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THIRTY-FOUR

Gene Vidal died in February 1969 at a hospital in Inglewood not far from where his last surviving sister, Margaret, lived. He had a cancer of the kidney. He was well-looked-after by a cousin-surgeon and by Kit, his wife.

Now, in June 2005, I am sent the galleys of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking which describes her husband, John’s, death in New York City.

It is hard to think of that quaking burning Pacific littoral without thinking of Joan who is the quintessential native: several generations of her family have flourished in the Sacramento area and few seem to have defected, including Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who, even when they did move to New York, always seemed to be somehow organically connected with her state.

It was at Malibu where I was first taken to see them by Jean Stein whom I had known since she was a child and I was an eighteen-year-old soldier soon to be shipped out to the Aleutian Islands. By the time I ate the Portuguese fish dish cooked by Joan it was some years after I’d returned from the Bering Sea. My mother, Nina, and Jean’s mother, Doris, had been passionately busy with their joint war work in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Now once the war was done, I saw the Didion-Dunnes from time to time. He was a splendid gossip in the low key while she had, according to that great transatlantic gossip, Ali Forbes, “the most endearing scowl.”

At the time of our Malibu meeting I was a novelist in Hollywood, writing television plays for CBS’s new studio on Fairfax Avenue. Even so, I was not often in California in those days but I often thought of seeing the Didion-Dunnes particularly after they abruptly moved on to New York City and left their house in Brentwood to be quickly torn down as things tend to be in that least permanent of places. Joan records her grief when she finally saw what had been done to their house. Now, John has just died in New York. Joan goes on. The Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel also goes on unchanged and, sometimes, in the large booth opposite the entrance to the bar, I can just make out the ghosts of those two Stakhanovite war-workers, Nina and Doris, two ladies plainly invented by Dawn Powell, to cheer our boys on to victory while exchanging endless secrets and drinking vodka.