Hollywood's Eve

by Lili Anolik

  Others, however, did not. Ed Ruscha, for example: “Eve was our Kiki of Montparnasse.” And sculptor Peter Alexander: “I’d see Eve around town, playing her game. She had those—well, let’s just call them attributes. I’d go up to her and say, ‘Oh, Eve, can I get a squeeze? Come on, give me a hug.’ And she’d give me one, and it would be great. Even if she acted like a groupie, though, she never was. Groupies are passive, bounce off whoever they’re around. And she was so much of a personality—bright, a multitude of talents, and confrontational. God, confrontational! Her opinions were immutable. It wasn’t, ‘I think it is.’ It was, ‘It is.’ And you applaud that. You’ve got to.”

  Passing herself off as a groupie allowed Eve to infiltrate, edge into territory from which she’d otherwise have been barred. “It was the only way I could hang out with the artists at Barney’s Beanery.” Where she belonged since she was an artist, too—pen and ink and watercolor—though, in fact, her true medium was as yet to be determined. Says Hickey, “Men artists are very, very welcoming of women artists who are ugly, but if they happen to be beautiful and sexy, the men hate them. A lot of those guys were scared of Eve. Most guys don’t deal well with erotic charisma. Ed [Ruscha] does. Ed loves beautiful women and he’s not afraid of them.”

  So Eve traded sex and sexuality for access, except it wasn’t that simple because she also traded sex and sexuality for sex and sexuality. The Ferus artists were a talented bunch, and she cottoned to this early. A pretty one, too—“artists who looked like movie stars”—which didn’t escape her attention either. Eve might not have known what kind of artist she was at this point, but her aesthetic gaze was already finely honed, and honing in. On Ed Ruscha (“the cutest”), Kenneth Price (“maybe cuter”), Ron Cooper (“cute too in a Toshiro Mifune way”). And on Dennis Hopper, an artist who looked like a movie star and was, only she had the sense to keep her distance. (“I loved Dennis but he was too weird for me. He once kept me up all night telling me about a screenplay he was writing. Easy Rider. It was better than anything I could think of, so I hated it.”). Hickey again: “Here’s what Eve wanted—to be one of the boys and to get with the boys.” How lucky for her then that these were not mutually incompatible goals.

  Not yet, at least.

  * * *

  I. A rhetorical question, posed by Eve, in casual conversation.

  Lucky Little Lady from the City of Lights

  On February 9, 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and, in Eve’s words, “changed It All.” Only It didn’t change. Not for her. Not right away.

  She spent a few more years as an artist (using as a studio the bungalow behind Sol and Mae’s house, where she also slept) and an artist’s moll (was one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends). She lived briefly, very, with Ron Cooper. Cooper: “Eve decided she wanted to move in with me. I wasn’t convinced this was a good idea. I’m not going to tell you what she did to convince me, but convince me she did. I drove over to her parents’ place in my 1954 Ford station wagon and packed up her stuff. We went back to my loft downtown. She stayed a couple weeks, then she told me she’d had enough.” During the day, she was at the L.A. Free Press, an underground paper, working as a receptionist. (“I learned how to type because my mother said I should.”) During the night, she was at Barney’s. (“The floor was covered in sawdust and the chili cost ¢35 and it was everything that was new and terrific and exciting.”)

  It isn’t that Eve was unaware of rock ’n’ roll as a phenomenon. It’s that she was unpersuaded by it. Until January 1966. “I was not culturally deprived, okay? My father had the same hat size as Albert Einstein. He got a Fulbright grant, a Ford grant, and then another Fulbright grant. He was this genius violinist and musicologist, and the only rock ’n’ roll record he allowed in the house was Chuck Berry. And when I first heard the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds—I mean, I didn’t think they could play. Then David Crosby took me to see the harmonica player Paul Butterfield at a club on Sunset called the Trip. I couldn’t believe it. Paul was so good and his band was so good.”

  And so Eve’s ur-groupie phase gives way, at last, to her groupie groupie phase. “Up until then, I’d thought of the Sunset Strip as older. You know, as a place for Bing Crosby and people like that. But then came rock ’n’ roll. And I was so in love with Paul Butterfield. I wore all these weird outfits and fake eyelashes out to here and went to see him everywhere. Nothing I did worked. Well, it turned out he only liked square girls. I found this out later when I was at a bar with my friend Lucille, and I was wearing this tweed suit that my mother had made. He walked in and saw me and said, ‘Eve, you look wonderful!’ So I guess I was on the wrong track.”

  With Paul Butterfield maybe, but not with Jim Morrison, on whom her ever-roving eye would also alight in early ’66. Eve wrote a piece about the Doors’ frontman for Esquire in 1991, timed to the release of the Oliver Stone biopic of the band. Her description of their initial encounter: “[It] took place . . . at a now-forgotten club just down on the Strip called the London Fog. . . . There were only about seven people in the room. . . . [I] propositioned him in three minutes, even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing. . . . ‘Take me home,’ I demurely offered when we were introduced.” He’d oblige, though not until the next night. It was worth the wait. “His skin was so white . . . [his mouth was] so edible.”

  Eve thrilled to Morrison the heartthrob, an object of desire so supreme he was also an object of art: “Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.” Morrison the artist provoked another reaction entirely: “The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. . . . It was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. . . . Even [Jim’s] voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash. . . . If [he] had lived in another era, he would have had a schoolteacher wife to support him while he sat at home writing ‘brilliant’ poetry.” It was Morrison’s girlfriend, Pamela Courson—erratic, aggressive, violent, sexual, nasty—who was rock ’n’ roll. Wrote Eve, “[Pamela] had guns, took heroin, and was fearless in every situation. Socially she didn’t care, emotionally she was shockproof. . . . [She was someone with] a heart embroidered on her pants over the place where her anus would be.” In short, all the things Jim pretended to be, Pamela was.

  (Something I should probably have the good taste to leave out, but here goes: When I first opened the March 1991 issue of Esquire that I’d purchased on eBay, saw Eve, in its pages, make sport of Morrison’s intelligence and sensibility, his posturing and pretention—calling his poetry “brilliant” rather than brilliant was an especially brutal and welcome touch—I almost wept with relief. The piece was the second-to-last thing of hers I read, and it would have been the very last except her Fiorucci book couldn’t be had for less than $2,000 on Amazon, and I wasn’t in the mood to stick up a bank. Morrison loomed large in Eve’s private mythology. Public, as well. She used a song he wrote as the title of one of her books and referenced him in nearly all. I was scared, is what it came down to. Was afraid of finding out that she regarded him as an existential hero and symbol of brooding, youthful fatalism, the Arthur Rimbaud of her time. The idea that she had even the slightest bit in common with the girls in college who irritated me most, the preeningly sensitive arty ones, a retro “Young Lion” poster invariably, inevitably, tacked to their dorm room walls, made my stomach twist, go watery. My love for her was pure, without irony or qualification, and I wanted to keep it that way. Which is why I ducked the Esquire piece for so long. And, yes, my feelings were unreasonable, but they lay beyond reason, and I was at their mercy. Morrison, to me, was just such an appalling figure. Mawkish and moist, striving to be taken seriously and therefore impossible to take seriously—a joke, basically. Final point, and then I’ll move on: the renewal of faith in Eve that I experienced while reading “Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood” wasn’t an isolated incident, would become a recurring theme in our relationship.)

  And yet, though Eve re
jected Morrison, she didn’t, couldn’t, not fully anyway. When they first got together, he was twenty-two and newly slender, having dropped thirty pounds after a summer of LSD—“a mud lark . . . [who woke] up a prince.” He had, until the drinking and drugging left him bloated and ravaged, remarkable beauty, and beauty made Eve reverent. He had, too, remarkable fame, which did likewise, fame being to Eve what money was to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The very famous are different from you and me, she believes, have about them a gorgeousness, a romance, a theatricality, an air of boundless possibility and promise. She wrote, “[People] don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to fuck every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that—back when rock ’n’ roll was in flower.”

  But aesthetics were only part of it. Between Eve and Morrison was an emotional pull. Morrison got to Eve. At least some aspect of him did—his mournfulness, his incomprehension, his sweetness, his grace. (Her portrait of him is extraordinary, utterly unsentimental yet deeply moving. The tenderness she feels for him sneaks up on you as you read it, as, I suspect, it did on her as she wrote it.) “[Jim] wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. . . . I couldn’t be mean to him. . . . He knew in his worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out. . . . [And] something about him began to seem great compared to everything else that was going on.” And her impulse was to protect him from Stone, a director who “[didn’t] even like [beauty]” and whose movies were “always about horrible men doing awful stuff.” Morrison might have been a poseur, but he was also the real thing: a genuine phony. Kind of like Hollywood.

  A few weeks later, on March 6, 1966, Eve moved to New York. “I decided to spend a year there, even though I didn’t want to. Why? To complete my education.” She worked as the office manager of a counterculture newspaper called the East Village Other, the type of publication that featured doctored photos of Lyndon Johnson with his head in the toilet; comics by R. Crumb; inscrutable sex ads (“Dominant iguana seeks submissive zebra”). John Wilcock, EVO’s editor in chief, met Eve when she was at the L.A. Free Press. He couldn’t get over her. Wrote Eve, “[He] talked about me so much that some girl who got around started calling me ‘Wondercunt’ before I’d even shown up, I was so famous.”

  Her first task was to throw an April Fools’ Ball. Says Eve, “It was held at some place on Bleecker and it was so packed I couldn’t move. I was on acid. The Fugs played. A group that staged happenings, Fluxus, was there. Yoko Ono was part of Fluxus, so she was there, too. Her job was to make crepe-paper streamers and then toss them all around. It was a den of iniquity, but the streamers made it look like a high school gym on prom night.”

  Playboy had a Playmate of the Month, EVO a Slum Goddess. Eve: “The Slum Goddess title was nothing, it wasn’t anything, it was something fat men with cigars came up with, but I had to have it. There was this girl Robin, and Robin was supposed to be Slum Goddess for that issue. She was prettier than I was and she wore peacock earrings. She should’ve won, only I did. She’d get me back, though. She’d steal one of my boyfriends.”

  Eve spent a lot of time with Andy Warhol. “The first time I saw Andy it was at the opening of his second Ferus show [September 30, 1963] and he was standing next to this Elvis that was silver and, like, twelve feet tall.” Eve and Warhol took to each other immediately. “Andy complimented me on my tan. He said, ‘With that tan you can do anything. Anything you do goes perfectly.’ And I thought his work was great. I got it immediately. When I was in New York, we used to meet at Bickford’s. We both ordered the English muffins.”

  Eve spent a lot of time, as well, with Timothy Leary, the pied piper of LSD, though that was a less happy association. Says Eve, “New York is hot in the summer, so I got a boyfriend who had air-conditioning. Ralph Metzner. Ralph was part of Timothy Leary’s team. I hated Tim. He was an alcoholic, and he always ordered everybody around as soon as he walked into a room. He made me type all his lectures, and he couldn’t write. He loved speed and gave it to everybody. I love speed, too, but it was still too high a price to pay, typing up all those goddamned lectures of his. Ralph was the brilliant one, and everybody loved him better than Tim, and so did I. And so did Robin. Ralph’s the boyfriend of mine she stole.”

  Metzner remembers the breakup slightly differently: “At the time Eve and I were together, I was using the I Ching. In one of our lovers’ discussions around the issue of ‘where is this relationship going,’ we decided to consult it. The main pronouncement was ‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.’ I interpreted that to mean we should discontinue our relationship. Eve, understandably, was pissed. But the oracle was right. The maiden was powerful. So that’s why we split. The other girl had nothing to do with it. She didn’t come until later. Oh, but Eve was a babe then. Gorgeous, just gorgeous!”

  While in New York, Eve would also: introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí (“We drank Chartreuse”); get busted by G. Gordon Liddy, soon-to-be mastermind of the Watergate break-in (“Actually, it was Tim Leary who got busted, but I was there. It was at that estate of his—Millbrook, that mansion with the Buddhas all over the place. I don’t know why the cops didn’t bust me, too. Maybe they thought I was cute”); testify, along with Walter Bowart, EVO’s publisher, about the ameliorative effects of LSD and other narcotics before a Senate committee that included Teddy Kennedy (“They asked me how many people I knew used marijuana, and I said, ‘Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother.’ Afterward, a reporter from the New York Times wanted to know why I hadn’t turned my grandmother on, and I said, ‘Because she’s high already’ ”); become a secretary on Madison Avenue (“Walter Bowart said I was embezzling. But I didn’t know how much I was supposed to be paid, so I took as much as I thought I deserved. I guess it was too much. He had to find me another job uptown. I worked for a guy who was an ad salesman for magazines. I hated it. I hated being put on hold”); and attend an exhibition of the artist Joseph Cornell.

  It was the last that had a significant impact. Eve: “Walter [Hopps] told me to go. It was at some teeny gallery. I went with my friend Carol. Carol looked just like me except she was black. We were both on acid. I looked at Joseph Cornell’s collages and I looked at Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and it was just, like, ‘Oh.’ I’d always considered myself a prodigy at art and drawing. I thought I was good and my mother, who was good, thought I was good, and those were the only two opinions I cared about. But what Joseph Cornell was doing was so beyond anything I’d ever seen or even thought of. Afterward I went out and bought all these magazines to make my collages. Which is when I started doing art madly.” That Eve should have received Cornell as a revelation isn’t so surprising. His work is homespun and pie-faced and Americana, and, at the same time, sophisticated and European and surrealist, each box a private reverie or fantasy. A private movie theater, as well. Cornell was an idolater of Hollywood. He made box tributes to Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, and—of course, naturally—Marilyn Monroe. Custodian II (Silent Dedication to M.M.), featuring a fragment of a constellation chart, a chunk of driftwood, and a gold ring with a chain, is one of his most mysterious, romantic, and moving pieces.

  Eve stayed in New York a year to the day, leaving on March 5, 1967. She put a duffel bag of her magazines for collages (“the main part of my life being centered around collages”) on a bus, and herself on a plane. She barely even told anybody she was going, so eager was she to be gone. It wasn’t so much that she hated the city as that she was temperamentally incompatible with the city. She wrote, “There are no spaces between the words [in New York], it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.”

  When Eve returned to L.A., she did the same things she was doing before she left, but she was different. “I was renting my own apartment on Formosa. That’s where I was when a friend called and told me Paul Butterfie
ld was playing in Huntington Beach. I’d finally got my license, but driving the freeway made my hair white. I could do side streets, though, so I borrowed my mother’s car and drove down. Nobody was in the audience except Stephen Stills [of Buffalo Springfield]. The rest of the band had gone, and Stephen needed a ride home. I said, ‘I’ll give you one if you let me do the art for your new record.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ I was thinking business, weird as it seems.”

  And so, from the only pictures of the band she could find, a spread in the fan magazine Teen Set—“Win a Dream Date with Buffalo Neil!”—Eve created a Joseph Cornell–style collage. It became the now-iconic cover of Buffalo Springfield Again. Eve: “I also bought one of those little Brownie cameras and started bringing it with me everywhere. I figured photos would be another way to get the record companies to pay me. What I’d do was print the pictures in sepia and then hand-color them so they looked like they’d been taken thirty years before. That’s how I liked things to look—old, out of the past.”