I need to learn Didion at her most vicious.
The cattiest (and thus possibly the funniest) essay Didion ever wrote was “Fairly Nancy,” a portrait of Nancy Reagan when she was the primary girl of California. Didion, a part of the fifth technology of a well-off Sacramento household, had completely no use for both Reagan from the second the Gipper stepped into politics. For her, the Reagans grew to become the prevailing metaphor for the whole lot that was fallacious with the American political scene, as a result of she believed they thought, acted, campaigned and ruled like Hollywood figures. “She has informed me that the governor by no means wore make-up even in movement photos, and that politics is rougher than the image enterprise since you shouldn’t have the studio to guard you,” Didion writes close to the top of the profile, when the tone of irritated disdain is virtually dripping off the web page.
Regardless of inflicting a big sting — Nancy Reagan mentions the essay in her personal memoirs — “Fairly Nancy” wasn’t collected in any of Didion’s books till the ultimate one, “Let Me Inform You What I Imply” (2021). It’s an ideal glimpse right into a younger, irritated author who knew precisely what she was doing.
Did she ever get swoony?
Phrases like “unsparing” and “cleareyed” are normally utilized to Didion’s cultural evaluation, however if you wish to see her in full weak-kneed mode, learn the essay “John Wayne: A Love Story.” (It’s collected in “Slouching In the direction of Bethlehem.”) In 1965, she lastly landed a pitch she’d been eager for: The Saturday Night Publish commissioned Didion to journey to northern Mexico, the place “The Sons of Katie Elder” — a western she’d later brush off in a paragraph-long assessment in Vogue — was taking pictures. The star was John Wayne, whom Didion had worshiped since watching him in a transformed plane hangar on the Military base the place her father was stationed throughout World Warfare II. He grew to become her thought of manhood, security, energy.
Wayne-like characters pop up throughout Didion’s fiction, as does her eager for the sort of safety this line represented to her. However Wayne as an precise individual was vital to her, too. When she lastly met her hero on set, he was simply coming off a lung most cancers scare; she mentions his “unhealthy chilly and a racking cough, so drained by late afternoon that he saved an oxygen inhalator on the set.” Famously, he’d used his analysis, and his tough-guy stature, to encourage folks within the smoke-filled period to get screened for the illness.
John Wayne is vital to Didion’s story for extra than simply leisure causes. Her political opinions, till properly into maturity, had been sternly conservative, not as proper wing as Wayne’s however practically so — she used to announce at Hollywood dinner events, seemingly for shock worth, that she had voted for Barry Goldwater. She switched affiliations after the California Republican Get together embraced Richard Nixon, however as late because the Nineties she was nonetheless saying she’d have voted for Goldwater in each election since, had he run.
