The Last Love Song (57 page)

On another occasion, a producer gave them a “hot idea”: “World War II.” “What do you want us to do with it?” Dunne asked. “You're the writers,” he said.

All of the producers said, “What if?” Again and again: “What if?” That was their contribution to story outlines. What if
this
happened? Or
that
?

*   *   *

A major part of each deal was the travel budget—the Dunnes needed time and distance from daily events (and child rearing) to work on a script. A thousand dollars a week and a chauffeured limousine at their beck and call, at the St. Francis in San Francisco, the Regency in New York, the Ambassador East in Chicago, and, most regularly, the Royal Hawaiian: This was the “attraction of borrowed luxury,” Dunne said—what it meant to be a star, if you were a writer.

They had become a team, equal partners, and in the process they had stopped fighting so much. Dunne still carried the disappointment of a literary reputation incommensurate with his hopes, but the respect he'd earned was not inconsiderable, and he had discovered in himself an innate facility for Hollywood deal making. In meetings, he was usually forced to take the lead because “Hollywood is largely a boy's club,” he said. “[F]or years Joan was tolerated only as an ‘honorary guy' or perhaps an ‘associate guy,' whose primary function was to take notes,” Dunne said. “‘Is John there?' an executive's assistant [would] say over the telephone when calling for his master. ‘This is Joan.' ‘Tell John to call when he gets home.'”

Thus it was in the “last stable society.”

If Didion would not accept women as an oppressed class within the industry, she had to admit that writers—for all the perks and steady work—straddled the lowest rungs. With his class sensitivities, festering since childhood, Dunne was especially vulnerable to social slights. “You're a Mel,” a producer joked with a friend of his one day. “Screenwriters are all named Mel. Producers are named Marty. In this town, the Martys hire the Mels.”

At least this was an injustice Dunne could share with his wife. It strengthened their teamwork.

As for sexism—well, even
women
were capable of oppressing women.

Enter Pauline Kael.

The Dunnes met her one night in New York at an Academy Awards party thrown by Lynn Nesbit. “She was perched in front of the television set, a tiny, birdlike woman in a Pucci knockdown and orthopedic shoes, giving the raspberry to each award,” Dunne said. He hesitated to introduce her to his wife. “She had despised …
Play It As It Lays
(Wilfrid Sheed had reported her reading it aloud derisively on the beaches of Long Island) … and Joan in turn had hammered Kael over the years [in print], suggesting among other things ‘vocational guidance.'” When the women met, they “circled each other warily,” Dunne said, these two Central Californians, “and they hit upon their rhythm—Valley talk. They talked about ranches and pickups and whiskey on the floorboards and the Silverado Trail, two tough little numbers, each with the instincts of a mongoose and an amiable contempt for the other's work, putting on a good old girl number. It was a funny act to watch.”

During the course of the evening, Dunne mentioned to Kael that Frank Perry would be directing the movie version of
Play It As It Lays.
Nick had made a distribution deal with Universal-Paramount, which had done quite well with Perry's
Diary of a Mad Housewife.
Kael thought Perry ham-handed and self-important; she asked Dunne why in the world they'd tapped
him
? Dunne said they'd really wanted Sam Peckinpah but the “studios reacted to Sam's doing a picture about a woman as if … Hitler [were to] do a film about the Jewish question.” Perry was a self-proclaimed “Didion freak.” She's the “most important voice writing in English today. She's past Mailer, Styron, Jones, the war guys,” he'd said. He'd put up his own money to direct her novel.

None of this pleased Kael, a Peckinpah admirer. She sniffed an inside job.

Several months later, in her review of
Play It As It Lays
in
The New Yorker,
Kael accused Didion of bringing to the screen the “ultimate princess fantasy,” which is “to be so glamorously sensitive and beautiful that you have to be taken care of; you are simply too sensitive for this world—you see the truth, and so you suffer more than ordinary people, and can't function.” She admitted she found Didion's novel laughable—“I know I have a lower tolerance for this sort of thing than many people, but should it be tolerated?”—and more than that, she found
Didion
ridiculous. She implied that Didion, the sensitive martyr, had seduced the men closest to her, her husband, her brother-in-law, and now Perry, into making her movie. It was a “novelist's wish fulfillment: narration that retains the most ‘eloquent' passages in the book, dialogue virtually intact.” “Perry hasn't found a ‘visual equivalent' for [Didion's] famished prose, but maybe this high-class-whorehouse style of moviemaking is the
true
equivalent.”

To date, this was the roughest mauling Didion had endured in print. It was personal and it was mean—on a par with Didion's treatment of Nancy Reagan. But because it involved professional matters—one writer, one movie insider to another—it contained a curious subtext. Against the odds, and in spite of continuing slights, Didion had become a powerful presence in a mostly male industry. Now here was an equally formidable woman pulling her down, publicly, personally, over traditionally “female” issues—sensitivity, silent suffering, suspicions of sleeping her way to the top.

You can
have
your damn solidarity, your movement, Didion must have thought. You old mongoose.

As for Dunne, he chivalrously defended his wife, as a knight of the stable society was required to do. Kael, he wrote, was “ludicrous … less a critic than a den mother” (
two
could sling this gender crap) “swatting her favorites gently when they get out of line, lavishing them with attention, smothering them with superlatives for their successes.”

If Didion was a Whore, Kael was an Overbearing Mom. Apparently, there was no room in this discussion for appraising solid professionals, doing their jobs.

*   *   *

Play It As It Lays
was certainly not a Joan Didion vanity project. It was a complex collaboration. “The four of us”—Didion, Dunne, Nick, and Perry—“locked ourselves into a hotel suite,” said the director. “We had this enormous bulletin board and all these stick-pins and colored file cards. It's the old writer's trick: To avoid writing, you go to the stationery store and freak out. Anyway, we broke the novel down into every one of its fragments and arranged them in order, and then rearranged them into our order and kept a master key so we knew how every shot was related and when every pay-off came. Then Joan and John wrote the screenplay.”

Didion was fascinated with film editing—“cutting,” she called it. The white spaces, the gaps, in the novel became quick cuts in the film, fragments of Maria's life repeated out of sequence. In particular, her abortion haunts her: Bloody images, memories of the doctor's gloved hand—these flit through her mind and across the screen when she and the viewer least expect them.

The editing alone took seven weeks and cost over a million dollars. Perry wanted a visual “mosaic” rather than a series of “definite statements,” in keeping with “the one-dimensional concern with the surface as employed in the book.” He was trying for a “radical departure” in texture. “I don't really know of any other screen stories that have been told in this fragmented form, which is the representation of [Maria's] chaotic thought processes. I believe this sort of subjective storytelling is a major new direction for film. And a most important one.”

Roy Lichtenstein joined the team as a visual consultant—the reason, Vincent Canby wrote, that the “dreadful Los Angeles freeway becomes, on the screen … a magnificent op art design—graceful gray loops on which tiny spots of red, yellow and aquamarine zoom in mindless motion.” Mental disintegration never looked so good.

“I wanted Lichtenstein because of his fascination with the visually banal,” Perry said. “It's so much part of the landscape here … [and] it's important because it represents the future of the country. It's the bellwether of the United States. Each day New England grows more like California. California does not grow like New England. It's plastic. It's artificial. It's also dynamic.”

Cost overruns mounted, including helicopter rentals for the freeway shots and lost camera equipment. Behind the scenes, Nick tussled with the studio. “[W]e had a studio chief who hated the movie, just hated it, and he would say this to anybody,” Nick said. “Ned Tanen, the head of Universal at the time, hated the book and called [the script] a piece of shit on our first meeting … [He] hated every single day's dailies, and he was the most awful person. It was so bitter.”

The filming was bitter for Didion, as well, but for entirely personal reasons. Her friend Diana Lynn had been scheduled to play a role in the movie, making a career comeback, but she suffered a stroke following a wardrobe fitting a few days before shooting began. She died a few days later, at the age of forty-five, in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai. Lynn had changed Didion's life, urging her to call Blake Watson and arrange Quintana's adoption. Now Quintana's Broken Man had taken Lynn away.

At the end of the movie, Maria says, “I know what nothing is, and keep on playing … Why not?”

Observers on the sets witnessed a similar grim stoicism hardening Didion's features.

*   *   *

The movie was not a hit, but Weld's performance (“a lot of puckers” conveying “cotton-candy misery,” according to Kael) earned her a Best Actress Award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival, and a Golden Globe nomination. Perry and Didion felt they'd achieved what they set out to do. The director believed that, together, the book and film made “incredibly essential statement[s] about where we're going in this country.” The critics were split. Though some, like Stanley Kauffmann, dismissed it as “pretentious, posturing, [and] empty,” based on the work of a “phony serious novelist,” others readily accepted the premise of Hollywood decadence as a harbinger of national destiny. Charles Champlin said it was “the year's most effective capturing of women's dissatisfaction,” and Rex Reed called it “profound,” the “first truly existential film ever made in this country.”

The Dunnes had now successfully released two unusual, uncompromising movies.

Their partnership earned them mentor status among a group of young writers. Jon Carroll, Dunne's cousin—“his mother and my grandmother were sisters,” he said—was living in San Francisco, writing for
Rolling Stone.
“I was intimidated by John. We were in the same field and he'd had success I hadn't had yet. He was large and gruff and knew everyone,” Carroll told me. “The temptation to treat him as a father figure was great. And he welcomed that. He enjoyed being my spirit guide, showing me around L.A.”

Carroll's connection to the Dunnes stood him well in the
Rolling Stone
offices. Founded with table scraps in 1967 by Jann Wenner, a Berkeley dropout galvanized by the Free Speech Movement, and Ralph Gleason, a former
Ramparts
editor and music critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone
revered Didion. Cameron Crowe, then a young writer struggling to find his style, remembered that “Jann Wenner gave me a copy of
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
 … He said, ‘This is the future of what you're doing now if you can hook into a more thoughtful, more soulful place.' I read one of her profiles on Jim Morrison and saw that it was about so much more than just Morrison.… [It] ended up being about life in California, the weather, and existence. I thought, ‘I get it! This is big picture stuff!'”

In the end, though, Wenner was just another businessman who wanted to do coke “with rock stars,” Carroll lamented. “[He] broke our hearts.” “I left
Rolling Stone
not on the best of terms,” he told me delicately. He went on to edit
New West,
Clay Felker's magazine, which Felker “meant to be a clone of
New York
.” In just a few years,
New West
would become an important outlet for the Dunnes' work.

Sara Davidson, a neophyte journalist, was another young writer making frequent pilgrimages to the Dunnes for lunch and advice, dazzled and amused by the way they'd “finish each other's sentences, batting the narrative back and forth as in a badminton game.”

One day, Eve Babitz surprised Didion with a piece she'd written about Hollywood High School. It was called “The Sheik,” a witty portrait of movie-star kids who know they own the world. Didion was charmed by it and she championed it with Grover Lewis, a
Rolling Stone
editor. On her advice, he bought “The Sheik,” and from there Babitz developed a series of incisive vignettes for her first book
, Eve's Hollywood
(1974), dedicated, in part, to “the Didion-Dunnes, for having to be what I'm not.”

Another young writer, Susanna Moore, had appeared at the Dunnes' parties (introduced to them by Connie Wald), though she would not publish her first novel until the early 1980s. Eventually, she would become one of Didion's closest friends. A tall, dark-haired former model, she had worked for a while as a script reader for Jack Nicholson and as Warren Beatty's personal assistant. She was nineteen when she applied for the job with Beatty. Just two years before that, she'd left Hawaii, where she'd lived since she was a girl. Her island background intrigued the Dunnes. Shortly after meeting them, she married production designer Richard Sylbert (
Shampoo, Chinatown, Catch-22
). Didion and Roman Polanski agreed to become godparents to her daughter, Lulu.