The Last Love Song (78 page)

In fact, Dominique never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead less than a week after entering the ICU.

Nick kissed her good-bye on his final day with her, pressing his lips to her bald head and whispering, “Give me your talent.”

The press referred to her as the niece of John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. This enraged him. “Oh, what difference does it make?” Lenny said—with “such despair in her voice, I felt ashamed to be concerned with such a trivial matter at such a crucial time,” Nick said. But he couldn't let it go. His ex-mother-in-law agreed with him. “Listen to what he's saying to you,” she told Lenny. “It sounds as if Dominique was an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle.” Lenny instructed Nick, miserably, “You handle it.” So he called a publicist. The cabin in Oregon hadn't
entirely
flushed Hollywood from his system.

Later, Nick published a lengthy account of his daughter's murder. In it, he mentioned, in passing, that on the eve of the funeral, he didn't have the heart to watch the “two television programs” featuring Dominique, playing that evening on the networks. “Also on television that night was a film I had produced, never before seen on television, and another film my brother had written, also being shown for the first time,” he wrote. The real point of the story seemed to be that his publicist was working overtime.

*   *   *

Quintana had been staying overnight with Susan Traylor in Malibu when news came that Dominique had been found strangled in her driveway. Quintana's parents called her at six in the morning.

After the funeral, she told her mother and father, “Most people I know at Westlake don't even know anyone who died, and just since I've been there I've had a murder and a suicide in my family.”

As if it were the school's fault. The curse of the suburbia house.

Her father told her, “It all evens out in the end.”

Didion assumed he meant good news eventually balances the bad.

Quintana understood him to mean that she shouldn't worry, that sooner or later, everyone
else
will get bad news, too.

*   *   *

“I have watched too many murder trials, known too many lawyers and too many judges and too many prosecutors, to have many illusions about the criminal-justice system,” Dunne wrote later. “Any trial is a ritual complete with its own totems. Calumny is the language spoken, the lie accepted, the half-truth chiseled on stone.” Before John Sweeney's first preliminary hearing on first-degree-murder charges, Dunne said, “I could predict that the counsel for the accused would present the standard defense strategy in cases of this sort: the victim, unable to speak for herself, would be put on trial, and presented, in effect, as a co-conspirator in her own murder.”

“John, who knew his way around the Santa Monica courthouse, thought that we should accept a plea bargain, and emissaries from the defense were sent to us to effect one,” Nick said.

Reasons for
not
going to trial were: Lenny's frail health would be further endangered by the drawn-out ordeal; the event would be a media storm, given Dominique's youth and relative celebrity; Dominique would be presented as a participant in her demise—neighbors would be called to the stand to testify that she'd had frequent fights with Sweeney, that she and her friends had condescended to him; the judge, Burton S. Katz, a theatrical man who had once prosecuted several members of the Manson Family, loved to play to the press. The defense attorney knew how to flatter him, and apparently the judge held the district attorney in ill favor.

“Lenny, Griffin, Alex and I felt pushed, as if we didn't matter,” Nick said. “The district attorney wanted a trial, and so did we. So we went to trial. John and Joan went to Paris.”

The brothers did not speak again, substantively, for a very long time.

*   *   *

Sweeney appeared in the courtroom each day clutching a white Bible.

“When Miss Dunne got in from the bars, how drunk was she?” Sweeney's defense attorney asked one of the witnesses again and again.

The judge would not allow testimony from one of Sweeney's previous girlfriends that he had regularly abused her, on the grounds that it would be “prejudicial.”

On the day the judge announced the jury's verdict, he “opened first one envelope and then the other, milking his moment before the television camera like a starlet at the Golden Globes,” Nick said. Sweeney was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, maximum sentence six and a half years, with possible parole in two and half. In fact, Sweeney served very little jail time and was soon working again as a chef at the Chronicle, a trendy Santa Monica restaurant. From there, he moved to Seattle and changed his name. The Dunnes finally lost track of him (but not before Nick toyed with the idea of hiring Anthony Pellicano, a private detective, to kill him. “Dominick, you don't want to do this,” Pellicano told him, and Nick's rage crumbled into helpless grief).

On the day the judge announced the verdict in the courtroom, Sweeney's attorney, realizing he'd gotten his client's charges drastically reduced, shouted, “I am ecstatic!”

The judge said justice had been served, and he thanked the jury on behalf of the lawyers and the families involved in the case. Trembling, Nick yelled at the bench, “Not for our family, Judge Katz!”

“You will have your chance to speak at the time of the sentencing, Mr. Dunne,” said the judge.

“It's too late then.”

“I will have to ask the bailiff to remove you from the courtroom.”

“No. I'm leaving the courtroom. It's all over here.”

He pushed Lenny's wheelchair up the aisle (“Lenny—sick, devastated, and the bravest of all of us,” he said). At the double doors at the rear, he turned again toward the judge and shouted, “You have withheld important evidence from this jury about this man's history of violence against women.”

Later, after the press had criticized the judge's handling of the trial, Katz expressed outrage at the jury's lenient verdict. “It was as if he had suddenly become a different human being,” Nick said. Shortly afterward, Sweeney was freed.

*   *   *

Ultimately, the trial became a source of redemption for Nick. He told the story this way: Two days before the trial was scheduled to begin, he was introduced to Tina Brown, then in talks to assume the editorship of
Vanity Fair.
She suggested he keep a journal throughout the proceedings and afterward come see her in New York.

“If I hadn't kept that journal … I would have gone mad. What I saw in the courtroom filled me with the kind of rage that only writing about it could quell,” Nick said. And “Tina … saw something in me I didn't know I possessed.” Under her guidance, and with the help of Wayne Lawson,
Vanity Fair
's new literary editor, he edited and shaped the journal entries into an article for the magazine, “Justice: A Father's Account of the Trial of His Daughter's Killer.” It ran in the March 1984 issue and established a fresh career for him. “For the first time in my life, I felt I was in step with my destiny,” he said. Tina Brown's
Vanity Fair
became a “great, highbrow, bling-bling icon about tony influentials,” said one media critic—and Nick's was
the
new voice of the magazine. For the next two decades, he would cover one celebrity murder trial after another, pretending no lack of prejudice, always championing the victims and their families. He had found his way back to Hollywood, discovered new outlets for his star worshiping, name-dropping, partygoing—girded now by a moral crusade. As
Vanity Fair
's Graydon Carter once said, “Wealthy people aren't quite shooting themselves at the rate we'd like them to, for Dominick's purposes.” In addition to his reporting for the magazine, Nick wrote bestselling novels based on his trial notes and his proximity to the upper crust. He had moved to colonize the territory once ruled exclusively by his brother and sister-in-law. As a result, their war got colder.

*   *   *

And still, Quintana added no new pages to
her
novel. She had written just enough to “show you,” and then she'd stopped.

Shortly after losing Dominique, however, she had written in a school journal, “I had an exciting revelation while studying a poem by John Keats. In the poem, ‘Endymion,' there is a line that seems to tell my present fear of life:
Pass into nothingness.
”

3

In the mid-1980s, as the publicity surrounding Dominique's murder ebbed, Didion and Dunne held court regularly in the art gallery of their friend Earl McGrath on North Robertson Boulevard. In a profile for
The New York Times Magazine,
Leslie Garis set the scene:

“The guests, gathered on a terrace beneath hibiscus trees, are more interested in each other than the show … The women are thin and tanned and wear very high heels.… Didion sits at a table quietly. She is peaceful. An endless stream of people comes to her, bending down to kiss her. She asks after their children, remembering personal details about everyone. Anjelica Huston, all legs in a little black dress, Teri Garr, George Stevens Jr., Tony Richardson, Michelle Phillips, Jean Vanderbilt and George Segal come to pay respects to the tiny woman with a gardenia in her hair.” (Painfully missing was Natalie Wood, who had drowned off Catalina Island—apparently after a tense, drunken evening with her husband and Christopher Walken, just another one of those nights; Didion could still remember wearing Natalie's dress to functions like this, Natalie checking her teeth in the reflection of her dinner knife.)

Meanwhile, Dunne roamed the terrace with a Scotch in his hand, chatting with frowning, sinewy men about the weekend's box-office grosses.

With the deaths of Truman Capote and Christopher Isherwood, the Dunnes were L.A.'s uncontested lit royalty (even to her face, people called Didion the “Kafka of Brentwood Park”). At Capote's funeral in the Westwood Mortuary, she was appalled at the litany of star-fucker tributes. Is
this
what she could expect when
her
time came?

“The last time I saw Joan was at the Beach Café. There was a party for her on the outdoor terrace,” said Don Bachardy. Isherwood had died and Didion was quite aware of her new queenly status. “At the time I was with a man who was about the same age in relation to me as I was with Isherwood when Isherwood and I first got together,” Bachardy told me. “Joan immediately expressed her disapproval with facial expressions and words to the effect of ‘I expected better of you.' I think she thought I should be a kind of literary widow devoted to the memory of Isherwood.”

*   *   *

Stardom had its drawbacks. “Wacko” letters came to the Chadbourne house: “You still have not taken my advice and dumped that miserable piece of Jewish dreck you are married to,” a man wrote Dunne. “I know, I know, you are going to tell me she is a WASP from Sacramento. B. S. She went to New York City anxious to break into publishing and came upon the idea that if she put on the Jewish Whining Act she could get published. Well, she succeeded all too well. Now her whole thing is permeated with the Jewish whine.”

One day, an ad appeared in the “Classified” section of the
Los Angeles Times,
announcing “BRENTWOOD PARK STEAL! Famous writers' loss is your gain.” Whether as a joke or as a genuinely hostile gesture, some anonymous person had created the appearance of scandal or misfortune in the Dunne household, purportedly forcing them to sell off their property. The Dunnes never learned who placed the ad. In an outraged letter to the newspaper, Dunne's greatest pique seemed reserved for the suggestion that his house was worth only $995,000.

The couple received endless requests for favors. A small press in Mississippi wondered if Didion would contribute a favorite recipe to a venture called
The Great American Writers' Cookbook.
The next thing she knew, the editors were selling first serial rights to magazines. She told her lawyers to sue the press if
Playboy
printed her recipe for Mexican chicken.

Worst were the missed opportunities—they came her way in the first place because of who she was, but who she was could turn around and bite her. Britain's
Sunday Times
magazine contacted Lois Wallace about the possibility of sending Didion to South Africa to expose that society's underbelly as she'd done in El Salvador. Didion expressed her keen interest in going, but then the magazine withdrew its offer, citing the new editor's change of heart. “That's Rupert Murdoch for you,” Dunne said.

Sometimes she just wanted to disappear into the daily routine of a typical wife and mom. “At some point … I think I twigged to the fact that I was no longer the woman in the yellow Corvette,” she said. “I needed a new car because with the Corvette there was always something wrong … [and] maybe it was the idea of [living in] Brentwood … when I gave up the yellow Corvette—and I literally gave up on it, I turned it in on a Volvo station wagon—the dealer was baffled.”

And Quintana was appalled. She wanted the objects in her life to stay the same—without fail. She liked predictable rituals. For a luncheon around the swimming pool on her sixteenth birthday, she wanted cucumber and watercress sandwiches because her mother had always served cucumber and watercress sandwiches at parties.

For a while, she'd had a sort of boyfriend whose very nice mother had given Quintana a suede coat. She wondered about the etiquette of wearing the coat when she'd dumped the boy. Rituals were important.

Her new rituals included counseling for “a stressful time,” or for “adolescent substance abuse.” (In
Democracy,
Didion appears to draw upon certain exchanges she and Quintana might have experienced in therapists' offices: “It might be useful to talk about you. Your own life. How you perceive it” [a doctor says to the mother]. “My life isn't really the problem at hand. Is it?” “The ‘problem at hand,' as you put it, is substance habituation. I notice you smoke.” “I do, yes. I also drink coffee. What I don't do is shoot heroin.”)