The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  As the novel begins, Maria tries, wanly, to orient herself. She cites an old narrative: “What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask.”

  The reader wonders, Who are “some people”? Aside from literature professors and theater directors, who ever asks, “What makes Iago evil?” Maria is an actress, apparently with some classical training, but a Shakespearean she’s not. As we learn more about her, we wonder where a perpetually stoned film player could encounter people who talk this way?

  The movies Maria’s friends make are hardly John Wayne Westerns. They are trifles, forgettable narratives, illusions of fear or pleasure, promoting no code other than instant self-gratification. In one film, made by her husband, bikers gang-rape Maria.

  Snippets of film dialogue filter into the real lives of the movie people as nuggets of fake cleverness. A man to whom Maria confesses her emptiness dismisses her desperation. Then he says, apropos of nothing, “You got a map of Peru?” When Maria doesn’t respond, he snaps, “That’s funny, Maria. That’s a line from Dark Passage.”

  In this lost paradise, language has become completely unmoored, no longer serviceable.

  And the reliable old road story? It offers only speed.

  The novel is related through various points of view, starting with Maria, shifting to her husband, then to a friend. After these initial first-person sections, the book is divided into eighty-four fragmented, omnisciently narrated segments. The quick, vivid fragments and the fluid points of view give the novel a restless urgency—a set of flimsy binoculars in the hands of a witnessing intelligence always on the move, chasing after Maria, focusing and refocusing, zooming in on the run. What holds the novel together, even as Maria splinters before our eyes, is this relentless pursuit of an elusive quarry.

  What holds it together is the longing for story.

  3

  “In the preface to her essays [Miss Didion] says that she has sometimes been ‘paralyzed by the conviction that writing is an irrelevant act.’ Her new book feels as if it were written out of an insufficient impulse by a writer who doesn’t know what else to do with all that talent and skill,” Lore Segal concluded in her front-page review. “It is … Joan Didion’s own lack of faith in what she is writing [that] puts her book in that heartbreaking category—a bad novel by a very good writer.”

  Kirkus concurred, calling the book “an ephemeral form of survival kitsch.”

  Many more critics agreed with John Leonard’s assessment that Didion had placed herself in the forefront of American novelists. In some ways the critical reception wasn’t crucial. On the heels of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and the famous divorce piece in Life, Play It As It Lays stirred already-intense reader interest in Didion. An excerpt appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. FSG pounded the advertising, with “teaser ads” three days a week in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, and Book World. On August 9, the publisher bought a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. The result was on-average national sales of a thousand copies a week in the first few weeks after publication. Following the novel’s appearance in Publishers Weekly’s bestseller rankings, sales topped five thousand a week in September. Bantam paid a $55,000 advance for paperback rights. The novel would be nominated for a National Book Award.

  Much of this interest stemmed from readers’ identification of Didion with “her creature.” The esteemed translator Herman Briffault wrote Henry Robbins a long, admiring letter on the book, insisting that any reader could discern its autobiographical core. The novelist was clearly “hurt” in a “shattering” world where sex, divorce, and abortion were treated as trivial matters. Robbins replied, yes, “the heroine, like the author herself, is a tortured soul.… Didion is exploring the ‘nothingness’ after one has been used as an object.”

  Even Lore Segal, for whom the novel didn’t work, found it most convincing when the author’s “high intelligence” cut through pale literary gestures. Didion thought she didn’t “write the child” well, but Segal disagreed: “When Maria speaks of her little daughter with an unspecified mental imbalance … what might have been sentimental is moving and true.” It’s just that Didion didn’t want to go there. Her reluctance only added to the mystery and provoked further speculation about the author.

  * * *

  Didion always claimed she expected the novel to fail. Dan Wakefield doesn’t buy this. “I can’t believe when she was writing Play It As It Lays she didn’t think she would be a star. Because she was a star. She deserved to be,” he said. “I remember staying with [the Dunnes] in Hollywood in ’68. [I went] up to Joan’s office to look at her typewriter. In it was the first paragraph of Play It [A]s It Lays, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow!’”

  Didion’s subsequent protests that her fame was unwelcome also ring false. “There was a certain tendency to read Play It As It Lays as an autobiographical novel, I suppose because I lived out here and looked skinny in photographs and nobody knew anything else about me,” she said in a Paris Review interview. What she didn’t say was that those photographs were very carefully arranged and disseminated in the press.

  Julian Wasser, who had snapped Eve Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, who had caught Bobby Kennedy in the Ambassador Hotel moments before he was shot, who had captured Vietnam’s Madame Nhu right after her husband was assassinated, posed Didion in front of her yellow Corvette Stingray behind the Franklin Avenue house. Didion wore a pale, thick caftan and sandals. She held a cigarette, the smoke, in one pose, wreathing her face and her shoulder-length hair. She leaned on the car, disaffected and bored (it seemed), and at one point danced casually around it. The pictures were teasing and sexy, the contour of a leg just visible beneath the caftan, and no reader of Play It As It Lays would fail to imagine Maria cruising the freeways in her Corvette, cracking a hard-boiled egg on the steering wheel. Didion knew she was forging the connection—or at the very least, acquiescing to the photographer’s desire to do so.

  The images became part of the narrative. Readers thought they knew this woman.

  PART SIX

  Chapter Nineteen

  1

  The Dunnes’ move to Malibu in January 1971 was an attempt to heal following the previous years’ excesses—or so Didion presented it in her essay “The White Album.” “This … house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history—a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf—but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind the place got exorcised,” she wrote.

  “She still had parties nonstop, so the move to Malibu wasn’t as antisocial as I first thought it was,” Eve Babitz told me. “But driving out there was horrible.” (Even though, in those days, it was only twenty minutes from Sunset to the Pacific Coast Highway.) The Dunnes’ new place, a spacious ocean-facing house with a wide terrace over the water, wall-size windows, a white brick fireplace (used year-round to dispel the chill in the air), and redwood ceilings, was located above the beach at 33428 Pacific Coast Highway, just beyond Decker Canyon at the west end of Malibu, some distance from the pastel swarms of B-list actors swelling the Colony. Interest rates were high and the housing market was slightly depressed, yet the area, formerly a private ranch, was becoming more accessible with the opening of the Kanan-Dume Road, near the school Quintana would attend. Late in the afternoon, on the beautifully clear day the family moved into the house, Didion made a run in her Corvette to the Trancas Market, three and a half miles down the highway, cranking up KRLA, “the heart of rock and roll!” By the time she got home, the fog was so thick that she couldn’t find her driveway. She held her breath, tried to forget the cliff’s edge, two hundred feet above the slamming waves, inched her way forward, and finally made a slow left turn.

  Soon, she learned not to keep the Corvette’s top down in the drive: Oc
casionally, king snakes fell from the trees or the eaves of the garage into the backseat.

  “The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks,” Didion said of Trancas and Zuma canyons (Zuma is a Chumash word suggesting “abundance”). In truth, between wildfires, the hills splay out in patches of parsley-green as one travels north and west from Los Angeles, enveloped by a sudden sense of isolation. Crows drift over ice plants and agave, the rainy yellow shimmer of mustard seeding the slopes as after-burn, draping low, reddish brown outcrops lined with scrappy eucalyptus. Pelicans dodge warm drafts of frying oil from the fish markets, salt and gasoline rising from the tides and from the buses and lettuce trucks ratcheting into low gear on their way to Oregon from Tijuana.

  The Dunnes’ house was secluded on a small road just off the highway, with only three year-round neighbors in close proximity (though gradually the area filled with picture people, first the carpenters and cinematographers—like the Dunnes’ neighbor Dick Moore—who were not required on movie sets every day, freelancers with plenty of time to sit around beach fires smoking the very good dope cultivated in Big Sur, and then more and more A-listers, as the canyons slicked up and the village expanded, with Cross Creek Plaza, lots of new bars, gun shops proudly flying California Bear flags, and a Swenson’s ice-cream parlor).

  “There are not only no blacks in Malibu,” Josie Mankiewicz told Dunne when she heard where he was going, “there are no brunettes.”

  “On this littoral there seemed to be no cellulite, either,” he wrote.

  Off and on, for over six months, the Dunnes engaged a construction crew to expand the waterside deck, install waxed pine bookshelves, and lay terra-cotta floor tiles. The men tore out prefabricated plywood walls and pulled up “icky green” flooring. Harrison Ford headed the crew. “They were the most sophisticated people I knew,” Ford said. “I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw before cocktails.”

  In Vegas, Dunne wrote, “[W]hat had started as a two-month job … [stretched] into its sixth month and the construction account was four thousand dollars overdrawn.… I fired the contractor. ‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ he said. He was an out-of-work actor and his crew sniffed a lot of cocaine and when he left he unexpectedly gave me a soul-brother handshake, grabbing my thumb while I was left with an unimportant part of his little finger.” The next day, Dunne realized the only thing separating him and his family from the Pacific Ocean was a clear sheet of Pliofilm where the French doors were supposed to go. “I rehired the contractor,” he wrote. “‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ the contractor said.”

  * * *

  Didion was enamored not of the ocean but of the “look of the horizon … It is always there, flat.” If she was no longer physically comfortable in the Central Valley, she needed the solacing feel of her childhood geography. Each day ended fast, no muss—a snuffing of the sun in the sea, a healthy glass of bourbon. She felt Malibu was “a new kind of life. We were living on the frontier, as it were.” She had her husband and her sheepdog and her barefoot child getting splinters in her heels on the redwood deck. She had hurricane lamps, her family’s rosewood piano (it had sailed around the Cape in 1848), her grandmother’s hanging quilts sewn on a covered wagon, and a Federal table once owned by her husband’s great-great-grandmother. She had her mother’s Craftsman dinner knives. She had straight-backed wooden chairs hand-painted by her mother-in-law, shipped from Connecticut. She had, on her wall, a large black-and-white photo of a stark valley roadside with a sign pointing to Sacramento, and she had Eve Babitz’s Ginger Baker poster above the tub in the bathroom.

  Tucked into the frame, behind another picture, she found a note to her in Noel’s handwriting—the one he’d left on his earlier visit: “You were wrong.” What about? Everything, no doubt. She burned the note and didn’t tell her husband about it.

  Just outside the window of the room she used as her office, she hung the family’s clothes on a line to dry in the salt wind: her comfy old fisherman’s sweater, her husband’s blue extra-large bathrobe, her daughter’s black wool challis dress. She liked a small, enclosed space in which to write—surrounding herself with talismans of the latest project: postcards, maps, trinkets, and shells. (Her husband spread his books around a fourteen-foot table in a large library opening onto the ocean.) She liked the clothes outside, warm sleeves flapping—gentle puffs of breath—curtaining her view. She liked it that she could barely hear her own voice, sometimes, over the crashing of water on the boulders below.

  Often at dinner she’d place a white orchid in her hair—her hair lightly reddened, lightly blonded by the sun.

  She felt comforted by the crystalline stars appearing one by one over kelp-cluttered sea foam.

  Her daughter went to sleep to the sound of the waves and awoke whenever the surf went silent at the tide’s lowest ebb.

  The elements aligned for happiness.

  Maybe the sixties really were over. The riots on Sunset Strip had petered out soon after Huey Newton went to prison: “Free the Strip! Free Huey!” Peace, then. It all seemed so distant. Miles down the road.

  Cielo Drive. The Landmark Motel. Such an evil time. In the rearview mirror.

  Now: the straight road ahead. Her husband had taken a full physical (for his insurance policy). Everything normal: prostate, EKG, EEG. The doctor had told him, in passing, he had “soft shoulders,” but that wasn’t a medical condition, and if this was the worst he could say, well then … bring on the breakers!

  And she … “I was so unhappy” writing Play It As It Lays, she admitted now to friends. “I didn’t realize until I finished it how depressed it had made me to write it. Then I finished it and suddenly it was like having something lifted from the top of my head, you know? Suddenly I was a happy person.” People “were talking about this book. Not in a huge way, but in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It made me feel good. It made me feel closer to it.… [F]rom that time on I had more confidence.”

  And why not?

  James Dickey had called her, in print, “the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today.”

  Her old teacher Mark Schorer had said, “One thinks of the great performers—in ballet, opera, circuses. Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”

  Alfred Kazin flew from New York to interview her for Harper’s magazine. The day he arrived, a small wildfire flared in the canyon hills, but this didn’t stop surfers from lugging their boards to the ocean and riding the swells under an angry canopy of red-black ash. Kazin invited Didion to lunch at Scandia on the Strip, annoyed when Dunne came along. The couple seemed inseparable—in his journal, Kazin noted an almost constant electric “ripple” between them.

  Dunne dominated the conversation, telling Kazin that California was the best place a writer could be to chronicle the American scene. He said Nixon was the “most interesting personality in the White House since FDR,” and he told Kazin he thought “one of these days the President will crack in public.”

  After eating, they all drove back to Malibu. “People who live in a beach house don’t know how wary it makes them,” Kazin wrote. Didion’s decision to move here, to keep an eye on the edge, told him she was a “very vulnerable, very defensive young woman whose style in all things is somehow to keep the world off, to keep it from eating her up, and so”—casting protective spells—“[she] describes Southern California in terms of fire, rattlesnakes, cave-ins, earthquakes, the indifference to other people’s disasters, and the terrible wind called the Santa Ana.”

  In the magazine piece, he characterized Didion as “subtle,” as possessing an “alarmed fragility,” and falling into “many silences.” In his private journal, he said she was “full of body language.… Her face runs the gamut from poor old Sookie to the temptress with long blonde-red locks. She can look at you and past you without the slightest hint of a concession. The unspoken is a most important part of her presence in
the world.”

  She was trying to tell him, This is what a happy woman looks like.

  2

  The determined insistence on happiness arose in part because, in spite of her new confidence as a writer, the previous year had been hectic and disturbing on many levels. She had left the Alamac Hotel in late December 1969 and only a short while later found herself in eastern Oregon, doing a column for Life on the nerve gas storage mounds at the army depot in Umatilla County. On arriving in the town of Hermiston, she felt at home initially, listening to locals in the Caravan Broiler talk about wheat shares and Shell Oil and high-moisture grain, but she was there to interview a funeral director who had been a strong booster of President Nixon’s plan to store VX and GB nerve gas on twenty-thousand acres just outside of town, for the employment it would stimulate. The people protesting the gas shipments were college kids in the liberal cushion of Eugene and big-city wine drinkers over in Portland, he said—“the academic-community-Moratorium-and-other-mothers-for-peace-or-whatever.” “They talk about a few drops of it killing thousands of people. Well, really, you’d need pretty ideal conditions for that,” he said. “And if you give yourself an injection within thirty seconds, there’s no effect whatsoever.”

  She drove into the hardscrabble area. The flat horizon here wasn’t so flat anymore. Over a thousand mounds—reinforced concrete under sod and sagebrush—“mutilated the land,” Didion wrote. She stood one day among the staggered rows of humps, interlaced with fifty miles of railroad track, and realized she was “not in a frontier town at all but in a post-frontier town.” All over the West, in places like this, settlers felt “cut free from the ambiguities of history. They could afford their innocent blend of self-interest and optimism. They still had a big country and a big sky and cheap expendable land, and they could still tap the Columbia for all the water and power they needed and the best was still to come, or so they thought.”