Didion and babitz, p.18
Didion and Babitz, page 18
That version, of course, never happened. (The studio balked at hiring a “man’s” director to adapt a “woman’s” book.) Blown chances are always a shame. This one, though, was especially shameful because it was, as well, Joan and Dunne’s best chance to catch the Hollywood New Wave.
“A few decades hence, these years may appear to be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s.” That sentence, written by Pauline Kael, is from the introduction to Reeling, her collection of 1972–75 reviews, including those of Mean Streets, Shampoo, The Godfather, Part II, and Nashville. In the seventies, movie culture would become central to American culture. Kael was the voice of movie culture, which meant Kael was the voice of American culture, which meant Joan no longer was.
Joan didn’t take the usurpation lying down. She went after Kael. Not head-on. She’d leave that to Dunne, who’d pan Kael’s Deeper into Movies in the March 25, 1973, Los Angeles Times. “A year or so ago I was asked to review Pauline Kael’s Raising Kane, an arrogantly silly book that made me giggle and hoot as much as any I had ever read,” was his opener. (Sound familiar?) No, Joan’s attack on Kael was a flank. “The review of pictures has been… a traditional diversion for writers whose actual work is somewhere else,” she wrote, also in 1973. “Perhaps the initial error is in making a career of it.” No serious writer takes movies seriously is what she’s saying. And yet movies were, at that moment, it, the hot art form.
So Joan, who missed nothing, had missed a major cultural shift. All of a sudden, the sharpest point on the cutting edge was dull, blunted, a danger no more.
* * *
Eve, with her instinctive hostility toward Trancas, her righteous anger at Joan for defecting there, had anticipated this dulling, this blunting. Yet, at the same time, she was looking to Joan as a model and guide. What I imagine she saw when she looked: a person who’d worked out the problem of being a female artist. Joan’s solution? Take for a mate a male artist. By choosing Dan Wakefield, Eve was, whether she knew it or not, imitating Joan.
Which is why I want to turn the spotlight of our attention, Reader, on Joan’s marriage.
CHAPTER 10 Still by the Sea
“You married a protector,” Griffin says to Joan in The Center Will Not Hold, and Joan readily agrees. Dunne, though, only looked like the alpha.
“Michiko Kakutani came to Trancas to do a story on Joan for the Times,” said Josh Greenfeld, also a Trancas resident. “I told [Michiko], ‘What you see in John, you get in Joan.’ He came on as tough and blustering, but he was soft. Don’t forget, she handled all their finances. She made brilliant real estate deals. And that shyness—that weakness—was actually her strength because it got John to run interference.”
Of her courtship with Dunne, Joan would say, “I don’t know what ‘fall in love’ means… But I do remember having a very clear sense that I wanted this to continue.” It isn’t true that falling in love was a concept with which she had no truck. In “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” her piece on Howard Hughes, she wrote of the “apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” It’s a wildly revealing statement, and she delivers it almost as a throwaway. Blink and you miss it. She’s telling the reader that Dunne is the person she married, some other man—Noel Parmentel, because who else?—the person she loved. (See what I mean when I said before that Joan can only be caught in fitful glimpses?)
In any case, Joan and Dunne were very married, presenting themselves to the world as a unit. Not only did they live together, raise a child together, they also worked together. Dunne was Joan’s cowriter, Joan’s editor, Joan’s first and last reader. As Eve put it, “They were connected at the typewriter ribbon.”
And the relationship was more symbiotic even than that. It was Dunne who made it possible for Joan to be Joan. “People often said that he finished sentences for me,” observed Joan. “Well, he did.” And because he did, she had the power of silence. It was a power she wielded expertly.
“It was in the early sixties, after Ivan Obolensky bought her novel, that Joan started to change,” said Dan Wakefield. “She wasn’t the aspirant from Sacramento anymore, the little girl who was too scared to speak. Now she didn’t speak on purpose. She understood that not speaking gave her mystery and mystery gave her magnetism. People were fascinated by her. I remember I gave a party. A guy was there—Norman Dorsen—a law professor at NYU, involved in liberal politics and all that shit. Joan was just standing there, not saying a thing. She had on this pair of dark glasses. Norman goes up to her and says, ‘Ms. Didion, why do you wear those sexy, intriguing dark glasses?’ I cracked up and said, ‘I think you’ve answered your own question.’ She was like the sphinx. And when the sphinx spoke, everybody listened.”
After Wakefield began seeing Eve, he called Joan and Dunne. “I said to them, ‘I’ve met this terrific girl.’ I told them her name, and there was laughter. And then John said, ‘Ah, yes, Eve Babitz, the dowager groupie.’ ”
“Dowager groupie” was an insult, Dunne besmirching Eve’s honor: she was a fuck-around, he was saying, and an aging fuck-around at that. But it wasn’t only an insult. It was also a compliment, a tribute to her prowess and prodigality. “Joan and John loved Eve,” said Wakefield. “They got a kick out of her. I think, frankly, John was jealous of me.”
That last remark of Wakefield’s stuck in my brain the way a piece of food sticks in your teeth. I couldn’t leave it alone, kept probing it with my tongue. Did Wakefield think right? I wondered. Did Dunne have the hots for Eve?
During the late sixties and early seventies, Joan and Dunne’s marriage was on the rocks, public knowledge since Joan had turned their marital woes into fodder for the column she wrote for Life. That famous line of hers, one I’ve quoted several times already and will quote several times more—“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce”—she used in her very first column. (A line Dunne would have edited, by the way.) Never, though, did she explain why divorce was suddenly looking like a possibility.
Eve dropped a clue. Dunne, according to her, was a rager. “Joan had migraines because she was married to John. He’d give anyone a migraine. He was an alcoholic and he broke down doors. That’s why Quintana was always trying to get Joan to leave him.”
Susanna Moore, who met Joan and Dunne almost exactly when Eve did—1968—and who would also go on to become a writer, described Dunne in much the same way. “John had a terrible, terrible temper,” said Moore. “He got angry very quickly. And he was vindictive. He held grudges. He didn’t forget. He was clever, he was secretive, and he sought revenge.” In her 2020 memoir, Miss Aluminum, Moore recounted a scene in a restaurant: an unprovoked Dunne throwing a tantrum, at the end of which he stormed off. She would’ve stormed off herself only Joan begged her not to. “I regret putting that in the book, actually, because it’s come back to haunt me. People have taken it as evidence that John was possibly violent.” I pointed out that people have taken it as evidence that he was possibly violent for excellent reason: he acted like a violent person in her telling, and Joan seemed afraid of him. Moore sighed. “He was violent. And one was a little bit afraid. After he left the table that night, I was angry because I thought he had behaved just irrationally and so rudely. I said to Joan, ‘I’m leaving.’ And that’s when she grabbed my arm and said, ‘No, no, please don’t leave me.’ She didn’t want to be alone with him.”
My guess is that Dunne got rough physically when he felt he’d gotten roughed up emotionally. In other words, he had to show how strong he was in order to conceal how feeble. Scratch a bully, find a crybaby.
What Dunne was crying over seems obvious: feelings of inferiority. In 1968, with Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan became one of the most lauded and lionized nonfiction writers in America; in 1970, with Play It as It Lays, one of the most lauded and lionized fiction writers. That couldn’t have been easy for Dunne, who also wrote nonfiction and fiction.
Feelings of inferiority in another sense, as well: Joan was what Dunne only pretended to be.
“I was staying with Joan and John,” said Wakefield. “This was a couple of years before I moved to L.A.—in 1967, I think. They were both writing for the Saturday Evening Post. Things were going well, and they bought a new car, a Corvette Stingray [Joan’s costar in those Julian Wasser photos]. They’d just drove it home, right off the lot, and then they heard that the Saturday Evening Post was canceling their column, or maybe that the whole magazine was folding—I forget which—and John said, ‘Oh, God, maybe we should take back the car.’ Joan looked at him and said, ‘Don’t think poor.’ ”
So, it was soft-spoken, bird-boned Joan (“Frail,” Nick Dunne called her behind her back), not hotheaded, chest-thumping Dunne (“Big Time,” Nick Dunne called him behind his back), who was the real pro and little toughie.
Or maybe what Dunne was crying over was exhaustion from all the caretaking Joan required. There were the migraines, of course. And the temporary blindness. In a 1965 letter to a friend, she wrote, “In all we did not have a very productive spring, mostly because I was exhibiting my constitutional inferiority… [It] culminated with a flourish late in March when I colorfully went blind in one eye for several weeks.” There was, too, the multiple sclerosis, which she’d been diagnosed with in the mid-sixties and which would go in and out of remission. In the early seventies, it was out. “Poor Joan had everything the matter with her,” said Eve. “She was so fragile and falling apart.”
Or maybe Dunne was crying for another reason entirely.
In 1974, Dunne published Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, a book he carefully characterized in a prefatory note as a blend of fact and fantasy. Yet in a letter to writer Jane Howard, he admitted that this description was misleading, an attempt to throw his mother off the autobiographical scent. “I finally prevailed upon Random House to call [it] ‘a fiction… that recalls a time both real and imagined,’ but I don’t think that will fool the Mum.”
Vegas is about a writer who leaves his wife, also a writer, and daughter, adopted, in a house on the beach in Los Angeles to live in the city known as Sin. Precisely what Dunne did in the early seventies. In lieu of filing for divorce coming perilously close to actually filing for divorce. (Vegas, incidentally, is dedicated to Noel Parmentel of all people.) “There was a period—and no one writes about this, I was thinking about it the other day—when John moved to Las Vegas for a year,” said Moore. “It was to write a book, supposedly. But it was also to be away from Joan and Quintana. So I think it was about more than the book. I mean, the book is wonderful. But still, to live in Las Vegas, in a motel, for an entire year and not be part of the marriage or the family is—well, it’s an interesting choice. You know, I remember a time when Joan told Quintana that she was going to leave John and take Quintana with her. But then she didn’t do it. She was passive and couldn’t do it. In the end, it was he who left.”
In Vegas, there’s a telephone exchange between the protagonist and his unnamed wife:
She said she was lonely and depressed. The septic tank had overflowed. There was a crash pad next door and one of the couples had taken to boffing on the grass in clear view of our daughter’s bedroom window. The wind was blowing and there were fires at Point Dume…
“What’s new with you?” she said.
“Jackie’s got me a date with a nineteen-year-old tonight [Jackie is Jackie Kasey, a nightclub comic]. She’s supposed to suck me and fuck me.”
“It’s research,” she said. “It’s a type, the girl who’s always available to fuck the comic’s friend. You’re missing the story if you don’t meet her.”
“But I don’t want to fuck her.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the telephone. “Well, that can be part of the story, too,” she said.
There seemed nothing more to say. I was the one who was supposed to be detached.
This isn’t dialogue. This is warfare. The wife defeats the husband, and with humiliating ease. She does it by refusing to take offense at his very offensive behavior. He informs her that he might get it on with a teenager, and she evinces neither shock nor anger at the prospect. Instead, she encourages him to, all but dares him to, the exact moment he turns meek and little-boy, backs down and off. Clearly, he’s frightened of her. “Living with her was like living with a piranha fish,” he writes. I suggested in an earlier chapter that Joan, in her writing, was a predator passing herself off as prey. I wonder, though, if prey passing herself off as a predator was what Joan was in her marriage. I wonder if that’s how Joan survived her marriage.
For example, in this conversation, Joan seems to be calling Dunne’s bluff. But calling it how? In what sense? Was she calm in the face of his cheating because she believed that cheating wasn’t fatal to their marriage? (In a 1971 interview with New York magazine, after casually confessing that she and Dunne were having a rough go of it—they’d just passed through what she termed “the season of divorce”—she added, equally casually, “I don’t really think infidelity is that important…. If you can make the promise over again, then the marriage should survive.”) Or was she the one doing the cheating, cheating not as you cheat on a spouse but cheating as you cheat at cards? By which I mean, could she see Dunne’s, and that sex with a nineteen-year-old girl wasn’t in them.
Or, for that matter, sex with a dowager groupie?
For his 2015 book, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty interviewed Don Bachardy, the artist and longtime lover of writer Christopher Isherwood. Said Bachardy, “I always thought, What’s [Joan] doing, married to John? I’ve never been as cruised by anyone as I was by him. He wouldn’t take his eyes off my crotch. He always seemed very queer to me, and so did his brother Nick.” (Nick would, later in life, describe himself as a “closeted homosexual,” though he felt Joan pulled him out of the closet with Play It as It Lays. He was sure that the character BZ, a secretly gay producer, was based on him, a secretly gay producer.) Bachardy continued: “I couldn’t understand how John could be so obvious about it. It was embarrassing to me. And Joan was around the whole time. She had to know.”
After repeating Bachardy’s words, getting a scandalous jolt out of them, Daugherty instructs the reader to take them with “heavy pitchers of salt,” explaining, “They’re best understood in light of Dunne’s class background, which made him feel perpetually excluded from whatever was happening, intensely curious about experiences he might be missing.” (Well, if you think Bachardy’s full of salt—i.e., shit—Tracy Daugherty, why quote him in the first place?) I, too, interviewed Bachardy, got the same words, and am inclined to go low-sodium. Here’s why: Bachardy wasn’t the only one to speak them.
Before I tell you who else spoke them, I want to establish Joan’s attitude toward homosexuality. Hostile, at least when she was young. (There was, I think, too much of the small-town girl in her to feel any other way.) She seemed to imagine that only one type of gay man existed: a mincing parody of a gay man. And early in her married life, she exhibited a kind of repelled fascination with gayness. In a May 9, 1965, letter to friend Mary Bancroft, she wrote, “If I hadn’t thought before that Tom Wolfe was queer, I might have suspected it when John got a more or less business letter from him written on colored construction paper.” Then, three months later, “Tom Wolfe is out here right now. He is more androgynous than even you think. I mean I don’t even think he’s a fairy now that I’ve seen him.” And Don Bachardy told me this, “Chris and I felt that Joan didn’t love queers much. As queers, we were highly conscious of whether or not our being queer bothered people. And we believed it did bother Joan. It had to have been a very sensitive subject for her.”
And now for those words and who spoke them:
Bret Easton Ellis, for one. In 2019, I did a story for Esquire on the writers of Bennington College, Class of 1986: Ellis, Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem. While at Bennington, Ellis became a friend of Quintana’s (Class of 1988), and then, later on, of Joan and Dunne’s.
Said Ellis:
I would walk into their apartment, and Joan would hand me a drink and she would just stand there and not say anything—terrifying, terrifying. Looking back, I often wonder why there were so many young, good-looking guys who were surrounding John, whether it was my boyfriend at the time—Jim—who I think John had a real thing for, or Jon Robin Baitz [the playwright]. My boyfriend Jim was blond, blue-eyed, a lawyer, very straight-acting, very good-looking. So, look, I always assumed John was gay. I never assumed he was not gay. It was just one of those things with that whole crowd—Nick Dunne, Tony Richardson, John Dunne. It was a gay man and a wife living the way you were supposed to live. That’s how it was back then. You couldn’t be open. And there were friends of mine who spotted John in certain gay bars late at night, very drunk. Not the chic, hip gay bars, the Times Square gay bars.
Susanna Moore spoke them, too, though not when I thought she did. In Miss Aluminum, she shared a memory of Dunne and Earl McGrath: “Arriving late at a party in a nightclub for a movie star, [Earl] spotted John in a crowded banquette, squeezed against the guest of honor. Earl leaned across the table to shout, ‘I knew that’s where I’d find you,’ causing John to throw his drink in his face.” During my interview with Moore, I asked her about the movie star and the tossed drink.
An excerpt from our conversation:
“Susanna,” I said, “as I was reading that scene, there was one question that kept popping into my mind—was the movie star male or female?”
“A man,” she said.
“That’s what I was guessing. So, Earl was implying that John was interested in the male movie star sexually, right? That’s why John got so mad?”
