The Last Love Song (54 page)

A week earlier, before her first day on the witness stand, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi convinced her not to wear a long dress because “long is for evening.” She needed to make a favorable impression on the jury. Didion, by now a confidante of sorts after several interviews at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, offered, maternally, to go to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and buy Kasabian the dress of her choice—“Size 9 Petite.” Kasabian had recently given birth to her baby. “Mini but not extremely mini,” she said. “In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold.” Either that, or a “Mexican peasant dress, smocked or embroidered.”

Didion delivered the dress to Kasabian and her attorney, Gary Fleischman, at Fleischman's office on Rodeo Drive. Kasabian's husband, Bob, was there, wearing a long white robe. Didion watched them climb into Fleischman's Cadillac convertible and drive off to Santa Monica, cheerily waving good-bye. She was grateful to be done with Sybil Brand. There, walking down antiseptic institutional hallways to meet with Kasabian, she would pass through half a dozen doors. They locked behind her, each a “little death,” she said. She remembered a white rabbit grazing on the grass beside the prison gate as Fleischman signed them in one day. After each interview, she would return to Franklin Avenue, “have two drinks and make … a hamburger and eat it ravenously.”

The day Kasabian wore the I. Magnin dress, she hoped to sneak into the courtroom unseen by gawkers or reporters, but Family hangers-on discovered her arrival and screamed at her, “You'll kill us all, you'll kill us all!”

Ed Sanders said Squeaky Fromme showed up at the
Freep
's offices one day during the trial, vaguely warning the paper not to print negative stories about Charlie. Eventually, Manson groupies would wonder if Didion failed to complete her book on Linda Kasabian because she feared retaliation by Family members. Actually, other factors scotched the project, not the least of which was Didion's frenetic schedule.

In order to convict Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, Bugliosi had deemed it best to deemphasize the drug deals and petty thievery and build a prosecution around a vast conspiracy. Manson, he said, had masterminded a plot called Helter Skelter (based on subliminal messages from the Beatles song), an attempt to start a race war—from which the Family would emerge as world rulers—by committing a series of murders and blaming the violence on the Black Panthers. The success of Bugliosi's trial strategy would depend on Linda Kasabian's performance, her “demure” and “pigtailed” appearance, her I. Magnin dress.

Despite a few faltering moments, despite throat-cutting gestures directed her way by Manson as she testified, she did her job. By the end of the year, the jury had found Manson and the three women guilty. The women didn't appear to be concerned. They had taken heart, in September, when the Weathermen broke Timothy Leary out of the San Luis Obispo federal prison, where he was serving a ten-year drug sentence. Maybe Charlie could escape, too! As for Manson, he maintained his innocence, and cleverly played on the media's desire to make him a symbol. “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” he told the judge at one point. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you … You made your children what they are … these children that come at you with their knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them … As for Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down fast … it is not my conspiracy.… Why blame it on me? I didn't write the music.”

*   *   *

“On August 13 [1970], all charges were dropped against Linda Kasabian, and she was set free. For a while thereafter she was a minor media celebrity,” Ed Sanders reported. Kasabian flew to New Hampshire to be with her mother and two children. “A few weeks after Kasabian had returned to the East Coast, Didion wanted to visit her and work on the book,” Sanders said. “Kasabian wouldn't oblige because she was going to be spending the weekend at Yale, watching the football game.”

Eventually, Didion
did
travel to New Hampshire, and on one occasion Kasabian went to see her in New York. Didion and Quintana went with her and her kids on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. One of these kids, Tanya, two and a half, Kasabian had left behind at Spahn Ranch two days after the LaBianca killings. “You abandoned your child with the very people you considered to be a band of murderers?” a defense attorney asked her during the trial. “Yes,” she replied. “Just something inside me told me she would be all right.”

*   *   *

Henry Robbins was terribly excited by the prospect of a Didion book on Linda Kasabian. It was the perfect confluence of author and subject, he thought. He spoke to her about it eagerly on Halloween night, 1970, when the Dunnes went to visit him and his wife at their apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. Quintana went trick-or-treating on every floor of the building with Robbins's two kids while Robbins told Didion what a damned good book he thought this would make. She'd already expended considerable energy on the interviews. Magazines were clamoring for serial rights. Now all she had to do was write it.

Kasabian seemed confused: Would this be a book
about
her—or
by
her, written with Didion's help? The situation knotted when Didion and FSG received letters from an attorney representing Bartyk Frykowski, in the matter of the wrongful death of his father at the hands of the defendants, including one Linda Kasabian. The defendants should not profit from their actions, the letters said. Any moneys accruing to Kasabian would be treated as a fraud against creditors.

Robbins replied, saying Didion had no contract with Kasabian, and no intention of securing one. He
didn't
say FSG had drawn up a draft agreement with Didion for the book, or that Kasabian (whom he referred to, privately, as “Pussy”) might
expect
money from it.

In the meantime, Kasabian had bought a camping trailer with her husband and hit the road, leaving no forwarding address. Didion didn't know how to reach her.

Periodically, Robbins checked with his author, hoping her interest in the Kasabian project hadn't flagged. She said nothing to him about it. She'd decided to make a Southern pilgrimage, on
Life
's dime, to gather material for columns and to start a novel. (All those reviewers who'd called
Run River
a Southern novel? Well, maybe this time she'd damn well
give
them a Southern novel!)

Dunne was in hunter-gatherer mode as well, so he went along (Quintana stayed in Sacramento). “The idea was … to drink Dr. Pepper at the general store and do the underwear and the dirty shirts at the crossroads coin laundry, to go to Little League games and get my hair cut while my wife got a manicure or a pedicure in the local beauty parlor—in other words, to take the pulse of the white South,” he said, revealing how firmly he'd determined already what the South had to offer. Here was a difference between him and his wife: Though she pitched a similarly clichéd idea to the
Life
editors, telling them she'd offer something like “The Mind of the South,” she carried no preconceptions into the bayous; more impressively, she aimed herself in whatever direction turned up, even when she didn't understand it, when it appeared to make no connection to anything she might do, when it couldn't be disseminated, much less
paragraphed,
for years. She would not produce “The Mind of the South.” She would not produce a Southern novel. But New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast were the “most interesting place[s] I had been in a long time,” she said. “[E]verything everybody said was astonishing to me.” Insights from the trip would enrich several future books, in surprising and unpredictable ways.

For example, she didn't expect to find in New Orleans “a strong sense of the Caribbean.” In this slumgullion atmosphere, she realized she'd been hearing, for years now, “weird stories … coming out about that part of the world,” and she wondered if a new cultural narrative was forming. “This was a time when people”—like her husband—“kept saying California was the face of America's future,” but she wasn't sure that was true anymore—another manifestation, perhaps, of her wish for the sixties, the
California
sixties, to be dead. The history of the United States had always been linked to Latin America—she knew this from her grandfather's writings, from the illegals working in her house, caring for Quintana—but new currents seemed to be blowing along the borders. Though her awareness of this was only shadows, “what I was actually interested in was the South as a gateway to the Caribbean,” she said.

She remembered Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who'd opened an investigation into the John Kennedy assassination (and provided the first public viewing of the Zapruder film). Though his prosecution of Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman he accused of conspiring with Oswald and a man named David Ferrie to murder the president in a “triangulation of crossfire” was ludicrously unfounded, the names Garrison exposed, rightly or wrongly, kept pointing to Miami, to Cuba, and to a “whole underbelly I'd never seen before,” Didion said. “It was just real news to me. I started thinking about that part of the world, from the Gulf Coast to down around Miami. The whole Caribbean connection. There was something going on in the Caribbean that I didn't understand.”

Not until 1988, on a return trip to the Crescent City, would she try to locate 544 Camp Street, where, reportedly, Oswald had rented an office in 1963 to distribute “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets, either as a Castro supporter or as someone posing as a Castro supporter while joining the opposition, or, more sinisterly, while leaving false trails as part of an assassination conspiracy.

In 1988 the small Newman Building no longer stood; even in 1970, Didion would have found no trace of Oswald, but she was well aware of the Camp Street address. People, she said, “had taken the American political narrative seriously at 544 Camp.”

In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations, convened by the U.S. House of Representatives with Gerald Ford's approval, would say “the testimony of a number of witnesses … placing Oswald and Ferrie together in early September 1963” in and around Camp Street “may be credible.” Furthermore, “Ferrie's experience with the underground activities of the Cuban exile movement and as a private investigator for [gangster] Carlos Marcello … might have made him a good candidate to participate in a conspiracy plot.”

Didion would seize these details, citing the House Committee document in her notes for
Miami
(1987). She would not forget her trip to New Orleans in the summer of 1970, or her first inkling that the corner of Camp Street might be “one of those occasional accidental intersections where the remote narrative”—tucked into the underbelly, hidden from public view—“had collided with the actual life of the country.”

*   *   *

For Dunne, the South's great revelation that summer was the “road glass.” “Whenever some member of the local gentry would pick us up to take us out to dinner, there would be a ‘road glass' on the dashboard, some spirits to fortify us for the ride to the local country club or the Holiday Inn dining room, martinis or a little straight whiskey with ice to tide us over,” he wrote. “The ubiquitous road glass was the perfect pagan icon of the secular South.”

Sitting beside him, or sipping Scotch on Walker Percy's rainy wooden porch in Covington, Louisiana, his wife brooded on her growing insight that “in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history.” What a difference from the West. In California, she was only just beginning to grasp, “we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”

*   *   *

When finally, without fanfare or warning, Didion told Henry Robbins the Kasabian project had died in her mind of natural causes, he was exasperated, even a little furious, though he kept it from her. In a letter to Marc Joffe of Bantam Books, with whom he'd coordinated publication arrangements, Robbins said he didn't understand why Didion couldn't have made her decision six months ago or at least let them know what she was thinking. This was in line with her refusal to acknowledge Roger Straus's attempts to nominate her for Rockefeller Foundation grants and other prizes. Was it simply negligence? Sometimes she didn't seem to grasp, even minimally, what it meant to be a citizen of the profession.

So now there would be no damned good Joan Didion book about the end of the 1960s. What a shame, Robbins thought. She had been poised to do it, and she had flinched.

Marc Joffe asked for Didion's research notes and her transcripts of the interviews with Kasabian so that Bantam could pursue its own Manson project. There is no record of Didion's response.

She had already moved on, months earlier telling her editors at
Life
she was dissatisfied with their tepid support. “I had a year's contract and I let them off at the end of six months, because they simply weren't running me,” she said. “I mean, I would file every week, and the pieces wouldn't run. I could have actually just made them pay me for the year … but that seemed too dispiriting to even contemplate.” The editors found her far too dark. She had never forgiven them for denying her Vietnam. “Some of the guys are going out,” Loudon Wainright had told her. The guys! For God's sakes, Mary McCarthy had slipped in-country and done
exactly
what Didion hoped to do—that is, parse the military language (“Napalm has become ‘Incinder-Jell,' which makes it sound like Jell-O,” McCarthy had written). The Calley trial was scheduled to start soon; the casualty figures weren't even
close
to adding up.