the Dunnes’ house. He was irresistible, his voice always
on the verge of laughter. I sensed that nothing one
could do would shock or alarm him. He also happened
to be beautiful, and I was a little in love with him.
Joan asked me to stay in the Franklin Avenue house as
she and John were going to Hawaii. I’d been uneasy living
in the Hollywood Hills, with their intimation of menace,
and I was happy to have a place to live, at least for a little
while, where I would not feel ill at ease. I moved into an
upstairs bedroom crowded with file boxes and neat piles of
personal papers, research, and manuscripts. A colony
of rats lived in a palm tree just outside a window on the
staircase landing, and each night I would race up the stairs
to bed, convinced that they were waiting for me, their eyes
red with reflected light. Joan had encouraged me to drive
her yellow Corvette while they were away, although driving
it was like mounting a wild animal. When I cautiously
accelerated, the car lunged forward as if suddenly let free
from its cage, so I did not use it often. It was not the kind
of car you took to Ralphs market on Doheny, or perhaps it
was, and I didn’t know better. I had noticed that whenever
John worked himself into a temper that could not otherwise
be constrained, he jumped into the car and drove north
on the Pacific Coast Highway at excessive speed until he
reached Santa Barbara, where he would turn around and
drive home at a more reasonable pace. He was the first
person, after my AP English teacher at Punahou, a school
in Honolulu, to encourage me to write. He knew that
I had written stories and plays as a child and suggested
that I should do so again. He liked that I was keeping
a notebook and urged me to find a subject that interested
me, or one that I thought would interest others, and write
about it. He said that since I seemed unsure of myself,
I should begin with journalism. He wanted me to submit
a piece to Rolling Stone, but I knew that my writing was
not good enough, even with the many improvements I
understood he’d make to it. Despite his frequent reminders
that I should be working on a story, any story, I did
not take his encouragement seriously. At least not yet.
When the Dunnes returned from their trip, they suggested
that I stay a little longer. I was relieved not to have to
return to the house in Beachwood Canyon, and we settled
into an easy routine in which I tried to keep out of their
way. In the morning, Joan, wearing dark glasses, would
come downstairs to drink an ice-cold bottle of Coke she
took from the refrigerator. She would be angry if one of
the Cokes was missing, and the Mexican housekeeper and
I were careful not to move the bottles from their place
on the top shelf. She would then light a cigarette and open
a can of salted almonds from one of the boxes that her
mother sent each Christmas from Sacramento. There was
no conversation, the only sounds the snap of the aluminum
tab and the whoosh of air as the can of nuts was opened.
She would then return to her office on the second floor,
where she would work until one o’clock, as did John in
his own office, when they would meet for lunch prepared
by the housekeeper or go to a restaurant. I found this
so instructive, so efficient, and even so romantic in its way,
that I wrote their schedule in my notebook, adding it to a
rather short list I titled “Tips for Domestic Contentment.”
Despite the eccentricity of the household, there was
love between them, and respect. I soon grew accustomed
to John’s easy superiority of manner, made bearable
by his quick intelligence and his willingness to laugh,
although I, too, always kept in mind his volatility, which
was unpredictable and often irrational. He liked to
boast that he never took sides in a divorce, and I would
wonder, Why not? You take sides in everything else. I
was so lacking in calculation, always a bit of a handicap,
that I didn’t at first realize that his ostentatious neutrality
in the matter of divorce was shrewdness on his part,
given his social ambition.J
oan was as fastidious, as particular in her
domestic life, as she was in her writing, all effort
concealed, not through any devious design
but because she was by nature secretive. She
made certain domestic decisions (what food
to serve at a dinner party, whom to invite) very
quickly. Artichoke vinaigrette. An orange-and-endive
salad. Mexican chicken—she was particularly irritated
when Nora Ephron pestered her for the recipe—and
for dessert, big strawberries with their stems, eaten with
brown sugar and sour cream.
People were disappointed, if not disbelieving, to
discover that she was not a liberal. Although she did not
hide her admiration for Barry Goldwater and John Wayne,
she never revealed for whom she had voted. Despite
her instinctive conservatism, she was crazy about Jerry
Brown. She mistrusted partisanship, believing that
one’s adherence to a particular ideology not only did not
matter in the end, but that it could be dangerous. She
was by nature averse to orthodoxy, especially when it was
political and enforced by popular thought. She was
a conservative in an old landed-gentry way, as might be
expected of a fifth-generation Californian, a descendant
of Protestant pioneers who had refused to accompany
their wagon train through the Donner Pass, a sensible
decision as it turned out, as those travelers who survived
the Donner Pass did so by eating their companions.
She was not a contrarian, which would have made her
exhausting, although refusal had been a part of her
nature since childhood. She once told me that the first time
she stopped eating was when her father went away to war.
One night during a party, Joan overheard someone
mention that drugs were available upstairs where her
young daughter, Quintana, was sleeping. Running upstairs,
she found some of her guests dispensing peyote in the
hall outside the child’s bedroom. When she asked them to
leave, a musician who had come with Janis Joplin said,
“You don’t know what you’re missing, babe,” and Joan,
following them down the stairs to the front door, said,
“Yes, I do.” @Excerpted from Miss Aluminum: A Memoir by
Susanna Moore, to be published by Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, this month.