The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Babitz noticed perceptual differences between the Dunnes’ generation, whose preferred relaxant was alcohol, and younger people at the parties, who liked pills and synthetic stimulants. But really, “no one cared,” she said. “By then, everyone was smoking pot.” “Joan and I connected,” she told Vanity Fair. “The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she’d take downers, but really she’s a Hell’s Angels girl, white trash.” As her date, Babitz often brought Peter Pilafian, an Armenian roadie with the Mamas and the Papas, and she talked about her cover art for Buffalo Springfield’s second album, a Joseph Cornell–inspired collage. Later, she would print, on special paper called Delmarva Text, a limited edition of psychedelic posters featuring the British band Cream. “Joan bought the Ginger Baker poster and put it in her house. She was, like, the only one who liked it,” Babitz said.

  Her remarks remind us how traditionally underappreciated the visual arts had been in L.A.—their influence on Didion, through figures like Babitz, has rarely been mentioned. At the time, “Los Angeles had no modern art museum and few galleries, which was exactly what renegade artists liked about it: Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Nauman … Judy Chicago…,” wrote Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. “[A] prevailing permissiveness in Los Angeles in the 1960s brought about countless innovations: Andy Warhol’s first show, Marcel Duchamp’s first retrospective, Frank Gehry’s unique architecture, Rudi Gernreich’s topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Doors. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.”

  Didion’s friend Earl McGrath opened a small art gallery on North Robertson Boulevard, on the edge of Beverly Hills. “He never made any money because he didn’t try very hard to sell the art,” Babitz said. “It’s a miracle he survived—but he had the best parties in the world.” At these parties, and at her own—through Babitz, Ann Marshall, and Teri Garr—Didion met the “Lumberjacks,” macho male painters associated with Walter Hopps’s Ferus Gallery, L.A.’s first Pop Art center. The best known of these artists was Ed Ruscha (another Okie). In the early sixties, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles on Route 66, he fell in love with the simple geometric architecture of filling stations. In 1963 he self-published a paperback book entitled Twentysix Gasoline Stations, featuring straightforward black-and-white photographs of the generally unremarkable structures. Artforum sneered: “[T]he book is so curious, and so doomed to oblivion that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence.” In fact, in the years since, Twentysix Gasoline Stations has been celebrated as a milestone in modern American art: It announced a distinctly Western sensibility based on close observation of (often manufactured) objects, suspending all judgment of them. “I want absolutely neutral material,” Ruscha said. “My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of ‘facts.’” His words might describe the literary style of Play It As It Lays, published a few years later by a woman who shared his fondness for gas stations.

  In this context, we see that Didion’s obsession with biker films was not just a guilty pleasure, but a recognition of a developing artistic style rooted in the raw, rough textures and materialistic culture of the American West.

  Like Ruscha, Dennis Hopper was an acquaintance of hers. His photographic skills may well have exceeded his talents as an actor. He took Ruscha’s cue, snapping pictures of the vernacular on L.A. street corners (including a famous gas station shot, Double Standard), and making the quintessential biker film—short on story and character but blazing with style—Easy Rider (1969).

  What really distinguished this West Coast style from the New York art world was its “direct response to life rather than to [aesthetic] ‘problems,’” said art critic John Coplans. Its blunt representational approach revealed a “deep understanding of the lie of the evolution of [artistic] progress” and an affirmation that “art springs directly from life, with all its anguish.” (His words may give us a clue as to why Didion was so perplexed by the hippies in the Haight, who, as novelist C. D. B. Bryan said, had embraced a “contemporary morality … based upon aesthetic rather than social values.” Didion did not share the hippies’ escapist, “It’s all too beautiful” impulse; however, what remained fundamentally Western about San Francisco’s LSD culture, and did attract her, was the value it placed on the “immediate, direct experience.”)

  Immediacy and directness were essential to the new Western art. “There is a very thin line as to whether this book [Twentysix Gasoline Stations] is worthless or has any value—to most people it is probably worthless,” Ruscha said. This mixing of high and low would become a Pop Art principle; given the astonishing work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it would come to be associated mostly with New York. But arguably its origins were in L.A. (the Ferus Gallery mounted the first American Pop Art show).

  Didion’s version of the Pop Art credo? “I never ask.”

  * * *

  Often, on party nights, she asked Sandy Sturges if her boys would baby-sit Quintana. (The first time Didion went to Sturges’s door, Sturges thought she was a little girl.) On evenings when the jasmine drifted through her open windows and people began to gather in her living room, “I imagined that my … life was simple and sweet,” Didion wrote. “[S]ometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors … nothing was unimaginable. The mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin’—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,’ and that many people were doing it—was very much with us.”

  The person closest to her who had gone too far was her brother-in-law. In late 1967 and early 1968, the drugs on the streets, and eventually in the upscale homes, got harder. Heroin and coke shoved aside hallucinogens … and then people jumped back into their old paraphernalia, to play again among cellophane flowers.

  Nick leaped. Over and over. Whenever he could. He remained charming and gregarious. He had never lacked friends who could supply him with the latest thrills. One of his budding pals was a hairdresser to the stars, Jay Sebring. “The first time I dropped acid, I dropped it with Jay,” Nick recalled. “He brought it over to my house on Walden Drive one time when Lenny and the kids were at her mother’s ranch.” Sebring loved to wear leather jackets and ride motorcycles with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen.

  “Jay had a private room for his steady clients so that they wouldn’t have to be seen by the other customers,” Nick said. “I had a regular appointment every third week, and it was in that room that I met Sharon Tate. She would often be sitting there in a chair, just to be with Jay as he worked. She looked so young that I thought at first she was coming there after school.”

  Tate was an aspiring actress who had just appeared as a character named Malibu in a picture that had nothing much going for it except a Byrds soundtrack and lots of shots of swimming pools.

  “She wore her blonde hair straight and long,” Nick said of Tate. “She was quiet and friendly and smiled a lot at our conversations. Jay … couldn’t stop looking at her.” On the day before she traveled to England to shoot a movie called Eye of the Devil, Nick and Sebring toasted her with champagne. While overseas, she would meet Roman Polanski.

  Nick recalled feeling uneasy that day, sipping champagne in Sebring’s private room.

  It was a time for the “jitters,” Didion wrote. The jitters were “setting in.”

  The demonstrations on Sunset continued, but in the meantime the clubs had gotten louder, raunchier, rougher. “You could smell the semen on the street in front of the Troubadour,” Eve Babitz said.

  In the evenings, Didion would check to see that Quintana was safely tucked into her bed, her moon-shaped night-light glowing (“my moon lamp,” Quintana called it), and then she would make dinner for her visitors.

  One night, a baby-sitter Didion had hired told her that death floated in Didion’s aura.

  She had her Dexies and gin. Compazine for anxiety. Still, she mustered the energy to cook for dozens. She put MoM
A place cards, with the guests’ names on them, at each place setting on tables around the rooms. It was an incredible performance. “She was drunk and on drugs—no wonder she was miserable. So how come she held it together so much better than all the rest of us?” Eve Babitz wondered.

  In the summer of 1968, the Dunnes threw a party for Tom Wolfe to celebrate the publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. “We invited one hundred people,” Dunne said. “[A]fter the first 250 showed up, we stopped counting.” Describing the party to one interviewer, he said, “It was a fucking zoo.”

  Nick’s thirteen-year-old boy, Griffin, had heard Janis Joplin was going to make an appearance at the party, so he talked Lenny into letting him go. At some point in the evening, a bald German man who seemed to be experiencing a bad acid trip latched onto the boy, asking his help getting settled somewhere. “I thought it was Colonel Klink” from the television show Hogan’s Heroes, Griffin said. It was the film director Otto Preminger.

  Joplin arrived at around ten-thirty, while Dunne was eating in the kitchen: “Chicken salad. Glasses of dry sherry,” he said. She asked him to get her a little brandy. “[W]hen I gave it to her in a snifter, she said, ‘What’re you doing? Saving it?’” “She had just done a concert,” Didion recalled. She wanted the brandy in a water tumbler, with a shot of Bénédictine in it. Tom Wolfe remembered that, just before Joplin “passed out on the divan, she said, ‘I paid my dues. I paid my dues.’” Two years later, she’d die on Franklin Avenue, in room 109 of the Landmark Motel, a Polynesian-themed monstrosity—a favorite of rock stars, said the the Byrds’ David Crosby, because of the “convenience of being close to street dealers.” She shot a balloon of smack. It was unusually potent; this same supply killed eight other people that weekend. Days later, the word on Franklin Avenue was that this was the best dope going: “It’s so strong it OD’d Janis.”

  If Didion had been given to metaphor, her house was the perfect emblem of dread: a huge, unmanageable space where, at any moment, the pipes might burst. Slush, rushing above and below you. She stuck to her role in the kitchen, stirring simmering pots, staring at a line from the Karl Shapiro poem: “It is raining in California.” She thought of the Hoover Dam, which she had visited not long ago for a possible Saturday Evening Post column: all that surging energy held in check. She remembered the cranes and the generators and the transformers, the hundred-ton steel shaft piercing the glassy surface. Organization. Control. She remembered one of the workers telling her the dam’s marble star map fixed forever the dam’s dedication date. He said it was for when they were all gone and the dam was left. She thought of the wind and the setting sun. She pictured torrents of water crashing through an empty world. And then she made an elaborate meal for her guests, many of whom (some of them strangers) were still in the house, asleep, when she awoke the following morning, padding barefoot over worn hardwood floors, past the brittle and crumbling window shades.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1

  The year was 1968. In the late afternoons, in the slanting light, on the clay tennis court behind the house on Franklin Avenue, Quintana sat alone, pulling weeds.

  On Zuma Beach in Malibu, where the Dunnes would live in just a few years, The Planet of the Apes crew shot a seminal scene (“We’ve got entertainment and a message in this picture,” said the movie’s star). Charlton Heston, one of the last humans on Earth, discovered, half buried in sand, a broken Statue of Liberty and screamed in rage at the realization that America had destroyed itself.

  On March 31, 1968, aware of Gallup Polls suggesting that only 23 percent of the American people approved of his handling of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson announced on television that he would not seek nor “accept the nomination of my party as your president.”

  On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. The following week, rioting flared in Harlem, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit.

  On April 23, student protesters at Columbia University occupied the lobby of Hamilton Hall and prevented the dean from leaving his office.

  On June 3, a woman claiming she was on a mission to destroy all men shot Andy Warhol.

  On June 6, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while on his way to visit Cesar Chavez, and thank him and the farmworkers who had helped him win the California Democratic primary.

  2

  The underground press was poor, in every sense of the word, but it was doing a finer job than the corporate media of documenting why most Americans thought the country was self-destructing.

  While Didion hit the Haight, Time ran a cover story on “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture.” The magazine’s insights into the hippie philosophy went like this: “They find an almost childlike fascination in beads, blossoms, and bells”; “[i]ndoors or outdoors, any place can provide a dance floor for hippies, who think that they are undulating in motion with the universe, experiencing joy and well-being.”

  The papers were even worse than the magazines.

  “The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are The Wall Street Journal … [though] I have a minimal interest in much of what it tells me … the Los Angeles Free Press, the Los Angeles Open City and the East Village Other,” Didion said in The Saturday Evening Post (whose rush toward bankruptcy gave it a certain healthy recklessness where its editorial policies were concerned). These papers spoke to her straightforwardly, though they were “amateurish and badly written,” “silly,” and “not sufficiently inhibited by information.” All other American newspapers reeked of “mendacity” by pretending to be objective. “Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer’s particular bias … It is the genius of these [underground] papers that they talk directly to their readers. They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight; the assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style,” Didion said—and here we see precisely why “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” succeeded while “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” did not.

  Toward the end of her piece, she listed a central reason for the failures of the mainstream press: The papers do not tell the “real story”; rather, they speak in insider “code” and “reflect the official ethic.” Over thirty years later, in Political Fictions, she would echo and amplify this theme.

  * * *

  The papers were one problem. Readers were another. Delano attracted little notice. Henry Robbins groused, “I find that most people east of Nevada haven’t the slightest knowledge of the strike and its significance.”

  The book’s best review appeared in The Kansas City Star, Dunne wrote a friend—a University of Missouri English professor said Delano restored one’s faith in nonfiction. “A lot of shit,” Dunne said, but it was good for the ego. “All I can say is, Nosotros Venceremos.”

  Years later, once Didion and Dunne became established, he would tell interviewers they never competed. But he was clearly distressed at Delano’s small ripples while his publisher and editor evinced mounting excitement over Slouching Towards Bethlehem. He chided Robbins over talk of a book party for Joan in New York—had Delano not deserved a bash? Only kidding, he said, but it was a joke he would not let go.

  He couldn’t help but feel his Dolittle project was slight, though probably it would enjoy greater public interest than the grape strikes, and he discovered he didn’t much care for the studio men he met. The Fox atmosphere was toxic. The sums involved in making movies, he learned, often resembled the national debts of emerging nations. And there was no shortage of self-importance.

  In the Haight, Dunne’s wife had grabbed the sixties by its lanky purple hair.

  What did he have? Rex Harriso
n on a giraffe.

  Around the house, his temper slipped over little things.

  * * *

  Fox pissed him off, but he liked making connections. And his foggy brother Nick was still working successfully as a film producer—Nick would soon bankroll for the screen Mart Crowley’s hit play, The Boys in the Band. The Dunnes had begun to consider screenplays again, especially since the The Saturday Evening Post might blow away. A producer friend had pitched them an idea—a heart-transplant thriller featuring an ailing Howard Hughes character whose thugs kill a former Olympic athlete for his heart. They’d done a treatment. The picture never got made, but CBS bought the treatment for fifty thousand dollars, allowing the Dunnes to join the Writers Guild for health insurance.

  Soon after returning from the Haight, Didion read James Mills’s novel of heroin addiction in New York City, The Panic in Needle Park. It was a powerful love story with a driving narrative, ready-made for the movies, she believed. Her husband and her brother-in-law agreed.

  Dunne thought of Jim Morrison for the lead role of the street hustler Bobby. Nick knew Morrison. So did Eve Babitz and her sister Mirandi, who designed many of Morrison’s outfits, including his signature leather pants. At the beginning of 1968, the Doors were at the peak of their popularity. The New Hollywood renegades—Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern, now haunting the Magic Castle hotel just up the road from the Dunnes, writing their bike opera, Easy Rider—dismissed the Doors as poseurs, but the teenage children of studio executives had fallen for the pants; the band was getting movie offers and stirring the interest of avant-garde filmmakers such as Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda.

  One evening in early spring, Didion and Dunne sat in on a Doors recording session. She hoped to get an article for The Saturday Evening Post (she captured the narcoleptic scene in her essay “The White Album”). Dunne wanted to check Morrison’s suitability for Panic. The band was making its third album, Waiting for the Sun, in the Two Terrible Guys Studio near Sunset and Highland.