The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Joan Didion: `A uniquely California person'
LOS ANGELES >> Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, a fifth-generation Californian, and wrote some of her most memorable essays, novels and screenplays during her years on the West Coast. She moved to New York City (for a second time) in 1988 and lived there — a literary, cultural and social icon — until she died in her Manhattan apartment at the age of 87 in 2021.
There have always been competing claims on the Didion legacy by New York and California. So it seems noteworthy that an examination of her life, an ambitious museum exhibition created with her blessing, will open Oct. 11 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
“Joan Didion: What She Means” is devoted not to a painter, sculptor or photographer, but to a writer. Yet the sweep of her life, from Sacramento to Hollywood to the Upper East Side, is captured in art — paintings, photography and video — along with archival material. That includes pages from original screenplays she wrote with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and the sign from the insurance and real estate firm her father owned in Sacramento.
And “What She Means” is being curated by another writer, Hilton Als, a New Yorker critic who became friends with Didion in New York and wrote the foreword to “Let Me Tell You What I Mean,” her final book of essays. “The musing of one writer on the life of another,” as Ann Philbin, the director of the museum, put it in the foreword to the exhibition catalog.
“We had been thinking of different ways to generate exhibitions,” said Connie Butler, the chief curator of the Hammer, who worked with Als assembling the collection. “We felt Hilton’s approach is a very interesting and personal one and unique to his curatorial projects.”
Als divides his time these days between New York and California — much the way the subject of the show once did — as he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, where Didion went to school. And his time in California, he said over lunch on a Saturday on the sundrenched patio at Lulu, the restaurant at the Hammer, had guided him in selecting paintings and photographs that capture the shimmering West Coast light that so enamored Didion, even after she decamped to New York (where a memorial service was held last month at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine).
“It’s fascinating to try to feel what she was feeling — a lot of my students call it the Golden State,” he said. “Which is that I sometimes can’t remember the day it is. She talks about loving that kind of drift, that feeling of drifting.”
Als suggested the idea after he finished curating a show on James Baldwin at the David Zwirner Gallery in Manhattan in 2019. (He has also curated shows there on Toni Morrison and Alice Neel.) “To pitch it in California was really the point,” he said. “I just thought it was an amazing place for her. I think she was a uniquely California person.”
At that, Als has little disagreement. “Didion clearly had a complex relationship with California, but she never lost the belief that it, or its myths, had shaped her absolutely, and she was its daughter-in-exile,” said Tracy Daugherty, a Didion biographer who teaches creative writing at Oregon State University.
Yet Didion’s life encompassed much more than California, and Als and Butler have spent nearly three years trying to assemble a collection that conveys the different chapters of her career which is sprawling — but also complicated. She was drawn to the natural beauty and spirit of California but also its political and cultural churn — her subject ranged from the Black
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But befitting her upbringing as the daughter of an insurance and real estate broker in Sacramento, she brought to her writing, in the view of some of her critics, the perspective of the California gentry, of the pioneers who made their lives and fortunes here who were, unlike Californians of today, largely white.
“A lot of Californians consider her to be a real voice of California — I certainly consider her to be a voice of California and a pretty essential voice of California,” said David L. Ulin, an author, editor and former book critic for the Los Angeles Times. “But in recent years there has been some pushback against her, particularly around issues of race and class. Didion represents a particular kind of California experience — the California aristocracy. She was raised in Sacramento. She was in the high school sorority with Earl Warren’s daughter.”
“For a long time she was the go-to Californian for New York,” he said. “She’s writing for The New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books. It has always seemed to be in a certain sense that she was the California spokesperson that Easterners and Midwesterners relied on as someone who could explain California’s exoticism to them.”
Als rejected the argument that Didion’s background undercut her ability to write about this ethnically and economically diverse part of the country. “Joan was essentially self-educated when it came to the rest of the world,” he said in an email. “The point to the
Grateful is that she was open to the world, and wrote about experiences other than her own, all in an effort to understand what made us, and thus herself, and why.”
Als said he had curated an exhibition that sought to create “a visual atmosphere based on Joan’s experience, and my experience of her work — a gay Black man who has no business doing this show, according to today’s ideologues, but I’m doing it.”
Given the evolution of her interests over the years, the amount of material on display is, not surprisingly, vast: nearly 215 separate items spread out over 10,000 square feet of galleries. “It didn’t start out that big,” Butler said. “We expanded it. Hilton’s a voracious curator. He would still be adding things if he could.”
There are works by Ed Ruscha, Wayne Thiebaud — famously from Sacramento — Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon. The museum used this collection to try to establish a sense of place for California — the subject — which was, not incidentally, central to Didion’s writing.
Didion and Dunne lived for a while in Malibu, and wrote screenplays for movies, among them the 1976 version of “A Star Is Born,” with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, and “The Panic in Needle Park” with Al Pacino. So it is that her California years will be marked with an Andy Warhol film clip of a Malibu sunset, as well as movie posters from their films.
Als used a Vija Celmins painting depicting a disembodied hand firing off a gun into a vast expanse — “Gun With Hand #1” from 1964 — in a part of the exhibition that covers the ecstatic review in The New York Times of “The Executioner’s Song,” the book by Norman Mailer about the execution of Gary Gilmore. “She talks about the weird, inarticulate nature of the West and the sky,” Als said of the review. “And I immediately thought of Vija Celmins. And then when I was going through Vija’s work there was a gun — someone shooting a gun in the kind of space Didion was describing.”
Ulin said this was the kind of exhibition that ultimately belonged in Los Angeles. “She spent probably 40 years in New York, but I really think in a lot of ways she’s a definitive and emblematic Los Angeles writer and Los Angeles figure.”
An excerpt from her 1965 essay, “Notes From a Native Daughter,” highlighted on a wall of the exhibition, captures what it was about Didion’s writing about California that was so compelling. “This is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento,” she wrote. “If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California . .... for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.”
In truth, part of what made Didion extraordinary is how she appealed to so many different audiences, and that extended beyond geography.
Daugherty noted how Didion over the years had “become a symbol of pioneering feminism despite her clash with the women’s movement, a liberal darling despite her conservative roots, a symbol of fidelity despite her tempestuous relationship with her husband, and a sort of grief counselor, with ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ despite her fatalistic outlook.”
“She managed to be many things to many different people,” he said.