Chaos of U.S. served reporter, writer well
Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “The Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.
The cause was Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Didion’s publisher.
Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and the Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory.
“We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the state. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”
In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979), she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers such as Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the poststudio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors.
Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.
“Her talent was for writing about the mood of the culture,” writer Katie Roiphe said. “She managed to channel the spirit of the 1960s and ’70s through her own highly idiosyncratic and personal — that is, seemingly personal — writing. She was perfectly matched to the times, with her slightly paranoid, slightly hysterical, highstrung sensibility. It was a perfect conjunction of the writer with the moment.”
Didion later turned to political reporting, filing long essays for the New York Review of Books on the civil war in El Salvador and Cuban émigré culture in Miami; they were published in book form as “Salvador” and “Miami.”
“She was fearless, original and a marvelous observer,” Robert Silvers, who was the editor of the New York Review of Books, which began publishing Didion’s work in the early 1970s, said in an interview for this obituary in 2009.
Didion was born Dec. 5, 1934, in Sacramento to Frank and Eduene ( Jerrett) Didion. She was a fifthgeneration Californian descended from settlers who left the ill-fated Donner party in 1846 and took the safer route.
As a teenager, Didion typed out chapters from Hemingway novels to see how they worked. She was deeply influenced by Hemingway’s handling of dialogue and silence. Joseph Conrad was another formative influence.
In her junior year at the
University of California, Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1956, Didion submitted an early draft of a short story to Mademoiselle and won a spot as guest fiction editor for the magazine. The next year, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue.
By the early 1960s, Didion was writing for Vogue, Mademoiselle and National Review, often on topics such as “Jealousy: Is It a Curable Illness?” At the same time, she published a well-received first novel, “Run, River” (1963), about the unraveling of a Sacramento family. It introduced the preoccupations that governed her later novels — violence, dread, the sickening sense that the world was spinning out of control.
In 1964, she married John Gregory Dunne, a writer at Time with whom she had been friends for several years. They moved to California and started writing screenplays. They also adopted a daughter, Quintana Roo, taking her name from the Mexican state, which they had chanced upon while looking at a map.
In time they became a bicoastal glamour couple, with one foot in Hollywood and the other in Manhattan’s literary salons. Dunne died of a heart attack at 71 in 2003. Two years later, Quintana Roo Dunne died of pancreatitis and septic shock at 39. Didion wrote about her husband’s death and her daughter’s illness in “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), which won the 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction and was adapted for the Broadway stage in 2007 in a one-woman production starring Vanessa Redgrave. Didion took up the subject of her daughter’s death in her 2011 memoir, “Blue Nights.”
Didion constructed a tripartite career devoted to reporting, screenwriting and fiction. Reporting, she once said, forced her into other people’s lives and allowed her to collect the information and impressions that fed her fiction. “Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me,” she told the Paris Review in 2006. Screenwriting, by contrast, offered a diversion, like working a crossword puzzle. She was unusually successful at all three.
In 1970, she and her husband wrote the screenplay for “Panic in Needle Park,” a film that gave Al Pacino his first starring role. Their second screenplay was an adaptation of Didion’s second novel, “Play It as It Lays” (1970), the elliptical tale of a young actress who compulsively drives the California freeways to forget her failed marriage, an abortion and her daughter’s mental illness. The film version, released in 1972, starred Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins.
With their third screenplay, Didion and her husband struck gold. With James Taylor and Carly Simon in mind for the lead roles, they rewrote “A Star Is Born” to bring it into the rock ’n’ roll era. With Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson starring, the film became a big box office success and paid its screenwriters handsomely.