The Last Love Song (41 page)

One day, she watched some of her new “friends” drop acid—she wanted to observe what happened when the “flash” kicked in. “The only LSD we could get was the real Sandoz” stuff, Jean Young said. Taking it was a “spiritual experience.” What Didion saw that day was petulance, impatience, narcissism. At the moment of the flash, she heard someone mutter a single, breathy “Wow.”

These were adolescents “who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together,” she wrote.

Significantly, the one major change she made in the essay from the magazine version to its appearance a year later in her book was the addition of a scene in which she tried to teach Michael the words to “Frère Jacques.” The point of the scene was that no one else paid attention to the child. Only Didion seemed to care.

*   *   *

Rarely in the essay does Didion step forth to judge what she witnesses. But toward the end she cannot hold her tongue: these children are “less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts,
Vietnam, Saran Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb,
” she writes.

But that's not quite the point.

The point is, “These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values.”

In retrospect, this reference to the severing of family ties clearly shows Didion in the Haight worrying about her adopted daughter back in the house on Franklin Avenue, the house cased all day by strangers driving unmarked panel trucks. And as in all her subsequent work, whenever she wrote about her daughter, she was also writing about herself.

In the essay, just before her lament about the torn family web, she quotes a San Francisco psychiatrist she'd interviewed:

Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It's a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you've got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it'll take for that to happen?

Didion notes: “[T]he peculiar beauty of this [authoritarian] potential, as far as … activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District, perhaps because the few seventeen-year-olds who are political realists tend not to adopt romantic idealism as a life style.”

Blind romanticism, political realism: two extremes in Didion's life, the arc (moving from one to the other) of her
personal
narrative, and of the career she was about to establish.

The
shape
of her writing—fragmented, jagged—suggested the chaos of contemporary circumstances. But the voice was icy with principled realism. One had to attend to both. Only with both could we begin to reconstruct the world.

Prior to visiting the Haight, Didion felt the act of writing
couldn't
contain the world any longer—the world had gotten out of hand; rendering it was irrelevant. Many more times, she'd be assailed by this doubt. But for now, she had rediscovered her center.

The children.

A child.

In just a few years, her child would describe for her a vivid recurring nightmare in which a “Broken Man” came to take her away. He always wore a blue work shirt. Lowering his eyes, he'd mutter, “
Hello, Quintana.
”

4

Didion still considered herself a novelist. Her nonfiction pieces for
The Saturday Evening Post
helped pay the bills, that's all. She would not have thought of collecting them into a book without the encouragement of Henry Robbins.

But “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” was different. It may have begun as just another magazine assignment with Ted Streshinsky; it became the first essay she felt she
had
to write—and the first piece she had no idea how to shape. Later, she would say it was “imperative” for her to deal “directly and flatly with the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.” Doing the piece, she became increasingly dependent on Dexies and gin. “I was … as sick as I have ever been when I was writing [it],” she said. It “was a very odd piece to do, because I was in [San Francisco] for quite a long time, longer than I'd ever spent before on a piece … and I kept staying because I kept having the sense that I wasn't getting it. I did not understand what was going on, and I finally came home, and I still didn't think I had it … Usually on a piece, there comes a day when you know you never have to do another interview. You can go home, you've gotten it. Well, that day never came on that piece. The piece had to be written right away. So I wrote it right away. But I wrote it in just a series of scenes, exactly how it happened to me, and that was the only way I could write it because I had no conclusions at all.” She was aware that at the center of the essay was a frightened concern for children. She'd been feeling “cut off” from Quintana while researching it, and that was why the Michael scenes were “very real” to her. Otherwise, “[t]hat piece is a blank for me still,” she said. “I have no idea whether it was good or bad, you know…”

She remembered “running so close to deadline with ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem' which [was] already on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
that, in order to get it to New York by closing, I had to drive it to an air freight hangar at LAX one Sunday morning … Before I left that morning, I happened to buy
The New York Times.
That was the upside of needing to go to LAX. LAX and the Beverly Hills Hotel were the only places in 1967 where you could buy
The New York Times.

“And I spent the rest of that Sunday [at] my brother-in-law's … pretending to read the paper while I fought against the overwhelming impulse that I needed to go back to the airport, go to San Francisco, and re-check the piece.”

Reactions to the article, once it appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post,
left her “despondent.” Friends congratulated her on having “finished the piece ‘just in time,' because ‘the whole fad's dead now,
fini,
kaput
.'” She said, “I suppose almost everyone who writes is afflicted some of the time by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening, but it seemed to me then (perhaps because the piece was important to me) that I had never gotten a feedback so universally beside the point.”

She also received a letter from one of the people she'd profiled—a girl she'd met through Paul Hawken—accusing Didion of being “unfair” to her and her friends and to the hippie scene in general.

It helped that Henry Robbins got what she was doing—so much so that he hoped she'd consider expanding the essay to book length. He had convinced her to sign with FSG despite her doubts (her agent had extricated her from her remaining contractual obligations to Obolensky). She'd told Robbins she'd been fiddling with an L.A. novel, tentatively titled
Maria Talking
. At this point, she had little more to work with than Lillian Hellman's line “What makes Iago evil?” and a scattered set of freeway scenes, but that was enough for Robbins. He felt her nonfiction was special, and if it took a novel contract to lure her into the fold, so be it. On July 12, 1967, he offered a six-thousand-dollar advance on the unfinished novel. He also said, “I want to include a special option clause
in addition
to the usual option, specifying an option on a particular book. This option will be a nonfiction book, tentatively titled
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
and dealing with the LSD life in California.” The total advance, then, payable in installments, was twelve thousand dollars.

She worried she'd let him down. The “Slouching” piece, she said, couldn't possibly be made into a book, as its style was “mindless.” And any
collection
of her articles “would either prove that I contradicted myself every month or that I always said the same thing every month, and I didn't know which would be worse.”

Meanwhile, Dunne's “Strike!” article had appeared in the May 6 issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
and immediately drew the threat of a lawsuit from lawyers representing the Di Giorgio Corporation. They objected to “inaccuracies” in the piece and said they would “protect” the company if these statements reappeared in book form. Dunne's reporting was airtight. Robbins responded that any “alleged errors” Dunne may have made were “matters of interpretation rather than fact,” and this ended the legal harrumphing.

Certain
Saturday Evening Post
readers were less easy to appease. Some canceled their subscriptions to the magazine. A typical letter went like this: “The author has clearly conveyed the impression that the Valley is a backward, illiterate section populated by slow-thinking, tight-fisted, provincial-minded farmers. We have lived in the Valley 46 years. We do not think the one month Mr. Dunne spent in Delano qualified him to make the vast generalizations about the weather, the people, and the situation.” One grower wrote, “The sweet and gentle Chavez [Dunne portrayed] was well-trained in the ultra-liberal school for Radicals headed by Alinsky!”

These responses were only the first signs of trouble for
Delano
. In August, salesmen on the road, pitching the volume to store owners in advance of publication, reported resistance: “I've tried several approaches on the DELANO with pathetic success,” one publisher's representative wrote to Roger Straus. “[T]he customer … read[s] that it's about a grape strike in California, and take[s] a … ‘So who the hell cares. Next' attitude.”

Spooked by these reports, Dunne kept revising the manuscript, right up to the galley stage. He hoped his brother Stephen, now working as a graphic designer in Michigan, might design the cover. The FSG Art Department did not warm to this idea, and Stephen felt slighted (Dunne conceded that his brother could be “a very difficult young man”).

Robbins tried to solicit blurbs from John Steinbeck and Bobby Kennedy. Neither man responded.

*   *   *

While Dunne prepared to launch
Delano,
Didion was bundling up her nonfiction pieces for Robbins and her new literary agent, Lois Wallace, at William Morris. Wallace was a tough-talking, chain-smoking woman of independent means who worked with literature for the sheer love of it.

Didion began to see the possibilities of a book divided into reportage, essays, reviews, and travel pieces. Robbins didn't want reviews. Concentrate on thematic links, he said. Initially, Didion thought to include her short story “The Welfare Island Ferry.” Whether she intended to rewrite it as nonfiction, retaining the New York atmosphere and its focus on desperate young professionals, isn't clear. Perhaps this was her first move toward writing “Goodbye to All That,” which she eventually composed for a specially themed issue of
The Saturday Evening Post
on the topic of “Love.”

“The [thematic] combinations are endless,” Wallace wrote Henry Robbins, tongue in cheek. “On Keeping John Wayne: Notes from an Enchanted Home. The Seacoast of Pearl Harbor. Emotional Blackmail: How Can I Tell Them There's Nothing Left?”

On August 1, buoyed by Robbins's support, Didion reported she'd made real headway on the novel. She had a new title for it, a crapshooter's phrase,
Play It As It Lays.
She admitted her husband didn't much care for the title. Robbins wasn't sure, either: The “‘as it lays' part … somehow sounds awkward,” he said, “and that last word always causes a certain amount of trouble.”

More bad news from the road: Store owners on the Great Plains didn't want to stock Dunne's book.
Delano
was going to be a tougher sell than anyone had realized. Before it even appeared, Dunne sensed a waning of enthusiasm in-house. Simultaneously, excitement increased for Didion's projects. On August 24, Dunne received a note from Roger Straus wishing him luck on publication day. Straus added, “Will you tell Joan, please, that a night or two ago I read ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem' and thought it simply marvelous.”

On September 27, Robbins sent Dunne the first advance review, a snippy little item from
Kirkus
“confus[ing] objectivity with neutrality,” Robbins said. He then spent the rest of the letter on a “postscript to Joan—How are you feeling about the title [of your collection] at this point … [I] have wondered a bit if it doesn't throw too much weight on the hippie piece … when the book as a whole”—as
he
had finally conceived it—“is more about, well, the confrontation between you and ‘the golden land.'”

Dunne handed the letter to his wife and brooded over the clipping from
Kirkus.

*   *   *

If Dunne had learned anything useful as a journeyman reporter, it was not to sit still. Rather than wait for
Delano
to sail or fail, he would move on with a fresh project.

He approached Richard D. Zanuck, vice president in charge of production at Twentieth Century–Fox, to ask if he could trace the making of a motion picture from beginning to end, from boardrooms, screening rooms, and back lots to gala premiere. To his surprise, Zanuck said yes. “There was no reason for him to give [access] to me, and … I don't know why he did; the nature of reporting is such that it certainly was not to his advantage to let me, or any reporter, see the inner workings of his studio,” Dunne said. But Zanuck gave him a parking space and an office and a secretary to type his notes, if he wanted. At the Fox studio, he “became as anonymous as a piece of furniture,” Dunne said. “My notebook was always out and visible, but I rarely took notes. After a meeting, I would race back to my office and transcribe the scene I had just witnessed … [or] duck into the men's room and jot down the things I wished to remember.”