"Hollywood's Eve - Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.":
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I wish this was a movie, for it it was I'd tell you to run out and see it immediately.
And although there might ultimately be a flick, it could never capture Eve completely.
I know, I know, you're burned out on her story, ever since the 2014 "Vanity Fair" update it's been all Eve all the time, even though her production was slight and a lot of it not so great.
But I knew who she was because she wrote "Slow Days, Fast Company."
I'm infatuated with Los Angeles. You've got to know, California was a dream in the sixties, I used to beg my mother to move there on a regular basis. All the TV shows were made there, and there was surfing and Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.
But Los Angeles was always considered to be déclassé, a place where there was no there there, a location where Woody Allen said the "only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light."
A New Yorker comes to Los Angeles and says they don't get it, there's no city center, that New York City is the greatest city in the world.
An Angeleno goes to New York City and says...greatest city in the world, but I'd rather live in Los Angeles.
L.A. is very livable. It's a giant suburb, you can have a single family dwelling with a yard and be only a short drive from where you want to go.
And the burbs are different from the city. It's less flash, less ego, it's inherently middle class. L.A. is not about inherited wealth, finance (not that there are not nepo-babies), it's a place where everybody starts from the same line and everybody can make it. Where everything that's meaningful in the east is irrelevant...where you went to school, who your parents are... The titans of the music industry didn't even go to college! The business was built by scrappy entrepreneurs. And this unique vision, not being hobbled by the past, enabled the growth of Silicon Valley. Everybody in the east would have told the inventors they were delusional dreamers or to wait their turn, that they didn't deserve it. And as goes Silicon Valley, so goes America.
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But the sixties were different from the twenty first century, if for no other reason than there were no smartphones with cameras. All the stories you've heard of groupies, the sex, drugs and rock and roll...it was right there for the taking, hiding in plain sight in Los Angeles.
And Eve Babitz was there.
She hung out at Barney's Beanery. Which the news tells me is hip again. However, if you went there late, in the last half-century, you asked yourself what it was all about.
As for the Troubadour bar, where the Eagles had their genesis, that lasted a little longer, I remember bumping into Alice Cooper and Keith Moon and having a bit of conversation. That doesn't happen anymore, everyone's behind closed doors, or they have bodyguards.
But once upon a time...
Eve was an L.A. native. And she traded in sex. She was liberated before the women's revolution. She would go to Barney's and pick up men and...
Eve had relationships with so many, so many married, some household names, like Jim Morrison, whom she ultimately excoriated in print.
As for Jim's leather pants... They were made by Eve's sister Mirandi and her husband Clem, who beat her. Mirandi was the true groupie... Eve was ultimately an outsider, a typical artist.
Eve wasn't always the center of attention, but she was there, making her own way...
Until it all fell apart in the eighties.
But before that...
I thought I knew rock and roll history. But I never knew Tom Dowd was unfaithful to his wife. And you'll get some of the true Ahmet Ertegun here, as opposed to the sanitized version in the mainstream press. Ahmet was a ladies' man... But he could be cruel. If you knew Ahmet, he was aware of his surroundings, the landscape which he helped build. Today's labels are run by functionaries who never had skin in the game. But to build something from scratch, that takes a special talent, that's what Hollywood is really all about. Ahmet could talk sh*t, he was a good hang, he might disdain others, but he would embrace you warmly if you too had attitude, if you too could poke fun at the games. Which after all they are, you don't want to take the business too seriously, but you do want to take the art.
Yes, you get Ed Ruscha, and his brother Paul. The start of the explosion of west coast art at the Ferus Gallery.
And, of course, you get Eve's picture with Marcel Duchamp, the two playing chess, with Eve sans clothing. Showing her...
Big t*ts.
Oh, she was quite proud of her big boobs. She wrote to Joseph Heller, saying she was a writer and she was "stacked."
Eve was the kind of girl you screwed, but never married. Possibly because you were married already, but mostly because Eve moved on, she didn't want to build a family with you, she wanted to be footloose and fancy free.
And she makes collages, and giving Stephen Stills a ride home from the South Bay, she gets him to promise her the ability to create the new Buffalo Springfield album cover, which she does, "Buffalo Springfield Again."
Yes Eve made album covers, before she was a writer. Work petered out and she needed a new game.
That's what people don't understand today, that your heyday is very brief, certainly in retrospect, oftentimes only a couple of years, then you have to reinvent yourself.
After reinventing herself as a writer, Eve spent a decade doing coke. Which eats up all your money.
That's what we never hear about, how these people survive. As my father always said...there are no miracles.
You can be famous, yet broke.
Eve gets money from the sale of her parents' house, and then a settlement after she sets herself on fire (a weak case, but a strong attorney). And Eve's sister insists she take the money as an annuity, otherwise she'll blow it all and be SOL.
And Eve was hiding in plain sight in the heart of Hollywood, completely forgotten until the "Vanity Fair" story, written by the author of this book, Lili Anolik.
They're all around, assuming they didn't die early of misadventure. O.D. or die in a car crash and you're a legend, continue to live and you're a mere mortal, like the rest of us.
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So we've got the Eagles... Eve is hired to write a screenplay that she never completes.
And Earl McGrath, who heretofore was known as an executive at Atlantic Records, but in truth he was a connector, a bon vivant whom everybody like to have around.
Eve touched all these people, or should I say they touched her.
Holes in history are filled here. Assuming you're interested.
Most aren't, they'd rather buy the legend as opposed to investigate the personalities, the identities of those involved.
And the more famous you are, usually the more compromised you are. In that you have holes in your personality. The well-adjusted don't take these risks, but with the risks come the rewards.
Not that Eve wanted to be famous, or be in the movies, but she did want to be part of the scene.
So...
"Hollywood's Eve" is written in a highfalutin' style. This is not a celebrity memoir, this is the work of an Ivy League graduate, written for the same class, one that favors analysis and theory more than facts, where the bigger the words, the denser the prose, the better your writing is considered to be.
Meaning I can't wholeheartedly recommend this book, it is not long, but it is a bit of a slog.
However, some of Anolik's insights are refreshing, she says that the height of writing is now journalism, akin to the new journalism of yore, with the writer invested and revealed as opposed to novels. I'll buy that.
But having said that...
The reason I read this book is...
Anolik has a new book, "Didion and Babitz," wherein she cuts Joan down to size. I loved "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," but it's good to know that I'm not the only who who is not on the Didion train. Didion worked it, like Susan Sontag. If you're sitting at home wondering why you're not anointed a public intellectual...know that your marketing skills are substandard, if in evidence at all.
And in the endless hype about "Didion and Babitz" I read that Anolik had a podcast, released in 2021, entitled "Once Upon a Time...At Bennington College," an in-depth analysis of the lives and work of Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem and...Donna Tartt.
Tartt has carefully manicured her image. But the truth is "The Secret History" was to a great degree based on fact, as was "Less Than Zero." These famous novels...are so often thinly fictionalized truth. One of my favorite books of the nineties was Pam Houston's "Cowboys Are My Weakness." Billed as fiction, Houston ultimately revealed it was real.
As are all of Eve Babitz's writings.
And listening to the Bennington podcast, I was moved to read "Hollywood's Eve."
Anolik is involved in hagiography here. In truth Babitz was not the sainted writer Lili keeps telling us she was. Babitz nailed some of Southern California culture, but her output was very thin, and mixed.
But the life she led...
We know about the stars. But those adjacent to the stars, those who are in relationships with them, who partake of the lifestyle, we really don't know much about.
You don't want to be Eve Babitz.
Then again, everybody today thinks they can be a star from their own home. And unlike most people my age, I am not down on internet culture, but the truth is when there were no smartphone cameras, when publicity was strictly controlled...there was a lot going on we didn't know about, and Eve was there and a lot is revealed in this book.
So...
If you're a rock and roll aficionado, looking for more SoCal information, step right up, there's stuff here that appears nowhere else.
But even more interesting is the arc of Babitz's life. Beneath the flash, the peaks...
Some people become stars and sustain. Sometimes they get ripped-off by advisors, but they can ultimately go on the road and make that money back, at least some of it.
And it all comes down to music. Because the people from this era, they were writing and singing their truth, unedited by the machine.
As for the movies...
Turns out Harrison Ford was a crappy carpenter, he survived by being a dope dealer. For almost fifty years we've been sold the legend that he was a carpenter to the rich and famous...yeah, one who took the money and never finished.
And Eve told Steve Martin to wear a white suit, and he ultimately gifted her with a Volkswagen and...
Anolik constantly marvels that Eve's tales are true. Especially in an era where everybody makes up their own story, where you can't trust nearly anything a celebrity or hanger-on says.
And it all starts at Hollywood High in the late fifties/early sixties. Where the students were movie stars, where society was fluid, where the rest of us were completely out of the loop.
You had to be there.
And Eve Babitz was.
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