The Last Love Song (63 page)

In any case, the Hearst jury did not swallow his testimony, and Patty went to prison. A short time later, in the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, no less an eminence than John Wayne called for her release. “If everybody is willing to accept the fact that one man can brainwash nine hundred people into committing suicide”—in a compound adjacent to a former CIA training facility, as it happened—“why can't they believe a treacherous bunch like the Symbionese Army could brainwash one little girl? She was one little girl tortured and confined and threatened with her life.”

The brave protector of little girls was still promising a safe haven at the bend in the river. At least a few of the little girls had different ideas, gleaned, it seemed, from the rough justice stylized in Hollywood Westerns. On September 5, 1975, just a few months after desperately attempting to contact Led Zeppelin's guitarist, Jimmy Page, to warn him of “bad energy,” Squeaky Fromme, one of Manson's girls, pointed a Colt .45 at Gerald Ford in Sacramento's Capitol Park. Seventeen days later, Sara Jane Moore, an FBI informant under the supervision of Special Agent Charles Bates, who had initially headed the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-in, and who had most recently advised Randolph Hearst during the kidnapping ordeal, fired a .38-caliber revolver at Ford across the street from San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel.

Conspiracy theorists delighted in pointing out that, at the time of these attempts on his life, Ford, a former member of the Warren Commission, had appointed a House committee to investigate U.S. intelligence activities, including assassinations.

*   *   *

The sixties kept ending and not ending. But as images of finality go, it was hard to beat the inferno at Fifty-fourth and Compton on May 17, 1974, the ramshackle roof exploding and igniting the palm tree above it as hundreds of policemen and FBI agents ringed the neighborhood, scattering mothers and kids crouched behind eroding cinder-block walls—all of it broadcast live on television, with the audience believing Patty Hearst was burning alive inside. In fact, she sat watching the spectacle on television, too, in a motel room near Disneyland.

It was the “greatest domestic firefight in the history of mobile television news coverage,” said Didion's friend Barry Farrell. As he put it, “[I]t was clear that the miniscule army [the SLA] had touched upon the sorest of American vulnerabilities, the temptation to see in new calamities the appearance of new entertainments.”

This wasn't a “police shoot-out, it was a police shoot-in,” said one neighborhood resident. Someone scrawled a message on a charred wall in front of the house: “It Took 500 Cops” to kill six people, including Cinque and William Wolfe (though later reports claimed that only nineteen SWAT team members participated in the gunfire). It went without saying that if the outlaws had holed up in Beverly Hills or Brentwood, the situation would have been handled quite differently. When the flames erupted, police did not allow firefighters anywhere near the neighborhood to put them out. It seemed no one wanted Cinque to stand before a multiheaded, cobralike bank of microphones to say what he knew. “The LAPD was making a statement to revolutionaries to stay out of the city,” said a witness. They were saying,
Once and for all, this is the end of the sixties.

Except, as Barry Farrell wrote, in paying the SLA the “homage of a coast-to-coast auto-da-fe,” the authorities legitimized the paranoia of antigovernment forces, Left
and
Right (in what would become a repeated pattern at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas); “to die in a flaming house with a flaming palm above you and something resembling the American Division crouched in the street outside is not exactly what it means to be defeated,” Farrell wrote, “not when it happens in plain sight of millions of viewers, among whom an unhealthy number may be presumed to have been inspired by the show … the six inside the house had died the only death that could give full meaning to the idea of being a ‘terrorist.'”

Without knowing it, the nation had witnessed, in this California drama, the
Coming Soon
of the MOVE fire in Philadelphia, of Oklahoma City and 9/11—terrorism as showbiz extravaganza. In retrospect, the moment was made all the more indelible by the resignation, in disgrace, of Yorba Linda's Richard Nixon from the presidency just three months after the embers had settled in South-Central L.A. (Quintana called him “President Nixon Vietnam Watergate, almost as if he had a three-tiered name like John Quincy Adams,” Dunne said.)

The Watergate affair had a long, shadowy history, many layers and complications, but in Nixon's mind it boiled down to a shoot-out with his perceived domestic enemies: protest marchers, hippies, rock stars, and his fellow politicians.

I don't know what happened to this country.

Busy being born, busy dying.

Not much emphasis on
why.

 

Chapter Twenty-two

1

Nineteen seventy-five: “[T]here was a sense that something was happening that spring in Berkeley, something important and memorable that you didn't want to miss out on,” wrote Caitlin Flanagan, referring to what she called “Didion-mania.” Flanagan was fourteen in 1975. Her father, chair of the Berkeley English Department, was hosting Didion as a Regents' Lecturer, a position established with the aid of Didion's old teachers Mark Schorer and James Hart to bring to campus, for a monthlong teaching appointment and culminating public address, a scholar or artist who worked outside academia. Though Didion had published only two novels and a book of essays at that point, she had achieved a higher profile than most of her former classmates, and there was “the impression that she had returned to Berkeley a prodigal, but ready at last to put herself on the right path,” Flanagan said. Schorer had never relinquished his hope that she would come back to him from the crass magazine world, “put her nose to the grindstone of Henry James criticism,” earn her Ph.D. (better late than never), and take her proper place in front of a classroom. “Who can blame those two old teachers for wanting to bring their bright-eyed girl back to Berkeley, who can blame them for wanting to keep her forever in Wheeler Hall with the transom windows and the parquet floors and the Beaux Arts balconies and the perfect bay views?” Flanagan wrote. “They had a fondness for her that was the old man's fondness for a very young woman he has helped along the way, something far past lust, something that was instead the deepest kind of affection.”

Toward securing establishment recognition, Didion's major cachet was her inclusion in Tom Wolfe's 1973 anthology,
The New Journalism.
She didn't know why she'd appeared in such company—“Certainly I have nothing in common with Hunter [Thompson],” she had said—but her name in the table of contents, as only one of two women (Barbara Goldsmith was the other), among such notables as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Gay Talese, Terry Southern, and George Plimpton, began a process of canonization, planting Didion as a geodetic mark in the American literary landscape. In his introductory manifesto, Wolfe made his now-familiar argument that the New Journalism was an exciting new prose form, more with-it than the novel. But what really made the anthology a benchmark, and its writers a posse to be reckoned with, was the growing recognition that this exciting new form championed more or less traditional American values. Its radical practitioners only
pretended
to rock the yacht.

At heart, Didion was still a Goldwater girl (though she had just registered as a Democrat in order to vote for Jerry Brown as governor of California in the 1974 primary). Barbara Goldsmith's profile of the actress Viva, her contribution to Wolfe's anthology, was a rather scolding exposé of the seamy side of Andy Warhol's Factory. And Hunter Thompson had revealed himself as an old curmudgeon, writing, on the occasion of Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972, “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” His subversive rant was really a nostalgic longing for a lost domain.

Establishment king- and queen-makers could reward such work, knowing they'd be hailed as adventurers while championing standard beliefs.

But it wasn't Didion's Establishment mantle that created the fervor at Berkeley in the spring of 1975. It was the harder-to-see resonance she had with certain readers, mostly women at this point, and mostly through her essays—it was the passion of the housewife who had taped Didion's
Life
columns above her kitchen sink, who felt she was being spoken to by a friend. The nature and depth of this passion may have surprised Didion as much as it shocked her former professors, but there it was.

In Establishment terms, on the local scene that April and May, she was very nearly a bust. She took a single room in the Faculty Club, in the center of campus, and quickly isolated herself. Later she claimed she spent most of her free time writing
A Book of Common Prayer;
more than a third of the novel had already been drafted by this point. Dunne had praised it, to Lois Wallace, as the best thing Joan had ever done. “At night I would be the only person on the campus,” Didion said. “After the library closed, there I'd be. It was so extraordinary. I slipped right back into a sort of student depression. You know, I started wearing a dirty raincoat again and I walked around … I had nuts in my pocket. I mean, it was really odd. And very gratifying, in a way, to close a circle … this extraordinary experience of going back to someplace that was a very emotional period of your life. Walking back into that life nineteen years later, or whatever it was…”

She hoarded bits of chocolate in her tiny desk drawer. She ate tacos for dinner. “[I] wrapped myself in my bedspread and read until two a.m., smoked too many cigarettes, and regretted, like a student, only their cost,” she said. “I fell not only into the habits but into the moods of the student day. Every morning I was hopeful, determined, energized by the campanile bells and by the smell of eucalyptus and by the day's projected accomplishments.… I would write five pages, return all calls, lunch on raisins and answer ten letters. I would at last read E. H. Gombrich.… And yet every afternoon by four o'clock, I was once again dulled, glazed, sunk in an excess of carbohydrates and in my own mediocrity, in my failure—still, after twenty years!—to ‘live up to' the day's possibilities.”

Her routine contrasted starkly with her role as inspirational teacher. She thought she had prepared well to assume a sage aura; that same spring, she had been asked to give a commencement address at UC Riverside—academia was tugging fiercely at her raincoat!—and she had written a talk projecting the persona she hoped would carry her through her collegiate commitments. “I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package,” she planned to tell the Riverside kids (the Kimberlys and Sherrys and Debbis she had mocked in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”). “I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think there do embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck with it.”

Now here she was at Berkeley, wrapped in a bedspread, nibbling chocolate in the dark in the middle of the night.

A previous year's tenure at Yale had not steeled her, as she had hoped it would, for academic rigor. In New Haven, she had been asked to conduct a seminar on American literature, have tea with a group of nonfiction students, and meet with a film class—but this last she could do with her husband, and none of the events required a formal talk. More pressing that fall was the swift illness and death, in December, of Dunne's mother. From the cancer diagnosis to the funeral was a mere four months. Always a secretive woman, she was only slightly more accommodating, Dunne found, when faced with her final end. One night he asked for her wisdom in coping with marital tensions. “Drink,” she said drily. “Drugs.” There was one good thing about dying, she told him: “I won't have to read about Richard Nixon or Patty Hearst anymore.” Dunne's grief during this period was balanced by intense curiosity: When he saw the funeral attendants carrying his mother from the house in a gray body bag, he was surprised. “I had always thought body bags were black,” he said. He “was already making notes” for
True Confessions,
and this was a useful detail.

For Didion, mother loss, followed by a return to a college campus, was disorienting, almost as if there had been a glitch in time and she was young and old all at once.

So it was that in Berkeley she barely felt adult enough to fulfill one of her official duties as Regents' Lecturer: being guest of honor at a formal dinner in the home of the English Department's chair. According to Caitlin Flanagan, the evening was a disaster. “The immediate impression she gave, patently obvious even to a 14-year-old, was one of a person in misery,” Flanagan wrote. “I can tell you this for certain: anything you have ever read by Didion about the shyness that plagued her in her youth, and about her inarticulateness in those days, in the face of even the most banal questions, was not a writer's exaggeration of a minor character trait for literary effect. The contemporary diagnosis for the young woman at our dinner table would be profound—crippling—social-anxiety disorder.”