The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  After the vitello Milanese, they’d stroll up Madison, past some of the most expensive real estate on the planet, and the best shopping in the world: Tiffany, Prada, Ralph Lauren. Still, Didion could spot the aftershocks of the 1987 stock market crash. At Seventy-second Street, a building sat empty; eventually, Ralph Lauren would occupy that space as well, but for now, it was padlocked and dark. Rats scurried through it. Homeless men spread sleeping bags up and down the block.

  Even in this neighborhood, Didion felt the “city’s rage at being broke and being in another recession and not having a general comfort level.” This awareness slowly opened her to the “stories the city [told] itself to rationalize its class contradictions” and its byzantine economic networks, “the distortion and flattening of character,” reducing events to simple narratives: “Lady Liberty, huddled masses, ticker-tape parades, heroes, gutters, bright lights, broken hearts, eight million stories in the naked city.” All of this, she figured—watching, reading, piecing it together—disguised the fact that New York did not exactly operate on a “market economy but on little deals, payoffs, accommodations, baksheesh, arrangements that circumvent the direct exchange of goods and services.” Hence, the self-congratulatory boast, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”’Cause ain’t no one gettin’ a fair shake on this corner, sister.

  At street level, on the docks and in the warehouses, small-potatoes jefes hustled to protect what turf they could. The jewelry. The fish. The garments. You got garbage? Want it gone? Let’s powwow.

  Didion’s oh-no-ing friends had it right. Manhattan was a vast criminal enterprise, wrapped in an ink-colored cloak of sentimental stories. Small Town Girl Chases Lifelong Dream in the Heart of the Big Apple. The Lights of Broadway!

  Meanwhile, and don’t forget it, pal, all the produce lands in my pockets, got it?

  How different the city looked to her now from the way it had when she’d last lived here, nearly a quarter of a century ago—then it was a dazzling procession of headlights reflecting off wet gray pavement, bare branches at dawn waving gently over the benches in Washington Square Park, billowing yellow curtains blowing through open windows, twining the rusty railings of the fire escapes.

  How different from the City of Angels—there, it wasn’t the media’s job to mask existing crime, but to create the foundational narratives institutionalizing graft. Harrison Gray Otis wanted water in L.A., so the Los Angeles Times presented the Owens River swindle as manifest destiny. Anyone who opposed it was an “enemy of the city.” In New York, narratives were damage control. In Los Angeles, they were opportunistic slogans, the war cries of unchecked capital formation.

  The criminalization of sentiment: the basis of all American politics.

  This wasn’t just an abstraction to Didion. In time, and for about ten years, she served as the president of her co-op board. She wrestled with the fine print of leases, of hiring and replacing supers, of contractual bids for repairing water damage in the elevator shafts. She was sued by a neighbor who felt she did not do enough, as board president, to settle a dispute between the neighbor and supermodel Cindy Crawford, who lived in the apartment upstairs, and who, the neighbor contended, made ungodly amounts of noise, subjecting her to “telephones ringing, closet doors opening and closing, toilets flushing and baths running”—all the “intimate sounds of daily life.”

  But these were examples of the big and obvious politics of binding arbitration, sad human nature.

  From her service on the board, Didion understood the more nefarious consequences of fantasy politics when they expanded, more generally, into the nation’s complex business. When “social and economic phenomena” got “personalized,” they came to seem intractable, impervious to legislative solutions. They were our problems, our fault. Poverty, racism, infanticide? Mea culpa. Moreover, these character failings kept us blaming one another rather than officials.

  Meanwhile, the political process—stumping, campaigns and balloons—was packaged as purely “electoral”: the coronation of leaders “who could in turn inspire the individual citizen to ‘participate,’ or ‘make a difference.’ ‘Will you help?’” Votes and money were what our leaders had in mind—not direct involvement: God knows you’ve got your own problems to work out; leave it to me to speak for the American people.

  5

  One Sunday morning in February 1989, Dunne pulled on a pair of black sweatpants—Princeton stitched across the left side—laced up his tennis shoes, and set off for a morning walk across the park. Traffic was light; he headed up Cedar Hill adjacent to the Met. His knees stiffened. His breath came hard. Sweat stung his eyes. He stopped and bent double, gasping. Joggers raced past him.

  The next thing he was aware of, inches from his face, was the asphalt road.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  1

  In Harp, Dunne reported that as soon as he came to himself with the help of a Good Samaritan offering to call a cab to take him to the emergency room, he decided not to tell his wife he had passed out. He thanked the good man for his concern. He was fine now. He sat on a bench and focused on the back wall of the museum until his breathing returned to normal. Didion had made dinner plans for that night. It would be a shame to cancel … no need to worry anyone.

  He got up to walk home and spied his wife with Casey on a leash. Right away, he softened and told her everything: “[W]e had not stayed married for twenty-five years by keeping secrets, however unpleasant, from one another.” In crisis times, he tended to fold, while she turned fierce.

  The following day, a cardiologist informed him he had symptoms of aortic stenosis. Open-heart surgery would probably be necessary to replace the aortic valve—and while they were in there, they would do a bypass to finesse the job of the angioplasty.

  The surgery was scheduled. At the last minute, it was scrubbed: An angiogram showed no aortic stenosis after all. Perhaps, doctors said, it was just a vasovagal response.

  * * *

  “I was quite desolate for about a year” in New York, Didion said. Worries about her husband’s health, his undiminished restlessness; worries about her daughter, who had transferred in a haze of unhappiness to Barnard, where at least she had found a more welcoming community; worries about lost knickknacks or books (several boxes remained to be unpacked)—it all hampered her writing.

  Not that she didn’t have plenty of work. Almost as soon as they’d moved, she agreed to do “Letter from Los Angeles” pieces for Robert Gottlieb at The New Yorker, and she’d flown to California several times. Bob Silvers wondered if she might like to cover domestic political campaigns for The New York Review of Books. The idea would never have occurred to her. “Bob kept pushing me in that direction,” she said. It was his “trust. Nothing else.… He recognized it was a learning experience for me. Domestic politics … was something I simply knew nothing about. And I had no interest … [but he] is really good at ascertaining what might interest you at any given moment and then throwing a bunch of stuff at you that might or might not be related, and letting you go with it.”

  Silvers arranged press credentials for her and so, one summer day in 1988, she arrived at the Butler Aviation terminal at Newark airport and awaited the contact from the Jesse Jackson campaign she’d been instructed to meet. The contact didn’t show. Apparently, the woman was already in California, preparing her candidate for the primary. Didion was sent to Hangar 14 and then to Post J, an unmarked gate to the tarmac. At Post J, Secret Service agents kept asking members of the Jackson campaign, “Who’s she? She hasn’t been cleared … what’s she doing here?” “All I know is, she’s got the right names in Chicago,” said a campaign staffer, checking her papers. Her bags were swept for weapons. She was allowed to get on the plane. For a while, she sat alone in the cabin. The pilot poked his head out the cockpit door. “Give me a guesstimate how many people are flying,” he said to her, as if she should know. “None of this seemed promising,” Didion remarked in a journal she was keeping.

 
At LAX, she got on a bus for a Jackson rally in South Central. The afternoon sunlight was gorgeous. The freeway looked stunning. “I was just in tears the whole way,” Didion said. “I couldn’t even deal with the rally because it was so beautiful. Los Angeles was so beautiful, and I had given it up. It took me a while to get sorted out,” which she needed to do in order to concentrate on the campaign.

  She told her husband all this on the phone. Since she was going to be away, he had decided to fly to Ireland to investigate his family heritage for Harp, the memoir he was trying to figure out how to write. Was it a memoir? Or fiction? Or a reporter’s notebook? He wasn’t sure, a symptom of his restlessness. He’d forgotten how much he hated traveling alone. The idea of it appealed to him, but the reality was something else. Didion mentioned a speechwriter she had met at the rally. “He’s a fucking snake,” Dunne warned her. All speechwriters were snakes. She knew this. Their mutual wariness—their protection against being surprised—was a bond they missed whenever they were apart. She mentioned an actress of their acquaintance, a “political groupie” who’d been tagging along on the campaign bus. “She still has that insane glitter in her eye,” Didion said. “It comes from trying to remember who she hasn’t fucked,” Dunne quipped.

  About this snake—Didion wondered how to get him right in her notes. “An artful presentation of a coherent untruth,” she said. That’s the speechwriter’s job. “Not bad,” Dunne told her. “How’s it going?” she asked him. “What the fuck am I doing here?” he said.

  Alone in the Irish town of Roscommon, he felt dull, noticing nothing. If only his wife were here! He got drunk by himself in the bars. He tried to revive his old snooping habits. Randomly, he dropped in on a stranger’s funeral Mass, just to see what was up. “Pat Curtin’s ma,” a priest told him. “I see.” “The whole town was pulling for her to make a hundred years young.” “Of course.” “Tough as an old boot, she was. And just as mean, if truth be told.”

  What the fuck am I—?

  If Didion was slightly more focused and vigilant—once she’d recovered from her homesickness—it was because she had a specific assignment, though the story was depressing. Listening, observing, she came to think of her fellow reporters as part of a “small but highly visible group of people who, day by day and through administration after administration, relay Washington to the world, tell its story, agree among themselves upon and then disseminate its narrative.”

  She wrote, “They report the stories. They write the op-ed pieces. They appear on the talk shows. They consult, they advise, they swap jobs, they travel with unmarked passports between the public and the private, the West Wing and the green room. They make up the nation’s permanent professional political class.” They also moved through restricted landscapes, speaking obscure languages the rest of the country couldn’t even begin to access.

  * * *

  While her mother ordered room service at the Hyatt Wilshire and her father sat in a Roscommon pub, Quintana flew to Guatemala and Nicaragua. Between her classes at Barnard, she had worked as a freelancer in the photo department at Newsweek. An editor there arranged for her to travel with the photographer Bill Gentile and other journalists covering Nicaragua’s civil war and America’s involvement in it. When she returned, she published pictures and an account of her experiences in the Columbia Spectator.

  She arrived first in Antigua, for a crash course in Spanish. While there, she stayed with a host family. “I don’t know how good an idea it really is,” she wrote. “I can’t stand living with a family … I don’t know if it’s this particular family or the whole idea of it. There’s something about going into people’s family in general. No matter what, it’s always an invasion. You always feel like an imposition and an intrusion.”

  She was “scared out of [her] mind” in the city. She’d never witnessed poverty up close, and her memories of New York now—“bankers and artists walk[ing] the streets with a specific intent, looking toward the next deal or lucky break”—seemed like mirages. She took discreet photographs of women carrying knapsacks of corn or wood, or women cooking and sewing by a fire. She “imagined these beautiful people being wiped out in an ambush.”

  In Nicaragua, she was wary of eating the red beans, rice, and tough meats sold on the streets. To her fellow travelers, she explained her lack of appetite as a manifestation of dengue fever. “I was afraid and ashamed to tell my secret,” she wrote. “[A] little later, out came the Campbell’s, bought at the Diplomat Store”—cream of mushroom, cream of asparagus. She hid chocolate in the drawer with her underwear in her hotel room. “Often, I found myself in the bathroom with the wood roaches and whatever else, just munching away on the creamy, delectable substance. I knew that if someone saw me they would either think I was crazy or just a pig.”

  Her irregular eating and sleeping, her inexperience with the language, and her fear wore her down. “Everybody talks so loud,” she wrote at one point. They “scream … in Spanish, while you lay [sic] there in total nausea not knowing when next you’re going to blow chow.” The vocabulary may not have been her mother’s, but otherwise this was pure Didion. “I’m going out of my mind.”

  One afternoon, she sat in the bed of a pickup truck with several sweating men, listening to a speech by Daniel Ortega. She was sunburned, exhausted, and hungry. “Tears streamed from beneath my sunglasses,” she said.

  Also like her mother, she had a keen eye for striking details: the “dark brown feet in sandals” of a woman lying without a casket in an open grave, “the bottoms of the feet appearing much lighter than the rest: the wrinkles, the dirt, and the hardship.” In Managua, “everything was orange, yellow, dry, and cold,” she said. At a bullfight, when the “bull was lying worn out in the dirt … a man lean[ed] down and [bit] the bull’s testicles off, screaming in celebration. He then proceeded to eat the testicles.”

  Her photographs of mothers of the missing and dead in front of a Nicaraguan government office were sensitive and telling. On the women’s faces, dignity, tough as tree bark, chipped away around the eyes, revealing a soft skin of pain underneath.

  Near the end of her stay, she spoke to a boy named Danilo, the son of the woman who “developed and supervised the manufacture of all the uniforms for the Sandinista army.” He had been injured in battle, and still carried shrapnel in his brain. He sat and stared at the sky all day, smoking cigarettes. He told Quintana he could remember pleasant, peaceful years with his family—he “knew there was a time when he was healthy,” but that time belonged to a lost domain. He said, “Everything is different now, and I don’t know why.”

  Back in New York, she’d gone to work for Sipa USA, the U.S. bureau for Paris-based Sipa Press, a photo agency founded by a Turkish journalist in 1973. The agency distributed thousands of photographs per day to publications and media outlets in dozens of countries. In 1987 it opened its U.S. branch on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. It specialized in editorial news and entertainment content. Quintana was a talented, energetic photographer with field experience, and she had access to people in the entertainment business. While at Barnard, she had served as the photo editor for the Spectator, and this made her attractive to Sipa, as well. It had been unusual for a transfer student to enjoy such swift acceptance on the Spectator staff (though some of Quintana’s classmates thought having famous writer parents didn’t hurt); she did solid work. Overall, she was happier at Barnard than she had been at Bennington. During the day, she settled into productive routines, academically and professionally, but she remained intense—too intense for many of her acquaintances—and excessive in her partygoing.

  She lived in an apartment on 116th Street but rarely stayed home in the evenings. She’d been coming to New York since she was a child: The city was hers. Sometimes she’d rent a limo with friends and drive around Manhattan all night, hoisting cocktails in the backseat. She could outdrink most of her peers, female and male, and she was impatient with people who couldn’t keep up with her. For a while, she’d heap att
ention on someone and then drop them without warning.

  MTV was just getting started in those days, shooting segments in New York studios. Quintana, who’d been hanging around rock stars since she was a kid, felt right at home with the hip young crowd.

  Funny, pretty, and charismatic, she possessed her father’s volubility and gregariousness, and her mother’s bladelike wit, with no stammering shyness to keep it in check. She was deeply loyal to her family and quick to hold a grudge if she felt any of them had been slighted. All her life, she’d been exposed to heavy drinking and lavish parties, but whether these examples drove her to self-destructive behavior, whether she was truly trying to counter suicidal impulses (Let me just be in the ground) or whether she had inherited a tendency toward alcoholism from her birth family were questions Didion never could answer.

  At Christmas 1989, once her mother had returned from her California sojourns and her father had finished with Ireland, Quintana joined her parents for a family trip to Barbados. In Blue Nights, Didion reported that her daughter “had gone immediately to bed” when they arrived, perhaps a way of saying she’d been drinking on the plane. Throughout Blue Nights, Didion remains adamantly indirect, yet nuanced, about Quintana. Didion sat up outside their rented house, listening to a radio, she says; she learned the United States had just invaded Panama. Early the next morning, she woke Quintana to tell her the news—Barbados might be threatened—and Quintana covered her head with the sheet. She didn’t care. She said she knew “exactly yesterday” that the United States was going to invade. All the Sipa photographers had been stopping by the office to pick up their press credentials for the Panama story. Quintana burrowed deep into her bed. “I did not ask her why she had not thought the invasion of Panama worth a mention on the five-hour fight down,” Didion wrote.