The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Didion kept vigil at Nick’s bedside in a straw chair on the sunporch. From time to time, she’d say something to the other visitors gathered around the bed, but her voice was so soft, on many occasions no one knew what she’d uttered.

  She said good-bye one August afternoon by gently placing her hand on Nick’s foot.

  * * *

  A memorial service took place a few weeks later at St. Vincent Ferrer, on a slightly overcast day with just a touch of autumn on the breeze. The service, featuring a High Mass, was a celebrity affair, as Nick would have wished. Among those attending were Stephen Sondheim, Mart Crowley, Richard Gere, Julianna Margulies, Tina Brown, Liev Schreiber, Dana Delany, Diane von Furstenberg. Martha Moxley’s mother came. The service opened with Nick’s favorite Cole Porter song, “Anything Goes,” followed by a reading from the Book of Daniel by Norman Carby and a homily from Nick’s friend Father Daniel Morrisey, who said Nick had been planning the details of the service for at least nine years.

  Griffin spoke of his father’s early marriage to Lenny. Alex came out of the shadows to say good-bye and to speak of his father’s bravery following his sister’s murder. Didion praised Nick’s devotion to family, in spite of his disagreements with her husband; in the cathedral’s airy vastness, few could hear her words.

  Afterward, people milled around, recalling Nick’s career. The last trial he’d covered for Vanity Fair was that of Phil Spector, accused of the shooting death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson. Spector, one of rock ’n’ roll’s finest record producers, creator of the 1960s “Wall of Sound” with girl groups such as the Ronettes, had been known for years to play around with firearms, even in the studio (he’d once put a bullet into the ceiling during a John Lennon recording session). Nick had met him through Ahmet Ertegün in the late 1980s. In condemning a rock impresario as one of his last public gestures, and in arranging to open his memorial service with a Cole Porter song, Nick seemed to hearken back to Old Hollywood, to deny, once and for all, that the 1960s had ever happened.

  * * *

  In the end, so little is left. About a year after Nick died, the family held an estate auction. On a bright second-floor space at the Stair Galleries on Warren Street in Hudson, New York, Nick’s furniture, clothes, jewelry, and books were hastily displayed. It was clear that his famous name, and the celebrity elbows he’d rubbed, were not going to be enough to jack up the prices. So what if Dominick Dunne had owned this copy of a John P. Marquand novel? No one had read Marquand for years. The hardcover first edition sold for twenty-five dollars. An old Mexican leather box filled with jeweled cuff links from Tiffany & Company went for seven hundred dollars, probably less than it was worth. The chintz club chairs and the furniture from Nick’s mother’s house in Hartford brought as little as fifty dollars. The stuff was all out of style—not antique, just old. And no one really cared about the ashtrays Nick had filched from the Ritz. The most valuable pieces—Chinese export porcelain and tall-case clocks—Nick had inherited from Lenny when she died. He was the first to admit she had always outclassed him.

  In an earlier century, when Melville haunted these streets, the gallery space had served as a plant for processing whale oil. The whales were gone. “Nowadays,” one observer remarked, “the substance rendered here is the material remnants of people’s lives.” And that usually came down to “so much sentimental dross,” no matter who you’d been, or whom you had known.

  Epilogue: Life Limits

  1

  When Didion’s Blue Nights came out in the late fall of 2011, the publisher hailed it as “a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.” It was hardly that. It was an impressionistic collage of isolated memories, slant observations, lists of objects, and riffs on rhythm. Several times during the writing, Didion nearly abandoned the project, but Lynn Nesbit, her agent, talked her out of it. The book went from being a meditation on parenting to a love song for Quintana to a lengthy complaint about aging and mortality. It ended up as none of these, quite.

  “[T]here’s a discernible remoteness to the whole presentation,” Meghan Daum said in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a “commitment to keeping emotion at arm’s length.” She said, “[A]t the risk of sounding like a philistine, I wanted some straighter talk. Is that an unfair request? Does the desire to know exactly what happened to Quintana represent a failure to meet the book on its own terms?” Daum answered herself, noting the book’s “preference for aesthetic details,” a “series of effects,” and a good deal of “imagery.” Another way of saying this is that Blue Nights is a poem, and asks to be read as such.

  The opening nocturne, a description of “twilights turn[ing] long and blue” in “certain latitudes,” becoming “more intense” even as they darken and fade, warning of the light’s last appearance, is a clear allegory for aging and death. There is no mistaking the latitude to which Didion has sailed, nor her approach to discussing it. She will not tell us straight out what happened to Quintana—she makes it very plain, throughout these pages, how much she struggles to speak directly of her daughter. What she will do is call our attention to the blue-and-white curtains in Quintana’s childhood bedroom and the blue-and-white curtains in the intensive care unit in which Quintana was intubated near the end of her life. Blue nights. Birth and death linked through poetic imagery: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

  Naturally, the lyrical impulse reaches its inevitable conclusion in the book’s final lines, culminating in a tiny grammatical knot almost unnoticeable. “Fade as the blue nights fade,” Didion says, “go as the brightness goes.” And then, speaking of missing and remembering Quintana, she writes, “there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.” Common sense—the need for clarity—suggests this sentence should read, “there is no day in my life in which I do not see her.” Most readers’ minds, correcting for meaning, will silently substitute my for her. But Didion wrote “her.” She equated herself with Quintana. She made mother and daughter, life and death, indistinguishable, separated not even by a sheer blue-and-white curtain. Not for the first time, Didion was both the lost child abandoned on the trail and the survivor, looking back: “When we talk about [our] mortality we are talking about our children.”

  * * *

  After Blue Nights was published, she said she wasn’t sure she would write anymore. Writing about “morality and culture” was “like pushing the stone uphill again. You write about X political events and nothing happens. That doesn’t push you to write again,” she said.

  As much as we might yearn for the Didion who once commented so perceptively on California, as valuable as it would be to receive a report from her on the West’s latest water wars or the transformation of San Francisco by the techno-riche or the new nexus of California money, commerce, entertainment, and politics—say, in the salons of Arianna Huffington or Lynda Resnick—she is a New Yorker now, increasingly out of touch with California. As she once wrote, “It is often said that New York is a city only for the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also … a city only for the very young.” She was once very young in New York. Now she is relatively rich there.

  Now and then a rumor will surface in the press or on the Internet that Didion is writing a screenplay, a thriller, with Todd Field, or that Campbell Scott plans to direct a movie of A Book of Common Prayer starring Christina Hendricks, or that Didion has abandoned her part in an HBO biopic of Katharine Graham; now and then, Didion will be sighted walking with a cane along Park Avenue, crossing Fifty-seventh Street in thirteen-degree weather wearing only a thin coat and white slippers, her bare ankles exposed to the wind, or she’ll be seen in the Yossi Yossi salon on the Upper East Side dishing with her hairdresser about Nancy Reagan’s remoteness; now and then, she’ll buy snacks at the William Poll deli on Lex or she’ll be spotted at an Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Whitney, looking like a teenager in Uggs; now and then, someone will recall having seen her once, in the old days, at Elaine’
s, watching Mick Jagger greet Yoko Ono (“Dahling!”), or patrons of Swifty’s restaurant will whisper about the small party dining quietly in the back room—Didion, Earl McGrath, and Barry Humphries (Broadway’s “Dame Edna”). “Earl’s job these days is taking care of Joan,” Eve Babitz told me.

  Since Blue Nights, there have been more occasions to mourn: Connie Wald, who died in her Beverly Hills home, site of so many splendid dinners, at the age of ninety-six; Nora Ephron, dead at seventy-one of pneumonia brought on by myeloid leukemia; Christopher Hitchens, who died of cancer at the age of sixty-two.

  There have been illnesses, minor injuries, neurological scares, brief hospitalizations, a broken collarbone, resulting in canceled appearances—in Boise, Idaho, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at the twenty-third annual PEN Center USA Literary Awards Festival in Los Angeles in October 2013. Governor Jerry Brown and Harrison Ford presented Didion a Lifetime Achievement Award in her absence.

  She did travel to Yale University in 2011 to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters for her “unflinching” exploration of “love and loss, politics and place, social disorder and the search for meaning.”

  And on July 10, 2013, at the White House, President Barack Obama placed a heavy National Humanities Medal around her neck—many at the affair thought it would pull her to the floor. “I’m surprised she hasn’t already gotten this award,” Obama said. “[D]ecades into her career, she remains one of our sharpest and most respected observers of American politics and culture.” For the ceremony, she wore a blue shawl and a plain flowered-print dress. Her bare arms were bone-thin, and the president had to help her onto the stage. She frowned with the effort of movement, looking a little lost, and she received the loudest ovation of the day (other Arts and Humanities Medal recipients that afternoon included Robert Silvers, Marilynne Robinson, Ernest Gaines, Kay Ryan, Tony Kushner, Ellsworth Kelly, Jill Ker Conway, Elaine May, Renée Fleming, Allen Toussaint, Herb Alpert, Frank Deford, and George Lucas). Didion steadied herself against the president, spreading her long, pale fingers against his dark suit. It was a striking image: this frail figure, the descendant of Western pioneers, reaching for the nation’s first African-American president, an image confounding attempts by the Twitter-verse and Beltway pundits to decipher the moment’s meaning. Was Didion politically conservative or liberal? Why had the White House chosen her? Was Obama sending a message? Appeasing Hollywood donors? The old National Review crowd? What did Didion think of him? Did this award bridge a generation gap? In the end, there was only one person’s hand grasping the shoulder of another.

  2

  To “really love Joan Didion—to have been blown over by things like the smell of jasmine and the packing list she kept by her suitcase—you have to be female,” Caitlin Flanagan wrote.

  Katie Roiphe agreed: “There are … male writers who imitate Didion, though more of them borrow from Tom Wolfe. Think of all those articles you’ve read in GQ and Esquire with such Wolfian sound effects as ‘Splat!’ and internal free associations and liberal spatterings of exclamation points.”

  Roiphe’s example probably tells us more about the editors of GQ and Esquire than it does about male writers, just as her (and Flanagan’s) broad strokes reveal more about her than the boys. Calls to gender wars over Didion blur the fact that her range has been vast and her style has become the music of our time. In spite of her sharp particularities, she is, finally, one of the most inclusive writers of the era: politics, history, war, the arts, popular culture, science and medicine, international relations, the passing of the years.

  Certainly, any writer concerned with California or grappling with the heritage of the West (which Didion proved was a confrontation with America at its core) must come to terms with her work. Matthew Specktor, whose novel, American Dream Machine, memorializes Hollywood’s recent history, calls her “absolutely essential.”

  Finally, in considering Didion’s literary legacy, one can’t ignore her silence on certain matters of class and ethnicity. It is made all the more obvious by the richness of these subjects in the work of such writers as Susan Straight, Al Young, Amy Tan, and Richard Rodriguez. Yet this gap indicates less that California is no longer where she was from than that her California was specific and personal, despite its broader applications. She told us this all along.

  Richard Rodriguez grew up in a far different Sacramento than Didion did, culturally and economically, but he admired her immensely and found her work galvanizing. In labeling writers, slotting them into cultural categories or dismissing them for what they fail to explore, we run the risk of politicizing literature, reading it as sociology, Rodriguez says: “Sociology is not literature. Sociology is the attempt to render an experience of averages and to search for the typical case from the average. The experience of literature is exactly the opposite. It looks for the particular, and then it seeks the universal through the particular rather than the other way around. So if you are a sociologist looking for the Mexican American experience, what you do is interview two hundred students and find out what they think.… What you do as a writer is, you write about one particular Mexican American kid.… If the writer is true, then people who are not Mexican American can say, ‘I don’t know who this kid is, but this reminds me of something I felt growing up.’”

  On those blue, blue nights, slouching toward a center that would not hold or the diminishing days of autumn, this writer was always true. If we pause and bother to listen, we remain dreamers of Didion’s dream.

  3

  Within a few days of the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death, Didion went to Saint John the Divine. A security guard let her into the small chapel off the main altar, underneath construction scaffolding, so she could hang a lei, sent by Susanna Moore from Honolulu, on a brass rod holding the marble plate to the vault containing her mother’s and husband’s ashes. As she left the nave and wandered up the main aisle, she stared at the magnificent rose window over the front entrance until, from a certain position, the sunlight through the stained-glass inserts flooded her vision with blue.

  Back in her neighborhood, so many changes were occurring, as they always did in New York. She wished she could tell her husband about them. Ralph Lauren seemed to be taking over the entire block between Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets. More bookstores had closed, here and across the length and breadth of Manhattan. “Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,” said the great biographer Robert Caro.

  Empty windows. Lost histories. Distant memories.

  “Memories are what you no longer want to remember,” Didion had discovered, padding through her silent apartment. Memories were no solace at all. Now Didion wished she hadn’t saved the silver from her mother’s house, her daughter’s old school uniforms, her husband’s shoes, the CD featuring the Israeli jazz pianist playing “Someone to Watch Over Me,” possibly the last song Dunne had listened to the night he died, old wedding invitations (some of the couples long divorced), funeral notices for people she could no longer picture.

  Writing The Year of Magical Thinking had not been an act of remembrance so much as a continuing engagement with her husband so that she wouldn’t yet have to consign him to her dusty old drawer of the past.

  Composing that book had been “like sitting down at the typewriter and bleeding,” she told her friend Sara Davidson. “Some days I’d sit with tears streaming down my face.” But she’d done it, and for a long time afterward, she’d kept herself busy. “I don’t call it strength. I call it pragmatism,” she’d said. What choice did she have? “I can handle it. I can cross the plains. Bury the baby.”

  Asked by a young interviewer, shortly after the appearance of The Year Magical Thinking, whether she could imagine falling in love again, she said, “I wouldn’t get married again, I don’t think. But fall in love? Absolutely.”

  * * *

  It took the stumble in her bedroom, the constant IV infusions of bone-loss medication, the skin cancer treatm
ents (she’d been warned all her life about sunning on tropical beaches!), the broken collarbone, the fevers, the PET scans, the physical therapy sessions, and, most of all, the writing of Blue Nights to change her tune.

  “I just jumped ship,” she told Sara Davidson one day about finishing the book. “I couldn’t live with it anymore.” So she brought it to a close. She went to dinner at Elio’s to celebrate her relief.

  After years of pushing hard, harder, she felt weary, listless. Perhaps she’d overdone it. She no longer wanted to go out for breakfast at Three Guys or to dinner at Tamarind, because what if she fell in the restaurant? She no longer cared about events at the Council on Foreign Relations, or window-shopping at Armani. She noticed people considering her “frail in an entirely more serious way—taxi drivers jump out of the cab to help me get out. In New York, that’s pretty scary,” she said.

  Alone in the apartment one day, she found a journal Quintana had kept. Middle school? High school? Didion turned the soft white pages. Quintana said she hated Jane Austen—and her parents. Why did they always have to treat her like a child? She was quite capable of taking care of herself.

  Perhaps it was then, that quiet instant while thumbing through the journal, staring out over the roof of St. James’s, that Didion admitted she could no longer bury the baby: “It’s not my code anymore … I’m not self-reliant.”

  But no. This scene was too much like the forced epiphany of an awkward short story.

  Still, in essence, it was true. Pioneer stoicism no longer enabled her “to get through the day.”

  One afternoon, Sara Davidson asked her if she wanted live-in help. No, Didion said. The “idea of someone living in my apartment is repellent.” Besides, she could call on over twenty staff members in the building in an emergency. She rarely kept her door locked anymore.