California had become “all San Jose,” Eduene said.
When they checked into the Claremont, Didion glanced into the bar. She recalled she had last been there in 1955 “with the son of a rancher from Mendocino County … I had my roommate’s driver’s license and a crème de menthe frappe.”
On the day of the ceremony, Didion gave her talk. Then the academic procession began. Afterward, her mother told her she had nearly cried “in front of everybody” when she saw a small group of fellows shuffling along behind a banner, “Class of 1931.”
“They were all old men,” said Eduene.
The Class of 1931 had been Frank Didion’s class.
“They were just like your father.”
“There was no believable comfort I could offer my mother: she was right,” Didion wrote. “They were all old men and it was all San Jose.”
Chapter Thirty-one
1
The Dunne brothers’ estrangement deepened in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Nick became the voice of Vanity Fair. In Los Angeles, his coverage of the trial of Erik Menendez—one of a pair of boys accused of shotgunning their wealthy parents—put him at odds with Menendez’s defense attorney, Leslie Abramson. He couldn’t abide the fact that she found Erik “adorable” or that she reportedly got $700,000 to try to free a murderer (Nick had already convicted the boy). She, in turn, couldn’t stand Nick’s prosecution bias—didn’t he know lying was “endemic” among cops, and that an astonishing number of judges were “remarkably stupid, totally crazy or deplorably lazy”?—nor did she appreciate his condescending descriptions of her in his articles (“Leslie Abramson’s curly blond hair bounces, Orphan Annie style, when she walks and talks”). She called his Vanity Fair work a series of “venomous little pieces.” He was “Judith Krantz in pants.”
Her greatest transgression, from Nick’s point of view, was her friendship with his brother. Dunne “admired her, and she doted on him,” Nick said. A tough-talking character named Leah Kaye in Dunne’s The Red White and Blue, “a believer in the value of effect,” a brilliant, ruthless woman who wears white silk blouses and Italian suede skirts, was clearly based on Abramson (and salt-and-peppered with Didion).
Nick found his brother’s admiration for her courtroom work “curious … in light of what’s happened to a murdered child in our family,” he said. “If that’s what he thinks is right, that’s fine for him. But not for me. It’s not right for me to remain friendly with him.”
Publicly, Dunne would only acknowledge his relationship with Nick as “complicated.”
Griffin Dunne urged his father and uncle to patch things up, but then in 1994, Dunne dedicated his Hollywood novel Playland to Abramson, “at the very time she and I were in public conflict,” Nick said. “After that my brother and I did not speak for more than six years.”
They clashed, as well, over the O. J. Simpson trial. They both covered it, Nick for Vanity Fair, Dunne for The New York Review of Books. Dunne assumed a snide stance toward the legal proceedings; for Nick, equally enthralled and horrified by the testimony, it was “All O.J., all the time!”
Simpson’s alleged butchery of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman, a waiter at Mezzaluna, “a second-rate Brentwood restaurant” in Dunne’s opinion, wrenched open L.A.’s racial divide—just like the Rodney King beating—while TV’s blow-by-blow presentation of the trial polarized the rest of the country.
Dunne’s coverage of the case tended to linger on the media spectacle. Of the Bronco incident (when Simpson apparently tried to flee from police in a friend’s white van), he wrote, “Ninety-five million Americans in two-thirds of the nation’s households tuned in on the longest, slowest chase in television history, a chase that no film director would dare stage.”
By contrast, Nick relied on innuendo to convict Simpson in his own private court: “On a wet Sunday morning in February, I met with a man I know in West Los Angeles who told me an extraordinary story about a plastic surgeon he is acquainted with in Beverly Hills whose name I cannot reveal. On two occasions during Simpson’s glory days as a University of Southern California football star, the plastic surgeon claims, he was hired to repair the faces of two young women Simpson had allegedly beaten up.”
When Simpson was acquitted in the criminal trial, Nick assured his readers the real punishment would materialize later. At dinner at Le Colonial, Tina Sinatra had told him, “O.J. will never be accepted back into the world he so desperately wants to be a part of. Never. They will never take him back.”
2
The brothers’ kerfuffle continued to knock about in the press and later escalated in a hail of books. Playwright and novelist Gary Indiana published a novel entitled Resentment: A Comedy, a reimagining of the Menendez trials, featuring a character obviously modeled on Nick, Fawbus Kennedy, “a third-rate middlebrow Depends ad.” Indiana sketched Kennedy as sexually ambiguous.
He took on Dunne and Didion as well, casting them as Sean Kennedy and Cora Winchell:
Can you imagine … what a family dinner with the three of them must be like, Fawbus Kennedy imploding with rage that he’ll never get notices as serious as Sean’s notices, and Sean pretending to himself that his last book was just as good as Cora’s, and Cora meanwhile thinking that she’s the golden canary of American letters, and of course … the joke is that all three of them can’t get through a paragraph without telling you which famous people they know … Fawbus is blatant and vulgar about it and Sean tries to give it a little ironic twist, whereas Cora has perfected the art of making her snobbery and name-dropping read like world-weary deprecation.
This might have been the final dustup—how embarrassing it was that the family rivalry had become a target for parody!—but then Nick published a “novel in the form of a memoir” about the O. J. Simpson trial, Another City, Not My Own, a lightly altered fictionalization of his Vanity Fair articles. “The litany of show-business and upper-crust names in the book is staggering,” wrote Alex Ross; Nick’s admission that he’s a “terrible name-dropper” was like “O.J. admitting he had his problems with Nicole.”
Yet again that might have been the end of it—until the Los Angeles Times asked Gary Indiana to review Nick’s book. “I am not aware of any animus toward Dunne on the part of Indiana … that would get in the way of a judicious and fair review,” said Steve Wasserman, the paper’s book review editor.
“Wasserman is a fucking liar,” Nick said. He accused the editor of setting him up: “As you know, Indiana, whom I have never met, has previously attacked me in the most mocking manner in his book called Resentment: A Comedy, a book I understand … you greatly admire … You set me up to be demolished.”
Worse, Nick strongly suspected that Wasserman had been persuaded to tap Indiana by his colleague Tim Rutten, who happened to be Leslie Abramson’s husband, a friend of the Dunnes, and the ghostwriter of Simpson’s lawyer’s account of the trial. It was a plot, and somewhere near its center sat Nick’s brother and sister-in-law. He was sure of it. He wasn’t keeping quiet. The New York Observer got wind of his allegations and remarked, “It seems that [Dominick] Dunne’s conversion to the more commercial side of the literary business, and his embrace of the glitzier manifestations of fame, strained his relationship with his brother, Ms. Didion and their intellectual circle.”
* * *
The year ended with all this terrible animosity.
It began with Lenny’s death.
Seven years earlier, she had left Los Angeles to return to her family’s ranch, Yerba Buena, in Nogales, Arizona. There she built a house and tucked herself in with round-the-clock nursing to tend to the worsening symptoms of her multiple sclerosis. She had never really recovered from Dominique’s death—nor had her younger son, Alex, whom Nick once described as “sensitive and shy and incredibly spiritual.” He never seemed to get rooted; for a while, he did social work in San Francisco. In the summer of 1995, while visiting his mother, he disappeared for three days in the scorching deser
t around the Santa Rita Mountains. Authorities swore he couldn’t survive. Lenny called Nick, who was staying in L.A., covering the Simpson trial, and Griffin flew in from New York. In Arizona, Nick spent his time going to McDonald’s, buying cheeseburgers for the search crews—horseback, helicopter, and foot patrols, combing an eight-square-mile wilderness. “I thought he was dead,” Nick said. “I was thinking, ‘Where will we bury him? Will we bury him with Dominique?’” Then Alex reemerged from the canyons as swiftly as he had vanished, whereupon he related a story of hunger and disorientation and remarkable recovery, a “transcendental experience.” His tale baffled law enforcement. “It’s a little less than plausible,” said Capt. Mark Pettit, grousing about the $26,000 bill for the search—passed on to taxpayers. “He’s suddenly able to walk out … I think that’s nothing short of divine intervention.”
Whatever happened, wherever Alex had gone, he did not repent and keep his family informed of his whereabouts. A few years later, Nick told a friend, “We’ve lost Alex in our lives. He has left us. I think the trouble started at the time of the murder. I think [Alex and Dominique] were the closest brother and sister I ever saw. He has just left us … I have not heard from Alex.”
Worries about her son, coupled with the ongoing grief for her daughter, had sapped Lenny’s strength, and in January 1997, at the age of sixty-four, she died. Nick asked that “in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to Justice for Homicide Victims,” an advocacy group Lenny had founded. The Dunne clan did not agree on much these days, but they all acknowledged that Lenny had been the one member of the family beyond reproach.
3
In The Last Thing He Wanted, a novel published in 1996, Didion included the following exchange between a troubled daughter and her mother:
We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.
What exactly did you have in Malibu that you don’t have now …
You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach … Or the Jacuzzi. Or the pool …
About the time Didion’s novel appeared, Quintana checked into the Hazelden rehabilitation center in Minnesota. “She was twenty-nine or thirty,” Didion recalled. She had finally admitted her daughter’s addiction: “She drank too much. She was an alcoholic. People would call her an alcoholic.”
Hazelden, located on five hundred wooded acres north of St. Paul, had been established in 1949 as a male-only facility in a tiny farmhouse. By the time Quintana arrived, a complex of buildings served nearly two thousand addicts, hewing closely to the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. “It’s like a Big Ten campus though without the frat parties and football,” said one former resident. Quintana’s room resembled that of a generic hotel, and the starchy food—breaded pork chops and spaghetti—put pounds on her. The rules were strict: no immodest clothing, no talking to members of the opposite sex, no missing daily seminars. The standard treatment lasted twenty-eight days.
Didion told Susanna Moore the hallways reeked of cigarette smoke.
The time was structured around counseling, yoga, meditation, and motivational speeches. Group activities were encouraged.
During this period, while hoping against hope for her daughter’s recovery, and while writing and promoting her new novel, Didion drafted, with Dunne, fifteen iterations of the former Jessica Savitch story. Producers had come and gone (Dunne’s old friend John Foreman had died of a heart attack); Disney was in play, then wasn’t, then was again; and the story had morphed into a more wholesome tale about heroic, ambitious newscasters searching for truth. What’s it really about? Dunne asked Scott Rudin, one of the new producers on board. “It’s about two movie stars,” Rudin said. Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer had committed to the project.
Didion and Dunne had stuck with the screenwriting, it seemed, to stay just one step ahead of trouble. Even in the abstract, Didion liked momentum and schedules, something to distract her, keep her mind Off What difference does it make? And always, always, there was the need for medical insurance. Dunne had been bitten on the ankle by an insect in an Off-Broadway theater one night while watching Quintana perform in a drama by a playwright friend of hers; from the bite, he’d contracted bacterial cellulitis, a grave risk to someone with a plastic aortic valve. He spent seven days in the hospital. Then Didion suffered a detached retina and underwent laser surgery.
So when Quintana emerged from Hazelden, she wasn’t the only one in the family courting rebirth. For her, it was like learning to walk again. Susanna Moore invited her to a party one night honoring a young novelist. Quintana accepted the invitation but did not show up. Later, she wrote Moore a note. She apologized for being a jerk. Booze had always been her public screen; it was difficult to get through an affair without a drink. It wouldn’t always be this way—someday she’d go out again with confidence. But for now, she was keeping her social life quiet.
* * *
One night, out to dinner in Santa Monica with Leslie Abramson and her husband, the Dunnes ran into Disney’s Michael Eisner. They talked about the Dunnes’ rewrites of the Jessica Savitch story and about how the movie was finally under way. Recently, Eisner had survived a heart bypass. Dunne mentioned he’d had the same procedure. Eisner replied, “Of course, mine was more serious.” Stunned into silence by what was, after all, a fairly typical example of crass Hollywood boasting, Dunne heard his wife “exclaim in outrage, ‘It was not!’”
* * *
Up Close & Personal, starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in March 1996. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking they were rewatching A Star Is Born: Once more (this time under pressure from Disney), Didion and Dunne had told the story of a jaded, self-destructive professional meeting a tragic end while his beautiful female companion rose to glory.
Reviewer Michael Medved seems to have seen a different movie. The film, he said, presents an “uncritical endorsement of … advocacy journalism … in which a reporter injects his own opinions into a story and takes off to humiliate or destroy some powerful public figure.”
If one didn’t know better, it sounded as though Dunne had made a picture in praise of his brother.
Chapter Thirty-two
1
“Some real things have happened lately.” So begins The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion’s fifth novel.
The opening sentence evokes artificiality as well as reality: The “real things” are anomalies. This is language cancerous with its own negation. It is the language of contemporary American democracy, employed to muddle operations on the ground.
At present, our society is experiencing something “interestingly described on page 1513 of the Merck Manual (Fifteenth Edition) as a sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments,” Didion says.
In a secretive, strange, jargon-laden environment, riddled with competing texts, each with its own vocabulary and agendas, its own obscurities and selective details, the writer finds herself in a prickly situation: Words, the tools of her trade, are worn and compromised by the abusive public uses to which they’re turned; as a result, her position as storyteller, witness, and sage has become utterly suspect. “You know me, or think you do. The not quite omniscient author,” Didion says. She has abandoned her plans to adopt a fictional persona. “I wanted to come at this straight. I wanted to bring my own baggage and unpack it in front of you.” Echoing her essay “The White Album” nearly thirty years earlier, she attempts to fix authority through weakness, confessing her limitations. And she wishes to eliminate all extraneous fictions.
Every assertion, she qualifies. Sometimes this rhetorical movement reveals her uncertainty: “History’s rough draft. We used to say. When we still believed that history merited a second look.”
Though blithely denying it, she is, of course, intensely engaged in taking second looks. Her uncertainty becomes a management strategy.
At other points, her qualifications puncture offic
ial pretenses: “You may recall the rhetoric of the time in question.… This wasn’t a zero-sum deal.… Elements beyond our control.… And yet. Still.”
Elsewhere, the narrator seizes particulars in a world of “weightless” definitions. Like Charlotte Douglas “picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song,” the “not quite omniscient author” worries the few useful notes she can find. Out of jargon, misinformation, and obsessive repetitions, she forms a weirdly beautiful music: “I still believe in history. Let me amend that. I still believe in history to the extent that I believe history to be made exclusively and at random by people … doing a little business, keeping a hand in, an oar in the water, the wolf from the door … They may not remember all the names they used but they remember the names they did not use. They may have trouble sorting out the details of all they knew but they remember having known it. They remember they had some moves. They remember they had personal knowledge of certain actions.”
The story’s time frame is sharply specific: Like the fall of Saigon, it’s another vast crater in American democracy. “If you remember 1984, which I notice fewer and fewer of us care to do, you already know some of what happened to Elena McMahon that summer,” Didion writes:
You know the context, you remember the names, Theodore Shackley Clair George Dewey Clarridge Richard Secord Alan Fiers Felix Rodriguez aka “Max Gomez” John Hull Southern Air Lake Resources Stanford Technology Donald Gregg Aguacate Elliott Abrams Robert Owen aka “T. C.” Ilopango aka “Cincinnati,” all swimming together in the glare off the C-123 that fell from the sky into Nicaragua. Not many women got caught in this glare.
The Last Love Song Page 64