The Last Love Song (10 page)

5

“I would have to say the rivers are my strongest memory of what the city was to me. They were just infinitely interesting … I mean, all of that moving water. I was crazy about the rivers,” Didion told Rob Turner, editor of
Sactown
magazine, in 2011.

In the way of adolescents, whose development requires testing limits, Didion shed many of her childhood fears during her junior high and high school years and enjoyed skirting danger. In the winters, flooding fascinated as much as terrified her now: the distant sound of dynamite on the levees, sheets of muddy water cresting thorny banks, hordes of ranchers and their children migrating through city streets to take shelter in school gymnasiums. In the summers, she joined friends in challenging the rivers for the thrills they'd release. In an essay entitled “Holy Water,” she wrote about being seventeen years old and getting “caught, in a military-surplus life raft, in the construction of the Nimbus Afterbay Dam on the American River … I remember that at the moment it happened I was trying to open a tin of anchovies with capers. I recall the raft spinning into the narrow chute through which the river had been temporarily diverted. I recall being deliriously happy.”

“The generation she was close to as a teenager, people who could describe Didion's personality then, mostly died in the 1980s,” Kel Munger told me. “There
are
still a few Didions in town, but they don't like to be tracked down.” This was not entirely true, but the family members who responded to me were too young to have anything other than hazy recollections of their cousin.

Joan Haug-West remembered her classmate Joan. Haug-West remained in Sacramento and became a college English teacher, often assigning Didion's essays to her students.

“She was in a higher social class than I was—though most of us were more aware of race than class,” Haug-West told me. “I knew a relative of hers sat on the Board of Education, and you didn't get a position like that unless you had money and influence. And she was friendly with Nancy Kennedy. I once heard Nancy talk about how her brother—it may have been Anthony—tried to stick a Coke bottle down the garbage disposal. Well, you know, very few people in town even
had
a garbage disposal back then.”

Didion was a frequent supper guest at the Kennedy house. There, she sat among lawyers, lobbyists (one of whom, Artie Samish, later went to jail for tax evasion), and oil company executives. Kennedy's parents loved to quote Dickens and Shakespeare in the midst of casual conversations. “We had a very vibrant, active household,” Anthony Kennedy once said. “My mother always had to set … extra places at the dinner table because people would come from out of the city, from out of the state to see [my father] and consult him. He was a great attorney.”

When she wasn't greeting CEOs or hurtling down rapids, Didion attended meetings of the Mañana Club—the “rich girls' sorority,” Haug-West called it. It was sponsored by the public school district. According to its bylaws, its aim was to promote democracy, charity, and literature—specifically, the reading of poetry. Nevertheless, a legal opinion written in the mid-1960s by a California appellate court stated that the Mañana Club practiced a “process of selection designed to create a membership composed of the ‘socially elite.'”

To be admitted, girls had to be sponsored by three members; they had to have reached the ninth grade and to have maintained a C average during the previous semester, and they had to have read at least two books not prescribed as compulsory by the school system. Once a candidate had been proposed for membership and survived a “Rush Tea,” the club's Admission Committee would “investigate all girls, and then select however many the officers have decided should be brought in.”

Didion recalled her initiation in the Governor's Mansion one night. She was friends with Nina Warren, daughter of Governor Earl Warren. Nina, dubbed “Honey Bear” by the national press corps, was a year ahead of Didion in school. Didion loved visiting her because the house was full of large, high-ceilinged rooms in which “one [could] imagine reading … or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner,” Didion said. The initiation rite consisted of being blindfolded in Nina's bedroom and subjected to insults by the club's older members. Didion was shocked when Nina—“by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America,” Didion wrote—said Didion was “stuck on herself.”

As a new member, she received a gold pin in the form of an
M,
with Mañana spelled out on the front in blue enamel letters. She was to wear it or keep it in her possession at all times. To others, outside the club, this may have fortified the impression that she was “stuck on herself.” To Joan Haug-West, Didion seemed unnaturally shy. “I rarely heard her voice in school,” she said.

*   *   *

Today, C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, in a posh area of the city known as Land Park, seems an oasis of seriousness and calm just off a busy boulevard, its tall windows reflecting rows of Italian cypress trees flanking its walls, its red tiled roof sloping low over Art Deco and California Mission detailing in the building's tan stone and dark brown woodwork. McClatchy marked “a very tedious time in my life,” Didion said. How could she not want to heave whenever she walked across the plaque in the front entrance (passing two ridiculous stone lions on either side of the steps), proclaiming McClatchy's devotion to “Truth-Liberty-Tolerance” and its loyalty to the “Native Sons of the Golden West”? How frequently could she repeat, in class, the products of our Latin American neighbors? Must she recite, once more, Euripides: “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet”? Did she have to hear, again, a local band butcher “How High the Moon” at some damp, dreary dance, and then walk home alone in the fog?

Worst of all was phys ed (“Sex Class”). There, she had to listen to the Nice Girls insist it was wrong to kiss boys “indiscriminately” because that was “throwing away your capital.” Given the boys she met at McClatchy, Didion didn't think it was
possible
to kiss “discriminately.” If you were “indiscriminate enough to kiss any one of them you might as well kiss them all,” she decided.

Often, in her room, she lay in the dark with a cold washcloth over her eyes. The discomfort of her periods heightened the throbbing migraines. In public, she'd try to deny the pain. She'd sit in a classroom with tears on her face. The “pain seemed a shameful secret,” she wrote, “evidence … of all my bad attitudes, my unpleasant tempers.”

She still loved stage acting but was offered little range in local productions because she was so tiny. At school, and at a small repertory theater downtown, she took children's roles—including that of Babette in Lillian Hellman's wartime melodrama,
Watch on the Rhine.
At one point in the play, a character says, in Babette's hearing, “The Renaissance Man is a man who wants to know … what made Iago evil?” Didion remembered this reference to Iago and would use it, many years later, to open her second novel,
Play It As It Lays.

Eugene O'Neill was a favorite. “I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked,” she said. “I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch all day and read Eugene O'Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.”

She memorized speeches from
The Member of the Wedding
and
Death of a Salesman
. She tackled
Moby-Dick
but “missed that wild control of language. What I had thought were discursive [passages] were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn't get the control in it.” On the other hand, Theodore Dreiser's
An American Tragedy
knocked her out. She locked herself in her room one weekend and read it to the end. She was amazed to learn that a story's accumulating power did not always grow from a spectacular style.
Suspense
was a necessity. And Henry James's sentences, so intricate and complex, nearly paralyzed her. “[He] made me afraid to put words down,” she said. One of the “discouraging things is that every word you put down limits the possibilities of what you have in your mind. [James] somehow got all of the possibilities into every sentence”—those multiple qualifications!—“and I really did not think I could do that.”

From James, Didion learned how the mind decodes existence, sifting possibilities, balancing what it fears with paradoxical recognitions of pleasure. For a young reader, this was a new revelation of what fiction could do. No other form of human thought could touch it.

*   *   *

Her fears now had less to do with collapsed bridges than with changes in her body and awareness that others responded to those changes. She became obsessed with news stories about Suzanne Degnan, a six-year-old on the North Side of Chicago who had been kidnapped from her bed by a college boy, hacked up in a sink, and scattered into the city's sewer system. The gory details recalled aspects of the Donner Party stories, but there was nothing natural about this tragedy. Though the victim was only six, the crime seemed to have something to do with sex, with female and male and the unpredictability of that mix.

Didion's notebook jottings—the ocean walkers, the romantic suicides—were doom-laden and dark, her imagination drawn to extremes that
needn't have been
but
were,
toward mysteries of human impulses at their starkest. The sea strolls and kidnap stories had pioneer elements, traces of the outsider, the wayward and the lost, the emptiness and promise of back roads and branching trails, but the choices weren't as clear (
take this cutoff or don't?
) and the consequences less obvious than cannibalism (
hacked up and scattered into the sewer system?
). Self-invention, yes, manifest destiny—but reckless now. Mean. No sacrifice, no courage, no glory. The most celebrated of Didion's early essays mimed epic struggles reduced to splintered glimpses of
modern
American tragedies.

And, in part, her evolving imagination had to do with the adolescent's penchant for thrills. Donner Pass had become a popular spot for juicing and joyriding. At fifteen and a half, Didion earned her learner's permit, attacking the roads in an old Army jeep her father had gotten at auction. On weekends, she'd drive friends up switchbacks in the Sierra, from Sacramento to Lake Tahoe and back again, six or seven hours, buzzed by alcohol and flirting, risking wrecks or DUIs. On some nights, the fog was so thick, she could see the road only if one of her friends got out and walked in front of the headlights along the highway's white center stripe. She was experiencing a new sort of narrative: the aimless American road story.

On simmering afternoons, she drove to the family cemetery and sat undisturbed, listening to country music on the radio, staring at the chipped monuments and dreaming up sad new stories. The boneyard was more companionable than the dusty house sickly sweet with dying flowers, her father's legal papers scattered on tables, countertops, chairs.

At some point during this period, the family moved into a new residence at 500 Hawthorn Road, near the present Fair Oaks Boulevard, a secluded three-bedroom house built in 1935. Didion also spent many days in her stepgrandmother's splendid neoclassical home at 2000 22nd Street—“a great house” with “proportions … a little different” for Sacramento, she said. That is, it was extremely large and slightly off-kilter, with pedimented dormers and balustrades. Didion discovered new hangouts. The Guild Theater in Oak Park. Vic's Ice Cream. The Crest (formerly the crumbling old vaudeville house the Hippodrome). The Woolworth on K Street, where teens gathered for food and sodas. The nation's first Tower Records. The first Shakey's Pizza. Boys took Good Girls—those who would “do it”—to the Starlite Drive-In. The Nice Girls went to the Senator Theater downtown. Didion loved the smell of paint in her uncle Bob's hardware store, the Duncan yo-yos and palm-size flashlights he sold to little kids. In the rear, Rosie Clooney warbled “This Old House” on a big old radio. Occasionally, Didion and her friends sneaked over to the West Side and ate spicy tacos with their fingers.

She loved gas stations. There was the grand old Shell at Seventh and L, the men in white uniforms and bow ties; the O'Neil Brothers' five locations in town, offering “crankcase service” and “vulcanizing.” Okie boys, Arkies, slouched around the hot, oily lots wearing T-shirts and greasy jeans, smoking, talking cars. Scary, intriguing—the kinds of boys Bill Clinton would remind her of years later. “They had knocked up girls and married them,” Didion wrote, driving all night to Carson City for a five-dollar ceremony “performed by a justice of the peace still in his pajamas. They got jobs at the places that had laid off their uncles.”

In the evenings, she liked to sit in the grass out by the Garden Highway (this area would become a primary setting for
Run River
), watching the sun set over waterfront ranches. Already, she knew the ranches were about to disappear, their lots subdivided and sold.

6

“In a gentle sleep Sacramento dreamed, until perhaps 1950, when something happened,” a young Didion wrote at the height of her place-bound romanticism. “What happened was that Sacramento woke to the fact that the outside world was moving in, fast and hard. At the moment of its waking Sacramento lost, for better or worse, its character.”

“That's a false portrayal of the city,” Rob Turner told me. Mel Lawson, a longtime Sacramento High School teacher who knew Didion as a girl, agreed. “I don't see any loss of character, only change,” he said. Before World War II, “this was essentially a town of shopkeepers, retired farmers, state workers, salesmen, operators of small plants like dairies, sheet-metal works, lumber yards and such. No big industries.” What Didion meant by loss of character, he thought, was the erosion of the city's old power structure. In the old days, “it was fairly easy to pinpoint who was in it,” he said. “One with any degree of perception had to be in Sacramento only a short time to know pretty well who ran the place,” including “Joan's Aunt Genevieve [
sic
].”