The Last Love Song (31 page)

The love story against a backdrop of conspiracy sounds more like Didion's Conradian mind than Dunne's, and in fact a letter from Dunne to H. N. “Swanie” Swanson, a legendary Hollywood agent who'd represented William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Ayn Rand, among others, says Didion cowrote the film treatment with him.

The letter is dated February 13, 1965, and is notable for two reasons: It is the first record we have of collaboration between Didion and Dunne; it indicates that their screenwriting partnership began immediately after their move to California in the summer of 1964. Second, the point of the letter is to withdraw the treatment from circulation in favor of a novel. Dunne had just signed a contract with Harper & Row. His belief that a movie of
Show Me a Hero
would be worthier, financially
and
critically, if it proceeded from the sale of a book, rather than from the direct sale of a screenplay, suggests the cultural power of novels.

Dunne's letter doesn't mention that, late in 1964, Didion had taken the film treatment to William Morris. A roomful of agents had offered the couple, as “constructive criticism,” only the advice that they “make the margins a little wider.”

This was typing, not writing; Dunne was grateful for the Harper & Row contract. He told Swanson he and Didion had no further plans for collaboration—she was working on a novel of her own, he said. In the meantime, if Swanson would consider representing Dunne's TV scripts, or his idea for a series …

The problem was, he had not written any TV scripts. He had not even
seen
a TV script. He and Didion had plunged into writing for the screen without pausing to study procedures and formats. Years later, Dunne recalled, “We were coming out of [the Daisy] one night about 2 o'clock in the morning, and some drunk actor was having a fight with his girlfriend, and he threw a script at her. And I picked up the script. It was a television script. It was the first script I'd ever read.”

They began to go to screenings, clutching pencils and pads of paper. They diagrammed movie sequences. “Basically the terminology is easy,” Dunne said. He named “three different things. Fade in. Cut to. Another angle.”

In the next several years, beginning with their sale to
Chrysler Theatre,
they would shed their naïveté about the writing and pitching of scripts. They would witness green-lighted projects go dead, watch other writers take credit for their ideas, get paid for abandoned work, and understand this was simply business. The distinction between
literary
and
commercial,
success
and
failure
(on a project-by-project basis) dimmed in their minds. They did not buy the sentimental view that the pictures had destroyed the literary talents of Faulkner and Fitzgerald. Almost gleefully, Dunne would come to accept the old Hollywood adage: “If you're going to be a whore, you can't complain about getting fucked.”

3

“We were crazy about it. We just loved it. I didn't even notice that six months had slipped into a year,” Didion said. “It was just easier to do everything, like take your clothes to the laundry.” Dunne extended his leave of absence at
Time.
He ordered a six-cylinder Mustang convertible, poppy red, from the Ford factory at River Rouge. Didion took to wearing black-and-white sleeveless dresses—they would have been too thin in New York. The couple was getting into the So Cal spirit.

As he had done in Manhattan, Dunne haunted piano bars, trend spotting. “[N]o one goes to a piano bar except to get laid,” he said. The first thing he discovered was that L.A. piano bars were filled with “ad guys from New York, Buckskin fringe, the kind of watch that tells the time in Caracas [and] Djibuti … Spritzer guys, a little Perrier water over the Almaden to cut the California taste,” the kind of guys who checked their Maldive chronometers and said they had to “catch the noon bird back to New York.” The women in these places all had a couple of ex-husbands and El Dorados with about thirty-two payments left on them. One day, at a bar, Dunne met a pro football player who spent eight thousand dollars a year on his wardrobe (“I'm into three-piece suits this fall … Part of the image I'm trying to project is a clean-cut guy in a certain kind of car.”) Dunne was certain he was getting the L.A. vibe.

Didion liked to study the city from the other end of the social scale, at fund-raisers and gallery openings. While Dunne kept a voyeuristic eye on the lowlifes and strivers, she took him to mingle with movers and shakers. This was the strength of their partnership.

Sometimes it seemed to them, though, that they would never fathom how pawns advanced across the board. One night, at a gala dinner, Didion watched, amazed, as Dorothy Buffum Chandler wheedled Jules Stein into contributing $25,000 toward the construction of her Music Center. In return for his gift, she said, she would offer Stein “twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of free publicity” in her little family paper, the
Los Angeles Times.
The exchange was remarkable for pulling together the political and business interests of Downtown and the Westside, two communities traditionally at odds. Downtowners thought the Westside a place where people exchanged “too many social kisses,” a way of saying it was too Jewish. The tête-à-tête at dinner exemplified a commingling of power and grace the “landed gentry” of Sacramento would have admired but could never quite achieve.

Didion feared she would never acquire the L.A. touch. She was not the accomplished hostess her sister-in-law was. “You want a different kind of wife,” she would tell Dunne in the open Mustang on a late drive back to Portuguese Bend after a party. The refinery flames off the San Diego Freeway burned away the night fog. “You should have married someone more like Lenny.”

“If I wanted to marry someone more like Lenny I would have married someone more like Lenny,” Dunne would say.

At home, Didion sat on the closed lid of the old Victorian toilet and swallowed a phenobarbital.

She began to lose more weight. Her wedding ring kept slipping off her finger. She wore it on a chain around her neck.

She urged Dunne to join her in “planning meetings.” They'd sit together with legal pads, state a problem they needed to solve, and then decide to drive to Santa Monica for lunch.

This seemed to work as well as any other strategy. As six months slipped into a year, they began to feel more at ease at affairs around town. They were less dependent on Nick. It turned out, literary cachet was not difficult to achieve in a place where no one read books. People were lazy and took you at your word.

Socially, it helped that Lenny considered Didion a work in progress. Lenny volunteered at the Colleagues, a charitable organization for unwed mothers. Show business ladies donated their previous year's wardrobes to the Colleagues for an annual fund-raiser. Didion looked sufficiently waiflike; Lenny set aside Natalie Wood's castoffs for her. They fit perfectly. Dunne recalled a “white Saint Laurent evening dress, a water-colored satin Galanos evening dress, and a yellow wool bouclé coat by Edith Head that had been part of Natalie's wardrobe for
Love with a Proper Stranger.
”

“Outsiders … had to be thoroughly vetted before receiving passports into that closed community,” Dunne wrote. Natalie Wood's wool bouclé coat was as good a pass as you could get. Soon, Didion and Dunne were dining regularly with Wood and her husband R. J. Wood charmed Dunne, using a table knife as a mirror, holding it up to her mouth while fixing her lipstick. He loved her stories of the old days when the studios took care of
everything
 … like the time (oh, you remember, she'd say) when Nick Gurdin killed a man, driving drunk, and the studio buried the manslaughter charge …

On evenings like this, it was easy to believe you could toss the
plans.

It would be oversimplifying matters to say that Dunne's brother Nick loved the Old Hollywood dream, and as hashish and blue jeans replaced cocktails in the discotheques, he lost his footing. But there
is
some truth to this. “Everything was changing,” he lamented. “People were starting to smoke pot. I was shocked and disapproving when someone lit up in our house one night … evening dresses were giving way to miniskirts.… Hairdressers started to be invited to parties. Dances changed. The foxtrot was out. The twist was in.… Cole Porter was out. The Beatles were in.”

As his brother's fortunes rose around town, Nick floundered, drinking too much—he reminded Didion of some of her New York pals—hoping people would forget his spat with Sinatra. By now, he and Lenny had three children, Griffin, Alex, and Dominique. Nick was so busy socializing, he rarely saw them. “The nanny would have the meal with the kids,” Griffin recalled. “The adults would check in, you know, have a little something with us, maybe. But then they'd go out for dinner and dancing. Or we'd be up in the bedroom hearing them getting hammered and just having a fantastic time.”

When the Beatles came to play the Hollywood Bowl in the summer of 1964, Nick took his kids to meet the moptops at the Brentwood house of Alan Livingston, Capital Records' president. In the garden, four-year-old Dominique curtsied, as her mother had taught her, when she shook Paul McCartney's hand. She amused the musicians, whose charm lay in their jokey boisterousness. It was another clash of old and new. Queasy, Nick snapped a picture for posterity.

Meanwhile, Didion's ardent support of Barry Goldwater posed a major social challenge in the mostly liberal Democratic circles she found herself in. People argued with her that the war in Vietnam was immoral; through Dunne's
Time
experiences, she'd become unhappy with the
effort,
but she figured “a series of such [military] encounters around the world was just part of the way that our future was going to be.” If nuclear weapons might expedite things, they ought to be considered.

Dunne joked about her archconservative values, but he couldn't keep a cap on her passions as the Republican National Convention approached. It was to be held in San Francisco's Cow Palace from July 13 to July 16. Didion was furious at the way Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon maneuvered to steal the spotlight from the “true” conservative, Goldwater. Two years earlier, a self-pitying Nixon had declared the country wouldn't have him to kick around anymore, but he had gotten himself a prime-time speech at the convention and his ambitions were clear. Reagan, on the stump, used a mix of Red baiting, trumped-up anger at “the Eastern elite,” and nostalgia to enthuse crowds, and California Republicans seemed to fall for it. Didion's anger flared at parties, followed by long silences.

A few weeks before the convention, she and Dunne flew back to New York for a Goldwater rally in Madison Square Garden. William Buckley was there, seated in a one-thousand-dollar box; all of the attendees “with the possible exception of Senator Goldwater” appeared eager to “kiss the hem of his garment,” Dunne wrote. “It was an idolatry that Mr. Buckley gave no sign of thinking either unjust or untoward,” even though, from the perspective of a new Californian, it was anachronistic. Republican power had shifted to the West.

An ugly tone characterized the rally, presaging the San Francisco event and American political style ever since. Dunne noted “the repeated droll allegations in the Garden that liberals were double-gaited, limp-wristed, and generally so light on their feet they could dance on a charlotte russe.”

“The stench of fascism is in the air,” California governor Pat Brown warned the press in San Francisco as the Republican convention gaveled to order. At Goldwater's instigation, 70 percent of the convention delegates voted down a platform plank affirming the constitutionality of the recently passed Civil Rights Act.

While authorities in Mississippi were still searching for the bodies of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, cheerful shouts caromed off the Cow Palace walls. “The nigger issue” was going to sink LBJ, a Republican aide told one reporter.

“A new breed of Republican had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operating in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany,” said Jackie Robinson, the baseball player and special delegate that year for Nelson Rockefeller. “The convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life.” He was appalled when Rockefeller was booed as a moderate Easterner. Several times that week, Robinson felt physically unsafe.

An African-American television reporter named Belva Davis and a fellow black journalist were chased out of the Palace by delegates yelling, “Niggers!… I'm gonna kill your ass!” “The throng began tossing garbage at us: wadded up convention programs, mustard-soaked hotdogs, half-eaten Snickers bars.… Then a glass soda bottle whizzed within inches of my skull,” Davis said.

Fury at the Civil Rights Act was matched by the Republicans' anger at the media. NBC newscasters Chet Huntley and David Brinkley felt distinctly threatened when trapped in the elevators at the Mark Hopkins Hotel with delegates muttering under their breath that they were “crypto-liberals!” One day, one man said to another, in Brinkley's hearing, “You know, these nighttime news shows sound to me like they're being broadcast from Moscow.”

This was all the result of the “greatest campaign in history,” according to Richard Nixon's introduction of Goldwater as Goldwater accepted the party's nomination for president. Goldwater's speech fanned the week's violence. He swore the country would not “stagnate in the swampland of collectivism” or “cringe before the bully of Communism.” It would not bow before the “false prophets” reversing the “tide of freedom” by expanding civil rights. This new legislation, he suggested, opened America's streets to “bullies and marauders.”