The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion

Daugherty is an enterprising biographer, and Didion’s life and career give him lots of opportunities to play social historian, literary sleuth, wish-I’d-been-there ’60s buff, and Lives of the Rich and Famous tour guide rolled into one. For starters, his subject has never been shy about reminding us that her California roots are both deeper and more genteel than most. Born in Sacramento in 1934, Didion played as a child in a family cemetery chockablock with her nineteenth-century forebears, plus the odd snake.
If the Depression stayed vague to her, the Okies’ Grapes of Wrath influx aside — few lessons in class beat an identifiably lower one’s advent — World War II didn’t. Shuttled from army base to army base by her father’s home-front Air Corps gig, she got an invaluable crash course in experiencing big-picture milestones as private traumas. Then the family returned to a Sacramento modernized by the war and go-gettingly unmoved by its vanished and/or vanquished ballast. Reviewers of Didion’s first novel, 1963’s Run River — whose appeals to nostalgia she later deprecated — were quick to point out that William Faulkner’s good old decaying South had relocated near the Pacific.
Daugherty does his best to generate thickets of meaning out of her formative years: Dad’s reliance on poker and bourbon to make himself passively-aggressively vivid, Mom’s faded society dame fatalism. Young Joan gets hooked on scribbling in notebooks, props a picture of the Donner Pass on her dresser, reads A Farewell to Arms — so that’s how it’s done! — and ends up at Berkeley after Stanford breaks her heart by saying no. But her biographer is champing at the bit to get her to New York and launched on the process of “becoming Joan Didion.”
That starts once she lands a summer guest editor spot at Mademoiselle in 1955 — the same plum Sylvia Plath had won two years earlier, with consequences described in Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. Didion was plainly a lot more determined to move up, not break down. Soon, she’s dismayed her Berkeley profs by ditching academia for Manhattan and a job at Vogue. Writing deep captions to specified word counts wasn’t bad training for a writer later renowned for her terseness and pointed lacunae; with an apprenticeship like that, no wonder Didion loathed the Beat writers’ indiscipline.
Not many years later, her early, already unmistakably Didionesque essays are in demand everywhere from National Review — much more of a writers’ mag when William F. Buckley ran the show — to the doughty, now forgotten Saturday Evening Post. As the makings of Slouching Towards Bethlehem start to accumulate, Daugherty thrills to the job of anatomizing literary New York’s excitements in those heady times.
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Then comes the marriage to her fellow aspirant Dunne, hard on the heels of Didion’s frustrating romance with the man who seems to have provided the template for more than one of the rakish, unreliable male leads in her fiction: Manhattan journalistic and political gadfly Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., one of those people who apparently crystallize an era in the memories of everyone around for it before disappearing, Zelig-style, from the graduation photo. Still alive and one of Daugherty’s prize sources, he only stopped speaking to Didion after deciding he’d been maligned in her 1977 novel A Book of Common Prayer.
Anyhow, once the Dunnes — or the Didions, as most people soon thought of them — relocate to L.A. in 1964, she’s ideally placed to come into her prime as the looming ’60s apocalypse’s foremost Left Coast interpreter. If Slouching Towards Bethlehem clinches that rep among the cognoscenti, Play It as It Lays wins raves like no Hollywood novel since Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust. In the summer of 1970, the way the literati talk about that book makes it sound as if a female T. S. Eliot has rewritten Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls in the style of “The Waste Land.”
This is where Daugherty really goes to town in multiple senses, placing the Didion-Dunnes at the soap opera center of his own garrulous nonfiction version of a Didion novel. It’s about Los Angeles social malaise and movie biz careerism in a panicky but glamorous time when, to quote him at his fake-Joan worst, “Tales of orgies fluttered like scented envelopes up and down the hills.” Me, I suspect those imaginary envelopes would more likely have been smelly, not scented, but let’s not expect exactitude from a writer who thinks Bob Fosse (!) directed My Sister Eileen.
His tangents range from the origins of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” — Steven Stills was miffed about not getting a drink after hours — to the ripple effect of Hollywood’s shock at the Manson murders. (Didion considered writing a book about family member turned state’s witness Linda Kasabian and ended up buying her the I. Magnin dress she wore at the trial.) We also get far too much about the travails of Dunne’s brother Dominick, who blew his chance as a film producer before reinventing himself as Vanity Fair‘s star celebrity-murder reporter. How his story relates to his sister-in-law’s can get pretty flimsy, but Daugherty is clearly out to create a mosaic — if not a potential miniseries, since Winona Ryder could use a comeback and John C. Reilly is always fun to watch.
Lots of biographers compete with their subjects at some level, but The Last Love Song’s ambitions in that vein are more blatant than most. On top of mimicking Didion’s agitation and fragmented mise-en-scène, the book is bloated with kaleidoscopic big-picture stuff about Da Sixties and their aftermath. Especially when political turmoil rates a cameo, you’re often uncertain whether Daugherty is paraphrasing Didion or climbing onto a soapbox of his own. “The criminalization of sentiment: the basis of all American politics,” he grandly interjects at one point, and I confess to simply not having a clue what that means. The 1968 Democratic and Republican conventions rate two pages of sick-soul-of-America hyperbole, but did Didion even attend either? Apparently not, but what the hell. There’s no reason to let Rick Perlstein have all the fun when you’re itching to go macro the way this author is.
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Undeniably, Daugherty’s overreaching has its trapeze-act charms, at least if guff about the Era to End All Eras is something you’ve got a weakness for. The book is lively even when he’s straining for effect, and often brainy about Didion herself when he quiets down. Sometimes a competition disguised as a collaboration and sometimes the other way around, her almost forty-year marriage to Dunne (“Mrs. Misery and Mr. Know-All,” Christopher Isherwood called them) is described as well as anyone without access to their bedroom can manage.
If The Last Love Song dwindles in intensity as the ’80s and ’90s trudge by, so did Didion’s persuasiveness as a West Coast Cassandra. Her name still had cachet, and one knack she’d never lose was for “working her brand” — something even an admirer like Daugherty thinks she’d figured out as early as 1967’s “Goodbye to All That,” her look back at her New York years. But the author of Salvador and Miami seemed to be relying on other people’s maps of what mattered to keep herself relevant, when Didion in her prime had been one of the writers doing the mapping. This problem shows up particularly in her dissections of Clinton-era Washington for the New York Review of Books, later collected as Political Fictions. She was putting on her spacesuit to contemplate our system’s little green men, and I’m prejudiced in favor of breathing the same air they do to understand them.
As harsh as it is to say so, only Dunne’s death gave her a way of being “Joan Didion” that resonated again. Losing a spouse at age sixty-nine is hardly an uncommon experience, but The Year of Magical Thinking made it an original one because of whom it had happened to; it was as if she’d finally morphed into the widowed Jackie Kennedy whose waspishly bookish kid sister she’d resembled in her sunglassed 1960s pics. Losing a child, on the other hand, is every parent’s ultimate dread, and Daugherty’s account of Quintana Roo Dunne’s agonizing demise — prematurely worldly, prone to alcoholism, she suffered health crises for years before dying in 2005 at age thirty-nine — will leave readers full of compassion for mother and daughter alike. When Didion herself coped with that event in Blue Nights, she had to wrestle with an element strikingly absent from her other work: self-criticism. Except in the act of putting words together, having agency isn’t her thing.
Pervading her fiction and nonfiction alike, that posture is the ingredient in her work most likely to puzzle or annoy readers today. Not only is it too obviously a sham — few writers so happily stack the deck while pretending they’re just passive receptors of the cards they’ve been dealt — but it’s also retro enough to make her seem like Peggy Noonan’s infinitely more talented secret sharer. Without even meaning to be critical, Daugherty nails Didion’s basic motif: “the princess in the castle” who discovers it’s a trap and wanders, “drifting, confused, through an ever more cryptic nation.”
Maybe it looks more cryptic from a yellow Corvette. But Didion’s excellent taste in wheels, along with lots of other Dolce Vita minutiae Daugherty includes, is a reminder of just how much her oracular and stricken M.O. leaves out — above all, any acknowledgment of pleasure. When she tells us that the “apparent ease of California life is an illusion,” all I have to do is glance around my Altadena neighborhood — less upscale than any she ever lived in — to wonder whom she thinks she’s fooling. Beats Detroit, you know? Once upon a time, fairly incredibly, she was hailed for her pitiless accuracy about the way we live now. But if her work survives, it will be because its distortions say so much about an era when “Fee, fie, foe, fum” was the unheard chorus reverberating in every Brian Wilson tune.