The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Every real American story”: Didion, “Gentlemen in Battle.”

  “there are no more great journeys”: ibid.

  “I would remind you”: Barry Goldwater, acceptance speech at the twenty-eighth Republican National Convention, San Francisco, July 1964; available at washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/daily/may98/goldwaterspeech.htm.

  “(correctly) perceived”: Priscilla L. Buckley, Living It Up with National Review: A Memoir (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 2005), 187.

  “[h]er prose, while always careful”: Priscilla Buckley cited in Linda Hall, “The Last Thing She Wanted,” The American Prospect, October 23, 2005, 19.

  “My God, did he love and appreciate his daughter”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “hysterical smallness” and “good deal of unpleasantness”: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, August 6, 1960, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  “Nothing if not eclectic!”: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, September 27, 1959, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  “I just turned a corner”: Joan Didion letter to Peggy La Violette, November 9, 1961, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  “[We] were all Westerners”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 177.

  A series of short stories: “Coming Home,” “The Welfare Island Ferry,” and “When Did Music Come This Way? Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?” in Joan Didion, Telling Stories (Berkeley, Calif.: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1978).

  “everything I saw and heard”: Didion, Telling Stories, 6.

  “a romantic figure in … white suits”: Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” New York, September 2, 1996, 31–32.

  “hostile”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “That’s what we did then”: ibid.

  “In ‘Goodbye to All That’”: Dan Wakefield in conversation with the author, May 4, 2013.

  “new people”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “rumors of abortions”: Mary Cantwell, Manhattan Memoir (New York: Penguin, 1998), 199.

  “tidal surge”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 80.

  “spent most of every morning in tears”: Nicholas Haslam, Redeeming Features: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 156.

  “All the fruit’s going”: Didion, Telling Stories, 6.

  “One incident I remember”: Noel Parmentel quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” 32.

  “What do I want with some little nobody”: ibid.

  “Those Okies she grew up with”: ibid., 33.

  “tapped into a certain vein of discontent”: Joan Didion, “Turning Point,” in Nostalgia in Vogue, 2000–2010, ed. Eve MacSweeney (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 81–82.

  “equalizers” and “sedation of anxiety”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 180, 186.

  “I was bored”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.

  “bad afternoon”: Joan Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” Life, December 5, 1969, 34.

  “Noel came over to my place”: Dan Wakefield in conversation with the author, May 4, 2013.

  “nothing much touched him” and “Nobody wants to”: Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.

  “memoir” and “fiction which recalls a time”: John Gregory Dunne, Vegas (New York: Random House, 1974), frontispiece.

  “capacity for voyeurism”: ibid., 199.

  In a letter to journalist Jane Howard: John Gregory Dunne letter to Jane Howard, October 17, 1973, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

  “large, good-looking woman”: Dunne, Vegas, 201.

  “to see if anyone famous had died”: ibid., 200.

  “She required total concentration”: ibid., 201.

  “There must have been five hundred bodies”: Dunne quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “How John Gregory Dunne Puts Himself into Books,” New York Times, May 3, 1982; available at www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/reviews/dunne-work.html.

  “Don’t be obtuse”: Dunne, Vegas, 206.

  “sat and stared”: ibid., 205.

  “I listened to the way people talked”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), xv.

  “The joke … was that the nuns”: George Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2,” The Paris Review 38, no. 138 (Spring 1996); available at theparisreview.org/interviews/1430/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-2-john-gregory-dunne.

  “we divided into the Four Oldest and the Two Youngest”: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 16.

  “a full cargo of ethnic and religious freight”: ibid.

  “their faces scrubbed and shiny”: “Dominick Dunne Biography”; available at www.biography.com/print/profile/dominick-dunne-9542407.

  “steerage to suburbia”: Dunne, Harp, 34.

  “[I was] slightly ashamed of my origins”: ibid., 45.

  “Get mad and get even”: ibid., 26.

  “[H]e had an enormous influence” and subsequent quotes from Dominick Dunne: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” originally published in Vanity Fair, March 2004; reprinted in Andrew Blauner, ed., Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 186.

  “coloreds,” “wayward,” and “as my mother was the dispenser of Kotex”: Dunne, Harp, 45.

  “sniper fire”: ibid., 30.

  “quick man with a strap”: ibid., 16.

  “would do my crying for me”: ibid., 17.

  “played life on the dark keys”: ibid., 18.

  “I listened for a heartbeat”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 159.

  “and worked in the factories”: Dunne, Vegas, 88.

  “very worldly”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

  Dunne thought the fellow queer: Dunne expressed this suspicion in a letter to Jane Howard on December 30, 1974, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

  “pageantry”: Dunne, Vegas, 107–108.

  “taint on the human condition”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

  “Where you from?”: Dunne, Vegas, 115.

  “Though it was three years after Hiroshima”: ibid., 116.

  “cherry”: ibid.

  “Hartford was a Yale town”: Dunne, Harp, 46.

  “I was just a tight-assed upper-middle-class kid”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting, No. 2.”

  “contacts who might help me”: Dunne, “The Death of a Yale Man,” The New York Review of Books, April 20, 1993; available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1993/apr/22/the-death-of-a-yale-man.

  “swordsmen”: ibid., 98.

  “finally made contact”: ibid., 120.

  “John was always fascinated”: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” 187.

  “constituency of the dispossessed,” “white and black underclass,” and “I grew to hate the officer class”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

  “to appreciate whores”: ibid.

  “Every failure in New York”: Dunne quoted in Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992), 57.

  “tinkling the ivories”: John Gregory Dunne, “Catching the Next Trend,” Esquire, April 1977, 10.

  “waiters from the Tower Suite”: Dunne, Regards, 283.

  “most creative gossip”: Calvin Trillin, Floater (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 30.

  “was always discovering two people”: Wakefield, New York in the Fifties,
231.

  “I was a jerk”: Dunne, Regards, 350.

  “I was still trying to run the game”: Joan Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses,” Vogue Daily, October 31, 2011; available at www.vogue.com/magazine/article/in-sable-and-dark-glasses-joan-didion.

  “I want to marry him” and “The minute I got into this house”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, “Joan Didion—Losing John,” O, The Oprah Magazine, 2005; available at www.saradavidson.com/joan-didion-losing-john.

  CHAPTER 10

  “couldn’t”: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 137–38.

  “Saigon-watcher”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 350.

  “I didn’t even know where the countries were”: Dunne quoted in Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992), 33.

  “what now seems a constant postcoital daze”: Dunne, Regards, 351.

  “I respected these guys”: Dunne quoted in Wakefield, New York in the Fifties, 331.

  “set straight the local reporters”: Dunne, Regards, 235.

  “all shit”: ibid., 351.

  “I start a book”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,” The Paris Review 20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter, 1978); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion.

  “very complicated chronologically”: ibid.

  “A friend would leave me the key”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 235.

  “fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk”: ibid., 232–33.

  “everything in it”: ibid., 232.

  “[T]hese dwarfs would go out into the garden”: Chris Chase, “The Uncommon Joan Didion,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1977.

  “Its specialty is being two blocks away”: Calvin Trillin, Floater (New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 68.

  “The usual suspects all turned it down”: Noel Parmentel to the author, February 5, 2013.

  “He used to say”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “I wrote this book” and subsequent quotes from Ivan Obolensky: Ivan Obolensky in conversation with the author, January 22, 2013.

  “pounding the sidewalks”: Matthew Guinn, “David McDowell: Forgotten Man of Letters,” Publishing Research Quarterly (Spring 1988): 1.

  “What does it mean?”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.

  “didn’t know how to do anything at all”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “That’s why the last half is better than the first half”: ibid.

  Smith couldn’t get anything past him: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “I kept trying to run the first half through”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71.”

  “Obolensky had a wonderful party” and subsequent quotes about the party: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

  “Things change”: Joan Didion, Run River (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 47.

  “Okie voice”: ibid., 68.

  “little interest”: ibid., 133.

  “talk about their diets”: ibid., 182.

  “lots of land / Under starry skies a-bove”: ibid., 162.

  “towns so clean”: ibid., 177.

  “She was not certain”: ibid., 264.

  “We could make the reasons”: ibid., 25.

  “late for choosing”: ibid., 33.

  “The future was being made”: ibid., 157.

  “tenacious”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 160.

  “not inaccurate characterization”: ibid., 166.

  “while the shrill verve”: Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife”; available at www.poets.org/viewmedia.php./prmMID/15283.

  “A member of Vogue’s staff”: Vogue, May 1963, 204.

  “[T]here are moments”: Katherine Mansfield, The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, ed. C. K. Stead (London: Penguin, 1977), 173.

  “While the scene here is California”: Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1963; available at www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-didion/run-river.

  “the appearance in California”: Guy E. Thompson, “California Saga Echoes Faulkner,” Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1963.

  “Miss Didion’s first novel”: The New Yorker, May 11, 1963, 178.

  “seemed to think”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

  “war was not even being fought” and subsequent quotes from David Halberstam: David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (New York: Dell, 1979), 642, 644–46.

  “There’s no way Time”: Dunne quoted in Wakefield, New York in the Fifties, 331.

  “light at the end of the tunnel”: ibid., 332.

  “dreamed of being an adventurer”: Dunne, Regards, 244–45.

  “The longing in man’s heart”: Life, October 19, 1962, 20.

  “tuneful source”: ibid., 117.

  “modern methods”: ibid., 96.

  “[W]e did not guarantee to each other”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), xix.

  “I don’t know of many good marriages”: Trudy Owett, “Three Interviews,” New York, February 15, 1971, 40.

  “It wasn’t so much a romance”: Didion quoted in Madore McKenzie, “Joan Didion Is Small but Far from Timid,” Boca-Raton News, July 21, 1977.

  “without emotional investment” and “clinically detached”: John Gregory Dunne, Vegas (New York: Random House, 1974), 4–5.

  “Who can I turn to?” John Gregory Dunne, Crooning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 17.

  “Marriage, writing” and subsequent quotes from Robinson: Jill Schary Robinson in conversation with the author, April 23, 2013.

  “I’m in a serious decline”: ibid.

  “My mother had a party for us”: Dunne quoted in Bernard Weinraub, “At Lunch with John Gregory Dunne: The Bad Old Days in All Their Glory,” New York Times, September 14, 1994; available at www.nytimes.com/1994/09/14/garden/at-lunch-with-john-gregory-dunne-the-bad-old-days-in-all-their-glory.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm.

  “by-elections in Liechtenstein”: Dunne, Regards, 352.

  “San Francisco’s independently owned”: Ransohoff’s advertisement in the San Francisco City Directory, 1963; available at sfgeneaology.com/sanfranciscodirectory/1963/1963_2853.pdf.

  “It’s when a woman is thirty” and subsequent quotes from this article: Vogue, July 1963, 31.

  “vertigo”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 15.

  “You know those little old ladies”: Michiko Kakutani, “Staking Out California,” New York Times, June 10, 1979; available at www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.htm?ref-joandidion.

  “The entire John Birch library”: Didion, Where I Was From, 205.

  “the classic betrayal”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 165.

  “So who were those little faggots?”: Robert Lipsyte quoting Ali in Muhammad Ali Through the Eyes of the World, ed. Mark Collings (London: MPG Books, 2001), 259.

  “a lot of people talking to [her]”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “unshirted hell”: Noel Parmentel, “Portrait of the Reviewer,” National Review, January 30, 1962, 68.

  “[One day] I stopped riding”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 141.

  “lilac and garbage”: ibid., 228.

  “[I] could not walk on upper Madison Avenue”: ibid., 237.

  “Its main liability”: Joan Didion, “Captain Newman, M.D.: ‘Painless Erosion,’” Vogue, April 1964, 42.

  “What disagreements?”: Halberstam, The Powers That Be, 647.

  “I could sit through”: Joan Didion, “The Guest,” Vogue, March 1964, 57.

  “What a Way t
o Go”: Joan Didion, “What a Way to Go: ‘A Million and a Half a Laugh,’” Vogue, May 1964, 60.

  “Although I assume”: Joan Didion, “The Night of the Iguana: ‘The Dream and the Nightmare,’” Vogue, September 1964, 106.

  “Everyone’s sitting around”: Lynne Sharon Schwartz interview, New York in the Fifties, directed by Betsy Blankenbaker (Figaro Films, 2000), film documentary.

  “The American soil”: James Baldwin in New York in the Fifties, film documentary.

  “Who’d you call”: Joan Didion, “Doulos—The Finger Man: ‘Wild, Scary, Comic,’” Vogue, April 1964, 42.

  “precisely because we know them so well”: Joan Didion, “The Organizer: ‘A Parlour Trick,’” Vogue, July 1964, 35.

  “She knew exactly what she was doing”: Dan Wakefield in conversation with the author, May 4, 2013.

  “creepy self”: Didion quoted in Wakefield, New York in the Fifties, 334.

  “[S]ome things just aren’t as funny as they once were”: Joan Didion, “Bedtime Story: ‘Prolonged Sick Joke,’” Vogue, August 1964, 34.

  “the only seduction”: Joan Didion, “The Pink Panther: ‘Built-in Comicality,’” Vogue, March 1964, 57.

  “[T]here was a song”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 226.

  “If New York is the site”: Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World: Place, Patriotism, and the New York Mainstream,” The New Yorker, July 15, 1972, 52.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Joan definitely had the real estate gene”: Josh Greenfeld in conversation with the author, April 6, 2013.

  “Joan put an ad in the paper”: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” originally published in Vanity Fair; reprinted in Andrew Blauner, ed., Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 187–88.

  “Feel the swell”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 227.

  “her blue Dacron crepe nightgown”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 34.

  “nutty idea”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,” The Paris Review 48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-Joan-didion.

  “In Hollywood”: Jill Schary Robinson in conversation with the author, April 23, 2013.