The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  For a few days, at least, the grapes would have to keep, as Dunne tracked Apollo. On January 27, two days prior to his scheduled trip to Houston, he drove to the North American Aviation plant in Downey, California. There, engineers had designed the Apollo capsule. He crawled inside a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft. He ate some of the astronauts’ food—it was even worse than the K rations he’d been served in the army. He was told there were seventy-eight cubic feet per man inside the cramped capsule—plenty of room, as the average male coffin had only twenty-eight.

  The engineers’ confidence made him giddy. In no time, moon shots were going to be routine, they said: “You can run a Greyhound bus line up there.” By 1985 we’d be making round-trips to Mars.

  What if something went wrong inside the spacecraft? Dunne asked. No problem. The survival factor clocked in at 99 percent.

  Two days later, on the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, fire swept through the Apollo 1 capsule, killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. Dunne canceled his Houston trip. He happened to be driving on the Hollywood Freeway when he heard about the fire on the radio. He recalled the engineers’ swagger, their armor of invulnerability—almost of immortality, they seemed to think. He said the Apollo disaster “was as if Achilles had fallen down the cellar stairs.”

  * * *

  In March, Quintana turned one. Almost coincident with her birthday, both her parents were about to secure major book contracts.

  Robbins had convinced Roger Straus to approve a three-thousand-dollar advance for the grape story (Dick Kluger, at S&S, was furious, feeling he’d been played). Delighted, Dunne listed possible titles. He fancied In Dubious Battle but feared Mr. Steinbeck might object.

  Robbins wrote to say, “And now that you’re with FSG—how about bringing your charming wife along?”

  Didion had taken their daughter to Sacramento, to celebrate Quintana’s birthday with Frank and Eduene (and to distance herself from the fact that she was not writing much). In her parents’ house, surrounded by her grandmother’s hand-painted teacups, she felt protected; sheltered from deadlines, contracts, proposals. As a child, she’d been in a rush to grow up and go away, but now she liked to return and luxuriate, briefly, in the illusion that the world had not changed—that it would not change for her daughter.

  She lit the candles on a large white cake. The adults drank champagne while the baby plowed through strawberry-marshmallow ice cream. Later, warm and content, sleepy, Didion pressed her face against Quintana’s through the thick, fat slats of the crib.

  * * *

  Squelching his anger at Dunne over the Chavez dealings, Dick Kluger wrote to ask if he’d like to propose a book on the space program. Dunne declined; eventually, both Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer produced books on the astronauts.

  The “New Journalists,” as Wolfe would call them, competed fiercely for the same subjects, many of them—car culture, hippies, NASA, Las Vegas—featuring Western settings or connections. “When I started writing in what became known as my style, I was trying to capture the newness and excitement of the West Coast thing,” Wolfe said. “It’s where all the exciting youth styles were coming from. They certainly weren’t coming from New York. Everything I was writing about was new to the East Coast.”

  On March 22, Dunne wrote Henry Robbins, chasing a rumor that Wolfe was doing a piece on Ken Kesey and the acidheads. He wondered if Robbins knew anything about this, as it was a matter of some interest to them.

  His wife had decided to go to the Haight.

  3

  “I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed,” she said. “If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”

  As she would write in the famous opening to her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “San Francisco was where the [country’s] social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies.’”

  Taking their cue from the Doors, the baby boomers shouted, “We want the world and we want it now!” Didion was intrigued and appalled.

  The most privileged, pampered, studied, and commercially targeted group in American history, the boomers were a massive workforce in the eyes of corporate executives. Madison Avenue saw a crowd of consumers. In order to channel their emergent desires, government agencies and medical boards tracked every twitch, blink, and speck of saliva. Behaviorists argued with psychiatrists who quibbled with law enforcement over the care and well-being of America’s kids. Biologists debated nature versus nurture, stimulus-response units, and organicism. The Woodworth Personal Data Sheet, Binet’s IQ test, Rorschach’s inkblots, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, Dr. Spock, and Captain Kangaroo spoon-fed boomers daily doses of themselves.

  Overfed, resentful of the poking and prodding, the children puked it all up. Many decided to go missing. And then they wanted more, but on their terms. The world had tried too hard to shape them. They decided to change the world.

  The testers had failed to maintain control. They’d fumbled the testing tools. How had this happened? Didion wondered.

  Perhaps the starting point was 1946: Persuaded by data sheets that the American populace was crippled with neuropsychiatric disorders, the U.S. Congress signed into law the National Mental Health Act, budgeting $4.2 million to study dysfunctions and to treat their manifestations through medicine. In this context—in tandem with the military’s aim to develop mind-control drugs—two Bay Area psychologists, working with Oakland’s Kaiser Hospital, published a study arguing that mental patients receiving psychotherapy fared no better after nine months than patients getting no treatments; mood-enhancing drugs, then, might be a profitable area of research. The primary author of this study was a young man named Timothy Leary.

  In this context, Max Rinkel, a psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, ordered a shipment of LSD-25 from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and dosed his colleague Robert Hyde to see what would happen. At the American Psychological Association’s convention in Cincinnati in 1951, Rinkel reported that Hyde had become paranoid on the drug, hearing imaginary doors slam shut.

  In this context, the Rand Corporation as well as various Veterans Administration hospitals, conducted lab experiments with mind-altering drugs. In Menlo Park, California, Dr. Leo Hollister, recruited by the CIA for MK-ULTRA, administered psilocybin and LSD to a volunteer subject named Ken Kesey.

  By now, it’s well documented that Kesey, Leary, and other pranksters let the goodies out of the bag. At least for a while, the lab men were no longer in charge of hallucinogen-based social experiments.

  Old Hollywood was flashing: Cary Grant dropped acid more than sixty times. “I have been born again,” he said. Christopher Isherwood dosed himself under the direction of Dr. Sidney Cohen of UCLA and the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles. Even Henry Luce tried the drug on a visit to California. He conducted an invisible orchestra on a lawn one night.

  Aldous Huxley, a lifelong quester for the ideal intoxicant and the author of The Doors of Perception, from which Jim Morrison took the name of his band, died, on the day JFK was shot, believing he had found in LSD the key to the cosmos. He used a William Blake quote as the epigraph to his book: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” He once told Timothy Leary that Western culture would experience a profound revolution in consciousness if “wisdom drugs” could be given to cultural “elites”—artists, economists, intellectuals—who would then disseminate their visions throughout society.

  With the help of Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts (who praised drug-induced mysticism on his Bay Area radio show), the Grateful Dead, and pioneer outlaw chemists, primarily Owsley Stanley, Leary went Huxley one better. He dispensed “wisdom” on the streets at about
two dollars a pop.

  Cheap rents, the proximity of Berkeley, and state-of-the-art labs at nearby VA hospitals combined to make San Francisco’s once-blighted Haight-Ashbury neighborhood a grand ballroom for mind expansion. “People are beginning to see that the Kingdom of Heaven is within them,” Ginsberg said. “It’s time to seize power in the Universe, that’s what I say … not merely over Russia or America—seize power over the moon—take the sun over.”

  For Didion, who had never marched to the Beats—or the hippies, as the press tagged them, playing off Norman Mailer’s term hipster, youngsters wearing flowers in their hair up and down the Haight—the Kingdom of Heaven was not nigh in psychedelic shenanigans. For her, this epic experiment, under no one’s supervision, was closer to William Carlos Williams’s warning in his introduction to Howl: “Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.”

  * * *

  The essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” probably began as a series of discussions with Ted and Shirley Streshinsky. “After Delano, we saw Joan and John in the Bay Area,” Shirley said. “I suppose the idea for a story on the subculture was talked about, because either Joan or Ted, or perhaps both of them, proposed the story to The Saturday Evening Post. Our friend Paul Hawken, who was very much part of the beginning of the hippie movement, had something to do with it. He was the son of one of Ted’s good friends, and during that period spent a lot of time at our house and convinced Ted that the counterculture movement was worth a story.”

  Like Didion, Paul Hawken was a fifth-generation Californian. In time, he would become a wealthy entrepreneur, selling macrobiotics and “gentleperson” gardening supplies. He established the Erewhon Natural Foods store in Boston, helped Stewart Brand publish The Whole Earth Catalog, and became a political adviser to Jerry Brown and Gary Hart. In the mid-1960s, he was living in the Haight with his friend Bill Tara, promoting theater and rock concerts in an old firehouse on Sacramento Street, just north of the Haight, in the Sunset District. His specialty was light shows. He gave Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company one of their first breaks, and he was an early supporter of Jerry Garcia and the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead). At the time, he embraced the hippie “lifestyle,” but he was by no means one of the “missing children” Didion would emphasize in her essay. Like Chet Helms and Bill Graham, better-known local rock promoters, he was a budding businessman. “When everybody else had long hair, I cut mine off,” he said. “I’ve always been a contrarian.”

  Didion met him in the Streshinskys’ kitchen. “I remember Paul not being sure how to handle a movie company who wanted to rent the warehouse space where Paul seemed to be in charge, and where Kesey’s ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’ was performed,” Shirley said. “Joan offered to handle the negotiation with the film company for Paul because she had some experience with movie producers.”

  Hawken became one of Didion’s informal guides to the Haight. In her essay, the Warehouse, which she described as “total theater, a continual happening,” and where she always felt “good,” was probably the alley space at 65 Hariett Street, south of Market, where Hawken lived with Tara and Tara’s sometime girlfriend, Jean Allison Young. “Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show” in the Warehouse, Didion wrote, “and there are a lot of interesting things around, like an old Chevrolet touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended like a swing from the rafters, the point of that being that it gives you a sensory-deprivation high.” She called the place “the garage of a condemned hotel.” Young said it was “actually an old factory for making the pre-packaged small half-pies that you could buy at a convenience store. Initially, we had a wicked problem with rats and mice … and had so many cockroaches that we used to have a monthly ‘cockroach killing party’ with Raid and beer. Great fun.”

  Didion visited—“I just stayed around awhile, and made a few friends,” she said—in the spring and early summer of 1967. She “stayed at a new (then) motel on University Avenue in Berkeley. Ted would pick her up and they spent the day, sometimes very long days, in the city,” Shirley told me. “Sometimes Ted would get the film developed so we could project the pictures on the wall in our living room so Joan could see them. He was doing some really wild photojournalism for then. Even for now, I think.” Most of the pictures were deliberately blurry and double-exposed, to simulate an LSD trip.

  LSD had been declared illegal in California seven or eight months before. On that day, the hippie community had gathered in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park to hear free music by Big Brother and the Holding Company, Wildflower, and the Dead, and to drop acid in unison in defiance of the new law. The Merry Pranksters pulled up in their Magic Bus, minus Ken Kesey, who’d fled the country on drug charges. Celebrants had been urged to bring to the park “photos of personal saints and gurus and heroes of the underground … children … flowers … drums … incense … symbols … [and] costumes.” Organizer Allen Cohen said, “We wanted to create a celebration of innocence. We were not guilty of using illegal substances. We were celebrating transcendental consciousness. The beauty of the universe. The beauty of being.”

  This was the Haight at its peak—before reporters outnumbered residents, before grifters moved in for quick scores and easy lays, before STP and harder drugs flooded the back alleys (shipped, some thought, by the Mafia or the CIA; after all, the neighborhood was a ready-made market … or an enclosed clinic, perfect for experimenting).

  On January 14, 1967, ten to twenty thousand people went to Golden Gate Park for “The Human Be-In, A Gathering of the Tribes,” an attempt to unite the Haight community with Berkeley activists. Allen Ginsberg chanted. Timothy Leary spoke. The Hells Angels guarded power cables so rock bands could perform. (“We’re in the same business,” Kesey told the Angels. “You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads.”) For the occasion, Owsley Stanley made enough acid to float the park. Linda Gravenites, a Dead hanger-on who lived with the band in their old Victorian at 710 Ashbury, recalled Owsley showing up with a “giant restaurant mayonnaise jar filled with teeny, tiny White Lightning pills. They were all gone by the end of the day.”

  And so was the Haight’s ambience. “Up until then, people came because they were full to overflowing and were sharing their fullness,” Gravenites told Alice Echols, Janis Joplin’s biographer. “After that”—spurred by sensationalist sex and drug stories in the press—“it was the empties who came, wanting to be filled.”

  By the time Didion showed up, even the Haight’s biggest believers realized the party was over. Posters began to appear on street corners: “Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again & again … Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street.… Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.” A mime troupe passed out flyers: “IF YOU DON’T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.” That August, George Harrison dropped in to witness the love and spiritual fulfillment he’d been hearing about and left profoundly frightened, having been assaulted by addicts and drunks. On October 6, the Haight’s residents held a mock funeral, hoisting a coffin through the neighborhoods amidst a psychedelic parade, declaring the “Death of Hippie.”

  * * *

  The cover of the September 23, 1967, issue of The Saturday Evening Post featured a splashy Ted Streshinsky photo of a top-hatted hippie grinning through face paint, with the caption “The Hippie Cult: Who They Are, What They Want, Why They Act That Way”—topics Didion’s essay failed to address, even remotely. Her real subject crawled into the piece about a quarter of the way through, in the form of a three-year-old named Michael, the child of a hippie girl. His mother got high every day and neglected him. Didion first met him in the Warehouse, “a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint.
” His presence pleased her, though she worried about his lack of supervision. While no one was playing with him, he tried to light a pair of joss sticks. Left alone, he crooned to himself, mesmerized by a blue theatrical spotlight. She recognized him in other children she encountered, children tangled accidentally in lamp cords, children fighting on the streets, children on acid—in “High Kindergarten.” In the essay, Didion stressed that the parents of these children were also just kids, “pathetically unequipped.”

  One day, she watched some of her new “friends” drop acid—she wanted to observe what happened when the “flash” kicked in. “The only LSD we could get was the real Sandoz” stuff, Jean Young said. Taking it was a “spiritual experience.” What Didion saw that day was petulance, impatience, narcissism. At the moment of the flash, she heard someone mutter a single, breathy “Wow.”

  These were adolescents “who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together,” she wrote.

  Significantly, the one major change she made in the essay from the magazine version to its appearance a year later in her book was the addition of a scene in which she tried to teach Michael the words to “Frère Jacques.” The point of the scene was that no one else paid attention to the child. Only Didion seemed to care.

  * * *

  Rarely in the essay does Didion step forth to judge what she witnesses. But toward the end she cannot hold her tongue: these children are “less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb,” she writes.