Signed by Didion and Krementz

Joan Didion at Home in Malibu.

[California]: March 31, 1972.

Price: $15,000.00


About the item

Silver gelatin print, 14 x 11. Signed by Didion and Krementz. Stamped and numbered, signed and dated by Krementz, and signed by Didion as Joan Didion Dunne.

Item #353190

A portrait of Didion in the house at 33428 Pacific Coast Highway that she and John Gregory Dunne moved to in 1971, and where they lived with their daughter Quintana Roo until 1978. Fleeing the paranoia of Hollywood in the wake of the Manson Murders that she describes so well in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, they built a cocoon of relative domestic calm and creative productivity. Nevertheless the house in Malibu was a synedoche of the California at large of which she was such a keen observer, perched between the Pacific Ocean and the desert mountains with their ravaging wildfires, a place whose "principal residential street, the Pacific Coast Highway, is quite literally a highway, California 1, which runs from the Mexican border to the Oregon line and brings Greyhound buses and refrigerated produce trucks and sixteen-wheel gasoline tankers hurtling past the front windows of houses frequently bought and sold for over a million dollars":

"In the part of Malibu where I lived from January of 1971 until quite recently we all knew one another’s cars, and watched for them on the highway and at the Trancas Market and at the Point Dume Gulf station. We exchanged information at the Trancas Market. We left packages and messages for one another at the Gulf station. We called one another in times of wind and fire and rain, we knew when one another’s septic tanks needed pumping, we watched for ambulances on the highway and helicopters on the beach and worried about one another’s dogs and horses and children and corral gates and Coastal Commission permits. An accident on the highway was
likely to involve someone we knew. A rattlesnake in my driveway meant its mate in yours. A stranger’s campfire on your beach meant fire on both our slopes.
"In fact this was a way of life I had not expected to find in Malibu. When I first moved in 1971 from Hollywood to a house on the Pacific Coast Highway I had accepted the conventional notion that Malibu meant the easy life, had worried that we would be cut off from “the real world,” by which I
believe I meant daily exposure to the Sunset Strip. By the time we left Malibu, seven years later, I had come to see the spirit of the place as one of shared isolation and adversity, and I think now that I never loved the house on the Pacific Coast Highway more than on those many days when it was impossible to leave it, when fire or flood had in fact closed the highway. We moved to this house on the highway in the year of our daughter’s fifth birthday. In the year of her twelfth it rained until the highway collapsed, and one of her friends drowned at Zuma Beach, a casualty of Quaaludes." ("Quiet Days in Malibu" 1976-78, The White Album).