Didion and babitz, p.19
Didion and Babitz, page 19
A short, sharp shake of the head. “No, no, Earl was implying that John was a starfucker.” She thought something over, then said, “Earl was never obviously homosexual. I’m sure his life with Ahmet and his life on the road with the Stones was unbelievably wild and licentious and illegal. But I never saw him with a boy. I never heard him talk about a boy. Maybe because he was married to Camilla. She was very stabilizing for him. Now, Earl was deeply in love with Harrison but even that never appeared gay. It just seemed like a very loyal, very long friendship. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded that I did.
Joan and Earl McGrath, on the deck that Harrison Ford (finally) built, at the Trancas house.
“Earl often said things that were appalling, just so nasty and rude, and a lot of people disliked him intensely. Not Joan, though. You know, I always got the feeling that Joan’s mother was awful, and that Joan hated her and had been very damaged by her. It was her father she was devoted to. And she didn’t have women friends, not really. Of course, I’m a woman and I was her friend, but you could only get so close to her. You’d absolutely never go to her with a personal problem. You’d never say to her, ‘I’m depressed because this happened,’ or, ‘I’m thinking of leaving my husband or partner for this reason.’ She didn’t want to hear it. You might eke a sentence out of her like, ‘Whatever you do, you’ll regret both,’ but that was it as far as advice went. She was cold. In a way, Earl was her woman friend. I’m thinking of a picture of the two of them. They’re on the deck of the Trancas house, shoulder to shoulder, looking over the balcony and laughing. There was an intimacy between them that was not sexual, that was like the intimacy between two women who are friends.”
“And I’d always heard that Earl was funny,” I said.
“Oh, very funny. Earl had an ability to free-associate, to fantasize and to imagine and to be outrageous. I suppose Joan depended on him saying the things she couldn’t. Also, I think she understood that he knew exactly who John was, and this gave her comfort. He thought John was a bit of a joke. So, Earl had John’s number. But we all had John’s number. I might have looked at John at that party and thought, ‘Naturally I’d find you squished into the banquette next to—’ whichever movie star it was, and I might have smiled to myself. Only I’d never have said anything.”
“Ah, okay,” I said. “I misunderstood. I thought Earl was calling John, you know, not straight.”
Moore started to respond, then paused. And in that pause, I could sense her feeling her way around, trying to shape what she wanted to say next. At last: “Well, one of the other stories I tell about John in my book—the Jann Wenner story—falls more in line with what you’re talking about. [In Miss Aluminum, Moore recalls a dinner she had with Joan and Dunne in New York. She writes, ‘John was infuriated when I said that I’d heard that Jann Wenner was gay. He slammed down his glass of Scotch, shouting that he had never heard such malicious gossip, and he left to recover himself in the men’s room.’]”
Proceeding cautiously, I said, “When you say, ‘falls more in line with,’ you mean the story suggests that John was gay or bisexual?”
“There were people who believed that he was.”
“His reaction to the Wenner rumor seems like a crazy overreaction to me. Really, really odd behavior.”
“It was odd,” said Moore. “It was particularly odd since John enjoyed gossip. He’d call me every morning with gossip. ‘This you won’t believe,’ he’d say. And, interestingly, the rumor about Jann Wenner turned out to be true! Look, there were people who objected to Joan’s book about John’s death because they were expecting her to reveal that he was gay or bisexual. And she did not. Obviously. And people were—I don’t know why—disappointed. I’ve had to say to people, ‘She’s entitled to write whatever she wants. She does not have to write that her husband was gay or was not gay.’ And they said, ‘It’s a lie.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just private.’ ”
* * *
Even Joan spoke the words. Didn’t speak them directly, of course. Spoke them by inference. In a 1977 interview with Madora McKenzie for the Boca Raton News, she said of her relationship with Dunne, “It wasn’t so much a romance as Other Voices, Other Rooms.” Other Voices, Other Rooms, the first published novel of Truman Capote. A love story, but not between a man and a woman, between a man and a man. (Take note, Reader: by ’77, Joan no longer sounded like a small-town girl, but a big-city sophisticate; homosexuality, even in the context of a heterosexual marriage, even in the context of her heterosexual marriage, barely eliciting a raised eyebrow from her, just another fact of life on planet earth.)
Finally, I put my question—did Wakefield think right, did Dunne have the hots for Eve?—to Wakefield himself. By way of answering, he told me a story:
In the spring of 1968, I was a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois journalism school, which is in Urbana, an awful place. So, I was talking to Joan and John on the phone—that, by the way, is how it worked with them, when you called, they both got on the line—and I said, “I’m through with this teaching thing at the end of May, and I want to finish my book [Going All the Way], and I’m trying to figure out where to go.” And they said, “Come here and we’ll find you an apartment on the beach in Venice.” And that’s what happened. I lived in Venice in the fall of ’68. I’d go over to the house on Franklin Avenue. Joan would be there, alone, and I’d say, “Where’s John?” And she’d say, “I don’t know.” He’d be gone for nights, for whole weekends. And this was before he spent that year living in Vegas, writing his book, doing whatever it was he was doing there. When John was around again, I said, “Where were you all those weekends?” And he said, “Well, Wakefield, did you ever just take off one night and drive on some road until you came to a diner and get out and meet the good-looking waitress after work and spend the night with her?” And what I wanted to say was, “No, and neither did you.” Really what I felt was that John was probably seeing the good-looking waiter.
And then he told me another story:
It was that same period, that period when John kept disappearing. Joan was working on Play It as It Lays, and I knew she was having trouble with it because she was wondering where John was, if he’d ever come back. I’m thinking, God, she’s never going to write her book hanging around the house, waiting and worrying like this. So I wrote her a note, and I said, “Why don’t we both go to Mexico and write our novels?” And then I thought, Well, we’ll probably end up having sex if we’re in Mexico together. But I sent the note anyway. And then one night I went over to see her, like usual, and John opened the door. I couldn’t believe it. Later I whispered to Joan, “I hope you hid my letter.” And she whispered back, “I burned it in the fireplace.”
Over the next decade, one of two things happened: Dunne’s anger mellowed or Dunne’s spirit was crushed. Either way, the marriage settled down. And by the eighties, Joan would be telling the New York Times that she and Dunne were “terrifically, terribly dependent on one another.” A statement that warms the heart.
Or chills the blood.
CHAPTER 11 I’ll See You on Johnny Carson
In September 1971, Eve mailed “The Sheik” to Grover Lewis at Rolling Stone. Two weeks later, Lewis mailed her a check.
The piece, she was informed, would appear in the magazine’s short-story section. (“I thought it was an essay,” she said, “but Rolling Stone saw it as fiction, and that was fine with me.”) She could scarcely believe it. Not only had her work sold, it had sold with ease and speed and to a total stranger. She didn’t have to make threats, as she did with Stephen Stills. Or break out the sex appeal, as she did with John Van Hamersveld.
Nor was Rolling Stone any old magazine. Started by Jann Wenner and Ralph Gleason four years before, it had fast become the most influential of its generation. Its writers didn’t just cover rock ’n’ roll stars, its writers were rock ’n’ roll stars. (For example, that fall, it ran, in two successive issues, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which turned Thompson, already a voice of the counterculture, into a hero of the counterculture.) And Eve’s first piece would be featured in its pages. It was as if Marilyn Monroe had landed, as her first role, not Girl Leaving Church Service in the barnyard comedy Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948), her actual first role, but her breakthrough role, Angela, the mistress of Louis Calhern’s crooked lawyer in the seminal heist film The Asphalt Jungle (1950), and so lazy-luscious she pulled off a heist of her own, stealing the picture right out from under the noses of her higher-billed costars.I
Eve’s mother and father were thrilled for her. (“My parents loved me before Rolling Stone but they thought maybe they had exotic taste.”) So were her friends. (“They were buying issues of the magazine hand over fist to keep the buoyant mood buoyant.”) There was one person, though, who wasn’t thrilled, not remotely.
“Dan Wakefield, oh yeah,” said Eve. “Rolling Stone had just turned down something of Dan’s. As soon as I told him they were going to publish my piece, he dumped me. And he fucked my friend. ‘I’ll see you on Johnny Carson.’ That’s what he said to me when he walked out the door.”
Wakefield remembered the breakup differently. “Our year together was one of my favorite years, but I couldn’t have lived through two of them. My God, the decadence! When I was with her, I tried every drug known to man. At least known to this man. And we were only ever going to be together for a year because I’d already accepted a teaching job at the University of Iowa. From Hollywood to Iowa City—boy, that was an extreme change.” After I delicately raised the subject of Eve’s friend, he said, “It’s true that in my last few weeks in L.A. I was seeing a girl who also lived at the Chateau Marmont. But it wasn’t to hurt Eve, no, no. Eve got that wrong.” (When I relayed what he said to Laurie Pepper, she laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know if Evie got that wrong. I wouldn’t be too quick to take Dan’s word on that one.”)
In the boxes at the back of Eve’s closet, I found several drafts of a letter to Wakefield in which she told him, in a variety of ways, to drop dead. My favorite ended thusly:
I am not ready to see you now nor in the future and if you think I’m ready for a round of Jules Fiffer [sic] talks on “What I have thought and seen and tried to figure out,” you must think I’m not me. Get yourself a Japanese nurse.
It was a drag about Wakefield. Still, the moment was a triumphant one for Eve. “[I] was twenty-eight,” she wrote. “It was time for [me] to O.D., not get published.”
Book people were quick to sniff her out. But only because she gave them her scent. Wakefield, perhaps trying to atone for Knox Burger (or for the girl at the Chateau Marmont), had acceded to her demand that he put her in touch with his publisher, Sam Lawrence. And once she established contact with Lawrence, she sent to him, along with two copies of Rolling Stone, a letter written by Joan on her behalf.
On January 29, 1972, Lawrence replied:
Dear Eve:
I liked your story THE SHEIK very much and I urge you to send us more of your stories and an outline of your book, or any material about it. I’ve sent the other copy of Rolling Stone to Kurt Vonnegut. I may be in Hollywood sometime this Spring and I hope we can meet.
Regards as ever,
Sam
Lawrence would make it to L.A., though not in the spring, in the fall. And Eve would have an affair with him. But she’d have an affair with another editor first: Grover Lewis.
Lewis wasn’t just an editor, he was a writer, too—of poetry and New Journalism mostly—and originally from West Texas, presently from San Francisco. The letter Eve sent to him after “The Sheik” had been accepted for publication was written care of Rolling Stone, on a typewriter, and in business-formal style. (“Enclosed is the ‘brief biography’ of myself to which you alluded.”) A few months later, Eve sent to Lewis another letter, also written care of Rolling Stone, also on a typewriter, also in business-formal style, though with a P.S., written by hand and in voluptuous cursive: “I yearn for you tragically.”
“Grover came up with the line ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out, fuck up, crawl back,’ ” said Eve. “He was great. I was almost thirty, too old to fuck around, I decided.”
And when Lewis, in early ’72, asked her if she wanted to move in with him, she said yes.
* * *
Grover Lewis was, in so many ways, Dan Wakefield Redux: another writer/editor, another boyfriend/husband, another potential John Gregory Dunne. “I’ve always associated San Francisco with retirement,” said Eve. “So I moved there to become a square. I thought that the move was for good, that Grover and I would get married, and I’d be a grown-up.”
“For good” ended up being for three months. As to why only three, Eve offered a friend an elliptical explanation: “This Texan appeared from San Francisco who was an editor at Rolling Stone and invited me to live with him, which I did until he became too masculine even for me.”
Mirandi offered me a less elliptical explanation: “Grover was rough with Eve. She didn’t mind that. To her that was sexy. Unless it wasn’t sexy, and then she did mind. I mean, she liked rough sex, but she didn’t like rough, awful behavior.”
Less elliptical, though not less elliptical enough. I held up a palm like a stop sign, and Mirandi broke off mid-sentence. “By ‘rough,’ ” I said, “you mean that he hit Eve, right?”
“Yeah,” said Mirandi. “Yes.”
“Okay,” I said, then nodded at her to continue.
She nodded back, did: “What happened was, Grover got really mad at Eve when she took money out of his wallet in front of him, which she considered a charming and flirtatious act. She was raised on the ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ belief from the Marilyn Monroe movies. She, of course, was always short of her own money and took it for granted that guys should pay. And here was Grover not being up for it. Grover was a heavy drinker and an ugly drinker. That night, he pushed her out the door and then jammed her clothes into pillowcases and pushed those out the door, too. So there she was, penniless and crying on the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and her car had conked out on her.”
She begged Mirandi to pick her up. “It took me two days,” said Mirandi, “but I got to San Francisco. I parked and went up the stairs of the house she was staying at. She threw open the door and grabbed me and asked, did I have any coke? Then she pulled me into the living room and started to holler at me and punch me. I caught her arm and said, ‘Stop that!’ And she stopped. I gave her a few hits of cocaine and then got her and the pillowcases into my car. And by the time we left the city, we were laughing and crying, and she was telling me everything. She said she couldn’t stay long at Annie’s house because Annie had always wanted her, and she didn’t think it was fair to Annie for her to hang around and bawl her eyes out about Grover.”
Annie as in Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, only twenty-two but already a star at Rolling Stone.
Eve was starting to ascend into the Rolling Stone firmament herself. She’d written several autobiographical pieces for the short-lived, L.A.-centric Rolling Stone supplement, “The Los Angeles Flyer.” She was also, at the behest of Jann Wenner, working on a long-form profile of Ahmet Ertegun for Rolling Stone proper.
And yet, as deep in with Rolling Stone as Eve had gone, she was unwilling to go any deeper. The reluctance was out of character since she loved scenes, lived for scenes. “I wanted to be part of every goddamn scene there was,” she said. So what was it about this one that put her off? Was it too crudely commercial for her? Too obsequiously fannish? Did she suspect that it wasn’t a scene at all, but a bunch of strivers and hacks faking a scene? Whatever the reason, she was tied in knots of ambivalence.
About the profile. “I didn’t think Rolling Stone deserved Ahmet,” she said.
About Rolling Stone itself. “That sordid National Inquirer [sic] of Rock,” she called the magazine.
About Leibovitz most of all. “My latest folly is Annie Leibovitz,” she told Carol Granison in a letter dated October 30, 1972. “I met her in San Francisco when I was living with Grover. And when I was assigned to do the Ahmet piece, she was the photographer and we got to be what I thought was close… Then when Grover and I broke up she let me stay in her apartment, gave me the keys and stuff like that, generally saved my life. The next thing that happens is that this picture of Ahmet and Mic [sic] Jagger appeared in RS with a joint being passed over their heads and Annie took it while she was [my] guest at this party… I don’t think she’s a friend at all, come to think of it, I think she’s an ambitious journalist and I better get out of her headlong way.”
So why didn’t she? She was asking herself that very question. More from the letter to Carol Granison: “And by this time Diane [Gardiner] is saying… ‘Annie’s a male chauvinist pig.’ And as for myself, though I have no physical relationship with her, she is awfully beautiful and almost 6 feet tall and totally graceless like a boy so I’m beginning to wonder[,] what am I doing?”
In no time, Eve would go from wondering what she was doing to actually doing it. But before we get to Eve’s next love, Annie Leibovitz, Eve’s previous love, Grover Lewis.
Lewis acted like a lout and lummox that night in his apartment. He couldn’t have acted like a lout and lummox normally, though, or Eve wouldn’t have put up with him for as long as she did. (Eve and Lewis were through as lovers in 1972 but remained friends until his death in 1995.) She regarded him as the genuine article. The genuine article as a person and the genuine article as a writer. And to me she conceded that she might have overwhelmed him, knocked him off his axis with her abrasive exuberance. “Nobody in San Francisco threw parties,” she said. “But I threw parties left and right. It drove Grover to nervous breakdown. I think I bowled him over. I couldn’t help it. I’m much too huge for some people.”
