The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  “We put ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on the record player”: Didion, The White Album, 41.

  “Joan and I connected”: Eve Babitz quoted in Lili Anolik, “All About Eve and Then Some,” Vanity Fair, March 2014, 291.

  “Los Angeles had no modern art museum”: Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), xxiii–xxiv.

  “[T]he book is so curious”: Philip Leider, “Books Received: Twentysix Gasoline Stations, by Edward Ruscha,” Artforum, September 1963, 57.

  “I want absolutely neutral material”: Ed Ruscha quoted in John Coplans, “Concerning ‘Various Small Fires’: Edward Ruscha Discusses His Perplexing Publications,” in Edward Ruscha, Leave Any Information at the Signal, ed. Alexandra Schwartz (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 26.

  “direct response to life”: John Coplans, “The New Painting of Common Objects,” in Pop Art: A Critical History, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 43. For more about Ruscha’s work, see Alexandra Schwartz, Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010).

  “contemporary morality”: C. D. B. Bryan, “‘The Pump House Gang’ and ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’” New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1968; available at www.nytimes.com/1968/08/18/books/1968wolfe-acid.html?_r=0.

  “There is a very thin line”: Ed Ruscha quoted in Coplans, “Concerning ‘Small Various Fires,’” 22.

  “I never ask”: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 1.

  “I imagined that my”: Didion, The White Album, 41.

  “The first time I dropped acid”: Dominick Dunne, “Murder Most Unforgettable,” Vanity Fair, April 2001; reprinted at sensationalsharontate.blogspot.com/2009/08/one-of-sharons-friends-dies-author.html.

  “Jay had a private room”: ibid.

  “She wore her blonde hair straight”: ibid.

  “jitters”: Didion, The White Album, 42.

  “You could smell the semen”: Eve Babitz quoted in Hoskyns, Hotel California, 70.

  “my moon lamp”: John Gregory Dunne, Dutch Shea, Jr. (New York: Pocket Books, 1983), 195. Didion has said that phrases attributed to Cat in the novel came from Quintana.

  “We invited one hundred people”: Elizabeth Mehren, “Authors Share Personal Footnotes: Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe Speak to Literati at PEN Meeting,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1985; available at articles.latimes.com/print/1985-11-13/news/vw-5406_1_novelist-joan-didion.

  “It was a fucking zoo”: Jemima Hunt, “The Didion Bible,” The Guardian, January 12, 2003; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/12/fiction.society.

  “I thought it was Colonel Klink”: Griffin Dunne quoted in “Sarasota Film Festival 2013: Closing Weekend,” Sarasota, April 13, 2013; available at sarasotamagazine.com/on-stage/2013/04/15/sarasota-film-festival-2013-closing-weekend.

  “Chicken salad”: Hunt, “The Didion Bible.”

  “[W]hen I gave it to her”: Mehren, “Authors Share Personal Footnotes.”

  “She had just done a concert”: Didion, The White Album, 25.

  “passed out on the divan”: Mehren, “Authors Share Personal Footnotes.”

  “convenience of being close to the street dealers”: Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise, 295.

  “It’s so strong”: ibid., 300.

  CHAPTER 16

  “We’ve got entertainment”: John Gregory Dunne, The Studio (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), 111.

  “accept the nomination”: Lyndon Johnson quoted in Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York: New American Library, 1968), 102.

  “They find an almost childlike fascination” and “[i]ndoors or outdoors”: James Shepley, a letter from the publisher in Time, July 7, 1967, photo insert captions (unpaginated).

  “The only American newspapers”: Joan Didion, “Alicia and the Underground Press,” The Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1968, 14.

  “I find that most people east of Nevada”: Henry Robbins letter to Robert Coles, October 18, 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  “A lot of shit”: John Gregory Dunne letter to Julie Coryn, April 5, 1968: in ibid.

  “the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 212.

  “Protest songs are dead”: Roger McGuinn quoted in Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes, and the Sound of Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 159.

  “from behind some disabling aphasia,” “There was a sense,” and “to the fly”: The White Album, 24–25.

  Eve Babitz told me: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.

  “Each of us was mad at the other”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, “Joan Didion—Losing John,” O, The Oprah Magazine, 2005; available at www.saradavidson.com/joan-didion-losing-john.

  “Manifest Destiny”: John Gregory Dunne, Crooning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 60.

  “Why seek ye the living”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 208.

  “lawns of the men”: ibid., 213.

  “my arena, my stage”: Jane Howard cited in the “Biographical Note” to the Jane Howard Papers, ca. 1930–1996, Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections; available at www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079538.

  “so depressing”: Joan Didion, Telling Stories (Berkeley, Calif.: Friends of the Bancroft Library, 1978), 13.

  “2 skirts”: Didion, The White Album, 34–35.

  “payable by the state”: ibid., 70.

  “That, apparently, was my big mistake”: Nancy Reagan, My Turn (New York: Random House, 2011); available at books.google.com/books?isbn=0307766520.

  “It was kind of a mean piece”: Lou Cannon cited in The Annotated Script; available at http://newshour-the-pbs.org/newshour/nancy-reagan/annotated_bib/Act5AnnotatedScriptRET.pdf.

  “My biggest fault”: Reagan, My Turn.

  “watch[ing] Nancy Reagan being watched by me”: Didion, The White Album, 90.

  “Fake the nip”: ibid., 92.

  “aggressive manipulator” and “not one of Nancy Reagan’s greatest admirers”: Bernard Weinraub, “The Public’s Feelings About Its First Ladies Are Decidedly Mixed,” New York Times, March 8, 1987; available at www.nytimes.com/1987/03/08/weekinreview/the-public-s-feelings-about-its-first-ladies-are-decidedly-mixed.

  “It has the feeling of the dust bowl”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 103.

  “hot and close” and “Dozens of vending machines”: ibid., 82–83.

  “where the rich used to live”: ibid., 89.

  “If Canada is a bummer”: ibid., 91.

  “How many men must the U.S. send?”: Time, July 7, 1967, 13.

  “if the Republican Party comes beating at my door”: ibid., 14.

  “I hope we get a look at your next one”: Robert Giroux quoted in a letter to Henry Robbins from John Gregory Dunne, March 1, 1968, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Special Collection.

  “Quintana’s mommy” and “mindlessly happy”: Joan Didion, “Where Tonight Show Guests Go to Rest,” Esquire, October 1976, 25.

  “You are at all times prey to subversive elements”: Dunne, Quintana & Friends, 87.

  “reality contact” and subsequent quotes from Didion’s psychiatric report: Didion, The White Album, 14–15.

  “an inappropriate response”: ibid., 15.

  “Many saw the unleashing”: Time, June 14, 1968, 15.

  “It became clear to me:” ibid., 93.

  “total breakdown” and subsequent quotes from “Singular Voices” questionnaire: rough draft of Harper’s Bazaar questionnaire, “Singular Voices: 100 Women in Touch with Our Time,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  King
of Beasts: Aesop’s Fables cited in Hugh Sidey, Time, June 28, 1968, 16.

  “[He offers] a dizzying series”: William Gass, “The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon,” The New York Review of Books, April 25, 1968; available at www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1968/apr/25/the-leading-edge-of-the-trash-phenomenon.

  “enthusiasm and literary fireworks”: C. D. B. Bryan, “‘The Pump House Gang’ and ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’” New York Times Book Review, August 18, 1968; available at www.nytimes.com/1968/08/18/books/1968wolfe-acid.html?_r=0.

  “some of the finest magazine pieces”: Dan Wakefield, “People, Places, and Personalities” in New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1968; available at www.nytimes.com/1968/06/21/books/didion-bethlehem.html.

  “Mailer presents this book”: Alfred Kazin, “The Trouble He’s Seen,” New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1968; available at www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-armies.html.

  “The new journalism”: Gay Talese quoted in Nicolaus Mills, The New Journalism: A Historical Anthology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), xii.

  “never dreamed”: Tom Wolfe, “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’; Eyewitness Report,” New York, February 14, 1972; available at nymag.com/news/media/47353/.

  “A new kind of journalism”: Dwight Macdonald quoted in Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution (New York: Crown), 5.

  “So far nobody in or out of the medical profession”: Tom Wolfe quoted in ibid., 107–108.

  “The ceiling is moving”: ibid., 114.

  “Despite the skepticism”: ibid., 105.

  “though her own personality”: Wakefield, “People, Places, and Personalities.”

  “cat’s ass”: handwritten note from John Gregory Dunne to Henry Robbins, October 2, 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  “I am comfortable”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 62–63.

  “I had a strong feeling that it was necessary”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at www.achievment.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1.

  “The fiction voice”: Didion quoted in Connie Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.

  her “beauty”: Henry Robbins letter to Joan Didion, October 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  “hippie” jacket: Joan Didion letter to Henry Robbins, October 2, 1967; in ibid.

  “pretty shocking”: ibid.

  “bleak and joyless”: “Melancholia, U.S.A.,” Time, June 28, 1968, 84.

  “Journalism by women”: Melvin Maddocks quoted in “Contemporary Reviews of Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” compiled by Jesse Donaldson for the author; available at http://didion.wikispaces.com/Contemporary+Reviews+of+Slouching+Towards+Bethlehem.

  “to that bend in the river”: Time, June 28, 1968, 84.

  “Defoe, Addison and Steele”: Jack Newfield quoted in Mills, The New Journalism, xvi.

  “In the Sixties you kept hearing”: Nora Sayre, Sixties Going on Seventies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5.

  “The so-called stylistic excesses”: Robert Scholes, “Double Perspective on Hysteria,” The Saturday Review, August 24, 1968, 37.

  “I am not the society in microcosm”: Didion, The White Album, 135.

  “movements of the Army day”: ibid., 152.

  REACH OUT AND GRAB THE GREATEST SUMMER EVER: Sayre, Sixties Going on Seventies, 12.

  “Chicago is a police state”: Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 145.

  “We will try to develop”: ibid., 135.

  “[J]oy, nooky, circle groups”: ibid.

  “not American”: ibid., 103.

  “time, I think”: ibid., 48.

  “faraway places”: ibid., 80.

  “country had learned an almost unendurable lesson”: ibid., 34.

  “political ideas are reduced”: Didion, The White Album, 86.

  “senseless-killing neighborhood”: ibid., 15.

  “someone who can talk”: ibid., 17.

  “since there [were] no winters”: Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood (New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), 126.

  “We hear sirens in the night”: Richard Nixon’s acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Miami, August 8, 1968; available at presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25968#axzz2h4V_FXLK.

  “Where you was?”: John Gregory Dunne, Dutch Shea, Jr. (New York: Pocket Books, 1983), 23, 25, 369.

  “I remember watching her weed it”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 150.

  CHAPTER 17

  “an adequate supply”: Nora Sayre, in Sixties Going On Seventies (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5.

  “Mommy’s snake book”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 37.

  “I wanna dance”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 68.

  Mills insisted: John Gregory Dunne letter to Henry Robbins, November 1, 1968, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

  “Romeo and Juliet on junk”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 175.

  “Writing is essentially donkey work”: John Gregory Dunne, “Foreword to the New Edition,” The Studio (New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), unpaginated.

  “What do they speak there?”: ibid., 156.

  “It is the season … of divorce”: Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 3.

  “season of doubt”: Joan Didion, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love,” Life, December 19, 1969, 28.

  “We communicated in nuance”: John Gregory Dunne, Vegas (New York: Random House, 1974), 268.

  “tell each other about their first wives”: Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 224.

  “Didion’s description of Maria’s abortion”: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect” (1979); available at writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html.

  “You familiar with this area, Maria?”: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 77.

  “theatrical temperament”: Michiko Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California,” New York Times, June 10, 1979; available at www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?ref=joandidion.

  “John and I were having a fight”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play, 19.

  “Did they have trouble?”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.

  “We … refrain”: Joan Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” Life, December 5, 1969, 34.

  “Why do you always have to be right”: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 141.

  “Anyway, John and I stayed together”: Trudy Owelt, “Three Interviews by Trudy Owelt,” New York, February 15, 1971, 40.

  “never worked for us”: Dunne, Vegas, 270.

  “If you can make the promise over again”: Owelt, “Three Interviews by Trudy Owelt,” 40.

  “What’s new with you?” and subsequent quotes about this conversation: Dunne, Vegas, 174–75.

  “familiar season of discontent”: ibid., 11.

  “too high a trouble quotient”: ibid., 245.

  “she’d try harder to make things matter”: Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.

  “precocious” and “could be construed”: Jeff Glor, “Blue Nights by Joan Didion,” Author Talk, CBS News, January 28, 2012; available at cbsnews.com/videos/author-talk-blue-nights-by-joan-didion.

  “She claimed”: Dunne, Vegas, 269–70.

  “a sleepwalker”: Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.

  “I am reminded that we laugh at the same things”: ibid.
<
br />   “That child is the picture of Ginger Rogers”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 110.

  “There were simply too many drugs”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 2013.

  “Cass used to send a limo”: ibid.

  Michelle Phillips told Didion a stunning story: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013. A version of the story appears in Phillips’s memoir, California Dreamin’ (New York: Warner Books, 1986), 22–23.

  “She closed her eyes against the light”: Didion, Play It As It Lays, 215.

  “quite paranoid”: Phillips, California Dreamin’, 187.

  “heard sounds one night”: ibid.

  “lit biz”: John Gregory Dunne letter to Henry Robbins, April 7, 1969, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. All details of Dunne’s New York book party are from documents in these records.

  “much darker than it was anyplace else”: “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.

  “Although it is not necessary”: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 49.

  “scattered to the four winds”: Dunne, Quintana & Friends, 13.

  “May all the one-eyed critics”: Philip H. Dougherty, “Postmortem on Saturday Evening Post,” New York Times, March 30, 1969; available at select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?.

  “did the LaBianca murder”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “drinking beer and smoking grass”: Tex Watson quoted at mansonsbackporch.com/library.html.

  “I can remember we had a baby-sitter”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “Darling, put the gun away”: Dominick Dunne, “Murder Most Unforgettable,” Vanity Fair, April 2001; available at sensationalsharontate.blogspot.com/2009/08/one-of-sharons-friends-dies-author.html.

  “It was the most bizarre period of my life”: Michelle Phillips quoted in ibid.

  “a kind of a conflicting sense”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

  “[T]his investigation”: William “Billy” Doyle interviewed by LAPD lieutenant Earl Deemer, August 30, 1969; available at cielodrive.com/updates/?cat=3.

  “were garbled and contradictory”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 42.