The Last Love Song
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“His rose garden was lovely”: Dominick Dunne, “Murder Most Unforgettable.”
“People were sending their children out of town” and “Steve McQueen packed a gun”: ibid.
“Many people I know in Los Angeles”: Didion, The White Album, 47.
“The tension broke that day”: ibid.
“greatest peaceful event in history”: Spencer Bright, “Forty Far-Out Facts You Never Knew about Woodstock,” The Daily Mail, August 8, 2009; available at dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1204849/forty-far-facts-knew-woodstock.html.
“Commedia dell’Artestyle group”: posted at rootsofwoodstock.com/2013/03/28/gerry-michael-and-the-bummers.
“kind of the spark for the Festival”: Weston Blalock and Julia Blalock, eds., Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory to “Woodstock” (Woodstock, N.Y.: WoodstockArts, 2009), 27–28.
whom Michael’s son said he met in a bar: Sean Day Michael to the author, November 4, 2013.
“wheel person”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”
“In fact we never talked about ‘the case’”: Didion, The White Album, 43.
“I was at the time the vice president” and subsequent quotes about Katleman: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 172, 175–76, 177.
“The numbers of the dead”: posted at time.com/history/faces-of-the-american-dead-in-vietnam-life-magazine-june-1969/#1.
“nibbled to death by ducks”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 111.
“to put me out in a world of revolution”: Didion quoted in Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” New York, September 2, 1996, 33.
“William L. Calley, Jr.”: Seymour Hersh, “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 13, 1969; available at pierretristam.com/Bobst/library/wf-200.htm.
“outstanding action”: Maurice Isserman, Vietnam War (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 134.
“These factors are not in dispute”: Hersh, “Lieutenant Accused of Murdering 109 Civilians.”
“He’s watching the NFL game”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 111.
“Some of the guys are going out”: ibid.
“Where did the morning went?”: Didion, Blue Nights, 89.
“It was point-blank murder”: Seymour Hersh, “Hamlet Attack Called ‘Point-Blank Murder,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 20, 1969; available at pierretristam.com/Bobst/library/wf-200.htm.
“The American way of war”: ibid.
“There was a lot of illusion in our national history”: ibid.
“I had better tell you where I am, and why”: Joan Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.
“At the Western Union office”: Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 112.
“didn’t get it”: Dan Wakefield quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” 32.
“I am not the society in microcosm”: Didion, The White Album, 135.
“It was a big shock”: Didion quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” 32.
“We saw you on the David Frost Show”: Henry Robbins letter to Jane Fonda, December 31, 1969, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
CHAPTER 18
she told her mother: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 6.
“‘In lieu of divorce!’”: Didion quoted in Leslie Garis, “Didion and Dunne: The Rewards of a Literary Marriage,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 1987; available at www.nytimes.com/1987/02/08/magazine/didion-dunne-the-rewards-of-a-literary-marriage.html.
“narcotized”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 159.
“Miss Didion”: Joan Didon, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love,” Life, December 19, 1969, 28.
“I’ll be there around noon”: ibid.
“I had wanted to make this Christmas”: ibid.
“[m]y husband and I see our lawyer”: ibid.
Could he have a small role in the movie?: Eileen Peterson, “They Dunne It Right!,” Twentieth Century–Fox press release, January 8, 1971, Dominick Dunne papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
“I tell myself that I am crying”: Didion, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love,” 28.
“There hasn’t been another American writer”: John Leonard, “The Cities of the Desert, the Desert of the Mind,” New York Times, July 21, 1970.
“A new novel by Joan Didion”: Lore Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing’ Meant” in New York Times Book Review, August 8, 1970; available at www.nytimes.com/1970/08/08/books/didion-play.html?_r=0.
“I just wanted to write a fast novel”: “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.
“I wanted to make it all first person”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,” The Paris Review 74 (Fall-Winter 1978); available at www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion.
“pull-back third person”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“in her essays [Didion] chooses to speak”: Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing’ Meant.”
“The water in the pool”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear”: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1976; reprinted in Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N. J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 7.
“‘character’ or ‘plot’ or even ‘incident’”: ibid.
“all eyes”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“I showed [the novel] to John”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
Lines of dialogue: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“Henry … and John and I sat down”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
“I try not to think of dead things and plumbing”: Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 8.
“a narrative strategy”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
“very arbitrary” and “I remember writing a passage”: ibid.
“By the time I finished it”: Michael Silverblatt, “The KCRW Bookworm Book Club”; available at https://soundcloud.com/KCRW/joan-didion-for-bookworm-book.
“This isn’t going to”: Sheila Heti, “Joan Didion,” The Believer, December 2011; available at believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_didion.
“And I didn’t think”: ibid.
“I told them both I wished to God”: Dunne quoted in Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,” New York, September 2, 1996, 32.
“other man”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“She would never”: Didion, Play It As It Lays, 137.
“two glands of neurotoxic poison”: ibid., 1.
“To look for ‘reasons’”: ibid.
“I might as well lay it on the line”: ibid., 5.
“[my name] is pronounced Mar-eye-ah”: ibid., 2.
“We had a lot of things and places”: ibid., 3.
“What makes Iago evil?”: ibid., 1.
“You got a map of Peru?”: ibid., 183.
“In the preface to her essays”: Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing’ Meant.”
“an ephemeral form of survival kitsch”: Kirkus Reviews, July 13, 1970; available at www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-didion/play-it-as-it-lays/.
“hurt” and “shattering”: Herman Briffault letter to Henry Robbins, undated (July 1970), Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
“t
he heroine, like the author herself”: Henry Robbins letter to Herman Briffault, July 22, 1970; in ibid.
“high intelligence” and “When Maria speaks”: Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing’ Meant.”
“I can’t believe”: Dan Wakefield quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold.”
“There was a certain tendency”: Keuhl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
CHAPTER 19
“This … house on the sea”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 47–48.
“She still had parties”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.
“The hills are scrubby and barren”: Didion, The White Album, 209.
“There are not only no blacks in Malibu”: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 80.
“They were the most sophisticated people I knew”: Carolyn Kellogg, “PEN’s Joan Didion Event Lacked Just One Thing: Joan Didion,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2013; available at latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/le-et-jc-pen-joan-didion-event-lacked-just-one-thing-joan-didion-2013015,06823645.story.
“[W]hat had started as a two-month job”: John Gregory Dunne, Vegas (New York: Random House, 1974), 231.
“look of the horizon”: Tom Brokaw interview with Joan Didion for NBC television, mid-1970s; available at youtube.com/watch?v=4qrsozdFKSU.
“a new kind of life”: Connie Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.
“Free the Strip!”: Mike Davis, “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,” Labour / Le Travail 59 (Spring 2007): 212.
“I was so unhappy”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion.
“the finest woman prose stylist”: James Dickey quoted in Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,” Harper’s magazine, December 1971, 113.
“One thinks of the great performers”: Mark Schorer, quoted in ibid.
“ripple”: Alfred Kazin’s journal, posted at theamericanscholar.org/the-passionate-encounter.
“most interesting personality”: Kazin, “Joan Didion,” 112.
“People who live in a beach house”: ibid., 114.
“very vulnerable”: ibid.
“subtle,” “alarmed fragility,” and “many silences”: ibid., 116, 120.
“full of body language”: Alfred Kazin’s journal.
“the academic-community-Moratorium”: Joan Didion, “On the Last Frontier with VX and GB,” Life, February 20, 1920, 22.
“mutilated the land”: ibid.
“not in a frontier town” and “cut free from the ambiguities of history”: ibid.
“Pretty healthy rabbit”: ibid.
“If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven”: ibid.
“[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 181.
“We had a lawn”: The Panic in Needle Park, directed by Jerry Schatzberg (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1971).
“Basically, we just reported”: Film Forum podcast on The Panic in Needle Park, January 30, 2009; available at digitalpodcast.com/items/1526291. See also “Joan Didion Remembers ‘The Panic in Needle Park,’” posted at ifc.com/news/2009/01/joan-didion-on-the-panic-in-ne.php.
“We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play”: Joshua Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds,” Time Out New York, January 22, 2009; available at timeout.com/newyork/film/junk-bonds.
“It was a fantastic script”: Film Forum podcast on The Panic in Needle Park.
“I didn’t see it as a happy ending”: ibid.
“I never found out what [he] saw”: Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds.”
“I’d seen Al four years earlier”: ibid.
“When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country”: ibid.
“[We were] a group of improbables”: Film Forum podcast on The Panic in Needle Park.
“‘We didn’t have money for heroin’”: ibid.
“The thoroughness”: ibid.
“drunk and stoned”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 184.
“knew exactly how to launch a production”: Eileen Peterson, “They Dunne It Right!” Twentieth Century–Fox press release, January 8, 1971, Dominick Dunne papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
“Neither of us likes to come back here”: Bruce Cook, “For the Dunnes, the Future Begins in L.A.,” The National Observer, March 8, 1971, 21.
“writing the film was great fun for us”: ibid.
“When a picture is shooting”: “Joan Didion Remembers ‘The Panic in Needle Park.’”
“All loss is loss”: Film Forum podcast on The Panic in Needle Park.
“I never thought this was a picture about drugs”: ibid.
“You can kill me now!”: Jeff Guinn, Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 353. For details about the Manson trial in general, I have drawn on Guinn’s excellent book.
“there is a minimum of client control”: ibid.
A young man in Berkeley: Ed Sanders, The Family (New York: New American Library, 1989), 418.
“Death is psychosomatic”: Guinn, Manson, 354.
“You have created the monster”: ibid., 357.
“coverage of the Charles Manson case”: ibid., 362.
“Your Honor, the President”: ibid., 363.
“demure,” “pigtailed,” “author Joan Didion,” and “straight”: Yvonne Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1970; available at cielodrive.com/archive/?p=6660.
“long is for evening”: Guinn, Manson, 360.
“Size 9 Petite”: Didion, The White Album, 45.
“little death”: ibid., 43.
“have two drinks”: ibid.
“You’ll kill us all”: Guinn, Manson, 360–61.
“In the name of Christian justice”: ibid., 371
“I am only what you made me”: ibid., 374–75.
“On August 13”: Sanders, The Family, 419.
“You abandoned your child”: Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial.”
Didion and FSG received letters: Nathaniel J. Friedman to Henry Robbins and Joan Didion, February 11, 1971, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
Robbins replied: Henry Robbins letter to Nathaniel J. Friedman, February 26, 1971; in ibid.
“Pussy”: Henry Robbins letter to Victor Temkin, August 11, 1970; in ibid.
“The idea was”: Dunne, Harp, 139.
“most interesting place[s]”: 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.
“weird stories”: Don Swaim’s audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion.
“This was a time”: Brod, In Depth interview with Joan Didion.
“gateway to the Caribbean”: ibid.
“triangulation of crossfire”: testimony of Perry Raymond Russo, State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw, February 10, 1969, posted at jfk-online.com/pr01.html.
“whole underbelly”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”
“had taken the American political narrative seriously”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 85.
“testimony of a number of witnesses” and subsequent quotes from the House Select Committee on Assassinations: excerpt, volume 10, House Select Committee on Assassinations; available at mcadams.posc.mu.edu/544camp.txt.
“one of those occasional accidental intersections”: Didion, After Henry, 86.
“road glass”: Dunne, Harp, 140.
“in the South they remained convinced”: Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 71.
“I had a year’s contract”: Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley, New York Public Library, November 21, 2011.
“Napalm has become ‘Incender-Jell’”: Mary McCarthy, Vietnam (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 3.
“the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy”; John Gregory Dunne, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen (New York: Random House, 1997), 75.
“the antithesis” and subsequent quotes about this meeting unless otherwise noted: David Patrick Columbia, “Remembering John Gregory Dunne,” New York Social Diary, January 7, 2004; available at newyorksocialdiary.com/the-list/2007/john-gregory-dunne.
“if Otto thought”: Dunne, Monster, 76.
“rage was never far beneath the surface”: ibid.
“grimy, roach-infested”: ibid.
“Studio executives”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 23.
“nice lesbian relationship”: Didion, The White Album, 154.
“If he got angry with us” and “[W]ith elaborate politeness”: Dunne, Monster, 76.
“Miss Universe contestants”: Dunne, Regards, 50.
“I forbid you to go”: Dunne, Monster, 76.
“My blessed cancer”: Trudy Dixon quoted by David Chadwick; available at cuke.com/Crooked Cucumber/cc excerpts/zmbm_excerpt_from_cc.htm.
“Trudy had been struggling”: Willard Dixon to the author, November 13, 2013.
“She was totally inspiring”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion (San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).
“every night to relax”: ibid.
“I didn’t like [meditation]”: ibid.
“[W]e should not do [something]”: Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, ed. Trudy Dixon (New York: Weatherhill, 2003), 53.
“In the beginner’s mind”: ibid., 21.
“As it was in the beginning”: Didion quoted in David Swick, “The Zen of Joan Didion,” Shambhala Sun, January 2007; available at www.lionsroar.com/the-zen-of-joan-didion.
“personal God”: ibid.
“vast indifference”: ibid.