The Last Love Song (70 page)

A pest-control man told her she'd probably have a rat problem in her avocado trees out back. She deadheaded and groomed her lilies of the Nile, her agapanthus and blue starbursts. She spray-washed the balcony trellises, hosed off the brick patio. She paid arborists to trim the deciduous trees; Dunne said the trees seemed “to shed their leaves not seasonally but whenever they got nervous.”

The neighborhood took lots of getting to know: its pacing, the timing of its lawn waterings, its morning and afternoon schedules. Recently, a woman across the street had backed into Dunne's pearl-gray Jag, denting its side, as she'd pulled out of her driveway. (And now the damn Corvette needed a new transmission!)

At a party one night, John Cheever told Dunne he loved visiting this part of town. Tudor homes, Colonial homes, white New England trim—the neighborhood reminded him of Connecticut.

On the weekends, Didion mapped out her shopping routes—this area, west and sloping all the way down to the sea, was blessed with the best supermarkets in the world. Sometimes she drove out to El Mercado de Los Angeles, in the shadow of ratty billboards announcing daily flights to San Salvador. There, she'd pick up cheeses, chicken, and salsa. She was in the mood for chili these days.

Among the market stalls, she moved past elderly men who wore only undershirts, past children tugging silver Mylar balloons on kid-sticky nylon strings. Brass bands blew competing tunes from the beer joints. Her neighbors had told her the “newly arrived” tended to gather at the market—undocumented families looking for work. If she needed extra house help, this was the place to come. Reliable help was hard to get.

Sara Davidson reported visiting the Dunnes one day at their Brentwood home to introduce them to her new baby. She took along her nanny, a young woman named Mary, the daughter of a truck driver. Mary said “cain't” and “youse,” visibly discomfiting Dunne. Later, when Davidson learned that Mary had been stealing from her, Dunne said he wasn't surprised: “You don't know White Trash.”

Protection, insulation, control. “I'm going to have a ‘me' decade,” Didion said. She'd hired a new housekeeper. Her personal secretaries and her niece Dominique, now twenty, were available for baby-sitting Quintana. Dominique liked to swim in the pool.

One night, Didion thought it would be lovely to float candles and gardenias in the pool's deep end for an outdoor party. She lit the candles and used a pool skimmer to arrange the flowers in pleasing patterns, but they all got sucked into the filter intake, and she drenched herself trying to pluck the soggy stems from the water. Through her clinging dress, her ribs in the mirror looked like the slender slats of a deck chair. Control was not so easy to establish.

So why did she think she could handle tossing away her cigarettes? The conviction had struck her one day; by happenstance, she'd run into an old teacher of hers from Berkeley, Jim Hart. He told her his wife had just died of lung cancer. He said he missed taking walks with her. Right then, Didion decided to stop smoking. She told Dunne she was doing this so he wouldn't pine for her on evening strolls around the neighborhood.

Then she read about the Italian political leader Aldo Moro: When he was kidnapped by terrorists, press profiles of him stressed that he'd been a man of moderate habits, smoking only five cigarettes a day. Didion figured since the cigarettes didn't kill him (his kidnappers shot him to death), she could afford to be moderate, too. From then on, five a day was her bargain with herself.

3

Quintana's unhappiness caused the family's greatest adjustment problems. Her laid-back life at the beach had not prepared her for the rigors of classes at the Westlake School for Girls or the rigid social order she had to plow her way into as an outsider. Westlake, enrolling about seven hundred students, many of them from Hollywood's business and entertainment elite, occupied its current buildings at North Faring Road because the Janns Investment Company decided it would make a solid anchor for the Holmby Hills development. This pragmatic, profit-oriented ethos set the tone for all work and activity at the school. The kids wore conforming blue uniforms and hauled their parents' attitudes into the crowded hallways. “Kids grow up and become aware of what their parents do, and they can be tough, Hollywood kids,” said Tim Steele. “They learn their parents' ruthless business techniques and they learn about power, but they only know it as habit.” (Didion agreed: “Writers do not get gross from dollar one, nor do they get the Thalberg Award, nor do they even determine when and where a meeting will take place: these are facts of local life known even to children,” she said.)

“In those days, public schools weren't shunned they way they are now; it didn't really matter where a kid went to school—public or private. All their parents were in the business, so the kids would meet and mingle,” Steele said. “I heard of schoolteachers teaching the sons and daughters of television producers and studio heads. If a kid was in danger of flunking, she'd threaten to have the teacher fired. That's the way things got done in Hollywood. The whole damn business was like high school. And vice versa.”

Didion rather enjoyed her vicarious return to school, reading
Moby-Dick
along with her daughter—she relished the assignments more than Quintana did: For the first time, she
got
what Melville was doing. Quintana wrote papers on Angel Clare's role in
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
and on the nervous system's responses to stress—often while eating alone off a TV tray in her bedroom.

Meanwhile, her parents would be out at Ma Maison, dining with the “same old faces”: George Cukor, Jacqueline Bisset, Dustin Hoffman, Carl Bernstein. For Didion, the move to Brentwood was one more step toward securing the “last stable society.” “This place never changes,” Carl Bernstein told her approvingly one night at the restaurant. “No,” Didion said. “Time stands still here.”

For her daughter, the “suburbia house” meant a terrible upheaval. Like Didion, Quintana was always haunted by the thought of a lost domain: the family she believed she would never know. Now the beach became a vanished world to which she could not quite return. Naturally, she visited Malibu friends and sometimes stayed overnight at Susan Traylor's house; still, everything had changed in spite of her efforts to hold them steady, despite her mother's denial of time.

“[W]e encourage them to remain children … our investments in each other remain too freighted ever to see the other clear,” Didion would write in
Blue Nights.

Quintana tried to tell her who she was, indirectly, obliquely, with a dollop of irony—the family style.

“It bothered her father: [Quintana] didn't seem to want to read anything he'd written, or that I'd written,” Didion said. “When I asked her about it, she said, ‘When you read something, you form an opinion about it, right? I don't want to form an opinion about my mother and father.'”

But this was a mask, like saying, with a smirk, “suburbia house,” instead of shouting,
I hate these little sitting rooms off each of our bedrooms. I can't stand being so far from my friends. How could you bring me to a place like this?

Of course she'd dipped into her parents' writing—seen her mother's fascination with trauma and terror, winced at her father's knowledge of anal and oral sex. He was more clued in than his wife to the “person” developing under their roof, just as Quintana saw
Dunne
more clearly (shocked that he'd hidden so many “adult” subjects from her). As a result, they fought more bitterly than ever—over space, chores, schoolwork. After arguing with her father, she'd imagine her birth parents. In her mind, they were always young and smiling. She'd think maybe they'd be more gently understanding of her.

She told her folks she'd decided to write a novel “just to show you.” In the prologue she wrote, “Some of the events are based on the truth and others are fictitious. The names have not yet been definitively changed.” The main character, Quintana, suspects she's pregnant. She informs her parents. “They said that they would provide the abortion but after that they did not even care about her any more. She could live in their suburbia house in Brentwood, but they didn't even care what she did any more. That was fine in her book. Her father had a bad temper, but it showed that they cared very much about their only child. Now, they didn't even care any more. Quintana would lead her life any way she wanted.”

“Just to show you”: Not only can I write, as you do—and about the very same subjects—but
I
can get pregnant. Or my character can. Take that.

“[T]hey would provide the abortion.” Who or what is aborted? Afterward, the character Quintana becomes a ghost in the house.

The novel ended with a fragment: “On the next pages you will find out why and how Quintana died and her friends became complete burnouts at the age of eighteen.”

*   *   *

Quintana wasn't the only member of the extended family worrying about early burnout or trying to write fiction.

Nick had finally hit bottom. “Day-to-day living became unbearable,” he said. He'd blown most of his money on his drug habits. “I sold my West Highland terrier named Alfie to Connie Wald for $300.… What kind of a man would
sell
his dog?”

“Desperate to save myself, I went through a spiritual stage. I started attending the Church of Self-Realization at the end of Sunset Boulevard just before the beach. It was a beautiful and tranquil place. A friend and I meditated there, but we always smoked a joint first, which wasn't really the point,” he said. “Then I went into the hospital overnight to have a cyst removed. In the recovery room, still under anesthesia, I suffered cardiac arrest and nearly checked out.”

Shortly afterward, in September 1978, he got into his two-door Ford Granada—by now, he'd lost his Mercedes—and drove to Oregon. Retrospectively, he framed the story this way: “I had heard the word[s]
Cascade Mountains,
and I was attracted to the peacefulness of the sound of ‘cascade.' In a hamlet called Camp Sherman, on the Metolius River, I had a flat tire. I didn't have any idea how to change a tire, and I was too weary to learn. The nearest garage was closed[, so] I rented a one-room cabin, with kitchenette and bath.”

In fact, he'd had some foreknowledge of Camp Sherman, according to Joyce Osika, the woman who rented him the cabin at Twin View Resort. “He did tell me that a lady in his apartment [in Beverly Hills] had suggested to him, ‘If you want quiet and solitude, go to Camp Sherman,” Osika said. Nick moved his typewriter into cabin number 5, and stayed for six months.

“There were 150-foot-high pine trees outside it and views of Black Butte and snow-capped Mount Jefferson,” Nick said. “I was like a whipped dog when I came … but there was something about this place that had an incredible effect on me.”

In the afternoons he walked to the mouth of the Metolius, fed by numerous springs, flowing north and east toward Lake Billy Chinook and the Deschutes River. At the Camp Sherman Store, just across a little footbridge, a fly fisherman told him (though he had no intention of fishing) that the best flies to try in the fall were the blue-winged olives or the no. 8 Dirty Bird. He didn't believe a word. He could tell a good storyteller when he saw one.

He
was trying to write a story. Later, he'd say he just gave fiction a what-the-hell whirl. But in truth, he had an agent in Hollywood, Arnold Stiefel. Stiefel had taken Nick to the Polo Lounge right before Nick drove north. “You're dead meat in the picture business,” he said. Nick said he already knew that. So Stiefel suggested he ghost-write a sequel to Joyce Haber's novel,
The Users.
Nick had produced a television movie of
The Users,
and he knew enough Hollywood gossip to write a rousing tale. In cabin 5 each day, he plotted chapters.

But mostly he “licked [his] wounds” and tried to shed his Tinseled skin. “I had no telephone and no television, and I literally lived in silence,” he said. He sat for hours, not moving, in an orange Naugahyde chair. He stopped drinking and drugging. “All that bullshit ended in the cabin. I used to think it was ‘this person's fault' that I didn't get that movie, or ‘that person' did this or that. I came to realize that the fault was always mine.”

He was surprised one day to find in his mailbox a letter from Truman Capote. They'd never been close, but Capote could sympathize with Nick: He'd had his own problems with chemical dependencies, and recently he'd been shunned by Hollywood society after publishing excerpts of his nasty roman à clef,
Answered Prayers,
in
Esquire.
On ecru-colored Tiffany paper, Capote said he admired Nick for trying to straighten himself out: “But remember this, that is not where you belong, and when you get out of it what you went there to get, you have to return to your own life.”

Capote died two years later. “I felt sure that if he had done what I had done, he wouldn't have been dead so early,” Nick said.

He also received in the mail one afternoon a pair of L. L. Bean rubber boots. They came from his brother Stephen, who hoped he'd spend many happy hours walking in the woods.

*   *   *

Nick's daughter Dominique and his eldest son, Griffin, had decided to try acting. Dominique earned small roles in televisions shows,
Family, CHiPs,
and
Fame.
Quintana was thrilled to see her cousin on the screen. Griffin skipped college and entered showbiz by running the popcorn stand at Radio City Music Hall. He became buddies with the camels in the annual Christmas nativity scene. “I fed them a lot of popcorn,” he said. Soon, he was appearing in obscure movies, but then he followed his father's old example and, with a couple partners, bought the film rights to Ann Beattie's novel
Chilly Scenes of Winter.
He and his partners drove to Boston to seal the deal with Beattie. “It was like seeing three of my characters walk through the door,” she said—hapless, post-sixties types, wondering what's next. (Beattie had been praised by reviewers as Joan Didion for a new generation, minimalist and melancholy.) Joan Micklin Silver directed the movie, originally titled
Head Over Heels.
It premiered in New York while Nick was busy pursuing asceticism in Oregon. Griffin pleaded with his father to come celebrate his success, but Nick refused. He was doing important work, he said, reassessing his past. Besides, money was a problem.