The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Hungover slightly, Didion drove back to Portuguese Bend. Before going home, she stopped at a supermarket and overheard a checkout clerk telling a customer she had no choice but to divorce her husband because he had a seven-month-old baby by another woman. Didion nearly crumpled with dread “because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover,” she said.

  4

  On August 11, 1965, in the Watts neighborhood, a white Highway Patrolman stopped a black driver on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The officer called for backup; a growing crowd felt the police were using excessive force (especially when the driver’s mother and brother arrived, heightening tensions). People began to throw rocks and chunks of concrete. Soon, cars were aflame. A police sergeant, Ben Dunn, said South-Central Los Angeles looked “like an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country. It bore no resemblance to the United States of America.” Thousands of National Guardsmen were mobilized to restore order.

  Noel Parmentel, who’d come to town to visit the Dunnes, insisted they go down there.

  Later, Didion would write coolly in her essay “The White Album” of the fires that burned at night, visible for miles on the freeways; she’d interview Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, who said of the riots, “Black people had been taught non-violence; it was deep within us. What good, however, was non-violence when the police were determined to rule by force?” (Newton would become a Hollywood favorite, invited to parties, posing for photos with Dennis Hopper and Jane Fonda, and producers such as Bert Schneider [Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show], looking to snag a little street cred). What Didion didn’t say in “The White Album” was that she spent the evening in Watts cowering in the backseat of the car, afraid she’d be shot by a National Guardsman, while Parmentel ran into the streets, shouting, “Press! Press!” (He did have legitimate press credentials at the time, from his work with CBS Reports and Richard Leacock on the documentary Ku Klux Klan—Invisible Empire.)

  Parmentel got lost in the chaos. Worried, Didion and Dunne returned to Portuguese Bend, where they found Dick Harden prowling the grounds with a shotgun big enough to bring down a “goddamned elephant,” Dunne said. “I’m going to be ready in case people come out here,” he insisted.

  Thirty-six hours later, Didion located Parmentel in the Chateau Marmont, where he was telling riot stories to a roomful of starlets. Then he was off to San Francisco with a lady friend to hang out with the editors of Ramparts magazine on a houseboat off Sausalito. He’d be back, he said. Upon his return, he drank and roamed the house, telling terrible jokes in mock Yiddish, grousing about Bobby Kennedy, griping about his mother, berating Didion for her shallow celebrity life. How square she’d become!

  She’d retreat to her bedroom to smoke and calm herself with sewing. Or she’d whip up a meal in the kitchen, though this was not terribly soothing, as something was always boiling over or thickening too fast. She found she was only happy at the typewriter or polishing silver; otherwise, she felt paralyzed. She loved Noel, but she couldn’t wait for him to leave.

  According to Dunne, on Parmentel’s last night in California, the two men squared off in a bar at three in the morning, arguing about the life the Dunnes had chosen, and threatened to kill each other with chairs. Parmentel disputes this.

  Shortly before his plane took off the next day, the three old friends embraced and said they must get together again.

  Years later, on the back of a framed picture she’d had hanging on the wall, Didion discovered a scribbled note to her from Parmentel (clearly meant to be found in the mists of time during some move or moment of change). It accused her of behaving badly toward him: “You were wrong,” it said.

  * * *

  That fall, after “John Wayne: A Love Song” appeared in the August issue of The Saturday Evening Post, she received a note from Wayne. “The Old Duke” was gratified, he said. It did a fellow good to be written about that way by a woman.

  Chapter Thirteen

  1

  Something was happening in the Central Valley. Sid Korshak had “his ear to the ground,” Dunne wrote in a pocket notebook. In Sacramento, Anthony Kennedy—the future U.S. Supreme Court justice and brother of Didion’s childhood friend Nancy—was preparing to work as a lobbyist for Schenley Industries. (Schenley, a liquor producer, would soon be charged with delivering illegal kickbacks to restaurants in California and New York.) Like Korshak, like Robert Di Giorgio, Kennedy was worried about laborers in the fields.

  What had them all stirred up was a secular saint or little tyrant—depending on whom you talked to—named Cesar Chavez. With Dolores Huerta, he had founded the National Farm Workers Association. On September 8, 1965, when Filipino laborers mounted a strike against grape growers in Delano (pronounced De-lay-no), Chavez supported them. He emerged as a compelling leader and local media magnet, a figure of resistant humility with sad eyes and stumpy legs.

  On the long drives up and down the valley to visit Didion’s family—“like driving four hundred miles on a pool table”—Dunne wondered, along with his wife, what the real stories were, the narratives beneath the headlines. While Burt Bacharach, Herb Alpert, or the 5th Dimension dithered from the car radio, as dust scratched the bottoms of the clouds and brown bodies bobbed up and down against the blue ridges of the Coast Range, the couple talked about doing a magazine piece on Chavez. Dunne’s novel was nowhere—he’d written fifty or so bland pages. Perhaps a few days in the fields, a little reporting, would refresh him. In Sacramento or Portuguese Bend, he collected newspaper profiles of Chavez, articles on the workers, interviews with the growers: “Cesar is a mystic—he’s always reading books on evolution.” “The growers say the strike is just a battle, not the war.…”

  Dunne wrote his literary agent, Carl Brandt, in New York, that in California’s Central Valley the mythology of the thirties was at work in the sixties. Nothing had changed. Time had stopped. It was very much a story worth exploring.

  So was Vietnam. Don McKinney, the Dunnes’ editor at The Saturday Evening Post, had hinted that the magazine might send them out if they wanted to go—given Dunne’s experience with the subject and given that the war had intensified following the North’s attack on Pleiku, along with Operation Rolling Thunder, LBJ’s massive new bombing campaign.

  Dunne wasn’t sure. His wife knew the valley’s history, its social peculiarities; she told him stories of coming to the valley as a child, eating short ribs and plucking cherries from her father’s bourbon cocktails in Gilroy, the “Garlic Capital of the World,” where even the hotel napkins smelled of processed garlic. With her help, he might make a richer story than he could with Vietnam. He liked the idea of working with her. He picked up another article on Chavez and underlined the following passage: “It was rough in those early years,” Chavez said. “[My wife] Helen was having babies and I was not there when she was in the hospital. But if you haven’t got your wife behind you, you can’t do many things. There’s got to be peace at home. So I did, I think, a fairly good job of organizing her.”

  2

  Didion was trying to have a baby, she told her friend Diana Lynn. It was New Year’s weekend, 1966. The Dunnes had joined Lynn, her husband, Morty Hall, president of KLAC radio, and another couple, Howard and Lou Erskine, on Hall’s “motor-sailer” for a getaway to Cat Harbor, just off Catalina Island. Howard Erskine was a television producer and performer. Diana Lynn was a once-promising movie star who had set aside her career for marriage and motherhood by the time Didion met her.

  In 1951, Lynn had starred with Ronald Reagan in the film Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan played a professor determined to prove that good morals, emotional stability, and a solid upbringing trump genetics in the well-being of a child. His proof was a chimpanzee, raised with the help of Lynn as a surrogate mother. Lynn entertained Didion with stories of how much more personable the monkey was than Reagan.

  On the boa
t that weekend, the couples were always “having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink,” Didion wrote in Blue Nights. Adoption came up. Lynn had been adopted as a child. The Erskines had adopted a baby. Didion’s pregnancy frustrations prompted Lynn to suggest she consult Blake H. Watson, a pediatrician at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica.

  “[T]he next week I was meeting Blake Watson,” Didion wrote, eliding much of the narrative. “When he called us from the hospital and asked if we wanted the beautiful baby girl there had been no hesitation: we wanted her.”

  Whether or not she’d suffered a miscarriage the previous spring, she and Dunne wondered if a physiological problem prevented them from conceiving. In Vegas, in possibly the worst prose he ever wrote, Dunne describes a sperm test he took. He places the scene, chronologically, years after it actually occurred, but the logistical details—getting to the doctor by driving east “on Palos Verdes Drive. South on 26th Street in San Pedro. Onto the Harbor Freeway”—establish the time frame.

  In a medical clinic on Wilshire Boulevard, he “sat in a stall trying to coax some heft into [his] flaccid member,” he wrote. The doctor pronounced him perfectly healthy.

  In a letter to Mary Bancroft, dated March 30, 1966, Didion mentions a recent hospital stay. She was getting final tests, she says, to settle the question of adoption. (As a contingency, the couple had already started adoption proceedings, according to a January 8 letter from Dunne to Carl Brandt.) In 2005, Didion would tell journalist Susanna Rustin that she and Dunne had been “[u]nable to have children of their own.” There may be doubt, or at least some confusion, about when this condition was confirmed and whether it was always the case. Like Didion’s fiction, Dunne’s novels make several references to miscarriages, abortions, uteruses “not strong enough … to hold a child to term,” or “incompetent” cervixes. At any rate, in the early months of 1966, the couple decided adoption was their best alternative.

  On March 3, 1966, the baby they would adopt with “no hesitation” was born.

  Didion told Bancroft she was exceedingly happy getting tests in the hospital. While there, she reread William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and picked up his latest novel, The Soft Machine. The Soft Machine had the effect of “a migraine attack, after pain and nausea and unwanted images have battered the nerve synapses until all connections are lost.” The book’s voice roved back and forth across centuries between modern Mexico and Panama and the Mayan empire, reminding Didion of the Pedro Ramírez Vázquez building, the giant Olmec head. She lay in her room envisioning banana rafts and hyacinths, overgrown jungles, strange albino creatures blinking in the sun. Burroughs’s tropical imagery took her “not only back but ahead in time, to what seems to be the end of the world.” She was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end” and “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.” More than ever, the name Quintana Roo, a lush openness, an unclocked mystery, seemed right.

  3

  “L’adoptada … M’ija.”

  One way to limit and control a narrative is through legal systems.

  Tyrants know this (possibly saints do, as well). Writers know this. So do adopted children and their parents.

  California Family Code, Section 8700–8720 states that “[e]ither birth parent may relinquish a child to the department, county adoption agency, or licensed adoption agency for adoption by a written statement signed before two subscribing witnesses and acknowledged by an authorized official.” Section 9200 (a) ensures that this arrangement “is not open to inspection by any person other than the parties to the proceeding and their attorney and the department, except upon the written authority of the judge of the supreme court.”

  Accordingly, Quintana Roo Dunne’s adoption, facilitated by Blake H. Watson, was private. Names and details were sealed according to California law and they remain sealed, though a caseworker’s error at the time allowed the Dunnes to learn the birth mother’s name and vice versa.

  In Blue Nights, Didion speaks disparagingly of Quintana’s birth family. Her nephew Griffin has called them, publicly, a “troubled lot.” Since neither Didion nor Griffin Dunne has offered much in the way of detail, I felt obligated to try to locate the birth family to see if their story illuminated anything about Didion. Two separate private investigators, working on my behalf, concluded there was no legal path around California Family Code. No records of the birth family existed in the L.A. County civil index. Bad news for my book but soothing to me as a citizen, just as stories broke about the National Security Agency’s invasions of privacy and Barack Obama began to resemble an aggrieved Richard Nixon.

  In the case of California adoptions, who would blame any family wishing to limit the narrative? That word: relinquish. Right there in Section 8700–8720. Eventually, it would haunt Quintana—and the grieving mother of Blue Nights.

  A “written statement signed”: like executing a book contract.

  4

  In the mid-1960s, the preferred narrative was We chose you.

  Positive. Proactive. A comfort to the child.

  What the narrative didn’t address—a howling silence no boy or girl failed to perceive—was that if we chose you, someone else chose to make you available to us.

  To relinquish you.

  Family law.

  Blake Watson understood the narrative, and he understood how to arrange matters around it so that nothing interfered with the story. He was not just any pediatrician. In his lifetime, he would deliver more than thirteen thousand babies (“I have never gotten over it—that flicker of life,” he’d say). His patients included Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Carol Burnett, and Ethel Kennedy. He was in the intensive care unit with Robert Kennedy the night Kennedy got shot; Ethel was four months pregnant with her eleventh child. Watson gave her a sedative. He overheard Jackie say to her, “I think you should feel as much of the pain and misery now as you can stand. Better now than later.”

  On March 3, 1966, in the late afternoon, Blake Watson phoned the house at Portuguese Bend. Didion was taking a shower. Dunne took the call. “I have a beautiful baby girl at St. John’s,” he said. “I need to know if you want her.” Dunne rapped on the bathroom door. Didion sobbed at the news.

  The baby’s mother, eighteen and unmarried, lived in Tucson, but she had been staying with relatives in California. The Dunnes didn’t meet her. They received solid assurances that the woman’s health was good.

  Despite the likelihood that Didion’s parents did not fully approve of the adoption—one of Dunne’s novels includes a colonel-like figure who “did not trust the uncertainties of unknown blood. He believed in a continuum of heirlooms and family silver”—Watson arranged all the paperwork. An hour after his phone call, Didion stood at the nursery window in St. John’s Hospital staring at “an infant with fierce dark hair and rosebud features,” she said. The baby was seventeen hours old. She was tucked into the arms of a nurse wearing a surgical mask. A pink ribbon curled across the infant’s pale head. A band around her wrist told her story: “N. I.” No Information, the hospital’s standard ID for babies being adopted.

  Didion had the start of another story: a name, Quintana Roo. Once upon a time.

  We chose you.

  “Once she was born I was never not afraid,” she would write.

  To the child through the nursery’s glass partition, she whispered, “You’re safe.”

  * * *

  When Quintana was five or six years old, she asked Dunne again and again to tell her the story of the nursery. It was after visiting hours, he’d say. Your mother and I went to the hospital and we were offered the choice of any baby in the place. No, not that baby, we said. Not that baby, not that baby … That baby! The one with the ribbon!

  “Quintana!” Quintana would shout.

  And then she asked him to tell it again, to do “That baby,” the baby with the ribbon.

  In 1977, in an
essay called “Quintana,” Dunne used the word fierce to describe the initial impression the baby made on him. In 2011, in Blue Nights, Didion wrote “fierce” to convey the baby’s immediate impact on her. Together, the Dunnes locked in a family story. Presumably, they intended the word to be positive, suggesting a fighter struggling into the world under tough circumstances, an indomitable spirit. But the word is ambiguous. Saint. Little tyrant.

  A “singularly blessed and accepting child,” Didion wrote within months of Quintana’s birth.

  “[W]atching her journey from infancy has always been like watching Sandy Koufax pitch … There is the same casual arrogance, the implicit sense that no one has ever done it any better,” Dunne wrote a few years later. He said she had “panache.”

  These lines also entered the accepted narrative. What windy silences Quintana may have heard in them, we’ll never know.

  * * *

  On the evening of March 3, after saying good-bye through the glass to their fierce new companion, the Dunnes stopped in Beverly Hills to tell Nick and Lenny the news. The child’s family had roots in Arizona—maybe a good omen. Lenny loved Arizona. Perhaps Lenny could take a dress to the hospital from the Colleagues for the child’s unwed mother. She pulled ice from a crystal bucket and offered to make drinks. “Making celebratory drinks was what we did in our family to mark any unusual, or for that matter, any usual, occasion,” Didion wrote. “In retrospect we all drank more than we needed to drink.”

  In our family.

  We all drank.

  We were always “having or thinking about having or making or thinking about making a drink.”