1
The Dunnes’ move to Malibu in January 1971 was an attempt to heal following the previous years’ excesses—or so Didion presented it in her essay “The White Album.” “This … house on the sea had itself been very much a part of the Sixties, and for some months after we took possession I would come across souvenirs of that period in its history—a piece of Scientology literature beneath a drawer lining, a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land stuck deep on a closet shelf—but after a while we did some construction, and between the power saws and the sea wind the place got exorcised,” she wrote.
“She still had parties nonstop, so the move to Malibu wasn’t as antisocial as I first thought it was,” Eve Babitz told me. “But driving out there was horrible.” (Even though, in those days, it was only twenty minutes from Sunset to the Pacific Coast Highway.) The Dunnes’ new place, a spacious ocean-facing house with a wide terrace over the water, wall-size windows, a white brick fireplace (used year-round to dispel the chill in the air), and redwood ceilings, was located above the beach at 33428 Pacific Coast Highway, just beyond Decker Canyon at the west end of Malibu, some distance from the pastel swarms of B-list actors swelling the Colony. Interest rates were high and the housing market was slightly depressed, yet the area, formerly a private ranch, was becoming more accessible with the opening of the Kanan-Dume Road, near the school Quintana would attend. Late in the afternoon, on the beautifully clear day the family moved into the house, Didion made a run in her Corvette to the Trancas Market, three and a half miles down the highway, cranking up KRLA, “the heart of rock and roll!” By the time she got home, the fog was so thick that she couldn’t find her driveway. She held her breath, tried to forget the cliff’s edge, two hundred feet above the slamming waves, inched her way forward, and finally made a slow left turn.
Soon, she learned not to keep the Corvette’s top down in the drive: Occasionally, king snakes fell from the trees or the eaves of the garage into the backseat.
“The hills are scrubby and barren, infested with bikers and rattlesnakes, scarred with cuts and old burns and new R.V. parks,” Didion said of Trancas and Zuma canyons (Zuma is a Chumash word suggesting “abundance”). In truth, between wildfires, the hills splay out in patches of parsley-green as one travels north and west from Los Angeles, enveloped by a sudden sense of isolation. Crows drift over ice plants and agave, the rainy yellow shimmer of mustard seeding the slopes as after-burn, draping low, reddish brown outcrops lined with scrappy eucalyptus. Pelicans dodge warm drafts of frying oil from the fish markets, salt and gasoline rising from the tides and from the buses and lettuce trucks ratcheting into low gear on their way to Oregon from Tijuana.
The Dunnes’ house was secluded on a small road just off the highway, with only three year-round neighbors in close proximity (though gradually the area filled with picture people, first the carpenters and cinematographers—like the Dunnes’ neighbor Dick Moore—who were not required on movie sets every day, freelancers with plenty of time to sit around beach fires smoking the very good dope cultivated in Big Sur, and then more and more A-listers, as the canyons slicked up and the village expanded, with Cross Creek Plaza, lots of new bars, gun shops proudly flying California Bear flags, and a Swenson’s ice-cream parlor).
“There are not only no blacks in Malibu,” Josie Mankiewicz told Dunne when she heard where he was going, “there are no brunettes.”
“On this littoral there seemed to be no cellulite, either,” he wrote.
Off and on, for over six months, the Dunnes engaged a construction crew to expand the waterside deck, install waxed pine bookshelves, and lay terra-cotta floor tiles. The men tore out prefabricated plywood walls and pulled up “icky green” flooring. Harrison Ford headed the crew. “They were the most sophisticated people I knew,” Ford said. “I was the first thing they saw in the morning and the last thing they saw before cocktails.”
In Vegas, Dunne wrote, “[W]hat had started as a two-month job … [stretched] into its sixth month and the construction account was four thousand dollars overdrawn.… I fired the contractor. ‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ he said. He was an out-of-work actor and his crew sniffed a lot of cocaine and when he left he unexpectedly gave me a soul-brother handshake, grabbing my thumb while I was left with an unimportant part of his little finger.” The next day, Dunne realized the only thing separating him and his family from the Pacific Ocean was a clear sheet of Pliofilm where the French doors were supposed to go. “I rehired the contractor,” he wrote. “‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ the contractor said.”
* * *
Didion was enamored not of the ocean but of the “look of the horizon … It is always there, flat.” If she was no longer physically comfortable in the Central Valley, she needed the solacing feel of her childhood geography. Each day ended fast, no muss—a snuffing of the sun in the sea, a healthy glass of bourbon. She felt Malibu was “a new kind of life. We were living on the frontier, as it were.” She had her husband and her sheepdog and her barefoot child getting splinters in her heels on the redwood deck. She had hurricane lamps, her family’s rosewood piano (it had sailed around the Cape in 1848), her grandmother’s hanging quilts sewn on a covered wagon, and a Federal table once owned by her husband’s great-great-grandmother. She had her mother’s Craftsman dinner knives. She had straight-backed wooden chairs hand-painted by her mother-in-law, shipped from Connecticut. She had, on her wall, a large black-and-white photo of a stark valley roadside with a sign pointing to Sacramento, and she had Eve Babitz’s Ginger Baker poster above the tub in the bathroom.
Tucked into the frame, behind another picture, she found a note to her in Noel’s handwriting—the one he’d left on his earlier visit: “You were wrong.” What about? Everything, no doubt. She burned the note and didn’t tell her husband about it.
Just outside the window of the room she used as her office, she hung the family’s clothes on a line to dry in the salt wind: her comfy old fisherman’s sweater, her husband’s blue extra-large bathrobe, her daughter’s black wool challis dress. She liked a small, enclosed space in which to write—surrounding herself with talismans of the latest project: postcards, maps, trinkets, and shells. (Her husband spread his books around a fourteen-foot table in a large library opening onto the ocean.) She liked the clothes outside, warm sleeves flapping—gentle puffs of breath—curtaining her view. She liked it that she could barely hear her own voice, sometimes, over the crashing of water on the boulders below.
Often at dinner she’d place a white orchid in her hair—her hair lightly reddened, lightly blonded by the sun.
She felt comforted by the crystalline stars appearing one by one over kelp-cluttered sea foam.
Her daughter went to sleep to the sound of the waves and awoke whenever the surf went silent at the tide’s lowest ebb.
The elements aligned for happiness.
Maybe the sixties really were over. The riots on Sunset Strip had petered out soon after Huey Newton went to prison: “Free the Strip! Free Huey!” Peace, then. It all seemed so distant. Miles down the road.
Cielo Drive. The Landmark Motel. Such an evil time. In the rearview mirror.
Now: the straight road ahead. Her husband had taken a full physical (for his insurance policy). Everything normal: prostate, EKG, EEG. The doctor had told him, in passing, he had “soft shoulders,” but that wasn’t a medical condition, and if this was the worst he could say, well then … bring on the breakers!
And she … “I was so unhappy” writing Play It As It Lays, she admitted now to friends. “I didn’t realize until I finished it how depressed it had made me to write it. Then I finished it and suddenly it was like having something lifted from the top of my head, you know? Suddenly I was a happy person.” People “were talking about this book. Not in a huge way, but in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It made me feel good. It made me feel closer to it.… [F]rom that time on I had more confidence.”
And why not?
James Dickey had called her, in print, “the finest woman prose stylist writing in English today.”
Her old teacher Mark Schorer had said, “One thinks of the great performers—in ballet, opera, circuses. Miss Didion, it seems to me, is blessed with everything.”
Alfred Kazin flew from New York to interview her for Harper’s magazine. The day he arrived, a small wildfire flared in the canyon hills, but this didn’t stop surfers from lugging their boards to the ocean and riding the swells under an angry canopy of red-black ash. Kazin invited Didion to lunch at Scandia on the Strip, annoyed when Dunne came along. The couple seemed inseparable—in his journal, Kazin noted an almost constant electric “ripple” between them.
Dunne dominated the conversation, telling Kazin that California was the best place a writer could be to chronicle the American scene. He said Nixon was the “most interesting personality in the White House since FDR,” and he told Kazin he thought “one of these days the President will crack in public.”
After eating, they all drove back to Malibu. “People who live in a beach house don’t know how wary it makes them,” Kazin wrote. Didion’s decision to move here, to keep an eye on the edge, told him she was a “very vulnerable, very defensive young woman whose style in all things is somehow to keep the world off, to keep it from eating her up, and so”—casting protective spells—“[she] describes Southern California in terms of fire, rattlesnakes, cave-ins, earthquakes, the indifference to other people’s disasters, and the terrible wind called the Santa Ana.”
In the magazine piece, he characterized Didion as “subtle,” as possessing an “alarmed fragility,” and falling into “many silences.” In his private journal, he said she was “full of body language.… Her face runs the gamut from poor old Sookie to the temptress with long blonde-red locks. She can look at you and past you without the slightest hint of a concession. The unspoken is a most important part of her presence in the world.”
She was trying to tell him, This is what a happy woman looks like.
2
The determined insistence on happiness arose in part because, in spite of her new confidence as a writer, the previous year had been hectic and disturbing on many levels. She had left the Alamac Hotel in late December 1969 and only a short while later found herself in eastern Oregon, doing a column for Life on the nerve gas storage mounds at the army depot in Umatilla County. On arriving in the town of Hermiston, she felt at home initially, listening to locals in the Caravan Broiler talk about wheat shares and Shell Oil and high-moisture grain, but she was there to interview a funeral director who had been a strong booster of President Nixon’s plan to store VX and GB nerve gas on twenty-thousand acres just outside of town, for the employment it would stimulate. The people protesting the gas shipments were college kids in the liberal cushion of Eugene and big-city wine drinkers over in Portland, he said—“the academic-community-Moratorium-and-other-mothers-for-peace-or-whatever.” “They talk about a few drops of it killing thousands of people. Well, really, you’d need pretty ideal conditions for that,” he said. “And if you give yourself an injection within thirty seconds, there’s no effect whatsoever.”
She drove into the hardscrabble area. The flat horizon here wasn’t so flat anymore. Over a thousand mounds—reinforced concrete under sod and sagebrush—“mutilated the land,” Didion wrote. She stood one day among the staggered rows of humps, interlaced with fifty miles of railroad track, and realized she was “not in a frontier town at all but in a post-frontier town.” All over the West, in places like this, settlers felt “cut free from the ambiguities of history. They could afford their innocent blend of self-interest and optimism. They still had a big country and a big sky and cheap expendable land, and they could still tap the Columbia for all the water and power they needed and the best was still to come, or so they thought.”
These ruminations helped seed Where I Was From (initially called Fairy Tales), a book she would not be able to write for another thirty years; for now, she still believed that the “ambiguities of history” would prevent mutilations of the land if the present generation became aware of them. In fact, the West’s history was always one of self-corrosion. In time, her perceptions would shift.
For the moment, she was acutely aware that there were no Woody Guthrie tunes riding the prairie wind and that she should be home helping her daughter arrange a tea party for her stuffed bunny, planning a celebration for her fourth birthday. Instead, she was standing in an empty mound examining protective clothing and petting a white rabbit used to indicate gas leakage. “Pretty healthy rabbit,” an army colonel told her. “We’ve never lost a rabbit in the line of duty.”
Perhaps farther east, out in the desert near Pendleton, the environment would relax her. But her sense of desolation only deepened. The manager of the motel she checked into was a Mormon. The day she left, he asked her, “If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying?”
Months later, Quintana lost Bunny Rabbit. No more tea parties. She left him in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and remembered him only on the evening Pan Am flight back to LAX. In Blue Nights, Didion wrote, “[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit’s cruel fate: Bunny Rabbit was lost, Bunny Rabbit was left behind, Bunny Rabbit had been abandoned.”
By the time they landed in Los Angeles, Quintana had consoled herself: Bunny Rabbit would be enjoying the room service at the Royal Hawaiian, swimming, rafting to the reef.
* * *
While Didion paced underground in Oregon, plans were proceeding for The Panic in Needle Park.
Dunne had taken her film treatment, stitched in dialogue, and finished a full draft, but the final version of the screenplay would owe its power to Didion’s sensibility.
It begins with the aftermath of a back-alley abortion; Helen, the hapless girl who tumbles into addiction in a pathetic attempt to keep her boyfriend, resembles a lost kid from Haight-Ashbury; she sums up her middle-class childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, speaking like a Sacramento housewife: “We had a lawn.”
Every scene in the film bristles with the sordid details of the bloody drug use Didion had witnessed on Broadway or in the darkened rooms at the Alamac. “Basically, we just reported,” she said. “We were reporters, John and I.”
“We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play,” said Kitty Winn, the actress who played Helen. “No improvisation. It’s all the script. And it spoiled me forever. I don’t think I ever enjoyed doing another film as much again.”
“It was a fantastic script,” Jerry Schatzberg said. Years later, re-screening the film, he’d think certain scenes must have been spontaneously captured on-camera, but then he’d check the screenplay and always the action or dialogue “was in the original script.”
Avco dropped the film—possibly frightened by the writing. “I didn’t see it as a happy ending,” Didion said. “At the time we wrote the script … it wasn’t a time in the history of the world when stories like this … [well,] they didn’t end in rehab.”
Fox picked up the option. Dick Zanuck, whom Dunne had shadowed for a year to write The Studio, suggested Henry Fonda for the lead. Politely, Dunne hinted that Fonda might be forty years too old for the part. Peter Fonda, maybe? The studio wanted nothing to do with Peter Fonda.
Nick Dunne had seen Kitty Winn, a classically trained actress, perform a stage version of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan in San Francisco. He sent a copy of the Needle Park script to her. “I never found out what [he] saw in my … performance that screamed ‘drug addict,’ but whatever. I stayed up all night reading it,” Winn said. “So extraordinary: two people locked in a co-dependent relationship, a battleground.”
Schatzberg came fully on board when his business manager told him Al Pacino, a dynamic young actor who’d never had a lead movie role, was interested in playing the part of Bobby. “I’d seen Al four years earlier onstage,” Schatzberg said. “He was so different … I related to him. You know, we come from different parts of the Bronx, but there’s still Bronx in both of us. And I thought, ‘Boy, if I ever did a film, that’s the guy.’”
Meanwhile, Schatzberg had met Adam Holender, a Polish immigrant, through Roman Polanski. “When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country, you notice things,” urban details, lights, shadows, angles that American cinematographers overlook, he said. His extraordinary work in Midnight Cowboy, a combination of psychedelia and rat-infested realism, convinced Schatzberg no other director of photography would do on Needle Park.
“[We were] a group of improbables,” Schatzberg said—a pair of literary writers, a fashion photographer, an Eastern European émigré, two unknown stage actors, and a perpetually stoned producer, on a budget of just over a million dollars (‘We didn’t have money for heroin,’ Winn quipped) but we pulled it off.”
For six weeks, Schatzberg rehearsed his actors on-site, copping gestures from the recovering addicts at Phoenix House, working with Holender on the documentary feel he wanted for the film. “The thoroughness” of preparation and attention to detail “was fantastic,” Didion said. She couldn’t have gotten luckier her first time out with a script, though the New York location and the tedious production process did not always lead to happy times. Filming began in mid-October and wrapped on December 22. Fox photo stills show Didion and the Dunne brothers shivering in Needle Park or posed in front of the Alamac. Didion’s long, straight hair, parted in the middle, looks unwashed, as if she were channeling the lives of her subjects. The braces-wearing drug dealer, whom she had promised a part in the film, was nowhere to be found—though she thought she glimpsed him one day in the crowds ringing the filming perimeter. She worried he was using again and felt too ashamed to approach them.
In the publicity shots, Nick, wearing a fleece-lined jacket, standing with his hands in his pockets on the corner of Broadway and Seventy-first, has the unmistakably fierce, wide-eyed look of a man flying on coke. Didion huddles close to her husband.
Besides coke, Nick was inhaling amyl nitrate back in his room at the Volney Hotel. One night, “drunk and stoned,” he “knocked over a lit candle onto the curtains, which went up in flame,” he wrote in his memoir, The Way We Lived Then.
The Fox publicity materials praised Nick as an experienced producer who “knew exactly how to launch a production in New York”; he was doing “valiant and invaluable” work in bringing to the screen a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. But his behavior threatened to scuttle the project.
Meanwhile, his brother Greg was not endearing himself to local reporters milling around the sets. “Neither of us likes to come back here to New York,” he said of himself and Joan. “It seems banal to us. Los Angeles is such a trip. It’s like having a grandstand seat on the birth of the future. But New York, well, it’s like having a grandstand seat on the death of the past.”
Didion attempted a softer tone. In spite of the wretchedness of this part of the Upper West Side, she said, “writing the film was great fun for us—and we learned a lot along the way.”
Filming was a different story. “When a picture is shooting, a lot of things seem arbitrary, or you might’ve done them differently if you thought twice about it. When we were shooting, I was overcome with what I had failed to do,” she said later. “[Y]ou’re hypersensitive to everything that might be wrong.”
The day Kitty Winn prepared to play the postabortion scene, she recalled every tragedy she’d ever experienced in order to assume the proper mind-set. “All loss is loss,” she figured. “I don’t know that [Joan and I] ever talked about it.” She decided the abortion was included in the film to indicate a “relationship gone wrong.”
“I never thought this was a picture about drugs,” Didion said. “It was a picture about betrayal. Love.”
* * *
While elements were locking in place for the filming and the eventual release of the movie in time for the May 1971 Cannes Film Festival, jury selection was beginning for the Manson trial. Manson had assaulted a bailiff; he had screamed at the judge that he couldn’t get a fair hearing. “You can kill me now!” he shouted in the courtroom, spreading his arms like Jesus on the cross. His lawyer admitted “there is a minimum of client control in this case.”
A young man in Berkeley, identifying himself as Rabbit, called Ed Sanders at the Los Angeles Free Press and said he was organizing a giant benefit rock concert to raise legal funds for the Manson Family. Not surprisingly, he had so far secured zero commitments from big-name bands, but Squeaky Fromme, one of Charlie’s girls, had given him home movies from Spahn Ranch to screen onstage.
Linda Kasabian, nine months pregnant with her second child, had agreed to offer prosecutors full cooperation and to testify against Manson in exchange for a request for immunity. This news got lost in the press beneath coverage of the Weathermen who had blown up a ten-room town house in Greenwich Village while bungling the making of a bomb, and again weeks later by reports on the shootings at Kent State. Manson, apparently concerned that his brand of violence might seem tame in Nitro-America (were the sixties over?) carved a swastika into his forehead and issued pronouncements: “Death is psychosomatic,” he said, and “You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you … I have Xed myself from your world.”
On August 3, 1970, Kasabian was again eclipsed in the media. On that day, President Nixon, speaking in Denver, mentioned off the cuff that he had noted the “coverage of the Charles Manson case. Front page every day in the papers … Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man yet who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be a rather glamorous figure…”
Immediately, Manson assailed the judge: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?” He smuggled into the courtroom a hand-printed sign: NIXON GUILTY.
What nearly got missed in all this was Kasabian’s third day of testimony at the Santa Monica Courthouse. Between admitting she’d taken fifty LSD trips and had sex with every man at the ranch, between agreeing she’d slept just fine following the Tate murders, and confessing she’d willingly driven the car for the second killing spree, Linda Kasabian, “demure” and “pigtailed,” according to the Los Angeles Times, said “author Joan Didion” was writing a book about her. She had been promised 25 percent of any profits from the book, she testified. She was not interested in becoming famous. She hoped the book would influence young people to remain “straight.”
A week earlier, before her first day on the witness stand, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi convinced her not to wear a long dress because “long is for evening.” She needed to make a favorable impression on the jury. Didion, by now a confidante of sorts after several interviews at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, offered, maternally, to go to I. Magnin in Beverly Hills and buy Kasabian the dress of her choice—“Size 9 Petite.” Kasabian had recently given birth to her baby. “Mini but not extremely mini,” she said. “In velvet if possible. Emerald green or gold.” Either that, or a “Mexican peasant dress, smocked or embroidered.”
Didion delivered the dress to Kasabian and her attorney, Gary Fleischman, at Fleischman’s office on Rodeo Drive. Kasabian’s husband, Bob, was there, wearing a long white robe. Didion watched them climb into Fleischman’s Cadillac convertible and drive off to Santa Monica, cheerily waving good-bye. She was grateful to be done with Sybil Brand. There, walking down antiseptic institutional hallways to meet with Kasabian, she would pass through half a dozen doors. They locked behind her, each a “little death,” she said. She remembered a white rabbit grazing on the grass beside the prison gate as Fleischman signed them in one day. After each interview, she would return to Franklin Avenue, “have two drinks and make … a hamburger and eat it ravenously.”
The day Kasabian wore the I. Magnin dress, she hoped to sneak into the courtroom unseen by gawkers or reporters, but Family hangers-on discovered her arrival and screamed at her, “You’ll kill us all, you’ll kill us all!”
Ed Sanders said Squeaky Fromme showed up at the Freep’s offices one day during the trial, vaguely warning the paper not to print negative stories about Charlie. Eventually, Manson groupies would wonder if Didion failed to complete her book on Linda Kasabian because she feared retaliation by Family members. Actually, other factors scotched the project, not the least of which was Didion’s frenetic schedule.
In order to convict Manson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Leslie Van Houten, Bugliosi had deemed it best to deemphasize the drug deals and petty thievery and build a prosecution around a vast conspiracy. Manson, he said, had masterminded a plot called Helter Skelter (based on subliminal messages from the Beatles song), an attempt to start a race war—from which the Family would emerge as world rulers—by committing a series of murders and blaming the violence on the Black Panthers. The success of Bugliosi’s trial strategy would depend on Linda Kasabian’s performance, her “demure” and “pigtailed” appearance, her I. Magnin dress.
Despite a few faltering moments, despite throat-cutting gestures directed her way by Manson as she testified, she did her job. By the end of the year, the jury had found Manson and the three women guilty. The women didn’t appear to be concerned. They had taken heart, in September, when the Weathermen broke Timothy Leary out of the San Luis Obispo federal prison, where he was serving a ten-year drug sentence. Maybe Charlie could escape, too! As for Manson, he maintained his innocence, and cleverly played on the media’s desire to make him a symbol. “In the name of Christian justice, someone should cut your head off!” he told the judge at one point. “I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you … You made your children what they are … these children that come at you with their knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them … As for Helter Skelter. Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down fast … it is not my conspiracy.… Why blame it on me? I didn’t write the music.”
* * *
“On August 13 [1970], all charges were dropped against Linda Kasabian, and she was set free. For a while thereafter she was a minor media celebrity,” Ed Sanders reported. Kasabian flew to New Hampshire to be with her mother and two children. “A few weeks after Kasabian had returned to the East Coast, Didion wanted to visit her and work on the book,” Sanders said. “Kasabian wouldn’t oblige because she was going to be spending the weekend at Yale, watching the football game.”
Eventually, Didion did travel to New Hampshire, and on one occasion Kasabian went to see her in New York. Didion and Quintana went with her and her kids on the Staten Island Ferry to see the Statue of Liberty. One of these kids, Tanya, two and a half, Kasabian had left behind at Spahn Ranch two days after the LaBianca killings. “You abandoned your child with the very people you considered to be a band of murderers?” a defense attorney asked her during the trial. “Yes,” she replied. “Just something inside me told me she would be all right.”
* * *
Henry Robbins was terribly excited by the prospect of a Didion book on Linda Kasabian. It was the perfect confluence of author and subject, he thought. He spoke to her about it eagerly on Halloween night, 1970, when the Dunnes went to visit him and his wife at their apartment on West Eighty-sixth Street. Quintana went trick-or-treating on every floor of the building with Robbins’s two kids while Robbins told Didion what a damned good book he thought this would make. She’d already expended considerable energy on the interviews. Magazines were clamoring for serial rights. Now all she had to do was write it.
Kasabian seemed confused: Would this be a book about her—or by her, written with Didion’s help? The situation knotted when Didion and FSG received letters from an attorney representing Bartyk Frykowski, in the matter of the wrongful death of his father at the hands of the defendants, including one Linda Kasabian. The defendants should not profit from their actions, the letters said. Any moneys accruing to Kasabian would be treated as a fraud against creditors.
Robbins replied, saying Didion had no contract with Kasabian, and no intention of securing one. He didn’t say FSG had drawn up a draft agreement with Didion for the book, or that Kasabian (whom he referred to, privately, as “Pussy”) might expect money from it.
In the meantime, Kasabian had bought a camping trailer with her husband and hit the road, leaving no forwarding address. Didion didn’t know how to reach her.
Periodically, Robbins checked with his author, hoping her interest in the Kasabian project hadn’t flagged. She said nothing to him about it. She’d decided to make a Southern pilgrimage, on Life’s dime, to gather material for columns and to start a novel. (All those reviewers who’d called Run River a Southern novel? Well, maybe this time she’d damn well give them a Southern novel!)
Dunne was in hunter-gatherer mode as well, so he went along (Quintana stayed in Sacramento). “The idea was … to drink Dr. Pepper at the general store and do the underwear and the dirty shirts at the crossroads coin laundry, to go to Little League games and get my hair cut while my wife got a manicure or a pedicure in the local beauty parlor—in other words, to take the pulse of the white South,” he said, revealing how firmly he’d determined already what the South had to offer. Here was a difference between him and his wife: Though she pitched a similarly clichéd idea to the Life editors, telling them she’d offer something like “The Mind of the South,” she carried no preconceptions into the bayous; more impressively, she aimed herself in whatever direction turned up, even when she didn’t understand it, when it appeared to make no connection to anything she might do, when it couldn’t be disseminated, much less paragraphed, for years. She would not produce “The Mind of the South.” She would not produce a Southern novel. But New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast were the “most interesting place[s] I had been in a long time,” she said. “[E]verything everybody said was astonishing to me.” Insights from the trip would enrich several future books, in surprising and unpredictable ways.
For example, she didn’t expect to find in New Orleans “a strong sense of the Caribbean.” In this slumgullion atmosphere, she realized she’d been hearing, for years now, “weird stories … coming out about that part of the world,” and she wondered if a new cultural narrative was forming. “This was a time when people”—like her husband—“kept saying California was the face of America’s future,” but she wasn’t sure that was true anymore—another manifestation, perhaps, of her wish for the sixties, the California sixties, to be dead. The history of the United States had always been linked to Latin America—she knew this from her grandfather’s writings, from the illegals working in her house, caring for Quintana—but new currents seemed to be blowing along the borders. Though her awareness of this was only shadows, “what I was actually interested in was the South as a gateway to the Caribbean,” she said.
She remembered Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney who’d opened an investigation into the John Kennedy assassination (and provided the first public viewing of the Zapruder film). Though his prosecution of Clay Shaw, the New Orleans businessman he accused of conspiring with Oswald and a man named David Ferrie to murder the president in a “triangulation of crossfire” was ludicrously unfounded, the names Garrison exposed, rightly or wrongly, kept pointing to Miami, to Cuba, and to a “whole underbelly I’d never seen before,” Didion said. “It was just real news to me. I started thinking about that part of the world, from the Gulf Coast to down around Miami. The whole Caribbean connection. There was something going on in the Caribbean that I didn’t understand.”
Not until 1988, on a return trip to the Crescent City, would she try to locate 544 Camp Street, where, reportedly, Oswald had rented an office in 1963 to distribute “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets, either as a Castro supporter or as someone posing as a Castro supporter while joining the opposition, or, more sinisterly, while leaving false trails as part of an assassination conspiracy.
In 1988 the small Newman Building no longer stood; even in 1970, Didion would have found no trace of Oswald, but she was well aware of the Camp Street address. People, she said, “had taken the American political narrative seriously at 544 Camp.”
In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations, convened by the U.S. House of Representatives with Gerald Ford’s approval, would say “the testimony of a number of witnesses … placing Oswald and Ferrie together in early September 1963” in and around Camp Street “may be credible.” Furthermore, “Ferrie’s experience with the underground activities of the Cuban exile movement and as a private investigator for [gangster] Carlos Marcello … might have made him a good candidate to participate in a conspiracy plot.”
Didion would seize these details, citing the House Committee document in her notes for Miami (1987). She would not forget her trip to New Orleans in the summer of 1970, or her first inkling that the corner of Camp Street might be “one of those occasional accidental intersections where the remote narrative”—tucked into the underbelly, hidden from public view—“had collided with the actual life of the country.”
* * *
For Dunne, the South’s great revelation that summer was the “road glass.” “Whenever some member of the local gentry would pick us up to take us out to dinner, there would be a ‘road glass’ on the dashboard, some spirits to fortify us for the ride to the local country club or the Holiday Inn dining room, martinis or a little straight whiskey with ice to tide us over,” he wrote. “The ubiquitous road glass was the perfect pagan icon of the secular South.”
Sitting beside him, or sipping Scotch on Walker Percy’s rainy wooden porch in Covington, Louisiana, his wife brooded on her growing insight that “in the South they remained convinced that they had bloodied their land with history.” What a difference from the West. In California, she was only just beginning to grasp, “we did not believe that history could bloody the land, or even touch it.”
* * *
When finally, without fanfare or warning, Didion told Henry Robbins the Kasabian project had died in her mind of natural causes, he was exasperated, even a little furious, though he kept it from her. In a letter to Marc Joffe of Bantam Books, with whom he’d coordinated publication arrangements, Robbins said he didn’t understand why Didion couldn’t have made her decision six months ago or at least let them know what she was thinking. This was in line with her refusal to acknowledge Roger Straus’s attempts to nominate her for Rockefeller Foundation grants and other prizes. Was it simply negligence? Sometimes she didn’t seem to grasp, even minimally, what it meant to be a citizen of the profession.
So now there would be no damned good Joan Didion book about the end of the 1960s. What a shame, Robbins thought. She had been poised to do it, and she had flinched.
Marc Joffe asked for Didion’s research notes and her transcripts of the interviews with Kasabian so that Bantam could pursue its own Manson project. There is no record of Didion’s response.
She had already moved on, months earlier telling her editors at Life she was dissatisfied with their tepid support. “I had a year’s contract and I let them off at the end of six months, because they simply weren’t running me,” she said. “I mean, I would file every week, and the pieces wouldn’t run. I could have actually just made them pay me for the year … but that seemed too dispiriting to even contemplate.” The editors found her far too dark. She had never forgiven them for denying her Vietnam. “Some of the guys are going out,” Loudon Wainright had told her. The guys! For God’s sakes, Mary McCarthy had slipped in-country and done exactly what Didion hoped to do—that is, parse the military language (“Napalm has become ‘Incinder-Jell,’ which makes it sound like Jell-O,” McCarthy had written). The Calley trial was scheduled to start soon; the casualty figures weren’t even close to adding up.
Saint Mary had found her angel in Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books. Didion needed a champion. To spur herself, she framed and hung on her wall a telex she’d managed to acquire concerning the death tolls in Vietnam.
By now, she’d moved on, as well, to tackle a screenplay based on Lois Gould’s novel Such Good Friends. Otto Preminger, “the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy,” according to Dunne, had hired the two of them to rewrite a script drafted three times by others. One night in early August of 1970, the Dunnes joined Preminger at the Bistro to toast the deal. With them was a young man named David Patrick Columbia, a friend of Preminger’s son; later, Columbia would establish the New York Social Diary online. He recalled Didion as “the antithesis of the smooth and creamy tinsel and glitz that was … haute Hollywood, and which filled the room that night. She looked like a super-cool, best-selling author” in her blue-and-white cotton dress. “Her ‘importance’ in the room that night [had been] palpable from the moment she and her husband entered. Otto, no doubt, was aware beforehand that it would be. He too was drawn to ‘names’ and hot talent and always hired them for his projects.”
After dinner, the group drove to Paramount Studios for a private screening of The Diary of a Mad Housewife, then walked across the lot to Preminger’s offices to discuss the Gould project. Columbia said he was impressed with Dunne’s ability to command the conversation with Preminger, as the men sat across a desk from one another. Didion sat silently, listening, as Dunne cajoled Preminger “with all the required subtle (and not so) deferences.” Already, Dunne sensed that “if Otto thought he could beat up on you, then he would beat up on you without mercy.” His “rage was never far beneath the surface.” So Dunne charmed the great man with a combination of “business and celebrity gossip,” Columbia said—it was a chat “between two pros” in “thrall” to the glamour of Hollywood.
Preminger pressed the Dunnes (whom he, like most people, thought of as the Didions) to go to New York for the fall and work with him every day in his offices on the script. They were going east, anyway, for the filming of The Panic in Needle Park. Before decamping, though, the couple had occasion to house-sit for a few days for a friend in Malibu. Didion stared at the comforting flat horizon and felt—not for the first time—she could be happy at the ocean. Happy? Miss Leaky Ice Pack? With that on the table, it took little to convince Dunne they should look seriously at the first available house on the coast.
Then they left for New York, subletting a “grimy, roach-infested” apartment, Dunne said. For fourteen weeks—between visits to the movie set—they met Preminger for five hours every day in his Fifth Avenue offices, trying to finalize the script. Dunne had learned a few tricks. “Studio executives are notoriously literal-minded, and the easiest way to soothe them when they complain about the mood of a scene is simply to add stage direction,” he said. “Thus, if they maintain that, ‘BOBBY: You dumb bitch’ is too grim, you change the line to: ‘BOBBY (Engagingly): You dumb bitch.’”
Preminger wanted to add a “nice lesbian relationship, the most common thing in the world” to the story. Didion didn’t think so. Oh yes, he said. “Very easy to arrange, does not threaten the marriage.”
“If he got angry with us, the top of his bald head would turn bright red,” Dunne said. At least he had finally gotten their names straight: “[W]ith elaborate politeness he would refer to Joan in his Teutonic accent as, ‘Misss-isss Dunne.’”
For lunch each day, they’d walk to La Côte Basque on West Fifty-fifth Street. There, among rich bouquets of roses and French village murals, they’d continue discussing the script unless they were interrupted by a showbiz manager. To Preminger’s delight, these managers would invariably introduce him to “Miss Universe contestants they had signed to personal services contracts.” Dunne recalled meeting “Miss Philippines and Miss Ceylon.”
Back in Malibu, a twenty-year-old one-story house in need of work had come on the market. It had once belonged to Michelle Phillips. Flush with movie money, the Dunnes decided to fly back at Christmas to close the sale, though they figured they were offering fifteen thousand dollars too much. “I forbid you to go,” Preminger said. Didion’s silence told him she didn’t care. His pate turned red. “If you worked for a studio, Misss-isss Dunne, this behavior would not be tolerated,” he said. When the couple left New York, Preminger yanked them off the script, threatened a two-million-dollar lawsuit, and put a lien against their remaining fee. They settled for forty cents on the dollar, and made for the sea.
3
The happiest woman Didion had ever seen was dying of breast cancer. “My blessed cancer,” Trudy Dixon would say, and she genuinely meant it.
Trudy and her husband, Mike, came to dinner at the Franklin Street house one night, a couple of years before the Dunnes moved to Malibu. Trudy had been a philosophy student at Wellesley and was now working as an editor at the Zen Center in San Francisco, transcribing the teachings of Shunryu Suzuki for a regular newsletter called Wind Bell, and collecting his lectures for the book that became Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, arguably the most important reason for Buddhism’s spread in the United States in the 1970s. Didion knew the place from her time in the Haight. She dismissed what she’d heard of its teachings. Zen, Krishna, acid—so much purple haze.
But Trudy Dixon impressed her. Didion had met Trudy and Mike, an artist who painted under the name Willard Dixon, through Earl McGrath. “Trudy had been struggling with breast cancer for some time and I had to carry her from place to place,” Mike told me. Despite her illness, she devoted herself to organizing, into simple and comprehensible English, the often obscure and culturally specific koans central to Buddhist practice. Didion was fascinated by the project’s linguistic challenge, but even more, she witnessed in Trudy an embodiment of the teachings’ aims to lead the mind toward “letting go … [of] what doesn’t matter.”
“She was totally inspiring in her ability to deal with the fact that she’d be dead in a short time,” Didion said. “She was on final morphine, and she’d made arrangements for her small children … She spoke about it with equanimity, which would have been impossible for me.”
When Trudy died in 1969, Suzuki wailed like a wounded animal. He had never known such a perfect disciple.
In 1970, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind appeared in a limited edition. For a while, in Malibu, Didion read the book “every night to relax when I went to bed,” she said. “It was very soothing to me.”
She had no intention of becoming a Buddhist: “I didn’t like [meditation] at all. But the book is wonderful.” It was suffused with her memories of Trudy Dixon. The woman’s calm dictated the very syntax of the sentences.
For Didion, then, this was a personal, rather than a religious, exploration. Her embrace of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind also indicates her self-correcting ability, a quality that would characterize much of her later writing. She moved from ignoring Zen to reconsidering it, rethinking her initial reaction to it, and then—unlike a zealous convert—quietly appreciating aspects of it that she found useful in her daily life.
Primarily, the book provided a pleasurable reading experience.
Beyond that, she recognized commonsense truths in its insistence on careful daily practice. “[W]e should not do [something] as if it were preparing for something else,” Suzuki said (in Trudy’s transcription). “This should be true in your everyday life. To cook, or to fix some food, is not preparation … it is practice … it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook!”
Cooking had become a contemplative, ritualistic act for Didion: Suzuki’s words made sense to her. She could see the benefits of extending his approach not only to commonplace acts but also to writing. Practicing without expectation, remaining alert to permutations, resisting expertise and habits of thought: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few,” Suzuki said.
Above all, rigid attachment to anything brings sorrow and dissatisfaction, he taught: Change is the essence of existence. This thought reminded Didion of the line from the Episcopal liturgy: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” “‘As it was in the beginning’ … means ever-changing, in my interpretation. Which may not be the orthodox interpretation,” Didion said.
She could not believe now, any more than she could accept when she was a girl, the orthodox notion of a “personal God, a God that is personally interested in me … And as far as the soul [goes] … I have understood the entire thing symbolically. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me symbolically. But it doesn’t if it’s supposed to be real.”
She could much more readily entertain the Buddhist concepts of “impermanence, nonself, and suffering.”
In Trudy Dixon, she’d seen a tangible example of accepting change and suffering; just so, she had, in the waves below her Malibu house, a daily reminder of the paradoxical relationship between permanence and change: the ever-abiding sea and its constantly shifting nature, moment to moment, breaker to breaker.
Through all this contemplation, her grandfather’s love of the “vast indifference” of geology returned to her in a powerful new context, enfolded in the rhythms of the Episcopal liturgy and Zen Mind’s weave of voices.
Constant land movement.
“I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying … reveal[ing] evidence of the scheme in action,” she said. “I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”
* * *
Meaning, Didion said now. Not happiness. A distinction began to appear to her.
“What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” she would write.
For one thing, peace was impossible with such a restless husband.
In the stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking, she would mention the fight one morning in Malibu that ended with her threat to take Quintana to LAX and fly away from Dunne. Quintana settled the standoff, insisting they “couldn’t do that to him.” (“[D]id she think herself safer with him than with me?” Didion asked.)
Dunne’s version of the same incident read differently. In Vegas, he said a member of the construction crew he’d hired “lit a joint [one day] and began to scar the concrete block on which the tile was being laid with a jackhammer. The noise from the jackhammer made my daughter cry and my wife said she would take her to Sacramento that morning and I said I would go back to Vegas the next day.”
In Sacramento, Didion, hoping to calm her nerves, took Quintana to Old Sac, a redeveloped area of town featuring restored saloons and wooden sidewalks from the city’s pioneer-boom days. She was about to tell her daughter how generations of her cousins had walked these alleys, how her great-grandfather had owned a tavern on Front Street, but then “I stopped. Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana’s responsibility,” Didion wrote. “This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from.”
So they flew back home on a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane. Painted on its nose was a big, silly smile. Quintana loved flying “The Smile.”
Meanwhile, in Vegas (or wherever he’d travel to get away from his wife), Dunne would sit alone, usually in a motel room, and imagine being interviewed on The Dick Cavett Show, the Famous Author discussing weighty subjects from “the weather … [to] my Nobel Prize.” But then he’d remember: “[My] voice on the air gets high and squeaky and my stammer prevents me from indulging in articulate patter.” He’d start to feel sorry for himself. He had written two good books, hadn’t he? Why hadn’t they earned more notice? He was pushing forty—my God. In the past, when his friends turned thirty-five, he’d send them notes: “Halfway home.” Now the joke didn’t seem so funny.
Once, plagued with the jits, he took the red-eye to New York and stayed in the apartment of a friend. He listened to the World Series on the radio, and in the evenings he went to the “Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison Avenue at 81st to see if I knew anyone who had died.” This was voyeurism keyed to his mortality. He’d return to the apartment and gobble Heath bars and Oreos—the old cures for the blues he’d shared with his brother Stephen.
Then he flew back to Vegas.
He missed his wife and child. But if he called home, he knew what he’d get—silence or recriminations: “[S]he was lonely and depressed … the wind was blowing and there were fires at Point Dume. The maid had quit, the fire insurance had been canceled and the engine in the Corvette had seized on the Ventura Freeway … [S]he had called Detroit and told the head of public relations at General Motors that if the warranty was not honored she was going to drive the car to Detroit and burn the motherfucker on the lawn of John Z. DeLorean … The head of public relations had suggested she see a psychiatrist.”
Sometimes living with her was like “living with [a] piranha,” he told her.
One night he went alone to a party in Venice. “It was like all those terrible parties in the Village in the fifties … Cinder-block bookcases full of Hesse and Tolkien. Gallon jugs of Almaden Mountain Red, plastic cups and no ice.” People wearing batik shirts were rolling joints and insisting that Walt Disney had been frozen.
A girl asked him to take her home, and he sat around with her and her ex-husband, a wraith in tie-dyed jeans, watching the boy clean a “kilo of marijuana.”
What the hell was he doing?
Sometimes, at his most depressed, he would imagine writing suicide notes, but “[w]hatever minimal impulse I had for suicide was negated by the craft of writing the suicide note. It became a technical problem.” He could not stop revising.
“When are you coming home?” his wife asked when she called.
* * *
One day, for no particular reason, the “bad season … was over,” he said. If they couldn’t fire the contractor, they couldn’t get a divorce, he reasoned. They were stuck with each other, at least until they got the house in order.
Chronologically, the Dunnes’ uneasy peace—individually and together—appeared to coincide with the beginning of Quintana’s nightmares about the Broken Man. “He has on a blue work shirt, like a repair man,” Quintana told her mother. “Short sleeves. He has his name on his shirt. On the right-hand side. His name is David, Bill, Steve, one of those common names. I would guess this man is maybe age fifty to fifty-nine. Brown belt, navy-blue pants, black really shiny shoes. And he talks to me in a really deep voice: Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage.”
One good thing: She had learned from her mother contempt for abstractions.
On some occasions, she said the Broken Man wore a cap with the word GULF on it.
The Point Dume Gulf Station was just down the road from their house.
Some of the guys in Harrison Ford’s crew wore blue work shirts.
But Didion did not waste energy searching for the sources of her child’s mental jigsaw. The details, and Quintana’s certainty about this figure, were too vivid. “Don’t let the Broken Man catch me,” she would say. “If the Broken Man comes, I’ll hang onto the fence and won’t let him take me.”
In Blue Nights, Didion wrote, “I realized my fear of The Broken Man to be as unquestioning as her own.”
4
In the spring of 1971, The Panic in Needle Park was chosen to be an official entry at the Cannes Film Festival. The festival was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary by giving Charlie Chaplin the Légion d’honneur. Twentieth Century–Fox paid the Dunnes’ way to France. Didion had never been to Europe, and she was so excited (traveling first-class, no less!), she boarded the airplane barefoot.
Quintana remained behind with family. As a gift, Didion would bring her a cashmere turtleneck sweater from London.
The Dunnes stayed at the Carlton on the Promenade de la Croisette, overlooking the Mediterranean. Every day, “the hall porter brought endless bottles of chateau d’Yquem, a studio publicity man handed out crisp, new hundred-franc notes as petty cash, every night there was dinner for six, eight, twelve at La Reserve: it all went on the budget of the picture,” Dunne said.
Nick loved being a big-time producer on the world stage, and he kept his behavior in check. What most annoyed his brother and sister-in-law was the credit he took for every aspect of the film. He claimed to have discovered the James Mills novel; he claimed to have spotted the potential for a love story in the midst of junkie angst. “To me, it’s a strong anti-drug film,” he said sanctimoniously, and Didion could hear the resentment in his voice when he told a reporter, “You know, Joan has become a great sort of best seller and everything with her book, Play It As It Lays.” He only mentioned this because Didion and Dunne were now writing a screenplay from the novel and Nick was set to produce it. The “three of us” cooked it up, he told the press. “Frank Perry is going to direct that.”
The initial reaction to The Panic in Needle Park at Cannes was underwhelming. Women’s Wear Daily called the movie “disappointing.” “There was great anticipation for this film,” the reviewer said. “[O]ne expects … stinging cynicism” from “Miss Didion,” but the film is “full of misery for so long … it is simply too much to sit through.”
Jerry Schatzberg had gotten the reaction he’d wanted. Keith Richards, at Cannes to promote the Stones’ concert film, Gimme Shelter, was so impressed by Panic’s authenticity, he asked Schatzberg, “Are you doing the hard stuff?”
Subsequent reviewers praised the movie’s realism and lack of sentimentality—the New York Post said, “[I]t must be considered one of the year’s top films both in [the] timeliness of its material and the skill of presentation. Like it or loathe it, you have to believe it.”
Kitty Winn, walking the beach wearing jeans, profoundly uncomfortable with so much glamour and celebrity hoopla, won the judges over. They gave her the Best Actress Award. “When a reporter who had interviewed me came to the door [with the news], it blew my mind,” she said. But on the whole, the experience traumatized her.
Like Didion, she was the daughter of an army colonel; she approached her work with discipline and seriousness.
Acting was one thing. The movie business was another.
While Didion enjoyed the luxury of Cannes—and Dunne ate it up—Winn recoiled. She would soon leave the profession, and live a quiet life as a wife and mother. “The idea of stardom I find frightening,” she said. “When I think of a star I think of a monster taking over someone’s personality, obliterating them.”