1
The “snake book.”
Blood and champagne.
This is how the era would end.
Nora Sayre reports that, during the Nixon presidency, Air Force One was stocked with “an adequate supply” of the president’s blood type “in the likelihood of attempted assassination,” and “cases of American champagne for toasting his hosts at a reciprocal banquet.” “That vast jet, pounding through the skies full of blood and bubbly, stayed with me as a symbol for peace-keeping” during this period, Sayre wrote.
“Mommy’s snake book” was Quintana’s name for Didion’s second novel, Play It As It Lays. When the novel appeared in 1970, it came in a bold jacket designed by the distinctive book artist Janet Halverson. A rattler’s silhouette curled across the stark white cover, its forked tongue flicking a small setting sun. Didion worked hard on the book throughout 1968 (making extensive notes) and 1969 (composing the chapters). Quintana’s earliest memories of her mother’s industry nestled in the reptile’s coils. The creature charmed her mom, dragged her away in the drafty old house. Didion would sit on the sun porch—the smell of aloe wafting through the windows—and say she needed to work. In the evenings, when there wasn’t a party, she’d light votive candles and set them on the living room windowsills. She’d sip bourbon and reread the pages she’d written that day.
Quintana danced to the eight-track player: the Mamas and the Papas, “Do You Want to Dance?” “I wanna dance,” Quintana shouted. Years later, in Blue Nights, to convey an ache of innocence, Didion would sketch scenes of her daughter talking back to the song, but she didn’t note that the Mamas and the Papas were sometimes guests in her daughter’s house.
“Turn! Turn! Turn!” Quintana sang with the Byrds. To everything there is a season. This was the season of Mommy’s snake book. Her mother would say she needed to work. Quintana would say the same about herself when Didion asked her to do something.
* * *
It was also election season. You couldn’t go to a restaurant without hearing Nixon’s name.
One night, the Dunnes had dinner with Jim Mills, author of The Panic in Needle Park. He was an associate editor at Life. The Panic in Needle Park had begun years earlier as an article and photo essay for the magazine. But when the Dunnes met him, hoping to option his book for a picture, he wanted to talk politics.
LBJ had just gone on television to announce a temporary bombing halt in Vietnam. Mills insisted that the American people were overly sensitive to the word nuclear. Many lives could have been saved in Southeast Asia if the United States had nuked it, he said. Didion had once considered this position, but her time with Dunne had tempered her views, and the couple thought Mills slightly cracked. Didion had decided not to vote in this election—the thought of choosing the lesser of two evils appalled her.
But the movie looked like a go. Mills was receptive. Along with Nick, the Dunnes agreed to put up $1,000 for a year’s option against $17,500 and 5 percent of net profits. Didion would write a film treatment. Nick thought he could find further financing, maybe at Fox (Dunne’s time there had taught him that the studios were down, not out; you needed a studio to get anything done, and they operated with brute efficiency—around town, people called Disney “Duckau”).
Mills’s story line was relentlessly grim, but Didion had learned the art of the pitch. What’s the picture about? “Romeo and Juliet on junk,” she said.
* * *
Dunne was eager to finish his Dolittle project. Nothing about it surprised him. “Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind,” he’d say later. “What makes it bearable are those moments … when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions. There were no detours like that in The Studio. My notes were like plans for a bridge. Writing the book was like building that bridge.”
He could barely lug his carcass to another studio meeting. He couldn’t stomach another working dinner at the Daisy, glancing at the glazed wall mirrors (strategically placed so everybody could stare at fellow diners without appearing to strain), listening to the studio heads discuss dubbing a picture in Israel:
“What do they speak there? Yiddish?”
“I don’t know. Hebrew maybe.”
“What’s ‘pussy’ in Hebrew?”
He groaned at the mountains of caviar honoring Hello, Dolly! now that the Wardrobe Department had determined Babs’s dress was sufficiently functional.
He’d had enough of the studio’s divine eminence. All he wanted now was a book party in New York. (Presumably, FSG had thrown the promised bash for Slouching Towards Bethlehem.) Dunne told Henry Robbins he wasn’t really pressing for a party, but just for kicks, he wondered, How many people might I invite?
What really nagged him was fear that The Studio was not a worthy follow-up to Delano, and Delano had vanished with little notice. Meanwhile, his wife had become the muse of the sixties. Even so, critical acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem had not translated into robust sales. New American Library refused to make a public offer for the paperback rights (eventually, Dell would extend a $1,250 advance). Literary success could be as gloomy as failure.
2
“It is the season … of divorce,” Didion had written of the cheating couples in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” At the end of 1969, shortly after discussing in print the possibility that she and her husband might separate, she would refer to her own “season of doubt.”
“We communicated in nuance,” Dunne wrote.
Let’s take a look.
At the end of “Los Angeles Notebook,” in the final section of Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion sits in a piano bar in Encino. Piano bars in Encino, she writes, are where people “tell each other about their first wives and last husbands.” She does not say what she was doing there alone. She does say she went to a pay phone and called a friend in New York. He asked her why she was there. She replied, “Why not?”
In Play It As It Lays, Encino is the faceless part of L.A. where Maria’s domestic dreams die in a bloody pail. (“Didion’s description of Maria’s abortion and her subsequent horror at the waste, the fetus in the pail … is all too true,” wrote the critic Barbara Harrison.) “You familiar with this area, Maria?” asks a doctor’s go-between in the novel. “Nice homes here. Nice for kids.”
Adding his own nuance to the mix, Dunne often told friends at parties during this period—sometimes joking, sometimes not—that his marriage was a week-to-week affair.
Contributing to their difficulties at this time were the stresses of writing, money, lots of drinking, Dunne’s quickness to anger, and Didion’s “theatrical temperament”—especially, it seems, in 1969, and again three years later, when, Didion wrote, “John and I were having a fight [and] he took it out on Quintana. She cried. I told her she and I were leaving, she and I were going to LAX, she and I were flying away from him.”
Without placing blame on either party, one of the couple’s old friends said Didion should have taken Quintana and gone to live with Frank and Eduene. Didion’s sufferings, whatever their causes, were as intense as Maria’s tensions with her husband in the novel.
“Did they have trouble? Oh, yes. And all those stories you read in the paper about Joan’s reclusiveness? I don’t understand why you’d think they’re true,” Eve Babitz told me. “Maybe it was John shouting over her. And she preferred it. John could be the idiot and she didn’t have to be. He pounded down doors, and that’s why Quintana hated him. Joan would never leave him—he got to be the obnoxious one. She thought staying with him proved she had character.”
In November 1969, after a particularly cloudy period, Didion wrote of an attempt at reconciliation: “We … refrain from mentioning the kicked-down doors, the hospitalized psychotics [presumably, when she was diagnosed at St. John’s] and the packed suitcases.”
“Why do you always have to be right. Why do you always have to have the last word. For once in your life, just let it go,” Didion wrote years later, invoking the echo of Dunne’s voice.
When Play It As It Lays was published, Didion acknowledged suffering severe marital setbacks. “Anyway, John and I stayed together,” she told an interviewer. “A lot of marriages are surviving infidelity around the country … [it] isn’t really that important except as a betrayal.”
“Betrayal,” Dunne wrote in Vegas, “never worked for us” as a major reason to fight.
“If you can make the promise over again, then the marriage should survive,” Didion said. “I don’t really think infidelity is that important.”
Vegas recounts a phone call on this very topic, illustrating the couple’s highly nuanced communication. (Remember: Dunne called Vegas a “fictionalized memoir”—about as nuanced as you can get.) He had gone to Nevada, partly to work, partly to escape home, and he was interviewing various residents of the underbelly. He called his wife one evening. “What’s new with you?” she said. He said he had a date “with a nineteen-year-old tonight. She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.” “It’s research,” Didion said. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available … You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.” “But I don’t want to fuck her,” Dunne said.
“There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone,” Dunne wrote. “‘Well, that can be part of the story, too,’ she said.
“There seemed to be nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.”
Dunne writes of buying Quintana a baseball mitt the spring she turned three and throwing a ball with her to fill his anguished days. He writes of a growing restlessness, of going to movies alone, driving the freeways for hours, and dreaming of escape. He writes of the “familiar season of discontent” at home, of moving from “crisis to crisis like old repertory actors going from town to town, every crisis an opening night with new depths to plumb in the performance.” He writes that his wife had “too high a trouble quotient.” She often slept with a leaky ice bag on her head, to ward off “PMT, the Santa Ana and all forms of bad karma.”
She fell into the lassitude she’d witnessed in her mother: Nothing made any difference. She promised him “she’d try harder to make things matter.” He told her he’d heard that before. Eventually, he spent eighteen months, off and on, in a residential motel just off the Strip in Las Vegas among hookers, cardsharps, and comedians, drafting a book.
Whatever else led to this “season of doubt,” writing played its part. Though neither could imagine not being married to a writer, though they counted on each other for editorial and professional support, an edginess grew between them—not competition so much as sadness that things could not always be equal. And in this particular space, this constant struggle to right the balance, there was little, if any, room for Quintana, who would parrot back at them their daily withdrawals.
Many years later, Didion would say she heard her daughter’s comments as “precocious”; now, she realized, they “could be construed in retrospect as pleas for help.” She “was already more aware of what was going on around her than I had any idea.”
Among other things, what was going on around Quintana, early in 1969, was her father’s increasing worry about the worth of his current project—perhaps one reason so much was riding, for him, on a book party in New York. Didion wanted to fix things. “She claimed that [in my writing] I vandalized other people’s lives instead of coming to grips with my own,” Dunne wrote. “It was an argument without a rebuttal, which is what made it particularly infuriating.”
It was also an argument about traditional reporting (Dunne’s special gift) versus the trendy, more personal style of nonfiction.
Coming to grips with her own life—for which she’d been praised in reviews of Slouching Towards Bethlehem—was dangerously self-absorbing, making it hard for Didion to make things matter. In Life magazine, she wrote that lately she felt herself “a sleepwalker, moving through the world unconscious … alert only to the stuff of bad dreams, the children burning in the locked car in the supermarket parking lot, the bike boys stripping down stolen cars on the captive cripple’s ranch, the freeway sniper … the cunning Okie faces that turn up in military investigations…”
Each of these grisly topics appears in newspaper clippings among the rough drafts of Play It As It Lays in Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Didion saved them while working on the novel. Across the top of each column, she scrawled “Maria”—in the book, Maria obsesses over violent newspaper stories. Didion’s comments in Life indicate a scary blurring between author and character.
At one point, Didion made a note about “voice”—how she would like to disguise her tone and speak like a teenager, though she was not a teenager anymore. It is unclear whether she was speaking of her own voice or Maria’s—or perhaps she was speaking as Maria.
Anyway, the couple stayed together: “I am reminded that we laugh at the same things.”
And then there was Quintana, weeding the tennis court.
Quintana, strolling with them around the lake in MacArthur Park. She was accosted one evening by an old man suddenly lurching at her out of the dark from a bench: “That child is the picture of Ginger Rogers,” he said.
One night, in the garden out back, where the rats ate the avocados, she put a seedpod up her nose. Didion drove her to Children’s Hospital. The attending pediatrician had been called away from a lavish party and wore a dinner jacket to the clinic. Quintana found this interesting. The following night, she sniffed up another seedpod so that she could meet the handsome doctor again.
3
The atmosphere in the neighborhood remained the same: Still the outlandish parties. Still the whispered talk. Satanic rituals. Filmed orgies. Public humiliations (whippings, sodomy) in retaliation for bad dope deals.
“There were simply too many drugs in that community,” said Noel Parmentel. “Hooch I understand. But not the other.” He had become a Hollywood fixture, dropping in on the Dunnes, staying at the Chateau Marmont. He was trying to produce a film of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. His drinking buddies included Robert Mitchum and Amanda Blake, Gunsmoke’s Miss Kitty. He’d hang with Cass Elliot, from whom he heard the dark rumors. “Cass used to send a limo to the airport for me, you know, with someone holding a sign: MR. PARMENTEL. She was great—a musical genius but all she wanted to do was look like Michelle [Phillips]. I did her a big favor once, stupidly. Through a congressman I knew, I got her scumbag boyfriend bailed out of jail.”
The man’s name, he couldn’t recall, but Cass’s drug-dealing beaux would fill Laurel Canyon. Maybe it was Pic Dawson, who came and went, like so many, from Cass’s house, or maybe it was William Doyle, whom she introduced at parties in the spring of 1969 as her fiancé. By summer’s end, the LAPD had taken a special interest in Doyle. He admitted selling MDA to Voytek Frykowski, Cass’s neighbor. Allegedly, Frykowski sold these same pills to Tex Watson and Linda Kasabian, who said the drugs were worthless. Watson would be convicted of killing Frykowski in Sharon Tate’s house.
Cass couldn’t stop talking that spring about the murder of Bobby Kennedy. The assassination and the turmoil at the Democratic National Convention the previous August had piqued her interest in politics. She thought maybe she’d run for the Senate someday. The night Bobby was shot, she’d been having dinner with Sharon and Roman in Malibu, and she couldn’t believe how shattered she felt, as if the whole country were bleeding out in that darkened hotel kitchen.
One night at a party, Michelle Phillips told Didion a stunning story, emblematic of the times: A version of it would appear as the penultimate chapter of Play It As It Lays. When Phillips was seventeen, she said, her best friend, a woman named Tamar Hodel, decided to kill herself. Hodel had introduced Phillips to folk music. Listen to Peter, Paul and Mary, she’d say—two rabbis and a hooker. She had been jilted by the singer Scott McKenzie (“If you’re going to San Francisco”). She asked Phillips to help her gobble forty-eight Seconal.
After Hodel had swallowed the pills, Phillips dragged her, comatose, to an unmade bed and lay there watching her. Finally, she fell asleep. John Phillips arrived and discovered the women in time to drive Hodel to a hospital and get her stomach pumped. Michelle had been scared, but—passive, young—she never questioned whether she should honor her friend’s request.
Didion took this story and gave it to Maria. As her friend BZ sinks into a Seconal haze, Maria holds his hand: “She closed her eyes against the light … and her mind against what was going to happen…”
Phillips told other stories that spring. Through Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys’ drummer, her husband, John, had met this fellow Charlie Manson. Manson was a songwriter, convinced that Terry Melcher, the Byrds’ producer, would get him a contract (Melcher was Doris Day’s son, a child of Old Hollywood). Manson was going to be a rock star. John didn’t think much of his talent, but he was an entertaining talker and he was always surrounded by pretty girls. Fun to be around. He and the girls lived occasionally on a former ranch—the backdrop for a lot of old Westerns, Manson said, Tom Mix, Howard Hughes.
Lately, though, John didn’t like to party with people. For some reason, he had grown “quite paranoid,” Phillips said.
What Phillips didn’t know, when she related this story, was that Manson had begun to instruct his followers to sneak onto peoples’ lawns and break into their houses—particularly places they’d been to, at flings and things—just to see if they could get away with it. Manson called this activity “creepy crawling.”
John “heard sounds one night and went downstairs carrying a shotgun,” Phillips said. “I waited, without much anxiety, for him to come back. ‘I saw six people,’ he said when he returned, ‘all dressed in black, in tights and leotards, men and women, and they were in the Rolls-Royce, out in the garage, and when I went to the door, they all tiptoed away like penguins.’”
Phillips didn’t believe him. She took the gun, gave him a Valium, and told him to come to bed.
Months later, she knew. They’d been “creepy crawled.”
4
For Dunne’s New York book party, on May 14, 1969, Farrar, Straus and Giroux reserved the Gauguin Room in the Gallery of Modern Art, complete with cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and a piano player. Until the moment he left California, Dunne waffled in letters to Robbins. He said he didn’t like going to New York (not true), that he wasn’t looking forward to the party (not true), that he was pathologically paranoid about the “lit biz” (true of everyone). He said he had turned down three motion pictures in the past three weeks, costing him $175,000, and he didn’t know if New York was worth it. The movie offers may or may not have been genuine; the only obvious game in play was Didion’s unfinished treatment of The Panic in Needle Park and Nick’s inability, so far, to interest studios in the “downbeat” material.
FSG planned a full-page ad for The Studio in The New York Times, which pleased Dunne but made him skittish. The rollout was smooth and highly supportive of Dunne but didn’t quell his fears. He didn’t want his bio to mention Delano—the distance between farmworkers and studio executives was so great, even he wondered what kind of résumé he was building.
Most tellingly, he had dropped his longtime agent, Carl Brandt, for Lynn Nesbit, who was shepherding the careers of Tom Wolfe and Donald Barthelme.
Dunne was not going through the motions of a breakdown, as his wife had, on the eve of his all-important second book, but his inner pitchings were no less turbulent. Whereas Didion acted out, to steel herself for the long run, Dunne bit back on his tensions—perhaps straining his heart (he’d wonder about this later). This was a difference between them, based in a shared understanding, and it was a way of balancing the scales.
As the guests wandered from the Gauguin Room to the penthouse lounge, sipping Singapore slings, picking at small plates of satay chicken or spiced apples, Didion realized she had missed New York men. They looked at women; you could catch their eye. They actually wanted to talk to you, instead of just probing to see what you could do for them, like the men in L.A. On the other hand, she hadn’t missed that overbearing East Coast chauvinism toward the West. New Yorkers had no idea what an apocalyptic romance California was having with itself. Didion had not realized, until leaving L.A., quite how dark that city had gotten, “much darker than it was anyplace else,” she said.
The ambivalence Dunne had felt before the celebration must have intensified during the evening. It was the same doubt characterizing his book: an insider’s account written from the perspective of an outsider who very much wanted in. “Although it is not necessary for a writer to be a prick, neither does it hurt,” Dunne would say. “A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.” And yet he always wanted to smash that window, and then be magnanimous enough to pay the damages.
On top of everything, he hadn’t anticipated that the affair would turn into a wake for The Saturday Evening Post. The magazine had finally drowned in debt, losing a defamation suit to University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant. In a pair of articles, the magazine had accused Bryant of encouraging violence on the field and of fixing a game. The magazine was ordered to pay over three million dollars in damages; in January, it had published an excerpt from The Studio; by February, it was gone. Dunne invited all the editors to his party. By now, they were “scattered to the four winds, [but] to my surprise they all came, inconvenient though it must have been,” he said. “We fell upon each other, sharers of a unique experience.”
He and Didion would move on to write a regular column for Esquire and they would enjoy many years of association with The New York Review of Books, but never again would they experience the freedom to indulge stories quite the way they had at The Saturday Evening Post … in the Haight or in the Valley’s poisoned fields.
A certain expansive spirit vanished with The Saturday Evening Post: a foretaste of the blight that would kill American magazines over the next three decades.
“May all the one-eyed critics lose their other eye,” said William Emerson, the magazine’s old editor in chief.
Dunne raised a glass to that.
5
Months later, Didion would be startled to learn directly from Linda Kasabian that the night the Manson Family “did the LaBianca murder, they were driving along Franklin Avenue looking for a place to hit … and we had French windows open, lights blazing all along on the street.” The votives perked on the windowsills. Maybe Quintana was dancing to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” Champagne flowed at parties up and down the block.
Franklin Avenue—the “senseless-killing neighborhood”—was one of Charlie Manson’s playgrounds. In the late 1950s, he had lived in an apartment a block from the Dunnes’ house, running a bogus talent agency, 3-Star Enterprises, as a front for a prostitution ring. His buddy Tex Watson had a girlfriend living on Franklin. In the months before the Tate-LaBianca murders, he said, he sometimes sunbathed on his girlfriend’s deck, “drinking beer and smoking grass while we watched all the big limousines drive up for the parties, dumping out beautiful people whom we never could quite recognize.” Allegedly, Manson shot to death a dope dealer in the Franklin Garden Apartments, in the shadow of the Magic Castle hotel.
On the afternoon of August 9, 1969, while Easy Rider played on area movie screens, while Portnoy’s Complaint, Slaughterhouse-Five, and The Godfather brought an unusually high volume of readers into bookstores, word spread from Sunset up into the hills about the slayings at 10050 Cielo Drive. Didion was swimming in the pool at her sister-in-law Lenny’s house in Beverly Hills when Natalie Wood phoned with the news. “I can remember we had a baby-sitter from Nayarit then, and she was very frightened … when we heard about the murders,” Didion said. “I assured her, ‘Don’t worry. It has nothing to do with us,’ but it did. It had to do with everyone.”
It seemed everybody knew somebody who had slept with, sold drugs to, or partied with the victims; in days to come, the people claiming to have been invited to the Cielo house that night exhausted the Hollywood A-list. Actor Steve McQueen said the L.A. sewer system was full of expensive drugs the day the news broke, as everyone, fearing visits from the cops, flushed their stuff.
Roman Polanski accused John Phillips of being the killer.
Michelle Phillips slipped a pistol into her purse. “Darling, put the gun away,” a friend had to tell her one night at the Daisy.
Suspicion spread like the tear gas on Sunset.
“It was the most bizarre period of my life,” Michelle Phillips said. “It could have been anyone, as far as I was concerned. The last conversation I ever had with Sharon was about wallpaper for her nursery.” Tate was eight months pregnant the night she was killed.
Didion was not alone in harboring “a kind of conflicting sense that … they [the victims] had somehow done it to themselves, that it had to do with too much sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
“[This] investigation has caused a lot of people a lot of pain, because a lot of people feel they’re guilty or they have something to hide about something, and go through enormous emotional wringers. This is what Cass is hysterical about,” William Doyle told LAPD lieutenant Earl Deemer on August 30.
Early reports about the crime “were garbled and contradictory,” Didion wrote in her essay “The White Album.” “One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”
Nick Dunne was surprised. He had last seen Sharon Tate at a party at Tony Curtis’s house. “His rose garden was lovely,” Nick said. “As I remember it all these years later, there were gravel pathways between the beds of roses and boxwood borders. At one point that night, I went out into the garden and there was Sharon, all alone, walking on a path by the white roses in full bloom. She was pregnant, and dressed in something white and billowing. It was like a scene in a movie watching her. She made me think of Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.… We talked about old times at [Jay Sebring’s] barbershop, and the marvelous turns her life had taken. I was smoking a joint, and she took a few tokes.… She was joyous about having the baby, and she had never looked more beautiful.”
Nick had been in New York, producing The Boys in the Band, when Lenny called to tell him about the killings. He flew home immediately. “People were sending their children out of town for safety, and ours were going to my mother-in-law’s ranch outside San Diego,” he said. He remembered that “Steve McQueen packed a gun at Jay Sebring’s funeral, where he gave one of the eulogies.”
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended on August 9, 1969,” Didion wrote, adding to the press’s overheated valedictions. It was really only the crowd at the Daisy whose sixties had come to an end, but this fact slipped at a certain point; the media managed to superimpose Manson’s face, with his crude swastika etched between his eyes, over psychedelic images of flowers and peace signs. Manson became a cult doll for the press, a penny-ante pimp inflated into a symbol for the national psychosis. But at ground level, in the community most directly affected, Didion’s reporting got right to the point: “The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
* * *
If the California narrative was an apocalyptic romance, the East maintained its sentimentality. A week after the Tate-LaBianca murders, on August 15, 16, and 17, the Woodstock Festival—officially, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair—in Bethel, New York, took place; it was valorized by Time magazine as the “greatest peaceful event in history,” a fulfillment of the sixties’ loftiest ideals.
Expectations for peaceful assembly were admittedly low after the previous year’s Democratic National Convention, and there was delicious irony in watching the antiwar crowd raise its arms toward food and medical supplies airlifted onto mud-soaked fields by the U.S. Army.
But for the purposes of our narrative, we need to look past the Peace and Love, past Janis and Jimi, and the naked bodies packed like rabbits in a box, to a five-piece rock band from Woodstock, who often played with a larger musical collective called the Bummers, a “Commedia dell’Arte style group of cowboys and Indians.” The Bummers performed folk rock at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village, produced an Off-Off-Broadway musical called The Golden Screw, and regularly appeared at the Woodstock Sound-Outs, annual mini-festivals held just south of Route 212 on the Glasco Turnpike. The Sound-Outs began in 1967 and became, according to Woodstock promoter Michael Lang, “kind of the spark for the Festival.” The Bummer’s drummer was a young man named Gerry Michael. He played a variety of styles, backing performers such as Bonnie Raitt, Paul Butterfield, and Juma Sultan, who accompanied Hendrix’s band at the ’69 event.
Gerry Michael was not a symbol of anything, neither apocalypse nor hope. He deserves quick note, at this point, only because he figures prominently in a later part of Didion’s story. In 2003, Gerry Michael, then a widower in his fifties, would marry Quintana Roo Dunne, whom Michael’s son said he met in a bar, and who would die just over two years later (the official cause would be “acute pancreatitis”).
* * *
“I wanna dance.”
* * *
The rock poet Ed Sanders covered the first Manson trial for the Freep (as everyone called the Los Angeles Free Press), straining to grant Manson a presumption of innocence: Like Sanders, Manson had long hair. Sanders’s attitude countered that of the mainstream press, which had already convicted Manson because he had long hair.
Dozens of reporters (and prosecutors) hoped to advance their careers with this story; among the many journalists given access to members of the Family in prison rooms, the Los Angeles County Courthouse, or the offices of the Freep (recently bombproofed after a series of threats from right-wing, anti-Castro partisans) was Joan Didion. She spent several evenings interviewing Linda Kasabian at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women. Kasabian had been the “wheel person” for the killers on the two-night murder run. At the time, she was the mother of an infant. How could the mother of an infant involve herself in the senseless killing of a woman who was eight months pregnant? If any writer could have understood Linda Kasabian, it was probably Joan Didion, who had spent the past year clipping from newspapers stories of children burning to death in supermarket parking lots and who was writing a novel ending with a woman passively watching a friend commit suicide.
“In fact we never talked about ‘the case,’” Didion wrote. “We talked instead about Linda’s childhood pastimes and disappointments, her high-school romances and her concern for her children.”
6
Two of Nick’s children, Alex and Dominique, stood frightened and confused next to their grim-faced uncle and aunt the night their father got arrested at LAX. Nick had arrived from a vacation in Mexico. Didion and Dunne had agreed to pick him up, and took his kids along to greet him. Someone tipped the airport police that he was carrying a “lid” of grass. They strip-searched and handcuffed him in front of his family in the Western Airlines waiting room. “I was at the time the vice president of a studio [Four Star, a television company owned by David Niven, Dick Powell, and Charles Boyer] and possessed the haughty attitude that came with the job, an attitude that did not endear me to the arresting officers,” Nick said. “Outside, there was a police car with a screaming siren and flashing red lights, waiting for me.… Manson himself couldn’t have drawn a bigger crowd than I did that Sunday night at LAX. There was a very tall cop on either side of me, each with a hand in my armpit, and they lifted me off the floor with my feet dangling.” He seemed a sad clown in his Brooks Brothers blazer and Gucci loafers. “The cops insisted on calling me Mr. Vice President in mocking voices.”
He stayed overnight in a Venice jail. The following day, Didion and Dunne bailed him out, saying nothing. He had endangered the Needle Park project. It was a hard-enough sell without being wrapped in the trade papers’ gossip columns. Worse, he had humiliated them—and his kids—in public.
For several months, in the midst of the Manson craziness, his slippage had exceeded everyone’s darkest fears. Most mornings he ate alone in a coffee shop called Nibblers, on the corner of Spalding and Wilshire. Sometimes the faded old movie queen Norma Shearer came in for breakfast, and without acknowledging he knew who she was, he’d talk with her about good Old Hollywood, when MGM ruled the world and kept us all safe.
One day, when his pot bust was about to come to trial, he got a call from Sid Korshak’s buddy Beldon Katleman. “He said he wanted to see me right away. It was an order, not a request,” Nick said. Katleman owned Gary Cooper’s old house in Holmby Hills. He was wearing a terry-cloth robe when Nick arrived. He told Nick to join him in the steam room. There, he said, no one could hear them. “What kind of trouble are you in?” he asked. “Who’s the judge?”
Weeks later, all of Nick’s charges were dropped. “Who the hell do you know?” asked one of the arresting cops, outside the courtroom. “Why don’t you assholes drink instead of using dope?”
Later, Katleman explained his generosity to Nick: “When I first came to this town from Vegas, nobody ever spoke to me at parties, but you did.”
7
On November 14, 1969, Didion finished drafting Play It As It Lays. The following day, she and her husband and their daughter flew to Honolulu.
George Hunt, the managing editor of Life, had recently offered her a regular column—perhaps at the prompting of Jim Mills—and she thought she might start by writing something about Hawaii. Shortly after she accepted the offer, Ralph Graves replaced Hunt. Graves had decided to shake up the staid old magazine. He hired Norman Mailer to cover the moon landing. On the cover of the June 27, 1969, issue, he had run a picture of a young man in military uniform, with the caption “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll.” Inside were photographs of 242 soldiers killed the previous week, and the quietly devastating statement “The numbers of the dead are average for every seven-day period during this stage of the war.” This was new territory for a publication associated with unquestioning patriotism.
Dunne warned his wife that working for the editors of a Luce outfit would be like getting “nibbled to death by ducks,” but they had, she said, promised “to put me out in a world of revolution, which sounded really attractive.”
Two days before the couple’s departure for the islands, Seymour Hersh released an article through the Dispatch News Service, picked up by thirty-five American newspapers, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Milwaukee Journal. The article began, “William L. Calley, Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname ‘Rusty.’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Cong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville.’”
Hersh had tried to interest Life and Look in the story, but he failed. Previously, The New York Times had buried deep inside the paper a two-paragraph AP piece based on a press release from Georgia’s Fort Benning mentioning, almost in passing, the charges against Calley. It had taken the military establishment almost a year to acknowledge that the massacre in My Lai was not precisely the “outstanding action” Gen. William C. Westmoreland had called it.
Pressure on the army to investigate the incident grew after a former door gunner from the Eleventh Infantry Brigade, who had flown over My Lai and witnessed the carnage, sent a letter to thirty congressmen imploring them to look into the matter. Most legislators ignored him, but Barry Goldwater and a pair of others urged the House Armed Services Committee to strong-arm the Pentagon.
“These factors are not in dispute,” Hersh wrote. “There are always some civilian casualties in a combat operation … You can’t afford to guess whether a civilian is a Viet Cong or not. Either you shoot them or they shoot you … Calley’s friends in the Officer’s Corps at Fort Benning, many of them West Point graduates, are indignant. ‘They’re using this as a Goddamned example,’ one officer complained. ‘He’s a good soldier. He followed orders.’”
When she learned these facts, Didion phoned her editor at Life, Loudon Wainright. His wife said he’d have to call her back.
It was a Sunday afternoon. “He’s watching the NFL game,” Dunne told her. “He’ll call you at halftime.”
When he did phone, she said she wanted to do her first column from Saigon. He said no. “Some of the guys are going out,” he told her, then suggested she stay put and just introduce herself.
Seething, she went for a walk on the sand, but it didn’t calm her down. Each afternoon, the talk on the Kahala beach was all about Ted Kennedy and that girl who’d drowned in his car. Nationwide, the adults were misbehaving. As a result, the children, mostly young women, were dying.
“Where did the morning went?” Quintana asked Didion one day, still on mainland time, expecting the sun.
* * *
Day by day, Hersh’s reports, picked up now by all the major papers, detailed the event at My Lai. He quoted Sgt. Michael Bernhardt: “It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it.… They were setting fire to the hootches and huts and waiting for people to come out and then shooting them up. They were going into the hootches and shooting them up. They were gathering people in groups and shooting them. As I walked in, you could see piles of people, all through the village.”
In an interview Didion could have gotten, Gen. Fred C. Weyand said, “The American way of war is particularly violent, deadly and dreadful. We believe in using ‘things’—artillery, bombs, massive firepower—in order to conserve our soldiers’ lives … [W]e should have made the realities of war obvious to the American people before they witnessed it on their television screens.”
For Didion, My Lai was another case of betrayal by romance. Before leaving for Quang Ngai Province, Calley and Charlie Company had joined the First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry for training at Schofield. James Jones had endeared the base to her. She always visited it whenever she flew to Hawaii. Now it was poisoned ground.
“There was a lot of illusion in our national history,” Reinhold Niebuhr said, around this time. “[I]t is about to be shattered.”
Didion was the chronicler of shattered romance. She needed to be in Saigon. Loudon Wainwright had suggested she introduce herself. Well, okay. She’d give Life’s readers one hell of an introduction.
Betrayal was very much on her mind.
“I had better tell you where I am, and why,” she wrote. “I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the winds … My husband switches off the TV set and stares out the window. I avoid his eyes and brush the baby’s hair … We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce.”
“Maybe it can be all right,” she says she said to him.
“Maybe,” he replied.
Dunne took Quintana to the Honolulu Zoo to give Didion time to finish the piece. Then he edited it and went with her to file it at the Western Union office. “At the Western Union office he wrote REGARDS, DIDION at the end of it,” Didion wrote later. “That was what you always put at the end of a cable, he said. Why, I said. Because you do, he said.”
Life’s readers did not know what to make of such an apparently candid piece. Many of them wrote to complain that the magazine’s new columnist was no Little Miss Sunshine. The editors began to wonder if they’d made a mistake. They “didn’t get it. [Didion’s] pieces [in Life] made such an impact—not just on people who were literary.… I know housewives who had [her column] over the sink,” Dan Wakefield said later: You mean it’s okay to admit you think about divorce? To think of yourself, when the world’s grappling with so many crises?
“I am not the society in microcosm,” she had said. And yet …
Even more than with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion was about to become Joan Didion, the woman who wrote the books, the woman in the books, in narratives of fact and fiction.
She had introduced herself properly.
“It was a big shock to find myself in a certain kind of limited public eye” because of that divorce column, she claimed. “I thought I was always going to be writing these books that I would finance somehow, that no one would ever review or read.”
On December 31, Henry Robbins wrote to Jane Fonda: “We saw you on the David Frost Show last week and were terribly pleased to hear you speak so excitedly about Joan Didion’s piece in Life magazine … Joan has just completed a new novel, Play It As It Lays, which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will be publishing in the spring. If you were impressed and touched by her Life article, you’ll be positively overwhelmed by this forthcoming book. We were.”