1
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Sacramento mobilized. By two P.M., McClellan Field was scrambling hundreds of Curtiss P-40s and B-26 Marauders for flights to Alaska, where they would be prepped for battle. Thomas Monk, the city’s mayor, ordered security details to guard the levees in case the mainland was attacked. On December 8, the mayor mandated citywide blackouts. Three days earlier, Didion turned seven. The festive atmosphere surrounding her birthday celebration soured quickly and then the world went dark. In the past, in San Francisco or on Stinson Beach, Didion, staring out over the waves, had mentally navigated Hawaii’s shores. The place loomed large in the minds of well-to-do Californians: a paradise within easy cruising distance. But now it was a smudged spot in the atlas. A territory called “War.”
After the attack on Hawaii, Didion’s father was assigned by the U.S. Army Air Corps to travel from Fort Lewis in Washington State to Durham, North Carolina, and finally to Peterson Field in Colorado. He would take his family with him, fragmenting Didion’s formal schooling from the end of first grade until the fourth. Military records indicate that Frank Didion joined the National Guard in 1939. His family had a long history with the Guard; his uncle Edward Reese served with distinction in the Guard’s hospital corps in San Francisco following that city’s massive earthquake and fire in 1906. It did not escape the Didions that military enlistment was often a conduit to business opportunities. Frank would remain in the military much of his life, working for the Selective Service as a procurement officer in Sacramento, becoming a major in the Air Corps, and finally retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in August 1965.
In his early thirties when the United States entered World War II, Frank stayed stateside, helping the army settle financial affairs. Specifically, he wrapped up outstanding World War I–era contracts, clearing the path for new business.
What this meant for Didion was saying good-bye to her friends. From now on, she’d experience reading not as something you did in school, but something you did on your own wherever you were: a secret pleasure. “I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it,” she said. “I [had] a literary idea of experience, and I still don’t know where all the lies are.”
In Tacoma, Washington, housing on base and even in town was overcrowded because of the sudden arrival of so many soldiers. Eduene scrambled to find accommodations for her family, going every morning to the army housing office to try to claim a room somewhere. Didion remembered seeing her mother cry for the first time one day outside the housing office. “Meanwhile, we were living in a hotel with a shared bathroom,” Didion recalled. “It was in sort of a nice part of town. I don’t think it was a bad hotel, but it was a period in American life when hotel rooms didn’t necessarily come with bathrooms. So my mother, I remember her emptying an entire bottle of pine-scented disinfectant into the bathtub every time she gave us a bath.” Eventually, the Didions found a single room to rent in a nearby guesthouse. “It’s an adventure,” Eduene told her daughter, trying to be cheerful. “It’s wartime, it’s history, you children will be thankful you got to see all this.”
Soon, Frank was transferred to North Carolina to sort through army records at Duke University. He traveled ahead. Eduene followed sometime later with the children. They took a train to Union Station in Los Angeles and from there caught the Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited, stopping once in New Orleans, spending a night at the St. Charles Hotel, a much finer establishment than they had known in Tacoma. The train was jammed with military personnel. Often Eduene and the kids were forced to stand in the couplings between cars, inhaling smoke and the smell of grease. One day, while the train was stopped on its way through the Southwest, a young sailor got off, bought a bottle of Coke for Eduene and a Navajo bracelet for Didion. Eduene thanked him graciously. Even in wearying circumstances, she was determined to keep up a respectable appearance, wearing a plaid seersucker suit, spectator pumps, and sometimes, when she could get them—as in New Orleans—white gardenias in her hair. She dressed her daughter in cardigans and pleated skirts. Her usual “non-depressed” performance slipped into sternness on the road, stiffened by the effort not to be humiliated. As for Didion, in the midst of confusion, her love of drama got plenty of nutrition. Her mother was right: This was an adventure. The sailor said he had survived the downing of the USS Wasp.
In Durham, the Didions again lived in one room, this one in a house owned by a Baptist preacher and his family. In the evenings, Didion would sit on the house’s wide wooden porch, listening to cicadas, sipping a Grapette or eating peach ice cream straight out of quart cartons with the preacher’s hulking daughters, hoping to play with their Gone With the Wind paper dolls. They never let her.
In sweltering midafternoons, other children on the block slithered under back stoops to eat dirt rich with clay, using a piece of raw potato as a spoon. Eduene told Didion the kids did this because of a physical condition called pica. “Poor children do it,” she said. The clay satisfied some craving untouched by their regular diet. “You never would have learned that in Sacramento,” Eduene said with a doubtful sense of accomplishment.
Sometimes during this uprooted period, Didion attended local schools; other times she didn’t (she skipped second grade altogether). Later, she would say she missed absorbing certain fundamental skills, such as subtraction, which she never mastered. She did learn, by rote, the poem “In Flanders Fields” for Armistice Day commemorations, wearing a stiff red poppy to class, pinned to her dress, but making little connection between the heroics of World War I, viewed on scratchy film strips in visual-aids rooms, and the military regulations her father endured on each new base he visited.
One day, near the end of the family’s stay in North Carolina, Eduene noticed her baby boy, Jim, reaching for something through the bars of his playpen: a copperhead, making its way through the room, eventually leaving, possibly to cool itself in the shade of a back stoop where the neighborhood children cradled their raw potatoes.
At Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, Didion first saw war. Though the family found decent housing here—a four-room bungalow—and Didion’s routine was steadier, with regular classes at Columbia School and a Brownie troop, the base was spartan, its movements paced to the grim precision of emergency measures. The field was still being developed; many of its landing strips were temporary, lanes of dust kicked up by razor winds in eye-piercing gusts. Tar-paper barracks lined the perimeter, along with a small Officers’ Club. Inside the club, in the late afternoons, Didion would sit, mesmerized by a display of fake blue rain behind the bar. About the time the Didions arrived, the field was named after 1st Lt. Edward J. Peterson, who had crashed here when the left engine of his twin-engine F-4 failed. He had been pulled alive from the flaming wreckage but later died of his burns. Didion heard stories about him, hushed and incomplete and in passing, and probably thought of him each time a noisy B-24 Liberator landed, rattling the house’s windows. She recalled writing a letter to her grandmother about the field’s new name, and she remembered how “pilots kept spiraling down through the high thin Colorado air. The way you knew was that you heard the crash wagons.” Hard work, sacrifice, and terror: the rhythm of conflict. Uncertainty ruled the days. Though the bungalow was nice enough, Eduene refused to unpack the family’s belongings. What difference did it make? she wondered. “Orders” could arrive at any moment, sending them packing. What were these “orders”? Did someone knock at the door with them? Whatever they were, they kept life tense, and they flattened Didion’s mother. In certain blue hours, Eduene roused herself. At base barbecues, she wore flowers in her hair. She made her daughter give a soldier apple-blossom soap as a going-away present the day he got transferred. She gave her daughter a copy of Emily Post’s book of etiquette and taught her how to accept and decline formal invitations. She told her daughter that after the war the family would move to Paris, where Frank would study architecture at the Sorbonne.
At Peterson Field, Didion encountered John Wayne. It was in a Quonset hut, and it was midafternoon. Outside, the wind was hot, stirring the yellow columbine. The B-24s were rumbling. It was the summer of 1943. The movie was War of the Wildcats, and it was love at first sight. His gestures, his voice, his deference toward women, his slow stoicism … together, if all this didn’t add up to “orders,” it’s what “orders” should have been. In an unsettled time, Wayne’s firm presence was just what the world needed. He was more confident than the men she had known, but he had that familiar, easy pioneer spirit. When he told the girl in the movie he would buy her a house at the bend in the bright river, Didion knew right where she belonged.
2
In essays, memoirs, and interviews, Didion has always underplayed her family’s itinerant period as a factor in her development as a writer, but we should not dismiss it so casually. A number of experiences, working with and against her memories of Sacramento, coincided then to seed her future style.
In Colorado Springs, the bungalow’s garden backed up to a psychiatric hospital. Didion used to take her notebook to the hospital grounds to record snippets of anguished dialogue. Discussing her memories of these episodes in Blue Nights, she ended with a flourish stylistically pleasing, but frustrating in its refusal to examine the emotional impact of sneaking around listening to people in pain: “I did not at the time think this an unreasonable alternative to staying in Sacramento and going to school.” This sentence, a neat rhetorical feint, was reminiscent of The White Album, written over thirty years earlier, when she elided her own psychiatric evaluation. In the title essay, she said her alienated condition did “not now seem … an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.”
The Blue Nights account reinforces the image of the lonely writer obsessed with loss first seen in “On Keeping a Notebook.” Just as, in the essay, she distinguished her discontented self from the more reasonable, better-adjusted people around her—her mother, her daughter—she said in Blue Nights that her four-year-old brother “scouted the neighborhood, and made friends” in Colorado while she brooded alone over dark doings in a scary place and dreamed up stories. No doubt the frequent moves isolated her, made her an outsider, and deepened her natural reserve (a schoolmate told her she was “military trash”). But more profound changes were afoot.
For one thing, her little brother wasn’t the only one meeting new people. On the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, Didion wasn’t always alone. Several afternoons, the daughter of a resident doctor accompanied her on her eavesdropping missions. This girl also carried a notebook and captured talk through open windows. At the end of the day, the two spies would convene to see who had gotten the best bits. Writing, then, was a social activity, and Didion was competitive about it.
She never forgot she was the daughter of a woman who “gave teas,” yet here she was among tar-paper shacks, dirt runways, training aircraft, trucks, and jeeps. Her mother wasn’t wrong: She was seeing things she would never see in Sacramento, but much of the time she wasn’t sure what she saw. Just looking was no longer good enough. The act of watching required backstory and judgment. Her descriptive powers were tested by alien objects, incidents, and details, but more than this, she was glimpsing a world of men. She was not tempted to become a tomboy, but she saw how Sacramento had cosseted her. It’s no surprise that, in just a few years, she would be receptive to Ernest Hemingway. The appeal was not just his style but the subjects on which he turned it—many of them familiar to her now.
Through solitary doggedness, Didion began to fashion a literary purpose. Like Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, she was a reporter. Her methods were surreptitious. She was not trying to write war stories, but stories of people suffering inner torment.
Not “an unreasonable alternative,” not “an inappropriate response”: From the beginning, certainty was one of her strengths, no matter how often she denied it (looking back, she called it “false bravery”). A young woman who could write, early in her career, that “for some time now [she had] felt radically separated from most of the ideas that seem to interest other people” is a woman comfortable with her voice on the page, a writer already experienced and confident despite her protests of frailty, and a woman in no way interested in apologizing for her point of view.
This point of view firmed up in wartime as she followed her father around the country. Only by leaving Sacramento could she begin—consciously or not—to glean she was a Westerner with firm Western attitudes: a stance she would develop more aggressively as she grew older, became more aware, and pursued writing as a vocation. “As far as my sense of place, I idealized Sacramento during those years,” she once said. “I was just yearning to get home.”
This did not mean her literary fantasies rejected Manhattan; one of her favorite pastimes on the army bases was reading Mademoiselle and Vogue. One day, in Colorado Springs, “we were snowbound,” Didion recalled, and she and her mother were looking through a magazine. “Vogue used to have a contest for college seniors [offering a trip to New York], and my mother … pointed it out to me as something I could win when I got old enough.”
Despite her early portraits of writer as isolated, maladjusted child, her memory of her mother’s encouragement shows how bookish the family really was; she had tacit permission to pursue the pleasures of her notebook. Several members of her mother’s family wrote verse. With Eduene’s editorial help, Didion’s maternal grandfather, Herman Daniel Jerrett, published in 1915 with a small Sacramento press a slender volume entitled California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today, dedicated to “my dear mother who crossed the plains with her parents and relatives in their own train of fifteen wagons, leaving their old home.” In 1963, the year Didion published her first novel, he released Hills of Gold, again with a small press in Sacramento, tackling, he said, “historical questions of a controversial character.”
In Where I Was From, Didion referred to her grandfather as an “innocent” from the mountains, but she adored him. He was much on her mind during her childhood exile from Sacramento. The importance of his literary activity lay not just in modeling for her the possibility of being a writer but also in teaching her to reject certain delusions. Inadvertently, he cast doubts on the family legacy. For example, in California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today, he called California’s crops sources of “enthusiasm and pride” for the state, and irrigation a “necessity for the production of fruits.” He wrote this as a major California landowner whose fields depended on irrigation, while managing the Loon Lake Water and Power Company, which set irrigation policies. Many years passed before Didion could see past the surface of her grandfather’s text to his self-interest. This process of rereading and rethinking what she thought she knew would eventually help her write Where I Was From. The habit of questioning, of comparing what she knew with fresh experiences and alternative viewpoints, began to take root on the road from Washington to North Carolina to Colorado.
* * *
If the world went dark for Didion during Sacramento’s blackouts just days after her seventh birthday, darkness seemed to assume a personal shape and intent while she was eight years old and living in Colorado. One day, during a fire drill at the Columbia School, her right temple began to ache and she experienced the sensation that something had been “taken out of the middle” of her vision. She had lost something “mentally” as well. It was not just a headache. It “brutalize[d] me,” she said. The school called her mother, who took her home. Didion lay listless in bed. Her conversation drifted. After a while, Eduene took her to the infirmary at Peterson Field, where an Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema, useless in relieving the pain.
Maybe her mother was right after all. Maybe she did need the quiet of darkened rooms and the fussing of Sunday aunts.
Didion learned that her grandmother, her mother, and her father had all suffered from migraines most of their lives—“those sick headaches my family brought west with the seeds.” She had inherited the malady. It worsened during her adolescence and young adulthood, and though she would eventually learn to live with the recurring pain, she would never be entirely free of it. As recently as 2011, she would tell a filmmaker, interviewing her for a documentary, “I have [a migraine] right now. I have to fight for certain words. I can see you, but if you were to hold up a sign … I couldn’t read the sign, probably.”
“It seemed to me that my life was totally unmanageable because it could be taken over at any time by a headache,” she said. This helplessness, compounded by not knowing when the next set of “orders” would upend the family’s life again, disconcerted Didion, but it may have fed her self-image as a perversely “special” child whose main solace was writing. Nothing could motivate a person to become a “lonely rearranger” of things as much as sudden visitations of pain.
3
“My sense was that we lived in the only possible place where we could be, that we paid this immense price to be there. That sense was part of who I was,” Didion said. Before Washington, North Carolina, and Colorado, she did not question the “immense price” paid by her ancestors in their arduous continental crossings. California was the “only possible place” for her family because her family had fought so hard to secure land there. But after seeing a bit of the continent, after returning to Sacramento, only to have fallen behind in school, the “dumb girl” in class, ostracized by social circles formed while she was gone, she began to perceive she was the one paying an “immense price to be there.” Her ancestry was a burden and a trap. What had happened to her mother’s promise of Paris? Eduene said her husband felt the family had an obligation to return to California.
Didion was happy to scan the flat horizons again (claustrophobic, all those mountains and trees!), happy to run through the tule fog in the winter and feel the summer heat. It made her strangely content when it rained so hard that the Natomas, the low-lying highway out to the airport, flooded. The land seemed to float. “There was a certain way that possibilities would seem to open up when the sun went down on really hot days,” she recalled years later.
It was near the end of 1943 when Eduene and the kids returned to Sacramento. Frank went on to Detroit to settle more defense contracts. “I think Mother just couldn’t face looking for another room in Detroit,” Didion said. Eduene’s mother and father took them in, in the house on Highland Avenue, while Frank served out the war. Didion attended the Arden School. “When the school was first built, it was in the middle of nowhere,” Kel Munger, a reporter for the Sacramento News and Review, told me. “It was mostly for the ranch and farm children—the white children. Of course, the kids of the people who actually worked the land were Mexican. The city didn’t integrate the schools until Didion was much older.” Already, in 1943, the “middle of nowhere” was showing signs of becoming suburbia: a development the Didions hated.
Didion connected with none of her teachers. The “idea that I was smarter than other people” was “very rapidly punctured,” Didion said. She felt she “didn’t get socialised” because of the family moves. She withdrew at school. She couldn’t be cheered at home. She had little in common with her brother, who loved to chase his bouncy boxer dog through streets and fields, and had a chipper disposition.
She took to missing the bus after school and walking home so she could pass a commercial greenhouse. The silence, the closed-in heat, the way the sloped glass panes focused diffuse sunlight appealed to her. She’d offer a nickel to buy a pansy, hoping the greenhouse keeper would let her spend the rest of the day there. He told her a nickel wouldn’t cut it. She was “using up the air.”
Often, migraines sent her to bed. On weekend outings, she’d cry and say she was afraid of the ski lift. She was afraid of rivers and sinkholes, afraid of snakes, afraid of the violence in comic books. The bridge over the Sacramento River? It was going to come crashing down someday. She exasperated her mother. Eduene couldn’t promise her she would always be safe. What did promises mean to a woman who felt that nothing mattered? Eduene would sit across the table from her daughter in the kitchen, playing double solitaire. Shouldn’t a mother teach her little girl to iron? To scramble an egg? “If you never learn how, you’ll simply never have to,” Eduene explained with a shrug, tossing another card onto the discard pile.
“It was mystifying to my mother why I was so despondent,” Didion said. In an early essay, “On Going Home,” she wrote, “We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place I came from.” With Eduene, also despondent, often distant, she began “a guerilla war we never understood.”
* * *
From Detroit, Frank brought Didion three silk twill handkerchiefs purchased at the J. L. Hudson Company. A saleswoman there had told him all the fashionable young girls these days wore them around their necks: orange, brown, and emerald green. Frank had never bought his daughter a gift—not without his wife’s prodding. Didion was overwhelmed by the beauty of the silk, and even more awed by the fact that her father considered her a young lady. She sat with him for lunch: cracked crab and iced tea in a silver pitcher. A proper grown-up now, she reached for the pitcher to fill her glass and dropped the heavy thing, splashing tea all over the table. It was the mistake of a child, not the act of a young girl deserving gorgeous silk handkerchiefs. She ran to her room and locked the door.
4
The world war had been good to Sacramento. Though the Didions complained about the cosmetic and social changes spurred by war-related development, they prospered from it. McClellan Field had become enormously important to the war effort and helped establish the Sacramento Valley as a future center of weapons research and industry. Following Pearl Harbor, most of the B-25s and other U.S. Army Air Corps planes sent to the Pacific theater were prepared at McClellan. In just a few years, Aerojet-General would build a facility in nearby Rancho Cordova. Founded by Caltech scientists, Aerojet began manufacturing jet-assisted takeoff rockets in 1941, giving extra boosts to airplanes operating from aircraft carriers. The company’s arrival in Rancho Cordova, and its need for worker housing, would be a boon to the Didion clan, which owned several hundred acres in the area.
Housing revitalized downtown as well. A resolution adopted by the Sacramento City Council on June 26, 1942, indicates that J. Frank Didion, Joan’s grandfather, “Tax Collector of the County of Sacramento,” conveyed to the county a large tract of land between A Street and the American River, profiting handsomely.
Buoyed by the defense industry, many of the Okie families in the Central Valley left the migrant camps, renting and even buying small houses in growing communities and towns. Okie kids jammed the hallways of Arden School. Didion picked up their characteristic drawl, the slightly nasal register, the flattening of vowels, and the tendency to stretch one-syllable words into two. As late as the 1970s, in a television interview with Tom Brokaw, Didion’s accent sounds unmistakably “Okie” to an Oklahoman. As she grew older, her voice lost that Great Plains edge, though not the habit of trailing off, as if she were speaking into the wind. Whether this was another Dust Bowl influence, her natural reticence, or a combination of the two, it’s hard to say. But it stood in contrast to her confident handwriting, which settled into its lifelong gait around this time, the phrases pressed hard into the page like inscriptions in stone, straight lines with leafy g’s and t’s crossed backward, tempting the reader to turn and start each sentence again.
At school dances, the music had a rough twang now, a beat like the thumping of an old flat tire, a lilt of gospel, a gumbo of folk and blues. Okie tunes: country, swing, a little black holler church, and proto-rock pierced by Scots-Irish despair. Above the exhilarating tempos, emptiness threaded through the melodies. It was minor-key moroseness tricked up as sexual urgency, and in the coming decade, Didion would track its spread through American culture.
In the Elks Clubs and town halls of the valley, safer Midwest music—square dance reels—played most Friday and Saturday nights. At dances, parades, sports events, at the state fair in the summers (fireworks sizzling above the worn old levees), Didion renewed old friendships and made new bonds.
She reconnected with her cousin Brenda. She caught up in school. Perhaps her knowledge now of what lay beyond the flat horizon prompted her to take greater interest in global events. The Spanish Civil War. Hitler’s march into Poland. The founding of Israel. A massacre in a country called El Salvador. FDR’s New Deal was a fraught topic at her aunts’ supper tables. It was socialism, they said, stunting the West’s pioneer spirit. Republican business leaders in town, including the Didion men, took up the Christian libertarianism of the California preacher James W. Fifield. Fifield claimed that the “blessings of capitalism come from God.”
His sacred entrepreneurship inspired Didion’s great-uncles when they opened a service station at Seventh and H, guided her uncle Robert when he established Didion Hardware on D Street, led Genevieve Didion when she planted camellias for tourists by the courthouse. These were fine examples of living up to “our heritage,” Didion said in her eighth-grade graduation speech at Arden School, delivered to a room full of Okies in June 1948. The speech had been developed with the help of her mother and grandfather, using themes straight out of the latter’s book California’s El Dorado Yesterday and Today (“We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known,” Didion wrote). Her mother helped her choose the perfect outfit for her performance, a crystal necklace and a pale green organdy dress, “a color that existed in the local landscape only for a few spring days when the rice first showed,” she said.
The speech impressed her teachers. “There’s a lot of mystery to me about writing and performing and showing off in general,” she said later. Her confidence had been boosted by the fineries she wore (from then on, she never underestimated the power of fashion and style in presenting herself, publicly, as a writer), and by the conviction that her audience—most of them first-generation Californians, whose parents had been living in sod huts on the Great Plains just a few years ago—sorely needed the lessons she offered. How often had the Sunday aunts started a conversation by saying, “The trouble with these new people”? Then they’d blast the Dust Bowl natives who had come to California seeking handouts. Pioneer families like the Didions understood real work and taking pride in their work. They understood what it meant to “live up” to one’s heritage.
The summer following her graduation speech, before classes began at California Junior High, Didion lived with her family on Walnut Avenue, on land apparently purchased by her father for subdividing and selling. It was “a downright rural region in the 1940s,” William Burg told me. “Sheep ranches and rolling hills: the housing stock there now is a mixture of mid-century single-family homes and mansions with horse property. The first shopping malls in the Sacramento area were built a bit north of this neighborhood.” Most of the land was divvied up from large old family ranches, Rancho Del Paso and others.
Didion recalled watching her brother on hot summer mornings take a shovel to the hardpan with the intention of digging a swimming pool on the property: a child’s version of development fever (as an adult, Jim would follow his father into the real-estate business). Even utopia could not escape the postwar boom. In newspaper photographs, Didion said, Hawaii was now a place of “well-fed Lincoln-Mercury dealers relaxing beside an outrigger at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.”
* * *
One summer night, while the family was vacationing at Stinson Beach (where Didion, wearing a frayed bathing suit puckered with safety pins, would take a sack of nectarines to a nest of rocks above the surf and play solitaire), Didion told her parents she was going to take her little brother to a square dance. Her folks were playing cards with friends in their rented cottage and paid scant attention to what she said. She dropped Jimmy off at the dance at the Greyhound station—an old railroad depot with stucco walls and a steep slate roof—then hurried past the Two A.M. Club and Café, beyond faded signs for Coca-Cola lost among wild geraniums, and down to the water’s edge. She had been writing stories about romantic suicides, people wandering San Francisco’s streets before leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge or people walking into the sea. She “wanted to know what it would feel like” to head into “the big nasty surf,” so, clutching her notebook, she put her head down and aimed herself in the general direction of Hawaii. “It was dark,” she said. “I walked into the ocean thinking I’ll get an idea of it by the time my knees are wet.” A huge wave picked her up and rolled her onto the sand. “I got out. I picked up my brother and went home.” It didn’t come to anything. She wasn’t serious about suicide. It was a literary experiment. She was serious about trying to grasp why a woman like her mother, with money and good looks, surrounded by family and friends, should “have so much trouble getting through the afternoon”—this sentiment appears in an early short story, “The Welfare Island Ferry.” The story paints a melancholy portrait of a “small woman in a bright dirndl skirt and high-heeled straw mules.” As the day wears on and the temperature approaches one hundred degrees, she wonders why on earth she should give a damn about the men’s golf scores at the country club or about her husband and children or about anything at all. “[B]aby,” she asks her daughter, “you ever afraid of the dark any more?”
5
“I would have to say the rivers are my strongest memory of what the city was to me. They were just infinitely interesting … I mean, all of that moving water. I was crazy about the rivers,” Didion told Rob Turner, editor of Sactown magazine, in 2011.
In the way of adolescents, whose development requires testing limits, Didion shed many of her childhood fears during her junior high and high school years and enjoyed skirting danger. In the winters, flooding fascinated as much as terrified her now: the distant sound of dynamite on the levees, sheets of muddy water cresting thorny banks, hordes of ranchers and their children migrating through city streets to take shelter in school gymnasiums. In the summers, she joined friends in challenging the rivers for the thrills they’d release. In an essay entitled “Holy Water,” she wrote about being seventeen years old and getting “caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River … I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.”
“The generation she was close to as a teenager, people who could describe Didion’s personality then, mostly died in the 1980s,” Kel Munger told me. “There are still a few Didions in town, but they don’t like to be tracked down.” This was not entirely true, but the family members who responded to me were too young to have anything other than hazy recollections of their cousin.
Joan Haug-West remembered her classmate Joan. Haug-West remained in Sacramento and became a college English teacher, often assigning Didion’s essays to her students.
“She was in a higher social class than I was—though most of us were more aware of race than class,” Haug-West told me. “I knew a relative of hers sat on the Board of Education, and you didn’t get a position like that unless you had money and influence. And she was friendly with Nancy Kennedy. I once heard Nancy talk about how her brother—it may have been Anthony—tried to stick a Coke bottle down the garbage disposal. Well, you know, very few people in town even had a garbage disposal back then.”
Didion was a frequent supper guest at the Kennedy house. There, she sat among lawyers, lobbyists (one of whom, Artie Samish, later went to jail for tax evasion), and oil company executives. Kennedy’s parents loved to quote Dickens and Shakespeare in the midst of casual conversations. “We had a very vibrant, active household,” Anthony Kennedy once said. “My mother always had to set … extra places at the dinner table because people would come from out of the city, from out of the state to see [my father] and consult him. He was a great attorney.”
When she wasn’t greeting CEOs or hurtling down rapids, Didion attended meetings of the Mañana Club—the “rich girls’ sorority,” Haug-West called it. It was sponsored by the public school district. According to its bylaws, its aim was to promote democracy, charity, and literature—specifically, the reading of poetry. Nevertheless, a legal opinion written in the mid-1960s by a California appellate court stated that the Mañana Club practiced a “process of selection designed to create a membership composed of the ‘socially elite.’”
To be admitted, girls had to be sponsored by three members; they had to have reached the ninth grade and to have maintained a C average during the previous semester, and they had to have read at least two books not prescribed as compulsory by the school system. Once a candidate had been proposed for membership and survived a “Rush Tea,” the club’s Admission Committee would “investigate all girls, and then select however many the officers have decided should be brought in.”
Didion recalled her initiation in the Governor’s Mansion one night. She was friends with Nina Warren, daughter of Governor Earl Warren. Nina, dubbed “Honey Bear” by the national press corps, was a year ahead of Didion in school. Didion loved visiting her because the house was full of large, high-ceilinged rooms in which “one [could] imagine reading … or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner,” Didion said. The initiation rite consisted of being blindfolded in Nina’s bedroom and subjected to insults by the club’s older members. Didion was shocked when Nina—“by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America,” Didion wrote—said Didion was “stuck on herself.”
As a new member, she received a gold pin in the form of an M, with Mañana spelled out on the front in blue enamel letters. She was to wear it or keep it in her possession at all times. To others, outside the club, this may have fortified the impression that she was “stuck on herself.” To Joan Haug-West, Didion seemed unnaturally shy. “I rarely heard her voice in school,” she said.
* * *
Today, C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, in a posh area of the city known as Land Park, seems an oasis of seriousness and calm just off a busy boulevard, its tall windows reflecting rows of Italian cypress trees flanking its walls, its red tiled roof sloping low over Art Deco and California Mission detailing in the building’s tan stone and dark brown woodwork. McClatchy marked “a very tedious time in my life,” Didion said. How could she not want to heave whenever she walked across the plaque in the front entrance (passing two ridiculous stone lions on either side of the steps), proclaiming McClatchy’s devotion to “Truth-Liberty-Tolerance” and its loyalty to the “Native Sons of the Golden West”? How frequently could she repeat, in class, the products of our Latin American neighbors? Must she recite, once more, Euripides: “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet”? Did she have to hear, again, a local band butcher “How High the Moon” at some damp, dreary dance, and then walk home alone in the fog?
Worst of all was phys ed (“Sex Class”). There, she had to listen to the Nice Girls insist it was wrong to kiss boys “indiscriminately” because that was “throwing away your capital.” Given the boys she met at McClatchy, Didion didn’t think it was possible to kiss “discriminately.” If you were “indiscriminate enough to kiss any one of them you might as well kiss them all,” she decided.
Often, in her room, she lay in the dark with a cold washcloth over her eyes. The discomfort of her periods heightened the throbbing migraines. In public, she’d try to deny the pain. She’d sit in a classroom with tears on her face. The “pain seemed a shameful secret,” she wrote, “evidence … of all my bad attitudes, my unpleasant tempers.”
She still loved stage acting but was offered little range in local productions because she was so tiny. At school, and at a small repertory theater downtown, she took children’s roles—including that of Babette in Lillian Hellman’s wartime melodrama, Watch on the Rhine. At one point in the play, a character says, in Babette’s hearing, “The Renaissance Man is a man who wants to know … what made Iago evil?” Didion remembered this reference to Iago and would use it, many years later, to open her second novel, Play It As It Lays.
Eugene O’Neill was a favorite. “I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked,” she said. “I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch all day and read Eugene O’Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.”
She memorized speeches from The Member of the Wedding and Death of a Salesman. She tackled Moby-Dick but “missed that wild control of language. What I had thought were discursive [passages] were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn’t get the control in it.” On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy knocked her out. She locked herself in her room one weekend and read it to the end. She was amazed to learn that a story’s accumulating power did not always grow from a spectacular style. Suspense was a necessity. And Henry James’s sentences, so intricate and complex, nearly paralyzed her. “[He] made me afraid to put words down,” she said. One of the “discouraging things is that every word you put down limits the possibilities of what you have in your mind. [James] somehow got all of the possibilities into every sentence”—those multiple qualifications!—“and I really did not think I could do that.”
From James, Didion learned how the mind decodes existence, sifting possibilities, balancing what it fears with paradoxical recognitions of pleasure. For a young reader, this was a new revelation of what fiction could do. No other form of human thought could touch it.
* * *
Her fears now had less to do with collapsed bridges than with changes in her body and awareness that others responded to those changes. She became obsessed with news stories about Suzanne Degnan, a six-year-old on the North Side of Chicago who had been kidnapped from her bed by a college boy, hacked up in a sink, and scattered into the city’s sewer system. The gory details recalled aspects of the Donner Party stories, but there was nothing natural about this tragedy. Though the victim was only six, the crime seemed to have something to do with sex, with female and male and the unpredictability of that mix.
Didion’s notebook jottings—the ocean walkers, the romantic suicides—were doom-laden and dark, her imagination drawn to extremes that needn’t have been but were, toward mysteries of human impulses at their starkest. The sea strolls and kidnap stories had pioneer elements, traces of the outsider, the wayward and the lost, the emptiness and promise of back roads and branching trails, but the choices weren’t as clear (take this cutoff or don’t?) and the consequences less obvious than cannibalism (hacked up and scattered into the sewer system?). Self-invention, yes, manifest destiny—but reckless now. Mean. No sacrifice, no courage, no glory. The most celebrated of Didion’s early essays mimed epic struggles reduced to splintered glimpses of modern American tragedies.
And, in part, her evolving imagination had to do with the adolescent’s penchant for thrills. Donner Pass had become a popular spot for juicing and joyriding. At fifteen and a half, Didion earned her learner’s permit, attacking the roads in an old Army jeep her father had gotten at auction. On weekends, she’d drive friends up switchbacks in the Sierra, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and back again, six or seven hours, buzzed by alcohol and flirting, risking wrecks or DUIs. On some nights, the fog was so thick, she could see the road only if one of her friends got out and walked in front of the headlights along the highway’s white center stripe. She was experiencing a new sort of narrative: the aimless American road story.
On simmering afternoons, she drove to the family cemetery and sat undisturbed, listening to country music on the radio, staring at the chipped monuments and dreaming up sad new stories. The boneyard was more companionable than the dusty house sickly sweet with dying flowers, her father’s legal papers scattered on tables, countertops, chairs.
At some point during this period, the family moved into a new residence at 500 Hawthorn Road, near the present Fair Oaks Boulevard, a secluded three-bedroom house built in 1935. Didion also spent many days in her stepgrandmother’s splendid neoclassical home at 2000 22nd Street—“a great house” with “proportions … a little different” for Sacramento, she said. That is, it was extremely large and slightly off-kilter, with pedimented dormers and balustrades. Didion discovered new hangouts. The Guild Theater in Oak Park. Vic’s Ice Cream. The Crest (formerly the crumbling old vaudeville house the Hippodrome). The Woolworth on K Street, where teens gathered for food and sodas. The nation’s first Tower Records. The first Shakey’s Pizza. Boys took Good Girls—those who would “do it”—to the Starlite Drive-In. The Nice Girls went to the Senator Theater downtown. Didion loved the smell of paint in her uncle Bob’s hardware store, the Duncan yo-yos and palm-size flashlights he sold to little kids. In the rear, Rosie Clooney warbled “This Old House” on a big old radio. Occasionally, Didion and her friends sneaked over to the West Side and ate spicy tacos with their fingers.
She loved gas stations. There was the grand old Shell at Seventh and L, the men in white uniforms and bow ties; the O’Neil Brothers’ five locations in town, offering “crankcase service” and “vulcanizing.” Okie boys, Arkies, slouched around the hot, oily lots wearing T-shirts and greasy jeans, smoking, talking cars. Scary, intriguing—the kinds of boys Bill Clinton would remind her of years later. “They had knocked up girls and married them,” Didion wrote, driving all night to Carson City for a five-dollar ceremony “performed by a justice of the peace still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles.”
In the evenings, she liked to sit in the grass out by the Garden Highway (this area would become a primary setting for Run River), watching the sun set over waterfront ranches. Already, she knew the ranches were about to disappear, their lots subdivided and sold.
6
“In a gentle sleep Sacramento dreamed, until perhaps 1950, when something happened,” a young Didion wrote at the height of her place-bound romanticism. “What happened was that Sacramento woke to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better or worse, its character.”
“That’s a false portrayal of the city,” Rob Turner told me. Mel Lawson, a longtime Sacramento High School teacher who knew Didion as a girl, agreed. “I don’t see any loss of character, only change,” he said. Before World War II, “this was essentially a town of shopkeepers, retired farmers, state workers, salesmen, operators of small plants like dairies, sheet-metal works, lumber yards and such. No big industries.” What Didion meant by loss of character, he thought, was the erosion of the city’s old power structure. In the old days, “it was fairly easy to pinpoint who was in it,” he said. “One with any degree of perception had to be in Sacramento only a short time to know pretty well who ran the place,” including “Joan’s Aunt Genevieve [sic].”
At McClatchy High School, despite her shyness, Didion didn’t always need a hall pass to get where she wanted to go. If she wasn’t the most popular girl in school, she was the kind of girl the most popular girls in school wanted to hang with. She was pretty and smart, with a pageboy haircut and high-collared blouses; her writing skills and ambitions were already apparent. People felt better about themselves around Joan Didion. She was funny. Quick.
Looking back, she liked to say she didn’t do well in high school. She was frail, she’d say. Always frail. Isolated and uninvolved. Several times a month, her migraines were debilitating. She had her family’s tendency toward silence. Constantly, she questioned herself. But in yearbook pictures, she beams, appearing robust, her face full, almost chubby.
She was a member of the Rally Committee (by no means the smallest on the team, male or female), and wore a bulky white sweater with a big McClatchy M on the front. She served on the Sophomore Ball and Junior Prom committees. She was a Student Council member. She joined the Science, Press, and Spanish clubs. She worked on the yearbook, The Nugget, and the school newspaper, The Prospector.
She got an after-school job with the society desk at The Sacramento Union, for which, she was thrilled to learn, Mark Twain had once written. “I wouldn’t call [it] reporting,” she said of her first professional stints. “People wanted reports of their upcoming weddings in the paper the weekend of the wedding. And so they would send you accounts of what the bridesmaids were going to wear and stuff like that, and you would write it up.” On her own, Didion was learning it was possible to write about California in a nonboosterish way, as Josiah Royce had in The Feud of Oakfield Creek, a novel based on the Sacramento squatter’s strike of 1850, and as Frank Norris had in The Octopus.
It’s hard to imagine what she might have sent The Nation (apparently, the manuscript has been lost), but she did submit a piece and received a prompt rejection. Already she felt the tension between making a name for herself at home and succeeding in the bigger world. In later years, she enjoyed recounting an anecdote involving one of her great-aunts and her mother. “We were talking about some people that we knew, the Johnston family,” Didion said. “And my great-aunt said, ‘That Johnston boy never did amount to anything.’ And my mother said, ‘He won a Pulitzer Prize.’ It was Alva Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize when he was working for a newspaper in New York. And my great-aunt did not even look up. She was playing solitaire, and without even looking up from her game, she said, ‘He never amounted to anything in Sacramento.’”
7
On April 25, 1952, she arrived home from school and found a letter waiting for her. She dropped her sweater and books on the hallway floor. The letter said:
Dear Joan,
The Committee on Admissions asks me to inform you that it is unable to take favorable action upon your application for admission to Stanford University. While you have met the minimum requirements, we regret that because of the severity of the competition, the committee cannot include you in the group to be admitted. The committee joins me in extending you every good wish for the successful continuation of your education.
Sincerely yours,
Rixford K. Snyder,
Director of Admissions
Didion reread the letter, trying to will a revision of it. Then she ran upstairs to her room, locked the door, and wept into an old robe on the floor of her closet. All of her friends who had applied to Stanford had been admitted. She had a “sharp and dolorous image of … growing old” in the house, she wrote later, “never going to school anywhere, the spinster in Washington Square.” She went into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and briefly considered swallowing several old codeine and Empirin tablets from the medicine cabinet. She pictured herself gasping in an oxygen tent while a sorrowful Rixford K. Snyder hovered over her in the ICU.
Perhaps the worst humiliation was knowing that the question of getting into the “right” school, “so traditionally urgent to the upwardly mobile,” had never come up in conversations with her family. There was no stronger indication that, for all its history and influence in old Sacramento, the Didion family’s “social situation was static” now. Later that evening, when she told her father her disappointing news, he simply offered her a drink.