The Last Love Song (109 page)

“this used to be a good town before”: John Gregory Dunne,
Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), 11.

if “you are working on a book about the strike”: Dick Kluger letter to Joan Didion, July 15, 1966, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“People, issues, and causes”: Dunne,
Quintana & Friends,
117.

“In Ingles!”: John Gregory Dunne's notebook, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“The soil [here] has been engineered”: Verlyn Klinkenborg. “Lost in the Geometry of California's Farms,”
New York Times,
May 4, 2013; available at
nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/Sunday/lost-in-the-geometry-of-californias-farms.htm/?_r=0
.

“largest human alteration of the earth's surface”: ibid.

“He had proposed a story on Chavez” and subsequent quotes from Streshinsky: Shirley Streshinsky to the author, March 25, 2012.

“Who is this fellow”: John Gregory Dunne's notebook, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“the Vietcong”: Dunne,
Delano,
158.

“Agriculture is the very foundation of our nation”: ibid., 111.

“I see you got a sunburn last Monday”: ibid., 85.

“Because I had been tired too long”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
187.

“In early August 1966”: Dunne,
Delano,
154.

“temperament for paradise”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
188.

“[S]omething to see”: Joan Didion,
Democracy
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 11.

“They do not describe” and “done Carson”: Joan Didion, “Where
Tonight Show
Guests Go to Rest,”
Esquire,
October 1976, 77.

“pale and bored”: ibid.

“sleazy festivity”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
191.

“[S]omeone just four years younger than”: ibid., 192–93.

“girls with hibiscus in their hair”: ibid., 194.

“Inside were a mother and seven children”: Dunne,
Delano,
98.

“California golden girl”: Dunne,
Quintana & Friends,
116–17.

CHAPTER 14

“Seldom has a jury”: Ruth Reynolds, “A Murder Jury Had to Decide Whether a Pregnant Wife Was Trying to Keep or Get Rid of Her Husband,”
Reading Eagle,
September 5, 1965.

“lies only an hour east”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 3.

“It was then and there”: Marc Reisner, excerpt from
Cadillac Desert,
in Gayle Wattawa
, Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California's Inland Empire
(Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2006), 19.

“What will I tell the children”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
6.

“October is the bad month”: ibid., 3.

“It might have been anyone's bad summer”: ibid., 9.

“[It] was a bright warm day”: ibid., 19.

“I now learned how others saw us”: Susan Straight, “Introduction,” in Wattawa,
Inlandia,
xx.

“The future always looks good”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
4.

“The guys I worked with”: James Fallows, “WigWams, Wittfogel, and Joan Didion: All in One Post,”
The Atlantic
online; available at
www.theatlantic.com/national/print/2013/08/wigwams-wittfogel-and-joan-didion-all-in-one-post
.

“full of hot exciting young babes”: ibid.

“It helped to make you famous but it's my life”: letter quoted in Debra J. Miller, “A Mother's Crime,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 2, 2006; available at
http://articles.latimes.com/print/2006/apr/02/magazine/tm-dreams14
.

“She didn't do it”: Reynolds, “A Murder Jury Had to Decide…”

“I never sleep”: Joan Didion's remarks at the 2007 National Book Award ceremony upon receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, November 14, 2007, Marriott Marquis Hotel, New York.

CHAPTER 15

“I am talking here”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 11.

“The place [was] vast”: John Gregory Dunne,
Crooning
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 39.

“Bette Davis had”: ibid.

“Now the pimps and junkies”: ibid.

“Synanon owned one house”: These days the Dunnes' old house is itself the home of the Shumei Hollywood Center, which advertises “healing by spiritual light.”

“a vast Stalinist couch”: Didion,
The White Album,
89.

“It is raining in California”: Karl Shapiro cited in ibid., 65.

“in order to live” and “The princess is caged in the consulate”: Didion,
The White Album,
11.

“Everybody knew everybody” and subsequent Phillips quotes: Michelle Phillips,
California Dreamin'
(New York: Warner Books, 1986), 90, 118, 119.

“What do you want?”: Didion,
The White Album,
19.

“It seems to me”: ibid.

“the man who will bring a big breath of fresh air”: Seth Rosenfeld,
Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 361.

“Before this is all over”: ibid.

“big ticket”: handwritten note (author unidentified) to Carl Brandt, February 25, 1966, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“troubled time”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Modern Library, 2000), xvi.

“Tell me that my house is burned down”: Didion,
The White Album,
172.

“Delano?”: Joan Didion letter to Henry Robbins, August 1, 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“The door on the Victorian commode” and other quotes about the break-in: John Gregory Dunne,
Quintana & Friends
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 42–43.

“superb job of reporting”: Henry Robbins letter to John Gregory Dunne, January 27, 1967, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“I keep waiting and hoping”: Dick Kluger letter to John Gregory Dunne, January 4, 1967; in ibid.

“You can run a Greyhound bus”: Dunne,
Quintana & Friends,
112.

“was as if Achilles had fallen”: ibid., 113.

“And now that you're with FSG”: Henry Robbins letter to John Gregory Dunne, February 1, 1967, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“When I started writing”: Tom Wolfe cited in Marc Weingarten,
The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution
(New York: Crown, 2005), 95.

“I had not been able to work in some months”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xiii–xiv.

“San Francisco was where”: ibid., 85.

Max Rinkel: For this and subsequent references to the history of LSD's development and distribution, I have drawn upon Jay Stevens,
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream
(New York: Harper & Row, 1987), and Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain,
Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion
(New York: Grove Press, 1985).

“I have been born again”: Cary Grant quoted in Stevens,
Storming Heaven,
64.

“If the doors of perception”: epigraph in Aldous Huxley,
The Doors of Perception
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).

“wisdom drugs”: Stevens,
Storming Heaven,
147.

“People are beginning to see”: Allen Ginsberg quoted in ibid., 146–47.

“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies”: William Carlos Williams quoted in ibid., 114.

“After Delano” and subsequent quotes from Shirley Streshinsky: Shirley Streshinsky to the author, April 1, 2012.

Paul Hawken: For a profile of Paul Hawken, see Wes Smith, “The Gardener of Eden,”
Chicago Tribune,
January 9, 1989; available at
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-01-09/features/8902240351_1_smith-hawken-paul-gardening
.

“total theater”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
95.

“Somebody is usually doing something interesting” and “garage of a condemned hotel”: ibid.

“actually an old factory”: Jean Allison Young quoted in William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyogi,
History of Erewhon
(Lafayette, Calif.: Soyinfo Center, 2011), 276–77.

“I just stayed around awhile”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
85.

“photos of personal saints”: Magic Bus; available at
http://magicbussf.com/october-06-1966-love-pageant-rally-in-panhandle
.

“We wanted to create a celebration of innocence”: ibid.

“We're in the same business”: Ken Kesey quoted in Alice Echols,
Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 157.

“giant restaurant mayonnaise jar”: Linda Gravenites quoted in ibid., 156.

“Up until then”: ibid., 157.

“Pretty little 16-year-old”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
101.

“IF YOU DON'T KNOW”: ibid., 125.

“a very blond and pale and dirty child”: ibid., 95.

“High Kindergarten”: ibid., 127.

“pathetically unequipped”: ibid., 122.

“The only LSD we could get”: Jean Allison Young quoted in Shurtleff and Aoyogi,
History of Erewhon,
276–77.

“Wow”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
106.

“who were never taught”: ibid., 84.

“less in rebellion”:
Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations,
ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton, N.J.: Ontario Review Press, 1984), 123.

“These were children”: ibid.

“Anybody who thinks”: ibid., 120.

“[T]he peculiar beauty”: ibid., 121.

“Broken Man” and “
Hello, Quintana
”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 51.

“imperative” and “I was … as sick”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xiii, xv.

“was a very odd piece to do”: “The Female Angst: Anaïs Nin, Joan Didion, and Dory Previn,” interview by Sally Davis, Pacifica Radio Archives Preservation and Access Project, KPFK, February 1, 1972; available at
www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recordings/bc0611
.

“running so close to deadline”: Joan Didion's remarks at the 2007 National Book Award ceremony upon receiving the Medal for Contribution to American Letters, November 14, 2007, Marriot Marquis Hotel, New York.

“despondent” and “finished the piece”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
xiv.

“I suppose almost everyone who writes”: ibid.

“unfair”: Christopher Bollen, “Joan Didion,”
V Magazine
; available at
christopherbollen.com/portfolio/joan_didion.pdf
.

“I want to include a special option clause”: Henry Robbins letter to Joan Didion, July 12, 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“mindless”: Joan Didion letter to Henry Robbins, August 1, 1967; in ibid.

“would either prove”: Didion quoted in Chris Chase, “The Uncommon Joan Didion,”
Chicago Tribune,
April 3, 1977.

“inaccuracies” and “protect”: David D. Connors, Jr., for Brabeck, Phleger, and Harrison, Attorneys, in a letter to Roger Straus and Henry Robbins, June 28, 1967, John Gregory Dunne Papers, 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“alleged errors”: ibid.

“The author has clearly conveyed” and “The sweet and gentle Chavez”: Subscriber letters to Don McKinney at
The Saturday Evening Post
; in ibid.

“I've tried several approaches on the DELANO”: L. Marvin Craig letter to Roger Straus, August 12, 1967, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“a very difficult young man”: John Gregory Dunne letter to Henry Robbins, March 22, 1967, John Gregory Dunne Papers 1962–1967, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

“The [thematic] combinations are endless”: Lois Wallace letter to Henry Robbins, September 21, 1967; in ibid.

“‘as it lays' part”: Henry Robbins letter to Joan Didion, August 9, 1967; in ibid.

“Will you tell Joan, please”: Roger Straus letter to John Gregory Dunne, August 24, 1967; in ibid.

“confus[ing] objectivity” and “postscript to Joan”: Henry Robbins letter to John Gregory Dunne, September 27, 1967; in ibid.

“There was no reason for him”: John Gregory Dunne, “Foreword to the New Edition,”
The Studio
(New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), unpaginated.

“became as anonymous”: ibid.

“[T]he omniscient cool narrator”: ibid.

“As a story”: ibid.

“There was a jasmine vine”: Didion,
The White Album,
41.

“She cooked nonstop” and subsequent quotes from Eve Babitz, unless otherwise noted: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.