1
CAUTION: CONSTANT LAND MOVEMENT.
Signs warning visitors of the ground’s erratic instability ring the Harden Gatehouse at Portuguese Bend, where Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne settled in June 1964. Here, at the southern tip of Los Angeles County’s Palos Verdes Peninsula, domelike hills rise more than 430 meters above the sea, rolling, falling steeply. The topsoil slides—always—sheeting the coast with bentonite, a clay mineral made from weathered volcanic ash capable of absorbing vast amounts of water, losing its cohesiveness, and destabilizing the surface even further. Geologists posit the area’s first major landslide at about 37,000 years ago. In our time, the land began to lose its grip again in 1956, initially shifting five inches a day over a two-year period. The danger did not stop real-estate developers from building more than 150 homes by 1961, digging seepage pits and installing septic systems in the trembling earth. When cracks began to appear in the houses’ foundations, outraged home owners filed the nation’s first class-action suit incurred by a geologic event, suing the County of Los Angeles, alleging that the landslide was caused by the construction of Crenshaw Boulevard. The court found the county liable even though it failed to establish negligence. Meanwhile, the land went on eroding.
Modern development began on the peninsula in 1913, when a New York investor named Frank Vanderlip envisioned a community of horse ranches on land first taken by the Portuguese from the Gabrielinos-Tongva Tribe and then stolen by U.S. entrepreneurs. Thus, the history of Southern California.
Didion’s new home, the Harden Gatehouse, at 5500 Palos Verdes Drive South, was built in 1926 by Vanderlip’s sister, Ruth, and her husband. A grand villa had been planned for the forty-eight acres of coastal land abutting the house’s grounds, but the Depression quashed that vision. This would be the first of the spectacular abodes Didion and Dunne would occupy in the Los Angeles area from 1964 to 1988. “Joan definitely had the real estate gene from her family,” said Josh Greenfeld.
“Joan put an ad in the paper saying that a writing couple was looking for a house to rent,” said Dominick Dunne. “A woman replied, offering an attractive gatehouse on an estate on the sea at Palos Verdes and explaining that the main house had never been built, because the rich people who commissioned it went bust. The lady wanted $800 a month. Joan said they were prepared to pay only $400. They settled at $500.”
This lady was the wife of Dick Harden, Ruth’s son, who would become Didion’s new landlord. Dunne found him eccentric and unpredictable, likable (he’d leave strawberries and baskets of sweet peas on their doorstep), but often uncomfortable to be around.
The Tuscan-style house, on a lot of just under two acres, initially had four bedrooms (it now has five) and a large living room with a stone fireplace and vaulted ceilings—over five thousand square feet. In Didion’s day, blocky brown wooden beams curved over arched doorways and rectangular columns painted adobe tan or white, defining the rooms. The tiled floors were cool and dark. Rounded windows opened onto the sunset and salt-scoured willows glittering with reflected light from granite outcrops curving down to the shore. A swimming pool has since been built where Didion kept a wisteria box garden. The house was angled toward the ocean, with a view of Catalina Island, away from the public road, which was always under repair. Pieces of marble, imported for the never-built villa, lay scattered among tall palms on the lawn. A low wall topped with sloping red tiles surrounded the property.
At the entrance to the drive stood an imposing stone arch draped with ivy; in it was set a ten-foot-high wooden gate trimmed with fleur-de-lis spikes and a ship’s bell jutting out from the wall.
At twilight, peacocks cried. They roamed the grounds aggressively, displaying their blue-green grace. Of an evening, Didion and Dunne would sit with iced drinks on a tiled back terrace, watching the peafowl prance. Hummingbirds and flycatchers flitted in and out of peach trees and low-hanging olive limbs. Glare from the Point Vicente lighthouse (said to be haunted by a woman whose lover had been lost at sea) raked the rocks below.
Sometimes the couple walked the shoreline, spying wreckage from the Greek freighter Dominator, sunk in a storm in 1961, just off Rocky Point. Occasionally, Dunne walked Didion down to the beach, among jagged tide pools teeming with hermit crabs, sea urchins, starfish, and anemone. They’d go swimming, skirting kelp beds by a submerged reef in Abalone Cove and timing the waves just right—“Feel the swell! Go with the change!” Dunne would shout—to be swept into a cave along the shore. Didion was afraid but exhilarated, reminded of shooting the rapids of the American River in Sacramento.
For shopping, laundry, and other errands, Dunne preferred the nearby village of San Pedro to the tonier community center, with its Spanish Mission–style houses and landscaping by the Olmsted Brothers, some eight miles distant. San Pedro, built on a foggy, shallow waterfront dubbed by its Portuguese discoverers the “Bay of Smokes,” was a sleepy town of bars, former canneries, and shuttered whorehouses once catering to personnel at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station and at the LA-55 Nike missile battery where Crenshaw dead-ended. The missile site was more successful as a movie backdrop in sci-fi films than as a defense against phantom Soviet bombers.
On Liberty Hill, at Fourth and Beacon, Upton Sinclair had been arrested for reading from the Bill of Rights during a 1920s longshoremen’s strike.
In his rented Chevy II Nova station wagon, Dunne cruised past scrap yards, the box houses of day laborers and shipbuilders, Croatian and Sicilian restaurants, and taverns such as TJ’s and the Dew Drop Inn. San Pedro had always welcomed a diverse population, including, recently, army private Jimi Hendrix and a grifter from West Virginia named Charlie Manson, looking to pimp local girls.
Dunne itched to uncover the tainted lives inside the bars’ moist, dark walls (that old Catholic teaching!). He’d gaze across the harbor to the Port of Los Angeles, at Terminal Island’s oil tanks, freight cars, cargo berths, container ships belching low-grade bunker fuel into the air: fish, sulfur, rotting plankton. He began to understand the pleasures of driving: spying from just behind the wheel, sealed from the world’s meanness, girded by speed.
On Friday mornings, he’d step out of bed and into the old Crane shower with its stainless-steel handle, wash quickly, and then wake his wife, who’d be sleeping, he wrote, in “her blue Dacron crepe nightgown.” They’d brew coffee, sip a cup or two, and head north in the station wagon, circling the peninsula, toward Palos Verdes Estates. Friday was the day The New Yorker arrived at Portuguese Bend, sometimes as much as three weeks after the issue’s appearance in the East.
To get to Chavez Ravine, they’d take the Pasadena Freeway. Beverly Hills, where Nick lived, required them to negotiate the Harbor Freeway and the San Diego Freeway. When they returned to the Bend late at night, often the fog was so dense, Didion would leave the car, walk along the road’s center stripes, guiding Dunne home, just as her high school friends used to get her down from Donner Pass.
* * *
It was a “nutty idea that we could write for television,” Didion said in an interview in The Paris Review in 2006. “We had a bunch of meetings with television executives, and they would explain to us, for example, the principle of Bonanza. The principle of Bonanza was: break a leg at the Ponderosa. I looked blankly at the executive and he said, Somebody rides into town, and to make the story work, he’s got to break a leg so he’s around for two weeks. So we never wrote for Bonanza. We did, however, have one story idea picked up by Chrysler Theatre. We were paid a thousand dollars for it.”
Nick Dunne arranged a few initial meetings with TV people. “In Hollywood, if you were related to someone, you’d have no problem getting work,” said Jill Schary Robinson. Tim Steele, a former ABC executive, told me, “Hollywood was always a nepotistic society. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters—no one frowned on that. It helped. It’s true that, in the pictures, writers weren’t terribly well respected, but even writers could gain respect if they had somebody opening doors for them. Plus, there weren’t that many people in it—making pictures is a small business. And once you’re in the system, it’s hard to get out. People just like going to the same people—the devil you know, right? You can get by for a long time by just being okay at what you do, if you’re not arrogant.
“Every event, every social occasion, is business, and you learn how to behave,” he added. “There’s lots of parties in people’s houses—this keeps it small-townish.”
Didion’s training in Sacramento, the etiquette she had learned as a girl, helped her see the cues not only to social acceptance but to professional ascendancy (though she was never not aware of Fitzgerald’s line from The Last Tycoon: “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood”). Of life for women in the upper reaches of the entertainment community, she wrote:
[It was] quite rigidly organized. Women left the table after dessert, and had coffee upstairs, isolated in the bedroom or dressing room with demitasse cups and rock sugar ordered from London and cinnamon sticks in lieu of demitasse spoons. On the hostess’s dressing table there were always very large bottles of Fracas and Gardenia and Tuberose. The dessert that preceded this retreat (a soufflé or mousse with raspberry sauce) was inflexibly served on Flora Danica plates, and was itself preceded by the ritual of the finger bowls and doilies.
Her brother-in-law’s wife, Lenny, was a superb hostess, well versed in the rituals, though she suspected her efforts were useless. She feared her husband, Nick, was a hack. Frank Sinatra teased him about this, late nights in the Bistro or at the Daisy (Dominick and Sinatra had gotten crosswise on a television program they’d done together). Nick’s career seemed limited, as well, by his medium: He produced TV shows in a town where the motion picture was king.
Humphrey Bogart had brought him to California to produce a TV show called The Petrified Forest, which also starred Lauren Bacall. Bogart had met Nick while working at NBC in New York and recognized a fellow blue blood; beneath his tough-guy persona, Bogart was an Andover boy. One day, on one of Nick’s early trips to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s (Lenny was still in New York), he gushed to his new friend, “God, I love to look at movie stars!” “Come to dinner,” Bogey said. That night, Nick met Lana Turner, Judy Garland, David Niven, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Frank Sinatra. “I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven,” Nick said. “They just sort of took me in. They accepted me as though I was one of them.” From then on, he became a dedicated name-dropper (and any account of his life risks imitating him). “I called Lenny: ‘We’ve got to move out here! It’s incredible!’ It was everything I wanted.”
It wasn’t Lenny’s dream. Born Ellen Beatriz Griffin, an Arizona ranching heiress, she liked New York. She had lived for a while at the Barbizon and hoped to be a model. Now, Nick’s Hollywood zeal alarmed her a little. But she packed up her baby, Griffin, and joined her husband in a beach house in Santa Monica, rented from Harold Lloyd. Nick had quit NBC and gone to work producing CBS’s Playhouse 90.
Immediately, Lenny stepped in as his social conduit. “She was totally comfortable with who she was. I was never comfortable with who I was,” Nick said. “My opinion of myself was nothing. I believed I was everything [my father] had said.” But now movie stars were coming to his home. Lenny, dark-haired and slender, with sexy bangs and smart, steady eyes, naturally attracted people; Nick was good-looking, too, with a genial smile and a pale full-moon face. They gave lavish parties. “People said they were climbers,” said Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band, the movie version of which Nick would produce. “Lenny and Nick’s parties were a veritable Who’s Who of Hollywood. If they were famous and they were hot, they were at the Dunnes’.” Included among these guests were François Truffaut, Vincente Minnelli, Natalie Wood, Diana Lynn Hall. And there weren’t just picture people. “David Hockney,” Crowley recalled. “Stephen Spender. Christopher Isherwood was always there.”
“[It] was the best place to be at that moment in time,” Nick said. His Santa Monica neighbor, just up the road at Louis B. Mayer’s old house on Palisades Beach, was Peter Lawford, Jack Kennedy’s brother-in-law. The Kennedys were “made” Irish—what the Dunnes had always striven to be; in 1950, through a college girlfriend, Nick had wrangled an invitation to the wedding of Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel. Bobby and Jack dazzled him. In Santa Monica, he was awed by the Kennedys’ treatment of Lawford: They’d fly in and demand to use his house for trysts. They’d say, “‘Get the girls, Peter. Get the blow, Peter. Tell Sinatra we can’t come, Peter, we’re staying at Bing Crosby’s instead.’” Nick had heard about the boys’ evenings with Marilyn Monroe in the house’s back bedrooms. By the time the president was slain, he regarded the Kennedys the way Nick Carraway viewed Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Still. The call of California.
Nick moved his family into a white Georgian house on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills. The parties continued. For his tenth wedding anniversary, in April 1964—around the time his brother Greg requested a leave of absence from the Luce empire—he threw a Black and White Ball, based on the Ascot scene Cecil Beaton had designed for My Fair Lady: “Dancing 10:00 p.m., Black Tie, Ladies please wear black or white,” said the invitations. Hydrangeas filled the house, wrapped around specially built white wooden trellises. A tent was raised on the lawn. Two orchestras played after a late supper. Among the many guests were Dennis Hopper and his wife, Brooke Hayward, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Vogue photographer Bob Willoughby snapped Truman Capote dancing with Tuesday Weld. (Two years later, in New York, Capote would famously replicate the ball; he did not invite Nick or Lenny.)
When Nick’s brother and sister-in-law arrived in town, he worried about the fit they’d make. Palos Verdes? And that goddamned station wagon! (Nick drove a black convertible Mercedes-Benz.) Didion wouldn’t know a French dress if it bit her. She confessed she felt relieved at four P.M. each day when she didn’t dip physically—she’d almost always had a hangover in New York. And now, more parties? But, honey, this is business.…
At night she would walk the road’s center stripes, parting the fog with her arms. In the bathroom, she rummaged through the medicine cabinet, looking for something to ward off her migraines. Her husband switched back and forth between television programs, one showing an evangelist shouting at people in wheelchairs, the other featuring an actress discussing the pleasures of “balling.” With the window open, she and Dunne would lie in bed in the dark, listening to the surf, trying to conceive a child.
2
“The freeway is forever!”
On the radio all summer, this slogan rode the static. If you didn’t like the city’s traffic, said one talk-show host, you could “go gargle razor blades.”
In her second novel, Didion would offer unforgettable freeway scenes, but in fact she feared the roads at first, the Chevy Nova not armor enough to reassure her she was safe. She had reversed and reenacted the pioneer trek across the continent, west to east and back again. It was the nature of the trail to be surrounded by casualties.
Dunne, on the other hand, appreciated the egalitarian drift of the merging lanes, speed and anonymity the great equalizers. It’s when you exited, into Silver Lake, Alhambra, Bell Gardens, South-Central, Beverly Hills, that you plunged into the world of class, social politics, one-upsmanship, the grids of misery and privilege.
On the freeway, along the matrices of the area’s original railway lines, space became time (the experience of passing through) and place motion. Much of the road planning was new when Didion and Dunne arrived (a 1960 Life magazine article spoke of “ribbons of freeway … gradually tying the city’s scattered pieces together”). People were split on what car culture was beginning to do to Los Angeles. Old residents argued that highway designers treated the “space between [destination] points [as] a social wasteland devoid of human significance.” Local meant nothing. But young drivers said they’d bonded under siege: Look, we’re surviving this rush hour together! It’s our weather, our low- and high-pressure systems!
The inescapable truth was this: Los Angeles was the twentieth-century American city, the first city whose physical layout and social order owed its patterning entirely to a real-estate- and petroleum-based economy. Didion would catch its tenor in Play It As It Lays, conceiving of American life as a series of “audacious lane changes,” a hurtle “straight on into the hard white empty core of the world.”
For men and women here, at the heart of American business, commuting defined each day. A transitional act, getting from point to point, assumed front and center. It was like turning a footnote into the main body of the text.
* * *
Transitions seemed to be the order of the day. Old Hollywood was becoming New Hollywood (though the phrase “New Hollywood” would not become press parlance for another few years). All over town, Didion recoiled from people’s anxieties about the change.
“What was happening was, the studios were dying, but they didn’t necessarily know it,” said Tim Steele. “This all went back to a pivotal moment in 1948. The antitrust decree was the beginning of the end. It said you couldn’t vertically integrate the movies. You couldn’t make and distribute them. The studios had to divest themselves of parts of their process. So Paramount, for example, divested itself of its theaters. It became the nucleus of ABC-TV. Film studios began to make television programs, stretching themselves thinner than before.” Former power blocs, economic strongholds, splintered. The old master players had turned feeble: Adolph Zukor, of Paramount, was ninety-one in 1964; Jack Warner was seventy-two; Darryl F. Zanuck, at Twentieth Century–Fox, had just turned sixty-two. If the studio heads were slower and stiffer, the tools of the trade had gotten lighter. “Better technology meant the movies began to be mobile,” Steele said. “Till then, the movies didn’t like to go anyplace. That’s what the back lots were all about.” Another move toward decentralization.
For newcomers like Didion and Dunne, these shifts made reading the cues—personal, professional—trickier than it might have been: One day’s verities vanished the following afternoon. Each Monday morning, there was a new ass to kiss.
“When the Old Hollywood fell apart, it devastated the social scene,” said Jill Schary Robinson. Her father, Dore Schary, was the first writer to become a studio head (MGM). She had grown up in the “dream factory,” along with other children of the traditional patronage system: Candice Bergen, Mia Farrow, Marlo Thomas, Tina Sinatra, and Shelley Wanger, daughter of Joan Bennett and producer Walter Wanger. Eventually, Shelley would become Didion’s book editor at Knopf.
In the forties and fifties, Hollywood was “like a little neighborhood,” said Marlo Thomas. “[W]e used to call it ‘the Village.’” Eve Babitz—soon to be Didion’s friend, a source of great entertainment to her—said the girls at Hollywood High were “too beautiful for high school”; they “were the downfall of any serious attempt at school in the accepted sense, and everyone knew it.”
Life was aphrodisiac. And then it fell apart. But not so you’d know it at first. You had to catch the cues.
A year before Didion came to town, Kurt Niklas opened the Bistro on Canon Drive, bankrolled by sixty people at about three thousand dollars a pop. Nick Dunne was an original investor, along with Jack Benny, Tony Curtis, Otto Preminger, Frank Sinatra, and Alfred Bloomingdale. An “unassuming little Beverly Hills restaurant,” according to the Los Angeles Times, serving “perfectly cooked” capellini, “impeccable” onion soup, and “wonderful clams casino.” It appeared to be the latest extension of Old Hollywood glamour, catering to the Reagans, the Kennedys, actors and producers. In 1962 the Daisy, a private discotheque, opened on Rodeo. Its exclusive membership fee jumped from $250 a year to $1,000 as its popularity grew and it burnished the Hollywood legend. “Compared to The Daisy, all other discotheques are slums,” Dan Jenkins wrote in Sports Illustrated. “It is a place where this great montage of thigh-high miniskirts and glued-on Jax pants are doing the skate, the dog, the stroll, the swim, the jerk, the bomp, the monkey, the fish, the duck, the hiker, the Watusi, the gun, the slop, the slip, the sway, the sally and the joint. Like all good Beverly Hills children, Daisy dancers never even sweat.”
But the signs of change were apparent: an edgy knowingness (celebrities need someplace “evil” to go, Jack Hanson, the Daisy’s owner, was quoted as saying), a sweet, smoky smell in the parking lot, a “hip” sneer in people’s greetings, a rawness in table manners. The night it became most apparent this was not the Old Hollywood was the night Frank Sinatra paid the Daisy’s maître d’, a gentle man named George, fifty dollars to walk up to Nick Dunne’s table, tap him on the shoulder, and punch him in the face: “Oh, Mr. Dunne, I’m so sorry about this, but Mr. Sinatra made me do it…”
“I was the amusement for Sinatra,” Nick said later. “My humiliation was his fun.” Here was the social order’s devastation, the brave new world. Now, Hollywood power meant having the ability to “make a decent man do an indecent act.”
Or perhaps none of this was true.
Perhaps New Hollywood was the Old Hollywood, just as California had never really changed. Was the “Lost Village” just a sloppy game of nostalgia? Styles and manners altered … but the fundamentals?
In Blue Nights, Didion casually mentions sitting one afternoon at the “corner banquette” of the Bistro, at a spot usually reserved for Sidney Korshak. By way of identifying Korshak, she quotes the producer Robert Evans: “Let’s just say a nod from Korshak, and the Teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball.”
In fact, all coyness aside, Didion knew quite well who Sidney Korshak was. He was a fixture in Old Hollywood—and now in the New—part of a group of Eastern European Jewish men originally from Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit. They had moved west to launder money in real estate, casinos, and lavish hotels, and to get in on the “flickers,” the fledgling motion picture industry. They had extended their reach into the state’s Democratic and Republican parties. Hollywood insiders referred to them as the “Kosher Nostra.”
People called Korshak “the Myth,” “the Fixer,” or they simply called him a “mob lawyer” (reportedly, Robert Duvall’s character in The Godfather was based on him). Nick had been to several parties at his house—each time shocked by the armed guards beneath the trees; along with Nick, Korshak had been one of the Bistro’s initial investors. His corner banquette, table three, was known as Korshak’s office. There, on a specially installed telephone, he had numerous “furtive conversations” with “such corporate titans and political lions as Al Hart, Lew Wasserman [head of Universal/MCA, along with Jules Stein], Paul Ziffren [a Democratic Party player, who’d made a killing selling assets seized from Nisei families in internment camps], Pat Brown, and Gray Davis,” journalist Gus Russo reported. “There were also confabs with ‘Dodgers people’ such as Walter O’Malley and team manager Tommy Lasorda.” Korshak had helped evict the squatters in Chavez Ravine so that Dodger Stadium could be built; as the Dodgers’ “labor consultant,” he was “responsible for keeping the cars parked, the lights on, and the food service employees behind the concession stands”—while drawing up stadium contracts for his pal Beldon Katleman, owner of the El Rancho Vegas casino. Katleman was a regular at Nick Dunne’s parties and balls.
When Korshak wasn’t dining in the Bistro, people vied to be seated at the notorious table three just for the thrill of it (Didion was no exception). Here’s where Hollywood’s deals got done. When he bustled in, the office was open for business. Niklas would seat him, get him a drink, escort starlets to the table so they could kiss his cheek.
“Along with his pal Lew Wasserman”—who nudged Ronald Reagan to become president of the Screen Actors Guild to do his labor bidding under the guise of anti-Communism—“Korshak ran the town,” Tim Steele told me. “Anytime there was a problem, he was involved. He was the Teamsters’ lawyer. The Teamsters were so powerful because in Hollywood you can’t get anything done without a truck.”
And you couldn’t have the New Hollywood without the flooring of the Old. Sometimes it was hard to tell the gangsters, the politicians, and the movie stars apart (for example, as one of Jules Stein’s MCA clients, Ronald Reagan got an early break in an Iowa nightclub controlled by the Chicago Outfit).
As the daughter of a gambler, Didion knew the look of deals being made, that little twitch of the mouth, masking supreme confidence. Raymond Chandler once said movie moguls at a luncheon look “exactly like a bunch of topflight Chicago gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on the beaten competitor.” There was a “psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money … and the rackets,” he said. “Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.”
* * *
They were gamblers in a town that loved to play.
“We were forced to sit in a house together and write to make a living, and neither one of us, I think, thought we could do it,” Didion said. On top of that, “I had no idea how to be a wife. In those first years I would pin daisies in my hair, trying for a ‘bride effect.’” She sounds, here, like Lily McClellan in Run River. “[B]oth John and I were improvising, flying blind.”
Already, “crapshoot” had become their favorite metaphor for marriage. They’d joke to lessen fears about the pressures they faced. “We needed … money because neither one of us was working,” Didion said.
She’d kept her reviewing gig, but Vogue’s enthusiasm for the pieces she filed began to wane. Was she being punished for not staying in New York? In retrospect, she’d hint that she was fired either because a senior editor disapproved of the films she chose or because her review of The Sound of Music suggested lesbian diddling between Julie Andrews and the Mother Superior. In fact, the review asserted no such thing; Didion said the movie was “like being trapped on a dance floor and crooned at by a drunk.” “Take back your Alps,” she wrote.
Didion’s real problems with Vogue were the magazine’s push for greater revenue and its discovery of Pauline Kael. Kael was offered a column. From the beginning, the women did not see eye-to-eye. Of the Jane Fonda movie Cat Ballou, Kael wrote, “It will probably be a big success, and it’s so much better than a lot of movies around that, relatively speaking, it deserves it.” In the following issue, discussing The Sons of Katie Elder, Didion appeared to take a swipe at her compatriot: “This is an old-fashioned action Western, the kind Cat Ballou tried so dismally to make fun of.” Shortly afterward, she stopped reviewing for Vogue.
The bigger issue for Didion was Si Newhouse’s more aggressive conception of what the magazine business should be. “At the time I began working for Vogue, there was a clear understanding that it was not a magazine for very many people,” Didion told Meghan Daum. “It had 250 to 350,000 subscribers and then a large pass-along readership, but it was specifically designed as a magazine for not very many people. [Later,] once … Newhouse had bought it and settled in, that was no longer the way the magazine was conceived. It had to build circulation all the time. If you’re building circulation all the time, you’re going to have a different sort of magazine”—that is, a watered-down product with wider but blander appeal.
* * *
In her first year at Portuguese Bend, Didion wrote three short stories based largely on her New York miseries. She had no particular passion for the short story as a form. “I was suffering a fear common among people who have just written a first novel: the fear of never writing another,” she said. “I sat in front of my typewriter and believed that another subject would never present itself. I believed that I would be forever dry. I believed that I would ‘forget how.’ Accordingly, as a kind of desperate finger exercise, I tried writing stories.”
Years later, she said she discovered, quickly, that she had “no talent” for stories, “no ability to focus the world in the window.” But in a letter to the actor Buzz Farber at the time, she expressed satisfaction with at least one of the pieces; she had carried off a first-person point of view, normally a difficult challenge for her, she said. As an aside, she told Farber she didn’t like stories about children because such stories were generally self-indulgent.
Didion’s pieces—family dramas and lovers’ tales—were vague, heavy on exposition, quite conventional in shape. The characters were listless, unsympathetic (“[S]he had gone [to the party] only because the soft April twilight saddened her and made her want someone to buy her dinner”). The stories met rejection, from Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Redbook. Rust Hills, then fiction editor for The Saturday Evening Post, did accept “Coming Home,” in retrospect an obvious run-through for “Goodbye to All That” (“When she heard the door close she got up, pulled off the blue silk slip and put on a nightgown, smoked a cigarette until it burned her fingertips, and then took two phenobarbitals from the bottle in Charlie’s medicine chest”).
The story is about a woman in a crumbling relationship with a peripatetic man. She has had an abortion because he did not want the baby: “When she was almost asleep she was able to conjure up an image of the baby, not her own unknown baby (she did not think about that) but the loved baby in [a] baby-food advertisement.”
Writing these stories, far from New York, made her realize once more just how happy she was to be away from Noel’s unpredictability. But there was another reason for her feeling of relief: “There’s a rush to opinion in New York that is kind of destructive, particularly to young writers,” she saw. “It’s very incestuous.”
She was glad to be gone. In truth, she had not held the New York intelligentsia in very high esteem. “Well, of course—her father was anti-Semitic,” Josh Greenfeld explained; her dad’s asides, his little jokes, may have deepened the estrangement she felt in the East.
In any case, she began to feel that one of the great things about Los Angeles “was you didn’t see other writers and editors. You saw a broader range of people.”
The appearance of “Coming Home” in the July 1964 issue of The Saturday Evening Post began a fruitful six-year relationship between Didion and the magazine, during which time she’d write some of her finest essays. Between 1964 and 1969, Didion and Dunne would publish more than fifty pieces there, sharing a column between them, “Points West.” It would be the most reliable source of their income. (Their first year in Los Angeles, she and Dunne would earn less than seven thousand dollars from their freelancing; in the following few years, they’d average around eight thousand from magazine work.) A “sense of impending doom” always hovered about the Post, Dunne wrote—it was financially imperiled because “Middle America read the magazine, but wasn’t buying the products advertised therein; the people whom the advertising was designed to reach didn’t read the magazine; change the magazine and you lost the readers.” The managing editor, Otto Friedrich, fought with his publisher; a mild insanity seemed to inflict the management (once, at a dinner for Vietnam’s Madame Nhu, the editorial director consistently referred to her country as South Korea).
But because the magazine was slowly failing, it was willing to try anything: a lucky situation for the writers, at least for a while. “Respect was grudgingly given, but once granted, the editors would follow you out onto the longest limb,” Dunne wrote.
A far cry from Tinsel Town. Out here on the movie lots, said Jack Warner, writers were simply “schmucks with Underwoods.”
* * *
In 1964, literary cachet still counted for something in certain Hollywood neighborhoods. The novel was a powerful cultural force. Everyone wanted to be Christopher Isherwood—and Isherwood knew it, too, at every party he attended.
Run River had not made Didion a novelist. She was just another person who’d published a book. She’d not made a mark in the pictures. The “fit” Nick worried about—Palos Verdes, the Nova—it was vexing.
Whom did he put them with?
The first time he’d had his brother and sister-in-law over, at a small outdoor Sunday lunch, he’d invited only two other guests, both book people with a toe in the movie pond: Helen Straus, Didion’s literary agent at the time (she’d started in the Story Department at Paramount, then founded the literary wing of the William Morris Agency), and Gavin Lambert, an openly gay expatriate English writer who’d published a book of short stories about Hollywood’s down-and-out modeled after Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. He’d written the screenplay for Sons and Lovers, so he, too, was trying to make a niche for himself somewhere between the literary and Technicolor.
In that spirit, and encouraged by his brother, Dunne went to work on a project—maybe a book, maybe a screenplay, or maybe it would serve as a treatment for something else—product, that was the thing. He called it Show Me a Hero (after Scott Fitzgerald’s line “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy”). It was about a woman named Marjorie caught in a Cold War right-wing plot. Her husband, a spy, is thrown into a Communist prison. A handsome young reporter from Tempo, a Time-like rag, gets wind of the story and falls in love with Marjorie. She “reciprocates carnally in a midwinter tryst in either a cottage on Fire Island or a suite at the Radisson Hotel in Minneapolis, a plot point to be worked out later,” Dunne wrote. In the end, the heroine is left to choose between love and duty to her husband.
The love story against a backdrop of conspiracy sounds more like Didion’s Conradian mind than Dunne’s, and in fact a letter from Dunne to H. N. “Swanie” Swanson, a legendary Hollywood agent who’d represented William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ayn Rand, among others, says Didion cowrote the film treatment with him.
The letter is dated February 13, 1965, and is notable for two reasons: It is the first record we have of collaboration between Didion and Dunne; it indicates that their screenwriting partnership began immediately after their move to California in the summer of 1964. Second, the point of the letter is to withdraw the treatment from circulation in favor of a novel. Dunne had just signed a contract with Harper & Row. His belief that a movie of Show Me a Hero would be worthier, financially and critically, if it proceeded from the sale of a book, rather than from the direct sale of a screenplay, suggests the cultural power of novels.
Dunne’s letter doesn’t mention that, late in 1964, Didion had taken the film treatment to William Morris. A roomful of agents had offered the couple, as “constructive criticism,” only the advice that they “make the margins a little wider.”
This was typing, not writing; Dunne was grateful for the Harper & Row contract. He told Swanson he and Didion had no further plans for collaboration—she was working on a novel of her own, he said. In the meantime, if Swanson would consider representing Dunne’s TV scripts, or his idea for a series …
The problem was, he had not written any TV scripts. He had not even seen a TV script. He and Didion had plunged into writing for the screen without pausing to study procedures and formats. Years later, Dunne recalled, “We were coming out of [the Daisy] one night about 2 o’clock in the morning, and some drunk actor was having a fight with his girlfriend, and he threw a script at her. And I picked up the script. It was a television script. It was the first script I’d ever read.”
They began to go to screenings, clutching pencils and pads of paper. They diagrammed movie sequences. “Basically the terminology is easy,” Dunne said. He named “three different things. Fade in. Cut to. Another angle.”
In the next several years, beginning with their sale to Chrysler Theatre, they would shed their naïveté about the writing and pitching of scripts. They would witness green-lighted projects go dead, watch other writers take credit for their ideas, get paid for abandoned work, and understand this was simply business. The distinction between literary and commercial, success and failure (on a project-by-project basis) dimmed in their minds. They did not buy the sentimental view that the pictures had destroyed the literary talents of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Almost gleefully, Dunne would come to accept the old Hollywood adage: “If you’re going to be a whore, you can’t complain about getting fucked.”
3
“We were crazy about it. We just loved it. I didn’t even notice that six months had slipped into a year,” Didion said. “It was just easier to do everything, like take your clothes to the laundry.” Dunne extended his leave of absence at Time. He ordered a six-cylinder Mustang convertible, poppy red, from the Ford factory at River Rouge. Didion took to wearing black-and-white sleeveless dresses—they would have been too thin in New York. The couple was getting into the So Cal spirit.
As he had done in Manhattan, Dunne haunted piano bars, trend spotting. “[N]o one goes to a piano bar except to get laid,” he said. The first thing he discovered was that L.A. piano bars were filled with “ad guys from New York, Buckskin fringe, the kind of watch that tells the time in Caracas [and] Djibuti … Spritzer guys, a little Perrier water over the Almaden to cut the California taste,” the kind of guys who checked their Maldive chronometers and said they had to “catch the noon bird back to New York.” The women in these places all had a couple of ex-husbands and El Dorados with about thirty-two payments left on them. One day, at a bar, Dunne met a pro football player who spent eight thousand dollars a year on his wardrobe (“I’m into three-piece suits this fall … Part of the image I’m trying to project is a clean-cut guy in a certain kind of car.”) Dunne was certain he was getting the L.A. vibe.
Didion liked to study the city from the other end of the social scale, at fund-raisers and gallery openings. While Dunne kept a voyeuristic eye on the lowlifes and strivers, she took him to mingle with movers and shakers. This was the strength of their partnership.
Sometimes it seemed to them, though, that they would never fathom how pawns advanced across the board. One night, at a gala dinner, Didion watched, amazed, as Dorothy Buffum Chandler wheedled Jules Stein into contributing $25,000 toward the construction of her Music Center. In return for his gift, she said, she would offer Stein “twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of free publicity” in her little family paper, the Los Angeles Times. The exchange was remarkable for pulling together the political and business interests of Downtown and the Westside, two communities traditionally at odds. Downtowners thought the Westside a place where people exchanged “too many social kisses,” a way of saying it was too Jewish. The tête-à-tête at dinner exemplified a commingling of power and grace the “landed gentry” of Sacramento would have admired but could never quite achieve.
Didion feared she would never acquire the L.A. touch. She was not the accomplished hostess her sister-in-law was. “You want a different kind of wife,” she would tell Dunne in the open Mustang on a late drive back to Portuguese Bend after a party. The refinery flames off the San Diego Freeway burned away the night fog. “You should have married someone more like Lenny.”
“If I wanted to marry someone more like Lenny I would have married someone more like Lenny,” Dunne would say.
At home, Didion sat on the closed lid of the old Victorian toilet and swallowed a phenobarbital.
She began to lose more weight. Her wedding ring kept slipping off her finger. She wore it on a chain around her neck.
She urged Dunne to join her in “planning meetings.” They’d sit together with legal pads, state a problem they needed to solve, and then decide to drive to Santa Monica for lunch.
This seemed to work as well as any other strategy. As six months slipped into a year, they began to feel more at ease at affairs around town. They were less dependent on Nick. It turned out, literary cachet was not difficult to achieve in a place where no one read books. People were lazy and took you at your word.
Socially, it helped that Lenny considered Didion a work in progress. Lenny volunteered at the Colleagues, a charitable organization for unwed mothers. Show business ladies donated their previous year’s wardrobes to the Colleagues for an annual fund-raiser. Didion looked sufficiently waiflike; Lenny set aside Natalie Wood’s castoffs for her. They fit perfectly. Dunne recalled a “white Saint Laurent evening dress, a water-colored satin Galanos evening dress, and a yellow wool bouclé coat by Edith Head that had been part of Natalie’s wardrobe for Love with a Proper Stranger.”
“Outsiders … had to be thoroughly vetted before receiving passports into that closed community,” Dunne wrote. Natalie Wood’s wool bouclé coat was as good a pass as you could get. Soon, Didion and Dunne were dining regularly with Wood and her husband R. J. Wood charmed Dunne, using a table knife as a mirror, holding it up to her mouth while fixing her lipstick. He loved her stories of the old days when the studios took care of everything … like the time (oh, you remember, she’d say) when Nick Gurdin killed a man, driving drunk, and the studio buried the manslaughter charge …
On evenings like this, it was easy to believe you could toss the plans.
It would be oversimplifying matters to say that Dunne’s brother Nick loved the Old Hollywood dream, and as hashish and blue jeans replaced cocktails in the discotheques, he lost his footing. But there is some truth to this. “Everything was changing,” he lamented. “People were starting to smoke pot. I was shocked and disapproving when someone lit up in our house one night … evening dresses were giving way to miniskirts.… Hairdressers started to be invited to parties. Dances changed. The foxtrot was out. The twist was in.… Cole Porter was out. The Beatles were in.”
As his brother’s fortunes rose around town, Nick floundered, drinking too much—he reminded Didion of some of her New York pals—hoping people would forget his spat with Sinatra. By now, he and Lenny had three children, Griffin, Alex, and Dominique. Nick was so busy socializing, he rarely saw them. “The nanny would have the meal with the kids,” Griffin recalled. “The adults would check in, you know, have a little something with us, maybe. But then they’d go out for dinner and dancing. Or we’d be up in the bedroom hearing them getting hammered and just having a fantastic time.”
When the Beatles came to play the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1964, Nick took his kids to meet the moptops at the Brentwood house of Alan Livingston, Capital Records’ president. In the garden, four-year-old Dominique curtsied, as her mother had taught her, when she shook Paul McCartney’s hand. She amused the musicians, whose charm lay in their jokey boisterousness. It was another clash of old and new. Queasy, Nick snapped a picture for posterity.
Meanwhile, Didion’s ardent support of Barry Goldwater posed a major social challenge in the mostly liberal Democratic circles she found herself in. People argued with her that the war in Vietnam was immoral; through Dunne’s Time experiences, she’d become unhappy with the effort, but she figured “a series of such [military] encounters around the world was just part of the way that our future was going to be.” If nuclear weapons might expedite things, they ought to be considered.
Dunne joked about her archconservative values, but he couldn’t keep a cap on her passions as the Republican National Convention approached. It was to be held in San Francisco’s Cow Palace from July 13 to July 16. Didion was furious at the way Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon maneuvered to steal the spotlight from the “true” conservative, Goldwater. Two years earlier, a self-pitying Nixon had declared the country wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore, but he had gotten himself a prime-time speech at the convention and his ambitions were clear. Reagan, on the stump, used a mix of Red baiting, trumped-up anger at “the Eastern elite,” and nostalgia to enthuse crowds, and California Republicans seemed to fall for it. Didion’s anger flared at parties, followed by long silences.
A few weeks before the convention, she and Dunne flew back to New York for a Goldwater rally in Madison Square Garden. William Buckley was there, seated in a one-thousand-dollar box; all of the attendees “with the possible exception of Senator Goldwater” appeared eager to “kiss the hem of his garment,” Dunne wrote. “It was an idolatry that Mr. Buckley gave no sign of thinking either unjust or untoward,” even though, from the perspective of a new Californian, it was anachronistic. Republican power had shifted to the West.
An ugly tone characterized the rally, presaging the San Francisco event and American political style ever since. Dunne noted “the repeated droll allegations in the Garden that liberals were double-gaited, limp-wristed, and generally so light on their feet they could dance on a charlotte russe.”
“The stench of fascism is in the air,” California governor Pat Brown warned the press in San Francisco as the Republican convention gaveled to order. At Goldwater’s instigation, 70 percent of the convention delegates voted down a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act.
While authorities in Mississippi were still searching for the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, cheerful shouts caromed off the Cow Palace walls. “The nigger issue” was going to sink LBJ, a Republican aide told one reporter.
“A new breed of Republican had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operating in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany,” said Jackie Robinson, the baseball player and special delegate that year for Nelson Rockefeller. “The convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life.” He was appalled when Rockefeller was booed as a moderate Easterner. Several times that week, Robinson felt physically unsafe.
An African-American television reporter named Belva Davis and a fellow black journalist were chased out of the Palace by delegates yelling, “Niggers!… I’m gonna kill your ass!” “The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hotdogs, half-eaten Snickers bars.… Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull,” Davis said.
Fury at the Civil Rights Act was matched by the Republicans’ anger at the media. NBC newscasters Chet Huntley and David Brinkley felt distinctly threatened when trapped in the elevators at the Mark Hopkins Hotel with delegates muttering under their breath that they were “crypto-liberals!” One day, one man said to another, in Brinkley’s hearing, “You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they’re being broadcast from Moscow.”
This was all the result of the “greatest campaign in history,” according to Richard Nixon’s introduction of Goldwater as Goldwater accepted the party’s nomination for president. Goldwater’s speech fanned the week’s violence. He swore the country would not “stagnate in the swampland of collectivism” or “cringe before the bully of Communism.” It would not bow before the “false prophets” reversing the “tide of freedom” by expanding civil rights. This new legislation, he suggested, opened America’s streets to “bullies and marauders.”
At dinner parties and Hollywood gatherings, Didion shocked some of her fellow guests when she said she would vote for Goldwater again and again if she could. He was a principled man in the mold of the pioneers, of John Wayne, and that was that.
She shared the Republicans’ disgust with the “liberal media.” The “unspoken, unadmitted” bias in papers like The New York Times hit readers “like so much marsh gas,” she argued. “[M]onkeys,” she said, must be in charge of the Teletypes.
* * *
A few months before the convention, Universal Studios released the last Hollywood film Ronald Reagan would ever star in, Don Siegel’s The Killers. Perhaps more than the convention, or any of Reagan’s speeches for Goldwater that year, The Killers bared the methods by which Hollywood money and myths would enter mainstream American politics.
Joan Didion would understand this dynamic better than any other writer in the country. Partly as an attempt to secure her own survival in L.A., she had studied the culture shaping Reagan. She saw Old Hollywood’s slippage and grasped the anxiety this would cause a man like him. Further, she saw the effects of change on the nexus of fashion, style, and the process of narrative formation that would manufacture Ronald Reagan as a leader for his time (in the interim, it was no coincidence that another Californian, Richard Nixon, had moved American politics toward greater cynicism).
In The Killers, Reagan plays a mob boss. The movie was made on the cheap. The sets were obviously fake. Universal’s color processing left the scenes washed-out and flat. “By the early 60s, the classical Hollywood filmmaking of the 30s and 40s had become mummified,” the critic Charles Taylor wrote. “The Killers reeks of this calcification.” No place in the movie “seems like anywhere that anyone real could actually exist … In other words, its relation to the Hollywood films that had preceded it is exactly the relation of Reagan’s white-picket fence vision of America to the real thing—a false, shallow copy stripped … to its basest motives.”
The movie’s plot? It was about how “a hood can become a respectable businessman.” (Just as, twenty years later, the Nicaraguan “Contras” would become “Freedom Fighters.”)
As Didion had learned, reading the A-lists, Hollywood had never distinguished hoods from respectable businessmen. Reagan’s early career had depended on blurring his vision; he never made a distinction between above or below-the-line deal making. Nor would he—or anyone else here—question the need for the “show to go on,” even if the means had “mummified” and the stage sets were cardboard.
For the time being, Didion’s grasp of these cultural forces and future consequences remained nascent; she observed their manifestations mostly in the increasingly sad figure of her brother-in-law. In his desperation to retain Old Hollywood glamour and the respect of powerful friends, he was becoming a “fake,” Nick admitted.
Meanwhile, Didion’s return to New York for the Goldwater rally had further convinced her that she and Dunne had made the right decision in moving to California. People’s assumptions, back east, that she would rush to embrace Manhattan again irritated her. New York was so sentimental about itself, like a lush hamming it up, convinced no one couldn’t love her. New Yorkers’ rote perceptions of L.A.—“smog,” “kooky cults”—were shockingly shallow. In a reversal of Nixon and Reagan, who saw California’s political process as a model for the rest of the nation, Easterners viewed “plastic” Los Angeles as a metaphor for all that was wrong with the country.
Back in Portuguese Bend, Dunne, still an Eastern boy, referred to his new home as “Lotusland” and was quickly corrected by his guests. At dinner, a visiting New Yorker complimented a Hollywood hostess’s chiles jalapeños and chicken mole. “You cook New York,” she said. “Mexico, actually,” the hostess replied. Didion wasn’t a Lenny-level hostess, but she was learning. The recipes she’d once copied for Vogue came in handy.
She reflected: Vogue had given her a style even when she’d chafed against it. She’d had to follow it closely to satisfy the magazine’s editors. This year in Portuguese Bend, the problem she’d experienced trying to write film treatments, short stories, and scripts was dearth of style. Nothing to give her direction. No Allene Talmey. Just the ocean surf breaking below, the shifting of the land beneath the road, the wind in the trees. After parties in town or dinners at home, she’d listen, she’d read, trying to hear California. For example, Raymond Chandler on the dreaded Santa Ana winds: “On nights like [this], every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.”