The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  A few weeks before the convention, she and Dunne flew back to New York for a Goldwater rally in Madison Square Garden. William Buckley was there, seated in a one-thousand-dollar box; all of the attendees “with the possible exception of Senator Goldwater” appeared eager to “kiss the hem of his garment,” Dunne wrote. “It was an idolatry that Mr. Buckley gave no sign of thinking either unjust or untoward,” even though, from the perspective of a new Californian, it was anachronistic. Republican power had shifted to the West.

  An ugly tone characterized the rally, presaging the San Francisco event and American political style ever since. Dunne noted “the repeated droll allegations in the Garden that liberals were double-gaited, limp-wristed, and generally so light on their feet they could dance on a charlotte russe.”

  “The stench of fascism is in the air,” California governor Pat Brown warned the press in San Francisco as the Republican convention gaveled to order. At Goldwater’s instigation, 70 percent of the convention delegates voted down a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act.

  While authorities in Mississippi were still searching for the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, cheerful shouts caromed off the Cow Palace walls. “The nigger issue” was going to sink LBJ, a Republican aide told one reporter.

  “A new breed of Republican had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operating in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany,” said Jackie Robinson, the baseball player and special delegate that year for Nelson Rockefeller. “The convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life.” He was appalled when Rockefeller was booed as a moderate Easterner. Several times that week, Robinson felt physically unsafe.

  An African-American television reporter named Belva Davis and a fellow black journalist were chased out of the Palace by delegates yelling, “Niggers!… I’m gonna kill your ass!” “The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hotdogs, half-eaten Snickers bars.… Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull,” Davis said.

  Fury at the Civil Rights Act was matched by the Republicans’ anger at the media. NBC newscasters Chet Huntley and David Brinkley felt distinctly threatened when trapped in the elevators at the Mark Hopkins Hotel with delegates muttering under their breath that they were “crypto-liberals!” One day, one man said to another, in Brinkley’s hearing, “You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they’re being broadcast from Moscow.”

  This was all the result of the “greatest campaign in history,” according to Richard Nixon’s introduction of Goldwater as Goldwater accepted the party’s nomination for president. Goldwater’s speech fanned the week’s violence. He swore the country would not “stagnate in the swampland of collectivism” or “cringe before the bully of Communism.” It would not bow before the “false prophets” reversing the “tide of freedom” by expanding civil rights. This new legislation, he suggested, opened America’s streets to “bullies and marauders.”

  At dinner parties and Hollywood gatherings, Didion shocked some of her fellow guests when she said she would vote for Goldwater again and again if she could. He was a principled man in the mold of the pioneers, of John Wayne, and that was that.

  She shared the Republicans’ disgust with the “liberal media.” The “unspoken, unadmitted” bias in papers like The New York Times hit readers “like so much marsh gas,” she argued. “[M]onkeys,” she said, must be in charge of the Teletypes.

  * * *

  A few months before the convention, Universal Studios released the last Hollywood film Ronald Reagan would ever star in, Don Siegel’s The Killers. Perhaps more than the convention, or any of Reagan’s speeches for Goldwater that year, The Killers bared the methods by which Hollywood money and myths would enter mainstream American politics.

  Joan Didion would understand this dynamic better than any other writer in the country. Partly as an attempt to secure her own survival in L.A., she had studied the culture shaping Reagan. She saw Old Hollywood’s slippage and grasped the anxiety this would cause a man like him. Further, she saw the effects of change on the nexus of fashion, style, and the process of narrative formation that would manufacture Ronald Reagan as a leader for his time (in the interim, it was no coincidence that another Californian, Richard Nixon, had moved American politics toward greater cynicism).

  In The Killers, Reagan plays a mob boss. The movie was made on the cheap. The sets were obviously fake. Universal’s color processing left the scenes washed-out and flat. “By the early 60s, the classical Hollywood filmmaking of the 30s and 40s had become mummified,” the critic Charles Taylor wrote. “The Killers reeks of this calcification.” No place in the movie “seems like anywhere that anyone real could actually exist … In other words, its relation to the Hollywood films that had preceded it is exactly the relation of Reagan’s white-picket fence vision of America to the real thing—a false, shallow copy stripped … to its basest motives.”

  The movie’s plot? It was about how “a hood can become a respectable businessman.” (Just as, twenty years later, the Nicaraguan “Contras” would become “Freedom Fighters.”)

  As Didion had learned, reading the A-lists, Hollywood had never distinguished hoods from respectable businessmen. Reagan’s early career had depended on blurring his vision; he never made a distinction between above or below-the-line deal making. Nor would he—or anyone else here—question the need for the “show to go on,” even if the means had “mummified” and the stage sets were cardboard.

  For the time being, Didion’s grasp of these cultural forces and future consequences remained nascent; she observed their manifestations mostly in the increasingly sad figure of her brother-in-law. In his desperation to retain Old Hollywood glamour and the respect of powerful friends, he was becoming a “fake,” Nick admitted.

  Meanwhile, Didion’s return to New York for the Goldwater rally had further convinced her that she and Dunne had made the right decision in moving to California. People’s assumptions, back east, that she would rush to embrace Manhattan again irritated her. New York was so sentimental about itself, like a lush hamming it up, convinced no one couldn’t love her. New Yorkers’ rote perceptions of L.A.—“smog,” “kooky cults”—were shockingly shallow. In a reversal of Nixon and Reagan, who saw California’s political process as a model for the rest of the nation, Easterners viewed “plastic” Los Angeles as a metaphor for all that was wrong with the country.

  Back in Portuguese Bend, Dunne, still an Eastern boy, referred to his new home as “Lotusland” and was quickly corrected by his guests. At dinner, a visiting New Yorker complimented a Hollywood hostess’s chiles jalapeños and chicken mole. “You cook New York,” she said. “Mexico, actually,” the hostess replied. Didion wasn’t a Lenny-level hostess, but she was learning. The recipes she’d once copied for Vogue came in handy.

  She reflected: Vogue had given her a style even when she’d chafed against it. She’d had to follow it closely to satisfy the magazine’s editors. This year in Portuguese Bend, the problem she’d experienced trying to write film treatments, short stories, and scripts was dearth of style. Nothing to give her direction. No Allene Talmey. Just the ocean surf breaking below, the shifting of the land beneath the road, the wind in the trees. After parties in town or dinners at home, she’d listen, she’d read, trying to hear California. For example, Raymond Chandler on the dreaded Santa Ana winds: “On nights like [this], every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”

  Chapter Twelve

  1

  When anything can happen, everything is already over.

  That’s how 1965 felt to Nick Dunne.

  “Everything was getting wilder. The pressures of social success with its incessant party going began to change me,” he wrote later
. “I started being unpleasant to Lenny, the person I most cared for.” One night, Afdera Fonda, Henry’s then wife, told Nick at a party that he “was not important,” that he was there “on a pass … without significant achievement.” “[I] couldn’t look at Lenny,” Nick said. “I knew she was ceasing to love me.… I had turned into an asshole and that was how I had come to be perceived.”

  On a different night, Nick dragged Lenny to another party she hadn’t wanted to go to. Afterward, they “were in the Mercedes, and the top was down,” he wrote. “We drove in silence for a while and then she told me she wanted to separate from me. I was devastated. I had to stop the car on Sunset Boulevard. I cried. I begged. But she had made up her mind, and she had made plans.”

  Didion and Dunne sided with Lenny through all that followed, though they remained friendly with Nick.

  He moved into an apartment on Spalding Drive in Beverly Hills, by no means a step down. It had a “multipaneled mirrored dining room that could be bathed in red or blue light,” he wrote. Perfect for amorous evenings after dancing in the clubs.

  Initially shocked by pot and rock ’n’ roll, he now applied himself to exploring their limits. It was more important to be “groovy” than glamorous. As the months passed, he grew his hair longer. He went to Malibu beach parties where a rather inept local band, the Byrds, played under wind-whipped tents. He saw a new act called the Doors at a grimy little club called London Fog. He hung around the singer. His apartment became a hip “stop-by, a drop-in kind of place,” he wrote. Harrison Ford, an unknown actor working as a carpenter, “came by for a smoke.” One day, the Doors’ Jim Morrison “stopped by to look at himself” in the dining room mirrors. “He closed the shutter doors behind him,” Nick said. “He turned the blue lights on, then the red lights, then the blue and red together, turning this way, turning that.”

  Eve Babitz, one of Morrison’s lovers, said he was a fat kid who’d lost a lot of weight doing speed. He never could believe how beautiful his body had become.

  That day in the dining room, he looked at himself “from thirteen different angles,” Nick said. “I always thought he exposed himself, but I was never really sure. Then he left.”

  * * *

  Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in a landslide. His campaign had frightened the public, presenting Goldwater as a lunatic capable of destroying the planet. LBJ’s most effective television spot showed a little girl plucking daisy petals as a countdown commenced. Two, one, zero, and then a mushroom cloud swallowed the child.

  Just weeks after the Republican convention, Johnson had announced that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked two U.S. Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. Though Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon questioned the veracity of this claim, Johnson’s speech further alarmed the public. Perhaps a change in the White House would not be wise if war was about to escalate.

  Didion was not alone in thinking dirty tricks were at work. The timing of Johnson’s news was just too neat.

  Meanwhile, up the road at her alma mater, protests against the war had intensified. Peace marches these weren’t. “Hot damn, Vietnam! Hot damn, Vietnam!” Norman Mailer shouted at a yelling crowd one day in the spring of 1965 while he rapidly paced Berkeley’s lower athletic field. “Only listen, Lyndon Johnson, you’ve gone too far this time! You are a bully with an air force, and since you will not call off your air force, there are young people who will persecute you back. It is a little thing, but it will hound you into nightmares and endless corridors of night without sleep. It will hound you.”

  Mailer’s appearance was the latest in a series of campus events signaling the end of the Silent Generation’s reign. Joan Baez showed up with an old guitar to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Gary Snyder read poetry. Prior to that, Berkeley faculty and students had arranged bus caravans to San Francisco to picket Goldwater’s convention.

  Shortly thereafter, a student named Mario Savio, a veteran of the Freedom Summer voter registration drives in Mississippi, somewhat reluctantly led the Free Speech Movement, lashing back at Clark Kerr’s restrictions of political activity on campus. Savio gave a galvanizing speech, trouncing Kerr’s view of the university as a “mechanism held together by administrative rules and powered by money.”

  “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop,” Savio said.

  Inspired by Savio’s words, Ralph Gleason, the San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic and soon-to-be cofounder of Rolling Stone magazine, wrote, “Literature, poetry and history are not made by smooth jowl and blue suit. They are made with sweat and passion and dedication to truth and honor.”

  Governor Brown did not agree. He pressured Kerr to quash the campus turmoil, at any cost.

  * * *

  Didion could not take the protestors or the administrators seriously. Berkeley was not a battlefield; Sather Gate was hardly the entrance to the City of Dis. Rich kids were not revolutionaries nor were the provost and deans the last garrison between civilization and perdition. The demonstrations and the backlash were a game of self-delusion, allowing each participant to claim high purpose and go merrily on his way.

  Neither side respected the spirit of Bishop Berkeley, for whom the school had been named. To be is to be heard, he had said. Let be. Instead, there were bullhorns, tear gas, posturing, and pedantry. Didion still believed what she had thought when she was a student at Berkeley in the fifties: Humanity’s problems were not political, nor could they be solved by political action. The problem was the intractable human heart.

  Norman Mailer should have known that. (She believed Barry Goldwater knew that, which was why she had voted for him—he never would have tried to regulate the world into a happier place.) Mailer’s ranting she found silly, but she had the greatest respect for his writing. In his prose, he said the “right things,” she wrote in a review of An American Dream in the April 20, 1965, issue of National Review, within weeks of his appearance at Berkeley.

  His public persona had done him no favors with the critics. Most dismissed the novel as melodramatic and repugnant. By contrast, Didion hailed the book as the “most serious New York novel since The Great Gatsby.” She saw Mailer succeeding at what she had failed to do in her short stories: capture the stench of decadence in America’s upper and middle classes. She admired his directness, his confidence, even if it did lead to absurdities, such as “[it was an] unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide.” At least here was a writer trying to say something. She thrilled at the novel’s noir romance, as when Rojack, the narrator, says of a lover, “[her] breast made its pert way toward what was hard and certain in my hand.”

  (In years to come, Didion remained one of Mailer’s few female contemporaries who refused to disparage his portrayals of women or his depictions of danger and violence in sex. Some critics would view her heroines as masochistic and her males as hard cases.)

  Mailer was so pleased by Didion’s review, he wrote William F. Buckley: “What a marvelous girl Joan Didion must be. I think that’s one conservative I would like to meet.”

  Eventually, at a party when she was back in New York, Noel Parmentel introduced her to him. When Mailer first glimpsed her striding across the room, he said, “She’s a perfect advertisement for herself.”

  * * *

  Didion perceived a “general erosion of technique” in the published fiction she read. “Experimental” stories, stream-of-consciousness writing emulating the Beats, and improvisational prose—it all made her “nose bleed,” she said.

  “[I]mprovisation is no art but a stunt” she declared in National Review. “[V]ery few of these [experimental] writers are opening any doors at all, preferring instead to jump up and down shrieking imprecati
ons at the locksmith.” Catch-22, she said, displayed “real vacuity.” (It had become a bible of sorts on the front lines at Berkeley.) J. P. Donleavy and Thomas Pynchon failed for her because they refused to “follow or think out the consequences” of what they wrote. They would not “go all the way with anything,” preferring instead to flit “any way [their] fancy led.” To throw a “picaresque character into a series of improvised situations”—which is what she saw most of the “new fiction” doing—“is to stay as clear of a consistent point of view as one possibly can,” she wrote. Perhaps not only fiction but also the campus protests, the issues of free speech, were on her mind when she added:

  Everyone wants to tell the truth, and everyone recognizes that to juxtapose even two sentences is necessarily to tell a lie, to tell less than one knows, to distort the situation, cut off its ambiguities and so its possibilities. To write with style is to fight lying all the way. Nonetheless, this is what must be done or we end up maundering. We tell nothing. To tell something, really tell it, takes a certain kind of moral hardness.

  With great sadness, she identified another problem: People talked about movies now more than they talked about novels, and they did so in the way they used to talk about novels, analyzing and arguing their merits to an absurd degree. In a shockingly short time, literary cachet seemed to have lost its luster.

  2

  Passé or not, fiction remained paramount in Didion’s mind even when she went to the movies.

  Lilith, a Robert Rossen film released late in 1964, caught her eye. She did not think it very good, but certain scenes—of a “well-dressed, high-strung young woman” playing gin rummy in a mental hospital—teased her thoughts. For Didion, the problem with the movie was its insistence on answering the question, What is wrong with Lilith? This was a little like the Berkeley protesters asking, What is wrong with the world? and believing that, once they knew the answer, they could fix everything.