The Last Love Song (86 page)

Worries about her son, coupled with the ongoing grief for her daughter, had sapped Lenny's strength, and in January 1997, at the age of sixty-four, she died. Nick asked that “in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to Justice for Homicide Victims,” an advocacy group Lenny had founded. The Dunne clan did not agree on much these days, but they all acknowledged that Lenny had been the one member of the family beyond reproach.

3

In
The Last Thing He Wanted,
a novel published in 1996, Didion included the following exchange between a troubled daughter and her mother:

We had a real life and now we don't and just because I'm your daughter I'm supposed to like it and I don't.

What exactly did you have in Malibu that you don't have now …

You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach … Or the Jacuzzi. Or the pool …

About the time Didion's novel appeared, Quintana checked into the Hazelden rehabilitation center in Minnesota. “She was twenty-nine or thirty,” Didion recalled. She had finally admitted her daughter's addiction: “She drank too much. She was an alcoholic. People would call her an alcoholic.”

Hazelden, located on five hundred wooded acres north of St. Paul, had been established in 1949 as a male-only facility in a tiny farmhouse. By the time Quintana arrived, a complex of buildings served nearly two thousand addicts, hewing closely to the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous. “It's like a Big Ten campus though without the frat parties and football,” said one former resident. Quintana's room resembled that of a generic hotel, and the starchy food—breaded pork chops and spaghetti—put pounds on her. The rules were strict: no immodest clothing, no talking to members of the opposite sex, no missing daily seminars. The standard treatment lasted twenty-eight days.

Didion told Susanna Moore the hallways reeked of cigarette smoke.

The time was structured around counseling, yoga, meditation, and motivational speeches. Group activities were encouraged.

During this period, while hoping against hope for her daughter's recovery, and while writing and promoting her new novel, Didion drafted, with Dunne, fifteen iterations of the former Jessica Savitch story. Producers had come and gone (Dunne's old friend John Foreman had died of a heart attack); Disney was in play, then wasn't, then was again; and the story had morphed into a more wholesome tale about heroic, ambitious newscasters searching for truth. What's it
really
about? Dunne asked Scott Rudin, one of the new producers on board. “It's about two movie stars,” Rudin said. Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer had committed to the project.

Didion and Dunne had stuck with the screenwriting, it seemed, to stay just one step ahead of trouble. Even in the abstract, Didion liked
momentum
and
schedules,
something to distract her, keep her mind Off
What difference does it make?
And always, always, there was the need for medical insurance. Dunne had been bitten on the ankle by an insect in an Off-Broadway theater one night while watching Quintana perform in a drama by a playwright friend of hers; from the bite, he'd contracted bacterial cellulitis, a grave risk to someone with a plastic aortic valve. He spent seven days in the hospital. Then Didion suffered a detached retina and underwent laser surgery.

So when Quintana emerged from Hazelden, she wasn't the only one in the family courting rebirth. For her, it was like learning to walk again. Susanna Moore invited her to a party one night honoring a young novelist. Quintana accepted the invitation but did not show up. Later, she wrote Moore a note. She apologized for being a jerk. Booze had always been her public screen; it was difficult to get through an affair without a drink. It wouldn't always be this way—someday she'd go out again with confidence. But for now, she was keeping her social life quiet.

*   *   *

One night, out to dinner in Santa Monica with Leslie Abramson and her husband, the Dunnes ran into Disney's Michael Eisner. They talked about the Dunnes' rewrites of the Jessica Savitch story and about how the movie was finally under way. Recently, Eisner had survived a heart bypass. Dunne mentioned he'd had the same procedure. Eisner replied, “Of course, mine was more serious.” Stunned into silence by what was, after all, a fairly typical example of crass Hollywood boasting, Dunne heard his wife “exclaim in outrage, ‘
It was not!
'”

*   *   *

Up Close & Personal,
starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer, was released in March 1996. Viewers could be forgiven for thinking they were rewatching
A Star Is Born:
Once more (this time under pressure from Disney), Didion and Dunne had told the story of a jaded, self-destructive professional meeting a tragic end while his beautiful female companion rose to glory.

Reviewer Michael Medved seems to have seen a different movie. The film, he said, presents an “uncritical endorsement of … advocacy journalism … in which a reporter injects his own opinions into a story and takes off to humiliate or destroy some powerful public figure.”

If one didn't know better, it sounded as though Dunne had made a picture in praise of his brother.

 

Chapter Thirty-two

1

“Some real things have happened lately.” So begins
The Last Thing He Wanted,
Didion's fifth novel.

The opening sentence evokes artificiality as well as reality: The “real things” are anomalies. This is language cancerous with its own negation. It is the language of contemporary American democracy, employed to muddle operations on the ground.

At present, our society is experiencing something “interestingly described on page 1513 of the
Merck Manual
(Fifteenth Edition) as a sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments,” Didion says.

In a secretive, strange, jargon-laden environment, riddled with competing texts, each with its own vocabulary and agendas, its own obscurities and selective details, the writer finds herself in a prickly situation: Words, the tools of her trade, are worn and compromised by the abusive public uses to which they're turned; as a result, her position as storyteller, witness, and sage has become utterly suspect. “You know me, or think you do. The not quite omniscient author,” Didion says. She has abandoned her plans to adopt a fictional persona. “I wanted to come at this straight. I wanted to bring my own baggage and unpack it in front of you.” Echoing her essay “The White Album” nearly thirty years earlier, she attempts to fix authority through weakness, confessing her limitations. And she wishes to eliminate all extraneous fictions.

Every assertion, she qualifies. Sometimes this rhetorical movement reveals her uncertainty: “History's rough draft. We used to say. When we still believed that history merited a second look.”

Though blithely denying it, she is, of course, intensely engaged in taking second looks. Her uncertainty becomes a management strategy.

At other points, her qualifications puncture official pretenses: “You may recall the rhetoric of the time in question.…
This wasn't a zero-sum deal.… Elements beyond our control.… And yet. Still.
”

Elsewhere, the narrator seizes particulars in a world of “weightless” definitions. Like Charlotte Douglas “picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song,” the “not quite omniscient author” worries the few useful notes she can find. Out of jargon, misinformation, and obsessive repetitions, she forms a weirdly beautiful music: “I still believe in history. Let me amend that. I still believe in history to the extent that I believe history to be made exclusively and at random by people … doing a little business, keeping a hand in, an oar in the water, the wolf from the door … They may not remember all the names they used but they remember the names they did not use. They may have trouble sorting out the details of all they knew but they remember having known it. They remember they had some moves. They remember they had personal knowledge of certain actions.”

The story's time frame is sharply specific: Like the fall of Saigon, it's another vast crater in American democracy. “If you remember 1984, which I notice fewer and fewer of us care to do, you already know some of what happened to Elena McMahon that summer,” Didion writes:

You know the context, you remember the names,
Theodore Shackley Clair George Dewey Clarridge Richard Secord Alan Fiers Felix Rodriguez aka “Max Gomez” John Hull Southern Air Lake Resources Stanford Technology Donald Gregg Aguacate Elliott Abrams Robert Owen aka “T. C.” Ilopango aka “Cincinnati,”
all swimming together in the glare off the C-123 that fell from the sky into Nicaragua. Not many women got caught in this glare.

Elena McMahon gets caught because her father, Dick, is one of those men, like Jack Lovett in
Democracy,
who has an oar in the water. When he falls ill, and is subsequently murdered in Miami, Elena—a now-familiar Didion princess, her royal hopes dashed—walks out of the story scripted for her, and into a narrative whose outlines can only be glimpsed among the mutable hills. Her father's last wish—the last thing he wanted—is for her to complete his final arms deal in an obscure Latin American location. The deal gets muddied in a messy assassination plot, Americans killing Americans to advance American interests. “You know the context, you remember the names.”

Unable to
read
the real story, Elena becomes its casualty. The Marlow-like narrator attempts to connect variable images in flash sequences but winds up wishing only that Elena could have been saved. Her potential hero, a government official named Treat Morrison, who has worked on special assignment at various American consulates, is the intended target of an assassination scheme. Though he survives, he is unable to rescue his princess. She is shot to death for murky reasons in a soon-forgotten place. “I want[ed] those two”—Elena and Treat—“to have been together all their lives,” the narrator says. Like Lily at the end of
Run River,
she craves one final fairy-tale wish.

The wish fails. John Wayne has gone the way of the cottonwoods; the stars' orbits are deteriorating. But in her late fiction, Didion has returned to the
possibility
of wishing.

*   *   *

Toward the end of the book, the narrator reads about a conference at an old resort hotel in the Florida Keys. Eight former members of the Kennedy administration had gathered to reassess the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. “The hotel was pink. There was a winter storm off the Caribbean.” She imagines the storm continuing indefinitely, the “[p]ower failing … the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room … the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm. Imperfect memories.
Time yet for a hundred indecisions. A hundred visions and revisions.
”

This scene reverberates with Robert Kennedy's funeral, watched on the verandah of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel; with the ballroom in the Hotel del Caribe, where Charlotte picks out a single tune in the dark; with the crumbling hotel where Elena lives, trying to complete her father's arms deal.

American outposts, American dreams. Public, private. The ruins of colonialism. Kennedy, Cuba … the buried story eroding so many fairy-tale premises—like “democracy”—withering so many of our hopes.

And yet, in the narrator's imagination, in this decrepit old resort, there is time yet for visions and revisions, time to find value in ambiguity and indecision. Time to script a new story.

*   *   *

“I wanted to do a very, very tight plot, just a single thread—you wouldn't even see the thread and then when you pulled it at the end [of the novel] everything would fall into place,” Didion explained in an interview. “So essentially what you have to do, I found, is you have to make it up every day as you go along. And then you have to play the cards you already have on the table—you have to deal with what you've already said. Quite often, you've got yourself into things that seem to lead nowhere, but if you force yourself to deal with them, that was the discipline of it.” Every now and then, she said, you have to “step back from it a little bit. Otherwise it's going to get linear, ‘and then she said, and then she did…' It doesn't keep you awake to write it.”

As with
Play It As It Lays,
she proceeded by “sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying.” Her rough draft paragraphs were stippled with “x,” “xx,” or “xxxx,” indicating words to come—syllabics more crucial than content, at first. “The arrangement was the meaning,” Didion said. It was akin to scoring music.

Which is not to say she had no story in mind. “I knew the end required a double set-up [the plot to kill Treat Morrison, the killing of Elena, the official blame placed on her posthumously for all the nefarious doings] but I didn't know what the set-up would be until I got there,” she said. “I had to write it in about three months in order to keep the plot in my mind.” She made good use of newspaper databases, stories from the Iran-Contra years—not the lead stories or the headlines (which typically obscured the
real
news), but two-inch wire stories that “tended to appear just under the page-fourteen continuation of the page-one story,” two-inch wire stories that “had to do with chartered aircraft of uncertain ownership that did or did not leave one or another southern airport loaded with one or another kind of cargo.”

In a review of the novel, Michiko Kakutani wrote in
The New York Times
that Didion's “conspiratorial view of history” was rife with “self-delusion” and “paranoia”; Kakutani seemed not to have read “history's rough draft” in her own paper, from which Didion drew heavily. The thriller plot in
The Last Thing He Wanted
bore strong similarities to an actual reported assassination scheme against the American ambassador to El Salvador, Thomas R. Pickering, in 1984, a scheme very close to being a case of Americans killing other Americans through their Salvadoran proxies, in a nation whose government, and its death squads, was supported by U.S. resources and personnel. (In the summer of that year, the summer of Didion's novel, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina accused Pickering of trying to “strangle liberty in the night,” and gave a lavish welcome, in Washington, to Roberto d'Aubuisson, the man allegedly behind the plan to murder the ambassador, a man convinced that he had the unwavering support of the U.S. government.)