The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  What’s that title again?

  She traveled the way her brother, a corporate real-estate broker, traveled—in style, regretting that most Americans were too soft these days to make it cross-country by wagon: “[W]e were often, my child and I, the only female passengers, and I apprehended for the first time those particular illusions of mobility which power American business”—and the political class. “Time was money. Motion was progress. Decisions were snap.” She perceived that the planet’s economics, trade deals, and wars, all indistinguishable, were driven mostly by men sipping gin and tonics in climate-controlled cabins above the clouds, keeping tenuous ties to people and places on the ground’s shaky crust.

  6

  An Event? A Book of Common Prayer sold moderately well, even made the bestseller lists in certain local markets. It earned over $100,000 in paperback sales. But the publishing experience dismayed Didion. She and her agent wrangled with S&S and Pocket Books (the paperback publisher) over royalty statements, which they considered consistently inaccurate and far too low; eventually, Simon & Schuster remaindered hundreds of hardback copies.

  Predictably, Kirkus gave Didion a hard time, proclaiming, in its review, that she offered readers “more sad songs,” in a “glossy, synthetic” novel whose characters were not “really alive.” Russell Davies, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, said the novel seemed more European than American in expressing doubt about “its own capacity to come up with the truth” about anything: “This is a manner and stance much favored by German writers today, but whereas the contemporary Germans seem to have … moral relativity on the brain chiefly because they are embarrassed to have at the backs of their minds moral certainties about the German past, Ms. Didion’s obliqueness is more a matter of temperamental dread … [stemming from the] rhythmic, natural chaos of womanhood,” he wrote. His assessment reveals how difficult it has always been for even sophisticated readers to accept American political novels—as though, relative to Europe, America’s past was not bloody enough to warrant uncertainty and “moral relativity”: these states of mind, then, must be factors of gender.

  On the other hand, Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Times, recognized Didion’s heroine as “a not untypical North American who simply revises history, personal and collective, as she goes along … a martyr, perhaps, to our ‘generally upward spiral of history.’” Oates said Didion was “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”

  * * *

  “The oft-rewritten script, attributed in its final version to John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion, and Frank Pierson … cannot even begin to convey why the highly successful rock star John Norman Howard … is going to pot … beyond ascribing it all to some undefined death wish we are meant to take for granted in these post-Joplin-Hendrix-Morrison days,” said John Simon in his review of A Star Is Born.

  In Newsweek, Jay Cocks noted, “A concert sequence, where the debuting Barbra brings a hostile rocker audience to their feet with the wonder of her funkiness, is a milestone of piquant absurdity, equivalent, perhaps, to having Kate Smith conquer Woodstock.”

  “During the filming, [Streisand] claimed that there weren’t enough close-ups of her,” Simon said. “[S]he re-edited the film to suit her enormous ego … [It] makes me marvel at the megalomania of the whole undertaking. And then I realize … that this hyperbolic ego and bloated countenance are things people shell out money for as for no other actress; that this progressively more belligerent caterwauling can sell anything—concerts, records, movies. And I feel as if our entire society were ready to flush itself down in something even worse than a collective death wish—a collective will to live in ugliness and self-debasement.”

  The Dunnes weren’t worried. Their lawyer, Morton Leavy, got them $175,000 up front for their work on the script, plus a “windfall” settlement, “including a stipulation that we share in the music and record royalties, a clause not previously included in our contract,” Dunne said. The movie went on to earn over $66 million, a percentage of which made a nice payday for the snobby intellectuals.

  * * *

  On March 28, 1977, while Didion and Quintana were staying at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, finishing up their tour for A Book of Common Prayer, Streisand took the stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to perform “Evergreen,” the love theme from A Star Is Born. Two months earlier, on the Dunnes’ thirteenth wedding anniversary, Quintana had watched the Golden Globes at home on television with her father. Didion had had a migraine that night and had gone to bed early. Streisand won several awards, including Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, for A Star Is Born. At one point, Dunne went into the bedroom to tell his wife happy anniversary. To cheer her up, he said, “Quintana just said, ‘Barbra went up there three times, and she never once thanked us.’”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  1

  “I knew doom when I saw it.” So wrote Lawrence Clark Powell, an early Malibu settler, of the Christmas 1956 fire that burned from the canyons and hills all the way down to the sea, destroying the houses of picture people who’d moved to the Colony to escape the madness of McCarthyism. Hell had followed them there.

  Fires were, and always would be, a given of the place, pumped by the wind as if by a bellows through the tunnel of the San Fernando Valley. Didion knew this. As the granddaughter of a geologist, she knew wildfires could crack the very structure of the soil, reaching temperatures of over two thousand degrees and creating a water-repellent layer of ground, hastening erosion and flooding. Life on the coast could only and ever be a temporary affair.

  At first, and for several years now, Didion had been willing to live with the risk. The Didions were gamblers, after all. But by 1978, there were other reasons to consider a move.

  Los Angeles County went to war with home owners in Trancas, commissioning plans to open a public beach. Already, the state owned the forests across the Pacific Coast Highway, and it aggressively pursued strategies for expropriating private homes or forcing the owners to sell. (Ever since the original coastal ranch had been subdivided in the 1940s, the general public had very little access to the glories of Malibu. “The seven million people within an hour’s drive” of the area “got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the 20,000 residents kept the beach,” said one historian.) The Dunnes wearied of land-use battles.

  Also, Quintana would soon reach middle-school age and needed a more stable environment. She was such a paradox. On the one hand, she was very much the young adult. One day, Didion remembered, Quintana accompanied her to a meeting with her motion picture agent at the William Morris office in Beverly Hills. Quintana listened attentively to the business negotiations, drinking water from a heavy Baccarat glass, and at the end, she asked the pertinent question, “But when do you give her the money?”

  On the other hand, she was still, of course, a child. At her eighth birthday party, she sat in the house with twenty-five other girls after the gifts had been opened. “[A]s little girls do, they were discussing things gynecological,” Dunne said, “specifically the orifice in their mothers’ bodies from which they had emerged at birth.” Quintana announced, “I didn’t. I was adopted.” She delivered this statement so matter-of-factly, her friends wanted special status, too. “Well, I was almost adopted,” one said.

  Quintana had begun to ask questions about her “other mother.” One night at dinner, she said she’d like to meet her someday, but it would be difficult, since she didn’t know her name. “There finally was the moment,” Dunne said. “We took a deep breath.” He and his wife decided to tell Quintana all they knew about the woman in Tucson. Didion felt extremely anxious, but, as if to reassure her, Quintana said if she ever met her natural mother, “I’d put one arm around Mom and one arm around my other mommy, and I’d say, ‘Hello, Mommies.’”

  A girl this bright, this vulnerable, was bound to suffer plenty through puberty.
Like all teens, she’d step into scary temptations, as if slogging through grainy beach tar. But perhaps Malibu was too scary—or seductively easy; recently, one of her young friends had overdosed on Quaaludes and drowned off Zuma Beach.

  “What do you think? Shall we buy a house today?” Dunne would joke whenever he had occasion to drive into Los Angeles.

  The couple agreed a move was in the cards. On top of everything else, the Trancas house had begun to feel too small. It wasn’t the Zen haven Didion had hoped it would be. Quintana walked in on them one day when they were making love. No one said a word about this later. Last December’s leftover ribbons, wrapping paper, and tissues cluttered Didion’s study floor—she had no place to put them. And she didn’t have room in her kitchen for her marble pastry slab. She placed it in the bathroom, but there was just “something obscene about rolling pastry in the bathroom.”

  She was tired of staring at the scorched fireplace bricks; tired of cleaning up, even with hired help, the same chairs and tables after late-night parties. The parties themselves—their own and their neighbors’—had become predictable and dull. They’d always viewed parties as sources of “combat intelligence from the social battlefield,” Dunne said, but these days, what were they learning? “She fucked her way to the middle,” an agent would say of a female studio executive.

  Please. They’d heard it a hundred times.

  2

  Dunne had tried to grow a beard. That was novel. Unfortunately, the experiment sprang from a familiar source: his restlessness, which always triggered his temper. He’d walk around the too-small house, grousing about the “Saturday jits.” “I got anxiety crawling all over me,” he’d say.

  Still, with the warm critical reception for True Confessions, Dunne had emerged in the literary world as more than Mr. Joan Didion, and he felt pleased about that. For years, he had been the “ideal writer’s wife,” said Josh Greenfeld, protecting Didion from outside intrusions, running interference for her, answering the telephone, encouraging her during public appearances. Now, without abandoning these responsibilities, he felt lighter, more confident.

  Didion and Dunne became better writers because of their mutual support—the association especially benefited Dunne. Their marriage had not just endured; it had strengthened. “They were like one person,” his brother said—despite the occasional jits.

  So when Didion finally met Mary McCarthy’s angel, Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, and he asked her to write for him, Dunne (clean-shaven once more) would not be far behind. In time, he would be the one to oil the social machinery, deepening the relationships all around.

  Didion’s attachment to The New York Review of Books sparked perhaps the most productive phase of her career. As an editor, Robert Silvers intuitively grasped her literary gifts and untapped potential. Like Didion, he exhibited a socially awkward streak, preferring his editorial work to most other activities. Food, for example—expensive dinners in garrulous company—didn’t much interest him. “[F]rankly, I’m in the office most of the time, and people tend to bring me one thing or another [to eat],” he said.

  From 1975 to 1982—during Didion’s apprenticeship with Silvers—Shelley Wanger worked as Silvers’s assistant in the Fisk Building. The Fisk was a bland brick structure in Manhattan’s West Fifties “whose lobby smelled of the Chinese food from the Yangtze River Restaurant that opened onto it,” Wanger wrote. (Soon, the magazine would move into more spacious offices on the thirteenth floor, nevertheless keeping “a comforting air of disheveled, bohemian mess,” reflecting Silvers’s personality.)

  He chain-smoked Nat Sherman cigarettes and worked round the clock, jotting ideas onto matchbook covers and various slivers of paper he’d slip into his suit coat pockets. “In the evening, if Bob did not go to dinner or the opera, around 8:30 he might go for some quick laps at the Henry Hudson Hotel on nearby 57th Street, return to have a dinner of soup delivered from the Carnegie Deli, and settle in, sometimes until after midnight,” Wanger wrote. “Who could match his stamina?”

  He always attributed the Review’s success to its habit of skeptical inquiry (with an unapologetic liberal bias), and he chalked up his skill as an editor to his capacity for admiring the genius of certain writers. The Review was cliquish. It betrayed no elitist qualms. If readers weren’t up to its offerings, well then, they could always go back to The New York Times Book Review. As one reporter put it, in a profile of the magazine’s ethos, “Even the telephone sex for sale [in the ads in the back] is cultured: ‘All fetishes, domination/submission fantasies explored by Ivy-League-educated Goddess.’”

  Silvers discovered Didion’s writing in the early 1970s. “I just thought she was a marvelous observer of American life,” he said. “In my ignorance, I had missed her work in National Review…” He told another reporter that she is “by no means predictable, by no means an easily classifiable liberal or conservative, she is interested in whether or not people are morally evasive, smug, manipulative, or cruel—those qualities of moral action are very central to all her political work.”

  Her first piece for him was an exposé of the film industry, similar to her husband’s reporting in The Studio. Eventually, Dunne became a regular contributor, as well, coaxing both his editor and his wife to combine their work with at least some attempts at pleasure. He said his pieces for the magazine usually began “with lunch at Patsy’s, a nondescript Italian restaurant on the West Side of Manhattan … On the second floor, at the top of the stairs, Bob drinks Pellegrino and eats only the inside of the bread, all the while neatly brushing the crust crumbs with his knife into his left hand, and from there onto the butter plate, and sometimes the floor, with not a break in the conversation.”

  And the range of conversation! It was always astonishing. “If he doesn’t know [something], he will learn it,” Dunne said. “And if he knows it, and you’re writing about it, you’re going to get it. Books, clips, press releases. The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the Times, magazines, desktop publishing.”

  Truly: a print-world angel.

  3

  From the vantage point of the heavens—if not quite from the windows of Didion’s house—Trancas Canyon narrowed from mountainous parklands to gentle slopes to grassy tableland at its mouth. The creek, draining a vast watershed, once ran the length of the canyon but now funneled into a concrete flood-control channel, culminating in a disturbed coastal lagoon near a shopping center. A garden-supply outfit occupied one of the few discernible mounds in the flatlands, the hump the last remnant of a Chumash burial site. Most striking, from an aerial view, was the small number of roads for such a densely developed region, restricting evacuation routes and fire department access. Commercial and political interests seemed to have combined to enforce the coast’s permanent “disaster area” status, guaranteeing periodic infusions of government money.

  On October 23, 1978, the face of doom belonged to a fifteen-year-old boy from Agoura. That day, just for the hell of it (spurred by Lord knows what scary temptation), he took a lit cigarette and wrapped it inside a matchbook until the matchbook began to burn. Then he tossed the matches into clumps of mountain chaparral and coastal sage scrub.

  At 12:11 P.M., the Agoura fire alarms rang. Just over two hours later—faster than anyone had ever seen—flames jumped the Pacific Coast Highway, melting a stretch of its asphalt, and reached the sea, powered by fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Six engine companies, twenty-eight camp crews, eight bulldozers, six five-hundred-gallon-capacity helicopters, and six fixed-wing tankers with a two-thousand-gallon capacity finally brought the fires under control, but not before they had destroyed 25,000 acres of watershed, 230 homes, and over 250 other structures.

  Just three months earlier, the Dunnes had finally left their house by the sea and moved to Brentwood Park, where they had purchased a two-story Colonial resembling “a house in West Hartford,” Didion said, “a house [John’s] mother might have lived in.”

  Quintana, who had fiercely resisted
the move, referred to it as her parents’ “suburbia house.”

  Early one October morning, Didion stood at an upstairs window of her new home, overlooking her swimming pool, watching the not-so-distant smoke in the hills. Either as a gesture of irony or California stoicism, the radio played James Taylor singing “Fire and Rain.” Announcers warned listeners that the fire’s final stand might be made at Sunset Boulevard. Didion startled, as a “house on a hill above Sunset implode[d]” in front of her eyes, “its oxygen sucked out by the force of the fire.” Palm fronds ignited—an eerie echo of the SLA shoot-out.

  Throughout the day, radio reports said cedar houses snapped like popcorn and fireballs rained upon tidal pools. Intrepid surfers rode the waves in defiance of the ashen skies. Power lines tangled by the winds broke and sent forth bolts of lightning. Wild rabbits sparked into flame, starting hundreds of brush fires wherever they hopped. Several area families raised Arabian horses; mares turned to char in the fields. Some of the animals had to be shot on the beach.

  There were reports of wealthy matrons loading boxes of jewels into kayaks and paddling out to the breakers. When rescued by lifeguards, they admitted they had left their maids behind.

  A few days later, around the first of November, the Pacific Coast Highway reopened. Grieving in advance, Didion drove out to Arthur Freed Orchids. She found Amado Vazquez standing amid cracked glass and melted metal in what had been the main greenhouse. “I lost three years,” he said softly, indicating shards of beakers that had once held seedlings.

  “I thought we both would cry,” Didion said.