The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Nick Dunne arranged a few initial meetings with TV people. “In Hollywood, if you were related to someone, you’d have no problem getting work,” said Jill Schary Robinson. Tim Steele, a former ABC executive, told me, “Hollywood was always a nepotistic society. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters—no one frowned on that. It helped. It’s true that, in the pictures, writers weren’t terribly well respected, but even writers could gain respect if they had somebody opening doors for them. Plus, there weren’t that many people in it—making pictures is a small business. And once you’re in the system, it’s hard to get out. People just like going to the same people—the devil you know, right? You can get by for a long time by just being okay at what you do, if you’re not arrogant.

  “Every event, every social occasion, is business, and you learn how to behave,” he added. “There’s lots of parties in people’s houses—this keeps it small-townish.”

  Didion’s training in Sacramento, the etiquette she had learned as a girl, helped her see the cues not only to social acceptance but to professional ascendancy (though she was never not aware of Fitzgerald’s line from The Last Tycoon: “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood”). Of life for women in the upper reaches of the entertainment community, she wrote:

  [It was] quite rigidly organized. Women left the table after dessert, and had coffee upstairs, isolated in the bedroom or dressing room with demitasse cups and rock sugar ordered from London and cinnamon sticks in lieu of demitasse spoons. On the hostess’s dressing table there were always very large bottles of Fracas and Gardenia and Tuberose. The dessert that preceded this retreat (a soufflé or mousse with raspberry sauce) was inflexibly served on Flora Danica plates, and was itself preceded by the ritual of the finger bowls and doilies.

  Her brother-in-law’s wife, Lenny, was a superb hostess, well versed in the rituals, though she suspected her efforts were useless. She feared her husband, Nick, was a hack. Frank Sinatra teased him about this, late nights in the Bistro or at the Daisy (Dominick and Sinatra had gotten crosswise on a television program they’d done together). Nick’s career seemed limited, as well, by his medium: He produced TV shows in a town where the motion picture was king.

  Humphrey Bogart had brought him to California to produce a TV show called The Petrified Forest, which also starred Lauren Bacall. Bogart had met Nick while working at NBC in New York and recognized a fellow blue blood; beneath his tough-guy persona, Bogart was an Andover boy. One day, on one of Nick’s early trips to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s (Lenny was still in New York), he gushed to his new friend, “God, I love to look at movie stars!” “Come to dinner,” Bogey said. That night, Nick met Lana Turner, Judy Garland, David Niven, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Frank Sinatra. “I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven,” Nick said. “They just sort of took me in. They accepted me as though I was one of them.” From then on, he became a dedicated name-dropper (and any account of his life risks imitating him). “I called Lenny: ‘We’ve got to move out here! It’s incredible!’ It was everything I wanted.”

  It wasn’t Lenny’s dream. Born Ellen Beatriz Griffin, an Arizona ranching heiress, she liked New York. She had lived for a while at the Barbizon and hoped to be a model. Now, Nick’s Hollywood zeal alarmed her a little. But she packed up her baby, Griffin, and joined her husband in a beach house in Santa Monica, rented from Harold Lloyd. Nick had quit NBC and gone to work producing CBS’s Playhouse 90.

  Immediately, Lenny stepped in as his social conduit. “She was totally comfortable with who she was. I was never comfortable with who I was,” Nick said. “My opinion of myself was nothing. I believed I was everything [my father] had said.” But now movie stars were coming to his home. Lenny, dark-haired and slender, with sexy bangs and smart, steady eyes, naturally attracted people; Nick was good-looking, too, with a genial smile and a pale full-moon face. They gave lavish parties. “People said they were climbers,” said Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band, the movie version of which Nick would produce. “Lenny and Nick’s parties were a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood. If they were famous and they were hot, they were at the Dunnes’.” Included among these guests were François Truffaut, Vincente Minnelli, Natalie Wood, Diana Lynn Hall. And there weren’t just picture people. “David Hockney,” Crowley recalled. “Stephen Spender. Christopher Isherwood was always there.”

  “[It] was the best place to be at that moment in time,” Nick said. His Santa Monica neighbor, just up the road at Louis B. Mayer’s old house on Palisades Beach, was Peter Lawford, Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law. The Kennedys were “made” Irish—what the Dunnes had always striven to be; in 1950, through a college girlfriend, Nick had wrangled an invitation to the wedding of Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Bobby and Jack dazzled him. In Santa Monica, he was awed by the Kennedys’ treatment of Lawford: They’d fly in and demand to use his house for trysts. They’d say, “‘Get the girls, Peter. Get the blow, Peter. Tell Sinatra we can’t come, Peter, we’re staying at Bing Crosby’s instead.’” Nick had heard about the boys’ evenings with Marilyn Monroe in the house’s back bedrooms. By the time the president was slain, he regarded the Kennedys the way Nick Carraway viewed Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

  Still. The call of California.

  Nick moved his family into a white Georgian house on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills. The parties continued. For his tenth wedding anniversary, in April 1964—around the time his brother Greg requested a leave of absence from the Luce empire—he threw a Black and White Ball, based on the Ascot scene Cecil Beaton had designed for My Fair Lady: “Dancing 10:00 p.m., Black Tie, Ladies please wear black or white,” said the invitations. Hydrangeas filled the house, wrapped around specially built white wooden trellises. A tent was raised on the lawn. Two orchestras played after a late supper. Among the many guests were Dennis Hopper and his wife, Brooke Hayward, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Vogue photographer Bob Willoughby snapped Truman Capote dancing with Tuesday Weld. (Two years later, in New York, Capote would famously replicate the ball; he did not invite Nick or Lenny.)

  When Nick’s brother and sister-in-law arrived in town, he worried about the fit they’d make. Palos Verdes? And that goddamned station wagon! (Nick drove a black convertible Mercedes-Benz.) Didion wouldn’t know a French dress if it bit her. She confessed she felt relieved at four P.M. each day when she didn’t dip physically—she’d almost always had a hangover in New York. And now, more parties? But, honey, this is business.…

  At night she would walk the road’s center stripes, parting the fog with her arms. In the bathroom, she rummaged through the medicine cabinet, looking for something to ward off her migraines. Her husband switched back and forth between television programs, one showing an evangelist shouting at people in wheelchairs, the other featuring an actress discussing the pleasures of “balling.” With the window open, she and Dunne would lie in bed in the dark, listening to the surf, trying to conceive a child.

  2

  “The freeway is forever!”

  On the radio all summer, this slogan rode the static. If you didn’t like the city’s traffic, said one talk-show host, you could “go gargle razor blades.”

  In her second novel, Didion would offer unforgettable freeway scenes, but in fact she feared the roads at first, the Chevy Nova not armor enough to reassure her she was safe. She had reversed and reenacted the pioneer trek across the continent, west to east and back again. It was the nature of the trail to be surrounded by casualties.

  Dunne, on the other hand, appreciated the egalitarian drift of the merging lanes, speed and anonymity the great equalizers. It’s when you exited, into Silver Lake, Alhambra, Bell Gardens, South-Central, Beverly Hills, that you plunged into the world of class, social politics, one-upsmanship, the grids of misery and privilege.

 
On the freeway, along the matrices of the area’s original railway lines, space became time (the experience of passing through) and place motion. Much of the road planning was new when Didion and Dunne arrived (a 1960 Life magazine article spoke of “ribbons of freeway … gradually tying the city’s scattered pieces together”). People were split on what car culture was beginning to do to Los Angeles. Old residents argued that highway designers treated the “space between [destination] points [as] a social wasteland devoid of human significance.” Local meant nothing. But young drivers said they’d bonded under siege: Look, we’re surviving this rush hour together! It’s our weather, our low- and high-pressure systems!

  The inescapable truth was this: Los Angeles was the twentieth-century American city, the first city whose physical layout and social order owed its patterning entirely to a real-estate- and petroleum-based economy. Didion would catch its tenor in Play It As It Lays, conceiving of American life as a series of “audacious lane changes,” a hurtle “straight on into the hard white empty core of the world.”

  For men and women here, at the heart of American business, commuting defined each day. A transitional act, getting from point to point, assumed front and center. It was like turning a footnote into the main body of the text.

  * * *

  Transitions seemed to be the order of the day. Old Hollywood was becoming New Hollywood (though the phrase “New Hollywood” would not become press parlance for another few years). All over town, Didion recoiled from people’s anxieties about the change.

  “What was happening was, the studios were dying, but they didn’t necessarily know it,” said Tim Steele. “This all went back to a pivotal moment in 1948. The antitrust decree was the beginning of the end. It said you couldn’t vertically integrate the movies. You couldn’t make and distribute them. The studios had to divest themselves of parts of their process. So Paramount, for example, divested itself of its theaters. It became the nucleus of ABC-TV. Film studios began to make television programs, stretching themselves thinner than before.” Former power blocs, economic strongholds, splintered. The old master players had turned feeble: Adolph Zukor, of Paramount, was ninety-one in 1964; Jack Warner was seventy-two; Darryl F. Zanuck, at Twentieth Century–Fox, had just turned sixty-two. If the studio heads were slower and stiffer, the tools of the trade had gotten lighter. “Better technology meant the movies began to be mobile,” Steele said. “Till then, the movies didn’t like to go anyplace. That’s what the back lots were all about.” Another move toward decentralization.

  For newcomers like Didion and Dunne, these shifts made reading the cues—personal, professional—trickier than it might have been: One day’s verities vanished the following afternoon. Each Monday morning, there was a new ass to kiss.

  “When the Old Hollywood fell apart, it devastated the social scene,” said Jill Schary Robinson. Her father, Dore Schary, was the first writer to become a studio head (MGM). She had grown up in the “dream factory,” along with other children of the traditional patronage system: Candice Bergen, Mia Farrow, Marlo Thomas, Tina Sinatra, and Shelley Wanger, daughter of Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger. Eventually, Shelley would become Didion’s book editor at Knopf.

  In the forties and fifties, Hollywood was “like a little neighborhood,” said Marlo Thomas. “[W]e used to call it ‘the Village.’” Eve Babitz—soon to be Didion’s friend, a source of great entertainment to her—said the girls at Hollywood High were “too beautiful for high school”; they “were the downfall of any serious attempt at school in the accepted sense, and everyone knew it.”

  Life was aphrodisiac. And then it fell apart. But not so you’d know it at first. You had to catch the cues.

  A year before Didion came to town, Kurt Niklas opened the Bistro on Canon Drive, bankrolled by sixty people at about three thousand dollars a pop. Nick Dunne was an original investor, along with Jack Benny, Tony Curtis, Otto Preminger, Frank Sinatra, and Alfred Bloomingdale. An “unassuming little Beverly Hills restaurant,” according to the Los Angeles Times, serving “perfectly cooked” capellini, “impeccable” onion soup, and “wonderful clams casino.” It appeared to be the latest extension of Old Hollywood glamour, catering to the Reagans, the Kennedys, actors and producers. In 1962 the Daisy, a private discotheque, opened on Rodeo. Its exclusive membership fee jumped from $250 a year to $1,000 as its popularity grew and it burnished the Hollywood legend. “Compared to The Daisy, all other discotheques are slums,” Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated. “It is a place where this great montage of thigh-high miniskirts and glued-on Jax pants are doing the skate, the dog, the stroll, the swim, the jerk, the bomp, the monkey, the fish, the duck, the hiker, the Watusi, the gun, the slop, the slip, the sway, the sally and the joint. Like all good Beverly Hills children, Daisy dancers never even sweat.”

  But the signs of change were apparent: an edgy knowingness (celebrities need someplace “evil” to go, Jack Hanson, the Daisy’s owner, was quoted as saying), a sweet, smoky smell in the parking lot, a “hip” sneer in people’s greetings, a rawness in table manners. The night it became most apparent this was not the Old Hollywood was the night Frank Sinatra paid the Daisy’s maître d’, a gentle man named George, fifty dollars to walk up to Nick Dunne’s table, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face: “Oh, Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr. Sinatra made me do it…”

  “I was the amusement for Sinatra,” Nick said later. “My humiliation was his fun.” Here was the social order’s devastation, the brave new world. Now, Hollywood power meant having the ability to “make a decent man do an indecent act.”

  Or perhaps none of this was true.

  Perhaps New Hollywood was the Old Hollywood, just as California had never really changed. Was the “Lost Village” just a sloppy game of nostalgia? Styles and manners altered … but the fundamentals?

  In Blue Nights, Didion casually mentions sitting one afternoon at the “corner banquette” of the Bistro, at a spot usually reserved for Sidney Korshak. By way of identifying Korshak, she quotes the producer Robert Evans: “Let’s just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.”

  In fact, all coyness aside, Didion knew quite well who Sidney Korshak was. He was a fixture in Old Hollywood—and now in the New—part of a group of Eastern European Jewish men originally from Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit. They had moved west to launder money in real estate, casinos, and lavish hotels, and to get in on the “flickers,” the fledgling motion picture industry. They had extended their reach into the state’s Democratic and Republican parties. Hollywood insiders referred to them as the “Kosher Nostra.”

  People called Korshak “the Myth,” “the Fixer,” or they simply called him a “mob lawyer” (reportedly, Robert Duvall’s character in The Godfather was based on him). Nick had been to several parties at his house—each time shocked by the armed guards beneath the trees; along with Nick, Korshak had been one of the Bistro’s initial investors. His corner banquette, table three, was known as Korshak’s office. There, on a specially installed telephone, he had numerous “furtive conversations” with “such corporate titans and political lions as Al Hart, Lew Wasserman [head of Universal/MCA, along with Jules Stein], Paul Ziffren [a Democratic Party player, who’d made a killing selling assets seized from Nisei families in internment camps], Pat Brown, and Gray Davis,” journalist Gus Russo reported. “There were also confabs with ‘Dodgers people’ such as Walter O’Malley and team manager Tommy Lasorda.” Korshak had helped evict the squatters in Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be built; as the Dodgers’ “labor consultant,” he was “responsible for keeping the cars parked, the lights on, and the food service employees behind the concession stands”—while drawing up stadium contracts for his pal Beldon Katleman, owner of the El Rancho Vegas casino. Katleman was a regular at Nick Dunne’s parties and balls.

  When Korshak wasn’t di
ning in the Bistro, people vied to be seated at the notorious table three just for the thrill of it (Didion was no exception). Here’s where Hollywood’s deals got done. When he bustled in, the office was open for business. Niklas would seat him, get him a drink, escort starlets to the table so they could kiss his cheek.

  “Along with his pal Lew Wasserman”—who nudged Ronald Reagan to become president of the Screen Actors Guild to do his labor bidding under the guise of anti-Communism—“Korshak ran the town,” Tim Steele told me. “Anytime there was a problem, he was involved. He was the Teamsters’ lawyer. The Teamsters were so powerful because in Hollywood you can’t get anything done without a truck.”

  And you couldn’t have the New Hollywood without the flooring of the Old. Sometimes it was hard to tell the gangsters, the politicians, and the movie stars apart (for example, as one of Jules Stein’s MCA clients, Ronald Reagan got an early break in an Iowa nightclub controlled by the Chicago Outfit).

  As the daughter of a gambler, Didion knew the look of deals being made, that little twitch of the mouth, masking supreme confidence. Raymond Chandler once said movie moguls at a luncheon look “exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor.” There was a “psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money … and the rackets,” he said. “Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”

  * * *

  They were gamblers in a town that loved to play.

  “We were forced to sit in a house together and write to make a living, and neither one of us, I think, thought we could do it,” Didion said. On top of that, “I had no idea how to be a wife. In those first years I would pin daisies in my hair, trying for a ‘bride effect.’” She sounds, here, like Lily McClellan in Run River. “[B]oth John and I were improvising, flying blind.”