The Last Love Song (15 page)

In their monastic rooms at the Barbizon, the girls discovered ironing was unavoidable, even in the Big Apple.

Didion's view of Manhattan—a swirl of luxury, romance, and punishingly hard work—never wavered from her first impressions that summer (in her twilight years, she would choose to live in an apartment just blocks from
Mademoiselle
's former editorial offices). Privately, she was delighted to be thousands of miles from Sacramento and her suitor, but for her profile in the magazine's August issue, she wrote, “Joan spends vacations river-rafting and small-boating in the picture-postcard atmosphere of the Sacramento Valley.” Her “interests” included “almost any book published,” she said, and “publishing a book of my own.”

*   *   *

On June 14, staff paired the GEs with celebrities, fashion designers, and literati—among them, T. S. Eliot, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O' Connor, Gore Vidal, and S. J. Perelman. The assignment was to interview these folks for a segment in the magazine called “We Hitch Our Wagons.” Didion was told to compose a brief profile of Jean Stafford. The session went much better than her Q&A with Auden back at Berkeley. “Certainly I was more socially anxious than Joan” during the interviews, Burroway told me. Stafford was big and wild-haired, friendly and relaxed. Didion sat demurely, prim beside her subject, wearing a long paisley skirt and a collarless blouse, tightly clutching a notebook. She was struck by Stafford's claim that the short story “seems better suited to the age” than novels: “Novels seem to be almost irrelevant these days.” Stafford wrote three hours daily and believed getting a story accepted for publication was worse than rejection because it's “such an exposure and you're always convinced that the thing is terrible … only the thrill of knowing you're writing as well as you possibly can makes it worthwhile.” Didion's profile of Stafford marked her first appearance in a national magazine.

*   *   *

We “discover[ed] to our delight that the famous are fun to meet,” Jane Truslow chirped in her guest column. In a letter home, Burroway complained about a “disgusting cocktail party” at Miss Blackwell's: “You wouldn't believe so many famous people could be so dull,” she wrote.

Joan Gage, another former GE, recalled “champagne and caviar” at Blackwell's soirees, “a strolling accordion player, a view of Central Park, a side chair once owned by Lincoln that no one was allowed to sit on and a cork floor that was badly scarred by the spike heels we wore. In her bedroom, free books sent for BTB's perusal [stood] in three-foot high stacks on the floor.”

*   *   *

The GEs completed most of their work for the magazine in the first two weeks of their stay. On June 24 they toured the United Nations. They sat in Dag Hammarskjöld's chair: a crash course on world politics. The chair's language button was locked on Russian. Then they got to sightsee and play, getting their hair cut (by world-famous stylist Enrico Caruso), going to dances on the roof of the St. Regis, going to the theater to see
The Bad Seed,
attending a fashion show at Trigere's, visiting the ad firm of Ogilvy, Benson, and Mather, touring the press room of
The New York Times
and the NBC television studios, dropping by a private screening of Bob Fosse's movie
My Sister Eileen
at Columbia Pictures. A photograph in the college issue shows Didion and a fellow GE “receiv[ing] instruction in skin care from beauty expert Mala Rubenstein.” The girls sit in front of big round mirrors, wearing towels on their heads, patting their faces in imitation of the looming Mala. Didion looks shrunken and pouty.

The group attended a College Clinic at the Astor “where fashion scored a touchdown,” said Truslow. “Warner's offered us new hope for a slim-hipped future by showing us their miraculous ‘Merry Widows.'” Everywhere they went,
Mademoiselle
“provided several escorts for each of us, not just one prince apiece.” “We were made gifts of, stuffed into, or ushered along to ogle the fashions,” Burroway said. “
[S]tiletto, sheath, cinch
 … Underneath each of us wore the bra that conjured Amazons … stitched in stiff concentric circles to a point.”

*   *   *

“Goodbyes … were bad at the office,” Burroway wrote her mother on July 1. “I am feeling pretty generally overwhelmed.”

For the return trip to California, Eduene had arranged for Didion to travel across the continent by train, including stops in Boston, Montreal, and Chicago. It would be an excellent education, Eduene said. En route, Didion wrote a series of letters to Peggy La Violette, who'd stayed in New York. However reticent Didion may have appeared publicly, the letters reveal a brash young woman sure of her intelligence and charm, impatient with most strangers, whom she considered commonplace and uninteresting. She was posing in the letters—the Barbizon girl loosed upon an unsuspecting world. But she was also certain of her ambition and talent.

She left the Barbizon for Grand Central Station on the morning of Friday, July 1. Beneath the starry dome, she couldn't persuade anyone to carry her bags or help her with directions, so she stood weeping in a bustling crowd. She was embarrassed to be crying so hysterically, but her tears brought action. A kind young man scurried over, took her bag, and helped her check it. (A few years later, she would write of a woman in
Run River
, “[she] was strong enough to make people take care of [her].”)

On the trip to Boston, she was forced to sing Armenian folk songs with a circle of girls headed to an outdoor camp in the Massachusetts woods. Alighting in the city, she ate a sandwich at Schrafft's, drank a bland milk shake, and found the experience so disagreeable that she was determined to phone her mother and demand an immediate flight home. Her letters to La Violette seethe with melodramatic impatience. At her hotel, she fell asleep fully dressed on her bed and did not wake until ten-thirty the following morning. After breakfast, feeling somewhat better, she took a subway to Cambridge and Harvard and walked around the Boston Public Garden. Later, as she was watching the swan boats, a man approached her and made several rude remarks. That was it: Boston, off the list.

That night, she caught the Montreal Red Wing to Quebec and stayed at the Château Frontenac. The trip was trying. The train cars were sad and dirty, she said. A young man made passes at her and an older gentleman, worried about her traveling alone, offered to take her to his village so she could meet his family, especially his younger brother, who'd marry her in a minute, he said. She escaped to the dining car. She described the waiter to La Violette as an Uncle Tom. By now, she was beginning to feel like Daisy Miller, an emblem of American innocence in the Canadian outback.

She was thrilled to reach Chicago: tea at Marshall Field's! She put on flats and walked the lakefront. She bought a collection of Katherine Anne Porter's short stories and was pleasantly surprised by their complexity. Bob sent her a letter by special delivery. She couldn't tell if he was clueless or canny in his cooing imprecations. She told La Violette she felt like Ingrid Bergman in
Gaslight.

Back on the train, she found the beauty of Colorado boring, but the flat, white, alkaline plains of eastern Utah, crossed by dried-up rivers, appealed to her “essentially monochromatic” personality.

And then she was back in Sacramento, in the listless arms of her family.

*   *   *

She missed New York. She couldn't stand being home. Downtown, stores selling paperback books were springing up on every block; other than that, everything seemed frozen in time.

Bob pressured her to be queen of the Lincoln-Mercurys. Her refusals were neurotic, he said. He understood her better than anyone. He knew she loved him. She said the most terrible things to him, but her cruelty made him cling to her all the more.

She needed to go to Berkeley to finish her finals, but she didn't want to. Almost desperately, she took a summer job writing wedding notices for
The Sacramento Union.
Journalism? Her editor told her it consisted mostly of clipping and rewriting, with a different slant, articles from opposition papers (“County Board of Supervisors Lauds North Area Realtors for Plan to Raze Slum, Construct Howard Johnson's”).

She sat in the house, trying not to fight with her mother. Her bedroom was ugly.
Why
had she painted her walls “Pastel Cyclamen”? It hadn't turned out: an awful pink, making her cringe. Her periods laid her low. She told La Violette she had regular headaches, and she implied they might be psychosomatic.

The Society Editor at the
Union
decided to get married and asked Didion if she'd like to be her full-time replacement at the paper. After two years, she'd earn $125 a month. Great—and on top of that, marry Bob? The fellow wouldn't relent. She could just see herself moving to Kern County, driving a new Ford each year, hanging out at the country club, bored to her bones, slipping into boozy, sad affairs with other women's husbands.

*   *   *

In August, the
Mademoiselle
college issue graced Sacramento newsstands. Didion's relatives snapped it up. An editor at Henry Holt, noting her desire to publish a book, wrote to offer her a “sympathetic reading.” If only she had a manuscript!

Between Bob and Henry Holt, Berkeley and the Society Desk, she lived the mixed messages of the “Millies.” “Capture a man … and a career,” said one of the magazine's ads: All you had to do was wear Dacron. “When you live out of a suitcase … take Tampax along.”

All the Bobs in all of Kern County couldn't hold a candle to what she had seen. And what she'd seen, readers would come to witness. Didion's path through society pages and fashion magazines put a unique stamp on her writing, and her writing would become synonymous with the New Journalism. It was a literary style
valuing
style, coinciding with fashion and the reading practices of the New Criticism. No object was too trivial to be analyzed;
everything
was design. Clothing, jewelry, furniture: More than just accoutrements, they were signatures, cultural markers, indicators of the present and the future, means by which life
could be read
. Conrad—that most “female” of men—had understood this even better than Miss Blackwell had. A storehouse of “beads, cotton cloth, red kerchiefs, brass wire, and other trade goods” was called a “fetish,” he said, “because of the spirit of civilization it contained.”

And so fleeting!

Oscar Wilde said fashion is “a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” Didion knew she was writing elegies (“Nothing matters”). The champagne, caviar, and accordion music could not last.

In the late 1970s,
Mademoiselle
stopped the guest editor program. In 1980 it suspended its poetry and fiction contests. In 2001 the magazine ceased altogether. And what of the ambitious girls who had gathered in the summer of 1955 to burn like lightning? We all know what happened to the poetry winner. And: “I was shocked and thrown off balance when Jane Truslow died,” Burroway said. Now Truslow is just a footnote to stories of Sylvia Plath. “Such a fully lovely and alive person, so little impact,” Burroway said. “We are all wisps in the wind.”

3

Grief passes.

“A night of memories and sighs / I consecrate to thee,” wrote the poet Walter Landor. What did he mean by these lines in his elegy for a dead young girl? Clearly, said Didion's teacher, he meant that however overwhelming and necessary mourning may be, it is, like all human experience, finite. The teacher had gone on to say, “A
night,
not a matter of a lifetime, a matter of some hours.”

Read it for yourself. Close textual analysis.
I'll expect your papers on Wednesday.

She was back at Berkeley, trying to shake off her hangover from the inert second half of the summer. Fights with Bob. Mediocre productions at the Music Circus—
South Pacific
again!
Carousel
again (though it did make her weep)! Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones at the state fair. The highlight of August was when her father roused himself to trade in the family's 1950 Ford for a '54 Sun Valley, pale shrimp in color, with matching upholstery and a glass top.

Mademoiselle
should have been the season's glory, but the issue came and went; already, Didion felt like a has-been.

She had completed her finals from the term before. She had purchased five yards of mulberry gray wool, along with a
Vogue
pattern for a couturier coat, and sewn the coat and a matching skirt. She had hoped to make a cocktail dress of striped silk to show her sorority sisters she was just as fashionable as they were despite the fact that she'd abandoned the Tri-Delt house, but once classes started, she lost steam.

She had wanted to take another short story–writing class and a course on Conrad's novels, but the English Department determined she'd used up her electives. She was
required
to finish English 155 (Chaucer), Anthro 120 (the peculiarities of Incan grammar), and Psych 168 (“Abnormal”—the only class she liked). She feared she'd be at Berkeley for another hundred years.

Over the summer, Mark Schorer's students had read his new novel. In Dwinelle Hall they debated its themes:
Was
there freedom of choice in life—really? One member of the group said no and declared himself a Trotskyist. They kicked around Graham Greene's latest novel,
The Quiet American
: subterfuge, international intrigue, U.S. empire building.

Meanwhile, once a week, Didion fended off the rakish comments of Professor Caldwell, who asked her to his office to discuss Edmund Spenser.

It was a long way from mirrored conference rooms. Berkeley sophistication consisted of small coffee shops on Walnut Street where World War II vets spent the afternoons telling eighteen-year-olds stories of combat and prostitution; Sather Gate, where pro- and anti-McCarthyites cleared their throats at one another; and the Cinema Guild Theatre, tucked into the corner of the Sequoia Apartments building on Telegraph Avenue. The Guild showed foreign features (Renoir's
Grand Illusion
), smart Hollywood comedies (Preston Sturges's
Unfaithfully Yours
); the theater's program director at one time was Pauline Kael, before she made her name as her generation's most important and infuriating movie critic. At the Guild, Didion saw Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel
and wept at
The Bicycle Thief.