The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  And we chose you.

  The silences in Blue Nights, noticed on repeated readings especially in the passages on Quintana’s entry into the family, ring louder and louder: “In my beginning is my end.”

  Lenny dropped more ice in Didion’s drink and said she’d go with her to Saks to buy a layette: “Saks because if you spend eighty dollars they throw in the bassinette.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Didion that she would need a layette, or a bassinette.

  For three nights, Quintana remained in the nursery at St. John’s Hospital. Didion writes of waking in the early mornings to chills, listening to the surf on the rocks beneath the house at Portuguese Bend. She dreamed and she imagined she’d left her baby behind, asleep or hungry in a drawer, while she’d gone off for dinner or a movie: “And worse yet, worse by far, so much worse as to be unthinkable, except I did think it, everyone who has ever waited to bring a baby home thinks it: what if I fail to love this baby?”

  She couldn’t believe she was about to be given this bundle—babies were what you lost on the trail, the weak ones you left in the weeds, not what you gained.

  Dunne imagined Quintana’s mother everywhere, bereft and ghostly, lurking, peering through fences or the leaves of trees. He imagined bad genes burbling in the baby’s DNA. The Dictionary of Literary Biography cheered him: In it, he found “Quintana, Manuel José. Spanish poet, patriot, and Liberal, 18th century.” A good association. Another fine omen.

  He told Mary Bancroft that Didion was stunning those first three days, preparing for Quintana’s arrival at Portuguese Bend. She got on the phone and was like a gambler calling in IOUs, he said, lining up bassinettes, thermal blankets, weighing scales, and playpens. Now they had about five of everything. They could barely move in the house.

  Often paralyzed and depressed on an ordinary day, Didion was energetic, focused, and frighteningly efficient in an emergency.

  The peacocks cried the day Quintana came from the hospital, warm in a silk-lined cashmere wrapper. “What if you hadn’t been home when Dr. Watson called?” Quintana asked her mother years later. “What would happen to me then?”

  Below the house, skirting rocks, waves crashed, a hollow roar, in the cave on the point.

  “Do the peacocks,” Quintana would beg, or “do the apple trees.”

  She meant “read to me.” Almost from that very first night, Didion recited poetry to get the baby to sleep. Wallace Stevens’s “Domination of Black” (“I heard them cry—the peacocks”) or T. S. Eliot’s “Landscapes” (“Swing up into the apple tree”).

  In the evenings, Didion set Quintana in her bassinette next to the wisteria in the box garden and sterilized bottles for the baby’s formula.

  At night, with the child asleep or not asleep, the ocean was alternately wild and calm—its power evoking for Didion a favorite passage in the explorer John Lloyd Stephens’s account of his discovery of the Mayan city of Copán: “It lay before us like a shattered bark in the midst of the ocean, her masts gone, her name effaced, her crew perished, and none to tell whence she came, to whom she belonged, how long on her voyage, or what caused her destruction.”

  * * *

  One night, in secret, Dunne bounced Quintana carefully in his hands. He carried her to a tiled sink inside the house, held her under a trickle of water, and gave her a personal christening. He didn’t want to chance her dying before a formal ceremony, and awaking, terrified, in limbo.

  Afterward, he announced in passing to his wife, “I just christened the baby.” He didn’t expect her to share his superstition—it was more that than faith—but he didn’t want an argument, either.

  She wasn’t up for a fight. Between migraines and the baby’s wailing at night, she was relieved to swallow some phenobarbital and fall into bed. She was also taking ergot, she wrote Mary Bancroft. Ergot was commonly prescribed to reduce heavy menstrual bleeding. It was also recommended before and after miscarriages.

  Most nights, Dunne didn’t sleep much, either. One morning at dawn, Didion awoke and saw him in the yard, hurling mushy peaches at the peacocks to get them to shut the hell up. The baby, he couldn’t do anything about.

  5

  In Blue Nights, Didion swears it never occurred to her she couldn’t take an infant to Saigon (Don McKinney, of The Saturday Evening Post, had firmed up an offer to send them). She says she went so far as to plan the trip, buying pastel linen dresses and a flowered parasol. In the end, she says, the Dunnes canceled the Vietnam assignment only because her husband had to “finish the book he had contracted to write about Cesar Chavez.”

  This wouldn’t ring true in any case, even if we didn’t know, from Dunne’s letters to Carl Brandt, that the Chavez book was not a sealed deal until several months after Quintana was born, and only after much cat and mousing between two publishers vying for rights to the material. Nor was it clear whether Dunne would be writing the story, or Didion, or both.

  The Blue Nights narrative is this: I was woefully unprepared to be a mother. Clueless. I would have taken my baby to Saigon—can you believe it?

  Unprepared, no doubt. Clueless she was not. She was a steely professional, not about to let motherhood get in the way of her career. Absolutely, she would have taken her baby to Saigon. Around this time, Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books was asking Mary McCarthy if she’d like to report on the war. Initially, she turned him down, but eventually she did fly to Southeast Asia. In The Atlantic Monthly, Frances FitzGerald had published on Vietnam, to much fanfare. Didion was itching to become one of the few females covering the story of the time.

  What stopped her was the fact that Quintana would be a ward of the court until September, when the adoption was finalized. She could not be transported out of state, much less out of the country. So by default, the grape strikes became the couple’s story.

  They had another problem: Their landlord wanted them out of the house. The addition of the baby was bad enough. But what he could not abide was the help they’d acquired (Dunne told Mary Bancroft that Joan had to have assistance with the kid; she couldn’t stop writing—they needed the money). They’d hired a teenage girl named Jennifer to help feed the baby, and they’d hired a maid, an illegal named Arcelia, to clean the house. It was Arcelia’s extended family that angered Dick Harden—he’d already put up with a damn stray gamecock, he said, abandoned no doubt by “Mexicans on the run,” and now the place was literally crawling with Spanish speakers.

  “L’adoptada.… M’ija.”

  “Qué hermosa … Qué chula.”

  The Dunnes would have to be gone by May first.

  * * *

  Vibora—the one Spanish word every Angelino understood. “[V]ibora in Los Angeles meant snake and snake in Los Angeles meant rattlesnake,” Didion wrote in Blue Nights. On the afternoon a social worker showed up in Portuguese Bend to evaluate the adoption candidate in her home environment, Arcelia at one point dropped the garden hose, screamed, “Vibora,” snatched up the baby, and ran inside the house.

  A perfectly normal West Coast home.

  * * *

  Eleven days after Quintana was born, Bobby Kennedy arrived in the Central Valley to meet Cesar Chavez. He didn’t want to do it. His assignment on the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Migratory Labor was the least glamorous of his roles; involvement in a regional agricultural squabble wouldn’t help him politically—the rest of the country didn’t give a damn about these strikes. On the flight from Washington, Kennedy kept pressing Peter Edelman, his point man, asking, “Why am I dragging myself all the way out to California?”

  Ever after, the official story, promoted by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Jack Newfield, and others, says RFK was so thoroughly charmed by Chavez, so taken with his saintliness, that “his head [caught] up with his heart” and he was, from that moment on, determined to see justice in the fields.

  The truth was more complex. Dunne wrote, “The Kennedys sponged up ideas, and implicit in Chavez was the inexorable strength of an idea whose ti
me had come. Kennedy’s real concern for the farm workers helped soften his image as a self-serving keeper of his brother’s flame and in turn plugged Chavez into the power outlets of Washington and New York. For the first time Chavez became fashionable, a national figure registering on the nation’s moral thermometer. Robert Kennedy and Cesar Chavez—the names seemed wired into the same circuitry, the one a spokesman, the other a symbol for the constituency of the dispossessed.”

  Following the publicity surrounding Kennedy’s visit, the Dunnes had all the more reason to broker a deal for a magazine piece, maybe even a book, about Chavez. Dunne wondered if The New Yorker was a possibility—it tended to publish “long.” He told his agent some of the things he’d seen while traveling up and down the valley: students from Berkeley sitting on railroad tracks, trying to stop grape shipments; Walter Reuther singing with picketers “We Shall Overcome.” He said the growers’ attitude toward the fieldworkers was a kind of domestic colonization.

  Finally, in June, Brandt wrote Dunne that The Saturday Evening Post would pay $2,500 for anything up to five or six thousand words; he told him not to stint on expenses. No promise of a book deal—Dunne should test the “desirability” of that idea.

  Dunne wasn’t sure even this agreement was firm; he pitched pieces on Hawaii’s “big waves” and the aftermath of the Watts riots, just in case the Chavez deal fell through, but neither Brandt nor Don McKinney responded.

  Brandt’s letter came to the Dunnes’ temporary new digs at 155 Fifth Anita Drive in West Los Angeles. It was the home of Sara Mankiewicz, Herman Mankiewicz’s widow. She had scheduled a six-month trip and was happy to rent the house. She packed away her china, along with her late husband’s Academy Award for Citizen Kane (“You’ll have friends over, they’ll get drunk, they’ll want to play with it”).

  On the day Didion left Portuguese Bend, she was harried and on her own. Dunne had hit the road with the San Francisco Giants, writing an article on Willie Mays for The Saturday Evening Post. She borrowed Lenny’s station wagon, packed it tight, settled Quintana in the backseat along with the teenage Jennifer, said good-bye to the gamecock in the yard, and drove to Fifth Anita Drive.

  Dunne called her from a sad hotel room in Houston. He was miserable. The Astrodome looked nothing like a baseball stadium. It was Andy Warhol, when what you wanted in a ballpark was James McNeill Whistler. He’d made no headway with Mays. He knew Mays had adopted a child in 1959, and he tried to find common ground with him by talking about Quintana. No go. Mays seemed weary of white reporters always bringing up race, always insisting that sports was a perfect metaphor for America. Bullshit. Didion sympathized with her husband’s difficulties, but after all, he was not sitting there with a crying child, among unpacked boxes in a big strange house. He was not staring at tax forms, wondering if day help could be deducted.

  It was here, on Fifth Anita Drive, that she threw a reception following Quintana’s official christening at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Brentwood. She served watercress sandwiches, fried chicken, and champagne, showed off the baby’s new dresses—dozens and dozens of them on tiny wooden hangers in the closet—and, along with her friends, filled the house with cigarette smoke. Most of the women were dressed like Jackie Kennedy, in trim Chanel suits, or they wore Jax jerseys or Lilly Pulitzer shifts, and David Webb bracelets: Connie Wald, Diana Lynn, Lenny. Didion had finally arrived as a Hollywood hostess.

  A few days later, the Dunnes received a letter from Henry Robbins, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He would be going to Los Angeles for a few days, he said, and he’d like to meet them. He admired their magazine writing. He’d be staying at the Chateau Marmont.

  On the warm night in June 1966 when she first met Henry Robbins, “I thought so little of myself as a writer … that I was obscurely ashamed to go to dinner with still another editor, ashamed to sit down again and discuss this ‘work’ I was not doing,” Didion wrote in the introduction to her essay collection After Henry (1992). She felt poor and put-upon in spite of the fact that she was living in Brentwood (a sort of Beverly Hills for those who didn’t want to seem pretentious by living in Beverly Hills), that her baby had just received sixty christening presents, and that she wore a black silk dress to dinner at the Bistro and then for drinks and music at the Daisy. She felt poor because, though the Dunnes regularly charged meals at the Bistro, they did not believe they could afford to tip the valet, so they parked their car on Canon Drive. The house they’d decamped to was “borrowed.” She was drowning in laundry, and the couple’s income from writing had amounted to only $305.06 in the previous three months.

  With Robbins that night “we got drunk,” she wrote, and “before the summer was out” he had “signed contracts with each of us, and, from that summer in 1966 until the summer of 1979,” when he died of a heart attack in the Fourteenth Street subway station in New York, he served as Didion’s book editor. (Actually, Didion got the dates wrong; she did not sign with Robbins until a year after their meeting.)

  Robbins had an “epic” bearing, said his niece Margi Fox, an “unusual gift for nurturing,” a “warmth” in his eyes that could give a listener “the sense that there were only two of [you] in [a] room full of people.” The writer Wilfrid Sheed once called him a saint. Michael Korda, in his memoir, described him as a madman with an incendiary temper. In fact, he was a workaholic with a weak heart, too many debts, and a passionate love of literature.

  Initially, he was more intrigued with Dunne than with Didion, perhaps because of Dunne’s reportorial experience at Time (a job he had finally relinquished). And Robbins had not traveled to California just to meet the couple. His brother was a labor lawyer in San Francisco; through him and through media coverage of Bobby Kennedy’s visit, Robbins had become enamored of Cesar Chavez. He talked with the Dunnes about the story they planned for The Saturday Evening Post, and he went to Delano, originally to see if he might sign Chavez to a book contract. A letter from Robbins to Chavez, dated July 5, indicates he had decided it would not be feasible for Chavez to write his own story, given how “incredibly busy” he was; it would probably be better to relate the tale “through a professional reporter (like John Gregory Dunne).” He concluded, “The enclosed check is my personal contribution to your strike fund, a token of my support for the great work you’re doing.” Effectively, the letter and check became Dunne’s passport into Chavez’s world.

  Anthony Kennedy, attorney for Schenley Industries, The Bistro Restaurant, Los Angeles, 11 June 1966: $29.45.

  Sidney Korshak, labor attorney, The Daisy, Los Angeles, 13 June 1966: $33.90.

  So begins Dunne’s list of expenses for his Chavez project.

  Field hands had marched on the capitol in Sacramento in April. Governor Brown ignored them. He went on vacation to Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs home. Immediately afterward, Chavez signed a “Recognition Agreement Between Schenley Industries and the National Farm Workers Association,” arranging for collective bargaining. Korshak signed on behalf of Schenley. Forget the governor. Chavez was getting what he wanted because he’d upset the liquor producers. Apparently, when liquor gets nervous, mob lawyers and future Supreme Court justices discover they have a great deal in common.

  Following Robbins’s letter to Chavez, on July 12, the Dunnes drove to Delano to see what all the fuss was about. TIRED, HUNGRY, CAR TROUBLE, NEED GAS? SHOP IN DELANO! said a sign on the outskirts of town. Dogs covered with flies nosed around dry alkaline ditches. Children played in the dust. The valley heat was punishing.

  The Dunnes had stopped in Bakersfield and picked up a couple of cardboard hand fans given out by local mortuaries. One side of each fan featured a handsome black couple holding a baby: “A Joyous Family.” The other side advertised funeral arrangements: “A Friendly, Courteous Service. Protect Your Loved Ones.”

  The couple had left Quintana with Didion’s parents in Sacramento, but at some point during the several weeks they spent in Delano, coming and going, singly or together, they
had Quintana with them, in the Stardust Motel (now a Travel Inn) just west of Highway 99. In 1970, in Room 44 of the Stardust, at two o’clock one morning, Chavez would sign the historic bargaining agreement between the farmworkers and Giumarra Vineyards, America’s largest table-grape supplier. This forced the hand of other growers, twenty-six of whom signed contracts with the workers—an early major victory for Chavez.

  In 1966, Delano was a town of about fourteen thousand. It didn’t take long to get the lay of the land. Randomly, one night, in a draw-poker parlor called Divina’s Four Deuces, near the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, Dunne asked a local what he thought of the grape strikes. “This used to be a good town before,” the man said. Dunne wrote, “It turned out that he meant before the construction of the freeway leveled the red-light district.”

  * * *

  Delano was Didion’s book to write. Dunne acknowledged as much on the dedication page, thanking Chavez, Ted Streshinsky, the photographer on the project, and “most of all, Joan Didion, who has been there for five generations.”

  She was the one with grape growers in her family. She was the one who knew Anthony Kennedy. She was the one who understood the first place to stop would be a draw-poker parlor.

  On July 15, a letter to Didion from Dick Kluger, a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, asked if “you are working on a book about the strike.” He wondered about its status and expressed interest in acquiring it.

  New motherhood wouldn’t have stopped her from writing the story (it didn’t stop her from going to Delano). She seems to have given her husband a gift, perhaps because she’d already published a book and now he needed to get untracked.

  In any event, Delano is shadow Didion, a kind of corollary to Run River, the other side of the valley.

  Which is not to diminish Dunne’s reportorial acuity. His notebooks, papers, and rough drafts of Delano, archived now in the UCLA Library Special Collections, show him to be a thorough and disciplined man on the beat, far more alert at the detail level than Didion. If she was better at emotional nuance and the big picture, he was a collector of the almost overlooked, and he was at ease with people. It earned him their trust, got him the story.