The Last Love Song (11 page)

At McClatchy High School, despite her shyness, Didion didn't always need a hall pass to get where she wanted to go. If she wasn't the most popular girl in school, she was the kind of girl the most popular girls in school wanted to hang with. She was pretty and smart, with a pageboy haircut and high-collared blouses; her writing skills and ambitions were already apparent. People felt better about themselves around Joan Didion. She was funny. Quick.

Looking back, she liked to say she didn't do well in high school. She was frail, she'd say. Always frail. Isolated and uninvolved. Several times a month, her migraines
were
debilitating. She had her family's tendency toward silence. Constantly, she questioned herself. But in yearbook pictures, she beams, appearing robust, her face full, almost chubby.

She was a member of the Rally Committee (by no means the smallest on the team, male
or
female), and wore a bulky white sweater with a big McClatchy
M
on the front. She served on the Sophomore Ball and Junior Prom committees. She was a Student Council member. She joined the Science, Press, and Spanish clubs. She worked on the yearbook,
The Nugget,
and the school newspaper,
The Prospector.

She got an after-school job with the society desk at
The Sacramento Union,
for which, she was thrilled to learn, Mark Twain had once written. “I wouldn't call [it] reporting,” she said of her first professional stints. “People wanted reports of their upcoming weddings in the paper the weekend of the wedding. And so they would send you accounts of what the bridesmaids were going to wear and stuff like that, and you would write it up.” On her own, Didion was learning it was possible to write about California in a nonboosterish way, as Josiah Royce had in
The Feud of Oakfield Creek,
a novel based on the Sacramento squatter's strike of 1850, and as Frank Norris had in
The Octopus.

It's hard to imagine what she might have sent
The Nation
(apparently, the manuscript has been lost), but she did submit a piece and received a prompt rejection. Already she felt the tension between making a name for herself at home and succeeding in the bigger world. In later years, she enjoyed recounting an anecdote involving one of her great-aunts and her mother. “We were talking about some people that we knew, the Johnston family,” Didion said. “And my great-aunt said, ‘That Johnston boy never did amount to anything.' And my mother said, ‘He won a Pulitzer Prize.' It was Alva Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize when he was working for a newspaper in New York. And my great-aunt did not even look up. She was playing solitaire, and without even looking up from her game, she said, ‘He never amounted to anything in Sacramento.'”

7

On April 25, 1952, she arrived home from school and found a letter waiting for her. She dropped her sweater and books on the hallway floor. The letter said:

Dear Joan,

The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education.

Sincerely yours,
Rixford K. Snyder,
Director of Admissions

Didion reread the letter, trying to will a revision of it. Then she ran upstairs to her room, locked the door, and wept into an old robe on the floor of her closet. All of her friends who had applied to Stanford had been admitted. She had a “sharp and dolorous image of … growing old” in the house, she wrote later, “never going to school anywhere, the spinster in
Washington Square.
” She went into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and briefly considered swallowing several old codeine and Empirin tablets from the medicine cabinet. She pictured herself gasping in an oxygen tent while a sorrowful Rixford K. Snyder hovered over her in the ICU.

Perhaps the worst humiliation was knowing that the question of getting into the “right” school, “so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile,” had never come up in conversations with her family. There was no stronger indication that, for all its history and influence in old Sacramento, the Didion family's “social situation was static” now. Later that evening, when she told her father her disappointing news, he simply offered her a drink.

 

PART TWO

 

Chapter Four

1

In 1953, Frank Didion was referred to Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco for study, tests, and treatment following what his daughter discreetly called “manifestations of … tension.” These manifestations included emotional withdrawal, heavy drinking (mostly bourbon highballs), and long silences. He littered the house with blueprints of shopping malls he would never build. He exhibited intense xenophobia, insisting the name Didion was not French, despite his family's origins in Alsace-Lorraine; the French were untrustworthy. His daughter remembered him staying at the hospital for “some weeks or months.” (The year before, an executive order had given the Veterans Administration the “responsibility for hospitalization for those members or former members of the uniformed services”—like Frank Didion—“who had chronic diseases.”)

The hospital changed its spots frequently as military culture evolved. Initially, it developed from rows of tents erected to treat sick and wounded soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War in 1898. Just after the turn of the century, a three-hundred-bed facility was completed, and by 1918, Letterman was the army's largest general hospital. Its medical staff pioneered the use of several orthopedic devices (including the “Letterman Leg”), physical therapy treatments, and—fortunately for Frank Didion—experiments in a field only then being recognized by the military, psychiatry. At the time, according to the army's Office of Medical History, the “modern concept of personality development was not widely known or accepted.” The military had only vaguely identified trauma as a legitimate medical condition, such as “alienation” or “nostalgia,” a “species of melancholy, or a mild type of insanity, caused by disappointment, and a continuous longing for the home.”

On weekends, Eduene would leave Sacramento, pick up her daughter at the Tri Delt house in Berkeley, where she was attending the University of California, and visit Frank at the hospital. They'd go to lunch. He'd only eat oysters. At area parks, he loved to watch pickup baseball games, and he liked to walk from Golden Gate Park back to the Presidio in the evenings. Didion recalled strolling with him, once, across the Golden Gate Bridge (and worrying later that a depressed person should not be allowed to walk alone across a precarious and foggy path). On Sunday nights, the ladies left Frank in the hands of the “mind guys”—his name for his doctors.

The “mind guys,” many of whom were occupational therapists, untrained in psychiatry, had at their disposal a hydrotherapy plant in one of the building's basements. When made available to neuropsychiatric patients in a “scientific manner,” it produced “most satisfactory results,” according to a Surgeon General's report. The acronym ADL—activities of daily living—became familiar to the patients, the idea being that patients needed to be as independent as possible in their personal routines. “Reality Testing Situations” (work assignments, social planning, ordering bread from the Alcatraz bakery) were encouraged. Generally, psychiatric patients were given what the hospital termed a “Total Push Program,” consisting of strenuous physical activity, recreation, and work. They were accompanied at all times by a physician. Talk sessions with psychiatrists were rare, as there was a shortage of trained doctors (most carried caseloads of thirty or more). Frank
did
later tell his daughter a particular “woman doctor” had been very helpful to him, prompting him to discuss the loss of his mother.

Probably he failed to quit bourbon highballs during his hospital stay, as each Friday afternoon the Letterman Officers' Club opened its doors to doctors and patients for a happy hour. There, among old adobe walls, waves of wounded GIs from Korea rolled toward the bar, some on gurneys. At sundown, flags were lowered, trumpets blared, and cannon were fired.

Frank was not restricted to neuropsych. He could leave the S-1 Ward any time he wished, wander uphill from Crissy Field to the main gate, and catch a trolley or the Muni no. 45 into San Francisco, though he did not much care for the city. The hillsides were canopied with orange California poppies and eucalyptus trees swaying in cool ocean breezes, lizards and salamanders scurrying among ice plants. These long walks, away from family, away from the amputees and the tuberculosis and malaria sufferers in the wards, may have done as much as anything to ease his “tension.”

Years later, his daughter's writing would teach readers to seize the odd detail. Here's an odd detail about the Letterman General Hospital: James Alexander Hamilton, a graduate of Berkeley and of Stanford's medical school, received his training there; a former chief of the assessment services of the OSS, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, Hamilton would one day establish a drug-testing laboratory at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a male-only state prison. Briefly, Letterman housed Dr. James E. Ketchum, who would go from San Francisco to the Edgewood Arsenal's Medical Research Laboratories in Maryland, where, as chief of the Psychopharmacolgy Branch, he was “given pretty much a free hand,” he said—along with a large congressional budget—to pursue mind-control experiments on human subjects using LSD, THC, and a long-acting atropine compound called BZ.

That Letterman General Hospital engaged in questionable medical experiments is certain; in 1955, a Letterman official wrote to Walter Reed Hospital, asking about the protocols for obtaining “permission” from patients on whom certain “test doses” were to be tried. This letter surfaced in the early 1990s during the Congressional Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments hearings, which acknowledged that the “Army and the CIA had conducted LSD experiments on unwitting subjects” in the 1950s and 1960s. It's unlikely that Frank Didion had anything to do with such experiments, but he was among the population from whom the “unwitting subjects” were drawn: a military man, willing to serve; sick, accepting of treatments; a veteran, for whom financial compensation to the family could be dispatched with no questions should anything misfire.

To mention these odd details in connection with Frank Didion's treatment for depression at Letterman General Hospital in 1953 is to risk losing hold of our narrative. Yet in little more than a decade after her father's convalescence in San Francisco, Didion would be intrigued by the fact that San Francisco seemed to be the epicenter of LSD's spread across the United States; intrigued enough to mention in one of her best-known early essays, “In Bed,” that Sandoz Pharmaceuticals first synthesized LSD-25 in its search for a cure for migraines, from which she still suffered once or twice a week; intrigued enough to travel to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to witness a group LSD trip; intrigued enough to note that the press blamed what
Time
magazine called the “counterculture” for the lysergic craze, while it was in medical facilities and government labs that two of the counterculture's emerging leaders, Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg, first took the drug.

In fact, losing hold of the narrative, in a California whose true nature seemed increasingly clandestine and nefarious, was how Didion would make her name as a reporter. Writing about Patty Hearst, she would say that in contemporary America, wildly disparate events often carried the “
frisson
of one another, the invitation to compare and contrast.”

So, for example, if Dr. James Alexander Hamilton, as described in a CIA memo dated May 29, 1963, was conducting research at Vacaville under “MK-ULTRA Subproject 140,” and if MK-ULTRA Subproject 140 included funding to support a “new series of experiments on 100 prisoner-subjects,” and if the CIA admitted to Congress that this research was “cover activity relating to independent work of Dr. Hamilton,” were we not invited to compare and contrast this information with the fact that Donald DeFreeze, once an informer for the L.A. Police Department, was a prisoner-subject at Vacaville, that he would later christen himself “Cinque,” found the Symbionese Liberation Army, and kidnap Patty Hearst? Were we not invited to note that the Symbionese Liberation Army never made any sense, politically or ideologically, even in a politically and ideologically unstable period,
except
in terms of the world of covert affairs, experimental drugs, domestic spying, mind-control studies, law enforcement's cozying up to organized crime, and espionage and counterespionage? Were we not invited to wonder about the fact that Congressman Leo Ryan of California, one of the CIA's staunchest critics, publicly identified Dr. James Alexander Hamilton as a CIA station agent in September 1978, and was murdered two months later in Guyana, near a former CIA training ground, by members of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple who had once offered themselves as hostages to the Symbionese Liberation Army in exchange for Patty Hearst, and who would subsequently die in a bizarre mass mind-control ritual? Were we not invited to marvel at the fact that not far from Haight-Ashbury, in the years just prior to the explosion of the LSD culture there, the CIA established a safe house under the supervision of a narcotics officer and former spy named George Hunter White, a safe house tricked up as a bordello? There, prostitutes brought unknowing customers drinks laced with LSD while White, sitting on a toilet, sipping martinis, observed the effects behind a two-way mirror. This “study” was known as Operation Midnight Climax.