Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Didion has an interest in unpacking celebrity as part of “the dream” she refers to in “Some Dreamers of the Golden dream,” and John Wayne and Joan Baez represent two very different types of 1960s celebrity. Wayne, who had been famous since 1939’s Stagecoach, was the epitome of an old-school style of Hollywood stardom that was beginning to fade at the time Didion wrote about him (he was also recovering from his first bout with cancer), and Baez was a counterculture ingenue whose music career coincided with the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of folk music. The two of them represent different poles of celebrity, for different generations, yet in both of these essays Didion’s curiosity gravitates toward unpacking the difference between person and myth.

Wayne’s myth is well established. By the time Didion met with him while filming The Sons of Katie Elder, he had three decades of stardom and had defined Hollywood’s idea of stoic masculinity for a generation. His cancer treatment had become public knowledge only recently, and Didion compares the image of him suffering in the hospital with her prepackaged idea of him: “Nothing very bad could happen in the dream, nothing a man could not face down. But something did” (32). For a woman who has been holding Wayne up as a masculine ideal for decades, this news is significant, though Didion treats it with her usual cool intellectualism.

This attitude of remove shifts, however, when she describes Wayne palling around with the other men on set, including Dean Martin. Didion writes of their machismo and chiding friendship with clear affection. The men are enjoying the idea of being in the Durango wilderness because it allows them to live out the masculine version of themselves that shows up on screen. Ultimately, this essay is about the power of “the dream,” as indicated by its closing on Didion feeling as though it has permeated her real life when she has dinner with Wayne. Didion is sometimes critical of Hollywood in her unique position as an observer who had access to the world of movies and movie stars (she wrote scripts with her husband) , but the tone in this essay remains admiring.

There’s considerably less fawning over Baez, with whom Didion takes a more journalistic approach. Though Didion paints Baez as a reluctant star, Baez was productive throughout the 1960s, releasing an album every year. For Didion, the crux of Baez is the difference between the woman whose politics and opinions are relatively unformed—the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence is not painted as a place of particular intellectual rigor, and Baez herself doesn’t have a clear stance on the politics of a movement that claims her as a figurehead—and her role as either a hero or a villain in the American consciousness.

Baez is a great example of 1960s celebrity because of her role as a political flashpoint, but also because, as Didion paints her, she is more interested in the connection with the audience than with money or even her art. She was a celebrity before she was a legal adult, and Didion says this makes her a kind of victim of fame, which is what Didion credits for Baez’s reluctance to tour or get back in the studio. But Didion does see the appeal of Baez and her fuzzy politics. Baez is portrayed as an earnest young woman whose savvy and grace give her power and whose emotional intelligence made her a star. Baez is quick to admit that she is not as studied on the movement as she would like to be, which Didion further credits her for.

It can be difficult to place Didion’s intent when she writes of the counterculture, as she tends to take a detached demeanor and fall back on journalistic objectivity when she writes of it; she’s clearly critical of what she sees as the more naïve, ridiculous, and sometimes dangerous elements of the counterculture ethos, but she also evinces empathy for specific individuals in the scene. Looking at these essays side-by-side, it is clear which “dream” is Didion’s own, and which is one she’s still trying to puzzle out.