The Last Love Song (106 page)

“capacity for voyeurism”: ibid., 199.

In a letter to journalist Jane Howard: John Gregory Dunne letter to Jane Howard, October 17, 1973, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

“large, good-looking woman”: Dunne,
Vegas,
201.

“to see if anyone famous had died”: ibid., 200.

“She required total concentration”: ibid., 201.

“There must have been five hundred bodies”: Dunne quoted in Michiko Kakutani, “How John Gregory Dunne Puts Himself into Books,”
New York Times,
May 3, 1982; available at
www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/02/reviews/dunne-work.html
.

“Don't be obtuse”: Dunne,
Vegas,
206.

“sat and stared”: ibid., 205.

“I listened to the way people talked”: John Gregory Dunne,
Quintana & Friends
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), xv.

“The joke … was that the nuns”: George Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2,”
The Paris Review
38, no. 138 (Spring 1996); available at
theparisreview.org/interviews/1430/the-art-of-screenwriting-no-2-john-gregory-dunne
.

“we divided into the Four Oldest and the Two Youngest”: John Gregory Dunne,
Harp
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 16.

“a full cargo of ethnic and religious freight”: ibid.

“their faces scrubbed and shiny”: “Dominick Dunne Biography”; available at
www.biography.com/print/profile/dominick-dunne-9542407
.

“steerage to suburbia”: Dunne,
Harp,
34.

“[I was] slightly ashamed of my origins”: ibid., 45.

“Get mad
and
get even”: ibid., 26.

“
[H]e had an enormous influence” and subsequent quotes from Dominick Dunne: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” originally published in
Vanity Fair,
March 2004; reprinted in Andrew Blauner, ed.,
Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 186.

“coloreds,” “wayward,” and “as my mother was the dispenser of Kotex”: Dunne,
Harp,
45.

“sniper fire”: ibid., 30.

“quick man with a strap”: ibid., 16.

“would do my crying for me”: ibid., 17.

“played life on the dark keys”: ibid., 18.

“I listened for a heartbeat”: John Gregory Dunne,
Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), 159.

“and worked in the factories”: Dunne,
Vegas,
88.

“very worldly”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

Dunne thought the fellow queer: Dunne expressed this suspicion in a letter to Jane Howard on December 30, 1974, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

“pageantry”: Dunne,
Vegas,
107–108.

“taint on the human condition”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

“Where you from?”: Dunne,
Vegas,
115.

“Though it was three years after Hiroshima”: ibid., 116.

“cherry”: ibid.

“Hartford was a Yale town”: Dunne,
Harp,
46.

“I was just a tight-assed upper-middle-class kid”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting, No. 2.”

“contacts who might help me”: Dunne, “The Death of a Yale Man,”
The New York Review of Books,
April 20, 1993; available at
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1993/apr/22/the-death-of-a-yale-man
.

“swordsmen”: ibid., 98.

“finally made contact”: ibid., 120.

“John was always fascinated”: Dominick Dunne, “A Death in the Family,” 187.

“constituency of the dispossessed,” “white and black underclass,” and “I grew to hate the officer class”: Plimpton, “John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2.”

“to appreciate whores”: ibid.

“Every failure in New York”: Dunne quoted in Dan Wakefield,
New York in the Fifties
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992), 57.

“tinkling the ivories”: John Gregory Dunne, “Catching the Next Trend,”
Esquire,
April 1977, 10.

“waiters from the Tower Suite”: Dunne,
Regards,
283.

“most creative gossip”: Calvin Trillin,
Floater
(New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 30.

“was always discovering two people”: Wakefield,
New York in the Fifties,
231.

“I was a jerk”: Dunne,
Regards,
350.

“I was still trying to run the game”: Joan Didion, “In Sable and Dark Glasses,”
Vogue Daily,
October 31, 2011; available at
www.vogue.com/magazine/article/in-sable-and-dark-glasses-joan-didion
.

“I want to marry him” and “The minute I got into this house”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson, “Joan Didion—Losing John,”
O, The Oprah Magazine,
2005; available at
www.saradavidson.com/joan-didion-losing-john
.

CHAPTER 10

“couldn't”: John Gregory Dunne,
Harp
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 137–38.

“Saigon-watcher”: John Gregory Dunne,
Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), 350.

“I didn't even know where the countries were”: Dunne quoted in Dan Wakefield,
New York in the Fifties
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1992), 33.

“what now seems a constant postcoital daze”: Dunne,
Regards,
351.

“I respected these guys”: Dunne quoted in Wakefield,
New York in the Fifties,
331.

“set straight the local reporters”: Dunne,
Regards,
235.

“all shit”: ibid., 351.

“I start a book”: Linda Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71,”
The Paris Review
20, no. 74 (Fall-Winter, 1978); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3439/the-art-of-fiction-no-71-joan-didion
.

“very complicated chronologically”: ibid.

“A friend would leave me the key”: Joan Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 235.

“fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk”: ibid., 232–33.

“everything in it”: ibid., 232.

“[T]hese dwarfs would go out into the garden”: Chris Chase, “The Uncommon Joan Didion,”
Chicago Tribune,
April 3, 1977.

“Its specialty is being two blocks away”: Calvin Trillin,
Floater
(New Haven: Ticknor & Fields, 1980), 68.

“The usual suspects all turned it down”: Noel Parmentel to the author, February 5, 2013.

“He used to say”: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

“I wrote this book” and subsequent quotes from Ivan Obolensky: Ivan Obolensky in conversation with the author, January 22, 2013.

“pounding the sidewalks”: Matthew Guinn, “David McDowell: Forgotten Man of Letters,”
Publishing Research Quarterly
(Spring 1988): 1.

“What does it mean?”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live,” Academy of Achievement interview with Joan Didion, June 3, 2006; available at
www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/did0int-1
.

“didn't know how to do anything at all”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

“That's why the last half is better than the first half”: ibid.

Smith couldn't get anything past him: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

“I kept trying to run the first half through”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction, No. 71.”

“Obolensky had a wonderful party” and subsequent quotes about the party: Noel Parmentel in conversation with the author, July 11, 2013.

“Things change”
: Joan Didion,
Run River
(New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963), 47.

“Okie voice”: ibid., 68.

“little interest”: ibid., 133.

“talk about their diets”: ibid., 182.

“
lots of land / Under starry skies a-bove
”: ibid., 162.

“towns so clean”: ibid., 177.

“She was not certain”: ibid., 264.

“
We could make the reasons
”: ibid., 25.

“
late for choosing
”: ibid., 33.

“The future was being made”: ibid., 157.

“tenacious”: Joan Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 160.

“not inaccurate characterization”: ibid., 166.

“while the shrill verve”: Robert Lowell, “Man and Wife”; available at
www.poets.org/viewmedia.php./prmMID/15283
.

“A member of
Vogue'
s
staff”
:
Vogue,
May 1963, 204.

“[T]here are moments”: Katherine Mansfield,
The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield,
ed. C. K. Stead (London: Penguin, 1977), 173.

“While the scene here is California”:
Kirkus Reviews,
June 15, 1963; available at
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-didion/run-river
.

“the appearance in California”: Guy E. Thompson, “California Saga Echoes Faulkner,”
Los Angeles Times,
May 19, 1963.

“Miss Didion's first novel”:
The New Yorker,
May 11, 1963, 178.

“seemed to think”: Kuehl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

“war was not even being fought” and subsequent quotes from David Halberstam: David Halberstam,
The Powers That Be
(New York: Dell, 1979), 642, 644–46.

“There's no way
Time
”: Dunne quoted in Wakefield,
New York in the Fifties,
331.

“light at the end of the tunnel”: ibid., 332.

“dreamed of being an adventurer”: Dunne,
Regards,
244–45.

“The longing in man's heart”:
Life,
October 19, 1962, 20.

“tuneful source”: ibid., 117.

“modern methods”: ibid., 96.

“[W]e did not guarantee to each other”: John Gregory Dunne,
Quintana & Friends
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1978), xix.

“I don't know of many good marriages”: Trudy Owett, “Three Interviews,”
New York
, February 15, 1971, 40.

“It wasn't so much a romance”: Didion quoted in Madore McKenzie, “Joan Didion Is Small but Far from Timid,”
Boca-Raton News,
July 21, 1977.

“without emotional investment” and “clinically detached”: John Gregory Dunne,
Vegas
(New York: Random House, 1974), 4–5.

“Who can I turn to?” John Gregory Dunne,
Crooning
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 17.

“Marriage, writing” and subsequent quotes from Robinson: Jill Schary Robinson in conversation with the author, April 23, 2013.

“I'm in a serious decline”: ibid.

“My mother had a party for us”: Dunne quoted in Bernard Weinraub, “At Lunch with John Gregory Dunne: The Bad Old Days in All Their Glory,”
New York Times
, September 14, 1994; available at
www.nytimes.com/1994/09/14/garden/at-lunch-with-john-gregory-dunne-the-bad-old-days-in-all-their-glory.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
.

“by-elections in Liechtenstein”: Dunne,
Regards,
352.

“San Francisco's independently owned”: Ransohoff's advertisement in the
San Francisco City Directory,
1963; available at
sfgeneaology.com/sanfranciscodirectory/1963/1963_2853.pdf
.

“It's when a woman is thirty” and subsequent quotes from this article:
Vogue,
July 1963, 31.

“vertigo”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 15.

“You know those little old ladies”: Michiko Kakutani, “Staking Out California,”
New York Times,
June 10, 1979; available at
www.nytimes.com/1979/06/10/books/didion-calif.htm?ref-joandidion
.

“The entire John Birch library”: Didion,
Where I Was From,
205.

“the classic betrayal”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
165.

“So who
were
those little faggots?”: Robert Lipsyte quoting Ali in
Muhammad Ali Through the Eyes of the World,
ed. Mark Collings (London: MPG Books, 2001), 259.

“a lot of people talking to [her]”: “Telling Stories in Order to Live.”

“unshirted hell”: Noel Parmentel, “Portrait of the Reviewer,”
National Review,
January 30, 1962, 68.

“[One day] I stopped riding”: Didion,
Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
141.

“lilac and garbage”: ibid., 228.

“[I] could not walk on upper Madison Avenue”: ibid., 237.

“Its main liability”: Joan Didion, “Captain Newman, M.D.: ‘Painless Erosion,'”
Vogue,
April 1964, 42.

“What disagreements?”: Halberstam,
The Powers That Be,
647.

“I could sit through”: Joan Didion, “The Guest,”
Vogue,
March 1964, 57.

“
What a Way to Go
”: Joan Didion, “What a Way to Go: ‘A Million and a Half a Laugh,'”
Vogue,
May 1964, 60.

“Although I assume”: Joan Didion, “The Night of the Iguana: ‘The Dream and the Nightmare,'”
Vogue,
September 1964, 106.

“Everyone's sitting around”: Lynne Sharon Schwartz interview,
New York in the Fifties,
directed by Betsy Blankenbaker (Figaro Films, 2000), film documentary.