Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold Page #4

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going up to Quintana's room just to

check and make sure that

everything was okay.

And...

there were drugs on the floor.

I couldn't believe that

anybody would do that.

There were a lot of drugs

around town at that time.

And the presence of these drugs

became all that was on anybody's mind.

You wanted to get rid of them.

You wanted them out of your house.

Friday night in Los Angeles,

a movie actress

and four of her friends were murdered

and the circumstances were lurid.

This was at the home

of Roman Polanski.

And it was his wife, Sharon Tate,

who was one of the victims.

She too had been stabbed,

repeated stab wounds.

One of the victims had

a hood placed over his head,

and the word "pig" was

written in blood on the door.

Many people I know in Los Angeles

believed that the '60s ended

abruptly on August 9th, 1969.

Ended at the exact moment when

the word of the murders of Cielo Drive

traveled like brushfire

through the community.

Where were you

when you heard about Manson?

In your mother's swimming pool.

Your mother was wearing

a Pucci bathing suit.

The phone was ringing.

She answered the phone.

- And it was Natalie.

- Natalie Wood.

And Natalie was calling to tell her

that this terrible thing

had happened the night before.

Before the Manson case,

everything seemed explicable.

And suddenly...

the Manson case happened

and nothing was making sense.

Tiny Linda Kasabian,

20 years old and 7 months pregnant

with her second child,

already has pleaded not guilty

in the murders of Sharon Tate

and six other persons.

Linda Kasabian, the person I was

interviewing on the Manson case,

told me they had gone by our house

which was spooky.

What was it like

interviewing Linda Kasabian?

Well, I spent quite

a bit of time with her, actually,

both when she was in jail

and before she testified.

That was a weird... situation.

Finding myself cooking... dinner for...

Linda Kasabian and her child.

And the child was...

The child had to be bathed, and...

You know, the whole thing was weirdly...

It was weirdly normal...

and yet it was not normal

in any way at all.

In this light,

all narrative was sentimental.

In this light,

all connections were equally meaningful

and equally senseless.

Try these.

On the morning of

John Kennedy's death in 1963,

I was buying,

at Ransohoff's in San Francisco,

a short silk dress

in which to be married.

A few years later,

this dress of mine was ruined

when at a dinner party in Bel Air,

Roman Polanski accidentally

spilled a glass of red wine on it.

On July 27th, 1970,

I went to the Magnin High shop

in Beverly Hills and picked out,

at Linda Kasabian's request,

the dress in which she began her testimony

about the murders at Sharon Tate

Polanski's house on Cielo Drive.

I believe this to be an authentically

senseless chain of correspondences.

But in the jingle jangle morning

of that summer,

it made as much sense

as anything else did.

The White Album,

I think those pieces are

about the late '60s, early '70s.

The Beatles album

figured in the Manson Trial.

It was a kind of dark album.

And that was the period.

On The Beatles' album,

The White Album,

there's ballads, and there are

sound experiments by Lennon.

There are soft songs,

hard songs, instrumental.

She does a very similar thing

in that essay

which I find... profound,

and it took ten years.

If you look at the date, I think it's a

ten-year period where she worked... on it.

You couldn't make a narrative

about the times.

The times weren't cohesive.

So, she found this way, which is to

kind of make a verbal record of the times.

I am talking here about

a time when I began to doubt

the premises of all the stories

I had ever told myself.

A common condition,

but one I found troubling.

I suppose this period began around 1966

and continued until 1971.

During those five years,

I appeared, on the face of it,

a competent enough member

of some community or another.

I wrote a couple of times a month

for one magazine or another,

published two books,

participated in the paranoia of the time.

The weirdness of America

somehow got into this person's bones

and came out on

the other side of a typewriter.

What was going on

in your marriage?

Well, he was not happy with...

what he was doing, and what was going on

in our marriage was we were not happy.

He had a temper, a horrible temper, yeah.

I didn't.

- What things would set him off?

- Everything would set him off.

I want you to know

as you read me precisely who I am,

and where I am, and what is on my mind.

I want you to understand

exactly what you're getting.

You're getting a woman,

who for some time now,

has felt radically separated

from most of the ideas

that seem to interest other people.

You're getting a woman

who somewhere along the line,

misplaced whatever slight faith

she had in the social contract...

in the whole grand pattern of

human endeavor.

I had better tell you where I am and why.

I'm sitting in a high-ceilinged room in

the Royal Hawaiian hotel in Honolulu,

watching the long translucent curtains

billow in the trade wind...

and trying to put my life back together.

My husband is here

and our daughter, age 3.

We are here on this island

in the middle of the Pacific

in lieu of filing for divorce.

Did he read that?

He edited that.

He edited it? So, how does that...?

What was the...? Was it...?

What was your agreement

about just writing about...

your inner public life?

It was... We didn't have an agreement.

We didn't have...

We didn't see it as a deal,

you know... or a deal-breaker.

Um...

We thought, generally, that you...

You wrote what...

You used your material.

You wrote what you had.

That was what I happened

to have at the moment.

At that moment.

He rented an apartment in Vegas.

It was a nightmare apartment.

He never stayed in it.

He never spent one night.

He would go over there,

and he would stay at...

At a hotel.

It was not a good time.

Actually, it was a wonderful book,

it turned out.

You and John were both

writing dark stuff?

Well, it was a dark time.

She's in there, in the world,

and she's writing about

all sorts of ugly things.

Look at Play It As It Lays.

Yes, the style is a very refined style,

but the subject matter is not at all.

And so there's this odd contrast

between subject matter and style.

Maria drove the freeway.

She dressed every morning with

a greater sense of purpose

than she had felt in some time,

for it was essential

that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock.

Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard,

not on her way to the freeway,

but actually on the freeway.

If she was not, she lost the day's rhythm,

its precariously imposed momentum.

Maria is detached in the way

that a reporter is detached.

Play It As It Lays is about

what Maria sees

and what she feels

which is... trying not to feel.

Maria was quite a bit of myself.

Obviously, not line for line.

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