In her memoir “Slow Days, Fast Company” (1977), Eve Babitz described the joys of “4/60 air conditioning,” which is what you get when you’re on the freeway with all four windows down and you’re traveling at 60 mph.
The best of Babitz’s writing keeps the windows cranked down, too, and she is always moving at speed. The recent rediscovery and reissue of her books — her memoirs are especially resonant — has been a deep pleasure to witness.
Lili Anolik helped jump-start the Babitz revival five years ago when she published a warm retrospective of the author’s life in Vanity Fair. Anolik is back now with “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.,” an expansion of that profile.
Don’t arrive here in search of a proper biography. Anolik warns us up front that she “won’t attempt to impose narrative structure and logic” on Babitz’s life. Further, she “doesn’t believe, or expect you to, that facts, dates, timelines, firsthand accounts, verifiable sources tell the tale.”
This is awkward. When did “logic” and “facts” and “firsthand accounts” get such a bad rap? (Did I miss a memo?) Anolik makes a show of tossing her car’s steering wheel out the window at the first turn.
The resulting book is good and bad in almost equal measure. It’s good because Anolik has an instinctive grasp of why Babitz mattered as a writer and because, despite her apparent protestations to the contrary, she’s done her homework. “Hollywood’s Eve” fills in many of the gaps in our knowledge of Babitz’s life and work.
It’s bad because it’s so breezily written, as if willing itself to become a work of what used to be called the New Journalism, that “4/60” does not begin to cover it. Reading it, you feel you’re taking part in three conversations, two on call-waiting.
Anolik’s book is filled with interjections such as “I’ve got to break in here, say something” and “Hang on a second” and “Wait, I want to withdraw that statement” and “Now, look sharp because things are about to take a turn for the funky.” Her insights deserve better than this flip tone.
What “Hollywood’s Eve” has going for it on every page is its subject’s utter refusal to be dull. “I think I’m going to be an adventuress,” Babitz reports saying as a child to her mother, in “Eve’s Hollywood” (1974), her first memoir. “Is it all right?” It was, and it is.
Babitz grew up under the Hollywood sign. Her father was first violinist for the 20th Century-Fox orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and her mother was an artist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. “He’s been slipping you glasses of Scotch under the table since you turned 13,” Anolik writes, “and his wife, the peerlessly elegant Vera, taught you how to eat caviar.”
When she was barely out of her teens, Babitz posed for a now-famous photograph of herself playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. He was clothed; she was naked. Babitz was beautiful and wild and opinionated.
She was a star of Los Angeles’ bohemian art and music crowds. “Eve was our Kiki of Montparnasse,” artist Ed Ruscha said. She designed album covers for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds. She seduced Jim Morrison and many others. Among them was writer Dan Wakefield, who commented: “Men didn’t conquer Eve Babitz, she conquered them.”
Babitz was 28 and approaching burnout (she termed it “squalid overboogie”) when she began to write in earnest. With the help of Joan Didion, a friend, she sold an essay to Rolling Stone in 1971. Babitz being Babitz, she slept with Grover Lewis, her Rolling Stone editor, and later with the editor of her first book.
Didion’s intervention is interesting because it’s among this book’s contentions that Babitz’s literary career was a reaction to that of her famous friend. Where Didion took a fundamentally dark view of Los Angeles — she was an intellectual Easterner, slumming it for the easy screenwriting money — Babitz had a feel for her hometown’s charms and celebrated them.
Anolik’s writing about Didion and Babitz is graceful until it isn’t. At one point she writes, referring to an earlier conversation with Babitz: “Now, I suppose, is the time to come clean. Eve was right. I do have homicidal designs on Didion. I think ‘Play It'” — Didion’s novel “Play It as It Lays” — “is a silly, shallow book. I think ‘Slow Days’ should replace it, become the new essential reading for young women (and young men) seeking to understand LA. There. I said it.”
Babitz had affairs with Warren Zevon and Annie Leibovitz and Steve Martin. (She advised Martin to wear white suits.)
She once wrote a letter to Joseph Heller, author of “Catch-22,” that contained two sentences: “I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” She spent the entirety of her first book advance on a big meal at her favorite restaurant, Musso & Frank Grill, ordering the caramel custard for everyone in the house.
Her books — there were memoirs, and then novels — never sold very well. She did too much cocaine. She wrote a screenplay for the Eagles, and when they delayed paying her she threatened to kill herself. (They paid.) She got into Alcoholics Anonymous in the early ‘80s.
Babitz suffered third-degree burns over much of her body in a freak accident in 1997, when she tried to light a cigar in her car, a VW Bug that Steve Martin had bought her, and her skirt and pantyhose caught fire. She essentially disappeared from public life. She is now 75. Anolik tracked her down in Los Angeles, where she listens to right-wing talk radio and mostly lives like a recluse.
Anolik sometimes verges on condescending to Babitz (“what a sport and a champ and a trouper”). But she’s a sensitive reader of her work and owns a sly wit. About the nude photo with Duchamp, for example, Anolik writes: “She might have something on — the radio, for example, or Chanel No. 5.”
In “Slow Days, Fast Company,” Babitz observed that “the best way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.” Anolik’s book succeeds in its primary mission: It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz.
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Publication Notes:
“Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.”
By Lili Anolik
Illustrated. 277 pages. Scribner. $26.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.