1
The California of Didion’s girlhood, during the Depression, offered enough open space to appear to be Eden still, especially to a child. The Sierra, where the Donners met their limits, still defied people’s efforts to tame them. The moody weather of the Sacramento Valley, which dictated the inhabitants’ physical and emotional rhythms, proclaimed daily its uncontrollability. In and around the Donner Pass, North America witnessed its heaviest snowfall, an average of thirty-seven feet a year. This formed an icy reservoir on the Sierra’s western exposure, which melted annually around the first of May, filling and sometimes flooding the Feather, Bear, Yuba, American, and Cosumnes Rivers, offsetting the baked summers, nurturing wheat fields, rice paddies, and orchards, sprouting berries, sugar beets, melons, plums, tomatoes, peaches, pears, walnuts, olives, cherries, and grapes.
But this Eden was industrial. Silver irrigation pipes sprawled among wheat stalks sliced by whirring steel blades—and anyway, the wheat was beginning to thin. Bad planting practices had exhausted the valley soil. When Didion was a girl, the crusading writer Carey McWilliams lamented California’s “factories in the fields”; his calls, in newspapers and books, for better care of the land and the people who worked it guided John Steinbeck’s hand as he drafted The Grapes of Wrath. In the pioneer myths Didion grew up on, no mention was ever made of the gold rush as a technological enterprise, a drive to develop the mechanics of moving water across hostile terrain to support the miners. In her teenage years, Didion would hear from her mother, her teachers, and Sacramento’s leaders that newcomers, the federal government, and corporate bosses from the East were ruining California’s once-perfect environment, but, in fact, the land was already an android, artificial tendrils fused with the natural, sustaining an unholy agricultural system.
That life in the valley was not pure or preordained was impressed most directly on Didion by Sacramento’s levees. From its founding, and through its early iterations, Sacramento City showed itself to be, in many ways, a poor idea. River floods devastated the place in 1849 and again in 1861 (perhaps one of the reasons Mark Twain decided not to stick around writing for The Sacramento Union). By early January 1862, twenty-three inches of rain had fallen in less than a month, melting some of the Sierra snowpack and driving most of the townspeople from their homes, among boxes, rotted goods, and debris, to a high spot known as Poverty Ridge, where squatting miners used to pitch their tents. A local paper, the Marysville Daily Appeal, reported that “stock of every kind could be seen passing downstream, some alive and struggling and bellowing or squealing for life.”
By 1934, the year of Didion’s birth, the levees had significantly reduced flooding. The Shasta Dam on the Sacramento River would be completed in 1945, emerging from within a grid of steelwork, cables, and scaffolding. The Wright Act, decades old by the time Didion was born, had chipped away at the natural flow of water by allowing farmers whose land did not abut rivers to organize irrigation districts to divert the moisture they needed from one area to another. Still, details such as those in the Daily Appeal of terrified cattle swept in torrents through the city seemed to belong to the present. Despite development, new technologies, and changing land uses, the politics and folklore of what some people still called Sacramento City ensured a living past, especially for a child with an imagination as vivid as Didion’s. As a former boomtown, hunkered between Sierra miners digging for gold and San Francisco merchants spinning gold into ephemeral, expensive trinkets, Sacramento had developed a tough, opportunistic, and insular society. It was an overwhelmingly male society in the beginning, a town of squatters, gamblers, and dreamers lured by gold. In Didion’s time, Sacramento still bore the traces and scars of this origin. Initially, the scarcity of women led men to idealize them, except for the ladies actually in their midst, often forced into prostitution, the ambivalence apparent in surviving saloon songs from the 1840s, such as “Sacramento Gals”:
They’re pretty gals, I must confess,
Nipping ’round, around, around;
And “Lordy-massy” how they dress,
As they go nipping ’round
On J Street …
The women’s celebrated style boasted Sacramento’s aspirations. It was a spot where rural treasure, extracted from the mountains, was forged by the magic of capital into luxuries destined for the drawing rooms of San Francisco. And each night that song could have been sung in a tavern called Didion’s on Front Street, frequented by eye-catching women, and run by Frank Didion’s great-grandfather.
As the initial crush of the gold rush receded, Sacramento’s residents longed for more women to “civilize” the place, to provide moral ballast to the men’s excesses. This longing, shaped into an unspoken civil policy, created a pinched and segregated social structure that lingered in the city well into Didion’s maturity. In the 1950s, when Sacramento tried to annex several outlying communities, these communities resisted, in part because their citizens viewed Sacramento as a “cold” place, repressive and tolerant of brutal police tactics. The influx of women as a moral army also set the city’s development patterns: The family unit was the pacifying force. Unlike farm life, which required many hands to do the work, city life, more centralized and diverse, operated as a series of interconnected hives. Subdivided lots and single-family dwellings checkerboarded the valley, making the buying and selling of real estate Sacramento’s real business, and eventually giving Didion’s family much of its income. Downtown, lavish hotels served as meeting spaces and stages for men just back from the mountains to strut their adventurousness. They struck the poses of literary figures from dime novels, newspaper stories, and railroad advertising circulars, which had seduced many of them into coming west in the first place. John Wayne prototypes: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett (whom Wayne would one day play in a movie), Kit Carson, John Charles Frémont, the self-made man. While women kept order at home, men burnished their reputations as good-hearted hell-raisers or courageous loners ready to ride off into the sunset. Impromptu gambling halls came and went; the spirit of speculation was as thick as contagion. From the first, a boisterous, transient population pushing against pleas for greater order made nostalgia the city’s dominant tone. As early as the 1850s, a newspaper editorial by E. C. Ewer mourned the loss of the good old days, “when the miners paid for everything in dust—when the red-shirted gentry were the nabobs of the land … Those days have passed, and with the change has come idleness, vagrancy, and coin as the circulating medium.” This is the tone Didion would adopt for her first novel, Run River, about valley life, in 1963.
As she admitted later, the tone was not quite suitable. From the start, Sacramento was an ornery place with plenty of dead zones. Its government plazas displayed a ruthless efficiency of design, outpacing the politicians’ capacities for matching it. That so many capital cities, where raw deals get made to enrich the whole, are ugly and lifeless at their cores reflects one of our oldest animal instincts: You don’t want to eat where you shit.
2
Right away, Didion dreamed of getting out—or so she remembered years later. In fact, she remained fond of many places in and around Sacramento. Nothing awful occurred in her early childhood, but it was often a gloomy time spent in still, dark rooms. The first house she knew was on Highland Avenue, in a neighborhood now called Curtis Park, northeast of downtown. Her parents shared the house with her mother’s folks. “The area was a streetcar suburb, built out between the 1880s and the 1920s,” William Burg, the city’s most ardent historian, told me. The no. 6 trolley cut through the neighborhood, past acres of hops and mint, ferrying a mix of laborers, bankers, and furniture salesmen; at night, just as mothers prepared children for bed, the outbound Twenty-first Street car clattered past tightly curtained windows. The houses, whether late Victorians, bungalows, or Tudors, had new sewer lines and were already being shaped by forces that would radically alter the look of Sacramento in just a few years. The most striking feature of the Didions’ 1923 house was its massive carport. In fact, the streetcars were all but done. In 1947, Pacific Gas & Electric would sell off the last of its trolleys, and suburban growth exploded with the auto. The Didions had a large lot, elevated in case of floods, and the house (boxy, with thin windows blocking more light than they let in) sat well away from the street. But traffic was increasing. The Sacramento Aviation Company was expanding its operations here, recruiting more workers and their families, another sign of things to come.
The 1940 and 1941 city directories list the Didions’ residence as 2211 U Street, a two-story 1908 Craftsman bungalow in Poverty Ridge, the former squatters’ camp and flood haven. In the late nineteenth century, it had turned into a posh neighborhood of Queen Anne, Stick, and Colonial Revival foursquares. The Poverty Ridge house is the one Didion considered her true childhood home. It was near the Ella K. McClatchy branch of the public library—a children’s library at the time—where Didion loved to read under towering, sunny windows.
In general, the neighborhood was still nice in the 1940s, but it was beginning to decline, as the suburbs drew many middle-class and wealthy families out of the city’s center. The migration made for good housing prices in town, and the Didions, now with a second child, Jim, born in December 1939, almost doubled their square footage with the move, and got a five-space garage in the bargain.
“My father, when I was first born, he was selling insurance, but nobody was buying anything, so he’d play poker,” Didion said. Gambling may have been lucrative for Frank Didion, but he continued to sell insurance through the Travelers Group well into the 1940s, even though his life in Sacramento was interrupted by the war and he had to leave town and return. City directories list a suburban address for his office. Frank Didion was a mediocre, or perhaps just a distracted, salesman; his real passion was risk. The place’s speculative fever filled him. He loved not just poker but anything on which a sum could be wagered, a claim staked. He seems to have really hit pay dirt after World War II, cleaning up at a government auction, acquiring dozens of Royal manual typewriters, which he later sold at a profit, along with property—a fire tower, a few old mess halls, sitting on valuable lots now—and a military jeep, in which he would teach his daughter to drive. After the auction, he settled into the boom-and-bust rhythm of real-estate speculation, moving money from one account to another. Dabble was a word Didion associated with his professional activities. He was “fuzzy” about finances, she said. The family seemed to have plenty—the house was spacious, the kids never wanted for ice-cream cones, trips to San Francisco or Stinson Beach—but a feeling lingered that their privileges were wispy: myths and illusions, like the family’s storied past. Frank was quiet and depressed—a good-looking man, though Eduene’s family thought he had a weak mouth. He was quick to fix a drink to quell the smallest anxieties. Didion remembers him as “full of dread.” She said that even at family parties, when he’d seem to enjoy himself playing ragtime piano, his bearing conveyed such tension, she’d run to her room and close the door. Frank’s mother had died when he was young, in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and his father had married a dynamic woman named Genevieve, who spent more time on local politics than on raising her stepchildren. Frank’s younger brother, Robert, lost an eye one summer in a fireworks accident in which Frank’s carelessness seems to have played a part. Didion thinks he suffered guilt about this for the rest of his life. As an adolescent, restless, hunting distractions, he always hoped to work at the California State Fair but never measured up to the job. His greatest discipline was reserved for sports. He lettered in basketball in 1928 at Sacramento City College. But then, as an adult, his discipline dissipated; he was always seeking something for nothing. He’d go from the high-flown Sutter Club (he was not a member) to the seediest gambling joints. Late at night, he’d drive to the Nevada border to shoot craps. Until 1940, the riverboat Delta King offered floating card games and strong drink on the Sacramento River. Prohibition had only recently ended, and odd cocktails prompted by the liquor ban were popular. Since the quality of outlawed alcohol was suspect, creative bartenders had added flavorings, sweeteners, and leafy sprinklings to their furtive whiskeys. Now, while laying down his bets, Frank Didion happily imbibed whatever buddies set in front of him: gin slings, old-fashioneds, manhattans, and aviations. Lady Luck rode the river swells up and down, up and down, and Frank never tired of chasing her, as someone of romantic temperament might have put it. And why not? Family lore suggested the name Didion was a derivative of the French Didier, a variation of desiderium: “unfulfilled longing.” In previous centuries, this longing had usually been spiritual in nature, though it often referred to a woman’s yearning for a child.
* * *
Frank spent his childhood a few blocks from an eccentric white house at Sixteenth and H Streets, built in 1877 and featuring cupolas shaped like pastries, Victorian Gothic detail, gingerbread trim, and intricate door moldings. The house had once belonged to the Steffens family. As a boy, Frank befriended Jane Hollister, niece of the poet Lincoln Steffens, and was later a classmate of hers at Berkeley.
In 1903, the old Steffens house had become the Governor’s Mansion. From that point on, every governor of the state of California lived in the house until Ronald Reagan in the 1970s. Like her father, Didion fell in love with this icon of nineteenth-century bohemianism, and like her father, she was always haunted by the conviction that its elegance meant the past was a lovely lost domain and the present a fallen state, dominated by petty, classless folk.
* * *
Eduene Didion preserved the genteel rituals of the past, holding ladies’ teas for her friends and many relatives—endless Sunday aunts, Didion recalled. One of them, her great-aunt Nell, habitually twisted the splendid rings on her fingers, snuffed cigarettes in a thick quartz ashtray, and told Didion that her grandmother was “nervous,” “different.” When Didion asked what this meant, Aunt Nell said it meant she couldn’t be teased. Eduene, wearing an ankle-length red lace dress, passed around trays of butter cookies, slices of lemon on Wedgwood plates, and cream cheese and watercress sandwiches.
“Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies”: Didion had memorized this line from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem and she thought of it, at tea, whenever one of the tottery ladies lamented the death of an old friend. To her, the notion of being alone, unattended, everyone close to you gone, was liberating and exciting, especially on these slow Sundays when the aunts came shuffling near, bathed in cloying perfume.
The rooms of the U Street house were filled with old muslin appliqués. There was a quilt stitched by Didion’s great-great-grandmother during a plains crossing shortly after she’d buried a child on the trail. Photographs lined the rooms: a stone marker by the side of Nancy Hardin Cornwall’s Umpqua cabin; Nancy’s great-granddaughter, Edna Magee Jerrett, standing boldly on a bare Sierra outcrop. The house was mote-dizzy, dim, the curtains usually drawn: a museum stillness, a concession to Frank’s “dread,” which needed gentling, as well as a reverential nod to the relics. The silverware was tarnished, the wallpaper faded, the flowers in vases brittle and dry. For Didion, it was not quite like living with Miss Havisham, coming upon cobwebby cakes in the kitchen with spiders for icing, but she did breathe the dust her mother would not disperse, did live in the dark, did eat corn bread and relish from recipes hauled over mountain passes by people who, with one or two missteps, might have eaten one another. Didion’s keen awareness of family ghosts and her home’s tilt toward neglect caused her to envy her ancestors’ heroics and to burn with shame that she could not match their examples.
Church did not ease her inadequacy. Eduene christened her daughter at the Trinity Episcopal Pro-Cathedral on M Street (where Eduene and Frank had married), and took her children to worship there each Sunday. Didion adored the elm trees dropping yellow leaves in front of the church, and perked up, smirking, whenever the priest compared Sacramento’s agricultural riches to those of the Holy Land, but otherwise she took little from services beyond the beauty of the music and language.
Once she turned eleven, she announced she was done with church. Her mother’s mother, Edna, educated in an Episcopal convent school, gave Didion an expensive Lilly Daché hat as an enticement to return to the fold. It didn’t work, though it was one more lesson in luxury and taste, like the time she’d bestowed on the girl—when Didion was six and recovering from the mumps—some Elizabeth Arden perfume in a tiny crystal bottle wrapped with gold thread. Her house was another museum, lined with delicate seashells, coral, and seeds.
Whatever spiritual awareness Didion developed seems to have come from Edna’s husband. Herman was the son of a forty-niner and a self-taught geologist whose livelihood depended on spotting the difference between serpentine and gold-bearing ores. In the language of geologic eras, in words such as igneous, cretaceous, and magma, Didion glimpsed the magnitude of time and its consequences for meaning and purpose. But these were abstractions, impossible to dwell on. Much more compelling was her awareness that her grandmother couldn’t be teased or she’d cry. Often, Didion pushed her to the brink of tears just to watch.
Occasionally on the streets, Didion observed a weeping man or woman. By the late 1930s, more than fifteen thousand Sacramento citizens were unemployed. Many of them had worked in canning, which had all but collapsed. Hoovervilles appeared in parts of the city, spreading as winter freezes destroyed the valley’s citrus crops, adding to the economic disaster. On rainy spring nights, as townspeople shored up the levees, it was possible for a child to notice differences between men for whom hauling the sandbags was merely a civic duty and those, more anxious and ragged, whose lives depended on the work. When she was twelve or thirteen, Didion asked her mother what social class the Didions belonged to. Eduene replied that the family didn’t think in terms of class. “Class … is something that we, as Americans and particularly as Californians, were supposed to have passed beyond,” Didion learned. But the main reason “we” don’t think about class was implicit in Eduene’s answer: We don’t have to.
The Didions and their extended families—Jerretts, Reeses—were prominent in town, and always had been: ranchers, bankers, saloon keepers, sheriffs. When Didion was a child, her grandfather was a local tax collector. His wife, Genevieve, would become president of the Board of Education; eventually, an elementary school would be named after her. Another Didion sat on the district court of appeals. “They were part of Sacramento’s landed gentry,” William Burg told me, “families who called themselves agriculturalists, farmers, ranchers, progressives, but they were the owners, not the ones who got their hands dirty.”
For all its visibility and influence, the family felt prosaic, muted, sad to Didion, even as a girl. Clerks and administrators: hardly the heroes of old, surviving starvation and blizzards. Furthermore, the progressives’ hold on Sacramento’s fortunes had weakened in the Depression and with the restrictions of Prohibition—a real blow to the valley’s hops growers. The land was ripe for tragedy, or the perception of it. When Didion was eight, the grand Buffalo Brewery, just blocks from her house, closed for good. It had been a palace of beer since the late 1880s. During Prohibition, the brewery temporarily halted production, but reopened the year of Didion’s birth, following the law’s repeal. It marketed drinks in cans but could never recapture its lost sales. The progressives got nervous. The place’s shuttering was not just a business failure; it was the end of an era, a threat to a way of life. A whiff of decadence clung to the gentry. When the WPA approved loans for public works in Sacramento, prompting construction of the Tower Bridge across the Sacramento River, green-lighting forty-six new buildings (including the high school Didion would attend) as well as runways at local airports, the Didions benefited from the uptick in business, but they would never acknowledge the federal government’s role in the changes. To admit the influence of outsiders, Easterners, government men, would suggest limits to one’s proud independence. In 1936, construction began on McClellan Air Force Base (then called McClellan Field). Mather, another local airfield, reopened after a dormant period. These developments were good news economically, but they brought an influx of workers from afar, began to change the city’s look and feel, and gave the Didions one more reason to cherish their glorious past and embrace whatever seemed inviolable about the present.
The Sunday aunts did their best to keep the past rolling. Miss Pearl Didion was busy with the Saturday Club, founded in 1893 to sustain classical music in Sacramento. Genevieve Didion was a powerful engine propelling the Camellia Society and eventually created a Camellia Grove in a park across the street from the state capitol, in honor of the valley’s pioneers. Her efforts were part of the progressives’ attempts to boost their own spirits by revising history—among other things, recasting the city’s founder, John Sutter, not as the economic opportunist he was, but as an agricultural dreamer.
In addition to music and flower clubs, Sacramento had a literary society, but no Didions seem to have joined it.
* * *
For a time, Didion’s literary activities stayed in her bedroom. Soon after becoming obsessed with tales of the Donner Party, she set a framed picture of Donner Pass on her dresser. In Run River, she writes of a woman “whose favorite game as a child” was “‘Donner Party,’ a ritual drama in which she, as its originator, always played Tamsen Donner and was left, day after day, to perish by the side of the husband whose foolish miscalculations had brought them all to grief.” We’re invited to wonder if the Donner Party game occurred to Didion much earlier in life than during the writing of her first novel.
Theatricality and drama appealed to her as much as writing—playacting was fun and seemed to suggest something true about people, in a family whose emotions were often masked (Didion said her mother gave a “successful impersonation of a non-depressed person,” a magnificent performance).
“I wanted to be an actress,” Didion said. “I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse [as writing]. It’s make-believe.… The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”
Declarations, evasions, confessions lay at the heart of drama. Didion’s desire to capture accurate dialogue led her to leave her bedroom clutching her notebook. She’d go skulking in hallways, behind half-closed doors, eavesdropping on adults, recording their remarks. On the whole, the Didion family disappointed her in this unwitting project. For example, Didion’s grandfather, her father’s dad, “didn’t talk,” she recalled. “I don’t think my grandfather knew my or my brother’s names, he would always address us as ‘hey you.’” And the conversations were rarely dramatic. “If you were born in Sacramento and bragged about the place, you were ‘puttin’ on airs,’” William Burg told me. “If you were a little uncomfortable about the city, it was easier to sell it to outsiders. A slightly disdainful aspect was an appropriate class attitude.” In Didion’s earliest essays on Sacramento, her disdain is apparent, but the attitude was not useful in her initial dialogue exercises. Still, she liked secretly gathering details. “There used to be a comic strip when I was little called Invisible Scarlet O’Neil,” she recalled. “Invisible Scarlet O’Neil was a reporter. She would press a band on her wrist, become invisible and cover the story invisibly. And everybody would be amazed that she had gotten the story.” And so Didion, gripping her notebook, would run and hide behind a tree, stalking the big folk.
In moments when she was all too visible—forced to go to church or attend a tea or other family gathering—her mother dressed her in “muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black,” she wrote. She inherited her great-grandmother’s black lace mantilla. If Didion’s memory is correct, her mother seems to have planted the idea in her daughter’s mind that she was too delicate and sensitive for her own good, in the manner of all the family women. She had a sad and anxious personality—“my mother says”—from the day she got home from Mercy General Hospital with all its hovering nuns. She was said to have her dead grandmother Ethel’s eyes, “eyes that reddened and watered at the first premonition of sun or primroses or raised voices, and I was also said to have some of her ‘difference,’ her way of being less than easy at that moment when the dancing starts…” It’s true she didn’t eat much as a child. Her mother fashioned a ritual to try to induce her to swallow her food—the “clean plate club,” she called it, prompting Frank to yell one night, “She’s not a human garbage can.” In fact, Didion’s meager appetite may have been an act of rebellion rather than a result of her frailty, a form of eating disorder (Didion later thought so). She admitted Eduene found her willful and difficult—so much so that if Eduene could have done it all over again, she might have stuck her daughter in a boarding school. This suggests steeliness beneath the quiet delicacy. Eduene had given her daughter a notebook to stop her “whining,” but the notebook tugged her toward an inner life, a private world brewing storms beyond her mother’s control. The myth of the weak one, the one who would have been left on the plains, was a way of convincing the girl she needed dark rooms, silent afternoons, the fussing of Sunday aunts. In truth, it was Eduene who needed the assurance of family rituals (“My mother ‘gave teas’ the way other mothers breathed,” Didion wrote). With carte blanche in the adult sections of the library, with gifts of expensive perfume and fancy hats whenever she had an illness or required persuading, Didion, it appears, was more pampered than impaired.
She had a cousin named Brenda, a year and a half younger, the daughter of her mother’s sister Gloria. Her favorite game with Brenda was “going page by page through an issue of Vogue and choosing what to ‘buy,’” she once wrote. “Brenda could buy whatever she wanted from the left-hand pages; I was limited to the right. The point was to see which of us could assemble, given the options only as they turned up, the most desirable wardrobe.” It thrilled Didion to imagine herself a woman wearing expensive clothing. She also liked controlling her cousin. If Brenda chose an item Didion didn’t want her to have, she would reject it on a pretext, claiming it was unfair to use an editorial page, say. “I was the older cousin. We would therefore do it my way,” Didion said. What Brenda preferred “never, not ever, not once … crossed my mind.” She loved to scare Brenda by scripting scenarios for the two of them in which they were about to step into an elevator bound for perdition.
Perhaps Didion wanted to punish her cousin: Brenda adhered to the family rules enforcing decorous meals and the need to make a “perfect white sauce”; she was more willing to accept the “delicacy” myth, going to bed promptly at six-thirty each night; she agreed to play the Snow Princess by the Christmas tree each year, to the delight of all the parents. Or perhaps Didion was trying to enlist her cousin in precocious rebellion (a stance repeated many years later with Quintana: forcing a child to embrace adulthood before she was fully prepared for it). Didion was ready to take her place in the world. No yellow vegetables for her. No cookies and milk. She wanted a cocktail. Observing her father’s tendencies, she’d take a leaf of iceberg lettuce, mix it with crushed ice in a stemmed glass, and pretend to drink like a grown-up.
Didion made other friends in town, notably Nancy Kennedy, whom she’d met when they were both five and starting ballet classes at Miss Marion Hall’s Dancing School. Nancy was the sister of Anthony Kennedy, who would eventually become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Since there wasn’t a gap in their ages, Didion was less inclined to control the relationship with Nancy, though its pleasures suited her to a tee. The girls liked dressing up in their ballet costumes (especially for their performance in Les Petites) and enjoyed trying on clothes. Together, they once modeled outfits in a charity fashion show. Didion joined a Girl Scout troop. She recalled being pressed to sing to shut-ins in an asylum just outside Sacramento. The songs included such lyrics as “lilies of the valley line your garden walk” and “that will happen only when the angels sing.” One of her troop mates told me that Didion was probably thinking of a medical facility called Weimar, north of the city, which treated tuberculosis patients. The place revealed to Didion the possible dangers of becoming an adult, but she still longed for the finish line of her childhood.
Twenty-four, her mother told her when Didion asked what was the best age to be. Eduene was twenty-four when she married, twenty-four when she gave birth to Joan. Twenty-four, she said, was her “lucky number” (for her, as for her husband, life was a floating casino). Grown-up talk was one thing Didion could share with her mother. Eduene would drag dusty boxes out of closets and show her daughter the red velvet cape with the white fur collar she wore at her wedding reception, as well as her older tea dresses.
From these glimpses of her mother’s fashionable past, and from magazine pictures, Didion concocted romantic daydreams. These were not about princesses or magical coaches, but of paparazzi chasing her through some exotic locale, maybe Argentina (a place she had seen in Vogue), while she, in a sable coat and dark glasses, pursued a divorce from her wealthy husband. Her great-grandmother’s black lace mantilla seemed to materialize out of these dramas and suggest their immanence.
She constructed literary fantasies, too. “I kept playing around with writing and imagining being a writer, which usually involved having a quote-unquote Manhattan penthouse,” she said. “That was my image of being a writer.”
3
San Francisco was not Manhattan—parts of it looked like Sacramento, only bigger—but the romance of the place was palpable, especially in the Paul Elder display windows and flower stands across from Union Square, home of jewelry shops and stores that sold books, art supplies, furniture, apparel, and sweets. On one family trip to the bayside city, Grandmother Edna bought violets for Didion and Brenda and ordered Dungeness crab Louie at El Prado. Eduene and Gloria wondered if the girls were getting so spoiled that they’d have nothing to look forward to in life. Said Edna, “Let that be the greatest of your worries.”
Though more than seventy thousand dockworkers had lost their jobs, and men had died in labor strikes (roughly half the city’s population belonged to unions), the visitors from the valley saw no trouble—Didions didn’t think about class—gawking instead at seagulls in the fog, Bauhaus and Beaux-Arts buildings, banana boats anchored just west of the Third Street Bridge and freighters under footlights. They breathed the odors of rotting timbers, roasting coffee, raw sugar; marveled at the brand-new Golden Gate Bridge. Begun in 1928, Grace Cathedral (later under the unconventional leadership of the Right Reverend James Albert Pike, whom Didion would one day write about as a true California eccentric) remained unfinished, its spire a rusty rib cage. Always, Eduene left a contribution for its completion in the mite box.
In the 1920s, as a slender ingénue, Eduene had attended afternoon tea dances in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel, sipping wine tea, nibbling handmade scones with Devonshire cream, and flirting with suitors. Her daughter’s view of the city was awash in splendor. Didion felt she’d missed a magical world; in her mind’s eye, department stores and hotels became the towers and ramparts of a castle in the clouds.
She’d stand at the water’s edge, trying to imagine the bottom of the bay. Maybe, when she grew up, she wouldn’t be a writer in New York. Maybe, instead, she’d study the oceans. She dreamed of leaving for Hawaii on the steamship Lurline, a voyage every woman of breeding and taste made at least once. With its palm trees, sweet drinks, and flowered necklaces, Hawaii was an even better place than Argentina to divorce a rich husband.
As she gazed out to sea, she wondered what had happened to Amelia Earhart. The headline in the San Francisco Chronicle read LONELY OCEAN STILL HOLDS SECRET OF AMELIA’S FATE. Like the pioneers of old, she had set out romantically in her fragile contraption, never knowing if she’d make her destination.
* * *
When they weren’t visiting the city, the Didions made frequent trips into the parched Central Valley. There, the family owned land. In the scant shade of fruit trees, watching dark-skinned men in straw hats pick crops beside white women, men, and children, Didion recognized links between California and more southerly climes. A heat-shimmery harshness infested the place. Everything was close to the bone. This was the real California.
Didion knew its legacies through her grandfather Herman. He had become a civil engineer and an attorney after leaving the Sierra mining camps, and he had also become a writer, composing technical treatises such as The Theory of Real Property Valuation as well as writing local histories. His accounts included brief mention of migrant workers lynched in insular towns.
In a series of articles for The San Francisco News, John Steinbeck also wrote of Central Valley drifters “hated” by the locals, living in shelters of “corrugated paper” and tents the “color of the ground.” These News pieces were run-ups to The Grapes of Wrath. Published in 1939, around the time Didion got her first notebook, Steinbeck’s novel dared to declare its origins in advocacy, its roots in reportage. Didion never claimed Steinbeck as an influence, but his ruminations on the valley matched hers, if from a different political angle, and must have reminded her of her grandfather’s writing (additionally, her paternal great-great-grandfather once organized grape growers in Florin County and owned twelve thousand acres of fruit trees). Stories like Steinbeck’s, and the consequences of life in California for the descendants of the first waves of Okies, hover behind Didion’s early essays. Steinbeck’s documentary approach, like that of Dorothea Lange with her photographs, or James Agee and Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, remained a model of how to frame political subject matter. In the 1960s and 1970s, critics would call Didion, along with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson, a pioneer of the New Journalism, in which the reporter inserted herself into the story as its centerpiece. In fact, the observational stance—the witnessing ethic—of Didion’s essays, and her tough tone, scrappy as the Christmas tinsel waving on Sacramento’s streetlights, shared as much DNA with the proletarian writing of the Great Depression as it did with the celebrity showstopping pieces of Mailer, Wolfe, and Thompson.