The Last Love Song (34 page)

Isherwood's longtime partner, Don Bachardy, told me, “Well, it was obvious why Chris didn't warm to Joan. She doesn't like fags. Really—I always thought, What's she doing, married to John? I've never been as cruised by anyone as I was by him. He wouldn't take his eyes off my crotch. He always seemed very queer to me, and so did his brother Nick. I couldn't understand how John could be so obvious about it. It was embarrassing to me. And Joan was around the whole time. She had to know. Women who are married to queers or who find out later … it has to be very peculiar for them. And it's easier to blame the queers than the husband.”

Bachardy's remarks should be taken with heavy pitchers of salt; they're best understood in light of Dunne's class background, which made him feel perpetually excluded from whatever was happening, intensely curious about experiences he might be missing. Hence, his voyeurism, his reporting, his fascination with crime and prostitution (obsessions he would play out in his fiction), with getting invited to every party in town, a need he shared with his brother Nick (who, as it happened, admitted his bisexuality shortly before his death in August 2009).

*   *   *

What made a good party back then?

“Harrison,” Eve Babitz told me. She meant Harrison Ford: beautiful young actors not yet sure of themselves. “And Joan, of course. The best cook, ever.”

Babitz charmed Didion and always made her laugh. She was a writer and artist, the goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky. In 1963 she'd posed for one of the most famous photographs in modern art history, playing chess, nude, with Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of his retrospective show at the Pasadena Museum of Art.

She became an “art groupie/art model” around L.A. “In every young man's life there is an Eve Babitz. Usually it's Eve Babitz,” said her friend Earl McGrath. For a while, she worked for Ahmet Ertegün at Atlantic Records, designing rock album covers. She met Didion through McGrath, a quintessentially L.A. creature, dabbling in a bit of everything—movies, music, art. “Mostly, he was supported by his wild Italian wife, Camilla,” Babitz said. Camilla was the daughter of a countess. Footloose with pots of money, “Earl just poked around L.A.,” Babitz said. He was one of Nick Dunne's great friends. “What he really wanted to do was cast movies with people like Harrison. He'd flit here and there. He'd pop into my lover's apartment unannounced at seven every morning. ‘Oh, hello, Earl.'”

Like Didion, Babitz grasped the importance of style: Watch styles change, she thought—in fashion, music, cars (“Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby”), culinary and aesthetic tastes—and you're a step ahead of everyone else in predicting where the culture will go. What “serious” intellectuals dismissed as passing fads was, in fact, the ball game. For example, “Marilyn Monroe was [a] role model,” Babitz pointed out. But then Hollywood abandoned the “Rubenesque” woman. “Marilyn had died [and] all the skinny girls were coming out and then when the Beatles came the skinny girls took over … the girls on the Sunset Strip. The girls that would go every night and get all dressed up and wear gloves and fake eyelashes and, you know, Jax dresses … it was just about sex.”

It's striking that Nick Dunne, enchanted with the Old Hollywood, and Eve Babitz, eager to tweak it any way she could, both marked with great melancholy a cultural sea change timed to the Beatles' arrival in the States. And though, of course, Hollywood had
always
been about sex, it had gotten harder, and this could end only one way.

*   *   *

Many of the girls Babitz saw on the Sunset Strip wound up at night at the Chateau Marmont, a 1920s-era hotel modeled after the Château d'Amboise in France's Loire Valley. The hotel was situated between Beverly Hills and Hollywood. The old movie studios used to rent rooms at the Marmont as safe havens for their stars' bad behavior. “I mean, it was built for, you know, peccadilloes,” Babitz told the writer A. M. Homes. “You know, if you want to commit suicide, if you want to commit adultery, go to the Chateau. It was the height of elegance.”

Inside the hotel's walls, among the crushed velvet sofas, the glass chandeliers, and the tiny elevators lined with signs (
IN CASE OF EARTHQUAKE, REMAIN CALM
), guests could embrace the illusion that the Strip was
not
just sex; it kept its noirish charm; the ghost of Marilyn might waltz through the door any minute.

Visiting New Yorkers loved to stay there because they could believe they'd landed in Europe rather than in Los Angeles.

Earl and Camilla McGrath lived in the Marmont. “When I was growing up … the hotel was always part of our lives,” Griffin Dunne said. “You know how some families have these uncles, they're not really their uncles, but you say uncle. Our uncle was a guy named Uncle Earl … Earl and Camilla lived in the fifth-floor penthouse.… [It was] the largest terrace space in Los Angeles.… If you're a kid it's like going to a castle.”

Sometimes, on weekends, Nick picked up the kids and took them to the Marmont. Occasionally, there, he'd meet his brother and sister-in-law. They'd sit and drink, trade gossip. To Didion, life was beginning to feel once more like an endless debauch, but she was also not immune to feeling left out, and she appreciated it when a party was
well done,
brought off by a consummate performer. Magical evenings, like those at Connie Wald's, helped mitigate sadness and ease the burden of the tawdry.

Her greatest melancholy had to do with her longing for a child.

One afternoon, an acquaintance she'd met at a party invited her to her Malibu home. They sat together on the terrace, overlooking the sea, drinking wine and trying to catch a bit of sun. The woman told Didion her husband had been born the night the
Titanic
went down. This sentence struck Didion as the kind of line she might use in a fiction (if only she were
writing
fiction!), but she couldn't keep hold of it; she was more intrigued by the woman's confession that she'd like to rent out her house and be with her children, who lived in Paris now. Didion told her she wished she could afford the one thousand dollars a month to rent the house. “Someday you will,” the woman said. “Someday it all comes.”

Hungover slightly, Didion drove back to Portuguese Bend. Before going home, she stopped at a supermarket and overheard a checkout clerk telling a customer she had no choice but to divorce her husband because he had a seven-month-old baby by another woman. Didion nearly crumpled with dread “because I wanted a baby and did not then have one and because I wanted to own the house that cost $1,000 a month to rent and because I had a hangover,” she said.

4

On August 11, 1965, in the Watts neighborhood, a white Highway Patrolman stopped a black driver on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The officer called for backup; a growing crowd felt the police were using excessive force (especially when the driver's mother and brother arrived, heightening tensions). People began to throw rocks and chunks of concrete. Soon, cars were aflame. A police sergeant, Ben Dunn, said South-Central Los Angeles looked “like an all-out war zone in some far-off foreign country. It bore no resemblance to the United States of America.” Thousands of National Guardsmen were mobilized to restore order.

Noel Parmentel, who'd come to town to visit the Dunnes, insisted they go down there.

Later, Didion would write coolly in her essay “The White Album” of the fires that burned at night, visible for miles on the freeways; she'd interview Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panthers, who said of the riots, “Black people had been taught non-violence; it was deep within us. What good, however, was non-violence when the police were determined to rule by force?” (Newton would become a Hollywood favorite, invited to parties, posing for photos with Dennis Hopper and Jane Fonda, and producers such as Bert Schneider [
Easy Rider,
Five Easy Pieces,
The Last Picture Show
], looking to snag a little street cred). What Didion didn't say in “The White Album” was that she spent the evening in Watts cowering in the backseat of the car, afraid she'd be shot by a National Guardsman, while Parmentel ran into the streets, shouting, “Press! Press!” (He
did
have legitimate press credentials at the time, from his work with
CBS Reports
and Richard Leacock on the documentary
Ku Klux Klan—Invisible Empire
.)

Parmentel got lost in the chaos. Worried, Didion and Dunne returned to Portuguese Bend, where they found Dick Harden prowling the grounds with a shotgun big enough to bring down a “goddamned elephant,” Dunne said. “I'm going to be ready in case people come out here,” he insisted.

Thirty-six hours later, Didion located Parmentel in the Chateau Marmont, where he was telling riot stories to a roomful of starlets. Then he was off to San Francisco with a lady friend to hang out with the editors of
Ramparts
magazine on a houseboat off Sausalito. He'd be back, he said. Upon his return, he drank and roamed the house, telling terrible jokes in mock Yiddish, grousing about Bobby Kennedy, griping about his mother, berating Didion for her shallow celebrity life. How
square
she'd become!

She'd retreat to her bedroom to smoke and calm herself with sewing. Or she'd whip up a meal in the kitchen, though this was not terribly soothing, as something was always boiling over or thickening too fast. She found she was only happy at the typewriter or polishing silver; otherwise, she felt paralyzed. She loved Noel, but she couldn't wait for him to leave.

According to Dunne, on Parmentel's last night in California, the two men squared off in a bar at three in the morning, arguing about the life the Dunnes had chosen, and threatened to kill each other with chairs. Parmentel disputes this.

Shortly before his plane took off the next day, the three old friends embraced and said they must get together again.

Years later, on the back of a framed picture she'd had hanging on the wall, Didion discovered a scribbled note to her from Parmentel (clearly meant to be found in the mists of time during some move or moment of change). It accused her of behaving badly toward him: “You were wrong,” it said.

*   *   *

That fall, after “John Wayne: A Love Song” appeared in the August issue of
The Saturday Evening Post,
she received a note from Wayne. “The Old Duke” was gratified, he said. It did a fellow good to be written about that way by a woman.

 

Chapter Thirteen

1

Something was happening in the Central Valley. Sid Korshak had “his ear to the ground,” Dunne wrote in a pocket notebook. In Sacramento, Anthony Kennedy—the future U.S. Supreme Court justice and brother of Didion's childhood friend Nancy—was preparing to work as a lobbyist for Schenley Industries. (Schenley, a liquor producer, would soon be charged with delivering illegal kickbacks to restaurants in California and New York.) Like Korshak, like Robert Di Giorgio, Kennedy was worried about laborers in the fields.

What had them all stirred up was a secular saint or little tyrant—depending on whom you talked to—named Cesar Chavez. With Dolores Huerta, he had founded the National Farm Workers Association. On September 8, 1965, when Filipino laborers mounted a strike against grape growers in Delano (pronounced De-
lay
-no), Chavez supported them. He emerged as a compelling leader and local media magnet, a figure of resistant humility with sad eyes and stumpy legs.

On the long drives up and down the valley to visit Didion's family—“like driving four hundred miles on a pool table”—Dunne wondered, along with his wife, what the real stories were, the narratives beneath the headlines. While Burt Bacharach, Herb Alpert, or the 5th Dimension dithered from the car radio, as dust scratched the bottoms of the clouds and brown bodies bobbed up and down against the blue ridges of the Coast Range, the couple talked about doing a magazine piece on Chavez. Dunne's novel was nowhere—he'd written fifty or so bland pages. Perhaps a few days in the fields, a little reporting, would refresh him. In Sacramento or Portuguese Bend, he collected newspaper profiles of Chavez, articles on the workers, interviews with the growers: “Cesar is a mystic—he's always reading books on evolution.” “The growers say the strike is just a battle, not the war.…”

Dunne wrote his literary agent, Carl Brandt, in New York, that in California's Central Valley the mythology of the thirties was at work in the sixties. Nothing had changed. Time had stopped. It was very much a story worth exploring.

So was Vietnam. Don McKinney, the Dunnes' editor at
The Saturday Evening Post,
had hinted that the magazine might send them out if they wanted to go—given Dunne's experience with the subject and given that the war had intensified following the North's attack on Pleiku, along with Operation Rolling Thunder, LBJ's massive new bombing campaign.

Dunne wasn't sure. His wife knew the valley's history, its social peculiarities; she told him stories of coming to the valley as a child, eating short ribs and plucking cherries from her father's bourbon cocktails in Gilroy, the “Garlic Capital of the World,” where even the hotel napkins smelled of processed garlic. With her help, he might make a richer story than he could with Vietnam. He liked the idea of working with her. He picked up another article on Chavez and underlined the following passage: “It was rough in those early years,” Chavez said. “[My wife] Helen was having babies and I was not there when she was in the hospital. But if you haven't got your wife behind you, you can't do many things. There's got to be peace at home. So I did, I think, a fairly good job of organizing her.”

2

Didion was trying to have a baby, she told her friend Diana Lynn. It was New Year's weekend, 1966. The Dunnes had joined Lynn, her husband, Morty Hall, president of KLAC radio, and another couple, Howard and Lou Erskine, on Hall's “motor-sailer” for a getaway to Cat Harbor, just off Catalina Island. Howard Erskine was a television producer and performer. Diana Lynn was a once-promising movie star who had set aside her career for marriage and motherhood by the time Didion met her.