The Last Love Song (97 page)

Like John Gregory Dunne, Cheney had long suffered from heart disease. Following one of his many surgeries, his doctor recalled seeing the vice president's heart “separated from [his] body … festooned with surgical clamps … [bearing] the scars of its four-decade battle.” The doctor said, “I turned from the heart to look down into the chest … the surreal void was a vivid reminder that there was no turning back.”

I don't know what happened to this country.

4

“Vanessa Redgrave is not playing me, Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion,” Didion wrote of her play. Granting that every autobiographical “I” in a literary work is a persona, presented selectively and therefore distanced from its creator, it was disingenuous of Didion to ask her audiences to distinguish the character in the spotlight from the author of the book, billed as a memoir, on which the play was based (and from which the character read directly onstage). During the writing, she may have been able to separate herself from her experiences and emotions in order to analyze them, but her viewers were understandably unable to make a similarly dispassionate break.

I attended one of the earliest performances of
The Year of Magical Thinking
at the Booth Theatre in New York in the spring of 2007 (it premiered on March 29), and, as keenly aware as I was of the gap between literature and life, I found it jarring to watch tall, big-boned Vanessa Redgrave tell Joan Didion's story
as
Joan Didion, the famously frail bird in a sweater.

The disparity was as great as that between dramatic form and the form of Didion's play—for the staging revealed starkly that
The Year of Magical Thinking,
even as a book, had never been a taut narrative, a meditation, or a diarist's account of sorrow. Instead, it was a seasoned journalist's report with
self
as subject, interrogated, challenged, questioned. On whether this made effective theater, the critics were divided.

Redgrave sat alone onstage in front of a gray curtain, insisting that variations of her personal tragedies would be experienced by everyone in the theater, despite our urgent desire to deny that fact: “You think I'm crazy. You think I'm crazy because otherwise I'm dangerous. Radioactive. If I'm sane, what happened to me could happen to you. You want me to give you a good prognosis. I can't. So it's safer to think I'm crazy.”

*   *   *

“I liked watching the performance[s] from a balcony above the lights,” Didion said. “I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play.”

On some nights, the crew brought in fried chicken, potato salad, corn bread, and greens from Piece of Chicken on Ninth Avenue, or matzo ball soup from the Hotel Edison's coffee shop, and Didion would eat with the crew backstage after a show at a small table with a checkered tablecloth and an electric candle. Everyone called this darkened little space “Café Didion.”

Redgrave gave 144 performances of
The Year of Magical Thinking
at the Booth Theatre (following twenty-three preview performances). She was nominated for a Tony.

On the final night, Didion stood in the wings and drank champagne with the crew. For her curtain calls, Redgrave was handed a spray of yellow roses. When she left the theater that night, she placed the roses on the stage. Someone asked Didion if she wanted to take the flowers home. “I did not want the yellow roses touched,” she wrote, indicating that even for her, the gap between literature and life had vanished. “I wanted the yellow roses right there, where Vanessa had left them, with John and Quintana on the stage of the Booth, lying there on the stage all night, lit only by the ghost light…”

In early August, Didion developed shingles. She ran a fever of 103; she had a rash, an earache, and severe pain in the facial nerves. She lost several pounds she could not afford to lose, despite the chocolate-vanilla ice cream stocked in her freezer as a hedge against dropping weight. She found she could not grasp things tightly. She wondered if her old symptoms of multiple sclerosis were returning. Buttoning a sweater or tying her shoes presented enormous challenges.

For nearly a month, she was forced to stay indoors. At first this seemed a minor blessing. She'd been drifting at dinners with friends, impatient with chitchat. Isolated in the apartment—staring at a black-and-white blowup of five-year-old Quintana, which was propped against the living room window—she discovered she was generally not a lonely person but that she easily grew bored.

She busied herself with a screenplay about Tom Dooley, a Vietnam navy doctor and humanitarian. It was her first solo picture project. She would not complete it.

Eventually, physical therapy and antiviral tablets helped relieve her pain.

In November, at the Mariott Marquis Hotel in New York, while she was feeling better, she was awarded a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Presenting the award, Michael Cunningham said, “There are a handful of writers whose work has been so seminal, so of its time and beyond its time, that their names have come to function as adjectives.… Didionesque means, to me at least, a fearless and almost frighteningly astute vision of a world blandly and even cheerfully collapsing under the weight of its own sorrows. It's a world entangled in consumerism, disastrous politics, pop culture, the slow-motion avalanche of history, the non-division of wealth … all of which rumbles along as we continue to cope as best we can with human conditions.”

Didion, wearing a dark sweater and a long, flowing pale pink scarf, conversed with Cunningham as he placed the medal around her neck; then, impatiently, she urged the crowd to sit down and be quiet. In an edgy voice, she said, “I didn't start writing to get a lifetime achievement award. In fact, it was pretty much the last thing on my mind.… Writing seemed to me … a job … done under pressure, a craft, but a craft that gave me inexplicable pleasure.” She noted that the “last time I was in this room, Norman Mailer was getting this award.” Mailer had died just a week before this year's ceremony. Didion paused, collecting herself. “
There
was someone who really, truly knew what writing was for,” she said.

*   *   *

In the spring of 2008, Vanessa Redgrave took
The Year of Magical Thinking
to the National Theatre in London. Didion flew over for a performance. Rushing to greet Redgrave backstage one evening, she fell, but she broke none of her brittle bones.

In March of the following year, Redgrave was set to reprise her role in a special performance at Saint John the Divine, to benefit UNICEF and the “children of Gaza and southern Israel,” but her daughter Natasha Richardson, forty-five, suffered a head injury on a beginner's ski slope north of Montreal, and the show was postponed. Richardson was flown to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, where Didion visited her in the ICU the day before she died.

Patty Hearst. Blanche DuBois. So many fine roles Tasha had played, so many compelling personalities gone along with her final flickering.

“This was never supposed to happen to her,” Redgrave, playing Didion, had proclaimed night after night in the darkened auditorium, speaking for us all.

Richardson's death recalled and intensified Didion's grief over Quintana, and she spoke more freely of her daughter now. “[S]omebody failed Quintana,” she told a reporter around this time. “And I'm the person in sight, you know?”

“Did I lie to you?” she had written.

“Did I lie to you all your life?” Redgrave asked onstage. “When I said you're safe, I'm here, was that a lie or did you believe it?”

Looking back, the best thing about the play, Didion mused, was that for “five evenings and two afternoons a week,” for “ninety full minutes,” her daughter “did not need to be dead.”

 

Chapter Forty-one

1

“You kind of grow into the role you have made for yourself,” Didion said. “The real person becomes the role.”

Ideally, the role does not call for aging. Or grief.

But, in fact, the real person goes to bed earlier and earlier each night—usually around seven-thirty. “I can hardly stay awake,” Didion said. “If I stay up any later, I'm ruined for the next day.”

She continued to smoke just five cigarettes every twenty-four hours.

Her preferred evening drink tended now to be white wine.

The real person suffered neuropathy in her feet. The real person had to have half her thyroid removed. She taped aloe leaves to her throat to heal the scar.

Her brother-in-law, Nick, had been diagnosed with bladder cancer. He insisted he would beat it: a role he played to the hilt.

A pair of Australian filmmakers, Kirsty de Garis and Timothy Jolley, had made a documentary about Nick's career, from his failure in Hollywood to his success as a writer for
Vanity Fair.
Didion agreed to be interviewed for the film, discussing Nick's novels. On camera, she said his dissection of American culture, through the manners and morals of the upper class, made him a Trollope for our time. Then she laughed, suggesting she didn't really believe what she'd said.

In November 2008, in the Oak Room at the Plaza, a screening was held for the film,
Dominick Dunne: After the Party.
Nick couldn't attend because of a scheduled surgery for his cancer. Didion went, along with Nora Ephron, Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and Ian McEwan. They all said they loved the movie—“It got closer to my brother-in-law than anybody I have seen,” Didion said—but most of the reception conversation consisted of gloomy forecasts for journalism and cautious hope following the presidential election, in which an African-American, Barack Obama, was elected president.

About journalism: “Good social reportage is very, very hard to find, particularly social journalism that has a heart and a point of view. And I came across Nick and I knew this guy must be able to write because he has such a way of telling a story,” Tina Brown told a reporter from
The New York Observer.
We might not see Nick's like again, though: This was “a very depressing time” for writers, said Brown, “a kind of industrial revolution in media” in the rubble of which who and what would survive was not at all clear.

On the other hand, Obama's election struck most of the writers in the room as what Ian McEwan called a “restoration of literacy as a value.” “I read both of [Mr. Obama's] books and he actually turns a very good paragraph,” said McEwan.

“He does, doesn't he!” said Evans. “I think it is a new era.” Rationality. Unity. American pride. “I think the change in spirit will last.”

Didion wasn't sure. A few days after the film screening, at a symposium on the election at the New York Public Library, sponsored by
The New York Review of Books,
she said, “I couldn't count the number of snapshots I got e-mailed” just prior to the vote “showing people's babies dressed in Obama gear.” Partisanship “could now be appropriately expressed by consumerism.”

“I couldn't count the number of times I heard the words ‘transformational' or ‘inspirational,' or heard the 1960s evoked by people with no apparent memory that what drove the social revolution of the 1960s was not babies in cute T-shirts but the kind of resistance to that decade's war that in the case of our current wars, unmotivated by a draft, we have yet to see.”

Expectations for Obama's performance were far too high, she believed: “Irony was now out. Naiveté, translated into ‘hope,' was now in.”

She recalled hearing “breathlessly on one [television] channel that the United States, on the basis of having carried off this presidential election, now had ‘the congratulations of all the nations.' ‘They want to be with us,' another commentator said. Imagining in 2008 that all the world's people wanted to be with us did not seem entirely different in kind from imagining in 2003 that we would be greeted with flowers when we invaded Iraq.”

*   *   *

Obama's acceptance speech seemed so melancholy, almost rueful, Susanna Moore told Didion. As if he knew, in advance, that his administration would be little more than an extended footnote to the Bush years, given the continuing legacies of war, torture, a shattered economy, and domestic spying. It made her worried for the future.

Didion agreed. The ignorance of the triumphalism in the streets dispirited her. It seemed to her—as she had said at the Brooklyn Book Fair, a few days before the election—that the country had slipped into a “national coma,” a coma “we ourselves” induced by “indulging the government in its fantasy of absolute power wielded absolutely.” Instead of working communally to solve our problems, or electing responsible leaders, she said, we reduced crises to simplistic stories in order to forget them: The war in Iraq had been reduced to the troop “surge,” and “who had or had not exhibited belief in it. Belief in the surge was equated with [the] success of the surge and by extension our entire engagement in Iraq, as if that success was an achieved fact rather than a wish.” In a similar sleight of hand, we “solved” the economic crisis by “de-linking” loans from “any imperative to get them paid off.” We “solved” the health care crisis by politicizing medical conditions instead of talking about what
real
reform would mean—“taking on the insurance industry.”

No, Obama's election did not particularly cheer her. By the end of the year, she was also feeling anxious about the prospect of returning to Hawaii for the first time since the deaths of her husband and daughter. Honolulu would be lovely, but lonely, too. (At least the new president would be there, vacationing in what newscasters insisted on calling “this exotic place”!)

In preparation for leaving, she straightened the apartment as best she could so that she wouldn't return to a mess. It was still hard for her to throw certain things away—like copies of Dunne's
Princeton Alumni Weekly
. The university hadn't removed him from its mailing list. She should have just tossed the newsletter, but the obituaries obsessed her: too many youngish men—like Dunne—and many men from her father's generation, the last of them, for whom national service had been a sacred obligation.