The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  In Play It As It Lays, Encino is the faceless part of L.A. where Maria’s domestic dreams die in a bloody pail. (“Didion’s description of Maria’s abortion and her subsequent horror at the waste, the fetus in the pail … is all too true,” wrote the critic Barbara Harrison.) “You familiar with this area, Maria?” asks a doctor’s go-between in the novel. “Nice homes here. Nice for kids.”

  Adding his own nuance to the mix, Dunne often told friends at parties during this period—sometimes joking, sometimes not—that his marriage was a week-to-week affair.

  Contributing to their difficulties at this time were the stresses of writing, money, lots of drinking, Dunne’s quickness to anger, and Didion’s “theatrical temperament”—especially, it seems, in 1969, and again three years later, when, Didion wrote, “John and I were having a fight [and] he took it out on Quintana. She cried. I told her she and I were leaving, she and I were going to LAX, she and I were flying away from him.”

  Without placing blame on either party, one of the couple’s old friends said Didion should have taken Quintana and gone to live with Frank and Eduene. Didion’s sufferings, whatever their causes, were as intense as Maria’s tensions with her husband in the novel.

  “Did they have trouble? Oh, yes. And all those stories you read in the paper about Joan’s reclusiveness? I don’t understand why you’d think they’re true,” Eve Babitz told me. “Maybe it was John shouting over her. And she preferred it. John could be the idiot and she didn’t have to be. He pounded down doors, and that’s why Quintana hated him. Joan would never leave him—he got to be the obnoxious one. She thought staying with him proved she had character.”

  In November 1969, after a particularly cloudy period, Didion wrote of an attempt at reconciliation: “We … refrain from mentioning the kicked-down doors, the hospitalized psychotics [presumably, when she was diagnosed at St. John’s] and the packed suitcases.”

  “Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life, just let it go,” Didion wrote years later, invoking the echo of Dunne’s voice.

  When Play It As It Lays was published, Didion acknowledged suffering severe marital setbacks. “Anyway, John and I stayed together,” she told an interviewer. “A lot of marriages are surviving infidelity around the country … [it] isn’t really that important except as a betrayal.”

  “Betrayal,” Dunne wrote in Vegas, “never worked for us” as a major reason to fight.

  “If you can make the promise over again, then the marriage should survive,” Didion said. “I don’t really think infidelity is that important.”

  Vegas recounts a phone call on this very topic, illustrating the couple’s highly nuanced communication. (Remember: Dunne called Vegas a “fictionalized memoir”—about as nuanced as you can get.) He had gone to Nevada, partly to work, partly to escape home, and he was interviewing various residents of the underbelly. He called his wife one evening. “What’s new with you?” she said. He said he had a date “with a nineteen-year-old tonight. She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.” “It’s research,” Didion said. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available … You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” “But I don’t want to fuck her,” Dunne said.

  “There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone,” Dunne wrote. “‘Well, that can be part of the story, too,’ she said.

  “There seemed to be nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.”

  Dunne writes of buying Quintana a baseball mitt the spring she turned three and throwing a ball with her to fill his anguished days. He writes of a growing restlessness, of going to movies alone, driving the freeways for hours, and dreaming of escape. He writes of the “familiar season of discontent” at home, of moving from “crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town, every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” He writes that his wife had “too high a trouble quotient.” She often slept with a leaky ice bag on her head, to ward off “PMT, the Santa Ana and all forms of bad karma.”

  She fell into the lassitude she’d witnessed in her mother: Nothing made any difference. She promised him “she’d try harder to make things matter.” He told her he’d heard that before. Eventually, he spent eighteen months, off and on, in a residential motel just off the Strip in Las Vegas among hookers, cardsharps, and comedians, drafting a book.

  Whatever else led to this “season of doubt,” writing played its part. Though neither could imagine not being married to a writer, though they counted on each other for editorial and professional support, an edginess grew between them—not competition so much as sadness that things could not always be equal. And in this particular space, this constant struggle to right the balance, there was little, if any, room for Quintana, who would parrot back at them their daily withdrawals.

  Many years later, Didion would say she heard her daughter’s comments as “precocious”; now, she realized, they “could be construed in retrospect as pleas for help.” She “was already more aware of what was going on around her than I had any idea.”

  Among other things, what was going on around Quintana, early in 1969, was her father’s increasing worry about the worth of his current project—perhaps one reason so much was riding, for him, on a book party in New York. Didion wanted to fix things. “She claimed that [in my writing] I vandalized other people’s lives instead of coming to grips with my own,” Dunne wrote. “It was an argument without a rebuttal, which is what made it particularly infuriating.”

  It was also an argument about traditional reporting (Dunne’s special gift) versus the trendy, more personal style of nonfiction.

  Coming to grips with her own life—for which she’d been praised in reviews of Slouching Towards Bethlehem—was dangerously self-absorbing, making it hard for Didion to make things matter. In Life magazine, she wrote that lately she felt herself “a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious … alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper … the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations…”

  Each of these grisly topics appears in newspaper clippings among the rough drafts of Play It As It Lays in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Didion saved them while working on the novel. Across the top of each column, she scrawled “Maria”—in the book, Maria obsesses over violent newspaper stories. Didion’s comments in Life indicate a scary blurring between author and character.

  At one point, Didion made a note about “voice”—how she would like to disguise her tone and speak like a teenager, though she was not a teenager anymore. It is unclear whether she was speaking of her own voice or Maria’s—or perhaps she was speaking as Maria.

  Anyway, the couple stayed together: “I am reminded that we laugh at the same things.”

  And then there was Quintana, weeding the tennis court.

  Quintana, strolling with them around the lake in MacArthur Park. She was accosted one evening by an old man suddenly lurching at her out of the dark from a bench: “That child is the picture of Ginger Rogers,” he said.

  One night, in the garden out back, where the rats ate the avocados, she put a seedpod up her nose. Didion drove her to Children’s Hospital. The attending pediatrician had been called away from a lavish party and wore a dinner jacket to the clinic. Quintana found this interesting. The following night, she sniffed up another seedpod so that she could meet the handsome doctor again.

  3

  The atmosphere in the neighborhood remained the same: Still the outlandish parties. Still the whispered talk. Satanic rituals. Filmed orgies. Public humiliations (whippings, sodomy) in retaliation for bad dope deals.

  “There were simply too many drugs in that community,” said Noel Parmentel. “Hooch I understand. But not the other.” He had become a Hollywood fixture, dropping in on the Dunne
s, staying at the Chateau Marmont. He was trying to produce a film of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. His drinking buddies included Robert Mitchum and Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty. He’d hang with Cass Elliot, from whom he heard the dark rumors. “Cass used to send a limo to the airport for me, you know, with someone holding a sign: MR. PARMENTEL. She was great—a musical genius but all she wanted to do was look like Michelle [Phillips]. I did her a big favor once, stupidly. Through a congressman I knew, I got her scumbag boyfriend bailed out of jail.”

  The man’s name, he couldn’t recall, but Cass’s drug-dealing beaux would fill Laurel Canyon. Maybe it was Pic Dawson, who came and went, like so many, from Cass’s house, or maybe it was William Doyle, whom she introduced at parties in the spring of 1969 as her fiancé. By summer’s end, the LAPD had taken a special interest in Doyle. He admitted selling MDA to Voytek Frykowski, Cass’s neighbor. Allegedly, Frykowski sold these same pills to Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian, who said the drugs were worthless. Watson would be convicted of killing Frykowski in Sharon Tate’s house.

  Cass couldn’t stop talking that spring about the murder of Bobby Kennedy. The assassination and the turmoil at the Democratic National Convention the previous August had piqued her interest in politics. She thought maybe she’d run for the Senate someday. The night Bobby was shot, she’d been having dinner with Sharon and Roman in Malibu, and she couldn’t believe how shattered she felt, as if the whole country were bleeding out in that darkened hotel kitchen.

  One night at a party, Michelle Phillips told Didion a stunning story, emblematic of the times: A version of it would appear as the penultimate chapter of Play It As It Lays. When Phillips was seventeen, she said, her best friend, a woman named Tamar Hodel, decided to kill herself. Hodel had introduced Phillips to folk music. Listen to Peter, Paul and Mary, she’d say—two rabbis and a hooker. She had been jilted by the singer Scott McKenzie (“If you’re going to San Francisco”). She asked Phillips to help her gobble forty-eight Seconal.

  After Hodel had swallowed the pills, Phillips dragged her, comatose, to an unmade bed and lay there watching her. Finally, she fell asleep. John Phillips arrived and discovered the women in time to drive Hodel to a hospital and get her stomach pumped. Michelle had been scared, but—passive, young—she never questioned whether she should honor her friend’s request.

  Didion took this story and gave it to Maria. As her friend BZ sinks into a Seconal haze, Maria holds his hand: “She closed her eyes against the light … and her mind against what was going to happen…”

  Phillips told other stories that spring. Through Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys’ drummer, her husband, John, had met this fellow Charlie Manson. Manson was a songwriter, convinced that Terry Melcher, the Byrds’ producer, would get him a contract (Melcher was Doris Day’s son, a child of Old Hollywood). Manson was going to be a rock star. John didn’t think much of his talent, but he was an entertaining talker and he was always surrounded by pretty girls. Fun to be around. He and the girls lived occasionally on a former ranch—the backdrop for a lot of old Westerns, Manson said, Tom Mix, Howard Hughes.

  Lately, though, John didn’t like to party with people. For some reason, he had grown “quite paranoid,” Phillips said.

  What Phillips didn’t know, when she related this story, was that Manson had begun to instruct his followers to sneak onto peoples’ lawns and break into their houses—particularly places they’d been to, at flings and things—just to see if they could get away with it. Manson called this activity “creepy crawling.”

  John “heard sounds one night and went downstairs carrying a shotgun,” Phillips said. “I waited, without much anxiety, for him to come back. ‘I saw six people,’ he said when he returned, ‘all dressed in black, in tights and leotards, men and women, and they were in the Rolls-Royce, out in the garage, and when I went to the door, they all tiptoed away like penguins.’”

  Phillips didn’t believe him. She took the gun, gave him a Valium, and told him to come to bed.

  Months later, she knew. They’d been “creepy crawled.”

  4

  For Dunne’s New York book party, on May 14, 1969, Farrar, Straus and Giroux reserved the Gauguin Room in the Gallery of Modern Art, complete with cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and a piano player. Until the moment he left California, Dunne waffled in letters to Robbins. He said he didn’t like going to New York (not true), that he wasn’t looking forward to the party (not true), that he was pathologically paranoid about the “lit biz” (true of everyone). He said he had turned down three motion pictures in the past three weeks, costing him $175,000, and he didn’t know if New York was worth it. The movie offers may or may not have been genuine; the only obvious game in play was Didion’s unfinished treatment of The Panic in Needle Park and Nick’s inability, so far, to interest studios in the “downbeat” material.

  FSG planned a full-page ad for The Studio in The New York Times, which pleased Dunne but made him skittish. The rollout was smooth and highly supportive of Dunne but didn’t quell his fears. He didn’t want his bio to mention Delano—the distance between farmworkers and studio executives was so great, even he wondered what kind of résumé he was building.

  Most tellingly, he had dropped his longtime agent, Carl Brandt, for Lynn Nesbit, who was shepherding the careers of Tom Wolfe and Donald Barthelme.

  Dunne was not going through the motions of a breakdown, as his wife had, on the eve of his all-important second book, but his inner pitchings were no less turbulent. Whereas Didion acted out, to steel herself for the long run, Dunne bit back on his tensions—perhaps straining his heart (he’d wonder about this later). This was a difference between them, based in a shared understanding, and it was a way of balancing the scales.

  As the guests wandered from the Gauguin Room to the penthouse lounge, sipping Singapore slings, picking at small plates of satay chicken or spiced apples, Didion realized she had missed New York men. They looked at women; you could catch their eye. They actually wanted to talk to you, instead of just probing to see what you could do for them, like the men in L.A. On the other hand, she hadn’t missed that overbearing East Coast chauvinism toward the West. New Yorkers had no idea what an apocalyptic romance California was having with itself. Didion had not realized, until leaving L.A., quite how dark that city had gotten, “much darker than it was anyplace else,” she said.

  The ambivalence Dunne had felt before the celebration must have intensified during the evening. It was the same doubt characterizing his book: an insider’s account written from the perspective of an outsider who very much wanted in. “Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt,” Dunne would say. “A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.” And yet he always wanted to smash that window, and then be magnanimous enough to pay the damages.

  On top of everything, he hadn’t anticipated that the affair would turn into a wake for The Saturday Evening Post. The magazine had finally drowned in debt, losing a defamation suit to University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. In a pair of articles, the magazine had accused Bryant of encouraging violence on the field and of fixing a game. The magazine was ordered to pay over three million dollars in damages; in January, it had published an excerpt from The Studio; by February, it was gone. Dunne invited all the editors to his party. By now, they were “scattered to the four winds, [but] to my surprise they all came, inconvenient though it must have been,” he said. “We fell upon each other, sharers of a unique experience.”

  He and Didion would move on to write a regular column for Esquire and they would enjoy many years of association with The New York Review of Books, but never again would they experience the freedom to indulge stories quite the way they had at The Saturday Evening Post … in the Haight or in the Valley’s poisoned fields.

  A certain expansive spirit vanished with The Saturday Evening Post: a foretaste of the blight that would kill American magazi
nes over the next three decades.

  “May all the one-eyed critics lose their other eye,” said William Emerson, the magazine’s old editor in chief.

  Dunne raised a glass to that.

  5

  Months later, Didion would be startled to learn directly from Linda Kasabian that the night the Manson Family “did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit … and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.” The votives perked on the windowsills. Maybe Quintana was dancing to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Champagne flowed at parties up and down the block.

  Franklin Avenue—the “senseless-killing neighborhood”—was one of Charlie Manson’s playgrounds. In the late 1950s, he had lived in an apartment a block from the Dunnes’ house, running a bogus talent agency, 3-Star Enterprises, as a front for a prostitution ring. His buddy Tex Watson had a girlfriend living on Franklin. In the months before the Tate-LaBianca murders, he said, he sometimes sunbathed on his girlfriend’s deck, “drinking beer and smoking grass while we watched all the big limousines drive up for the parties, dumping out beautiful people whom we never could quite recognize.” Allegedly, Manson shot to death a dope dealer in the Franklin Garden Apartments, in the shadow of the Magic Castle hotel.

  On the afternoon of August 9, 1969, while Easy Rider played on area movie screens, while Portnoy’s Complaint, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Godfather brought an unusually high volume of readers into bookstores, word spread from Sunset up into the hills about the slayings at 10050 Cielo Drive. Didion was swimming in the pool at her sister-in-law Lenny’s house in Beverly Hills when Natalie Wood phoned with the news. “I can remember we had a baby-sitter from Nayarit then, and she was very frightened … when we heard about the murders,” Didion said. “I assured her, ‘Don’t worry. It has nothing to do with us,’ but it did. It had to do with everyone.”