Joan Didion was famously reserved. But she openly adored John Wayne and Old Hollywood
- Share via
On the Shelf
We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine
By Alissa Wilkinson
Liveright: 272 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
If Joan Didion had an overarching preoccupation as a journalist and novelist, it was to find interstices where truth and myth blend into each other.
In many of the essays that were collected in the books “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” and “The White Album,” Didion, in contrast to her New Journalism contemporaries, keenly debunked the prevailing myth of the ’60s counterculture as some new utopian portal, instead revealing in her essays a country that was coming undone by its own unchecked permissiveness, inward-looking narcissism and spiritual anomie.
Curiously, she had a blind spot when it came to the most efficient mythmaking machinery of the 20th century: Hollywood movies. In her new book, “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine,” Alissa Wilkinson paints the famously reserved author as an unabashed fan of Hollywood, especially the foursquare genre pictures churned out by studios in the 1940s and 1950s. As a green writer, Didion wrote movie reviews for William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review, among other outlets, celebrating entertainment for its own sake and ignoring the incipient art-film movement of Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes and Michelangelo Antonioni. “She liked to be entertained by Hollywood stories,” says Wilkinson.
As a child of the West, she was especially drawn to the films of John Wayne — that self-reliant man of action, Hollywood’s figurehead of Manifest Destiny. Didion, who spent a short time during her childhood on Army bases with her enlisted father, watched movies to fend off her restlessness. It was during one such languorous afternoon that, according to Wilkinson, “Joan first encountered the love of her life.” It was Wayne — America’s biggest movie star, the self-reliant enforcer, the loping lawman who set the world to rights by virtue of his unbending fortitude.
For Didion, Wayne was the embodiment of individual will, quiet strength and indomitable can-do-ism. “John Wayne was one of the guiding lights of her life,” says Wilkinson. “He represented safety and security for her, this kind of independent spirit. He was the personification of this image she had of The West, of doing the work necessary to settle the new land. He was crucial to her personal mythology.”
Didion would write fulsomely about Wayne in her early magazine stories. “Saw the walk, heard the voice,” Didion wrote of Wayne in an article for the Saturday Evening Post. “Heard him tell the girl in the picture called ‘War of the Wildcats’ that he would build her a house ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’” Didion wanted to be that girl.
Of course, Wayne was a walking myth. The actor, who was synonymous with heroism and bravery for millions of Americans, did not enlist in the Army when his country entered World War II, and he never saw combat or used live ammunition to defend himself. Instead, Wilkinson writes in her book, Wayne “became the man we imagined him to be.”
This suited Didion; she would later write of the necessity of constructive myths and origin stories that Americans cling to as articles of faith, stories that served as signposts to a way forward, as opposed to the empty ’60s myths that she believed led to entropy. Even when Didion moved away from film reviews to become one of the preeminent essayists of her generation, she clung to Wayne as an avatar.
Joan Didion’s diary of post-therapy notes, addressed to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, is going to be published in ‘Notes to John.’
Wilkinson points out that Didion was an outlier among her generation, a conservative both in her aesthetic taste and her politics. And she was drawn to politicians who projected what she had admired in John Wayne: that no-nonsense, plainspoken approach to problem-solving. When Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, a compassionate conservative who championed civil rights and environmental protections, announced his intention to run against John F. Kennedy in the 1964 election, Didion embraced his candidacy.
“Goldwater was a commanding presence who projected a straight-forward approach towards issues,” observes Wilkinson. “Didion saw some of Wayne in him.” In contrast, she was wary of Kennedy — too smooth, too willing to alter his backstory to curry favor. (Goldwater would lose to Lyndon B. Johnson.)
To Didion, Kennedy represented something insidious in the American character: the desire for voters to admire politicians like movie stars, and the pandering of American politicians to provide heroes made of clay. This, for her, was the start of the new “star system” that was to infect American politics all the way up to Bill Clinton, a new misdirection that avoided the hard questions in favor of feel-good glad-handing, the glittery spin of politics in the age of TV that created a false consensus.
What rankled Didion about this turn was that it reduced the complexity of all issues to tidy bromides. “She hated the idea of that Hollywood enchantment crossing over into political discourse,” explains Wilkinson. “Movie logic was everywhere,” she writes, as political conventions were now expressly staged for TV audiences. At the same time, as Wilkinson points out, movies could be an inflection of the national mood, even if they were misinterpreted by the politicians who cited them. When Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, President Johnson cited Arthur Penn’s film “Bonnie and Clyde” as a potential cause of national violence, rather than a reflection of the national mood. Movies only suited politicians when their prevailing myths lined up with campaign rhetoric.
Despite her creeping cynicism toward politics and its appropriation of movie style, Didion hadn’t lost her ardor for film. In 1964, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, moved from New York to Los Angeles, determined to break into the industry. They soon found success in Hollywood — their first film, “The Panic in Needle Park,” screened at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival — but by that time, Didion, who had been hosting legendary “industry” parties at her house on Franklin Avenue, sensed a vacuity that she described in “Play It As It Lays,” her 1970 novel. Hollywoodland, as it turned out, was also a myth.
“She was both inside and outside Hollywood when she wrote that novel,” says Wilkinson. “You can see her noticing this all over Southern California, this lack of a moral center, and people for whom a moral center is a laughable invention.”
Lili Anolik turns a cache of letters between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz into a book about the unlikely friendship between two seminal L.A. writers before they went their separate ways.
According to Didion, that moral hollowness found its ideal spokesman in Ronald Reagan, a minor Hollywood actor who leveraged his position as a Screen Actors Guild leader to be elected California’s governor in 1966. In 1968, while on assignment for the Saturday Evening Post, Didion visited Nancy Reagan at the governor’s mansion and observed a TV news crew as they tried to get a perfect shot of Reagan cutting flowers from her garden. Nothing of substance was even broached. The photo-op had supplanted policy as the sine qua non of political discourse. Hollywood had hijacked politics and there was no turning back.
Didion continued to explore this subject in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books in the ’80s and ’90s, the best of which were collected in a book aptly titled “Political Fictions.” In her essay “Insider Baseball,” Didion decried the trivial nature of two-party politics in the age of media saturation. Watching then-President Reagan addressing the delegates at the 1988 GOP convention, Didion witnessed a speech “rhetorically pitched not to a live audience but to the more intimate demands of the camera.” In Didion’s view, viewers now processed politics like TV dramas, with their own heroes and villains, subplots and twists.
Didion, who died in late 2021, lived long enough to witness the slow decline of traditional media and the creeping hegemony of social media, with policy positions laid out in 140-word missives and the raging hailstorm of online political discourse. Even the movies aren’t really movies anymore, just raw material for the streaming maw. One thing is for certain: They are the stories we now tell ourselves in order to live.
