The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Later Quintana snapped a photo of the ocean and gave the picture to her parents, with an inscription on the back: “For Mom and Dad. Try to imagine the seductive sea if you can, love XX, Q.”

  2

  All the travel, the family worries, and the chaos of resettling kept Didion off her feed for several months. She felt she just wasn’t getting New York this time around.

  She’d identified its self-congratulatory sentimentality, but how to talk about it? What to say? Then an incident occurred to sharpen her thinking.

  On April 19, 1989, between 8:30 and 9:30 P.M., Trisha Meili, a twenty-eight-year-old white employee of the Wall Street investment bank Salomon Brothers, went for her regular evening jog through Central Park. She was discovered four hours later, stripped of her clothing, beaten so badly that her left eye had dislodged from its socket. She had lost 75 percent of her blood, she was suffering from severe hypothermia, and, Didion wrote, “the characteristic surface wrinkles of her brain” were “flattened.” Dirt and twigs “found in her vagina” suggested rape.

  In 1989, 3,254 rapes were reported in New York City, but this was the one singled out by Governor Mario Cuomo as “the ultimate shriek of alarm.”

  This was the one with all the requisite elements to fulfill New York’s sentimental self-portrait.

  “Teen Wolfpack Beats and Rapes Wall Street Exec on Jogging Path,” read one headline.

  “One [assailant] shouted ‘hit the beat’ and they all started rapping to ‘Wild Thing.’”

  “[C]rimes are universally understood to be news to the extent that they offer, however erroneously, a story, a lesson, a high concept,” Didion wrote. The lesson here was that the city’s recent economic downturn had nothing to do with the stock market or financial regulation or globalization, but with teen “wolves” (read: nonwhites) infiltrating “our” (read: whites) Edenic park, ruining everything, spreading crime and garbage, and attacking our dynamic young leaders (the victim was “probably one of the top four or five students of the decade”; “fun-loving,” though only “when time permitted”). Furthermore, she was a “Bacharach bride,” Didion said: hardworking, middle-class, and ethical—that is, virginal (metaphorically speaking) in contrast to the dark beasts who went after her on the path that night.

  Most of the establishment press refused to announce her name, in order to “protect” her (a “magical” assumption, Didion wrote), while the names of the five boys arrested—one Latino, four African-American—remained on full and constant display, despite the fact that all were minors and they had not yet been arraigned. The journalistic convention of not naming a rape victim, as though rape were a violation of a “nature best kept secret,” Didion saw as further sentimentality—a refusal to acknowledge what had really happened, how often it happened in American culture and why, or to discuss the matter seriously.

  DNA and other physical evidence indicated that none of the five boys was guilty of the rape. There was “no matching semen, no matching fingernail scrapings, no matching blood.” The boys claimed the cops had coerced them into confessing (denying them, in some instances, the presence of their parents or of lawyers)—and, in fact, as the office of the New York district attorney admitted, in retrospect, “The accounts given by the five defendants differed from one another on the specific details on virtually every major aspect of the crime … [and] some of what they said was simply contrary to established fact.” Nevertheless, all five were convicted and served significant jail time. Putting them away was an important step in “taking back” the city, in the city’s self-fulfilling narrative.

  Meanwhile, Meili, given scant odds of surviving, began to recover. The New York Post called her “Lady Courage.” The New York Daily News and New York Newsday made her “A Profile in Courage.” The New York Times said she was a symbol of “New York rising above the dirt.”

  Didion bucked the mainstream trend in questioning the fairness of the criminal justice system and in wondering, in print, if the boys were really guilty. In part, she developed her contrariness by turning a disadvantage into a plus. She couldn’t get a police pass into the courtroom, so she analyzed the trial coverage, the language of the headlines, the strategies of the legal teams planting rumors through the very act of denying them. She explained her methods later: “You’re going to get it right if you tell yourself a story about it. If you go below the surface, you get it wrong. If you get the surface right, it will tell you the rest.” Once again, she learned it was the edges of a piece where she belonged.

  In this case, the edges led her to The City Sun and the Amsterdam News, papers distributed in African-American neighborhoods. These outlets regularly named the victim, described the assault and its aftermath in detail, and openly questioned what they perceived to be a rush to judgment. As she had done in the 1960s, trolling the underground press for news she’d otherwise miss, Didion turned to alternative sources for narratives countering the dominant sentiment. For example, she heard a statement by the Reverend Calvin O. Butts of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church: “What you do in the United States of America when a white woman is raped is round up a bunch of black youths, and I think that’s what happened here.” Of course, this was a familiar narrative, too, steeped in its own sentimentality, but like a tributary to a much larger river, it needed to be marked on the map.

  Didion published “Sentimental Journeys,” her account of the Central Park Jogger case, in the January 17, 1991, issue of The New York Review of Books (it was one of the first pieces she composed on a computer, which made its through line more “logical,” she said). The essay gave the lie to former Wall Street Journal reporter David Blum’s judgment of the Review a few years before. Writing in New York, Blum claimed the Review had lost its urgency after the turbulent 1960s, that it had “grown steadily less inflammatory and controversial.” Didion’s piece condemned not only the courts but also the press and the unquestioned cultural assumptions structuring the stories most Americans told themselves.

  In 2002 the New York State Supreme Court would vacate the convictions of the so-called Central Park Five when DNA evidence, revisited, and an accurate confession by a serial rapist named Matias Reyes proved the five men innocent.

  * * *

  Getting the city right. Money and fashion, New York’s hemoglobin—that she’d discovered long ago as a Vogue girl, and she didn’t mind a little transfusion now and then. On September 22, 1991, Businessweek announced that the Gap clothing line had increased its recent monthly sales by 21 percent—it now owned 2 percent of the nation’s one-hundred-billion-dollar-a-year apparel market—by conducting a “savvy ad campaign featuring such celebrities as Spike Lee and Joan Didion.” These celebrities had helped the Gap turn “plain clothing such as jeans and T-shirts into fashion statements.” In one ad, Didion posed with Quintana for photographer Annie Leibovitz. Mother and daughter both wore black turtleneck sweaters; Didion nestled her left cheek against her daughter’s temple and stared wistfully into the lens, as if this moment meant everything to her and she’d never let this little girl go.

  The Gap wasn’t the only company seeking her endorsement. Gulf & Western, owner of Simon & Schuster, asked her one year to make a “contribution” to its annual shareholders’ report, to be distributed to 55,000 shareholders as well as to the “financial community, bankers, press contacts, [and] public relations sources.” Didion wrote a puff piece, professing a faith she didn’t possess: “Some years back it became a kind of tic to assume that we trembled on the threshold of a world in which the written word would vanish, in which the occasional book might survive, an example of craft from the past … What we are seeing in fact is one aspect of a great social revolution in the United States, in which people in even the most unlikely social and economic circumstances have come to treat books not as exotic objects of reverence on someone else’s shelf but as the essential tools and pastimes of daily life.” The director of S&S’s Corporate Communications “anticipate[d] a terrifically positive response” to
her words; not only would the piece provide “useful promotion” for her books, but Gulf & Western had just been crowned a guardian of literature and civilization.

  In reality, Didion felt S&S didn’t give a damn about literature, authors, or books qua books; Dick Snyder was pushing a product for profit, and he wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it in her case. When Henry Robbins left, the last friend of letters had passed. Furthermore, reading skills were eroding and bookstores were running just ahead of the wrecking ball: After twenty-one years, the venerable Rizzoli, with its beautiful handwrought chandeliers, cherrywood paneling, and hand-carved marble doorframe, had been forced out of its Fifth Avenue home by a real-estate developer. Somehow the store had managed to relocate, but still, it wasn’t the same, and in general the book business seemed fragile.

  Real estate was the business to be in. Didion had always known this; her family had thrived on the knowledge. Recently, she’d formed, with her brother, a limited liability company, JJD Carmel Investments, registered in California and Nevada, to consolidate and protect the family’s property holdings and her brother’s commercial brokerage operations. James had become one of the leading real-estate executives in the nation. He was the CEO of Coldwell Banker and had purchased the company, along with an investment group, for $300 million. He was also the CEO of CB Commercial and headed up a nonprofit group, Roundtable, frequently briefing the White House and the U.S. Congress on the needs and positions of the nation’s real-estate community. As his partner in the LLC and as one of its officers, Didion had gone from fashion writer to sixties icon to Hollywood player to Joan Didion, Incorporated.

  Along with Dunne, Elaine May, and novelist Peter Feibleman, she centralized her business activities still further, establishing the DBA Company (Doing Business As), to channel her screenplay work into a more manageable niche. In a book called Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (1997), Dunne lists a dizzying number of scripts that he and Didion simultaneously wrote or rewrote, at various stages, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They sincerely wanted to step away from the greater part of what he termed the “Hollywood ratfuck,” but the money was good and they figured if they accepted only rewrites on films already in production, with detailed budgets, definite start dates, and all the elements locked into place, they could avoid risks and wasted time. DBA was designed to keep them out of Hollywood meetings and to set up a fee structure like that of a law firm—“so much to read a script … so much per hour (including telephone conferences), so much per day, so much per week, so much for a production draft, so much for a polish, so much for looping dialogue.”

  The company sputtered. “[A]fter each of us [Didion, May, Feibleman, and Dunne] had exempted those picture-makers with whom we had long-term professional and personal relationships, there were very few people left to share,” Dunne said. And it was hard to abandon “back-burner projects” good for quick bursts of cash. The move to New York had been more expensive than they’d anticipated; medical charges had piled up; and as the result of a “venomous” five-month writers’ strike in 1988, several contracts they’d counted on had been canceled, including an adaptation of Dunne’s novel Dutch Shea, Jr., and a Western about the California water wars.

  “[I]t was a class issue,” Didion wrote of the strike—“about whether the people who made the biggest money were or were not going to give a little to the people who made the less big money.”

  “Fuck ’em, they’re weaklings,” one director said of the Writers Guild in the middle of the strike, and, in fact, the Guild wound up accepting terms it had initially rejected, which kept the picture-making machine more or less at status quo.

  “Not until July of 1988, at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, did the emotional core of the strike come clear to me,” Didion wrote. On assignment for The New York Review of Books, she had gone to the Omni, but the credentials Bob Silvers had secured for her did not give her immediate access to the convention floor. She ran into the director Paul Mazursky, who, “like all the other industry people I saw in Atlanta, had a top pass, one of the several all-access passes,” she said. Since she was working as a reporter and he only seemed to be schmoozing, she asked if she could borrow his pass for half an hour. He said he’d “really like” to do this for her, but he thought not. “He seemed surprised that I had asked, and uncomfortable that I had breached the natural order of the community as we both knew it,” Didion wrote. “[D]irectors and actors and producers, I should have understood, have floor passes. Writers do not, which is why they strike.”

  As a consequence of the canceled contracts, Didion and Dunne continued to accept whatever screenplay work they could get. Dunne labored away on a script for Lorimar called Playland, about the gangster Bugsy Siegel, but then Warner Bros. bought Lorimar and killed most of its outstanding commitments. “We feel this project has a lot of potential,” a Warner’s vice president told Dunne about the Siegel story, and he knew the script was dead. (Eventually, he’d fold some of the material into his fourth novel.)

  The dreaded Hollywood meetings went on, made even worse by the long flights out from New York. One meeting was so disastrous, “full of so many silences we could not decode that we wondered why we had been summoned,” Dunne said. After that, he and Didion worked up a signal. If they were sitting in a meeting together and it started to go sour, or if one of them wanted to bail, one would look at the other and say, “White Christmas.” This was, of course, the U.S. military’s trigger for evacuation during the fall of Saigon, the last song played: “[I]t’s time to cut our losses and split.”

  3

  On Christmas Day 1990, the Dunnes flew to Honolulu with Quintana. While running for a cab in the Honolulu airport, Dunne fainted. He was out for only a few seconds, and he managed to convince Didion not to call a doctor unless it happened again.

  They had come for a quiet, sunny getaway to work on a rewrite for Disney, a “whammy picture” (a thriller) called Ultimatum, whose “concept line” read this way: “When terrorists threaten to set off a nuclear weapon on the eve of a presidential election, a top aide must find it.” As President Bush had just given Iraq a deadline of January 15 to pull out of Kuwait or face the consequences, it “did not seem the most fortuitous moment for an Arab terrorist story,” Dunne thought, but the script was money in the bank, and after this most recent blackout, he was more convinced than ever they might need it. They asked the Kahala Hilton to place a laser printer in their room, and each day they swam, worked, lunched, swam, and worked some more, and then met Quintana for dinner. Dunne did not faint again. The screenplay they produced read like a “‘Saturday Night Live’ skit,” said one Disney-Touchstone source (one problem the Dunnes faced was trying to “visualize what you see on the screen when you look at a generic terrorist”). After several more rewrites, and a raft of other writers, Disney abandoned the project, having spent around three million dollars on its development.

  The day he returned to New York, Dunne saw his cardiologist and described the fainting spell. After an echocardiogram and an angiogram, the doctor determined that Dunne was suffering from a congenital defect of the aortic valve—his father’s killer. “You have open-heart surgery [now] or you die,” the doctor said bluntly.

  A week later, after a five-and-a-half-hour operation, he had a brand-new plastic valve in his heart. In the McKeen Pavilion at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, near Saint John the Divine (where, coincidentally, the Dunnes had tucked the nuclear device in their Ultimatum scenario), he was wheeled into a recovery room. In the next room, the heiress Sunny von Bülow lay in a coma, watched by private security guards, though she’d been in this comatose state for nearly ten years. Her husband, Claus, had twice been accused of attempting to murder her. Dunne’s brother Nick had written about the von Bulöws for Vanity Fair (“The children talked, the servants talked, mistresses talked, duchesses talked”)—it was one of the celebrity crime tales on which he’d made his name since Dominique’s killing. Now Nick’s brother consider
ed the guards, and the heiress’s private nurses, with increasing irritation.

  Each day, nurses wheeled him into the McKeen atrium for high tea while a pianist played “Send in the Clowns.”

  His new plastic valve made an audible click.

  Quintana called him the “Tin Man.”

  Chapter Thirty

  1

  “Hi, this is Bill Clinton. Is Governor Brown there?”

  Most days, Dunne replied that the governor had just stepped out. It was July 1992, the eve of the Democratic National Convention, and the candidates were not playing nice. Brown refused to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket, and he was running around New York calling Clinton a “bobbing, weaving target that has no moral compass.” Didion had noted Clinton’s “reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary, when things did not go his way.” She said this was a response “so reliable that the aides on Jerry Brown’s … campaign looked for situations in which it could be provoked.” Clinton’s people wanted to muzzle Brown, rein him in before the convention—they called this “unifying the party.” They refused to give the former California governor a prime speaking slot at the big balloon-dropping extravaganza.

  Throughout the primaries, the Dunnes had offered Brown a room in their apartment as a resting spot and base of operations. Neither of them had registered to vote, but they supported Brown’s “guerrilla” campaign—his staff of grassroots volunteers, his refusal to accept individual contributions of over one hundred dollars, his calls for congressional term limits and a flat tax. As one reporter said, “He seemed to be the most left-wing and right-wing man in the field,” unpredictable in his policies, bipartisan in his condemnation of political corruption, and almost proud of his derisive nickname in the press, “Governor Moonbeam,” affixed to him because of rapturous remarks he’d made about the environment, his former Zen practices, Ronald Reagan’s ostentatious governor’s mansion, and his fascination with new technologies (which were science fiction to the press).