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