The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  On March 5, 1965, the jury found Lucille Miller guilty of murder in the first degree. She was remanded to the California Institution for Women at Frontera.

  Didion’s interest in the Millers lay less in the crime—a common enough tabloid story, she admitted—than in their restlessness for a happier life and their disappointment: pale echoes of the pioneer trope. An age-old California story was playing out again, the ancient legends abetted by the romance of the movies, whose dialogue people unwittingly mimicked in their talk of true love, affairs of the heart, crimes of passion.

  “October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously,” Didion wrote, linking the land’s distress with human frailty, establishing Lucille Miller’s crime as something more than a crime: This is the land of unpredictable blazes; nothing can stop what is going to happen, what has always happened. “There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” In her opening aria, before even mentioning dentistry, debt, VWs, and sex motels, Didion has locked in her narrative.

  Should we doubt her authority to tell this story, she says, “It might have been anyone’s bad summer, anyone’s siege of heat and nerves and migraine and money worries.” You and me, reader, we’ve been there, too. Who can say no? The voice is so certain and knowing. She has enlisted our complicity.

  “[It] was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms,” Didion wrote:

  A seventy-year-old pensioner drove his station wagon at five miles an hour past three Gardena poker parlors and emptied three pistols and a twelve-gauge shotgun through their windows, wounding twenty-nine people. “Many young women become prostitutes just to have enough money to play cards,” he explained in a note. Mrs. Nick Adams said that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans on the Les Crane Show, and, farther north, a sixteen-year-old jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived.

  Oh. That kind of day.

  This is a masterful paragraph, combining random incidents so matter-of-factly, they don’t seem random at all. Instead, they are unmistakable warnings of the inevitable “prickly dread.”

  * * *

  In fact, it was only Didion’s view of the events that was inevitable, shaped by her narrative. When the piece appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (along with a full-page ad for Volkswagens and a profile of Benjamin Spock talking babies and bombs), many inland residents quietly seethed at her sketch of their lives. As a seventeen-year-old university freshman in Los Angeles, novelist Susan Straight was assigned to read the essay: “I now learned how others saw us: ‘the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdresser’s school.’

  “I lay awake all night, thinking of my friends and their parents,” Straight said. She admired Didion’s “elegance and precision and genius” but found the essay “painful” and unpitying in its class judgments.

  “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past,” Didion’s essay insisted.

  That’s just wrong, says one inlander: “The guys I worked with … Get any three of them together in the pumphouse waiting out a rainy day and they would talk the whole time about who got paid the least for a day chopping cotton back in West Texas or Arkansas.”

  And all that teased-up hair Didion talked about? Forget it. The Inland Empire was “full of hot exciting young babes that never saw the inside of a hairdressers’ school and whose residual fumes rock stars are probably still writing songs about.”

  * * *

  In 1991, Lucille Miller’s daughter, Debra, wrote Didion a letter concerning “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” “It helped to make you famous but it’s my life,” she said. Following her mother’s incarceration and subsequent history, she’d suffered years of cocaine addiction and misery.

  On a later occasion, in Los Angeles, she happened to meet Didion at a signing. Didion inscribed a book to her: “For Debra Miller—who knows better than anyone I know the ambiguity of the written word.”

  On March 5, 1965, when the jury pronounced Lucille Miller guilty of murder in the first degree, little Debbie had stood in the courtroom and shouted, “She didn’t do it! She didn’t do it! I’ll never see my mother again!”

  * * *

  Quintana was three weeks old when Didion hit her deadline for finalizing the San Berdoo article for The Saturday Evening Post. “I never sleep the night before a piece closes. I always get up to check it,” she said.

  At the last minute, she doubted her accuracy about certain details and drove to the San Bernardino courthouse for the better part of a day to look up facts. It was the first time since bringing Quintana home that she’d left her infant’s side.

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Fifteen

  1

  “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself … I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971,” Didion wrote. These dates match precisely the years she rented, for four hundred dollars a month, a sprawling, spooky house at 7406 Franklin Avenue, just south of the Hollywood Hills and north of Sunset Boulevard. “The place [was] vast,” said John Gregory Dunne. It was “on the lines of an abandoned fraternity house.”

  Or a raddled old Barbizon. How life had changed.

  It sat in the middle of the block, in a neighborhood shedding its former existence for an uncertain new direction. “Bette Davis had [once] lived on one corner, Preston Sturges on another [his widow, Sandy, would become a friend]; the Canadian consulate was a block away, the Japanese consulate at the time of Pearl Harbor [was] across the street,” said Dunne. Now many of the glamorous old houses—plumbing busted, roofs eroding, paint chipping off the window shutters—were turning into communes. Rock ’n’ roll bands moved into them, or fly-by-night self-improvement groups. A few wealthy octogenarians, refusing to countenance change, hung on in the area, eyeing newcomers angrily as nurses pushed them in their wheelchairs past newly minted warehouses, dilapidated bungalows, and pastel apartments choked with dusty oleanders. “Now the pimps and junkies were beginning to take over Hollywood Boulevard, a block south. There was a whorehouse in a brand-new high-rise down the street, Synanon owned one house in the neighborhood, a Dr. Feelgood was dispensing amphetamines like gumdrops in another, and the former Japanese consulate, boarded up, was a crash pad for a therapy group,” Dunne observed.

  The clay tennis court behind the Dunnes’ house had started to sprout weeds.

  Mold grew in the crevices of some of the twenty-eight rooms inside the house, but this Havisham-like touch was offset by the place’s genuine charm: tall French windows, sunny, open rooms (with plenty of space for Didion’s Chickering piano, inherited from her family), and solid wooden floors. In the basement, rag rugs and “a vast Stalinist couch” lured dust, Didion said. Hundreds of copies of The New Masses moldered in a dark corner.

  In the spacious kitchen, she hung a copy of a Karl Shapiro poem she had long loved. Its verses celebrated the West’s ability to renew itself: “It is raining in California, a straight rain / Cleaning the heavy oranges on the bough.”

  Sometimes at night, she thought she heard rattlesnakes outside her bedroom window. Peering through the glass, Dunne scanned the nearby dry wash with a flashlight and told her it was nothing. A leaky faucet. Paper in the wind.

  * * *

  Physically surrounded by the scars and adornments of a changing story—Old Hollywood flaking under the New—Didion roamed the vicinity with wary fascination. It was yet another Lost Domain. The boarded-up consulate across the street epitomized for her not just the transformation of the block but also the country’s fic
kle moods. In her essay “The White Album,” the example she would offer of a story we once told “in order to live” began “The princess is caged in the consulate.” Every morning from her smudgy windows, she could see the terms of this story. Fairy tales had fled the neighborhood along with trust when California locked its Amerasian children inside filthy internment camps.

  And now look where we were: Just a few blocks away, a genuinely classy (if eccentric) American folk hero, Howard Hughes, hid inside a tacky Art Moderne house with chicken wire webbing its windows while kids tripping out of their heads trashed the street outside. Bette Davis had been ousted by the Mamas and the Papas. The young singers shared rooms on Franklin Avenue, up the block from the Dunnes. Since March, when their single “California Dreamin’” topped the record charts, they had been greeted in the press as New Hollywood royalty. Their presence in the neighborhood attracted groupies, hangers-on, Scientology advocates, strangers of every sort, and promoted a no ownership ethos. Free love, free food, open doors: Rock ’n’ rollers hiked the Hollywood Hills chanting these generous mantras. In Laurel Canyon, nearby, there “were more pop stars than you could count,” said Michelle Phillips, one of the group. “Everybody knew everybody … [W]herever you could fit a little wooden house … there were friends dotted over the hillside and right up to the edge overhanging the great, wide, shimmering city.” Where old money had once run horses in the hills (Jeanette MacDonald, Nelson Eddy, Maurice Chevalier), one-hit, three-chord wonders now buzzed the rocky ravines on little tabs of acid. Even the gurus of freedom worried about where this “lifestyle” might lead. Phillips saw a “lot of thin, insipid girls … Flower Children, we called them … moving in and out” of people’s rooms. Her fellow Mama, Cass Elliot, would soon buy a house and sling pillows all over the floor for “masses of friends and ‘well-wishers.’” She was “pretty consistently ripped off,” Phillips said. “People used to write on her walls: messages, loving graffiti, pestilent stuff. Problems arrived inside the house wearing pants or shorts or nothing at all. Cass was so easy to intrude upon.”

  Intrusion was the rhythm of Franklin Avenue. One day, Didion came upon a stranger in the entrance hall to her house. “What do you want?” she asked him. He said nothing until he saw Dunne on the stair landing. “Chicken Delight,” he blurted. Didion had ordered no food and his hands were empty. He drove away in an unmarked panel truck. “It seems to me … that during those years I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks,” Didion wrote, “panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.”

  If the new spirit of anything goes attempted to slip through her foyer, the spirit of the past sent dusty clouds through the open door of her basement. She wondered what all those New Masses said about the history of her house. One day, Dunne asked their landlord about the magazines. He was a friendly middle-aged fellow named Dan James, a distant relative of Frank and Jessie. In the thirties and forties, he said, he had been a member of the Communist Party. He had become political working in the Oklahoma oil fields—some of those old Okies were pretty damn radical!—and began to attend Party meetings once he’d made his way to Hollywood. He met Charlie Chaplin and worked as a screenwriter on the set of The Great Dictator. Oh yes, he said, Franklin Avenue had seen plenty of raucous Party squabbles.

  Susceptible to vertigo even on a good day, Didion was dizzied by the strange contradictions of her street, the odd and frightening loveliness of her house. She sought distraction by driving to area theaters and sitting through biker films. Lately, they had become a popular, if derided, movie subgenre. Right away, she saw that they, too, were a mix of old and new: the Beat sensibility married to the code of the Hollywood Western. Yearning lay at their core: longing for freedom and simple principles by which a man could live (and they were all about men). The acting was atrocious, the cinematography amateurish, but the landscapes in which they unspooled, the broad, open vistas, were stunningly gorgeous. Didion’s reactions to the movies were as paradoxical as the films themselves. She saw them as markers of the time—the anguish of valuing an old way of existence while craving a new style of life. On the one hand, they represented everything she feared: a further dismantling of the Lost Domain, Old Paint made roadkill by a Harley. On the other, she enjoyed their decadent textures, familiar to her from Old Sac, from her days slumming in valley gas stations.

  While biker movies filled L.A. theaters, Ronald Reagan was taking the oath of office in Sacramento: another contradictory image. Old Hollywood’s last gasp; the grinning cowboy had trounced Pat Brown on the promise of halting the changes taking place. Just as Communists had once infiltrated the film industry, he said, Reds were now ruining California’s college campuses.

  In November 1966, at a Los Angeles dinner honoring the governor-elect as well as the regents of Berkeley, H. R. Haldeman, later Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, toasted Reagan as “the man who will bring a big breath of fresh air to the university.” Seated at one of the tables, Clark Kerr knew right away that one of the new governor’s first acts would be to fire him as university president. Reagan saw him as weak for not punishing student protestors more harshly. Shortly after dinner, one of the regents whispered to Kerr a sentence Didion might have swiped as a motto of the years she’d spend on Franklin Avenue: “Before this is all over, you’re going to be covered in blood.”

  2

  Didion worked in the mornings in a nearly empty bedroom with piles of books and a chair. She kept her needlepoint handy in case she got stuck on a piece. Down the hall, Dunne typed his notes from Delano and began to shape them into a narrative. He still had no book contract, but he hoped to get more than a Saturday Evening Post article out of the grape strikes. Back in February, when his agent, Carl Brandt, had sent his observations on Chavez’s movement to editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, most responded negatively, citing the difficulty of selling a book on such a dry-dust topic—it wasn’t “big ticket,” one said. Henry Robbins agreed, but he admired Dunne’s writing and he’d fallen under Chavez’s spell. He wanted to see something happen, and he encouraged Dunne to think beyond the boundaries of a magazine piece.

  Dunne was scheduled to fly to Houston at the end of January to cover the first Apollo launch for The Saturday Evening Post. Didion had her assignments for the magazine, too, and she’d been tinkering with the start of a novel. But between going to Ralph’s Market to shop for the baby each day and feeding her, she didn’t feel much like a writer. Besides, a torched VW in San Berdoo wasn’t remotely as glamorous as a domed baseball diamond or rockets to the moon.

  Three or four days a month, migraines sidelined her. She’d spend a day in bed, leaving Quintana in the care of her teenage nanny. She took Dexedrine and drank gin and hot water to dull the pain. In retrospect, she’d see this period as a “troubled time,” but she also noticed that major stressors—plumbing disasters, accidents—didn’t cause her paralysis. “Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache,” she said. “It comes instead when I am fighting … a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up.” Key here is “work.” The headaches were related to her writing and her sense of herself as a writer. Armed with this insight, she was able to massage her malady—she “learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it … as more friend than lodger.”

  In late December, while Dunne stayed behind to work on his Chavez story, she took Quintana to her parents’ house in Sacramento. Everyone agreed the baby was a charmer. “Delano?” Didion’s mother said when Didion told her about the project. “Nobody wants to read about Delano. Modesto, maybe.” />
  Alone one morning in the Franklin Avenue house, Dunne walked downstairs and found the dining room filling with water. A pipe had burst. The ceiling had turned to soggy plaster. The following day, he returned from a trip to the grocer’s and sensed immediately that something was wrong. Had another pipe split? No. “The door on the Victorian commode had been wrenched off its hinges, and the desk drawers in the living room were thrown open and the contents strewn on the floor,” he said. Every room had been cased. “Is there anyone in this house?” he called. He touched nothing—the out-of-date passports, the expired New York apartment leases, carbons of letters he “wished [he] had never written,” scattered across the floor—and called the police. Three hours later, officers arrived. Bored, they told him a similar break-in had recently occurred down the street; it was probably some kid looking for drug cash. Luckily, nothing major was missing. They dusted for fingerprints while Dunne smoked and made himself a drink. There wasn’t much they could do, said the cops. Dunne glanced anxiously out his windows. “I had never noticed so many strangers on the block,” he said.

  * * *

  In early January 1967, Dunne sent Brandt and Robbins a rough draft of the magazine version of his strike story. Robbins thought it a “superb job of reporting,” with a strong “visual sense of what it’s like in the fields.” He was eager to give Dunne “comments and suggestions for expansion.” He wanted to see a book, if only he could convince his colleagues at FSG. Meanwhile, Brandt had been busy stirring up interest in Dunne. Dick Kluger at Simon & Schuster, unaware of Robbins’s involvement with the writer, wrote Dunne on January 4, “I keep waiting and hoping to hear about Cesar and Company. Can you, will you, advise what, if anything, has happened to the project?”