Already, “crapshoot” had become their favorite metaphor for marriage. They’d joke to lessen fears about the pressures they faced. “We needed … money because neither one of us was working,” Didion said.
She’d kept her reviewing gig, but Vogue’s enthusiasm for the pieces she filed began to wane. Was she being punished for not staying in New York? In retrospect, she’d hint that she was fired either because a senior editor disapproved of the films she chose or because her review of The Sound of Music suggested lesbian diddling between Julie Andrews and the Mother Superior. In fact, the review asserted no such thing; Didion said the movie was “like being trapped on a dance floor and crooned at by a drunk.” “Take back your Alps,” she wrote.
Didion’s real problems with Vogue were the magazine’s push for greater revenue and its discovery of Pauline Kael. Kael was offered a column. From the beginning, the women did not see eye-to-eye. Of the Jane Fonda movie Cat Ballou, Kael wrote, “It will probably be a big success, and it’s so much better than a lot of movies around that, relatively speaking, it deserves it.” In the following issue, discussing The Sons of Katie Elder, Didion appeared to take a swipe at her compatriot: “This is an old-fashioned action Western, the kind Cat Ballou tried so dismally to make fun of.” Shortly afterward, she stopped reviewing for Vogue.
The bigger issue for Didion was Si Newhouse’s more aggressive conception of what the magazine business should be. “At the time I began working for Vogue, there was a clear understanding that it was not a magazine for very many people,” Didion told Meghan Daum. “It had 250 to 350,000 subscribers and then a large pass-along readership, but it was specifically designed as a magazine for not very many people. [Later,] once … Newhouse had bought it and settled in, that was no longer the way the magazine was conceived. It had to build circulation all the time. If you’re building circulation all the time, you’re going to have a different sort of magazine”—that is, a watered-down product with wider but blander appeal.
* * *
In her first year at Portuguese Bend, Didion wrote three short stories based largely on her New York miseries. She had no particular passion for the short story as a form. “I was suffering a fear common among people who have just written a first novel: the fear of never writing another,” she said. “I sat in front of my typewriter and believed that another subject would never present itself. I believed that I would be forever dry. I believed that I would ‘forget how.’ Accordingly, as a kind of desperate finger exercise, I tried writing stories.”
Years later, she said she discovered, quickly, that she had “no talent” for stories, “no ability to focus the world in the window.” But in a letter to the actor Buzz Farber at the time, she expressed satisfaction with at least one of the pieces; she had carried off a first-person point of view, normally a difficult challenge for her, she said. As an aside, she told Farber she didn’t like stories about children because such stories were generally self-indulgent.
Didion’s pieces—family dramas and lovers’ tales—were vague, heavy on exposition, quite conventional in shape. The characters were listless, unsympathetic (“[S]he had gone [to the party] only because the soft April twilight saddened her and made her want someone to buy her dinner”). The stories met rejection, from Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Redbook. Rust Hills, then fiction editor for The Saturday Evening Post, did accept “Coming Home,” in retrospect an obvious run-through for “Goodbye to All That” (“When she heard the door close she got up, pulled off the blue silk slip and put on a nightgown, smoked a cigarette until it burned her fingertips, and then took two phenobarbitals from the bottle in Charlie’s medicine chest”).
The story is about a woman in a crumbling relationship with a peripatetic man. She has had an abortion because he did not want the baby: “When she was almost asleep she was able to conjure up an image of the baby, not her own unknown baby (she did not think about that) but the loved baby in [a] baby-food advertisement.”
Writing these stories, far from New York, made her realize once more just how happy she was to be away from Noel’s unpredictability. But there was another reason for her feeling of relief: “There’s a rush to opinion in New York that is kind of destructive, particularly to young writers,” she saw. “It’s very incestuous.”
She was glad to be gone. In truth, she had not held the New York intelligentsia in very high esteem. “Well, of course—her father was anti-Semitic,” Josh Greenfeld explained; her dad’s asides, his little jokes, may have deepened the estrangement she felt in the East.
In any case, she began to feel that one of the great things about Los Angeles “was you didn’t see other writers and editors. You saw a broader range of people.”
The appearance of “Coming Home” in the July 1964 issue of The Saturday Evening Post began a fruitful six-year relationship between Didion and the magazine, during which time she’d write some of her finest essays. Between 1964 and 1969, Didion and Dunne would publish more than fifty pieces there, sharing a column between them, “Points West.” It would be the most reliable source of their income. (Their first year in Los Angeles, she and Dunne would earn less than seven thousand dollars from their freelancing; in the following few years, they’d average around eight thousand from magazine work.) A “sense of impending doom” always hovered about the Post, Dunne wrote—it was financially imperiled because “Middle America read the magazine, but wasn’t buying the products advertised therein; the people whom the advertising was designed to reach didn’t read the magazine; change the magazine and you lost the readers.” The managing editor, Otto Friedrich, fought with his publisher; a mild insanity seemed to inflict the management (once, at a dinner for Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, the editorial director consistently referred to her country as South Korea).
But because the magazine was slowly failing, it was willing to try anything: a lucky situation for the writers, at least for a while. “Respect was grudgingly given, but once granted, the editors would follow you out onto the longest limb,” Dunne wrote.
A far cry from Tinsel Town. Out here on the movie lots, said Jack Warner, writers were simply “schmucks with Underwoods.”
* * *
In 1964, literary cachet still counted for something in certain Hollywood neighborhoods. The novel was a powerful cultural force. Everyone wanted to be Christopher Isherwood—and Isherwood knew it, too, at every party he attended.
Run River had not made Didion a novelist. She was just another person who’d published a book. She’d not made a mark in the pictures. The “fit” Nick worried about—Palos Verdes, the Nova—it was vexing.
Whom did he put them with?
The first time he’d had his brother and sister-in-law over, at a small outdoor Sunday lunch, he’d invited only two other guests, both book people with a toe in the movie pond: Helen Straus, Didion’s literary agent at the time (she’d started in the Story Department at Paramount, then founded the literary wing of the William Morris Agency), and Gavin Lambert, an openly gay expatriate English writer who’d published a book of short stories about Hollywood’s down-and-out modeled after Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. He’d written the screenplay for Sons and Lovers, so he, too, was trying to make a niche for himself somewhere between the literary and Technicolor.
In that spirit, and encouraged by his brother, Dunne went to work on a project—maybe a book, maybe a screenplay, or maybe it would serve as a treatment for something else—product, that was the thing. He called it Show Me a Hero (after Scott Fitzgerald’s line “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy”). It was about a woman named Marjorie caught in a Cold War right-wing plot. Her husband, a spy, is thrown into a Communist prison. A handsome young reporter from Tempo, a Time-like rag, gets wind of the story and falls in love with Marjorie. She “reciprocates carnally in a midwinter tryst in either a cottage on Fire Island or a suite at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, a plot point to be worked out later,” Dunne wrote. In the end, the heroine
is left to choose between love and duty to her husband.
The love story against a backdrop of conspiracy sounds more like Didion’s Conradian mind than Dunne’s, and in fact a letter from Dunne to H. N. “Swanie” Swanson, a legendary Hollywood agent who’d represented William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ayn Rand, among others, says Didion cowrote the film treatment with him.
The letter is dated February 13, 1965, and is notable for two reasons: It is the first record we have of collaboration between Didion and Dunne; it indicates that their screenwriting partnership began immediately after their move to California in the summer of 1964. Second, the point of the letter is to withdraw the treatment from circulation in favor of a novel. Dunne had just signed a contract with Harper & Row. His belief that a movie of Show Me a Hero would be worthier, financially and critically, if it proceeded from the sale of a book, rather than from the direct sale of a screenplay, suggests the cultural power of novels.
Dunne’s letter doesn’t mention that, late in 1964, Didion had taken the film treatment to William Morris. A roomful of agents had offered the couple, as “constructive criticism,” only the advice that they “make the margins a little wider.”
This was typing, not writing; Dunne was grateful for the Harper & Row contract. He told Swanson he and Didion had no further plans for collaboration—she was working on a novel of her own, he said. In the meantime, if Swanson would consider representing Dunne’s TV scripts, or his idea for a series …
The problem was, he had not written any TV scripts. He had not even seen a TV script. He and Didion had plunged into writing for the screen without pausing to study procedures and formats. Years later, Dunne recalled, “We were coming out of [the Daisy] one night about 2 o’clock in the morning, and some drunk actor was having a fight with his girlfriend, and he threw a script at her. And I picked up the script. It was a television script. It was the first script I’d ever read.”
They began to go to screenings, clutching pencils and pads of paper. They diagrammed movie sequences. “Basically the terminology is easy,” Dunne said. He named “three different things. Fade in. Cut to. Another angle.”
In the next several years, beginning with their sale to Chrysler Theatre, they would shed their naïveté about the writing and pitching of scripts. They would witness green-lighted projects go dead, watch other writers take credit for their ideas, get paid for abandoned work, and understand this was simply business. The distinction between literary and commercial, success and failure (on a project-by-project basis) dimmed in their minds. They did not buy the sentimental view that the pictures had destroyed the literary talents of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Almost gleefully, Dunne would come to accept the old Hollywood adage: “If you’re going to be a whore, you can’t complain about getting fucked.”
3
“We were crazy about it. We just loved it. I didn’t even notice that six months had slipped into a year,” Didion said. “It was just easier to do everything, like take your clothes to the laundry.” Dunne extended his leave of absence at Time. He ordered a six-cylinder Mustang convertible, poppy red, from the Ford factory at River Rouge. Didion took to wearing black-and-white sleeveless dresses—they would have been too thin in New York. The couple was getting into the So Cal spirit.
As he had done in Manhattan, Dunne haunted piano bars, trend spotting. “[N]o one goes to a piano bar except to get laid,” he said. The first thing he discovered was that L.A. piano bars were filled with “ad guys from New York, Buckskin fringe, the kind of watch that tells the time in Caracas [and] Djibuti … Spritzer guys, a little Perrier water over the Almaden to cut the California taste,” the kind of guys who checked their Maldive chronometers and said they had to “catch the noon bird back to New York.” The women in these places all had a couple of ex-husbands and El Dorados with about thirty-two payments left on them. One day, at a bar, Dunne met a pro football player who spent eight thousand dollars a year on his wardrobe (“I’m into three-piece suits this fall … Part of the image I’m trying to project is a clean-cut guy in a certain kind of car.”) Dunne was certain he was getting the L.A. vibe.
Didion liked to study the city from the other end of the social scale, at fund-raisers and gallery openings. While Dunne kept a voyeuristic eye on the lowlifes and strivers, she took him to mingle with movers and shakers. This was the strength of their partnership.
Sometimes it seemed to them, though, that they would never fathom how pawns advanced across the board. One night, at a gala dinner, Didion watched, amazed, as Dorothy Buffum Chandler wheedled Jules Stein into contributing $25,000 toward the construction of her Music Center. In return for his gift, she said, she would offer Stein “twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of free publicity” in her little family paper, the Los Angeles Times. The exchange was remarkable for pulling together the political and business interests of Downtown and the Westside, two communities traditionally at odds. Downtowners thought the Westside a place where people exchanged “too many social kisses,” a way of saying it was too Jewish. The tête-à-tête at dinner exemplified a commingling of power and grace the “landed gentry” of Sacramento would have admired but could never quite achieve.
Didion feared she would never acquire the L.A. touch. She was not the accomplished hostess her sister-in-law was. “You want a different kind of wife,” she would tell Dunne in the open Mustang on a late drive back to Portuguese Bend after a party. The refinery flames off the San Diego Freeway burned away the night fog. “You should have married someone more like Lenny.”
“If I wanted to marry someone more like Lenny I would have married someone more like Lenny,” Dunne would say.
At home, Didion sat on the closed lid of the old Victorian toilet and swallowed a phenobarbital.
She began to lose more weight. Her wedding ring kept slipping off her finger. She wore it on a chain around her neck.
She urged Dunne to join her in “planning meetings.” They’d sit together with legal pads, state a problem they needed to solve, and then decide to drive to Santa Monica for lunch.
This seemed to work as well as any other strategy. As six months slipped into a year, they began to feel more at ease at affairs around town. They were less dependent on Nick. It turned out, literary cachet was not difficult to achieve in a place where no one read books. People were lazy and took you at your word.
Socially, it helped that Lenny considered Didion a work in progress. Lenny volunteered at the Colleagues, a charitable organization for unwed mothers. Show business ladies donated their previous year’s wardrobes to the Colleagues for an annual fund-raiser. Didion looked sufficiently waiflike; Lenny set aside Natalie Wood’s castoffs for her. They fit perfectly. Dunne recalled a “white Saint Laurent evening dress, a water-colored satin Galanos evening dress, and a yellow wool bouclé coat by Edith Head that had been part of Natalie’s wardrobe for Love with a Proper Stranger.”
“Outsiders … had to be thoroughly vetted before receiving passports into that closed community,” Dunne wrote. Natalie Wood’s wool bouclé coat was as good a pass as you could get. Soon, Didion and Dunne were dining regularly with Wood and her husband R. J. Wood charmed Dunne, using a table knife as a mirror, holding it up to her mouth while fixing her lipstick. He loved her stories of the old days when the studios took care of everything … like the time (oh, you remember, she’d say) when Nick Gurdin killed a man, driving drunk, and the studio buried the manslaughter charge …
On evenings like this, it was easy to believe you could toss the plans.
It would be oversimplifying matters to say that Dunne’s brother Nick loved the Old Hollywood dream, and as hashish and blue jeans replaced cocktails in the discotheques, he lost his footing. But there is some truth to this. “Everything was changing,” he lamented. “People were starting to smoke pot. I was shocked and disapproving when someone lit up in our house one night … evening dresses were giving way to miniskirts.… Hairdressers started to be invited to parties. Dances chan
ged. The foxtrot was out. The twist was in.… Cole Porter was out. The Beatles were in.”
As his brother’s fortunes rose around town, Nick floundered, drinking too much—he reminded Didion of some of her New York pals—hoping people would forget his spat with Sinatra. By now, he and Lenny had three children, Griffin, Alex, and Dominique. Nick was so busy socializing, he rarely saw them. “The nanny would have the meal with the kids,” Griffin recalled. “The adults would check in, you know, have a little something with us, maybe. But then they’d go out for dinner and dancing. Or we’d be up in the bedroom hearing them getting hammered and just having a fantastic time.”
When the Beatles came to play the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1964, Nick took his kids to meet the moptops at the Brentwood house of Alan Livingston, Capital Records’ president. In the garden, four-year-old Dominique curtsied, as her mother had taught her, when she shook Paul McCartney’s hand. She amused the musicians, whose charm lay in their jokey boisterousness. It was another clash of old and new. Queasy, Nick snapped a picture for posterity.
Meanwhile, Didion’s ardent support of Barry Goldwater posed a major social challenge in the mostly liberal Democratic circles she found herself in. People argued with her that the war in Vietnam was immoral; through Dunne’s Time experiences, she’d become unhappy with the effort, but she figured “a series of such [military] encounters around the world was just part of the way that our future was going to be.” If nuclear weapons might expedite things, they ought to be considered.
Dunne joked about her archconservative values, but he couldn’t keep a cap on her passions as the Republican National Convention approached. It was to be held in San Francisco’s Cow Palace from July 13 to July 16. Didion was furious at the way Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon maneuvered to steal the spotlight from the “true” conservative, Goldwater. Two years earlier, a self-pitying Nixon had declared the country wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore, but he had gotten himself a prime-time speech at the convention and his ambitions were clear. Reagan, on the stump, used a mix of Red baiting, trumped-up anger at “the Eastern elite,” and nostalgia to enthuse crowds, and California Republicans seemed to fall for it. Didion’s anger flared at parties, followed by long silences.
The Last Love Song Page 23