“You married a protector,” Griffin Dunne tells his aunt Joan in the 2017 documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, and she readily agrees. But her husband, John Gregory Dunne, only looked like the alpha.
“Michiko Kakutani came to Trancas to do a story on Joan for the Times,” said Josh Greenfeld, Didion and Dunne’s neighbor in the Trancas Canyon section of Malibu. “I told [Kakutani], ‘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.”
In any case, Didion 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 Didion’s co-writer, her editor, her first and last reader.
As Eve Babitz put it, “They were connected at the typewriter ribbon.”
“What you see in John, you get in Joan.”
In early 1971, the writer Dan Wakefield, close to Didion and Dunne since the 50s, was set up on a blind date with Babitz. Soon after, he called the couple. “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 Babitz’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 Babitz?
As Babitz put it, Didion and Dunne were “connected at the typewriter ribbon.”
During the late 60s and early 70s, Didion and Dunne’s marriage was on the rocks, public knowledge since Didion had turned their marital woes into fodder for the column she wrote for Life. That oft-quoted line of hers—“We are here on this island in the middle of the Pacific in lieu of filing for divorce”—is culled from 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.
Babitz 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 [Didion and Dunne’s adopted daughter] was always trying to get Joan to leave him.”
Susanna Moore, who met Didion and Dunne almost exactly when Babitz did—1968—and who, like Babitz, would 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 Didion begged her not to.
“I regret putting that in the book, actually, because it’s come back to haunt me.” 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, Didion 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: Didion 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. 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 Didion, not hotheaded, chest-thumping Dunne, who was the real pro and little toughie.
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 70s. In lieu of filing for divorce, coming perilously close to actually filing for divorce.
“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—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.
Didion, in this conversation, 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? (Her father, it should be noted, was a crack poker player.) By which I mean, could she see Dunne’s, and that sex with a 19-year-old girl wasn’t in them?
Or, for that matter, sex with a dowager groupie?
Could Didion see Dunne’s cards, and that sex with a 19-year-old girl wasn’t in them?
For his 2015 book, The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion, Tracy Daugherty interviewed artist Don Bachardy, the 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.” (Dominick Dunne would, later in life, describe himself as a “closeted homosexual,” though he felt Didion pulled him out of the closet with her 1970 novel 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.”
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.
“I always thought, What’s [Joan] doing, married to John?… He wouldn’t take his eyes off my crotch.”
Bret Easton Ellis spoke them. “Looking back,” said Ellis, “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—[Dominick] 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 Didion and Dunne’s longtime friend Earl McGrath, then head of Rolling Stone Records: “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?”
“No, no, Earl was implying that John was a starfucker,” said Moore. “Earl often said things that were appalling, just so nasty and rude, and a lot of people disliked him intensely. Not Joan, though.”
“I’d always heard that Earl was funny.”
“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, O.K.,” I said, “I misunderstood. I thought Earl was calling John, you know, not straight.”
“I couldn’t understand how John could be so obvious about it.... And Joan was around the whole time. She had to know.”
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 Didion 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 over-reaction 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 [The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005] 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.’”
“I always assumed John was gay. I never assumed he was not gay.”
Even Didion 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.
Finally, I put my question—Did Wakefield think right, did Dunne have the hots for Babitz?—to Wakefield himself. By way of answering, he told me a story:
“I lived in Venice in the fall of ’68. I’d go over to [Joan and John’s] house on Franklin Avenue [in Hollywood]. 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.”
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 80s, Didion 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.
Lili Anolik is a Writer at Large for AIR MAIL. She is the author of Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. and the creator of the podcasts Once upon a Time… in the Valley and Once upon a Time … at Bennington College
