Why did Joan Didion abandon her book about the Manson murders?

Washington Post

2 days ago

In late July 1970, at the beginning of the murder trial of Charles Manson and three young women in his Family, a 21-year-old named Linda Kasabian took the stand. Kasabian had recently given birth to her second child, and journalists noted how different this turncoat appeared from the other strange, seemingly feral Manson girls sitting at the defense table. By comparison, Kasabian exuded innocence: Her wide-set green eyes, blonde pigtails and 'little girl's voice' were regularly noted in coverage of the trial — even though this serene accomplice managed to make even veteran crime reporters blanch when she recounted the events of Aug. 9, 1969: the horrific slaughter of actress Sharon Tate, then eight months pregnant, and four others.
Kasabian had driven the getaway car from the 'Tate residence,' as she primly referred to 10050 Cielo Drive during her testimony, and had been briefly present at the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca when Manson's followers murdered them the day after the Tate killings. Initially charged with seven counts of murder and one of conspiracy, Kasabian had agreed to become the prosecution's star witness in exchange for immunity. The intrigue surrounding her was palpable.
Toward the end of her grueling 18-day testimony, during which she described the relentless orgies and acid trips at Spahn Ranch, the Family's headquarters, Kasabian revealed during cross-examination that she was working on a book about her life with 'author Joan Didion.' The defense lawyers hoped that the revelation would help discredit Kasabian as a seeker of fame and fortune. For other reporters and writers already entrenched in their own ambitious book projects about Manson's world — including an underground press reporter and poet named Ed Sanders and prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi — this exclusive arrangement with Didion was very unwelcome news. Few in the trial press corps had detected Didion's presence when she visited the courtroom earlier in Kasabian's testimony: She had been discreetly seated not in the media section but among the public spectators.
The press corps covering the trial was 'big enough to start its own country,' recalled one crime reporter. Two quickie, sensationalist Manson books had been released before the trial even began. Rolling Stone had just run a blockbuster cover story featuring interviews with Manson and prosecutor Aaron Stovitz. One of the story's co-authors, a young music reporter named David Dalton, had, along with his wife, essentially embedded with Manson Family members who were still at Spahn Ranch. Sanders had been working on his own Manson book since early 1970, and Bugliosi had quietly planted his co-author, Curt Gentry, in the courtroom.
In a crowded, feverishly competitive field, a book by Didion posed a unique threat. Following the publication in 1967 of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem,' her report for the Saturday Evening Post on the onetime hippie nirvana in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, which had spiraled into hellish dissolution (the country's 'center was not holding,' it began), and the release of her essay collection of the same name the following year, Didion was seen by many as a cultural clairvoyant. Letters to her from solicitous editors at publications across the country revealed their view of her as uniquely equipped to parse for readers just exactly what the hell was going on with America's youth and what it all portended for the nation's soul. Even better that she was a product of, and a critic of, California, a place by then becoming accepted — sometimes begrudgingly — by those same editors as a cultural nexus and bellwether.
Luckily for the other writers immersed in the Manson world (some of whom were buying dead bolts for their doors), Didion's book with Kasabian did not ultimately come to fruition. As I've researched my own book in progress about coverage of the Manson saga, I've been flummoxed by the reasons behind Didion's apparent abandonment of the book, which had commanded a substantial monetary advance and received its own wave of media attention. What journalist would give up that sort of coveted exclusive? When others questioned Didion throughout the 1970s about the project's fate, she often gave vague responses. Members of the Manson Family were reportedly smug that she had walked away, convinced that their intimidation efforts against other journalists may have done the trick with her, too.
About a year after Didion's death near the end of 2021, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired her papers, along with those of her husband and longtime creative partner, John Gregory Dunne: more than 300 boxes of the couple's writings, records, photos and other memorabilia. When the archive opened this year, I scored the first appointment to view it and flew to New York from Los Angeles, with hopes of finding material related to the Kasabian project.
When the archivist gave me a box containing some of Didion's reporting materials from the late 1960s and early 1970s, I sat for a moment before opening it. I willed it to be a trove but steeled myself for disappointment. Then I opened it and saw the item right at the top: a neatly stapled, 10-page document typed on onionskin paper bearing the simple title 'Linda.' I scanned it quickly, hands trembling. I felt certain I was holding a fragile draft of literary history, possibly even an early version of an unpublished 'White Album' essay on Kasabian and her role in the Manson trial. Also in the box was a stack of neatly typed notes from Didion's interviews and interactions with Kasabian and other Manson-related research.
Like much of Didion's published reporting, the 'Linda' document used a collage approach to journalism, weaving together her keen observations, snippets of dialogue with the principals, and fragments from the trial transcript in which Kasabian talked about drug use and orgies at Spahn Ranch. It was a rough draft by Didion's standards, but an evocative and complete essay by almost anyone else's. I spotted elements that Didion ultimately used in 'The White Album,' an essay published in 1979 in which she briefly recounted some impressions from jailhouse interviews she had conducted with Kasabian ('Each of the half-dozen doors that locked behind us as we entered Sybil Brand was a little death, and I would emerge after the interview like Persephone from the underworld, euphoric, elated,' she recalled) and her interactions with Kasabian's attorney, Gary Fleischman, who had helped broker the book deal. Didion also wrote in 'The White Album' of Kasabian telling her that she dreamed of someday owning a restaurant/boutique/pet store. It was the stuff of absurdity, Didion wrote, and the 'juxtaposition of the spoken and the unspeakable' — i.e. the slaughters in which Kasabian had been an accomplice — 'was eerie and unsettling.'
But these were just crumbs; the quantity and quality of material that Didion had relegated to her archives were astonishing. In 'Linda,' there were glimpses of quintessentially idiosyncratic Didion, too, as she discerned significance in details that everyone else in the teeming Manson press corps had missed or deemed irrelevant.
Leaving coverage of the gorier details entirely to that crew (the 'freakathon' theatrics of the trial, as reporter Ed Sanders put it), Didion carved out her own angle on the circus. Yes, she wanted to know how someone like Kasabian, so seemingly subdued and maternal, could have willingly joined Manson's cadre of murderous sex slaves. But she also wanted to use a study of Kasabian as a way to understand what had gone so desperately awry with 'these children of the late forties,' as she put it in her unpublished notes. The approach was reminiscent of her pilgrimage to study the hippies of Haight-Ashbury in 1967.
In the 'Linda' document, Didion noted the unnerving properness of Kasabian's diction on the witness stand and her 'Magdalene quality, there under the flags of the United States of America and the State of California.' She described the titillating effect of the proceedings on visitors who had managed to score seats to the show — a microcosm of the nation's ghoulish fascination with the case.
'This was really worth waiting for,' one attendee told Didion. 'Just to see them in person,' swooned another.
In her jailhouse interviews with Kasabian — and in later interviews with her in New York and in her home state, New Hampshire — Didion dug deep into her subject's early life. Kasabian told her that her childhood had been impoverished but occasionally happy, until her father abandoned the family 'just before I entered school,' adding that she'd always hoped he'd come back and that he'd given her a parting gift of 'a whole bunch of pennies.' Soon a violent, predatory stepfather entered the picture. Kasabian spoke of her early sexual precocity, her early marriages, her flirtations with the counterculture — and her urgent desire to get out of small-town New England. Any escape route would do. Life at Spahn Ranch was discussed in detail, as well as Kasabian's fleeing from the ranch after the Tate and LaBianca murders.
Perhaps the most grimly startling scene that Didion documented involved a visit she made with Kasabian and her young kids to Howdy's, a burger joint near Kasabian's ramshackle home in New Hampshire. Kasabian's children — one she had briefly abandoned at Spahn Ranch; the other was born in prison as she waited to testify — ordered hamburgers, french fries and Cokes. Didion observed with incredulousness: It seemed like such a normal, quintessentially American family outing.
'Linda had gone from Howdy's to the Spahn Ranch to Cielo Drive and now she was back at Howdy's, and none of it seemed to make much difference,' Didion wrote in her notes. 'It seemed to me sometimes that she had been in clinical shock all her life, and only the slightest accident or rupture of circumstances had taken her to Cielo Drive at all, this somnambulist from the depressed underside of New England.'
Kasabian and her family also joined Didion in New York City around that time. Didion recounted in 'The White Album' an excursion with this onetime Manson disciple to see the Statue of Liberty, her young children again in tow; Didion brought along her own young daughter, Quintana Roo. In her unpublished notes, Didion wrote that the kids — oblivious to the horrific events that had brought Kasabian and Didion together in the first place — sang 'Jumping Jack Flash' and played together on the Staten Island Ferry. On a visit to Henri Bendel, an upscale Fifth Avenue department store, Kasabian overheard on the music speakers 'Piggies' by the Beatles, a song from which Manson had drawn sinister inspiration. She ran to the bathroom to throw up.
Didion decided, in mid-1971, about a year after the Manson trial began, not to write the Kasabian book — at least not as it was originally conceived. Kasabian became a recluse; while she had been released from her legal obligation of exclusivity for the Didion project, she never spoke at such length with any other reporter. (She died in 2023, at 73.)
Meanwhile, Didion stashed away her material for nearly a decade: 'The White Album,' with its brief mentions of Kasabian and the Manson saga — about 1,000 words extracted from Didion's reams of reporting — was savvily released just weeks before the 10th anniversary of the murders. During the investigations and trial, some journalists practically sold their souls for comparatively insignificant Manson scoops, which they scrambled to publish as quickly as possible. More reporters had since vied for access to the reclusive Kasabian, with no success. Yet Didion had unapologetically taken what she wanted from their interactions, coolly strategized how to best use it to her literary advantage.
By the time 'The White Album' was released, other writers had published big, noisy Manson books: Sanders's lurid account, 'The Family,' came out in 1971. Prosecutor Bugliosi released 'Helter Skelter' in 1974; it became the best-selling true crime book in history. But in the afterword to the 20th-anniversary edition of the book, Bugliosi quoted Didion's famous words in 'The White Album' to illustrate how the terrifying murders had defined the era: 'Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969 … and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.'
While Bugliosi's book remains a widely read albeit controversial true-crime classic, Didion ultimately claimed a different sort of literary prize, burnishing that clairvoyant reputation with her narrower investigation. Other writers had devoted years and thousands of pages to deciphering the Manson morass, yet she was able to use her findings to define one of the most tumultuous decades in American history in a single, bare-bones essay, years after the fact.
Didion did privately acknowledge that the definitive 'why' behind the ordeal remained elusive to her, even after the many hours she spent with one of the saga's protagonists.
'Everything that came to my attention about situations with Linda came down to the same thing: the paradox, the ordinariness of the situation and the extraordinariness of the fact, the mystery (in the theological sense) of the night on Cielo Drive,' she mused in her unpublished notes. 'I could not penetrate that mystery, or avoid it or evade it or get beyond it.'
Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist and historian. She is the author, most recently, of 'Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.' She is currently finishing her book on the Manson saga, 'A Devil's Bargain.'