The Last Love Song (38 page)

Back in the valley, Quintana in tow, the Dunnes interviewed a physician from Fresno who tended the farmworkers. He told them about a recent visit he'd made to an apartment in town. “Inside were a mother and seven children. The stench of putrefying, necrotic tissue filled the interior,” he said. “A baby of eighteen months lay asleep on the bare floor in front of a blazing gas heater. The mother lay sick on the couch. She had delivered her seventh baby at home, with the aid of a neighbor lady, several days before I arrived. There was a considerable loss of blood. I wondered who would take care of the children when she died.”

While Didion fed Quintana in a room at the Stardust, Dunne walked to the People's Bar, hung out, talked to the volunteers from Berkeley, listened to them sing to a strike song on the jukebox, “El Corrido de Delano.” Someone had tacked to the wall a cartoon depicting the Di Giorgio ranch as an octopus. Wet newspapers on the floor carried the latest reports of Ronald Reagan's gubernatorial campaign—if elected in the fall, he promised to correct the weaknesses of Pat Brown and Clark Kerr, and root out all the radicals at Berkeley.

One chilly late-summer night, near the end of the Dunnes' stay in the valley, in the foothills of the Sierra, Dunne watched a “California golden girl,” probably a student, seduce a “panicky young farm worker” from Mexico. The girl “worked hard and loyally for Chavez,” but “no amount of good faith on her part could bridge the chasm of social and sexual custom” between her and the young man. The encounter was bound to end badly, Dunne thought, just like the long, dusty struggle for justice: “I remember the boy still desperately picking on his guitar even as he was being led off to the bedroom”—maybe the last love song he'd ever sing.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Didion had not shuttered her Royal KMM typewriter in the excitement of arranging her daughter's adoption or planning stays in Delano. Just before and during this period, she wrote one of her most enduring essays, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” originally titled “How Can I Tell Them There's Nothing Left” and published in
The Saturday Evening Post
in the May 7, 1966, issue.

For nearly two years, she had been reading lurid headlines out of the San Bernardino Valley,
MOVIE CALLED BLUEPRINT FOR DENTIST'S DEATH
;
MOTEL ROMANCE LOVELESS ON HIS PART
;
MRS. MILLER CALLED
“
USER OF PEOPLE
.” These teasers summed up a tawdry and apparently unremarkable bedroom-community episode. Nevertheless, the incident had drawn the attention of ace crime reporters from across the country. On September 5, 1965, Ruth Reynolds of the New York
Daily News
wrote, “Seldom has a jury been called upon to deliberate two points of view quite so divergent as those presented to twelve Californians last March at the end of the trial of Mrs. Lucille Maxwell Miller, 35.”

The San Bernardino Valley “lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place … haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour,” Didion wrote as a preface to
her
version of Lucille Miller's story. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mormons streaming out of Utah, seeking escape to the sea, established irrigation canals in this basin—now commonly called the Inland Empire—and began to grow oranges, corn, and cabbages. “It was then and there”—based upon cultivating water where water naturally tended to dissipate—“that the phenomenon of modern Los Angeles began,” wrote one historian.

Didion understood this history, and it would be the
real
subject of her essay.

After World War II, when young couples seeking affordable mortgages were seduced into the highway sprawl among savannalike grass, king snakes, and coyotes crying in canyon washes, the San Bernardino Valley inherited the coastal communities' troubles. It became an American lab experiment, a combination of Levittown and Appalachia, of industry and agriculture, of stolen water and prefab structures. In a country often hailed sweetly as a melting pot, the Inland Empire was the real thing, with all the grit, grease, and grievance the term suggested.

There were gun shops and mini-malls. Office parks. Hindu mortuaries tucked among pepper trees. Here and there, on the edges of mobile-home factories, the wreck of an old chicken ranch. A roadside motel had buildings shaped like a tee-pee (the Wigwam Motel). Freight yards. Bible stores. The Striptease Hall of Fame. Sanctuaries lined with bleachers and beer stands housed the local religion: high school football, practiced as brutally here as anywhere in the nation.

Hollywood sent its screenwriters to the valley to dry out or to meet impending deadlines. Among the brittle weeds of Victorville, Herman Mankiewicz finished the first draft of
Citizen Kane.
Truckers humping contraband stopped and burned their manifests in tangled mesquite. In San Berdoo, in 1948, the same year the McDonald brothers opened their first “Speedee Service” restaurant, a gang of desert-begrimed, disgruntled World War II vets formed a motorcycle club and named it after the U.S. Army's Eleventh Airborne Division: Hells Angels, hitting the highways for freedom.

It was here that Didion chose to set what would become the inaugural piece of her first nonfiction collection, in a landscape whose history she knew so well that she didn't have to mention the past; instead, she hinted at it to imbue a series of anecdotes with more general significance, convincing the reader that what happened in the San Bernardino Valley exposed America's soul.

What happened in the San Bernardino Valley was that a woman apparently burned her dentist husband alive in a Volkswagen one night after going to the market for milk. Police said she drugged him and deliberately set the blaze, motivated by her affair with a prominent local lawyer and inspired by the plot of
Double Indemnity.
Lucille Miller claimed the flames were accidental, sparked by a jostled gas can after the car jerked mysteriously off the road. Her husband was asleep in the front seat, having taken a combination of Nembutal and Fiorinal for depression. He'd been suicidal, she said, overwhelmed by their mortgage and his debts. Far from wanting to kill him, she'd tried repeatedly to save him. “What will I tell the children, when there's nothing left, nothing left in the casket?” she'd cried after glimpsing her husband's char through the Beetle's windshield. In particular, she was concerned about her sensitive daughter, Debbie, fourteen years old at the time.

On March 5, 1965, the jury found Lucille Miller guilty of murder in the first degree. She was remanded to the California Institution for Women at Frontera.

Didion's interest in the Millers lay less in the crime—a common enough tabloid story, she admitted—than in their restlessness for a happier life and their disappointment: pale echoes of the pioneer trope. An age-old California story was playing out again, the ancient legends abetted by the romance of the movies, whose dialogue people unwittingly mimicked in their talk of true love, affairs of the heart, crimes of passion.

“October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously,” Didion wrote, linking the land's distress with human frailty, establishing Lucille Miller's crime as something more than a crime: This is the land of unpredictable blazes; nothing can stop what is going to happen, what has always happened. “There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.” In her opening aria, before even mentioning dentistry, debt, VWs, and sex motels, Didion has locked in her narrative.

Should we doubt her authority to tell this story, she says, “It might have been anyone's bad summer, anyone's siege of heat and nerves and migraine and money worries.” You and me, reader, we've been there, too. Who can say no? The voice is so certain and
knowing.
She has enlisted our complicity.

“[It] was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms,” Didion wrote:

A seventy-year-old pensioner drove his station wagon at five miles an hour past three Gardena poker parlors and emptied three pistols and a twelve-gauge shotgun through their windows, wounding twenty-nine people. “Many young women become prostitutes just to have enough money to play cards,” he explained in a note. Mrs. Nick Adams said that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans on the Les Crane Show, and, farther north, a sixteen-year-old jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived.

Oh.
That
kind of day.

This is a masterful paragraph, combining random incidents so matter-of-factly, they don't seem random at all. Instead, they are unmistakable warnings of the inevitable “prickly dread.”

*   *   *

In fact, it was only Didion's
view
of the events that was inevitable, shaped by her narrative. When the piece appeared in
The Saturday Evening Post
(along with a full-page ad for Volkswagens and a profile of Benjamin Spock talking babies and bombs), many inland residents quietly seethed at her sketch of their lives. As a seventeen-year-old university freshman in Los Angeles, novelist Susan Straight was assigned to read the essay: “I now learned how others saw us: ‘the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdresser's school.'

“I lay awake all night, thinking of my friends and their parents,” Straight said. She admired Didion's “elegance and precision and genius” but found the essay “painful” and unpitying in its class judgments.

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past,” Didion's essay insisted.

That's just wrong, says one inlander: “The guys I worked with … Get any three of them together in the pumphouse waiting out a rainy day and they would talk the whole time about who got paid the least for a day chopping cotton back in West Texas or Arkansas.”

And all that teased-up hair Didion talked about? Forget it. The Inland Empire was “full of hot exciting young babes that never saw the inside of a hairdressers' school and whose residual fumes rock stars are probably still writing songs about.”

*   *   *

In 1991, Lucille Miller's daughter, Debra, wrote Didion a letter concerning “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” “It helped to make you famous but it's my life,” she said. Following her mother's incarceration and subsequent history, she'd suffered years of cocaine addiction and misery.

On a later occasion, in Los Angeles, she happened to meet Didion at a signing. Didion inscribed a book to her: “For Debra Miller—who knows better than anyone I know the ambiguity of the written word.”

On March 5, 1965, when the jury pronounced Lucille Miller guilty of murder in the first degree, little Debbie had stood in the courtroom and shouted, “She didn't do it! She didn't do it! I'll never see my mother again!”

*   *   *

Quintana was three weeks old when Didion hit her deadline for finalizing the San Berdoo article for
The Saturday Evening Post.
“I never sleep the night before a piece closes. I always get up to check it,” she said.

At the last minute, she doubted her accuracy about certain details and drove to the San Bernardino courthouse for the better part of a day to look up facts. It was the first time since bringing Quintana home that she'd left her infant's side.

 

PART FIVE

 

Chapter Fifteen

1

“I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself … I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971,” Didion wrote. These dates match precisely the years she rented, for four hundred dollars a month, a sprawling, spooky house at 7406 Franklin Avenue, just south of the Hollywood Hills and north of Sunset Boulevard. “The place [was] vast,” said John Gregory Dunne. It was “on the lines of an abandoned fraternity house.”

Or a raddled old Barbizon. How life had changed.

It sat in the middle of the block, in a neighborhood shedding its former existence for an uncertain new direction. “Bette Davis had [once] lived on one corner, Preston Sturges on another [his widow, Sandy, would become a friend]; the Canadian consulate was a block away, the Japanese consulate at the time of Pearl Harbor [was] across the street,” said Dunne. Now many of the glamorous old houses—plumbing busted, roofs eroding, paint chipping off the window shutters—were turning into communes. Rock 'n' roll bands moved into them, or fly-by-night self-improvement groups. A few wealthy octogenarians, refusing to countenance change, hung on in the area, eyeing newcomers angrily as nurses pushed them in their wheelchairs past newly minted warehouses, dilapidated bungalows, and pastel apartments choked with dusty oleanders. “Now the pimps and junkies were beginning to take over Hollywood Boulevard, a block south. There was a whorehouse in a brand-new high-rise down the street, Synanon owned one house in the neighborhood, a Dr. Feelgood was dispensing amphetamines like gumdrops in another, and the former Japanese consulate, boarded up, was a crash pad for a therapy group,” Dunne observed.

The clay tennis court behind the Dunnes' house had started to sprout weeds.

Mold grew in the crevices of some of the twenty-eight rooms
inside
the house, but this Havisham-like touch was offset by the place's genuine charm: tall French windows, sunny, open rooms (with plenty of space for Didion's Chickering piano, inherited from her family), and solid wooden floors. In the basement, rag rugs and “a vast Stalinist couch” lured dust, Didion said. Hundreds of copies of
The New Masses
moldered in a dark corner.