She is not yet a star, but she has already acquired a flattering reputation. In 1965, at just 30 years old, Joan Didion was about to leave the magazine vogue, where she spent seven years. She had entered it as a proofreader, before climbing the ladder to become one of the feathers of the editorial staff. Two years earlier, she had already published a first novel, Run River (A season of nights, published by Grasset in 2014). Soon, she will become one of the keenest observers of life in Hollywood, but also and above all of the emergence of the counter-culture, in particular for Esquire And Life.
But, for the time being, she accepts a proposal from the weekly Tea Saturday Evening Post : that of meeting a myth, in the person of John Wayne, on the set of his new western, The Four Sons by Katie Elder. It’s 141e John Wayne movie, the 59e directed by Henry Hathaway and, incidentally, the 44e screen appearance of Dean Martin. After a three-month delay, the team was finally able to shoot the exteriors in Durango, Mexico, and is settling in for the final days of filming at studios near Mexico City, Estudios Churubusco. John Wayne should find time there more easily to meet a journalist.
The proposals of Saturday Evening Post are those that cannot be refused. The title indeed remunerates its contributors very well. The journalist has just returned to her native California and settled in Los Angeles, with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, a journalist from Time who will quickly become a prominent novelist and screenwriter. The couple, who are leading the way, need money. They drive in a sports car, a Corvette in front of which Joan Didion poses in 1968 in a long mesh dress for a series of images that will become famous. They appreciate good restaurants and would like to leave the Los Feliz district for Malibu, where the Hollywood stars and producers live, whose actions they wish to chronicle. But it’s not just to pay the bills that Joan Didion accepts the magazine’s proposal: John Wayne is the idol of her childhood.
She is only a little girl when, accompanied by her little brother, she sees him for the first time at the cinema. It’s 1943, at Peterson Field in Colorado Springs, where his parents work, and there’s not much to do in this military camp. Apart from admiring the first B-29 – which has gone down in history as the plane that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and going to the movies.
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