The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  The Dunnes embraced Rosemary. A journalist and a screenwriter, she was smart and funny, and Didion respected her stoicism. Since her early thirties, she had suffered a rare autoimmune blood disorder. She was constantly anemic, often crippled with headaches; the long-term prognosis was sketchy. Didion impressed Rosemary as “someone with a center made of steel”; she was “fiercely protective of those she loved.” Dunne took a particular interest in Rosemary’s writing. Eventually, he became her “number one fan,” calling her early in the mornings to congratulate her on magazine columns she’d published or to encourage her as she polished a script for the TV series NYPD Blue. She felt “lucky” to have them in her life.

  By the early 2000s, Nick, his luck on the skids, may have wished he could join Breslin on a busted elevator, stuck between floors somewhere. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001; he was still fighting with his brother; he was engaged in a very public feud with Robert Kennedy Jr.; and former congressman Gary Condit was suing him for defamation, reportedly for eleven million dollars.

  The trouble was, Nick could never resist a story about a young woman’s tragic ending. Over and over, he tried to rewrite Dominique’s narrative. Hence, his spat with the Kennedys. The tension between them spanned fifty years, of course—the Dunnes’ “steerage” roots had planted in Nick a jealousy of the wealthier Irish family; the jealousy grew as he tried to work his way into the upper class, managing to attend Bobby’s wedding to Ethel Skakel (“I remember being dazzled by the beauty of the Skakel estate,” he said); the jealousy shaded into rage as Nick witnessed “Joe Kennedy be so fuckin’ mean” to his Hollywood pal Peter Lawford; and the rage became vengeance when Nick saw an opportunity to pile his justice crusade on the back of Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy’s.

  Here’s how it happened. In 1975 in Greenwich, Connecticut, Martha Moxley, a fifteen-year-old neighbor of the Skakels, was bludgeoned to death by a golf club later traced to the Skakel home. For lack of further evidence, the murder went unsolved. Nick was convinced that either Michael or his brother, Tommy, both teenagers in the mid-1970s, both with a history of emotional problems, and both of whom had evinced sexual interest in Martha, had killed her. The case became even more personal for him when he learned that Martha and Dominique had each been murdered on October 30.

  In 1993, Nick published a novel entitled A Season in Purgatory, an obvious retelling of the Moxley affair, switching the murder weapon to a baseball bat. Purgatory renewed public interest in the Moxley case. Nick took the further step of acquiring a private investigator’s report in which Michael Skakel’s alibis on the night of Martha’s killing conflicted. Nick passed this report to former L.A. cop Mark Fuhrman, late of the O. J. Simpson trial. Fuhrman published his own book, Murder in Greenwich, in 1998, implicating Michael Skakel in the girl’s death. Shortly thereafter, the Connecticut state’s attorney brought Skakel to trial. He was convicted and sent to prison.

  Robert Kennedy Jr. blamed Nick—a “pathetic creature”—for railroading his innocent cousin. “The formula that Dominick Dunne has employed to fulfill his dreams has done damage to a lot of people,” Kennedy said. “Dunne wants to write about two things, both of which are easy to sell: high-profile crimes and famous people. So he’s forced to try to make connections between his high-profile protagonists and the crimes.… If you look at how he couches his accusations, it’s always ‘Somebody told me this.’ ‘An anonymous source said this.’ So he’s not saying it’s true, but the average reader misses that nuance.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about what that little shit has to say,” Nick remarked of Kennedy to Chris Smith, a reporter for New York magazine. “That fucking asshole. This pompous, pompous, POMPOUS man. I don’t care what he has to say. He’s not a person that I have any feeling or respect for.”

  Nor did he respect Congressman Gary Condit, whose young D.C. intern, Chandra Levy, disappeared in May 2001. Months later, her remains turned up in Washington’s Rock Creek Park. Condit, married and much older than Levy, told police he’d had a “friendship” with the girl but refused to elaborate, publicly, on the nature of their relationship. Investigators did not tie the congressman to her death (he was later exonerated), but tabloids cast suspicion on him, and Nick took an interest in the case. It would embroil him in another byzantine affair. In December 2001, before Levy’s body was found, Nick went on radio and television with a bizarre story about a lead he’d been given in the investigation. He claimed to have met a “horse whisperer” who once worked for a Dubai sheikh who, in turn, procured young prostitutes for Washington power brokers when they visited the Middle East. The horse whisperer said Condit was a frequent guest at Middle Eastern embassies in Washington and “let it be known that he was in a relationship with a woman that was over, but she was a clinger. He couldn’t get rid of her.” Nick said Condit “created the environment that led to [Levy’s] disappearance. And she shortly thereafter vanished.” Nick said he had it on good authority that she’d been thrown from an airplane over the Atlantic Ocean.

  Condit sued him. Quickly, Nick backtracked, admitting he’d fallen for an outlandish hoax. He told Condit’s lawyers he’d be willing to settle. “I’ve had prostate cancer,” he said. “I still think I’ve got a great book in me.… I don’t want to tie up my creative period; the days are getting thin. And I don’t want to waste it … on Gary Condit.”

  He was chastened, afraid to gossip in his usual manner at dinner parties, worried that if Condit pursued the lawsuit, he’d have no money to leave to his children.

  During this season of troubles, he ran into Dunne “by happenstance” at “eight o’clock in the morning in the Hematology Department of New York–Presbyterian Hospital,” he said. Both brothers were there to give blood samples, Nick for a PSA test, Dunne for a heart checkup. “We spoke,” Nick said. “And then John called me on the phone to wish me well. It was such a nice call, so heartfelt. All the hostility that had built up simply vanished.”

  Soon thereafter, Dunne suggested to Griffin that they “all go to Elio’s and laugh [their] asses off.” “Let me tell you about reconciliation. It’s a glorious thing,” Nick reflected. “The thing that made our reconciliation so successful was that we never tried to clear up what had gone so wrong. We just let it go. There was too much about each other to enjoy.”

  They talked about their grandfather, who’d passed along his love of reading to them when they were kids; they talked about their parents, their late sisters, their poor brother Stephen. They talked about Dominique.

  They would even pose together for a Vanity Fair photo shoot, publicly ending their estrangement.

  When Nick was “loath to go out in public” in the fallout with the congressman, Dunne insisted, “Be seen. Don’t hide.”

  * * *

  Dunne was looking very thin. “He had these big, arty glasses. He was extremely quiet,” said Meghan Daum, who interviewed Didion in her apartment one afternoon for a magazine profile. The days were long past when Dunne would finish Didion’s sentences for her.

  Nick recalled that during this period “John was having problems with his heart,” which might account for his thinness and muted demeanor. “He had several overnight stays at New York–Presbyterian for what he always referred to as ‘procedures,’” Nick said. “He was dismissive about their seriousness, but Griffin … told me, ‘He always thought he was going to keel over in Central Park.’”

  Nick’s medical treatments seemed to have vanquished his prostate cancer, and he would eventually settle with Gary Condit—not for eleven million dollars, but for a hefty sum he never disclosed. The last year or so had been trying, but once again, Nick had taken a hard look at himself, admitted his mistakes, and bounced back firmly.

  2

  Quintana’s defenses seemed to be crumbling. She had begun to receive regular phone calls from her natural mother in Dallas, urging Quintana to visit. The woman wanted to discuss the circumstances that had forced her to put Quintana up for adoption
. These calls came usually very early in the morning when Quintana was getting ready for work and during a period when Elle Décor was realigning its staff. Quintana feared for her job.

  She spoke with a psychiatrist, seeking strategies for coping with her tensions. These conversations resulted in a letter to her mother. She confessed that “being found” was “too much to handle” right now. The invitations to visit Dallas were “too much too soon”; she needed to “step back” and “catch up for a while.”

  In response, her birth mother wrote to say she would not be a burden, and then she disconnected her telephone.

  The gesture seemed calculated to throw all the guilt of the intervening years onto Quintana. Didion makes it very clear in Blue Nights that she blames the mother for “shattering” Quintana’s world.

  At about this time, Quintana’s old friend from Westlake, Anna Connolly, moved to New York. “I phoned her once or twice and hung up when I got no answer,” Connolly said. “She then called me back. Soon after, I visited her at her apartment in the Sutton Place neighborhood.… It was the last time I saw her.… I remember high ceilings, large rooms (though not a sprawling place). Quintana and I both smoked and smoked, and we drank gin and tonics.… She said many things about her struggles and issues—in college, with men, with work, and with drinking.… She had just met a bartender at a nearby bar—I’m not sure if that was the man she eventually married.”

  It was. The bar was called the Mayfair, and it was located on the southwest corner of First Avenue and Fifty-third Street, a short walk from Quintana’s apartment. The bartender was named Gerry Michael. He lived four blocks from Quintana, at Fifty-sixth and Second. “It was a meeting by proximity,” said Michael’s son, Sean: “In 2002 … she was a regular in the bar.” Quintana was thirty-six; Michael was in his fifties. Sean was twenty-seven and came to regard Quintana as a “sister.” “Q and my dad seemed two peas in a pod,” he said. They both “loved to celebrate … she was no stranger to alcohol and could hold her own.” Michael had been widowed about a year before. He’d been dating a young model—they “found comfort in each other after my mother’s death,” Sean said, but soon “different lifestyles and age difference blew a hole” in any ongoing romance. Shortly afterward, when Quintana walked into the Mayfair, projecting cheeriness in spite of her depression, unattached, and bigger than life, Michael was smitten. “Some of my father’s friends and my dad himself thought Quintana had similarities to … my mother,” Sean told me. “I didn’t see that at all. But the minute I met Joan, I was struck by my father’s ability to attract someone with so many [of the] same qualities. It was not Quintana but her mother! Her hair, her glasses, and her sense of personal justice. Her seeking of truth through writing. And her steely intelligence. All qualities of my mother.” To Sean, Joan was “a delicate sparrow with hawk’s eyes. Those eyes burn, letting anyone know that the power [inside] outstrips her fragile form. [She’s] designed perfectly to telegraph her message.”

  Quintana had “softer sides,” he reflected. “She was [quicker] to laugh” than Joan, “more innately curious about simple things and simple pleasures. And more heart-centered.” Quintana shared “joy” with her father—they were “truly connected.” “With Joan, I saw a real love there, too. But it was over a fence,” Sean said. “Both would reach over [it] successfully and truly be together—but it would be for a short time. The fence would remain.”

  Over nightly cocktails in the Mayfair, talking with Michael, Quintana felt more and more comfortable. “The best quality I think any couple can have is that both individuals feel lucky. Lucky to have the other. They had that,” Sean said. “And Quintana was a curious, lovable little bear, always up for a celebration and hoping for excitement around the next corner. It was in her eyes. A hunger for fun and human connection.”

  * * *

  Like three-year-old Michael crawling through the 1960s in the essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Gerry Michael was a child of the “vacuum,” the era, in Didion’s view, in which we could “no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed.”

  He came from Woodstock, one of the 1960s energy centers, home for a while of Dylan and the Band, including the latter’s legendary drummer, Levon Helm. Michael himself was a creative and talented drummer, and he got an early career start playing with the Bummers, which featured his brother Kevin on lead guitar, Tom Sankey on tenor guitar, Sankey’s wife, Janet, on autoharp, and Frank Thumbheart on bass. In 1967 reviewers noted of Sankey’s Off-Off-Broadway folk rock musical, The Golden Screw, that its antiwar songs were effective, along with its lyric renditions of lost innocence. ATCO released the cast album, featuring Michael on drums; it was hailed as the first rock theatrical recording. Afterward, the Bummers staged a show at Group 212, a Woodstock arts collective mixing music, poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and electronica. Michael played at several of the Sound-Outs, mini-festivals inspiring the 1969 extravaganza.

  The Bummers secured a recording contract with RCA, with an advance of twelve thousand dollars, but “smutty lyrics” scotched the album.

  In 1970, Michael married Tom Sankey’s ex-wife, Janet. In addition to playing music, Janet joined the Off-Off-Broadway theater ensemble Theatre Genesis, which held productions in St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. There she worked with Sam Shepard. Soon she was writing about art and community events for the Woodstock Times under the pen name Arabella Faunstock. She met and interviewed Bob Dylan in Bearsville, and they became friends (Dylan was part of the connective tissue between Gerry Michael and Quintana). In 1975, Janet gave birth to Sean.

  When Quintana and Gerry Michael got engaged, Sean asked Didion what he should call her. “Step-Gran? Joan? My dad’s wife’s mother?” He said “she was immediate and emphatic: ‘Grandmother.’”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  1

  In early July 2003, three weeks before Quintana’s wedding to Gerry Michael, Didion collapsed on the street and spent several nights in Columbia-Presbyterian’s intensive care unit while doctors searched for the cause of a gastrointestinal bleed. They did not succeed, despite the techies’ obvious excitement over their medical equipment. Didion was discharged, improved but still shaky.

  In June, Dunne had undergone a radio-frequency ablation of the atrial-ventricular node and surgeons had implanted a Medtronic Kappa 900 SR pacemaker in his chest. This had followed nearly a year of frequent slippages into atrial fibrillation. Regularly, doctors shocked his heart into rhythm—a short procedure, but one requiring sedation each time—and placed him on Coumadin, a blood thinner. He bruised easily. His skin was paper-thin. The slightest change in his physical circumstances—a plane flight, a minor cold—could send him back into A-fib.

  Once the pacemaker was in place, doctors assured him he could hold a cell phone to his heart, punch in a number, and “get a reading” on the device. This gave him confidence that his cell phone worked, but it did not calm him about the state of his heart.

  He thought he was dying. He expressed doubts about everything he had ever written, including his latest novel, Nothing Lost, whose publication he was awaiting. His handwriting was growing fainter, as though he no longer trusted the force of his ideas. “When something happens to me…” he would say. Didion would interrupt to insist nothing was going to happen to him. “But if it does. If it does,” he would say, talking over her objections. She was to keep the apartment. She was to marry again. “You don’t understand,” she told him, and the conversation would end.

  He even said he wondered what he was doing in New York now. He spoke often of the backyard pool in Brentwood, the summer he was rereading Sophie’s Choice and they would go into the house together in the early evening, wearing their bath towels, to watch television.

  Such talk reminded Didion of a night alone in Brentwood; Quintana was off at school and Dunne had gone to spend some time in their pied-à-terre in New York. This was during his restless period in L.A., when he spoke of moving to New York and she did
n’t really want to. She went into the kitchen to feed the dog, and a flashing red light cut through the twilight in the window. She looked out and saw an ambulance parked in front of a house across Marlboro Street. The next day, she learned that the woman who lived in that house had just become a widow. Didion called Dunne and said maybe he had been right. Maybe they should spend more time in New York.

  This memory sent her spiraling into an even earlier time in California, when they all lived in Malibu and she still owned the yellow Corvette. One day she had driven with Quintana to a fish place to buy lobsters for a big dinner. While they sat in the car, half a dozen bikers surrounded them and began popping wheelies. “What exactly do those wit-nits think they’re doing?” Quintana said.

  And then Didion remembered how Quintana had burst into tears in the backseat of the Volvo when they’d returned one evening to the Chadbourne neighborhood after selling the house, only to see that the new owners had torn huge chunks of it apart during the remodeling.

  * * *

  Didion was surrounded now by ghosts, by her “friend[s] from the bridge.”

  “Not our friend from the bridge” had become a family saying after Dunne’s aunt Harriet had used the phrase to describe running into the same strangers again and again, seeing the same car, for example, in a supermarket parking lot that she had spotted a short while earlier on a bridge.

  Didion’s sense of a short while seemed to be contracting. Strangers seemed more and more familiar. Or else everyone was becoming a stranger.

  Strolling up Madison past the Ralph Lauren store, or the empty space where the Madison Avenue Bookshop used to be, she’d see a woman wearing a big silver ring, surely the spirit of Allene Talmey (“Action verbs! Run it through again, sweetie!”), and, simultaneously, the reincarnation of Didion’s great-aunt Nell. Here they were again, in midtown, flouncing through the twenty-first century. Oh, but where could they go? The worlds they had known had vanished. The frumpy Miss Daves—there she was, turning the corner into the park! And was that a whiff of Arpège in the air? The smell of egg salad, scarfed on the run just ahead of the next deadline?