"She seduced me that summer to trails of corrupt and luxurious entertainments of the moments."
SUMMARY
Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz Originally Published in 1974 A legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie.
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds —and every bit as seductive as she is.
Source -Penguin
BOOK EXTRACTS
ATTRACTED TO PROBLEMATIC MEN
“Why do you hate all the women I fuck?” he asked her lately
“Why do you fuck the women you hate” she replied.
(He) was in a perpetual state of catastrophe. There are always things going on in his life which put rapid shooting to shame...
…he quit, got lonely, probably. He had always had this magical air of tragic beneath his careless and grace and charm.
DATING, AFFAIRS & RELATIONSHIPS
…and then I felt free to indulge myself in the huge, new, unbelievable diverse world of men who wanted to sleep with me.
We were in café society at night and school in the day time. We were both virgins too as we drank in the Garden of Allah bar with fake id’s and tried to be clever around men twice as old as us.
“Tell me your fantasies” my lover asked, once again.
“Take me out to dinner” I said directly opposing his fantasies which depended on him never spending longer that half an hour at a time with me. And never in public.
It is, then something when someone can make you see beauty where you only saw ugliness before. He is wonderful that man.
And they boldly whisper the rapture of secret desires consummated in passion that we once stumbled upon together in the days when we never through that such a thing as “irreconcilable differences” would have to do with us.
The flashy lover had been granted out of the country and we wrote letters pledging fidelity but I know he was already probably fucking the stewardess on the plane out and that it didn’t matter because he wasn’t my hearts desire at all. “They’re all assholes, they got no class and I actually met one guy who though going down on a girl was something called muff diving and only perverts did it”
Their affair had lasted all through the time she needed perfection and he had been utter perfection. If she had written out on a slip of paper and stuck into the suggestion box just exactly what she wanted, she would never have been able to imagine something as flawless as he turned out to be. What she would have said was that she wanted something elegant, unattainable, and slightly tense, plus she didn’t want to be interfered with because she 3 months of thinking to do and she didn’t want it all muddied up with slamming doors and waiting for telephone calls.
When she dropped him at the airport it was simple what she had to do so she did it. “thanks for the romance”
WOMEN WHO INTRIGUE
She seduced me that summer to trails of corrupt and luxurious entertainments of the moments.
From her warmly tanned face she languidly opened her expensive blue eyes wide before narrowing them, transforming them into the eyes of an aristocratic animal whose defence lay in some rapid, paralyzing venom which hissed from the pupils and stopped him in his tracks.
She bought all the her clothe at Jax, which made sexy starlet clothes. Her hair came halfway down to her waist and was dark auburn and tangled and like a lions mane always. I never saw it combed. It always looked like she’d just risen from a bed of passion that only she could have inspired. And finally, she was the monster of brilliant mean tricks and recounter of past coups.
…thought when Marilyn died I knew all across the world people harbouring grudges against Hollywood and thinking “I would have saved her. I wouldn’t have just let her die like that. Those insensitive Hollywood people killed her.” People who think that have never been around an ingénue. The logic of an ingénue is to court disaster.
FACTS ON BEAUTY
In most high schools, you learn social things along with the rest. In mine I learned irrevocably that beauty is power and the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty.
“the privileges of beauty” jean Cocteau said “ are enormous”
And the possessors of beauty are reticent about this privileges or act as though it was luck that the cop didn’t give them a ticket, that I was just a “nice man” who let them through customs without having to wait in line. Beauty unlike money, seems unable to focus on the source of the power. Even talent knows they are special and why they were invited.
Her rose red beauty could not survive unhappiness.
MOMENTS & LIFE LESSONS
There were a couple of other things the matter with them as well which I couldn’t avoid because they were elementary in my life. One was that they didn’t read , they didn’t know about art and they didn’t know about music. There is a pause while the perfection of this idea is appreciated.
Neither of them were especially anything and yet they’d made this night happen.
It’s the eternal thing about the artist and the businessman, and to stop businessmen the artist must forsake his art.
…and here I am with no children, no dog, no husband, and no divorce, even. But as an adventuress….it is to be said that sometimes I’ve ridden a white horse, clutching its mane, into blue heaven and tasted the sins of the Green Death.
Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except fro the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moment of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They’re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You its worth the twinge of envy when you recovered from the dazzle because the mystery if life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten. Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get.
By the middle of the third week she’d finish the second part and she was glowing in its unbelievable finish. She’d done it! Its shape was there, there was no doubt about it – it had a form. It may have had a flawed form, but tender is the night is a flawed novel. All she was mainly interested in was having the thing have a form in the first place.
FLIRTING WTH DISASTER
Irresistibly drawn by a web of thrilling daydreams awash on a shore of panic.
There is only three things to say about cocaine. One, there is no such thing as enough. Two, it will never be as good as the first time. Three, these first two facts constitute a tragedy of expense in ways that cant be experienced unless you’ve had cocaine. Its expense lies in knowing that someone’s having fun on Mt Olympus without you and that should you try to stay here always.
His eyes were the true eyes of a liar. The hands that pushed back his hair were the hands of someone who love women and who knows what to do, his eyes listen to you, carefully watching to see what you want to hear so that it shorten the times until his hands can undo your clothe and touch your back into heaven, into blue heaven and lies….
…the Jim Morisson phrase which occurs to me whenever I think about some fool hardy, glamorous & fatal adventure. He was “Trapped in a prison of his own devise.”
We shimmered with pleasure from those afternoons, for the urgency and timelessness of this evenings spectacle.
Bolts of expectations slammed around the theatre as the lights dimmed.
THE LA SOCIETY LIFESTYLE
In LA, when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool. …reminders that people were never meant to live in LA in the first place – reminders unheeded bu the local residents, a bunch of hedonist who live in the moment, turning their backs on Europe and the past , facing the sunset and the sea.
After all, there had to be some adversity in the middle of all that sunshine & money.
Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions.
I met tons of poets in new York. There are none whatsoever in LA.
The party was good and not relaxed. It was a fast crowd.
“But…I always know at least a month in advance when I’m doing to fly the opposite coast” “yeah?” I never know in the morning what I’ll be doing at 6.”
I sat in Schwabs drinking coffee with my actors/ race track friends who I’ve known all my life but cant remember where from, and we’re discussion impossible possibilities, frittering away in the afternoon. The question is “what would you do if you were to the gas chamber and instead of giving you a last meal they gave you a least movie?”
BOOKS & AUTHORS SHE MENTIONS
But my education has been through reading which has been my salvation and backbone throughout my life.
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Diamond as big as the Ritz by F Scott Fitzgerald
Earthly Paradise by Collette
Seven Gothic Tale, Out of Africa by Isak Dineser
Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
A Room of One's Own By Virginia Woolf
"She ( Virginia Woolf) is in love with London and I’m in love with LA, but London has season and this giant history, and strata of society….she wouldn't like LA but maybe she’d forgive me for loving it anyways."
INTERVIEWS
5 QUESTIONS WITH BABITZ www.girlsatlibrary.com
How do you define an LA woman today? I’m sure my definition is different than others because my version is the same as ever, secure, smart, and not intimidated, but that’s how I’d like to think of all women.
Why do you read? I don’t know how to answer that. How could anyone not read? That’s one of life’s greatest pleasures and I usually have two books going at once. I read for every reason under the sun, enjoyment, knowledge, escape, comfort…to go someplace and enter another person's world.
Extract Sourced from 5Qs on www.girlsatlibrary.com
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Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Interview with Eve Babitz conducted by Paul Karlstrom
At her home in Hollywood, California, June 2000
MS. BABITZ: I thought of myself as, I was like an art groupie/art model and I wanted to-I never modeled for anything like that and never again did, and really most artists, you know, when they have models they really are drawing them basically, like in sculptures, not taking photographs, so I don't know who-and it wasn't Duchamp's idea so I figured I was the artist and the model in that one.
MR. KARLSTROM: Well, Julian Wasser was the photographer.
MS. BABITZ: Well, Julian came and there was the-they had the big party at the Green Hotel, even though Julian doesn't remember it; he has photographs that he took there at that time. And so I didn't get invited to it because Walter Hopps [curator of Duchamp retrospective at Pasadena Art Museum, 1963] was mad at me.
MR. KARLSTROM: Why was that?
MS. BABITZ: Because his wife was in town, basically.
MS. BABITZ: Yes. I mean she came back, she suddenly did come back in a flash the minute that Duchamp thing happened and I was like not allowed in. So, but then I found out Jim Elliott wasn't invited either, so maybe nobody under 20, maybe 21, under 21 you weren't allowed in. So, so, he didn't invite me, so, and he wouldn't call me back, and he wouldn't call my mother back. And so I decided that if I could ever, like, you know, create any vengeance or havoc in his life I would, even though I was pretty powerless because I was only 20 and there was no way I could get to him. But, this Julian came up to me at the opening, the public opening, which I went to with my parents and-
MS. BABITZ: Yeah. At the Pasadena Art Museum, and he said he had this great idea that I should play chess naked with Marcel Duchamp and it seem to be such a great idea that it was just like the best idea I'd ever heard in my life. It was like a great idea. I mean, it was, not only was it vengeance, it was art, and it was like a great idea. And even if it didn't get any vengeance, it would still turn out okay with me because, you know, it would be sort of immortalized. I would be this, you know, here's this Nude Descending the Staircase guy and now he's going to be The Nude in the Pasadena Art Museum. But, of course, I said, you know, I didn't think that the Pasadena Art Museum old ladies would go along with this. So-
MR. KARLSTROM: Was that part of what attracted you to the idea?
MS. BABITZ: Yes. Yeah, because it was like the Little Old Ladies from Pasadena, you know that Beach Boys' song.
MS. BABITZ: He photographs a lot. He gets a lot of girls to take off their clothes and takes pictures of them, and he's a great photographer, so, they don't mind.
MR. KARLSTROM: Then what were you doing?
MS. BABITZ: It was getting naked pictures of yourself so you could show guys.
MR. KARLSTROM: Oh, I see. So that's what you were doing?
MS. BABITZ: That's right.
MS. BABITZ: Well, I thought they were very stylish and I wanted to be stylish too but I didn't know if I could, like, bear to be that skinny in order to be stylish.
Extracts Sourced from Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
download full interview bellow
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LA Mag 1970s Literary 'It" Girl Eve Babitz Is Having a Renaisance - at 76 by Merle Ginsberg, December 2019
The typically press-shy author opens up about her racy past, her current politics, and how she really feels about being a millennial feminist icon.
Before New York Review Books Classics began to reissue your work in 2015, you weren’t taken as seriously as a writer as you were an “It” girl. Why was that?
I don’t know. I always took myself seriously as a writer. I suppose it took 40 years for the world to catch up with me. I like being an “It” girl as well, although I prefer the writer category and had the pleasure of being one for over 30 years.
As an essayist and novelist, you chronicle a young woman in 1970s L.A. who loves partying and sex over anything serious. Was that a character you created—or actually true?
I think it’s probably both. My friends that I wrote about said that I created a character that was sort of them—and I think I did the same thing with my own character, changing my name and some facts about myself. Writing is hard! Partying seemed easier, at least at that time.
What are you currently doing with your time?
I see my friends; go to [AA] meetings. I am gratefully sober. I read all the time: books, magazines, everything.
Did any of your lovers ever complain about being portrayed in your work?
Not to me; maybe they complained to others. Some complained that they weren’t included. Paul Ruscha was probably the person I featured the most, and he always knew what I was going to say. My sister [Mirandi] occasionally got really mad at me over things I wrote about her.
No doubt a clichéd question, but do you have any regrets?
Regrets are hard things to have and then hard things to let go of. … But, in the end, they are a waste of time. You can’t do anything about them. And, at this point in my life, carrying them around would be exhausting. People always ask if I regret the accident. I think being grateful is an easier way to get through the day, and with the odds being stacked against me for even surviving the accident, I am grateful just to be here at the odd age of 76, living with this happening about my work.
Extracts sourced from LA Mag
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Vanity Fair
Interview with Eve Babitz and Lili Anolik
February 2014
He was a museum curator and dealer—art dealer, I mean, not drug. You were with him during your art-groupie phase. You’d slip Ken Price and Ron Cooper in there too. And Ed Ruscha. In fact, you were one of the girlfriends in Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends. Later you’d go through a rock ’n’ roll groupie phase. So who was it better to be a groupie for—artists or musicians?
I like handsome-devil artists the best. Musicians are impossible. My sister can get along with them and I love them and everything, but it’s no use. I had affairs with them but they all died. Jim Morrison—now he was great.
You’d go for artists and musicians but, with a few exceptions, you refused to go for actors. And you always give actors a hard time in your books. How come?
Because all actors want to talk about is their agents and why they aren’t getting jobs. Even wonderful actors. Even Harry Dean Stanton, that’s all he wanted to talk about. Dirty Dancing is one of my favorite movies and I was in love with Patrick Swayze for years, but I tried to stay out of his way and never to meet him because I knew if I did, he’d want to talk about yogurt or some weird dietary restriction or something.
FEATURES
Eve Babitz's guide to Los Angeles
Eve's Babitz guide to Los Angeles
By Hadley Meares , 2017
Take a tour of the writer’s sexy, smoggy city of the 1960s and ’70s
19. La Scala Boutique
9646 S Santa Monica Blvd Beverly Hills, CA 90210 “Illusions shatter at the Boutique daily,” Eve wrote. This très chic Beverly Hills eatery opened in 1962, the daytime counterpart to owner Jean Leon’s ultra-fashionable La Scala restaurant next door. According to Eve, “the best thing you can get at Boutique aside from the devastating chocolate mousse is Leon Salad and glimpses of people you never believe live.” Often, when in a particularly “delicate and brazen mood,” Eve would go find her troubled friend who lunched at Boutique every day and always sat at the corner table. There they would drink champagne and watch the social whirl go by. “Everyone politely overlooked Daniel Ellsberg, the way they do with all celebrities, even the ones who have cancelled written across their futures.”
21. Canter's Delicatessen
419 N Fairfax Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90036
“‘Hi,’ I said. What was her name? It was another one of those faces, a friend of Karen’s. I pieced together, and someone else, too, the guy Bob,” Eve wrote in Eve’s Hollywood. “She and Bob had been close and I always saw them at Cantor’s together when LSD was the rage. Everyone would leave the Strip at 2 when the clubs closed and go to Cantor’s en masse so blasted out of their heads that if you asked someone what time it was they backed away, wide-eyed, as though you’d presented them with a philosophical impossibility. Bob was adorable but so obnoxious that he wore his nickname on his lapel. He had it made into a button and it said, ’I am Bummer Bob.’”Bummer Bob turned out to be Bobby Beausoleil, one of the Manson family killers, still in jail to this day.
Extracts Sourced from La.curbed.com
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T New York Times Style Magazine
L.A. Confidential
By Holly Brubach , Aug. 2009
The best — two volumes of autobiographical essays called “Eve’s Hollywood” and “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.” — have been out of print for years now, proving (as if proof were needed) that the survival of the fittest where books are concerned by no means guarantees the survival of the most amusing or the most original or even the most intelligent. Babitz was clearly the life of a party I somehow failed to attend, and now, years after it ended, I have finally made her acquaintance, tracking her down online at a friend’s suggestion and catching up to her on Web sites that sell used books, forgotten and abandoned.
Nor is Babitz’s hometown the far-off cultural “wasteland” disdained by writers with literary credentials, a paradise where serious minds wind up drowned in the wading pool. Far from it. Spend an evening with Babitz, and you never know who you’ll run into: Igor Stravinsky, her godfather; Joseph Szigeti, the violinist; Eugene Berman, the artist; Kenneth Rexroth and Kenneth Patchen, poets; Ed Ruscha, an old boyfriend; Frank Zappa and Salvador Dalí, whom she introduced. (On the Internet, it seems, her biggest notoriety is not as an author but as a 20-year-old who played chess, naked, with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp — an art stunt that goes unmentioned in her own accounts of her life.)
In her autobiographical stories, Babitz variously describes herself as “shallow,” “sinister,” “lazy” and “cynical” — qualities that are in one way or another borne out by her recollections but in her charming account come off as completely endearing. She is also candid, self-deprecating, curious and game. After reading five of her seven books, I consider her a kindred spirit, not because she’s the kind of woman I have ever been but because she’s the kind of woman I’ve always admired.
Extracts sourced from T New York Times Style Magazine
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Vanity Fair All About Eve - and Then Some by Lili Anolik , February 2014
An irresistible hybrid of boho intellectual and L.A. party girl, Eve Babitz bowled over every man she met in the 60s, from Jim Morrison to Ed Ruscha. Literary stardom followed and then . . . Seventeen years after the freak accident that shut her down, Babitz remembers it all.
And then—just like that—your imagination is captured, your sensibility formed. Even if you don’t think much of the movies or the people who make them, your viewpoint from this moment on will be, in essence, cinematic. Hollywood, with its appeal to the irrational and the unreal, its provocation of desire and volatility, its worship of sex and power and spectacle, will forevermore be your touchstone and guiding light. For better or worse, its ethos is your ethos, its values your values.
If that were her whole story, however, Eve wouldn’t be a whole story. She’d be a footnote. A minor figure of glamour in America’s cultural history. A groupie with a provocative pedigree. She’d be Edie Sedgwick, basically: so relentless a companion to celebrity that she became a bit of one herself, the spotlight just naturally spilling over onto her, making her luminous, too. But she’s not. Eve is Edie cut with Gertrude Stein and a little Louise Brooks thrown in.
Why?
For one thing, Eve had what artist Chris Blum dubbed “major radar,” a sort of next-order intuition that allowed her to see connections and affinities between people and things that others couldn’t, not until she brought them together. She arranged for an encounter between Frank Zappa and Salvador Dalí. (“One of my favorite things I ever did.”) She put Steve Martin in his first white suit. (“There was this great French photographer, Henri Lartigue. He took pictures of Paris in the 20s. All his people wore white. I showed his photographs to Steve. ‘You’ve got to look like this,’ I said.”) She gave singer-songwriter Michael Franks the title to one of his best-known tunes, “Popsicle Toes,” a phrase she tossed off when they were in bed together and her tootsies got cold. (“Everybody steals my lines.”) And she was the first to pick up on the fact that a Bennington College junior in need of a blurb was a rock ’n’ roll star in disguise. (“[Less than Zero] is the novel your mother warned you about. Jim Morrison would be proud.”) And speaking of her old flame Jim, she very nearly talked him out of naming his band after some goofy Aldous Huxley book. (“I mean, The Doors of Perception. What an Ojai-geeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.”) Well, you can’t win them all.
Eve was disappointed, of course, but not too deeply. She’d managed to pique the interest of a Major Artist. No mean feat. Even better, she’d done it not by denying her sexpot voluptuousness but by reveling in it. It was the first time.
It wouldn’t be the last.
Julian Wasser, then taking pictures for Time, approached her at the opening, the public opening, which she’d attended, humiliatingly enough, with her parents. Wasser told her he was looking for a girl willing to be photographed playing chess with Duchamp, who in the 20s had all but forsaken his career as an artist to devote himself exclusively to the game. The only catch: the girl would have to strike a pose toute nue, since the Frenchman’s most famous work was titled Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2). In a move so Hollywood it was practically a rite of passage, Eve agreed to bare all for the camera. Only she wouldn’t be doing it for rent money like some down-on-her-luck starlet. She’d be doing it for revenge.
And art.
And now for what Eve would call her “groupie-adventuress” phase. It could be argued that, by the time of the photograph with Duchamp, she was well into it. After all, she’d already cut quite a swath through the cute young hunk L.A. artists: Kenny Price, Ed Ruscha, Ron Cooper. But post-photograph, she went on a tear that lasted nearly half a decade. Said Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stones Records, “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.”
And now for what Eve would call her “groupie-adventuress” phase. It could be argued that, by the time of the photograph with Duchamp, she was well into it. After all, she’d already cut quite a swath through the cute young hunk L.A. artists: Kenny Price, Ed Ruscha, Ron Cooper. But post-photograph, she went on a tear that lasted nearly half a decade. Said Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stones Records, “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.”
As Steve Martin, then a young banjo-playing comic and Troubadour regular, explained, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Eve was assured in her taste, no question. She knew what she liked and why.
By the end of the decade, Eve knew everyone. She was at every party, every event. “Life was one long rock ’n’ roll,” she’d say of those days. Even fun, though, can get to be a drag if you have too much of it. Writer Dan Wakefield, Eve’s big romance during this period, said, “Our year together was one of my favorite years, but I couldn’t have lived through two of them. My God, the decadence!” By 1971, Eve was suffering from a condition she termed “squalid overboogie.” It was time for a change.
Shifting her attention from photography back to prose, she began writing a piece about her alma mater titled “The Sheik.” When she was finished, she showed it to Joan Didion, whom she knew through Wakefield. Said Eve, “Joan and I connected. The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she’d take downers, but really she’s a Hell’s Angel girl, white trash. . . . [Joan] was all the rage then. Grover [Lewis, an editor at Rolling Stone] asked her to write for him. She couldn’t, because of her contract with Life.She recommended me.” Eve sent the piece to Lewis. Lewis sent Eve a check. She could scarcely believe it. Rolling Stone was, at the time, the hottest thing going, “just too fabulous and hip for words.” Best of all, it was publishing her work.
So what’s her writing like? Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.
L.A. is, in fact, her favorite subject matter. It’s the height of irony that Joan Didion should have been the one to give her a shot at the big time. Their views on the city couldn’t be more antithetical. Didion—small, unsmiling, fragile, a lifelong sufferer of migraines—sees it as a spiritual and intellectual wasteland, a place where “a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity,” where the Golden Dream turns into God’s Worst Nightmare as quickly as the Santa Anas whip down the San Gorgonio Pass. Her sensibility is doom and gloom with the style to match: dry, measured, spare, with a tight-lipped control of emotion, lots of white on the page.
Eve, on the other hand—curvy, sunny, resilient to the point of indestructibility, only gets headaches when she gets hangovers—sees the city as “a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio,” loving it for its “spaces between the words, [its] blandness and the complete absence of push.” Eve is the true spirit of L.A., the pleasure principle incarnate. And, as with Didion, her style is reflective of her sensibility: giddy, gushing, conversational, infused with a kind of hip, happy innocence, sentences that run on and on and on, unable to catch their breath.
Eve is easy to dismiss because she doesn’t wear her seriousness on her sleeve. Her concerns are the seating arrangements at dinner parties, love affairs on the skids. She offers up information commonly known as gossip. Girl stuff, basically. (By that standard, of course, Proust was writing girl stuff, too.) But her casualness has depth, an aesthetic resonance. She achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment
Her agent, Erica Spellman-Silverman, takes a different view: “I called her F. Scott FitzBabitz. She really got the time—L.A. in the 70s. Captured it perfectly. In the 80s, though, things started to change.” And not for the better. Not for Eve. The advent of cocaine caused overboogie to sink to untenable depths of squalor. Said Paul Ruscha, “She’d blown her book advance on coke, fucked up her nose. She called me, begged me to come over. I couldn’t believe what I saw. There wasn’t an inch of floor not covered in bloody Kleenex. The cats were running around high.” It was time for Eve to join A.A., not just for alcoholics, according to her.
Eve has not written a book since the fire. She did, however, have a new set of business cards printed up:
Eve Babitz Better red than dead.
She still lives in Hollywood.
Extracts Sourced from Vanity Fair
BOOK REVIEWS
The Second Pass
THURSDAY MARCH 12TH, 2009
By Deborah Shapiro
To begin with, there’s the full-page Annie Leibovitz portrait on the book’s cover: Babitz – a self-described “art-groupie” turned writer – healthy-looking in a black bikini and a boa, standing by a wall of greenery with one hand on her hip, dark bangs fringing her eyes. And there she is again, just opposite the title page, wearing the same bikini, only now she’s seated, legs crossed, talking on a rotary phone. This full embrace of authorial vanity is an indication of what’s to come – namely, an eight-page dedication that starts with Sol and Mae Babitz, her parents, and then goes on (and on) to include, among a host of notable names and places, the following dedicatees:
- The Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not - Eggs Benedict at the Beverly Wilshire - the purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain - Frank O’Hara’s “Lunch Poems” - Dr. Boyd Cooper, gynecologist extraordinaire - Saturday - sour cream -the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in -the observatory where I used to try to find James Dean after he died -Desbutal, Ritalin, Obetrol and any other speed. It wasn’t that I didn’t love you, it was that is was too hard.
While the cover bills it as “a confessional L.A. novel,” Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles.
It’s worth noting that The Luau and its gardenias – its seedy decadence – coincidentally make an appearance in “The White Album,” Joan Didion’s masterful essay on the excess and incomprehensibility of the late ’60s, particularly in L.A. It’s instructive to read Babitz in relation to Didion because they wrote of the same time and place (recall the dedication, above), yet the contrast between them is stark. Where Didion is clipped and edgy, on the verge of collapse, Babitz is looser, discursive, funny. For Didion, for a time, life became illegible and narratives stopped making sense. Babitz, you suspect, never much relied on narrative sense in the first place.
but I’d have to put Eve’s Hollywood right up there with it. As a New Yorker by way of New England, I’m hardly the most qualified judge of these things. But reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.
Extracts sourced from The Second Pass
New York Times Book Review - Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz, a Glamour Girl Who Refused to Be Dull
By Dwight Garner, May 2017
That writer is the Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz, whose prose reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila.
Babitz is aware, throughout “Eve’s Hollywood,” of the effect she has on people, especially men. “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter,” she writes. Actors spun their cars around to follow her.
She decides the thing to do with her life is not to be dull. “Mother,” she says one evening, when she’s a teenager. “Yes, darling,” her mother replies. Babitz says, “I think I’m going to be an adventuress. Is that all right?”
She does become an adventuress; she pursues ravishment. There’s a good deal of sex in “Eve’s Hollywood.” There are scenes of running into the ocean with vodka martinis in hand.
Extract Sourced from New York Times
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Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating.
—Carmela Ciuraru, The New York TimesBabitz’s style is cool, conversational, loose, yet weighted with a seemingly effortless poetry. Unlike her contemporary, Joan Didion, Babits isn’t staring into the abyss and reporting back; but she does want to tell you how good the light is out by the abyss.
—Andrew Male, The Guardian[A] charming tour guide who takes a wasteland and gives us back a wonderland.
—Steffie Nelson, New York Magazine
Unlike Didion, who’d dedicated herself early to her craft, Babitz seemingly became a writer just because she had so many great stories to tell. Many of them fill the pages of her first book, the “confessional L.A. novel” Eve’s Hollywood, first published in 1974. Eve’s Hollywood takes us from dances in the gymnasium at Hollywood High, to her parents’ famed salons, to a suite at the Chateau with a pile of pure cocaine and a southern heartbreaker who’s a dead ringer for Gram Parsons. Her writing style is so easy and breezy that it was, combined with her personal life, easy for critics to dismiss as insubstantial. It possesses none of the noir, Manson-tinged melodrama that is the ruling L.A. trope. This might explain why all seven of her books — including the glossy 1980 collectible Fiorucci the Book — have been out of print for decades, collected obsessively on eBay and in thrift stores by other nascent “It” girls.
Babitz retired from public life in 1997, after a horrific accident — her skirt caught on fire while she was driving, severely burning most of her body. After the incident, she has said, she simply didn’t feel like writing anymore. One can’t help but wonder whether the loss of her beauty and youth made Babitz feel powerless, and whether the city she loved might not have, in essence, turned its back on her. It’s a painful truth that we owe it to her to look at.
But we’re equally obligated to crack the cover of Eve’s Hollywood, featuring the author as photographed by Annie Leibovitz in full starlet mode, and settle in with this charming tour guide who takes a wasteland and gives us back a wonderland. Thanks in part to a reassessment of L.A.’s role in the history of modern art, Babitz herself has been rediscovered by a generation raised on both Didion and Sex and the City, one that believes a girl should be able to have her cake, wash it down with Champagne, and write about it, too.
HER ESSAYS
Ms. Magazine
My Life in a 36DD Bra, Or, The All-American Obsession
By Eve Babitz, April 1976
When I was 15 years old, I bought and filled my first 36 DD bra. Since then, no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me in the first hour that he was a leg man. Tits! Why, he hadn’t even noticed!
Later I noticed that men would view my tits and become aflame with desire for them, and they would fantasize about having a pair of their own: “God, if I had tits like those I could fuck my way into a million bucks…” I also started getting plenty of, “Shit, she must really be horny.” (They get horny so I’m supposed to.)
There are other little tricky situations that arise from big tits. Sometimes other women, a lot of the time when they’re drunk, can’t keep their eyes off them. They think you’re doing it on purpose. It’s like big guys in bars getting picked on for fights. But that’s okay, I don’t really mind about women. Deep down they know I know they can’t help it and eventually they turn their venom on their escorts for liking women with big tits and leave me out of it
There is one other problem—not a problem but a little matter of concern—about having big tits, and that is that a lot of sensitive, smart men are terrified because they’re consumed by lust and they haven’t learned the old “leg man” line. Also they have this nervous feeling that anyone with tits like that must be vulgar. Or insensitive. There I sit, reading my Proust and minding my p’s and q’s and keeping up with current oddities—no slouch more or less—and I see them shrink from my gaze as they I were a tramp.
Occasionally, I sit in a restaurant and I watch as a lithe, long-limbed creature with daises embroidered on a sheer organdy blouse (beneath which she does not now, nor has she ever had to wear a bra) enters. I see the face of the man who awaits her; it has a particularly familiar look and until lately, I couldn’t place it. He kisses her, she sits down, and he reaches over to pour her some cool white wine. And then, I’ll bet you anything, he says, “You know, even though we just met, I think I must tell you right off…I’m a tit man.”
Full available on The Stack Reader
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Playboy Why You Should By Eve Babitz, December 1989
Once you feel what it’s like to dance with someone who knows how to dance, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You may even come to realize, as I have, that dancing is better than sex. I mean that, I really do. It’s better because it’s a flirtation that can go on forever and ever without being consummated; because you can do it with strangers and not feel guilty or ashamed; because you can do it outside your marriage and not get in any trouble; and because you can do it in public, with people watching and applauding. And when you’re doing it right, you can’t think about anything else, such as what you forgot at work or that the ceiling needs painting.
Which is why women love to dance.
Not taking dance lessons is a common mistake among men. They fail to realize that dancing is one of the few things a man can learn when he’s young that will come in handy later. Men who know how to dance—even a few basic steps—will never end up sad and alone, with nobody to play with, because women will always be looking for that rare man who can dance. They’ll take him to night clubs and parties and on cruises, and they’ll go all mushy after a simple waltz.
“Ahhh,” he said, “you’re the queen of slow dances, aren’t you? You’re so easy to dance with, your body is the great escape.”
Of course, it’s only a dance.
Nothing more.
But the great thing about ballroom dancing is where it can lead, if only a woman knows how to follow.
Full available on The Stack Reader
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Smart Magazine
Sober Virgins of the 80's
By Eve Babitz, Fall 1988
I think it was at the party for Donovan when Jim Morrison stuck his fist through a plate-glass window that I began to realize that love and sex in the sixties was really more like a bunch of people tasting appetizers, wondering who might be good for them if they ever, in fact, decided to stay in one bedroom longer than overnight.
The trick in the sixties was to grab the most sought-after member of the opposite sex and see how long you could keep him from leaving, from trying to get more than just you into bed.
It seemed that there was no hope.
I watched everyone I knew who used to be hot stuff either drop out from what J.D. Souther called “over-boogie-related” conditions like Epstein-Barr or join “programs” like AA or Cocaine Abusers Anonymous, where they seemed to come to their senses. This created clusters of what my friend Julia calls “sober virgins,” for although none of these people were by any stretch of the imagination virgins, once they were sober, getting undressed in front of total strangers became a whole new ball game.
And everyone in the world went to the gym. Suddenly, men I always thought of as wispy poets had shoulders as if there were no tomorrow...... I myself got leg weights and went hiking around the Hollywood Hills, wondering if this was better for me than closing down the Troubadour every night.
In the meantime, I had taken up ballroom dancing, thinking that it was a good way to spend time with the opposite sex up close without having bodily fluids change hands. But the trouble with doing the tango, I discovered, was that it makes you sort of more sexy and languorous and in the mood than something old-fashioned should do.
Doing the tango made guys who had been “just friends” suddenly look like hot stuff.
But now that I have it myself, I can actually see how love and sex might have something to do with each other, rather than what I learned in the sixties: that sex was something two people did until one of them thought he’d fallen in love with someone else.
Extracts Sourced from The Stack Reader
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Esquire Magazine I Was a Naked Pawn For Art
by Eve Babitz, September 1991
Being a true account of the day Marcel Duchamp put the West Coast underground on the culture map by playing chess in Pasadena with the author, who was at the moment an unclothed young woman with a lot to learn.
Extracts sourced from Esquire
FURTHER READING
Book about Eve
t Lili Anolik in her new book “Hollywood’s Eve” (Scribner), out Tuesday. “[She] was a sex object who was, too, a sex subject, meaning she exploited herself every bit as ruthlessly as … the men exploited her. She wasn’t just model and muse, passive and pliable, but artist and instigator, wicked and subversive.”
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