Joan Didion: the writer who can capture America like no one else - View Woman - Interview

Amy Spindler

Thirteen years after covering her first presidential election campaign, Joan Didion has published her definitive collection of political essays (Political Fictions, Knopf) inspired by her experiences "on the bus." Even from this distance, and even after the Gore/Bush debacle, her observations have that cool sting we're accustomed to getting from her, alcohol on a paper cut. And, like alcohol on a paper cut, the sting might lead to a healthier healing. It is Didion's cool perspective on hot issues that has made her work some of the most powerful writing of our time. This interview, done a few weeks before the World Trade Center disaster, discusses the issues laid out in Didion's book, politics in a more innocent time--even if those politics felt, post-election, anything but innocent.

AMY SPINDLER: So, Ingrid [Sischy] called me to do this because she knows you're my very favorite writer and, also, I became a journalist because of you and Bob Woodward [who with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story in the Washington Post in 1972, and later authored, with Bernstein, All the President's Men and The Final Days], which is very ironic considering your Bob Woodward chapter in Political Fictions. I was so fascinated by that chapter because I was a Watergate baby. I was a kid when all that was going on. A lot of what you're talking about in the book--the media being so celebrity-hungry and people getting into journalism to become famous--I think started with Woodward and Bernstein.

JOAN DIDION: It did. The investigative reporter became a glamorous persona, which it hadn't been before. Nobody had thought of it for a while because there was no such thing as investigative reporting during that whole period.

AS: And what other reporter could be played by Robert Redford [as he was in the 1976 film version of All the President's Men]?

JD: Woodward's a very, very thorough reporter, but he's maybe overly reverent about what people tell him. He doesn't seem to feel that he has the right as a reporter to question what they tell him, or to put it together with something they said yesterday which was something opposite. It's in his whole approach, too. I know Carl [Bernstein] very well, and Woodward was probably the one who worked the hardest on Watergate. I think that Carl probably had a more instinctive feel for putting the story together, without having to go find evidence that he needed but didn't have to make that inductive leap. Woodward [was the one] who'd go and find the evidence.

AS: Has Woodward's celebrity destroyed his journalism? You've written about being invisible as a journalist.

JD: To some extent. Imagine you're an assistant secretary or whatever: What would it mean if Woodward came to your office to interview you?

AS: But today there are so few invisible journalists. In the preface to your book Slouching Towards Bethlehem [1968] you wrote, "My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does."

JD: A lot of people later thought I meant that I went in [to interviews] with bad intentions. I just mean that the way you are going to come into a room and represent somebody is not necessarily the way they see themselves when they look in a mirror. It's maybe not the way that they would want to see themselves. I mean, you're going to see them differently, obviously. It's just the nature of being alive.

AS: But a life unexamined is a completely nostalgic concept now, with all these reality TV shows. What you're describing here is something that almost doesn't exist anymore. I love the beginning of your new book, when you talk about being assigned to cover the [1988 presidential] elections, and you kept saying, "Oh, I just don't know."

JD: Again, I was the least obtrusive person in the situation, because I was not trying to get the seat next to the candidate. I didn't actually want the seat next to the candidate. I just wanted to go through the experience, and so it was a weird kind of dreamlike experience.

AS: Why were you so hesitant to jump in?

JD: I temperamentally hold back on everything. Also, I'd read the stuff in the papers and I couldn't even work up any interest in the candidates. I don't remember who the early candidates were that year, but I would read that one dropped out and there would be this little flicker of relief: "That's one I don't have to deal with." [laughs]

AS: I love how you dissect that whole need for the story line, the need for the arc, the need for the horse race, because I always blame that need on why Bush was able to even be a contender in the election. In the beginning it seemed obvious he wasn't going to win.

JD: Yeah, it [the race] was created.

AS: You describe the sort of Sisyphean way that with each election, you can take the whole thing and transfer the story onto the next election. It's almost like the Hollywood remake of the next election.

JD: Right. And it's the same with the first hundred days [of the presidency]. They always hit the ground running, they have superhuman powers. We went through this again in this [latest] first hundred days. In the face of really, really remarkable evidence to the contrary, I mean.

AS: I want to quote the book here: "..... what remains novel, and unexplained, was the increasingly histrionic insistence of the political establishment that it stood apart from, and indeed above, a country that had until recently been considered its validation." It does remain unexplained. Can you explain it? Can you hazard a guess as to why they were willing to do that?

JD: You know, I could venture to say that it probably validated to some extent the estrangement of the political class from the electorate. That instead of going out to find out what they thought, it was the evidence that the electorate didn't agree with them that enabled the political class to simply say, "Well, they're wrong and we're right."

AS: Do you think they were just trying to institutionalize ignoring the voters?

ID: Yes, I think they were. I think we have moved away from a political process in which the idea is to represent the voter, or to represent the electorate at large. The idea [now] is that by manipulating the process, tinkering with the process, you can eliminate a large part of the electorate and then have a very controllable playing field. I mean, as far as political professionals go, it is much easier to win an election on very narrow ground. Have you ever lived in Washington?

AS: No.

JD: Neither have I.

AS: But I think it's just like Hollywood. You go see a movie like The Family Man and [it's clear that Hollywood executives] actually believe that the guy in the Midwest that looks like Nicolas Cage and the woman who looks like Tea Leoni really are bowling and selling tires. And that's exactly what Washington D.C.'s idea of the Midwest is, too.

JD: Yeah, they're both company towns and yes, you re right, they probably do have the same basic view of "out there."

AS: But you must go and sign books and give lectures and go to these places. I'm from South Bend, Indiana. I just went home for my high school reunion, and it's a very sophisticated place. The University of Notre Dame is there. Professors live there, not guys wearing bowling shirts.

JD: I know. I came to the conclusion while I was in Hawaii for two weeks that Honolulu was the most sophisticated place I've been to in many years.

AS: Which is a pretty amazing statement.

JD: And more civilized.

AS: What made you feel that way?

JD: Just the general feel of it. The ways in which it was multi-ethnic in a nonconfrontational way, without a lot of conversation about it. Sweet museums, good food, not a lot conversation about either one of those, either, you know what I mean?

AS: But Hollywood and Washington D.C. also treat the press the same way--like publicists.

JD: Oh, exactly. I spent a week in Washington trying to get somebody to return a phone call. I wasn't trying to get the President to return my phone call, I was trying to get Faith Whittlesey [the former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland] to return my phone call. I called every day. Never once in that week did I get Faith Whittlesey to return that phone call, and finally I called and left my home number... in California!

AS: Basically, in L.A., unless you're Julia Roberts or, in Washington, a Kennedy, you're not going to get your phone calls returned.

JD: And also, no worlds mix in Los Angeles.

AS: Yes. Socialites don't mix with stars.

JD: You want to walk into a room and see different kinds of people. But nobody in Hollywood wants to. You don't very often see people [together] from a large number of occupations.

AS: Right, they want to recognize every person there or else they're not comfortable.

JD: Yes. You don't see people from the L.A. Times [with Hollywood people].

AS: I have this ongoing fantasy about your life in Hollywood in the late '60s, because I read You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again [Julia Phillips' memoir published in 1991] and there was her description of Malibu at that time, when everybody was starting out and just wrote and produced together. It's not like that anymore.

JD: Well, I don't know because I don't live there anymore. That period in Malibu, you know, Julia had these lunches every Sunday--she was just down the beach [from Didion's house] so sometimes John [Gregory Dunne, Didion's husband] would walk down but, mainly because I was working on Sundays, I didn't very often. I mean, Julia's was the first place where anybody met Steven Spielberg, who was just about to make The Sugar/and Express [1974]. She had a lot of people coming through her house all the time.

AS: So it wasn't bucolic fabulousness? I always think, I just want to live on the beach in Malibu and write screenplays like you guys did.

JD: In some ways it was great for our daughter because we moved out there when she was four and then we moved back into town [L.A.] when she was about to start the seventh grade and go to a real school. Her hair was always sun-bleached and she was the only person on the beach. But it was very quiet, you know, and I guess it was sort of lonely from one point of view--but from my point of view it was very sweet-looking.

AS: One of the stories in the book I found pretty shocking for someone not in the world of politics was the whole Dukakis/baseball story [about a photo opportunity arranged for presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in which he was shot tossing a baseball and that was subsequently written about reverentially by journalists covering the campaign]. As that was unfolding in front of you, did you know that that was how the press was going to treat it? [both laugh]

JD: I was stunned because it just sort of happened. You could see what was happening and the CNN producer, when I talked to her about it, had pretty much said she wasn't doing anything with it, of course, because we have this all the time etc. And so I just sort of forgot about [this moment] until I started reading about it.

AS: As I was reading [the piece] it reminded me how I had been followed around the other day by a camera crew. [This TV program] had called me and said, "We want [to video] an authentic day in your life, what a typical day is like for you." And then they proceeded to set up every single thing I did. I was walking through doorways 10 times, as if when I walk through a doorway I'm always trying to get it right, and if I don't, I go back and do it again! [laughs)

JD: "Give it another take!"

AS: But why do you think some journalists become so complicit in the whole thing?

JD: Well, if you're 24 years old and you're put on a campaign and you're supposed to be filing [stories] every day, it's very hard to take the long view.

AS: In other words, you want to get your name in the paper. So it's going back to the Bob Woodward factor.

JD: Yeah.

AS: With dropping out being such a big theme in your work, did you feel like dropping out after this? I mean, were you really disillusioned by what you witnessed?

JD: No, I was fascinated to discover that there was less [to politics] than meets the eye. Because it has always been this area in which I had sort of vaguely thought, Well, you're not very interested in it, but it's really serious, serious stuff that's going on there. And then, when I saw what was going on, or how little was actually going on, it became kind of interesting to me to watch it. Although in '92 I [only] did the Democratic campaign, not the Republican campaign. I mean, my interest level was not that high.

AS: Reading what you were saying about the media in the book kept reminding me of the moment in [the film) Shakespeare in Love [1998], when the actor who's playing the nun is asked what Romeo and Juliet is about and answers, "Well, it's about this nun." Members of the media are supposed to be covering the election but all they really want to do is make it about themselves.

JD: One of the reasons the reporting is that way is it's so weirdly passive an experience. Because basically you're in these controlled situations observing these staged events, and things are moving very fast. And so I think there's a tendency to just move with it. You're on the bus or you're not on the bus. It's one of those situations where you don't really have a whole lot of time to think it through. You can just kind of sink into the rhythm of it, the momentum.

AS: One of my favorite quotes of yours is "Writers are always selling somebody out." In this case I think your subjects deserved it! Were the other reporters paying attention to you, like when Hunter Thompson was also on the campaign bus?

JD: No, I was just this person who was shorter [than everyone else]. [laughs]

AS: I thought one of the most important things in the book was your dedication, which reads "for John Gregory Dunne, who lived through my discovering what he already knew." I was curious about what John already knew.

JD: Well, at the time we got married and for many years thereafter, John was interested in domestic politics, or appeared to me to be interested in domestic politics, or at least he would watch the Sunday shows, or watch the news, or every once in a while mention something about it. And then all he had with it was a total disgust, right? And so then when I was kind of forced into learning about it ... well, I eventually got to the same point.

AS: In your book you basically call Bob Woodward a pornographer and Newt Gingrich an idiot. Are you planning to visit Washington any time soon?

JD: I am going down for a couple of days!

AS: I hope you're planning to have your number unlisted! I had been so alienated by the last election that when I first started reading the book I thought, I don't know if I can ever go back there. But there was something comforting in this whole idea you suggest of Sisyphus, in the fact that this happened before and it's going to happen again--that no matter how horrible this last election seemed, it's just this ongoing process. You don't have any sense of what would break the cycle or make it better? A great candidate?

JD: A candidate who was actually picked by the electorate and not by the parties selecting ever safer and safer candidates. You just wonder where these people are coming from sometimes when they really seriously think that Michael Oukakis is going to be a charismatic candidate. I think probably John McCain could have made a good run this time, could have energized a lot of people.

AS: Was it just his bluntness that hurt him?

JD: Well, I think in the end it was that the party thought he wasn't controllable.

AS: And so the party made sure certain things got out so they could oust him. Do you talk about politics a lot? When you have a dinner party do you ever discuss it?

JD: Once in a while.

AS: I never like to talk about it.

JD: No, I don't either. I mean sometimes, as an election approaches, it's hard not to.

AS: I just find it impossible not to personalize it. Like Mary Matalin and James Carville [the assistant to the President and counselor to the Vice President and political strategist (respectively) who got married in 1993]--I could never many somebody who didn't agree with my politics.

JD: Yeah, imagine that!

AS: Do you and John agree on politics?

JD: Yeah.

AS: Did you ever fight when you were writing screenplays together?

JD: Sure. All the time, just constantly.

AS: Because writing is very personal, too.

JD: There's not a lot of ego investment in screenplays because we know it's going to end up being the director's movie, so we're not going to fight over commas so much [when collaborating]. But you're working in a very intense, high-speed situation and you definitely fight. You fight over, "Well, I don't see that as anything a woman would say. A woman would never say that!"

AS: --"And I should know!"

JD: That's the one killer line in my arsenal.

AS: Except then he can come back and say the opposite. Are you working on anything now? Are you thinking of a screenplay?

JD: Oh, we have to do a rewrite. We're going out for a meeting on a picture that we did; actually we did the picture a year or so ago but then everybody involved was tied up on something else, so we're going out to do the meeting the week after next.

AS: And what is it?

JD: A suspense film for Kennedy/Marshall [the film production company] with a lot of interesting elements in it. But which of them will end up being in the movie, I won't know until the meeting. [laughs]

AS: It always amazes me when I've read quotes from you or John about Hollywood and your scripts, saying, "Once you hand it over, it's not yours anymore.' You're probably the only important writers that I've heard be that laid-back about it. Is journalism a sort of safety net for you so you can have that distance about the movie work?

JD: But you have to feel that way about [scriptwriting because, unless you're going to direct, it's not going to be yours. I mean, if I had another life I would rather be a cutter [film editor] than anything in the world. I'm really amazed by how, within the cutting of a film, you can change the line of something. It's really the thing [about filmmaking] that interests me the most.

AS: The control in the dark. The same as being the invisible journalist.

JD: Alone in the room, with the film. We were once left alone for a day with an editor and we cut 10 minutes out of the middle of a picture. A lot of it got put back in for one reason or another, but it was so exhilarating. I mean, I wanted never to leave that room.

AS: And now with DVD, it's so easy. You could actually edit your own movie.

JD: You can edit at home.

AS: But you still love writing together, right? I mean, is it fun?

JD: Yeah. What I love doing is production rewrites.

AS: You're probably the only writer I've heard say that!

JD: [laughs] You're working under such pressure, you know. I find it very exhilarating.

AS: And what was your best experience on a movie?

JD: A lot of them have been good experiences in different ways. But probably the first great experience we had on a movie was True Confessions [1981]. Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler were the producers and Ulu Grosbard was the director and everything just clicked on that picture. Everybody got along in a very low-key way. [Robert] De Niro and [Robert] Duvall just fell into place on it. It was based on John's book--it was different in tone from the book, but it was interesting on a totally different level. Here's the thing that happened on it: We go to Chicago and Boston for previews and in the Chicago airport, after both screenings, Joe Farrell, who came from the Gallup poll and was hired to do [market] research on the film, meets us and tells us that the audience for this picture has 16-plus years of education! [laughs] We flew back in silence!

AS: Oh, but that movie's legandary for the writing--and there aren't many movies that are famous primarily for their writing!

JD: It was a terrific movie, and it was a wonderful project to work on. During the shooting, we would come over every Saturday and Sunday and we would do the adjustments for the next week's shoot. It was all so easy.

AS: So, do you know what your next book is going to be?

JD: I'm working on something, I'm about halfway done. It's about California.

AS: Fiction or nonfiction?

JD: Nonfiction.

AS: I was very jealous of the Tina Barney shoot you did for W magazine [October 1999]. I was so glad to see fashion elevated in that way. What did they put you in? I don't remember. I just thought, Joan Didion!

JD: It was like a horse blanket. None of the clothes actually fit me except the horse blanket. They said, "You'll look great in this horse blanket!" [laughs]

AS: You know, you can say no!

JD: It was too late to say no.

AS: You can say, "No, I am not wearing that horse blanket!"

JD: Yes, send it back!

AS: You can just wear your chintz or something. How was it when you worked for Vogue [Didion was there from 1956 to 1963]?

JD: It was fun. I liked it.

AS: We just did a story about Brooke Hayward [in the New York Times magazine] and we ran an excerpt from the Terry Southern story about her that appeared in Vogue in 1965, for which you had written the picture captions.

JD: Oh, really?

AS: It was just so great, to imagine you writing picture captions. It will be one of those things that young journalists across America will be comforted by!

JD: We had just gotten married and moved to California. It was the first time I had ever met Dennis [Hopper, Hayward's husband at the time and the photographer of the piece]. I went to the house with the layouts to do the captions, right, and he was so unsettling in some way, do you know what I mean?

AS: That's so surprising! The excerpt we ran was when a sculpture in the room tips and Brooke goes to set it up, and he says, "Wait a minute, don't set it Up! I think we're onto something here, I think we're onto something here!" And he's jumping around, photographing it, and he's telling her. "Go lie down next to the sculpture that's lipped over." And I thought, That marriage lasted two years! Anyway, what was Vogue like when you were there? Was Diana Vreeland the editor?

JD: She came after I left. Jessica Daves was the editor when I was there. I don't think it's probably anything like the way it is now--it was still a big magazine, big format, very definite feature section, you could find it. It began with Vogue's "Eye View" and then went to "People Are Talking About," and you know, it was very definite. The ads were up front. They weren't threaded through. It was 20 issues a year.

AS: But those were pretty groovy literary pretensions. Dennis Hopper taking the pictures, Terry Southern writing the piece and loan Didion writing the captions. It's not the Vogue I know! [laughs)

JD: Actually it was a lot of fun. Everything I learned, I learned at Vogue. I mean everything, because you had to very rapidly acquire a shallow knowledge of all kinds of stuff!

AS: That's a perfect loan Didion description about what we do: Shallow knowledge of all kinds of stuff! [laughs]

Amy Spindler is the style editor of the New York Times magazine. Above: Tuesday Weld in scenes from Play It As It Lays (1972), written by Joan Didion. Photos: Photofest.

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