The Last Love Song (49 page)

He and Didion would move on to write a regular column for
Esquire
and they would enjoy many years of association with
The New York Review of Books,
but never again would they experience the freedom to
indulge
stories quite the way they had at
The Saturday Evening Post …
in the Haight or in the Valley's poisoned fields.

A certain expansive spirit vanished with
The Saturday Evening Post:
a foretaste of the blight that would kill American magazines over the next three decades.

“May all the one-eyed critics lose their other eye,” said William Emerson, the magazine's old editor in chief.

Dunne raised a glass to that.

5

Months later, Didion would be startled to learn directly from Linda Kasabian that the night the Manson Family “did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit … and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.” The votives perked on the windowsills. Maybe Quintana was dancing to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Champagne flowed at parties up and down the block.

Franklin Avenue—the “senseless-killing neighborhood”—was one of Charlie Manson's playgrounds. In the late 1950s, he had lived in an apartment a block from the Dunnes' house, running a bogus talent agency, 3-Star Enterprises, as a front for a prostitution ring. His buddy Tex Watson had a girlfriend living on Franklin. In the months before the Tate-LaBianca murders, he said, he sometimes sunbathed on his girlfriend's deck, “drinking beer and smoking grass while we watched all the big limousines drive up for the parties, dumping out beautiful people whom we never could quite recognize.” Allegedly, Manson shot to death a dope dealer in the Franklin Garden Apartments, in the shadow of the Magic Castle hotel.

On the afternoon of August 9, 1969, while
Easy Rider
played on area movie screens, while
Portnoy's Complaint, Slaughterhouse-Five,
and
The Godfather
brought an unusually high volume of readers into bookstores, word spread from Sunset up into the hills about the slayings at 10050 Cielo Drive. Didion was swimming in the pool at her sister-in-law Lenny's house in Beverly Hills when Natalie Wood phoned with the news. “I can remember we had a baby-sitter from Nayarit then, and she was very frightened … when we heard about the murders,” Didion said. “I assured her, ‘Don't worry. It has nothing to do with us,' but it did. It had to do with everyone.”

It seemed everybody knew somebody who had slept with, sold drugs to, or partied with the victims; in days to come, the people claiming to have been invited to the Cielo house that night exhausted the Hollywood A-list. Actor Steve McQueen said the L.A. sewer system was full of expensive drugs the day the news broke, as everyone, fearing visits from the cops, flushed their stuff.

Roman Polanski accused John Phillips of being the killer.

Michelle Phillips slipped a pistol into her purse. “Darling, put the gun away,” a friend had to tell her one night at the Daisy.

Suspicion spread like the tear gas on Sunset.

“It was the most bizarre period of my life,” Michelle Phillips said. “It could have been anyone, as far as I was concerned. The last conversation I ever had with Sharon was about wallpaper for her nursery.” Tate was eight months pregnant the night she was killed.

Didion was not alone in harboring “a kind of conflicting sense that … they [the victims] had somehow done it to themselves, that it had to do with too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”

“[This] investigation has caused a lot of people a lot of pain, because a lot of people feel they're guilty or they have something to hide about something, and go through enormous emotional wringers. This is what Cass is hysterical about,” William Doyle told LAPD lieutenant Earl Deemer on August 30.

Early reports about the crime “were garbled and contradictory,” Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album.” “One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not:
I remember that no one was surprised.
”

Nick Dunne was surprised. He had last seen Sharon Tate at a party at Tony Curtis's house. “His rose garden was lovely,” Nick said. “As I remember it all these years later, there were gravel pathways between the beds of roses and boxwood borders. At one point that night, I went out into the garden and there was Sharon, all alone, walking on a path by the white roses in full bloom. She was pregnant, and dressed in something white and billowing. It was like a scene in a movie watching her. She made me think of Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby
.… We talked about old times at [Jay Sebring's] barbershop, and the marvelous turns her life had taken. I was smoking a joint, and she took a few tokes.… She was joyous about having the baby, and she had never looked more beautiful.”

Nick had been in New York, producing
The Boys in the Band,
when Lenny called to tell him about the killings. He flew home immediately. “People were sending their children out of town for safety, and ours were going to my mother-in-law's ranch outside San Diego,” he said. He remembered that “Steve McQueen packed a gun at Jay Sebring's funeral, where he gave one of the eulogies.”

“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended on August 9, 1969,” Didion wrote, adding to the press's overheated valedictions. It was really only the crowd at the Daisy whose sixties had come to an end, but this fact slipped at a certain point; the media managed to superimpose Manson's face, with his crude swastika etched between his eyes, over psychedelic images of flowers and peace signs. Manson became a cult doll for the press, a penny-ante pimp inflated into a symbol for the national psychosis. But at ground level, in the community most directly affected, Didion's reporting got right to the point: “The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”

*   *   *

If the California narrative was an apocalyptic romance, the East maintained its sentimentality. A week after the Tate-LaBianca murders, on August 15, 16, and 17, the Woodstock Festival—officially, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—in Bethel, New York, took place; it was valorized by
Time
magazine as the “greatest peaceful event in history,” a fulfillment of the sixties' loftiest ideals.

Expectations for peaceful assembly were admittedly low after the previous year's Democratic National Convention, and there was delicious irony in watching the antiwar crowd raise its arms toward food and medical supplies airlifted onto mud-soaked fields by the U.S. Army.

But for the purposes of
our
narrative, we need to look past the Peace and Love, past Janis and Jimi, and the naked bodies packed like rabbits in a box, to a five-piece rock band from Woodstock, who often played with a larger musical collective called the Bummers, a “Commedia dell'Arte style group of cowboys and Indians.” The Bummers performed folk rock at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, produced an Off-Off-Broadway musical called
The Golden Screw,
and regularly appeared at the Woodstock Sound-Outs, annual mini-festivals held just south of Route 212 on the Glasco Turnpike. The Sound-Outs began in 1967 and became, according to Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, “kind of the spark for the Festival.” The Bummer's drummer was a young man named Gerry Michael. He played a variety of styles, backing performers such as Bonnie Raitt, Paul Butterfield, and Juma Sultan, who accompanied Hendrix's band at the '69 event.

Gerry Michael was not a symbol of anything, neither apocalypse nor hope. He deserves quick note, at this point, only because he figures prominently in a later part of Didion's story. In 2003, Gerry Michael, then a widower in his fifties, would marry Quintana Roo Dunne, whom Michael's son said he met in a bar, and who would die just over two years later (the official cause would be “acute pancreatitis”).

*   *   *

“I wanna dance.”

*   *   *

The rock poet Ed Sanders covered the first Manson trial for the
Freep
(as everyone called the
Los Angeles Free Press
), straining to grant Manson a presumption of innocence: Like Sanders, Manson had long hair. Sanders's attitude countered that of the mainstream press, which had already convicted Manson because he had long hair.

Dozens of reporters (and prosecutors) hoped to advance their careers with this story; among the many journalists given access to members of the Family in prison rooms, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, or the offices of the
Freep
(recently bombproofed after a series of threats from right-wing, anti-Castro partisans) was Joan Didion. She spent several evenings interviewing Linda Kasabian at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Kasabian had been the “wheel person” for the killers on the two-night murder run. At the time, she was the mother of an infant. How could the mother of an infant involve herself in the senseless killing of a woman who was eight months pregnant? If any writer could have understood Linda Kasabian, it was probably Joan Didion, who had spent the past year clipping from newspapers stories of children burning to death in supermarket parking lots and who was writing a novel ending with a woman passively watching a friend commit suicide.

“In fact we never talked about ‘the case,'” Didion wrote. “We talked instead about Linda's childhood pastimes and disappointments, her high-school romances and her concern for her children.”

6

Two of Nick's children, Alex and Dominique, stood frightened and confused next to their grim-faced uncle and aunt the night their father got arrested at LAX. Nick had arrived from a vacation in Mexico. Didion and Dunne had agreed to pick him up, and took his kids along to greet him. Someone tipped the airport police that he was carrying a “lid” of grass. They strip-searched and handcuffed him in front of his family in the Western Airlines waiting room. “I was at the time the vice president of a studio [Four Star, a television company owned by David Niven, Dick Powell, and Charles Boyer] and possessed the haughty attitude that came with the job, an attitude that did not endear me to the arresting officers,” Nick said. “Outside, there was a police car with a screaming siren and flashing red lights, waiting for me.… Manson himself couldn't have drawn a bigger crowd than I did that Sunday night at LAX. There was a very tall cop on either side of me, each with a hand in my armpit, and they lifted me off the floor with my feet dangling.” He seemed a sad clown in his Brooks Brothers blazer and Gucci loafers. “The cops insisted on calling me Mr. Vice President in mocking voices.”

He stayed overnight in a Venice jail. The following day, Didion and Dunne bailed him out, saying nothing. He had endangered the
Needle Park
project. It was a hard-enough sell without being wrapped in the trade papers' gossip columns. Worse, he had humiliated them—and his kids—in public.

For several months, in the midst of the Manson craziness, his slippage had exceeded everyone's darkest fears. Most mornings he ate alone in a coffee shop called Nibblers, on the corner of Spalding and Wilshire. Sometimes the faded old movie queen Norma Shearer came in for breakfast, and without acknowledging he knew who she was, he'd talk with her about good Old Hollywood, when MGM ruled the world and kept us all safe.

One day, when his pot bust was about to come to trial, he got a call from Sid Korshak's buddy Beldon Katleman. “He said he wanted to see me right away. It was an order, not a request,” Nick said. Katleman owned Gary Cooper's old house in Holmby Hills. He was wearing a terry-cloth robe when Nick arrived. He told Nick to join him in the steam room. There, he said, no one could hear them. “What kind of trouble are you in?” he asked. “Who's the judge?”

Weeks later, all of Nick's charges were dropped. “Who the hell do you know?” asked one of the arresting cops, outside the courtroom. “Why don't you assholes
drink
instead of using dope?”

Later, Katleman explained his generosity to Nick: “When I first came to this town from Vegas, nobody ever spoke to me at parties, but you did.”

7

On November 14, 1969, Didion finished drafting
Play It As It Lays
. The following day, she and her husband and their daughter flew to Honolulu.

George Hunt, the managing editor of
Life,
had recently offered her a regular column—perhaps at the prompting of Jim Mills—and she thought she might start by writing something about Hawaii. Shortly after she accepted the offer, Ralph Graves replaced Hunt. Graves had decided to shake up the staid old magazine. He hired Norman Mailer to cover the moon landing. On the cover of the June 27, 1969, issue, he had run a picture of a young man in military uniform, with the caption “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week's Toll.” Inside were photographs of 242 soldiers killed the previous week, and the quietly devastating statement “The numbers of the dead are average for every seven-day period during this stage of the war.” This was new territory for a publication associated with unquestioning patriotism.

Dunne warned his wife that working for the editors of a Luce outfit would be like getting “nibbled to death by ducks,” but they had, she said, promised “to put me out in a world of revolution, which sounded really attractive.”

Two days before the couple's departure for the islands, Seymour Hersh released an article through the Dispatch News Service, picked up by thirty-five American newspapers, including the
Chicago Sun-Times,
the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
and
The Milwaukee Journal.
The article began, “William L. Calley, Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname ‘Rusty.' The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.'”