“Just to show you”: Not only can I write, as you do—and about the very same subjects—but I can get pregnant. Or my character can. Take that.
“[T]hey would provide the abortion.” Who or what is aborted? Afterward, the character Quintana becomes a ghost in the house.
The novel ended with a fragment: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.”
* * *
Quintana wasn’t the only member of the extended family worrying about early burnout or trying to write fiction.
Nick had finally hit bottom. “Day-to-day living became unbearable,” he said. He’d blown most of his money on his drug habits. “I sold my West Highland terrier named Alfie to Connie Wald for $300.… What kind of a man would sell his dog?”
“Desperate to save myself, I went through a spiritual stage. I started attending the Church of Self-Realization at the end of Sunset Boulevard just before the beach. It was a beautiful and tranquil place. A friend and I meditated there, but we always smoked a joint first, which wasn’t really the point,” he said. “Then I went into the hospital overnight to have a cyst removed. In the recovery room, still under anesthesia, I suffered cardiac arrest and nearly checked out.”
Shortly afterward, in September 1978, he got into his two-door Ford Granada—by now, he’d lost his Mercedes—and drove to Oregon. Retrospectively, he framed the story this way: “I had heard the word[s] Cascade Mountains, and I was attracted to the peacefulness of the sound of ‘cascade.’ In a hamlet called Camp Sherman, on the Metolius River, I had a flat tire. I didn’t have any idea how to change a tire, and I was too weary to learn. The nearest garage was closed[, so] I rented a one-room cabin, with kitchenette and bath.”
In fact, he’d had some foreknowledge of Camp Sherman, according to Joyce Osika, the woman who rented him the cabin at Twin View Resort. “He did tell me that a lady in his apartment [in Beverly Hills] had suggested to him, ‘If you want quiet and solitude, go to Camp Sherman,” Osika said. Nick moved his typewriter into cabin number 5, and stayed for six months.
“There were 150-foot-high pine trees outside it and views of Black Butte and snow-capped Mount Jefferson,” Nick said. “I was like a whipped dog when I came … but there was something about this place that had an incredible effect on me.”
In the afternoons he walked to the mouth of the Metolius, fed by numerous springs, flowing north and east toward Lake Billy Chinook and the Deschutes River. At the Camp Sherman Store, just across a little footbridge, a fly fisherman told him (though he had no intention of fishing) that the best flies to try in the fall were the blue-winged olives or the no. 8 Dirty Bird. He didn’t believe a word. He could tell a good storyteller when he saw one.
He was trying to write a story. Later, he’d say he just gave fiction a what-the-hell whirl. But in truth, he had an agent in Hollywood, Arnold Stiefel. Stiefel had taken Nick to the Polo Lounge right before Nick drove north. “You’re dead meat in the picture business,” he said. Nick said he already knew that. So Stiefel suggested he ghost-write a sequel to Joyce Haber’s novel, The Users. Nick had produced a television movie of The Users, and he knew enough Hollywood gossip to write a rousing tale. In cabin 5 each day, he plotted chapters.
But mostly he “licked [his] wounds” and tried to shed his Tinseled skin. “I had no telephone and no television, and I literally lived in silence,” he said. He sat for hours, not moving, in an orange Naugahyde chair. He stopped drinking and drugging. “All that bullshit ended in the cabin. I used to think it was ‘this person’s fault’ that I didn’t get that movie, or ‘that person’ did this or that. I came to realize that the fault was always mine.”
He was surprised one day to find in his mailbox a letter from Truman Capote. They’d never been close, but Capote could sympathize with Nick: He’d had his own problems with chemical dependencies, and recently he’d been shunned by Hollywood society after publishing excerpts of his nasty roman à clef, Answered Prayers, in Esquire. On ecru-colored Tiffany paper, Capote said he admired Nick for trying to straighten himself out: “But remember this, that is not where you belong, and when you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to return to your own life.”
Capote died two years later. “I felt sure that if he had done what I had done, he wouldn’t have been dead so early,” Nick said.
He also received in the mail one afternoon a pair of L. L. Bean rubber boots. They came from his brother Stephen, who hoped he’d spend many happy hours walking in the woods.
* * *
Nick’s daughter Dominique and his eldest son, Griffin, had decided to try acting. Dominique earned small roles in televisions shows, Family, CHiPs, and Fame. Quintana was thrilled to see her cousin on the screen. Griffin skipped college and entered showbiz by running the popcorn stand at Radio City Music Hall. He became buddies with the camels in the annual Christmas nativity scene. “I fed them a lot of popcorn,” he said. Soon, he was appearing in obscure movies, but then he followed his father’s old example and, with a couple partners, bought the film rights to Ann Beattie’s novel Chilly Scenes of Winter. He and his partners drove to Boston to seal the deal with Beattie. “It was like seeing three of my characters walk through the door,” she said—hapless, post-sixties types, wondering what’s next. (Beattie had been praised by reviewers as Joan Didion for a new generation, minimalist and melancholy.) Joan Micklin Silver directed the movie, originally titled Head Over Heels. It premiered in New York while Nick was busy pursuing asceticism in Oregon. Griffin pleaded with his father to come celebrate his success, but Nick refused. He was doing important work, he said, reassessing his past. Besides, money was a problem.
Didion and Dunne had lent Nick ten thousand dollars, and he was careful how he spent it. Accepting the loan (it was more like a gift) also fueled his shame when he was around the family. “A terrible resentment builds when you’ve borrowed money and can’t pay it back, although they never once reminded me of my obligation,” Nick said. His “important work” consisted of more than just sitting in penitential solitude, which is how he presented the period later. In his search for an “epiphany,” he sent “long, artful” letters to his brother in Brentwood. They were “full of character evaluation and private secrets and revisionist family history,” Dunne wrote in his memoir, Harp. “[B]lame was sprinkled like holy water; the archbishop of this schismatic church was careful to douse himself as well as his … family.” (Dunne’s language is enlightening here; at the time, he had recently finished True Confessions, about a pair of quarreling brothers, one a volatile, tough-talking cop, the other a self-righteous priest.)
“I had the uneasy feeling that there was an audience for this exchange of letters to which I was not privy, with the result that my answers became at best perfunctory,” Dunne said.
On one occasion, Nick’s rakings through family foibles so enraged Dunne, he threw the letter in the fire. In a terse note he told his brother he had done so. Nick wrote back, “Fuck you!” “[M]y note, he said, had been much discussed at his support group, which at least confirmed my suspicion that ours had not been a private correspondence,” Dunne said.
4
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day …
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Hopkins’s poetry solaced Dunne in the months ahead.
He and Nick later disagreed about the timing of the calls. Dunne said he got the news at four-thirty in the morning and immediately phoned Nick. Nick remembered that Joyce Osika knocked on his cabin door at about three A.M., saying he had a call down at the lodge from his brother.
What is not in dispute: Nick gave a cry of extraordinary “bleakness.” Then he told Dunne that “he had been contemplating suicide himself, perhaps at the exact same moment as Stephen.”
Their little brother. The one who had always “played life on the dark keys.” Who had always cried, in place of his brothers, whenever their father got mad. Who had never outgr
own the stigma of his childhood stutter, according to an old friend, Lem Bainton. Who had been told by FSG he couldn’t design the cover of his brother’s first book. Who apparently felt he’d never been wanted enough. In his garage in New Canaan, Connecticut, he had carefully taped shut the windows and doors of his car, started the engine, and asphyxiated himself.
Dunne was still angry at Nick for the letters, the loan. On the phone, he said there was no need for Nick to fly back east for the funeral; after all, he was so much older than Stephen and never really knew him that well. Nick was offended. Of course he’d go to the funeral. Then Dunne said he would not give Nick any more money. Nick erupted, calling his brother “wanton and insensitive.”
At the funeral in Connecticut—one of the last times they’d see their sisters, Harriet and Virginia, both of whom would die of breast cancer—the brothers, one a prince of Hollywood, the other in exile, barely spoke.
Before flying to New Canaan, Dunne had changed his will. Originally, Stephen had been named Quintana’s guardian in the event that “mutual disaster” befell her mother and father.
* * *
O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall, Frightful, sheer …
Another unbearable loss.
One morning, in the Fourteenth Street subway station near Union Square in Manhattan, Henry Robbins dropped dead of a heart attack. He was fifty-one years old. His old coworkers at Farrar, Straus and Giroux noted the irony: He had crumpled near the FSG offices—“under Roger’s gaze,” as one colleague put it. “To the end, Roger was looking down on Henry.”
The two of them had never reconciled after Robbins’s departure from FSG to Simon & Schuster, though Robbins would surely have agreed with Straus’s recent declaration, in The New York Times, that a “lot of publishing houses are being run by accountants, businessmen and lawyers with very little concern for books. They could just as well be selling spaghetti or rugs.”
Dick Snyder, at S&S, assumed Straus was needling him personally with these remarks, and he responded publicly: “I think his opinion is not only groundless, but opportunistic.” He accused Straus of using corporations as whipping boys, to dupe writers into staying with a penny-pinching independent.
Despite Robbins’s ire at Straus’s persnickety business practices, he had always been happier at FSG than he would ever be with Snyder, for precisely the reasons Straus had indicated in the Times: He was shoveling pasta. Shortly before his death, he had left S&S to become editor in chief at Dutton, where he had published John Irving’s enormously successful The World According to Garp.
This time, when he made a move, he didn’t take Didion with him—the contractual bonds were far too complicated.
And then he was gone altogether.
“[W]e are all terminal cases,” Irving had written in Garp—a line he repeated at Robbins’s memorial service at the Society for Ethical Culture at Sixty-fourth Street and Central Park West. Doris Grumbach said, “Because of [Henry’s] importance to us, we must have thought him exempt. Tragically, we were wrong.”
Didion was too upset to speak at the service, but she later called herself, in print, “Henry’s orphan sister.” Robbins’s real sister did not appreciate these words. Margi Fox, Robbins’s niece, said that, of all the speakers at the service—a bunch of egotistical writers, who could only talk about what Henry had done for them—John Gregory Dunne was the one person courteous enough to mention the family’s loss.
Straus seized the sad occasion to woo Didion one more time: “I would be less than honest with you if I didn’t say that would you wish to ‘come home again,’ the door would be open,” he wrote her on August 8, 1979. “It may be premature of me to state the blunt fact … over and under the heads of whoever the agents are these days…”
There is no record of a reply.
5
London. Paris. Honolulu. New York.
Kuala Lumpur.
The Sherry-Netherland. The Dorchester. The Plaza Athénée.
The Peninsula Hotel in the heart of Hong Kong.
In spite of recent moves, adjustments, and funerals, the Dunnes never slowed their travels, nor would they in the decade ahead. “Vacations” weren’t part of the plan. A writer is working, wherever she goes—whether or not she’s got a specific assignment or interest in a project. Dunne’s idea of a relaxing afternoon in Honolulu was to go to the courthouse and watch a trial, as he often did in Santa Monica.
Didion was still trying to convince him they should buy a house in Hawaii. It was the only “benign climate” she had ever known, she said. The air smelled of flowers. The place was pink. It made her feel good.
Maybe, he said. Maybe.
They each kept travel notebooks. And they were competitive. Whoever used a detail first in a novel or an essay—well, fair enough. One night in Jakarta, while having drinks with the American ambassador, Dunne ordered a Scotch on the rocks. He got a Scotch and soda instead. The ambassador waved over the servant and asked him to change the order. “It’s part of the exaggerated politeness of the Indonesians,” he explained to the Dunnes. “They would never ask you to repeat your order. That would imply you were not speaking clearly and would be impolite.” Dunne noticed his wife sketching the scene and figured she’d beat him to the punch on this one.
At their request, one afternoon the Dunnes were given a tour of Kai Tak East, a transit camp for Vietnamese refugees near Kai Tak Airport, in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Refugees were big business in this part of the world. A writer could exploit them as easily as a Vietnamese official, a Hong Kong policeman, or a Chinese syndicate trading ID cards for blocks of gold.
As she had in Bogotá, Didion scratched in her notebook several scenes of local color: an old woman bleeding out a live chicken with a paring knife as “children with bright scarlet rashes on their cheeks giggled and staggered, mimicking the chicken”; women cooking, warming their hands over woks; cast-off clothing piled in a sweltering room smelling of jasmine, shit, and sesame oil.
Didion learned that of the “11,573 Vietnamese who had passed through Kai Tak East since the camp opened, in June 1979, only some 2,000 had been, by December, relocated, the largest number of them to the United States and Canada. The rest waited, filled out forms, pretended fluency in languages they had barely heard spoken.”
This sad knowledge would inform her novel Democracy.
She was most struck by the abandoned children, the children without parents, the parents who had lost their kids, slumped in the dirt in the cold winter sunlight. “Mes filles, mes filles!” someone was always crying.
* * *
Dominique had her hands full, staying with Quintana while the Dunnes traveled the world. She was also helping her father.
She had spent an evening with him and her brother in New York, following her uncle’s funeral in Connecticut. Griffin made them all laugh, telling stories about the movie he’d produced and a play he was in. Nick assured his children he was no longer tempted by suicide—not after staring at his brother’s casket.
Still, he was far from fine. When he arrived back at the Portland airport, he broke down. “[The] events of the last few years caught up with me, and I totally fell apart in a fit of weeping and keening,” he said. “I didn’t care that people were staring at me. I had never cried like that before.”
He took a Greyhound bus to Camp Sherman and stayed in the cabin a few more weeks. Then, with Dominique’s help, he returned to L.A. “I had no money, but I had a beautiful apartment that somebody sublet when I was away, and beautiful things, and I sold every single thing I owned,” he said (an exaggeration). “Every stick of furniture, every piece of porcelain, crystal, and silver, every book, every Porthault sheet and towel, all the things I always thought I couldn’t live without. I even sold my monogrammed Turnbull & Asser shirts and all the ashtrays I’d stolen from Claridge’s in London, the Ritz in Paris, and the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, when the going was good.”
Dominique gave him a thousand dollars so he could pa
y the last month’s rent on his apartment. “She stayed by my side during the entire three-day sale, tagging, wrapping, carrying, keeping up my spirits,” he said. “I’ll never forget that. She was divine.”
Soon thereafter, turning to Griffin for help, he took a room on West Ninth Street, in New York’s Greenwich Village. “It was smaller than the cabin in Oregon,” he said. “I didn’t know then that I would write my first bestseller in that room, but I was filled with hope again.”
6
“Simon & Schuster [has] published Joan’s last two books, both of which were on the NYTimes Bestseller list for a long time. However, the novel, A Book of Common Prayer, sold only about 50,000 copies in hardcover (maybe 5,000 less) and it hasn’t set the world on paperback fire … The White Album has done much, much better with 90,000 sold in hardcover and another printing just ordered,” Lois Wallace reported to her business partner, Anthony Sheil, on November 30, 1979.
In August, while Roger Straus was courting Didion, Wallace had conducted an auction for the paperback rights to The White Album, upping the price, through five rounds of bidding among seven publishers, from $65,000 to $247,500, the amount paid by Pocket Books.
The White Album, Didion’s second collection of essays, was welcomed by reviewers as a sequel to Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Didion’s final word on the American 1960s. In particular, critics lauded the title piece as a masterpiece of “montage, a style that best suits the spirit of the age she is describing.” A scrapbook of terror, from the Black Panthers to the nihilism of the Doors to the Manson murders, it is a fractured document of writing’s failure to truly grasp anything.
Girding the central essay’s denial of meaning—especially of any cultural, social, or political hope of salvation—Didion constructs a series of short pieces portraying California as the pinnacle of American infrastructure. It is not a happy picture. One by one, she examines the bureaucracies overseeing water supply, traffic patterns, museum acquisitions, official properties, and artistic aspirations—not to mention the West’s unique spirituality.
The Last Love Song Page 53