1
If Didion became a girl again on the Berkeley campus, nibbling nuts from her raincoat pocket, she aged rapidly while writing A Book of Common Prayer. “I don’t mean physically. I mean that in adopting [the main character’s] point of view, I felt much sharper, harsher,” she said. “I adopted a lot of the mannerisms and attitudes of an impatient, sixty-year-old dying woman. I would cut people off in the middle of conversations. I fell into Grace because I was trying to maintain her tone.”
It was the tone, of course, of Dunne’s dying mother, just as the girl in the book, on the lam from the FBI, is, in some measure, Patty Hearst. These recent events made their way into the novel the way radiation from the TRIGA Mark III bathed anything straying unprotected into its radius; Didion began to see the novelist’s job as wandering, vulnerable, into the culture’s red zones, setting off the alarms.
But in speaking, in the novel, as an older woman about a younger one with a misguided daughter she’s never understood, Didion was—more crucially—speaking to herself, observing her life from the wide end of the telescope, returning with warnings from the future, a form of magical thinking available only in fiction. “A Book of Common Prayer to some extent has to do with my own daughter’s growing up,” she admitted to Susan Stamberg on National Public Radio. “My child is nowhere near the age of Marin, the girl in the novel, but she’s no longer a baby. I think that part of this book came out of the apprehension that we are going to both be adults pretty soon … And [the daughter] has been misperceived by her mother most of her life.”
Didion was quick to distinguish her biography from her artistry. “What I work out in a book isn’t what the book is about. I mean, this book isn’t about mothers and daughters. That’s part of what it was for me, but I don’t think it’s what it is for a reader.”
For the reader, it was a rare artifact: an American political novel. Since her trips to the Gulf Coast states and to Colombia, since her research on the Southern hemisphere and its economic ties to the Northern one, her notion of what a contemporary American novel needed to be had changed.
The fractured style of all her late novels (A Book of Common Prayer, Democracy, The Last Thing He Wanted) is qualitatively different from the fragmentations in her earlier work. It conveys not a broken sensibility so much as the shattered texture of American public life. More pointedly than before, she assumes, in these books, a communal rather than an individual voice.
Behind this new emphasis was a firm conviction, though at the time of A Book of Common Prayer, it was inchoate in her mind. She would not articulate it directly until the essays in After Henry and Political Fictions, starting in the 1990s. But already she was feeling the rhythm, the structure, of her conviction, and here is what she knew: The people inside America’s governing process, including the journalists who report on officials’ behavior, have “congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which [is] its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.”
These insiders use fables and romances (we favor the freedom fighters; that’s what this party is all about; strong bipartisan support; putting the American people first) to obscure the ruthless, exclusive nature of the process.
This is how the world is, the powerful swear from on high. This is the way it has always been. Self-evidently, their claims are not true. What is true is harder to find these days. It was easy to see the squalor of a squatters’ camp in a California fruit field in the 1930s. It’s much harder to see the link between a civil war in Central America and a drug blight in Compton (a subject Didion would track in the 1980s).
Instead of clear connections, we have—on the news, on the Internet, in videos—flash pictures in variable sequence.
Or to put it another way: In the kind of domestic narrative Didion once followed (in Run River and even in Play It As It Lays) the house in which the couple will or will not live happily ever after is a given. The later Didion, intent upon cracking official fables, insists the real narratives are these: who owns the land on which the house was built; who built the house and when; who sold the house to whom; when, why, and for how much; who, ultimately, benefited from the sale; where did the proceeds actually go; for what purposes was the house actually used?
This is no longer a world aspiring to happily ever after. It is a world of transactions ever more complex, leading to mass movements of money and consolidations of power. And it requires a new kind of storytelling.
* * *
In Berkeley, Didion had put a Xeroxed manuscript of the unfinished novel into Henry Robbins’s hands. She continued to tinker with the story and add to it, using her husband’s notes. He read as she worked and offered handwritten suggestions on yellow legal sheets, which she typed up and studied during revisions. Mostly, his comments had to do with clarifying details and keeping the point of view straight: Like a narrator in a Conrad novel, Grace tells stories about others, and it is not always clear how she knows what she knows.
Dunne worried about the book’s bleak vision: In Didion’s view, politics was essentially a planet-wide arms deal.
The novel offered a dark picture of North American power moves from a fresh angle. “In North America, social tensions that arise tend to be undercut and co-opted quite soon, but in Latin America there does not seem to be any political machinery for delaying the revolution. Everything is thrown into bold relief. There is a collapsing of time. Everything is both older than you could ever know, and it started this morning,” Didion said.
She had hired a personal secretary and researcher, a young woman named Tina Moore, to help her with business correspondence as well as materials for the novel. She was a “fantastic researcher,” Didion said. “She would go to the UCLA library, and I would say, ‘Bring me back anything on plantation life in Central America.’ And she would come back and say, ‘This is really what you’re looking for—you’ll love this.’ And it would not be plantation life in Latin America. It would be Ceylon, but it would be fantastic. She had an instinct for what was the same story, and what I was looking for. What I was looking for were rules for living in the tropics. I didn’t know that, but that’s what I found.”
Her screenplay work had given her confidence in “intercutting” dialogue among several characters at once, and she enjoyed trying her hand at “big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers—when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes.” She realized when she got within twenty pages of the end that she “still hadn’t delivered [the] revolution” she’d promised earlier in the book. The novel “had a lot of threads, and I’d overlooked this one. So then I had to go back and lay in the preparation for the revolution.” It was like sewing, “setting in a sleeve … I mean I had to work that revolution in on the bias, had to ease out the wrinkles with my fingers.”
She freely embraced the fact that she was writing a “romance,” that her women were “romantic heroines rather than actual women in actual situations.” She had constructed a brooding allegory of the life of our times.
On March 24, 1976, Henry Robbins wrote Didion to say A Book of Common Prayer was a novel of great “power and beauty.” He said, “I see what John means about … perhaps laying on the ambience of rot and death too heavily, but it didn’t and doesn’t bother me … The novel is about death (just as Play It As It Lays was in its different way), and I don’t find these thematic signals intrusive.” He concluded, “It’s a wonderful book, and I know it will be recognized as such—even by those who were frightened of Play It As It Lays. You’re not going to have to wait for the appreciation this time.”
She retreated into her study, surrounded by the magic objects easing her into her dream world and getting her past the “low dread” she felt each morning before beginning to write: postcards from Cartagena, a volume entitled Inside South America, a book of useful phrases (Quiere ser mi testiga, “Do you want to be my witness?”), a newspaper photograph of a man washing blood off the floor of a bombed Caribbean hotel lobby, lists of arms (M2, AR-15, Kalashnikov), lists of names (Graciela, Grace) written on sheets of onionskin paper stapled together, books of botany and medicines (Tropical Nature, An Epilome of the Laboratory Diagnosis and Treatment of Tropical Diseases—“For persistent vomiting: A few drops of 1:1000 solution of adrenalin in a little water, taken by mouth with sips of iced champagne”).
Scattered across her desk were several forty-nine-cent Wire-In-Dex pads of ruled index cards containing images or lines of dialogue: “The oil rainbow slick on the water.” “He runs guns. I wish they had caviar.” Of these last two sentences, Didion said later, “When I heard Charlotte say this [in my mind], I had a very clear fix on who she was.”
She saved newspaper articles on matters that would not make it into the novel, but they indicate how political her thinking had become, and they anticipate future projects: profiles of Vietnamese orphans, of Nicaraguan rebel groups, of money deals in and out of Miami.
There was a Pablo Neruda poem, “A Certain Weariness,” clipped from The New Yorker: “I don’t want to be tired alone. / I want you to grow tired along with me.”
* * *
“As a child of comfortable family in the temperate zone she had been as a matter of course provided with clean sheets, orthodontia, lamb chops, living grandparents … ballet lessons, and casual timely information about menstruation and the care of flat silver,” says Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of A Book of Common Prayer. She is speaking about a woman named Charlotte Douglas.
Grace, in her sixties and dying of cancer, remains, like Conrad’s Marlow, largely in the story’s background, infusing every image in the book with her sensibility—but obliquely. Public, rather than private, incidents dominate the action. “I tell you … about myself only to legitimize my voice,” Grace says.
Charlotte, a “child of the western United States,” had been provided with “faith in the values of certain frontiers on which her family had lived, in the virtues of clean and irrigated land, of high-yield crops, of thrift, industry and the judicial system, of prayers and education, and in the generally upward spiral of history.” In other words, she was a member of the Blue Sky Tribe, and John Wayne rode through her dreams.
But these details are merely introductory, the last remnants of a novel like Run River. “Some women … marry or do not marry with equanimity,” Grace says. “They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They … get up and scramble eggs.”
“So you know the story,” she says dismissively at the start of the novel, preparing us for something else entirely. Though we do not know it yet, the domestic has been swamped by America’s “underwater narrative,” which is powered by nothing that cozy families, in their mortgaged homes, can possibly perceive. Behind the nice houses and the slick new shopping malls, the political class is busy making deals and counterdeals in anonymous rooms in remote terrains that the average citizen cannot find on any map.
Charlotte’s daughter, Marin, a Patty Hearst–type radicalized by the 1960s, goes underground. Charlotte, unhinged by her daughter’s disappearance, and harassed by the FBI in its efforts to find the girl, retreats to a small Latin American country, a place resembling Costaguana in Conrad’s Nostromo. It seems to have “no history”—or maybe too many parallel pasts. It is called Boca Grande: Big Mouth, a vacant maw spewing disputatious language designed to preserve the “deniability” of anyone who passes through the region, since the only visitors here are the “occasional mineral geologist or CIA man traveling on one or another incorporeal AID mission.”
Along the way, Charlotte gives birth to a hydrocephalic baby. It dies a few weeks later: the third dead infant we’ve met (so to speak) in as many Didion novels.
Charlotte waits, in vain, at the Boca Grande airport—as Didion once waited in Panama—for a plane that might connect her, somehow, to her daughter, Marin.
Grace, the widow of a wealthy man with financial stakes in Boca Grande, takes an interest in her fellow exile. Grace was raised in the American West, among transients in a hotel. She feels a kinship, a “common prayer,” with Charlotte (though the childlike Charlotte is far more naive): They’re shaped by the same Blue Sky values, disappointed by greedy, ambitious husbands, adrift now in an unchartable world, their hopes blasted by forces they cannot see, much less confront.
Each night, as Grace rinses her hair, she is aware of Liberian tankers in the bay outside her window, shadows on “incorporeal” missions (Liberian registration is usually a false cover for clandestine ships—slipping the narrative as easily as they slip in and out of foreign harbors).
In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion has cast off the social satire of Edith Wharton with its love of surface contours—a residue of which remained in Play It As It Lays; she has moved beyond the Gothic insularity of Poe, beyond the arbitrary postmodern collages of many of her contemporaries, and into a Melvillean world of confidence men and shifting sight (early on, Charlotte writes a paper on Melville for a college professor who later becomes her husband; he gives her an F).
One night, at the Hotel del Caribe, where Charlotte lives on Boca Grande, the generator flickers out, and she sits “alone in the dark at the ballroom piano until three A.M. picking out with one hand, over and over again and in every possible tempo, the melodic line of a single song.” (The scene recalls Didion’s essay “On the Morning After the Sixties,” where the melancholy father of a Berkeley frat boy tweaked a tune, hoping to find the happy chords of his past—the essay itself an echo of Didion’s dad trying, throughout her childhood, to cheer himself up by playing ragtime piano.) The dance floor, site of so many fairy-tale triumphs, has gone black; still, the abandoned princess keeps trying to find the right structural rhythm, the one continuous line getting her to the end of the only song she was ever taught to play.
But the melody won’t carry on the island of Boca Grande.
None of the usual rituals or forms, nothing on which Charlotte has depended in her temperate life, will suffice now. As Grace says, words—accepted definitions, explanations, points of contact—don’t work here.
* * *
At the end of the novel, once Charlotte has died brutally as a result of her refusal to acknowledge the realities of political violence, Grace locates Marin “in a dirty room in Buffalo” to bear final witness, to tell the girl her mother “always kept [her] in her mind.” Marin, hardened by her radicalism, doesn’t care—or pretends not to. In the end, she does break down.
The scene is a mirror image of the final section of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, when Marlow cannot tell Kurtz’s intended the truth of what happened to her beloved in the wilderness. In Conrad, women, cosseted by strict social expectations, unaware of the world’s primal darkness, must be lied to for their own protection. In Didion, women are exposed to the horror just as much as the men are; if they remain deluded, it’s not because they haven’t tried to see the truth. It’s because, since Conrad’s day, the truth has become a seven-headed cobra (Kalashnikovs, the TRIGA Mark III).
Says Grace, “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”
No one could.
* * *
On August 7, 1976, Didion wrote Lois Wallace, detailing her expectations for a sales strategy in marketing the novel. She trusted Henry Robbins, but perhaps she had already seen that he would hit a wall at Simon & Schuster in attemps to promote literary fiction. Another editor at the house remarked that a novel called A Book of Common Prayer might well end up on the religion shelf. The comment upset Didion, not because she feared she’d have to change her title (she was not about to), but because it suggested a less than wholehearted approach to selling the book. There was no point in pushing a literary novel as a rousing good adventure yarn—futzing with the title made no difference. No. The way to sell a literary novel, Didion said, was to make it An Event. She believed the book had commercial potential if the reading public could be persuaded hers was the novel to buy this year, whether or not they read it: Its appearance was a Major Literary Milestone. Therefore, the sales possibilities lay entirely in S&S promoting the book as A Novel by Joan Didion, with her name in larger letters on the cover than the title. Sell the author and the author’s importance more than the book itself.
The novel’s rollout had to be handled with a kind of arrogant certainty, she said, and she expected Wallace to inject a shot of testosterone into the S&S sales staff.
Whether the letter was prompted by pure anxiety over Simon & Schuster, or genuine confidence after her successful lecture at Berkeley, Didion was sincere in her plan for selling the book. (And she seems to have gotten her way: On the cover of the first-edition hardback, her name, printed in all caps at the top, is bolder than the title.)
She closed her letter by announcing to Wallace that she’d just bought a red fox coat.
* * *
S&S’s Dick Snyder did have a blockbuster mentality and little patience for the placid backwater of literary fiction. In 1974, after a few weak years, he’d resuscitated the company financially with a deal he’d very nearly declined: All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the story of their reporting trail in the Watergate affair.
All the President’s Men became the definition of “blockbuster.” Now, just weeks before the official publication date of A Book of Common Prayer, the movie of the Woodward-Bernstein story, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, was gobbling up review space, pumping new life into the paperback, and generating buzz for this year’s sequel, The Final Days, charting the end of the Nixon presidency. For the foreseeable future, Simon & Schuster would devote its best resources to selling this book. Tricky Dick had screwed Didion.
She bore no animosity toward Carl Bernstein, who had married her friend Nora Ephron in April. A charming rogue, he entertained Didion; she recognized he was probably the sort of man “capable of having sex with a venetian blind” (the reputation preceding, and surviving, his union with Ephron), but he never troubled her with his randiness or his gossip, and they got along fine. He admired her writing. The only potential awkwardness in their friendship occurred around certain others: Ben Stein, another new Didion pal, a former Nixon speechwriter (once rumored to have been Deep Throat), now trying to break into the movie business. Didion and Dunne were enormously helpful to him, introducing him to their picture agents. They were amused by his continuing support for Nixon. “I just think he was a saint!” he’d say. “[So] he was a politician who lied. How remarkable!” Probably not a good idea to herd him into the same room with Bernstein.
The other difficulty was Bernstein’s partner. Woodward didn’t particularly care for Nora Ephron or her social circle. “I just didn’t have the natural connection with Nora,” he admitted. “I remember I heard Nora talk about some dinner and holding a discourse on the kind of lettuce that had been served. ‘Can you believe they served that kind of lettuce?’ There was just this sense that she had been offended … it just wasn’t the way I lived.” He’d never have made it in Old Sac. And—grateful as Didion was for his exposure of the used-car salesman muttering to himself in the White House at night—he didn’t endear himself to her.
2
“I remember going to a party at Joan’s house in Trancas. I did not like the party, but Joan was so incredibly nice. Couldn’t have been more hospitable,” Ben Stein told me. “The people at the party were just uninteresting. I remember sitting at a table with John’s brother Nick, and he was particularly uninteresting.”
“I wasn’t invited [anywhere] much anymore,” Nick said. “In my journal of that period I recorded with names every snub, every slight. Already I had almost jumped in front of a train in Santa Barbara. At the last second I let it pass me. Already I’d had a major flirtation with a kitchen knife that I took to bed with me, as if I could make it happen in my sleep, thereby absolving me of any responsibility in the eyes of God, or so I thought. The love that I felt for Los Angeles turned to hate.” He knew it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to abandon the community altogether. He was no longer a deal maker. That distinction belonged to his brother now.
Working the room, chatting people up, refilling their drinks, Dunne loved to pique his guests’ curiosity, remarking coyly about his efforts on A Star Is Born, “Put it this way, it’s our beads, but it’s not our necklace.”
Didion would just smile, cook, arrange bowls of chicken salad on a table, and replenish the hors d’ouvres trays.
Sometimes, late in the evenings when the parties were winding down, when the chairs had been shoved aside to make space and it seemed that the largest piece of furniture in the room was the ocean outside, Nick’s daughter Dominique and Quintana would walk through the house, grazing on leftovers, Quintana wearing a too-big sweatshirt, her skin lightly reddened from days in the sun. When asked what they’d been doing, the girls said they’d been working.
It was through her parents’ work, before and during the long negotiations over A Star Is Born, that Quintana met Barbra Streisand’s son, Jason. “I wasn’t crazy about their playing in the cage with the pet lion cub, but I figured what the hell, this was Hollywood,” Dunne said.
In the latter half of 1975, Quintana spent a lot of time alone, or with Dominique and Susan Traylor, as her folks fiddled with the script for A Star Is Born.
Their original screenplay was entitled Rainbow Road. “It should make us a lot of money,” Didion said at the outset. “In fact, we saw it basically as a picture about money.”
John Foreman took it to Jerry Schatzberg; the Dunnes were delighted to work with him again. Richard Perry, the music producer recruited by Warner Bros., found the screenplay unrealistic and trite. These people didn’t know their rock ’n’ roll. The Dunnes reworked the story (after screening Seven Days in May and The Third Man to remind themselves of scene composition and pacing; The Third Man, they thought, was the perfect movie).
Meanwhile, Sue Mengers took the screenplay to Streisand, who had an outstanding four- to six-million-dollar contract for a musical in which she would perform six songs. The contract called for the movie to be delivered by December 1976. Streisand detested the script. The man’s part was bigger than the female lead’s. This picture had no romance.
Streisand’s latest boyfriend, Jon Peters, an illiterate hairdresser with dreams of producing movies, saw the script and asked Streisand to reconsider the part. “I had seen Barbra at the Cocoanut Grove … [W]hen [she] sang … the power she had—the magic in her fingers and face—controlled the entire room,” he said. He wanted to reproduce that experience on-screen, and he convinced Streisand he could do it. “Jon has a way of seeing me, he knows me as a woman, as a sexual being, and I’m tired of being just Funny Girl, a self-deprecating waif,” she said now. Peters bumped aside John Foreman as executive producer; Schatzberg fled the project.
Years later, in a book proposal distilling his life story, Peters (working with the writer William Stadiem) took complete credit for A Star Is Born. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said:
Jon’s brainstorm was to do a rock ’n’ roll version of A Star Is Born … Los Angeles had replaced London as the center of the rock universe, a universe in which Jon fancied himself a player who wanted to become a master. He also wanted to make Barbra over to be cool and hip, not just a Broadway icon. Here was his chance to have it all … Jon even found a script of the remake called “Rainbow Road,” by Hollywood’s then most powerful and prestigious screenwriting couple, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The only problem was that Jon could not read it. His illiteracy was his darkest, most shameful secret … The showdown script meetings between the reformatory dropout [Peters] and the snobby intellectual Dunnes was the stuff of farce. The dropout won. He fired the Dunnes and went through draft after draft with the biggest scribes in the business.
Peters’s memoir was never published. His assertions that the Dunnes were cowed by him and that he fired them do not square with the couple’s recollections. Already, prior to Streisand’s commitment, the Dunnes worried that “A Star Is Born was becoming a career” and they wanted to abandon it, Dunne said. Then, when Streisand came aboard, “[v]enality forced us to reconsider … with Barbra Streisand involved, we knew we weren’t going to get poor.”
Soon Peters was referring to the project as “my film” and “my concept.” The Dunnes looked for a way out. He just wanted to shoot his girlfriend’s ass. “We couldn’t … quit, because then we would have been in breach of contract and lost our ‘points,’ or percentage of the profits,” Dunne wrote. “Nor could we be fired, because then we would have left with our points intact, and the business people would have none of that. They wanted to give us some of our points back, which we refused to do until it was stipulated that we could leave without being in breach. It took eight weeks to negotiate this point.”
Meanwhile, Peters said he could direct. He said he could star in the movie. He said he could sing—“Put a band behind me, and I can sing. If not, shout around me.” Finally, the studio convinced him to let the veteran Frank Pierson direct the film. “The Didion/Dunne third draft script [was] by far the best—sharp and tough-minded,” Pierson said. But by now, Peters was adamant: The movie should be a thinly disguised version of his love affair with Streisand. She agreed. “People are curious: they want to know about us,” she said. “That’s what they come to see.”
Pierson asked the studio heads why they’d allowed a callow egotist like Jon Peters to take control of a six-million-dollar musical. “It doesn’t matter,” he was told. “It would be nice if the picture was good, but the bottom line is to get [Streisand] to the studio. Shoot her singing six numbers and we’ll make sixty million.”
3
Throughout the months of writing both A Book of Common Prayer and the screenplay for A Star Is Born, Didion found Zen-like relief from the pressures of her work in the mundane rituals of shopping, cooking, controlling what went into her refrigerator (though it’s also true that, as she worked on her novel and Dunne worked on his, days would pass when no one spoke to anyone else in the house, no one made meals or opened the mail). More than anything else, she took pleasure in meditative retreats to certain locations along the coast and in activities she shared with her daughter.
For company and moral support, she hoped to take Quintana on the road with her during the tour S&S was busy arranging for A Book of Common Prayer (the publisher’s attempt to create an event; at least it was something).
“We are going to miss planes, we are going to miss meals, we are going to lose luggage,” Didion warned Quintana.
“And … and then what?” Quintana asked.
“No matter what happens, we’ll be fine.”
In the meantime, Quintana volunteered a few hours a month as a nurse’s aide at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where she had been born. Didion always made sure her blue-and-white pinafore was clean. Quintana swam regular laps back to shore from beyond the Zuma Beach breakers (having been dropped off by a boat) as part of her training in the Junior Lifeguards program. One day, when Didion went there to pick her up, she found her daughter huddled, all alone, in a towel behind a dune. The beach was deserted. The lifeguards had insisted on taking everyone home—“for absolutely no reason,” Quintana told her mother. There must be a reason, Didion said. “Only the sharks,” Quintana said. “They were just blues.”
The lifeguards’ lookout, a pale blue wooden structure in the center of Zuma Beach (near the spot where Charlton Heston had discovered the shattered Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes), was a cozy enclave to which Didion would love to have retreated. “I would drive past Zuma some late foggy nights and see [men] moving around behind the lookout’s lighted windows, the only other souls awake in all of northern Malibu,” she said. “It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea.” Once, after a Santa Ana wind off the Mojave Desert had set ablaze 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County, with soot blighting the beaches, clouding the high tide, making it look like tinfoil burned in an oven, the lifeguards’ bunker seemed to her even more essentially safe, a squat, solid hut in the midst of “some grave solar dislocation.”
But her absolute favorite retreat, where she went to eat lunch by herself, was Arthur Freed Orchids. She’d drive past cheap new motels and condominiums, past rolling straw-colored hills smelling like mud-caked wooden trowels, and pull into a tucked-away complex of greenhouses full of the “most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” They reminded her of the greenhouse she used to haunt, walking home from school when she was nine—where she “used up” the air, according to the owner. Here, the keeper of the plants, an Jalisco-born middle-aged man named Amado Vazquez, left her alone in the perfect atmosphere (seventy-two degrees, 60 percent humidity), among the phalaenopsis (most fertile “at full moon because in nature it must be pollinated by a night-flying moth,” he told her). “He seemed to assume that I had my own reasons for being there,” Didion said. “He would speak only to offer a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”
Eventually, Vazquez bought out Arthur Freed and opened his own place, Zuma Canyon Orchids—it stands today, among tall Monterey pines and dusty agave plants, cactus gardens and herb gardens, off a winding road pocked with flood-warning signs.
To Didion, Vazquez was the embodiment of Zen, an expression of the deepest caring in each delicate touch of a petal—of a Leopard Prince, a Walnut Valley Halo, purple, white, and orange—in each gentle tug of the pulleys and chains releasing cascades of water among the swaying leaves in row after row along the greenhouse walls.
“I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved,” Didion said, and she never wanted to leave.
“You want to know how I feel about the plants?” he confided in her one day. “I’ll tell you. I will die in orchids.”
* * *
Of course, Sacramento was Didion’s oldest, surest retreat. As with her previous three books, she had gone there to finish A Book of Common Prayer, undisturbed by visitors, her daughter, or ringing telephones. When she’d reached the last chapters, she felt she had become impossible to live with, fighting over everything, unable to cope with Quintana’s need for help on her homework. “I’m like a child in my parents’ house,” she said.
Eduene, silent, left her alone.
4
“A Book of Common Prayer was an evil impulse,” Noel Parmentel told me in the summer of 2013. “A hostile act against a close friend.”
He remains convinced that a character in the novel, Warren Bogart, Charlotte Douglas’s drunk and abusive ex-husband, the estranged father of her child, was based on him. He feels the portrait was defamatory.
“Lewis Lapham called me and said, ‘It’s all about you!’ Part of it was published in Harper’s. I thought, My God, look at this. Sidney Zion, a lawyer for writers [best known for outing Daniel Ellsberg as the one who leaked the Pentagon Papers] said I should threaten a lawsuit against Joan and the publisher. He thought they’d settle.”
On January 28, 1977, Parmentel wrote Dick Snyder at S&S, Cc-ing Didion and Lois Wallace, warning him not to publish this “calumny.” He said the characterization was malicious, a serious invasion of his privacy, and extremely damaging to him personally.
Wallace called him. “Noel, it’s not about you,” she said.
“Come on. Get serious,” he replied.
He wouldn’t talk to Didion. “She tried to get in touch with me. I wouldn’t,” he said. “The deed had been done. Lawyers were advising her. I don’t know why she did it. I suspect it was Greg. I have a hunch he told Joan, ‘Noel won’t get mad. He’s seen it before.’”
A suggestive line in the novel, describing Charlotte, may indicate how Didion had often felt when caught between her husband’s affections and a lingering regard for her former lover: “[S]he was incapable of walking normally across the room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not.” On some level, as well as being a story about mothers and daughters, A Book of Common Prayer may also have been a book of demarcations.
Simon & Schuster responded to Parmentel’s threat with a curt letter denying his charge, but adding, in any case, that “it would [not] be legally improper” for Didion to have based a character on him in a work of fiction. “Were we or any other publisher to accede to this kind of unjustified complaint, it would give a power of censorship over every book … to every person who believes they can show a resemblance to themselves in the text,” the letter said.
“The problem was, I couldn’t prove ‘malice,’” Parmentel said. Nor could he afford a protracted lawsuit. It saddened him to see his long friendship with Didion end in such a fashion, but he never spoke to her again. “What got me mad was I didn’t spend time with Quintana anymore,” he told me. “I used to see her as a child in Hartford. I was her godfather. I didn’t get to see her grow up.”
5
Quintana’s math book and her unsolved equations sprawled across the hotel desk, among scattered pages of the Boston Ritz-Carlton’s stationery. Quintana was napping in the next room, in a giant bed covered with Judy Blume books.
Didion ordered iced drinks from room service and sat answering a reporter’s questions. She and her daughter had been on the road now for over a week, on the Common Prayer book tour. Radio stations and television stations in New York, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston—they were all the same cramped space: wicker settees and camera cables and Styrofoam cups half filled with cold coffee. Always the same uninflected questions were posed: “Where are we heading … [and where were they heading] ‘as Americans’ … or ‘as American women’”? It didn’t matter what she said; the shows’ hosts were only looking for her to fill three or four minutes of airtime until the next hair spray commercial. Most of them had no idea what her book was about and some of them never got its name right—or hers, either, for that matter.
Hotel rooms: the St. Regis, the Ritz-Carlton, the Jefferson. Quintana became deft and efficient at ringing up room service: lamb chops, consommé, oatmeal, crab salad. She ordered bourbon on the rocks for her mother and signed for her Shirley Temples. She learned to call for the car whenever her mother had an appointment with an interviewer, and if the car failed to show up on time, she knew to check the itinerary and phone the Simon & Schuster publicity director. Her mother had always hated talking on the telephone, and Quintana was happy to make the arrangements.
Of course, this wasn’t Quintana’s first experience with extended hotel stays and her mother’s on-the-go work schedule. (“She’s remarkably well-adjusted,” Nick once observed. “Considering that every time I see her she’s in a different city.”) There were the frequent trips to Hawaii. There were the three weeks of rock gigs. And once, when she was five or six, her parents had taken her to Tucson, where they huddled with a script producer on a picture called The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, starring Paul Newman.
It took Didion many years to admit these business trips might have had a powerful, and not purely positive, effect on her daughter.
For example, in 1973, in an essay later published in The White Album, Didion mentioned Quintana only in passing in her haste to tell a funny anecdote: “We go out to dinner in Tucson: the sitter tells me that she has obtained for her crippled son an autographed picture of Paul Newman. I ask how old her son is. ‘Thirty-four,’ she says.”
In 2011, in Blue Nights, Didion expanded this story, admitting more agency: “The Hilton Inn, where the production was based during its Tucson location, sent a babysitter to stay with [Quintana] while we watched the dailies. The babysitter asked her to get Paul Newman’s autograph. A crippled son was mentioned. Quintana got the autograph, delivered it to the babysitter, then burst into tears. It was never clear to me whether she was crying about the crippled son or about feeling played by the babysitter.”
As a consequence of her mother’s job. At five or six years old.
“[S]he had no business in these hotels,” Didion finally conceded.
She also said she found the name of Quintana’s birth mother in the Tucson telephone directory. She said she took the directory to her husband and they told the producer there should be no media reports about the Dunnes’ presence in Arizona: “[U]nder no condition should Quintana’s name appear in connection with the picture.” Didion didn’t want to risk meeting the mother on the set one day, asking to see her daughter.
Most likely, as in the incident of the lecture hall at Berkeley, she put her husband up to talking to the film’s producer. “I believed as I did so that I was protecting both Quintana and her mother,” she wrote.
Now, on the S&S book tour, Quintana was out and about each day, highly public and active, in many ways her mother’s best representative. In D.C., The Washington Post’s Katharine Graham asked her, “How do you like our monuments?” “What monuments?” Quintana said. She’d not had time for the Lincoln or Washington Memorials. She’d been too busy learning her way around newsrooms and the National Public Radio broadcast booths. “Had an interesting talk with Carl Bernstein,” she wrote in the journal her fifth-grade teacher had asked her to keep on the tour as part of an English assignment. She chatted with Peggy Noonan, soon to be one of Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters—Noonan was then working at WEEI radio in Boston. Quintana got to hear the latest Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac records before anyone else in the country. She made sure her mother didn’t forget to pack her thousand-watt hair blower whenever they left a hotel.
Quintana’s favorite city was Dallas. She liked its flat horizon. Boston made the bottom of her list: It was “all white,” she said. “You mean you didn’t see many black people in Boston?” Susan Traylor’s mother asked her once she got home. “No,” Quintana said. “I mean it’s not in color.”
In the air, Didion and her daughter traveled first-class—S&S was no longer an old-fashioned gentlemen’s publisher. Stamped across Didion’s itinerary was the bland phrase “A Division of Gulf & Western Corporation.” She was now part of a loose conglomeration of companies, none of them having anything to do with one another except being owned by the same giant and owing that giant a profit. Books were an afterthought in the giant’s global transactions.
What’s that title again?
She traveled the way her brother, a corporate real-estate broker, traveled—in style, regretting that most Americans were too soft these days to make it cross-country by wagon: “[W]e were often, my child and I, the only female passengers, and I apprehended for the first time those particular illusions of mobility which power American business”—and the political class. “Time was money. Motion was progress. Decisions were snap.” She perceived that the planet’s economics, trade deals, and wars, all indistinguishable, were driven mostly by men sipping gin and tonics in climate-controlled cabins above the clouds, keeping tenuous ties to people and places on the ground’s shaky crust.
6
An Event? A Book of Common Prayer sold moderately well, even made the bestseller lists in certain local markets. It earned over $100,000 in paperback sales. But the publishing experience dismayed Didion. She and her agent wrangled with S&S and Pocket Books (the paperback publisher) over royalty statements, which they considered consistently inaccurate and far too low; eventually, Simon & Schuster remaindered hundreds of hardback copies.
Predictably, Kirkus gave Didion a hard time, proclaiming, in its review, that she offered readers “more sad songs,” in a “glossy, synthetic” novel whose characters were not “really alive.” Russell Davies, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, said the novel seemed more European than American in expressing doubt about “its own capacity to come up with the truth” about anything: “This is a manner and stance much favored by German writers today, but whereas the contemporary Germans seem to have … moral relativity on the brain chiefly because they are embarrassed to have at the backs of their minds moral certainties about the German past, Ms. Didion’s obliqueness is more a matter of temperamental dread … [stemming from the] rhythmic, natural chaos of womanhood,” he wrote. His assessment reveals how difficult it has always been for even sophisticated readers to accept American political novels—as though, relative to Europe, America’s past was not bloody enough to warrant uncertainty and “moral relativity”: these states of mind, then, must be factors of gender.
On the other hand, Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Times, recognized Didion’s heroine as “a not untypical North American who simply revises history, personal and collective, as she goes along … a martyr, perhaps, to our ‘generally upward spiral of history.’” Oates said Didion was “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.”
* * *
“The oft-rewritten script, attributed in its final version to John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion, and Frank Pierson … cannot even begin to convey why the highly successful rock star John Norman Howard … is going to pot … beyond ascribing it all to some undefined death wish we are meant to take for granted in these post-Joplin-Hendrix-Morrison days,” said John Simon in his review of A Star Is Born.
In Newsweek, Jay Cocks noted, “A concert sequence, where the debuting Barbra brings a hostile rocker audience to their feet with the wonder of her funkiness, is a milestone of piquant absurdity, equivalent, perhaps, to having Kate Smith conquer Woodstock.”
“During the filming, [Streisand] claimed that there weren’t enough close-ups of her,” Simon said. “[S]he re-edited the film to suit her enormous ego … [It] makes me marvel at the megalomania of the whole undertaking. And then I realize … that this hyperbolic ego and bloated countenance are things people shell out money for as for no other actress; that this progressively more belligerent caterwauling can sell anything—concerts, records, movies. And I feel as if our entire society were ready to flush itself down in something even worse than a collective death wish—a collective will to live in ugliness and self-debasement.”
The Dunnes weren’t worried. Their lawyer, Morton Leavy, got them $175,000 up front for their work on the script, plus a “windfall” settlement, “including a stipulation that we share in the music and record royalties, a clause not previously included in our contract,” Dunne said. The movie went on to earn over $66 million, a percentage of which made a nice payday for the snobby intellectuals.
* * *
On March 28, 1977, while Didion and Quintana were staying at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, finishing up their tour for A Book of Common Prayer, Streisand took the stage at the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles to perform “Evergreen,” the love theme from A Star Is Born. Two months earlier, on the Dunnes’ thirteenth wedding anniversary, Quintana had watched the Golden Globes at home on television with her father. Didion had had a migraine that night and had gone to bed early. Streisand won several awards, including Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy, for A Star Is Born. At one point, Dunne went into the bedroom to tell his wife happy anniversary. To cheer her up, he said, “Quintana just said, ‘Barbra went up there three times, and she never once thanked us.’”