The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  * * *

  Jerry’s was a well-known liquor store in Brentwood where the skate rats liked to chill after dark. Teens would gather in front of the store and ask young customers to buy them sixers of Mickey’s Big Mouth.

  But this was child’s stuff. “There were always open bars at Hollywood parties where the kids of parents in the business could get drinks,” said Tim Steele.

  “I knew a lot of privileged kids in L.A. with problems—obviously, I was such a kid,” said Matthew Specktor, a young Los Angeles novelist and a good friend of Anna Connolly’s. “As for Quintana…” He’s careful, as are so many of Quintana’s old friends and acquaintances when discussing her. “I think our upbringings were pretty similar—we ate with similar cutlery, so to speak.” (He remembered well the Dunnes’ Salvadoran housekeeper.) “I don’t know what Quintana’s problems were, but I’ve heard tell there were some real drug issues, right?” The important point, he told me, was that “the problems of that era, the problems I had, regardless of their relative intensity, were inseparable from the city’s atmosphere, which is what Didion is in large part describing” in her work. He recalled a holiday party he attended when he was fifteen, where a screenwriter cut lines of coke on a table directly in front of him and his mother, and no one thought anything of it. The screenwriter was “agitated because he owed the studio a draft on Monday morning and just then—Thursday night—he hadn’t written a single word. It was all part of the same picture: the drugs, the movies, the horror—whatever not-quite-nameable thing Didion was pointing at.” This was Quintana’s world.

  And then she’d visit Malibu—reminded of the world she’d lost. The stark white light. The smell of hibiscus. She’d stroll happily along the beach, near a bluff leading up to the Pacific Coast Highway; she’d run her fingers across a thin branch of oak leaves or roses, and her fingertips came away gray, covered with thick, rich pollen. This was her home.

  It’s not that the social scene here was necessarily easier to negotiate than the one in Brentwood; it’s just that she’d been better prepared for it before being plucked away to suburbia. In fact, Malibu could be “socially vicious,” said Karl Greenfeld. A “surfers-rule, no-fat-chix ethic” was “strictly enforced.” Those who weren’t “blond, strong, handsome, fast, and harsh enough turn[ed] invisible” or became “victims of that gang of surfers and skateboarders who rule[d] our teenage wasteland. Brewing just out of sight [was] a subculture of fear and kid-on-kid violence.”

  “Karl knew some of the same people Quintana did—those beach community people,” said his father, Josh. “It’s astonishing how fast kids grow up on the coast.”

  Karl recalled his adolescence as a “haze of marijuana smoke,” Cheap Trick records, and a lot of “crappy, low-grade THC.” He recalled the students’ cars in the school parking lots as finer than those of the teachers (Quintana drove to Malibu now in her own car, shiny red, with a vanity license plate, QROO). He recalled a lot of single-parent households and absentee moms and dads—yet it was those parents who passed Proposition 13, “lowering property taxes and gutting California’s public schools.” He also recalled a lot of family cats being locked out of empty houses during the day, eaten by coyotes.

  Then there were the parties in the houses of people whose parents were away—stereos cranked to the max, playing the Sex Pistols, Triumph, the Dead Kennedys. Kids pumped fists in the air and chanted along with the Clash: “I’m so bored with the U … S … A!” The children of celebrities pretended to disparage fame, or rather, “mainstream popularity,” said Matthew Specktor. “De Niro was cool, or Kubrick—you know, it was about a certain art house credibility.” The backroom dope deals, the backroom sex.

  Josh Greenfeld said he heard a persistent rumor that a well-known movie star, a star about whom “everyone had stories—and they were probably all true,” had “deflowered” Quintana. Just another Hollywood rumor, but it wouldn’t go away. In any case, what was certain, he said, was that “Quintana had a hard time of it. Everyone knew that.”

  It’s not precisely clear when Didion began to take her daughter to specialists, but at a certain point, she saw Quintana “wishing for death as she lay on the floor of her sitting room in Brentwood Park, the sitting room from which she had been able to look into the pink magnolia. Let me just be in the ground, she had kept sobbing.” In Blue Nights, Didion writes, “She was depressed. She was anxious. Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.”

  The specialists diagnosed Quintana’s “depths, shallows, [and] quicksilver changes” as manic depression or OCD, and finally as “borderline personality disorder,” often a medical catchall for people whose moods lurch unpredictably from sadness to hostility without visible provocation. “Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients,” clinical psychologist Marsha Linehan once said. “They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin.”

  Doctors could not advise Didion whether the core of Quintana’s problems was genetic or environmental, a result of family dynamics, or a combination of all three, but in any event, Didion did not trust what they were telling her. “I have not yet seen that case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility,” she wrote. The wallpaper in Quintana’s sitting room may as well have been malarial yellow, straight out of a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story.

  “Let me just be in the ground.… Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.”

  2

  On November 17, 1982, Susanna Moore wrote Quintana a condolence note. She said she understood sudden, crushing loss—her mother had died when she was very young. This had not granted her any particular wisdom. No one could say anything to ease the pain. But she wanted Quintana to know that she had been thinking of her.

  What is heartbreaking about Quintana’s response—a rather perfunctory thank-you note—is the paper on which it’s written. Like her mother, Quintana had ordered personalized letterhead stationery—but underneath her name, in bold Colonna MT script, the paper was ruled like a grade-school notebook, and Quintana’s handwriting, in pencil, wavered from dark to light.

  The occasion for this exchange was the murder of Quintana’s twenty-two-year-old cousin, Dominique. On the evening of October 30, Dominique’s former boyfriend, John Thomas Sweeney, a chef at Ma Maison, strangled her for nearly three and a half minutes in what he later claimed was a blackout fit of rage. Dominique, who had just appeared in her first feature-length motion picture, Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, had lived with Sweeney for several months in a one-bedroom house in West Hollywood, but then she began to fear his temper, his nasty jealousy of her friends, whom he considered snobs (he had been born to a poor family in Pennsylvania’s coal country). She broke up with him. On the night police arrived at her residence and found Sweeney hunched over her unmoving body in the driveway, he said, according to a police department spokesperson, “I killed my girlfriend.”

  * * *

  Nick got a call at five in the morning, in his tiny Manhattan apartment, from Detective Harold Johnston of the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau. The detective told him his daughter was near death at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Lenny came on the phone. “I need you,” she said.

  “What happened?” Nick asked.

  “Sweeney.”

  “I’ll be on the first plane.”

  Nick had met Sweeney some months earlier at a lunch with his daughter and her boyfriend; he had sensed the man’s simmering tension and Dominique’s unhappiness. Later, on the telephone, she told her father, “He’s not in love with me, Dad. He’s obsessed with me. It’s driving me crazy.” Her brother, Alex, couldn’t stand the guy, and Lenny knew Dominique feared him. Dominique had told her this in tears one night, after she’d fled to the house of a friend of hers, an artist named Norman Carby, to hide from Sweeney.

  Nick and Griffin caught a TWA flight to LAX and drove
straight to Lenny’s house on Crescent Avenue in Beverly Hills. She had moved from the residence on Walden, the place she’d shared with Nick when they were married, because she needed a smaller, more negotiable space. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She was confined now to a wheelchair.

  “The news is not good,” she told Nick. The doctors had mentioned “brain damage.” The hospital phoned to ask “permission to insert a bolt into Dominique’s skull to relieve the pressure on her brain.”

  Sometime over the next couple days, Didion accompanied Lenny to the ICU. Dominique lay still, encoiled in tubes, her eyes, enlarged, staring at nothing, her hair shaved off. Didion had known Sweeney a little. He had gone to her house with Dominique to stay with Quintana on a couple occasions when the Dunnes were away.

  It was like giving the Broken Man the key to your front door.

  “She looks even worse than Diana did,” Lenny said, holding her daughter’s limp hand. She was remembering Diana Lynn Hall, who had died in this ICU following a stroke—Diana, who had encouraged Didion to phone Blake Watson, setting in motion the adoption process leading her to Quintana.

  When Lenny mentioned Diana, Didion understood what she meant. She was saying that Dominique was going to die.

  If the girl was being kept alive by machines, did this mean she was already technically dead? As opposed to what—really dead?

  Technical life?

  “It’s not black and white,” one of the residents told them.

  This exchange, slightly shaded, made it into Democracy: “It’s not necessarily an either-or situation.” “Life and death? Are not necessarily either-or?”

  In fact, Dominique never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead less than a week after entering the ICU.

  Nick kissed her good-bye on his final day with her, pressing his lips to her bald head and whispering, “Give me your talent.”

  The press referred to her as the niece of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. This enraged him. “Oh, what difference does it make?” Lenny said—with “such despair in her voice, I felt ashamed to be concerned with such a trivial matter at such a crucial time,” Nick said. But he couldn’t let it go. His ex-mother-in-law agreed with him. “Listen to what he’s saying to you,” she told Lenny. “It sounds as if Dominique was an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle.” Lenny instructed Nick, miserably, “You handle it.” So he called a publicist. The cabin in Oregon hadn’t entirely flushed Hollywood from his system.

  Later, Nick published a lengthy account of his daughter’s murder. In it, he mentioned, in passing, that on the eve of the funeral, he didn’t have the heart to watch the “two television programs” featuring Dominique, playing that evening on the networks. “Also on television that night was a film I had produced, never before seen on television, and another film my brother had written, also being shown for the first time,” he wrote. The real point of the story seemed to be that his publicist was working overtime.

  * * *

  Quintana had been staying overnight with Susan Traylor in Malibu when news came that Dominique had been found strangled in her driveway. Quintana’s parents called her at six in the morning.

  After the funeral, she told her mother and father, “Most people I know at Westlake don’t even know anyone who died, and just since I’ve been there I’ve had a murder and a suicide in my family.”

  As if it were the school’s fault. The curse of the suburbia house.

  Her father told her, “It all evens out in the end.”

  Didion assumed he meant good news eventually balances the bad.

  Quintana understood him to mean that she shouldn’t worry, that sooner or later, everyone else will get bad news, too.

  * * *

  “I have watched too many murder trials, known too many lawyers and too many judges and too many prosecutors, to have many illusions about the criminal-justice system,” Dunne wrote later. “Any trial is a ritual complete with its own totems. Calumny is the language spoken, the lie accepted, the half-truth chiseled on stone.” Before John Sweeney’s first preliminary hearing on first-degree-murder charges, Dunne said, “I could predict that the counsel for the accused would present the standard defense strategy in cases of this sort: the victim, unable to speak for herself, would be put on trial, and presented, in effect, as a co-conspirator in her own murder.”

  “John, who knew his way around the Santa Monica courthouse, thought that we should accept a plea bargain, and emissaries from the defense were sent to us to effect one,” Nick said.

  Reasons for not going to trial were: Lenny’s frail health would be further endangered by the drawn-out ordeal; the event would be a media storm, given Dominique’s youth and relative celebrity; Dominique would be presented as a participant in her demise—neighbors would be called to the stand to testify that she’d had frequent fights with Sweeney, that she and her friends had condescended to him; the judge, Burton S. Katz, a theatrical man who had once prosecuted several members of the Manson Family, loved to play to the press. The defense attorney knew how to flatter him, and apparently the judge held the district attorney in ill favor.

  “Lenny, Griffin, Alex and I felt pushed, as if we didn’t matter,” Nick said. “The district attorney wanted a trial, and so did we. So we went to trial. John and Joan went to Paris.”

  The brothers did not speak again, substantively, for a very long time.

  * * *

  Sweeney appeared in the courtroom each day clutching a white Bible.

  “When Miss Dunne got in from the bars, how drunk was she?” Sweeney’s defense attorney asked one of the witnesses again and again.

  The judge would not allow testimony from one of Sweeney’s previous girlfriends that he had regularly abused her, on the grounds that it would be “prejudicial.”

  On the day the judge announced the jury’s verdict, he “opened first one envelope and then the other, milking his moment before the television camera like a starlet at the Golden Globes,” Nick said. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, maximum sentence six and a half years, with possible parole in two and half. In fact, Sweeney served very little jail time and was soon working again as a chef at the Chronicle, a trendy Santa Monica restaurant. From there, he moved to Seattle and changed his name. The Dunnes finally lost track of him (but not before Nick toyed with the idea of hiring Anthony Pellicano, a private detective, to kill him. “Dominick, you don’t want to do this,” Pellicano told him, and Nick’s rage crumbled into helpless grief).

  On the day the judge announced the verdict in the courtroom, Sweeney’s attorney, realizing he’d gotten his client’s charges drastically reduced, shouted, “I am ecstatic!”

  The judge said justice had been served, and he thanked the jury on behalf of the lawyers and the families involved in the case. Trembling, Nick yelled at the bench, “Not for our family, Judge Katz!”

  “You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne,” said the judge.

  “It’s too late then.”

  “I will have to ask the bailiff to remove you from the courtroom.”

  “No. I’m leaving the courtroom. It’s all over here.”

  He pushed Lenny’s wheelchair up the aisle (“Lenny—sick, devastated, and the bravest of all of us,” he said). At the double doors at the rear, he turned again toward the judge and shouted, “You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man’s history of violence against women.”

  Later, after the press had criticized the judge’s handling of the trial, Katz expressed outrage at the jury’s lenient verdict. “It was as if he had suddenly become a different human being,” Nick said. Shortly afterward, Sweeney was freed.

  * * *

  Ultimately, the trial became a source of redemption for Nick. He told the story this way: Two days before the trial was scheduled to begin, he was introduced to Tina Brown, then in talks to assume the editorship of Vanity Fair. She suggested he keep a journal throughout the proceedings
and afterward come see her in New York.

  “If I hadn’t kept that journal … I would have gone mad. What I saw in the courtroom filled me with the kind of rage that only writing about it could quell,” Nick said. And “Tina … saw something in me I didn’t know I possessed.” Under her guidance, and with the help of Wayne Lawson, Vanity Fair’s new literary editor, he edited and shaped the journal entries into an article for the magazine, “Justice: A Father’s Account of the Trial of His Daughter’s Killer.” It ran in the March 1984 issue and established a fresh career for him. “For the first time in my life, I felt I was in step with my destiny,” he said. Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair became a “great, highbrow, bling-bling icon about tony influentials,” said one media critic—and Nick’s was the new voice of the magazine. For the next two decades, he would cover one celebrity murder trial after another, pretending no lack of prejudice, always championing the victims and their families. He had found his way back to Hollywood, discovered new outlets for his star worshiping, name-dropping, partygoing—girded now by a moral crusade. As Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter once said, “Wealthy people aren’t quite shooting themselves at the rate we’d like them to, for Dominick’s purposes.” In addition to his reporting for the magazine, Nick wrote bestselling novels based on his trial notes and his proximity to the upper crust. He had moved to colonize the territory once ruled exclusively by his brother and sister-in-law. As a result, their war got colder.

  * * *

  And still, Quintana added no new pages to her novel. She had written just enough to “show you,” and then she’d stopped.

  Shortly after losing Dominique, however, she had written in a school journal, “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats. In the poem, ‘Endymion,’ there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life: Pass into nothingness.”

  3

  In the mid-1980s, as the publicity surrounding Dominique’s murder ebbed, Didion and Dunne held court regularly in the art gallery of their friend Earl McGrath on North Robertson Boulevard. In a profile for The New York Times Magazine, Leslie Garis set the scene: