The Last Love Song (58 page)

2

Meanwhile, the Dunnes had difficulty managing their own daughter. “Before Quintana was born, before she came to live with me … I assumed that I was mother material,” Didion said years later. “It was only when I had to face the reality of actually having the perfect baby in my arms that I kind of felt not, not up to it … I didn't have a clue what was involved.”

“I wish I could have stopped Quintana at age two,” she said.

On the day Leslie Caron came to listen to the “new voices of California literature,” she recognized that Quintana was “already a health worry” for the Dunnes. She was a “remarkably precocious baby,” she said, but something was
off
in her affect. It was simply odd to see a child talking and behaving so much like a grown-up.

In
Blue Nights,
Didion speaks, as well, of her daughter's “dizzying alterations of infancy and sophistication,” the “strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult.” For instance, Quintana called her toys “sundries,” apparently because of the sundry shops “in the many hotels to which she had already been taken.” She made a dollhouse featuring a central “projection room” with “Dolby Sound.” One night, she told her parents nonchalantly, “I just noticed I have cancer.” (It was chicken pox.)

Didion speaks obliquely of her daughter's “quicksilver changes of mood,” and of her own failure to seek treatment for Quintana because that wasn't the kind of thing people did in her family—though, in fact, it was; perhaps memories of her father's stay in Letterman continued to haunt her. One day, while the Dunnes were out, Quintana placed a call to a state psychiatric facility named Camarillo (“the hospital in which Charlie Parker once detoxed,” Didion felt obliged to report). Quintana “had called Camarillo, she advised us, to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy. She was five years old.”

On the
Blue Nights
promotional tour, when interviewers asked Didion how in the world a five-year-old could have known about Camarillo, she waved the question away. It was just a place people talked about sometimes. Actually, it was a place her friend Josh Greenfeld talked about. His son Noah had been born with severe brain damage. On occasion, Greenfeld threatened to take his boy to Camarillo. The name awakened Quintana's abandonment fears. Quintana “was always very sweet, very solicitous of Noah,” Greenfeld told me. “There was something special … something she identified with in him.”

Her closest friend was Susan Traylor, daughter of the acting teachers William Traylor and Peggy Feury. Their students included Sean Penn, Meg Ryan, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Anjelica Huston. “[We] would sit on the couch in the kitchen and all of these people would come to be around my parents for inspiration,” Traylor said. “And these people would talk about their relationships and all of their hard times, right in front of us. We were kids!”

At Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School, Quintana and Traylor met Bob Dylan's son, Jesse. Dylan had bought a large Spanish-style house in Malibu following his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. The kids flirted together on the beach, mimicking behaviors learned from the adults. (Eventually, Traylor and Jesse Dylan would marry.)

Quintana developed romantic notions of her own. “I've loved Donny Osmond for six months,” she told Sara Davidson matter-of-factly one night. They were sitting in Quintana's bedroom: white walls painted with trees and flowers, blue-and-white gingham curtains. “I want to marry him when I'm twenty. I think he's a sweet person and I like his records. I want to live with him in a big white house with a swimming pool and have lots of babies. But I don't want all the babies to come at once!”

She wrote Osmond a letter: “We have a lot to talk about. Can I come to Las Vegas?”

She had learned that people were always available to you if you got a budget, made a deal.

Around this time, possibly on a screenplay junket, Didion happened to take Quintana to the Chicago Museum of Art, where a Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit stunned her daughter. Quintana ran to a stair landing and stared at the abstract shapes on a
Sky Above Clouds
canvas. “Who drew it?” she whispered to her mother. Didion told her. “I need to talk to her,” Quintana said.

Didion bought a reproduction of the painting, framed it, and hung it on the wall in Malibu, next to the photo of the open road leading to Sacramento. Sky and earth. Whether or not the combination grounded Quintana, it seemed to soothe Didion as she padded in her sandals to her study.

*   *   *

“
Brush your teeth, brush your hair, shush I'm working
,” Quintana scribbled on a piece of paper under the heading “Mom's Sayings.” She posted it on the garage wall, like a little Martin Luther.

She left a crayoned note one day: “
Dear Mom, when you opened the door it was me who ran away XXXXXX
—
Q.
”

When her cousin Dominique came to baby-sit her one afternoon, Quintana left a card for her mother on the kitchen table: “
Roses are red, violets are blue. I wish you weren't home and Dominique does too. Love, Happy Mother's Day, D & Q
.”

In school, she wrote a poem called “The World”: “The world / Has nothing / But morning / And night / It has no / Day or lunch / So this world / Is poor and desertid [
sic
].”

On most days, the world certainly looked fragile on the Pacific Coast Highway between the house and the classroom buildings. School officials felt obligated to send notes home to parents advising them of contingency plans when fires came roaring down the hills. “Dry winds and dust, hair full of knots. Gardens are dead, animals not fed,” Quintana wrote when asked by her teacher for an “autumn” poem.

Didion couldn't keep from critiquing her daughter's jottings and correcting her grammar—unlike Eduene, who, when Didion was a girl, urged a notebook on her child to make her go away. Under scrutiny, Quintana became self-conscious about her prose. In time, she'd view writing the way her father did: as a way of settling scores.

One day, Susan Traylor rode in the car to school with Dunne and his daughter. Quintana showed him a paper she'd written. He asked her if she'd let her mother proof it, and when she said no, Traylor was shocked to see Dunne toss the paper out the window.

In the mornings, Dunne generally got up early, fetched wood for the living room fireplace, woke Quintana, and made her breakfast. “Joan was trying to finish a book” during this period “and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed,” he said. “She always made Q's lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox.… [Not] your basic peanut butter and jelly schoolbox lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces … Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar.” Quintana had to wear a plaid jumper and white sweater as a school uniform. She'd pull her hair back in a ponytail. “So I'd take Q to school, and she'd walk down this steep hill,” Dunne said. “I would watch her disappear down that hill, the Pacific a great big blue background, and I thought it was as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen. So I said to Joan, ‘You got to see this, babe.' The next morning Joan came with us, and when she saw Q disappear down that hill she began to cry.”

*   *   *

In
Blue Nights,
Didion flagellates herself for being a bad mother. Quintana “was already a person. I could never afford to see that,” she writes, suggesting, in hindsight, a refusal to countenance time, change, aging; a denial of the troubles she witnessed in her daughter. At the time, though, in a 1972 radio interview, she was
quite
aware of being “apprehensive about everything and anxious so I have to try not to lay [my neuroses] on her, and anyways, she wouldn't have any of it if I did try. I mean, she's very, very…” She didn't seem to know what else to say about Quintana. “She's very competent, I mean, she's, ahhh…”

Here was the thing: One of the young Mexican girls who'd worked for the Dunnes as a nanny since Quintana was born had left her husband around the time the family moved to Malibu. “She was pregnant, and she stayed with us until the baby was born,” Didion said. “Then she and the baby lived with us. When the baby was six months old, the girl went on vacation, took the baby home to Mexico. The baby, who had never been fed on anything but American formula, never eaten off anything but sterile dishes, became ill in Mazatlan, dehydrated, and was dead in twenty-four hours. It was a terrible thing. But we didn't know how bad it was for Quintana until we went to visit a friend who had a baby. Quintana looked at the baby, smiled at his grandmother, and said politely, ‘When is he going to die?'”

3

Nick's Hollywood career was about to come to an end.

“I was not one who learned my lesson after my first mistake,” he admitted. “The humiliating experience of my arrest [at LAX] was merely the first in a series of public shames that followed on the way to the bottom. I did not value my life highly at that point and did dangerous things with dangerous people.”

He recalled one night being in some “stranger's closet with people I didn't know, using Turnbull & Asser ties to find a vein to shoot cocaine. One of the strangers overdosed and died, but I had already run and was never questioned. Then, [when I was] stoned again, a crazed psychopath I'd invited over for some cocaine beat me up, tied me up, put a brown bag over my face, and dropped lighted matches on the bag. God came back to me, posthaste. So did my Catholicism. ‘God, help this man who is killing me,' I said over and over and over. He left, quietly. I lived.”

Between these escapades, he continued to work as a film producer, efficient and competent except for occasional tardiness at a meeting while nursing a terrible hangover. Just as he had believed his father's poor opinion of him as a child, he now believed Sinatra's view of him as a phony. I “rose too high,” he said. “I didn't deserve to be where I was. My credits weren't good enough for the world I moved in.”

He made a deal with Bob Evans at Paramount to produce an Elizabeth Taylor–Henry Fonda picture called
Ash Wednesday,
to be filmed in Rome. The screenplay had been written by a man named Jean-Claude Tramont, the story of a beautiful woman, anxious about getting older, who tries to rekindle her husband's lust by submitting to plastic surgery. The wisdom of asking audiences to accept Elizabeth Taylor as a candidate for beauty treatments involving sheep-gland injections should have been questioned by everyone involved in the production. The real problem was the quality of the script, “written … with all the fearlessness and perception demanded in the boiling of an egg,” Vincent Canby said in his review. Nick knew he had a turkey here, but he couldn't pass up the chance to meet Liz Taylor and Richard Burton—who, boozing and fighting steadily, snubbed him anyway.

The worst moment came in the middle of shooting, in the Café de Flore in Paris, when he met his screenwriter for the first time. Tramont, Belgian-born and raised in France, according to his official biographies, was the fiancé of Sue Mengers, Barbra Streisand's agent and “the most powerful woman in Hollywood at the time,” Nick said. In his memoir,
The Way We Lived Then,
he claimed Tramont was actually a fellow named Jack Schwartz, whom Nick had known twenty years earlier when he worked as a stage manager for NBC. Schwartz was a page boy then. When Mengers introduced them in Paris, Nick was stunned but said nothing. Immediately, he assumed this stinker of a screenplay had surfaced only through Mengers's pull. She was a heavyset woman, not particularly attractive to Nick—she was always wearing dumpy caftans—and he further assumed that Schwartz/Tramont was exploiting her affections to get ahead (in fact, he and Mengers remained married until his death from cancer in 1996).

Ash Wednesday
premiered in New York in November 1973. Exhausted, ignored by the star of his movie, nervous and more self-destructive than ever, Nick didn't wait for the critics to trash it. To the studio's dismay, he declared publicly, “It's a minor film. It's not like
A Place in the Sun
 … It's the end of Elizabeth Taylor's career. There's nothing riveting about
Ash Wednesday.
”

A couple weeks later, drunk at a dinner party in Los Angeles, he told several of the guests his Jack Schwartz story. “If the history of this movie ever gets written,” he quipped, “it should be called ‘When a Fat Girl Falls in Love.'”

Somehow,
Hollywood Reporter
columnist Marvene Jones learned of Nick's remark and printed it in the paper. Nick claimed he got a call from Bob Evans, a great friend of Mengers. “He just said to me, ‘You're through. You are over in Hollywood,' and I was, and I knew it,” Nick said.

This was confirmed for him when Ahmet Ertegün introduced him to Mick Jagger one day as “Joan Didion's brother-in-law.”

Later, Evans demurred, “I don't remember” telling Nick he was through. “I may have said that. I could have.”

“I was flattered that Nick Dunne would identify me as the person who ended his career in Hollywood because of my power. I wish it were true,” Mengers said.

In any case, Nick had committed a far worse blunder than insulting a beloved agent. It was the one unforgivable sin in Hollywood.

He had made a movie that bombed.

*   *   *

Didion met Sue Mengers and Barbra Streisand one night at a party. Mengers's house was like “a John Woolf jewel, with great, tall, Hollywood Regency doors and a living room that looked over a largely unused, egg-shaped pool,” Graydon Carter recalled.