The Last Love Song (43 page)

The demonstrations on Sunset continued, but in the meantime the clubs had gotten louder, raunchier, rougher. “You could smell the semen on the street in front of the Troubadour,” Eve Babitz said.

In the evenings, Didion would check to see that Quintana was safely tucked into her bed, her moon-shaped night-light glowing (“my moon lamp,” Quintana called it), and then she would make dinner for her visitors.

One night, a baby-sitter Didion had hired told her that death floated in Didion's aura.

She had her Dexies and gin. Compazine for anxiety. Still, she mustered the energy to cook for dozens. She put MoMA place cards, with the guests' names on them, at each place setting on tables around the rooms. It was an incredible performance. “She was drunk and on drugs—no wonder she was miserable. So how come she held it together so much better than all the rest of us?” Eve Babitz wondered.

In the summer of 1968, the Dunnes threw a party for Tom Wolfe to celebrate the publication of
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
“We invited one hundred people,” Dunne said. “[A]fter the first 250 showed up, we stopped counting.” Describing the party to one interviewer, he said, “It was a fucking zoo.”

Nick's thirteen-year-old boy, Griffin, had heard Janis Joplin was going to make an appearance at the party, so he talked Lenny into letting him go. At some point in the evening, a bald German man who seemed to be experiencing a bad acid trip latched onto the boy, asking his help getting settled somewhere. “I thought it was Colonel Klink” from the television show
Hogan's Heroes,
Griffin said. It was the film director Otto Preminger.

Joplin arrived at around ten-thirty, while Dunne was eating in the kitchen: “Chicken salad. Glasses of dry sherry,” he said. She asked him to get her a little brandy. “[W]hen I gave it to her in a snifter, she said, ‘What're you doing? Saving it?'” “She had just done a concert,” Didion recalled. She wanted the brandy in a water tumbler, with a shot of Bénédictine in it. Tom Wolfe remembered that, just before Joplin “passed out on the divan, she said, ‘I paid my dues. I paid my dues.'” Two years later, she'd die on Franklin Avenue, in room 109 of the Landmark Motel, a Polynesian-themed monstrosity—a favorite of rock stars, said the the Byrds' David Crosby, because of the “convenience of being close to street dealers.” She shot a balloon of smack. It was unusually potent; this same supply killed eight other people that weekend. Days later, the word on Franklin Avenue was that this was the best dope going: “It's so strong it OD'd Janis.”

If Didion had been given to metaphor, her house was the perfect emblem of dread: a huge, unmanageable space where, at any moment, the pipes might burst. Slush, rushing above and below you. She stuck to her role in the kitchen, stirring simmering pots, staring at a line from the Karl Shapiro poem: “It is raining in California.” She thought of the Hoover Dam, which she had visited not long ago for a possible
Saturday Evening Post
column: all that surging energy held in check. She remembered the cranes and the generators and the transformers, the hundred-ton steel shaft piercing the glassy surface. Organization. Control. She remembered one of the workers telling her the dam's marble star map fixed forever the dam's dedication date. He said it was for when they were all gone and the dam was left. She thought of the wind and the setting sun. She pictured torrents of water crashing through an empty world. And then she made an elaborate meal for her guests, many of whom (some of them strangers) were still in the house, asleep, when she awoke the following morning, padding barefoot over worn hardwood floors, past the brittle and crumbling window shades.

 

Chapter Sixteen

1

The year was 1968. In the late afternoons, in the slanting light, on the clay tennis court behind the house on Franklin Avenue, Quintana sat alone, pulling weeds.

On Zuma Beach in Malibu, where the Dunnes would live in just a few years,
The Planet of the Apes
crew shot a seminal scene (“We've got entertainment
and
a message in this picture,” said the movie's star). Charlton Heston, one of the last humans on Earth, discovered, half buried in sand, a broken Statue of Liberty and screamed in rage at the realization that America had destroyed itself.

On March 31, 1968, aware of Gallup Polls suggesting that only 23 percent of the American people approved of his handling of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson announced on television that he would not seek nor “accept the nomination of my party as your president.”

On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. The following week, rioting flared in Harlem, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit.

On April 23, student protesters at Columbia University occupied the lobby of Hamilton Hall and prevented the dean from leaving his office.

On June 3, a woman claiming she was on a mission to destroy all men shot Andy Warhol.

On June 6, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles while on his way to visit Cesar Chavez, and thank him and the farmworkers who had helped him win the California Democratic primary.

2

The underground press was poor, in every sense of the word, but it was doing a finer job than the corporate media of documenting why most Americans thought the country was self-destructing.

While Didion hit the Haight,
Time
ran a cover story on “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture.” The magazine's insights into the hippie philosophy went like this: “They find an almost childlike fascination in beads, blossoms, and bells”; “[i]ndoors or outdoors, any place can provide a dance floor for hippies, who think that they are undulating in motion with the universe, experiencing joy and well-being.”

The papers were even worse than the magazines.

“The only American newspapers that do not leave me in the grip of a profound physical conviction that the oxygen has been cut off from my brain tissue, very probably by an Associated Press wire, are
The Wall Street Journal
 … [though] I have a minimal interest in much of what it tells me … the Los Angeles
Free Press,
the Los Angeles
Open City
and the
East Village Other,
” Didion said in
The Saturday Evening Post
(whose rush toward bankruptcy gave it a certain healthy recklessness where its editorial policies were concerned). These papers spoke to her straightforwardly, though they were “amateurish and badly written,” “silly,” and “not sufficiently inhibited by information.” All other American newspapers reeked of “mendacity” by pretending to be objective. “Do not misread me: I admire objectivity very much indeed, but I fail to see how it can be achieved if the reader does not understand the writer's particular bias … It is the genius of these [underground] papers that they talk directly to their readers. They assume that the reader is a friend, that he is disturbed about something, and that he will understand if they talk to him straight; the assumption of a shared language and a common ethic lends their reports a considerable cogency of style,” Didion said—and here we see precisely why “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” succeeded while “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture” did not.

Toward the end of her piece, she listed a central reason for the failures of the mainstream press: The papers do not tell the “real story”; rather, they speak in insider “code” and “reflect the official ethic.” Over thirty years later, in
Political Fictions,
she would echo and amplify this theme.

*   *   *

The papers were one problem. Readers were another.
Delano
attracted little notice. Henry Robbins groused, “I find that most people east of Nevada haven't the slightest knowledge of the strike and its significance.”

The book's best review appeared in
The Kansas City Star,
Dunne wrote a friend—a University of Missouri English professor said
Delano
restored one's faith in nonfiction. “A lot of shit,” Dunne said, but it was good for the ego. “All I can say is,
Nosotros Venceremos.
”

Years later, once Didion and Dunne became established, he would tell interviewers they never competed. But he was clearly distressed at
Delano
's small ripples while his publisher and editor evinced mounting excitement over
Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
He chided Robbins over talk of a book party for Joan in New York—had
Delano
not deserved a bash? Only kidding, he said, but it was a joke he would not let go.

He couldn't help but feel his
Dolittle
project was slight, though probably it would enjoy greater public interest than the grape strikes, and he discovered he didn't much care for the studio men he met. The Fox atmosphere was toxic. The sums involved in making movies, he learned, often resembled the national debts of emerging nations. And there was no shortage of self-importance.

In the Haight, Dunne's wife had grabbed the sixties by its lanky purple hair.

What did
he
have? Rex Harrison on a giraffe.

Around the house, his temper slipped over little things.

*   *   *

Fox pissed him off, but he liked making connections. And his foggy brother Nick was still working successfully as a film producer—Nick would soon bankroll for the screen Mart Crowley's hit play,
The Boys in the Band
. The Dunnes had begun to consider screenplays again, especially since the
The Saturday Evening Post
might blow away. A producer friend had pitched them an idea—a heart-transplant thriller featuring an ailing Howard Hughes character whose thugs kill a former Olympic athlete for his heart. They'd done a treatment. The picture never got made, but CBS bought the treatment for fifty thousand dollars, allowing the Dunnes to join the Writers Guild for health insurance.

Soon after returning from the Haight, Didion read James Mills's novel of heroin addiction in New York City,
The Panic in Needle Park.
It was a powerful love story with a driving narrative, ready-made for the movies, she believed. Her husband and her brother-in-law agreed.

Dunne thought of Jim Morrison for the lead role of the street hustler Bobby. Nick knew Morrison. So did Eve Babitz and her sister Mirandi, who designed many of Morrison's outfits, including his signature leather pants. At the beginning of 1968, the Doors were at the peak of their popularity. The New Hollywood renegades—Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern, now haunting the Magic Castle hotel just up the road from the Dunnes, writing their bike opera,
Easy Rider
—dismissed the Doors as poseurs, but the teenage children of studio executives had fallen for the pants; the band was getting movie offers and stirring the interest of avant-garde filmmakers such as Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda.

One evening in early spring, Didion and Dunne sat in on a Doors recording session. She hoped to get an article for
The Saturday Evening Post
(she captured the narcoleptic scene in her essay “The White Album”). Dunne wanted to check Morrison's suitability for
Panic.
The band was making its third album,
Waiting for the Sun,
in the Two Terrible Guys Studio near Sunset and Highland.

Two things were working against the Doors in March 1968: First, Morrison saw himself as a rock poet, but the band's growing popularity meant their producer, Paul Rothchild, saw them as a hit machine. He had rejected Morrison's more ambitious music, such as “Celebration of the Lizard,” for poppier tunes like “Hello, I Love You.” Morrison was unhappy and losing interest in recording. Also, by this time, on a daily basis he was regularly putting away two shots of whiskey and a six-pack of beer.

These facts meant the Doors were no longer “the Norman Mailers of the Top Forty,” as Didion called them. Nor was rock music, in general, the force it had been. “Protest songs are dead,” Roger McGuinn, the Byrds' head songwriter, had declared. “I don't see anything is to be gained by marching around with a sign or anything.”

Didion's essay “The White Album” offers the Doors' session as an example of the anomie freezing the culture in the late 1960s. At first, Morrison is not in the studio; everyone is waiting for him so that they can get on with their work; when he actually arrives, no one notices. The musicians speak as if “from behind some disabling aphasia.” Didion says, “There was a sense that no one was going to leave the room, ever.” Unforgettably, she presents an image of Morrison lighting a match and deliberately lowering it “to the fly of his black vinyl pants.”

In fact, Eve Babitz told me, Morrison burst into the studio, drunk, towing a couple of blitzed young girls. He
did
light matches, but he tossed them at Didion, flirting and laughing.

She did not get her interview for
The Saturday Evening Post.

Dunne did not get a star, that night, for
The Panic in Needle Park.

His temper did not abate and the couple's tensions escalated.

“Each of us was mad at the other half the time,” Didion recalled of this period. Describing young couples, she said, “You fight because you don't understand each other.”

Stoned guests filled the house (a friend of Bud Trillin's had come and stayed the night and gotten profoundly drunk; she threw up, and the stain matched the pattern in the carpet, maybe even improving it a little, which told Dunne something about the house he occupied). Sometimes strangers followed Dunne home from the market, veering off in the direction of the Landmark Motel when they realized he had noticed them. The jitters were increasing. And Joan Didion was about to become Joan Didion.

*   *   *

At Christmas, the couple enjoyed a brief trip on a cruise ship skirting the coast of Mexico. And in the spring of 1968, they shared a splendid time on Mount Shasta, camping in a tent in a wilderness a quarter mile from a hippie farmhouse.
Esquire
had asked Dunne to write a piece on communal life in California. It seemed Easterners couldn't get their fill of macrobiotniks and goat-milk drinkers. Quintana stayed with her grandparents in Sacramento. Didion had bought a large white dog and named it Prince Albert. Albert ran through sunny meadows while Didion sat naked at her husband's typewriter by the bank of a noisy creek.