The Last Love Song (80 page)

He scheduled the angiogram at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, where his greatest blessing, Quintana, had come wriggling into the world. Friends told him to forget his genetic history—these modern life-saving techniques hadn't existed when his father died. A literary agent he knew told him about someone who'd sailed through his angioplasty with nary a hitch: “He's too terrible to die. Not that you have to be a terrible person to come through this thing; you're not a terrible person at all.”

On the day of the procedure, in late September 1987, the admitting nurse insisted that he watch television soap operas in his room while he waited, because that's what
all
the patients did. She couldn't fathom anyone reading a book—besides, no one would keep track of the book once he was wheeled down to the cath lab. Repeatedly, the TV networks played clips of Bob Fosse's movie
All That Jazz,
because Fosse had died that day. “Bye, bye, life,” Roy Scheider, as Fosse, said again and again as he slipped away following open-heart surgery.

The angiogram confirmed the EKG: 90 percent blockage. An angioplasty was scheduled for a week later. Doctors would make an incision in his left groin and snake a balloon into his artery to dilate the LAD.

When the day came, the OR seemed as cold as the L.A. morgue. The anesthesiologist inserted an IV of Valium into his arm. “I don't think I've been this stoned since 1968,” Dunne joked with the efficient young fellow.

“Few of us have, Mr. Dunne. Few of us have.”

Bach and Mozart piped through the OR speakers. Dunne focused as well as he could on the TV monitors above his head, which showed the various pathways in his chest. It was like looking at a map of the Los Angeles freeway system.

Poof, poof, poof
went his heart.

He tried to imagine cruising Sunset to the Malibu beach, but mostly what he thought of (to the extent he thought of
anything
) was that this whole ordeal was going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of forty grand. He'd have to keep rewriting scripts just to maintain his Guild insurance.

Two days later, as he lay recovering in his fourth-floor hospital room, his bed began to shake. “Sister,” he said to the floor nun puttering around the room, straightening pill bottles, “I think this is a fucking earthquake.” “I think you're right, Mr. Dunne.” She grabbed the bed and held on tight. He was hooked to an IV and couldn't do anything. He was still bleeding from his groin incision. He knew this wing was in an older part of the hospital and hoped it was built to code. More than that, he worried about the fact that he'd just said “fuck” in front of a nun.

“Spectacular,” his cardiologist pronounced ten days later, examining the latest EKG results. Six months after this, Dunne's LAD remained dilated. His cholesterol was down and he'd lost twenty-five pounds. “You've bought yourself a new life,” the internist said.

Dunne's first thought:
What the fuck do I do with it?

2

This was much worse than the jits. For months he'd concentrated so intensely on his heart, on learning the parameters of the problem, the alternative solutions, the risks, the chances of recovery. The news was good now, and he felt physically fit, but a sense of anticlimax hovered around him, similar to finishing a book, of being deep inside the dream, then coming out of it, having no idea what to do next.

Add to that the knowledge that his body had been invaded—the uneasy sensation that he was not quite the same, that he would never again be the man he had been.

And who had he been?

He totted it all up.

“Twenty-four years, nearly a quarter of a century, five houses, seven books published, four film scripts produced, a million or two words pounded out on typewriter and computer; a marriage that survived, a daughter born and raised to her majority, three siblings dead, plus a mother and an aunt, a suicide in the family and a murder…”

The doctors had given his heart a jump start. Now, he figured, the rest of his life needed a “goose.”

“I don't know why we moved back to New York,” Didion would say years later, recalling this chapter of her life. “It was not a very thought-out decision.”

Dunne presented a different story, claiming they'd both contemplated a move for quite some time; they were weary of the “hetero-coastal” travel (Dunne refused to be “bi-anything”)—though the travel never stopped, so
that
was hardly a reason to move. At most, he said, the decision to return permanently to New York was only slightly “accelerated” by his cardiac episode.

He craved the change more than she did. “I don't know. John was between books. He was sort of restless. Our daughter was at Barnard … Suddenly it seemed as if there was no particular reason to stay,” Didion said.

“[We've] stayed too long at the fair. I [feel] tapped out,” he insisted. And in response, Didion heard her mother's voice in her ear:
What difference does it make?

In their conflicting accounts of reaching the final decision, they agreed on one detail: One night, on one of their many back-and-forths between the coasts, probably early in 1988, their plane to Los Angeles got stuck for several hours on a runway in Newark. It was there, while sitting tired and disgruntled on the airplane that they admitted aloud to each other,
This just isn't adding up
.

Let's do it, Dunne said.

Why not, Didion replied.

3

Quintana had not started her college career at Barnard. Impressed by the summer program she'd attended years earlier, she enrolled, as a freshman, at Bennington, in Vermont—at the time, the most expensive private liberal arts college in the country.

Jonathan Lethem, Quintana's classmate, called the mid-eighties at Bennington, simply, “cocaine days,” an era of “scandal-plagued faculty.” The campus was a minor literary salon: In addition to Lethem, Donna Tartt, Jill Eisenstadt, Lawrence David, Reginald Shepherd, Joseph Clarke, and Bret Easton Ellis enrolled. Ellis had secured an agent already through the help of one of his teachers, Joe McGinniss, who admired Ellis's stories “about youth culture in L.A.” They were “very much in the style of Joan Didion,” Ellis admitted. “It was inconvenient that I liked him,” Lethem wrote later. “Bret stood perfectly for what outraged me at that school, and terrified me, too, the blithe conversion of privilege into artistic fame.”

Ellis befriended Quintana and told her how much he loved her mother's writing. (“I would rewrite paragraphs of hers just to see how she would do it,” he'd say later.) Quintana seemed genuinely shocked at the level of celebrity her parents enjoyed among her peers; she'd always known they were public figures, but this was par for the course in West Hollywood. Here, among youthful scribes on the make, her mom and dad were
heroes.
Why hadn't they told her?

“Quintana seemed spooky to me, or perhaps I mean spooked,” Lethem told me. “It's too easy to project a profound sadness back onto those very scarce encounters we had, but there's certainly nothing about the way she moved through that campus world that would contradict an impression of profound sadness. My impression of her inaccessibility is strong. She seemed bound up in something impenetrable with the small number of others she was available to, and very likely was charismatic within that circuit—what was conveyed to me was a blank surface onto which I, for various reasons that are probably typical of me, projected the sadness.”

Yet Lethem was not the only one who felt a force field of melancholy enveloping Quintana, especially on early-autumn nights with the smell of rotting apples in the air. She was pushing the limits and her unhappiness showed. The hermetic atmosphere, the frequent cold and snow, the competitive artistic striving, the social hierarchies (those with or without financial aid, and those, like Lethem, who had to work to pay for their classes), the easy availability of chemical stimulants—they all combined to make Quintana a desperate creature during her first year away from home. She lived in one of the newer suites of dorms. In her whitewashed room she hung various hats on the walls and kimonos next to colorful lacy blouses. One fellow resident swore she displayed a collection of whips, but she may have mistaken Quintana's exotic belts for more outré objects. Quintana had turned her standard-issue college desk into a cosmetics counter—eyeliners, flaming fingernail polish, compacts—and its drawers into a pharmaceutical dispensary, everything from Anacin to Demerol.

“Wet Wednesdays” and “Thirsty Thursdays” at the local bars lured her out of her room, and visits to the Laundromat or fast-food joints at one
A.M.
; film screenings at Tishman Hall (where, Lethem wrote, the campus sophisticates hooted at the likes of John Wayne), or a house party where everyone tanked up on grain-alcohol punch under the limbs of the yew trees and tried to rhyme like rappers while dancing to Talking Heads or Siouxsie and the Banshees. Quintana was gritty, showy, and tough; she talked fast and loud, and her voice, when she chattered about the boys she was dating or wanted to date (she shared her father's fondness for the word
fuck
), or when she recounted volcanic nausea after a day of drinking or getting high, could rise to the level of a shriek.

The students at Bennington who didn't like Quintana, or those who didn't really know her, could cite her loudness, her hectoring tone, her theatrical and melodramatic public presence (all that California
enthusiasm,
so different from Eastern reserve) as character flaws; those closer to her saw how instantly empathetic she became when a friend of hers experienced grief or family sorrows. She was compassionate, pragmatic, and wholly present in such moments, offering genuine sympathy and plenty of drink and drugs to ease the pain.

4

With renewed physical vigor, Dunne made arrangements to put the Brentwood house on the market. It sold immediately. If it hadn't, Didion said later, they probably would have changed their minds about moving.

By this time, Didion was well acquainted with her daughter's frailties and propensities, and she suspected Quintana was struggling, living on her own in the East, trying to establish an identity and a direction. Didion knew “it was upsetting to her” at Bennington when she “found that one or both of her parents had names that were known to her teachers.” In an interview with radio host Don Swaim during this period, Didion said, “I have a child in college now … I think being in college is the hardest time for children. It's really scary.” Yet the notion of settling nearer a troubled child never arose in Didion's conversations about reasons to move.

“I have a highly developed capacity for denial,” she'd say years later.

Ron and Carol Herman, who bought the house from the Dunnes, found the property slightly run-down. “The ‘bones' of the house were good but we needed to change the floor plan to fill the needs of our growing family,” Carol Herman told me. Didion had loved this house; if she had fantasized it would still be hers, in some magical way, even though she'd agreed to leave it, the Hermans' plans destroyed that illusion. Ron Herman said he imagined his daughter getting married in the backyard garden someday.

There was now no available switchback for Didion.

(In
Blue Nights,
she complained that the “man who was buying the house” had insisted they kill the termites by “tenting it and pumping in Vikane and chloropicirin,” wiping out the mint and the pink magnolia and the stephanotis in the garden. She said she could smell Vikane weeks later in New York as she opened boxes.)

Meanwhile, the Dunnes had decided their pied-à-terre on West Fifty-eighth Street was too small to accommodate them full-time. Whenever they arrived, they'd “have to arrange to get the windows washed and get food in,” Didion said, so now they packed up the furniture, the Rauschenberg and Richard Serra prints. Natasha Richardson, fresh from playing Patty Hearst in Paul Schrader's film, bought the place from them. They located an available co-op apartment on the fifth floor of an eleven-story 1920s-era building at 30 East 71st, on the corner of Madison, across the street from St. James's Episcopal Church. It was steps away from Central Park.

The apartment needed painting; it also needed some new flooring and more stylish lighting fixtures. The Dunnes wanted built-in bookcases. “Oh no,” friends told them. “You don't know New York contractors. They'll lie about their bids. They'll lie about the amount of time the job will take.” These people made Manhattan sound like a vast criminal enterprise. In time, Didion would agree with them, but initially the warnings had no effect. The Dunnes wanted the apartment. “There weren't too many ways I was going to do it if it wasn't
right,”
Didion said.

*   *   *

In Brentwood, they rented an industrial-size Dumpster and planted it in their driveway. Twenty-four years, 26,000 pounds of
stuff,
about 18,000 pounds of which would have to go. There were old tax returns, newspaper clippings, college yearbooks, high school literary magazines, clothes, and shoes, shoes, shoes. They also unearthed an invitation from Princeton, asking Dunne to return and deliver a public lecture as a distinguished alumnus; reviews of his books, her books, accusing them, each in their turn, of being entrepreneurs of angst; a letter to Dunne from a fellow screenwriter: “[Y]ou took all those years to write what—that it's all shit? For Christ sake, don't you think we know that?”

Some of their old friends chided them for leaving. Dunne's cousin Jon Carroll called from San Francisco to say, “I hope you're not going to move back east and then tell the world how terrible California is, a perfect place … if you're an orange.”

“When they left, Joan gave her housekeeper the Volvo,” Josh Greenfeld said. “She was a very compassionate person, Joan—always good to her Latino help.” He and his wife, Foumi, spent a final evening reminiscing with the Dunnes. “I knew how much I'd miss John. A lot of people counted on him here. He was always the first guy to call if you had car trouble. He'd do anything for you. And Joan—she was the best person to compare writing stories with. I remember one day she said to me, ‘What are you writing?' I said, ‘College entrance essays for my kid.' ‘Me, too!' she said. ‘It's the hardest writing I've ever done!' With Joan, everything was an exaggeration—oh, I was going to miss that, too. The
drama
she created. What an entertainment! If they had a small leak in the roof, she'd say, ‘I had to set out buckets and buckets!'”