Griffin recalls meeting her for the first time as a child in bathing trunks and being mortified that a testicle had emerged from his costume all the adults roared with laughter except Didion, for which he has always loved her. We discover from her literary agent that Didion puts her manuscripts in the freezer if she needs to let them settle, and from her friend Susanna Moore that, back in the day, Didion would silently descend in the morning, crack open a Coca-Cola and a tin of salted almonds and get to work. The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 documentary made by Griffin Dunne, the nephew of Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne, is a particularly rich fund. The issue with the anecdotes is that they are both diverting and revealing.
She threw parties, but was not a hippie – the endless tales of acid and free love ‘all sounded like marmalade skies to me’ No Hollywood affectations” – but the photographs themselves had such star quality that the fashion house Céline not only recreated one in its 2015 ad campaign, but also featured the then 80-year-old writer herself, in black sweater and enormous sunglasses.Īnd the stories: the parties at the same rented house, on Franklin Avenue, to which Janis Joplin might turn up, asking for a glass of brandy and Benedictine (musicians, Didion noted, never wanted ordinary drinks) the Malibu beach house she later lived in, where the carpenter was Harrison Ford the first assignment the neophyte writer did for Vogue, a piece on self-respect that only came to her because the original journalist failed to deliver and they’d already put the strapline on the cover. Wasser remembers her as “a very easy person to talk to. There’s Didion in her long dress with long hair, smoking, leaning against her Corvette Stingray standing up in its sunroof lolling out of the driver’s window, in Julian Wasser’s 1968 shoot inside, pictured with her daughter Quintana on her lap (her favourite of that day), or staring straight at the camera. If you’re interested in certain aspects of the culture – American counterculture in the 1960s, California, female writers – the pictures are familiar, if not ingrained. T o think about Joan Didion, you have to confront two things before you get to the words: the pictures and the anecdotes.
0 kommentar(er)
