In a 1969 column for Life, her first for the magazine, Joan Didion let drop that she and husband, John Gregory Dunne, were at the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu “in lieu of filing for divorce,” surely the most famous subordinate clause in the history of New Journalism, an insubordinate clause if ever there was one. The poise of it, the violence, the cool-bitch chic—a writer who could be the heroine of a Godard movie!—takes the breath away, even after all these years. Didion goes on: “I tell you this not as aimless revelation but because I want you to know, as you read me, precisely who I am and where I am and what is on my mind. I want you to understand exactly what you are getting.” I suppose I’m operating under a similar set of impulses—a mixture of candor, self-justification and self-dramatization, the dread of being misapprehended coupled with the certainty that misapprehension is inevitable (Didion’s style is catching, but not so much as her habit of thought)—when I tell you I’m scared of her.
Before I get into why, I need to clarify something I said. Or, rather, something I didn’t say and won’t say, but which I’m anxious you’re going to think I said: that Didion isn’t a brilliant writer. She is a brilliant writer—sentence for sentence, among the best this country’s ever produced. And I’m not disputing her status as cultural icon either. As large as she looms now, she’ll loom larger as time passes—I’d bet money on it. In fact, I don’t want to diminish or assault her in any way. What I do want to do is get her right. And over the past 11 years, since 2005, when she published the first of her two loss memoirs, one about Dunne, the other about Quintana, her daughter, she’s been gotten wrong. And not just wrong, egregiously wrong, wrong to the point of blasphemy. I’m talking about the canonization of Didion, Didion as St. Joan, Didion as Our Mother of Sorrows. Didion is not, let me repeat, not a holy figure, nor is she a maternal one. She’s cool-eyed and cold-blooded, and that coolness and coldness—chilling, of course, but also bracing—is the source of her fascination as much as her artistry is; the source of her glamour too, and her seductiveness, because she is seductive, deeply. What she is is a femme fatale, and irresistible. She’s our kiss of death, yet we open our mouths, kiss back.
The subject of this piece, though, is not just a who, Didion, but a what, Hollywood. So to bring them together, which is where they belong, a natural pairing, this: I think that Didion, along with Andy Warhol, her spiritual twin as well as her artistic, created L.A.—that is, modern L.A., contemporary L.A., the L.A. that is synonymous with Hollywood. And I think that Didion alone was the vehicle—or possibly the agent—of L.A.’s destruction. I think that for the city of Los Angeles, Didion is the Ángel de la Muerte.
There. I said it. Now you know why I’m scared. Who wants to get on the Ángel de la Muerte’s bad side? Not that I believe I’m going to. Because I have one last thing to add, and I don’t care how weird and screw-loose it sounds: I think she wanted me to say it.
An Ingénue, Disingenuous
The Joan Didion who moved from New York to L.A. in June of 1964 was no more Joan Didion than Norma Jeane Baker was Marilyn Monroe, or Marion Morrison was John Wayne, or, for that matter, Andrew Warhola was Andy Warhol. She was a native daughter, but only sort of. The California she grew up in—the Sacramento Valley—was closer in spirit to the Old West than to the sun-kissed, pleasure-mad movie colony. Just shy of 30, she’d recently married Dunne. Both had been working as journalists, she for Vogue, he for Time. Her first book, a novel, the traditional if not quite conventional Run River, had been published the year before. Critics hadn’t taken much notice; neither had readers. Hurt, likely a little angry too, she was ready for a new scene. Dunne was equally itchy to blow town. Plus, he had a brother in the industry, Dominick—Nick.
In his memoir Popism, Warhol wrote, “The Hollywood we were driving to that fall of ‘63 was in limbo. The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn’t started yet.” Old Hollywood, of course, didn’t know it was finished. Was carrying on like it was show business as usual. And it still hadn’t wised up the following spring when the Didion-Dunnes arrived.
Nick, young though he was, was Old Hollywood. Professionally he hadn’t made it: a second-rate producer in a second-rate medium, TV. But socially he’d hit the heights. He and wife Lenny threw lavish, stylish parties, and lots of them. A month before the Didion-Dunnes showed, they’d thrown their most lavish and stylish, a black-and-white ball inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. (That the ball—a ball!—wasn’t in color is a detail almost too on the nose. Soon the whole town would turn psychedelic, and such evenings would seem so old-fashioned as to have been in black and white even if they weren’t.) Among the splendidly monochromatic: Ronald and Nancy Reagan, David Selznick and Jennifer Jones, Billy Wilder, Loretta Young, Natalie Wood. Also present, Truman Capote, who, in a gesture either of rip-off or homage, would stage his own black-and-white ball in New York. Nick’s invitation would get lost in the mail.
In later years, Didion and Dunne would play a double game with Hollywood: they were participants who were also onlookers; supported by the industry but not owned by it; in the thick of it and above the fray. They seemed much less ambivalent in their early years. In their early years, they wanted in. A line invoked by both so often you know they must have believed it gospel is from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon: “We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood.” How lucky for them then that they were the brother and sister-in-law of Nick, and thus part of the Hollywood family, if poor relations. And, as poor relations, they were given castoffs: clothes, Natalie Wood’s (for Didion); houses, too. They rented Sara Mankiewicz’s, fully furnished, though Mankiewicz did pack up the Oscar won by her late husband, Herman, for writing Citizen Kane.
So Didion and Dunne wanted in and got in, but they wanted in deeper. Hollywood’s appeal for writers isn’t hard to figure: it’s about the only place they can strike it rich. And doing it for the money seems to be how a writer stays respectable, at least in the eyes of fellow writers. Says writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of the couple’s from New York, “They didn’t give a sh*t about the movies except it was a way to make a lot of money. And I totally respect that.” Only maybe the Didion-Dunnes weren’t just tricking after all. Wrote Dunne, “The other night, after a screening, we went out to a party with Mike Nichols and Candice Bergen and Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand. I never did that at Time.” They were doing it then for love, too, if not of the movies, of the glamour and celebrity that movies bring. Says writer Josh Greenfeld, a friend of the couple’s from L.A., “Joan and John were star f*ckers. They wouldn’t miss a party. They could do four in a night—come, see what had to be seen, go.” And Don Bachardy, the artist and longtime lover of Christopher Isherwood, then a reigning figure on the L.A. literary scene, recalls their ardent pursuit of Isherwood. “They were both highly ambitious, and Chris was a rung on the ladder they were climbing. I don’t like to tell on Chris, but he wasn’t very fond of either of them. I think he found her clammy.” (Isherwood already told on himself. He makes numerous unflattering references to Didion and Dunne—“Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All”—in his diaries.)
The basic plan, careerwise, seems to have been that Nick would provide Didion and Dunne with introductions and they’d try their hands, collective—it would be a team effort—at scriptwriting. Their hands would remain idle for seven years, not counting an episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre. Well, idle and full. In 1964, Didion struck up a relationship with a magazine highly receptive to her sensibility and interests, The Saturday Evening Post. It would become the primary home for her work until its publisher filed for bankruptcy in 1969. And in 1966, she’d have a baby—or, have a baby without quite having had a baby. She and Dunne adopted, at birth, a girl, Quintana Roo. So Didion had plenty to keep her occupied.
Besides, she didn’t need the movies to become a star.
ONE HAPPY FAMILY
Joan, John, and Quintana, photographed by Julian Wasser in their L.A. home in 1968.
Photograph by Julian Wasser.
A Star Is Born, an Immaculate Conception
In 1968, Didion published Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of essays mostly and most strikingly about California, and, with a single exception, composed entirely while living in her new hometown. Slouching would become a touchstone for a decade and an era, its readers more than mere readers but followers, devotees, fans. The critics were just as beguiled. The New York Times called it “a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.” And the writing is great: direct and matter-of-fact, yet lyrical and poetic and hypnotic, too—writing that casts a spell, though whether you’ve been enchanted or cursed isn’t wholly clear. The true triumph of Slouching, however, is Joan Didion, or, rather, “Joan Didion,” the central character in a book that famously denies that the center exists, or at least that it’s capable of holding; also, as it happens, the most enduring creation of Joan Didion.
We’re told at *Slouching’*s outset that it was written in a state of acute emotional distress. From the preface: “I went to San Francisco [for the title piece, about the hippie scene in the Haight] because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed.” And many of the stories “Didion” tells are real-life horror stories: a suburban housewife who, one night when she was out of milk, set fire to her dumb lug of a husband; High Kindergarten, where children were given LSD; Howard Hughes. And yet the tone of the telling is noticeably, conspicuously not horrified; nor is it distressed, or even emotional; it’s the opposite, is composed, affectless, flat. There are, I should note, two places in the book where the tone changes, becomes tender. The first is in “John Wayne: A Love Song.” (Didion admirers like, I suspect, to believe that that “Love” is ironic—it’s not; she’s sweet on the Duke, who in his simplicity and stoicism represents to her a masculine ideal.) The second is in “Goodbye to All That,” her profile of her young self.
Like Warhol, “Didion” presents herself as an observer—no, a witness—to unspeakable acts. In fact, “Death and Disaster,” Warhol’s early-60s series depicting all manner of grisliness—car accidents, riots, suicides—could have been the title of Slouching, and maybe a better one. (The Yeats reference, in retrospect, seems a little alarmist.) “Didion” is absorbed, intensely, in what’s going on around her, but is not involved; her gaze fixed, even salivating, yet also vacant. Her motto might be: See everything, hear everything, do nothing. Still, her nothing is something, her extreme passivity a form of extreme aggression. She takes events, people, places that inspire violent and chaotic feelings—passion, hope, terror, despair—and subdues them, controls them, counteracting their awesome power simply by looking at them in a certain way. Her look, Warhol’s look, too—it’s aestheticizing, providing a psychic distance, a paradoxical kind of a cool. A burned-out cool. A cool that gives off heat.
The Strange Case of Earl McGrath
So New York had missed Didion’s star quality, its eye passing right over her. Not L.A., though. (Warhol, too, incidentally, would have to leave New York, go to L.A., to get discovered. It was the Ferus Gallery, on La Cienega, that gave him his big break, his first fine-arts show back in 1962, him and his soup cans.) L.A. knew how to talent-spot. But in 1968, it didn’t know much else. It was in a state of flux, or maybe crisis. The culture had swung counter, and the movies hadn’t swung along with it, not fully. Nineteen sixty-eight, remember, was the year of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, about what a super-fantastic idea the Vietnam War was. Music, not movies, had captured the hearts and minds of the younger generation. Old Hollywood, though, now knew it was Old. Wrote Nick Dunne, “Everything was changing…. People were starting to smoke pot…. Hairdressers started to be invited to parties.” And even if it wasn’t clear what exactly the New was, it was clear that Didion was part of it. She and Dunne began to move in different circles, most notably Earl McGrath’s.
Who is Earl McGrath? A mystery man I was never able to solve, is the short answer. Didion dedicated The White Album, her essay collection mainly about L.A. during the years she and Dunne and Quintana lived in a house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood (1966–71), to him, which should give you some idea of his importance to her. He reminds me of Jay Gatsby, not for the obvious reason, though for that reason too—he threw killer parties—but because the claims made about him seem outlandish yet, somehow, plausible: “he ran Bobby Kennedy’s career”; “he ran Rolling Stones Records”; “he ran an art gallery”; “he was head of production for Twentieth Century Fox”; “he married an Italian countess”; “he gave Steve Martin his I’m-a-Little-Teapot routine.” All of that—some of that, none of that—though, was just a front, a cover. What he did really was get to know the ultra-hip and get them to know each other. Says artist Ron Cooper, “Earl is the Gertrude Stein of our era. He had a salon like Stein. I met Andy Warhol through him and Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper and Michelle Phillips and Michael Crichton and Joan and John, of course—and, oh, just an amazing roster of people.” Says singer-actress Michelle Phillips, “If you went to Earl’s, you were going to a party that you knew was going to be staffed and stuffed with the most interesting, f*ckable people, always, always.”
Drugs were a big part of the scene. Says writer Eve Babitz, “Mostly pot and acid and speed—Dexedrine, Benzedrine. I thought Joan was more in control than we were, but I reread the The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” So was Harrison Ford. Says Babitz, “Harrison was a carpenter then, a terrible one. He built a deck for John Dunne and John was outraged it took so long. John really expected him to build it! And Earl was in love with Harrison. He let Harrison basically get away with murder as far as his carpentry was concerned. But Fred Roos [famed casting director for Francis Ford Coppola] hired Harrison and made him finish his project, and then got him in Star Wars.”
