The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  * * *

  At Quintana’s memorial service, held six weeks later at New York’s Dominican Church of St. Vincent Ferrer, Didion read the poems she had recited to her baby girl whenever Quintana would say, “Do the peacocks” or “Do the apple trees”—Wallace Stevens’s “Domination of Black” and T. S. Eliot’s “Landscapes.” Gerry, Susan Traylor, Griffin Dunne, and Calvin Trillin spoke. Patti Smith sang. Gregorian chant echoed beneath the high ceilings. The next day, along with Nick and Griffin, Didion placed Quintana’s ashes in the marble wall in Saint John the Divine, next to her mother and her husband. The last place reserved there is for her.

  Gerry Michael eventually returned to Woodstock, where he took up house painting, giving drum lessons, and working with a group to develop a local bartering system involving community service and professional trade-offs—an alternative to traditional economics. “Woodstock wasn’t in his plans,” his son told me. “It was a gradual decision that came from needing a retreat from the city and a foundation for a quieter life without … reminders of tragedy.”

  Didion told a reporter from New York magazine that she didn’t see any reason to stay in touch with Gerry now that Quintana was dead.

  “My dad lost a wife, Joan lost a daughter, and I lost a sister and a grandmother,” Sean Michael said. “My father—I won’t speak for him. Griffin—I won’t speak for him. But I believe each hug or even a ‘hello’ if [they] run into [each other] is an instant reminder of death. You can’t help thinking how this relationship would be if. It splits you, death.”

  * * *

  “I promised myself that I would maintain momentum,” Didion wrote, ever the pioneer woman making the arduous crossing. She did not cancel her book tour that fall for The Year of Magical Thinking. “[I]t did not cross my mind to cancel it because I simply didn’t know what I would do if—I mean, I was never in my whole life going to stop grieving for Quintana.… [I]t was a question of are you going to live for the rest of your life. Get on a plane and live.” She flew to Boston, Dallas, and Minneapolis. She flew to Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Toronto, and Palm Springs. Everywhere she went, she got a “very strong emotional response to Magical Thinking,” she said. In the past, when people had pressed her for advice or commiseration because they felt they’d made a personal connection to her through her writing, she’d found the situation awkward, disagreeable. This time, it was “not a crazy response; it’s not demanding,” she said. “It’s people trying to make sense of a fairly universal experience that most people don’t talk about. So this is a case when I have found myself able to deal with the response directly.” She said she could “just lie back.” She was a “witness” to other people’s stories. “It was a role I found very comforting.”

  For a reading on an outdoor stage in Central Park one night, more than seven hundred people, mostly young, mostly women, showed up. Didion joked that she might need a band to back her. As she started to read, rain fell lightly, but no one left. Then the skies opened and the organizers cut things short. Didion walked to a tent where she sat and signed books for more than two hundred people, who waited patiently in line, shivering and soaked. One teenaged girl told Didion, “You’re the awesomest.”

  Despite nights like that, many members of her audiences, presumably unacquainted with her previous books, noted on blog sites and social media that they found her baffling, disappointing—she was not the warm grief counselor some of them expected. Often, she was quiet, tense, curt onstage. Mark Feeney, a reporter for The Boston Globe, learned that “she in no way ingratiates herself” with interviewers—unusual for someone promoting a book, he said, especially a book on such an intimate topic. “She has a job to do, to answer questions with forthrightness and civility. But she doesn’t make small talk.… There’s back and forth, but no around and about.” As he spoke to her about the deaths of her husband and daughter, he noticed she kept a tissue in her hand but rarely used it. If tears came, they went quickly.

  “I don’t think she’s changed much in the last year and a half,” Robert Silvers admitted to Feeney. “She’s very much the same person. She has a completely unsentimental distance from the experiences she’s had.”

  Traveling (to some of the same cities she’d visited on her very first book tour, when Quintana had accompanied her) gave her this self-perspective: “I think my view of death didn’t change so dramatically after John died as after Quintana died. Very little bad can happen to me [now]. So I don’t anticipate anything—I mean, I’ve always been kind of apprehensive, but that’s sort of left me over the course of the summer.”

  The Year of Magical Thinking went on to become Didion’s bestselling book in hardcover; by the end of the year, more than 200,000 copies had sold. This number would triple before the book appeared in paperback, where its sales continued to outpace Didion’s previous efforts.

  On November 16, 2005, she was given the National Book Award (542 volumes had been nominated that year in the nonfiction category—the most ever). The judges’ citation read, in part, “The Year of Magical Thinking is a masterpiece in two genres: memoir and investigative journalism. The subject of the memoir is the year after the sudden death of the writer’s husband. The target of the investigation, though, is the nature of folly and time.… What [Didion] offers is an unflinching journey into intimacy and grief.”

  Her acceptance speech was as brief and as curt as her tour appearances: “There is hardly anything I can say about this except thank you, and thank you to everybody at Knopf who accepted my idea that I could sit down and write a book about something that was not exactly anything but personal and that it would work. Thank you all.”

  2

  Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, O Mistress Mine—the first play Didion remembered seeing. She was around twelve at the time. A Saturday matinee in Sacramento. She could even recall some of the credits on the playbill: “Hats by John Frederics, Parliament cigarettes by Benson & Hedges.”

  Oh, how she’d wanted to be an actress!

  As a very young teenager, she’d walked one day to the Senator Hotel, across the street from the state capitol, to audition for a representative of the Pasadena Playhouse. Her real ambition was to get to the American National Theater Academy in New York, but that was beyond her reach right then, so Pasadena would have to do. She remembered skipping her homework in the weeks before the audition, listening to the Theatre Guild on the radio, going to the city library to check out Death of a Salesman, The Member of the Wedding, and Strange Interlude. For the man from Pasadena, she thought maybe she’d read a Blanche DuBois speech from A Streetcar Named Desire. He’d make her an offer, she’d drop out of high school, and she’d be on her way. In fact, the man did not want to hear the Blanche DuBois speech. He asked Didion how tall she was. Five foot two, she told him, exaggerating by a quarter of an inch. “Absolutely too short for the stage,” the man told her. “Although possibly you could aim for the cinema.” So much for her career in the footlights.

  Fifty years later, while she was flying from city to city to promote The Year of Magical Thinking, the theatrical and film producer Scott Rudin called to offer her a chance to resurrect her girlhood dreams, indirectly, by writing a play for Broadway. In early October 2005, he asked her how she’d like to adapt Magical Thinking for the stage. At first, she said no. Too much to do; she knew nothing about playwriting. But as the book tour wound down and she faced losing her forward motion, she contacted Rudin. He had a director in mind, the veteran David Hare, and he had some thoughts about restructuring the book as a monologue. She made notes as she spoke with him:

  The movement … should build sequentially, repeated refrains taking on new meaning as they build. The speaker is urgent, driven to tell us something we don’t want to know. She is reporting, bringing us a dispatch from a far country. At some point we notice a slippage in this. We begin to suspect that the delivery of this report is all that holds the speaker together. We begin to sense a tension between wh
at we are being told and what we are not being told—What’s going on here? Is she crazy? Or is she aware that we think she’s crazy and doesn’t care? Is that the risk she is taking? Why is she taking it? Think of the Greeks, how ragged they are, how apparently careless of logical transition. Is there a deeper logic?

  Shortly after the first of the year, Didion met with Rudin and David Hare in New York. She committed to the project. By then, “I knew that the play would be about language—that if it was to exist at all, it would need to exist in this subtext, in the collision between different kinds of language, the tension between what is said and not said,” she recalled. Adapting the book for performance forced her to articulate what had always powered her writing: “The speaker would be someone who uses language not to communicate but to distance, to obscure what she thinks even from herself.”

  * * *

  While she worked on the play, she also tried to “maintain momentum” in more familiar ways, refusing to isolate herself in her apartment. She went to dinner with friends; she attended gallery openings. The painter Eric Fischl had mounted a new show. He’d become famous in the 1980s for what The New York Times called “sexually simmering suburban scenes” and for being an art-world “bad boy,” engaging in high-profile feuds with Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. More recently, he’d become a noted celebrity portraitist. Paul Simon, Lorne Michaels, Steve Martin, Chuck Close, and E. L. Doctorow had sat for him. In 2002 he’d made a joint portrait of Didion and Dunne. In the painting, they both face the viewer, standing at a distance from each other. Dunne hides his hands in his pockets. He appears wary, exhausted. Didion wears a large pair of sunglasses and has placed her arms across her chest. She grips her own shoulders, as if cradling herself for comfort. The two could be strangers.

  Didion spent time correcting the proofs of her husband’s final novel, Nothing Lost, to be published posthumously. Some of the details in the book were based on trips Dunne had made to rural Nebraska in the late 1990s to cover the trial of Brandon Teena’s murderers. The case had fascinated him. Brandon Teena was a transgender man who moved to Falls City, Nebraska, to begin a new life for himself. He dated several women, which enraged two locals. These men raped and later killed him in coordinated assaults resembling nothing so much as high school football scrimmages. Dunne’s account of the story in The New Yorker, “The Humboldt Murders” (January 19, 1997), was arguably his last great masterstroke of reporting, as fine as any work he’d done since Delano. Expanded, it would have been an American aria on a par with Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It suggested the extraordinary talent Dunne might have become if he hadn’t been so dazzled by Hollywood, if he had left Hollywood sooner to report on the heartland.

  * * *

  In early spring 2006, Didion, Scott Rudin, and David Hare sat in the almost-empty Lion Theatre on West Forty-second Street as an actress read through a draft of Didion’s adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking. As the actress began, Didion held her breath. “Only when I realized that David and Scott and I were responding as if the words were not familiar did I stop hyperventilating,” she said. “[W]e were all laughing. This was new, a surprise. I was free. We were watching a play.”

  A month later, Vanessa Redgrave agreed to play the part of Joan Didion.

  Didion would tweak the monologue; setting and costume designers would soon start to work; there would be rehearsals, previews, and then the opening. “I remember liking the entire process a good deal,” Didion wrote later. “I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and the electricians.” She also enjoyed the marketing people, the advertisers, the PR men.

  Meanwhile, she had to have laser surgery to correct her cataracts. She had to shake off a nasty upper respiratory infection. And Ahmet Ertegün fell backstage at the Beacon Theatre one night as the Rolling Stones prepared to play a concert marking Bill Clinton’s sixtieth birthday. Ertegün hit his head and suffered a brain injury. Weeks later, he died. The loss of a friend was sorrowful enough, but the incident’s similarity to Quintana’s tumble at LAX haunted Didion.

  3

  She used the publication of several books by and about members of the Bush administration to maintain momentum and to write a coruscating piece on Dick Cheney for The New York Review of Books, which was published October 5, 2006. As of this writing, it remains one of her last lengthy political essays.

  “Cheney did not take the lesson he might have taken from being in the White House at the time Saigon fell, which was that an administration can be overtaken by events that defeat the ameliorative power of adroit detail management,” she wrote. Instead, he “took a more narrow lesson, the one that had to do with the inability of the White House to pursue victory if Congress ‘tied its hands.’”

  Cheney regarded Congress as a “massive inconvenience to governing” and the “separation of powers as a historical misunderstanding,” Didion said. On his watch as vice president, he took it upon himself to erase the bad memories of Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra; he did so by advocating the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses (he himself had never served in the military—he claimed he’d had other “priorities”), by working to legalize torture, by farming out military operations to private enterprise. Didion saw what he was up to: No one knew better than a Californian with family ties to the real-estate market that war was an ongoing redevelopment project. Cheney insisted that anything the president wished to do, regardless of existing laws, was “by definition legal.” In his view, Watergate and Iran-Contra were mistakes only because the executive branch had “allowed the illegal to become illegal in the first place.” He thought he could substitute himself for the “entire government.”

  To Didion, Cheney was nothing more than a crude, self-serving “ninth-grade bully in [a] junior high lunchroom, the one sprawled in the letter jacket so the seventh-graders must step over his feet.”

  Like John Gregory Dunne, Cheney had long suffered from heart disease. Following one of his many surgeries, his doctor recalled seeing the vice president’s heart “separated from [his] body … festooned with surgical clamps … [bearing] the scars of its four-decade battle.” The doctor said, “I turned from the heart to look down into the chest … the surreal void was a vivid reminder that there was no turning back.”

  I don’t know what happened to this country.

  4

  “Vanessa Redgrave is not playing me, Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion,” Didion wrote of her play. Granting that every autobiographical “I” in a literary work is a persona, presented selectively and therefore distanced from its creator, it was disingenuous of Didion to ask her audiences to distinguish the character in the spotlight from the author of the book, billed as a memoir, on which the play was based (and from which the character read directly onstage). During the writing, she may have been able to separate herself from her experiences and emotions in order to analyze them, but her viewers were understandably unable to make a similarly dispassionate break.

  I attended one of the earliest performances of The Year of Magical Thinking at the Booth Theatre in New York in the spring of 2007 (it premiered on March 29), and, as keenly aware as I was of the gap between literature and life, I found it jarring to watch tall, big-boned Vanessa Redgrave tell Joan Didion’s story as Joan Didion, the famously frail bird in a sweater.

  The disparity was as great as that between dramatic form and the form of Didion’s play—for the staging revealed starkly that The Year of Magical Thinking, even as a book, had never been a taut narrative, a meditation, or a diarist’s account of sorrow. Instead, it was a seasoned journalist’s report with self as subject, interrogated, challenged, questioned. On whether this made effective theater, the critics were divided.

  Redgrave sat alone onstage in front of a gray curtain, insisting that variations of her personal tragedies would be experienced by everyone in the theater, despite our urgent desire to deny that fact: “You
think I’m crazy. You think I’m crazy because otherwise I’m dangerous. Radioactive. If I’m sane, what happened to me could happen to you. You want me to give you a good prognosis. I can’t. So it’s safer to think I’m crazy.”

  * * *

  “I liked watching the performance[s] from a balcony above the lights,” Didion said. “I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play.”

  On some nights, the crew brought in fried chicken, potato salad, corn bread, and greens from Piece of Chicken on Ninth Avenue, or matzo ball soup from the Hotel Edison’s coffee shop, and Didion would eat with the crew backstage after a show at a small table with a checkered tablecloth and an electric candle. Everyone called this darkened little space “Café Didion.”

  Redgrave gave 144 performances of The Year of Magical Thinking at the Booth Theatre (following twenty-three preview performances). She was nominated for a Tony.

  On the final night, Didion stood in the wings and drank champagne with the crew. For her curtain calls, Redgrave was handed a spray of yellow roses. When she left the theater that night, she placed the roses on the stage. Someone asked Didion if she wanted to take the flowers home. “I did not want the yellow roses touched,” she wrote, indicating that even for her, the gap between literature and life had vanished. “I wanted the yellow roses right there, where Vanessa had left them, with John and Quintana on the stage of the Booth, lying there on the stage all night, lit only by the ghost light…”