The Last Love Song (112 page)

“This isn't going to”: Sheila Heti, “Joan Didion,”
The Believer,
December 2011; available at
believermag.com/exclusives/?read=interview_didion
.

“And I didn't think”: ibid.

“I told them both I wished to God”: Dunne quoted in Linda Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold,”
New York,
September 2, 1996, 32.

“other man”: Joan Didion Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

“She would never”: Didion,
Play It As It Lays,
137.

“two glands of neurotoxic poison”: ibid., 1.

“To look for ‘reasons'”: ibid.

“I might as well lay it on the line”: ibid., 5.

“[my name] is pronounced Mar-
eye
-ah”: ibid., 2.

“We had a lot of things and places”: ibid., 3.

“What makes Iago evil?”: ibid., 1.

“You got a map of Peru?”: ibid., 183.

“In the preface to her essays”: Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing' Meant.”

“an ephemeral form of survival kitsch”:
Kirkus Reviews,
July 13, 1970; available at
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/joan-didion/play-it-as-it-lays/
.

“hurt” and “shattering”: Herman Briffault letter to Henry Robbins, undated (July 1970), Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“the heroine, like the author herself”: Henry Robbins letter to Herman Briffault, July 22, 1970; in ibid.

“high intelligence” and “When Maria speaks”: Segal, “Maria Knew What ‘Nothing' Meant.”

“I can't believe”: Dan Wakefield quoted in Hall, “The Writer Who Came In from the Cold.”

“There was a certain tendency”: Keuhl, “Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction No. 71.”

CHAPTER 19

“This … house on the sea”: Joan Didion,
The White Album
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 47–48.

“She still had parties”: Eve Babitz in conversation with the author, March 30, 2013.

“The hills are scrubby and barren”: Didion,
The White Album,
209.

“There are not only no blacks in Malibu”: John Gregory Dunne,
Harp
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 80.

“They were the most sophisticated people I knew”: Carolyn Kellogg, “PEN's Joan Didion Event Lacked Just One Thing: Joan Didion,”
Los Angeles Times,
October 15, 2013; available at
latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/le-et-jc-pen-joan-didion-event-lacked-just-one-thing-joan-didion-2013015,06823645.story
.

“[W]hat had started as a two-month job”: John Gregory Dunne,
Vegas
(New York: Random House, 1974), 231.

“look of the horizon”: Tom Brokaw interview with Joan Didion for NBC television, mid-1970s; available at
youtube.com/watch?v=4qrsozdFKSU
.

“a new kind of life”: Connie Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion, Book TV, C-SPAN 2, 1992.

“Free the Strip!”: Mike Davis, “Riot Nights on Sunset Strip,”
Labour / Le Travail
59 (Spring 2007): 212.

“I was so unhappy”: Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion.

“the finest woman prose stylist”: James Dickey quoted in Alfred Kazin, “Joan Didion: Portrait of a Professional,”
Harper's
magazine, December 1971, 113.

“One thinks of the great
performers
”: Mark Schorer, quoted in ibid.

“ripple”: Alfred Kazin's journal, posted at
theamericanscholar.org/the-passionate-encounter
.

“most interesting personality”: Kazin, “Joan Didion,” 112.

“People who live in a beach house”: ibid., 114.

“very vulnerable”: ibid.

“subtle,” “alarmed fragility,” and “many silences”: ibid., 116, 120.

“full of body language”: Alfred Kazin's journal.

“the academic-community-Moratorium”: Joan Didion, “On the Last Frontier with VX and GB,”
Life,
February 20, 1920, 22.

“mutilated the land”: ibid.

“not in a frontier town” and “cut free from the ambiguities of history”: ibid.

“Pretty healthy rabbit”: ibid.

“If you can't believe you're going to heaven”: ibid.

“[M]y child mourned Bunny Rabbit's cruel fate”: Joan Didion,
Blue Nights
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 181.

“We had a lawn”:
The Panic in Needle Park,
directed by Jerry Schatzberg (Twentieth Century–Fox, 1971).

“Basically, we just reported”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park,
January 30, 2009; available at
digitalpodcast.com/items/1526291
. See also “Joan Didion Remembers ‘The Panic in Needle Park,'” posted at
ifc.com/news/2009/01/joan-didion-on-the-panic-in-ne.php
.

“We rehearsed it as though it were a stage play”: Joshua Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds,”
Time Out New York,
January 22, 2009; available at
timeout.com/newyork/film/junk-bonds
.

“It was a fantastic script”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park
.

“I didn't see it as a happy ending”: ibid.

“I never found out what [he] saw”: Rothkopf, “Junk Bonds.”

“I'd seen Al four years earlier”: ibid.

“When you come from a gray, grimy Communist country”: ibid.

“[We were] a group of improbables”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park.

“‘We didn't have money for heroin'”: ibid.

“The thoroughness”: ibid.

“drunk and stoned”: Dominick Dunne,
The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper
(New York: Crown, 1999), 184.

“knew exactly how to launch a production”: Eileen Peterson, “They Dunne It Right!” Twentieth Century–Fox press release, January 8, 1971, Dominick Dunne papers, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

“Neither of us likes to come back here”: Bruce Cook, “For the Dunnes, the Future Begins in L.A.,”
The National Observer,
March 8, 1971, 21.

“writing the film was great fun for us”: ibid.

“When a picture is shooting”: “Joan Didion Remembers ‘The Panic in Needle Park.'”

“All loss is loss”: Film Forum podcast on
The Panic in Needle Park
.

“I never thought this was a picture about drugs”: ibid.

“You can kill me now!”: Jeff Guinn,
Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 353. For details about the Manson trial in general, I have drawn on Guinn's excellent book.

“there is a minimum of client control”: ibid.

A young man in Berkeley: Ed Sanders,
The Family
(New York: New American Library, 1989), 418.

“Death is psychosomatic”: Guinn,
Manson,
354.

“You have created the monster”: ibid., 357.

“coverage of the Charles Manson case”: ibid., 362.

“Your Honor, the President”: ibid., 363.

“demure,” “pigtailed,” “author Joan Didion,” and “straight”: Yvonne Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial,”
Los Angeles Times,
August 4, 1970; available at
cielodrive.com/archive/?p=6660
.

“long is for evening”: Guinn,
Manson,
360.

“Size 9 Petite”: Didion,
The White Album,
45.

“little death”: ibid., 43.

“have two drinks”: ibid.

“You'll kill us all”: Guinn,
Manson,
360–61.

“In the name of Christian justice”: ibid., 371

“I am only what you made me”: ibid., 374–75.

“On August 13”: Sanders,
The Family,
419.

“You abandoned your child”: Patten, “Linda Kasabian on Stand for Third Day of Cross-Examination in Manson Murder Trial.”

Didion and FSG received letters: Nathaniel J. Friedman to Henry Robbins and Joan Didion, February 11, 1971, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

Robbins replied: Henry Robbins letter to Nathaniel J. Friedman, February 26, 1971; in ibid.

“Pussy”: Henry Robbins letter to Victor Temkin, August 11, 1970; in ibid.

“The idea was”: Dunne,
Harp,
139.

“most interesting place[s]”: Hilton Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1,”
The Paris Review
48, no. 176 (Spring 2006); available at
www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5601/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-1-joan-didion
.

“weird stories”: Don Swaim's audio interview with Joan Didion, October 29, 1987; available at
www.wiredforbooks.org/joandidion
.

“This was a time”: Brod,
In Depth
interview with Joan Didion.

“gateway to the Caribbean”: ibid.

“triangulation of crossfire”: testimony of Perry Raymond Russo,
State of Louisiana v. Clay L. Shaw,
February 10, 1969, posted at
jfk-online.com/pr01.html
.

“whole underbelly”: Als, “Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1.”

“had taken the American political narrative seriously”: Joan Didion,
After Henry
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 85.

“testimony of a number of witnesses” and subsequent quotes from the House Select Committee on Assassinations: excerpt, volume 10, House Select Committee on Assassinations; available at
mcadams.posc.mu.edu/544camp.txt
.

“one of those occasional accidental intersections”: Didion,
After Henry,
86.

“road glass”: Dunne,
Harp,
140.

“in the South they remained convinced”: Didion,
Where I Was From
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 71.

In a letter to Marc Joffe: Henry Robbins letter to Marc Joffe, May 17, 1971, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.

“I had a year's contract”: Joan Didion in conversation with Sloane Crosley, New York Public Library, November 21, 2011.

“Napalm has become ‘Incender-Jell'”: Mary McCarthy,
Vietnam
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 3.

“the all-time top-seeded Hollywood bully boy”; John Gregory Dunne,
Monster: Living Off the Big Screen
(New York: Random House, 1997), 75.

“the antithesis” and subsequent quotes about this meeting unless otherwise noted: David Patrick Columbia, “Remembering John Gregory Dunne,” New York Social Diary, January 7, 2004; available at
newyorksocialdiary.com/the-list/2007/john-gregory-dunne
.

“if Otto thought”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.

“rage was never far beneath the surface”: ibid.

“grimy, roach-infested”: ibid.

“Studio executives”: John Gregory Dunne,
Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne
(New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), 23.

“nice lesbian relationship”: Didion,
The White Album,
154.

“If he got angry with us” and “[W]ith elaborate politeness”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.

“Miss Universe contestants”: Dunne,
Regards,
50.

“I forbid you to go”: Dunne,
Monster,
76.

“My blessed cancer”: Trudy Dixon quoted by David Chadwick; available at
cuke.com/Crooked Cucumber/cc excerpts/zmbm_excerpt_from_cc.htm
.

“Trudy had been struggling”: Willard Dixon to the author, November 13, 2013.

“She was totally inspiring”: Didion quoted in Sara Davidson,
Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion
(San Francisco: Byliner, 2011).

“every night to relax”: ibid.

“I didn't like [meditation]”: ibid.

“[W]e should not do [something]”: Shunryu Suzuki,
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind,
ed. Trudy Dixon (New York: Weatherhill, 2003), 53.

“In the beginner's mind”: ibid., 21.

“As it was in the beginning”: Didion quoted in David Swick, “The Zen of Joan Didion,”
Shambhala Sun,
January 2007; available at
www.lionsroar.com/the-zen-of-joan-didion
.

“personal God”: ibid.

“vast indifference”: ibid.

“I found earthquakes”: ibid.

“What I have made for myself”: Didion,
The White Album,
208.

“couldn't do that to him”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking: A Play
(New York: Vintage, 2007), 19.

“lit a joint”: Dunne,
Vegas,
231–32.

“I stopped”: Didion,
Where I Was From
, 218.

“the weather”: Dunne,
Vegas,
169–70.

“Halfway home”: Jonathan Yardley, “John Gregory Dunne,”
Washington Post,
January 22, 2006; available at
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/19/AR2006011902698.html
.

“Frank E. Campbell”: Dunne,
Vegas,
13.

“[S]he was lonely and depressed”: ibid., 174–75.

“living with [a] piranha”: ibid., 11.

“It was like all those terrible parties”: ibid., 232.

“kilo of marijuana”: ibid.

“[w]hatever minimal impulse I had”: ibid., 246.

“When are you coming home?”: ibid., 269.

“bad season … was over”: ibid., 287.

“He has on a blue work shirt”: Didion,
Blue Nights,
51.

“Don't let the Broken Man catch me”: Joan Didion,
The Year of Magical Thinking
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 51.