The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  “The guests, gathered on a terrace beneath hibiscus trees, are more interested in each other than the show … The women are thin and tanned and wear very high heels.… Didion sits at a table quietly. She is peaceful. An endless stream of people comes to her, bending down to kiss her. She asks after their children, remembering personal details about everyone. Anjelica Huston, all legs in a little black dress, Teri Garr, George Stevens Jr., Tony Richardson, Michelle Phillips, Jean Vanderbilt and George Segal come to pay respects to the tiny woman with a gardenia in her hair.” (Painfully missing was Natalie Wood, who had drowned off Catalina Island—apparently after a tense, drunken evening with her husband and Christopher Walken, just another one of those nights; Didion could still remember wearing Natalie’s dress to functions like this, Natalie checking her teeth in the reflection of her dinner knife.)

  Meanwhile, Dunne roamed the terrace with a Scotch in his hand, chatting with frowning, sinewy men about the weekend’s box-office grosses.

  With the deaths of Truman Capote and Christopher Isherwood, the Dunnes were L.A.’s uncontested lit royalty (even to her face, people called Didion the “Kafka of Brentwood Park”). At Capote’s funeral in the Westwood Mortuary, she was appalled at the litany of star-fucker tributes. Is this what she could expect when her time came?

  “The last time I saw Joan was at the Beach Café. There was a party for her on the outdoor terrace,” said Don Bachardy. Isherwood had died and Didion was quite aware of her new queenly status. “At the time I was with a man who was about the same age in relation to me as I was with Isherwood when Isherwood and I first got together,” Bachardy told me. “Joan immediately expressed her disapproval with facial expressions and words to the effect of ‘I expected better of you.’ I think she thought I should be a kind of literary widow devoted to the memory of Isherwood.”

  * * *

  Stardom had its drawbacks. “Wacko” letters came to the Chadbourne house: “You still have not taken my advice and dumped that miserable piece of Jewish dreck you are married to,” a man wrote Dunne. “I know, I know, you are going to tell me she is a WASP from Sacramento. B. S. She went to New York City anxious to break into publishing and came upon the idea that if she put on the Jewish Whining Act she could get published. Well, she succeeded all too well. Now her whole thing is permeated with the Jewish whine.”

  One day, an ad appeared in the “Classified” section of the Los Angeles Times, announcing “BRENTWOOD PARK STEAL! Famous writers’ loss is your gain.” Whether as a joke or as a genuinely hostile gesture, some anonymous person had created the appearance of scandal or misfortune in the Dunne household, purportedly forcing them to sell off their property. The Dunnes never learned who placed the ad. In an outraged letter to the newspaper, Dunne’s greatest pique seemed reserved for the suggestion that his house was worth only $995,000.

  The couple received endless requests for favors. A small press in Mississippi wondered if Didion would contribute a favorite recipe to a venture called The Great American Writers’ Cookbook. The next thing she knew, the editors were selling first serial rights to magazines. She told her lawyers to sue the press if Playboy printed her recipe for Mexican chicken.

  Worst were the missed opportunities—they came her way in the first place because of who she was, but who she was could turn around and bite her. Britain’s Sunday Times magazine contacted Lois Wallace about the possibility of sending Didion to South Africa to expose that society’s underbelly as she’d done in El Salvador. Didion expressed her keen interest in going, but then the magazine withdrew its offer, citing the new editor’s change of heart. “That’s Rupert Murdoch for you,” Dunne said.

  Sometimes she just wanted to disappear into the daily routine of a typical wife and mom. “At some point … I think I twigged to the fact that I was no longer the woman in the yellow Corvette,” she said. “I needed a new car because with the Corvette there was always something wrong … [and] maybe it was the idea of [living in] Brentwood … when I gave up the yellow Corvette—and I literally gave up on it, I turned it in on a Volvo station wagon—the dealer was baffled.”

  And Quintana was appalled. She wanted the objects in her life to stay the same—without fail. She liked predictable rituals. For a luncheon around the swimming pool on her sixteenth birthday, she wanted cucumber and watercress sandwiches because her mother had always served cucumber and watercress sandwiches at parties.

  For a while, she’d had a sort of boyfriend whose very nice mother had given Quintana a suede coat. She wondered about the etiquette of wearing the coat when she’d dumped the boy. Rituals were important.

  Her new rituals included counseling for “a stressful time,” or for “adolescent substance abuse.” (In Democracy, Didion appears to draw upon certain exchanges she and Quintana might have experienced in therapists’ offices: “It might be useful to talk about you. Your own life. How you perceive it” [a doctor says to the mother]. “My life isn’t really the problem at hand. Is it?” “The ‘problem at hand,’ as you put it, is substance habituation. I notice you smoke.” “I do, yes. I also drink coffee. What I don’t do is shoot heroin.”)

  For Quintana, some of the best times were those spent traveling, with or without her parents: Hawaii, always Hawaii, where her father would take her and Susan Traylor to watch a trial at the Honolulu courthouse for an afternoon’s entertainment; Paris, where she’d almost had a play date, once, with Princess Stephanie; Barbados (her mother did love the tropics); Saint-Tropez, the summer after she’d turned fifteen, traveling with Tasha Richardson and her dad, swimming topless and teasing the Italian boys on the beach, pretending to be a college girl from UCLA.

  At a nearby bookstore in Saint-Tropez, she’d found a book in English called Baby Animals and Their Mothers and mailed it to her mom. She included a postcard, saying the book “reminded me of you.” The postcard featured an infant polar bear with its mother, and the caption “Cuddling on the ice floe.”

  Better to remain on the move instead of lying on the sitting room floor, thinking about suicide and murder, wishing to be in the ground. “Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it,” she’d told her mother.

  If only she could take her own advice.

  * * *

  The quiet “suburbia” life—and the Volvo station wagon—required steady support, so the Dunnes reentered the screenwriting fray. They took early cracks at scripts for The Old Gringo, a vehicle for Jane Fonda and Gregory Peck, and The Little Drummer Girl, a John le Carré spy story. Eventually, The Old Gringo’s producers turned to other writers, and Drummer Girl “foundered on the twin rocks of Hollywood deal-making—hubris and ego,” according to Dunne.

  For a while, Didion hoped A Book of Common Prayer would be made into a picture (Joseph Losey showed some interest, with a possible script by Harold Pinter; Didion could just see Vanessa Redgrave as Charlotte), but nothing came of the plans.

  In the late 1970s, Lawrence Schiller, a former Life and Look photographer, now a producer, and a one-man blizzard of publishing deals, had obtained the rights to the Gary Gilmore story (Utah had sentenced Gilmore to die by firing squad for murdering two young Mormons). Schiller approached several people, including Barry Farrell and Didion, about collaborating on a Gilmore project. Eventually, Norman Mailer took the assignment and produced his magnificent The Executioner’s Song. Didion read an early draft of the novel and suggested several cuts, which Mailer accepted. In the mid-1980s, she crossed paths with Mailer again: She and her husband wrote a screenplay based on his early novel The Deer Park. This was another project—centered on Hollywood’s cynical deals—that failed to make it to the screen. Amid several scenes of cruelty in the script, one touching moment stands out: The daughter of a producer plucks at her father’s sleeve “to get his attention, which she has never enjoyed.”

  Perhaps the antic screenplay work, as well as the experience of rereading Mailer’s Hollywood novel, led Dunne to create Jack Broderick, the screenwriting protagonist of his next novel, The Red
White and Blue (1987). Broderick, another “mouthpiece” for Dunne, writes movie scripts because “the pay is good, the responsibility small, the emotional stake minimal.” Like Mailer’s hero, he inhabits a world where “celebrity and political action make common cause”; a world as an enormous courthouse where everyone is “not guilty by reason of insanity.” As in True Confessions, a self-righteous brother appears in this book, celibate and severely deficient in humanity. Dunne dedicated the novel to Earl McGrath, and he used the occasion of its writing to empty his reporter’s notebooks of leftover details from Vietnam, Delano, and El Salvador.

  4

  Didion wrote, “There is in the development of every motion picture a process known as ‘licking the script,’ that period during which the ‘story’ is shaped and altered to fit the idealized character who must be at its center.”

  For her, the 1980s—her Brentwood years, the years when her writing first became overtly political—were notable for mistaking rhetoric and action. In this, the culture followed the mind-set of its actor president, who understood “licking the script,” who grasped the storytelling value of symbolism. For example, Didion noted that, after the Grenada invasion in 1983—“a lovely little war,” according to one correspondent, ostensibly mounted to counter Soviet and Cuban influence on the island—“the number of medals awarded eventually exceeded the number of actual combatants.”

  And still the books kept coming from the corridors of the think tanks. Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader (an “idealized character”), by Dinesh D’Souza, written for a “new generation with no alternative source of information.” And whose reading skills had badly eroded.

  Looking back on this exhausted decade, Didion understood that the last real moment, before the script’s illusions locked into place, was the Christmas season of the Iranian hostage crisis—before Reagan’s inauguration. She remembered, in Hawaii, following the events on hotel televisions; she recalled running into her old friend Nancy Kennedy in Honolulu’s Outrigger Canoe Club; they’d kissed and shared a drink; Didion had smiled, watching Nancy laugh and argue with her children at the table, the way she had laughed and argued with Didion when they were kids at her parents’ table in Sacramento—another world altogether.

  That day in the Outrigger, Nancy promised they’d get together again soon. A few months later, she was dead of cancer in New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital.

  In the mid to late 1980s, whenever Didion returned to Sacramento for a visit, she thought of Nancy and those sweet, laughing fights. Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it.

  Sometimes, between screenwriting assignments or her husband’s work on The Red White and Blue, she convinced Dunne to travel with her. In Sactown, at dinners with her brother and old family friends—CEOs, federal judges—they’d reminisce about their childhoods or they’d discuss the unreality of the national script: the Reagan Doctrine, Jessie Jackson’s threat to the stability of the old Democratic Party, Nancy Reagan’s astrologer.

  Words, words, words.

  Well. It’s easy to mock public figures, one or another dinner guest said.

  Yes, but words matter, Dunne argued genially over drinks one night. For instance, it genuinely hurts when a reviewer calls you “slime” in a newspaper.

  Still, they’re only words, said his brother-in-law. They had no substantial effect on Dunne’s ability to make a living. On the other hand, a CEO could be fired by his board after one bad quarter. The Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court could come along and reverse every decision a federal judge made.

  Writers took words too seriously. They should join the rest of us here in the real world. Where it’s “Morning in America.”

  * * *

  More and more, Dunne used words Didion hadn’t heard him utter before. Old, he said. He felt old (he was in his mid-fifties). He said he’d like to be alone with her in front of the fireplace instead of going out to a party. He said he didn’t like to drive so much after dark.

  He groaned when he bent to feed Casey, their little black Bouvier des Flandres.

  He groaned at the clutter of female stuff all around him: Quintana’s plastic pink razors, Fiorinal for migraine, Naturetin-K for bloat, HydroDiuril for premenstrual symptoms, all those damn Compazine suppositories. It was like a fucking pharmacy, he thought.

  He said he felt restless (that she had heard before).

  He said they weren’t having any fun. He talked about an older couple they’d met once in Indonesia, people who seemed to embrace life following their retirement, traveling, teaching, learning all they could. He wanted to be that older couple.

  He wondered about moving to New York. Since 1984 they’d kept a pied-à-terre on West Fifty-eighth Street in Manhattan for their frequent trips to meet with editors or to do media gigs for their books. Maybe they should just settle there (as they’d done in the past, they could ask their secretary to FedEx Meyer lemons and fresh tortillas to them whenever they got homesick for California).

  He thought maybe he’d written all he could about Los Angeles.

  He was overweight and not feeling well.

  Didion tried to dismiss this talk as his usual “jits” whenever he’d finished a major project, or as his typical Irish gloom (“Two things the Irish would think are wonderful are, one, kissing the Blarney Stone and, two, slipping and falling when you’re kissing the Blarney Stone and cracking your head open,” he liked to say).

  But then his doctor diagnosed him as borderline diabetic and told him to go on the wagon. In the evenings, he mixed various healthy concoctions—“odd waters,” Didion called them. She found it “very tedious” drinking alone.

  He’d wade out silently into the center of the pool, reading. She’d pull on a pair of sweatpants and go into the garden, snipping stalks for brewing lemongrass tea. She’d sit and thumb through Penelope Hobhouse’s Color in Your Garden and contemplate changes she might make. After a while, Dunne seemed to settle (his glucose levels reached an acceptable plateau) and the nights were usually pleasant.

  Of course, his abstinence didn’t last.

  Late in 1987, he consented to a series of medical checkups for insurance purposes—if doctors declared him generally fit, his policy value would increase by 50 percent “in light of the many changes in interest rates and product design,” said an official letter he’d received. He got an EKG and did a treadmill test. “You’ve got a glitch,” his internist said.

  “What kind of glitch?”

  “An abnormality. I want you to see a cardiologist.”

  A short while later, a friend of the Dunnes died in a waterskiing accident—a man they didn’t know well but whom they’d always liked, one of those charming Hollywood characters you’d see everywhere. He had played tennis part-time for a living and worked as a restaurant greeter. His memorial service was scheduled one afternoon on a private tennis court in Beverly Hills. Didion arrived on her own. Dunne planned to meet her there following an appointment with a cardiologist in Santa Monica.

  The day was bad enough already: The tennis player had known John Sweeney—they’d met in the restaurant business. Sweeney was now out of jail. Dunne feared running into him at the service and having to restrain himself. Maybe it was just as well he’d be late.

  In his account of these matters in Harp, a “more or less” true rendering of the day, he wrote, Sweeney did not show. There “had not been an appropriate moment” during the memorial to tell his wife about the doctor visit. When the service ended, she asked him what the cardiologist had said. Later, she would claim to have no clear memory of the exchange. She had simply not taken it in. “He said I was a candidate for a catastrophic cardiovascular event,” Dunne said. “He scared the shit out of me, babe.” Then, he said, he started to cry.

  PART EIGHT

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  1

  “I now know how I’m going to die,” Dunne said.

  “You no more know how you’re going to die than I do or anyone else
does,” Didion replied.

  Doctors informed him he had a “hemodynamically significant lesion” in his left anterior descending artery (LAD) as well as a 90 percent narrowing in the circumflex marginal artery. An internist he knew in New York told him cardiologists called the LAD the “widowmaker.”

  He sought advice from specialists. One day, sitting with his shirt unbuttoned in an examining room, he noticed a Jim Dine print on the wall. “I know Jim,” he told a nurse, but his jauntiness faded; he realized the insider connections he’d worked hard all his life to arrange didn’t help him one whit now. Now he wondered what sort of “pretentious asshole” would hang a Jim Dine print in his examining room.

  “Milk it, but no excessive melodramatics,” he wrote one afternoon in a notebook. After all, he was a writer and this was great material. But the melodramatics were hard to avoid, both on the page and off. He began to compose his obituary in his head. “I was ever aware of mundane last times,” he wrote in Harp. “[T]his was the last time I would have dinner at Morton’s, the last time I would have a lube job on the Volvo, the last time I would have kung pao shrimp, the last time I would go to Dodger Stadium, the last time I would see a perfect pair of tits. Ah, sex, the last time this, the last time that, the last fucking hard-on.”

  Eventually, his doctors concurred: An angiogram was in order, followed possibly by an angioplasty (if the angiogram confirmed the EKG results). Without medical intervention, he had a high likelihood of a major heart attack, or even a massive attack. Not even prayer would help with that.

  He made plans in case the worst occurred. Calvin Trillin would break the news to Quintana, now attending college in New York. He updated his financial records for “the little widow.” He worried that Didion wouldn’t be able to take care of herself. Who was he kidding? She was as tough as a little machine, with a much better head than he for business.