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| Eve Babitz |
Eve Babitz: return of the LA woman
Jim Morrison wrote a song about her, Ed Ruscha romanced her, and she played chess with Marcel Duchamp nude – but it’s her books, to be adapted for TV, that have ensured Babitz’s reputation will last
Andrew Male
Tuesday 8 November 2016
“Eve Babitz does not give interviews,” says her agent, Erica Spellman-Silverman, in a clipped, formidable tone, down the line from her New York office. As opening lines go, it’s more of a closer, but it makes a kind of sense. After all, Babitz is a currently a writer in demand, undergoing something of a renaissance. She doesn’t need to give interviews.
A year ago, Tristar Television announced that two storied former Sony executives, Amy Pascal and Elizabeth Cantillon, would be producing a TV series about 1960s and 1970s LA, based on Babitz’s autobiographical novels. The announcement coincided with a New York Review of Books reissue of the first of these books, Eve’s Hollywood, originally published in 1974. Last month, NYRB reissued the second of Babitz’s memoirs, Slow Days, Fast Company. Both have been met with glowing reviews, critics praising Babitz’s serene, painterly depiction of a beguiling Los Angeles of earthquake weather, martini lunches, messy romances and Quaalude reveries. Babitz’s style is cool, conversational, loose, yet weighted with a seemingly effortless poetry. Unlike her contemporary, Joan Didion, Babitz 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.
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| Eve Babitz Photo by Mirande Babitz |
Spellman-Silverman has been instrumental in both the TV series and the reissues, but to understand how we got here – how this LA author, who few people had even heard of before last year, is now the toast of Hollywood – we need to go back a little further.
Naked chess
If you know your art history, you may be familiar with a black-and-white image of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked woman. The photograph, titled Duchamp Playing Chess With A Nude (Eve Babitz), was taken at Pasadena Art Museum in 1963 by Time photographer Julian Wasser. Eve was just 20, and the photo was an act of revenge against her married lover, gallerist Walter Hopps, who had failed to invite Babitz to the VIP opening of the museum’s Duchamp retrospective a few days previously, knowing his wife would be there.
In 2011 art-historian Hunter Drohojowska-Philp filled in the photograph’s backstory for her history of the LA 60s art scene, Rebels in Paradise. As well as being Hopps’ girlfriend, Babitz was a habitué of art-scene hangout Barney’s Beanery; lover of Ed Ruscha (and his brother, Paul) and seducer of Jim Morrison. Eve is Jim’s LA Woman, inspiration for the Doors song. “Never saw a woman/ So alone” – that’s Eve.
Then, in January 2012, Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott wrote a blogpost praising Babitz’s novels, and referenced a number of younger female writers who’d recently rediscovered her writing. One of these was his colleague Lili Anolik.
“I must have first read Eve about six years ago,” says Anolik. “I hunted down a copy of [her second novel] Slow Days, Fast Company. I couldn’t believe how good it was.”
Anolik fell in love with Babitz’s cool, carefree prose, and decided to track her down, to bring this forgotten west coast chronicler back into the daylight.
“She was in the phone book [but] I was too shy to call,” says Anolik. “So I sent her postcards of movie stars I knew she liked: Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando. No response.”
With the authority of Vanity Fair behind her, Anolik contacted Spellman-Silverman. “I was thrilled,” says the agent. “I thought, OK, maybe this will get people interested in Eve again.”
Anolik started by interviewing people around Eve: her cousin, her sister, Paul Ruscha. “Eve got curious, and told Paul to tell me to give her a call.”
Following an initial, awkward face-to-face meeting, Anolik and Babitz spoke weekly on the phone for over a year. The resulting Vanity Fair feature, when it appeared in the February 2014 Hollywood Issue, presented a life so remarkable it felt like a crime to admit that, yes, this was the first time you were finding out about Eve Babitz.
‘Squalid overboogie’
Raised in 1950s Hollywood by an artist mother and a father who was first violinist in the 20th Century Fox orchestra, with Igor Stravinsky for her godfather and family friends that included Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo and Bertrand Russell, Babitz and her younger sister, Mirandi, spent their teenage years devouring literature and nightlife in Europe and LA. In 1962, Babitz entered what she calls her “groupie-adventuress” phase, moving between the LA art gang and the west coast rock scene. Inspired by seeing a Joseph Cornell exhibition on acid, she became an album-cover designer, crafting Cornellian collages for 1967’s Buffalo Springfield Again and the Byrds’ 1970 double LP Untitled. She introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, and suggested to her boyfriend Steve Martin that he should model his stand-up look on a 1906 Henri Lartigue photo of a man on a beach in a white suit. Of her brief fling with a young Harrison Ford, she told Anolick: “Harrison could fuck. Nine people a day. It’s a talent, loving nine different people in one day. Warren [Beatty] could only do six.”
But all this living was only half the life. By the end of the 60s, suffering from what she described to Anolik as “squalid overboogie”, Babitz turned to writing. Through her novelist boyfriend Dan Wakefield, she sent a prose piece about her old school, Hollywood High, to Didion, which landed her a gig at Rolling Stone magazine. Babitz’s Hollywood followed in 1974. This is where Spellman-Silverman enters the story.
“I met her in 1976,” says Spellman-Silverman. “I was going to LA as a literary agent at ICM. My friend said, ‘Oh you must meet Eve. You should work with her.’ I’m a born and bred New Yorker so naturally a little reserved, but Eve was completely infectious. I coined a kind of a nickname for her: ‘F Scott Fitzbabitz’. Her world seemed very Fitzgeraldean. There was something very magical and open, but also, like quicksilver – she could be very infuriating and undisciplined.”
Spellman-Silverman’s sister Victoria Wilson, an editor at Knopf, transformed Babitz’s brilliant aphoristic LA essays into her second book and possible masterpiece, Slow Days, Fast Company. “There was a musical, whispery ease about Eve’s writing, but also the possibility that it could all melt away,” says Spellman-Silverman. “Which was exactly like Eve. She drove around for years in this old yellow VW bug. You got in that car, you were never sure if you were going to get out alive. You felt it was all going to fall apart on the freeway.”
The books Spellman-Silverman represented were Slow Days; the brilliant Sex And Rage from 1979; and the only slightly less wonderful LA Woman, which came out in 1982.
“Then I went to the William Morris agency,” says Spellman-Silverman. “My work became much more corporate. LA changed, the music business changed, the culture changed. Maybe we all changed. And she didn’t. Eve carried on being Eve. Then I went to run United Artists in New York, we fell out if touch. I no longer had the time or ability to pull this work out of her. Then Eve had her accident.”
Driving home from a party one night in 1997, smoking a cigar, Babitz dropped a cone of ash onto her skirt. The skirt went up in flames. She suffered third-degree burns over half her body. She stopped going out, stopped writing. Her light waned and, with it, her name.
“So when I read Lili’s piece,” says Spellman-Silverman, “I thought, oh my God I’ve got to get these books republished.”
For the Sony deal, all four of Babitz’s novels will be adapted, at Spellman-Silverman’s insistence. “They just wanted to buy Eve’s Hollywood. I said no – all the books. It’s one character. one story. Eve’s story.”
Babitz, however, will not be involved in the production.
“That’s one of the reasons Eve doesn’t give interviews anymore,” says Spellman-Silverman. “LA in the late 60s and mid-70s was like a comet. You can’t describe it to anybody who wasn’t there, other than the way Eve did. She’s thrilled about all of this, but she’s not going to comment on it. Because nothing she can say is ever going to explain it or show it better than what she wrote. She wants people reading the books to see that person, and she’s not that person anymore. None of us are.”
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