Even at 20, in 1963, Eve Babitz knew how to make a statement. Back then, her curator boyfriend gave the artist Marcel Duchamp a retrospective in Pasadena, Calif., and made the mistake of not inviting her to the opening party.
So she attended another party at the museum days later. There, a photographer for Time magazine needed a shot of Duchamp playing chess with a young woman. Naked.
Babitz took her revenge.
The resulting image shows Babitz’s face hidden by her hair, her voluptuous body on full display. The photo firmly placed her in the pop-culture firmament — a shadowy figure, true, but an indelible one. That picture is one of the most iconic to emerge from the LA art scene at that time.
It was also classic Eve, writes journalist 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.”
Babitz was the daughter of Los Angeles bohemians. Her father, Sol, a Jew from Brooklyn, was first violinist for the 20th Century Fox Orchestra. Her mother, Mae, was beautiful and charming, hosting parties for the various musicians and intellectuals that wandered through the Babitz home. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather; Fats Waller, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley all had cameos in her childhood.
With the Time photo serving as her de facto coming-out party, Babitz let loose on LA, becoming a groupie to various artists and musicians. She propositioned Jim Morrison within minutes of meeting him in 1966 and liked the man, whom she found to be tender (“He knew in his worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out . . .”) but not his music, which she found to be drivel (“The Doors were embarrassing, like their name . . . Even [Jim’s] voice . . . sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash.”)
Of this time, she wrote, “I was 23 and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to f–k my way through rock ’n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer.”
She was also working as a photographer and artist, creating collage album covers for Buffalo Springfield, Linda Ronstadt and the Byrds. But what she really became was a sculptor of life, weaving together flamboyant and fantastic experiences, like beads on a rosary.
While on a brief sojourn to New York (she rarely left LA) she hung out with Timothy Leary and Andy Warhol; and introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dali. Back in her hometown, she was a fixture at the Troubadour, a rock club near the Sunset Strip, where she both photographed and slept with Don Henley, Glenn Frey and aspiring comic Steve Martin. She and Byrds singer Gram Parsons never made love but did once spend an afternoon snorting cocaine and discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which was better than sex, Anolik writes.
She also fell in with the manager of the Rolling Stones’ record label, the bon vivant Earl McGrath, who would introduce her to Harrison Ford before he was Han Solo, Ahmet Ertegun while he was the president of Atlantic Records, and the writer Joan Didion.
Ford became her lover but was busy, attending to up to nine women a day, Babitz told Anolik. “It’s a talent, loving nine people in one day. Warren Beatty could only do six.”
Ertegun also became her lover. “He always had the best drugs. Not just the best drugs, the most exotic drugs, like opium,” Babitz’s sister Mirandi told Anolik.
But it was Didion who would help Babitz get published, which changed everything. She had always written; she began her first novel, “Travel Broadens,” as a teenager. When she finished it in 1961, she cheekily wrote to Joseph Heller — then 38 and riding high off the recent publication of his seminal book, “Catch-22”: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.”
He wrote back and sent the book to his editor, who turned it down.
Nine years later, she wrote a story called “The Sheik” triggered by the death of one of the most beautiful girls to ever graduate Hollywood High. She sent it to an agent, who rejected it, to Playboy, which rejected it, and then to Didion, who passed it to a friend at Rolling Stone, which published it without changing a word. At 28, just when her groupie/muse/sex symbol days were waning anyway, Babitz had officially become a writer.
Her first book, “Eve’s Hollywood” (1974), is a collection of autobiographical vignettes in which a voluptuous and languid Los Angeles drips off every page. The cover photo is Babitz in a bra and a feather boa taken by Annie Leibovitz, another lover.
But it wasn’t until 1977, when Babitz published “Slow Days, Fast Company,” that she hit her stride. Also memoir disguised as fiction, “Slow Days” is an insider’s guide to the center of metaphysical LA — movie stars, heroin, writers, lovers of ambiguous sexuality. It showed Babitz trying to make sense — and art — of her life.
She writes: “The one time I came close to taking [heroin] myself was during a shaky week-long period of my life when I was confronted with the possibility that a book I’d written might become a best-seller. A curious pain curled up in my chest and neither Valium nor Wild Turkey seemed to be able to numb it . . . I did not become famous, but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it’s held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.”
Babitz went on to write more books, “Sex and Rage” (1979) and “L.A. Woman” (1982), and one about the designer Fiorucci in 1980. But an all-consuming cocaine habit was out of control by this point, affecting everything in her life, including her writing. She got clean in 1982 after joining AA, where she met the aging rock star Warren Zevon, with whom she had a brief affair. When that ended she moved in with her mother for a time. She finished another book, “Black Swans,” which came out in 1993, and another, about tango, in 1999.
Then, suddenly she stopped writing. Slowly she faded from the public view.
In the late 2000s, Anolik, then 32, was living in a tiny apartment in Manhattan — a “writer” but unpublished — when she came across a quote by Babitz about sex and Los Angeles in a book she was reading.
“I wanted to know who this woman was,” she says. But there was nothing to know. All of Babitz’s books were out of print, and there was only one small 2001 story in Smithsonian Magazine about her. Anolik didn’t know this yet, but at this time Babitz was living in a run-down condo in West Hollywood, supported in part by friends, forgotten, a recluse.
Anolik somehow found a used copy of “Slow Days,” devoured it, and that launched an obsession. “I had to talk to her,” she writes. She found Babitz’s address in the white pages and sent postcards to no avail; she even slid a note under her door when she found herself outside’s Eve’s condo once while in LA. No response.
But when, a year or so later, Anolik got the golden opportunity to pitch a story to a Vanity Fair editor, she suggested Babitz, who, with her legion of lovers, her clear voice and her vantage point as the ultimate insider who always dished — not to mention her disappearance from the scene — was a perfect subject for the magazine. Anolik got the green light.
Once again she wrote to Babitz; she called. Still no response.
It turns out there was a tragic reason for Babitz’s reclusiveness. In a crazy twist of fate, Anolik says, after living her whole life in the white-hot center of the action, Babitz actually set herself on fire in 1997. She was not high or even at a party, but sober as a judge when she dropped a match on her lap while driving and trying to light a cigar in broad daylight. Her skirt went up in flames, and her pantyhose melted to her skin, leaving her with horrible burns over much of her body. After that, she rarely went out.
Undaunted, Anolik began calling Babitz’s friends and family, her sister, her cousin, her ex-lovers. Babitz finally got curious.
She had her former lover, Paul Ruscha, call Anolik and tell her she could take Babitz to lunch the next day. Anolik hopped on a flight the next morning. They had an awkward 20-minute meal but began talking on the phone often after that.“She would take my calls and answer my questions, but you had to know how to ask the question. There was a code she spoke that you had to crack,” Anolik says.
At age 75, Babitz is finally smelling the ‘stench of success.’
It took two years before the piece finally appeared in Vanity Fair in 2014. Once it did, the course of Babitz’s life was changed again.
The piece was a sensation. Eighteen months after the story ran, New York Review Books Classics reissued “Eve’s Hollywood” and “Slow Days.” Other publishing houses soon followed with three more of her books. Babitz was suddenly the rage in the literary crowd, with write-ups everywhere from BuzzFeed to The Washington Post.
She was also embraced by millennials: In 2016 “Girls” star Zosia Mamet hosted a panel on Babitz’s influence at the New York Public Library; the actress Emma Roberts Instagrammed herself reading “Sex and Rage” one year later. Now the Hulu network is developing a forthcoming series, “L.A. Woman,” inspired by Babitz’s life and books.
At age 75, Babitz is finally smelling the “stench of success.”
Whether or not she’s enjoying it is hard to say. But she also appears to have found the thing she once prized above all: “A friend who knows what you’re talking about.” A whole new generation of them, in fact.
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