On Hollywood’s Eve
In an excerpt from her 2019 study of Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA, Lili Anolik recalls a series of interviews with Babitz to focus on the striking transformation of literary party girl to reclusive literary figure. Transparently recalling her own projections on Babitz, Anolik writes:
That Eve, famous for her beauty and seductiveness, was now a ruin and a gorgon excited me. It heightened the beauty and seductiveness of her books, reinforced my conviction that she was an artist and an original. That her life had descended into either tragedy or folly or both also excited me. It meant that there was a grandeur about her, a magnificence.
Anolik is self-conscious about her position as someone who is not simply an observer or writer with a sedate, scholarly interest in Babitz’s work, but someone who is starstruck by the “magnificent” construction of Eve Babitz—and as we see, Babitz herself seems to be enamored with her invention, or what in retrospect seems like one. Despite the abjection with which Anolik treats Babitz’s traumatic injuries, and despite the fact that her obsession with Babitz’s image seems only to work best at the hands of Babitz herself, what emerges is a shared affinity between the two writers for the voice and the image of a glamorous character. One quality Anolik nails is the significance of Babitz’s name, given to her by her godfather Igor Stravinsky himself: “Could he, by the way, have made a cannier choice? Eve is the most emblematic of designations, and rife with cultural and allegorical significance, suggesting guileless innocence and lethal knowledge at once. You’re it. Or maybe it’s you.”
A fringed Eve in sepia from a photo booth reel, eyes closed and holding to her mouth a cigarette between her index and her middle fingers, so precariously that you’d think she was daring it to fall, to mar her shirt with ash. The iconic nude Eve, aged twenty, playing chess across Marcel Duchamp, emblazoned across a thousand cool-girl Instagram feeds—a ploy, apparently, to incite the envy of Walter Hopps, her married boyfriend at the time. Eve in a large sun hat holding a telephone receiver to her ears, blonde with a kitten on her shoulders and a rare, blinding smile. All of these images have an abiding property of magnetism that works to supplement Babitz’s unparalleled voice—depicting the aura of 1970s Los Angeles, or at least its supercut.
Babitz strikes a balance between the outrageous lifestyle of a Hollywood insider & the levity of an extremely shrewd iconoclast.
As we suffer through history, California’s writers and artists remain some of the most reliable figures left to recommend it. With witticisms abound, Babitz strikes a balance between the outrageous lifestyle of a Hollywood insider and the levity of an extremely shrewd iconoclast. Babitz is not pretentious, and neither is she shallow—the two extremes of character that she sometimes comically portrays in her essays (but never in a mean-spirited manner). Nobody better to represent the city than one who is taken with it and acknowledges the power of the period which would spawn an industry of media and products based around its aesthetic appeal.
And Babitz did have a premonitory sense of how she might capitalize off the appeal of 1970s Los Angeles. Her writing honors the inherent narrative quality of California time—her real life was begging to be immortalized, and had wisely chosen Babitz as its muse. Writer Dan Wakefield, who had dated Babitz at one time, explains “she bought a Brownie box camera and took wonderful pictures of parties and rock groups, adding a sepia tone to make them look old.” In Slow Days, Fast Company, Babitz acknowledges the temporal significance of the city’s very architecture: “LA didn’t invent eternity. Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion. I love LA because it does things like that.”
Molly Lambert expands upon Babitz’s vision of the city for the Paris Review:
The garish architecture and people are there if you want them, just don’t go mistaking one part for the whole. The real tourist attraction in LA is not the shitty, pay-for-play Walk of Fame, or any museum or arena, it’s the chance to immerse yourself in the human carnival . . . She makes you reconsider things you might have dismissed as ugly, strange, or even boring, and look at them as if for the first time to find that they are in fact the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen in your life. Everything Babitz writes is both pop and intellectual, shiny but deep, like an artificial-snow-flocked Christmas tree, every bit as real and sentimental for a Tinseltowner as a Douglas fir.
Eve Babitz
The charm of Babitz, beyond her persona or her love for California, might be her prophetic knowledge of the significance of her specific time & her commitment to living entirely in the present—or at least documenting it.
Whether that same city exists today is up for debate, but Babitz’s recent emergence into the mainstream has revealed at least a resurgent desire for that time and place—or revealed fatigue regarding our own time and place. Living at the end of history now has a distinctly less glamorous air about it.
The Eve image resonates deeply with Los Angeles in the ’70s, sex and rage, Jim Morrison’s California from “The End,” which is also conscious of a California living through so much history that it seems to be stuck in time, at the very end of time (Morrison was one of Babitz’s paramours). The charm of Babitz, beyond her persona or her love for California vividly captured, might be her prophetic knowledge of the significance of her specific time and her commitment to living entirely in the present—or at least documenting it.
It is possible her readers feel about her the way she felt about her friends:
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 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 even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you’re talking about.
