The Last Love Song (27 page)

At JFK's funeral, Jackie, the
Vogue
girl, the Prix de Paris winner, became the nation's mother, stiffening the spines of her children; she became the nation's mourner, dignified in her grief, proudly bearing the public's sorrow; in years to come, she bore the nation's memory and myths, crafting the story of Camelot.

Women may not have been
in
the game, but women were what the game was all about.

*   *   *

“It's when a woman is thirty—give or take a few years—that she comes at last into her personality. Her hour has struck. From then on begin the magnificent years, the beginning of youth with its frustrations and crotchets drained away—the nerves, suspense, suffocations finally gone. In that ‘soft green meadow' of time, a woman emerges from the dream enclosing her, into an era of equanimity and realism.” These words, probably written by Didion, appeared in
Vogue
four months before the thirty-four-year-old Jackie Kennedy lost her husband.

Didion was twenty-eight at the time, on the verge of marrying, of leaving New York and starting a new life.

“At thirty she knows what the teen years were meant for: a preparation for something fascinating to come,” the
Vogue
article stated.

Accompanying the article was a large picture of Jackie, taken through a car window streaked with rain. The lengthy, complex caption, jeweled with a literary reference, was almost certainly the expression of the once and future Californian:

The time was right for her, no doubt about that. We wanted to grow up. She came along, and suddenly we forgot about the American girl—that improbably golden never-never child who roved through the world's imagination with a tennis racket, an unmarred make-up, and some spotty phrase-book French—and fell in love instead with the American woman, a creature possessed of thoughtful responsibility, a healthy predilection for the good and the beautiful and the expensive, and a gift for moving through the world aware of its difficulties, its possibilities, its large and small joys—the kind of American woman who at her best can be, as Henry James once said, “heiress to all the ages.”

Jackie. Joan. Ready to leap—or thrust by circumstance—toward whatever came next.

6

In
Vertigo,
Kim Novak's character leaps from the bell tower of the mission church at San Juan Bautista. At another point, Jimmy Stewart's character dresses her up to be the woman he wants her to be—in Ransohoff's. He has fallen in love with a phantom, a woman who never existed.

In choosing to buy her dress at Ransohoff's and to recite her marriage vows in the mission church at San Juan Bautista—hardly a coincidence—Didion turned her wedding into an elaborate movie reference.

Hitchcock's love of voyeurism must have appealed to the groom. After all, he said his first intimacy with his bride-to-be had followed a spying incident, in a scene reminiscent of
Rear Window.
Later, in her essay “The White Album,” Didion would describe her general response to the late 1960s, in the first years of her marriage, as “vertigo.” Perhaps the movie in-joke, involving mistaken identities, fictional characters, paralyzing phobias, and a suicide attempt beneath the Golden Gate Bridge (recalling Didion's fears for her father during his days at Letterman) was the couple's way of hedging their bets: a little self-conscious levity masking a serious commitment.

Around forty people, mostly Dunne's family, with the exception of his aunt Harriet, a devout Catholic who objected to the ceremony (Dunne was marrying outside his faith), attended the wedding on Thursday, January 30, 1964.

Dunne had not, until that day, met Didion's mother. Eduene walked up to him and said, “You know those little old ladies in tennis shoes you've heard about? Well, I'm one of them.” (For Christmas that year, Dunne gave her “the entire John Birch library, dozens of call-to-action pamphlets, boxed,” Didion said. The Eastern Catholic and the Western libertarian warmed to each other swiftly.)

The church, dedicated in 1812, located at the foot of the Gavilan Mountains, was the largest of the California missions. A stone dove, representing the Holy Ghost, hovered above a large font in a central aisle situated between short wooden pews. The church's bloodred floor tiles, made of stone and cement, had been dried outdoors before being laid; as a result, skittish animal tracks marked them. The curved interior arches, painted white and earthy tan, had been decorated by a sailor who'd jumped ship in Monterey in 1816. He became the first American citizen to settle in California.

Didion did not want a formal procession. The ghosts of the pioneers and the natives they had conquered were enough for her. She wore her short backless dress and cried softly throughout the ceremony behind a large pair of sunglasses. Dunne wore a navy blue suit.

Given her fascination with geology, she probably knew that the San Andreas Fault ran through the mission grounds, along the base of the hill below the cemetery. The 1906 earthquake had collapsed a side wall of the church; the damage was still evident on the day of the wedding (the wall would not be fully repaired until the late 1970s). The couple stood at the altar along with the best man, Dunne's younger brother, Stephen, who would one day commit suicide. They were joined, as well, by Dunne's four-year-old niece, Dominique, a flower girl. She would one day be strangled to death. Cognizant of the family drama—aware that, to parents, a child's marrying is “the classic betrayal”—and overwhelmed by the odds against happiness in life, Didion promised Dunne that, if necessary, they would release each other before “death do us part.”

*   *   *

A reception followed the wedding at the Lodge at Pebble Beach, a one-story log cabin–style inn overlooking the ocean. The couple honeymooned first in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, toasting each other in the sprawling indoor spas, admiring the blossoms along the highways, and then, bored, fled to the Beverley Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. California was every bit the luxurious adventure Dunne had thought it would be.

It's intriguing to think that at the Beverly Hills Hotel the couple might have watched on a television the Beatles' first performance on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
on Sunday, February 9. Possibly they found the Beatles, with their prim suits and neatly groomed long hair, silly. But a new music was about to sweep aside the old, the innocence of the Beatles' early lyrics—“I wanna hold your hand”—shadowed by the sexual urging of bass and drums. Rock 'n' roll wasn't fresh in 1964, but the Beatles put a stylish face on it (
Vogue
was a fan), spreading its subversive undercurrents far across and deep into the culture: black gospel, rhythm and blues, Dust Bowl laments laced with Anglo-Irish warrior screams. Within a few years, the Beatles' double record, popularly known as
The White Album,
would disorient and fascinate Didion; she'd find it ominous and disturbing, emblematic of the decade's darkest eddies. By 1968, the adolescent eagerness of “From Me to You” had given way to “Cry Baby Cry.” The honeymoon was over. During this same period, the nostalgia in Didion's prose would sharpen to a razor edge and finally flake away. Eventually, she'd offer
her
version of
The White Album,
a verbal mirror of the horror in the Beatles' least-played, but arguably most important track, the sound collage “Revolution 9,” a mash-up of car wrecks, protest shouts, burning buildings, gunfire, warfare, weeping babies.

*   *   *

Back in New York, after the honeymoon, Didion returned to what people were talking about:

The Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight in Miami.
Days before the bout, Clay had posed for photographers with the Beatles (“So who
were
those little faggots?” he asked after the shoot). Like pop stars, he seemed dismissible, a garrulous clown—but with edgy undertones, especially when, a day after upsetting Liston in the sixth round, he changed his name to Cassius X and then to Muhammad Ali. What
was
the Nation of Islam?

The American Supermarket,
an art show planned for the Upper East Side gallery of Paul Bianchini and Ben Birillo. The space would resemble a small supermarket featuring a painted bronze watermelon by Billy Apple, a plastic turkey by Tom Wesselmann, and dozens of chrome eggs by Robert Watts. In particular, Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans would surely confound patrons as to what was art and what was junk and
what difference did it make?

A young short story writer named Donald Barthelme,
about whom there was notable literary buzz. His first collection,
Come Back, Dr. Caligari,
was scheduled for publication in April and was already being hailed as bold, crazy, wildly innovative. Warhol had taken pictures of Barthelme in Times Square; the photos appeared in
Harper's Bazaar
along with shots of other writers, dancers, and painters to watch.

People were
not
talking about
Run River.

Joan Didion was not a writer, dancer, or painter to watch.

How could she get traction on—or even begin—a second novel with “a lot of people talking to [her] all the time about their advances”; with all the glib, faux-intellectual chatter in the bars? One day, Dylan Thomas was all the rage. Then it was Auden. Then it was Yeats. “The Second Coming,” the center giving way—what the hell did these green, gloomy writers know about the Apocalypse?

And then there was Noel, apparently happy to gad about town giving people “unshirted hell about their ethnic backgrounds, social proclivities, and general
raisons d'etre
.” This was his description of a character in Jack Gelber's play
The Apple,
a “drunken reviler of all and sundry,” reportedly based on him.

Come to Norman's party, he'd say to Didion. Ginsberg will be there. C. Wright Mills. Tiger Jones. Mobsters and beauties.

She couldn't stand it. She wouldn't go. New York had palled for her, altogether. “[One day] I stopped riding the Lexington Avenue IRT because I noticed for the first time that all the strangers I had seen for years—the man with the seeing-eye dog, the spinster who read the classified pages every day, the fat girl who always got off with me at Grand Central—looked older than they once had,” she wrote in “On Keeping a Notebook.”

She
felt bone-weary. How had that happened? When? Everything that had seemed within her reach, the curiosities around every corner, the heady smells of “lilac and garbage and expensive perfume,” drifted away from her.

And what about this
marriage
of hers? One Monday morning, she ducked into Saint Thomas Church—perhaps for relief from the crowds, all those fur-wrapped ladies walking their toothy little terriers. In the nave, she saw a book by James Albert Pike,
If You Marry Outside Your Faith.
The bishop said it was an error to marry outside your faith and that a person had a moral obligation to annul such a godless union and forget any promises she may have made in the heat of her wrong.

It was the kind of thing Noel might have said to her as a joke—not really joking.

Stunned, she fled the church.

Come on, come to Norman's party.

How could she
miss
the parties, even the bad ones? The putrid wine, the stupid talk. Ad agents. Democrats. Rejected novelists, convinced they'd find their muse in central Mexico. Everyone was scrabbling to find a niche.

“[I] could not walk on upper Madison Avenue in the mornings, and … could not talk to people and still cried in Chinese laundries,” Didion wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” “I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael's Pub or at Toots Shor's or at Sardi's East.”

*   *   *

Paralyzed, maybe. But she got to a lot of movies. She had a regular film column now in
Vogue.
“Goodbye to All That” portrays her as full of despair during this period, but the column reveals that she was also having a good deal of fun at the filmmakers' expense. Her persona on the page was lighthearted, confident, and sassy. Of the movie
Captain Newman, M.D.,
she said, “Its main liability is its script, the drift of which is that the mind has no mountains, no cliffs of fall, which can not be painlessly eroded if you'll only just lie down there and let Gregory Peck (M.D.) and Angie Dickinson (R.N.) shoot you a little more sodium pentothal.”

In fact, she may have been having a better time than her husband. It seems he could not count on dinner. At work, he was bored out of his skull with the Common Market and the financial distress of tiny monarchies. One day in April, he called Didion to ask if she'd mind if he quit his job at
Time.
Go ahead, she said. Absolutely. He could freelance. She could freelance.

He asked for a six-month leave of absence. To maintain cordiality, and to keep the door open in case the freelancing didn't work out, he wrote Otto Fuerbringer a note. They'd had their disagreements, he said, but he'd greatly valued his years at the magazine. Fuerbringer replied, “What disagreements?”

*   *   *

It's clear from Didion's movie reviews that, for some time, she had considered (or toyed with) joining the business of Hollywood. “I could sit through [this movie] only by wondering who in the screening room was involved with whom, and what they fought about,” she wrote in March 1964 (the movie was
The Guest
).

“
What a Way to Go
is supposed to have cost six million dollars, which averages out to about a million and a half a laugh,” she figured.