Didion will be 75 on the 5th of December. Happy birthday Joan from the staff of this site, and on behalf of our wonderful readers!

Vanessa Redgrave will reprise her starring role from the 2007 Broadway play “The Year of Magical Thinking” at a performance on Monday to benefit programs run by United Nations charities.

The play is based on Joan Didion’s 2005 memoir chronicling the deaths of her daughter and husband. When Redgrave performs Monday at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it will be the first time she has played the role since the death of her own daughter, actress Natasha Richardson, in March.

“The message of this play is so important to me that I want to make sure that it can be heard by as wide an audience as possible,” Redgrave said in a statement. “This is an experience we all go through, young and old alike. It would be wonderful to see the Cathedral filled with both those whose lives are fully ahead of them, as well as those who know fully what that road is like.”

Source.

YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING – Debut October 10, 2009, Saturday at 21:30 at Teatro Bibi Ferreira. Season: Fridays and Saturdays at 21:30 and Sundays at 19 hours, until 1 November 2009.

Author: Joan Didion. Direction: Caio de Andrade. Cast: Imara Reis. Translation: Erica de Almeida Rego Migon and Ursula de Almeida Rego Migon. Set and costume design: Célia Alves. Soundtrack: Caio de Andrade. Lighting: Hiram Ravache. Photographer: Jefferson Martins. Design: Emmanuel Della Nina. Production Manager: Luque Daltrozo. Director: Daltrozo Produções Ltda. Indication group: 14 years. Tickets: £ 40.00 (Fridays and Sundays) and $ 60.00 (Saturday) – half price for students and seniors. Indication group: 14 years. Duration: 60 minutes.

TEATRO BIBI FERREIRA – Avenida Brigadeiro Luís Antônio, 931 – Bela Vista. Phone: (11) 3105-3129. Conveniado Parking: $ 7.00. Capacity: 300 seats. Box office: From Tuesday to Sunday from 14.30. Accepts cash, check and cards Visanet. Join Fast: 4003-1212 www.ingressorapido.com.br Air Conditioning. Access for disabled people. www.teatrobibiferreira.com.br

Teatro Sérgio Cardoso – Sala Paschoal Charlemagne. Reestréia November 13, at 21h30 (Fridays at 21h30 on Saturdays at 21h, Sunday, at 19 hours, tickets, $ 20.00 and $ 10.00 a half). Rua Rui Barbosa, 153. Bela Vista. Tel: 3288 0136. Close to subways and San Joaquin Brig. Accessibility for people with special needs. Box Office: Wednesday to Sunday from 15h to 19h (advance sales). Sale through the site entrance fast: www.ingressorapido.com.br. Capacity – 144 seats. Season – Fridays at 21h30, Saturdays at 21 pm and Sunday at 19 hours. Tickets – $ 20.00 and $ 10.00 (half). Cards – Visa. Until December 20.

Burt Britton has auctioned off some of his vast collection of celebrity self-portraits, including those of writers Joan Didion and John Updike.

The Daily Beast has the full story:

Working at the famed Strand bookstore in New York for a decade, and later owning Books & Company on Madison Avenue, Britton befriended many of the writers and artists whose portraits he gathered. And his collection reads like a who’s who of Manhattan during a bygone era: Brassaï, David Hockney, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Wolfe all sketched for him. In 1976, Britton published a book from the drawings,Self-Portrait: Book People Picture Themselves, which has since gone out of print, leaving the auction the only place to see Paul Newman’s cheeky interpretation of himself in his later years.

Many of the portraits were drawn during the height of the scribbler’s fame and show how their life and work were intertwined. Photographer André Kertész drew his eye as a lens and claimed, “I am the camera!” Where the Wild Things Are author and illustrator Maurice Sendak sketched himself as one of his Wild Things, hands crossed over a furry stomach, six years after his book hit the shelves.

Writers weren’t short on creativity either. The blind Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges sketched his drawing using one finger guided by his free hand. True to form, Joan Didion created her portrait, inscribing a sheet of lined paper with faults, including, “Too thin. Astigmatic. Has no visual sense of self,” and her thumbprint.

On most of the ink or pencil drawings, an autograph, typically the prized possession for any other collector, is merely an afterthought to the rare glimpse of an artist’s self-expression. Britton himself has been somewhat reclusive, and a self-portrait of the collector was nowhere to be found in the book or auction, which may only represent a quarter of his vast—and enviable—trove. It’s only fitting that the quiet man among the book stacks was able to draw out intimate details from artists used to hiding behind their own work.

Click here to see a gallery of some of the self-portraits.

On Thursday, September 10th, Dominick Dunne’s funeral took place at a Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Manhattan. Hundreds attended from the worlds of society and culture, including Richard Gere, Julianna Margulies, Liev Schreiber, and Diane von Furstenberg.

Joan Didion was, of course, also in attendance. She spoke of Dunne ultimately as family-orientated and brave, according to the Huffington Post:

…Even though she acknowledged that he and his late brother, her husband, novelist and screenwriter John Gregory Dunne, frequently had periods of disagreement.

“I came to see the very clear pleasure he took at seeing a celebrity,” Didion said. “He wasn’t ashamed when people spoke to him on the street and was never afraid to share the moment.”

She also spoke of him as a trusted confidant, as recorded on the NYTimes.com blog ‘Media Decoder’. “…he was the first person she called when Didion’s husband died, in part because he knew tragedy in all of its dimensions.”

A resource to advance the study of Joan Didion’s work with exclusive FREE online content! Read essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Thomas Mallon, Michiko Kakutani and many more right now.

Dominick Dunne and Joan Didion at John Gregory Dunne's funeral.

Dominick Dunne, the ultimate self-made American man, died today following a long battle with bladder cancer. He was 83.

Dunne rose to public consciousness in the movie business. He was a producer at the very end of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, though not a very prolific one. He was attracted to glamour; indeed, when he was a child, he had a picture of Michèle Morgan, a French actress, on his wall. His favorite movie was ‘Now, Voyager’, starring Betty Davis.

“The idea that a camp movie like Now, Voyager became my most important movie was because she became someone different from what she was. I found it so fascinating. She had that awful life — that mother, she was fat and unattractive. She came back, she was different. I thought about my own life, ‘It doesn’t have to be like this’.”

But paradoxically, he never quite felt at home when surrounded by the rich and famous. In the midst of hot-dog parties and Malibu sunsets, Dunne said he “never could figure out [his] place” in that social strata:

“I always felt I was there more on a pass than reality. I would produce this movie with Elizabeth Taylor (‘Ash Wednesday’) and have a glamorous time in Europe. But I was never a producer in charge. I didn’t have the balls to go to the front office and say ‘I want this’.”

Nevertheless, it was a successful time, and not just for Dominick, but also for his brother John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. In the early 1970s, they formed a film company called ‘Dunne-Didion-Dunne’. John and Joan wrote, while Dominick produced. In Vanity Fair, he would later write about the experience:

“Our first picture was The Panic in Needle Park, for Twentieth Century Fox, based on a Life-magazine article by James Mills about heroin junkies. I remember sitting in the projection room and watching the dailies for the first time. In the darkness, John and I looked at each other as if we couldn’t believe that two Hartford boys were making a big Hollywood-studio movie on location in New York City. [...] The picture was picked as an American entry to the Cannes Film Festival, and we all went over and had our first red-carpet experience. The film won the best-actress award for a young beginner named Kitty Winn. There were cheers and huzzahs and popping flashbulbs. It was a thrilling experience for all three of us. The following year John and Joan wrote the screenplay for Play It as It Lay which was based on Joan’s best-selling novel of the same name. [...] That was our last film together. John and I came away from that picture not liking each other as much as we had after the first. Then Joan and John made a mint on the movie A Star Is Born, starring Barbra Streisand, which was an enormous success, and in which they had a share of the profits. I remember being at the star-studded premiere in Westwood, when Streisand made one of the great movie entrances. And there were John and Joan, up there, having arrived, being photographed, getting celebrity treatment. Was I jealous? Yes.”

There followed a low-point in Dunne’s life when film-projects sputtered away, and his relationship with his wife, Lenny, had ended, perhaps for good:

“The problem with that marriage was me. She had really loved me. She was great . . . I f***ed that up.”

Dominick Dunne turned to drink and drugs. He was arrested for “carrying grass” when he got off a plane and John and Joan bailed him out. But this was only the beginning, as Dominick wrote:

“When I went broke, they lent me $10,000. A terrible resentment builds when you’ve borrowed money and can’t pay it back, although they never once reminded me of my obligation. That was the first of the many estrangements that followed. Finally, in despair, I left Hollywood early one morning and lived for six months in a cabin in Camp Sherman, Oregon, with neither telephone nor television. I stopped drinking. I stopped doping. I started to write. At about three o’clock one morning, John contacted me [...] to tell me that our brother Stephen, who was particularly close to John, had committed suicide.”

The funeral deepened the rift between the brothers. Shortly afterwards, while living alone in a miniscule New York apartment, he learned that his daughter, the actress Dominique Dunne, had been murdered. His friend Tina Brown suggested he write about the trial for Vanity Fair, which would, in fact,  give Dunne the tools he would to turn around the remainder of his life. Dunne witnessed Dominique’s murderer, an ex-boyfriend named John Thomas Sweeney, get a six-and-a-half year sentence in 1983, and saw him released for good behavior after two years. A burning sense of injustice propelled him into print. He began writing “with a passion” he had never felt before. Dominick wrote four best-sellers in a row, all of which were made into mini-series. He was also a rising star at Vanity Fair. Was John jealous?

“Yes. Our books came and went, but we never mentioned them to each other, acting as if they did not exist. There was no resemblance between our writing styles. His novels were tough and dealt with low-life criminals. My novels were more socially rarefied and dealt with high-life criminals. There were difficult periods. Sometimes we maintained civility, despite bad feelings on both sides. Sometimes we didn’t.”

After a further disagreement about the character of the defence attorney Leslie Abramson, (John liked her… Dominick did not), the brothers did not speak for six years. They did not speak again until they met in hospital. Dominick was in for prostate cancer, and John has having his heart monitored. Later, John called and said “Let’s all go to Elio’s and laugh our asses off.”

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When Dominick was a child he was bullied by his father, a renowned surgeon:

“I remember the maid knocking on the door and saying, ‘The hospital is calling, Dr Dunne.’ He stopped the whipping, picked up the phone, gave the hospital the relevant instructions, came back and picked up right where he left off.”

When he came home from the war with a Bronze Star, having rescued two soldiers who would otherwise have been abandoned, none of the family mentioned it. Even then, according to Dominick, John was “the glamorous one”. It took a family friend to tell Dominick that they were proud of him. “I felt like an outsider in my own family,” he later claimed. However, the memory of the rescue stayed with him:

“The last thing I saw was this guy reaching out, and squeezing the first two fingers of my hand — his way of saying thank you. I’ve never forgtten that: several times in my life I’ve been in scary situations I’ve looked at my fingers and said to that guy, his spirit, ‘Help me’. “

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Dominick Dunne is perhaps best known for his journalistic work. In the pages of Vanity Fair, he has covered every major celebrity murder trial worth mentioning. His keen eye for detail, his inability to be swayed by legal alchemy, and his take-no-prisoners approach have made him famous. When he was a child, he had a picture of Michèle Morgan on his bedroom wall. He remained, for his entire life, fascinated by the shenanigans of the upper-class. However, it was his own life, in all its misfortune, that proved to be an important catalyst. His bravery lay in his ability to persevere where others would not, and in his honest depictions of humanity where you would least  expect to find it- not just the jewelry of the rich and famous, but their secrets and their motives. He described the urges and emotions of murderers: greed, jealousy, love; in doing so, he articulated insights into ourselves.

‘The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play’ (TYoMT: P), a self-adapted staging of Joan Didion’s non-fiction book of the same name, was first performed by Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway in the summer of 2007. Though Didion did the writing; the director, David Hare, and Redgrave herself were intimately part of the production process.  Recently, we have seen a steady supply of alternative productions, with each actress taking the work in a different direction, some more successfully than others. In May 2009, Analee Jefferies inhabited the role in a TheatreWorks production in Hartford Connecticut, earning strong reviews from The New York Times, who praised her “earthier, less reserved” approach.

Now another actress is preparing to play the part of ‘Didion’ – a writer coping with grief and waking up the audience to its unsubtle methods. The Intiman Theatre in Seattle is preparing for its run from August 21st until September 20th, with Judith Roberts as the sole performer. Roberts’ stage credits have a solid Shakespearian flavour, including Richard 111 at Classic Stage Company. Such experience should serve her well as she endeavours to communicate a character entirely in extremis. “In the midst of life we are in death,” Didion wrote, recalling the words Presbyterians say at the graveside. Done correctly, the play can stun an audience by articulating the simple burden of this reality.

If you missed the original, you’ll get another chance to see Vanessa Redgrave this October when she reprises the role to raise money for UNICEF. Joan Didion and David Hare will be special guests at this performance in St. John The Divine, Manhattan. This event had been scheduled for April 2009, but was postponed following the sudden death of Natasha Richardson, Redgrave’s daughter. When asked by a reporter if Didion thought that Redgrave’s previous involvement with the work would help her with the grieving process, Didion replied, “I don’t think there’s any comfort… [Or if there is], it’s cold comfort.”

The Year of Magical Thinking, adapted by Joan Didion from her memoir, directed by Sarna Lapine and starring Judith Roberts. Performances will begin at Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street at Seattle Center, on Friday, August 21 and continue through Sunday, September 20. The opening night performance is Wednesday, August 26 at 7:30 pm. For more, click here.

A benefit performance by Vanessa Redgrave of “The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play” in support of UNICEF on Monday, October 26th, 2009. Click here.

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With customary cattiness, the media blog Gawker.com has zeroed in on Jill Abramson’s piece about her dog, “Chewing Towards Bethlehem“, in today’s NYT. The article forms part of Abramson’s “Puppy Diaries” column, in which she chronicles “the challenges and satisfactions of raising a puppy”. The title derives, of course, from that of Didion’s famous essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, which, in turn, is borrowed from Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”

Gawker invites the reader to compare and contrast same, to devastating effect:

People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

Vs.

We have a puppy gate that keeps Scout in the rear of our house.

Oh dear.

And yet, as one who writes a lot of tragic Didion-related headlines, I understand Abramson’s predicament. The zeitgeist cannot be held accountable for it’s half-baked lexicon. I have read pieces free of anything but the most tenuous relation to the Didion that draw on “Slouching Towards X”; ” X Towards Bethlehem”; “After X”; “The Year of Magical Xing”. The other day I even came across a gem: “Marathon Absurd.” A piece about a marathon which did not start on time. This, in the eyes of the reporter, made it a fiasco of sufficient outrageousness to deserve, to demand, a snappy literary reference.

A quick glance back through previous News items on this site is an embarrassment of ridiculous riches. A few months ago, we covered a story about a revival of Yeats’ plays with the headline: “No Slouching: A Fresh Look At Yeats As Playwright.” Why? Well, in the picture, Yeats appears to be sitting up poker-straight. Reader, I’m sorry.

Post your favorite Didionesque headline beauties in the comment section below.