The Last Love Song (26 page)

She could work undisturbed in her parents' house. They didn't ask her questions. They barely spoke to one another, or at all.

The air and the light—late into the evenings—stirred memories of Stinson Beach when she was a child: driving up the coast with her folks to watch Spencer Tracy movies at an old theater in Bolinas; screaming at a black widow beneath her mother's lawn chair at the beach cottage while her mother played solitaire. The strength of these memories only enriched the “tenacious” nostalgia webbing her novel.

After a few days, she'd miss the purple twilights of New York—slipping out to dinner in a silk dress, or watching the sun rise on someone's terrace while torch singers crooned from the hi-fi just inside the apartment.

She'd catch a late flight back east: the same guys in the same rumpled shirts.

She felt neither here nor there, which did not mean she had no obligations to her job or to friends. A Katherine Mansfield line strayed, often, into her mind: “[T]here are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the willful guests.”

*   *   *

On June 15,
Kirkus Reviews
noted, of
Run River,
“While the scene here is California, the climate seems more somnolently southern in character: the fretful dissolution; the faintly incestuous family relationships; the bourbon; the sex down on the levee; and the soft singsong of ‘baby' and ‘Everett baby.'”

Guy E. Thompson, of the
Los Angeles Times,
had also noticed “the appearance in California of a novel genre formerly indigenous to the decaying South,” singling out
Run River
. “As California wines are designated by the European type they most resemble, so must California novels be named for the established novelists they simulate. In which case this is Faulkner-type,” Thompson wrote. “Many consider the California product less robust than the original—so will readers.”

In addition to nostalgia, the novel was suffused with Noel Parmentel. It could not have sat well with Didion to have this pointed out to her repeatedly in print.

On balance, the reviews were tepid.
The New Yorker
's response was typical: “Miss Didion's first novel,” about a “childish creature who drinks too much, enjoys frequent crying spells, and takes every chance that comes along to be unfaithful,” shows her “to be the possessor of a vigorous style,” the magazine said, but her style was “wasted on her characters” who seemed like “human leftovers.” “Miss Didion writes of people who get through life instead of living it.”

Sales were disappointing, too. West Coast readers, the book's natural target, may have been confused by all this Southern talk. Literary insiders were puzzled, as well, by the book's appearance with a publisher best known for its Dixie list.

In Sacramento, a lot of people “seemed to think that I had somehow maligned them and their families,” Didion said. Maybe she
couldn't
go home again. The novel was “only read by about ten people … you know, not only was it not a commercial success, it wasn't by any means, I don't think, a success on its own terms.”

*   *   *

At exactly this moment—the summer of 1963—Buddhist monks in Vietnam began immolating themselves before the world's television cameras, protesting persecutions by the Ngo Dinh Diem administration.

Now, thought Charley Mohr, surely
Time
's editors will stop airbrushing my dispatches. In early August he prepared a piece on Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. He tied her family to government corruption in Saigon. America's investment in the Ngo family was shortsighted, he said, self-defeating. For well over a year, said David Halberstam, Mohr had been insisting that the “war was not even being fought, let alone being won” and the “Ngo family, rather than being a fine instrument of American anti-Communism, was … rotting, archaic.” Mohr's new piece made a bulletproof case: “[T]he venture in Vietnam” was folly.

When Greg Dunne received Mohr's cables, he quailed. Halberstam: “[Henry] Luce's vision of mission and truth called for one kind of story”—despite the Buddhist crisis—and “the file from Mohr called for another.”

Dunne believed Mohr: He'd been there. Furthermore, he'd served in the army; he knew war was all about class
here at home.
Forget the fucking domino theory.

To please his editors, Dunne “tried to thread the needle.” He wrote a story using some of Mohr's information, “attempting to get in as much about the arrogance and insensitivity of the family as possible, while, of course, not entirely surrendering Fort Saigon,” Halberstam said.

When Mohr saw the watered-down piece, he erupted. He fired off a letter denouncing Otto Fuerbringer's pro-Diem bias. Furious, Fuerbringer ordered a story about the “young, immature American press corps” in Vietnam; their liberal sympathies were misleading the public, he believed. Additionally, he assigned Dunne to write the next week's Vietnam piece without the use of cables from Saigon.

Halberstam got the details from Didion and Dunne:

All week, colleagues kept coming by to laugh and congratulate Dunne on his good fortune in getting the Vietnam assignment. He was very nervous about it, even more so on Friday, when a strong file came in from Mohr that began: “Vietnam is a graveyard of lost hopes.” … Dunne agonized over [what to do], went out for a drink with his fiancée … Joan Didion, and proceeded to get very drunk.

The couple went to the Chalet Suisse on West Fifty-second Street and ordered fondue. “There's no way
Time
is going to print this story,” Dunne said miserably.

“Write it the way he sent it,” Didion urged him.

He shook his head.

Halberstam: “He decided he would not return to the office but would call in sick. Miss Didion stiffened his spine; if he were a man, he would go back and write the truth, which he finally did, half drunk, staying up most of the night, turning out the worst piece of writing he had ever done for the magazine but keeping it faithful to Mohr's file.”

The “story was of course completely turned around” once the senior editors got hold of it. Instead of a losing war effort, there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” On Dunne's original copy, Fuerbringer had written, “Nice.”

With Didion's support, Dunne asked to be relieved of Vietnam assignments. From then on, he was given minutia to cover. An expected raise never came through.

*   *   *

Dunne had saved the October 19, 1962, special issue of
Life
magazine devoted to the “Call of California: Its Splendor, Its Excitement.”

He had always “dreamed of being an adventurer,” he said, and of going to someplace exotic, like Thailand, where there was “a whisper of opium and there were women always called sloe-eyed, wearing
ao dais
and practiced in the Oriental permutations of fellatio.”

His daydreams mushroomed in the Charley Mohr fallout. When his fantasies lit on California, they didn't altogether dissipate. He was
engaged
to a Californian. If her permutations weren't “Oriental,” they were sufficiently complex to have kept his interest for half a decade.

“The longing in man's heart for a better life has driven him throughout history to seek out a brighter land,”
Life
proclaimed. California! “Its only limitations rest within the power contained in the burning sun…”

The magazine hailed the Golden State's visionaries: Clark Kerr, educator; Joan Baez, a “tuneful source of … wistful intensity”; Robert Di Giorgio, agriculturalist, whose “modern methods of skillful management” were poised to lead America's march to prosperity in the 1960s.

Dunne knew from his dealings with editors, and from conversations with Didion, that California's stories were not nearly as simple as Luce would have them seem. Perhaps stronger, stranger narratives were waiting to be uncovered out west.

*   *   *

Of course,
marriage
was an adventure, but to hear the couple talk, they viewed their coming nuptials as just another assignment. Block it out, bring it in on time. What's the angle? Get it right. The first public announcement of their engagement appeared in the editor's notes column of
National Review.

“[W]e did not guarantee to each other at the end of the first week that we would still be married at the end of the second,” Dunne recalled.

“I don't know of many good marriages,” Didion said. “I don't know of many not-good marriages, either.”
What difference does it make
? It's an “exercise in self-improvement.” Like keeping a notebook.

This certainly wasn't the grand passion she had shared with Noel Parmentel. No thunder and earthquakes. She had decided pragmatism offered better long-term benefits than passion. Good-bye to all that.

“It wasn't so much a romance as
Other Voices, Other Rooms,
” Didion admitted. The reference was to Truman Capote's 1948 novel, in which a rather effeminate, tale-telling lad pursues a distanced and troubling friendship with a moody tomboy (Capote and Harper Lee as played by Dunne and Didion).

She contemplated Dunne's spying, his eavesdropping—hobbies, he said, “without emotional investment.” She feared he was “clinically detached”: a useful quality for a reporter but maybe not so good around the house. Still, the fact of his reporting explained his centrality to her life. He was a writer. He was
there.
On the ground. He knew what
on the ground
meant. How could she not be married to a writer? Who else would put up with
her
self-absorption?

She loved the way, when he thought he was alone, he'd loosen his tie and stand in front of the mirror, singing nasally, “Who can I turn to / When nobody needs me?” He was utterly, hopelessly tone-deaf.

5

“Marriage, writing, who could figure it out? It was easier for the guys. I remember, we all thought, I'd like to be a guy writer,” Didion's friend Jill Schary Robinson told me. “Male writers—like Greg Dunne—they had mystique and access. Oh my God. They were surveyors of their land and of their society, and they
caught
it. And they could do something we couldn't do. They could
fight.
Girls were supposed to be polite.

“The thing about Joan is, she never questioned, ‘Am I a writer?' even when she was about to marry Greg. So many of us took so
long
to say, ‘This is what I do and to hell with everybody else'—
I'd
abandon projects left and right to fall in love with another idiot or work on someone's political campaign. But Joan was designed
to do this,
the way a Ferrari is designed to do what it does.”

Nevertheless, Didion had to sit in the shadows, engine idling, watching “the guys” race toward the Guggenheims: Philip Roth, Josh Greenfeld, Brian Moore. Her novel languished on bookstore shelves. Tacitly, she felt, women were not in the game.

This was not a protofeminist stance. “She never got involved in the movement because she was beyond that, anyway,” Robinson said. “Joan was just Joan. Of course, where she grew up made that possible. She was so independent. She didn't seem strangled by family or conventions of any sort.”

In literary New York in the 1960s and 1970s, female role models—those who successfully balanced work, independence, and personal fulfillment—were rare. Who could a young woman turn to? Djuna Barnes? “I'm in a serious decline and the young dykes are driving me crazy,” she'd say, “but should I recover, perhaps they'll hear from me.”

Lillian Hellman? She posed regularly for
Vogue
and appeared at all the literary parties, but her reputation seemed to rest largely on Dashiell Hammett, for whom she'd become the professional keeper of the flame. The pleasure she took in this role made Didion uneasy.

Mary Bancroft? Didion took great delight in
her
: a true free spirit, a child of money (
The Wall Street Journal
), a former CIA spy, companion to Carl Jung, Allen Dulles, and Henry Luce. Everyone in the publishing industry hoped to snap up her memoirs. But again, her luster seemed linked to the men she'd drawn.

*   *   *

The women in Greg Dunne's family wondered how
this
little thing had snared their baby boy.
She wasn't one of them.
“My mother had a party for us [in Hartford] and we had a hundred and twenty-five people,” Dunne recalled. “There were one hundred and twenty-four Catholics and Joan.”

His engagement saved him, gave him something to think about on those ruinous days at his desk.

Time
assigned him to cover “by-elections in Lichtenstein, Scandinavian sexual mores, and Common Market agricultural policy.” For one piece, he was forced to compose the sentence “How small is a small tomato?”

On November 2, 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem was brutally assassinated in Vietnam.

*   *   *

Three weeks later, in San Francisco, Didion entered a grand four-story edifice on Post Street. It was the home of Ransohoff's, a department store selling itself as “San Francisco's independently owned specialty shop, traditionally known for quality and fashion.” Alfred Hitchcock had chosen the store for a key scene in his 1958 film,
Vertigo.
Despite its chattering crowds, airy ceilings, and spacious aisles, the place felt intimate, even cozy.

Didion had come to purchase a wedding dress—backless, white, short, made of silk.

On leaving the store, she heard that John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

In the following days, in newspapers and magazines, the amount of column space given to Jackie's wardrobe at the moment of the assassination was astonishing. Her pillbox hat and strawberry pink double-breasted Chanel wool suit dominated many accounts of the Kennedy shooting. The suit was described yet again when Jackie insisted on wearing it, stained with blood, at Lyndon Johnson's swearing-in on Air Force One, just before flying back to Washington, D.C.