Hollywood Never Had a Better Girlfriend Than Eve Babitz

 

Eve Babitz

Hollywood Never Had a Better Girlfriend Than Eve Babitz

The reissue of her 1972 classic Eve's Hollywood is a perfect opportunity to get acquainted with old Los Angeles' funniest serial celebrity muse.

BY Maggie Lange

October 6, 2015

Eve Babitz—artist, author, and famed girlfriend of a handful of famous men (Harrison Ford, Jim Morrison, Steve Martin among them)—was once notably introduced to the Beatles as "the best girl in America" by their Los Angeles-based press agent. No one seemed to question it then and hasn't questioned it since.

Today, the New York Review of Books reissued a perfect introduction to Babitz's champagne-tinted worldview: a 1972 collection of essays called Eve's Hollywood. In Eve's Hollywood, she is Los Angeles’ best ambassador and stand-in girlfriend. She loves the city, flaws and false facades and all. For example, she cheerfully describes Hollywood as "our angel’s prop halo." She holds the key to the city's particular devotion to superficiality; she extrapolates it from an obsession with the popular girls in high school. It stirs one "into confusion by what appeared to be a bunch of petals not stuck onto a flower."

Here is her entire chapter on Cary Grant:

I once saw Cary Grant up close. He was beautiful. He looked exactly like Cary Grant.

She expertly shades a rival flirt as a woman who "has 36 pairs of shoes and goes around barefoot... the kind of girl who is always carrying books about witchcraft, only they're new."

Full of anecdotes like these, Eve's Hollywood reads like a superbly observant diary of a party girl—the kind who's mysterious because how do they exist when they're not at parties? Babitz is like a literary antecedent to Cher from Clueless or Parker Posey from Party Girl. Do they really think in the language of cocktail-party banter? This one does.

For the fastest dose of of Babitz's addictive and voluptuous generosity of spirit, just turn to her formidably unwieldy dedications page in Eve's Hollywood. It includes her friends, enemies, frenemies, colleagues, eggs Benedict at certain hotels, certain serving spoons at others, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, "to STRAWBERRIES and ASPARAGUS, the season is upon us," the word "brouhaha," and countless other important items you wouldn't even think to thank. But you'll want to thank her for introducing such widespread affection and walking you through her big joyous party.

GQ