The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  For example, she didn’t expect to find in New Orleans “a strong sense of the Caribbean.” In this slumgullion atmosphere, she realized she’d been hearing, for years now, “weird stories … coming out about that part of the world,” and she wondered if a new cultural narrative was forming. “This was a time when people”—like her husband—“kept saying California was the face of America’s future,” but she wasn’t sure that was true anymore—another manifestation, perhaps, of her wish for the sixties, the California sixties, to be dead. The history of the United States had always been linked to Latin America—she knew this from her grandfather’s writings, from the illegals working in her house, caring for Quintana—but new currents seemed to be blowing along the borders. Though her awareness of this was only shadows, “what I was actually interested in was the South as a gateway to the Caribbean,” she said.

  She remembered Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who’d opened an investigation into the John Kennedy assassination (and provided the first public viewing of the Zapruder film). Though his prosecution of Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman he accused of conspiring with Oswald and a man named David Ferrie to murder the president in a “triangulation of crossfire” was ludicrously unfounded, the names Garrison exposed, rightly or wrongly, kept pointing to Miami, to Cuba, and to a “whole underbelly I’d never seen before,” Didion said. “It was just real news to me. I started thinking about that part of the world, from the Gulf Coast to down around Miami. The whole Caribbean connection. There was something going on in the Caribbean that I didn’t understand.”

  Not until 1988, on a return trip to the Crescent City, would she try to locate 544 Camp Street, where, reportedly, Oswald had rented an office in 1963 to distribute “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets, either as a Castro supporter or as someone posing as a Castro supporter while joining the opposition, or, more sinisterly, while leaving false trails as part of an assassination conspiracy.

  In 1988 the small Newman Building no longer stood; even in 1970, Didion would have found no trace of Oswald, but she was well aware of the Camp Street address. People, she said, “had taken the American political narrative seriously at 544 Camp.”

  In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations, convened by the U.S. House of Representatives with Gerald Ford’s approval, would say “the testimony of a number of witnesses … placing Oswald and Ferrie together in early September 1963” in and around Camp Street “may be credible.” Furthermore, “Ferrie’s experience with the underground activities of the Cuban exile movement and as a private investigator for [gangster] Carlos Marcello … might have made him a good candidate to participate in a conspiracy plot.”

  Didion would seize these details, citing the House Committee document in her notes for Miami (1987). She would not forget her trip to New Orleans in the summer of 1970, or her first inkling that the corner of Camp Street might be “one of those occasional accidental intersections where the remote narrative”—tucked into the underbelly, hidden from public view—“had collided with the actual life of the country.”

  * * *

  For Dunne, the South’s great revelation that summer was the “road glass.” “Whenever some member of the local gentry would pick us up to take us out to dinner, there would be a ‘road glass’ on the dashboard, some spirits to fortify us for the ride to the local country club or the Holiday Inn dining room, martinis or a little straight whiskey with ice to tide us over,” he wrote. “The ubiquitous road glass was the perfect pagan icon of the secular South.”

  Sitting beside him, or sipping Scotch on Walker Percy’s rainy wooden porch in Covington, Louisiana, his wife brooded on her growing insight that “in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history.” What a difference from the West. In California, she was only just beginning to grasp, “we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

  * * *

  When finally, without fanfare or warning, Didion told Henry Robbins the Kasabian project had died in her mind of natural causes, he was exasperated, even a little furious, though he kept it from her. In a letter to Marc Joffe of Bantam Books, with whom he’d coordinated publication arrangements, Robbins said he didn’t understand why Didion couldn’t have made her decision six months ago or at least let them know what she was thinking. This was in line with her refusal to acknowledge Roger Straus’s attempts to nominate her for Rockefeller Foundation grants and other prizes. Was it simply negligence? Sometimes she didn’t seem to grasp, even minimally, what it meant to be a citizen of the profession.

  So now there would be no damned good Joan Didion book about the end of the 1960s. What a shame, Robbins thought. She had been poised to do it, and she had flinched.

  Marc Joffe asked for Didion’s research notes and her transcripts of the interviews with Kasabian so that Bantam could pursue its own Manson project. There is no record of Didion’s response.

  She had already moved on, months earlier telling her editors at Life she was dissatisfied with their tepid support. “I had a year’s contract and I let them off at the end of six months, because they simply weren’t running me,” she said. “I mean, I would file every week, and the pieces wouldn’t run. I could have actually just made them pay me for the year … but that seemed too dispiriting to even contemplate.” The editors found her far too dark. She had never forgiven them for denying her Vietnam. “Some of the guys are going out,” Loudon Wainright had told her. The guys! For God’s sakes, Mary McCarthy had slipped in-country and done exactly what Didion hoped to do—that is, parse the military language (“Napalm has become ‘Incinder-Jell,’ which makes it sound like Jell-O,” McCarthy had written). The Calley trial was scheduled to start soon; the casualty figures weren’t even close to adding up.

  Saint Mary had found her angel in Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books. Didion needed a champion. To spur herself, she framed and hung on her wall a telex she’d managed to acquire concerning the death tolls in Vietnam.

  By now, she’d moved on, as well, to tackle a screenplay based on Lois Gould’s novel Such Good Friends. Otto Preminger, “the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy,” according to Dunne, had hired the two of them to rewrite a script drafted three times by others. One night in early August of 1970, the Dunnes joined Preminger at the Bistro to toast the deal. With them was a young man named David Patrick Columbia, a friend of Preminger’s son; later, Columbia would establish the New York Social Diary online. He recalled Didion as “the antithesis of the smooth and creamy tinsel and glitz that was … haute Hollywood, and which filled the room that night. She looked like a super-cool, best-selling author” in her blue-and-white cotton dress. “Her ‘importance’ in the room that night [had been] palpable from the moment she and her husband entered. Otto, no doubt, was aware beforehand that it would be. He too was drawn to ‘names’ and hot talent and always hired them for his projects.”

  After dinner, the group drove to Paramount Studios for a private screening of The Diary of a Mad Housewife, then walked across the lot to Preminger’s offices to discuss the Gould project. Columbia said he was impressed with Dunne’s ability to command the conversation with Preminger, as the men sat across a desk from one another. Didion sat silently, listening, as Dunne cajoled Preminger “with all the required subtle (and not so) deferences.” Already, Dunne sensed that “if Otto thought he could beat up on you, then he would beat up on you without mercy.” His “rage was never far beneath the surface.” So Dunne charmed the great man with a combination of “business and celebrity gossip,” Columbia said—it was a chat “between two pros” in “thrall” to the glamour of Hollywood.

  Preminger pressed the Dunnes (whom he, like most people, thought of as the Didions) to go to New York for the fall and work with him every day in his offices on the script. They were going east, anyway, for the filming of The Panic in Needle Park. Before decamping, though, the couple had occasion to house-sit for a few days for a friend in Malibu. Di
dion stared at the comforting flat horizon and felt—not for the first time—she could be happy at the ocean. Happy? Miss Leaky Ice Pack? With that on the table, it took little to convince Dunne they should look seriously at the first available house on the coast.

  Then they left for New York, subletting a “grimy, roach-infested” apartment, Dunne said. For fourteen weeks—between visits to the movie set—they met Preminger for five hours every day in his Fifth Avenue offices, trying to finalize the script. Dunne had learned a few tricks. “Studio executives are notoriously literal-minded, and the easiest way to soothe them when they complain about the mood of a scene is simply to add stage direction,” he said. “Thus, if they maintain that, ‘BOBBY: You dumb bitch’ is too grim, you change the line to: ‘BOBBY (Engagingly): You dumb bitch.’”

  Preminger wanted to add a “nice lesbian relationship, the most common thing in the world” to the story. Didion didn’t think so. Oh yes, he said. “Very easy to arrange, does not threaten the marriage.”

  “If he got angry with us, the top of his bald head would turn bright red,” Dunne said. At least he had finally gotten their names straight: “[W]ith elaborate politeness he would refer to Joan in his Teutonic accent as, ‘Misss-isss Dunne.’”

  For lunch each day, they’d walk to La Côte Basque on West Fifty-fifth Street. There, among rich bouquets of roses and French village murals, they’d continue discussing the script unless they were interrupted by a showbiz manager. To Preminger’s delight, these managers would invariably introduce him to “Miss Universe contestants they had signed to personal services contracts.” Dunne recalled meeting “Miss Philippines and Miss Ceylon.”

  Back in Malibu, a twenty-year-old one-story house in need of work had come on the market. It had once belonged to Michelle Phillips. Flush with movie money, the Dunnes decided to fly back at Christmas to close the sale, though they figured they were offering fifteen thousand dollars too much. “I forbid you to go,” Preminger said. Didion’s silence told him she didn’t care. His pate turned red. “If you worked for a studio, Misss-isss Dunne, this behavior would not be tolerated,” he said. When the couple left New York, Preminger yanked them off the script, threatened a two-million-dollar lawsuit, and put a lien against their remaining fee. They settled for forty cents on the dollar, and made for the sea.

  3

  The happiest woman Didion had ever seen was dying of breast cancer. “My blessed cancer,” Trudy Dixon would say, and she genuinely meant it.

  Trudy and her husband, Mike, came to dinner at the Franklin Street house one night, a couple of years before the Dunnes moved to Malibu. Trudy had been a philosophy student at Wellesley and was now working as an editor at the Zen Center in San Francisco, transcribing the teachings of Shunryu Suzuki for a regular newsletter called Wind Bell, and collecting his lectures for the book that became Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, arguably the most important reason for Buddhism’s spread in the United States in the 1970s. Didion knew the place from her time in the Haight. She dismissed what she’d heard of its teachings. Zen, Krishna, acid—so much purple haze.

  But Trudy Dixon impressed her. Didion had met Trudy and Mike, an artist who painted under the name Willard Dixon, through Earl McGrath. “Trudy had been struggling with breast cancer for some time and I had to carry her from place to place,” Mike told me. Despite her illness, she devoted herself to organizing, into simple and comprehensible English, the often obscure and culturally specific koans central to Buddhist practice. Didion was fascinated by the project’s linguistic challenge, but even more, she witnessed in Trudy an embodiment of the teachings’ aims to lead the mind toward “letting go … [of] what doesn’t matter.”

  “She was totally inspiring in her ability to deal with the fact that she’d be dead in a short time,” Didion said. “She was on final morphine, and she’d made arrangements for her small children … She spoke about it with equanimity, which would have been impossible for me.”

  When Trudy died in 1969, Suzuki wailed like a wounded animal. He had never known such a perfect disciple.

  In 1970, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind appeared in a limited edition. For a while, in Malibu, Didion read the book “every night to relax when I went to bed,” she said. “It was very soothing to me.”

  She had no intention of becoming a Buddhist: “I didn’t like [meditation] at all. But the book is wonderful.” It was suffused with her memories of Trudy Dixon. The woman’s calm dictated the very syntax of the sentences.

  For Didion, then, this was a personal, rather than a religious, exploration. Her embrace of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind also indicates her self-correcting ability, a quality that would characterize much of her later writing. She moved from ignoring Zen to reconsidering it, rethinking her initial reaction to it, and then—unlike a zealous convert—quietly appreciating aspects of it that she found useful in her daily life.

  Primarily, the book provided a pleasurable reading experience.

  Beyond that, she recognized commonsense truths in its insistence on careful daily practice. “[W]e should not do [something] as if it were preparing for something else,” Suzuki said (in Trudy’s transcription). “This should be true in your everyday life. To cook, or to fix some food, is not preparation … it is practice … it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook!”

  Cooking had become a contemplative, ritualistic act for Didion: Suzuki’s words made sense to her. She could see the benefits of extending his approach not only to commonplace acts but also to writing. Practicing without expectation, remaining alert to permutations, resisting expertise and habits of thought: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” Suzuki said.

  Above all, rigid attachment to anything brings sorrow and dissatisfaction, he taught: Change is the essence of existence. This thought reminded Didion of the line from the Episcopal liturgy: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” “‘As it was in the beginning’ … means ever-changing, in my interpretation. Which may not be the orthodox interpretation,” Didion said.

  She could not believe now, any more than she could accept when she was a girl, the orthodox notion of a “personal God, a God that is personally interested in me … And as far as the soul [goes] … I have understood the entire thing symbolically. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me symbolically. But it doesn’t if it’s supposed to be real.”

  She could much more readily entertain the Buddhist concepts of “impermanence, nonself, and suffering.”

  In Trudy Dixon, she’d seen a tangible example of accepting change and suffering; just so, she had, in the waves below her Malibu house, a daily reminder of the paradoxical relationship between permanence and change: the ever-abiding sea and its constantly shifting nature, moment to moment, breaker to breaker.

  Through all this contemplation, her grandfather’s love of the “vast indifference” of geology returned to her in a powerful new context, enfolded in the rhythms of the Episcopal liturgy and Zen Mind’s weave of voices.

  Constant land movement.

  “I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying … reveal[ing] evidence of the scheme in action,” she said. “I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”

  * * *

  Meaning, Didion said now. Not happiness. A distinction began to appear to her.

  “What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” she would write.

  For one thing, peace was impossible with such a
restless husband.

  In the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking, she would mention the fight one morning in Malibu that ended with her threat to take Quintana to LAX and fly away from Dunne. Quintana settled the standoff, insisting they “couldn’t do that to him.” (“[D]id she think herself safer with him than with me?” Didion asked.)

  Dunne’s version of the same incident read differently. In Vegas, he said a member of the construction crew he’d hired “lit a joint [one day] and began to scar the concrete block on which the tile was being laid with a jackhammer. The noise from the jackhammer made my daughter cry and my wife said she would take her to Sacramento that morning and I said I would go back to Vegas the next day.”

  In Sacramento, Didion, hoping to calm her nerves, took Quintana to Old Sac, a redeveloped area of town featuring restored saloons and wooden sidewalks from the city’s pioneer-boom days. She was about to tell her daughter how generations of her cousins had walked these alleys, how her great-grandfather had owned a tavern on Front Street, but then “I stopped. Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility,” Didion wrote. “This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from.”

  So they flew back home on a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane. Painted on its nose was a big, silly smile. Quintana loved flying “The Smile.”

  Meanwhile, in Vegas (or wherever he’d travel to get away from his wife), Dunne would sit alone, usually in a motel room, and imagine being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, the Famous Author discussing weighty subjects from “the weather … [to] my Nobel Prize.” But then he’d remember: “[My] voice on the air gets high and squeaky and my stammer prevents me from indulging in articulate patter.” He’d start to feel sorry for himself. He had written two good books, hadn’t he? Why hadn’t they earned more notice? He was pushing forty—my God. In the past, when his friends turned thirty-five, he’d send them notes: “Halfway home.” Now the joke didn’t seem so funny.