The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Halberstam got the details from Didion and Dunne:

  All week, colleagues kept coming by to laugh and congratulate Dunne on his good fortune in getting the Vietnam assignment. He was very nervous about it, even more so on Friday, when a strong file came in from Mohr that began: “Vietnam is a graveyard of lost hopes.” … Dunne agonized over [what to do], went out for a drink with his fiancée … Joan Didion, and proceeded to get very drunk.

  The couple went to the Chalet Suisse on West Fifty-second Street and ordered fondue. “There’s no way Time is going to print this story,” Dunne said miserably.

  “Write it the way he sent it,” Didion urged him.

  He shook his head.

  Halberstam: “He decided he would not return to the office but would call in sick. Miss Didion stiffened his spine; if he were a man, he would go back and write the truth, which he finally did, half drunk, staying up most of the night, turning out the worst piece of writing he had ever done for the magazine but keeping it faithful to Mohr’s file.”

  The “story was of course completely turned around” once the senior editors got hold of it. Instead of a losing war effort, there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” On Dunne’s original copy, Fuerbringer had written, “Nice.”

  With Didion’s support, Dunne asked to be relieved of Vietnam assignments. From then on, he was given minutia to cover. An expected raise never came through.

  * * *

  Dunne had saved the October 19, 1962, special issue of Life magazine devoted to the “Call of California: Its Splendor, Its Excitement.”

  He had always “dreamed of being an adventurer,” he said, and of going to someplace exotic, like Thailand, where there was “a whisper of opium and there were women always called sloe-eyed, wearing ao dais and practiced in the Oriental permutations of fellatio.”

  His daydreams mushroomed in the Charley Mohr fallout. When his fantasies lit on California, they didn’t altogether dissipate. He was engaged to a Californian. If her permutations weren’t “Oriental,” they were sufficiently complex to have kept his interest for half a decade.

  “The longing in man’s heart for a better life has driven him throughout history to seek out a brighter land,” Life proclaimed. California! “Its only limitations rest within the power contained in the burning sun…”

  The magazine hailed the Golden State’s visionaries: Clark Kerr, educator; Joan Baez, a “tuneful source of … wistful intensity”; Robert Di Giorgio, agriculturalist, whose “modern methods of skillful management” were poised to lead America’s march to prosperity in the 1960s.

  Dunne knew from his dealings with editors, and from conversations with Didion, that California’s stories were not nearly as simple as Luce would have them seem. Perhaps stronger, stranger narratives were waiting to be uncovered out west.

  * * *

  Of course, marriage was an adventure, but to hear the couple talk, they viewed their coming nuptials as just another assignment. Block it out, bring it in on time. What’s the angle? Get it right. The first public announcement of their engagement appeared in the editor’s notes column of National Review.

  “[W]e did not guarantee to each other at the end of the first week that we would still be married at the end of the second,” Dunne recalled.

  “I don’t know of many good marriages,” Didion said. “I don’t know of many not-good marriages, either.” What difference does it make? It’s an “exercise in self-improvement.” Like keeping a notebook.

  This certainly wasn’t the grand passion she had shared with Noel Parmentel. No thunder and earthquakes. She had decided pragmatism offered better long-term benefits than passion. Good-bye to all that.

  “It wasn’t so much a romance as Other Voices, Other Rooms,” Didion admitted. The reference was to Truman Capote’s 1948 novel, in which a rather effeminate, tale-telling lad pursues a distanced and troubling friendship with a moody tomboy (Capote and Harper Lee as played by Dunne and Didion).

  She contemplated Dunne’s spying, his eavesdropping—hobbies, he said, “without emotional investment.” She feared he was “clinically detached”: a useful quality for a reporter but maybe not so good around the house. Still, the fact of his reporting explained his centrality to her life. He was a writer. He was there. On the ground. He knew what on the ground meant. How could she not be married to a writer? Who else would put up with her self-absorption?

  She loved the way, when he thought he was alone, he’d loosen his tie and stand in front of the mirror, singing nasally, “Who can I turn to / When nobody needs me?” He was utterly, hopelessly tone-deaf.

  5

  “Marriage, writing, who could figure it out? It was easier for the guys. I remember, we all thought, I’d like to be a guy writer,” Didion’s friend Jill Schary Robinson told me. “Male writers—like Greg Dunne—they had mystique and access. Oh my God. They were surveyors of their land and of their society, and they caught it. And they could do something we couldn’t do. They could fight. Girls were supposed to be polite.

  “The thing about Joan is, she never questioned, ‘Am I a writer?’ even when she was about to marry Greg. So many of us took so long to say, ‘This is what I do and to hell with everybody else’—I’d abandon projects left and right to fall in love with another idiot or work on someone’s political campaign. But Joan was designed to do this, the way a Ferrari is designed to do what it does.”

  Nevertheless, Didion had to sit in the shadows, engine idling, watching “the guys” race toward the Guggenheims: Philip Roth, Josh Greenfeld, Brian Moore. Her novel languished on bookstore shelves. Tacitly, she felt, women were not in the game.

  This was not a protofeminist stance. “She never got involved in the movement because she was beyond that, anyway,” Robinson said. “Joan was just Joan. Of course, where she grew up made that possible. She was so independent. She didn’t seem strangled by family or conventions of any sort.”

  In literary New York in the 1960s and 1970s, female role models—those who successfully balanced work, independence, and personal fulfillment—were rare. Who could a young woman turn to? Djuna Barnes? “I’m in a serious decline and the young dykes are driving me crazy,” she’d say, “but should I recover, perhaps they’ll hear from me.”

  Lillian Hellman? She posed regularly for Vogue and appeared at all the literary parties, but her reputation seemed to rest largely on Dashiell Hammett, for whom she’d become the professional keeper of the flame. The pleasure she took in this role made Didion uneasy.

  Mary Bancroft? Didion took great delight in her: a true free spirit, a child of money (The Wall Street Journal), a former CIA spy, companion to Carl Jung, Allen Dulles, and Henry Luce. Everyone in the publishing industry hoped to snap up her memoirs. But again, her luster seemed linked to the men she’d drawn.

  * * *

  The women in Greg Dunne’s family wondered how this little thing had snared their baby boy. She wasn’t one of them. “My mother had a party for us [in Hartford] and we had a hundred and twenty-five people,” Dunne recalled. “There were one hundred and twenty-four Catholics and Joan.”

  His engagement saved him, gave him something to think about on those ruinous days at his desk.

  Time assigned him to cover “by-elections in Lichtenstein, Scandinavian sexual mores, and Common Market agricultural policy.” For one piece, he was forced to compose the sentence “How small is a small tomato?”

  On November 2, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was brutally assassinated in Vietnam.

  * * *

  Three weeks later, in San Francisco, Didion entered a grand four-story edifice on Post Street. It was the home of Ransohoff’s, a department store selling itself as “San Francisco’s independently owned specialty shop, traditionally known for quality and fashion.” Alfred Hitchcock had chosen the store for a key scene in his 1958 film, Vertigo. Despite its chattering crowds, airy ceilings, and spacious aisles, the place felt intimate, even cozy.

  Didion had come to purchase a wedding dress�
��backless, white, short, made of silk.

  On leaving the store, she heard that John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

  In the following days, in newspapers and magazines, the amount of column space given to Jackie’s wardrobe at the moment of the assassination was astonishing. Her pillbox hat and strawberry pink double-breasted Chanel wool suit dominated many accounts of the Kennedy shooting. The suit was described yet again when Jackie insisted on wearing it, stained with blood, at Lyndon Johnson’s swearing-in on Air Force One, just before flying back to Washington, D.C.

  At JFK’s funeral, Jackie, the Vogue girl, the Prix de Paris winner, became the nation’s mother, stiffening the spines of her children; she became the nation’s mourner, dignified in her grief, proudly bearing the public’s sorrow; in years to come, she bore the nation’s memory and myths, crafting the story of Camelot.

  Women may not have been in the game, but women were what the game was all about.

  * * *

  “It’s when a woman is thirty—give or take a few years—that she comes at last into her personality. Her hour has struck. From then on begin the magnificent years, the beginning of youth with its frustrations and crotchets drained away—the nerves, suspense, suffocations finally gone. In that ‘soft green meadow’ of time, a woman emerges from the dream enclosing her, into an era of equanimity and realism.” These words, probably written by Didion, appeared in Vogue four months before the thirty-four-year-old Jackie Kennedy lost her husband.

  Didion was twenty-eight at the time, on the verge of marrying, of leaving New York and starting a new life.

  “At thirty she knows what the teen years were meant for: a preparation for something fascinating to come,” the Vogue article stated.

  Accompanying the article was a large picture of Jackie, taken through a car window streaked with rain. The lengthy, complex caption, jeweled with a literary reference, was almost certainly the expression of the once and future Californian:

  The time was right for her, no doubt about that. We wanted to grow up. She came along, and suddenly we forgot about the American girl—that improbably golden never-never child who roved through the world’s imagination with a tennis racket, an unmarred make-up, and some spotty phrase-book French—and fell in love instead with the American woman, a creature possessed of thoughtful responsibility, a healthy predilection for the good and the beautiful and the expensive, and a gift for moving through the world aware of its difficulties, its possibilities, its large and small joys—the kind of American woman who at her best can be, as Henry James once said, “heiress to all the ages.”

  Jackie. Joan. Ready to leap—or thrust by circumstance—toward whatever came next.

  6

  In Vertigo, Kim Novak’s character leaps from the bell tower of the mission church at San Juan Bautista. At another point, Jimmy Stewart’s character dresses her up to be the woman he wants her to be—in Ransohoff’s. He has fallen in love with a phantom, a woman who never existed.

  In choosing to buy her dress at Ransohoff’s and to recite her marriage vows in the mission church at San Juan Bautista—hardly a coincidence—Didion turned her wedding into an elaborate movie reference.

  Hitchcock’s love of voyeurism must have appealed to the groom. After all, he said his first intimacy with his bride-to-be had followed a spying incident, in a scene reminiscent of Rear Window. Later, in her essay “The White Album,” Didion would describe her general response to the late 1960s, in the first years of her marriage, as “vertigo.” Perhaps the movie in-joke, involving mistaken identities, fictional characters, paralyzing phobias, and a suicide attempt beneath the Golden Gate Bridge (recalling Didion’s fears for her father during his days at Letterman) was the couple’s way of hedging their bets: a little self-conscious levity masking a serious commitment.

  Around forty people, mostly Dunne’s family, with the exception of his aunt Harriet, a devout Catholic who objected to the ceremony (Dunne was marrying outside his faith), attended the wedding on Thursday, January 30, 1964.

  Dunne had not, until that day, met Didion’s mother. Eduene walked up to him and said, “You know those little old ladies in tennis shoes you’ve heard about? Well, I’m one of them.” (For Christmas that year, Dunne gave her “the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed,” Didion said. The Eastern Catholic and the Western libertarian warmed to each other swiftly.)

  The church, dedicated in 1812, located at the foot of the Gavilan Mountains, was the largest of the California missions. A stone dove, representing the Holy Ghost, hovered above a large font in a central aisle situated between short wooden pews. The church’s bloodred floor tiles, made of stone and cement, had been dried outdoors before being laid; as a result, skittish animal tracks marked them. The curved interior arches, painted white and earthy tan, had been decorated by a sailor who’d jumped ship in Monterey in 1816. He became the first American citizen to settle in California.

  Didion did not want a formal procession. The ghosts of the pioneers and the natives they had conquered were enough for her. She wore her short backless dress and cried softly throughout the ceremony behind a large pair of sunglasses. Dunne wore a navy blue suit.

  Given her fascination with geology, she probably knew that the San Andreas Fault ran through the mission grounds, along the base of the hill below the cemetery. The 1906 earthquake had collapsed a side wall of the church; the damage was still evident on the day of the wedding (the wall would not be fully repaired until the late 1970s). The couple stood at the altar along with the best man, Dunne’s younger brother, Stephen, who would one day commit suicide. They were joined, as well, by Dunne’s four-year-old niece, Dominique, a flower girl. She would one day be strangled to death. Cognizant of the family drama—aware that, to parents, a child’s marrying is “the classic betrayal”—and overwhelmed by the odds against happiness in life, Didion promised Dunne that, if necessary, they would release each other before “death do us part.”

  * * *

  A reception followed the wedding at the Lodge at Pebble Beach, a one-story log cabin–style inn overlooking the ocean. The couple honeymooned first in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, toasting each other in the sprawling indoor spas, admiring the blossoms along the highways, and then, bored, fled to the Beverley Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. California was every bit the luxurious adventure Dunne had thought it would be.

  It’s intriguing to think that at the Beverly Hills Hotel the couple might have watched on a television the Beatles’ first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, on Sunday, February 9. Possibly they found the Beatles, with their prim suits and neatly groomed long hair, silly. But a new music was about to sweep aside the old, the innocence of the Beatles’ early lyrics—“I wanna hold your hand”—shadowed by the sexual urging of bass and drums. Rock ’n’ roll wasn’t fresh in 1964, but the Beatles put a stylish face on it (Vogue was a fan), spreading its subversive undercurrents far across and deep into the culture: black gospel, rhythm and blues, Dust Bowl laments laced with Anglo-Irish warrior screams. Within a few years, the Beatles’ double record, popularly known as The White Album, would disorient and fascinate Didion; she’d find it ominous and disturbing, emblematic of the decade’s darkest eddies. By 1968, the adolescent eagerness of “From Me to You” had given way to “Cry Baby Cry.” The honeymoon was over. During this same period, the nostalgia in Didion’s prose would sharpen to a razor edge and finally flake away. Eventually, she’d offer her version of The White Album, a verbal mirror of the horror in the Beatles’ least-played, but arguably most important track, the sound collage “Revolution 9,” a mash-up of car wrecks, protest shouts, burning buildings, gunfire, warfare, weeping babies.

  * * *

  Back in New York, after the honeymoon, Didion returned to what people were talking about:

  The Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight in Miami. Days before the bout, Clay had posed for photographers with the Beatles (“So who were those little faggots?” he a
sked after the shoot). Like pop stars, he seemed dismissible, a garrulous clown—but with edgy undertones, especially when, a day after upsetting Liston in the sixth round, he changed his name to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali. What was the Nation of Islam?

  The American Supermarket, an art show planned for the Upper East Side gallery of Paul Bianchini and Ben Birillo. The space would resemble a small supermarket featuring a painted bronze watermelon by Billy Apple, a plastic turkey by Tom Wesselmann, and dozens of chrome eggs by Robert Watts. In particular, Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s soup cans would surely confound patrons as to what was art and what was junk and what difference did it make?

  A young short story writer named Donald Barthelme, about whom there was notable literary buzz. His first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was scheduled for publication in April and was already being hailed as bold, crazy, wildly innovative. Warhol had taken pictures of Barthelme in Times Square; the photos appeared in Harper’s Bazaar along with shots of other writers, dancers, and painters to watch.

  People were not talking about Run River.

  Joan Didion was not a writer, dancer, or painter to watch.

  How could she get traction on—or even begin—a second novel with “a lot of people talking to [her] all the time about their advances”; with all the glib, faux-intellectual chatter in the bars? One day, Dylan Thomas was all the rage. Then it was Auden. Then it was Yeats. “The Second Coming,” the center giving way—what the hell did these green, gloomy writers know about the Apocalypse?

  And then there was Noel, apparently happy to gad about town giving people “unshirted hell about their ethnic backgrounds, social proclivities, and general raisons d’etre.” This was his description of a character in Jack Gelber’s play The Apple, a “drunken reviler of all and sundry,” reportedly based on him.

  Come to Norman’s party, he’d say to Didion. Ginsberg will be there. C. Wright Mills. Tiger Jones. Mobsters and beauties.