The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  These ruminations helped seed Where I Was From (initially called Fairy Tales), a book she would not be able to write for another thirty years; for now, she still believed that the “ambiguities of history” would prevent mutilations of the land if the present generation became aware of them. In fact, the West’s history was always one of self-corrosion. In time, her perceptions would shift.

  For the moment, she was acutely aware that there were no Woody Guthrie tunes riding the prairie wind and that she should be home helping her daughter arrange a tea party for her stuffed bunny, planning a celebration for her fourth birthday. Instead, she was standing in an empty mound examining protective clothing and petting a white rabbit used to indicate gas leakage. “Pretty healthy rabbit,” an army colonel told her. “We’ve never lost a rabbit in the line of duty.”

  Perhaps farther east, out in the desert near Pendleton, the environment would relax her. But her sense of desolation only deepened. The manager of the motel she checked into was a Mormon. The day she left, he asked her, “If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying?”

  Months later, Quintana lost Bunny Rabbit. No more tea parties. She left him in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and remembered him only on the evening Pan Am flight back to LAX. In Blue Nights, Didion wrote, “[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate: Bunny Rabbit was lost, Bunny Rabbit was left behind, Bunny Rabbit had been abandoned.”

  By the time they landed in Los Angeles, Quintana had consoled herself: Bunny Rabbit would be enjoying the room service at the Royal Hawaiian, swimming, rafting to the reef.

  * * *

  While Didion paced underground in Oregon, plans were proceeding for The Panic in Needle Park.

  Dunne had taken her film treatment, stitched in dialogue, and finished a full draft, but the final version of the screenplay would owe its power to Didion’s sensibility.

  It begins with the aftermath of a back-alley abortion; Helen, the hapless girl who tumbles into addiction in a pathetic attempt to keep her boyfriend, resembles a lost kid from Haight-Ashbury; she sums up her middle-class childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, speaking like a Sacramento housewife: “We had a lawn.”

  Every scene in the film bristles with the sordid details of the bloody drug use Didion had witnessed on Broadway or in the darkened rooms at the Alamac. “Basically, we just reported,” she said. “We were reporters, John and I.”

  “We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play,” said Kitty Winn, the actress who played Helen. “No improvisation. It’s all the script. And it spoiled me forever. I don’t think I ever enjoyed doing another film as much again.”

  “It was a fantastic script,” Jerry Schatzberg said. Years later, re-screening the film, he’d think certain scenes must have been spontaneously captured on-camera, but then he’d check the screenplay and always the action or dialogue “was in the original script.”

  Avco dropped the film—possibly frightened by the writing. “I didn’t see it as a happy ending,” Didion said. “At the time we wrote the script … it wasn’t a time in the history of the world when stories like this … [well,] they didn’t end in rehab.”

  Fox picked up the option. Dick Zanuck, whom Dunne had shadowed for a year to write The Studio, suggested Henry Fonda for the lead. Politely, Dunne hinted that Fonda might be forty years too old for the part. Peter Fonda, maybe? The studio wanted nothing to do with Peter Fonda.

  Nick Dunne had seen Kitty Winn, a classically trained actress, perform a stage version of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in San Francisco. He sent a copy of the Needle Park script to her. “I never found out what [he] saw in my … performance that screamed ‘drug addict,’ but whatever. I stayed up all night reading it,” Winn said. “So extraordinary: two people locked in a co-dependent relationship, a battleground.”

  Schatzberg came fully on board when his business manager told him Al Pacino, a dynamic young actor who’d never had a lead movie role, was interested in playing the part of Bobby. “I’d seen Al four years earlier onstage,” Schatzberg said. “He was so different … I related to him. You know, we come from different parts of the Bronx, but there’s still Bronx in both of us. And I thought, ‘Boy, if I ever did a film, that’s the guy.’”

  Meanwhile, Schatzberg had met Adam Holender, a Polish immigrant, through Roman Polanski. “When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country, you notice things,” urban details, lights, shadows, angles that American cinematographers overlook, he said. His extraordinary work in Midnight Cowboy, a combination of psychedelia and rat-infested realism, convinced Schatzberg no other director of photography would do on Needle Park.

  “[We were] a group of improbables,” Schatzberg said—a pair of literary writers, a fashion photographer, an Eastern European émigré, two unknown stage actors, and a perpetually stoned producer, on a budget of just over a million dollars (‘We didn’t have money for heroin,’ Winn quipped) but we pulled it off.”

  For six weeks, Schatzberg rehearsed his actors on-site, copping gestures from the recovering addicts at Phoenix House, working with Holender on the documentary feel he wanted for the film. “The thoroughness” of preparation and attention to detail “was fantastic,” Didion said. She couldn’t have gotten luckier her first time out with a script, though the New York location and the tedious production process did not always lead to happy times. Filming began in mid-October and wrapped on December 22. Fox photo stills show Didion and the Dunne brothers shivering in Needle Park or posed in front of the Alamac. Didion’s long, straight hair, parted in the middle, looks unwashed, as if she were channeling the lives of her subjects. The braces-wearing drug dealer, whom she had promised a part in the film, was nowhere to be found—though she thought she glimpsed him one day in the crowds ringing the filming perimeter. She worried he was using again and felt too ashamed to approach them.

  In the publicity shots, Nick, wearing a fleece-lined jacket, standing with his hands in his pockets on the corner of Broadway and Seventy-first, has the unmistakably fierce, wide-eyed look of a man flying on coke. Didion huddles close to her husband.

  Besides coke, Nick was inhaling amyl nitrate back in his room at the Volney Hotel. One night, “drunk and stoned,” he “knocked over a lit candle onto the curtains, which went up in flame,” he wrote in his memoir, The Way We Lived Then.

  The Fox publicity materials praised Nick as an experienced producer who “knew exactly how to launch a production in New York”; he was doing “valiant and invaluable” work in bringing to the screen a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. But his behavior threatened to scuttle the project.

  Meanwhile, his brother Greg was not endearing himself to local reporters milling around the sets. “Neither of us likes to come back here to New York,” he said of himself and Joan. “It seems banal to us. Los Angeles is such a trip. It’s like having a grandstand seat on the birth of the future. But New York, well, it’s like having a grandstand seat on the death of the past.”

  Didion attempted a softer tone. In spite of the wretchedness of this part of the Upper West Side, she said, “writing the film was great fun for us—and we learned a lot along the way.”

  Filming was a different story. “When a picture is shooting, a lot of things seem arbitrary, or you might’ve done them differently if you thought twice about it. When we were shooting, I was overcome with what I had failed to do,” she said later. “[Y]ou’re hypersensitive to everything that might be wrong.”

  The day Kitty Winn prepared to play the postabortion scene, she recalled every tragedy she’d ever experienced in order to assume the proper mind-set. “All loss is loss,” she figured. “I don’t know that [Joan and I] ever talked about it.” She decided the abortion was included in the film to indicate a “relationship gone wrong.”

  “I never thought this was a picture about drugs,” Didion said. “It was a picture about betrayal. Love.”

&nb
sp; * * *

  While elements were locking in place for the filming and the eventual release of the movie in time for the May 1971 Cannes Film Festival, jury selection was beginning for the Manson trial. Manson had assaulted a bailiff; he had screamed at the judge that he couldn’t get a fair hearing. “You can kill me now!” he shouted in the courtroom, spreading his arms like Jesus on the cross. His lawyer admitted “there is a minimum of client control in this case.”

  A young man in Berkeley, identifying himself as Rabbit, called Ed Sanders at the Los Angeles Free Press and said he was organizing a giant benefit rock concert to raise legal funds for the Manson Family. Not surprisingly, he had so far secured zero commitments from big-name bands, but Squeaky Fromme, one of Charlie’s girls, had given him home movies from Spahn Ranch to screen onstage.

  Linda Kasabian, nine months pregnant with her second child, had agreed to offer prosecutors full cooperation and to testify against Manson in exchange for a request for immunity. This news got lost in the press beneath coverage of the Weathermen who had blown up a ten-room town house in Greenwich Village while bungling the making of a bomb, and again weeks later by reports on the shootings at Kent State. Manson, apparently concerned that his brand of violence might seem tame in Nitro-America (were the sixties over?) carved a swastika into his forehead and issued pronouncements: “Death is psychosomatic,” he said, and “You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you … I have Xed myself from your world.”

  On August 3, 1970, Kasabian was again eclipsed in the media. On that day, President Nixon, speaking in Denver, mentioned off the cuff that he had noted the “coverage of the Charles Manson case. Front page every day in the papers … Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man yet who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be a rather glamorous figure…”

  Immediately, Manson assailed the judge: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?” He smuggled into the courtroom a hand-printed sign: NIXON GUILTY.

  What nearly got missed in all this was Kasabian’s third day of testimony at the Santa Monica Courthouse. Between admitting she’d taken fifty LSD trips and had sex with every man at the ranch, between agreeing she’d slept just fine following the Tate murders, and confessing she’d willingly driven the car for the second killing spree, Linda Kasabian, “demure” and “pigtailed,” according to the Los Angeles Times, said “author Joan Didion” was writing a book about her. She had been promised 25 percent of any profits from the book, she testified. She was not interested in becoming famous. She hoped the book would influence young people to remain “straight.”

  A week earlier, before her first day on the witness stand, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi convinced her not to wear a long dress because “long is for evening.” She needed to make a favorable impression on the jury. Didion, by now a confidante of sorts after several interviews at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, offered, maternally, to go to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and buy Kasabian the dress of her choice—“Size 9 Petite.” Kasabian had recently given birth to her baby. “Mini but not extremely mini,” she said. “In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold.” Either that, or a “Mexican peasant dress, smocked or embroidered.”

  Didion delivered the dress to Kasabian and her attorney, Gary Fleischman, at Fleischman’s office on Rodeo Drive. Kasabian’s husband, Bob, was there, wearing a long white robe. Didion watched them climb into Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible and drive off to Santa Monica, cheerily waving good-bye. She was grateful to be done with Sybil Brand. There, walking down antiseptic institutional hallways to meet with Kasabian, she would pass through half a dozen doors. They locked behind her, each a “little death,” she said. She remembered a white rabbit grazing on the grass beside the prison gate as Fleischman signed them in one day. After each interview, she would return to Franklin Avenue, “have two drinks and make … a hamburger and eat it ravenously.”

  The day Kasabian wore the I. Magnin dress, she hoped to sneak into the courtroom unseen by gawkers or reporters, but Family hangers-on discovered her arrival and screamed at her, “You’ll kill us all, you’ll kill us all!”

  Ed Sanders said Squeaky Fromme showed up at the Freep’s offices one day during the trial, vaguely warning the paper not to print negative stories about Charlie. Eventually, Manson groupies would wonder if Didion failed to complete her book on Linda Kasabian because she feared retaliation by Family members. Actually, other factors scotched the project, not the least of which was Didion’s frenetic schedule.

  In order to convict Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, Bugliosi had deemed it best to deemphasize the drug deals and petty thievery and build a prosecution around a vast conspiracy. Manson, he said, had masterminded a plot called Helter Skelter (based on subliminal messages from the Beatles song), an attempt to start a race war—from which the Family would emerge as world rulers—by committing a series of murders and blaming the violence on the Black Panthers. The success of Bugliosi’s trial strategy would depend on Linda Kasabian’s performance, her “demure” and “pigtailed” appearance, her I. Magnin dress.

  Despite a few faltering moments, despite throat-cutting gestures directed her way by Manson as she testified, she did her job. By the end of the year, the jury had found Manson and the three women guilty. The women didn’t appear to be concerned. They had taken heart, in September, when the Weathermen broke Timothy Leary out of the San Luis Obispo federal prison, where he was serving a ten-year drug sentence. Maybe Charlie could escape, too! As for Manson, he maintained his innocence, and cleverly played on the media’s desire to make him a symbol. “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” he told the judge at one point. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you … You made your children what they are … these children that come at you with their knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them … As for Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down fast … it is not my conspiracy.… Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”

  * * *

  “On August 13 [1970], all charges were dropped against Linda Kasabian, and she was set free. For a while thereafter she was a minor media celebrity,” Ed Sanders reported. Kasabian flew to New Hampshire to be with her mother and two children. “A few weeks after Kasabian had returned to the East Coast, Didion wanted to visit her and work on the book,” Sanders said. “Kasabian wouldn’t oblige because she was going to be spending the weekend at Yale, watching the football game.”

  Eventually, Didion did travel to New Hampshire, and on one occasion Kasabian went to see her in New York. Didion and Quintana went with her and her kids on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. One of these kids, Tanya, two and a half, Kasabian had left behind at Spahn Ranch two days after the LaBianca killings. “You abandoned your child with the very people you considered to be a band of murderers?” a defense attorney asked her during the trial. “Yes,” she replied. “Just something inside me told me she would be all right.”

  * * *

  Henry Robbins was terribly excited by the prospect of a Didion book on Linda Kasabian. It was the perfect confluence of author and subject, he thought. He spoke to her about it eagerly on Halloween night, 1970, when the Dunnes went to visit him and his wife at their apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. Quintana went trick-or-treating on every floor of the building with Robbins’s two kids while Robbins told Didion what a damned good book he thought this would make. She’d already expended considerable energy on the interviews. Magazines were clamoring for serial rights. Now all she had to do was write it.

  Kasabian seemed confused: Would this be a book about her—or by her, written with Didion’s help? The situation knotted when Didion and FSG received letters from an attorney representing Bartyk Frykowski, in the matter of the wrongful death of his father at the hands of the defendants, including one
Linda Kasabian. The defendants should not profit from their actions, the letters said. Any moneys accruing to Kasabian would be treated as a fraud against creditors.

  Robbins replied, saying Didion had no contract with Kasabian, and no intention of securing one. He didn’t say FSG had drawn up a draft agreement with Didion for the book, or that Kasabian (whom he referred to, privately, as “Pussy”) might expect money from it.

  In the meantime, Kasabian had bought a camping trailer with her husband and hit the road, leaving no forwarding address. Didion didn’t know how to reach her.

  Periodically, Robbins checked with his author, hoping her interest in the Kasabian project hadn’t flagged. She said nothing to him about it. She’d decided to make a Southern pilgrimage, on Life’s dime, to gather material for columns and to start a novel. (All those reviewers who’d called Run River a Southern novel? Well, maybe this time she’d damn well give them a Southern novel!)

  Dunne was in hunter-gatherer mode as well, so he went along (Quintana stayed in Sacramento). “The idea was … to drink Dr. Pepper at the general store and do the underwear and the dirty shirts at the crossroads coin laundry, to go to Little League games and get my hair cut while my wife got a manicure or a pedicure in the local beauty parlor—in other words, to take the pulse of the white South,” he said, revealing how firmly he’d determined already what the South had to offer. Here was a difference between him and his wife: Though she pitched a similarly clichéd idea to the Life editors, telling them she’d offer something like “The Mind of the South,” she carried no preconceptions into the bayous; more impressively, she aimed herself in whatever direction turned up, even when she didn’t understand it, when it appeared to make no connection to anything she might do, when it couldn’t be disseminated, much less paragraphed, for years. She would not produce “The Mind of the South.” She would not produce a Southern novel. But New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast were the “most interesting place[s] I had been in a long time,” she said. “[E]verything everybody said was astonishing to me.” Insights from the trip would enrich several future books, in surprising and unpredictable ways.