The Last Love Song (42 page)

The movie whose troubled history he would chronicle was
Dr. Dolittle,
starring Rex Harrison and a cast of mammals. It was a major undertaking for Fox. Prior to the movie's release, the studio negotiated with more than fifty companies for tie-in advertising; together, these companies planned to spend over twelve million dollars on retail displays, cereal boxes, dolls, clocks and watches, T-shirts, and fast food wrapped in cute
Dolittle
packaging. The studio felt it couldn't miss—hence, perhaps, Zanuck's confidence in allowing a reporter on his lot. Music and animals: Who could resist?

For Dunne, a side benefit of the project would be his personal education, an intimate glimpse into the system's culture, which might lead to screenwriting work. His experiences in Delano—showing up, hanging out, waiting for the story to come to him—made him think he should adopt a more deliberative stance this time. It didn't do to get
too
attached to a piece (he was preparing himself for disappointment with the book). He decided he knew the voice he desired this time: “[T]he omniscient cool narrator. I knew the style I wanted: short takes, shifting among a whole range of onstage and offstage characters. I knew where I wanted to start … and I knew where I wanted it to end.” No saints or tyrants, no big issues. “As a story it was reasonable enough to pass, and I sometimes believed what I said,” Norman Mailer wrote in his Hollywood novel,
The Deer Park.
This was Dunne's attitude toward the Fox story, and along the way—because the studios were being challenged by independent talents with more and more cash (much of it washing in on the tide of rock 'n' roll)—he would detail significant changes in the entertainment industry, the clash of old and new.

5

That clash of old and new occurred in the Dunnes' living room on any given weekend. “There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people,” Didion said.

“She cooked nonstop. She made stuff like beef Wellington—for a sit-down dinner for thirty-five people—with a side dish, Cobb salad or something, for those who didn't eat meat,” said Eve Babitz. “It's the first time I ever saw Spode china. She seemed to be the only sensible person in the world in those days. She could make dinner for forty people with one hand tied around her back while everybody else was passed out on the floor.”

These were not the traditional Hollywood parties Nick Dunne so adored, or the rigid affairs Didion had first attended upon moving to Los Angeles, where ladies took their coffee upstairs after dessert. By now, she knew many of the old-timers: Connie Wald, Natalie Wood, Sara Mankiewicz, Diana Lynn, Sandy Sturges. She knew their rebellious children: Jill Schary Robinson, Ann Marshall. Didion had also met the upstarts: Warren Beatty, Julie Christie, Teri Garr. And now she lived down the street from the Mamas and the Papas. “The two worlds met. Hollywood went rock 'n' roll and rock 'n' roll went Hollywood,” said Barney Hoskyns, veteran observer of the L.A. music scene. Producer Lou Adler, fresh from pulling off the Monterey Pop Festival (which had introduced Jimi Hendrix and his flaming guitar to the world), palled around with Jack Nicholson and the Monkees in Laurel Canyon. At the Chateau Marmont, John Phillips, Papa John, partied with—and later swapped partners with—Roman Polanski.

Initially, Didion watched, amused, as rock became a novelty among the children of movie stars in West Hollywood. They cased pawnshops for cheap guitars, taught themselves a handful of chords, and grew their hair like the Beatles. But in the fall of 1966, just as the Dunnes were moving into the Franklin Avenue house, Pandora's Box, a popular coffeehouse on Sunset, a few blocks away, drew the attention of the LAPD and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. There were numerous complaints about loud music, drug use, and underage drinking on the Strip. Pandora's Box did not, in fact, serve alcohol, but its manager, Al Mitchell, acted as a sponsor of sorts to high school students and teenage runaways in the area, so residents and local property owners viewed the coffeehouse as a trouble spot. (Veteran Strip watchers saw the heavy hand of mob-controlled business owners, in league with corrupt cops, clearing the street for
their
clientele—somewhere in the background lurked Sidney Korshak.)

The authorities enforced a curfew requiring everyone under eighteen to be off the Strip by ten
P.M.
Pandora's Box would be closed. This news sparked an impromptu riot outside the coffeehouse one night, which trickled up into the Dunnes' neighborhood. Watts it wasn't—these were middle-class kids raising a little hell because they wanted to stay out late. They pushed a city bus on its side and a few heads got billy-clubbed. But Stephen Stills and the Buffalo Springfield captured the moment in a song called “For What It's Worth”: “There's a man with a gun over there.… Stop, children, what's that sound?”

Basically, Stills was demanding to be served a drink after hours, but never mind—the song got taken up as an antiestablishment anthem. When the Lou Adler–produced antiwar chant “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire hit number one,
Billboard
reported cynically, but accurately, “Folk
+
Rock
+
Protest
=
Dollars.”

At the parties in her house, “We put ‘Lay Lady Lay' on the record player or ‘Suzanne,'” Didion said. They also played “Visions of Johanna” and “Midnight Confessions.” Many of the L.A. session musicians were Okie transplants, and Didion caught their Dust Bowl rhythms in many of the tunes, the accents she'd heard in the speech of her middle-school classmates, and the country lilt of the broadcasts out of Tulsa that she listened to as a teenager on the car radio. The music was a cushion. She cooked to it. This was her special performance, a soothing role while grab-ass chaos rolled around the twenty-eight rooms above, about, and below her. Meanwhile, “John was in charge,” Babitz said. “He was the talker,” serving drinks, seeing to everyone's needs.

Babitz noticed perceptual differences between the Dunnes' generation, whose preferred relaxant was alcohol, and younger people at the parties, who liked pills and synthetic stimulants. But really, “no one cared,” she said. “By then,
everyone
was smoking pot.” “Joan and I connected,” she told
Vanity Fair.
“The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she'd take downers, but really she's a Hell's Angels girl, white trash.” As her date, Babitz often brought Peter Pilafian, an Armenian roadie with the Mamas and the Papas, and she talked about her cover art for Buffalo Springfield's second album, a Joseph Cornell–inspired collage. Later, she would print, on special paper called Delmarva Text, a limited edition of psychedelic posters featuring the British band Cream. “Joan bought the Ginger Baker poster and put it in her house. She was, like, the only one who liked it,” Babitz said.

Her remarks remind us how traditionally underappreciated the visual arts had been in L.A.—their influence on Didion, through figures like Babitz, has rarely been mentioned. At the time, “Los Angeles had no modern art museum and few galleries, which was exactly what renegade artists liked about it: Ed Ruscha, David Hockney, Robert Irwin, Ed Kienholz, Bruce Nauman … Judy Chicago…,” wrote Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. “[A] prevailing permissiveness in Los Angeles in the 1960s brought about countless innovations: Andy Warhol's first show, Marcel Duchamp's first retrospective, Frank Gehry's unique architecture, Rudi Gernreich's topless bathing suit, Dennis Hopper's
Easy Rider,
the Beach Boys, the Byrds, and the Doors. In the 1960s, Los Angeles was the epicenter of cool.”

Didion's friend Earl McGrath opened a small art gallery on North Robertson Boulevard, on the edge of Beverly Hills. “He never made any money because he didn't try very hard to sell the art,” Babitz said. “It's a miracle he survived—but he had the best parties in the world.” At these parties, and at her own—through Babitz, Ann Marshall, and Teri Garr—Didion met the “Lumberjacks,” macho male painters associated with Walter Hopps's Ferus Gallery, L.A.'s first Pop Art center. The best known of these artists was Ed Ruscha (another Okie). In the early sixties, driving from Oklahoma City to Los Angeles on Route 66, he fell in love with the simple geometric architecture of filling stations. In 1963 he self-published a paperback book entitled
Twentysix Gasoline Stations,
featuring straightforward black-and-white photographs of the generally unremarkable structures.
Artforum
sneered: “[T]he book is so curious, and so doomed to oblivion that there is an obligation, of sorts, to document its existence.” In fact, in the years since,
Twentysix Gasoline Stations
has been celebrated as a milestone in modern American art: It announced a distinctly Western sensibility based on close observation of (often manufactured) objects, suspending all judgment of them. “I want absolutely neutral material,” Ruscha said. “My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of ‘facts.'” His words might describe the literary style of
Play It As It Lays,
published a few years later by a woman who shared his fondness for gas stations.

In this context, we see that Didion's obsession with biker films was not just a guilty pleasure, but a recognition of a developing artistic style rooted in the raw, rough textures and materialistic culture of the American West.

Like Ruscha, Dennis Hopper was an acquaintance of hers. His photographic skills may well have exceeded his talents as an actor. He took Ruscha's cue, snapping pictures of the vernacular on L.A. street corners (including a famous gas station shot,
Double Standard
), and making the quintessential biker film—short on story and character but blazing with style—
Easy Rider
(1969).

What really distinguished this West Coast style from the New York art world was its “direct response to life rather than to [aesthetic] ‘problems,'” said art critic John Coplans. Its blunt representational approach revealed a “deep understanding of the lie of the evolution of [artistic] progress” and an affirmation that “art springs directly from life, with all its anguish.” (His words may give us a clue as to why Didion was so perplexed by the hippies in the Haight, who, as novelist C. D. B. Bryan said, had embraced a “contemporary morality … based upon aesthetic rather than social values.” Didion did not share the hippies' escapist, “It's all too beautiful” impulse; however, what remained fundamentally Western about San Francisco's LSD culture, and
did
attract her, was the value it placed on the “immediate, direct experience.”)

Immediacy and directness were essential to the new Western art. “There is a very thin line as to whether this book [
Twentysix Gasoline Stations
] is worthless or has any value—to most people it is probably worthless,” Ruscha said. This mixing of high and low would become a Pop Art principle; given the astonishing work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, it would come to be associated mostly with New York. But arguably its origins were in L.A. (the Ferus Gallery mounted the first American Pop Art show).

Didion's version of the Pop Art credo? “I never ask.”

*   *   *

Often, on party nights, she asked Sandy Sturges if her boys would baby-sit Quintana. (The first time Didion went to Sturges's door, Sturges thought she was a little girl.) On evenings when the jasmine drifted through her open windows and people began to gather in her living room, “I imagined that my … life was simple and sweet,” Didion wrote. “[S]ometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors … nothing was unimaginable. The mystical flirtation with the idea of ‘sin'—this sense that it was possible to go ‘too far,' and that many people were doing it—was very much with us.”

The person closest to her who had gone too far was her brother-in-law. In late 1967 and early 1968, the drugs on the streets, and eventually in the upscale homes, got harder. Heroin and coke shoved aside hallucinogens … and then people jumped back into their old paraphernalia, to play again among cellophane flowers.

Nick leaped. Over and over. Whenever he could. He remained charming and gregarious. He had never lacked friends who could supply him with the latest thrills. One of his budding pals was a hairdresser to the stars, Jay Sebring. “The first time I dropped acid, I dropped it with Jay,” Nick recalled. “He brought it over to my house on Walden Drive one time when Lenny and the kids were at her mother's ranch.” Sebring loved to wear leather jackets and ride motorcycles with Paul Newman and Steve McQueen.

“Jay had a private room for his steady clients so that they wouldn't have to be seen by the other customers,” Nick said. “I had a regular appointment every third week, and it was in that room that I met Sharon Tate. She would often be sitting there in a chair, just to be with Jay as he worked. She looked so young that I thought at first she was coming there after school.”

Tate was an aspiring actress who had just appeared as a character named Malibu in a picture that had nothing much going for it except a Byrds soundtrack and lots of shots of swimming pools.

“She wore her blonde hair straight and long,” Nick said of Tate. “She was quiet and friendly and smiled a lot at our conversations. Jay … couldn't stop looking at her.” On the day before she traveled to England to shoot a movie called
Eye of the Devil,
Nick and Sebring toasted her with champagne. While overseas, she would meet Roman Polanski.

Nick recalled feeling uneasy that day, sipping champagne in Sebring's private room.

It was a time for the “jitters,” Didion wrote. The jitters were “setting in.”