The White Album

by Joan Didion

  Indeed some locals do, and some nonlocals too. Reducing the number of lone souls careering around the East-West Corridor in a state of mechanized rapture may or may not have seemed socially desirable, but what it was definitely not going to seem was easy. “We’re only seeing an initial period of urifamiliarity” I was assured the day I visited Caltrans. I was talking to a woman named Eleanor Wood and she was thoroughly and professionally grounded in the diction of “planning” and it did not seem likely that I could interest her in considering the freeway as regional mystery. “Any time you try to rearrange people’s daily habits, they’re apt to react impetuously. All this project requires is a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning. That’s really all we want.”

  It occurred to me that a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning might seem, in less rarefied air than is breathed at 120 South Spring, rather a great deal to want, but so impenetrable was the sense of higher social purpose there in the Operations Center that I did not express this reservation. Instead I changed the subject, mentioned an earlier “pilot project” on the Santa Monica: the big electronic message boards that Caltrans had installed a year or two before. The idea was that traffic information transmitted from the Santa Monica to the Xerox Sigma V could be translated, here in the Operations Center, into suggestions to the driver, and flashed right back out to the Santa Monica. This operation, in that it involved telling drivers electronically what they already knew empirically, had the rather spectral circularity that seemed to mark a great many Caltrans schemes, and I was interested in how Caltrans thought it worked.

  “Actually the message boards were part of a larger pilot project,” Mrs. Wood said. “An ongoing project in incident management. With the message boards we hoped to learn if motorists would modify their behavior according to what we told them on the boards.”

  I asked if the motorists had.

  “Actually no,” Mrs. Wood said finally. “They didn’t react to the signs exactly as we’d hypothesized they would, no. But. If we’d known what the motorist would do...then we wouldn’t have needed a pilot project in the first place, would we.”

  The circle seemed intact. Mrs. Wood and I smiled, and shook hands. I watched the big board until all lights turned green on the Santa Monica and then I left and drove home on it, all 16. 2 miles of it. All the way I remembered that I was watched by the Xerox SigmaV. All the way the message boards gave me the number to call for CAR POOL INFO. AS I left the freeway it occurred to me that they might have their own rapture down at 120 South Spring, and it could be called Perpetuating the Department. Today the California Highway Patrol reported that, during the first six weeks of the Diamond Lane, accidents on the Santa Monica, which normally range between 49 and 72 during a six-week period, totaled 204. Yesterday plans were announced to extend the Diamond Lane to other freeways at a cost of $42,500,000.

  1976

  Good Citizens

  1

  I WAS ONCE invited to a civil rights meeting at Sammy Davis, Jr. ’s house, in the hills above the Sunset Strip. “Let me tell you how to get to Sammy s,” said the woman to whom I was talking. “You turn left at the old Mocambo.” I liked the ring of this line, summing up as it did a couple of generations of that peculiar vacant fervor which is Hollywood political action, but acquaintances to whom I repeated it seemed uneasy. Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” someone said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois he had advised me as well that “no man is an island.” As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway. “What a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism,” I heard an actor say about the death in a plane crash of the president of the Philippines. It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony. “Those men are our unsung heroes,” a quite charming and intelligent woman once said to me at a party in Beverly Hills. She was talking about the California State Legislature.

  I remember spending an evening in 1968, a week or so before the California primary and Robert Kennedy’s death, at Eugene’s in Beverly Hills, one of the “clubs” opened by supporters of Eugene McCarthy. The Beverly Hills Eugene’s, not unlike Senator McCarthy’s campaign itself, had a certain déjà vu aspect to it, a glow of 1952 humanism: there were Ben Shahn posters on the walls, and the gesture toward a strobe light was nothing that might interfere with “good talk,” and the music was not 1968 rock but the kind of jazz people used to have on their record players when everyone who believed in the Family of Man bought Scandinavian stainless-steel flatware and voted for Adlai Stevenson. There at Eugene’s I heard the name “Erich Fromm” for the first time in a long time, and many other names cast out for the sympathetic magic they might work (“I saw the Senator in San Francisco, where I was with Mrs. Leonard Bernstein...”), and then the evening’s main event: a debate between William Styron and the actor Ossie Davis. It was Mr. Davis’ contention that in writing The Confessions of Nat Turner Mr. Styron had encouraged racism (“Nat Turner’s love for a white maiden, I feel my country can become psychotic about this”), and it was Mr. Styron’s contention that he had not. (David Wolper, who had bought the motion picture rights to Nat Turner, had already made his position clear: “How can anyone protest a book,” he had asked in the trade press, “that has withstood the critical test of time since last October?”) As the evening wore on, Mr. Styron said less and less, and Mr. Davis more and more (“So you might ask, why didn’t I spend five years and write Nat Turner? I won’t go into my reasons why, but...”), and James Baldwin sat between them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in understandable but rather theatrical agony. Mr. Baldwin summed up: “If Bill’s book does no more than what it’s done tonight, it’s a very important event.” “Hear, hear,” cried someone sitting on the floor, and there was general agreement that it had been a stimulating and significant evening.

  Of course there was nothing crucial about that night at Eugene’s in 1968, and of course you could tell me that there was certainly no harm and perhaps some good in it. But its curious vanity and irrelevance stay with me, if only because those qualities characterize so many of Hollywood’s best intentions. Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked (the confrontation on the courthouse steps, the revelation that the opposition leader has an anti-Semitic past, the presentation of the bill of particulars to the President, a Henry Fonda cameo), the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade. Marlon Brando does not, in a well-plotted motion picture, picket San Quentin in vain: what we are talking about here is faith in a dramatic convention. Things “happen” in motion pictures. There is always a resolution, always a strong cause-effect dramatic line, and to perceive the world in those terms is to assume an ending for every social scenario. If Budd Schulberg goes into Watts and forms a Writers’ Workshop, then “Twenty Young Writers” must emerge from it, because the scenario in question is the familiar one about how the ghetto teems with raw talent and vitality. If the poor people march on Washington and camp out, there to receive bundles of clothes gathered on the Fox lot by Barbra Streisand, then some good must come of it (the script here has a great many dramatic staples, not the least of them a sentimental notion of Washington as an open forum, cf. Mr. Deeds Goes to Washington), and doubts have no place in the story.

  There are no bit players in Hollywood politics: everyone makes things “happen.�
� As it happens I live in a house in Hollywood in which, during the late thirties and early fifties, a screenwriters’ cell of the Communist Party often met. Some of the things that are in the house now were in it then: a vast Stalinist couch, the largest rag rug I have ever seen, cartons of New Masses. Some of the people who came to meetings in the house were blacklisted, some of them never worked again and some of them are now getting several hundred thousand dollars a picture; some of them are dead and some of them are bitter and most of them lead very private lives. Things did change, but in the end it was not they who made things change, and their enthusiasms and debates sometimes seem very close to me in this house. In a way the house suggests the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals, but I do not mention that to many of the people who visit me here.

  2

  Pretty Nancy Reagan, the wife then of the governor of California, was standing in the dining room of her rented house on 45th Street in Sacramento, listening to a television newsman explain what he wanted to do. She was listening attentively. Nancy Reagan is a very attentive listener. The television crew wanted to watch her, the newsman said, while she was doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home. Since I was also there to watch her doing precisely what she would ordinarily be doing on a Tuesday morning at home, we seemed to be on the verge of exploring certain media frontiers: the television newsman and the two cameramen could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a cinema verite study of the rest of us watching and being watched by one another. I had the distinct sense that we were on the track of something revelatory, the truth about Nancy Reagan at 24 frames a second, but the television newsman opted to overlook the moments peculiar essence. He suggested that we watch Nancy Reagan pick flowers in the garden. “That’s something you might ordinarily do, isn’t it?” he asked. “Indeed it is,” Nancy Reagan said with spirit. Nancy Reagan says almost everything with spirit, perhaps because she was once an actress and has the beginning actress’s habit of investing even the most casual lines with a good deal more dramatic emphasis than is ordinarily called for on a Tuesday morning on 45th Street in Sacramento. “Actually,” she added then, as if about to disclose a delightful surprise, “actually, I really do need flowers.”

  She smiled at each of us, and each of us smiled back. We had all been smiling quite a bit that morning. “And then,” the television newsman said thoughtfully, surveying the dining-room table, “even though you’ve got a beautiful arrangement right now, we could set up the pretense of your arranging, you know, the flowers.”

  We all smiled at one another again, and then Nancy Reagan walked resolutely into the garden, equipped with a decorative straw basket about six inches in diameter. “Uh, Mrs. Reagan,” the newsman called after her. “May I ask what you’re going to select for flowers?”

  “Why, I don’t know,” she said, pausing with her basket on a garden step. The scene was evolving its own choreography.

  “Do you think you could use rhododendrons?”

  Nancy Reagan looked critically at a rhododendron bush. Then she turned to the newsman and smiled. “Did you know there’s a Nancy Reagan rose now?”

  “Uh, no,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  “It’s awfully pretty, it’s a kind of, of, a kind of coral color.”

  “Would the...the Nancy Reagan rose be something you might be likely to pick now?”

  A silvery peal of laughter. “I could certainly pick it. But I won’t be using it.” A pause. “I’aw use the rhododendron.”

  “Fine,” the newsman said. “Just fine. Now I’ll ask a question, and if you could just be nipping a bud as you answer it...”

  “Nipping a bud,” Nancy Reagan repeated, taking her place in front of the rhododendron bush.

  “Let’s have a dry run,” the cameraman said.

  The newsman looked at him. “In other words, by a dry run, you mean you want her to fake nipping the bud.”

  “Fake the nip, yeah,” the cameraman said. “Fake the nip.”

  3

  Outside the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica a hard subtropical rain had been falling for days. It scaled still more paint from the faded hotels and rooming houses that front the Pacific along Ocean Avenue. It streamed down the blank windows of unleased offices, loosened the soft coastal cliffs and heightened the most characteristic Santa Monica effect, that air of dispirited abandon which suggests that the place survives only as illustration of a boom gone bankrupt, evidence of some irreversible flaw in the laissez-faire small-business ethic. In any imaginative sense Santa Monica seemed an eccentric place for the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce to be holding a national congress, but there they were, a thousand delegates and wives, gathered in the Miramar Hotel for a relentless succession of keynote banquets and award luncheons and prayer breakfasts and outstanding-young-men forums. Now it was the President’s Luncheon and everyone was listening to an animated singing group called The New Generation and I was watching the pretty young wife of one delegate pick sullenly at her lunch. “Let someone else eat this slop,” she said suddenly, her voice cutting through not only the high generalities of the occasion but The New Generation’s George M. Cohan medley as well. Her husband looked away, and she repeated it. To my left another delegate was urging me to ask every man in the room how the Jaycees had changed his life. I watched the girl down the table and asked the delegate how the Jaycees had changed his life. “It saved my marriage and it built my business,” he whispered. “You could find a thousand inspirational stories right here at this President’s Luncheon.” Down the table the young wife was sobbing into a pink napkin. The New Generation marched into “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” In many ways the Jaycees’ 32nd Annual Congress of America’s Ten Outstanding Young Men was a curious and troubling way to spend a few days in the opening weeks of 1970.

  I suppose I went to Santa Monica in search of the abstraction lately called “Middle America,” went to find out how the Jaycees, with their Couéistic emphasis on improving one’s world and one’s self simultaneously, had weathered these past several years of cultural shock. In a very real way the Jaycees have exemplified, usually so ingenuously that it was popular to deride them, certain ideas shared by almost all of the people in America’s small cities and towns and by at least some of the people in America’s large cities, ideas shared in an unexamined way even by those who laughed at the Jaycees’ boosterism and pancake breakfasts and safe-driving Road-e-os. There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an “introvert” into an “extrovert,” if one learns to “speak effectively” and “do a job,” success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally. There was the approach to international problems which construed the underdeveloped world as a temporarily depressed area in need mainly of People-to-People programs. (“Word of Operation Brotherhood swept through the teeming masses of Asia like a fresh wind from the sea,” reads a Jaycee report on one such program in the late Fifties. ) If only because these ideas, these last rattles of Social Darwinism, had in fact been held in common by a great many people who never bothered to articulate them, I wondered what the Jaycees were thinking now, wondered what their mood might be at a time when, as their national president put it one day at the Miramar, “so much of America seems to be looking at the negative.”

  At first I thought I had walked out of the rain into a time warp: the Sixties seemed not to have happened. All these Jaycees were, by definition, between 21 and 35 years old, but there was a disquieting tendency among them to have settled foursquare into middle age. There was the heavy jocularity, the baroque rhetoric of another generation entirely, a kind of poignant attempt to circumnavigate social conventions that had in fact broken down in the Twenties. Wives were lovely and forbearing. Getting together for drinks was having
a cocktail reception. Rain was liquid sunshine and the choice of a table for dinner was making an executive decision. They knew that this was a brave new world and they said so. It was time to “put brotherhood into action,” to “open our neighborhoods to those of all colors.” It was time to “turn attention to the cities,” to think about youth centers and clinics and the example set by a black policeman-preacher in Philadelphia who was organizing a decency rally patterned after Miami’s. It was time to “decry apathy.”

  The word “apathy” cropped up again and again, an odd word to use in relation to the past few years, and it was a while before I realized what it meant. It was not simply a word remembered from the Fifties, when most of these men had frozen their vocabularies: it was a word meant to indicate that not enough of “our kind” were speaking out. It was a cry in the wilderness, and this resolute determination to meet 1950 head-on was a kind of refuge. Here were some people who had been led to believe that the future was always a rational extension of the past, that there would ever be world enough and time for “turning attention,” for “problems” and “solutions.” Of course they would not admit their inchoate fears that the world was not that way any more. Of course they would not join the “fashionable doubters.” Of course they would ignore the “pessimistic pundits.” Late one afternoon I sat in the Miramar lobby, watching the rain fall and the steam rise off the heated pool outside and listening to a couple of Jaycees discussing student unrest and whether the “solution” might not lie in on-campus Jaycee groups. I thought about this astonishing notion for a long time. It occurred to me finally that I was listening to a true underground, to the voice of all those who have felt themselves not merely shocked but personally betrayed by recent history. It was supposed to have been their time. It was not.