Joan Didion made her mark on L.A. Here are 10 places she knew and loved
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Joan Didion haunts Los Angeles. In January, as catastrophic fires ripped through the Pacific Palisades and Altadena, Didion’s name became an echo on social media timelines as Angelenos shared and reshared her famous quotes about the Santa Ana winds.
So much so that local literary critic Katie Kadue was moved to tweet, wryly, “I think I speak for everyone here in Los Angeles when I say we desperately need a link to that Mike Davis article, or even just a Joan Didion quote. Every little bit helps.”
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Didion looms so large in the literary world that, even in death, her work is getting published. In April, Knopf will release an edited collection of her journal entries that she wrote for her husband, John Gregory Dunne, transcribing intimate sessions she had with a psychiatrist in the 1990s. And whether she intended to or not, Didion has become known as one of Los Angeles’ foremost mythmakers — a conceit that is central to yet another new Didion book, a cultural biography, “We Tell Ourselves Stories,” by New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson.
“She’s so tied to Los Angeles in the imagination, even though arguably other parts of California are more formative for her,” says Wilkinson.
Joan Didion fell in love with movies as a girl but would sour on Hollywood after working there, Alissa Wilkinson writes in ‘We Tell Ourselves Stories.’
Didion was born and raised in Sacramento and died in 2021 in New York, where she’d spent the last several decades of her life. But her 20 years in Los Angeles left a lasting mark on both her and the city.
The Los Angeles that Didion describes in her books — and specifically “The White Album,” from which Wilkinson borrows her book’s title — isn’t as tangible as the Los Angeles described by her frequently invoked counterpart, Eve Babitz. Though both women were socialites, Babitz’s writing was set in glam restaurants and glitzy hotels. Didion’s Los Angeles often took place in the imagination.
“She’s interested in very specific aspects of the geography and of the weather and the water and the fires and the winds and she writes about all that stuff, but for her California is an idea that governed her life,” Wilkinson says of Didion. “And it is the idea that kind of wraps up with American expansion and Western pioneers and courage and John Wayne and all of that stuff.”
Even as she wrote about Los Angeles with detachment, Didion’s prose showed affection. “What is striking about Los Angeles after a period away from it is how well it works,” she wrote in a 1988 essay for the New Yorker about real estate in Hollywood. “The famous freeways work, the supermarkets work (a visit to, say, the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s, where the aisles are wide and the shelves full and checkout is fast and free of attitude, elevates grocery shopping to a form of zazen), the beaches work.”
Looking forward to some of our most anticipated books hitting store shelves in 2025 — including one about literary icon Joan Didion — and reflecting on last year’s crop of releases.
For reasons both quotidian and tragic, much of the Los Angeles that Didion described in her writing is gone — or at the very least unrecognizably altered. The Pacific Palisades Gelson’s was reduced to ashes in January. The Trancas Market she mentions in “The White Album” is now the Starbucks at Trancas Country Market. I. Magnin, the department store where she bought a dress for Manson family member Linda Kasabian to wear to court on her first day on the stand, is now a Saks Fifth Avenue. Ma Maison, where Didion often dined with her husband — which also became central to a feud between the couple and Dunne’s brother, Dominick, whose daughter was murdered by the sous chef there — closed in 1985 and its location on Melrose Avenue remains vacant. And, of course, the Malibu that was once her home is now irrevocably changed by both time and fire.
But as much as things have changed, they also have stayed the same, and if you search real hard you can still experience Joan Didion’s Los Angeles — which is not just a place but a vibe. Here are our suggestions on how to do just that.
Do some “magical thinking” at her old Hollywood house
“In the big house on Franklin Avenue many people seemed to come and go without relation to what I did,” Didion wrote in the book, published in 1979. “I knew where the sheets and towels were kept but I did not always know who was sleeping in every bed. I had the keys but not the key. I remember taking a 25-mg. Compazine one Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people, many of whom were still around on Monday.”
The house, located at 7406 Franklin Ave. — just south of Runyon Canyon — is now home to the Shumei, a “spiritual organization dedicated to advancing health, happiness and harmony for all humankind through applying the insights of its founder, Mokichi Okada.” You can visit by signing up for their free healing light classes.
Play it as it lays at her Malibu home
From there, follow Didion’s regular route. She found refuge in Zuma Beach, which became the site of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s Incident Command Center in January. (Zuma Beach has since reopened for beachgoers.)
“I had wanted to meet the lifeguards ever since I moved to Malibu. I would drive past Zuma some cold winter mornings and see a few of them making their mandatory daily half-mile swims in open ocean,” she writes in “The White Album.” In typical Didion fashion, she later notes dryly that one of Quintana’s friends had drowned at Zuma Beach.
In Malibu, she also befriended Amado Vazquez, who tended the orchid hothouses for which Malibu is famous. He even named an orchid after her and another after Quintana. Amado went on to found the Zuma Canyon Orchids, which is still open as “a regenerative farm, apothecary, center for the arts, and a place of gathering.”
Hold court at the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel
Her opinions on the Beverly Hills Hotel must have changed later in life, as author Andrew O’Hagan recalled to the New Statesman, “Joan Didion once told me you shouldn’t stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel; you should stay at the Beverly Wilshire. When I’ve finished the big book I’m working on, I’m going to take her advice for the rest of my life.”
You can, of course, book a table at the Polo Lounge and form your own opinion. She never revealed her order, but she had a risotto recipe in her personal cookbook — the Polo Lounge serves a Maine lobster version that’ll set you back $74.
Have some self-respect at the Beverly Wilshire
“After we moved to New York and needed to be in Los Angeles for a picture we would stay there, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for weeks at a time. ... Yet the Beverly Wilshire seemed when Quintana was at UCLA the only safe place for me to be, the place where everything would be the same, the place where no one would know about or refer to the events of my recent life; the place where I would still be the person I had been before any of this had happened,” she wrote after Dunne’s death.
The Beverly Wilshire is now owned by Four Seasons — and it’s certainly no less glamorous. Book a room for a staycation at the hotel ($831 to $1,160 per night), which has been around since 1928, or have brunch at the pool bar.
Tell yourself a story in Brentwood Park
Back then, Brentwood was a bright, affluent (but still achievable) suburb that stood in such contrast to Didion’s personality that her friends playfully called her the “Kafka of Brentwood Park.” But the streets of Brentwood Park, although now much less open than they used to be (and much less achievable), still make for a lovely scenic walk of house-watching.
Enjoy a bite at Morton’s (or at a former Morton’s)
Back then, Morton’s was a star-studded restaurant dynasty. While it no longer has that reputation (or the shrimp quesadillas), you can still experience Morton’s at its location in Burbank, which can evoke the West Hollywood location if you squint hard enough.
Didion’s Morton’s was on the southwest corner of Robertson and Melrose, though it moved in 1994 to the southeast corner, where 颁别肠肠辞苍颈’蝉 is now. If the vibe you’re looking for is less “literally Morton’s” and more the “Deadline Hollywood”-era of Didion’s day, then drop by 颁别肠肠辞苍颈’蝉 for a gnocchi — and maybe catch a glimpse of Ellen DeGeneres, Gwen Stefani, Kristen Stewart or Jennifer Lopez, who all have been spotted at the chic Italian eatery.
Take a sentimental journey at the Chasen’s booth seats (now in a Bristol Farms)
In “Play It As It Lays,” she referenced the restaurant again, writing, “Its chili quickly became popular with the show biz crowd, and Chasen’s rapidly grew into Hollywood’s premier restaurant.” The chili was so famous that Elizabeth Taylor had it flown to Rome where she was filming “Cleopatra.”
Chasen’s no longer exists. But that doesn’t mean you can’t experience its “warm, clubby atmosphere of heavy wood paneling and red leather booths.” When the building was converted into a Bristol Farms in 2000, the wood paneling and red leather booths were preserved and are used in the Bristol Cafe within the luxury grocery store. A plaque on the wall outside the Bristol Farms says, “Chasen’s: A Legendary Hollywood Haunt 1936-1995.” It’s much, much easier to get a table nowadays.
Cruise by the stately Harden Gatehouse at Portuguese Bend in Rancho Palos Verdes
Didion describes recognizing Portuguese Bend in a commercial in “The Year of Magical Thinking”: “Neither the house nor its gate could be seen in the commercial but I experienced a sudden rush of memories: getting out of the car on that highway to open the gate so that John could drive through; watching the tide come in and float a car that was sitting on our beach to be shot for a commercial; sterilizing bottles for Quintana’s formula while the gamecock that lived on the property followed me companionably from window to window.”
The current owners, Allen and Charlotte Ginsburg, intend to turn the gatehouse, located at 5500 Palos Verdes Drive South, into the Palos Verdes Heritage Castle Museum, but work on that project is still ongoing. In the meantime, you can drive past its ornate gates and politely admire the home from afar.
Immerse yourself in the collections at the Getty Villa
“As a matter of fact large numbers of people who do not ordinarily visit museums like the Getty [Villa] a great deal, just as its founder knew they would,” Didion wrote in “The White Album.” “There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole ‘the critics’ distrust great wealth, but ‘the public’ does not. On the whole ‘the critics’ subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but ‘the public’ does not. In the end the Getty [Villa] stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.”
Whether you like visiting museums or do not, we do believe the place is worth a visit ourselves.
Note: The Getty Villa is temporarily closed due to the wildfires in the Palisades. Check Getty.edu for updates.
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