The Last Love Song (111 page)

“senseless-killing neighborhood”: ibid., 15.

“someone who can talk”: ibid., 17.

“since there [were] no winters”: Eve Babitz,
Eve's Hollywood
(New York: Delacorte Press, 1974), 126.

“We hear sirens in the night”: Richard Nixon's acceptance speech, Republican National Convention, Miami, August 8, 1968; available at
presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25968#axzz2h4V_FXLK
.

“Where you was?”: John Gregory Dunne,
Dutch Shea, Jr
. (New York: Pocket Books, 1983), 23, 25, 369.

“I remember watching her weed it”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 150.

CHAPTER 17

“an adequate supply”: Nora Sayre, in
Sixties Going On Seventies
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5.

“Mommy's snake book”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play
(New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 37.

“I wanna dance”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 68.

Mills insisted: John Gregory Dunne letter to Henry Robbins, November 1, 1968, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“Romeo and Juliet on junk”: John Gregory Dunne,
Quintana & Friends
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), 175.

“Writing is essentially donkey work”: John Gregory Dunne, “Foreword to the New Edition,”
The Studio
(New York: Limelight Editions, 1985), unpaginated.

“What do they speak there?”: ibid., 156.

“It is the season … of divorce”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 3.

“season of doubt”: Joan Didion, “In Praise of Unhung Wreaths and Love,”
Life,
December 19, 1969, 28.

“We communicated in nuance”: John Gregory Dunne,
Vegas
(New York: Random House, 1974), 268.

“tell each other about their first wives”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
224.

“Didion's description of Maria's abortion”: Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, “Joan Didion: Only Disconnect” (1979); available at
writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/103/didion-per-harrison.html
.

“You familiar with this area, Maria?”: Joan Didion,
Play It As It Lays
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 77.

“theatrical temperament”: Michiko Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California,”
New York Times,
June 10, 1979; available at
www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.html?ref=joandidion
.

“John and I were having a fight”: Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play,
19.

“Did they have trouble?”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.

“We … refrain”: Joan Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,”
Life,
December 5, 1969, 34.

“
Why do you always have to be right
”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 141.

“Anyway, John and I stayed together”: Trudy Owelt, “Three Interviews by Trudy Owelt,”
New York,
February 15, 1971, 40.

“never worked for us”: Dunne,
Vegas,
270.

“If you can make the promise over again”: Owelt, “Three Interviews by Trudy Owelt,” 40.

“What's new with you?” and subsequent quotes about this conversation: Dunne,
Vegas,
174–75.

“familiar season of discontent”: ibid., 11.

“too high a trouble quotient”: ibid., 245.

“she'd try harder to make things matter”: Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.

“precocious” and “could be construed”: Jeff Glor, “
Blue Nights
by Joan Didion,”
Author Talk,
CBS News, January 28, 2012; available at
cbsnews.com/videos/author-talk-blue-nights-by-joan-didion
.

“She claimed”: Dunne,
Vegas,
269–70.

“a sleepwalker”: Didion, “A Problem of Making Connections,” 34.

“I am reminded that we laugh at the same things”: ibid.

“That child is the picture of Ginger Rogers”: Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking,
110.

“There were simply too many drugs”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 2013.

“Cass used to send a limo”: ibid.

Michelle Phillips told Didion a stunning story: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013. A version of the story appears in Phillips's memoir,
California Dreamin'
(New York: Warner Books, 1986), 22–23.

“She closed her eyes against the light”: Didion,
Play It As It Lays,
215.

“quite paranoid”: Phillips,
California Dreamin',
187.

“heard sounds one night”: ibid.

“lit biz”: John Gregory Dunne letter to Henry Robbins, April 7, 1969, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. All details of Dunne's New York book party are from documents in these records.

“much darker than it was anyplace else”: “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
.

“Although it is not necessary”: John Gregory Dunne,
Harp
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 49.

“scattered to the four winds”: Dunne,
Quintana & Friends,
13.

“May all the one-eyed critics”: Philip H. Dougherty, “Postmortem on
Saturday Evening Post,”
New York Times,
March 30, 1969; available at
select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?
.

“did the LaBianca murder”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“drinking beer and smoking grass”: Tex Watson quoted at
mansonsbackporch.com/library.html
.

“I can remember we had a baby-sitter”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“Darling, put the gun away”: Dominick Dunne, “Murder Most Unforgettable,”
Vanity Fair,
April 2001; available at
sensationalsharontate.blogspot.com/2009/08/one-of-sharons-friends-dies-author.html
.

“It was the most bizarre period of my life”: Michelle Phillips quoted in ibid.

“a kind of a conflicting sense”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“[T]his investigation”: William “Billy” Doyle interviewed by LAPD lieutenant Earl Deemer, August 30, 1969; available at
cielodrive.com/updates/?cat=3
.

“were garbled and contradictory”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 42.

“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
.