Last Love Song : A Biography of Joan Didion (9781466877405) by Daugherty Tracy

Author:Daugherty, Tracy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466877405
Publisher: Macmillan

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In considering—and not quite hitting—the real story of Patty Hearst, Didion felt sure the periphery was the key. She looked for an out-of-the-way anecdote, seemingly insignificant, channeling all of California; the pioneer experience in its modern manifestations; the historical imperative; the chain of forces shaping Tania: a verbal image as immediately impactful as the spread legs, the carbine, and the cobra.

She was after this same effect in Play It As It Lays, a “fast novel,” a method of presentation allowing us to perceive Maria in a flash.

A snake book.

A poetic impulse, surpassing narrative.

Somewhere on the edge of the story.

She remembered an anecdote that Lewis Lapham of Harper’s magazine told her. He’d heard that Abigail Folger had been called home by her family to attend a wedding rehearsal dinner a year before she became one of the victims in the house on Cielo Drive. She was twenty-one at the time. She showed up late at the rehearsal, stoned and wearing an inappropriate dress, trying to remember what she had to do to be a daughter.

Didion thought this the best story she’d heard about the Manson case—perhaps the very best story about the 1960s.

* * *

Not quite hitting it.

Along with the usual challenges of thinking straight, composing carefully and well, she faced certain off-the-page impediments to her writing during this period. In the summer of 1973, Henry Robbins had a heart attack. At forty-five, his life had started to unravel. In the spring of that year, FSG had made him editor in chief. One of his first acts was to sign Didion for a nonfiction book, with an advance of sixty thousand dollars, payable in two installments. Presumably, this was the ill-fated Fairy Tales, which not even Patty Hearst could save.

From the stress or the headiness of his new position, Robbins had more arguments with his colleagues. He began an affair with a publicist in the office. He told friends his wife had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was difficult to live with. By this point, his two children were attending private schools; his $25,000-a-year salary wouldn’t stretch. As an independent—and during a publishing downturn—FSG was strapped. In fact, Roger Straus ordered a salary freeze and threatened pay cuts for the company’s top officers. He pressured his editors to drop their “marginal titles” and pursue “Godfather type-book[s].” This raised Robbins’s hackles even further.

As he lay in the hospital following his heart attack, doctors told his girlfriend he was “touch and go.” Once he recovered, he told buddies his illness had “frightened the whiskers” off him. He “had to try a new life.”

Dick Snyder, the head of Simon & Schuster, got wind of Robbins’s restlessness and made him an offer. S&S was still retooling after the departure of Robert Gottlieb, who’d taken Joseph Heller and his best literary authors to Knopf. Snyder said he’d make Robbins an executive editor and vice president, and he’d almost double his salary. Robbins knew Snyder cared little for literature; he was a far more commercial and unabashedly

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