Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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Eve Babitz’s claims to fame rest, in large measure, on her claims on the famous. She’s the goddaughter, of course, of one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. Then there’s that photograph of the chess match with Marcel Duchamp, Eve contemplating her next move without so much as a fig leaf for cover. And what about the series of Adams, better known than the original, some of them, to whom she offered her forbidden fruit? Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Ed Ruscha, J. D. Souther, Stephen Stills, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Warren Zevon, Ahmet Ertegun all took a bite at one time or another. In the depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” I was in LA almost every weekend. (hitched a ride from UC Berkeley to UCLA to visit Larry—a boyfriend of few years-who sadly died last year), and to visit my sister at the same time.

Since enjoying Eve and her book — I’ve already started listening to another: “Slow Days, Fast Company”….. Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm . . . Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and an ingénue in the same breath . . . Babitz takes the reader on travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs. Says Eve Babitz, “irresistible hybrid of boho intellectual and L.A. party girl” according to Vanity Fair. The year is 1972 and this is her first book, a collection of quasi-autobiographical essays. Those three sentences comprising the whole of a chapter called simply ‘Cary Grand’ are a good example of Babitz’s writing (witty, insinuating and intimate – almost conspiratorial) and of the way she shares names and places, moods and yearnings, as though we are all members of the same group of insiders.

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Yet something about this reached me. There is a time-capsule quality to Eve’s Hollywood that transcends its glibness. Babitz’s parents were beautiful, talented, creative people, and like many people with symmetrical features and a desire to express themselves, they washed up on the shores of Hollywood. This is how Eve Babitz found herself going to Hollywood High, surrounded by some of the most beautiful teenagers on the planet. She was far from ugly, but she never made the top cut of those sirens who were not only breathtaking, but already gliding through life with self-assurance and poise. I read today That Eve Babitz died a few days ago, at 78. She was unique and one of the best of her kind. She mined the most unusual and the most everyday moments – ice skating, shopping, a screening of the surfing movie Five Summer Stories, a Los Angeles Dodgers game. In The Answer, she drops acid with a local hippy-bohemian who decides he needs to go to the bank.

Now, no one will sit, staring into Persia—now when it’s raining. The Sheik is extinguished by dark skies and forecasts. And now it’s almost Christmas, an impatiently suffered imposition tolerated only until the clear hot skies return with shining palms, and the beautiful, scornful eyes of the new 20 gaze out of the windows of Hollywood High.” As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with; and better still, made herself felt in every encounter. In Nathanael West's celebrated novel of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, Eve Babitz sees nothing but an unfair diatribe against her beloved hometown of Los Angeles. Babitz often hears of Hollywood being described as a 'wasteland', a fake town full of fake people where even the greenery is plastic. In Eve's Hollywood she refutes that myth. 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. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.

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Eve was learning how to be a pinup on the surface, an artist underneath. Just like her idol, Marilyn. You’re Eve Babitz, future artist and muse, observer and observed, chronicler of scenes, stealer of them, too; and you’re poised to enter a new decade. Her stories tell of drinking in the Garden of Allah bar with fake I.D.s, watching smoke rise over Watts from the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont in August 1965 or a year spent in New York City were she had gone to be the office manager of an East Village underground newspaper. She got her first acid from Richard Alpert, who became Baba Ram Dass and had worked with Timothy Leary in the early 1960s researching the the therapeutic effects of psychedelic drugs. She allowed Bobby Beausoleil, who later became involved with the Manson family, to romp with his dog at her house. Babitz skips around time with ease and writes with the airy, knowing offhandedness of Renata Adler’s Jen Fain, except she eschews Manhattan sophistication in favor of a Hollywood unpretentiousness.”—Alison Herman, Flavorwire