stork Club and La Rue, he was asked—challenged, really—by one of the cocky New Yorkers, “Where you from?” “Hartford,” Dunne said (after a long day of classes, dropping the t and r’s in the manner of the lace-curtain Irish, “Ha-fod,” giving himself away). “I think I’ve heard of it,” the boy said with a nasal whine, signaling his fine breeding.

  One weekend, Dunne managed to get to New York with a pack of hungry boys. Wearing his maroon school blazer, he bought a dollar’s worth of tickets to the Lido. He stood and watched women smoke cigarettes. The women were too young to be as ravaged as they looked. “Though it was three years after Hiroshima and seven since Pearl Harbor, the only song on the jukebox seemed to be ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,’” he wrote. He returned to Portsmouth still a “cherry.”

  His father had always insisted his children enroll in the best colleges in the East. The eldest brother, Richard, went to Harvard. Nick attended Williams. When John’s time came, his mother and his aunt Harriet pressured him to realize his father’s wish. “Hartford was a Yale town,” he said. His mother “had always wanted a son to go to Yale … [and] Yale was where the Yanks went.” But his anger at the Yanks’ condescension had hardened into Frog Hollow defiance and he rebelled by going to Princeton. “I was just a tight-assed upper-middle-class kid … [with] this sense of Ivy League entitlement,” he said years later.

  On his entrance essay, he wrote that in college he hoped to meet “contacts who might help me in later life.”

  At Princeton, he developed a jaded sophistication, but the pose didn’t free him of class resentments. Everyone he met was grooming himself for a vice presidency at Procter & Gamble (“Princeton in the Nation’s Service”), except, perhaps, for his even more ambitious classmate, Donald H. “Rummy” Rumsfeld.

  The boys all claimed to be sexual “swordsmen.” At parties in nightclubs in New York, he was reminded of the cocky Portsmouth kids and his awkward evening at the Lido. At one such affair, in his sophomore year, his brother Nick introduced him to a motion picture press agent named John Foreman, who was showing off a young actress, Grace Kelly. She had just appeared with Gary Cooper in High Noon. Later, Foreman would become a friend and professional connection; already, the Hollywood crowd Nick courted proved lucky for Greg.

  Four days shy of his twenty-first birthday, Dunne “finally made contact” with one of the legendary sisters he’d been hearing about since Portsmouth, he wrote. He said he called her from a bar in Times Square, made his way to her Fifty-second Street flat, near the mobbed-up cafés, and paid twenty dollars to lose his virginity among Salvation Army chairs and a couch. The woman had Ivy League school pennants pinned to her walls, and a photograph of Princeton’s a cappella choir, the Nassoons.

  In 1954, Dunne graduated with a degree in history. At his mother’s insistence, he applied to the Stanford Business School, but then he changed his mind and volunteered for the draft. Nick had been a war hero, earning a Bronze Star for saving a wounded soldier in Felsberg, Germany. “John was always fascinated by that period of my life,” Nick said, but if Dunne hoped to trump his brother’s accomplishments, or simply compete with him, he was soon disillusioned. In basic training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, he learned the army was a “constituency of the dispossessed—high school dropouts, petty criminals, rednecks, racists, gamblers, you name it—and I fit right in,” he said. Before then, he had not spent much time with America’s “white and black underclass.” He told George Plimpton, “I grew to hate the officer class that was my natural constituency. A Princeton classmate was an officer on my post [at Fort Carson, Colorado] and he told me I was to salute and call him sir, as if I had to be reminded, and also that he would discourage any outward signs that we knew each other. I hate that son of a bitch to this day. [Later] I took care of him [in print].”

  Revenge, and the settling of class scores, would always supply him with literary fuel.

  Dunne served in a gun battery in Wertheim, Germany, near the Czech border. There, he said, military training consisted mostly of learning “to appreciate whores.”

  In 1959 he went to work for Time in New York. He was twenty-seven years old. He had been bouncing around Manhattan, working as a messenger for an ad agency, living with four roommates in a fifty-six-dollar-a-month town house in the Silk Stocking District. “Every failure in New York” populated the place, he said: “A guy who had failed the New York bar exam twice, and failed a third time while he was there, was typical.”

  At night, he ate Hydrox cookies and swilled milk in his room while trying to write a novel about a movie director. Sometimes he’d slip out, on his own, to a piano bar. There, watching the desperate singles hoping to make contact, he could spot the latest fashions, hear the newest pickup lines. Social research. Once, in a club in the East Fifties, he saw Warren Beatty “tinkling the ivories”—before he was a star and before he’d “started going to bed with household names.”

  Dunne got a job at Industrial Design magazine, writing several hours a day in a cubicle on Fiftieth Street facing St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He’d lied about his reporting experience (he concocted a résumé claiming he’d worked on a Colorado Springs daily). He parlayed this into the position at Time through a woman he was dating. She was seeing a writer in the magazine’s business section. The Luce men were all Ivy Leaguers and looked after one another.

  At Time, Dunne earned $7,700 a year, writing about stocks and bonds, about which he knew nothing. In the evenings, “waiters from the Tower Suite, on top of the Time-Life Building, rolled in buffet carts with beef Wellington and chicken divan and sole and assorted appetizers and vegetables and desserts,” he said. Liquor was dispensed in “prodigious quantities.” Hotel rooms “were available for those suburbanites who had missed their last train, or would so claim to their wives when in fact all they wished was an adulterous snuggle with a back-of-the-book researcher.” There were “limousines to take us home, Carey Cadillacs for most, but I secured a company charge account at Buckingham Livery, which used only Rolls-Royces, and when I turned in my expense accounts no one objected. It was not journalism, but it was fun.”

  Eventually, he moved into better digs on East Seventy-third Street. Occasionally, his brother Stephen, who was hoping to become an art designer, shared the apartment with him.

  According to his friend and colleague Calvin Trillin, Dunne was the “most creative gossip at the magazine.” He “was always discovering two people who worked for Time necking in some place you’d never go, like Washington Heights. His typical sentence would begin, ‘I just happened to be going through the lingerie department of Bloomingdale’s yesterday, when who should I see…’”

  “I was a jerk,” Dunne said flatly.

  * * *

  His new lover was alarmingly frail. Headaches every week (he knew what that was like), weight fluctuating from little to less, fingers trembling, snapping like sparrows’ beaks whenever she wanted to stress a point. She seemed increasingly distressed at the lack of discipline and order in the lives of her friends. Perhaps for this reason, she relished imposing her will whenever she could. When her cousin Brenda got married, “I was still trying to run the game, make the rules, have it my way,” she admitted. “There would be at Brenda’s wedding, I promised her, nothing banal, nothing ordinary.… I had decreed: there would be … checked gingham and wreaths of daisies.” Right up until the guests were seated, Didion was hastily disporting the wreaths.

  It was the sense of “great calm and order”—the relief of it—in the Hartford house of Greg Dunne’s mother that made Didion think, “I want to marry him,” she said.

&nbs
p; He had invited her to dinner one night in New York, one of those weeks of parties and more parties and another round of drinks, martini lunches and editorial meetings, bars smelling of disinfectant, sugar, and chocolate, rips in the hem of her plaid silk dress and no safety pin to keep it taut, and he had said he was going to spend the weekend with his mother in Connecticut. Would she like to come?

  “The minute I got into this house,” Didion said, “[I] felt peace and well-being.… There were meals. There was a closet full of organdy tablecloths on long rollers—the way they came back from the French laundry, under tissue.” Here, away from deadline pressures and tedious chatter about people’s publishing advances, their editor this, their agent that, she and Dunne could share anxieties about their novels in progress without any fuss. They sat by the hearth at night, stoking the wood, close and warm in wavering circles of light.

  Chapter Ten

  1

  Possibly it was in the Graben Hotel in Vienna, while on assignment for Time in November 1960, that Dunne caught the clap. He remembered being back in New York, a week later, at a black-tie party with a crowd watching the Kennedy-Nixon election returns and telling his date he “couldn’t”—he had a “small problem of Teutonic origin.” The woman told him she had a similar malady. The times they were a-changin’. Or maybe not.

  In any case, as Time’s newly appointed “Saigon-watcher,” he flew to Indochina and “fornicated for five weeks,” he wrote. “I didn’t even know where the countries were, so I asked Time if they’d send me there. I was a bachelor, so I said I’d take my vacation there … if they’d pay my air fare, and they said okay.” Eventually, in “what now seems a constant postcoital daze, I floated to the nascent realization that the war beginning to metastasize in Vietnam was a malignant operation.”

  He met David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Peter Arnett. “I respected these guys … and they were all saying things are not like the Pentagon says they are.” He was confused. On the flight over, he’d thought his job was to “set straight the local reporters whom [his] editors thought had gone native.” Later, he was grateful when Halberstam “overlook[ed] this impertinence.”

  He met a former colonel in the Turkish Air Force who had been recruited by the CIA for the Bay of Pigs invasion. This man had come to Vietnam to work off his contract following the Cuba fiasco. From his chopper, he said, what he saw was “all shit.” Dunne tried to shake the chill of this with sweet drinks at Saigon’s Cercle Sportif or with whores in Cholon.

  His fascination with prostitutes, instilled in him in the army, had not abated. This could have been a sore spot, given his growing bond with Didion. Still, he indulged only when he traveled. Most months, his Vietnam reporting consisted of sitting at his desk in Manhattan, tailoring for mass consumption weekly cables sent to the office by the Southeast Asia bureau. The biggest problem with his assignments was the novel he was trying to write—he could never get to it.

  Meanwhile, despite a strict nightly regimen, Didion was struggling to give shape to Harvest Home. She was thinking of retitling it In the Night Season. Perhaps the trouble lay in the story, which didn’t much interest her. What interested her were sunsets and heat, neither of which she was able to enjoy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. There was always something missing. In an instant, the days got dark. Before writing in the evenings, she’d stroll to the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, one of the few vantage points in the city where the disappearing sun could be witnessed in its fullness. On the weekends, she’d walk to the Hudson to be in the presence of moving water. She knew homesickness, more than plot, tickled her prose, but a novel needed a plot. She’d stolen, as a kind of dresser’s dummy for her narrative, an incident she’d read about in the Times, a one-inch story about a man in South Carolina on trial for killing the foreman on his farm. Perhaps the trouble lay in the incident—maybe it wouldn’t translate to Sacramento. Perhaps the trouble lay in the characters. Lily and Martha, the women in the story, were not nearly as interesting to her as Everett, Lily’s husband, but what did she know about a man’s point of view? Perhaps the trouble lay in her work ethic. “I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world,” she’d reflect years later. “Ten pages in, I’ve already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That’s very discouraging. I hate the book at that point.”

  In Dunne’s apartment, she’d pull out the Wicker Dale Spode his mother had given him—dinner plates, salad plates, butter plates painted with blue flower petals and roses—and she’d cook for them, and they’d sit together on his black chintz couch (also a castoff from Mama) and bemoan the miseries of fiction.

  To add to his worries, Dunne was certain he was on a collision course with his editors at the magazine. His immediate boss, Otto Fuerbringer, bought the Pentagon’s view of Vietnam, and so did Henry Luce, but Charley Mohr, the ground reporter whose cables Dunne edited each week, was telling a different story. Mohr’s doubts confirmed Dunne’s suspicions, formed on his visit to Indochina, that the American effort was faltering. Soon, Dunne was not going to be able to smooth things over with his bosses by softening Mohr’s tone or leaving out certain details. It would be a matter of reporting accurately or deliberately lying to the public.

  2

  When Didion had typed around 150 manuscript pages, arranged so that sunsets didn’t utterly overwhelm incident (though she wanted the novel “to be very complicated chronologically,” she said, “to somehow have the past and present operating simultaneously”), she sent the pages to a publisher. The answer came back no. She mailed the pages again. Same result.

  She cried on the subways. She wept in Laundromats. Someone had told her to breathe into a paper bag when the tears got to be too much and she felt herself hyperventilating, but the bags smelled of onions or the sweet after-scent of apples. It no longer cheered her to buy crab boil at her favorite Czech market in the East Eighties. “A friend would leave me the key to her apartment in the West Village when she was out of town, and sometimes I would just move down there, because … the telephone was beginning to bother me,” she wrote of this period in “Goodbye to All That.” “I remember one day when someone … came to pick me up for lunch there, and we both had hangovers, and I cut my finger opening him a beer and burst into tears, and we walked to a Spanish restaurant and drank Bloody Marys and gazpacho until we felt better.”

  The most memorable image in “Goodbye to All That” is the “fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk” hung across her bedroom windows because she “had some idea that the gold light would make [her] feel better.” In fact, the loose curtains only got “tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms.”

  She had moved out of her Park Avenue apartment, leaving “everything in it, even my winter clothes and the map of Sacramento County I had hung on the bedroom wall to remind me who I was,” she wrote. “[I]t was all breaking up.”

  Noel Parmentel took the Park Avenue apartment. Her new place was a four-room floor-through at 41 East 75th Street, across from the Whitney Museum. Beneath her was a nursery school. “[T]hese dwarfs would go out into the garden at odd hours of the day, and they would all scream,” she said. She had two garden chairs, lent by friends, and a double mattress and box spring. She had her unfinished manuscript. She would live with it fiercely.

  No, said a third publisher. Then a fourth.

  She’d meet Dunne for long lunches at a Chinese restaurant near the Time-Life Building. “Its specialty is being two blocks away,” he’d say. She enjoyed his ease with the city, the way he could turn almost anyone—waiters, fellow diners—into an audience for his stories and jokes. The staff at this particular restaurant knew him well. He’d wave a finger and summon a martini—unless it was a Wednesday or a Thursday, when the magazine’s weekly deadlines howled in his ear. Then the waiters would bring a white wine spritzer or a club soda. The lunches were less enjoyable than they used to be because of Charley Mohr’s gloomy cables. Also, like Didion, Dunne was begi
nning to feel restless and stale in the trenches, everyone talking about the books they were writing, only they weren’t really writing them, or if they were, they couldn’t get them published, and—oh!—the people getting published were just the worst sorts of folks—it was like being snowbound in a village full of nuts.

  After Didion had unsuccessfully peddled her manuscript to half a dozen publishers, she appealed to an old friend. “The usual suspects all turned it down, so I more or less nagged Ivan into publishing it,” Parmentel told me. “Ivan” was Ivan Obolensky.

  He was a distinguished gentleman. (“He used to say, ‘Everybody who comes from Russia claims he’s a prince,’” said Parmentel. “But he really was a prince.”) His small imprint was solid and well respected. He gave Didion a contract—“just to get me off his back,” Parmentel joked. She felt lucky. In fact, she could not have wound up with an editor more at odds with her sensibilities.

  * * *

  Ivan Sergeyevich Obolensky was born to a Russian prince in London in 1925. He was the grandson of John Jacob Astor IV, said to be the richest man in the world when he died on the Titanic. Educated at Yale, formerly a navy pilot, Obolensky formed a publishing company with David McDowell in 1957. “I wrote this book, Rogue’s March, and David and Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf [at Random House] thought the world of it,” Obolensky told me. “David was my editor and I figured, What the hell, why don’t we start our own house? So I scared up ten thousand dollars.”

  McDowell had befriended James Agee through Father James H. Flye at St. Andrew’s School in Sewanee, Tennessee. At Vanderbilt, he met the young writer Peter Taylor. McDowell had a penchant for “pounding the sidewalks and just plain selling the books,” said James Laughlin, a poet and the founder of New Directions. This, along with his links to Southern authors, put McDowell and Obolensky on the map. Under their imprint, Agee’s A Death in the Family appeared posthumously. It won the Pulitzer Prize and became a bestseller.