The Last Love Song (7 page)

“I wanted to be an actress,” Didion said. “I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse [as writing]. It's make-believe.… The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.”

Declarations, evasions, confessions lay at the heart of drama. Didion's desire to capture accurate dialogue led her to leave her bedroom clutching her notebook. She'd go skulking in hallways, behind half-closed doors, eavesdropping on adults, recording their remarks. On the whole, the Didion family disappointed her in this unwitting project. For example, Didion's grandfather, her father's dad, “didn't talk,” she recalled. “I don't think my grandfather knew my or my brother's names, he would always address us as ‘hey you.'” And the conversations were rarely dramatic. “If you were born in Sacramento and bragged about the place, you were ‘puttin' on airs,'” William Burg told me. “If you were a little uncomfortable about the city, it was easier to sell it to outsiders. A slightly disdainful aspect was an appropriate class attitude.” In Didion's earliest essays on Sacramento, her disdain is apparent, but the attitude was not useful in her initial dialogue exercises. Still, she liked secretly gathering details. “There used to be a comic strip when I was little called Invisible Scarlet O'Neil,” she recalled. “Invisible Scarlet O'Neil was a reporter. She would press a band on her wrist, become invisible and cover the story invisibly. And everybody would be amazed that she had gotten the story.” And so Didion, gripping her notebook, would run and hide behind a tree, stalking the big folk.

In moments when she was all
too
visible—forced to go to church or attend a tea or other family gathering—her mother dressed her in “muted greens and ivories, dusty rose, what seems in retrospect an eccentric amount of black,” she wrote. She inherited her great-grandmother's black lace mantilla. If Didion's memory is correct, her mother seems to have planted the idea in her daughter's mind that she was too delicate and sensitive for her own good, in the manner of all the family women. She had a sad and anxious personality—“my mother says”—from the day she got home from Mercy General Hospital with all its hovering nuns. She was said to have her dead grandmother Ethel's eyes, “eyes that reddened and watered at the first premonition of sun or primroses or raised voices, and I was also said to have some of her ‘difference,' her way of being less than easy at that moment when the dancing starts…” It's true she didn't eat much as a child. Her mother fashioned a ritual to try to induce her to swallow her food—the “clean plate club,” she called it, prompting Frank to yell one night, “She's not a human garbage can.” In fact, Didion's meager appetite may have been an act of rebellion rather than a result of her frailty, a form of eating disorder (Didion later thought so). She admitted Eduene found her willful and difficult—so much so that if Eduene could have done it all over again, she might have stuck her daughter in a boarding school. This suggests steeliness beneath the quiet delicacy. Eduene had given her daughter a notebook to stop her “whining,” but the notebook tugged her toward an inner life, a private world brewing storms beyond her mother's control. The myth of the weak one, the one who would have been left on the plains, was a way of convincing the girl she
needed
dark rooms, silent afternoons, the fussing of Sunday aunts. In truth, it was Eduene who needed the assurance of family rituals (“My mother ‘gave teas' the way other mothers breathed,” Didion wrote). With carte blanche in the adult sections of the library, with gifts of expensive perfume and fancy hats whenever she had an illness or required persuading, Didion, it appears, was more pampered than impaired.

She had a cousin named Brenda, a year and a half younger, the daughter of her mother's sister Gloria. Her favorite game with Brenda was “going page by page through an issue of
Vogue
and choosing what to ‘buy,'” she once wrote. “Brenda could buy whatever she wanted from the left-hand pages; I was limited to the right. The point was to see which of us could assemble, given the options only as they turned up, the most desirable wardrobe.” It thrilled Didion to imagine herself a woman wearing expensive clothing. She also liked controlling her cousin. If Brenda chose an item Didion didn't want her to have, she would reject it on a pretext, claiming it was unfair to use an editorial page, say. “I was the older cousin. We would therefore do it my way,” Didion said. What Brenda preferred “never, not ever, not once … crossed my mind.” She loved to scare Brenda by scripting scenarios for the two of them in which they were about to step into an elevator bound for perdition.

Perhaps Didion wanted to punish her cousin: Brenda adhered to the family rules enforcing decorous meals and the need to make a “perfect white sauce”; she was more willing to accept the “delicacy” myth, going to bed promptly at six-thirty each night; she agreed to play the Snow Princess by the Christmas tree each year, to the delight of all the parents. Or perhaps Didion was trying to enlist her cousin in precocious rebellion (a stance repeated many years later with Quintana: forcing a child to embrace adulthood before she was fully prepared for it). Didion was ready to take her place in the world. No yellow vegetables for her. No cookies and milk. She wanted a cocktail. Observing her father's tendencies, she'd take a leaf of iceberg lettuce, mix it with crushed ice in a stemmed glass, and pretend to drink like a grown-up.

Didion made other friends in town, notably Nancy Kennedy, whom she'd met when they were both five and starting ballet classes at Miss Marion Hall's Dancing School. Nancy was the sister of Anthony Kennedy, who would eventually become a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Since there wasn't a gap in their ages, Didion was less inclined to control the relationship with Nancy, though its pleasures suited her to a tee. The girls liked dressing up in their ballet costumes (especially for their performance in
Les Petites
) and enjoyed trying on clothes. Together, they once modeled outfits in a charity fashion show. Didion joined a Girl Scout troop. She recalled being pressed to sing to shut-ins in an asylum just outside Sacramento. The songs included such lyrics as “lilies of the valley line your garden walk” and “that will happen only when the angels sing.” One of her troop mates told me that Didion was probably thinking of a medical facility called Weimar, north of the city, which treated tuberculosis patients. The place revealed to Didion the possible dangers of becoming an adult, but she still longed for the finish line of her childhood.

Twenty-four, her mother told her when Didion asked what was the best age to be. Eduene was twenty-four when she married, twenty-four when she gave birth to Joan. Twenty-four, she said, was her “lucky number” (for her, as for her husband, life was a floating casino). Grown-up talk was one thing Didion could share with her mother. Eduene would drag dusty boxes out of closets and show her daughter the red velvet cape with the white fur collar she wore at her wedding reception, as well as her older tea dresses.

From these glimpses of her mother's fashionable past, and from magazine pictures, Didion concocted romantic daydreams. These were not about princesses or magical coaches, but of paparazzi chasing her through some exotic locale, maybe Argentina (a place she had seen in
Vogue
), while she, in a sable coat and dark glasses, pursued a divorce from her wealthy husband. Her great-grandmother's black lace mantilla seemed to materialize out of these dramas and suggest their immanence.

She constructed literary fantasies, too. “I kept playing around with writing and imagining being a writer, which usually involved having a quote-unquote Manhattan penthouse,” she said. “That was my image of being a writer.”

3

San Francisco was not Manhattan—parts of it looked like Sacramento, only bigger—but the romance of the place was palpable, especially in the Paul Elder display windows and flower stands across from Union Square, home of jewelry shops and stores that sold books, art supplies, furniture, apparel, and sweets. On one family trip to the bayside city, Grandmother Edna bought violets for Didion and Brenda and ordered Dungeness crab Louie at El Prado. Eduene and Gloria wondered if the girls were getting so spoiled that they'd have nothing to look forward to in life. Said Edna, “Let that be the greatest of your worries.”

Though more than seventy thousand dockworkers had lost their jobs, and men had died in labor strikes (roughly half the city's population belonged to unions), the visitors from the valley saw no trouble—Didions didn't think about class—gawking instead at seagulls in the fog, Bauhaus and Beaux-Arts buildings, banana boats anchored just west of the Third Street Bridge and freighters under footlights. They breathed the odors of rotting timbers, roasting coffee, raw sugar; marveled at the brand-new Golden Gate Bridge. Begun in 1928, Grace Cathedral (later under the unconventional leadership of the Right Reverend James Albert Pike, whom Didion would one day write about as a true California eccentric) remained unfinished, its spire a rusty rib cage. Always, Eduene left a contribution for its completion in the mite box.

In the 1920s, as a slender ingénue, Eduene had attended afternoon tea dances in the Garden Court of the Palace Hotel, sipping wine tea, nibbling handmade scones with Devonshire cream, and flirting with suitors. Her daughter's view of the city was awash in splendor. Didion felt she'd missed a magical world; in her mind's eye, department stores and hotels became the towers and ramparts of a castle in the clouds.

She'd stand at the water's edge, trying to imagine the bottom of the bay. Maybe, when she grew up, she wouldn't be a writer in New York. Maybe, instead, she'd study the oceans. She dreamed of leaving for Hawaii on the steamship
Lurline,
a voyage every woman of breeding and taste made at least once. With its palm trees, sweet drinks, and flowered necklaces, Hawaii was an even better place than Argentina to divorce a rich husband.

As she gazed out to sea, she wondered what had happened to Amelia Earhart. The headline in the
San Francisco Chronicle
read
LONELY OCEAN STILL HOLDS SECRET OF AMELIA'S FATE.
Like the pioneers of old, she had set out romantically in her fragile contraption, never knowing if she'd make her destination.

*   *   *

When they weren't visiting the city, the Didions made frequent trips into the parched Central Valley. There, the family owned land. In the scant shade of fruit trees, watching dark-skinned men in straw hats pick crops beside white women, men, and children, Didion recognized links between California and more southerly climes. A heat-shimmery harshness infested the place. Everything was close to the bone. This was the
real
California.

Didion knew its legacies through her grandfather Herman. He had become a civil engineer and an attorney after leaving the Sierra mining camps, and he had also become a writer, composing technical treatises such as
The Theory of Real Property Valuation
as well as writing local histories. His accounts included brief mention of migrant workers lynched in insular towns.

In a series of articles for
The San Francisco News,
John Steinbeck also wrote of Central Valley drifters “hated” by the locals, living in shelters of “corrugated paper” and tents the “color of the ground.” These
News
pieces were run-ups to
The Grapes of Wrath
. Published in 1939, around the time Didion got her first notebook, Steinbeck's novel dared to declare its origins in advocacy, its roots in reportage. Didion never claimed Steinbeck as an influence, but his ruminations on the valley matched hers, if from a different political angle, and must have reminded her of her grandfather's writing (additionally, her paternal great-great-grandfather once organized grape growers in Florin County and owned twelve thousand acres of fruit trees). Stories like Steinbeck's, and the consequences of life in California for the descendants of the first waves of Okies, hover behind Didion's early essays. Steinbeck's documentary approach, like that of Dorothea Lange with her photographs, or James Agee and Walker Evans in
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,
remained a model of how to frame political subject matter. In the 1960s and 1970s, critics would call Didion, along with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson, a pioneer of the New Journalism, in which the reporter inserted herself into the story as its centerpiece. In fact, the observational stance—the witnessing ethic—of Didion's essays, and her tough tone, scrappy as the Christmas tinsel waving on Sacramento's streetlights, shared as much DNA with the proletarian writing of the Great Depression as it did with the celebrity showstopping pieces of Mailer, Wolfe, and Thompson.

 

Chapter Three

1

When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, Sacramento mobilized. By two
P.M.
, McClellan Field was scrambling hundreds of Curtiss P-40s and B-26 Marauders for flights to Alaska, where they would be prepped for battle. Thomas Monk, the city's mayor, ordered security details to guard the levees in case the mainland was attacked. On December 8, the mayor mandated citywide blackouts. Three days earlier, Didion turned seven. The festive atmosphere surrounding her birthday celebration soured quickly and then the world went dark. In the past, in San Francisco or on Stinson Beach, Didion, staring out over the waves, had mentally navigated Hawaii's shores. The place loomed large in the minds of well-to-do Californians: a paradise within easy cruising distance. But now it was a smudged spot in the atlas. A territory called “War.”

After the attack on Hawaii, Didion's father was assigned by the U.S. Army Air Corps to travel from Fort Lewis in Washington State to Durham, North Carolina, and finally to Peterson Field in Colorado. He would take his family with him, fragmenting Didion's formal schooling from the end of first grade until the fourth. Military records indicate that Frank Didion joined the National Guard in 1939. His family had a long history with the Guard; his uncle Edward Reese served with distinction in the Guard's hospital corps in San Francisco following that city's massive earthquake and fire in 1906. It did not escape the Didions that military enlistment was often a conduit to business opportunities. Frank would remain in the military much of his life, working for the Selective Service as a procurement officer in Sacramento, becoming a major in the Air Corps, and finally retiring at the rank of lieutenant colonel in August 1965.