The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  In early August, Didion developed shingles. She ran a fever of 103; she had a rash, an earache, and severe pain in the facial nerves. She lost several pounds she could not afford to lose, despite the chocolate-vanilla ice cream stocked in her freezer as a hedge against dropping weight. She found she could not grasp things tightly. She wondered if her old symptoms of multiple sclerosis were returning. Buttoning a sweater or tying her shoes presented enormous challenges.

  For nearly a month, she was forced to stay indoors. At first this seemed a minor blessing. She’d been drifting at dinners with friends, impatient with chitchat. Isolated in the apartment—staring at a black-and-white blowup of five-year-old Quintana, which was propped against the living room window—she discovered she was generally not a lonely person but that she easily grew bored.

  She busied herself with a screenplay about Tom Dooley, a Vietnam navy doctor and humanitarian. It was her first solo picture project. She would not complete it.

  Eventually, physical therapy and antiviral tablets helped relieve her pain.

  In November, at the Mariott Marquis Hotel in New York, while she was feeling better, she was awarded a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Presenting the award, Michael Cunningham said, “There are a handful of writers whose work has been so seminal, so of its time and beyond its time, that their names have come to function as adjectives.… Didionesque means, to me at least, a fearless and almost frighteningly astute vision of a world blandly and even cheerfully collapsing under the weight of its own sorrows. It’s a world entangled in consumerism, disastrous politics, pop culture, the slow-motion avalanche of history, the non-division of wealth … all of which rumbles along as we continue to cope as best we can with human conditions.”

  Didion, wearing a dark sweater and a long, flowing pale pink scarf, conversed with Cunningham as he placed the medal around her neck; then, impatiently, she urged the crowd to sit down and be quiet. In an edgy voice, she said, “I didn’t start writing to get a lifetime achievement award. In fact, it was pretty much the last thing on my mind.… Writing seemed to me … a job … done under pressure, a craft, but a craft that gave me inexplicable pleasure.” She noted that the “last time I was in this room, Norman Mailer was getting this award.” Mailer had died just a week before this year’s ceremony. Didion paused, collecting herself. “There was someone who really, truly knew what writing was for,” she said.

  * * *

  In the spring of 2008, Vanessa Redgrave took The Year of Magical Thinking to the National Theatre in London. Didion flew over for a performance. Rushing to greet Redgrave backstage one evening, she fell, but she broke none of her brittle bones.

  In March of the following year, Redgrave was set to reprise her role in a special performance at Saint John the Divine, to benefit UNICEF and the “children of Gaza and southern Israel,” but her daughter Natasha Richardson, forty-five, suffered a head injury on a beginner’s ski slope north of Montreal, and the show was postponed. Richardson was flown to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, where Didion visited her in the ICU the day before she died.

  Patty Hearst. Blanche DuBois. So many fine roles Tasha had played, so many compelling personalities gone along with her final flickering.

  “This was never supposed to happen to her,” Redgrave, playing Didion, had proclaimed night after night in the darkened auditorium, speaking for us all.

  Richardson’s death recalled and intensified Didion’s grief over Quintana, and she spoke more freely of her daughter now. “[S]omebody failed Quintana,” she told a reporter around this time. “And I’m the person in sight, you know?”

  “Did I lie to you?” she had written.

  “Did I lie to you all your life?” Redgrave asked onstage. “When I said you’re safe, I’m here, was that a lie or did you believe it?”

  Looking back, the best thing about the play, Didion mused, was that for “five evenings and two afternoons a week,” for “ninety full minutes,” her daughter “did not need to be dead.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  1

  “You kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself,” Didion said. “The real person becomes the role.”

  Ideally, the role does not call for aging. Or grief.

  But, in fact, the real person goes to bed earlier and earlier each night—usually around seven-thirty. “I can hardly stay awake,” Didion said. “If I stay up any later, I’m ruined for the next day.”

  She continued to smoke just five cigarettes every twenty-four hours.

  Her preferred evening drink tended now to be white wine.

  The real person suffered neuropathy in her feet. The real person had to have half her thyroid removed. She taped aloe leaves to her throat to heal the scar.

  Her brother-in-law, Nick, had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. He insisted he would beat it: a role he played to the hilt.

  A pair of Australian filmmakers, Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley, had made a documentary about Nick’s career, from his failure in Hollywood to his success as a writer for Vanity Fair. Didion agreed to be interviewed for the film, discussing Nick’s novels. On camera, she said his dissection of American culture, through the manners and morals of the upper class, made him a Trollope for our time. Then she laughed, suggesting she didn’t really believe what she’d said.

  In November 2008, in the Oak Room at the Plaza, a screening was held for the film, Dominick Dunne: After the Party. Nick couldn’t attend because of a scheduled surgery for his cancer. Didion went, along with Nora Ephron, Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and Ian McEwan. They all said they loved the movie—“It got closer to my brother-in-law than anybody I have seen,” Didion said—but most of the reception conversation consisted of gloomy forecasts for journalism and cautious hope following the presidential election, in which an African-American, Barack Obama, was elected president.

  About journalism: “Good social reportage is very, very hard to find, particularly social journalism that has a heart and a point of view. And I came across Nick and I knew this guy must be able to write because he has such a way of telling a story,” Tina Brown told a reporter from The New York Observer. We might not see Nick’s like again, though: This was “a very depressing time” for writers, said Brown, “a kind of industrial revolution in media” in the rubble of which who and what would survive was not at all clear.

  On the other hand, Obama’s election struck most of the writers in the room as what Ian McEwan called a “restoration of literacy as a value.” “I read both of [Mr. Obama’s] books and he actually turns a very good paragraph,” said McEwan.

  “He does, doesn’t he!” said Evans. “I think it is a new era.” Rationality. Unity. American pride. “I think the change in spirit will last.”

  Didion wasn’t sure. A few days after the film screening, at a symposium on the election at the New York Public Library, sponsored by The New York Review of Books, she said, “I couldn’t count the number of snapshots I got e-mailed” just prior to the vote “showing people’s babies dressed in Obama gear.” Partisanship “could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.”

  “I couldn’t count the number of times I heard the words ‘transformational’ or ‘inspirational,’ or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade’s war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see.”

  Expectations for Obama’s performance were far too high, she believed: “Irony was now out. Naiveté, translated into ‘hope,’ was now in.”

  She recalled hearing “breathlessly on one [television] channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had ‘the congratulations of all the nations.’ ‘They want to be with us,’ another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world’s people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind
from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq.”

  * * *

  Obama’s acceptance speech seemed so melancholy, almost rueful, Susanna Moore told Didion. As if he knew, in advance, that his administration would be little more than an extended footnote to the Bush years, given the continuing legacies of war, torture, a shattered economy, and domestic spying. It made her worried for the future.

  Didion agreed. The ignorance of the triumphalism in the streets dispirited her. It seemed to her—as she had said at the Brooklyn Book Fair, a few days before the election—that the country had slipped into a “national coma,” a coma “we ourselves” induced by “indulging the government in its fantasy of absolute power wielded absolutely.” Instead of working communally to solve our problems, or electing responsible leaders, she said, we reduced crises to simplistic stories in order to forget them: The war in Iraq had been reduced to the troop “surge,” and “who had or had not exhibited belief in it. Belief in the surge was equated with [the] success of the surge and by extension our entire engagement in Iraq, as if that success was an achieved fact rather than a wish.” In a similar sleight of hand, we “solved” the economic crisis by “de-linking” loans from “any imperative to get them paid off.” We “solved” the health care crisis by politicizing medical conditions instead of talking about what real reform would mean—“taking on the insurance industry.”

  No, Obama’s election did not particularly cheer her. By the end of the year, she was also feeling anxious about the prospect of returning to Hawaii for the first time since the deaths of her husband and daughter. Honolulu would be lovely, but lonely, too. (At least the new president would be there, vacationing in what newscasters insisted on calling “this exotic place”!)

  In preparation for leaving, she straightened the apartment as best she could so that she wouldn’t return to a mess. It was still hard for her to throw certain things away—like copies of Dunne’s Princeton Alumni Weekly. The university hadn’t removed him from its mailing list. She should have just tossed the newsletter, but the obituaries obsessed her: too many youngish men—like Dunne—and many men from her father’s generation, the last of them, for whom national service had been a sacred obligation.

  2

  One of her doctors told her she had “made an inadequate adjustment to aging.”

  She told him he was wrong. She had in fact “made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.” In the role she was playing, she had “lived [her] entire life to date without seriously believing that [she] would age.”

  Meanwhile, early in the summer of 2010, the real person fainted in her bedroom one night (she had no memory, later, of falling to the floor). She awoke hours later with both legs bleeding, with blood on her forehead and one of her arms. She could not get up and she could not reach any of the thirteen telephones in the apartment. She went to sleep in a puddle of blood, having pulled a quilt down from a wicker chest to fold beneath her head.

  On waking, she managed to pull herself up and phone a friend, who took her to Lenox Hill Hospital. The only available bed there, once she left the emergency room, was in a cardiac unit, where nurses falsely assumed she must’ve had cardiac trouble. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitor,” one said, as if Didion were purposely bedeviling her. Didion said she did not have a cardiac problem. “Of course you have a cardiac problem. Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit,” the nurse replied.

  Finally, after many days of tests at Lenox Hill and then at the New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, “[e]veryone agreed … there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did,” she said.

  You kind of grow into the role.

  3

  “No good at human relationships. Just can’t do it,” Nick told the actor Frank Langella one day in the spring of 2008. They were lunching together at Michael’s on West Fifty-fifth Street. For years they had known each other glancingly, had said hello at parties, but Langella had always been wary of Nick’s “practiced reporter’s skill at charming you, then trying to trip you up; getting you to reveal something you hadn’t intended to.” Mostly, he avoided the man. What prompted this lunch was Langella’s recent movie, Starting Out in the Evening, based on the Brian Morton novel about a lonely old writer estranged from his child. It touched Nick. He phoned Langella and admitted he’d related to the character in the film. “It was heartbreaking how that man threw his life away,” he said.

  Because of his cancer, Nick had reached another crisis moment, a searching time of brutal self-honesty and reassessment. He eagerly accepted when Langella suggested lunch. He poured his worries out to the actor. Langella recounted the scene in his memoir, Dropped Names. Nick said he was sick, he was going to fight the disease, but he wanted to resolve all of his unfinished business: He was still feuding with Graydon Carter—he believed the editor had not fully supported him in his conflict with Gary Condit; he was having trouble finishing his latest novel, in which the character Gus Bailey, Nick’s alter ego in previous autobiographical fiction, struggled to accept his sexuality.

  “So, are you gay?” Langella asked him.

  “I’m nothing now,” Nick said. “I’ve been celibate for twenty years. It just got too difficult for me to deal with.”

  “What did?”

  “Hiding it. Wanting it.”

  Langella wondered if Nick had ever talked to his sons about his feelings. Nick recoiled in horror: “God no!” he said. “I’m a coward.” He said he was sure Griffin knew anyway. In any case, he no longer missed sex.

  Lunch ended with Nick’s resolve to patch things up with Graydon Carter and to finish his book.

  Over the course of the next several months, Nick pursued various treatments for his disease. Twice he flew to the Dominican Republic for stem-cell therapy, and twice he went to a stem-cell clinic in Germany, the first time in March 2009, and the second time in August. On the second visit, he contracted a serious infection, and Griffin arrived to bring him back home. When he met his father, he saw that Nick had asked an old friend to accompany him to the clinic. This fellow had been “a great friend of my sister’s,” Griffin said. He “just sort of went from being my sister’s best friend to my father’s best friend.”

  “Dominick and I met late June of 1974, to set the record straight,” the friend, Norman Carby, explained to me. “He told me to keep a journal, as I was going to have a very interesting life.” Carby was a painter, mainly of pastel-hued Southern California landscapes. He also manufactured fine jewelry, did silkscreens and lithographs, and worked in TV and film as a photographer. Through Nick, he met Didion and Dunne and “spent weekends at John and Joan’s beach house in their absence,” he said. He helped Dominique arrange her acting portfolio soon after she arrived in the States after studying in Italy. She had “an audition for a movie within two weeks of her return to America. I believe that was 1979,” he recalled.

  Carby had been a key witness at John Sweeney’s trial. In the early 1980s, he lived on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles. Three weeks before Sweeney murdered Dominique, “Sweeney attacked her; hands around her throat,” Nick told one interviewer. “She got in her car and went to this painter’s house. Great guy. She had a friendship with him, and he hid her for several days. He photographed her neck, which was used during the trial. She had gone on Hill Street Blues and played a battered woman, and a lot of it was not makeup. A lot of it was what [Sweeney] had done to her. But I’ve always been grateful to this guy.” Nick explained that the painter had since moved to Hawaii but that annually he came to Chicago to visit his family. “I see him once a year over the Memorial Day weekend,” Nick said. “After all these years, this amazing thing has happened. I now read him my novels [as I write them]. It started with the articles … and we’ve established this thing now. It’s unbelievable. I talk to him every day now, this guy in Hawaii, and I read it to him rough, and then I hear it, because you can’t read out loud to yourself.”<
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  Jim Hyde, the interviewer, asked the painter’s name. “Norman Carby,” Nick said. He added, somewhat obliquely, “It’s an accidental thing that happened. Let life happen and go with it. Just go with it.”

  In 2009, when Griffin arrived in Germany to take his father home on a chartered plane, he saw this man “looking after” Nick. “I don’t think he’d mind me mentioning his name,” Griffin said. “There was Norman. I’ll just say his name. He’d be fine.”

  Griffin said, “I saw the … history” between the two men. It’s “one of the real kind of touching, grateful memories I have of Dad’s last months.”

  In Nick’s final novel, Too Much Money, which he did manage to finish, his character Gus Bailey admits he’s closeted and celibate. He says, “Can’t die with a secret, you know. I’m nervous about the kids, even though they’re middle-aged men now. Not that they don’t already know, I just never talk about it.” And in an interview for the Times of London, just months before his death, Nick said, “I call myself a closeted bisexual celibate.”

  He could never speak directly to his children. In the summer of 2009, in his apartment at Forty-ninth and Lexington, he submitted to hospice care. Langella arrived to say good-bye one day. “Frank. I did it. I finished my book,” Nick said. “It’s going to be a hit, I think, Frank.” He showed Langella a cardboard image of the cover and discussed the planned marketing of the novel. Langella noticed Griffin sitting on a sunporch off the living room, his back toward the hospital bed, staring out the window. It saddened Langella that “even on his deathbed,” Nick was “unable to speak truth to a son sitting some twenty feet away.” Instead, Nick “preferred rather to look at a mock-up of [his] new book title, discuss possible profits he would never enjoy, and have his hand held by a formerly estranged colleague.”