“You knew you couldn’t win the nomination when you started?”
“Yes. I knew all along.” Jerry has an odd crooked smile which he suddenly deployed. “Do you think I’m neurotic?” he asked, much amused.
Now he is running for state attorney general. “It’s the only job where you can actually do something useful. My father always said it was the one time he was really happy in politics. The governorship is just endless photo ops,” he added.
And so highly suitable for professional actors. Democracy!
THIRTY-FOUR
Gene Vidal died in February 1969 at a hospital in Inglewood not far from where his last surviving sister, Margaret, lived. He had a cancer of the kidney. He was well-looked-after by a cousin-surgeon and by Kit, his wife.
Now, in June 2005, I am sent the galleys of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking which describes her husband, John’s, death in New York City.
It is hard to think of that quaking burning Pacific littoral without thinking of Joan who is the quintessential native: several generations of her family have flourished in the Sacramento area and few seem to have defected, including Joan and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, who, even when they did move to New York, always seemed to be somehow organically connected with her state.
It was at Malibu where I was first taken to see them by Jean Stein whom I had known since she was a child and I was an eighteen-year-old soldier soon to be shipped out to the Aleutian Islands. By the time I ate the Portuguese fish dish cooked by Joan it was some years after I’d returned from the Bering Sea. My mother, Nina, and Jean’s mother, Doris, had been passionately busy with their joint war work in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Now once the war was done, I saw the Didion-Dunnes from time to time. He was a splendid gossip in the low key while she had, according to that great transatlantic gossip, Ali Forbes, “the most endearing scowl.”
At the time of our Malibu meeting I was a novelist in Hollywood, writing television plays for CBS’s new studio on Fairfax Avenue. Even so, I was not often in California in those days but I often thought of seeing the Didion-Dunnes particularly after they abruptly moved on to New York City and left their house in Brentwood to be quickly torn down as things tend to be in that least permanent of places. Joan records her grief when she finally saw what had been done to their house. Now, John has just died in New York. Joan goes on. The Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel also goes on unchanged and, sometimes, in the large booth opposite the entrance to the bar, I can just make out the ghosts of those two Stakhanovite war-workers, Nina and Doris, two ladies plainly invented by Dawn Powell, to cheer our boys on to victory while exchanging endless secrets and drinking vodka.
THIRTY-FIVE
Until the end, Howard and I kept on making plans for future trips. The one that we were most looking forward to was aboard the Radisson line, starting from near home at Salerno and then on to the Greek islands and the Turkish coast. In exchange for our passage, I’d lecture on Greece and the islands, putting me in competition with my august friend Gough Whitlam, onetime prime minister of Australia and a classicist who had been doing pretty much the same thing for another line. Unfortunately, we never made that trip to the Greek islands but at least, years earlier, Howard and I had sailed the Aegean in a caique with Paul Newman whose wife, Joanne Woodward, jumped ship at the first stop and flew to London to attend the theater. Meanwhile, our arrival at each of a dozen islands was heralded by youthful voices shouting, in unison, POLE. NOO…MUN! How they knew we were aboard so nondescript a boat restores one’s belief in the Sirens who infested those waters when Ulysses himself sailed by. We also encountered some rather grim sirens when we put into port at Mykonos. A tall Giacometti-style woman vaulted aboard to introduce herself to Paul as a Hohenzollern princess of Prussia. She was swollen with ouzo not to mention imperial airs. “Get rid of her,” Paul kept muttering to me and Howard. We did our best but her long imperial limbs seemed made of fettuccine: we could never get a polite grip on her. Suddenly, this self-styled heiress to Frederick the Great slithered free of us and rushed into Paul’s stateroom where she relieved herself of what seemed to be a gallon of ouzo on his bunk. With that, Howard, who had a strong managerial side and spoke sailors’ Italian, shouted for the police to rescue POLE NOO MUN which they did. The imperial princess put up a fight worthy of her great ancestor Der Alte Fritz but she was soon shore-bound as our skipper weighed anchor and got us around the island. For a long time Mykonos gossip, I’m told, spoke of a royal romantic quarrel aboard our ship the Helena Pente while in port. Luckily, the princess proved to be our last perhapsburg.
The next morning we awakened to a science-fiction world. At the center of the island of Santorini—sometimes called Thera—there is a deep crater filled with blue-black water. Rising from the water were the sides of the volcano whose spectacular explosion in 1520 BC allegedly ended the Minoan civilization on nearby Crete and destroyed a fairly glittering civilization at Santorini.
Howard, Paul, and I rode donkeys to the top of what was left of the volcano. Archaeologists were only beginning their excavations of surprisingly well-preserved modern-looking buildings. Some still had their walls, murals, and roofs while tomatoes were in full bloom on the winding path to the top of the mountain. These tomatoes proved to be our breakfast.
Paul Newman and I in 1961 on the island of Delos where the god Apollo was born. Here we are saluting what is left of one of the monuments.
I had read a great deal about the eruption of Santorini before we arrived in the obsidian black crater of what had been the original volcano. The capital of the Minoan empire was Knossos on nearby Crete and as most of the Cretan palaces and villages including Knossos had been in ruins until Arthur Evans, a renowned archaeologist, who was perhaps too much school of Walt Disney, had undertaken extensive restorations which gave one a sense of what Walt Disney himself might have done had he been assigned to so vast a project. Purists hated the result. I was neutral because I had nothing to compare Evans’s work to. But Santorini the day that Howard, Paul, and I arrived at noon was very much like Herculaneum, the lava-buried city south of Naples where archaeologists are still restoring parts of the city to what it had looked like originally, right down to charred wood furniture and elaborate carbonized venetian blinds.
Santorini, a thousand years older than Herculaneum and Pompeii, is an even more vivid look at the past exactly as it was when the top of the mountain blew off and a city was smothered while villages were preserved with all sorts of food on their tables, excepting the tomato, a late arrival from Virginia.