The Last Love Song (67 page)

Pierson asked the studio heads why they'd allowed a callow egotist like Jon Peters to take control of a six-million-dollar musical. “It doesn't matter,” he was told. “It would be nice if the picture was good, but the bottom line is to get [Streisand] to the studio. Shoot her singing six numbers and we'll make sixty million.”

3

Throughout the months of writing both
A Book of Common Prayer
and the screenplay for
A Star Is Born,
Didion found Zen-like relief from the pressures of her work in the mundane rituals of shopping, cooking, controlling what went into her refrigerator (though it's also true that, as she worked on her novel and Dunne worked on his, days would pass when no one spoke to anyone else in the house, no one made meals or opened the mail). More than anything else, she took pleasure in meditative retreats to certain locations along the coast and in activities she shared with her daughter.

For company and moral support, she hoped to take Quintana on the road with her during the tour S&S was busy arranging for
A Book of Common Prayer
(the publisher's attempt to create an event; at least it was
something
).

“We are going to miss planes, we are going to miss meals, we are going to lose luggage,” Didion warned Quintana.

“And … and then what?” Quintana asked.

“No matter what happens, we'll be fine.”

In the meantime, Quintana volunteered a few hours a month as a nurse's aide at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, where she had been born. Didion always made sure her blue-and-white pinafore was clean. Quintana swam regular laps back to shore from beyond the Zuma Beach breakers (having been dropped off by a boat) as part of her training in the Junior Lifeguards program. One day, when Didion went there to pick her up, she found her daughter huddled, all alone, in a towel behind a dune. The beach was deserted. The lifeguards had insisted on taking everyone home—“for absolutely no reason,” Quintana told her mother. There must be a reason, Didion said. “Only the sharks,” Quintana said. “They were just blues.”

The lifeguards' lookout, a pale blue wooden structure in the center of Zuma Beach (near the spot where Charlton Heston had discovered the shattered Statue of Liberty in
Planet of the Apes
), was a cozy enclave to which Didion would love to have retreated. “I would drive past Zuma some late foggy nights and see [men] moving around behind the lookout's lighted windows, the only other souls awake in all of northern Malibu,” she said. “It seemed to me a curious, almost beatified career choice, electing to save those in peril upon the sea.” Once, after a Santa Ana wind off the Mojave Desert had set ablaze 69,000 acres of Los Angeles County, with soot blighting the beaches, clouding the high tide, making it look like tinfoil burned in an oven, the lifeguards' bunker seemed to her even more essentially safe, a squat, solid hut in the midst of “some grave solar dislocation.”

But her absolute favorite retreat, where she went to eat lunch by herself, was Arthur Freed Orchids. She'd drive past cheap new motels and condominiums, past rolling straw-colored hills smelling like mud-caked wooden trowels, and pull into a tucked-away complex of greenhouses full of the “most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers.” They reminded her of the greenhouse she used to haunt, walking home from school when she was nine—where she “used up” the air, according to the owner. Here, the keeper of the plants, an Jalisco-born middle-aged man named Amado Vazquez, left her alone in the perfect atmosphere (seventy-two degrees, 60 percent humidity), among the phalaenopsis (most fertile “at full moon because in nature it must be pollinated by a night-flying moth,” he told her). “He seemed to assume that I had my own reasons for being there,” Didion said. “He would speak only to offer a nut he had just cracked, or a flower cut from a plant he was pruning.”

Eventually, Vazquez bought out Arthur Freed and opened his own place, Zuma Canyon Orchids—it stands today, among tall Monterey pines and dusty agave plants, cactus gardens and herb gardens, off a winding road pocked with flood-warning signs.

To Didion, Vazquez was the embodiment of Zen, an expression of the deepest caring in each delicate touch of a petal—of a Leopard Prince, a Walnut Valley Halo, purple, white, and orange—in each gentle tug of the pulleys and chains releasing cascades of water among the swaying leaves in row after row along the greenhouse walls.

“I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved,” Didion said, and she never wanted to leave.

“You want to know how I feel about the plants?” he confided in her one day. “I'll tell you. I will die in orchids.”

*   *   *

Of course, Sacramento was Didion's oldest, surest retreat. As with her previous three books, she had gone there to finish
A Book of Common Prayer,
undisturbed by visitors, her daughter, or ringing telephones. When she'd reached the last chapters, she felt she had become impossible to live with, fighting over everything, unable to cope with Quintana's need for help on her homework. “I'm like a child in my parents' house,” she said.

Eduene, silent, left her alone.

4

“
A Book of Common Prayer
was an evil impulse,” Noel Parmentel told me in the summer of 2013. “A hostile act against a close friend.”

He remains convinced that a character in the novel, Warren Bogart, Charlotte Douglas's drunk and abusive ex-husband, the estranged father of her child, was based on him. He feels the portrait was defamatory.

“Lewis Lapham called me and said, ‘It's all about you!' Part of it was published in
Harper's.
I thought, My God, look at this. Sidney Zion, a lawyer for writers [best known for outing Daniel Ellsberg as the one who leaked the Pentagon Papers] said I should threaten a lawsuit against Joan and the publisher. He thought they'd settle.”

On January 28, 1977, Parmentel wrote Dick Snyder at S&S, Cc-ing Didion and Lois Wallace, warning him not to publish this “calumny.” He said the characterization was malicious, a serious invasion of his privacy, and extremely damaging to him personally.

Wallace called him. “Noel, it's not about you,” she said.

“Come on. Get serious,” he replied.

He wouldn't talk to Didion. “She tried to get in touch with me. I wouldn't,” he said. “The deed had been done. Lawyers were advising her. I don't know why she did it. I suspect it was Greg. I have a hunch he told Joan, ‘Noel won't get mad. He's seen it before.'”

A suggestive line in the novel, describing Charlotte, may indicate how Didion had often felt when caught between her husband's affections and a lingering regard for her former lover: “[S]he was incapable of walking normally across the room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not.” On some level, as well as being a story about mothers and daughters,
A Book of Common Prayer
may also have been a book of demarcations.

Simon & Schuster responded to Parmentel's threat with a curt letter denying his charge, but adding, in any case, that “it would [not] be legally improper” for Didion to have based a character on him in a work of fiction. “Were we or any other publisher to accede to this kind of unjustified complaint, it would give a power of censorship over every book … to every person who believes they can show a resemblance to themselves in the text,” the letter said.

“The problem was, I couldn't prove ‘malice,'” Parmentel said. Nor could he afford a protracted lawsuit. It saddened him to see his long friendship with Didion end in such a fashion, but he never spoke to her again. “What got me mad was I didn't spend time with Quintana anymore,” he told me. “I used to see her as a child in Hartford. I was her godfather. I didn't get to see her grow up.”

5

Quintana's math book and her unsolved equations sprawled across the hotel desk, among scattered pages of the Boston Ritz-Carlton's stationery. Quintana was napping in the next room, in a giant bed covered with Judy Blume books.

Didion ordered iced drinks from room service and sat answering a reporter's questions. She and her daughter had been on the road now for over a week, on the
Common Prayer
book tour. Radio stations and television stations in New York, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston—they were all the same cramped space: wicker settees and camera cables and Styrofoam cups half filled with cold coffee. Always the same uninflected questions were posed: “Where are we heading … [and where were they heading] ‘as Americans' … or ‘as American women'”? It didn't matter what she said; the shows' hosts were only looking for her to fill three or four minutes of airtime until the next hair spray commercial. Most of them had no idea what her book was about and some of them never got its name right—or hers, either, for that matter.

Hotel rooms: the St. Regis, the Ritz-Carlton, the Jefferson. Quintana became deft and efficient at ringing up room service: lamb chops, consommé, oatmeal, crab salad. She ordered bourbon on the rocks for her mother and signed for her Shirley Temples. She learned to call for the car whenever her mother had an appointment with an interviewer, and if the car failed to show up on time, she knew to check the itinerary and phone the Simon & Schuster publicity director. Her mother had always hated talking on the telephone, and Quintana was happy to make the arrangements.

Of course, this wasn't Quintana's first experience with extended hotel stays and her mother's on-the-go work schedule. (“She's remarkably well-adjusted,” Nick once observed. “Considering that every time I see her she's in a different city.”) There were the frequent trips to Hawaii. There were the three weeks of rock gigs. And once, when she was five or six, her parents had taken her to Tucson, where they huddled with a script producer on a picture called
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean,
starring Paul Newman.

It took Didion many years to admit these business trips might have had a powerful, and not purely positive, effect on her daughter.

For example, in 1973, in an essay later published in
The White Album,
Didion mentioned Quintana only in passing in her haste to tell a funny anecdote: “We go out to dinner in Tucson: the sitter tells me that she has obtained for her crippled son an autographed picture of Paul Newman. I ask how old her son is. ‘Thirty-four,' she says.”

In 2011, in
Blue Nights,
Didion expanded this story, admitting more agency: “The Hilton Inn, where the production was based during its Tucson location, sent a babysitter to stay with [Quintana] while we watched the dailies. The babysitter asked her to get Paul Newman's autograph. A crippled son was mentioned. Quintana got the autograph, delivered it to the babysitter, then burst into tears. It was never clear to me whether she was crying about the crippled son or about feeling played by the babysitter.”

As a consequence of her mother's job. At five or six years old.

“[S]he had no business in these hotels,” Didion finally conceded.

She also said she found the name of Quintana's birth mother in the Tucson telephone directory. She said she took the directory to her husband and they told the producer there should be no media reports about the Dunnes' presence in Arizona: “[U]nder no condition should Quintana's name appear in connection with the picture.” Didion didn't want to risk meeting the mother on the set one day, asking to see her daughter.

Most likely, as in the incident of the lecture hall at Berkeley, she put her husband up to talking to the film's producer. “I believed as I did so that I was protecting both Quintana and her mother,” she wrote.

Now, on the S&S book tour, Quintana was out and about each day, highly public and active, in many ways her mother's best representative. In D.C.,
The Washington Post
's Katharine Graham asked her, “How do you like our monuments?” “What monuments?” Quintana said. She'd not had time for the Lincoln or Washington Memorials. She'd been too busy learning her way around newsrooms and the National Public Radio broadcast booths. “Had an interesting talk with Carl Bernstein,” she wrote in the journal her fifth-grade teacher had asked her to keep on the tour as part of an English assignment. She chatted with Peggy Noonan, soon to be one of Ronald Reagan's speechwriters—Noonan was then working at WEEI radio in Boston. Quintana got to hear the latest Steely Dan and Fleetwood Mac records before anyone else in the country. She made sure her mother didn't forget to pack her thousand-watt hair blower whenever they left a hotel.

Quintana's favorite city was Dallas. She liked its flat horizon. Boston made the bottom of her list: It was “all white,” she said. “You mean you didn't see many black people in Boston?” Susan Traylor's mother asked her once she got home. “No,” Quintana said. “I mean it's not in color.”

In the air, Didion and her daughter traveled first-class—S&S was no longer an old-fashioned gentlemen's publisher. Stamped across Didion's itinerary was the bland phrase “A Division of Gulf & Western Corporation.” She was now part of a loose conglomeration of companies, none of them having anything to do with one another except being owned by the same giant and owing that giant a profit. Books were an afterthought in the giant's global transactions.

What's that title again?

She traveled the way her brother, a corporate real-estate broker, traveled—in style, regretting that most Americans were too soft these days to make it cross-country by wagon: “[W]e were often, my child and I, the only female passengers, and I apprehended for the first time those particular illusions of mobility which power American business”—
and
the political class. “Time was money. Motion was progress. Decisions were snap.” She perceived that the planet's economics, trade deals, and wars, all indistinguishable, were driven mostly by men sipping gin and tonics in climate-controlled cabins above the clouds, keeping tenuous ties to people and places on the ground's shaky crust.