The movie version of Play It as It Lays was, as I already noted, surf’s-up for Joan and Dunne. It was, unquestionably, their best shot at catching the Hollywood New Wave, and it was, also unquestionably, a wipeout.
Another Hollywood New Wave, though, would come along.
Before Vegas was published, Dunne slipped a few chapters to his neighbor, Julia Phillips. Julia, with husband Michael and partner Tony Bill, had produced The Sting, the second-highest-grossing movie of 1973 and the winner of Best Picture at the 1974 Academy Awards, making her both New Wave Hollywood and Establishment Hollywood.
From her memoir, You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again:
John Dunne gives me forty-three pages of something he is calling Vegas. It starts with a three-page rundown on all the facts about Vegas: churches, schools, population, on and on and on. On the fourth page, the book finally begins with the sentence: “In the summer of my nervous breakdown I went to Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” From there on I am riveted… I ask for a free run to set it up and he gives it to me. I start to look for a writer. Nothing in life comes for free.
Julia approached Paul Schrader, a friend of Joan and Dunne’s. “I was actually much closer with John,” said Schrader. “I liked Joan well enough, but John was a bit of a roustabout and Joan wasn’t.” Not that Schrader didn’t have a keen appreciation of Joan. “Back then I had an idea for an article called ‘I Wish They All Could Be California Girls,’ about Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Pauline Kael. All three had a similar kind of energy, a smart, go-getter kind of energy that was an influence on me. And I thought I’d write about them as this West Coast female intellectual phenomenon. I proposed it to each of them, and each hated it more than the last.” A wave of laughter broke over him. “So that”—he laughed again—“was that.”
That was that for Vegas the movie, too. “I was supposed to do the script for Vegas,” said Schrader. “I wanted to do the script for Vegas. Julia wanted me to do the script for Vegas. But it never proceeded to deal status.” The fault of Dunne, according to Julia. “Vegas blows because no matter how good a [deal my lawyer] gets him, John Dunne isn’t satisfied.”
Julia, Michael, and Schrader would move on to that paean to paranoia—and New Wave Hollywood classic—Taxi Driver (1976). Too bad for Joan and Dunne. Julia and Michael Phillips were producers with timing and taste. And Schrader, like Peckinpah, was a key figure of the moment and milieu, plus an artist.
Schrader had a guess as to why Joan and Dunne were so conflicted about their movie work. “They wanted to be successful screenwriters first and they wanted to be serious novelists first. That gets a little messy. You run into the whole problem of, ‘I’ve got to be a big-money screenwriter, but I need to be thought of as a serious novelist.’ It was the same thing with Gore Vidal. Vidal loved writing for the movies, loved getting those checks. But if you ever suggested to him that he was a screenwriter, he’d take umbrage. Still, Joan, John, Vidal—they all aspired to play the Hollywood game.”
Joan and Dunne were playing that game for keeps. They were inveterate party-givers, the ones in Trancas considerably tonier than the ones at Franklin Avenue had been. Writer Sara Davidson recalled a farewell party they gave for documentary-maker Peter Davis in 1974, how A-list the guest list: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? star George Segal, Five Easy Pieces director Bob Rafelson, Easy Rider producer Bert Schneider, and Warren Beatty, then shooting Shampoo, about to shoot The Fortune. (Beatty, his wandering eye still fixed on Joan, pumped Davidson for details on the back massage she’d administered to Joan earlier in the day.) They were also inveterate partygoers. “They wouldn’t miss a party,” said Josh Greenfeld. “They could do four in a night—come, see what had to be seen, go. Buck [Henry] had this picture of John. He’d just broken his arm. It was in a cast. But he was still going to a party.”
Joan and Dunne were playing another game for keeps, as well: the literary. Don Bachardy remembered their ardent pursuit of Christopher Isherwood, then the big kahuna of belles-lettres L.A. “They were both highly ambitious,” said Bachardy. “And Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing. I don’t like to tell on Chris, but he wasn’t very fond of either of them. I think he found her clammy.” (Isherwood already told on himself. He called them “Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All” in his diaries.)
Isherwood wouldn’t let them into his coterie of writers, so they made their own. Part of it: Irish novelist Brian Moore, who’d been in L.A. since writing Torn Curtain (1966) for Hitchcock; playwright Josh Greenfeld, who’d co-write Harry and Tonto (1974) with director Paul Mazursky; and journalist Barry Farrell, with whom Joan shared her column at Life. “The Dunnes had this party and Joan’s editor Henry Robbins was there,” said Greenfeld. “And Henry turned to me and said, ‘How can you live out here? Don’t you miss the literary life of New York?’ And I said, ‘Look, Trancas is great. I’m here. The Dunnes are here. Barry is here. Brian is here, and Brian always has some European writer or poet staying with him. That’s enough literary life for me.’ And it was.”
Eve was either not interested in joining this coterie or not invited to join. I suspect the latter. Brian Moore’s wife, Jean, recalled running into Eve in Trancas. “Brian and I were introduced to Eve Babitz by Joan. Eve was unsmiling and apparently not too pleased to meet us. The Dunnes and Earl occasionally mentioned her, but with little ‘knowing’ smiles. I interpreted that as a joke no one chose to explain.”
Eve had to have seen those smiles—or intuited them—doubtless the reason she couldn’t muster one of her own. She was too dazed and deceived to charm. At what point, I wonder, did she become for Joan an object of ridicule? There’s no way of knowing exactly. But there may be a way of knowing approximately.
First, though, an abbreviated timeline of the Joan-Eve friendship from Joan’s perspective:
What Joan must’ve experienced when she and Eve discovered each other in 1967 was the shock of the new. Eve was unlike anyone she’d ever met before. Eve, Joan sensed, was powerfully talented and had something inside her that was far freer than anything inside Joan. There was nothing middle-class about Eve, nothing scholarly or clerical. She was an artist in the grand and romantic style. And she existed in a state of extremity, of disreputability. Her wit was sordid and stupendous, her temperament odd and delightful. She had a radical turn of mind; also, sexual valor. (Joan, having slept with two men in her entire life, the second man an extension of the first, placed, I should imagine, a high premium on sexual valor.) Eve no-thought grabbed what she wanted and didn’t let go. Joan, who stayed so carefully within her limits, whose nature was to wait and watch, had to have been dazzled, excited, maybe even a little intimidated.
In a 1977 interview with the Paris Review, Joan said this:
When I was starting to write—in the late fifties, early sixties—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles… Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. I’m not sure this is so true anymore, but it certainly was at the time, and I didn’t much like it.
Didn’t much like it yet acquiesced to it totally. The role Joan created for herself, operated behind, was that of an invalid. One of her most brilliant pieces, one of her most characteristic pieces, was, after all, “Migraine,” written for the Saturday Evening Post. (Joan’s original twist on the old theme: to make being an invalid glamorous, seductive. “In Bed” is what she’d retitle the piece when she included it in a collection.) Eve, though, with her drinking and drugging, fucking and fighting, outrageousness and bite, appeared to offer up an alternative role, that of an invalid’s inverse. (Eve’s original twist on a new theme: to make being an invalid’s inverse glamorous, seductive. She’d write, “My skin is so healthy it radiates its own kind of moral laws; people simply cannot resist being attracted to what looks like pure health.”)
In an earlier chapter, I observed that Eve would’ve looked to Joan as a model and guide, a person who’d worked out the problem of being a woman artist. Still, it isn’t unthinkable that Joan was looking to Eve for those same things, for that same reason. In ’67, Joan and Eve weren’t so far apart, really.
Weren’t so far apart in terms of their psychologies. Both were leery of groups and solidarities, of feminism in particular. Eve, as is evident from her reference to Menstruation Bathroom creator Judy Chicago in the letter to Robert Doty, found feminism obvious and corny. (Blood-soaked feminine-hygiene products as a metaphor for the female condition? Yikes! Say no more!) She also found it damaging and destructive. It robbed women of their mystery. Robbed women of their power, in short.
Weren’t so far apart in terms of where they were in their careers, either. Joan was a promising novelist, an accomplished magazine writer; but Eve was Stravinsky’s goddaughter, Duchamp’s nude, Morrison’s consort, and the album-cover designer for a band whose songs were being played everywhere, by everyone. (“Earl fell in love with Buffalo Springfield the minute they came out,” said Eve. “He played their album all day long.”) And Eve must’ve retained her luster for Joan even as Joan surpassed her in starriness.
Retained her luster until 1973, anyway. 1973, the year she and Joan reached the end stages of the Eve’s Hollywood editing process. 1973, the year she became for Joan a figure of fun.I 1973, the year goodwill was injected with poison.
Mutual disenchantment set in. Where Eve once seemed wild and inspired to Joan, she now seemed slack and slothful. Where Joan once seemed meticulous and masterly to Eve, she now seemed dogged and doctrinaire. The rupture was, of course, a deeper one for Eve. Joan, she felt, posed an existential threat to her as an artist.
Though perhaps it wasn’t deeper for Eve. Perhaps Eve was as existentially threatening to Joan as Joan was to her. Not to Joan the artist. To Joan the person.
Friendship is, at its most basic level, an act of imaginative sympathy. It means seeing the world through the other person’s eyes. Eve was a concupiscent creature. She believed in physicality and sexuality, in passion as a ruling passion. And if that was the lens you used when looking at Joan and Dunne’s marriage—well, they didn’t have one. So, Joan had to make a decision: Dunne or Eve? And that decision had to be snap since relations between her and Dunne were crumbling fast, might already have deteriorated beyond repair.
She chose Dunne.
Not unrelated: it was in 1973, you’ll recall, that Joan started working on A Book of Common Prayer, the book that would cause her split with Noel Parmentel.
Not unrelated either: it was in 1973, you’ll also recall, that Joan wrote for the New York Review of Books “Hollywood: Having Fun,” though “Joan’s Hollywood” would’ve been the more apt title. And Joan’s Hollywood had—surprise, surprise—a lot less sex in it than Eve’s. The piece, which reads like a coded letter to Dunne, contains a passage about Hollywood’s libido, barely there, according to Joan:
Flirtations between men and women, like drinks after dinner, remain largely the luxury of character actors out from New York, one-shot writers, reviewers being courted by Industry people, and others who do not understand the mise of the local scene… There is in Hollywood, as in all cultures in which gambling is the central activity, a lowered sexual energy.
And what little sex there was was, in the main, homosexual sex because a lover of the same gender didn’t imperil a marriage the way a lover of the opposite did. Or so said Joan:
This is a community whose notable excesses include virtually none of the flesh or spirit: heterosexual adultery is less easily tolerated than respectably settled homosexual marriage or well-managed liaisons between middle-aged women. “A nice lesbian relationship, the most common thing in the world,” I recalled Otto Preminger insisting when my husband and I expressed doubt that the heroine of the Preminger picture we were writing should have one. “Very easy to arrange, does not threaten the marriage.”
We tell ourselves stories in order to live indeed.