The Last Love Song (55 page)

Saint Mary had found her angel in Robert Silvers at
The New York Review of Books
. Didion needed a champion. To spur herself, she framed and hung on her wall a telex she'd managed to acquire concerning the death tolls in Vietnam.

By now, she'd moved on, as well, to tackle a screenplay based on Lois Gould's novel
Such Good Friends.
Otto Preminger, “the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy,” according to Dunne, had hired the two of them to rewrite a script drafted three times by others. One night in early August of 1970, the Dunnes joined Preminger at the Bistro to toast the deal. With them was a young man named David Patrick Columbia, a friend of Preminger's son; later, Columbia would establish the New York Social Diary online. He recalled Didion as “the antithesis of the smooth and creamy tinsel and glitz that was …
haute
Hollywood, and which filled the room that night. She looked like a super-cool, best-selling author” in her blue-and-white cotton dress. “Her ‘importance' in the room that night [had been] palpable from the moment she and her husband entered. Otto, no doubt, was aware beforehand that it would be. He too was drawn to ‘names' and hot talent and always hired them for his projects.”

After dinner, the group drove to Paramount Studios for a private screening of
The Diary of a Mad Housewife,
then walked across the lot to Preminger's offices to discuss the Gould project. Columbia said he was impressed with Dunne's ability to command the conversation with Preminger, as the men sat across a desk from one another. Didion sat silently, listening, as Dunne cajoled Preminger “with all the required subtle (and not so) deferences.” Already, Dunne sensed that “if Otto thought he could beat up on you, then he would beat up on you without mercy.” His “rage was never far beneath the surface.” So Dunne charmed the great man with a combination of “business and celebrity gossip,” Columbia said—it was a chat “between two pros” in “thrall” to the glamour of Hollywood.

Preminger pressed the Dunnes (whom he, like most people, thought of as the Didions) to go to New York for the fall and work with him every day in his offices on the script. They were going east, anyway, for the filming of
The Panic in Needle Park.
Before decamping, though, the couple had occasion to house-sit for a few days for a friend in Malibu. Didion stared at the comforting flat horizon and felt—not for the first time—she could be happy at the ocean. Happy? Miss Leaky Ice Pack? With that on the table, it took little to convince Dunne they should look seriously at the first available house on the coast.

Then they left for New York, subletting a “grimy, roach-infested” apartment, Dunne said. For fourteen weeks—between visits to the movie set—they met Preminger for five hours every day in his Fifth Avenue offices, trying to finalize the script. Dunne had learned a few tricks. “Studio executives are notoriously literal-minded, and the easiest way to soothe them when they complain about the mood of a scene is simply to add stage direction,” he said. “Thus, if they maintain that, ‘BOBBY:
You dumb bitch
' is too grim, you change the line to: ‘BOBBY (
Engagingly
):
You dumb bitch
.'”

Preminger wanted to add a “nice lesbian relationship, the most common thing in the world” to the story. Didion didn't think so. Oh yes, he said. “Very easy to arrange, does not threaten the marriage.”

“If he got angry with us, the top of his bald head would turn bright red,” Dunne said. At least he had finally gotten their names straight: “[W]ith elaborate politeness he would refer to Joan in his Teutonic accent as, ‘Misss-isss Dunne.'”

For lunch each day, they'd walk to La Côte Basque on West Fifty-fifth Street. There, among rich bouquets of roses and French village murals, they'd continue discussing the script unless they were interrupted by a showbiz manager. To Preminger's delight, these managers would invariably introduce him to “Miss Universe contestants they had signed to personal services contracts.” Dunne recalled meeting “Miss Philippines and Miss Ceylon.”

Back in Malibu, a twenty-year-old one-story house in need of work had come on the market. It had once belonged to Michelle Phillips. Flush with movie money, the Dunnes decided to fly back at Christmas to close the sale, though they figured they were offering fifteen thousand dollars too much. “I forbid you to go,” Preminger said. Didion's silence told him she didn't care. His pate turned red. “If you worked for a studio, Misss-isss Dunne, this behavior would not be tolerated,” he said. When the couple left New York, Preminger yanked them off the script, threatened a two-million-dollar lawsuit, and put a lien against their remaining fee. They settled for forty cents on the dollar, and made for the sea.

3

The happiest woman Didion had ever seen was dying of breast cancer. “My blessed cancer,” Trudy Dixon would say, and she genuinely meant it.

Trudy and her husband, Mike, came to dinner at the Franklin Street house one night, a couple of years before the Dunnes moved to Malibu. Trudy had been a philosophy student at Wellesley and was now working as an editor at the Zen Center in San Francisco, transcribing the teachings of Shunryu Suzuki for a regular newsletter called
Wind Bell,
and collecting his lectures for the book that became
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
arguably the most important reason for Buddhism's spread in the United States in the 1970s. Didion knew the place from her time in the Haight. She dismissed what she'd heard of its teachings. Zen, Krishna, acid—so much purple haze.

But Trudy Dixon impressed her. Didion had met Trudy and Mike, an artist who painted under the name Willard Dixon, through Earl McGrath. “Trudy had been struggling with breast cancer for some time and I had to carry her from place to place,” Mike told me. Despite her illness, she devoted herself to organizing, into simple and comprehensible English, the often obscure and culturally specific koans central to Buddhist practice. Didion was fascinated by the project's linguistic challenge, but even more, she witnessed in Trudy an embodiment of the teachings' aims to lead the mind toward “letting go … [of] what doesn't matter.”

“She was totally inspiring in her ability to deal with the fact that she'd be dead in a short time,” Didion said. “She was on final morphine, and she'd made arrangements for her small children … She spoke about it with equanimity, which would have been impossible for me.”

When Trudy died in 1969, Suzuki wailed like a wounded animal. He had never known such a perfect disciple.

In 1970,
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
appeared in a limited edition. For a while, in Malibu, Didion read the book “every night to relax when I went to bed,” she said. “It was very soothing to me.”

She had no intention of becoming a Buddhist: “I didn't like [meditation] at all. But the book is wonderful.” It was suffused with her memories of Trudy Dixon. The woman's calm dictated the very syntax of the sentences.

For Didion, then, this was a personal, rather than a religious, exploration. Her embrace of
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
also indicates her self-correcting ability, a quality that would characterize much of her later writing. She moved from ignoring Zen to reconsidering it, rethinking her initial reaction to it, and then—unlike a zealous convert—quietly appreciating aspects of it that she found useful in her daily life.

Primarily, the book provided a pleasurable reading experience.

Beyond that, she recognized commonsense truths in its insistence on careful daily practice. “[W]e should not do [something] as if it were preparing for something else,” Suzuki said (in Trudy's transcription). “This should be true in your everyday life. To cook, or to fix some food, is not preparation … it is practice … it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time; you should work on it with nothing in your mind, and without expecting anything. You should just cook!”

Cooking
had
become a contemplative, ritualistic act for Didion: Suzuki's words made sense to her. She could see the benefits of extending his approach not only to commonplace acts but also to writing. Practicing without expectation, remaining alert to permutations, resisting expertise and habits of thought: “In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few,” Suzuki said.

Above all, rigid attachment to
anything
brings sorrow and dissatisfaction, he taught: Change is the essence of existence. This thought reminded Didion of the line from the Episcopal liturgy: “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.” “‘As it was in the beginning' … means ever-changing, in my interpretation. Which may not be the orthodox interpretation,” Didion said.

She could not believe now, any more than she could accept when she was a girl, the orthodox notion of a “personal God, a God that is personally interested in me … And as far as the soul [goes] … I have understood the entire thing symbolically. I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me symbolically. But it doesn't if it's supposed to be real.”

She could much more readily entertain the Buddhist concepts of “impermanence, nonself, and suffering.”

In Trudy Dixon, she'd seen a tangible example of accepting
change
and
suffering;
just so, she had, in the waves below her Malibu house, a daily reminder of the paradoxical relationship between permanence and change: the ever-abiding sea and its constantly shifting nature, moment to moment, breaker to breaker.

Through all this contemplation, her grandfather's love of the “vast indifference” of geology returned to her in a powerful new context, enfolded in the rhythms of the Episcopal liturgy and
Zen Mind
's weave of voices.

Constant land movement.

“I found earthquakes, even when I was in them, deeply satisfying … reveal[ing] evidence of the scheme in action,” she said. “I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life. Setting the table. Lighting the candles. Building the fire. Cooking. All those soufflés, all that crème caramel, all those daubes and albondigas and gumbos. Clean sheets, stacks of clean towels, hurricane lamps for storms, enough water and food to see us through whatever geological event came our way.”

*   *   *

Meaning,
Didion said now. Not
happiness.
A distinction began to appear to her.

“What I have made for myself is personal, but is not exactly peace,” she would write.

For one thing, peace was impossible with such a restless husband.

In the stage version of
The Year of Magical Thinking,
she would mention the fight one morning in Malibu that ended with her threat to take Quintana to LAX and fly away from Dunne. Quintana settled the standoff, insisting they “couldn't do that to him.” (“[D]id she think herself safer with him than with me?” Didion asked.)

Dunne's version of the same incident read differently. In
Vegas,
he said a member of the construction crew he'd hired “lit a joint [one day] and began to scar the concrete block on which the tile was being laid with a jackhammer. The noise from the jackhammer made my daughter cry and my wife said she would take her to Sacramento that morning and I said I would go back to Vegas the next day.”

In Sacramento, Didion, hoping to calm her nerves, took Quintana to Old Sac, a redeveloped area of town featuring restored saloons and wooden sidewalks from the city's pioneer-boom days. She was about to tell her daughter how generations of her cousins had walked these alleys, how her great-grandfather had owned a tavern on Front Street, but then “I stopped. Quintana was adopted. Any ghosts on this wooden sidewalk were not in fact Quintana's responsibility,” Didion wrote. “This wooden sidewalk did not in fact represent anywhere Quintana was from.”

So they flew back home on a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane. Painted on its nose was a big, silly smile. Quintana loved flying “The Smile.”

Meanwhile, in Vegas (or wherever he'd travel to get away from his wife), Dunne would sit alone, usually in a motel room, and imagine being interviewed on
The Dick Cavett Show,
the Famous Author discussing weighty subjects from “the weather … [to] my Nobel Prize.” But then he'd remember: “[My] voice on the air gets high and squeaky and my stammer prevents me from indulging in articulate patter.” He'd start to feel sorry for himself. He
had
written two good books, hadn't he? Why hadn't they earned more notice? He was pushing forty—my God. In the past, when his friends turned thirty-five, he'd send them notes: “Halfway home.” Now the joke didn't seem so funny.

Once, plagued with the jits, he took the red-eye to New York and stayed in the apartment of a friend. He listened to the World Series on the radio, and in the evenings he went to the “Frank E. Campbell funeral home on Madison Avenue at 81st to see if I knew anyone who had died.” This was voyeurism keyed to his mortality. He'd return to the apartment and gobble Heath bars and Oreos—the old cures for the blues he'd shared with his brother Stephen.

Then he flew back to Vegas.

He missed his wife and child. But if he called home, he knew what he'd get—silence or recriminations: “[S]he was lonely and depressed … the wind was blowing and there were fires at Point Dume. The maid had quit, the fire insurance had been canceled and the engine in the Corvette had seized on the Ventura Freeway … [S]he had called Detroit and told the head of public relations at General Motors that if the warranty was not honored she was going to drive the car to Detroit and burn the motherfucker on the lawn of John Z. DeLorean … The head of public relations had suggested she see a psychiatrist.”