The Last Love Song (19 page)

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.

 

Chapter Eight

1

Didion gave notice at
Vogue.

Mademoiselle
had been looking for a new college editor, someone to run the GE contest, read manuscripts, ride herd on the girls. Didion fit the bill. A former GE and now an
old woman,
she knew the ropes.

She'd done a few freelance pieces for
Mademoiselle,
including a travel brief on Carmel. Her long hours at
Vogue
meant she struggled to meet
Mademoiselle
's deadlines. Polly Weaver, the editor, had become impatient with her. Still, it was Weaver who recruited her to oversee the college issue. She admired the girl's drive and knew she was juggling too much.

So in mid-summer of 1959, Didion told the frumpy Miss Daves,
Vogue
's managing editor, that she'd decided to leave. Miss Daves shocked her by making a counteroffer: “Feature Associate.” What would she say to that? She'd still be working with Allene Talmey, but she'd be writing articles instead of promotional copy. Her adjusted salary would top
Mademoiselle
's bid. She'd be expected to start just after Labor Day.

Didion had a new piece in the
Mademoiselle
pipeline, scheduled to run in January. After the big betrayal, she'd still have to work with Polly Weaver.

She went to bed with a migraine.

*   *   *

Mademoiselle
had asked her to return to her alma mater and report on “Berkeley's Giant: The University of California.”

On the brink of a new decade, the magazine was more playfully innovative than any of its competitors. While Luce publications predicted a stable period ahead, with prosperity and material contentment for all,
Mademoiselle
had grasped the Beats' rumblings as an overture to mania.

The magazine's advantage was its freedom to explore subjects its peers wouldn't touch. Words didn't sell it. Readers bought
Mademoiselle
for the photographs and fashion bulletins, so the editors had considerable latitude in choosing fiction and assigning topics. In its pages, Didion found herself bumping up against the Beat writing she had so despised in college. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lorraine Hansberry, Norman Podhoretz, François Truffaut, and Christopher Logue offered readers hopes and future fears.

The January 1960 issue ran a feature called “Seven Young Voices Speak Up to the Sixties.” “Whatever one may think of them, certainly if more voices like these speak up, lively and idiosyncratic, we may look forward to the decade with cheerful curiosity,” the magazine declared. Later, Joyce Johnson remarked that this particular issue of
Mademoiselle
gave “several thousand young women between fourteen and twenty-five” a “map to a revolution.”

Ginsberg wrote, “Everybody should get high for the next ten years.” Burroughs reduced America's values to “plastic, all hues, inflatable and deflatable, for the Pause that Refreshes, helicopters and every kind of motor vehicle. Gadgets, contrivances in dazzling number and variety, all mute and odorless.”

At Berkeley, Didion failed to see insurgencies. “Call it the weather, call it the closing of the frontier, call it the failure of Eden; the fact remains that Californians are cultivating America's lushest growth of passive nihilism right along with their bougainvillea,” she said. The current crop of college kids was irresponsible, unmotivated, “totally unequipped,” marked by an “absence of drive.”

In the library, or a sorority lobby, she
did
occasionally encounter vague disquiet. “Everyone I meet is the same,” one coed confessed to her. “I don't know what I expected, but sometimes they make me tired.” This is hardly a foretaste of campus riots; with hindsight, it's tempting to say Didion didn't get what was brewing. She projected her own lassitude onto people she met and witnessed only what she wanted to see (her critics have
always
charged her with this). On the other hand, the coed's remark shared page space with a column of ads urging girls to “get top jobs” as secretaries, trained by Katharine Gibbs, the Berkeley School, Grace Ball Secretarial College, Wood Secretarial School, Grace Downs, the Powers School for “poise and self-assurance.” Not precisely a map to a revolution.