1
The woman we know from the books was about to emerge, but she felt she was “in a coma.” “I could quote a lot of English poetry—that’s what I did in college—and I could give you the house and garden imagery of a lot of English novels. You could have asked me what the Boer War was and I couldn’t have told you.”
Didion’s selling herself short: She came to Vogue equipped with discipline, a passion for reading, a keen attentiveness, a grounding in the history of the West, and a sensitivity to quirky locutions. She came with an old-fashioned work ethic—you fought for your territory. She did not abide idleness or education for its own sake or the view that pragmatism sullied the soul.
“[I was] a good deal of trouble,” she said, looking back. “[S]kirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts.” At Vogue, she was initially limited to promotional copy—“the kind that was sent to stores as advertising support”—thirty lines at most, usually eight or so, hacked at by her editor.
Once a career has taken root, its seeds are hard to trace: In retrospect, its flowering seems inevitable. Surely, Joan Didion, piercing observer, fierce stylist, oddly sexy and reluctant pop icon, leaped fully blown into the hippie-dippie sixties, exposing our hypocrisies, our sloppy thoughts.
In fact, when she first settled in New York, “She was a) hard to know, b) very shy, and people, being stupid as they are, underrated her,” said Noel Parmentel, who’d soon be a central figure in her life. “Practically everybody I knew underrated her. She just didn’t register on the screen.”
“I … tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously,” Didion said. “I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.”
An instructive aside: In 1973, John Gregory Dunne accused Pauline Kael of misunderstanding how movies are made, how careers unfold, how art gets done. In a letter to Kael warning her of his attack, he said, “I think you’re the best movie critic in America, but I’m not altogether sure that’s a compliment.” The problem, he said later, is that an “implacable ignorance of the mechanics of filmmaking … prevails in all of Kael’s books.… Few critics understand the roles of chance, compromise, accident and contingency in the day-by-day of a picture.”
Similarly, Didion watchers tend to ascribe to her levels of agency, guile, and foresight she just didn’t have. For example: Her early writing “captures the turbulence of a culture in upheaval,” one reviewer said; it “impose[s] some order on … American mayhem,” another wrote. Or as Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post’s former book review editor, said, she “had her eyes on the nation” and “dared” to say what she saw.
These assessments—like the claims I made in the prologue to this book—aren’t wrong, but they suggest a deliberative approach simply not present in Didion’s daily writing of the 1950s and early 1960s. Her first important essays, written across several years for various assignments, composed in volatile emotional weathers, and under varying editorial strictures, did not come ready-made from a Vogue dress pattern—length, width, and color all laid out. Nor did their appearance make Didion an instant star, coaxing fire from her Smith Corona, the way Jimi Hendrix pulled flames from his Stratocaster.
If Didion sold her young self short, and critics gave her too much rope, the truth of her professional beginnings and subsequent fame is much more complex and fascinating.
Later, she understood how helter-skelter the process had been. “[In 1969] I was starting a column for Life, and we happened to be in Hawaii,” she told Meghan Daum in 2004. “I had to write my first column introducing myself, and right then the My Lai stuff broke. So I called my editor at Life and said I want to go out to Vietnam, but he said, ‘No, some of the guys are going out. You just introduce yourself.’ And I was so angry that I introduced myself in a very un-Life-like way.” That is, she was, or appeared to be, uncomfortably personal in a formal column (we’ll look at the column later). “Life at that time had eleven million readers and I got an awful lot of feedback, a lot of it negative, and a lot of it more responsive than I could deal with. Then Play It As It Lays came out shortly after, which was read as autobiographical, although it wasn’t, and so between Play It As It Lays and that column, I was getting a lot of that [popular attention]. It was kind of a burden.”
She’s not admitting how titillating it was, in 1969, for a woman to write about abortion, divorce, S&M, orgies, and drugs, especially if she appeared to be talking about herself. Women saw her as emotionally available; men fantasized more lurid access.
How crafty was she in choosing her subjects? How lucky? How did she get her breaks? How did the timing work? These questions can be answered only by studying her Vogue years, from 1956 to roughly 1966, though she contributed occasional columns after that. Until her relationship with The New York Review of Books, begun in 1973, her ties to Vogue formed her longest-lasting bond with a particular magazine. This commitment clicked when the slicks had power and she was a pup. In the meantime, the “advantages” of writing a novel at night, in secret, after a day in the fashion trenches were “probably … precisely the same as the disadvantages,” she reflected later. “A certain amount of resistance is good for anybody. It keeps you awake.”
2
Didion upped her salary from forty-five dollars a week to sixty-five or seventy. “At Vogue, she worked hard because they knew how good she was and made her do all of the heavy lifting,” said Parmentel. Eventually, she “conned” the Vogue Promotion Department into thinking it was reasonable to expect only one ad every two weeks from a copywriter. The schedule gave her time to freelance for other magazines. She had an office, a telephone, and messenger service. Marshaling these resources, she fired off pieces to Mademoiselle and Gentlemen’s Quarterly. The first one bit, not the second. At one point, she had six positive responses to queries she’d mailed, to places as diverse as Commonweal, The Nation, and The Reporter.
Rosa Rasiel left Vogue for graduate school at Columbia. When she moved out, Didion spent a year living in the cellar of Mildred Orrick’s apartment. Orrick was a well-known fashion designer celebrated for introducing dance leotards as items of casual clothing and promoting flared coats once wartime fabrics restrictions eased.
Eventually, Didion rented an apartment in the East Nineties, “furnished entirely with things taken from storage by a friend whose wife had moved away,” she wrote in “Goodbye to All That.” The apartment was a third-floor walk-up at 1215 Park Avenue, across the street from the Armory, between Ninety-fourth and Ninety-fifth streets. She had a fireplace, shuttered windows, air conditioning, high ceilings and white walls, one bedroom and a kitchenette, for $130 a month—a tough amount to make, even freelancing. She hung a map of Sacramento County on the living room wall to remind herself of water. New York had rivers, but they weren’t … well, rivers.
She bought Victorian walnut marble-top tables to add to the furniture she’d borrowed from her friend. To Peggy La Violette, she identified this friend as “Noel,” her “old love.” She remained involved with him off and on during her years in New York; exactly when she stopped considering him her “love”—if she ever really did—is unclear. (By now, Bakersfield Bob was history.)
Parmentel “has never been credited in Didion profiles because he has never (until now) agreed to go on the record about their relationship,” Linda Hall wrote in New York magazine in 1996.
For over a year I requested an interview with this mysterious man, whom Hall had described as a “hard-drinking, anarchic, verbal gymnast.” I got no answer, and then one day a charming voice on my answering machine said, “I owe you an apology. I didn’t answer you ’cause I didn’t want to talk to you, but everyone ’cept me thinks I should talk to you, so I will.” A year or so later, he invited me to his lovely house in Fairfield, Connecticut, for a lengthy chat. He promised to meet me at the railway station carrying a copy of The White Album so that I’d know who he was: “We’ll ‘meet cute,’ as in an old Hitch movie.”
Later, when we’d settled on his screened porch with glasses of white wine, he said he “hadn’t wanted to think about Joan again after what she’s been through,” but, once upon a time, he “knew her better than anybody in the world.”
* * *
Noel E. Parmentel Jr. was born in Algiers, Louisiana, an old Victorian-era section of New Orleans west of the Mississippi River, in 1927. His mother had worked for the Veterans Administration. Besides having rivers in common, a love of Victorian houses, and a parent in the army, Didion and Parmentel shared temperaments. “I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South,” Didion said. Parmentel was her man.
Except he was not so easy to understand. His friend Norman Mailer saw him as an “arch-conservative but a marvelously funny guy” (“I must love him, otherwise I’d kill him,” Mailer said). Historian Kevin Smant saw him as a “non-conservative,” a wolf in sheepskin prowling the National Review offices, and writer Julia Reed remembered her mother dismissing him as “drunk, of course.”
“[A]nyone who knew anything about New York … knew Noel,” Dan Wakefield wrote in New York in the Fifties. He “was the most politically incorrect person imaginable. He made a fine art of the ethnic insult, and dined out on his reputation for outrageousness. In print, he savaged the right in the pages of The Nation, would turn around and do the same to the left in National Review [he once called The Village Voice a ‘little Leftist don’t-do-it-yourself affair’] and blasted both sides in Esquire—and everyone loved it.”
“Well, Dan had some fun with me in his book,” Parmentel said, “but it was accurate.”
After a stint in the Marines, Parmentel attended Tulane University and the University of Minnesota before heading for New York. “I could have gotten my Ph.D. at Columbia, but instead I got my education at the West End Bar—a much better choice,” he said.
Parmentel would pace Wakefield’s “small, cluttered apartment on Jones Street, rattling the ice cubes in his glass of bourbon, clearing his throat with a series of harrumphs, and pronouncing who was a phony and who was not, like some hulking, middle-aged Holden Caulfield with a New Orleans accent,” Wakefield wrote. “Most people, in Noel’s harsh opinion, were phonies but he delighted in discovering the few who were not.”
His search for authentic companionship took him down byways and into the back rooms of literary publishers, theater directors, and filmmakers—and to “about six parties a day. Too many,” he said. “Everything happens at parties, and that’s how I met people. My wife finally filed for divorce, and who could blame her?”
In his white suits, he was a seductive figure, with a large frame and a “shock of light brown hair falling over his wide brow,” said Wakefield. He befriended Carey McWilliams and William F. Buckley Jr., Mailer, and the film documentarians Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker. Like Didion, he had a “conservative streak that was real,” said Jim Desmond, who worked as a cameraman for Leacock and Pennebaker. “He was no redneck, but he knew all those guys. He knew the stuff from the top right down to the crap. He could cross any class line there was. I mean, he took me beagling in New Jersey once!”
On a trip down South with Parmentel, the actor Sam Waterston learned “he’d been a rake-hell and a rogue in his youth, and it seemed to my innocent eyes that everyone who was anyone in the Garden District had been in love with him at one time or another.”
In New York, he was a raconteur, prankster, gadabout, and one of the city’s finest writers. “His style … was that of an axe-murderer,” said John Gregory Dunne. Parmentel was perhaps the best teacher of young writers on the island. “[H]e was as close to a mentor as anyone I have ever known,” Dunne wrote. “I arrived in New York in 1956 [full of] right-minded and untested opinion. I met him at a party, he insulted the hostess and most of the guests, and left.… In the polite, middle-class Irish Catholic circles in which I grew up, a guest did not call his hostess ‘trash.’ Neither did a guest, when introduced to a Middle-European count, say pleasantly, ‘Scratch a Hungarian and you’ll find a Jew.’” Parmentel was “like a stick of unstable dynamite,” Dunne admitted, but he said Parmentel “taught me to accept nothing at face value, to question everything, above all to be wary. From him I developed an eye for social nuance, learned to look with a spark of compassion upon the socially unacceptable, to search for the taint of metastasis in the socially acceptable.”
When Parmentel met Didion, he knew right away she was no “phony.”
“As I remember it, Joan met Noel at a party we went to at John Sack’s, courtesy of a college acquaintance, Steve Banker, who lived in the neighborhood and invited us to John’s,” said Rosa Rasiel. Banker had gone to Harvard with David Halberstam, J. Anthony Lukas, and Sydney Schanberg. John Sack had been a war correspondent in Korea.
“At the party, Joan and I got to talking about a gin mill in Berkeley I used to hang out at when I was a Marine,” Parmentel told me. “We hit it off. I could see right away that she was different and special. The best sense of humor. And a wonderful bullshit detector.”
Afterward, “Noel was around a lot,” Rasiel said. (He lived very near them, in a railroad flat on Ninety-third Street.) “From the beginning, he called Joan ‘That mouse.’” He became “Joan’s eminence grise, her taskmaster,” she said. He convinced her that World War II did not start with Pearl Harbor. He took her to meetings of the Village Independent Democrats and to parties at Bill Buckley’s or Alexander Liberman’s. He taught her to be skeptical, in print, even of her most cherished ideals, as when he dismissed the young Republicans he met each week in the White Horse Tavern, and of whom he was quite fond, as “the acne and the ecstasy.”
“One evening, while Joan’s mother was visiting New York, Joan invited me to dinner, I think as a buffer, since Noel was expected,” Rasiel recalled. “I don’t remember whether he ever called or showed up. I do remember Mrs. Didion saying, when he was about half an hour late, ‘I don’t know that I’d bother.’”
When Eduene did finally meet him, her sole pronouncement was, “He’s too big.”
* * *
At first, Parmentel wasn’t quite sure what to make of Joan Didion. “I never saw ambition like that,” he said. “Not ambition as in hanging out at Elaine’s. I mean, Joan would work twelve hours a day at Vogue and twelve hours a night. It was ferocious. Flabbergasting. In the culture she was from, girls didn’t go to New York and work like that.”
In California, her family’s fabric was beginning to unravel. Her parents called to say her grandmother Edna had collapsed, unconscious, on the sidewalk in front of her house. That night, in Sutter Hospital, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Wistfully, as though hearing a distant radio through an open window somewhere, Didion remembered Edna’s old stories: in wartime, working the line at the Del Monte cannery, weeping with a migraine; knitting cashmere socks for the Red Cross to send to boys at the front; spending afternoons in Sacramento window-shopping at Bon Marché, buying a cracked crab for supper, and taking a cab back home.
She left Didion fifty shares of Transatlantic stock. Her will instructed her granddaughter to sell the stock and buy something she wanted but couldn’t afford—food, a hat, cocktails after work.
Didion hunkered over her typewriter. From the window of her office, high above Lex, she could see TIME and LIFE spelled out in signs above Rockefeller Plaza.
The next deadline was nigh.
* * *
“Action verbs!” yelled Allene Talmey.
Didion couldn’t believe it: She had grown up reading this woman in Vogue, and now she worked for her. A graduate of Wellesley, Talmey had been at the magazine since the 1930s, after writing for The Boston Globe and the New York World, and editing for the old Vanity Fair.
Each morning now, Didion walked into Talmey’s office with several lines of copy. The editor wore a big ring; aquamarine and silver, it reminded Didion of her great-aunt Nell, and she sat mesmerized, trembling, as the ring flashed across her pages. With a blunt pencil, Talmey scratched out words. She would “get very angry,” Didion said. A previous apprentice had told Mary Cantwell, “The first few weeks [with Talmey] … well, my dear, I used to go home, sit in the tub, and weep. My dear, the bathwater was pure salt.” Not everyone lasted with the fierce old editor, but those who did got a splendid education.
Didion’s captions had to fit the magazine’s layout—blocks of text, thirty lines long, each featuring sixty-four characters. Very demanding. “On its own terms it had to work perfectly,” she recalled.
“I would have her write three hundred to four hundred words and then cut it back to fifty,” Talmey said. “We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.”
An early example: “All through the house, colour, verve, improvised treasures in happy but anomalous coexistence. Here, a Frank Stella, an Art Nouveau stained-glass panel, a Roy Lichtenstein. Not shown: A table covered with brilliant oilcloth, a Mexican find at fifteen cents a yard.”
“It is easy to make light of this kind of ‘writing,’” Didion wrote many years later. “I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words (as well as with people who hung Stellas in their kitchens and went to Mexico for buys in oilcloth), a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.”
To Peggy La Violette, Didion described Talmey as sharp and nasty; later, in interviews, she expressed her gratitude for the woman’s teaching. “Run it through again, sweetie, it’s not quite there,” Talmey would say. “Give me a shock verb two lines in. Remember the Rule of Three: three modifiers per subject. Prune it out, clean it up, make the point.”
“We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs,” Didion said. “We learned as reflex the grammatical tricks we had learned only as marginal corrections in school (‘there were two oranges and an apple’ read better than ‘there were an apple and two oranges,’ passive verbs slowed down sentences, ‘it’ needed a reference within the scan of the eye) … Less was more, smooth was better, and absolute precision essential to the monthly grand illusion.”
3
At photo shoots, Didion learned that the “traditional convention of the portrait, which was that somehow, somewhere, in the transaction between artist and subject, the ‘truth’ about the latter would be revealed” was false. “In fact, what occurred in these sittings, as in all portrait sittings was a transaction of an entirely opposite kind,” she said. “[S]uccess was understood to depend on the extent to which the subject conspired, tacitly, to be not ‘herself’ but whoever and whatever it was that the photographer wanted to see in the lens.” At the time, it may not have occurred to Didion that a writer’s verbal portraits of people traced highly subjective truths, as well, but with a hungry eye she watched intensely the “little tricks,” the “small improvisations, the efforts required to ensure that the photographer was seeing what he wanted”: covering the lens with a veil of black chiffon, changing dresses, altering the lighting.
4
The night novel hung in strips of pages, taped together, on the wall of Didion’s apartment near her map of Sacramento County. Whenever she finished a scene, she would tape or pin it to the others in no particular sequence. Sometimes a month, maybe two, would pass before she’d run her fingers through the strips. They rustled like snakeskins. Harvest Home was her working title; homesickness, her spur.
5
Among her writer friends, drinking was “part of the texture of life in general” in 1950s New York, Didion said. “I mean, it wasn’t just writers. It was people across the board. People who worked in offices, people who worked in advertising agencies.” At Vogue, “we’d routinely have a drink at lunch.”
And then after work, neighborhood bars offered “drinks for fifty cents and you’d think, ‘Wow, my god,’ and you’d sit there and be pissed to your eyeballs,” said John Gregory Dunne.
Didion met Dunne one night in 1958—“it was not long after Sputnik,” Parmentel recalled. He introduced them. At the time, Didion was living in Mildred Orrick’s basement. She made dinner. “Noel told her, ‘This is the guy you ought to marry,’” Dan Wakefield said.
“It’s true,” said Parmentel. “I did tell her that. He was a good catch. His family had a good deal of money. The Dunnes were the Kennedys of Hartford. He was a nice guy, though he had some of those Irish shortcomings—temper, drink.”
“Greg,” as Dunne was known, wrote for Time. As his dinner date that night, he brought a charming woman named Madeleine, the daughter of Lloyd Goodrich, the director of the Whitney Museum. “I adored Greg,” Goodrich—now Madeleine Noble—told me. “He was a very complex person—just the way he’d later come off in his books. Often, we’d go to hear Mabel Mercer together after work.” For hours, they’d sit in the Byline Room and “down dry martinis.”
Right away, at dinner, Dunne took to Didion. “He made me laugh,” she said. “[H]e was smart and funny … and we thought the same way about a lot of things.” For instance, neither believed they were particularly imaginative; their strength as writers lay in responding to their immediate surroundings. “I’ve thought of myself that way since I was a little girl,” Didion said. Dunne said he understood this.
Prodded by Parmentel, who saw her tendency to withdraw as a professional liability, Didion had been trying to overcome her shyness. “I decided it was pathological for a grown woman to be shy,” she said. “I began pushing myself to make a contribution. Instead of being shy, I became ‘reticent.’” Her love of acting came in handy. It was useful to consider life a series of performances and to discover suitable roles—writing, sewing, cooking. To this repertoire, she now added “Jamesian distance.”
Alcohol helped. Over drinks at dinner, she warmed to Greg Dunne. She liked his heft, his blue eyes, his gentle voice, slightly raspy, with just the trace of a lisp. Parmentel helped, too. He entertained the table, kidding Dunne about his Catholic boyhood. Didion’s Western directness disarmed Dunne. According to him, after Parmentel left Didion’s apartment, Madeleine passed out in a chair (she doesn’t remember this). Didion fixed him red beans and rice, the great Southern standard. This is what men liked, right? “We talked all night,” he said.
* * *
Didion’s early Vogue pieces make explicit reference to unhappy domestic arrangements. She writes of being with a man who would whirl into the apartment, ask her to fix him a drink, and wonder why she hadn’t cleaned the place. She’d stare at him and say nothing. She’d refuse to type his letters. He’d forget to ask her how she felt at the end of the day. “Noli me tangere, sweetie,” he’d say, and slip out again.
This man had an irritating habit of trying to convince her he knew her better than she knew herself by telling her what she wanted—whether she wanted it or not.
He once told her it didn’t matter whether you took care of somebody or they took care of you; it was all the same. The fact that this may have been a mature way of viewing life didn’t matter to her. It still made her angry. Sometimes now “the world takes on for me the general aspect of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch,” she wrote. “The tulips on Park Avenue appear to be dirty.”
Above all, she feared her own feelings. Perhaps her ambitions were skewed. “[W]e are fatally drawn toward anyone who seems to offer a way out of ourselves,” she wrote during her period with Parmentel. “At first attracted to those who seem capable of forcing the hand, we then resent their apparent refusal to understand us, their failure to be both Svengali and someone to watch over me.”
“The truth is, I did a lot for Joan and she did a lot for me,” Parmentel said. “She tried to sober me up. It was hopeless. Then she tried to get me to write all the time, and that was hopeless, too.”
At twenty-four—her mother’s best year—she was sick of the world. Her novel kept fattening, shedding its skins. Allene Talmey tossed most of her words on the floor. And her Southern knight—well, where the hell was he this time?
Invited out for drinks—Yes, five minutes. Get your ass over here!—she’d rise from bed, slide the wet cloth off her head, and rush to the corner for a fifth of Jack. She couldn’t risk missing anything, and yet after most parties, she was disappointed she’d gone. At dinner in a restaurant, aware of a man’s flirtatious glances from the next table over, she overdid her slightest gestures. She couldn’t help it; it was an automatic response. On the streets, waiting for a walk signal, she’d stare at a man to see if she could make him stare back at her, and then she’d move on with indifference. The confidence boost never lasted. Small favors for friends, their most innocuous requests, overwhelmed her. Everyone bored her.
She remembered a party in an apartment on Bank Street in the fall of 1956, when she’d first arrived in New York. In retrospect, what most surprised her that night was meeting Democrats! A grad student from Princeton tried to seduce her by suggesting he had a “direct wire to the PMLA, baby”; a Sarah Lawrence girl cooed about J. D. Salinger—she could tell from his work he had a Zen-like ability to see into her soul. Now, one more Zen remark at a party and she’d scream. By the way! someone had told her recently. Miss Sarah Lawrence? She seems to have pledged her soul to an electronics engineer.
* * *
One hot June evening, Didion attended a party at Betsy Blackwell’s apartment for current and former Mademoiselle guest editors. It was the year Ali MacGraw became a GE; Didion would come to know her as Diana Vreeland’s assistant. Years later, she and MacGraw would renew their friendship in California. But that night at Miss Blackwell’s, Didion was not much in the mood to talk to anyone.
A power failure had knocked out the air conditioning. Miss Blackwell was drunk. The new GEs were eager, bright, and giggly: dreaming of penthouses, Argentina, sable coats. “Jamesian distance” couldn’t calm Didion’s nerves. The parade had moved on without her.