Nostalg ia
When a young Susanna Moore arrived at Joan Didion and
John Gregory Dunne’s home to house-sit, she did
not expect to stay long. Then they returned. She stayed.(^7406) Frank lin Avenue
I
n 1968, Connie Wald, a Beverly Hills hostess
who befriended me when I first arrived in Los
Angeles, introduced me to John Gregory and
Joan Dunne at one of her dinner parties. That
was the beginning of my long friendship with
them. Although some of the same people whom
I met at Connie’s dinners would also be at the Dunnes’
parties, the mood was less predictable and less conservative.
I no longer had to pretend to be fascinated, and I could
talk about the Vietnam War as much as I liked. I noticed
that Joan did not like to be introduced as Joan Didion but
as Joan Dunne, which was not difficult for me to do, as I
thought of her as Joan Dunne. When I once introduced her
as Joan Didion to someone who I was afraid would not
know her by her married name, she was surprised and later
said to me, “You seem to have forgotten who I am.”
I was often invited to their two-story house on Franklin
Avenue, north of the Strip, where the houses were mostly
rentals, their tenants changing monthly, if not weekly.
The house sat directly on the street, with a cracked cementwalkway leading from the narrow sidewalk to the front
door. There was an overgrown garden and a ruined tennis
court, still bearing a torn and sagging net. It was said that
the Dunnes’ house had been the Japanese Consulate before
Pearl Harbor, which only added to its mysterious charm.
It was not a desirable neighborhood, although the houses
were large and handsome, which may have been why the
Dunnes lived there, especially as Joan was liable to a certain
perversity. Given her particular character, based in part
on a mistrust of the fashionable, the neighborhood suited
her. She chose not to live in the center of things until
much later, when John insisted, despite her wish to remain
in her house in Brentwood, on moving to New York.
Any journalists or writers in town from New York or
Europe would turn up at the Dunnes’,
along with Christopher Isherwood
and Janis Joplin and Ed Ruscha and
Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown.
I first met the costume designer and
later director Joel Schumacher at