The Last Love Song (98 page)

2

One of her doctors told her she had “made an inadequate adjustment to aging.”

She told him he was wrong. She had in fact “made no adjustment whatsoever to aging.” In the role she was playing, she had “lived [her] entire life to date without seriously believing that [she] would age.”

Meanwhile, early in the summer of 2010, the real person fainted in her bedroom one night (she had no memory, later, of falling to the floor). She awoke hours later with both legs bleeding, with blood on her forehead and one of her arms. She could not get up and she could not reach any of the thirteen telephones in the apartment. She went to sleep in a puddle of blood, having pulled a quilt down from a wicker chest to fold beneath her head.

On waking, she managed to pull herself up and phone a friend, who took her to Lenox Hill Hospital. The only available bed there, once she left the emergency room, was in a cardiac unit, where nurses falsely assumed she must've had cardiac trouble. “Your cardiac problem isn't showing up on the monitor,” one said, as if Didion were purposely bedeviling her. Didion said she did not have a cardiac problem. “Of course you have a cardiac problem. Because otherwise you wouldn't be in the cardiac unit,” the nurse replied.

Finally, after many days of tests at Lenox Hill and then at the New York–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, “[e]veryone agreed … there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did,” she said.

You kind of grow into the role.

3

“No good at human relationships. Just can't do it,” Nick told the actor Frank Langella one day in the spring of 2008. They were lunching together at Michael's on West Fifty-fifth Street. For years they had known each other glancingly, had said hello at parties, but Langella had always been wary of Nick's “practiced reporter's skill at charming you, then trying to trip you up; getting you to reveal something you hadn't intended to.” Mostly, he avoided the man. What prompted this lunch was Langella's recent movie,
Starting Out in the Evening,
based on the Brian Morton novel about a lonely old writer estranged from his child. It touched Nick. He phoned Langella and admitted he'd related to the character in the film. “It was heartbreaking how that man threw his life away,” he said.

Because of his cancer, Nick had reached another crisis moment, a searching time of brutal self-honesty and reassessment. He eagerly accepted when Langella suggested lunch. He poured his worries out to the actor. Langella recounted the scene in his memoir,
Dropped Names.
Nick said he was sick, he was going to fight the disease, but he wanted to resolve all of his unfinished business: He was still feuding with Graydon Carter—he believed the editor had not fully supported him in his conflict with Gary Condit; he was having trouble finishing his latest novel, in which the character Gus Bailey, Nick's alter ego in previous autobiographical fiction, struggled to accept his sexuality.

“So, are you gay?” Langella asked him.

“I'm nothing now,” Nick said. “I've been celibate for twenty years. It just got too difficult for me to deal with.”

“What did?”

“Hiding it. Wanting it.”

Langella wondered if Nick had ever talked to his sons about his feelings. Nick recoiled in horror: “God no!” he said. “I'm a coward.” He said he was sure Griffin knew anyway. In any case, he no longer missed sex.

Lunch ended with Nick's resolve to patch things up with Graydon Carter and to finish his book.

Over the course of the next several months, Nick pursued various treatments for his disease. Twice he flew to the Dominican Republic for stem-cell therapy, and twice he went to a stem-cell clinic in Germany, the first time in March 2009, and the second time in August. On the second visit, he contracted a serious infection, and Griffin arrived to bring him back home. When he met his father, he saw that Nick had asked an old friend to accompany him to the clinic. This fellow had been “a great friend of my sister's,” Griffin said. He “just sort of went from being my sister's best friend to my father's best friend.”

“Dominick and I met late June of 1974, to set the record straight,” the friend, Norman Carby, explained to me. “He told me to keep a journal, as I was going to have a very interesting life.” Carby was a painter, mainly of pastel-hued Southern California landscapes. He also manufactured fine jewelry, did silkscreens and lithographs, and worked in TV and film as a photographer. Through Nick, he met Didion and Dunne and “spent weekends at John and Joan's beach house in their absence,” he said. He helped Dominique arrange her acting portfolio soon after she arrived in the States after studying in Italy. She had “an audition for a movie within two weeks of her return to America. I believe that was 1979,” he recalled.

Carby had been a key witness at John Sweeney's trial. In the early 1980s, he lived on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles. Three weeks before Sweeney murdered Dominique, “Sweeney attacked her; hands around her throat,” Nick told one interviewer. “She got in her car and went to this painter's house. Great guy. She had a friendship with him, and he hid her for several days. He photographed her neck, which was used during the trial. She had gone on
Hill Street Blues
and played a battered woman, and a lot of it was not makeup. A lot of it was what [Sweeney] had done to her. But I've always been grateful to this guy.” Nick explained that the painter had since moved to Hawaii but that annually he came to Chicago to visit his family. “I see him once a year over the Memorial Day weekend,” Nick said. “After all these years, this amazing thing has happened. I now read him my novels [as I write them]. It started with the articles … and we've established this thing now. It's unbelievable. I talk to him every day now, this guy in Hawaii, and I read it to him rough, and then I hear it, because you can't read out loud to yourself.”

Jim Hyde, the interviewer, asked the painter's name. “Norman Carby,” Nick said. He added, somewhat obliquely, “It's an accidental thing that happened. Let life happen and go with it. Just go with it.”

In 2009, when Griffin arrived in Germany to take his father home on a chartered plane, he saw this man “looking after” Nick. “I don't think he'd mind me mentioning his name,” Griffin said. “There was Norman. I'll just say his name. He'd be fine.”

Griffin said, “I saw the … history” between the two men. It's “one of the real kind of touching, grateful memories I have of Dad's last months.”

In Nick's final novel,
Too Much Money,
which he
did
manage to finish, his character Gus Bailey admits he's closeted and celibate. He says, “Can't die with a secret, you know. I'm nervous about the kids, even though they're middle-aged men now. Not that they don't already know, I just never talk about it.” And in an interview for the
Times
of London, just months before his death, Nick said, “I call myself a closeted bisexual celibate.”

He could never speak directly to his children. In the summer of 2009, in his apartment at Forty-ninth and Lexington, he submitted to hospice care. Langella arrived to say good-bye one day. “Frank. I did it. I finished my book,” Nick said. “It's going to be a hit, I think, Frank.” He showed Langella a cardboard image of the cover and discussed the planned marketing of the novel. Langella noticed Griffin sitting on a sunporch off the living room, his back toward the hospital bed, staring out the window. It saddened Langella that “even on his deathbed,” Nick was “unable to speak truth to a son sitting some twenty feet away.” Instead, Nick “preferred rather to look at a mock-up of [his] new book title, discuss possible profits he would never enjoy, and have his hand held by a formerly estranged colleague.”

Didion kept vigil at Nick's bedside in a straw chair on the sunporch. From time to time, she'd say something to the other visitors gathered around the bed, but her voice was so soft, on many occasions no one knew what she'd uttered.

She said good-bye one August afternoon by gently placing her hand on Nick's foot.

*   *   *

A memorial service took place a few weeks later at St. Vincent Ferrer, on a slightly overcast day with just a touch of autumn on the breeze. The service, featuring a High Mass, was a celebrity affair, as Nick would have wished. Among those attending were Stephen Sondheim, Mart Crowley, Richard Gere, Julianna Margulies, Tina Brown, Liev Schreiber, Dana Delany, Diane von Furstenberg. Martha Moxley's mother came. The service opened with Nick's favorite Cole Porter song, “Anything Goes,” followed by a reading from the Book of Daniel by Norman Carby and a homily from Nick's friend Father Daniel Morrisey, who said Nick had been planning the details of the service for at least nine years.

Griffin spoke of his father's early marriage to Lenny. Alex came out of the shadows to say good-bye and to speak of his father's bravery following his sister's murder. Didion praised Nick's devotion to family, in spite of his disagreements with her husband; in the cathedral's airy vastness, few could hear her words.

Afterward, people milled around, recalling Nick's career. The last trial he'd covered for
Vanity Fair
was that of Phil Spector, accused of the shooting death of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson. Spector, one of rock 'n' roll's finest record producers, creator of the 1960s “Wall of Sound” with girl groups such as the Ronettes, had been known for years to play around with firearms, even in the studio (he'd once put a bullet into the ceiling during a John Lennon recording session). Nick had met him through Ahmet Ertegün in the late 1980s. In condemning a rock impresario as one of his last public gestures, and in arranging to open his memorial service with a Cole Porter song, Nick seemed to hearken back to Old Hollywood, to deny, once and for all, that the 1960s had ever happened.

*   *   *

In the end, so little is left. About a year after Nick died, the family held an estate auction. On a bright second-floor space at the Stair Galleries on Warren Street in Hudson, New York, Nick's furniture, clothes, jewelry, and books were hastily displayed. It was clear that his famous name, and the celebrity elbows he'd rubbed, were not going to be enough to jack up the prices. So what if Dominick Dunne had owned this copy of a John P. Marquand novel? No one had read Marquand for years. The hardcover first edition sold for twenty-five dollars. An old Mexican leather box filled with jeweled cuff links from Tiffany & Company went for seven hundred dollars, probably less than it was worth. The chintz club chairs and the furniture from Nick's mother's house in Hartford brought as little as fifty dollars. The stuff was all out of style—not antique, just old. And no one really cared about the ashtrays Nick had filched from the Ritz. The most valuable pieces—Chinese export porcelain and tall-case clocks—Nick had inherited from Lenny when she died. He was the first to admit she had always outclassed him.

In an earlier century, when Melville haunted these streets, the gallery space had served as a plant for processing whale oil. The whales were gone. “Nowadays,” one observer remarked, “the substance rendered here is the material remnants of people's lives.” And that usually came down to “so much sentimental dross,” no matter who you'd been, or whom you had known.

 

Epilogue: Life Limits

1

When Didion's
Blue Nights
came out in the late fall of 2011, the publisher hailed it as “a work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter.” It was hardly that. It was an impressionistic collage of isolated memories, slant observations, lists of objects, and riffs on rhythm. Several times during the writing, Didion nearly abandoned the project, but Lynn Nesbit, her agent, talked her out of it. The book went from being a meditation on parenting to a love song for Quintana to a lengthy complaint about aging and mortality. It ended up as none of these, quite.

“[T]here's a discernible remoteness to the whole presentation,” Meghan Daum said in the
Los Angeles Review of Books,
and a “commitment to keeping emotion at arm's length.” She said, “[A]t the risk of sounding like a philistine, I wanted some straighter talk. Is that an unfair request? Does the desire to know exactly what happened to Quintana represent a failure to meet the book on its own terms?” Daum answered herself, noting the book's “preference for aesthetic details,” a “series of effects,” and a good deal of “imagery.” Another way of saying this is that
Blue Nights
is a poem, and asks to be read as such.

The opening nocturne, a description of “twilights turn[ing] long and blue” in “certain latitudes,” becoming “more intense” even as they darken and fade, warning of the light's last appearance, is a clear allegory for aging and death. There is no mistaking the latitude to which Didion has sailed, nor her approach to discussing it. She will not tell us straight out what happened to Quintana—she makes it very plain, throughout these pages, how much she struggles to speak directly of her daughter. What she
will
do is call our attention to the blue-and-white curtains in Quintana's childhood bedroom and the blue-and-white curtains in the intensive care unit in which Quintana was intubated near the end of her life. Blue nights. Birth and death linked through poetic imagery: “When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.”

Naturally, the lyrical impulse reaches its inevitable conclusion in the book's final lines, culminating in a tiny grammatical knot almost unnoticeable. “Fade as the blue nights fade,” Didion says, “go as the brightness goes.” And then, speaking of missing and remembering Quintana, she writes, “there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.” Common sense—the need for clarity—suggests this sentence should read, “there is no day in
my
life in which I do not see her.” Most readers' minds, correcting for meaning, will silently substitute
my
for
her.
But Didion wrote “her.” She equated herself with Quintana. She made mother and daughter, life and death, indistinguishable, separated not even by a sheer blue-and-white curtain. Not for the first time, Didion was both the lost child abandoned on the trail and the survivor, looking back: “When we talk about [
our
] mortality we are talking about our children.”