The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Here was the thing: One of the young Mexican girls who’d worked for the Dunnes as a nanny since Quintana was born had left her husband around the time the family moved to Malibu. “She was pregnant, and she stayed with us until the baby was born,” Didion said. “Then she and the baby lived with us. When the baby was six months old, the girl went on vacation, took the baby home to Mexico. The baby, who had never been fed on anything but American formula, never eaten off anything but sterile dishes, became ill in Mazatlan, dehydrated, and was dead in twenty-four hours. It was a terrible thing. But we didn’t know how bad it was for Quintana until we went to visit a friend who had a baby. Quintana looked at the baby, smiled at his grandmother, and said politely, ‘When is he going to die?’”

  3

  Nick’s Hollywood career was about to come to an end.

  “I was not one who learned my lesson after my first mistake,” he admitted. “The humiliating experience of my arrest [at LAX] was merely the first in a series of public shames that followed on the way to the bottom. I did not value my life highly at that point and did dangerous things with dangerous people.”

  He recalled one night being in some “stranger’s closet with people I didn’t know, using Turnbull & Asser ties to find a vein to shoot cocaine. One of the strangers overdosed and died, but I had already run and was never questioned. Then, [when I was] stoned again, a crazed psychopath I’d invited over for some cocaine beat me up, tied me up, put a brown bag over my face, and dropped lighted matches on the bag. God came back to me, posthaste. So did my Catholicism. ‘God, help this man who is killing me,’ I said over and over and over. He left, quietly. I lived.”

  Between these escapades, he continued to work as a film producer, efficient and competent except for occasional tardiness at a meeting while nursing a terrible hangover. Just as he had believed his father’s poor opinion of him as a child, he now believed Sinatra’s view of him as a phony. I “rose too high,” he said. “I didn’t deserve to be where I was. My credits weren’t good enough for the world I moved in.”

  He made a deal with Bob Evans at Paramount to produce an Elizabeth Taylor–Henry Fonda picture called Ash Wednesday, to be filmed in Rome. The screenplay had been written by a man named Jean-Claude Tramont, the story of a beautiful woman, anxious about getting older, who tries to rekindle her husband’s lust by submitting to plastic surgery. The wisdom of asking audiences to accept Elizabeth Taylor as a candidate for beauty treatments involving sheep-gland injections should have been questioned by everyone involved in the production. The real problem was the quality of the script, “written … with all the fearlessness and perception demanded in the boiling of an egg,” Vincent Canby said in his review. Nick knew he had a turkey here, but he couldn’t pass up the chance to meet Liz Taylor and Richard Burton—who, boozing and fighting steadily, snubbed him anyway.

  The worst moment came in the middle of shooting, in the Café de Flore in Paris, when he met his screenwriter for the first time. Tramont, Belgian-born and raised in France, according to his official biographies, was the fiancé of Sue Mengers, Barbra Streisand’s agent and “the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time,” Nick said. In his memoir, The Way We Lived Then, he claimed Tramont was actually a fellow named Jack Schwartz, whom Nick had known twenty years earlier when he worked as a stage manager for NBC. Schwartz was a page boy then. When Mengers introduced them in Paris, Nick was stunned but said nothing. Immediately, he assumed this stinker of a screenplay had surfaced only through Mengers’s pull. She was a heavyset woman, not particularly attractive to Nick—she was always wearing dumpy caftans—and he further assumed that Schwartz/Tramont was exploiting her affections to get ahead (in fact, he and Mengers remained married until his death from cancer in 1996).

  Ash Wednesday premiered in New York in November 1973. Exhausted, ignored by the star of his movie, nervous and more self-destructive than ever, Nick didn’t wait for the critics to trash it. To the studio’s dismay, he declared publicly, “It’s a minor film. It’s not like A Place in the Sun … It’s the end of Elizabeth Taylor’s career. There’s nothing riveting about Ash Wednesday.”

  A couple weeks later, drunk at a dinner party in Los Angeles, he told several of the guests his Jack Schwartz story. “If the history of this movie ever gets written,” he quipped, “it should be called ‘When a Fat Girl Falls in Love.’”

  Somehow, Hollywood Reporter columnist Marvene Jones learned of Nick’s remark and printed it in the paper. Nick claimed he got a call from Bob Evans, a great friend of Mengers. “He just said to me, ‘You’re through. You are over in Hollywood,’ and I was, and I knew it,” Nick said.

  This was confirmed for him when Ahmet Ertegün introduced him to Mick Jagger one day as “Joan Didion’s brother-in-law.”

  Later, Evans demurred, “I don’t remember” telling Nick he was through. “I may have said that. I could have.”

  “I was flattered that Nick Dunne would identify me as the person who ended his career in Hollywood because of my power. I wish it were true,” Mengers said.

  In any case, Nick had committed a far worse blunder than insulting a beloved agent. It was the one unforgivable sin in Hollywood.

  He had made a movie that bombed.

  * * *

  Didion met Sue Mengers and Barbra Streisand one night at a party. Mengers’s house was like “a John Woolf jewel, with great, tall, Hollywood Regency doors and a living room that looked over a largely unused, egg-shaped pool,” Graydon Carter recalled.

  Against this lavish backdrop, Streisand approached Didion and Dunne. With no introduction, she asked, “What do you think of fidelity in marriage?”

  Apparently, she didn’t stick around for the answer.

  Didion was now throwing regular parties of her own—exclusive affairs, like Mengers’s, but with a literary twist—“sort of new for the movie world,” Nick said (though he’d invited Christopher Isherwood and Mart Crowley to his soirees). Gore Vidal, in love with Didion’s prose, appeared at her door, and so did Truman Capote. Barry Farrell, whom Dunne had known at Time, became such a close friend, he and his wife named their adopted daughter Joan. He’d written for Life magazine—covering the Manson trial—and took freelance assignments on the Hollywood crime beat. Dunne used to call him every night to “natter” about underworld gossip, slightly jealous of his seamy, hard-boiled existence. “In the background I could hear the noises from the mean streets outside his Hollywood office, the wailing sirens and the voices of the dispossessed floating up through the open window,” Dunne said. For his part, Farrell admired Dunne’s panache, both as a journalist and as a husband. He had watched the Dunnes in restaurants—when people stared at Didion, Dunne would lean back in his chair ever so slightly so that the gawkers could get a better view. Farrell had never seen anything so romantic.

  Josh Greenfeld and his wife, Foumi, attended Didion’s fetes whenever they could find a sitter for their troubled son. “Someday I’m going to kill that kid,” Greenfeld said with a sigh. One night, he told Dunne he had driven up the coast to inspect Camarillo. Flies pestered helpless children in the wards while the staff read magazines in air-conditioned cubicles. He heard horrible rumors about patients raping one another.

  Quintana probably heard his stories. She was often at the parties, said Eve Babitz: “When John got too loud, she’d move to the sober side of the table.”

  What Greenfeld appreciated about Didion’s parties was this: No one ever tried to make him feel small. That was the nice thing about literary affairs. “Writers don’t compete with each other,” he said. “We compete with the fucking dead.”

  The man of whom this was truest was the Dunnes’ neighbor, the Irish novelist Brian Moore. He and his wife, Jean, had moved into a $75,000 “shack on the Pacific,” just up the coast. The frequent floodwaters “intermixed with good red mud” reminded him of damp, foggy Belfast days. He’d sit in his kitchen, watching pelicans soar past the windows, and turn his thoughts to stories. Though he’d done his s
hare of screenplay work, for Alfred Hitchcock among others, he was, first and last, a determined novelist. He rarely let himself be distracted from his literary tasks. Though he enjoyed the Dunnes’ parties, he liked to joke that he was the Count Dracula of the group, needing to return to his coffin while the others ushered in the dawn. But then Earl McGrath would burst through the door, along with David Hockney and Bianca Jagger, all wearing circus clothes, and he’d be persuaded to stay a little longer.

  His temper could be as hair-trigger as Dunne’s. Sometimes they got into drunken verbal jousts—just a couple of salty micks having it out. Moore took literature very seriously. He had no patience for writers like Capote and Mailer, he said, “show-business people” who were “shameless little puffers-up of their talents and muggers-in-public for anyone who would write them up.” Dunne would tell him to lay off his pals; sometimes their voices rose and their bodies got a little too close, warm Scotches sloshing over the backs of their thumbs. Didion recalled one night, not in her house but at a dinner in Beverly Hills, when the evening “abruptly became a shambles” following a shouting match between the two men. Dunne “walked out and I fled,” she said.

  They all made up, and a week or so later, they’d gather by the fire over bourbons and mole, having a fine old time.

  * * *

  “I remember the first time I had dinner at [the Dunnes’] house. I’d let John … mix my drinks. By the time the main course was served I was on my knees in the bathroom throwing up into the toilet,” wrote producer Julia Phillips in her memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. The Dunnes courted her assiduously after her success with The Sting—another rare woman with clout in the industry (until she went lights-out on coke). For a while, she considered making a movie of Vegas, which pleased Dunne no end. “Since I was in their bathroom anyway, I checked out their medicine cabinet,” Phillips said. “Outside of my mother’s, it was the most thrilling medicine cabinet I had ever seen. Ritalin, Librium, Miltown, Fioranol, Percodan … every upper, downer, and in-betweener of interest … circa 1973.”

  “All prescribed (in vain) for the migraine headaches with which my wife and I were both afflicted,” Dunne responded later in print. “But to a junkie it is comforting to think everyone else is a junkie too.”

  And by the way, he said, he’d served her only “one Bloody Mary” that night.

  * * *

  The medicine cabinet needed a serious upgrade, with vast infusions of azithromycin, after a trip to the Cartagena Film Festival in the summer of 1973. The Dunnes had been invited as part of a contingent representing U.S. filmmakers. (“I recall invoking the name ‘Jack Valenti’ a lot,” Didion said.)

  “Why had the American film industry not made films about the Vietnam War?” people at parties wanted to know.

  “What would be the point?” others argued. “They run that war on television.”

  Feverish, exhausted from travel, Didion preferred to flee the festival and walk the narrow cobblestone lanes, past the staggered stone steps of the San Felipe fort and the old city walls, the yellowed rooftops visible from certain angles, and the Palace of the Inquisition, with its massive oak doors. Street markets sold high-quality leather goods, the deep, earthy smells of shoes and belts as rich as cured bacon in the hot, tented alleys, and old men played accordions, songs about war, in shadowed doorways. Everywhere, mountains, shot through with depleted silver mines. She had slipped into Conrad territory.

  On the street corners, tabloid headlines read JACKIE Y ARI. “[I] bought a paper” to read about “how the princess de los norteamericanos ruled the king of the Greek sea by demanding of him pink champagne every night and medialunas every morning, a story a child might invent,” she said. She made a note about a North American princess marrying a man of power, living in exile.

  Fairy tales filled the air, as if the “whole history of the place” were a “mirage, a delusion on the high savannah, its gold and its emeralds unattainable, inaccessible, its isolation … splendid and unthinkable,” Didion said. It occurred to her, especially when she considered visions of shimmering gold, that California’s history was every bit as ephemeral—childlike in retellings—as South America’s.

  These thoughts roiled feverishly in her brain, along with the strange tales she’d heard in New Orleans about the Caribbean and its political ties to Latin American exiles up and down the Gulf Coast.

  She’d lie in her hotel bed, trying to sort out these stories, while Dunne went to the festival’s evening events and apologized for his wife’s absence. The hotel’s generator blinkered to a stop. No lights, no phone. Her fever, quite real, rose to 103.

  She and Dunne flew to Bogotá—after waiting four days to book seats on the once-a-morning Avianca flight. She could no longer stand the blinding coastal dawns and the dusty winds. She thought she might die.

  Waiting for her in the city, at the Hotel Tequendama, were “room service and Xerox rápido and long-distance operators who could get Los Angeles in ten minutes.… Hot water. Madeira consommé in cool dining rooms.”

  One day, in the sixteenth-century Church of San Francisco, she collapsed gratefully into a pew, and lit a candle for her daughter back home.

  Even here, in what passed for urban modernity, a “dislocation of time fixed on the mind the awesome isolation of the place,” she said. In the city’s major movie theaters, the fare consisted of bad American films ten years old.

  She admitted her discomfort: “I was aware of being an American in Colombia in a way I had not been in other places.” Like a hasty travel writer, she fixed on “local color,” on “a shantytown of packing-crate and tin-can shacks where a small boy, his body hideously scarred and his face obscured by a knitted mask, played listlessly with a yo-yo.”

  Always, Didion’s literary approach had been to describe the surface of a place so thoroughly that its depths were exposed, like polishing wood until its grain came through. Her essay “In Bogotá” revealed the limitations of this strategy when the writer stepped outside her habitat: The details, culturally uninformed, risked superficiality and condescension. The outsider did not know what depths the surface might reveal.

  Didion’s essay did not bode well for her future observations of El Salvador, which she would turn to in the 1980s.

  At parties in the city, she met officials from the American embassy, USIS men, information officers—all CIA, the Colombians believed. She met filmmakers who had worked with Norman Mailer, Rip Torn, and Richard Leacock on Mailer’s movie Maidstone. It seemed Noel Parmentel had also joined the set, playing a small role in the film. Hearing his name in this faraway place forged another link for Didion between her visit to New Orleans and her South American trip. That night, she made a few more random notes.

  * * *

  On the way back to Los Angeles, the plane stopped to refuel at the Panama airport. It was six A.M. Heat rose off the tarmac and pasted her skirt to her legs. Her sandals stuck to the asphalt. Her fever had remained steady and imbued the colors she saw—on the airport’s stucco walls, on the shiny Pan Am tail—with an astonishing aura, as if they had absorbed all the light in the world. She stepped inside a waiting lounge, assaulted by the blips and bloops of a slot machine.

  The passengers waited for an hour, the smell of gas infusing the stench of tar and dust. In a newspaper she saw a photograph of a hijacked 707 burning at night in a Middle Eastern desert. The blue of the airport walls reminded her of the Bevatron in Berkeley. She thought of Henry Adams, the Dynamo, coal, Conrad’s tales of mining in the tropics, politics.

  She thought of Jackie and Ari, princesses and powerful men, moving around the world, transit lounges, transitional spaces. She saw herself sitting here—for decades, it seemed—en route, in limbo. Feverish. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting for what?

  New Orleans.

  Noel.

  The Caribbean.

  She made more notes. Without quite knowing it, she had begun what would become her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer—the t
emplate for all her remaining fiction.

  * * *

  Back home, abdominal pains accompanied the fever. She couldn’t eat. Her weight dropped to seventy pounds. Doctors diagnosed her with paratyphoid. In Cartagena, she’d ingested tainted food or water—perhaps at a restaurant along the Bocagrande, the vast urban beach, from which she kept a receipt one night when she and her husband had three whiskies and a coco martinique; langoustines and steak pimiento; a plato frío. She’d kept the receipt to write off expenses, but also because the words Boca Grande (“Big Mouth”) intrigued her; this would become the name of the fictional Latin American country in A Book of Common Prayer.

  As her weight fluctuated dangerously, her mother arrived in Malibu to care for her and Quintana.

  Didion would sit outside on the deck and watch the wind stir ashes from the chimney, dusting the house’s smooth white bricks. She’d sit beside a neighbor’s pool, watching Katharine Ross teach her daughter to swim by tossing a Tahitian shell into the water and telling Quintana the shell was hers if she could retrieve it.

  One night, sometime during this period, Didion found Quintana under her bedcovers with a flashlight, gaping at Margaret Bourke-White’s pictures of Buchenwald in an old Life magazine she’d found on the shelves. “That was what she had to know,” Didion wrote.

  Quintana’s blue-and-white gingham curtains rustled in the breeze.

  Politics. What on earth could you tell a child?

  Friends brought her soufflés, soups, and desserts, and eventually Didion regained a little strength—enough to start worrying about cash again. Often, there was a considerable lag between the couples’ script doctoring and the cutting of checks. They were making money, but not always fast enough. “I [made] graphs. If we only spent X dollars for the next nine months we could survive, but it didn’t seem likely that we could only spend X dollars because we’d spent twice X dollars every month for the past year,” she said.