The Last Love Song by Tracy Daugherty

consult him. He was a great attorney.”
    When she wasn’t greeting CEOs or hurtling down rapids, Didion attended meetings of the Mañana Club—the “rich girls’ sorority,” Haug-West called it. It was sponsored by the public school district. According to its bylaws, its aim was to promote democracy, charity, and literature—specifically, the reading of poetry. Nevertheless, a legal opinion written in the mid-1960s by a California appellate court stated that the Mañana Club practiced a “process of selection designed to create a membership composed of the ‘socially elite.’”
    To be admitted, girls had to be sponsored by three members; they had to have reached the ninth grade and to have maintained a C average during the previous semester, and they had to have read at least two books not prescribed as compulsory by the school system. Once a candidate had been proposed for membership and survived a “Rush Tea,” the club’s Admission Committee would “investigate all girls, and then select however many the officers have decided should be brought in.”
    Didion recalled her initiation in the Governor’s Mansion one night. She was friends with Nina Warren, daughter of Governor Earl Warren. Nina, dubbed “Honey Bear” by the national press corps, was a year ahead of Didion in school. Didion loved visiting her because the house was full of large, high-ceilinged rooms in which “one [could] imagine reading … or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner,” Didion said. The initiation rite consisted of being blindfolded in Nina’s bedroom and subjected to insults by the club’s older members. Didion was shocked when Nina—“by my fourteen-year-old lights the most glamorous and unapproachable fifteen-year-old in America,” Didion wrote—said Didion was “stuck on herself.”
    As a new member, she received a gold pin in the form of an M, with Mañana spelled out on the front in blue enamel letters. She was to wear it or keep it in her possession at all times. To others, outside the club, this may have fortified the impression that she was “stuck on herself.” To Joan Haug-West, Didion seemed unnaturally shy. “I rarely heard her voice in school,” she said.
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    Today, C. K. McClatchy Senior High School, in a posh area of the city known as Land Park, seems an oasis of seriousness and calm just off a busy boulevard, its tall windows reflecting rows of Italian cypress trees flanking its walls, its red tiled roof sloping low over Art Deco and California Mission detailing in the building’s tan stone and dark brown woodwork. McClatchy marked “a very tedious time in my life,” Didion said. How could she not want to heave whenever she walked across the plaque in the front entrance (passing two ridiculous stone lions on either side of the steps), proclaiming McClatchy’s devotion to “Truth-Liberty-Tolerance” and its loyalty to the “Native Sons of the Golden West”? How frequently could she repeat, in class, the products of our Latin American neighbors? Must she recite, once more, Euripides: “I tell myself that we are a long time underground and that life is short, but sweet”? Did she have to hear, again, a local band butcher “How High the Moon” at some damp, dreary dance, and then walk home alone in the fog?
    Worst of all was phys ed (“Sex Class”). There, she had to listen to the Nice Girls insist it was wrong to kiss boys “indiscriminately” because that was “throwing away your capital.” Given the boys she met at McClatchy, Didion didn’t think it was possible to kiss “discriminately.” If you were “indiscriminate enough to kiss any one of them you might as well kiss them all,” she decided.
    Often, in her room, she lay in the dark with a cold