In the valley today, little of the old Chavez hope remains. As Dunne foresaw with cutting accuracy, in the 1960s martyrdom would seem the only resolution to the nation’s problems. If that didn’t mean literal assassination, as in the case of Bobby Kennedy, it meant the eventual shunning of heroes. “People, issues, and causes hit the charts like rock groups, and with approximately as much staying power,” he wrote. “For all the wrong reasons, Chavez had all the right credentials—mysticism, nonviolence, the nobility of the soil. But … saints generally fail and when they do not, the constant scrutiny of public attention causes a certain moral devaluation. Enthusiasm for a cause is generally in inverse proportion to actual involvement.”
At the Filipino Community Center in Delano, just east of Highway 99, where Chavez gave some of his fiercest speeches (“In Ingles!” he’d exhort his followers—speak “in Ingles” so the reporters will understand!), no placards, statues, or artifacts mark the workers’ history now. In the large meeting room with light green walls and a scuffed brown wooden floor, a nice young Filipino man told me he’d heard of Chavez but didn’t know much about him. The meeting room had been turned into a day-care center for seniors, some of whom reminisced about the strikes while playing bingo.
The old Stardust hasn’t changed much. The rooms are tiny, with gritty brown carpets, giant TV cabinets, and twiglike lamps sticking out of walls painted the color of urine. Nothing to honor Chavez’s ghost. Up and down the valley, the dust haze in the air, reflecting the sky’s light back at the sky, nearly obscures taco trucks and tractors, signs for palm readers and casinos. Flocks of swifts circle “Cowschwitz” (the Harris Ranch feedlot). A helicopter flying low over fields, with a long, thin sprayer slung to its bottom, buzzes a tall grain elevator next to wooden shacks. Men in heavy plastic suits move among crops, spreading smoky pesticides. “The soil [here] has been engineered to precision,” Verlyn Klinkenborg has written. “This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure.”
The California Aqueduct, running along I-5, drawing water from the Sacramento River delta, has caused the entire valley to slump, buckle, and sink; the United States Geological Survey has called this the “largest human alteration of the earth’s surface.”
Constant land movement.
On or around June 20, 1966, Shirley Streshinsky moved down the valley on a train from San Francisco. Her husband, Ted, a freelance photographer who often worked for The Saturday Evening Post, was already in Delano. “He had proposed a story on Chavez. John had as well, and the two of them were assigned to work together on the story,” Shirley told me. “Those were luxury days for photojournalists, before magazines started saving money by sending out the writer to get the story, the photographer to follow up and provide photos.” In the 1960s, “for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, where photographs were an important part of the story, the photographer and the writer were to work together, and the magazine gave them enough time to consult with each other and talk through what the story was.”
Shirley and Ted had married just days before, on the sixteenth. A Berkeley alum who abandoned a political science career to document the major issues of the day, he had met Didion a few years earlier, when Mademoiselle assigned him to take pictures for her article on the Berkeley campus. Shirley was a journalist and had stayed in San Francisco right after her wedding to finish a story.
“Joan picked me up at the train station” in Delano, she recalled. “I remember that one of my first questions to Joan was something like, ‘Is Chavez genuine?’ And her answer was something like, ‘I think so.’ At least I remember her reaction to be positive. We met John and Ted, and from then on my memories are sort of strobe light–like. We went to one of the watering holes for the farm labor movement”—this would have been People’s Bar on the Garces Highway. It was “an old bar with pool tables. The main office was an old storefront. It had a big room, battered wooden floors, a bare-bones type of place where the major figures had gathered, along with workers and others. I’m not sure if [community organizer] Saul Alinsky was there, but I seem to remember him. Certainly Cesar was, and Dolores Huerta. My memory is standing in a large circle that encompassed the room, arms linked and hands held, singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’”
Over the next several days, Didion impressed Shirley as “a knowledgeable daughter of the West, of the Central Valley, of its history and its long struggle over water rights. One way you can tell a true Westerner: she’s the one who—when winters are too dry and too many days in a row are excessively beautiful—begins to worry about the snowpack in the Sierras.” Didion and Dunne spoke obsessively of Quintana, she said, “with the real pleasure of new parents.”
* * *
Didion had gone from the valley to Vogue and now she was back at the edge of the continent, where she’d first started scribbling in a Big Five tablet. Alongside her husband, she interviewed Yugoslavian grape growers, SNCC members and students down from Berkeley, fresh from the war protests, looking for a new cause to embrace. They’d help and hinder Chavez, she thought: enthusiastic, energetic but eternally romantic, a setup for dread and disillusionment. These kids made him feel a hundred years old, Dunne told her.
They were both aware of people posing as journalists but who, in fact, seemed to be taking pictures of the real journalists, noting their movements. They were also aware of people posing as supporters of the workers but who, in fact, seemed a little too brusque with the cops, giving them cause to move in and break up assemblies.
On some days, Dunne felt he was watching a thirty-year-old film reel.
“Who is this fellow, Saul Alinsky, meeting with Chavez?” a man in a crowd yelled at the cops one day. “People don’t have a clue who he is. All they know is he’s got a name like a bomb thrower.”
Teamsters referred to the farmworkers as “the Vietcong.”
Students moved through the throng, handing out pamphlets: “Agriculture is the very foundation of our nation.” Didion could have given them her eighth-grade graduation speech.
She discovered that many of the field supervisors were the sons of Dust Bowl Okies—men like her old high school classmates—who had started working for the grape companies as pickers and moved their way up. They saw themselves as badasses now.
One afternoon, a Tulare County deputy sheriff stopped Dunne on a road beside a vineyard and asked to see his credentials. “I see you got a sunburn last Monday,” the man said. Dunne knew then that he’d been watched. “And that little lady with you in the red dress—that your wife?” the deputy said. “She really wilted.”
* * *
“Because I had been tired too long and quarrelsome too much and too often frightened of migraine and failure and the days getting shorter, I was sent, a recalcitrant thirty-one-year-old child, to Hawaii,” Didion begins her essay “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N. 157° 52' W.” In fact, she was sent to Hawaii by The Saturday Evening Post, perhaps initially to write the “big waves” piece Dunne had proposed to Don McKinney a few months earlier.
Dunne went with her. In Delano, his version of the trip goes like this: “In early August 1966, I decided to leave the Valley … I flew to Honolulu for ten days, glad to get away for a while from the heat, the bitterness, and the self-righteousness on both sides of the freeway in Delano.”
The thrust of Didion’s essay is that she lacked the “temperament for paradise,” but it was a relief to the couple to sit by the pool of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel sipping frozen daiquiris. (Quintana was still with her grandparents.) People told wonderful stories. In the days of nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands, just after the Second World War, admirals and congressmen entertained Ernest O. Lawrence, designer of Berkeley’s cyclotron and a key member of the Manhattan Project, at the Royal Hawaiian. Then they’d all fly to the Eniwetok Atoll to sit in beach chairs with coffee and sandwiches and witness the shots. In 1952 the first hydrogen bomb test obliterated the Elugelab islet near Eniwetok.
Oh yes, people had stories. People still reme
mbered. Didion recalled her nights in Berkeley, hearing the hum of the Bevatron. Nearly twenty years later, she would open her novel Democracy with flashes of nuclear dawns on the scattered, pearl-like islands: “[S]omething to see. Something to behold. Something that could almost make you think you saw God…”
All day on Hawaii’s hot sands, Hollywood vacationers read scripts or synopses of television shows. “They do not describe what they are doing as ‘reading,’” Didion said. “They describe it as ‘doing some reading.’” A good portion of the tourists at the most lavish hotels had just “done Carson”—that is, they’d had a recent guest spot on The Tonight Show.
On the beach in front of the new Kahili Hilton, the Rolling Stones, not yet as famous as they would be, sat glumly, “pale and bored, and facing away from the sea,” disappointed that fans had not flocked to find them despite round-the-clock broadcasts by KPOI-Honolulu revealing their location. They ordered drinks with floating orchids and signed a napkin for a little girl. Didion noticed that when the girl left, she forgot the napkin, along with her soaked towel.
One morning, Didion left the Royal Hawaiian and took a bright pink tour boat from Kewalo Basin to Pearl Harbor. Amid the “sleazy festivity” of the tourists, at the site of the listing Utah and the spot where the Arizona’s gun turret broke the smooth gray waves, she began to cry. Later, she would write, “[S]omeone just four years younger than I told me that he did not see why a sunken ship should affect me so, that John Kennedy’s assassination, not Pearl Harbor, was the single most indelible event of what he kept calling ‘our generation.’ I could tell him only that we belonged to different generations.”
At the time of her initial visit to Pearl Harbor, she had just come from the Central Valley, from the heat and the air of her childhood. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had wrenched her from that early innocence, blacking out her world, taking her for the first time from the valley—memories borne in on her as she bobbed in the little pink boat beside the Utah. The father of those war years—the Pearl Harbor dad—was perhaps the last stable father she had known, in his crisp uniform, in the grip and surety of his duty. Not the Letterman father. Not the desperate gambler.
From Pearl Harbor, she made her way to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known locally as the “Punchbowl” or the “Hill of Sacrifice.” Ancient lore mentioned human offerings to pagan gods on the edge of the volcanic crater. Underneath the crater, World War II–era tunnels remained, where gun batteries had once been installed. It may have occurred to Didion that U.S. militarization of these islands was a provocation to the Japanese, in some sense making the attack on Pearl Harbor inevitable, in some sense providing an inevitable excuse for Hiroshima. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Near a rim of the crater overlooking Waikiki, Didion noticed the latest human sacrifices, fresh graves marked with temporary plastic identification cards spattered with mud: military dead shipped from Vietnam. A man cut grass in the mist.
Down the hill, she wandered into hordes of sailors, nineteen, twenty years old, on R & R that week from the carrier Coral Sea, personnel from Schofield Barracks, and young Marines on their way to Okinawa and from there to Vietnam. The next wave of offerings to the gods.
They were cruising the strip clubs and the pinball arcades up and down Hotel Street, whistling at “girls with hibiscus in their hair,” popping into tattoo parlors and massage studios. For the time being, this was as close as she would get to Saigon.
* * *
Dunne dreaded the return to Delano. He had learned something here in the islands, talking to fellows from the Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Since 1945, he was told, mechanization had reduced Hawaii’s sugar workforce from 35,000 to 10,500. Chavez’s agitation in the valley would only hasten the growers’ move toward machinery. Cesar was ensuring his own doom, the doom of his movement, the ultimate sacrifice of the people who had placed all their faith in him.
Back in the valley, Quintana in tow, the Dunnes interviewed a physician from Fresno who tended the farmworkers. He told them about a recent visit he’d made to an apartment in town. “Inside were a mother and seven children. The stench of putrefying, necrotic tissue filled the interior,” he said. “A baby of eighteen months lay asleep on the bare floor in front of a blazing gas heater. The mother lay sick on the couch. She had delivered her seventh baby at home, with the aid of a neighbor lady, several days before I arrived. There was a considerable loss of blood. I wondered who would take care of the children when she died.”
While Didion fed Quintana in a room at the Stardust, Dunne walked to the People’s Bar, hung out, talked to the volunteers from Berkeley, listened to them sing to a strike song on the jukebox, “El Corrido de Delano.” Someone had tacked to the wall a cartoon depicting the Di Giorgio ranch as an octopus. Wet newspapers on the floor carried the latest reports of Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign—if elected in the fall, he promised to correct the weaknesses of Pat Brown and Clark Kerr, and root out all the radicals at Berkeley.
One chilly late-summer night, near the end of the Dunnes’ stay in the valley, in the foothills of the Sierra, Dunne watched a “California golden girl,” probably a student, seduce a “panicky young farm worker” from Mexico. The girl “worked hard and loyally for Chavez,” but “no amount of good faith on her part could bridge the chasm of social and sexual custom” between her and the young man. The encounter was bound to end badly, Dunne thought, just like the long, dusty struggle for justice: “I remember the boy still desperately picking on his guitar even as he was being led off to the bedroom”—maybe the last love song he’d ever sing.
Chapter Fourteen
Didion had not shuttered her Royal KMM typewriter in the excitement of arranging her daughter’s adoption or planning stays in Delano. Just before and during this period, she wrote one of her most enduring essays, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” originally titled “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left” and published in The Saturday Evening Post in the May 7, 1966, issue.
For nearly two years, she had been reading lurid headlines out of the San Bernardino Valley, MOVIE CALLED BLUEPRINT FOR DENTIST’S DEATH; MOTEL ROMANCE LOVELESS ON HIS PART; MRS. MILLER CALLED “USER OF PEOPLE.” These teasers summed up a tawdry and apparently unremarkable bedroom-community episode. Nevertheless, the incident had drawn the attention of ace crime reporters from across the country. On September 5, 1965, Ruth Reynolds of the New York Daily News wrote, “Seldom has a jury been called upon to deliberate two points of view quite so divergent as those presented to twelve Californians last March at the end of the trial of Mrs. Lucille Maxwell Miller, 35.”
The San Bernardino Valley “lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place … haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour,” Didion wrote as a preface to her version of Lucille Miller’s story. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons streaming out of Utah, seeking escape to the sea, established irrigation canals in this basin—now commonly called the Inland Empire—and began to grow oranges, corn, and cabbages. “It was then and there”—based upon cultivating water where water naturally tended to dissipate—“that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began,” wrote one historian.
Didion understood this history, and it would be the real subject of her essay.
After World War II, when young couples seeking affordable mortgages were seduced into the highway sprawl among savannalike grass, king snakes, and coyotes crying in canyon washes, the San Bernardino Valley inherited the coastal communities’ troubles. It became an American lab experiment, a combination of Levittown and Appalachia, of industry and agriculture, of stolen water and prefab structures. In a country often hailed sweetly as a melting pot, the Inland Empire was the real thing, with all the grit, grease, and grievance the term suggested.
There we
re gun shops and mini-malls. Office parks. Hindu mortuaries tucked among pepper trees. Here and there, on the edges of mobile-home factories, the wreck of an old chicken ranch. A roadside motel had buildings shaped like a tee-pee (the Wigwam Motel). Freight yards. Bible stores. The Striptease Hall of Fame. Sanctuaries lined with bleachers and beer stands housed the local religion: high school football, practiced as brutally here as anywhere in the nation.
Hollywood sent its screenwriters to the valley to dry out or to meet impending deadlines. Among the brittle weeds of Victorville, Herman Mankiewicz finished the first draft of Citizen Kane. Truckers humping contraband stopped and burned their manifests in tangled mesquite. In San Berdoo, in 1948, the same year the McDonald brothers opened their first “Speedee Service” restaurant, a gang of desert-begrimed, disgruntled World War II vets formed a motorcycle club and named it after the U.S. Army’s Eleventh Airborne Division: Hells Angels, hitting the highways for freedom.
It was here that Didion chose to set what would become the inaugural piece of her first nonfiction collection, in a landscape whose history she knew so well that she didn’t have to mention the past; instead, she hinted at it to imbue a series of anecdotes with more general significance, convincing the reader that what happened in the San Bernardino Valley exposed America’s soul.
What happened in the San Bernardino Valley was that a woman apparently burned her dentist husband alive in a Volkswagen one night after going to the market for milk. Police said she drugged him and deliberately set the blaze, motivated by her affair with a prominent local lawyer and inspired by the plot of Double Indemnity. Lucille Miller claimed the flames were accidental, sparked by a jostled gas can after the car jerked mysteriously off the road. Her husband was asleep in the front seat, having taken a combination of Nembutal and Fiorinal for depression. He’d been suicidal, she said, overwhelmed by their mortgage and his debts. Far from wanting to kill him, she’d tried repeatedly to save him. “What will I tell the children, when there’s nothing left, nothing left in the casket?” she’d cried after glimpsing her husband’s char through the Beetle’s windshield. In particular, she was concerned about her sensitive daughter, Debbie, fourteen years old at the time.
The Last Love Song Page 28