This story was originally published in October 2019. The iconic Los Angeles author Eve Babitz died Friday at the age of 78.
In dedication to his first book, “Eve’s Hollywood,” Eve Babitz dryly thanked Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for “being who I am not.”
“Didion-Dunnes,” as she referred to them, were friends of Babitz and in her social circles when the book was published in 1974, but the line is also clearly a burn. (And a bit of self-ownership – but it was Babitz ‘light brilliance, playing himself as both charming foil and punchline.)
For Eve Babitz – whose resurgence peaked on Tuesday with the release of her first “new” work in decades – was exactly what the Didion Dunners were not.
If Eve Babitz had worn an old bikini top to Ralphs on Sunset and Fuller in the late 1960s, it would have been for fun, spectacle and seduction – not because the center could not hold.
Babitz was disgusting, where Didion was coolly detached, as well as lustful, seemingly junky and somewhat of a pleasure-seeking missile.
She is the daughter of a violinist from the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra and grew up at the base of the Hollywood hills among haute bohemians and film royalty. The young Babitz was beautiful, cheeky, and at home in high culture: “I looked like Brigitte Bardot, and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter,” as she put it in her first book.
She became known only a year or two from Hollywood High for posing naked at a chessboard opposite Marcel Duchamp in 1963. The image was intended to avenge her married boyfriend, but it would become a defining image of the budding art of the West Coast. scene.
She remained an “It” girl in the art and literary world in the 1960s and 70s, and she tumbled around the city with a Zelig-like ability to both make friends with and sleep cultural personalities. Her major writing break came in 1971, when she published an essay in Rolling Stone, after Didion had passed it on to the editor. “Eve’s Hollywood” was published in 1974, and several other books followed.
But in 1997, Babitz retired from public life after an insane accident. She was on her way to a Sunday brunch in her old VW bug when she hit a match to light a small cigar with cherry flavor. The lit match dropped and ignited her slick skirt like something out of a nightmare. Babitz was left with third-degree burns over nearly half of his body and deep in debt from the subsequent medical treatment. And then she almost disappeared.
The current Babitz renaissance began in earnest in 2014, when the hermit from the age of seven was the reluctant subject of a Vanity Fair love letter-cum-magazine profile written by Lili Anolik. At the time, Babitz – who had not been taken very seriously by the literary establishment to begin with – was largely forgotten, with her books dusted and discontinued.
A wave of renewed interest in her work followed, with the New York Review of Books Classics republishing two of her books, starting in 2015 with “Eve’s Hollywood,” followed by “Slow Days, Fast Company.” Counterpoint Press republished several others.
Anolic’s obsessive hunt for Babitz and her legacy culminated in the release of “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA” in January 2019, which described Babitz as “Los Angeles’ louche, headstrong, cold-blooded, hidden genius.” Anolik’s book is more ridiculous Valentine’s day than pure biography, but the airy infatuation may suit her subject and the lush abundance of her work. Babitz never hid his enthusiasm, and neither does Anolik.
In her heyday, Babitz had often been described as an insignificant party girl – famous for her cleavage. (legendary) and her conquests (also legendary) as her work.
The New York Times declared “Slow Days, Fast Company” to be “a mixture of the seductive and the idiotic, thrown in a light dressing” when it was first released in 1977; “Sex and Rage,” this newspaper exclaimed in 1979, “is an extended example of women’s magazine infection at its most mediocre.”
But after decades of ambiguity – and even though Babitz herself remained in relative seclusion – her name and books were suddenly everywhere at the end of the current decade.
Or at least “everywhere” within an extremely specific subgroup of the world, as the New York Times breathlessly repeated her work, Hulu developed a series based on her books, and millennial cool girls on the Internet posed with her republished book covers on Instagram.
Yes, Babitz nasel-stared and name-dropped, but she was also an exquisite observer of the city and her very specific cultural environment. Was her Los Angeles wild, dull play landscape made possible – as critics have accused – of her looks, privileges and access?
Why, of course. That’s why it’s fun to read.
Eva Babitz.
(From the collection of Mirandi Babitz)
She may have been young and beautiful in the era of “Eve’s Hollywood,” but she also understood and observed sharply each mercury currency and knew how to channel them to her own purposes. A woman can be both frothy and shrewd.
But in a city of sunshine and noir, there is a show pro forma equation, we have come to expect from literary depictions of light glamor and dazzling light. They should only be introduced as a contrast to the darkness, where any fun party scene becomes the ultimate curse. It’s fine to dab a bit of shiny paint, as long as the canvas in question eventually reveals the gaping void – and the view from the beautiful house in the hills makes it clear that it’s Sodom and Gomorrah. Except that Babitz’s work refused to embrace such a trampled binary.
While I can hardly strongly agree with Anolik’s categorization of “Slow Days” as a superior book compared to Didion’s iconic LA novel “Play It as It Lays”, I can not disagree with her claim that “Play It as It Lays” “flatters the reader and tells us what we are already supposed to know – that, as Anolik writes,” Hollywood is rotten and corrupt; that the beautiful people have ugly souls; that the game is rigged. “
But “Slow Days,” Anolik argues, with “his total lack of interest in approving or rejecting the morals of the characters,” has in its own way entertained too much skepticism to emerge with such an easily quantifiable calculation of darkness and light. .
Anolik, who had previously drawn a parallel between “Play It As It Lays” and “The Day of the Locust,” also subsequently compared “Slow Days” to Nathanael West’s LA condemnation opus, which Babitz hated. (She thought it was simplistic and that West – in her refusal to be seduced – missed the flourishing splendor of the place, so, as she put it, “the bougainvilleas did not stand a chance.”)
The essay in which Babitz takes on West is from her sometimes messy first book “Eve’s Hollywood”, but there is nothing meandering in this section: “People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them that it is not only blue skies and pink sunsets, so they do not have to worry: it is shallow, corrupt and ugly, “writes Babitz, where the concern in question is probably that while it’s winter again, out here the bougainvillea stays in bloom forever.
In Babitz’s insidious, witty view, “The Day of the Locust” – the essential novel from LA’s literary canon – is really just one girl’s attempt to reassure her friends back to the East “that even though he had gone to Hollywood, he did not have that gone Hollywood. “It’s, as she puts it, a” little excuse “for West taking the dirty Hollywood money and basking in the sun. Or a man who manages to get his cake and eat it.
And perhaps that was more precisely what was so dissuasive and seemingly nonsensical about Babitz in her time. She wanted her cake and ate it, wrote the story and also starred in it. But without any of the necessary nothing-cases are removed to apologize for the shiny parts.
There is a specific brand of crazy, damaged delicacy that we have come to honor in female writers who describe their own island life and also look striking in their author images. Babitz was messy and determined at times on the run, but she had way too good time for the rest of it.
Her work, even the apparent fiction, was always autobiographical, and ironically, it is probably the author’s later biographical arc that has finally allowed for that imprimatur of significance. After all, disgraceful misfortunes, JD Salinger-like rejections of public life, and the smoldering cult interest of writers and scholars are typically the province of Serious Literary Figures, not flibbertigibbets and funny LA “It” girls.
“I Used to Be Charming”, published by NYRB Classics on Tuesday, contains nearly 50 previously unpublished works written between 1975 and 1997. It includes a burning piece about her misfortune and long-term recovery, beginning with a passage that she puts the side edge of a tray in flames while she, skirt on fire, tries to roll on the grass to get the flames off. All the while a cozy “Sunday brunch couple” looks awful.
“The thing is, it was not the first time I had been naked embarrassed in Pasadena,” she writes, referring to her famous Natural chess match with Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum.
Except now that carelessness carries the weight of a copupance, and the urge for beauty and fame costs. And it’s an LA tale, we know how to categorize.
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