The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (20 page)
Authors: Marc Weingarten
Tags: #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Literary, #Journalism, #Fiction, #Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, #American, #Literary Criticism, #Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, #Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, #Biography & Autobiography, #American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, #General, #Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, #Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, #Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
Didion didn’t know that this shape-shifting image of California that she maintained throughout her young life would become the raw material of her greatest work as a writer when she left Sacramento to attend the University of California, Berkeley, as an English major. After winning a writing contest for a story on the San Francisco architect William Wilson Wurster, Didion left for New York after graduating in 1956 and found a job at
Vogue
writing captions for editor Allene Talmey. Didion
eventually graduated to stories about country homes, clothing designers, and other personalities, where a high premium was placed on getting the finer details of the products just right while avoiding the extraneous adjective or verb, the unnecessary descriptive word.
Didion fell in love with New York as only a rural initiate could love it. “Nothing was irrevocable,” she would later write, “everything was within reach. Just around the corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never seen or done or known about.” New York was an “infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”
And yet the West maintained a powerful grip on her; she missed the region terribly. Even as Didion was moving up the masthead at
Vogue
, eventually becoming an editor, she dreamed of Sacramento and the great silted rivers in which she had swum. Her first novel,
Run River
, which was written after hours while Didion was still working at
Vogue
, was a paean to the Sacramento Valley as it existed in her dream life, “the way the rivers crested and the way the tule fogs obscured the levees and the way the fallen camellias turned the sidewalks brown and slick during the Christmas rains.” But it was also a novel that pitted the encroachment of modernity against the disturbances of rural life; in the novel, the protagonist Lily McClellan’s mother sells off parcels of her land to make way for tract housing, while the body of her daughter Martha is inexorably exhumed from its grave by the swelling river.
Didion was making it in the city that was the big brass ring for journalists who came of age in the 1950s, but eventually the great media culture clamor—the endless cocktail parties, the enforced bonhomie of an intensely private person impelled to become a public one—sent her back to California. Newly married to John Gregory Dunne, an ambitious young writer at
Time
who longed to write novels and with whom she had adopted a baby girl they named Quintana Roo, Didion moved to Los Angeles in 1966.
The paradise of her youth had been wiped clean; a new generation of exiles had laid claim to the freedoms and opportunities that had brought Didion’s forebears across the Midwest in the 1800s, and the Dust Bowlers in the 1930s after them, to a golden land that was wide open and unfettered by entrenched notions of class and tradition or the heavy
baggage of historical continuity. This is the place where Tom Wolfe had seen new statuspheres spring up from nowhere, but Didion longed for that old continuity. In its absence, chaos and anarchy were free to roam.
For Didion, geography was destiny. Just as the land on which she was reared had shaped her view of the world as indeterminate, so her subjects in her earliest magazine stories were shaped by the natural laws of California, a state that, despite a postwar population boom that was unprecedented in American history, was still a wild, untamed desert that could tamp down the heartiest souls with obdurate force. Like previous migrants in search of some elusive destiny in the West, Didion’s subjects were drawn by the Hollywood myths, only to encounter the same dust and desolation.
Didion saw disorder at every turn in California: in the hollowed-out eyes of the drug-addled hippies in the Haight, in suburban housewives staring down hope and losing, in the sun-baked concrete enclaves far away from the Pacific breezes. Shortly after moving back West, Didion became “paralyzed by the conviction that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder.”
In her story “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?” which ran in the May 7, 1966, issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
, Didion chronicled in chilling detail the story of Lucille Miller, the child of strict Seventh-Day Adventists, who was reared in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and “came off the prairies in search of something she had seen in a movie or heard on the radio.” Instead, Miller found herself in San Bernardino, a city “haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” Miller’s story, which Didion had read about in the
Los Angeles Times
, seemed ripped from the pages of a James M. Cain potboiler. On October 7, 1964, “a night when the moon was dark and the wind was blowing and she was out of milk,” Miller, deep into an illicit affair with a local attorney named Arthwell Hayton, immolated her dentist husband alive in his VW Bug in an attempt to collect on his life insurance.
For Didion, Miller’s story seemed to typify the desperation of all those lonely lower-middle-class strivers out on the fringes of L.A., the
California “where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke, without ever meeting a Catholic or a Jew. This is the California where it is easy to Dial-a-Devotion, but hard to buy a book.” Miller expected one thing and got something else.
Didion seemed an unlikely writer for such a tawdry story. A painfully, almost pathologically shy interlocutor, Didion somehow made her reticence work to her advantage. “Most of my sentences drift off, don’t end,” she said. “It’s a habit I’ve fallen into. I don’t deal well with people. I would think that the appearance of not being very much in touch was probably one of the reasons I started writing.” Instead of pushing and prodding her subjects into revealing themselves, Didion let them fill in the awkward silences, discreetly jotting it all down in her spiral notebook. In this fashion, she achieved a rapport with her subjects that eluded most traditional reporters.
For this story, Didion interviewed Miller, her friends and family members, and the prosecuting and defense attorneys, and meticulously pored over court transcripts to carefully piece together the timeline of the murder and its aftermath. The story is structured like a film noir; Didion skillfully unfurls the narrative without tipping her hand. The reader learns the facts as they are revealed to the protagonists in the story itself, culminating in a courtroom climax that leads to Miller’s incarceration and a final visit to the Millers’ vacant house on Bella Vista Road, with the television aerial “toppled on the roof, and a trash can [was] stuffed with the debris of family life: a cheap suitcase, a child’s game called ‘Lie Detector.’”
Didion’s omnivorous eye ranged over the San Bernardino courthouse during the Miller trial, catching the small but revealing details that elevated the story beyond a true-crime tale into a morality play, the battle between darkness and light that seemed, for Didion, to permeate every aspect of contemporary California life. “So they had come,” Didion wrote,
to see Arthwell, these crowds who milled beneath the dusty palms outside the courthouse, and they had also come to see Lucille, who appeared as a slight, intermittently pretty woman, already pale from lack of sun, a woman who would turn thirty-five before the trial was over and whose tendency toward haggardness was beginning to
show, a meticulous woman who insisted, against her lawyer’s advice, on coming to court with her hair piled high and laquered. “I would’ve been happy if she’d come in with it hanging loose, but Lucille wouldn’t do that,” her lawyer said.
Lucille Miller’s was not an isolated case; it was emblematic of the dislocations of a region that obliterated its past as fast as it constructed new myths to replace it, withholding all of the golden dreams that it so tantalizingly proffered, a culture that granted its residents permissiveness as it if were an inalienable right but extracted a pound of flesh in return.
Didion saw this all so clearly in San Francisco, with the countercultural revolution in full bloom. Where others preferred to see a new community of the young rising like daisies from the cracked sidewalk streets, Didion saw a village of lost children, the fallout of a fractious society with a high divorce rate, where “adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.”
Didion embarked for San Francisco in the spring of 1967 on assignment from the
Saturday Evening Post
. She had only the flimsiest of conceits—to take the measure of the hippie scene—and even flimsier contacts. So she hung around awhile and insinuated herself with some of the kids she met on the street, and they invited her into their crash pads, offered their drugs and food to her.
What Didion witnessed was a far cry from the pie-eyed exuberance of the Merry Pranksters that Tom Wolfe had chronicled so gleefully in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. Instead, these were runaways living on handouts and day labor, organizing their lives around acid trips, selling the acid they didn’t ingest, scurrying around in search of some identity that would stick.
Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend’s apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me and as I fiddle with the ignition I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they
had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.
Jeff throws a Coca-Cola bottle out the car window. “I can’t remember I ever thought about it,” he says.
“I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,” Debbie says. “But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.”
Ken Kesey’s dream to “move beyond acid” never took hold in the Haight; drugs just became an end in themselves, permeating everything like toxic fallout. Didion paints a bleak picture of a would-be utopia curdling into a dystopian nightmare, and not even the very young are immune. The conclusion of the piece, which Didion called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (from the Yeats poem with the line “things fall apart; the center cannot hold”), is an image of a five-year-old girl named Susan
wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.
“Five years old,” Otto says. “On acid.”
Wolfe’s words seemed to tumble out in a logorrheic rush, but Didion’s prose was spare, honed to a fine edge. She strove for directness, a clear and uninflected rhythm, just like her literary hero Hemingway. She credited her
Vogue
apprenticeship with teaching her how to sculpt sentences down to the bone. “Every day I would go into [Allene Talmey]’s office with eight lines of copy or a caption or something,” she recalled. “She would sit there and mark it up with a pencil and get very angry about extra words, about verbs not working.”
Didion did place herself into some of her reported pieces, but only as a dispassionate observer; she never recorded her own impressions in Maileresque fashion, leaving that for her personal essays. If anything, Didion followed the tenets of Lillian Ross, framing stories in scenes and relying on her moral instincts to provide the undercurrent of tragedy that pervaded so much of her sixties output.
Didion’s profile of John Wayne, which appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1965, was a close cousin of Ross’s
Picture
. In it, Didion hung around the set of director Henry Hathaway’s
The Sons of Katie Elder
outside Mexico City and carefully observed the interaction between the
veteran cast and crew, which included Dean Martin and Earl Holliman. Wayne had been Didion’s embodiment of the frontier man of action, the hero of her young dream life. Now Wayne was ill with cancer but still possessed that same stolid vigor of legend; he still had something of the cowboy’s maverick code in his creaky carriage.
Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth and looked across the table. “Some guy just tried to kill
me
he wouldn’t end up in jail. How about you, Duke?”
Very slowly, the object of Hathaway’s query wiped his mouth, pushed back his chair, and stood up. It was the real thing, the authentic article, the move which had climaxed a thousand scenes on 165 flickering frontiers and phantasmagoric battlefields before, and it was about to climax this one, in the commissary at Estudio Churubusco outside Mexico City. “Right,” John Wayne drawled. “I’d kill him.”
Because Didion’s main outlet at the time was the
Saturday Evening Post
, a general-interest magazine not particularly known for its creative nonfiction during this era and headed toward its dissolution in 1969, her work didn’t receive the kind of notice that Wolfe and Gay Talese garnered with their
Esquire
stories. But when Henry Robbins—Wolfe’s editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux—compiled the San Francisco and John Wayne pieces, as well as a handful of other essays from
Esquire
, the
American Scholar
, and
Holiday
, in a book called
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
in the summer of 1968 (summer traditionally being a downtime for high-profile books), it was immediately hailed as the work of an exciting new voice in American letters. So unrecognized was Didion as a major talent that Dan Wakefield felt compelled to preface his
New York Times
review of the book with the qualifier that “Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers of my own generation.” Wakefield continued: “Now that Truman Capote has pronounced that such work may achieve the stature of ‘art,’ perhaps it is possible for this collection to be recognized as it should be: not as a better or worse example of what some people call ‘mere journalism,’ but as a rich display of some of the best prose written today in this country.”