The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  The couple stayed at the Hotel Alamac at Seventy-first and Broadway, near Sherman and Verdi squares; together, these were known as Needle Park. The Alamac, nineteen stories high, topped with large decorative concrete urns, was a luxury hotel when it opened in the 1920s, featuring orchestras in its Congo Room and hosting international chess tournaments, but by 1969 it was a run-down residential establishment housing mostly the elderly unemployed. The City University of New York leased three floors there, offering remedial classes to high school kids, but the program was troubled: The black and Puerto Rican students demanded nonwhite teachers and the administration despised its radical young faculty, assigning Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung. Violence hung in the air. On the residential floors, drug use and prostitution passed the hours. Didion kept her eyes down in the jerky old elevators.

  She didn’t last long at the Alamac. She wanted to leave the moment she discovered the management wouldn’t bring her clean white sheets every day (she went to Bloomingdale’s and bought her own fresh towels). For a while, though, she got to play Hard-Boiled Reporter (to pack: bras and bourbon). Observing the bloody needles discarded in the halls, watching the bartender at P&J Café drag overdosed patrons from his bathroom to the curb at Verdi Square, meeting recovering addicts from Phoenix House nearby, she gathered telling details for the screenplay. Blissfully, Dunne indulged his voyeuristic tendencies.

  The intersection of Amsterdam, Seventy-first, and Broadway was an urban pressure point, a tumor of traffic swelling around a jam in the city’s nerve system. The pressure was heightened by Robert Moses’s slum-clearance campaign and by the destructive wave rolling through neighborhoods here following the ground-breaking ceremony at Lincoln Center. Veteran residents fled; absentee landlords took over; city services declined; fewer cops patrolled the streets; conditions decayed; drug dealers claimed their spots.

  It was the perfect setting for a New Hollywood love story.

  * * *

  With Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, and Midnight Cowboy, the studios had encountered both a threat to their operation and a new formula that, if successfully absorbed, would reinvent them: the studio picture as “indie,” often shot on location with nonunion crews, featuring gritty subject matter wrapped around traditional narrative elements, the love story, the buddy flick, the road movie, the updated Western. In committing to The Panic in Needle Park, Avco was just like every other studio in 1969—“narcotized,” Didion said, “by Easy Rider’s grosses” and convinced that “all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost … crew, and this terrific 22-year-old kid director.” In fact, to direct the picture, Nick had lined up Jerry Schatzberg, a fashion photographer best known for snapping the cover of Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Nick had also tapped Midnight Cowboy’s director of photography, Adam Holender. Didion may have been miserable at the Alamac, but in terms of the project, she couldn’t have had happier timing. At no other point in cinematic history could the movie she was writing get made.

  * * *

  “Miss Didion, do you have any luggage?” asked the Alamac night clerk when the couple checked in. He seemed mildly surprised when she said yes. Jazz players smoked in the lobby, milling quietly between sets at a nearby nightclub. Toothless old men clutching tubs of cottage cheese shuffled into the elevators, smelling of days-old cough syrup and unwashed clothes.

  In the room—tiled floors, yellow walls—Dunne phoned to make an appointment to interview a drug dealer in a Blimpy Burger down the block (a friend had put him in touch with a fellow who supplied movie people, filming in New York, with all the goodies they’d need). “I’ll be there around noon,” the dealer said. “Or anyway between noon and four.”

  Didion called Quintana. She had a new dress, she told her mother. Didion asked what kind of dress it was. Quintana said she had to go, she had to work.

  Didion phoned her mother in California. Here, in this bleak hotel, away from her daughter, she longed to be ten again, or sixteen, enjoying Christmas at home while a soft winter rain pattered the windows. Her mother agreed with her: In the old days, Christmas used to be better, before the family drank too much and gave one another too many presents.

  “I had wanted to make this Christmas a ‘nice’ Christmas, for my husband and for our baby,” Didion wrote in one of her Life columns. She had wanted to perceive herself “in a new and flattering light,” she said, to get past marital squabbles and create an atmosphere at home where “no harsh words” would be spoken. She had wanted to “imprint indelibly upon her [daughter’s] memory some trace of the rituals of family love.”

  Instead, she was sitting in the near dark on a hard bed, listening to the raised voices of Puerto Rican call girls in the hallway.

  The next day, “[m]y husband and I see our lawyer, who tells us that because of a movie in which we are involved, he has incorporated us in the state of Delaware. I abandon the attempt to understand why,” she wrote.

  The dealer in the Blimpy Burger turned out to be a sixteen-year-old high school student wearing braces on his front teeth. His mother was an addict and his brother also sold drugs. He peddled pot and heroin on the Upper West Side on his bicycle. He wasn’t, himself, currently “shooting.” Could he have a small role in the movie? Sure, Didion said.

  He put the Dunnes in touch with some of his clients, who went to the couple’s room at the Alamac. Dunne gave them Hostess Twinkies and pocket change, and the addicts shot up, a real-life performance for the writers.

  To file her Life drafts, Didion walked to a nearby press office, which had an AP wire. In California, the big story was the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont, at which the Hells Angels had murdered a boy. Instantly, the press labeled the event the anti-Woodstock and claimed it was the next thing—after Manson—tolling the death of 1960s idealism.

  Didion stood one night in the nearly deserted press office, listening to the clatter of the AP wire, thinking about Christmas wreaths. She started to cry. “I tell myself that I am crying because the baby told me in November that she wanted a necklace for Christmas, and instead of stringing beads by firelight I am watching an AP wire in an empty office,” she wrote later. “But of course that is not why I am crying at all. Watching an AP wire in an empty office is precisely what I want to be doing: women do not end up in empty offices and Blimpy Burgers by accident.” She was tired and feeling sorry for herself. And despite doing what she wanted to be doing, she couldn’t help but wonder, she wrote, “if indeed we have been doing anything right.”

  2

  Just over six months later, her former National Review colleague John Leonard would write in The New York Times, in a review of Play It As It Lays, “There hasn’t been another American writer of Joan Didion’s quality since Nathaniel West. She writes with a razor, carving her characters out of her perceptions with strokes so swift and economical that each scene ends almost before the reader is aware of it; and yet the characters go on bleeding afterwards.”

  On the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, novelist Lore Segal wrote, “A new novel by Joan Didion is something of an event.” This was true, Segal said, not because of Didion’s previous novel, but because “she has gathered quite a following with her nonfiction pieces.” It was “interesting to wonder what sort of fiction Miss Didion’s beautiful writerly skills would now make of her clear-eyed and anguished perception of our time.”

  The rough drafts and notes for the novel archived in the Bancroft Library suggest word music and silence were at stake in composing the book as much as an accurate “perception of our time.” As Didion said later, “I just wanted to write a fast novel.… [I]t was going to exist in a white space. It was going to exist between the paragraphs.” She was harking back to the mysteries in pioneer tales and family histories. Who was telling this story? From what angle? And why? How would our understanding be affected?

  She made elaborate notes to herself concerning narrative distance and the flexibi
lity of point of view. Originally, “I wanted to make it all first person,” she said, “but I wasn’t good enough to maintain [it] at first.… [O]ne night I realized that I had some first person and some third person and that I was going to have to go with both, or just not write a book at all. I was scared.”

  Finally, she understood that, for the reader to feel Maria’s dislocations, it would be necessary to alienate Maria not only from the other characters but also from the novel’s controlling voice. Thus, the “pull-back third person” narrator (the novel’s omniscient consciousness) never acknowledges Maria’s abortion. It’s only in “close third,” when the voice creeps nearer Maria’s perceptions, that trouble can be traced. Of course, the “pull-back” voice and the “close” voice are the same—like a camera zooming in and out. The deliberate blurriness made it difficult for many readers to distinguish Maria, the narrator, and the author. This difficulty was compounded, Segal said in her review, by the fact that “in her essays [Didion] chooses to speak in her own person.… [S]he has given herself the task of interpreting and coming to terms with the period of time which has produced Maria,” and therefore “it is less impertinent than usual for the critic to deduce the writer from her creature.”

  Yes and no. We mustn’t dismiss the artist’s craft. A consistent pattern emerged in Didion’s revisions of Play It As It Lays. This pattern zeroed in on adverbs. Initially, her habit was to place adverbs after the verbs in every sentence. Often in revision, she would reverse this order. Thus “The water in the pool was always 85 degrees” became “The water in the pool always was 85 degrees.” The latter forced greater distance between subject and verb, a gap, a jump in a film reel—further fracturing Maria’s perceptions of the world, and our view of her. Finally, Didion was not “her creature,” in spite of their many similarities. She was standing back, observing, shading.

  “Grammar is a piano I play by ear,” she said. Like a series of musical staves, grammar became a set of bars between author and character, clarifying the substance and nature of the novel’s performance.

  Aesthetic considerations so dominated Didion’s approach to the writing, they threatened to undermine the story structure. At first, the novel was set in New York. Maria was a model. Then she became an actress in California. In interviews, and in the essay “How I Write,” Didion said the novel’s genesis had nothing to do with “‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident.’” It began with “something actually witnessed,” she said. “A young woman with long hair and a short white halter walks through the casino at the Riviera in Las Vegas at one in the morning. She crosses the casino alone and picks up a house telephone. I watch her because I have heard her paged, and recognize her name: she is a minor actress I see around Los Angeles from time to time, in places like Jax and once in a gynecologist’s office in the Beverly Hills Clinic, but have never met. I know nothing about her. Who is paging her? Why is she here to be paged? How exactly did she come to this? It was precisely this moment in Las Vegas that made Play It As It Lays begin to tell itself to me.”

  It was also true that she’d collected notes, clippings, and scattered observations for quite some time, including her early Vogue piece on Ingrid Bergman’s “withdrawal” in front of the camera and an intriguing quote from a newspaper about “Bond Girl” Jill St. John, whom Didion had seen around Hollywood on the arm of Henry Kissinger. In the quote, which Didion jotted down among her notes for the novel, St. John complained that, as a minor celebrity and sex object, she was exposed to “all eyes,” but “no one talks to me.”

  In November 1969, “I showed [the novel] to John and then I sent it to Henry Robbins,” Didion said. “It was quite rough, with places marked ‘chapters to come.’”

  Many of the rough draft pages start with weather reports, as if a running climate record might impose order on the material.

  The holes were enormous. What was certain was a sense of rhythm.

  “Henry … and John and I sat down one night in New York and talked, for about an hour before dinner, about what needed doing,” Didion said. “We all knew what it needed. We all agreed. After that I took a couple of weeks and ran it through. It was just typing and pulling the line through. For example, I didn’t know that BZ was an important character in Play It As It Lays until the last few weeks I was working on it. So those places I marked ‘chapter to come’ were largely places where I was going to go back and pull BZ through, hit him harder, prepare for the way it finally went” (that is, BZ’s overdose in front of Maria, from Michelle Phillips’s story about her friend Tamar Hodel). “I didn’t realize until after I’d written it that it was essentially the same ending as Run River. The women let the men commit suicide.”

  For many readers, Maria’s abortion is the centerpiece of the book—it is Maria’s lowest point, physically and psychologically, and she never recovers from it. It is related, in her mind, to leaky pipes and crumbling houses. “I try not to think of dead things and plumbing,” she says.

  When asked if the abortion was simply “a narrative strategy,” Didion said it “didn’t occur to me until I’d written quite a bit of the book.” The book needed an active moment, a moment which changed things for Maria.…”

  In fact, her notes indicate that the abortion scene was central all along to her conception of the story. Yet, in an interview in The Paris Review in 1978, she insisted plot devices in her novels were generally “very arbitrary.” For example, “I remember writing a passage in which Kate [Maria’s emotionally impaired daughter] came home from school and showed Maria a lot of drawings, orange and blue crayon drawings, and when Maria asked what they were, Kate said, ‘Pools on fire.’ You can see I wasn’t having too much success writing this child. So I put her in a hospital. You never meet her. Now, it turned out to have a great deal of importance—Kate’s being in the hospital is a very large element in Play It As It Lays—but it began because I couldn’t write a child, no other reason.”

  Perhaps, but it’s essential to note that Didion later told radio host Michael Silverblatt that Quintana was the girl in Play It As It Lays: “By the time I finished it, she [Quintana] was clearly talking”; and Didion would continue to encounter trouble “writing a child,” even when, as in Blue Nights, her child was the ostensible subject of the book.

  * * *

  She told Henry Robbins she didn’t want a novel in which a series of events happened to a character; the character’s fall should be experienced imperceptibly by the reader—an enactment of fatalism.

  Maria, she said, has no will. She is incapable of love. She cannot take positive action. She isn’t brave enough to gamble.

  “This isn’t going to—you’re never going to—you’re never going to—this book isn’t going to make it,” Dunne told her one night.

  “And I didn’t think it was going to make it, either,” Didion said. “[I]t was my third book and I had not made it until then.… You think you have some stable talent which will show no matter what you’re writing, and if it doesn’t seem to be getting across to the audience once, you can’t imagine the moment when it suddenly will.”

  Still, Dunne tried to help her as professionally as he could. In a long typed note, dated November 18, 1969 (written, therefore, in Hawaii), he said cautiously that he liked the novel but he had several reservations. The most serious of these concerned the character Ivan Morell (the name was later changed to Ivan Costello). Costello appears to be based on Noel Parmentel—Parmentel certainly thought so. “I told them both I wished to God they’d meet some new people,” he said. Didion’s notes identify Costello as the other man Maria loved once, and by whom she had an aborted child. Originally, he was never to be seen in the novel, but he does make a cameo appearance.

  Morell/Costello, Dunne wrote, needs to be firmly cast in Maria’s New York past, with no continuing role to play in her life except as a destructive force against which her other loves are measured. Carter, Maria’s husband, is a more stable version of Morell, Dunne said. This distinctio
n should be clear.

  In his view, Maria loved to cause trouble. Daily life she couldn’t handle. Tragedy was a navigable sea.

  * * *

  Play It As It Lays, published seven years after Run River, indicates a growing crisis of faith in narrative. Maria Wyeth, a disintegrating movie actress, no longer desires to close her eyes and make a wish, as Lily McClellan does at the end of the first novel. Instead, Maria defines herself by what she doesn’t want: “She would never: walk through the Sands or Caesar’s alone after midnight. She would never: ball at a party, do S-M unless she wanted to, borrow furs from Abe Lipsey, deal. She would never: carry a Yorkshire in Beverly Hills.”

  As in Run River, snakes in a garden open the book—pygmy rattlers and corals with “two glands of neurotoxic poison”—but archetypes, myths, and story logic fall away sharply thereafter. “To look for ‘reasons’ is beside the point,” Maria says, one of her few confident statements. And: “I might as well lay it on the line, I have trouble with as it was.”

  Even her name is problematic. She needs to inform the reader that “[my name] is pronounced Mar-eye-ah, to get it straight at the outset.” On even the simplest level, language wobbles.

  “We had a lot of things and places that came and went,” Maria says, “a cattle ranch with no cattle and a ski resort picked up on somebody’s second mortgage and a motel that would have been advantageously situated at a freeway exit had the freeway been built.” The consumer binge tearing apart the McClellans has left behind a hollow world for people like Maria. Even the old fairy tales (“Ain’t she the prettiest little bride?”) are unavailable; in this sexual free market, relationships come and go like parcels of real estate.

  Promise doesn’t merely disappoint. It either fails to materialize—the freeway doesn’t get built—or it fosters unprecedented tragedy. Domestic safety has been forfeited for a fragile public space: a badly planned for, poorly located motel.