December 25, 2024 • 31 mins
Vanity Fair’s Lili Anolik examines her book Didion Babitz, which delves into Joan Didion’s fascinating life and her relationship with writer Eve Babitz. Author Ken Follett discusses cathedrals and the reopening of Notre Dame.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have
a great show for you. Today. Lillly Anilek examines her
new book Didion Babbitts, which is all about Joan Didion's
interesting life and relationship with the writer Eve Babbitts. But
first we'll talk to author Ken Follow. We'll talk to
us about the cathedral and the reopening of Notre Dame.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Fast Politics, ken Follow it.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
It's very exciting to have you because besides being an
incredibly famous historical novelist and a spy novelist and a
genius and a pillar of British fabulousness, you are also
probably my mother's longest friend ever.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I think that might be true. Yes, So I know.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
You really well, and or at least as well as
I know anyone, and I was so excited to get
to talk to you about politics because though you guys
have been very involved in politics the UK, the Notre
Damn story is sort of more expansive than any of
that so explain to our listeners your relationship with the
cathedral and then go from there.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
It's a little unexpected because I'm an atheist and have
been all my adult life, so it was unexpected that
I would write a book about cathedrals. What attracted me
to the notion was the fact that cathedrals were built
by a team of people. Cathedral is a work of art,
but it isn't the work of one person. It's the
work of the whole team. It's a kind of community exercise.
(01:35):
And from a literary point of view, that appealed to
me greatly because then you can have several major characters
who are interacting and perhaps quarreling and having differences of
opinion and maybe even fighting with each other. So I
wrote it because I wrote it, not for any reason
of faith. I wrote it because I thought it could
be a great popular novel, like Gone with the Wind,
(01:57):
and it's very very successful. Happened is that I'm the
person people turned to comment on anything to do with cathedrals. Now,
of course, there are many people in the world who
know more about church architecture than I do, but they're
not celebrities, and so shows shows call me, which is
very nice for me.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
You wrote a couple of novels about cathedrals and then
you went to nonfiction. Just explain to us sort of
how that happened.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
When I told my publishers that I wanted to write
The Pillars of the Earth, some of them were really
very worried and they said, so Ken, it's about building
a church in the Middle Ages. Are you sure your
readers while buy this book. You know, when it was
first published it had quite modest sales, but then it
(02:42):
became kind of a word of mouth thing. You know.
It was on the German bestseller list for six years
and we've now sold twenty nine million copies of The
Pillars of the Earth. So it's it's so well known.
And then when not at Arm caught on fire the
way we've I found out about it, Barbara and I
were in the kitchen just finishing supper and the phone
(03:05):
rang and it was a very old friend of ours.
Since this is a political show, I'll tell you that
that very old friend is now the Home Secretary of
the British in the kstar and government.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And your wife, Barbara was an MP.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yes, Barbara was elected in nineteen ninety seven and they
were both involved in the Tony Blair government, so they're
great friends friends. And anyway, Yvett said, I'm in Paris,
put the TV on, and of course we've put the
TV on and you know what we saw. But the
thing about that night was that the journalists covering this
(03:38):
fire didn't really understand what was burning. Because this is
a stone building, a right, so how does it catch fire?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So how does it catch fire off its a stone building?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well I knew because while I was writing The Pillars
of the Earth, I'd studied cathedral fires in the Middle Ages,
and many of them did burn down. And what happens
is the fire star in the roof, which is the
only part of the church that's not made of stone.
And in the case of Notre Dame, of course, the
timbers in the roof were eight hundred years old and
(04:10):
very dry. Plus those spaces, those roof spaces are hardly
ever seen by anybody except workmen, so they're full of debris.
They have bits of old rope and bits of wood,
birds nests and wasps nests, and modern litter, cigarette packets
and sandwich wrappers that have been left thereby people who've
gone up to do a bit of work in the
(04:30):
roof space, so it's easy to see how a dropped
cigarette or an electrical spark could have set fire to
the litter, which would have then set fire to the roof.
And I tweeted that I was watching that evening, I
was watching TV and social media at the same time,
and I just tweeted, this is how the fire must
have started. And I started getting calls from the newsrooms.
So I spent that evening and all of the next
(04:52):
day explaining this fire to people. And the following day, Wednesday,
I went to Paris to be on a show called
Like Grand Librarie and do the same again. On the
Thursday morning, my French publisher but I had breakfast with
her and she said, I'd like you to write a
short book about why Notre Dame is so important to people,
because there had been worldwide sort of outdwing of emotion
(05:15):
about this great cathedral burning down. You know, it was
an interesting question why. So then I wrote another book.
I wrote a nonfiction book, very short book, with the
proceeds going to the building fund. I've done two quite
well known books about cathedrals, and so on Saturday, when
the cathedral was reopened after more than five years of repairs.
(05:38):
I was there. I was invited to the opening ceremony,
but I went early. Actually, I went there at eight
o'clock in the morning. All the French media had tents
up on the forecourt of the cathedral, and so I
did interviews. It was raining and freezing cold and windy,
which is why I've got this cough by the way.
And you know, it was so wonderful in many ways.
(06:01):
First of all, they were very quick. President Macron said
we're going to do this in five years and people
said it's impossible.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
This actually is what I wanted to ask you. So
I live in New York City. We have a cathedral here,
Saint John the Demine. It is still being built, right,
so clearly this is not an easy feat. So how
did he do it? And you know, I mean it's
sort of miraculous.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Right, It's like a miracle, yes. And I you know,
I said, when he made this vow five years ago,
people said it was impossible. I said, you know, I
know the French a little bit, and when they put
their minds to something, nothing is allowed to get in
the way. And I thought they probably would do it.
(06:45):
I mean, they've done it by putting an enormous amount
of money and effort into it. A thousand craftsmen masons obviously,
but carpenters and glaziers and lead workers and sculptors. They
were worried at first whether they could find trees big enough,
because the beams in the roof have to stretch from
(07:07):
one side of the nave to the other, and there
aren't many trees that tall, and they didn't know if
they had enough trees that tall in France, and they
were going to look all over the world. But it
turned out that they did have enough trees in France,
so all the beams of French and they spent about
eight hundred million euros, all of which was raised by
the way. The government didn't spend that money that was
(07:27):
raised from the legendies. And I don't know whether this,
whether this is true, but I was told but after
the fire, Macron phoned up the heads of the ten
richest families in France and said, you've got to give
me one hundred million euros. That's what that's what they're saying.
I don't know, but certainly, and one of them, Bernardino,
(07:47):
gave two hundred million dollars euros. Sorry. I was privileged
to sit next to him at a dinner in Versailles,
and first thing I said to him over was thank
you very much for giving two hundred men in euros
to the rebuilding front. People sent in five euros and
ten euros. There were donations from all over the world.
It was a tremendous public response. Everybody involved was thrilled
(08:13):
with that public response. And I went into the church
just about two months after the fire, I was shown
around by the architect of the repairs, whose name is
Philippe Villeneerve. He showed me around, He showed me all
the things I had to do. At the end of it,
I said to him, do you really think you can
do it in five years? And his reply was I hope.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So talk to me about the significance. France is like
America going through this anti incumbent craziness. What is it like?
Bring me to the sort of meaning of something like
this being repaired, showing the government can work when there
is such strife in France right now? Government strive. The
(08:56):
PM just got a vote of no confidence. I mean,
just sort of what is the significance here?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Well, I'm sure Macron would have expected a tremendous outpouring
of gratitude to him for having pulled this off. But
the trouble with politics is you never get any gratitude.
If people are driving down a highway, a beautiful highway
at fifty five miles an hour, and they never think, gosh,
(09:22):
are our politicians great for making these roads for us.
But if there are potholes in the road, they say,
those damn politicians. They can't get anything right. You know,
in politics, you get blamed for what goes wrong, and
you get no credit for what goes wrong. This has
not rescued Macron from the political trouble that he's in,
and the problem that he has actually is not much
(09:42):
different from the problems of every other major European country,
which is that the people feel entitled to things like
good schools and roads with no potholes and a strong
army to protect them. They feel entitled to all that,
but if you tell them they've got to pay for it,
they're horrified. They're in didn't taxes the government weighs so much,
(10:03):
so that was the issue before the Parliament in the
week running up to the reopening of Notre Dame and
what happened in parliamentary terms was the extreme Left Alliance
and the extreme Right Party run by Marine Lapenn. Basically
they ganged up and they both voted no confidence in
(10:27):
the prime minister. He had to resign Barnier his name is.
And the trouble is nobody knew what to do next.
Marine la Penn didn't have a plan. The leftists didn't
have a plan. They didn't have a budget. They were
upset at the prime Minister's budget, but they didn't have
an alternative budget. They had no idea how to give
(10:48):
the French people all the things that they feel entitled
to without putting taxes up. So nobody knows what's going
to happen next. And well, of course Macron, who's job
it is to appoint the Prime minister, has got appoint
a new prime minister. As far as anybody could see,
the only thing he could possibly do is appoint another
middle of the roader to produce a budget which will
(11:08):
more or less make sense fiscally. I suppose if he
does that, then the left and the right will gang
up on the new prime minister and get rid of
him as well. So nobody knows where this is going,
and I I must admit it did somewhat sour the
great celebrations of Macron's achievement in getting the church prepared
in time.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
You tangentially, at least through Barbara having been an MP
involved in the Labor government. You guys won. That's pretty good.
Talk to me about what it's like in American politics
right now.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
American point, I.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Mean British British politics. American politics are spoken name Eric
mean about British.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Politics, British politics. There's been a turnaround. You know, that
Conservative Party was loath than and hated by the time
the election came along. They had done so many bad
things and made so many mistakes that everybody hated them.
So they voted for the Labor Party. And then the
Labor Party came into power and made a mistake. They
said we're going to have a budget in six weeks time,
(12:07):
and that was all they said. And what they didn't
realize is that when you are the government, you have
to control the media agenda right from the start, and
you have to constantly be giving the media a story
that's more or less positive about yourself, otherwise they will
make up stories than a negative.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
There's a problem we had in the US too.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
Go on.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Well, one of the things that we announced, there's a
payment made to pensioners called the Winter Fuel Allowance. Nearly
all of that money is wasted. It's very expensive. Everybody
gets it. I get it. So you know, I'm driving
around in a Rolls Royce and they're giving me three
hundred pounds to make sure I don't get cold in
the winter. It's ludicrous and the obvious thing to do
(12:50):
is only to give it to people who need it.
But that has been blown up into a betrayal of
old people and pensioners in this country now have had
a better story about them. We should have put out
the story saying most of this money is wasted because
it's given to people who already got plenty of money,
and we're going to stop giving it to rich people
(13:11):
like Ken Follett, and we're going to use some of
the extra money to give more to the people who
really needed it. That would have been a good story,
but they didn't think of that. And so what's happened
is that the right wing press has led the media
agenda and our Prime Minister, Key Kirstarma has become very unpopular.
I think he'll you know, he's only been Prime Minister
(13:31):
for about three months. He's got five years to win
it back, and I'm sure he will. But that's the
situation in British politics. At the moment that the Conservative
Party was unbelievably unpopular, they voted Labor. Now the Labor
Party is unbelievably unpopular.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So interesting, not so dissimilar from where the United States
has found itself. Ken file It thank you so much
for joining us.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
It was a great pleasure. I was good to talk
to you more.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Louie Adlwick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and
a writer at large for Airmail, as well as the
author of Didion Babbitt's.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Lily God, It's so glad to be here, Mollie.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
I'm just going to talk about you in a very
annoying way. Jesse usually says to me, it's politics, it's
fast politics. So I tend not to be able to
have a lot of my friends on me because a
lot of my friends are on the culture side. But
we were like this Trump is about to take over
the federal government is a complete disaster, and people don't
(14:35):
want to listen to dire predictions on Christmas. Let's have
something that isn't soul crushing. And I was like, yes, Lily,
so here we are, Lily welcome.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Thank you my God. To be described it, he's all crushing, Mollie.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yes, yes, something that won't make you want to kill
yourself on Christmas. The goal I want you to explain
to us. You're involved with a bunch of women, all
of whom are dead, many of whom are complicated. Tell
us the story of how you got here.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
Just tearing you say that, I guess I have a type. Yeah, yeah, so,
I mean this started so long ago for me with
Eve Babbitt. I didn't read her. I heard about her
through you know, Joe Esther Hass, the guy who did
Base Yes and show Girls, my favorite in Ouvra. So
he had this period where he was writing a lot
of memoirs, multiple and they were like kind of sleazy
(15:31):
and great. You know, I was reading Hollywood Animal and
he would start each chapter with like, in my memory,
he started each chapter with a quote about you know, Hollywood.
And there was one from a woman named Eve Babbitt's
and it was about sex in La and I just
thought it was so great I'd never heard of this person.
I knew she was a writer. I found out she
had all these out of print books, and I bought
(15:51):
Slowday's Fast Company and I just loved it right. And
there was nothing about her on the internet. There was
just no trace of her. All I could find out
was that she'd burnt herself nearly burned herself alive in
the nineties. So I stalked her. You know, she was
in the phone book. I would write her letters, I
would call her, and I didn't get anywhere. But then
kind of finally I started to make some headway at
Vanity Fair, and they were going to let me do
a profile on her. Not that she'd agreed to this,
(16:13):
but at that point I was close with her sister,
her cousins, She had many legions of ex boyfriends, and
I made friends with all of those people. So finally,
one day she told one of the ex boyfriends to
tell me I could take her to lunch, and I
flew to LA the next day, and that's sort of
how it all started. So I wrote the profile of her. Yeah,
petnah nuts, And I'd written a profile of her for
Vanity Fair. All her books started to get reissued, and
(16:35):
she caught on in this kind of major way. So
she'd sort of been overlooked when she was actually writing.
But you know, now it's like Kendall Jenner is photographed
in a little green bikini reading her on a yacht.
She's like stylish and wow late, you know, like a
pheno on. I didn't write. I wrote a book on
her in twenty nineteen called Hollywood's Eve. I thought I
was done with her. Then she died, and she lived
in this kind of crazy shitthole of a hellhole of ante.
(16:59):
She was smoking a cigar and she brought the match
while she was in a car, and she just let
herself on fire. Jesus, I know exactly. So she was
now and she had been so intensely social and her
like sex resume may is like no other. But she
withdrew after the fire. She completely withdrew from people. And
she was kind of like a combination of Norma Desmond
and Miss Havisham, you know, wow. And she just stank
(17:19):
and the apartment was filthy. And anyway, there were these
after she died, kind of at the back of a closet,
these boxes were found and they were they'd been packed
years before by her mother and kind of sealed with
duct tape, and they contained all her letters. And the
first letter I pulled out was this kind of like
harangue like temper tantrum and the guys of a letter
to Joan Diddon in nineteen seventy two. U, And I
(17:40):
knew I was kind of back in. I was under
contract to do a book on a totally different topic,
but I knew I kind of had to. I had
to take this on.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I love the story. How did she start writing letters
to Joan Didion?
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Part of the same social scene in kind of Manson
Post Manson Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Really interesting?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Yeah, for sure. It's kind of the most glamorous and
the most sinister, you know, period in la I think,
you know. So they started hanging out in kind of
nineteen sixty seven, Joanan and her husband John Greg Ruby
dun they had rented this huge, kind of rambling mansion.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I've read the pieces she wrote about it. Yeah, yeah, go.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
On, yeah, of course, you know White album is all
about that scene in that house. So it was this
kind of huge, kind of alopted mansion on Franklin Avenue
and there were a lot of parties and Eve also
had a lot of parties and a guy named Earl
mc grath and kind of on the scene. It was
like Jennis Joplin. It was you know, Michelle Phillips of
the Mamas and the Papas. It was kind of Hair
Harris imported in his drug dealing in Perpentry Days aired again,
(18:37):
who ran Atlantic Records. So it was kind of these
kind of great cast of characters, kind of flamboyant kind
of artists in flamboyant low lives, and they were really close.
And Evie at that time finding she was a visual
artist at that time and she was designing record albums,
so she had just done a big Buffalo Springfield album,
Buffalo Springfield Again. And she and Joan were very close.
And it was Joan who got her published, you know,
who got her into Rolling Stone magazine, which at that
(18:59):
time was such a huge deal, and then got agreed
to edit her very first book. So they were wow, yeah,
look on seriously intimate terms. And Eve in turn, you know,
Eve was fucking Jim Morrison and Joan was fascinated by him. So,
you know, that kind of famous scene Joan at the
doors recording session. Eve got her there, you know, Eve
was there too that day, but she brought Joan in.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
So what happens next in this relationship between these two women, Yeah, well.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
What happens next? So Joan agrees to edit Eve's book
and Eve kind of the word Eve would use with
her boyfriend Paul orshe was I fired Joan. Joan did
not actually work for her, but there exxactly, but like
the sensibility wise, I mean, Eve was enraged by Joan.
I think Joan wanted her to be more disciplined, you know,
(19:45):
perish the thought, and encouraged her to read more Graham Green.
Somehow she was antithetical to Eve's idea of art and
writing and the fake world, you know. But they kind
of were still in one another's orbit. Like I've had
a serious boyfriend, naed Dan Wakefield, who was a writer
and who was an old friend of Jones. They were
just kind of all over each other in kind of
the late sixties through the seventies. Joan had a secretariat,
(20:06):
a woman named Tina Moore, and that was one of
Eve's girlfriends. So they just were kind of on top
of each other that whole period.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Wow, So that's how you got to this story.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Yeah, And really what I had meant to do. So
I was supposed to be writing a book for Scribner
on Bennington College class of nineteen eighty six, which is,
you know, Brady Sonelli's Dot A Churt Jonathan Latham. I
was prepared to do that. Evie dies, I see all
these letters, I really feel like I owe it to
Eve to get it right. And when I read these letters,
which were all kind of unsent letters, it was letters
she saved but never sent, so they really, you know,
(20:38):
like a diary basically, and I'd gotten things wrong, you
know when I was interviewing Eve over you know, for
a period of ten years, her brain was crumbling from
the Huntington's. She was also a book open and not forthcoming.
So there were things I had missed, and you know,
and really it was her emotional life that she had
kept from me. So these letters were still revelatory. But
my plan was to kind of write a long piece
for Vanity Fair on this letter Eve wrote Joan in
(21:00):
seventy two, which I did, stick that as in an
introduction and then just interspersed letters throughout, you know, sort
of have a revised you know, like a DVD extra version, right.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Right, you started out with something easy or what seemed
like it might be easy.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Well, that's exactly it. Like I was lying to my
you know how, both of these big projects. I thought
maybe I could do four to six weeks work and
in and out. But then it just hijacked my life.
And it's sort of was I was revising and kind
of totally rewriting, like rewriting from scratch of course, you know.
And at a certain point I realized I was writing
a shadow a shadow book on Joan Didion, you know,
So that's sort of how it happened.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
What So that's where you got to Joan Didion.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Yeah, And it started to seem to me that these
two women were kind of opposites who were also doubles,
and they were on the exact same scene and it
was kind of thrilling and like material for both of them.
Their approach was opposite, right, even the participants. She was
sleeping with everybody. I'm an Ertican, Harrison Ford, J. Morrison,
she was sleeping with everybody. She was doing every drug,
(22:02):
any drug that kind of came into her view she
was doing. So she was kind of that person on
the scene and Joan was she was like the participant,
and then Joan was just the observer, right married, you know,
just kind of off to the side and watching. And
Joan was sort of a craftsman or a crafts person
in her approach to writing, and Eve was improvisitory. They
just they just stroke me as and kind of each
(22:23):
got under the other's skin. I mean, so the letter
that he wrote writes Joan in nineteen seventy two. So
Eve's enraged because Joan, that's the pretext of the letter.
She wants to kind of chastise Joan for neglecting or
disregarding Virginia Wolf. Then she sort of goes on to
a piece Joan had just written for the New York
Times on the women's movement, and Joan really puts down
the women's movement, and.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
She I'm shocked. I mean, the subtext here is that
Joan Didion is a secret conservative and she is equal
parts Ross do thodd and other things.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Well, I mean that's not wrong, that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
She's more complicated than that. But yes, go on, y.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
It's more complicated. But yeah, I mean, you could put
it in those terms and be totally accurate. But I
think it was more like Eve also had her problem
with the women's movement. I think she didn't like its style,
you know, she just but she was like, I think
she was so enraged that Joan was saying it didn't
have a point. She was I think she felt that
Joanes sold out women to getting good with men, right,
like Joan wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Right, which sounds that sounds absolutely one hundred percent As
a big Joan Diddion fan, that sounds one hundred percent right.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Just kind of is and it's not even like a
well Joan for it, because like Joane's born in thirty four,
and it's kind of like if you wanted to be
taken seriously as a writer, not as a woman's writer,
which was a way of kind of patriots Like.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, yeah, it was a put down I know from
my mother.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Yeah, you would know, you know better than anybody exactly
what kind of a put down it was. And it
was a way of kind of taking you out of
contention for you know, to be a big writer basically.
And I understand why Joan did what she did, but
you know, Eve felt that not only did Joan sell
out women to getting good with men, but that she
kind of sold out La to getting good with New York,
you know, so I think you know it was, but
(24:01):
she also totally admired Joan, and I think really admired
Joan's ability kind of to maneuver, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Yeah, So explain to us what happens next.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Well, I mean, technically Eve survives the seventies in the sense.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
That she that's a great line.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Technically, I'm sorry to say so. She calls she has
this great term squalid over boogie. It's like when you're
fucking too much, when you're doing too many drugs, you
just fucked and drugged yourself out right, you're just what
And she really she really hit that in the late seventies.
So the best book she did comes out in seventy
seven called Slowdaspath Company. She does it with Kannop. It's
like everything comes together for her right. She's on exactly
(24:40):
the right drugs. She's with the exact right guy, All Roche,
who's kind of both who's who's not really straight, he's
kind of highly sexual with Herbert really prefers men, and
so he's kind of elusive in a way that's she likes, yeah,
and keeps her on her toes. She's got just the
right editor and Vicki Wilson at Kannop who kind of
takes this, Oh.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yeah, who's still there, right, or maybe she's retired now,
but she was there for.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
A long time.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
I can't believe you know that, Yes, that's exactly right.
She's just gone. But she took a very strong hand
with Eve and really helped Eva's structuring. Eva's no good
at structuring. Surprise, surprise, you know. And anyway, she's and
I somehow she was like using just the right amount
of coke to get her going, but not you know,
make her and then it all tips over in the
late seventies and she's it's just all too much, so
kind of to save herself, she's sort of by eighty two,
(25:25):
she writes two kind of not good novels. She sort
of loses faith, and she's kind of loses confidence and
in her form, right, she was writing novels, but they
were really they were in the form of short stories,
but they were really novels. She basically invented a form
to express herself and it was great. Then she tries
to be conventional and write a novel and they're just duds.
So at any rate, she's kind of she's exhausted herself
and she decides to get clean, and she never really
(25:48):
does good work again. So she technically survives the decade,
but really is a casualty of it. And Joan is
the one who kind of ends up writing. I mean
Slowda's Fast Company is I think as good as anything
Joan did Joan is the one who kind of takes
ownership of the Franklin Avenue scene when she writes White Album,
So he's kind of over after the seventies and Joan
very much is not.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And so then you start writing about Joan and where
Eve Babbitt does not have anyone in the world and
has forgotten to history, Joan Didion is an industrial complex
and has all different problems. So talk to me about
that well.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
I mean, nobody manages a career better than Joan did
in Each My Monster, like in the history of American letters,
I mean, she just gets more and more, she gets
bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think there's a
really interesting kind of inflection point in two thousand. I
want to say two thousand or two thousand and one.
I think two thousand. There's a CNN interview and you
can find it on YouTube and Joan is getting interviewed
on some c SPAN show and it's right career retrospective,
(26:48):
and it's about what a big deal she is. And
there's a call in portion and Eve calls in. It's
unbelievable because Eves just survived the fire, but she's about
like in two thousand and one is when hunting takes
over and she didn't know what was coming. You know,
her father actually died of it, but her mother, because
Huntington's is genetic, you have a fifty percent chance the
moble brought the hospital or brought someone to call in
(27:10):
and lie to her two daughters. But the father died
of a tomor not Huntington's. I get why she did it,
you know, in a way like there's nothing they can
do well. But and I think that's partly why Eve
was being so self destructive in the late seventies, because
she could see what was happening to her father and
she was sure it was going to happen to her,
and it was. It was exactly so two thousand and one,
that's when the brain starts to crumble. So in two
(27:31):
thousand and one, of is of course when John Donne
will die and the marriage turns out to be much
more complicated than I ever would have guessed. One of
the people I came to late in my research was
Noel Prmontel, who was jones kind of first lover and
first mentor in the late fifties. And he was a
sort of flashbuckling Southern guy from New Orleans, from kind
of a grand family. So I'm always in a white
(27:51):
suit and fought with everybody. I wrote for the Nation
and for Esquire, And he'd already kind of been in
the Marines and Iowajima. He was older, had a wife
and children, and already's book from the life and with
a total kind of hard drinker and woman eight sir,
and you know Joe, and both had overheels for him.
And he he's the guy who gets her into print,
like he gets her first byline her first novel, which
(28:13):
nobody is interested in. It gets turned down by a
dozen publishers and she's distraught. He bolways a guy named
Ivan Oblenski into publishing it even doesn't like the book,
but he's sort of hugely instrumental in her early career,
and she kind of had written him out of her
origin story and kind of the most interesting fact of
all to me. It was such a shock. You know.
He was ninety seven when I met him. I interviewed
him in his house in the country, and he had
(28:35):
told me that he finally kind of made her understand
he would never marry her and never give her children.
And she had a nervous breakdown, which she writes about, yes.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yes, yeah, yeah, goodbye to all that, right.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
Yeah, And she obliquely kind of you know that there's
a kind of a I have a Hemingway ass figure
in the background who's causing her torment.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
It's really unseat but yes.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Yeah, very much on and said, but you can kind
of into it it and you can feel it in
her books, particularly in her novel, she always about Noel.
But he sees she's distressed and he wants to help,
so he says, marry this guy. And it's some guy.
It was a guy who was like an acolyte of his,
like just like a little puppy dob who used to
hang around him and worship him. And that was John
Gregory Dunn. And remember Noel said to me he had
(29:14):
no interest in her, She had no interest in him,
but she kind of just did what Noel said, And
I think it was because that was her kind of
way of marrying Noel. Noel was always staying with them
when he'd come to Los Angeles to do his Hollywood business,
and she would always go to him for advice when
there was trouble in the marriage with John, or when
she was having work trouble. He was like her husband,
you know, in so many ways. And you know, the
marriage with John, you know, it was upsetting. You know,
(29:37):
he was very hard drinking, he was violent. I just
would hear, I would hear about this crazy temper. And
I also heard that he was not you know a
lot of people had kind of told me he wasn't.
He was gay, right, yeah, at the very least bisexual.
So it was not an easy marriage. But he was
a wonderful editor for her and I you know, and
I remember Noel saying this to me. He said to me,
I'd edit Joan, but I wouldn't do it word by word.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
You know.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
John would go over every line with her, every single lines.
I think that was huge for her to have somebody
that committed to her career, you know, partners in screenwriting,
and I mean, I think it was like a totally
successful marriage for what she wanted. It was great for
her career, but it was, you know, a complicated situation.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So interesting. Oh my god, this is such an incredible,
incredible story and also just so interesting. I am so
excited to read both these books. I'm going to read
them on vacation.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
I'm quite excited what yours. Kara's telling you great things.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Oh, I have a book coming out in June. For
anyone who still can stand me. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, Loly oh Molli.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
This was a blast.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
We're on vacation, but that doesn't mean we don't have
a great show for you. Today. Lillly Anilek examines her
new book Didion Babbitts, which is all about Joan Didion's
interesting life and relationship with the writer Eve Babbitts. But
first we'll talk to author Ken Follow. We'll talk to
us about the cathedral and the reopening of Notre Dame.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Welcome to Fast Politics, ken Follow it.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Thank you. It's great to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
It's very exciting to have you because besides being an
incredibly famous historical novelist and a spy novelist and a
genius and a pillar of British fabulousness, you are also
probably my mother's longest friend ever.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I think that might be true. Yes, So I know.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
You really well, and or at least as well as
I know anyone, and I was so excited to get
to talk to you about politics because though you guys
have been very involved in politics the UK, the Notre
Damn story is sort of more expansive than any of
that so explain to our listeners your relationship with the
cathedral and then go from there.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
It's a little unexpected because I'm an atheist and have
been all my adult life, so it was unexpected that
I would write a book about cathedrals. What attracted me
to the notion was the fact that cathedrals were built
by a team of people. Cathedral is a work of art,
but it isn't the work of one person. It's the
work of the whole team. It's a kind of community exercise.
(01:35):
And from a literary point of view, that appealed to
me greatly because then you can have several major characters
who are interacting and perhaps quarreling and having differences of
opinion and maybe even fighting with each other. So I
wrote it because I wrote it, not for any reason
of faith. I wrote it because I thought it could
be a great popular novel, like Gone with the Wind,
(01:57):
and it's very very successful. Happened is that I'm the
person people turned to comment on anything to do with cathedrals. Now,
of course, there are many people in the world who
know more about church architecture than I do, but they're
not celebrities, and so shows shows call me, which is
very nice for me.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
You wrote a couple of novels about cathedrals and then
you went to nonfiction. Just explain to us sort of
how that happened.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
When I told my publishers that I wanted to write
The Pillars of the Earth, some of them were really
very worried and they said, so Ken, it's about building
a church in the Middle Ages. Are you sure your
readers while buy this book. You know, when it was
first published it had quite modest sales, but then it
(02:42):
became kind of a word of mouth thing. You know.
It was on the German bestseller list for six years
and we've now sold twenty nine million copies of The
Pillars of the Earth. So it's it's so well known.
And then when not at Arm caught on fire the
way we've I found out about it, Barbara and I
were in the kitchen just finishing supper and the phone
(03:05):
rang and it was a very old friend of ours.
Since this is a political show, I'll tell you that
that very old friend is now the Home Secretary of
the British in the kstar and government.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
And your wife, Barbara was an MP.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yes, Barbara was elected in nineteen ninety seven and they
were both involved in the Tony Blair government, so they're
great friends friends. And anyway, Yvett said, I'm in Paris,
put the TV on, and of course we've put the
TV on and you know what we saw. But the
thing about that night was that the journalists covering this
(03:38):
fire didn't really understand what was burning. Because this is
a stone building, a right, so how does it catch fire?
Speaker 1 (03:47):
So how does it catch fire off its a stone building?
Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well I knew because while I was writing The Pillars
of the Earth, I'd studied cathedral fires in the Middle Ages,
and many of them did burn down. And what happens
is the fire star in the roof, which is the
only part of the church that's not made of stone.
And in the case of Notre Dame, of course, the
timbers in the roof were eight hundred years old and
(04:10):
very dry. Plus those spaces, those roof spaces are hardly
ever seen by anybody except workmen, so they're full of debris.
They have bits of old rope and bits of wood,
birds nests and wasps nests, and modern litter, cigarette packets
and sandwich wrappers that have been left thereby people who've
gone up to do a bit of work in the
(04:30):
roof space, so it's easy to see how a dropped
cigarette or an electrical spark could have set fire to
the litter, which would have then set fire to the roof.
And I tweeted that I was watching that evening, I
was watching TV and social media at the same time,
and I just tweeted, this is how the fire must
have started. And I started getting calls from the newsrooms.
So I spent that evening and all of the next
(04:52):
day explaining this fire to people. And the following day, Wednesday,
I went to Paris to be on a show called
Like Grand Librarie and do the same again. On the
Thursday morning, my French publisher but I had breakfast with
her and she said, I'd like you to write a
short book about why Notre Dame is so important to people,
because there had been worldwide sort of outdwing of emotion
(05:15):
about this great cathedral burning down. You know, it was
an interesting question why. So then I wrote another book.
I wrote a nonfiction book, very short book, with the
proceeds going to the building fund. I've done two quite
well known books about cathedrals, and so on Saturday, when
the cathedral was reopened after more than five years of repairs.
(05:38):
I was there. I was invited to the opening ceremony,
but I went early. Actually, I went there at eight
o'clock in the morning. All the French media had tents
up on the forecourt of the cathedral, and so I
did interviews. It was raining and freezing cold and windy,
which is why I've got this cough by the way.
And you know, it was so wonderful in many ways.
(06:01):
First of all, they were very quick. President Macron said
we're going to do this in five years and people
said it's impossible.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
This actually is what I wanted to ask you. So
I live in New York City. We have a cathedral here,
Saint John the Demine. It is still being built, right,
so clearly this is not an easy feat. So how
did he do it? And you know, I mean it's
sort of miraculous.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Right, It's like a miracle, yes. And I you know,
I said, when he made this vow five years ago,
people said it was impossible. I said, you know, I
know the French a little bit, and when they put
their minds to something, nothing is allowed to get in
the way. And I thought they probably would do it.
(06:45):
I mean, they've done it by putting an enormous amount
of money and effort into it. A thousand craftsmen masons obviously,
but carpenters and glaziers and lead workers and sculptors. They
were worried at first whether they could find trees big enough,
because the beams in the roof have to stretch from
(07:07):
one side of the nave to the other, and there
aren't many trees that tall, and they didn't know if
they had enough trees that tall in France, and they
were going to look all over the world. But it
turned out that they did have enough trees in France,
so all the beams of French and they spent about
eight hundred million euros, all of which was raised by
the way. The government didn't spend that money that was
(07:27):
raised from the legendies. And I don't know whether this,
whether this is true, but I was told but after
the fire, Macron phoned up the heads of the ten
richest families in France and said, you've got to give
me one hundred million euros. That's what that's what they're saying.
I don't know, but certainly, and one of them, Bernardino,
(07:47):
gave two hundred million dollars euros. Sorry. I was privileged
to sit next to him at a dinner in Versailles,
and first thing I said to him over was thank
you very much for giving two hundred men in euros
to the rebuilding front. People sent in five euros and
ten euros. There were donations from all over the world.
It was a tremendous public response. Everybody involved was thrilled
(08:13):
with that public response. And I went into the church
just about two months after the fire, I was shown
around by the architect of the repairs, whose name is
Philippe Villeneerve. He showed me around, He showed me all
the things I had to do. At the end of it,
I said to him, do you really think you can
do it in five years? And his reply was I hope.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
So talk to me about the significance. France is like
America going through this anti incumbent craziness. What is it like?
Bring me to the sort of meaning of something like
this being repaired, showing the government can work when there
is such strife in France right now? Government strive. The
(08:56):
PM just got a vote of no confidence. I mean,
just sort of what is the significance here?
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Well, I'm sure Macron would have expected a tremendous outpouring
of gratitude to him for having pulled this off. But
the trouble with politics is you never get any gratitude.
If people are driving down a highway, a beautiful highway
at fifty five miles an hour, and they never think, gosh,
(09:22):
are our politicians great for making these roads for us.
But if there are potholes in the road, they say,
those damn politicians. They can't get anything right. You know,
in politics, you get blamed for what goes wrong, and
you get no credit for what goes wrong. This has
not rescued Macron from the political trouble that he's in,
and the problem that he has actually is not much
(09:42):
different from the problems of every other major European country,
which is that the people feel entitled to things like
good schools and roads with no potholes and a strong
army to protect them. They feel entitled to all that,
but if you tell them they've got to pay for it,
they're horrified. They're in didn't taxes the government weighs so much,
(10:03):
so that was the issue before the Parliament in the
week running up to the reopening of Notre Dame and
what happened in parliamentary terms was the extreme Left Alliance
and the extreme Right Party run by Marine Lapenn. Basically
they ganged up and they both voted no confidence in
(10:27):
the prime minister. He had to resign Barnier his name is.
And the trouble is nobody knew what to do next.
Marine la Penn didn't have a plan. The leftists didn't
have a plan. They didn't have a budget. They were
upset at the prime Minister's budget, but they didn't have
an alternative budget. They had no idea how to give
(10:48):
the French people all the things that they feel entitled
to without putting taxes up. So nobody knows what's going
to happen next. And well, of course Macron, who's job
it is to appoint the Prime minister, has got appoint
a new prime minister. As far as anybody could see,
the only thing he could possibly do is appoint another
middle of the roader to produce a budget which will
(11:08):
more or less make sense fiscally. I suppose if he
does that, then the left and the right will gang
up on the new prime minister and get rid of
him as well. So nobody knows where this is going,
and I I must admit it did somewhat sour the
great celebrations of Macron's achievement in getting the church prepared
in time.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
You tangentially, at least through Barbara having been an MP
involved in the Labor government. You guys won. That's pretty good.
Talk to me about what it's like in American politics
right now.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
American point, I.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Mean British British politics. American politics are spoken name Eric
mean about British.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Politics, British politics. There's been a turnaround. You know, that
Conservative Party was loath than and hated by the time
the election came along. They had done so many bad
things and made so many mistakes that everybody hated them.
So they voted for the Labor Party. And then the
Labor Party came into power and made a mistake. They
said we're going to have a budget in six weeks time,
(12:07):
and that was all they said. And what they didn't
realize is that when you are the government, you have
to control the media agenda right from the start, and
you have to constantly be giving the media a story
that's more or less positive about yourself, otherwise they will
make up stories than a negative.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
There's a problem we had in the US too.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
Go on.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Well, one of the things that we announced, there's a
payment made to pensioners called the Winter Fuel Allowance. Nearly
all of that money is wasted. It's very expensive. Everybody
gets it. I get it. So you know, I'm driving
around in a Rolls Royce and they're giving me three
hundred pounds to make sure I don't get cold in
the winter. It's ludicrous and the obvious thing to do
(12:50):
is only to give it to people who need it.
But that has been blown up into a betrayal of
old people and pensioners in this country now have had
a better story about them. We should have put out
the story saying most of this money is wasted because
it's given to people who already got plenty of money,
and we're going to stop giving it to rich people
(13:11):
like Ken Follett, and we're going to use some of
the extra money to give more to the people who
really needed it. That would have been a good story,
but they didn't think of that. And so what's happened
is that the right wing press has led the media
agenda and our Prime Minister, Key Kirstarma has become very unpopular.
I think he'll you know, he's only been Prime Minister
(13:31):
for about three months. He's got five years to win
it back, and I'm sure he will. But that's the
situation in British politics. At the moment that the Conservative
Party was unbelievably unpopular, they voted Labor. Now the Labor
Party is unbelievably unpopular.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
So interesting, not so dissimilar from where the United States
has found itself. Ken file It thank you so much
for joining us.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
It was a great pleasure. I was good to talk
to you more.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Louie Adlwick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and
a writer at large for Airmail, as well as the
author of Didion Babbitt's.
Speaker 1 (14:08):
Welcome to Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (14:11):
Lily God, It's so glad to be here, Mollie.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
I'm just going to talk about you in a very
annoying way. Jesse usually says to me, it's politics, it's
fast politics. So I tend not to be able to
have a lot of my friends on me because a
lot of my friends are on the culture side. But
we were like this Trump is about to take over
the federal government is a complete disaster, and people don't
(14:35):
want to listen to dire predictions on Christmas. Let's have
something that isn't soul crushing. And I was like, yes, Lily,
so here we are, Lily welcome.
Speaker 4 (14:49):
Thank you my God. To be described it, he's all crushing, Mollie.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
Yes, yes, something that won't make you want to kill
yourself on Christmas. The goal I want you to explain
to us. You're involved with a bunch of women, all
of whom are dead, many of whom are complicated. Tell
us the story of how you got here.
Speaker 4 (15:10):
Just tearing you say that, I guess I have a type. Yeah, yeah, so,
I mean this started so long ago for me with
Eve Babbitt. I didn't read her. I heard about her
through you know, Joe Esther Hass, the guy who did
Base Yes and show Girls, my favorite in Ouvra. So
he had this period where he was writing a lot
of memoirs, multiple and they were like kind of sleazy
(15:31):
and great. You know, I was reading Hollywood Animal and
he would start each chapter with like, in my memory,
he started each chapter with a quote about you know, Hollywood.
And there was one from a woman named Eve Babbitt's
and it was about sex in La and I just
thought it was so great I'd never heard of this person.
I knew she was a writer. I found out she
had all these out of print books, and I bought
(15:51):
Slowday's Fast Company and I just loved it right. And
there was nothing about her on the internet. There was
just no trace of her. All I could find out
was that she'd burnt herself nearly burned herself alive in
the nineties. So I stalked her. You know, she was
in the phone book. I would write her letters, I
would call her, and I didn't get anywhere. But then
kind of finally I started to make some headway at
Vanity Fair, and they were going to let me do
a profile on her. Not that she'd agreed to this,
(16:13):
but at that point I was close with her sister,
her cousins, She had many legions of ex boyfriends, and
I made friends with all of those people. So finally,
one day she told one of the ex boyfriends to
tell me I could take her to lunch, and I
flew to LA the next day, and that's sort of
how it all started. So I wrote the profile of her. Yeah,
petnah nuts, And I'd written a profile of her for
Vanity Fair. All her books started to get reissued, and
(16:35):
she caught on in this kind of major way. So
she'd sort of been overlooked when she was actually writing.
But you know, now it's like Kendall Jenner is photographed
in a little green bikini reading her on a yacht.
She's like stylish and wow late, you know, like a
pheno on. I didn't write. I wrote a book on
her in twenty nineteen called Hollywood's Eve. I thought I
was done with her. Then she died, and she lived
in this kind of crazy shitthole of a hellhole of ante.
(16:59):
She was smoking a cigar and she brought the match
while she was in a car, and she just let
herself on fire. Jesus, I know exactly. So she was
now and she had been so intensely social and her
like sex resume may is like no other. But she
withdrew after the fire. She completely withdrew from people. And
she was kind of like a combination of Norma Desmond
and Miss Havisham, you know, wow. And she just stank
(17:19):
and the apartment was filthy. And anyway, there were these
after she died, kind of at the back of a closet,
these boxes were found and they were they'd been packed
years before by her mother and kind of sealed with
duct tape, and they contained all her letters. And the
first letter I pulled out was this kind of like
harangue like temper tantrum and the guys of a letter
to Joan Diddon in nineteen seventy two. U, And I
(17:40):
knew I was kind of back in. I was under
contract to do a book on a totally different topic,
but I knew I kind of had to. I had
to take this on.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
I love the story. How did she start writing letters
to Joan Didion?
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Part of the same social scene in kind of Manson
Post Manson Hollywood.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (17:58):
Really interesting?
Speaker 4 (17:59):
Yeah, for sure. It's kind of the most glamorous and
the most sinister, you know, period in la I think,
you know. So they started hanging out in kind of
nineteen sixty seven, Joanan and her husband John Greg Ruby
dun they had rented this huge, kind of rambling mansion.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
I've read the pieces she wrote about it. Yeah, yeah, go.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
On, yeah, of course, you know White album is all
about that scene in that house. So it was this
kind of huge, kind of alopted mansion on Franklin Avenue
and there were a lot of parties and Eve also
had a lot of parties and a guy named Earl
mc grath and kind of on the scene. It was
like Jennis Joplin. It was you know, Michelle Phillips of
the Mamas and the Papas. It was kind of Hair
Harris imported in his drug dealing in Perpentry Days aired again,
(18:37):
who ran Atlantic Records. So it was kind of these
kind of great cast of characters, kind of flamboyant kind
of artists in flamboyant low lives, and they were really close.
And Evie at that time finding she was a visual
artist at that time and she was designing record albums,
so she had just done a big Buffalo Springfield album,
Buffalo Springfield Again. And she and Joan were very close.
And it was Joan who got her published, you know,
who got her into Rolling Stone magazine, which at that
(18:59):
time was such a huge deal, and then got agreed
to edit her very first book. So they were wow, yeah,
look on seriously intimate terms. And Eve in turn, you know,
Eve was fucking Jim Morrison and Joan was fascinated by him. So,
you know, that kind of famous scene Joan at the
doors recording session. Eve got her there, you know, Eve
was there too that day, but she brought Joan in.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
So what happens next in this relationship between these two women, Yeah, well.
Speaker 4 (19:25):
What happens next? So Joan agrees to edit Eve's book
and Eve kind of the word Eve would use with
her boyfriend Paul orshe was I fired Joan. Joan did
not actually work for her, but there exxactly, but like
the sensibility wise, I mean, Eve was enraged by Joan.
I think Joan wanted her to be more disciplined, you know,
(19:45):
perish the thought, and encouraged her to read more Graham Green.
Somehow she was antithetical to Eve's idea of art and
writing and the fake world, you know. But they kind
of were still in one another's orbit. Like I've had
a serious boyfriend, naed Dan Wakefield, who was a writer
and who was an old friend of Jones. They were
just kind of all over each other in kind of
the late sixties through the seventies. Joan had a secretariat,
(20:06):
a woman named Tina Moore, and that was one of
Eve's girlfriends. So they just were kind of on top
of each other that whole period.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Wow, So that's how you got to this story.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
Yeah, And really what I had meant to do. So
I was supposed to be writing a book for Scribner
on Bennington College class of nineteen eighty six, which is,
you know, Brady Sonelli's Dot A Churt Jonathan Latham. I
was prepared to do that. Evie dies, I see all
these letters, I really feel like I owe it to
Eve to get it right. And when I read these letters,
which were all kind of unsent letters, it was letters
she saved but never sent, so they really, you know,
(20:38):
like a diary basically, and I'd gotten things wrong, you
know when I was interviewing Eve over you know, for
a period of ten years, her brain was crumbling from
the Huntington's. She was also a book open and not forthcoming.
So there were things I had missed, and you know,
and really it was her emotional life that she had
kept from me. So these letters were still revelatory. But
my plan was to kind of write a long piece
for Vanity Fair on this letter Eve wrote Joan in
(21:00):
seventy two, which I did, stick that as in an
introduction and then just interspersed letters throughout, you know, sort
of have a revised you know, like a DVD extra version, right.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Right, you started out with something easy or what seemed
like it might be easy.
Speaker 4 (21:15):
Well, that's exactly it. Like I was lying to my
you know how, both of these big projects. I thought
maybe I could do four to six weeks work and
in and out. But then it just hijacked my life.
And it's sort of was I was revising and kind
of totally rewriting, like rewriting from scratch of course, you know.
And at a certain point I realized I was writing
a shadow a shadow book on Joan Didion, you know,
So that's sort of how it happened.
Speaker 1 (21:35):
What So that's where you got to Joan Didion.
Speaker 4 (21:39):
Yeah, And it started to seem to me that these
two women were kind of opposites who were also doubles,
and they were on the exact same scene and it
was kind of thrilling and like material for both of them.
Their approach was opposite, right, even the participants. She was
sleeping with everybody. I'm an Ertican, Harrison Ford, J. Morrison,
she was sleeping with everybody. She was doing every drug,
(22:02):
any drug that kind of came into her view she
was doing. So she was kind of that person on
the scene and Joan was she was like the participant,
and then Joan was just the observer, right married, you know,
just kind of off to the side and watching. And
Joan was sort of a craftsman or a crafts person
in her approach to writing, and Eve was improvisitory. They
just they just stroke me as and kind of each
(22:23):
got under the other's skin. I mean, so the letter
that he wrote writes Joan in nineteen seventy two. So
Eve's enraged because Joan, that's the pretext of the letter.
She wants to kind of chastise Joan for neglecting or
disregarding Virginia Wolf. Then she sort of goes on to
a piece Joan had just written for the New York
Times on the women's movement, and Joan really puts down
the women's movement, and.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
She I'm shocked. I mean, the subtext here is that
Joan Didion is a secret conservative and she is equal
parts Ross do thodd and other things.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
Well, I mean that's not wrong, that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:57):
She's more complicated than that. But yes, go on, y.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
It's more complicated. But yeah, I mean, you could put
it in those terms and be totally accurate. But I
think it was more like Eve also had her problem
with the women's movement. I think she didn't like its style,
you know, she just but she was like, I think
she was so enraged that Joan was saying it didn't
have a point. She was I think she felt that
Joanes sold out women to getting good with men, right,
like Joan wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Right, which sounds that sounds absolutely one hundred percent As
a big Joan Diddion fan, that sounds one hundred percent right.
Speaker 4 (23:26):
Just kind of is and it's not even like a
well Joan for it, because like Joane's born in thirty four,
and it's kind of like if you wanted to be
taken seriously as a writer, not as a woman's writer,
which was a way of kind of patriots Like.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, yeah, it was a put down I know from
my mother.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
Yeah, you would know, you know better than anybody exactly
what kind of a put down it was. And it
was a way of kind of taking you out of
contention for you know, to be a big writer basically.
And I understand why Joan did what she did, but
you know, Eve felt that not only did Joan sell
out women to getting good with men, but that she
kind of sold out La to getting good with New York,
you know, so I think you know it was, but
(24:01):
she also totally admired Joan, and I think really admired
Joan's ability kind of to maneuver, you know.
Speaker 1 (24:07):
Yeah, So explain to us what happens next.
Speaker 4 (24:12):
Well, I mean, technically Eve survives the seventies in the sense.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
That she that's a great line.
Speaker 4 (24:19):
Technically, I'm sorry to say so. She calls she has
this great term squalid over boogie. It's like when you're
fucking too much, when you're doing too many drugs, you
just fucked and drugged yourself out right, you're just what
And she really she really hit that in the late seventies.
So the best book she did comes out in seventy
seven called Slowdaspath Company. She does it with Kannop. It's
like everything comes together for her right. She's on exactly
(24:40):
the right drugs. She's with the exact right guy, All Roche,
who's kind of both who's who's not really straight, he's
kind of highly sexual with Herbert really prefers men, and
so he's kind of elusive in a way that's she likes, yeah,
and keeps her on her toes. She's got just the
right editor and Vicki Wilson at Kannop who kind of
takes this, Oh.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yeah, who's still there, right, or maybe she's retired now,
but she was there for.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
A long time.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
I can't believe you know that, Yes, that's exactly right.
She's just gone. But she took a very strong hand
with Eve and really helped Eva's structuring. Eva's no good
at structuring. Surprise, surprise, you know. And anyway, she's and
I somehow she was like using just the right amount
of coke to get her going, but not you know,
make her and then it all tips over in the
late seventies and she's it's just all too much, so
kind of to save herself, she's sort of by eighty two,
(25:25):
she writes two kind of not good novels. She sort
of loses faith, and she's kind of loses confidence and
in her form, right, she was writing novels, but they
were really they were in the form of short stories,
but they were really novels. She basically invented a form
to express herself and it was great. Then she tries
to be conventional and write a novel and they're just duds.
So at any rate, she's kind of she's exhausted herself
and she decides to get clean, and she never really
(25:48):
does good work again. So she technically survives the decade,
but really is a casualty of it. And Joan is
the one who kind of ends up writing. I mean
Slowda's Fast Company is I think as good as anything
Joan did Joan is the one who kind of takes
ownership of the Franklin Avenue scene when she writes White Album,
So he's kind of over after the seventies and Joan
very much is not.
Speaker 1 (26:08):
And so then you start writing about Joan and where
Eve Babbitt does not have anyone in the world and
has forgotten to history, Joan Didion is an industrial complex
and has all different problems. So talk to me about
that well.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
I mean, nobody manages a career better than Joan did
in Each My Monster, like in the history of American letters,
I mean, she just gets more and more, she gets
bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think there's a
really interesting kind of inflection point in two thousand. I
want to say two thousand or two thousand and one.
I think two thousand. There's a CNN interview and you
can find it on YouTube and Joan is getting interviewed
on some c SPAN show and it's right career retrospective,
(26:48):
and it's about what a big deal she is. And
there's a call in portion and Eve calls in. It's
unbelievable because Eves just survived the fire, but she's about
like in two thousand and one is when hunting takes
over and she didn't know what was coming. You know,
her father actually died of it, but her mother, because
Huntington's is genetic, you have a fifty percent chance the
moble brought the hospital or brought someone to call in
(27:10):
and lie to her two daughters. But the father died
of a tomor not Huntington's. I get why she did it,
you know, in a way like there's nothing they can
do well. But and I think that's partly why Eve
was being so self destructive in the late seventies, because
she could see what was happening to her father and
she was sure it was going to happen to her,
and it was. It was exactly so two thousand and one,
that's when the brain starts to crumble. So in two
(27:31):
thousand and one, of is of course when John Donne
will die and the marriage turns out to be much
more complicated than I ever would have guessed. One of
the people I came to late in my research was
Noel Prmontel, who was jones kind of first lover and
first mentor in the late fifties. And he was a
sort of flashbuckling Southern guy from New Orleans, from kind
of a grand family. So I'm always in a white
(27:51):
suit and fought with everybody. I wrote for the Nation
and for Esquire, And he'd already kind of been in
the Marines and Iowajima. He was older, had a wife
and children, and already's book from the life and with
a total kind of hard drinker and woman eight sir,
and you know Joe, and both had overheels for him.
And he he's the guy who gets her into print,
like he gets her first byline her first novel, which
(28:13):
nobody is interested in. It gets turned down by a
dozen publishers and she's distraught. He bolways a guy named
Ivan Oblenski into publishing it even doesn't like the book,
but he's sort of hugely instrumental in her early career,
and she kind of had written him out of her
origin story and kind of the most interesting fact of
all to me. It was such a shock. You know.
He was ninety seven when I met him. I interviewed
him in his house in the country, and he had
(28:35):
told me that he finally kind of made her understand
he would never marry her and never give her children.
And she had a nervous breakdown, which she writes about, yes.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Yes, yeah, yeah, goodbye to all that, right.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
Yeah, And she obliquely kind of you know that there's
a kind of a I have a Hemingway ass figure
in the background who's causing her torment.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
It's really unseat but yes.
Speaker 4 (28:54):
Yeah, very much on and said, but you can kind
of into it it and you can feel it in
her books, particularly in her novel, she always about Noel.
But he sees she's distressed and he wants to help,
so he says, marry this guy. And it's some guy.
It was a guy who was like an acolyte of his,
like just like a little puppy dob who used to
hang around him and worship him. And that was John
Gregory Dunn. And remember Noel said to me he had
(29:14):
no interest in her, She had no interest in him,
but she kind of just did what Noel said, And
I think it was because that was her kind of
way of marrying Noel. Noel was always staying with them
when he'd come to Los Angeles to do his Hollywood business,
and she would always go to him for advice when
there was trouble in the marriage with John, or when
she was having work trouble. He was like her husband,
you know, in so many ways. And you know, the
marriage with John, you know, it was upsetting. You know,
(29:37):
he was very hard drinking, he was violent. I just
would hear, I would hear about this crazy temper. And
I also heard that he was not you know a
lot of people had kind of told me he wasn't.
He was gay, right, yeah, at the very least bisexual.
So it was not an easy marriage. But he was
a wonderful editor for her and I you know, and
I remember Noel saying this to me. He said to me,
I'd edit Joan, but I wouldn't do it word by word.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
You know.
Speaker 4 (29:58):
John would go over every line with her, every single lines.
I think that was huge for her to have somebody
that committed to her career, you know, partners in screenwriting,
and I mean, I think it was like a totally
successful marriage for what she wanted. It was great for
her career, but it was, you know, a complicated situation.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
So interesting. Oh my god, this is such an incredible,
incredible story and also just so interesting. I am so
excited to read both these books. I'm going to read
them on vacation.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
I'm quite excited what yours. Kara's telling you great things.
Speaker 1 (30:32):
Oh, I have a book coming out in June. For
anyone who still can stand me. Thank you, thank you,
thank you, Loly oh Molli.
Speaker 4 (30:40):
This was a blast.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend
and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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