The Last Love Song
Page 84
“marginal titles”: Boris Kachka, Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 199.
“touch and go,” “frightened the whiskers,” and “had to try”: ibid., 198.
“[f]inancial considerations”: ibid., 200.
“such major writers”: Sarah Gallick, “Some Gossip,” Harper’s magazine, September 30, 1974, 4.
“None of [my] authors”: Kachka, Hothouse, 201.
“surrogate father”: ibid., 202.
“to our part of town”: Roger Straus letter to Lois Wallace, July 25, 1974, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
“the new novel is going well”: Roger Straus letter to Joan Didion, November 11, 1975, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“not the kind of writer that should be put on the block”: Kachka, Hothouse, 203.
“terribly impressed” and subsequent quotes about Wharton: Didion quoted in Madore McKenzie, “Writer Joan Didion: A Laugh Like a Silver Bell,” Boca Raton News, July 21, 1977.
“an uncertain but determined adolescent”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 19.
“some gynecological detective work” and “This is not … feasible”: Sara Davidson, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion (San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).
“to make it all one book”: McKenzie, “Writer Joan Didion.”
“Maybe because he thought”: ibid.
“[T]hree weeks of one-night stands”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 40.
“You’d find yourself”: “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.
“the better part of an afternoon”: Dunne, Regards, 40.
“Call KL 5-2033”: ibid.
“a groupie”: ibid.
“roomy suite”: Robert Lamm, “Memoir 4: Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, and Colonel Klink,” posted at ChicagoTheBand.us/forum/topics/memoir-4-joan-didion-john?commentID=5536203%3AComment%3A31058.
“ate caviar for the first time”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 89.
“onstage, on one of the amps”: ibid.
“the crowd had rocked the car”: ibid.
“did not want to go to her grandmother’s”: ibid., 90.
“I crave the power Charlie Manson had”: Talbot, Season of the Witch, 176.
“an ongoing program”: ibid., 128.
“blasting off”: ibid.
“If everybody is willing to accept the fact”: “Wayne Says Patty Hearst Should Be Granted Freedom,” Eugene Register-Guard, December 2, 1978.
“bad energy”: Stephen Davis, “Power, Mystery, and the Hammer of the Gods: The Rise and Fall of Led Zeppelin,” Rolling Stone, July 4, 1985; available at http://boards.atlantafalcons.com/topic/2988594-the-rise-and-fall-of-led-zeppelin-power-mystery-and-the-hammer-of-the-gods/.
“greatest domestic firefight”: Farrell, How I Got to Be This Hip, 71.
“[I]t was clear”: ibid., 81.
“police shoot-out”: Talbot, Season of the Witch, 194.
“It Took 500 Cops”: Miles Corwin, “The Shootout on East 54th Street,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1994; available at articles.latimes.com/1994-05-18/local/me-59109_1_east-54th-street.
“The LAPD was making a statement”: ibid.
“homage of a coast-to-coast auto-da-fe”: Farrell, How I Got to Be This Hip, 71–72.
“President Nixon Vietnam Watergate”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 6.
CHAPTER 22
“[T]here was a sense that something was happening”: This and subsequent quotes in this chapter are from Caitlin Flanagan’s article “The Autumn of Joan Didion,” The Atlantic, January/February 2012, 95–100.
“Certainly I have nothing in common with Hunter”: Didion quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society.
“This may be the year”: Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing: The Fat City Blues,” cited in Marc Weingarten, The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism Revolution (New York: Crown, 2005), 267.
“At night I would be the only person on the campus”: Don Swaim’s audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion.
“[I] wrapped myself in my bedspread”: Joan Didion, After Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 115–16.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better”: Didion quoted in Rachel Donadio, “Every Day Is All There Is,” New York Times, October 9, 2005; available at www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html?pagewanted=all.
“Drink”: John Gregory Dunne, Harp (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 31–32.
“I had always thought body bags were black”: ibid., 33.
“a dozen or so students in the English Department”: Joan Didion, Democracy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 71–72.
“in the face of definite annihilation”: Didion, After Henry, 123.
“blue in the glass at Chartres”: ibid., 124.
“the blue that is actually a shock wave in the water”: ibid.
“question of whether one spoke of Saigon ‘falling’”: ibid., 117.
“plotting of Vanity Fair”: ibid.
“Tank battalions vanished”: Didion, Democracy, 73.
“colors of the landing lights”: ibid.
“amount of cash burned”: ibid., 73–74.
“formed a straight line”: 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.
“I’m a writer” and subsequent quotes regarding this encounter: Didion, After Henry, 118.
“At nineteen I had wanted to write”: ibid.
“large numbers of … Vietnamese”: George Esper, “Evacuation from Saigon Tumultuous at the End,” New York Times, April 30, 1975; available at www.nytimes.com/learning/general/specials/Saigon/evacuation.html.
“Americans can [now] regain the sense of pride”: Gerald Ford’s speech at Tulane University, April 23, 1975, posted at historyplace.com/speeches/ford-tulane.htm.
“number of Vietnamese soldiers”: Didion, Democracy, 74.
“[E]ditors do not, in the real world”: Didion, After Henry, 21.
Didion said she had worked up the nerve: Joan Didion letter to Lois Wallace, August 7, 1976, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“I’ve been sitting here”: Didion quoted in Susan Braudy, “A Day in the Life of Joan Didion,” Ms., February 1977, 108.
“[T]here’s no getting around the fact”: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” New York Times Book Review, December 5, 1976; reprinted in Joan Didion: Essay and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 5.
“By which I mean”: ibid.
“You just lie low”: ibid.
CHAPTER 23
“I don’t mean physically”: Susan Stamberg, “Cautionary Tales,” in Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 22.
“A Book of Common Prayer to some extent”: ibid., 23.
“What I work out in a book”: ibid.
“congealed into a permanent political class”: Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 9.
“In North America”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, “A Visit with Joan Didion,” in Friedman, ed., Joan Didion, 14.
“fantastic
researcher”: 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.
“intercutting”: ibid.
“big set-piece”: ibid.
“still hadn’t delivered [the] revolution”: 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.
“romance”: ibid.
“power and beauty”: Henry Robbins letter to Joan Didion, March 24, 1976, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
magic objects: This list of objects and texts can be found among the Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“low dread”: Davidson, in Friedman, ed., Joan Didion, 15.
“The oil rainbow slick” and “He runs guns”: ibid.
“When I heard Charlotte say this”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”
“I don’t want to be tired alone”: Pablo Neruda, “A Certain Weariness,” clipping found in the Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.
“As a child of comfortable family”: Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 59.
“I tell you … about myself”: ibid., 21.
“child of the western United States”: ibid., 59–60.
“Some women”: ibid., 84.
“So you know the story”: ibid., 11.
“underwater narrative”: Joan Didion, Vintage Didion (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 50.
“no history”: Didion, A Book of Common Prayer, 14.
“occasional mineral geologist”: ibid., 26.
“alone in the dark”: ibid., 24.
“in a dirty room in Buffalo”: ibid., 258.
“I have not been the witness I wanted to be”: ibid., 272.
The way to sell a literary novel: Joan Didion letter to Lois Wallace, August 7, 1976, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“capable of having sex with a venetian blind”: ibid.
“I just think he was a saint!”: Caitlin McDermott Click, “People Watching in Washington,” Politico, April 2013; available at politico.com/blogs/click/2013/94/ben-stein-nixon-was-a-saint-162102.html.
“I just didn’t have”: Alicia C. Shepard, “People and Politics: Woodward and Bernstein Uncovered,” The Washingtonian, September 1, 2003; available at washingtonian.com/articles/people/woodward-and-bernstein-uncovered.
“I remember going to a party”: Ben Stein in conversation with the author, June 6, 2013.
“I wasn’t invited”: Dominick Dunne, The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper (New York: Crown, 1999), 199.
“Put it this way, it’s our beads”: Susan Braudy, “A Day in the Life of Joan Didion,” Ms., February 1977, 66.
“I wasn’t crazy about their playing in the cage”: John Gregory Dunne, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), 41–42.
“It should make us a lot of money”: James Kimbrell, Barbra: An Actress Who Sings: An Unauthorized Biography (Wellesley, Mass.: Branden Books, 1984), 198.
“I had seen Barbra”: ibid., 195.
“Jon has a way of seeing me”: ibid., 196.
“Jon’s brainstorm”: excerpts of Peters’s book proposal, posted at deadline.com/2009/05/it-should-be-called-dickhead-jon-peters-book-proposal-sets-new-low.
“A Star Is Born was becoming a career”: Dunne, Regards, 41.
“We couldn’t … quit”: ibid., 42.
“Put a band behind me”: Kimbrell, Barbra, 198.
“The Didion/Dunne third draft”: Frank Pierson, “My Battles with Barbra and Jon,” New West, November 22, 1976; available at barbra-archives.com/bjs_library/70s/new_west_battles_barbra_jon.html.
“People are curious”: ibid.
“We are going to miss planes”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion (San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).
“for absolutely no reason”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 87.
“I would drive past Zuma”: Joan Didion, The White Album (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 211.
“some grave solar dislocation”: ibid.
“most aqueous filtered light”: ibid., 216.
most fertile at “full moon”: ibid., 218.
“I had never talked to anyone so direct”: ibid., 221.
she felt she had become impossible to live with: Chris Chase, “The Uncommon Joan Didion,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1977.
“I’m like a child in my parents’ house”: Didion quoted in Davidson, Joan, 17.
“A Book of Common Prayer was an evil impulse” and subsequent quotes from Noel Parmentel unless otherwise noted: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.
“calumny”: Noel Parmentel letter to Dick Snyder, January 28, 1977, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“[S]he was incapable”: Didion, Book of Common Prayer, 85.
“it would [not] be legally improper”: Rachel Ulell letter to Noel Parmentel, February 7, 1977, Lois Wallace Literary Agency Records, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
“Where are we heading”: Didion, The White Album, 173.
“She’s remarkably well-adjusted”: Dominick Dunne quoted in John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 6.
“We go out to dinner in Tucson”: Didion, The White Album, 162.
“The Hilton Inn”: Didion, Blue Nights, 90.
“[S]he had no business in these hotels”: ibid., 88.
“[U]nder no condition” and “I believed as I did”: ibid., 126.
“How do you like our monuments?”: ibid., 91.
“Had an interesting talk with Carl Bernstein”: Didion, The White Album, 177.
“all white”: Didion, Blue Nights, 91.
most Americans were too soft: Rachel Donadio, “Every Day Is All There Is,” New York Times, October 9, 2005; available at www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html?pagewanted=all.
“[W]e were often, my child and I”: Didion, The White Album, 176.
“more sad songs”: Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1977; available at www.kirkusreviews.com/book-review/joan-didion/a-book-of-common-prayer/.
“its own capacity to come up with the truth”: Russell Davies, “Then and Now, 1977,” Times Literary Supplement, July 8, 1977, available at the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article833615.ece.
“a not untypical North American”: Joyce Carol Oates, “A Taut Novel of Disorder,” New York Times Book Review, April 3, 1977; available at www.nytimes.com/1977/04/03/books/didion-prayer.html?_r=0.
“The oft-rewritten script”: John Simon, “May, Bogdonovich, and Streisand: Varieties of Death Wish,” New York, January 10, 1977, 56.
“A concert sequence”: Jay Cocks, “Barbra: A One-Woman Hippodrome,” Newsweek, January 3, 1977, 68.
“During the filming”: Simon, “May, Bogdonovich, and Streisand,” 56.
“windfall”: John Gregory Dunne, Crooning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 179.
“Quintana just said”: Dunne, Quintana & Friends, 6.
CHAPTER 24
“I knew doom when I saw it”: Mike Davis, “Let Malibu Burn: A Political History of the Fire Coast,” posted at ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/misc/misc/SoCalFires.html.
“The seven million people”: ibid.
“But when do you give her the money?”: Joan Didion, Blue Nights (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 92.
“[A]s little girls do”: John Gregory Dunne, Quintana & Friends (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 6.
“other mother”: ibid.
“What
do you think?”: Sara Davidson, Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion (San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).
“something obscene about rolling pastry”: Chris Chase, “The Uncommon Joan Didion,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1977.
“combat intelligence”: ibid.
“She fucked her way to the middle”: ibid.
“Saturday jits”: Sara Davidson, “A Visit with Joan Didion,” in Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 13.
“ideal writer’s wife”: Josh Greenfeld in conversation with the author, April 6, 2013.
“They were like one person”: Dominick Dunne quoted in Susanna Rustin, “Legends of the Fall,” The Guardian, May 20, 2005; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/usnationalbookawards.society.
“[F]rankly, I’m in the office most of the time”: Emily Stokes, “Lunch with the FT: Robert B. Silvers,” Financial Times, January 25, 2013; available at ft.com/cms/s/2/091b61b6-11e2-a3db-00144feab49a.html.
“whose lobby smelled of the Chinese food” and subsequent Wanger quotes from this article: Shelley Wanger, “It Was 1975…,” posted at www.nybooks.com/blogs/50-years/2013/apr/17/shelley-wanger-it-was-1975/.
“Even the telephone sex”: Andrew Brown, “The Writer’s Editor,” The Guardian, January 23, 2004; available at www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/society.
“I just thought she was a marvelous observer”: Robert Silvers quoted in Rachel Donadio, “Every Day Is All There Is,” New York Times, October 9, 2005; available at nytimes.com/2005/10/09/books/review/09donadio.html?page wanted=all.
“by no means predictable”: Robert Silvers quoted in Rustin, “Legends of the Fall.”
“with lunch at Patsy’s” and “If he doesn’t know”: John Gregory Dunne, Crooning (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 12–13.
Agoura fire alarms: For details on the Agoura fire, see Molly Burell, “The Hour-by-Hour Battle of $70 Million Holocaust,” Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Archive; available at lafire.com/famous_fires/1978-1000_MandevilleCanyonFire/102978_mandeville_LBpresstele.htm.
“a house in West Hartford”: Davidson, Joan.
“suburbia house”: Didion, Blue Nights, 50.