Didion: Master of Dread on How to Defeat It

The news has been filled with Joan Didion obituaries and remembrances since the writer’s death last week. Here is one of my favorite stories about her. A friend watched it happen.

Didion regularly covered political conventions – usually filing for The New York Review of Books. At one point, she was introduced to Bert Lance, who first emerged on the national scene as part of the campaign team that engineered former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter’s stunning victory in the 1976 presidential election. Lance was appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget in the new administration. He soon had to resign, however, amid a scandal that the New York Times columnist William Safire (a former speechwriter in the Nixon administration) delightedly dubbed “Lancegate.” (Though Safire won a Pulitzer for his Lancegate columns, Lance was ultimately pronounced innocent of the charges.)

In any case, Lance long remained an acknowledged maestro of Southern politics, particularly knowledgeable about the all-important Black vote. He was a savvy and invaluable adviser to the Democratic Party. At one national convention, someone introduced Lance to Didion. The bluff Southerner smiled down at the wisp-thin writer: “How ya doin’, little lady?”

Didion may have looked fragile, but one should never have mistaken her for a “little lady.” Her reporting toolkit invariably included pens, pencils, typewriters and then computers, notebooks, scalpels and stilettos. She wielded all with equal facility.

Her writing could be fierce and lethal. She was a fifth-generation Californian and when I read her work, I often thought of another California legend, Zorro. There is a scene in the 1940 movie, “The Mark of Zorro,” starring Tyrone Power, where Zorro is showing off his deft swordsmanship. His rival, played by Basil Rathbone, has displayed an elegant flourish, slicing a lighted candle neatly in half. Powers responds with the same motion, but the candle he targets remains undisturbed. Rathbone laughs in disdain. But then Powers picks up the top half of the lighted candle: His sword had moved through it so swiftly that the top half remained in place.

That is what Didion’s writing brought to mind. Clear, clean prose which landed with such precision that her subjects might not even realize how sharply her stiletto had skewered them. Sometimes not until long after the fact -- when friends who read the piece asked, in sympathy, how they were doing.

When I was editor of The Los Angeles Times Sunday “Opinion” section, I would regularly call Didion to see if I could entice her to write a piece. This usually resulted in long conversations with her husband, the writer, John Gregory Dunne, who generally answered the phone at their home. I felt his acuity about Los Angeles and California matched hers, and his literary voice was also remarkable. But even after offering the most astute of comments, he always had a well-practiced response – his wife covered California for The New Yorker, so he couldn’t write about it.

After many years of this, I was finally able to offer Didion a subject she couldn’t resist: Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of one publisher of The Los Angeles Times (Norman Chandler) and mother of another (Otis Chandler) had died in 1997. But “Buffy” Chandler stood as a power in her own right – one crucial to the development of Los Angeles. Her efforts to create the Music Center – and its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – marked the first time that the glittery and bohemian denizens of Hollywood, who largely lived in Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Los Feliz, joined forces with the staid oligarchs of Downtown, white-shoe lawyers and bankers who lived in Hancock Park and Pasadena. By roping them together, Buffy Chandler enabled the balkanized communities to envision the idea of a unified city.

Dorothy Chandler at the new Los Angeles Music Center in Downtown L.A.

Didion, descendent of indominable pioneers who had built her native California, understood the vision required to achieve this. “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest,” she wrote in “The White Album,” “remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.”

In writing about Chandler, Didion linked her to the other indominable women who had created the very idea of the Golden State – including Phoebe Apperson Hearst, mother of the newspaper publisher, who envisioned Berkeley and the entire University of California system, and Jane Lathrop Stanford, wife of the roalroad robber baron, who established a celebrated university in honor of a son who had died too young.

The opinion piece Didion wrote broke every rule – she didn’t even mention her subject until the fourth paragraph. But it offered a powerful and poignant elegy not just to Buffy Chandler but to all the crucial women before her who understood how to build a lasting, vibrant community.

Though Didion was justly famed as expert in conveying dread and dysfunction, her opinion piece on Buffy Chandler revealed keen insight into what it takes to defeat them.

Essayist and Novelist Joan Didion in 1970.