The Last Love Song (44 page)

Thank God for magazine work. It made them flush. It kept them engaged.

It's worth recounting a few of the assignments they accepted during this period, to illustrate how busy they were (and how often Quintana remained apart from them). Prior to
this
assignment, Dunne had gone to Death Valley to write about car wrecks on empty blacktops; he'd gone to the Owens Valley to learn firsthand that “Manifest Destiny” was nothing more than a journey from “waterhole to waterhole.” For
The Saturday Evening Post,
Didion had visited Alcatraz's empty cells, finding crumpled on the floor an old Easter service program: “
Why seek ye the living among the dead?
”; she had taken a brief trip east, to see the “lawns of the men” who had built the great railroads, leaving nothing behind “but the shadows of migrainous women, and the pony carts waiting for the long-dead children.”

Most disturbingly, Dunne had spent a couple days at Montana's Malmstrom Air Force Base, headquarters of the Strategic Air Command's 341st Strategic Missile Wing. He flew over stiff fields glazed with ice to see the fruit of the Bevatron: the nuclear missile silos piercing the ground, and the young soldiers in charge of the birds, each armed with a snub-nosed .38 in case a colleague went berserk.

As the Dunnes' friend Jane Howard, a
Life
correspondent, once put it, magazines—bad as they were—served as “my arena, my stage, the channel for most of my energies.” To work for magazines was “to possess a dizzying degree of what [the poet] Marianne Moore [called] accessibility of experience.”

Plus, in 1968 you could fly from L.A. to San Francisco for twelve dollars a pop. You could run off to do a story and be home by midnight. Or your husband could fly up for dinner with you at Ernie's if you were stuck in the Bay Area on a lengthy piece.

Together, now, the couple shared a column in
The Saturday Evening Post,
“Points West,” trading the writing chores every other month. This was far more satisfying to Didion than trying to publish fiction regularly, in spite of thinking of herself as a novelist. Her short story “When Did Music Come This Way? Children Dear, Was It Yesterday?,” written three years earlier, had been rejected by more than two dozen magazines (“so depressing that I'm going to sit under a cloud of angst and gloom all afternoon … I'm sorry we are seldom inclined to give our readers this bad a time,” said an editor at
Good Housekeeping
). Finally, Didion dumped the story into an obscure literary journal,
The Denver Quarterly,
for fifty bucks.

So she welcomed her magazine work. She taped inside her closet door a packing list so she could head out on a story without stopping to think: “
2 skirts / 2 jerseys or leotards / 1 pullover sweater / 2 pair shoes / stockings / bra … cigarettes / bourbon … aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax
.” She never took a watch, she tells us in “The White Album.” She'd always have to call Los Angeles and ask Dunne what time it was. If it was early evening, she knew her baby girl would be out picking weeds on the tennis court.

3

“Pretty Nancy” didn't know who'd arrived at her door. If she'd understood how this demure young reporter felt about her, she'd never have let her in.

In the spring of 1968, Governor and Nancy Reagan were living in a rented white brick house with steep Tudor peaks, at 1341 45th Street in Sacramento, in a neighborhood known as the “Fab 40s.” The intersection of Forty-sixth and J had once been a streetcar turnaround for the J Street line, so it was unusually wide; the neighborhood's lots were excessive, the homes lavish.

The Reagans had occupied the Governor's Mansion at Sixteenth and H—the old Steffens place beloved of Didion—for only four months before Mrs. Reagan declared it a fire trap, not to her taste. Now, for twelve hundred dollars a month, “payable by the state to a group of Reagan's friends,” Didion wrote, the governor and his wife enjoyed a more modern space, with six bedrooms and a pool.

On the sunny spring morning when Mrs. Reagan opened her door to greet Joan Didion, with whom she'd agreed to talk for
The Saturday Evening Post,
she smiled. “That, apparently, was my big mistake,” she would write in her memoir,
My Turn,
the title of which revealed her lifelong bitterness at the press.

“I … enjoyed the time we spent together,” Mrs. Reagan wrote. The formal interview was civil and pleasant. She'd thought they were getting along fine. Some weeks later, on a plane trip to Chicago, she happened to notice a copy of
The Saturday Evening Post
and thumbed through it eagerly. She was appalled to find Didion's piece “dripping with sarcasm,” beginning with the title, “Pretty Nancy.” “[M]y smile was described as ‘a study in frozen insincerity,'” Mrs. Reagan wrote. “Well, I wasn't insincere. And I smile, I'm afraid, the way I smile. I couldn't help but wonder: Would she have liked it better if I had snarled? She had obviously written the story in her mind before she ever met me.”

“It was kind of a mean piece. Even those of us who weren't Nancy fans thought this … was over the top,” said Lou Cannon, then bureau chief for the
San Jose Mercury News.

Mrs. Reagan never recovered from the insult. From then on, wary of all reporters, she was especially suspicious of females. “My biggest fault, it seems, was that I was too polite, too much a lady,” she wrote (Old Hollywood in a sadly debauched world). She came to believe that one reason female reporters went after her was that “some women aren't all that crazy about a woman who wears size fours, and … seems to have no trouble staying slim.” This would hardly account for Didion's reaction to her.

To avoid further betrayals, Mrs. Reagan tightly choreographed all her future interviews. This had been Didion's point: A former actress, Nancy Reagan represented the formal entrance into politics of the studio mind-set, where all actions, on and off the screen, are scripted in advance, taken care of by ad executives. That day on Forty-fifth Street, Didion had been flabbergasted by the arrival of a television crew who considered “watch[ing] Nancy Reagan being watched by me, or I could watch Nancy Reagan being watched by the three of them, or one of the cameramen could step back and do a
cinéma vérité
study of the rest of us watching and being watched by one another.” The news people set up a scene in Mrs. Reagan's garden where she would fake the nipping of a flower bud for the cameras. “Fake the nip, yeah,” said one of the cameramen. “Fake the nip.”

Didion never changed her mind about “Pretty Nancy.” In 1987, following press reports that Mrs. Reagan was an “aggressive manipulator of the affairs of state, who, after three months of acrimonious trying, had succeeded in ousting … [the] White House chief of staff,” Didion reiterated that she was “not one of Nancy Reagan's greatest admirers”: “Her only interest is protecting her and his face to the world. She has no intrinsic interest in politics.”

*   *   *

Just two ladies chatting in the garden, that's all. But while Nancy faked the nip, elsewhere in Ronald Reagan's California, hidden from the hippies in the Haight, out of sight of the investors who'd bought the governor a house, 75 percent of the ammunition used in Vietnam was being shipped from Port Chicago, on a spit in the San Francisco Bay: 100,000 tons of shells and rockets a month, moved from the magazine at the U.S. Naval Weapons Station in the hills above the port to the loading piers less than a mile from the city proper. On assignment for
The Saturday Evening Post,
Dunne drove out there one day. “It has the feeling of the dust bowl,” he wrote. “A windmill flopped aimlessly in the breeze. Cattle grazed, and bales of hay punctuated the sun-burnt hills that contain hundreds of thousands of tons of death.” No one working at the port seemed to know or remember that one night, in the summer of 1944, two munitions ships exploded, killing 322 stevedores and shattering windows throughout the city, sending shock waves fifty miles distant.

Dunne visited an army induction center in Oakland, where Berkeley students arrived early in the mornings to yell at recruiters, then shouldered their book bags and hurried off to their eight o'clock classes. He was allowed to tour Building 590 at the Oakland Army Base, “hot and close and smell[ing] of sweat.” This was where enlisted soldiers spent their last twenty-four hours before boarding buses to Travis Air Force Base, halfway between Oakland and Sacramento, to be lifted on a World Airways Boeing 707 to Anchorage and then to Japan's Yokota Air Base and then to Bien Hoa, South Vietnam. Building 590 housed two thousand men. “Dozens of vending machines disgorge an endless variety of coffee, milk, soft drinks, ice cream, sandwiches, pastry, Nalley's Hot Tamales, Nalley's Hot Enchiladas, Nalley's Chili Con Carne,” Dunne wrote. “In the latrine, men have written all over the walls the date of their departure.” Above a phone booth, a sign read
YOUR LAST CHANCE
.

He dropped in one day on a Quaker meeting hall in a tumble-down section of Pasadena “where the rich used to live, second- and third-generation money from the East in an atmosphere so sedate … the only sound was the hardening of arteries,” he said. Now it was a neighborhood of crumbling garden apartments. There, members of the Resistance, a New Left group, offered sanctuary to draft resisters and boys who'd gone AWOL. These were not conscientious objectors, despite the activists' attempt to make them over into rebels. They were lost kids, Dunne thought, boys who'd enlisted because their parents wanted them to and who found they couldn't cut it. They could go to Canada, but the group wanted them to stay, take a public stand, risk court-martial and prison to draw attention to the system's evils. More to the point, said one of the boys, “If Canada is a bummer, you're stuck there for the rest of your life.”

These were fissures in the land of Reagan, and they needed close study. Nearly half a million American troops had been deployed overseas. Now, even
Time
magazine, which had once censored Dunne's attempts to tell the truth about the war, was asking, “How many men must the U.S. send?” Reagan was being coy about his plans. At a GOP governor's meeting in Grand Teton, he had recently told the press he had no intention of ever running for president, but “if the Republican Party comes beating at my door, I wouldn't say, ‘Get lost, fellows.'” This was why it mattered if “Pretty Nancy” faked the nip.

4

Didion's profile of the governor's wife appeared in the June 1, 1968, issue of
The Saturday Evening Post,
days after FSG's official release date for
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
. Perhaps to avoid the possible surge of attention (
might
there be attention?), Didion took herself and her family to Hawaii.

The first inkling she'd had that her book might get noticed came at a signing at L.A.'s Pickwick Bookstore in mid-May. She sold thirty copies and felt overwhelmed that the store stocked as many of her books as it did of Arthur Hailey's ready-for-the-box-office
Airport.

Heady but nerve-racking. There were other reasons for escaping the mainland.
The Saturday Evening Post,
continuing to bleed cash, had just undergone a personnel shuffle; no one knew what this meant for the future, but the Dunnes were worried. And then in March, Robert Giroux, a quiet, genial man, had come to Los Angeles for a visit. Didion had been dismayed to learn how poor the lines of communication were at her new publisher. The Dunnes took their guest to the Bistro. Halfway through dinner, Giroux told Didion he had just finished
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
liked it, and wondered if she would ever consider turning her hand to fiction. After an awkward pause, Didion told him she'd published a novel. “I hope we get a look at your next one,” Giroux said. While Didion's eyes darted, Dunne changed the subject.

So Hawaii was just the ticket. On the beach, Didion was simply “Quintana's mommy.” The hotel desk clerk remembered Quintana's name and said hello to her every morning. Didion could be “mindlessly happy” in Honolulu, she said, “good-natured to an extent that would surprise my acquaintances on the mainland. The place is manageable. I know what I will find” on the beach, among the life-insurance salesmen on incentive trips, the San Francisco divorcées, and the NBC television executives. A new TV drama,
Hawaii Five-O,
started filming that year, and the series' star, Jack Lord, booked rooms at the Kahala for all the guest stars. The sixties seemed not to have happened here. All the women dressed like Pat Nixon, in turquoise and yellow, waiting for cars under pink porte cocheres.

Outside the cordoned-off sections of sand, reserved for the patrons of the large luxury hotels, one might occasionally find a roll of barbed wire left over from the war, or overhear old-timers talking about the fires at Pearl Harbor—how, after the Japanese attack, older children from the public schools were given unloaded guns and told to go guard the reservoirs. Or one might hear an argument about how the war had been a good thing; at least it had modernized the islands and broken the hold of the colonial families who'd controlled all the sugar.

On the hotels' private beaches, one could ignore the fragile tourism and defense economy on which this spun-sugar paradise had been built. One could pretend it wasn't an armed camp. At the Kahala or the Royal Hawaiian, Didion could imagine young matrons in print dresses and tight little hats stepping off the
Lurline,
trailing valets and nurses and steamer trunks. She could believe she heard on the wind someone performing “My Little Grass Shack in Kealakekua Hawaii” the way a distant aunt used to sing it back in Sacramento.

Looking across a golf course, she could see a vast walled house, its blue-tiled roof reflecting sun diamonds back at the sea. Each day she watched the maid unlock the house's front gate and rouse the English sheepdog there. She wanted that house.