Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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On rainy days in gym class, the girls were allowed to dance. The Pachucos danced “The Choke,” which Babitz describes as “enraged anarchy posed in mythical classicism as a dance . . . There was no swing in the Choke, it was staccato. It was Pachuco, police-record, L.A. flamenco dancing.” Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather. In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art”. 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. In the depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”

A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure . . . The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it. And the story about Rosie the Cat, I had to call my mother and read her the whole thing. But then, we like cats. This is one of her earlier books, I believe the first full-length one, and the voice of her first-person stories, which I have always found delightful, is not as refined and controlled as in her later books. Here the very casual conversational style can sometimes veer into rambling which seems to prefer flourishes to coherence. She is, always, a girl very much concerned with style – in language, in clothes, in dance. In this debut, she had not yet achieved the point where style becomes substance. But this is apparent in only a few of the stories.From Aces Butler, a boy with so much attitude he could rattle the adults trying to educate him, Babitz learned to stop using a can of hairspray a day to preserve her roller-shaped curls and look like the popular girls. Blunt in stating his opinions, “The scorn behind his straw-colored eyes was sabotage plain and simple” to his teachers, Babitz writes. “His existence was scorching the hallways and traditions as he shrugged and glanced at the floor that first day he lowered himself into the last row in algebra.” Claiming that going to Olvera Street requires a leisurely drive down Sunset Blvd. -- “taking the freeway when you’re on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to go visit your cat, the texture’s all wrong” --she paints a picture of the working class east end of Sunset, ambling through the “hills and flowers and the car part places.” Yeah, Janis should have done that. 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

She knew Bobby Beausoeil who was a talented upcoming musician until he was recruited and “brainwashed” by Charles Manson. Bobby’s good looks were used by Manson to lure attractive women into “the family”. Because of Bobby’s glumness, Eve and her friends always called him Bummer Bob. Thinking about the fact that Eve actually spent the night under the same roof with Bummer Bob on more than one occasion, although she does make it clear that she never had sexual relations with him, has to produce an involuntary shiver from time to time when she contemplates his role in the Manson murders. In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. I enjoyed how she kept defending West Coast against its East Coast relegation to ‘cultural wasteland’: Eve's Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I'm there." Valentino died of a burst appendix because he refused to go to the hospital (too brave), and like the Jim Morrison phrase which occurs to me whenever I think about some foolhardy, glamorous, and fatal adventure, he was “trapped in a prison of his own device.” In fact, Hollywood herself was always trapped in a prison of her own devise, but don’t think about that (because if you do you’ll start wondering what devises are, anyway, if not prisons, and if you’re going to have to be trapped in one, it might as well be a Hollywood devise).What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Didion or Nathanael West . . . is that no matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast in pursuit of ‘movie dreams.'”—Steffie Nelson, The Los Angeles Review of Books Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book.” All of that was somewhat overshadowed by the attention of the media regarding her liberal views about sexuality. She was romantically involved with Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, and Harrison Ford, just to name a few. One could get the impression she was famous for just being the plus one. As Steve Martin, then a young banjo-playing comic and Troubadour regular, explained, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Eve was assured in her taste, no question. She knew what she liked and why. Her account of her affair with Jim Morrison is simultaneously gaga and coolheaded. She would write, “Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.” If she venerated him as a love object, though, she rejected him as an artist: “[Jim’s] voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash.” Eve might have been a hopeless romantic but she was also nobody’s fool. Eve’s Hollywood”…..(essays and vignettes), is the perfect antidote to depression, grief, psycho-therapy, breathwork, yoga, Pilates, Taoism, and boredom…..