The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  It was a little like her father’s “mind guys” swearing by Letterman’s hydrotherapy units when probably a bourbon highball at happy hour was just as effective.

  Quite possibly, what was wrong with the world was the conviction that something was wrong with the world—specifically, people’s “refusal to believe that the irrational might prevail” just as easily as the “rational.” In a review of Lilith in Vogue (one of the last regular reviews she filed with the magazine), Didion wrote that the “irrational” was not a damaged version of the orderly; it was simply “something quite different.” To ask, “What makes Lilith schizophrenic?” was like asking, “What makes Iago evil?” or “Why Auschwitz?”

  “I wonder if to ask is not beside the point,” Didion wrote.

  Six years later, her second novel would begin with a woman in a mental institution declaiming, “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

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  In May 1965, Mary Bancroft wrote Didion from New York to say she’d appreciated Didion’s piece on An American Dream in National Review. On May 9, Didion replied with her thanks. Only about six people in the country seemed to have liked Mailer’s novel, she quipped.

  A series of letters to Bancroft followed from Didion and Dunne; these, along with Dunne’s letters to various editors and agents detailing his literary projects, allow us to trace the couple’s life during the period spanning what the slicks called Freedom Summer to the Summer of Love.

  It’s clear that, in spite of warming to her new life in California, Didion felt separated from the literary world. She told Bancroft her “constitutional inferiority” had surfaced and infected everything. A visit from Dunne’s old pal Calvin “Bud” Trillin reinforced the conviction that she was missing out. The New Yorker had sent Trillin to cover the Berkeley protests. This was Didion’s territory. She was skeptical of Trillin’s ability to really “get” the story, especially when he wrote long and fast between breakfast and drinks and swimming in the ocean.

  Tom Wolfe was another interloper getting a lot of mileage out of the West, writing about California car culture. Didion found his prose hit-or-miss—his editors were too lax with him, she thought—and when he sent Dunne a business letter on colored construction paper, she wondered about his sexuality.

  She told Bancroft she heard from Noel Parmentel only when he was particularly high or particularly low. She worried about him. Apparently, he was carousing somewhere in the South with Richard Leacock, making a documentary about the Ku Klux Klan. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act and Malcolm X’s murder, the South might not be the best place to be right now, even for a Southerner, she thought. But Noel had a genius for worming his way into places where he probably shouldn’t be.

  * * *

  She probably shouldn’t have been in Mexico earlier that year—not with Trillin and Wolfe eyeing her turf—but she had talked The Saturday Evening Post into sending her to a suburb of Mexico City to visit the movie set where John Wayne and Dean Martin were busy filming interiors for The Sons of Katie Elder. The Duke in the flesh! But he had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and was shooting the movie against his doctor’s orders. He insisted on doing his own stunts. The man truly was a hero.

  “John Wayne: A Love Song” recounts Didion’s experiences at Estudio Churubusco and firmly establishes the Didion we would come to know on the page: the gambler’s daughter, the outsider, the trenchant observer of telling gestures. For example, Wayne—his face “in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s,” Didion writes—observes “the Code” at a commissary lunch of huevos con queso and Carta Blanca beer, the Code of Movie Star, the Code of American Man: he “wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes in 165 flickering frontiers.” But in the late afternoons, Didion saw him turning to the oxygen inhalator he’d tucked away on the set. She heard his racking cough. He had a bad cold. He had a tire around his middle.

  After puncturing Hollywood pretenses—her own as well as the reader’s—Didion ends her essay with the lure of nostalgia. Longing will not let us go, even when we know better, and this is what makes “John Wayne: A Love Song” a signature Didion piece: It becomes an elegy not just for an individual but for an era.

  One night at dinner, on an ordinary evening, “an evening anywhere,” Didion says, she and Dunne had a “lot of drinks” with Wayne and his wife, Pilar. Wayne, too, was ordinary by now, just a guy wrapping up a job. “And then something happened. Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the dream.” Three mariachis came and serenaded the table with “The Red River Valley.” Wayne lifted his wineglass “almost imperceptibly” toward his wife. The guitar players “did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this,” Didion writes. Here we have it: the persistence of longing despite a discordant rhythm; the awareness of loss and the gesture of recovery in making a story to pass on to others; no, not just to others—to “you.” This is as personal as can be.

  Something else: that contrarian streak. Wayne was adamantly pro-war. He was rumored to be a member of the John Birch Society. Just as she was becoming a Hollywood insider—though she never would have perceived herself so (“Oh yeah, she became the ultimate insider,” said her friend Ben Stein)—Didion chose to profile a figure despised by her new liberal friends, a proponent of views bucking cultural trends.

  Never mind Bud Trillin: In context, “John Wayne: A Love Song” was Didion’s piece on Berkeley’s unrest, though she never mentions the campus. Her ode to the cowboy is the Silent Generation’s last hurrah. Her finest early essays would all be distinguished by a stubborn refusal to tack with the prevailing winds.

  In Mexico City, at week’s end, she and Dunne were grumpy and tired. She may have caught Wayne’s cold, and even then it might have borne a flu that would linger through the spring. The days were hot, the streets thronged with Texans drunk on money and margaritas. Every stranger the couple met told them they had to see the new anthropological museum. Dunne had no interest. He argued with Didion about it. Finally, one evening at around six o’clock, she set off alone. “I have found my way around plenty of museums without you, never you fear,” she yelled at her husband, and slammed the hotel door. Wall plaster crumbled into dust at her feet.

  The massive Pedro Ramírez Vázquez building, made of volcanic stone, overwhelmed her: a modern edifice with the power of a ruin, brutal and timeless. Her encounter with Wayne had put her in a pensive mood; similarly, the museum’s giant Olmec head, its jade bats and stone fountains impressed the ephemeral on her, the way objects tend to outlast their makers, leaving behind only faint, flawed glimpses of history. She stood for a long time in front of a fountain, the tourists’ chattering fading behind her. The shattering of the water, the prickles of drops on her face, brought to mind the word immolation.

  That evening, over drinks, she made up with Dunne. She told him she might like to spend more time in Mexico, maybe a few months in the Yucatán. “Two months might be stretching that particular role,” he said, and she laughed. He had caught her. Her dreaminess. Her nostalgia for Lost Domains. She knew he was right. They ordered more drinks and listened to an orchestra play “The Yellow Rose of Texas” for a group of good ol’ boys in the corner.

  Later, while poring over a map of Mexico, looking for the Yucatán Peninsula (Dunne may have been humoring her), they were captivated by the words Quintana Roo, the name of a territory on the peninsula’s eastern side—an unexplored wilderness. They promised each other that if they ever had a daughter, they would name her Quintana Roo.

  * * *

  “[S]he cradles herself in her own arms, as women do when they are cold,” Alfred Kazin wrote in a profile of Didion in Harper’s magazine.

  She was cold a lot in the spring of 1965 after returning from Mexico City. She had a stubborn flu. In late March, this flu seemed to culminate in a case of blindness. S
he told Mary Bancroft that for nearly six weeks she lost vision in one eye.

  In his profile, published a few years later, Kazin said this “traumatic blindness” occurred “after a miscarriage.”

  At first, the doctors at the Beverly Hills Clinic thought she had arsenic poisoning. They tracked her history of migraines and the various drugs she had taken to control them, including self-administered histamine injections (“You don’t look like a migraine personality,” one doctor told her). They noted her heavy drinking and her reliance on Pall Malls. They tested her, suspecting multiple sclerosis. She interpreted this as their way of saying they didn’t know what it was. It might or might not go away, they said. It might chronically affect her eyes, her legs, her speech. Or it might not. Cortisone shots might or might not help. They forced her to sit in one waiting room after another, listening to Muzak, “Mountain Greenery” over and over.

  She phoned National Review in New York and said she was having a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t file her scheduled book reviews.

  Eventually, her eyesight returned.

  “I had, [at this] time, a sharp apprehension not of what it was like to be old but of what it was like to open the door to the stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife,” Didion would write of her medical ordeal in The White Album. “[T]hings which happened only to other people could in fact happen to me.”

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  Didion’s brother, Jim, didn’t know what to make of Dunne on those occasions when the couple traveled up the Central Valley to visit Didion’s family in Sacramento. “Joan’s husband,” he’d call Dunne to his face. Dunne was “uneasy” in the house, Didion wrote, “because once there I [fell] into their ways, which [were] difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate.” He was stunned by Eduene’s habit of not cleaning (once, with his finger, he wrote the word D-U-S-T on tables and countertops in every room; no one noticed). “[W]e appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals, about people we know who have been booked on drunk-driving charges, and about property, particularly about property, land, price per acre and C-2 zoning and assessments and freeway access,” Didion said. On one visit, when Jim failed to engage Dunne on the topic of sale leasebacks, the men slumped into an awkward silence. So “[w]e miss each other’s points, have another drink and regard the fire,” Didion wrote.

  Back in Los Angeles, the Dunnes got invited to parties now without Nick’s aid. “Joan and John were tremendous celebrity-fuckers,” Josh Greenfeld said. “The thing is, they really knew how to work a party. They’d go through a party in twenty-five minutes and talk to everyone they had to talk to, and go.”

  Connie Wald, widow of producer Jerry Wald (Mildred Pierce, Key Largo) and hostess par excellence, became very important to Didion. Didion studied Wald’s dinner gatherings: buffets of “red” chicken, roast pork loin, gnocchi, spaghetti puttanesca, all laid out in the dining room of her Dutch Colonial house in the heart of Beverly Hills. The Dunnes were seated next to Gore Vidal, Gene Kelly, Rosalind Russell—A-list all the way.

  She met Tom Wolfe. He seemed androgynous to her, not a “fairy,” she told Mary Bancroft, but something entirely new.

  She did everything possible to get invited to Christopher Isherwood’s house in Santa Monica. Isherwood thought the Dunnes “were strivers,” said L.A. art critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, a view confirmed by Isherwood’s diaries. “Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All,” he called them. Didion “spoke in [a] tiny little voice which always seems to me to be a mode of aggression. Or an instrument of it, anyhow; for it must be maddening in the midst of a domestic quarrel. She drinks quite a lot. So does he.” After one party, he noted, “Those tragic and presumably dying women, Lenn Dunne and Joan Didion were around, no doubt feeling as sick as they looked. How can they martyr themselves by going to these get-togethers? Is it really preferable to staying home? Are they so afraid of loneliness?”

  Isherwood’s longtime partner, Don Bachardy, told me, “Well, it was obvious why Chris didn’t warm to Joan. She doesn’t like fags. Really—I always thought, What’s she doing, married to John? I’ve never been as cruised by anyone as I was by him. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my crotch. He always seemed very queer to me, and so did his brother Nick. I couldn’t understand how John could be so obvious about it. It was embarrassing to me. And Joan was around the whole time. She had to know. Women who are married to queers or who find out later … it has to be very peculiar for them. And it’s easier to blame the queers than the husband.”

  Bachardy’s remarks should be taken with heavy pitchers of salt; they’re best understood in light of Dunne’s class background, which made him feel perpetually excluded from whatever was happening, intensely curious about experiences he might be missing. Hence, his voyeurism, his reporting, his fascination with crime and prostitution (obsessions he would play out in his fiction), with getting invited to every party in town, a need he shared with his brother Nick (who, as it happened, admitted his bisexuality shortly before his death in August 2009).

  * * *

  What made a good party back then?

  “Harrison,” Eve Babitz told me. She meant Harrison Ford: beautiful young actors not yet sure of themselves. “And Joan, of course. The best cook, ever.”

  Babitz charmed Didion and always made her laugh. She was a writer and artist, the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky. In 1963 she’d posed for one of the most famous photographs in modern art history, playing chess, nude, with Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of his retrospective show at the Pasadena Museum of Art.

  She became an “art groupie/art model” around L.A. “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. Usually it’s Eve Babitz,” said her friend Earl McGrath. For a while, she worked for Ahmet Ertegün at Atlantic Records, designing rock album covers. She met Didion through McGrath, a quintessentially L.A. creature, dabbling in a bit of everything—movies, music, art. “Mostly, he was supported by his wild Italian wife, Camilla,” Babitz said. Camilla was the daughter of a countess. Footloose with pots of money, “Earl just poked around L.A.,” Babitz said. He was one of Nick Dunne’s great friends. “What he really wanted to do was cast movies with people like Harrison. He’d flit here and there. He’d pop into my lover’s apartment unannounced at seven every morning. ‘Oh, hello, Earl.’”

  Like Didion, Babitz grasped the importance of style: Watch styles change, she thought—in fashion, music, cars (“Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”), culinary and aesthetic tastes—and you’re a step ahead of everyone else in predicting where the culture will go. What “serious” intellectuals dismissed as passing fads was, in fact, the ball game. For example, “Marilyn Monroe was [a] role model,” Babitz pointed out. But then Hollywood abandoned the “Rubenesque” woman. “Marilyn had died [and] all the skinny girls were coming out and then when the Beatles came the skinny girls took over … the girls on the Sunset Strip. The girls that would go every night and get all dressed up and wear gloves and fake eyelashes and, you know, Jax dresses … it was just about sex.”

  It’s striking that Nick Dunne, enchanted with the Old Hollywood, and Eve Babitz, eager to tweak it any way she could, both marked with great melancholy a cultural sea change timed to the Beatles’ arrival in the States. And though, of course, Hollywood had always been about sex, it had gotten harder, and this could end only one way.

  * * *

  Many of the girls Babitz saw on the Sunset Strip wound up at night at the Chateau Marmont, a 1920s-era hotel modeled after the Château d’Amboise in France’s Loire Valley. The hotel was situated between Beverly Hills and Hollywood. The old movie studios used to rent rooms at the Marmont as safe havens for their stars’ bad behavior. “I mean, it was built for, you know, peccadilloes,” Babitz told the writer A. M. Homes. “You know, if you want to commit suicide, if you want to commit adultery, go to the Chateau. It was the height of elegance.”

  Inside the hotel’s walls, among the crushed velvet sofas, the glass chandel
iers, and the tiny elevators lined with signs (IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE, REMAIN CALM), guests could embrace the illusion that the Strip was not just sex; it kept its noirish charm; the ghost of Marilyn might waltz through the door any minute.

  Visiting New Yorkers loved to stay there because they could believe they’d landed in Europe rather than in Los Angeles.

  Earl and Camilla McGrath lived in the Marmont. “When I was growing up … the hotel was always part of our lives,” Griffin Dunne said. “You know how some families have these uncles, they’re not really their uncles, but you say uncle. Our uncle was a guy named Uncle Earl … Earl and Camilla lived in the fifth-floor penthouse.… [It was] the largest terrace space in Los Angeles.… If you’re a kid it’s like going to a castle.”

  Sometimes, on weekends, Nick picked up the kids and took them to the Marmont. Occasionally, there, he’d meet his brother and sister-in-law. They’d sit and drink, trade gossip. To Didion, life was beginning to feel once more like an endless debauch, but she was also not immune to feeling left out, and she appreciated it when a party was well done, brought off by a consummate performer. Magical evenings, like those at Connie Wald’s, helped mitigate sadness and ease the burden of the tawdry.

  Her greatest melancholy had to do with her longing for a child.

  One afternoon, an acquaintance she’d met at a party invited her to her Malibu home. They sat together on the terrace, overlooking the sea, drinking wine and trying to catch a bit of sun. The woman told Didion her husband had been born the night the Titanic went down. This sentence struck Didion as the kind of line she might use in a fiction (if only she were writing fiction!), but she couldn’t keep hold of it; she was more intrigued by the woman’s confession that she’d like to rent out her house and be with her children, who lived in Paris now. Didion told her she wished she could afford the one thousand dollars a month to rent the house. “Someday you will,” the woman said. “Someday it all comes.”