Separated by 50 years but united by Hollywood, wildfires, and the endless hum of ‘the deal,’ two writers share a bath in Los Angeles.
On Monday I took a bath with Joan Didion. She was gracious, took the faucet end. She didn’t mind my nudity, carried on talking as if nothing unusual was going on, telling me stories about Hollywood in the 1970s. Not much has changed, which is both a comfort and unnerving. Only the brand of ubiquitous overpriced scented candle appears to be different: what once was Rigaud, is now Diptyque or Le Labo.
It’s strange to come so late to work considered “classic.’ I don’t pretend to have an exhaustive knowledge of literature. My degree went wide but not deep, covering, over the course of only three years, texts from the 1st Century to the present day, and almost all of them British.
I flash the “Oxford degree in literature” card from time to time, it’s true, mostly because it does so tidily nip in the bud any burgeoning assumptions that since I’m blonde, and not pronouncedly ugly, that I must be stupid. But ever since my late twenties, I’ve preferred spiritual and non-fiction texts to “literature” per se, this marking the moment I ceased wanting to “escape” through reading, and instead wanted it to bring me deeper into the present moment.
It’s nice to read a writer who lived and wrote, at least for some time, in Los Angeles. It’s not a particularly literary city, it’s not even a place that lends itself particularly well to reading. I once sat next to an Italian prince at dinner who remarked that he’d found it almost impossible to read a book since he’d moved here. I agreed that it had been my experience too. Then he showed me a picture of his famous Hollywood wife, who later went on to be someone else’s famous Hollywood wife, and subsequently someone’s famous Hollywood girlfriend and who is now, I believe, single.
I can’t even say for sure why it’s so much harder to read here, except that I’ve always associated reading with a withdrawal, a retreat into the inner world, a process more naturally suited to inclement weather than the relentlessly fine.
I’m speaking here of course of reading fiction, of novels in particular. All across town from dawn to dusk and late into the night, a great variety of people are reading screenplays. Or self-improvement. Or Instagram algorithm-suggested viral memes that offer watered-down wisdom in an array of personally branded fonts. But this is not the natural habitat of the traditional, fiction-loving bookworm. Her capital won’t get her far here because it can’t be monetized.
In Paris or London, or any other European city where its citizens flaunt their intellectual and cultural prowess the way others might show off their designer clothes, our bookworm has caché. Unless she can convert that knowledge into something off which a room full of executives can profit, however, it is of little value here. And value is everything in Hollywood—“the grosses, the deal, the morning line”, as Joan puts it.
The reading done here is extractive—how can I use this, how can I sell this, how can I package this—the pace snappy and speedy, a wired energy more befitting what Joan calls a “grand casino” than the thoughtful intellectual’s considered appreciation of subtlety and meaning. Even weekends here have the feel of a relentlessly spinning Peloton wheel. It is, I suspect, usually simply too hard to slow down and relax enough to enjoy a good literary book. Which is probably how I ended up reading in the bath.
I wonder what kinds of books Joan read while she lived here, and if it was easier once she moved to New York. I ask her, but she doesn’t reply. She’s not interested in my questions, she’s only here to tell her story, in her own words.
I let her go on, laughing in recognition at her description of the Hollywood dinners, the women who “seem to have ascended through chronic shock into an elusive dottiness” and the “creative 24-year-old producers” reduced to smoking pot before lunch on the Warner Brothers lot and watching each other’s unreleased movies after the box office luck of ’69 ran out. I offer Joan a glass of wine. She declines but lights up a cigarette. I turn a blind eye, neglect to mention that nobody smokes indoors anymore. I’m curious where she plans to flick the ash.
She goes on to tell me about living in Malibu, and of later returning back there during wildfire season just months after she and her husband had sold the house where they’d lived together with their daughter for seven years. She takes a drag on her cigarette, her energy suddenly nervy.
“One morning during the fire season of 1978, a brush fire caught in Agoura, in the San Fernando Valley. Within two hours a Santa Ana wind had pushed this wind across 25,000 acres and thirteen miles to the coast, where it jumped the Pacific Coast Highway as a half-mile fire storm generating winds of 100 miles per hour and temperatures up to 2500 degrees Fahrenheit. Refugees huddled on the beach. Horses caught fire and were shot on the beach, birds exploded in the air.”
I pull myself up to sitting, choking on my own tears in shock. I’ve lived through fourteen fire seasons here, each one seemingly worse than the last, but I’ve never seen or heard of anything as horrifying as this. Joan pauses for a moment, but then carries on regardless, never having been much of one for emotion, for that which cannot be brought neatly into order between punctuation marks.
She tells me that, after the fire, she and John and Quintana drove out to the site of the house on the Pacific Coast Highway they’d called home only to discover that, extraordinarily, “The fire had come to within 125 feet of the property, then stopped or turned or been beaten back, it was hard to tell which.”
She knows what she’s doing in telling me this, in ending the essay—the entire collection—this way, and yet simultaneously stands in resolute defiance against the unquestioning acceptance of all that it suggests. I ask her if she believes in magic, in something other, in miracles.
She looks at me quizzically, her head tilted slightly, her expression somewhere between curiosity and contempt. Almost imperceptibly, her right eye twitches as her mouth curls into a smile.
Then she stubs her cigarette out in the bath, and she’s gone.
Emma Campbell Webster’s LETTERS FROM LOS ANGELES appears in Substack.
