Didion and babitz, p.17
Didion and Babitz, page 17
Joan, in her career, had beat men at their own game. Proof not that the game wasn’t rigged. Proof that a woman playing the game couldn’t win without also losing. For instance, so that her writing might be formidable and flashy, Joan made herself itsy-bitsy and meek—a tongue-tied wallflower. As Eve points out, Joan emphasized, almost fetishized, her frailty. Frailty was, for Joan, a kind of disguise or drag, a way of concealing her boldness, her brashness, her outrageous self-assurance—qualities that she, as a female, had no business having. (Girls weren’t supposed to be natural aggressors.) In other words, Joan was a predator who passed herself off as prey. From the closing paragraph of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” (Italics hers.)
If Joan wanted to sell herself out to maintain her viability as a writer that was okay with Eve. Eve was practical. She understood ugly necessity, the dilemma of survival. What was not okay with Eve: that Joan, with the New York Times piece, was selling women out to get in good with men, as Joan, with Play It, had sold L.A. out to get in good with New York.
The end of the letter:
It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a “woman’s novelist” and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art. It’s the only thing that’s real other than murder, I sometimes think—or death. Art’s the fun part, at least for me. It’s the salvation.
Eve was tracing the connection she imagined Joan made between women and art: alike in their volatility, their illogic, their wet, tangled profusion and lurid chaos. And both, Eve believed, were appalling to Joan, an affront to Joan’s orderly and austere intellect. Which means that Eve, with her double-D breasts and overlapping love affairs and big, unwieldy, slovenly talent, was also appalling to Joan. After all, Earl McGrath, Joan’s proxy, rejected Eve as “gross,” didn’t he? Only Joan, unlike Earl McGrath, was an artist, an artist almost in spite of herself, and Joan didn’t reject Eve. On the contrary, Joan, whose relationship with so many in her orbit was vampiric, nurtured Eve.
But for how long would Eve allow herself to be nurtured? As this letter shows, her deference was growing ever more bitter, her resentment ever more festering.
CHAPTER 9 By the Sea
We’re going to leave Eve and Wakefield for now, head to the beach to check in on Joan and Dunne, see what they’re up to.
Their new house was in Trancas, and Trancas was in Malibu. But not the Malibu that gleamed in the collective national imagination, a bright shining symbol of the Southern California good life. (Chevrolet introduced its Malibu line in 1964; Mattel brought out Malibu Barbie in 1971.) In other words, not Malibu Colony, i.e., Hollywood Malibu. The dead opposite, in fact: the anti-Malibu Colony, the anti-Hollywood Malibu.
Jennifer Salt, an actress, her biggest credit to date a small part in Midnight Cowboy (1969), moved to Trancas with Margot Kidder, also a struggling actress, the same year as Joan and Dunne. “Malibu Colony had been around for a long time,” she said. “So many old movie stars had lived there. And it was a big thing, if you were a new movie star, to have a house in the Colony. Trancas was about as far from all that as you could get. There was nothing chic about Trancas. It was cheap and nobody was there and it was really rustic. Margot and I decided we were going to be roommates. We weren’t looking for a fancy house or a big pool or whatever it was people were looking for when they went to the Colony. We just wanted a house on the beach. And that’s what we got—a little A-frame hippie pad on Nicholas Beach in Trancas. A year or so later, Margot convinced Michael and Julia [Phillips, producers who hadn’t yet produced] how great Trancas was. They took the house next to ours.”
Anti-Hollywood Malibu was about to turn into Hollywood Malibu.
* * *
Flashback:
Joan and Dunne came to L.A. from New York in the summer of ’64. Both wanted to write books. Both also wanted to write movies, hard to do without connections. As it happened, they had one: Dunne’s older brother, Dominick “Nick” Dunne.
In his memoir, Popism, Andy Warhol described journeying cross-country at around the same time as Joan and Dunne—fall of ’63—and entering a Hollywood that was “in limbo.” (While there, Warhol would go to the Duchamp retrospective party at the Hotel Green, get sick on the pink champagne.) “The Old Hollywood was finished and the New Hollywood hadn’t started yet,” he wrote. Old Hollywood, of course, didn’t know it was finished. Was carrying on like it was show business as usual.
Nick, young as he was, was Old Hollywood. Professionally, he was flailing—a second-rate producer in a medium that didn’t rate at all (TV). Socially, though, he’d made it. He and his beautiful heiress wife, Lenny, threw flamboyant, theatrical parties, and lots of them. A month before Joan and Dunne arrived, they’d thrown their most flamboyant and theatrical yet: a black-and-white ball inspired by the Ascot scene in My Fair Lady. Among the splendidly monochromatic were David Selznick, Billy Wilder, Loretta Young, Ronald and Nancy Reagan. Also, Truman Capote, who, in the spirit of homage—or larceny—would stage his own black-and-white ball in New York in 1966. (He’d forget to invite Nick.)
In later years, Joan and Dunne tried to have it both ways with Hollywood: they were insiders who were also outsiders; supported by the industry but not owned by the industry; in the thick of it yet above the fray. In earlier years, though, they were much less ambivalent: they straight-up wanted in.
“We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood,” is a line from Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, and one invoked by Joan and Dunne so often you know they thought it gospel. How lucky for them then that they were the brother and sister-in-law of Nick, and therefore part of the Hollywood family, even if poor relations. And, as poor relations, they were given hand-me-downs.
In the form of clothes. The playwright Mart Crowley (The Boys in the Band), who worked for years as Natalie Wood’s personal assistant, recalled, “Joan had a lot of Natalie’s clothes and underwear. Nick’s wife, Lenny, was involved with a charity that sold the castoffs of entertainment people. Lenny would notice when Natalie’s stuff came in and she’d hide it, then call Joan to come in, and Joan would buy it all, sight unseen. I’d see her in a great dress or wearing a pair of shades, and John would brag about it all belonging to Natalie.” (Dunne would brag about it again in the last piece he ever published: “STAR!,” a review of Gavin Lambert’s biography of Wood.)
In the form of houses. They rented Sara Mankiewicz’s, fully furnished, though Mankiewicz did pack up the Oscar won by her late husband, Herman, for writing Citizen Kane. “You’ll have friends over,” Mankiewicz told Joan, “they’ll get drunk, they’ll want to play with it.”
Hollywood’s appeal for Joan and Dunne wasn’t hard to fathom. It was one of the few places on earth where a writer could strike it rich. And writing movies for the money and only the money seemed to be how a writer maintained his or her integrity. At least in the eyes of other writers. “[Joan and John] didn’t give a shit about the movies except it was a way to make a lot of money,” said Dan Wakefield. “And I totally respect that.” In brief, books were art, movies were commerce.
Only, that was changing.
* * *
In 1969, the summer of Manson, Easy Rider roared onto screens trailing clouds of motorcycle exhaust and marijuana smoke. A new era of Hollywood had begun. (“Now the children of Dylan were in control,” actor-screenwriter Buck Henry told me.) It was Nouvelle Vague American style. And Joan and Dunne, in their house on the bluff above Nicholas Beach, overlooking the houses of Jennifer Salt and Margot Kidder, Michael and Julia Phillips, were smack-dab in the middle of it. Though I don’t think they quite knew what “it” was.
Joan might have had a glimmering. “One night, Joan and John were on their porch, watching a party going on at Michael and Julia’s,” said writer-director Paul Schrader. “And Joan turned to John. ‘You could power all of Hollywood with the ambition in that house,’ she said.”
But only a glimmering. “Julia and I hadn’t produced The Sting yet,” said Michael Phillips. “We had a film, though—Steelyard Blues—set up at a studio, and that put us half a step ahead of our peers. Every weekend there was a party. It wasn’t even a party. It was just, ‘Come hang out at the beach.’ A group would show, and I’d take a head count to see how many steaks and hamburgers I needed to pick up at the market. I scratched out a list of names of the people who were there, almost all of them unknowns at the time. There was Steven Spielberg and Amy Irving. Julia’s and my producing partner, Tony Bill. David Ward, who wrote The Sting. Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck—they wrote American Graffiti. And John Milius, who wrote Apocalypse Now. Harvey Keitel was there. And Scorsese and De Niro and Brian De Palma, who was Margot’s boyfriend. For Christmas one year, Brian wrapped two scripts and put them under the tree, one for Margot, one for Jennifer. The script was for Sisters [1972]. Jill Clayburgh was around a lot. So was Michael Douglas and Brenda Vaccaro, Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner. And Joan and John would stop by sometimes. Listen, they were great, they were wonderful. But they weren’t really part of what we were doing. It was like they came down from the clouds to mingle with the hoi polloi. They were always distant observers.”
With the Old Hollywood crowd—the Establishment Hollywood crowd—in the mid-sixties, Joan and Dunne were the young marrieds: unheralded, uncertain, in need of advice and handouts. With the New Hollywood crowd—the New Wave Hollywood crowd—in the early seventies, in contrast, they were the older married couple: mature, dignified, a trifle staid. “Joan and John were definitely of a different generation,” said Salt. “They were elegant, in control of their social lives. They weren’t going to be at some party where most of the people were on psychedelics. What they had were dinner parties. If you saw them, it would be because you were invited to one of those.”
I asked Salt what Joan and Dunne were like at their dinner parties. A thoughtful pause, and then, “Joan was very, very quiet. She wasn’t a sourpuss or anything like that—she was lovely and gracious—but somehow you ended up being the jabber-mouth and the idiot, and she was the cool customer. It could seem like she wasn’t particularly present, but then she’d remember things I said or wore, and she probably even had an opinion on how I fit into the group. John did the talking for both of them. He was friendly, and he loved to gossip, which was fun. There was always a sense of mystique around Joan. Even when you were in her house, you knew she might not appear because she had terrible migraines that would take her down for days. It was a big part of their life together, her migraines. John was very concerned, very doting. Even though he was a writer and quite self-important, he functioned in that relationship like a—like I don’t know what—like the wife of a great tycoon, of a great whatever. He made Joan’s life what it was. He was the host, the gregarious one. But Joan was the royalty.”
* * *
Joan and Dunne were living in New Wave Hollywood. Working in it, too. Except they weren’t really working in it. Really, they were slumming in it.
In a 1975 interview with the Atlantic, Dunne said of himself and Joan, “We write for movies because the money is good, because doing a screenplay is like doing a combination jigsaw and crossword puzzle—it’s not writing, but it can be fun—and because 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.”
Joan would also say movies were about the money, though she’d say it obliquely in her first piece for the impeccably literary, impeccably East Coast New York Review of Books. “Hollywood: Having Fun,” which appeared in the March 22, 1973, issue, was a takedown of her adopted town. (The piece was the perfect double-agent move: making a show of not going Hollywood so no one would notice she was going Hollywood.) “[Hollywood’s] spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial,” she wrote. “The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: ‘A very imaginative deal,’ they say, or, ‘He writes the most creative deals in the business.’ ” In short, art isn’t the art in Hollywood, business is the art, and only a sucker would think otherwise.
That they weren’t suckers—or morons, to use Ertegun’s preferred phrase—is something Joan and Dunne very much wanted you to know. Yet a willingness to risk being a sucker is, I’d argue, nearly a prerequisite for creating art. And their unwillingness perhaps accounts for why, in Hollywood, they didn’t. (How could they make a movie that was any good when they were so busy condescending to the medium?) And while they wrote a number of movies in the seventies, they didn’t write a single Seventies movie. Meaning, they didn’t write a single movie in the seventies that defined or outlasted the decade.
There is, however, a movie they wrote in the seventies that I would like to discuss: Play It as It Lays (1972).
First, though, a discussion of Play It as It Lays, the book.
Its world is a contrived one, a deliberate artifice even while borrowing the name of a real place (Los Angeles). And not for an instant do you believe that its story can end other than in calamity, that life’s random energies have a shot against tragedy’s classic structure. Which is why Play It, taken on its own terms, is profound, high art; and, not taken on its own terms, is profoundly silly, high camp. The assessment of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael (Kael’s review is a twofer: she goes after the book before going after the movie) is so crushing because she laughs at it—“I found the Joan Didion novel ridiculously swank, and I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles”—and once you start laughing, you can’t stop.
Though maybe that’s the movie’s problem: it takes the book on the book’s own terms. It was made, after all, by people inclined to deference. Frank Perry, a self-described “Didion freak,” directed it, Joan and Dunne wrote it, and Nick Dunne coproduced it. The movie is the book, but without the magic of Joan’s prose. And absent that magic, Play It is exposed. Suddenly you see its tawdry pathos, how purest-corn and junk-Hollywood it is—the glamour of desolation, the hollowness of fame, how lowlife are those living the high life. You’re watching, you realize, intellectualized trash. A soap opera with the look of an art-house film. The Bad and the Beautiful reshot by Michelangelo Antonioni, Monica Vitti in the Lana Turner role.
Play It didn’t have to be that. Joan’s first pick for director was Sam Peckinpah, who, with The Wild Bunch (1969), had done for the cowboy picture what Easy Rider had done for the biker.
In an April 4, 1970, letter to Peckinpah, she wrote:
My agent at William Morris wants to take PLAY IT AS IT LAYS to a studio before publication, which is July something. A lot of people have asked for it but I told Morris not to show it to anyone until I found out what you want to do—whether (on reflection) you still want to do it, and if so what studio you would want us to take it to… Obviously I want you to—you are the only person John and I can see taking it beyond where it is and bringing back a picture of the very edge.
Peckinpah seems a counterintuitive choice. Play It is urban, contemporary, feminine, delicate. He was a director of Westerns, often set in the past, often preoccupied with masculine dilemmas, and invariably extremely violent. Yet his violence was beautiful: sensuous and painterly. And he was a fatalist, and thus close to Joan in terms of sensibility. Her hope, too, was that he would not just film the book—what Perry ended up doing—but reimagine the book, so that he might, as she said in her letter, “[bring] back a picture of the very edge.”
Or perhaps over the edge.
It always struck me as false that Maria Wyeth was so tranquil behind the wheel of her Corvette. How much more joy would she have gotten from her rides if she’d left devastation in her wake? Is there a better way for one of the most alienated characters in modern literature to connect than inside her metal shell, her barest touch resulting in blood and guts, severed limbs and spattered brains? Peckinpah’s Maria might still have wound up in a sanatorium, but she’d have put a few people in the morgue en route. He’d have shown what Joan couldn’t quite bring herself to show: that Maria was a victim who was also a victimizer. And, in so doing, he’d have turned Play It into what it was meant to be: Andy Warhol’s Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times at two hundred and eighty words per page, at twenty-four frames per second; Godard’s Weekend, only instead of burning cars and oozing corpses littering a highway in the French countryside, burning cars and oozing corpses littering the San Diego Freeway, the Harbor, the Hollywood, etc.
