The Last Love Song (30 page)

But the signs of change were apparent: an edgy knowingness (celebrities need someplace “evil” to go, Jack Hanson, the Daisy's owner, was quoted as saying), a sweet, smoky smell in the parking lot, a “hip” sneer in people's greetings, a rawness in table manners. The night it became most apparent this was
not
the Old Hollywood was the night Frank Sinatra paid the Daisy's maître d', a gentle man named George, fifty dollars to walk up to Nick Dunne's table, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face: “Oh, Mr. Dunne, I'm so sorry about this, but Mr. Sinatra made me do it…”

“I was the amusement for Sinatra,” Nick said later. “My humiliation was his fun.” Here was the social order's devastation, the brave new world. Now, Hollywood power meant having the ability to “make a decent man do an indecent act.”

Or perhaps none of this was true.

Perhaps New Hollywood
was
the Old Hollywood, just as California had never really changed. Was the “Lost Village” just a sloppy game of nostalgia? Styles and manners altered … but the fundamentals?

In
Blue Nights,
Didion casually mentions sitting one afternoon at the “corner banquette” of the Bistro, at a spot usually reserved for Sidney Korshak. By way of identifying Korshak, she quotes the producer Robert Evans: “Let's just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.”

In fact, all coyness aside, Didion knew quite well who Sidney Korshak was. He was a fixture in Old Hollywood—and now in the New—part of a group of Eastern European Jewish men originally from Al Capone's Chicago Outfit. They had moved west to launder money in real estate, casinos, and lavish hotels, and to get in on the “flickers,” the fledgling motion picture industry. They had extended their reach into the state's Democratic and Republican parties. Hollywood insiders referred to them as the “Kosher Nostra.”

People called Korshak “the Myth,” “the Fixer,” or they simply called him a “mob lawyer” (reportedly, Robert Duvall's character in
The Godfather
was based on him). Nick had been to several parties at his house—each time shocked by the armed guards beneath the trees; along with Nick, Korshak had been one of the Bistro's initial investors. His corner banquette, table three, was known as Korshak's office. There, on a specially installed telephone, he had numerous “furtive conversations” with “such corporate titans and political lions as Al Hart, Lew Wasserman [head of Universal/MCA, along with Jules Stein], Paul Ziffren [a Democratic Party player, who'd made a killing selling assets seized from Nisei families in internment camps], Pat Brown, and Gray Davis,” journalist Gus Russo reported. “There were also confabs with ‘Dodgers people' such as Walter O'Malley and team manager Tommy Lasorda.” Korshak had helped evict the squatters in Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be built; as the Dodgers' “labor consultant,” he was “responsible for keeping the cars parked, the lights on, and the food service employees behind the concession stands”—while drawing up stadium contracts for his pal Beldon Katleman, owner of the El Rancho Vegas casino. Katleman was a regular at Nick Dunne's parties and balls.

When Korshak wasn't dining in the Bistro, people vied to be seated at the notorious table three just for the thrill of it (Didion was no exception).
Here's
where Hollywood's deals got done. When he bustled in, the office was open for business. Niklas would seat him, get him a drink, escort starlets to the table so they could kiss his cheek.

“Along with his pal Lew Wasserman”—who nudged Ronald Reagan to become president of the Screen Actors Guild to do
his
labor bidding under the guise of anti-Communism—“Korshak ran the town,” Tim Steele told me. “Anytime there was a problem, he was involved. He was the Teamsters' lawyer. The Teamsters were so powerful because in Hollywood you can't get anything done without a truck.”

And you couldn't have the New Hollywood without the flooring of the Old. Sometimes it was hard to tell the gangsters, the politicians, and the movie stars apart (for example, as one of Jules Stein's MCA clients, Ronald Reagan got an early break in an Iowa nightclub controlled by the Chicago Outfit).

As the daughter of a gambler, Didion knew the
look
of deals being made, that little twitch of the mouth, masking supreme confidence. Raymond Chandler once said movie moguls at a luncheon look “exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor.” There was a “psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money … and the rackets,” he said. “Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”

*   *   *

They were gamblers in a town that loved to play.

“We were forced to sit in a house together and write to make a living, and neither one of us, I think, thought we could do it,” Didion said. On top of that, “I had no idea how to be a wife. In those first years I would pin daisies in my hair, trying for a ‘bride effect.'” She sounds, here, like Lily McClellan in
Run River.
“[B]oth John and I were improvising, flying blind.”

Already, “crapshoot” had become their favorite metaphor for marriage. They'd joke to lessen fears about the pressures they faced. “We needed … money because neither one of us was working,” Didion said.

She'd kept her reviewing gig, but
Vogue
's enthusiasm for the pieces she filed began to wane. Was she being punished for not staying in New York? In retrospect, she'd hint that she was fired either because a senior editor disapproved of the films she chose or because her review of
The Sound of Music
suggested lesbian diddling between Julie Andrews and the Mother Superior. In fact, the review asserted no such thing; Didion said the movie was “like being trapped on a dance floor and crooned at by a drunk.” “Take back your Alps,” she wrote.

Didion's real problems with
Vogue
were the magazine's push for greater revenue and its discovery of Pauline Kael. Kael was offered a column. From the beginning, the women did not see eye-to-eye. Of the Jane Fonda movie
Cat Ballou,
Kael wrote, “It will probably be a big success, and it's so much better than a lot of movies around that, relatively speaking, it deserves it.” In the following issue, discussing
The Sons of Katie Elder,
Didion appeared to take a swipe at her compatriot: “This is an old-fashioned action Western, the kind
Cat Ballou
tried so dismally to make fun of.” Shortly afterward, she stopped reviewing for
Vogue.

The bigger issue for Didion was Si Newhouse's more aggressive conception of what the magazine business should be. “At the time I began working for
Vogue,
there was a clear understanding that it was not a magazine for very many people,” Didion told Meghan Daum. “It had 250 to 350,000 subscribers and then a large pass-along readership, but it was specifically designed as a magazine for not very many people. [Later,] once … Newhouse had bought it and settled in, that was no longer the way the magazine was conceived. It had to build circulation all the time. If you're building circulation all the time, you're going to have a different sort of magazine”—that is, a watered-down product with wider but blander appeal.

*   *   *

In her first year at Portuguese Bend, Didion wrote three short stories based largely on her New York miseries. She had no particular passion for the short story as a form. “I was suffering a fear common among people who have just written a first novel: the fear of never writing another,” she said. “I sat in front of my typewriter and believed that another subject would never present itself. I believed that I would be forever dry. I believed that I would ‘forget how.' Accordingly, as a kind of desperate finger exercise, I tried writing stories.”

Years later, she said she discovered, quickly, that she had “no talent” for stories, “no ability to focus the world in the window.” But in a letter to the actor Buzz Farber at the time, she expressed satisfaction with at least one of the pieces; she had carried off a first-person point of view, normally a difficult challenge for her, she said. As an aside, she told Farber she didn't like stories about children because such stories were generally self-indulgent.

Didion's pieces—family dramas and lovers' tales—were vague, heavy on exposition, quite conventional in shape. The characters were listless, unsympathetic (“[S]he had gone [to the party] only because the soft April twilight saddened her and made her want someone to buy her dinner”). The stories met rejection, from
Harper's Bazaar, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
Redbook.
Rust Hills, then fiction editor for
The Saturday Evening Post,
did accept “Coming Home,” in retrospect an obvious run-through for “Goodbye to All That” (“When she heard the door close she got up, pulled off the blue silk slip and put on a nightgown, smoked a cigarette until it burned her fingertips, and then took two phenobarbitals from the bottle in Charlie's medicine chest”).

The story is about a woman in a crumbling relationship with a peripatetic man. She has had an abortion because he did not want the baby: “When she was almost asleep she was able to conjure up an image of the baby, not her own unknown baby (she did not think about that) but the loved baby in [a] baby-food advertisement.”

Writing these stories, far from New York, made her realize once more just how happy she was to be away from Noel's unpredictability. But there was another reason for her feeling of relief: “There's a rush to opinion in New York that is kind of destructive, particularly to young writers,” she saw. “It's very incestuous.”

She was glad to be gone. In truth, she had not held the New York intelligentsia in very high esteem. “Well, of course—her father was anti-Semitic,” Josh Greenfeld explained; her dad's asides, his little jokes, may have deepened the estrangement she felt in the East.

In any case, she began to feel that one of the great things about Los Angeles “was you didn't see other writers and editors. You saw a broader range of people.”

The appearance of “Coming Home” in the July 1964 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
began a fruitful six-year relationship between Didion and the magazine, during which time she'd write some of her finest essays. Between 1964 and 1969, Didion and Dunne would publish more than fifty pieces there, sharing a column between them, “Points West.” It would be the most reliable source of their income. (Their first year in Los Angeles, she and Dunne would earn less than seven thousand dollars from their freelancing; in the following few years, they'd average around eight thousand from magazine work.) A “sense of impending doom” always hovered about the
Post,
Dunne wrote—it was financially imperiled because “Middle America read the magazine, but wasn't buying the products advertised therein; the people whom the advertising was designed to reach didn't read the magazine; change the magazine and you lost the readers.” The managing editor, Otto Friedrich, fought with his publisher; a mild insanity seemed to inflict the management (once, at a dinner for Vietnam's Madame Nhu, the editorial director consistently referred to her country as South Korea).

But because the magazine was slowly failing, it was willing to try anything: a lucky situation for the writers, at least for a while. “Respect was grudgingly given, but once granted, the editors would follow you out onto the longest limb,” Dunne wrote.

A far cry from Tinsel Town. Out here on the movie lots, said Jack Warner, writers were simply “schmucks with Underwoods.”

*   *   *

In 1964, literary cachet still counted for something in certain Hollywood neighborhoods. The novel was a powerful cultural force.
Everyone
wanted to be Christopher Isherwood—and Isherwood knew it, too, at every party he attended.

Run River
had not made Didion a novelist. She was just another person who'd published a book. She'd not made a mark in the pictures. The “fit” Nick worried about—Palos Verdes, the Nova—it was vexing.

Whom did he put them with?

The first time he'd had his brother and sister-in-law over, at a small outdoor Sunday lunch, he'd invited only two other guests, both book people with a toe in the movie pond: Helen Straus, Didion's literary agent at the time (she'd started in the Story Department at Paramount, then founded the literary wing of the William Morris Agency), and Gavin Lambert, an openly gay expatriate English writer who'd published a book of short stories about Hollywood's down-and-out modeled after Isherwood's
Goodbye to Berlin.
He'd written the screenplay for
Sons and Lovers,
so he, too, was trying to make a niche for himself somewhere between the literary and Technicolor.

In that spirit, and encouraged by his brother, Dunne went to work on a project—maybe a book, maybe a screenplay, or maybe it would serve as a treatment for something else—
product,
that was the thing. He called it
Show Me a Hero
(after Scott Fitzgerald's line “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy”). It was about a woman named Marjorie caught in a Cold War right-wing plot. Her husband, a spy, is thrown into a Communist prison. A handsome young reporter from
Tempo,
a
Time
-like rag, gets wind of the story and falls in love with Marjorie. She “reciprocates carnally in a midwinter tryst in either a cottage on Fire Island or a suite at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, a plot point to be worked out later,” Dunne wrote. In the end, the heroine is left to choose between love and duty to her husband.