The Last Love Song (14 page)

*   *   *

Schorer's creative writing course paralyzed Didion. “We were constantly being impressed with the fact that everybody else had done it already and better. It was very daunting to me,” she said. Phyllis Butler, one of her classmates, remembered her as quiet but intense, a good performer of her work, which stood out in a group of extraordinarily talented students (including Butler, who went on to a successful writing career). To get into the course, students had to submit a one-page essay to Schorer. “You hoped he would like it, and a lot of people got turned down,” Butler said.

“I was so scared in that class I couldn't speak. I felt too shy and too inadequate,” Didion recalled. “[I had] a terror that any sentence I committed would expose me as
not good enough
.” She completed only three of the required five stories. Her classmates, many of them older than she was, wrote witty and entertaining anecdotes. Conrad had hardened her conviction that “there was more to be learned” about life “from the
dark
journey.” Her peers' concerns—marriage, work, the struggle for day-to-day contentment—seemed prosaic. “[I]t had not yet struck me in any visceral way that being nineteen was not a long-term proposition,” she said years later. She failed to engage her compatriots in the glories of point of view, frame tales, the possibilities of intimacy and distance. “A lot of people don't get as excited about these things as I do,” she told an interviewer. She dreaded showing up at noon each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at Dwinelle Hall.

In class, Schorer stressed “sociological history,” Butler told me. “‘Understand your society,' he'd say. ‘If you can capture your time in your writing—as Verdi did in his operas, for example—you've made a real contribution.' He also warned us, ‘If you want to get published, it's difficult to come from California.' He felt there was a real East-West divide in the literary world.”

Eventually, Didion completed a short story she felt pretty good about. It wasn't Joseph Conrad—she wasn't prepared to scale Mount Parnassus, so she stayed in the valley and wrote close to home.

She tried reporting for the campus newspaper. W. H. Auden began a West Coast tour in the fall of 1953. His recent poetry, about a culture driven “mad” by excess and war, intrigued Didion. He had defined the present as the “Age of Anxiety.” His poem “September 1, 1939,” whose images of “blind skyscrapers” and flashings of light amid an “odor of death” would be widely disseminated on the Internet following the World Trade Center attack in 2001, was quoted frequently in Berkeley bars. In it, he described the decade of Didion's birth as “low” and “dishonest,” a snuffing of America's “clever hopes.”

Perhaps Didion feared what he had to say about her generation's prospects. She was “absolutely terrified” of him, his smoker's cough and baleful eyes. She said, “I couldn't think of any questions [for him]. I had written some down but they seemed too stupid.” She stammered and went white and mute during this meeting with Auden, her first official interview.

 

Chapter Five

1

By sophomore year, Didion had fled the chaotic Tri-Delt house and moved into a five-bedroom, twelve-bath place at 2520 Ridge Road, across from Etcheverry Hall, near old stucco apartment suites with scalloped balconies tucked among avocado and apple trees, Italian cypress, silver birch. She shared the house with three other girls, including Corrine Benson from Marin County and Didion's sorority roommate, Shirley Stephenson. Stephenson's decorative arts enthusiasms meant Mondrian murals were tacked to the closet doors and stylized animals crawled across kitchen walls. An abstract mobile hung from the living room ceiling, its sharp edges frightening Didion whenever she got up for any reason in the middle of the night. She felt her friends had staked out each corner of the house before she'd had a chance to move in.

If not quite at home on campus, she was settled in her rituals. She was part of a student coterie in the English Department invited to faculty digs. One night, one of her teachers got sloppy drunk and revealed his bitterness at academic drudgery and university regulations. Didion was stunned to learn her mentors shared some of the same adult disappointments she'd seen in her family's house while growing up. The serious English majors were expected to go to graduate school. Didion did not share this ambition. Though she felt like an imposter among her peers, her teacher's drunken screed strengthened her reluctance to remain in academia. For the time being, though, she hoped to secure an undergraduate teaching assistantship with Thomas Parkinson, a poet and Yeats scholar fascinated by the fledgling Beat movement. Parkinson was the son of a laborer who'd been blacklisted in the San Francisco general strikes in the 1930s. He was active in campus politics. He was particularly sympathetic to the struggles of his female students, whose fellowship opportunities were limited and poorly funded compared to their male counterparts'.

In the summers, Didion pursued a tepid romance in Sacramento with a boy she referred to in letters to friends only as Robert or Bob. Robert's uncle owned a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Bakersfield, and his family had large oil, cotton, and uranium shares. In Bakersfield, the Lincoln-Mercury dealers—Haberfelde, Kitchen-Boyd—were major power brokers, hosting lavish parties, establishing fine arts collections, and controlling city politics. Robert had declared his enduring love for Didion and hoped she would marry him once she graduated from Berkeley. He insisted Bakersfield's future was boundless—Ford was about to introduce a new Continental sure to sell like hotcakes. For a starter home, the couple could purchase a modest ranch-style house in the suburbs, the type of acreage her father hoped to develop now that he was out of Letterman and dabbling again in real estate.

*   *   *

Four years after World War II, Americans had bought 21.4 million cars, 20 million refrigerators, 5.5 million stoves, and 11.6 million television sets. They had moved into one million new housing units. Simone de Beauvior, on the same trip to the States as her Berkeley visit, said the developing American suburb was “rigid,” “frozen,” “closed.” She decried the “serried rows of ranch houses, painted in pastel colors, each with its own picture window and its garden, each equipped with a deep freeze, oil furnace, and automatic washer, spring[ing] up in the wilderness.” But the nation was buying the dream.

The dream was sold, hard, in
Good Housekeeping,
Mademoiselle,
and other magazines. Bob could use the glossy ads featuring well-coiffed wives in his courtship ritual. Ironically, in 1939,
Mademoiselle
had established a promotion encouraging college-age girls to delay keeping house and to pursue a professional path. It was called the guest editor program. Each year, twenty girls were chosen from fifteen hundred applicants nationwide to be flown to New York for a month to work with the magazine's editors on an August college issue. To apply, students submitted work fitting the magazine's needs in their personal area of interest: fiction, nonfiction, fashion, advertising. The girls got hands-on publishing experience and the magazine's advertisers got firsthand feedback from its target audience.

In 1953, Sylvia Plath was picked to be managing guest editor. She was two years older than Didion; otherwise, early on they would have competed for many of the same opportunities. In a letter to her mother, Plath summed up her experience at
Mademoiselle
: “I have, in the space of six days, toured the second largest ad agency in the world and seen television kitchens, heard speeches there, gotten ptomaine poisoning from crabmeat the agency served in their ‘own special test kitchen' and wanted to die very badly for a day.” She fictionalized her New York adventures in
The Bell Jar;
had the novel been published in time (it appeared under a pseudonym in Britain in 1963 and in the United States in 1971), Didion would have had reason to be skeptical of ranch house kitchens, not to mention magazine work. In 1955, submitting an early draft of a short story, she applied for
Mademoiselle
's guest editor slot in fiction and got it.

2

Didion's first glimpse of Manhattan, from an Idlewild bus into town, was obscured by spring rain, but that fact was more exotic than her old penthouse dreams. It didn't rain in Sacramento in the late spring or summer. Her dress was too thin. She'd known it the instant she'd stepped off the DC-7 in Idlewild's makeshift terminal and sensed the moisture in the air—warm air tinged with mildew.

It was May 1955. She'd just completed her junior year (temporarily excused from taking her finals). A national magazine had recognized her talent. Later, in “Goodbye to All That,” one of her finest early essays, she'd say “one of the mixed blessings of being twenty … is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary, has ever happened to anyone before.”

The bus took her to the Barbizon Hotel for Women on the corner of Lexington and East Sixty-third Street: twenty-three stories of elegant Gothic Revival, Moorish, and Renaissance touches carved into coral brick and sandstone. Since 1927 a “women-only” establishment, whose patrons were expected to be pedigreed, stylish, and chaste, the Barbizon, said
Vanity Fair,
was “the city's elite dollhouse.”
Mademoiselle
and other fashion magazines toasted it as the
only
place “ambitious, discriminating young women” would want to stay in New York: Anyone who was anyone wanted to be a “Barbizon girl.”

Most of the hotel's seven hundred guest spaces were tiny and spare. Didion spent her first night in the Barbizon with a sudden fever and a cold from the rain and the room's freezing temperature. She did not know how to turn the air conditioner off. She was afraid to call the desk and ask someone to come up and help her because she did not know how much she should tip the hotel employees. So she wrapped herself in wool blankets and telephoned Bob. She told him she could see the Brooklyn Bridge from the window of her room. In fact, it was the Triborough Bridge. A single red rose and a work schedule lay on her pillow; the following morning she would meet the magazine's editors and all of her fellow “Millies.”

Among the other guest editors that year were Jane Truslow, who would marry Plath's old boyfriend, Peter Davison; Janet Burroway, who would publish several well-regarded novels; Gael Greene, eventually a restaurant critic for
New York
magazine; and Peggy La Violette from Berkeley, with whom Didion was especially close.

Greene and Burroway said they had only vague memories of Didion. She kept herself small. “I remember Joan as something between shy and scared. But you never know when ‘shy' is ‘private,'” Greene said.

“I would say, consulting a faulty memory, that I did find her a touch aloof, intelligent at an intelligent distance,” Burroway explained. But in no sense was Didion a “quivering creature.” “She struck me as a very self-possessed young woman. Of course, I was a quivering contradiction of ambition and clumsiness myself, so I may certainly have failed to recognize that in her.”

Mademoiselle
's main conference room, on the sixth floor at 575 Madison Avenue, where the guest editors first got to know one another and received their initial assignments from the staff, had “one whole wall” fully mirrored, Burroway recalled. The other walls were decorated “in a black and cream wallpaper of Victorian ads, ladies in bustled dresses. This is where Betsy Talbot Blackwell [the magazine's editor] greeted us that first day with her fur stole, cigarette holder, and ‘We believe in pink this year.'”

Burroway shared with me several excerpts from letters she sent her parents from New York. They cover in detail the group's activities and impressions.

May 31: “Interviews with
Mlle.
editors, all of whom were nice and helpful except for Miss McNeil, Merchandising Editor, who is a very tough cookie and not about to be impressed.… Had lunch at the Ivy Room of the Hotel Drake.… French and gold-leaf ritzy, filet of sole 3.95, coffee .50, ice cream .70.… We're going to Columbia campus tomorrow morning to have pix taken for the aug. issue. Gave us skirts, blouses, and shoes to wear. We have to give back the skirts and shoes, but I think we keep the blouses.”

The photo shoot took place at 6:45 at Baker Field. The girls sat in the bleachers, squinting into the sun, wearing “man-tailored” long-sleeved cotton shirts with buttoned collars and woven stripes. Didion's pageboy is immaculate, her smile easy and wide, her face turned to the right—her preferred pose. It framed a slight dimple in her left cheek. Jane Truslow would write in her guest editor column that whenever the GEs got together, “creative energy crackled like summer heat lightning,” but in these pictures the girls look sleepy and disoriented.

June 3: “The magazine is funny … ½ the office is writing it & ½ advertising it—there's even a dept. for publicizing
Mlle.
publicity.… Ridiculous.”

“It was the first time I'd ever worked in an office,” Didion said, years later, “except for
The Sacramento Union,
which wasn't a real office because it was
The Sacramento Union.
”

By June 7, the drudgery of writing and rewriting dull copy, having it “ripped to pieces” by the editors in tedious group conferences was setting in. Burroway wrote her mother, “
All
the GEs are disappointed and disillusioned, most of them more so than I.”

June 9: “We sat in a 3-hour editorial conference rehashing ideas and style; then I took all the editorials and the conference notes, put each on a yellow card, shuffled and rearranged & tried to put them together to please everybody. It wasn't easy.”

In the evenings, back at the Barbizon, sitting around the lobby on Oriental carpets under antique English lanterns, the GEs gossiped about the magazine's editors. One was Cyrilly Abels, the homeliest woman in the office, all the girls agreed. She wore wool crepe dresses clinging tightly to her bosom. She was unforgiving: She kept a box of Kleenex by her desk for girls who withered under her raw, critical gaze. Others included Polly Weaver; Rita Smith, the plump, alcoholic-splotchy sister of Carson McCullers (“Sistah has ruined my
life
!”) and crying shoulder for Terry Southern, who called her seven or eight times a day; the “ridiculous” Miss Blackwell, always wearing formal hats at her desk, given to cataclysmic coughing—she'd be into the vodka by noon each day, her glazed eyes fixed on the Georgian chandelier in her office. The GEs traded stories they'd heard about Barbizon legends—Grace Kelly dancing in the hallways in her nightie;
Vogue
models splitting finger sandwiches in the lobby with dumpy girls from the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School; J. D. Salinger seducing Barbizon babes at a nearby drugstore and then sweeping them off to naughty Greenwich Village. Homesick, the girls talked about where they'd come from—Arizona, Indiana, Ohio. They admitted they loved and hated New York.