The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Once, plagued with the jits, he took the red-eye to New York and stayed in the apartment of a friend. He listened to the World Series on the radio, and in the evenings he went to the “Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison Avenue at 81st to see if I knew anyone who had died.” This was voyeurism keyed to his mortality. He’d return to the apartment and gobble Heath bars and Oreos—the old cures for the blues he’d shared with his brother Stephen.

  Then he flew back to Vegas.

  He missed his wife and child. But if he called home, he knew what he’d get—silence or recriminations: “[S]he was lonely and depressed … the wind was blowing and there were fires at Point Dume. The maid had quit, the fire insurance had been canceled and the engine in the Corvette had seized on the Ventura Freeway … [S]he had called Detroit and told the head of public relations at General Motors that if the warranty was not honored she was going to drive the car to Detroit and burn the motherfucker on the lawn of John Z. DeLorean … The head of public relations had suggested she see a psychiatrist.”

  Sometimes living with her was like “living with [a] piranha,” he told her.

  One night he went alone to a party in Venice. “It was like all those terrible parties in the Village in the fifties … Cinder-block bookcases full of Hesse and Tolkien. Gallon jugs of Almaden Mountain Red, plastic cups and no ice.” People wearing batik shirts were rolling joints and insisting that Walt Disney had been frozen.

  A girl asked him to take her home, and he sat around with her and her ex-husband, a wraith in tie-dyed jeans, watching the boy clean a “kilo of marijuana.”

  What the hell was he doing?

  Sometimes, at his most depressed, he would imagine writing suicide notes, but “[w]hatever minimal impulse I had for suicide was negated by the craft of writing the suicide note. It became a technical problem.” He could not stop revising.

  “When are you coming home?” his wife asked when she called.

  * * *

  One day, for no particular reason, the “bad season … was over,” he said. If they couldn’t fire the contractor, they couldn’t get a divorce, he reasoned. They were stuck with each other, at least until they got the house in order.

  Chronologically, the Dunnes’ uneasy peace—individually and together—appeared to coincide with the beginning of Quintana’s nightmares about the Broken Man. “He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man,” Quintana told her mother. “Short sleeves. He has his name on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.”

  One good thing: She had learned from her mother contempt for abstractions.

  On some occasions, she said the Broken Man wore a cap with the word GULF on it.

  The Point Dume Gulf Station was just down the road from their house.

  Some of the guys in Harrison Ford’s crew wore blue work shirts.

  But Didion did not waste energy searching for the sources of her child’s mental jigsaw. The details, and Quintana’s certainty about this figure, were too vivid. “Don’t let the Broken Man catch me,” she would say. “If the Broken Man comes, I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me.”

  In Blue Nights, Didion wrote, “I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own.”

  4

  In the spring of 1971, The Panic in Needle Park was chosen to be an official entry at the Cannes Film Festival. The festival was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary by giving Charlie Chaplin the Légion d’honneur. Twentieth Century–Fox paid the Dunnes’ way to France. Didion had never been to Europe, and she was so excited (traveling first-class, no less!), she boarded the airplane barefoot.

  Quintana remained behind with family. As a gift, Didion would bring her a cashmere turtleneck sweater from London.

  The Dunnes stayed at the Carlton on the Promenade de la Croisette, overlooking the Mediterranean. Every day, “the hall porter brought endless bottles of chateau d’Yquem, a studio publicity man handed out crisp, new hundred-franc notes as petty cash, every night there was dinner for six, eight, twelve at La Reserve: it all went on the budget of the picture,” Dunne said.

  Nick loved being a big-time producer on the world stage, and he kept his behavior in check. What most annoyed his brother and sister-in-law was the credit he took for every aspect of the film. He claimed to have discovered the James Mills novel; he claimed to have spotted the potential for a love story in the midst of junkie angst. “To me, it’s a strong anti-drug film,” he said sanctimoniously, and Didion could hear the resentment in his voice when he told a reporter, “You know, Joan has become a great sort of best seller and everything with her book, Play It As It Lays.” He only mentioned this because Didion and Dunne were now writing a screenplay from the novel and Nick was set to produce it. The “three of us” cooked it up, he told the press. “Frank Perry is going to direct that.”

  The initial reaction to The Panic in Needle Park at Cannes was underwhelming. Women’s Wear Daily called the movie “disappointing.” “There was great anticipation for this film,” the reviewer said. “[O]ne expects … stinging cynicism” from “Miss Didion,” but the film is “full of misery for so long … it is simply too much to sit through.”

  Jerry Schatzberg had gotten the reaction he’d wanted. Keith Richards, at Cannes to promote the Stones’ concert film, Gimme Shelter, was so impressed by Panic’s authenticity, he asked Schatzberg, “Are you doing the hard stuff?”

  Subsequent reviewers praised the movie’s realism and lack of sentimentality—the New York Post said, “[I]t must be considered one of the year’s top films both in [the] timeliness of its material and the skill of presentation. Like it or loathe it, you have to believe it.”

  Kitty Winn, walking the beach wearing jeans, profoundly uncomfortable with so much glamour and celebrity hoopla, won the judges over. They gave her the Best Actress Award. “When a reporter who had interviewed me came to the door [with the news], it blew my mind,” she said. But on the whole, the experience traumatized her.

  Like Didion, she was the daughter of an army colonel; she approached her work with discipline and seriousness.

  Acting was one thing. The movie business was another.

  While Didion enjoyed the luxury of Cannes—and Dunne ate it up—Winn recoiled. She would soon leave the profession, and live a quiet life as a wife and mother. “The idea of stardom I find frightening,” she said. “When I think of a star I think of a monster taking over someone’s personality, obliterating them.”

  Chapter Twenty

  1

  By the mid-1970s, embedded on the coast, Didion and Dunne were stars. Producers came to them, from L.A., for business or story-conference lunches. Didion had little time to practice Zen, but she made a ritual of arranging the picture people in her living room, facing the ocean, and serving them “a cold leek soup, antipasto, baguettes of French bread, fruit, Brie, and white wine,” Dunne said. These lunches were “programmed to reinforce the notion that the turf [was] ours, and that it would be bad form for a guest to push aberrant ideas; we [were] no longer employees, but host and hostess.”

  Actress Leslie Caron remembered driving to Trancas to “listen to Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne,” who had been described to her as “the new voices of California literature.” The combination of their books, magazine articles, and screenplays made them triple threats: a two-headed juggernaut. They stood at the center of a growing community of film people, musicians, and writers in Malibu: Steven Spielberg, Lee Grant, Katharine Ross, Brian Moore, Peter Boyle, Julia and Michael Phillips, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It was “very heady,” said Paul Schrader. Every weekend “[we] would have a barbecue, swim, lie in the sun, listen to music, and talk about movies. A lot of these writers and directors helped each other
… Even though we were relatively unknown, there was a real feeling that the world was our oyster.”

  Naturally, Didion saw her new life in darker terms: “[T]he spirit of the place [was] one of shared isolation and adversity,” she wrote. “I never loved the house on the Pacific Coast Highway more than on those many days when it was impossible to leave it, when fire or flood had in fact closed the highway.”

  At least they’d buried the sixties. The casualties from that period lay all along the trail. Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix, Mama Cass. The national conscience. William Calley had been convicted of mass murder, but Nixon made sure his house arrest at Fort Benning was more party than pain.

  Cocaine was ravaging the entertainment industry; big money warped the studios’ product; but Didion, perched on an ancient landslide, overlooking tidal swells and the “acid yellow” of mustard glazing the hills, rode a different crest.

  For her, Hollywood was the “last stable society.”

  The late 1960s had been a “hangover” from the Easy Rider orgy, before the studios figured out how to reinvent themselves, take power back from the young upstarts, reassert control of distribution and development money. But they’d done it—“all the terrific 22-year-old directors went back to shooting television commercials and all the creative 24-year-old producers used up the leases on their office space at Warner Brothers by sitting out there in the dull Burbank sunlight smoking dope before lunch and running one another’s unreleased pictures after lunch,” Didion wrote in a 1973 essay entitled “In Hollywood.”

  The fact that she and Dunne could publish coruscating pieces on Hollywood and remain players in town only added to their luster. Picture people loved to read about themselves: Hey, you know, what the hell, as long as folks are talking …

  So she could get her hair done at Gene Shacove’s and rest assured that even the hairdressers were “looking for the action,” trying to pull together a “beautiful story” and all the “elements” (writers, stars), to scare up studio interest. She could be certain most people would practice discretion at parties because discretion was not only good taste, it was “good business.” Bottom line: Everyone wanted to be “bankable.” This was a clear form of right and wrong—a great comfort to Didion—and she was relieved to learn that she had not arrived in Hollywood too late (as she had feared in the lost domain of Franklin Avenue).

  Of course she saw the irony: The “last stable society” existed to generate texts, images, and songs whose sole purpose was to disseminate restlessness. Fear, titillation, subversion, promises of freedom and release—massive instability—were Hollywood’s métier. It was no surprise that one screen-bedazzled group after another rose to demand its rights, just as poor Lucille Miller had, seeking noir thrills in San Berdoo.

  You laughed and cried with La Raza! Cheered the Panthers!

  And now—grab the edges of your gowns—get ready for the women’s movement!

  Here was a prime target for Didion. Squatting in her “stable” nest, she had already ridiculed some of the movement’s heroines (Joan Baez was “a personality before she was entirely a person,” she’d declared). In another essay, while praising Hollywood’s social hierarchy, Didion disparaged feminism’s “invention of women as a ‘class.’” “To make an omelette you need not only those broken eggs but someone ‘oppressed’ to break them,” she’d scoffed.

  Her omelette sparked a skirmish with the editors of Ms. magazine. They published a response to Didion written by Catharine Stimpson. “Her attitudes pose a problem for us all,” Stimpson said. “[She] insists that grief, which is enduring, can only be endured … [and] if women resist suffering, they must be perpetual children.”

  Didion’s critique of the movement was slyer than Stimpson allowed. For instance, she’d objected to feminist crusaders scorching Western novels for their patriarchal structures and calling for celebrations of the feminine. “The idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women”; the truth is, “fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology,” she wrote. Besides, Joseph Conrad grasped far more about birth and blood than George Eliot ever did.

  As for the glories of female orgasm: “I think sex is a lot darker than Kate Millet does,” Didion said. “It seems to me a fairly right fantasy … that men want to ravage and women want to be ravaged.” She provoked her readers further: “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper … [H]e is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” That man’s unspeakable name was guaranteed to rile the sisters.

  Beneath the wit and intelligence of Didion’s attack lay painful memories of her independence in New York.

  In her essay, in a tone of sustained mockery, she wrote of the oppressed “Everywoman” who needed “contraceptives because she was raped on every date … and raped finally on the abortionist’s table. During the fashion for shoes with pointed toes, she … had her toes amputated.” Didion’s point—“why did [this Everywoman] not get herself another gynecologist, another job, why did she not get out of bed and turn the television off”—did not cancel the fact that she had just described the lives of many of the young women she had known at Vogue, including—on some days—herself.

  It was better, she thought, to operate in a stable society where serving the antipasto and the white wine meant good business as well as being the good little woman.

  * * *

  A lot of good business came her way.

  The early to mid-1970s was a “fine time for writers in Hollywood,” said Tim Steele. “The studios had begun to squeeze out the independents. They’d front money to the creative people and keep them on staff. The studios took all the risk out of it for writers. By ’71, ’72, in addition to movies, the studios dominated everything made for TV. Then they began to be purchased by conglomerates such as Gulf & Western. A writer could get $100,000 for doing a rewrite—and not a lot of people were doing it back then. It was a small world, really.”

  In an essay called “Tinsel” (1974), Dunne listed a handful of screen projects offered him and his wife. While at Cannes, he said, they had reread Tender Is the Night; back in Los Angeles, they’d learned that Fox held the remake rights to the novel, which reduced the book to a five-page single-spaced synopsis. They declined to draft a treatment. They were asked to do “an extension of The Graduate” and “Rebel Without a Cause in the west Valley, with a girl in the James Dean part.” They were pitched an early version of the Serpico story, for a movie reprising the winning formula of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. “Write me a Western,” said Sam Peckinpah, the prospective director. “Jesus, Sam, it’s about two cops in New York City,” Dunne said. “Every story is a Western,” Peckinpah insisted.

  On another occasion, a producer gave them a “hot idea”: “World War II.” “What do you want us to do with it?” Dunne asked. “You’re the writers,” he said.

  All of the producers said, “What if?” Again and again: “What if?” That was their contribution to story outlines. What if this happened? Or that?

  * * *

  A major part of each deal was the travel budget—the Dunnes needed time and distance from daily events (and child rearing) to work on a script. A thousand dollars a week and a chauffeured limousine at their beck and call, at the St. Francis in San Francisco, the Regency in New York, the Ambassador East in Chicago, and, most regularly, the Royal Hawaiian: This was the “attraction of borrowed luxury,” Dunne said—what it meant to be a star, if you were a writer.

  They had become a team, equal partners, and in the process they had stopped fighting so much. Dunne still carried the disappointment of a literary reputation incommensurate with his hopes, but the respect he’d earned was not inconsiderable, and he had discovered in himself an innate facility for Hollywood deal making. In meetings, he was usually forced to take the lead because “Hollywood is largely a boy’s club,” he said. “[F]or years Joan was tolerated only as an ‘honorary guy’ or perhaps an ‘associate g
uy,’ whose primary function was to take notes,” Dunne said. “‘Is John there?’ an executive’s assistant [would] say over the telephone when calling for his master. ‘This is Joan.’ ‘Tell John to call when he gets home.’”

  Thus it was in the “last stable society.”

  If Didion would not accept women as an oppressed class within the industry, she had to admit that writers—for all the perks and steady work—straddled the lowest rungs. With his class sensitivities, festering since childhood, Dunne was especially vulnerable to social slights. “You’re a Mel,” a producer joked with a friend of his one day. “Screenwriters are all named Mel. Producers are named Marty. In this town, the Martys hire the Mels.”

  At least this was an injustice Dunne could share with his wife. It strengthened their teamwork.

  As for sexism—well, even women were capable of oppressing women.

  Enter Pauline Kael.

  The Dunnes met her one night in New York at an Academy Awards party thrown by Lynn Nesbit. “She was perched in front of the television set, a tiny, birdlike woman in a Pucci knockdown and orthopedic shoes, giving the raspberry to each award,” Dunne said. He hesitated to introduce her to his wife. “She had despised … Play It As It Lays (Wilfrid Sheed had reported her reading it aloud derisively on the beaches of Long Island) … and Joan in turn had hammered Kael over the years [in print], suggesting among other things ‘vocational guidance.’” When the women met, they “circled each other warily,” Dunne said, these two Central Californians, “and they hit upon their rhythm—Valley talk. They talked about ranches and pickups and whiskey on the floorboards and the Silverado Trail, two tough little numbers, each with the instincts of a mongoose and an amiable contempt for the other’s work, putting on a good old girl number. It was a funny act to watch.”