The Last Love Song (85 page)

Clinton's people wanted him to move away from the Democratic Party's “Vietnam base” and position himself as a “Reagan Democrat.” Clinton announced, “The choice we offer is not conservative or liberal, in many ways it is not even Republican or Democratic. It is different. It is new.… I call it a New Covenant.” (This phrase was considerably better than his earlier try, “The Third Way,” which, Didion noted, “sounded infelicitously Peruvian.”) The New Covenant was a plan to “reinvent government”—in other words, a management reorganization, in which old bureaucrats would be eliminated at the hands of new bureaucrats brought in explicitly to eliminate the old bureaucrats. Lest anyone be confused as to what this meant for the American people, the Covenant was a “new choice based on old values.”

Its implementation (that is, raising enough money from a wealthier donor base than the party had usually attracted) meant reducing political language to coded messages aimed specifically at this shiny new donor type. So, as per guidelines to party officials from Democratic pollsters: “Instead of talking about Democrats lifting someone out of poverty, describe the party's goal as helping average Americans live the good life; [instead] of saying Democrats want to eliminate homelessness and educate the underclass, talk about finding a way for young couples to buy their first home.”

Just change the language—as the government in El Salvador had done to cover its bloody tracks.

Meanwhile, rather than pointing out the emptiness of this linguistic shell game, and breaking down the policy ramifications, the media were busy dreaming up dramatic narratives to entrance readers and viewers. The presidential election was a horse race. Who's ahead? Who's falling behind this week?

A “crisis” was more heart-pounding, therefore easier to pitch to an audience, than a complex “structural malfunction,” the probing of which would require intelligence and patience by both commentators and listeners (as in the Savings and Loan debacle). A program featuring two relatively uninformed people yelling at each other, purportedly from the Left and the Right, but really from within the financial package offered to them by the television network, was cheaper to produce than a program
about
something, based on committed investigative reporting.

“At Madison Square Garden in New York from July 13, 1992, until the balloons fell on the evening of July 16, four days and nights devoted to heralding the perfected ‘centrism' of the Democratic Party, no hint of what had once been that party's nominal constituency was allowed to penetrate prime time, nor was any suggestion of what had once been that party's tacit role, that of assimilating immigration and franchising the economically disenfranchised, or what used to be called ‘co-opting' discontent,” Didion wrote. “Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter got slotted in during the All-Star Game. Jerry Brown spoke of ‘the people who fight our wars but never come to our receptions' mainly on C-SPAN.”

*   *   *

On December 22, Lois Wallace wrote Didion to say how sorry she was to have heard of Frank Didion's death, after a short stint in a nursing home. The loss of a parent is never easy, she said, even if that parent was old or unwell.

The business between Wallace and Didion was done.

*   *   *

Three months after her father died, Didion flew to California to speak at a University of California's Charter Day ceremony. She picked up her mother in Monterey and drove to Berkeley with her. The plan was to spend a relaxing few days at the Claremont Hotel following Didion's talk.

In
Where I Was From,
Didion writes that her mother seemed confused as they motored up 101. “Are we on the right road?” she asked. Didion assured her they were. “Then where did it all go?” Eduene replied.

“She meant where did Gilroy go, where was the Milias Hotel, where could my father eat short ribs now. She meant where did San Juan Bautista go, why was it no longer so sweetly remote as it had been on the day of my wedding there in 1964,” Didion wrote. The “familiar open vista[s] had been relentlessly replaced” by “mile after mile of pastel subdivisions and labyrinthine exits and entrances to freeways that had not previously existed.”

California had become “all San Jose,” Eduene said.

When they checked into the Claremont, Didion glanced into the bar. She recalled she had last been there in 1955 “with the son of a rancher from Mendocino County … I had my roommate's driver's license and a crème de menthe frappe.”

On the day of the ceremony, Didion gave her talk. Then the academic procession began. Afterward, her mother told her she had nearly cried “in front of everybody” when she saw a small group of fellows shuffling along behind a banner, “Class of 1931.”

“They were all old men,” said Eduene.

The Class of 1931 had been Frank Didion's class.

“They were just like your father.”

“There was no believable comfort I could offer my mother: she was right,” Didion wrote. “They were all old men and it was all San Jose.”

 

Chapter Thirty-one

1

The Dunne brothers' estrangement deepened in the late 1980s and early 1990s as Nick became the voice of
Vanity Fair.
In Los Angeles, his coverage of the trial of Erik Menendez—one of a pair of boys accused of shotgunning their wealthy parents—put him at odds with Menendez's defense attorney, Leslie Abramson. He couldn't abide the fact that she found Erik “adorable” or that she reportedly got $700,000 to try to free a murderer (Nick had already convicted the boy). She, in turn, couldn't stand Nick's prosecution bias—didn't he
know
lying was “endemic” among cops, and that an astonishing number of judges were “remarkably stupid, totally crazy or deplorably lazy”?—nor did she appreciate his condescending descriptions of her in his articles (“Leslie Abramson's curly blond hair bounces, Orphan Annie style, when she walks and talks”). She called his
Vanity Fair
work a series of “venomous little pieces.” He was “Judith Krantz in pants.”

Her greatest transgression, from Nick's point of view, was her friendship with his brother. Dunne “admired her, and she doted on him,” Nick said. A tough-talking character named Leah Kaye in Dunne's
The Red White and Blue,
“a believer in the value of effect,” a brilliant, ruthless woman who wears white silk blouses and Italian suede skirts, was clearly based on Abramson (and salt-and-peppered with Didion).

Nick found his brother's admiration for her courtroom work “curious … in light of what's happened to a murdered child in our family,” he said. “If that's what he thinks is right, that's fine for him. But not for me. It's not right for me to remain friendly with him.”

Publicly, Dunne would only acknowledge his relationship with Nick as “complicated.”

Griffin Dunne urged his father and uncle to patch things up, but then in 1994, Dunne dedicated his Hollywood novel
Playland
to Abramson, “at the very time she and I were in public conflict,” Nick said. “After that my brother and I did not speak for more than six years.”

They clashed, as well, over the O. J. Simpson trial. They both covered it, Nick for
Vanity Fair,
Dunne for
The New York Review of Books.
Dunne assumed a snide stance toward the legal proceedings; for Nick, equally enthralled and horrified by the testimony, it was “All O.J., all the time!”

Simpson's alleged butchery of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman, a waiter at Mezzaluna, “a second-rate Brentwood restaurant” in Dunne's opinion, wrenched open L.A.'s racial divide—just like the Rodney King beating—while TV's blow-by-blow presentation of the trial polarized the rest of the country.

Dunne's coverage of the case tended to linger on the media spectacle. Of the Bronco incident (when Simpson apparently tried to flee from police in a friend's white van), he wrote, “Ninety-five million Americans in two-thirds of the nation's households tuned in on the longest, slowest chase in television history, a chase that no film director would dare stage.”

By contrast, Nick relied on innuendo to convict Simpson in his own private court: “On a wet Sunday morning in February, I met with a man I know in West Los Angeles who told me an extraordinary story about a plastic surgeon he is acquainted with in Beverly Hills whose name I cannot reveal. On two occasions during Simpson's glory days as a University of Southern California football star, the plastic surgeon claims, he was hired to repair the faces of two young women Simpson had allegedly beaten up.”

When Simpson was acquitted in the criminal trial, Nick assured his readers the
real
punishment would materialize later. At dinner at Le Colonial, Tina Sinatra had told him, “O.J. will never be accepted back into the world he so desperately wants to be a part of. Never. They will never take him back.”

2

The brothers' kerfuffle continued to knock about in the press and later escalated in a hail of books. Playwright and novelist Gary Indiana published a novel entitled
Resentment: A Comedy,
a reimagining of the Menendez trials, featuring a character obviously modeled on Nick, Fawbus Kennedy, “a third-rate middlebrow Depends ad.” Indiana sketched Kennedy as sexually ambiguous.

He took on Dunne and Didion as well, casting them as Sean Kennedy and Cora Winchell:

Can you imagine … what a family dinner with the three of them must be like, Fawbus Kennedy imploding with rage that he'll never get notices as serious as Sean's notices, and Sean pretending to himself that his last book was just as good as Cora's, and Cora meanwhile thinking that she's the golden canary of American letters, and of course … the joke is that all three of them can't get through a paragraph without telling you which famous people they know … Fawbus is blatant and vulgar about it and Sean tries to give it a little ironic twist, whereas Cora has perfected the art of making her snobbery and name-dropping read like world-weary deprecation.

This might have been the final dustup—how embarrassing it was that the family rivalry had become a target for parody!—but then Nick published a “novel in the form of a memoir” about the O. J. Simpson trial,
Another City, Not My Own,
a lightly altered fictionalization of his
Vanity Fair
articles. “The litany of show-business and upper-crust names in the book is staggering,” wrote Alex Ross; Nick's admission that he's a “terrible name-dropper” was like “O.J. admitting he had his problems with Nicole.”

Yet again that might have been the end of it—until the
Los Angeles Times
asked Gary Indiana to review Nick's book. “I am not aware of any animus toward Dunne on the part of Indiana … that would get in the way of a judicious and fair review,” said Steve Wasserman, the paper's book review editor.

“Wasserman is a fucking liar,” Nick said. He accused the editor of setting him up: “As you know, Indiana, whom I have never met, has previously attacked me in the most mocking manner in his book called
Resentment: A Comedy,
a book I understand … you greatly admire … You set me up to be demolished.”

Worse, Nick strongly suspected that Wasserman had been persuaded to tap Indiana by his colleague Tim Rutten, who happened to be Leslie Abramson's husband, a friend of the Dunnes, and the ghostwriter of Simpson's lawyer's account of the trial. It was a plot, and somewhere near its center sat Nick's brother and sister-in-law. He was sure of it. He wasn't keeping quiet.
The New York Observer
got wind of his allegations and remarked, “It seems that [Dominick] Dunne's conversion to the more commercial side of the literary business, and his embrace of the glitzier manifestations of fame, strained his relationship with his brother, Ms. Didion and their intellectual circle.”

*   *   *

The year ended with all this terrible animosity.

It began with Lenny's death.

Seven years earlier, she had left Los Angeles to return to her family's ranch, Yerba Buena, in Nogales, Arizona. There she built a house and tucked herself in with round-the-clock nursing to tend to the worsening symptoms of her multiple sclerosis. She had never really recovered from Dominique's death—nor had her younger son, Alex, whom Nick once described as “sensitive and shy and incredibly spiritual.” He never seemed to get rooted; for a while, he did social work in San Francisco. In the summer of 1995, while visiting his mother, he disappeared for three days in the scorching desert around the Santa Rita Mountains. Authorities swore he couldn't survive. Lenny called Nick, who was staying in L.A., covering the Simpson trial, and Griffin flew in from New York. In Arizona, Nick spent his time going to McDonald's, buying cheeseburgers for the search crews—horseback, helicopter, and foot patrols, combing an eight-square-mile wilderness. “I thought he was dead,” Nick said. “I was thinking, ‘Where will we bury him? Will we bury him with Dominique?'” Then Alex reemerged from the canyons as swiftly as he had vanished, whereupon he related a story of hunger and disorientation and remarkable recovery, a “transcendental experience.” His tale baffled law enforcement. “It's a little less than plausible,” said Capt. Mark Pettit, grousing about the $26,000 bill for the search—passed on to taxpayers. “He's suddenly able to walk out … I think that's nothing short of divine intervention.”

Whatever happened, wherever Alex had gone, he did not repent and keep his family informed of his whereabouts. A few years later, Nick told a friend, “We've lost Alex in our lives. He has left us. I think the trouble started at the time of the murder. I think [Alex and Dominique] were the closest brother and sister I ever saw. He has just left us … I have not heard from Alex.”