She agreed with Robert Scholes: Ours was a hysterical age. This fact placed special burdens on storytellers. Scholes coined another new term, Hystorians. “The so-called stylistic excesses of such men as Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe are in my view no more than the indispensable equipment they must employ in doing justice to our times,” he said. “[H]ysteria cannot be assimilated and conveyed by one totally aloof.” He joined the chorus decrying the faded formulas of old-fashioned journalism, which merely supported a given paper’s editorial policies. “The hystorian fights this tendency toward formula with his own personality,” Scholes said.
In the simplest, gravest terms, this meant being a witness to your time. A solemn responsibility. “I am not the society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year-old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves,” Didion would assert in one of her essays. And yet she protested too much. She ended this same piece by tracking the “movements of the Army day” at Schofield Barracks and concluded, “James Jones had known a simple truth.” “[T]he Army was nothing more or less than life itself.” If the whole is the sum of its parts, then the life of our times rests in each of us, particularly in those devoted to the act, and the art, of witnessing. A dedicated hystorian (in an “old bikini bathing suit”), Didion felt this in her bones.
* * *
In the late summer of 1968, after her return from Hawaii, after the flurry of reviews for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and her visit to St. John’s Hospital, she and her fellow reporters would need to strain their witnessing powers to the limit to keep pace with what appeared to be the rapid disintegration of America’s democratic process.
With LBJ’s weary admission of failure and the murder of Bobby Kennedy, the choosing of the new president was cast in an elegiac light. The Mass mourning for Kennedy would be the last image of unity—of diversity truly coalescing—in this troubled political season.
In August, during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, and particularly during the violence in Chicago, it was as if the war in Vietnam had spread across the globe, to be fought in front of Macy’s.
REACH OUT AND GRAB THE GREATEST SUMMER EVER, said banners on the sides of Chicago police trucks.
“Chicago is a police state,” Paul Krassner, editor of the underground magazine The Realist, warned his readers. “The cops want to turn our parks into graveyards.”
“We will try to develop a Community of Consciousness,” Abbie Hoffman said.
And in an example of what Norman Mailer called “hippie prose,” Ed Sanders of the rock band the Fugs expressed many young people’s expectations of their week in the Windy City: “[J]oy, nooky, circle groups, laughing, dancing, sharing, grass, magic, meditation, music, theatre, and weirdo mutant-jissomed chromosome-damaged ape-chortles.”
The stage was rigged to explode.
While convention chair Carl Albert tried to keep order in the hall, wheezing his pinched Okie vowels at the cameras, and Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye broke protocol, standing at the podium and reciting the country’s perils rather than cheering his candidate, kids on the streets greased their faces with Vaseline, anticipating tear gas. Tear gas set your breath on fire. In Lincoln Park, Allen Ginsberg’s Hindu chanting sounded like a death rattle, ravaged by the poison. Behind him, William Burroughs stood like a ghost, wearing a gray fedora.
In McCarthy headquarters inside the Hilton Hotel, people tore up sheets to make bandages for victims of police clubs. The city sealed its manhole covers with hot tar so that no one could hide below street level.
Stop, children, look around.
There’s a man with a gun over there.
For most observers, the debacle at the Democratic Convention was the summer’s main political news. Didion saw it differently. In a city run by a thuggish mayor, a place where money moved on rivers of blood, where the smell of watery shit seeping from slaughterhouses still hung like prophecy in the air, the horror in the streets was not surprising.
The real story had taken place weeks earlier in Miami, a city Lyndon Johnson had once described as “not American.”
It was a city of old Cubans seething with resentment, armed with packets of plastique; of late-night deals at the edges of airport runways; and the story was, the Republicans had come to town. The country’s deep pockets had gathered for cocktails in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel. The most ambitious men in the nation were there: John Wayne. Barry Goldwater. Ronald Reagan. Billy Graham. Richard Nixon arrived to the fanfare of two marching bands playing “Nixon’s the One,” while blond cheerleaders danced beneath floating red balloons and Graham proclaimed him more realistic than Jesus. It was his time—the “time, I think, when the man and the moment in history come together,” Nixon said.
While Nixon stood in the convention hall, weaving a sweet narrative of his journey to success from the bosom of a peace-loving, football-playing family, from nights as a boy listening to distant train whistles and dreaming of “faraway places where he’d like to go,” the real story found its syntax in the daily numbers of war dead in Vietnam, the bodies flown to the Punchbowl Crater—for in defeat, four years earlier, Barry Goldwater had managed to stamp his policies on the political Right. His passions guided the party now (the party’s other venerable leader, the more temperate Dwight Eisenhower, languished that summer in Walter Reed Hospital following a series of heart attacks). The war had become America’s major global initiative.
But here was the other part of the story. The “country had learned an almost unendurable lesson—its history in Asia was next to done,” Mailer reported from Miami. Goldwater’s vision “depressed some part of America’s optimism … the country had begun to wear away inside.”
And now, riding these vast crosscurrents, California was about to seize the White House.
Nixon’s California was the Golden Land of Golf, of Puritanism and austerity.
Didion had traveled sun-hardened stretches in the center of the state, where these concepts failed to stick, as did the idea of America as a cultural or economic force. In that California, people spoke in tongues and played with rattlesnakes in defiance of Satan or Uncle Sam. They’d put a gun in your face if you came anywhere near them. They’d pick up young hitchhikers off the sides of the roads and vanish with them, fates unknown, in the hypnotic memory wipe of ceaselessly moving metal. That California, too, would accompany Tricky Dick to the banks of the Potomac, whether he knew it or not.
It was his time. But his time was beyond him. Beyond us all. That was the story told in Miami in the summer of 1968.
8
All fall, at Hollywood parties, presidential politics topped the talk. Only here, it seemed, could the result be uncertain.
The liberal hopefuls reminded Didion of Las Vegas wedding couples she’d witnessed outside the twenty-four-hour chapels, stumbling, drunk and impulsive, into a dream of happily ever after. The A-listers would gather in the hills above the Strip, past the old Mocambo, at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house for Hollywood “political action” parties, where, Didion said, “political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad).” While Hollywood gentry debated the finer points of the war or expressed continuing support for the grape strikes or discussed whether or not William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner promoted racism, the disaffected children of the people who used to sip the Mocambo’s vodka tonics and dance to Old Blue Eyes were throwing bottles at cops in front of Ciro’s while the Byrds floated eight miles high.
One night, at a party in Bel-Air, Didion met Nora Ephron, a fine young journalist (she was ever sharp, and yet the Newsweek staff put her to work in its mailroom!). They’d become great friends—they agreed that writing never helped them understand a damn thing. Didion was also introduced to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. That night, Didion wore the dress in which she’d married, the backless silk dress she’d bought the day JFK was shot. Polanski spilled a glass of wine on it. The red stain seemed port
entous, and would come to seem more so; only half kidding, one of Didion’s friends began to call the area around Franklin Avenue the “senseless-killing neighborhood.” Even in a year of chaos—perhaps especially in a year of chaos—people sought symbols and narrative links, though Ephron and Didion could have told them not to bother.
Just that October, a few miles from Didion’s house, in Laurel Canyon, a former silent movie actor, Ramon Novarro, had been murdered in his home by a pair of self-described hustlers looking for stardom or cash or something they felt Novarro had promised them. (A hustler, said one of the killers, is “someone who can talk—not just to men, to women, too … There are a lot of lonely people in this town, man.”)
Two blocks from the Dunnes’ home stood the Black Dahlia house, resembling a Mayan temple. The couple had heard rumors that, in the forties, in the basement of the house, a prominent L.A. physician had tortured and sliced in half an aspiring actress, Elizabeth Short (aka the Black Dahlia, presumably because of the color of her hair). The doctor’s son, Steve Hodel, suspected his father of the murder, and suggested a connection between the Hollywood killing and the dismemberment, years ago, of Suzanne Degnan in Chicago. Dunne would base some of his novel True Confessions on details from the Black Dahlia case.
Crazy violence was becoming a way to reckon time in California—normally difficult, said Eve Babitz, “since there [were] no winters.” There were just “earthquakes, parties, and certain people. And songs.” But the best-by date had passed. Most of the songs, overproduced, too smooth, had started to blur: “The Byrds and the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas … sounded as though they came out of a Frostie Freeze machine pipe organ.”
This was also true of the prose in the corporate press. Politics. Crime. All part of the Great American Muzak.
Late in 1968, the Los Angeles Times named Didion one of its Women of the Year, along with Greer Garson and Nancy Reagan. Didion was celebrated for her achievement as the author of Slouching Towards Bethlehem—for becoming Joan Didion. As she would later write in her essay “The White Album,” she was performing, day by day, barely up to the task. She was just like her mother, improvising, wearing her red suede sandals, her cashmere leggings, hoop earrings, and big enameled beads.
The newspaper editors placed her among Leaders, Pillars of the Community, Centers of the American Family.
“We hear sirens in the night,” Richard Nixon had said back in August, asserting his vision of leadership. “We see Americans hating each other, fighting each other, killing each other.” No matter. “Tonight I see the face of a child.… [H]e’s an American child.… He is a poet.… He is everything we ever hoped to be and everything we dare to dream to be.”
American children, raised by Women of the Year.
Because of them, Nixon said, “I believe that historians will recall that 1968 marked the beginning of the American generation in world history.”
* * *
In the crash pad next to the house, a couple had taken to making love on the lawn, in full view of Quintana’s bedroom window.
“Where you was?” Quintana, wearing fuzzy pink slippers, asked her mother whenever Didion returned home from a party or a shopping trip.
In the evenings, Quintana bounce-stepped onto the tennis court. “I remember watching her weed it, kneeling on fat baby knees, the ragged stuffed animal she addressed as ‘Bunny Rabbit’ at her side,” Didion wrote, heartbroken, a few years after her daughter had died.
Chapter Seventeen
1
The “snake book.”
Blood and champagne.
This is how the era would end.
Nora Sayre reports that, during the Nixon presidency, Air Force One was stocked with “an adequate supply” of the president’s blood type “in the likelihood of attempted assassination,” and “cases of American champagne for toasting his hosts at a reciprocal banquet.” “That vast jet, pounding through the skies full of blood and bubbly, stayed with me as a symbol for peace-keeping” during this period, Sayre wrote.
“Mommy’s snake book” was Quintana’s name for Didion’s second novel, Play It As It Lays. When the novel appeared in 1970, it came in a bold jacket designed by the distinctive book artist Janet Halverson. A rattler’s silhouette curled across the stark white cover, its forked tongue flicking a small setting sun. Didion worked hard on the book throughout 1968 (making extensive notes) and 1969 (composing the chapters). Quintana’s earliest memories of her mother’s industry nestled in the reptile’s coils. The creature charmed her mom, dragged her away in the drafty old house. Didion would sit on the sun porch—the smell of aloe wafting through the windows—and say she needed to work. In the evenings, when there wasn’t a party, she’d light votive candles and set them on the living room windowsills. She’d sip bourbon and reread the pages she’d written that day.
Quintana danced to the eight-track player: the Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Want to Dance?” “I wanna dance,” Quintana shouted. Years later, in Blue Nights, to convey an ache of innocence, Didion would sketch scenes of her daughter talking back to the song, but she didn’t note that the Mamas and the Papas were sometimes guests in her daughter’s house.
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” Quintana sang with the Byrds. To everything there is a season. This was the season of Mommy’s snake book. Her mother would say she needed to work. Quintana would say the same about herself when Didion asked her to do something.
* * *
It was also election season. You couldn’t go to a restaurant without hearing Nixon’s name.
One night, the Dunnes had dinner with Jim Mills, author of The Panic in Needle Park. He was an associate editor at Life. The Panic in Needle Park had begun years earlier as an article and photo essay for the magazine. But when the Dunnes met him, hoping to option his book for a picture, he wanted to talk politics.
LBJ had just gone on television to announce a temporary bombing halt in Vietnam. Mills insisted that the American people were overly sensitive to the word nuclear. Many lives could have been saved in Southeast Asia if the United States had nuked it, he said. Didion had once considered this position, but her time with Dunne had tempered her views, and the couple thought Mills slightly cracked. Didion had decided not to vote in this election—the thought of choosing the lesser of two evils appalled her.
But the movie looked like a go. Mills was receptive. Along with Nick, the Dunnes agreed to put up $1,000 for a year’s option against $17,500 and 5 percent of net profits. Didion would write a film treatment. Nick thought he could find further financing, maybe at Fox (Dunne’s time there had taught him that the studios were down, not out; you needed a studio to get anything done, and they operated with brute efficiency—around town, people called Disney “Duckau”).
Mills’s story line was relentlessly grim, but Didion had learned the art of the pitch. What’s the picture about? “Romeo and Juliet on junk,” she said.
* * *
Dunne was eager to finish his Dolittle project. Nothing about it surprised him. “Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind,” he’d say later. “What makes it bearable are those moments … when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in The Studio. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.”
He could barely lug his carcass to another studio meeting. He couldn’t stomach another working dinner at the Daisy, glancing at the glazed wall mirrors (strategically placed so everybody could stare at fellow diners without appearing to strain), listening to the studio heads discuss dubbing a picture in Israel:
“What do they speak there? Yiddish?”
“I don’t know. Hebrew maybe.”
“What’s ‘pussy’ in Hebrew?”
He groaned at the mountains of caviar honoring Hello, Dolly! now that the Wardrobe Department had determined Babs’s dress was sufficiently functional.
He’d had enough of the studio’s
divine eminence. All he wanted now was a book party in New York. (Presumably, FSG had thrown the promised bash for Slouching Towards Bethlehem.) Dunne told Henry Robbins he wasn’t really pressing for a party, but just for kicks, he wondered, How many people might I invite?
What really nagged him was fear that The Studio was not a worthy follow-up to Delano, and Delano had vanished with little notice. Meanwhile, his wife had become the muse of the sixties. Even so, critical acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem had not translated into robust sales. New American Library refused to make a public offer for the paperback rights (eventually, Dell would extend a $1,250 advance). Literary success could be as gloomy as failure.
2
“It is the season … of divorce,” Didion had written of the cheating couples in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” At the end of 1969, shortly after discussing in print the possibility that she and her husband might separate, she would refer to her own “season of doubt.”
“We communicated in nuance,” Dunne wrote.
Let’s take a look.
At the end of “Los Angeles Notebook,” in the final section of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion sits in a piano bar in Encino. Piano bars in Encino, she writes, are where people “tell each other about their first wives and last husbands.” She does not say what she was doing there alone. She does say she went to a pay phone and called a friend in New York. He asked her why she was there. She replied, “Why not?”
The Last Love Song Page 35