The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  During the course of the evening, Dunne mentioned to Kael that Frank Perry would be directing the movie version of Play It As It Lays. Nick had made a distribution deal with Universal-Paramount, which had done quite well with Perry’s Diary of a Mad Housewife. Kael thought Perry ham-handed and self-important; she asked Dunne why in the world they’d tapped him? Dunne said they’d really wanted Sam Peckinpah but the “studios reacted to Sam’s doing a picture about a woman as if … Hitler [were to] do a film about the Jewish question.” Perry was a self-proclaimed “Didion freak.” She’s the “most important voice writing in English today. She’s past Mailer, Styron, Jones, the war guys,” he’d said. He’d put up his own money to direct her novel.

  None of this pleased Kael, a Peckinpah admirer. She sniffed an inside job.

  Several months later, in her review of Play It As It Lays in The New Yorker, Kael accused Didion of bringing to the screen the “ultimate princess fantasy,” which is “to be so glamorously sensitive and beautiful that you have to be taken care of; you are simply too sensitive for this world—you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people, and can’t function.” She admitted she found Didion’s novel laughable—“I know I have a lower tolerance for this sort of thing than many people, but should it be tolerated?”—and more than that, she found Didion ridiculous. She implied that Didion, the sensitive martyr, had seduced the men closest to her, her husband, her brother-in-law, and now Perry, into making her movie. It was a “novelist’s wish fulfillment: narration that retains the most ‘eloquent’ passages in the book, dialogue virtually intact.” “Perry hasn’t found a ‘visual equivalent’ for [Didion’s] famished prose, but maybe this high-class-whorehouse style of moviemaking is the true equivalent.”

  To date, this was the roughest mauling Didion had endured in print. It was personal and it was mean—on a par with Didion’s treatment of Nancy Reagan. But because it involved professional matters—one writer, one movie insider to another—it contained a curious subtext. Against the odds, and in spite of continuing slights, Didion had become a powerful presence in a mostly male industry. Now here was an equally formidable woman pulling her down, publicly, personally, over traditionally “female” issues—sensitivity, silent suffering, suspicions of sleeping her way to the top.

  You can have your damn solidarity, your movement, Didion must have thought. You old mongoose.

  As for Dunne, he chivalrously defended his wife, as a knight of the stable society was required to do. Kael, he wrote, was “ludicrous … less a critic than a den mother” (two could sling this gender crap) “swatting her favorites gently when they get out of line, lavishing them with attention, smothering them with superlatives for their successes.”

  If Didion was a Whore, Kael was an Overbearing Mom. Apparently, there was no room in this discussion for appraising solid professionals, doing their jobs.

  * * *

  Play It As It Lays was certainly not a Joan Didion vanity project. It was a complex collaboration. “The four of us”—Didion, Dunne, Nick, and Perry—“locked ourselves into a hotel suite,” said the director. “We had this enormous bulletin board and all these stick-pins and colored file cards. It’s the old writer’s trick: To avoid writing, you go to the stationery store and freak out. Anyway, we broke the novel down into every one of its fragments and arranged them in order, and then rearranged them into our order and kept a master key so we knew how every shot was related and when every pay-off came. Then Joan and John wrote the screenplay.”

  Didion was fascinated with film editing—“cutting,” she called it. The white spaces, the gaps, in the novel became quick cuts in the film, fragments of Maria’s life repeated out of sequence. In particular, her abortion haunts her: Bloody images, memories of the doctor’s gloved hand—these flit through her mind and across the screen when she and the viewer least expect them.

  The editing alone took seven weeks and cost over a million dollars. Perry wanted a visual “mosaic” rather than a series of “definite statements,” in keeping with “the one-dimensional concern with the surface as employed in the book.” He was trying for a “radical departure” in texture. “I don’t really know of any other screen stories that have been told in this fragmented form, which is the representation of [Maria’s] chaotic thought processes. I believe this sort of subjective storytelling is a major new direction for film. And a most important one.”

  Roy Lichtenstein joined the team as a visual consultant—the reason, Vincent Canby wrote, that the “dreadful Los Angeles freeway becomes, on the screen … a magnificent op art design—graceful gray loops on which tiny spots of red, yellow and aquamarine zoom in mindless motion.” Mental disintegration never looked so good.

  “I wanted Lichtenstein because of his fascination with the visually banal,” Perry said. “It’s so much part of the landscape here … [and] it’s important because it represents the future of the country. It’s the bellwether of the United States. Each day New England grows more like California. California does not grow like New England. It’s plastic. It’s artificial. It’s also dynamic.”

  Cost overruns mounted, including helicopter rentals for the freeway shots and lost camera equipment. Behind the scenes, Nick tussled with the studio. “[W]e had a studio chief who hated the movie, just hated it, and he would say this to anybody,” Nick said. “Ned Tanen, the head of Universal at the time, hated the book and called [the script] a piece of shit on our first meeting … [He] hated every single day’s dailies, and he was the most awful person. It was so bitter.”

  The filming was bitter for Didion, as well, but for entirely personal reasons. Her friend Diana Lynn had been scheduled to play a role in the movie, making a career comeback, but she suffered a stroke following a wardrobe fitting a few days before shooting began. She died a few days later, at the age of forty-five, in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai. Lynn had changed Didion’s life, urging her to call Blake Watson and arrange Quintana’s adoption. Now Quintana’s Broken Man had taken Lynn away.

  At the end of the movie, Maria says, “I know what nothing is, and keep on playing … Why not?”

  Observers on the sets witnessed a similar grim stoicism hardening Didion’s features.

  * * *

  The movie was not a hit, but Weld’s performance (“a lot of puckers” conveying “cotton-candy misery,” according to Kael) earned her a Best Actress Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival, and a Golden Globe nomination. Perry and Didion felt they’d achieved what they set out to do. The director believed that, together, the book and film made “incredibly essential statement[s] about where we’re going in this country.” The critics were split. Though some, like Stanley Kauffmann, dismissed it as “pretentious, posturing, [and] empty,” based on the work of a “phony serious novelist,” others readily accepted the premise of Hollywood decadence as a harbinger of national destiny. Charles Champlin said it was “the year’s most effective capturing of women’s dissatisfaction,” and Rex Reed called it “profound,” the “first truly existential film ever made in this country.”

  The Dunnes had now successfully released two unusual, uncompromising movies.

  Their partnership earned them mentor status among a group of young writers. Jon Carroll, Dunne’s cousin—“his mother and my grandmother were sisters,” he said—was living in San Francisco, writing for Rolling Stone. “I was intimidated by John. We were in the same field and he’d had success I hadn’t had yet. He was large and gruff and knew everyone,” Carroll told me. “The temptation to treat him as a father figure was great. And he welcomed that. He enjoyed being my spirit guide, showing me around L.A.”

  Carroll’s connection to the Dunnes stood him well in the Rolling Stone offices. Founded with table scraps in 1967 by Jann Wenner, a Berkeley dropout galvanized by the Free Speech Movement, and Ralph Gleason, a former Ramparts editor and music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone revered Didion. Cameron Crowe, then a young writer struggling to find his style, remembered that “Ja
nn Wenner gave me a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem … He said, ‘This is the future of what you’re doing now if you can hook into a more thoughtful, more soulful place.’ I read one of her profiles on Jim Morrison and saw that it was about so much more than just Morrison.… [It] ended up being about life in California, the weather, and existence. I thought, ‘I get it! This is big picture stuff!’”

  In the end, though, Wenner was just another businessman who wanted to do coke “with rock stars,” Carroll lamented. “[He] broke our hearts.” “I left Rolling Stone not on the best of terms,” he told me delicately. He went on to edit New West, Clay Felker’s magazine, which Felker “meant to be a clone of New York.” In just a few years, New West would become an important outlet for the Dunnes’ work.

  Sara Davidson, a neophyte journalist, was another young writer making frequent pilgrimages to the Dunnes for lunch and advice, dazzled and amused by the way they’d “finish each other’s sentences, batting the narrative back and forth as in a badminton game.”

  One day, Eve Babitz surprised Didion with a piece she’d written about Hollywood High School. It was called “The Sheik,” a witty portrait of movie-star kids who know they own the world. Didion was charmed by it and she championed it with Grover Lewis, a Rolling Stone editor. On her advice, he bought “The Sheik,” and from there Babitz developed a series of incisive vignettes for her first book, Eve’s Hollywood (1974), dedicated, in part, to “the Didion-Dunnes, for having to be what I’m not.”

  Another young writer, Susanna Moore, had appeared at the Dunnes’ parties (introduced to them by Connie Wald), though she would not publish her first novel until the early 1980s. Eventually, she would become one of Didion’s closest friends. A tall, dark-haired former model, she had worked for a while as a script reader for Jack Nicholson and as Warren Beatty’s personal assistant. She was nineteen when she applied for the job with Beatty. Just two years before that, she’d left Hawaii, where she’d lived since she was a girl. Her island background intrigued the Dunnes. Shortly after meeting them, she married production designer Richard Sylbert (Shampoo, Chinatown, Catch-22). Didion and Roman Polanski agreed to become godparents to her daughter, Lulu.

  2

  Meanwhile, the Dunnes had difficulty managing their own daughter. “Before Quintana was born, before she came to live with me … I assumed that I was mother material,” Didion said years later. “It was only when I had to face the reality of actually having the perfect baby in my arms that I kind of felt not, not up to it … I didn’t have a clue what was involved.”

  “I wish I could have stopped Quintana at age two,” she said.

  On the day Leslie Caron came to listen to the “new voices of California literature,” she recognized that Quintana was “already a health worry” for the Dunnes. She was a “remarkably precocious baby,” she said, but something was off in her affect. It was simply odd to see a child talking and behaving so much like a grown-up.

  In Blue Nights, Didion speaks, as well, of her daughter’s “dizzying alterations of infancy and sophistication,” the “strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.” For instance, Quintana called her toys “sundries,” apparently because of the sundry shops “in the many hotels to which she had already been taken.” She made a dollhouse featuring a central “projection room” with “Dolby Sound.” One night, she told her parents nonchalantly, “I just noticed I have cancer.” (It was chicken pox.)

  Didion speaks obliquely of her daughter’s “quicksilver changes of mood,” and of her own failure to seek treatment for Quintana because that wasn’t the kind of thing people did in her family—though, in fact, it was; perhaps memories of her father’s stay in Letterman continued to haunt her. One day, while the Dunnes were out, Quintana placed a call to a state psychiatric facility named Camarillo (“the hospital in which Charlie Parker once detoxed,” Didion felt obliged to report). Quintana “had called Camarillo, she advised us, to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy. She was five years old.”

  On the Blue Nights promotional tour, when interviewers asked Didion how in the world a five-year-old could have known about Camarillo, she waved the question away. It was just a place people talked about sometimes. Actually, it was a place her friend Josh Greenfeld talked about. His son Noah had been born with severe brain damage. On occasion, Greenfeld threatened to take his boy to Camarillo. The name awakened Quintana’s abandonment fears. Quintana “was always very sweet, very solicitous of Noah,” Greenfeld told me. “There was something special … something she identified with in him.”

  Her closest friend was Susan Traylor, daughter of the acting teachers William Traylor and Peggy Feury. Their students included Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Anjelica Huston. “[We] would sit on the couch in the kitchen and all of these people would come to be around my parents for inspiration,” Traylor said. “And these people would talk about their relationships and all of their hard times, right in front of us. We were kids!”

  At Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School, Quintana and Traylor met Bob Dylan’s son, Jesse. Dylan had bought a large Spanish-style house in Malibu following his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. The kids flirted together on the beach, mimicking behaviors learned from the adults. (Eventually, Traylor and Jesse Dylan would marry.)

  Quintana developed romantic notions of her own. “I’ve loved Donny Osmond for six months,” she told Sara Davidson matter-of-factly one night. They were sitting in Quintana’s bedroom: white walls painted with trees and flowers, blue-and-white gingham curtains. “I want to marry him when I’m twenty. I think he’s a sweet person and I like his records. I want to live with him in a big white house with a swimming pool and have lots of babies. But I don’t want all the babies to come at once!”

  She wrote Osmond a letter: “We have a lot to talk about. Can I come to Las Vegas?”

  She had learned that people were always available to you if you got a budget, made a deal.

  Around this time, possibly on a screenplay junket, Didion happened to take Quintana to the Chicago Museum of Art, where a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit stunned her daughter. Quintana ran to a stair landing and stared at the abstract shapes on a Sky Above Clouds canvas. “Who drew it?” she whispered to her mother. Didion told her. “I need to talk to her,” Quintana said.

  Didion bought a reproduction of the painting, framed it, and hung it on the wall in Malibu, next to the photo of the open road leading to Sacramento. Sky and earth. Whether or not the combination grounded Quintana, it seemed to soothe Didion as she padded in her sandals to her study.

  * * *

  “Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I’m working,” Quintana scribbled on a piece of paper under the heading “Mom’s Sayings.” She posted it on the garage wall, like a little Martin Luther.

  She left a crayoned note one day: “Dear Mom, when you opened the door it was me who ran away XXXXXX—Q.”

  When her cousin Dominique came to baby-sit her one afternoon, Quintana left a card for her mother on the kitchen table: “Roses are red, violets are blue. I wish you weren’t home and Dominique does too. Love, Happy Mother’s Day, D & Q.”

  In school, she wrote a poem called “The World”: “The world / Has nothing / But morning / And night / It has no / Day or lunch / So this world / Is poor and desertid [sic].”

  On most days, the world certainly looked fragile on the Pacific Coast Highway between the house and the classroom buildings. School officials felt obligated to send notes home to parents advising them of contingency plans when fires came roaring down the hills. “Dry winds and dust, hair full of knots. Gardens are dead, animals not fed,” Quintana wrote when asked by her teacher for an “autumn” poem.

  Didion couldn’t keep from critiquing her daughter’s jottings and correcting her grammar—unlike Eduene, who, when Didion was a girl, urged a notebook on her child to make her go away. Under scrutiny, Quintana became self-conscious about her prose. In time, she’d view writ
ing the way her father did: as a way of settling scores.

  One day, Susan Traylor rode in the car to school with Dunne and his daughter. Quintana showed him a paper she’d written. He asked her if she’d let her mother proof it, and when she said no, Traylor was shocked to see Dunne toss the paper out the window.

  In the mornings, Dunne generally got up early, fetched wood for the living room fireplace, woke Quintana, and made her breakfast. “Joan was trying to finish a book” during this period “and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed,” he said. “She always made Q’s lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox.… [Not] your basic peanut butter and jelly schoolbox lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces … Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar.” Quintana had to wear a plaid jumper and white sweater as a school uniform. She’d pull her hair back in a ponytail. “So I’d take Q to school, and she’d walk down this steep hill,” Dunne said. “I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and I thought it was as beautiful as anything I’d ever seen. So I said to Joan, ‘You got to see this, babe.’ The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry.”

  * * *

  In Blue Nights, Didion flagellates herself for being a bad mother. Quintana “was already a person. I could never afford to see that,” she writes, suggesting, in hindsight, a refusal to countenance time, change, aging; a denial of the troubles she witnessed in her daughter. At the time, though, in a 1972 radio interview, she was quite aware of being “apprehensive about everything and anxious so I have to try not to lay [my neuroses] on her, and anyways, she wouldn’t have any of it if I did try. I mean, she’s very, very…” She didn’t seem to know what else to say about Quintana. “She’s very competent, I mean, she’s, ahhh…”