Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

into the swimming pool. “Those fire guys might’ve just given it up,” Wayne said. “Just let it burn.” In fact this was a good story, and one incorporating several of their favorite themes, but a Bel Air story was still not a Durango story.
    In the early afternoon they began the last scene, and although they spent as much time as possible setting it up, the moment finally came when there was nothing to do but shoot it. “Second team out, first team in, doors closed ’’ the assistant director shouted one last time. The stand-ins walked off the set, John Wayne and Martha Hyer walked on. “All right, boys, silencio , this is a picture.” They took it twice. Twice the girl offered John Wayne the tattered Bible. Twice John Wayne told her that “there’s a lot of places I go where that wouldn’t fit in.” Everyone was very still. And at 2:30 that Friday afternoon Henry Hathaway turned away from the camera, and in the hush that followed he ground out his cigar in a sand bucket. “O. K. ,” he said. “That’s it.”
     
    Since that summer of 1943 I had thought of John Wayne in a number of ways. I had thought of him driving cattle up from Texas, and bringing airplanes in on a single engine, thought of him telling the girl at the Alamo that “Republic is a beautiful word.” I had never thought of him having dinner with his family and with me and my husband in an expensive restaurant in Chapultepec Park, but time brings odd mutations, and there we were, one night that last week in Mexico. For a while it was only a nice evening, an evening anywhere. We had a lot of drinks and I lost the sense that the face across the table was in certain ways more familiar than my husband’s.
    And then something happened. Suddenly the room seemed suffused with the dream, and I could not think why. Three men appeared out of nowhere, playing guitars. Pilar Wayne leaned slightly forward, and John Wayne lifted his glass almost imperceptibly toward her. “We’ll need some Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table,” he said, “and some red Bordeaux for the Duke.” We all smiled, and drank the Pouilly-Fuisse for the rest of the table and the red Bordeaux for the Duke, and all the while the men with the guitars kept playing, until finally I realized what they were playing, what they had been playing all along: “The Red River Valley” and the theme from The High and the Mighty . They did not quite get the beat right, but even now I can hear them, in another country and a long time later, even as I tell you this.
    1965
     
     

 

     
     

    Where The Kissing Never Stops
     
     
    outside the monterey county courthouse in Salinas, California, the Downtown Merchants’ Christmas decorations glittered in the thin sunlight that makes the winter lettuce grow. Inside, the crowd blinked uneasily in the blinding television lights. The occasion was a meeting of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, and the issue, on this warm afternoon before Christmas 1965, was whether or not a small school in the Carmel Valley, the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, owned by Miss Joan Baez, was in violation of Section 32-C of the Monterey County Zoning Code, which prohibits land use “detrimental to the peace, morals, or general welfare of Monterey County.” Mrs. Gerald Petkuss, who lived across the road from the school, had put the problem another way. “We wonder what kind of people would go to a school like this,” she asked quite early in the controversy. “Why they aren’t out working and making money.”
    Mrs. Petkuss was a plump young matron with an air of bewildered determination, and she came to the rostrum in a strawberry-pink knit dress to say that she had been plagued “by people associated with Miss Baez’s school coming up to ask where it was although they knew perfectly well where it was— one gentleman I remember had a beard.”
    “Well I don’t care ” Mrs. Petkuss cried when someone in the front row giggled.”I have