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| Eve Babitz |
LILI ANOLIK
I wrote the book on Eve. Hollywood’s Eve is its title, a play on the title of one of her books, Eve’s Hollywood. People often call it a biography, though I never do. Not if I can help it, at least. A work should reflect its subject. And a biography, by its very nature, is organized, linear, official; and Eve, by her very nature, was magnificently disorganized, and even more magnificently discursive, and always, always off the record and on the sly, i.e., unofficial. She was the secret genius of L.A., the city she was born in back in 1943 when it wasn’t a city or really much of anything at all—a couple of studios that manufactured make-believe, plus sea and sky and sand and space, sunlight colliding with water, creating a hazy luster that turned the world into dazzle and blur, a place where reality was so beautiful it looked unreal. (As Eve herself once observed, “In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one.”) Or rather Eve was the secret genius of L.A. until I went and shot off my big fat mouth. Because before I wrote the book on Eve, I wrote a feature on Eve, for Vanity Fair in 2014, and the secret was out.
Now, the secret would’ve come out whether I shot off my mouth or not. Eve’s genius is too clear, too shining, too true to stay under wraps forever. And nowhere is that genius more in evidence than in her books, at least six of which were reissued after my piece appeared. (New York Review Books Classics in particular did right by Eve, bringing back her two masterpieces, Eve’s Hollywood in 2015, and Slow Days, Fast Company in 2016; and bringing forth, in 2019, I Used to Be Charming, a collection of the best of her uncollected work, short-listed for a PEN Award, and conjured practically out of thin air by the brilliant editor Sara Kramer.) So my piece didn’t change things so much as goose them. Had it not been written, Eve’s late-blooming chic would’ve bloomed a few years after her death instead of a few years before is all.
But oh what a difference a few years can make. In 1977, Eve tells of “a shaky week-long period…when I was confronted with the possibility that a book I’d written might become a best-seller…. I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias.” The book she’s referring to, her first, Eve’s Hollywood, was originally published in 1974, when she was in her 30s. The question is: Was the smell any sweeter when she was in her 70s and not just near fame but at it, in it, of it?
To answer that question, I’m going to take you back to the spring of 2012, when Eve wasn’t quite 70, was a week shy of 69, and I first met her. It’s a tale I’ve told before, both in Vanity Fair and Hollywood’s Eve. I’m loath to repeat myself, so I’ll keep it snappy. Will speed through the chronology of facts and events that brought me to that particular city (L.A.) in that particular restaurant (Short Order) on that particular day (Friday, May 4).
The speedy version: I fell in love.
The speedy version, slightly slowed down: Two years prior, in 2010, I read one of Eve’s out-of-print books (in 2010, all Eve’s books were out-of-print books). She was so good I couldn’t believe it. The writing—its innocence, its sophistication, its candor, its wit, its profligacy and pluck, its willingness to fly in the face of received wisdom, its sheer headlong, impish glee—made me positively dizzy with pleasure. I had to talk to her, tell her. But how? Other than an interview she did with the Archives of American Art back in 2000 (an interview she wasn’t even the focus of; a photograph taken by somebody else was), she was barely on the internet. Certainly wasn’t on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn.
She was, however, in the phone book. I scrawled ecstatic words on a postcard, mailed it. That didn’t work, so I hand-delivered a note. (Her condo was in West Hollywood; I lived in New York.) That didn’t work either. When, a year later, I got a nibble—not even a nibble, a “Maybe, could be interesting”—from an editor who’d never heard of her at Vanity Fair, a magazine I’d never written for, I sent an actual letter, claiming with wild, nay reckless, optimism that she was about to be the subject of a full-length feature. Nothing. I changed tack. Reached out to her sister, Mirandi, and cousin, Laurie, both of whom were wary initially but warmed eventually, as well as several key ex-boyfriends. The day before, one of those key ex-boyfriends, Paul Ruscha, an artist, the brother of another key ex-boyfriend, Ed Ruscha, also an artist, called. Eve had told him to tell me I could take her to lunch. I flew out of JFK the next morning.
As Eve’s once and future frenemy Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Here’s the story I’d been telling myself: Eve and I were in a romance—not a physical one, obviously, but of the minds—a far-fetched flirtation, a screwball comedy for bookworms. She hadn’t been rejecting my advances all this time. No, she’d been testing my resolve, making me prove how much I cared. That’s why she was letting me catch her now—I’d passed, I’d proved. I didn’t know then of the other, more illustrious, suitors (art-critic-as-artist Dave Hickey, novelist-publisher Emily Gould, the redoubtable Sara Kramer) who’d already tried with Eve and failed. Had I known, though, I wouldn’t have been cowed. Not ardent enough, I’d have thought.
And yes, readers—sigh—I’m aware of how deluded I sound with my rom-com babble, how close to lunacy. But this is Eve Babitz we’re talking about. Eve fucking Babitz. Everything she did had an erotic sparkle, a wild playfulness. Seduction was her stock in trade. A love goddess/sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, wasn’t just the model and ideal for her personal life (in her younger days, Eve was epically promiscuous, the men—and the occasional women—swashbuckling through her bedroom consorts worthy of a love goddess/sex symbol: Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, Ahmet Ertegun, Annie Leibovitz, among others), but for her artistic life as well. From L.A. Woman: “I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then…[my mother] told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry. And so I realized she was right and didn’t.”
Of course I’d heard about the fire. (In case you haven’t: In 1997, Eve was lighting a cigar, dropped a match in her lap, went up in flames. Her face was spared, but not her body. She very nearly died.) And I’d been told that she didn’t see people anymore, or go out. Didn’t write either. (Two by Two was published after the fire, in 1999, though written almost entirely before, and there hadn’t been a book since.) Yet even her withdrawal struck me as a love goddess/sex symbol gambit. She was operating in the grand tradition—none grander—of Greta Garbo and the coy come-on of “I want to be alone,” beckoning us forward as she pushed us away.
It’s the beckon I was choosing to heed, not the push. Which is why I was sitting at this upscale hamburger joint on Fairfax and Third, my suitcase (I’d come straight from the airport) wedged between chair and wall. My eyes were flicking this way and that: scanning the front door, the window, the front door. I glanced at my cell to check the time, got distracted by a text. When I looked up, I noticed a woman by the hostess stand.
I knew instantly that it was Eve, though she didn’t remotely resemble the Eve on the jackets of her books. I knew instantly too that she and I weren’t in any kind of story or seduction. Something about her was—and I don’t know how else to put this—wrong. It was the hair that tipped me off: gray and brutally short, almost hacked-looking. And then the clothes confirmed my suspicions: a dark yet faded T-shirt, stained; shapeless black pants; glasses with lenses so thick and greasy that the eyes behind them were hugely magnified, distorted. I’d misread her and the situation so egregiously that for several seconds I was disoriented. It was the sound of a clattering dish that snapped me to. As I walked toward her, she gave me an unfocused smile. A tooth, I saw, was missing. I flashed on a line from Slow Days: “I also have nearly perfect teeth, which I believe is the real secret to the universe.” I flinched, but didn’t break stride.
To say that the meal went badly is to imply that it went at all. It didn’t. Eve wolfed her food and wanted to leave. That was it, that was the meal. Not that she was rude or hostile. On the contrary, her tone, her expression, her general ambience was cheerful, friendly. In fact, cheer and friendliness, along with unkemptness and decrepitude, were her most conspicuous characteristics. Her most disconcerting as well, because they didn’t seem connected to anyone or anything around her.
The check hadn’t yet come when Eve stood up from the table. Her condo, I realized with a pang, was within walking distance. (She no longer drove.) Desperate for more time with her, I threw down bills, asked the waiter to call a cab. She talked more in it than she did in the restaurant, but I couldn’t follow the sentences: One was about Evita Perón, the next about carob trees. As I leaned in to better hear, I became conscious of a smell coming off her, something sweet, rotten. I tried to breathe through my mouth.
Within minutes, we were on a sun-shot, sun-dazed, sleepy little block just south of Santa Monica. I spotted her building, rundown yet still pretty because of the bougainvillea and rhododendrons, both in bloom, surrounding it. The cab hadn’t quite rolled to a stop and she was getting out. She was in a rush but not, thank goodness, fast. And after wrestling my suitcase out of the trunk, I caught up with her at her door. She opened it just enough to slip through. I couldn’t see what was inside other than darkness, clutter. I could smell what was inside, though, and it was the same smell I smelled in the cab, except much, much stronger—a stench, really—of filth, of decay, of squalor, and it hit me like a physical blow.
I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. (That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness.
All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true.
So here’s how I’ve been occupying myself in the days, now weeks, since Eve’s death: holding up the memory of that first encounter and looking at it from another angle. Hers. Eve, I think, always knew we were in a Greek myth, only in her view, Hades wasn’t a place to which she’d been forcibly consigned, but voluntarily retreated. The three-headed dog was her staunch protector, not her vicious captor. Isolation, madness, and despair were sources of solace and comfort rather than torment and terror. And I—well, I wasn’t a heroic figure, a savior, at all. I was the monster, a figure of dread and menace intent on thrusting her back into the sunlight, exposing her to its pitiless glare, and on restoring her to a world that had treated her with cruelty and indifference.
Says Eve’s cousin, Laurie Pepper, “Of course Evie was scared of you. You represented that whole East Coast literary world. She thought East Coast people were snotty, and that they had no right to be snotty. But she also had a lurking fear that maybe they did have the right, and that maybe they knew better. To get reviewed in The New York Times back then was really just it. And oh, God, The Times was horrible to her—horrible! Over and over again. That last review nearly killed her.”
You wouldn’t guess it from The Times’ glowing coverage of Eve in recent years, capped by a to-die-for obituary, but the paper was, in general, quite rough on her when she was actually writing. Julia Whedon, assessing Slow Days in hardcover for The Times in ’77, gave the book a mixed-to-poor review, concluding, “I discern in [Babitz] the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia.” The title of P.J. O’Rourke’s review of L.A. Woman in ’82 was “Not a Bad Girl but a Dull One.” And Times chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of Black Swans (the “last review” that Laurie just referenced) in ’93, closed with the wish that Eve “maybe take a vacation from L.A.”
Nor was The Times alone in its low estimation of Eve. She was largely derided and dismissed by the literary establishment during her career. (Every time I hear the words rediscovery and revival attached to Eve’s name, I think of Lily Tomlin narrowing her eyes at Don Johnson in Eastbound & Down and saying, “What’s this ‘we’ shit, white man?” Only I swap out we for re.) Hip people got her—Joan Didion suggested Rolling Stone publish her; Steve Martin and Ed Ruscha were more than lovers, were fans; writers Alice Adams and Laurie Colwin thought she was something else, as did editor Vicky Wilson; and Jackie Onassis pressed copies of Slow Days on anyone going to L.A.—but hip people are, sadly, few and far between.
Let’s talk about the dangers of choosing Marilyn Monroe as your guiding light. Marilyn was the first postmodern movie star, a wet-lipped, platinum blonde sexpot who played the role of a wet-lipped, platinum blonde sexpot. When nude photos of her surfaced in 1952 and a reporter asked whether she really had nothing on during the shoot, Marilyn said, “I had the radio on,” a mock-dumb and thus supersmart response. Only a lot of people didn’t catch the “mock” part, took her for straight-up dumb (proving, obviously, that they were the straight-up dumb ones). Eve, à la Marilyn, routinely referred to herself as a “groupie-adventuress,” which she was (she bedded Jim Morrison, Warren Zevon, several Eagles), and wasn’t (before she was publishing books, she was designing album covers—for Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds). Yet there were those who missed her irony, missed her wit, as they’d missed Marilyn’s. “Eve Bah-bitz, with the great big tits” was what she was called behind her back by the guys hanging out at Barney’s Beanery, an artists’ drinking hole near the Sunset Strip, in the ’60s. And that’s essentially what reviewers were calling her to her face, or at least in print. To them, she was a ding-a-ling from La-La Land with a typewriter, and breasts instead of brains. Wrote Eve of Marilyn’s suicide, “Marilyn kept putting herself in people’s hands…. They let her think she was just a shitty Hollywood actress and Arthur Miller was a brilliant genius…. No wonder she liked to sleep.”
And here I was, trying to shake Eve awake. Laurie Pepper: “It was the bad reviews. It was getting older. Plus, the fire. She just didn’t want to have to be ‘Eve Babitz’ anymore. Not for you or anyone else.”
It took two years, but I successfully completed my heroic and/or monstrous task. My piece on Eve appeared in Vanity Fair’s 2014 Hollywood issue. The ball was now rolling, or I should say, the star was now ascending, and its momentum was unstoppable. It was the reprints of her books, and the wild appreciation those reprints inspired, of course. People finally had, to use a favorite expression of Eve’s, “the eyes to see.” (I can still remember the shock of hearing writer-editor Gerry Howard, when he introduced me at an event for Hollywood’s Eve, describe Eve as one of late-20th-century L.A.’s greatest living chroniclers, starting to eclipse even the mighty Joan Didion. It was his casual tone, like his statement wasn’t especially daring or controversial, that floored me most of all.) Yet she was touching imaginations in a way that couldn’t be explained by the brilliance of her books alone. It was something about her, about Eve qua Eve and what she stood for—glamour, ebullience, courage, sex-and-drug-saturated bad behavior redeemed through obsessive hard work—and how it contrasted with the moment we were in—po-faced, whey-faced, mealy-mouthed—a historical period defined by its earnestness and hypocrisy, by its love of hall monitors. And young women who were already dauntingly cool were confirming and enhancing their vogue by associating with her.
To wit: In 2018, New Yorker It girl Jia Tolentino and Girls It girl Zosia Mamet appeared alongside Stephanie Danler, writer of Sweetbitter, the It novel of a couple years before, on a panel dedicated to Eve at the New York Public Library. In 2019, model-mogul Kendall Jenner was photographed on a yacht in the briefest of bikinis, a reissue of Black Swans peeking coyly out of her tote. And in 2021, Audrey Hope (Emily Alyn Lind) signaled that she had more than looks, had smarts too, when she stuck her well-shaped nose in a collection of Eve’s in the Gossip Girl reboot.
In the span of half a dozen years, Eve went from nowhere to everywhere. She’d skipped fame and fortune—bourgeois aspirations—and gone straight to legend, like the aristocrat-bohemian she so deeply was. To the world at large, this was a happily-ever-after ending: A jewel had been snatched out of the trash heap of history, and in the nick of time. She was still around to enjoy her glory.
But the truth is, she wasn’t. Not quite. After the fire, Eve existed in a kind of posthumous state. As if she’d somehow contrived to outlive herself—hence the isolation, madness, and despair. Though there was also the Huntington’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that was diagnosed late, in the last year or two of her life, yet present from way back, and probably the cause of the isolation and despair, certainly of the madness. Says her sister Mirandi, “Chunks of her poor brain were just falling off.”
Which is perhaps why the ending was, for Eve, unhappily ever after. “It’s too late,” she’d mutter darkly to Mirandi when the media requests began, in 2014, to trickle, then pour, in. Mirandi, a saint—truly a saint, I’m not kidding or exaggerating—shielded Eve from the sudden celebrity, responding to all reporters’ queries so Eve didn’t have to. And Mirandi, by responding to those queries, also shielded the sudden celebrity from Eve, who simply couldn’t be trusted not to blow it up in some spectacular fashion. (Eve didn’t have a computer, though once, in 2017, she got an A.A. friend to log her onto Facebook, and went on quite a spree. “Democrats started the KKK!” she posted. And “I love Rush Limbaugh!” Mirandi took down the posts as soon as she was alerted, then tore into Eve, who was properly chastened, and the A.A. bud, who was properly scared shitless. The answer to the question I’m most frequently asked about Eve: Yes, Eve, raised by Trotskyist parents and uninterested in politics but undoubtedly liberal her entire life, was far right in her final years. My amendment to that answer: Eve was also out of her ever-lovin’ mind in her final years.)
Really, though, and in fact, the ending for Eve was ambiguously ever after, those gardenias sometimes blowing rancid, sometimes sweet. One of the last scenes she and I played together:
Fall, 2017. Musso & Frank Grill, the old steakhouse on Hollywood Boulevard. We were having lunch, celebratory, because it had been announced in the trades that Hulu was developing a show based on Eve’s books. Mirandi and Laurie were also there, only in the case of Laurie, not yet—traffic; and in the case of Mirandi, yet, but not at that particular second—bathroom. Eve and I were alone.
I was about to ask her if she was going to order the sand dabs—a silly question; she always ordered the sand dabs at Musso’s—when she said, “I guess I ought to thank you.”
I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to. She wasn’t thanking me, and I don’t think I’d have been able to bear it if she was. (Eve didn’t do humbug emotions like gratitude.) There was a half smile on her face, and she was looking at me intently, something I couldn’t recall her ever having done before. I felt the need to speak, only I couldn’t think what to say. Couldn’t think, couldn’t think.
A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said.
And a minute after that, Mirandi was at the table too, and an energetic discussion ensued about the best route to take from the Eastside to Hollywood at midday.
Yet for me, the moment hasn’t passed. Maybe because it was such a charged one and for reasons I didn’t grasp at the time. I do now. It was the sole instance of Eve acknowledging, even if only obliquely, the complexity—and the complicity—of our secret, long-standing relationship. Secret because it took place entirely over the phone, nobody but us on the line; long-standing because it began on May 5, 2012, the day after the disastrous Short Order outing. I remember vividly the reluctance with which I reached for my cell that morning. To call her seemed the ultimate in hopeless gestures. Still, I forced myself to make it. I didn’t think she’d pick up. She did, though, and we had a pleasant if brief chat.
From that point on, Eve always took my calls, and I made them, several times a week, for years and years. The rapport that eluded us in person, where every encounter was abrupt, stilted, awkward, was, over the phone, effortless.
“Oui, oui?” she’d say, by way of greeting. I’d identify myself and then start peppering her with questions about the good old bad old days. (That was the trick, I’d discovered: grabbing her and immediately leaping backward. Execute the leap right and you’d fly over the damage that the fire and time and Huntington’s had wrought on her cerebral cortex, land cleanly in the past, untouched for whatever reason by the nuttiness.) When I ran out of breath, she’d say, before answering the questions, “Lili!” the exclamation point audible in her voice, which—and I thought this every time I heard it, the same thought, without fail—was so charming, unusually charming. It was girlish and light and lilting, the enunciation softly crisp, laughter bubbling up in it, and it said such sneaky-funny things. (If you want to know sneaky-funny how, watch this clip. It’s of Joan Didion on C-SPAN in 2000. Eve calls in, makes cool customer Didion break up twice with a single line: “Spode china.”) Yet the voice was drowsy too, as if the phone’s ringing had roused her from a post-sex slumber. And this was what I began to picture, despite my knowing exactly what Eve was like now: Eve then, Eve’s Hollywood–era Eve, sitting up in bed, tousle-haired and mascara-smeared, a sheet wrapped around her torso, the receiver cradled between her jaw and shoulder, a man beside her, only his back visible, trying to hold on to sleep.
On the phone, she talked like she looked. On the phone, she talked like she wrote. On the phone, she was what Laurie said she no longer could be: She was Eve Babitz.
In 1963, Eve, 20, naked, played chess with French Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, 76, in a suit as impeccable as his sangfroid, for photographer Julian Wasser. (Eve was trying to get back at her boyfriend, Walter Hopps, who’d scored a curatorial coup when Duchamp consented to a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, where Hopps was director. There was a party. Hopps invited his wife; didn’t invite Eve.) Wasser’s finger clicked many times that day. He let Eve, though, select the final image. Most revealed her in toto. She chose one that didn’t. In it, her body is on full and lush display. Her face, though, is concealed, her hair falling over it, veil-like.
This photograph, which would go on to become among the best known in California art history (it’s the one the Archives of American Art interviewed Eve about in 2000), was Eve’s first successful creative act. With it, she pulled the Marilyn trick—making herself into an exploitable sex object who was, too, a self-exploiting sex subject. (“Walter thought he was running the show, and I finally got to run something,” she said when I asked her why she agreed to pose.) With it, she also expressed her contradictory, even paradoxical, attitude toward fame: She wanted to be the person all eyes turned to while simultaneously giving those eyes the slip; to be ready for her close-up and then not take it; to be a star but anonymous.
I got it wrong earlier when I said that the secret genius of L.A.—that is, Eve—would’ve come out whether I shot off my mouth in Vanity Fair or not. Or rather, I got it right and wrong. Right, since Eve’s a literary heroine because of what she wrote. And some well-placed somebody, at some point, would’ve stumbled across her books, twigged to how dynamite the best of them are, started shouting. Wrong though, since Eve’s a cultural heroine because of who she was, something only she could tell us. And in 2014, she was already so near the end, her memory on its last legs.
The Vanity Fair piece set matters in motion for Eve by laying out her complicated and chaotic life, letting readers take in the scope of it, the scale, its grandeur and folly (often one and the same), glamour and grime, beauty and horror. And it was she who was doing the laying. Giving us the lowdown on the fan note-cum-mash note she sent Joseph Heller of Catch-22 fame: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” On Harrison Ford in the sack: “The thing about Harrison was Harrison could fuck. Nine people a day.” On the source of fellow feelings between her and Joan Didion: “Joan and I connected. The drugs she was on, I was on.” On what her skin looked like after the fire: “I’m a mermaid now, half my body.”
At 70, Eve was prepared at last to push back the veil of her hair, show her face to the world.
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