The Last Love Song (50 page)

Hersh had tried to interest
Life
and
Look
in the story, but he failed. Previously,
The New York Times
had buried deep inside the paper a two-paragraph AP piece based on a press release from Georgia's Fort Benning mentioning, almost in passing, the charges against Calley. It had taken the military establishment almost a year to acknowledge that the massacre in My Lai was not precisely the “outstanding action” Gen. William C. Westmoreland had called it.

Pressure on the army to investigate the incident grew after a former door gunner from the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, who had flown over My Lai and witnessed the carnage, sent a letter to thirty congressmen imploring them to look into the matter. Most legislators ignored him, but Barry Goldwater and a pair of others urged the House Armed Services Committee to strong-arm the Pentagon.

“These factors are not in dispute,” Hersh wrote. “There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation … You can't afford to guess whether a civilian is a Viet Cong or not. Either you shoot them or they shoot you … Calley's friends in the Officer's Corps at Fort Benning, many of them West Point graduates, are indignant. ‘They're using this as a Goddamned example,' one officer complained. ‘He's a good soldier. He followed orders.'”

When she learned these facts, Didion phoned her editor at
Life,
Loudon Wainright. His wife said he'd have to call her back.

It was a Sunday afternoon. “He's watching the NFL game,” Dunne told her. “He'll call you at halftime.”

When he
did
phone, she said she wanted to do her first column from Saigon. He said no. “Some of the guys are going out,” he told her, then suggested she stay put and just introduce herself.

Seething, she went for a walk on the sand, but it didn't calm her down. Each afternoon, the talk on the Kahala beach was all about Ted Kennedy and that girl who'd drowned in his car. Nationwide, the adults were misbehaving. As a result, the children, mostly young women, were dying.

“Where did the morning went?” Quintana asked Didion one day, still on mainland time, expecting the sun.

*   *   *

Day by day, Hersh's reports, picked up now by all the major papers, detailed the event at My Lai. He quoted Sgt. Michael Bernhardt: “It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it.… They were setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them up. They were going into the hootches and shooting them up. They were gathering people in groups and shooting them. As I walked in, you could see piles of people, all through the village.”

In an interview
Didion
could have gotten, Gen. Fred C. Weyand said, “The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things'—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers' lives … [W]e should have made the realities of war obvious to the American people before they witnessed it on their television screens.”

For Didion, My Lai was another case of betrayal by romance. Before leaving for Quang Ngai Province, Calley and Charlie Company had joined the First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry for training at Schofield. James Jones had endeared the base to her. She always visited it whenever she flew to Hawaii. Now it was poisoned ground.

“There was a lot of illusion in our national history,” Reinhold Niebuhr said, around this time. “[I]t is about to be shattered.”

Didion was the chronicler of shattered romance. She needed to be in Saigon. Loudon Wainwright had suggested she introduce herself. Well, okay. She'd give
Life
's readers one
hell
of an introduction.

Betrayal was very much on her mind.

“I had better tell you where I am, and why,” she wrote. “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the winds … My husband switches off the TV set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes and brush the baby's hair … We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”

“Maybe it can be all right,” she says she said to him.

“Maybe,” he replied.

Dunne took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo to give Didion time to finish the piece. Then he edited it and went with her to file it at the Western Union office. “At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it,” Didion wrote later. “That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.”

Life
's readers did not know what to make of such an apparently candid piece. Many of them wrote to complain that the magazine's new columnist was no Little Miss Sunshine. The editors began to wonder if they'd made a mistake. They “didn't get it. [Didion's] pieces [in
Life
] made such an impact—not just on people who were literary.… I know housewives who had [her column] over the sink,” Dan Wakefield said later:
You mean it's okay to admit you think about divorce? To think of
yourself
, when the world's grappling with so many crises?

“I am not the society in microcosm,” she had said. And yet …

Even more than with
Slouching
Towards Bethlehem,
Joan Didion was about to become Joan Didion, the woman who wrote the books, the woman
in
the books, in narratives of fact and fiction.

She had introduced herself properly.

“It was a big shock to find myself in a certain kind of limited public eye” because of that divorce column, she claimed. “I thought I was always going to be writing these books that I would finance somehow, that no one would ever review or read.”

On December 31, Henry Robbins wrote to Jane Fonda: “We saw you on the David Frost Show last week and were terribly pleased to hear you speak so excitedly about Joan Didion's piece in
Life
magazine … Joan has just completed a new novel,
Play It As It Lays,
which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing in the spring. If you were impressed and touched by her
Life
article, you'll be positively overwhelmed by this forthcoming book. We were.”

 

Chapter Eighteen

1

Quintana had no coat. She wore a bright frangipani lei in the cold Connecticut air. Shivering on the runway at Hartford's Bradley Field, she told her mother it was okay, that children with leis don't wear coats. She was glad to be staying with her dad's mom for a while. Her last few days in Hawaii had been cooped up and crazy, first because an earthquake had struck the Aleutians, threatening tsunamis in Honolulu, and second because the tsunamis didn't come, leaving the family to suffer its tensions with no hope of distraction. She couldn't go to the beach. Her parents were awfully careful with each other, and quiet.

They dropped her in West Hartford because of their movie project. Nick had cut a production deal with Joseph E. Levine at Avco-Embassy, an independent studio responsible for
The Graduate
and
Carnal Knowledge.
The Dunnes intended to go to New York to see Needle Park.

Friends in the city were stunned to run into them at a party. People made embarrassed allusions to the
Life
piece. “‘In lieu of divorce. In lieu of!'” Didion told them, and laughed.

The couple stayed at the Hotel Alamac at Seventy-first and Broadway, near Sherman and Verdi squares; together, these were known as Needle Park. The Alamac, nineteen stories high, topped with large decorative concrete urns, was a luxury hotel when it opened in the 1920s, featuring orchestras in its Congo Room and hosting international chess tournaments, but by 1969 it was a run-down residential establishment housing mostly the elderly unemployed. The City University of New York leased three floors there, offering remedial classes to high school kids, but the program was troubled: The black and Puerto Rican students demanded nonwhite teachers and the administration despised its radical young faculty, assigning Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung. Violence hung in the air. On the residential floors, drug use and prostitution passed the hours. Didion kept her eyes down in the jerky old elevators.

She didn't last long at the Alamac. She wanted to leave the moment she discovered the management wouldn't bring her clean white sheets every day (she went to Bloomingdale's and bought her own fresh towels). For a while, though, she got to play Hard-Boiled Reporter (
to pack: bras and bourbon
). Observing the bloody needles discarded in the halls, watching the bartender at P&J Café drag overdosed patrons from his bathroom to the curb at Verdi Square, meeting recovering addicts from Phoenix House nearby, she gathered telling details for the screenplay. Blissfully, Dunne indulged his voyeuristic tendencies.

The intersection of Amsterdam, Seventy-first, and Broadway was an urban pressure point, a tumor of traffic swelling around a jam in the city's nerve system. The pressure was heightened by Robert Moses's slum-clearance campaign and by the destructive wave rolling through neighborhoods here following the ground-breaking ceremony at Lincoln Center. Veteran residents fled; absentee landlords took over; city services declined; fewer cops patrolled the streets; conditions decayed; drug dealers claimed their spots.

It was the perfect setting for a New Hollywood love story.

*   *   *

With
Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider,
and
Midnight Cowboy,
the studios had encountered both a threat to their operation and a new formula that, if successfully absorbed, would reinvent them: the studio picture as “indie,” often shot on location with nonunion crews, featuring gritty subject matter wrapped around traditional narrative elements, the love story, the buddy flick, the road movie, the updated Western. In committing to
The Panic in Needle Park,
Avco was just like every other studio in 1969—“narcotized,” Didion said, “by
Easy Rider
's grosses” and convinced that “all that was needed to get a picture off the ground was the suggestion of a $750,000 budget, a low-cost … crew, and this terrific 22-year-old kid director.” In fact, to direct the picture, Nick had lined up Jerry Schatzberg, a fashion photographer best known for snapping the cover of Bob Dylan's
Blonde on Blonde.
Nick had also tapped
Midnight Cowboy
's director of photography, Adam Holender. Didion may have been miserable at the Alamac, but in terms of the project, she couldn't have had happier timing. At no other point in cinematic history could the movie she was writing get made.

*   *   *

“Miss Didion, do you have any luggage?” asked the Alamac night clerk when the couple checked in. He seemed mildly surprised when she said yes. Jazz players smoked in the lobby, milling quietly between sets at a nearby nightclub. Toothless old men clutching tubs of cottage cheese shuffled into the elevators, smelling of days-old cough syrup and unwashed clothes.

In the room—tiled floors, yellow walls—Dunne phoned to make an appointment to interview a drug dealer in a Blimpy Burger down the block (a friend had put him in touch with a fellow who supplied movie people, filming in New York, with all the goodies they'd need). “I'll be there around noon,” the dealer said. “Or anyway between noon and four.”

Didion called Quintana. She had a new dress, she told her mother. Didion asked what kind of dress it was. Quintana said she had to go, she had to work.

Didion phoned her mother in California. Here, in this bleak hotel, away from her daughter, she longed to be ten again, or sixteen, enjoying Christmas at home while a soft winter rain pattered the windows. Her mother agreed with her: In the old days, Christmas used to be better, before the family drank too much and gave one another too many presents.

“I had wanted to make this Christmas a ‘nice' Christmas, for my husband and for our baby,” Didion wrote in one of her
Life
columns. She had wanted to perceive herself “in a new and flattering light,” she said, to get past marital squabbles and create an atmosphere at home where “no harsh words” would be spoken. She had wanted to “imprint indelibly upon her [daughter's] memory some trace of the rituals of family love.”

Instead, she was sitting in the near dark on a hard bed, listening to the raised voices of Puerto Rican call girls in the hallway.

The next day, “[m]y husband and I see our lawyer, who tells us that because of a movie in which we are involved, he has incorporated us in the state of Delaware. I abandon the attempt to understand why,” she wrote.

The dealer in the Blimpy Burger turned out to be a sixteen-year-old high school student wearing braces on his front teeth. His mother was an addict and his brother also sold drugs. He peddled pot and heroin on the Upper West Side on his bicycle. He wasn't, himself, currently “shooting.” Could he have a small role in the movie? Sure, Didion said.

He put the Dunnes in touch with some of his clients, who went to the couple's room at the Alamac. Dunne gave them Hostess Twinkies and pocket change, and the addicts shot up, a real-life performance for the writers.

To file her
Life
drafts, Didion walked to a nearby press office, which had an AP wire. In California, the big story was the Rolling Stones' disastrous concert at Altamont, at which the Hells Angels had murdered a boy. Instantly, the press labeled the event the anti-Woodstock and claimed it was the
next
thing—after Manson—tolling the death of 1960s idealism.

Didion stood one night in the nearly deserted press office, listening to the clatter of the AP wire, thinking about Christmas wreaths. She started to cry. “I tell myself that I am crying because the baby told me in November that she wanted a necklace for Christmas, and instead of stringing beads by firelight I am watching an AP wire in an empty office,” she wrote later. “But of course that is not why I am crying at all. Watching an AP wire in an empty office is precisely what I want to be doing: women do not end up in empty offices and Blimpy Burgers by accident.” She was tired and feeling sorry for herself. And despite doing what she wanted to be doing, she couldn't help but wonder, she wrote, “if indeed we have been doing anything right.”