The Last Love Song (53 page)

After eating, they all drove back to Malibu. “People who live in a beach house don't know how wary it makes them,” Kazin wrote. Didion's decision to move here, to keep an eye
on the edge,
told him she was a “very vulnerable, very defensive young woman whose style in all things is somehow to keep the world off, to keep it from eating her up, and so”—casting protective spells—“[she] describes Southern California in terms of fire, rattlesnakes, cave-ins, earthquakes, the indifference to other people's disasters, and the terrible wind called the Santa Ana.”

In the magazine piece, he characterized Didion as “subtle,” as possessing an “alarmed fragility,” and falling into “many silences.” In his private journal, he said she was “full of body language.… Her face runs the gamut from poor old Sookie to the temptress with long blonde-red locks. She can look at you and past you without the slightest hint of a concession. The unspoken is a most important part of her presence in the world.”

She was trying to tell him, This is what a happy woman looks like.

2

The determined insistence on happiness arose in part because, in spite of her new confidence as a writer, the previous year had been hectic and disturbing on many levels. She had left the Alamac Hotel in late December 1969 and only a short while later found herself in eastern Oregon, doing a column for
Life
on the nerve gas storage mounds at the army depot in Umatilla County. On arriving in the town of Hermiston, she felt at home initially, listening to locals in the Caravan Broiler talk about wheat shares and Shell Oil and high-moisture grain, but she was there to interview a funeral director who had been a strong booster of President Nixon's plan to store VX and GB nerve gas on twenty-thousand acres just outside of town, for the employment it would stimulate. The people protesting the gas shipments were college kids in the liberal cushion of Eugene and big-city wine drinkers over in Portland, he said—“the academic-community-Moratorium-and-other-mothers-for-peace-or-whatever.” “They talk about a few drops of it killing thousands of people. Well, really, you'd need pretty ideal conditions for that,” he said. “And if you give yourself an injection within thirty seconds, there's no effect whatsoever.”

She drove into the hardscrabble area. The flat horizon here wasn't so flat anymore. Over a thousand mounds—reinforced concrete under sod and sagebrush—“mutilated the land,” Didion wrote. She stood one day among the staggered rows of humps, interlaced with fifty miles of railroad track, and realized she was “not in a frontier town at all but in a post-frontier town.” All over the West, in places like this, settlers felt “cut free from the ambiguities of history. They could afford their innocent blend of self-interest and optimism. They still had a big country and a big sky and cheap expendable land, and they could still tap the Columbia for all the water and power they needed and the best was still to come, or so they thought.”

These ruminations helped seed
Where I Was From
(initially called
Fairy Tales
), a book she would not be able to write for another thirty years; for now, she still believed that the “ambiguities of history” would prevent mutilations of the land if the present generation became aware of them. In fact, the West's history was
always
one of self-corrosion. In time, her perceptions would shift.

For the moment, she was acutely aware that there were no Woody Guthrie tunes riding the prairie wind and that she should be home helping her daughter arrange a tea party for her stuffed bunny, planning a celebration for her fourth birthday. Instead, she was standing in an empty mound examining protective clothing and petting a white rabbit used to indicate gas leakage. “Pretty healthy rabbit,” an army colonel told her. “We've never lost a rabbit in the line of duty.”

Perhaps farther east, out in the desert near Pendleton, the environment would relax her. But her sense of desolation only deepened. The manager of the motel she checked into was a Mormon. The day she left, he asked her, “If you can't believe you're going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what's the point of dying?”

Months later, Quintana lost Bunny Rabbit. No more tea parties. She left him in a suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and remembered him only on the evening Pan Am flight back to LAX. In
Blue Nights,
Didion wrote, “[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit's cruel fate: Bunny Rabbit was lost, Bunny Rabbit was left behind, Bunny Rabbit had been abandoned.”

By the time they landed in Los Angeles, Quintana had consoled herself: Bunny Rabbit would be enjoying the room service at the Royal Hawaiian, swimming, rafting to the reef.

*   *   *

While Didion paced underground in Oregon, plans were proceeding for
The Panic in Needle Park.

Dunne had taken her film treatment, stitched in dialogue, and finished a full draft, but the final version of the screenplay would owe its power to Didion's sensibility.

It begins with the aftermath of a back-alley abortion; Helen, the hapless girl who tumbles into addiction in a pathetic attempt to keep her boyfriend, resembles a lost kid from Haight-Ashbury; she sums up her middle-class childhood in Fort Wayne, Indiana, speaking like a Sacramento housewife: “We had a lawn.”

Every scene in the film bristles with the sordid details of the bloody drug use Didion had witnessed on Broadway or in the darkened rooms at the Alamac. “Basically, we just reported,” she said. “We were reporters, John and I.”

“We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play,” said Kitty Winn, the actress who played Helen. “No improvisation. It's all the script. And it spoiled me forever. I don't think I ever enjoyed doing another film as much again.”

“It was a fantastic script,” Jerry Schatzberg said. Years later, re-screening the film, he'd think certain scenes must have been spontaneously captured on-camera, but then he'd check the screenplay and
always
the action or dialogue “was in the original script.”

Avco dropped the film—possibly frightened by the writing. “I didn't see it as a happy ending,” Didion said. “At the time we wrote the script … it wasn't a time in the history of the world when stories like this … [well,] they didn't end in rehab.”

Fox picked up the option. Dick Zanuck, whom Dunne had shadowed for a year to write
The Studio,
suggested Henry Fonda for the lead. Politely, Dunne hinted that Fonda might be forty years too old for the part.
Peter
Fonda, maybe? The studio wanted nothing to do with Peter Fonda.

Nick Dunne had seen Kitty Winn, a classically trained actress, perform a stage version of George Bernard Shaw's
Saint Joan
in San Francisco. He sent a copy of the
Needle Park
script to her. “I never found out what [he] saw in my … performance that screamed ‘drug addict,' but whatever. I stayed up all night reading it,” Winn said. “So extraordinary: two people locked in a co-dependent relationship, a battleground.”

Schatzberg came fully on board when his business manager told him Al Pacino, a dynamic young actor who'd never had a lead movie role, was interested in playing the part of Bobby. “I'd seen Al four years earlier onstage,” Schatzberg said. “He was so different … I related to him. You know, we come from different parts of the Bronx, but there's still Bronx in both of us. And I thought, ‘Boy, if I ever did a film, that's the guy.'”

Meanwhile, Schatzberg had met Adam Holender, a Polish immigrant, through Roman Polanski. “When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country, you notice things,” urban details, lights, shadows, angles that American cinematographers overlook, he said. His extraordinary work in
Midnight Cowboy,
a combination of psychedelia and rat-infested realism, convinced Schatzberg no other director of photography would do on
Needle Park.

“[We were] a group of improbables,” Schatzberg said—a pair of literary writers, a fashion photographer, an Eastern European émigré, two unknown stage actors, and a perpetually stoned producer, on a budget of just over a million dollars (‘We didn't have money for heroin,' Winn quipped) but we pulled it off.”

For six weeks, Schatzberg rehearsed his actors on-site, copping gestures from the recovering addicts at Phoenix House, working with Holender on the documentary feel he wanted for the film. “The thoroughness” of preparation and attention to detail “was fantastic,” Didion said. She couldn't have gotten luckier her first time out with a script, though the New York location and the tedious production process did not always lead to happy times. Filming began in mid-October and wrapped on December 22. Fox photo stills show Didion and the Dunne brothers shivering in Needle Park or posed in front of the Alamac. Didion's long, straight hair, parted in the middle, looks unwashed, as if she were channeling the lives of her subjects. The braces-wearing drug dealer, whom she had promised a part in the film, was nowhere to be found—though she thought she glimpsed him one day in the crowds ringing the filming perimeter. She worried he was using again and felt too ashamed to approach them.

In the publicity shots, Nick, wearing a fleece-lined jacket, standing with his hands in his pockets on the corner of Broadway and Seventy-first, has the unmistakably fierce, wide-eyed look of a man flying on coke. Didion huddles close to her husband.

Besides coke, Nick was inhaling amyl nitrate back in his room at the Volney Hotel. One night, “drunk and stoned,” he “knocked over a lit candle onto the curtains, which went up in flame,” he wrote in his memoir,
The Way We Lived Then.

The Fox publicity materials praised Nick as an experienced producer who “knew exactly how to launch a production in New York”; he was doing “valiant and invaluable” work in bringing to the screen a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs. But his behavior threatened to scuttle the project.

Meanwhile, his brother Greg was not endearing himself to local reporters milling around the sets. “Neither of us likes to come back here to New York,” he said of himself and Joan. “It seems banal to us. Los Angeles is such a trip. It's like having a grandstand seat on the birth of the future. But New York, well, it's like having a grandstand seat on the death of the past.”

Didion attempted a softer tone. In spite of the wretchedness of this part of the Upper West Side, she said, “writing the film was great fun for us—and we learned a lot along the way.”

Filming was a different story. “When a picture is shooting, a lot of things seem arbitrary, or you might've done them differently if you thought twice about it. When we were shooting, I was overcome with what I had failed to do,” she said later. “[Y]ou're hypersensitive to everything that might be wrong.”

The day Kitty Winn prepared to play the postabortion scene, she recalled every tragedy she'd ever experienced in order to assume the proper mind-set. “All loss is loss,” she figured. “I don't know that [Joan and I] ever talked about it.” She decided the abortion was included in the film to indicate a “relationship gone wrong.”

“I never thought this was a picture about drugs,” Didion said. “It was a picture about betrayal. Love.”

*   *   *

While elements were locking in place for the filming and the eventual release of the movie in time for the May 1971 Cannes Film Festival, jury selection was beginning for the Manson trial. Manson had assaulted a bailiff; he had screamed at the judge that he couldn't get a fair hearing. “You can kill me now!” he shouted in the courtroom, spreading his arms like Jesus on the cross. His lawyer admitted “there is a minimum of client control in this case.”

A young man in Berkeley, identifying himself as Rabbit, called Ed Sanders at the
Los Angeles Free Press
and said he was organizing a giant benefit rock concert to raise legal funds for the Manson Family. Not surprisingly, he had so far secured zero commitments from big-name bands, but Squeaky Fromme, one of Charlie's girls, had given him home movies from Spahn Ranch to screen onstage.

Linda Kasabian, nine months pregnant with her second child, had agreed to offer prosecutors full cooperation and to testify against Manson in exchange for a request for immunity. This news got lost in the press beneath coverage of the Weathermen who had blown up a ten-room town house in Greenwich Village while bungling the making of a bomb, and again weeks later by reports on the shootings at Kent State. Manson, apparently concerned that
his
brand of violence might seem tame in Nitro-America (
were
the sixties over?) carved a swastika into his forehead and issued pronouncements: “Death is psychosomatic,” he said, and “You have created the monster. I am not of you, from you … I have Xed myself from your world.”

On August 3, 1970, Kasabian was again eclipsed in the media. On that day, President Nixon, speaking in Denver, mentioned off the cuff that he had noted the “coverage of the Charles Manson case. Front page every day in the papers … Here is a man who was guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. Here is a man yet who, as far as the coverage was concerned, appeared to be a rather glamorous figure…”

Immediately, Manson assailed the judge: “Your Honor, the President said we are guilty, so why go on with the trial?” He smuggled into the courtroom a hand-printed sign:
NIXON GUILTY
.

What nearly got missed in all this was Kasabian's third day of testimony at the Santa Monica Courthouse. Between admitting she'd taken fifty LSD trips and had sex with every man at the ranch, between agreeing she'd slept just fine following the Tate murders, and confessing she'd willingly driven the car for the second killing spree, Linda Kasabian, “demure” and “pigtailed,” according to the
Los Angeles Times,
said “author Joan Didion” was writing a book about her. She had been promised 25 percent of any profits from the book, she testified. She was not interested in becoming famous. She hoped the book would influence young people to remain “straight.”