On January 30, 1964, shortly after her 30th birthday, Joan Didion married fellow writer John Gregory Dunne in central California’s Mission San Juan Bautista. According to Tracy Daugherty’s Didion biography, The Last Love Song, the newlyweds began their honeymoon in a bungalow at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito, but soon grew bored and “fled to the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset Boulevard.” The couple’s SoCal sojourn made a favorable impression, and a few months later, they made the decision to take a leave of absence from their lives in New York City and give LA a whirl.

Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, rented this 1926 farmhouse on the Vanderlip Estate in Portuguese Bend from June 1964 to 1966. According to The Last Love Song, the couple landed the 5,000-square-foot house when the wife of its owner responded to an ad Didion placed in the paper. Designed by the illustrious Gordon Kaufmann, the Tuscan-style residence sat on a two-acre lot where peacocks roamed freely.

Now known as the Palos Verdes Heritage Castle Museum, the estate is available for weddings and other events.

In 1966, Didion and Dunne began renting this ramshackle 1920s mansion in the heart of Hollywood for $400 a month. Julian Wasser, who had taken the famous picture of Didion’s friend Eve Babitz playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, shot the now-iconic photos of the chain-smoking author with her Corvette Stingray in front of the house in 1968.

Says Didion in The White Album: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled. In another sense the Sixties did not truly end for me until January of 1971, when I left the house on Franklin Avenue and moved to a house on the sea.”

Today, the estate is home to the Shumei America Hollywood Center, a spiritual organization “dedicated to advancing health, happiness, and harmony for all human kind.” The center hosts spiritual events and a “commune with nature” most Saturdays.

In their early days as Angelenos, Dunne and Didion spent many evenings at the home of Dunne’s brother, Dominick, then a television producer, and his socialite wife, Lenny. Here they would make industry connections and cross paths with numerous celebrities, some of whom would become friends of the literary it couple.

In The White Album, Didion writes: “On August 9, 1969 I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend (Natalie Wood) who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

In The White Album, Didion paints a vivid picture of the insular way of life in Malibu, where she lived from 1971 to 1978, in a house 132 steps from the ocean that had once been a gambling den.

“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 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.”

Opened in 1958 by Walt Disney’s director of recording, Tutti Camarata, the studios of Sunset Sound have played a part in the making of countless classic record albums, as well as Didion’s classic book The White Album, in which the author describes the evening she spent there “sitting on the cold vinyl floor” waiting for Jim Morrison to turn up for a Doors recording session. When the singer finally deigns to arrive, it becomes clear the wait was not worth it:

“Morrison sits down on the leather couch again and leans back. He lights a match. He studies the flame awhile and then very slowly, very deliberately, lowers it to the fly of his black vinyl pants. Manzarek watches him. The girl who is rubbing Manzarek’s shoulders does not look at anyone. There is a sense that no one is going to leave this room, ever. It will be some weeks before The Doors finish recording this album. I do not see it through.”

Commissioned by Howard Hughes and constructed in 1930-31 for a reported cost of $2 million, the sprawling Deco Moderne-style building at 7000 Romaine Street in Hollywood served as the headquarters of Hughes’ business empire for more than four decades.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem’s essay on the eccentric mogul, Didion observes, “That the Hughes ‘communication center’ should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world—involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-tool subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, and an electronics and missile operation—run by a man whose modus operandi most closely resembles that of a character in The Big Sleep.”

Space in the storied structure is currently being offered for lease on Loopnet.

In the summer of 1968, Didion checked herself into St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica (now Providence Saint John’s Health Center), and underwent a battery of psychiatric tests, the results of which would later become fodder for her landmark essay “The White Album.” According to her medical report, Didion’s test results “emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her.”

On a happier note, St. John’s is also where Didion and Dunne’s adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, was born, on March 3, 1966.

After moving to Los Angeles, Didion and Dunne became close friends of Earl McGrath, a celebrated bon vivant who had worked his way up from screenwriter to head to production at 20th Century Fox, to president of Rolling Stones Records—Didion even dedicated The White Album to him.

In the mid-’80s, McGrath opened an art gallery in West Hollywood, where the couple regularly held court. One such occasion was depicted in a 1987 New York Times Magazine profile: “Didion sits at a table quietly. She is peaceful. An endless stream of people comes to her, bending down to kiss her. She asks after their children, remembering personal details about everyone. Anjelica Huston, all legs in a little black dress, Teri Garr, George Stevens Jr., Tony Richardson, Michelle Phillips, Jean Vanderbilt and George Segal come to pay respects to the tiny woman with a gardenia in her hair.”

McGrath died in 2016; the building that held his gallery now houses the 454 North hair salon.

“For reasons that remain unclear to me the Beverly Wilshire itself only rarely triggered the vortex effect,” Didion recounts in The Year of Magical Thinking. “In theory its every corridor was permeated with the associations I was trying to avoid. When we were living in Malibu and had meetings in town we would bring Quintana and stay 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.”

LA’s highways and byways are a favorite subject for Didion, “the only secular communion” the city has, she asserts in The White Album.

For Maria Wyeth, the main character of her 1970 novel Play it as it Lays, “it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o’clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. if she was not she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour, Normandie ¼ Vermont ¾ Harbor Fwy 1. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”