All of us are excited by what we most deplore — ‘especially,’ as Miss Didion says in another context, ‘if we are writers’. Miss Didion used to be excited by human stupidity and viciousness. Slouching towards Bethlehem (1968), her previous collection of journalism and essays, begins with a piece about a murder in the San Bernadino Valley — Mormon country. On October 7,1964, Lucille Miller took her depressive and generally below-par husband, Cork, out for a moonlight drive in their Volkswagen. After a visit to a nearby supermarket, Mrs Miller stopped the car in the middle of the road, poured a can of petrol over her husband, set fire to him, and then attempted to propel the VW over a four-foot drop. As it happened, the car got stuck on the ledge; Mrs Miller seemed to have a change of heart at this point, and spent the next seventy-five minutes trying to save her husband by poking at him with a stick (‘I just thought if I had a stick, I’d push him out’); but by now, anyway, Cork was ‘just black’. The trial was surprisingly protracted, considering that the tirelessly hysterical Mrs Miller had a boyfriend and $120,000 coming to her in the event of Cork s accidental death. ‘It wasn’t a very interesting murder as murders go,’ Miss Didion quotes the DA as saying ‘laconically’, intending a gentle laugh on him. Actually the DA was right. It wasn’t a very interesting murder. But it was certainly very stupid and vicious, and Miss Didion used to be excited by that kind of thing.
She isn’t any more. No longer can Miss Didion regard the neurotic waywardness and vulgar infamies of California as simply ‘good material’. The White Album deals with the late Sixties and early Seventies. During these menacing years Miss Didion lived with her husband and daughter in a large house in Hollywood, at the heart of what a friend described as a ‘senseless-killing neighborhood’. Across the street, the one-time Japanese Consulate had become a group-therapy squat for unrelated adults. Scientologists used to pop by and explain to Miss Didion about E-meters and how to become a Clear. High-minded narcotics dealers would call her on the telephone (‘what we’re talking about, basically, is applying the Zen philosophy to money and business, dig?’). Pentêcostalist Brother Theobald informed her that there were bound to be more earthquakes these days, what with the end of time being just round the corner. One night a baby-sitter remarked that she saw death in Miss Didion’s aura; in response, Miss Didion slept downstairs on the sofa, with the windows open. Then it happened — not to Joan Didion, but to Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski, Steven Parent, Rosemary and Leno LaBianca, and Sharon Tate:
On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: / remember that no one was surprised.
And, at a stroke, the Sixties ended — ‘the paranoia was fulfilled’.
Miss Didion reached her own breaking-point almost exactly a year before Charles Manson reached his. Alerted by an attack of nausea and vertigo (and such an attack does not now seem to [her] an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968′), Miss Didion enrolled as a private outpatient of the psychiatric clinic at St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where she underwent the Rorschach Test, the Thematic Apperception Test, the Sentence Completion Test and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Index. Miss Didion quotes at italicised length from the ensuing psychiatric report: ‘a personality in process of deterioration … regressive, libidinal preoccupations … fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic … feels deeply that all human effort is foredoomed to failure…’. Following a series of periodic visual disturbances, she then submits to three electroencephalograms, two sets of skull and neck X-rays, one five-hour glucose-tolerance test, two electromyelograms, a variety of chemical tests and consultations with two ophthalmologists, one internist and three neurologists. Damage to the central nervous system is diagnosed and given a nasty name by the sinister doctors. ‘The startling fact was this,’ writes Miss Didion: ‘my body was offering a precise physiological equivalent to what had been going on in my mind.’ At that moment she had a sharp apprehension ‘of what it was like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger did indeed have the knife.’ Charles Manson had come calling, but under the name of Multiple Sclerosis. ‘Lead a simple life,’ the neurologist concluded: ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’