Book Review: The White Album, by Joan Didion (1979)

Joan Didion with her Corvette on a paperback cover of The White Album, first released in 1979.

Joan Didion’s 1979 essay collection The White Album starts with a bang. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion writes. That’s become probably Didion’s most famous quotation, one that you can find in every corner of the internet. It’s perhaps a simple statement, but no one before Didion had said it so bluntly. 

Joan Didion has many obsessions. Shopping malls, orchids, the Santa Ana winds, traffic, dams. We learn about many of these obsessions in The White Album. The book’s centerpiece is the title essay, a 35-page sprawl through the tense paranoia that was California in the late 1960’s. Didion encounters strange people at her door, Didion encounters the Doors at a recording session. Didion meets Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, and sees campus unrest at San Francisco State College.

Didion writes about the Charles Manson murders, and the shockwaves they sent through the Hollywood community: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.” (p.47) I think Didion makes an excellent point here. In many ways, the hippie dream of the 1960’s ended with the violent apocalyptic visions of Charles Manson. 

The essay “Holy Water” details Didion’s fascinations with water and dams, a subject that is quite obviously still near and dear to the hearts of Californians today, forty-two years after Didion’s essay was written. Didion visits the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project, where water flow for many areas is controlled. 

“Many Mansions” details the travails of the California Governor’s Mansion. The original mansion, built in 1877, housed the state’s governors from 1903 until 1967. Then Ronald Reagan’s friends and benefactors built a giant new house in the suburb of Carmichael. This house wasn’t finished when Reagan left office, and at the time Didion wrote her essay, the house was gathering dust as then-Governor Jerry Brown refused to live in it. (The state eventually sold the house in 1982.) Didion contrasts the styles of the two houses, much preferring the old Second Empire-Italianate mansion in downtown Sacramento. (It helps that Didion was friends with Earl Warren’s daughter, so she occasionally visited the house.) In the kitchen of that old mansion is a pastry marble, and we get to see some of Didion’s snobbery when she takes a public tour of the mansion and no one knows what a pastry marble is used for! Shock! Horror! Didion writes, “It occurred to me that we had finally evolved a society in which knowledge of a pastry marble, like a taste for stairs and closed doors, could be construed as ‘elitist.’” (p.72) Well, knowledge of a pastry marble doesn’t necessarily make you elitist, but if you have one in your house, it’s definitely a luxury item. 

I’m not going to say anything about Didion’s controversial 1972 essay “The Women’s Movement.” Suffice it to say, Didion was not running to the barricades with Gloria Steinem. You can read it and judge for yourself. 

The White Album is an excellent collection, and I enjoyed it more than Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion’s voice seems more developed by the time she wrote The White Album, so even the shortest pieces in the book still capture the reader’s interest and contain great writing. 

Throughout The White Album we learn more about Joan Didion. She gets migraines. She was obsessed with shopping malls for a time: “I recall staying late in my pale-blue office on the twentieth floor of the Graybar Building to memorize David D. Bohannon’s parking ratios.” (p.182) She’s haunted by the image of the Hoover Dam: “Since the afternoon in 1967 when I first saw Hoover Dam, its image has never been entirely absent from my inner eye.” (p.198) She writes of moving to Malibu: “I had not before 1971 and will probably not again live in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.” (p.209) Well, not unless she moves to Bel Air. 

Joan Didion is something of an enigma, a contradiction. She writes so much about her own fragility: she is incapacitated by migraines, she tells us how she doesn’t have a watch with her when she’s traveling for an assignment, which keeps her constantly calling down to the front desk to ask them the time. When she’s called the front desk too many times, she calls her husband at home to ask him the time. She is afraid of driving her rental car over the Carquinez Bridge spanning the San Francisco Bay. (Didion incorrectly spells it “Carquinas,” a misspelling that persists in the 2009 edition of The White Album.) She gives us more than a page from her own psychiatric report. 

And yet, for all this talk of fragility, I can’t help but feel that Joan Didion must be a very strong person to have made a living as a freelance writer for the last sixty years. I wonder if she isn’t hiding her strength behind her fragility.

The Beatles' Break-up

The Beatles at their last photo session together, at John's house, Tittenhurst Park, August 22, 1969.

After reading Mojo magazine's latest issue about the recording of Abbey Road, and Mikal Gilmore's article "Why the Beatles Broke Up," in Rolling Stone, I've been thinking a lot more about the Beatles' break-up. Why exactly did it happen? Who or what was to blame? Business squabbles, Yoko, the group just growing apart, Paul being too bossy, Yoko, what was it? I can't claim to answer that question in one mere blog post, but I'm going to explore some of the issues that drove the band apart.

The roots of the Beatles break-up go back to 1967, and the death of their manager Brian Epstein. After Brian died, there was a leadership void within the band. (Obviously, Brian didn't order them around, but he was still an influence on the band.) Paul McCartney was the Beatle who started leading the group after Brian died, despite John Lennon being the oldest and the perceived leader. Paul was the one who came up with the concept for Sgt. Pepper and the Magical Mystery Tour TV special, which he basically directed. In time, I think that Lennon came to resent McCartney's "takeover" of the band, and he felt that Paul was usurping his own place in the band. The group's 1968 trip to India with the Maharishi was one time when George was able to assert his leadership and get all the others on board with him. But after the White Album, it was back to Paul being the leader, as he had the idea that the group should tour again and play some small club gigs. (This started out as the Get Back sessions, which became the movie and album Let It Be.)

Part of the reason that Paul seems to have gotten his way so much in the last few years of the group's life is that no one else seemed to have any alternatives. It wasn't as though John had a different idea that got shot down by everyone else, it really seems like Paul was the only one who was willing to articulate a vision for the band. Why was that? Were the other members just that apathetic? If John was frustrated by feeling like Paul was always getting his own way, why didn't John suggest some alternatives? For whatever reason, John essentially abdicated his own leadership role in the band, and Paul was willing to take on that role. Why did John back down from leading the band? Was it the burden of his drug addictions, (LSD in 1966-67, heroin in 1968-69) his problems at home-his failing marriage to Cynthia and emerging relationship with Yoko? We'll probably never know for sure.

When the Beatles started recording the White Album, things changed dramatically. These sessions, which lasted from May 30th to October 15th, 1968, were fraught with tension among the band members, and it was during these sessions that Ringo quit the band for two weeks. And not only did the Beatles' arguments reach new heights, they now had a new person attending all of their recording sessions: Yoko Ono, John's new girlfriend. John's decision to have Yoko continually by his side at Abbey Road must have rankled the other three members of the group. And, as far as I can tell, there was little discussion between John and the other three about their new addition. One day Yoko was simply there. By his actions, John was straining his relationship with the rest of the band. But somehow the group finished the White Album, which was released on November 22, 1968.

On January 2, 1969, the Beatles met at Twickenham film studios to start recording Get Back. The plan was to film the group rehearsing new songs in preparation for a live concert. It was Paul's idea, as he thought they should "get back" to their roots by doing concerts in small clubs. Which wasn't a bad idea, and under different circumstances it might have worked. I've always thought that one of the problems with Get Back is that it followed so quickly on the heels of the White Album. Work finished on the White Album in mid-October, and just two and a half months later they were rehearsing and recording their new album! I think the group probably needed a longer break from each other, they probably should have taken six months off! But anyway, the Beatles were back, and Paul was excited, even if no one else was. So, if no one else was as excited as Paul, why did they agree to the project? Again, it simply seems to be that no one offered any alternative ideas. That's always been a paradox of the Beatles' break-up, the story is that Paul was "bossy," but no one else was standing up and offering alternative plans. What was Paul to do?

The Get Back sessions made the White Album sessions look like fun. On January 10th, just a week into the sessions, George Harrison quit the group. George came back, but on the condition that the concert idea be dropped. It's easy to understand why George was pissed off with the group. He was tired of only getting one song per album side, especially since he was writing songs that were just as good as John and Paul's. (On the White Album, George got exactly one song on each side.) George felt marginalized and neglected by both John and Paul. Although much is made of George's resentment of Paul's bossiness, (see the Let It Be clip where George tells Paul, "I'll play whatever it is you want me to play.") Harrison's relationship with John Lennon was also fracturing. According to the Rolling Stone article, on January 10th, the day George quit, "Harrison and Lennon got into a fight that they later had to deny came to blows." Clearly George's relationship with John had seriously deteriorated.

Somehow the band was able to put things aside long enough to play an impromptu concert on the roof of the Apple building on January 30th, their last live performance. The Get Back project was left not-quite finished, and the group kept recording new material throughout the spring. John and Paul recorded "The Ballad of John and Yoko" on their own during one mid-April session. In July they began intensive studio sessions for what was to become their final LP, Abbey Road. George Martin said, "Let It Be was a miserable experience and I never thought that we would get back together again." And somehow they managed to. Paul McCartney said in Mojo, "We'd had bad times, and the relief of just getting back together again and doing what we knew and not asking too many questions was quite a pleasure." No one walked out during the Abbey Road sessions, so they must have been relatively harmonious. Although, at one point, John wanted all of his songs on one side of the album and all of Paul's songs on the other! (Maybe this is why on side one John's songs open and close the side, and Paul's are in the middle, with George and Ringo's separating them.)

But just around the time Abbey Road was released in September, John Lennon dropped a bombshell on his bandmates: he was breaking up the group. Paul and Allen Klein were able to persuade him to not say anything publicly. So why did John say he was leaving? Why was he so fed up with the band? He had the latitude to release his experimental noodlings with Yoko as solo albums, so what more did he want? I don't know the answer to this question, and I'm not sure that John Lennon himself knew the answer. He just knew that he wanted something other than the Beatles. John was a very insecure person, and I think he felt threatened by Paul's continued leadership of the band. But even though John resented this, he didn't seem to be able to tell Paul this, so Paul just went on leading the group, or trying to.

Would the Beatles have been able to survive as a group if they had let members release solo works? Clearly George would have jumped at the chance to record his own album in 1969. But would everyone have just cherry-picked their best songs for their solo records and left the group with their leftovers? Who knows, but it might have placated John and George, at least for a while.

So for the next six months, nothing really happened with the Beatles. All the members concentrated on their solo work. It was only when Paul tried to release his solo album McCartney, and the date interfered with the scheduled release of Let It Be that things came out in public. John and George tried to get Paul to change his release date, to let Let It Be come out first, and they sent Ringo as their emissary to talk to Paul. Ringo went to Paul's house, and McCartney quickly became incensed, and threw Ringo out of his house. Paul drafted a Q&A to be included with advance copies of McCartney, and he made it clear that he had no plans to record with the Beatles in the future. Lennon was pissed off because Paul had preempted him, as it appeared at the time that Paul was leaving the group. Paul later said, "I was the last one to leave!" What would have happened had Paul not "left" the group in April of 1970? Would anyone have said anything? Would they have somehow recorded more music together? That seems pretty unlikely, as it had been 8 months since the last Beatles recording session, and there were no plans for them to record together again. Really, it was a strange and sad end for the group, but there you have it.

There are so many other issues I didn't even get to, like Allen Klein's attempt to manage the Beatles, and McCartney's battle against Klein, John and Paul losing control of their music publishing, the whole Apple business...there just isn't time right now, maybe in a future post.