by Lili Anolik
As an album-cover designer and photographer, Eve was part of the rock ’n’ roll scene in a way she hadn’t been, was a legitimate player. Later she’d shrug off this career, laughingly refer to it as “a hoax.” What she really was, she claimed, was “a slave to skinny boys with long hair who sang and played guitar” posing as a cool-eyed professional—a groupie-plus, basically, her designer-photographer guise providing her with both a front and an alibi, as well as an all-access backstage pass. Because I’ve read her books and talked to her and talked to those off whom she cadged jobs during this period, however, I know the truth. She was serious about her art. Says John Van Hamersveld, art director of Capitol Records when he first met Eve in 1967, “She came into my office. She had her collages and her Buffalo Springfield album with her. Her reputation was as a predator. And she chased me around my desk a few times, asked me on dates. But that was just Eve playing around. Work is what she wanted from me. She was looking to get hired.” A thing about Eve I’ve learned: though she never lies, she’s not always to be believed. And I’m inclined to put more trust in this line of hers—“Become art, not decoration”—the closest she ever came to articulating an ethical code, or, for that matter, giving advice.
Eve had a hungry heart. She wrote, “I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock ’n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer.” So eagerly does Eve court corruption, so exuberantly does she participate in her degradation, so merrily does she roll along the path of sin, that she’s incorruptible, undegradable, and beyond reproach. (Has there ever been a less jaded debauchee?) She’s naughty, certainly, but bad, never. Is an innocent no matter how depraved her conduct. A lewd angel.
The Sunset Strip had, by the mid-sixties, become the place where youth and beauty, talent and ambition—art and commerce, too—met. A point of collision that was also a point of explosion. And of orgasm. In other words, the Sunset Strip, in West Hollywood,I had become Hollywood. As Eve was the first to recognize: “I was already much further into HOLLYWOOD than most of my parents’ friends. It was like all they ever knew was the movies about Hollywood whereas to me the Sunset Strip was ten times more immediate than a movie. Plus, it was alive.”
Eve wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. But boyfriends, ah, now that was a different story. Her romances were fleeting, casual, legion. In one of her books, a conversation is recounted. It’s between Eve, though called “Sophie” or “I,” and her cousin Laurie, though called “my cousin Ophelia” or “she.” (Eve’s books, while frequently billed as fiction—“novel,” “confessional novel,” “stories”—are not. Says Eve, “Everything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it. It was one hundred percent nonfiction. I just changed the names. Why? So I wouldn’t get sued!” Mirandi corroborates, “I was Eve’s first reader, always. She’d hand something to me and say, ‘Who’s going to kill me if I write this?’ ”) From L.A. Woman:
“But you know so many men,” Ophelia said, “isn’t there even one for you?”
“They’re all adjectives,” I said, “they all make me feel modified; even a word like girlfriend gives me this feeling I’ve just been cut in half. I’d rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.”
Eve is saying a lot of words here, but really she’s only saying four: Don’t tread on me. (She’s also using the words, near exact, that she used when explaining why she couldn’t be a Thunderbird Girl.) It’s an extraordinarily aggressive statement, for a woman especially, even if the language it’s delivered in is groping, unsure. She wanted sexual freedom, yes, a genuine possibility for the first time in history, thanks to advances in medicine and science. Biology no longer called the shots. Wrote Eve, “Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that . . . now suddenly didn’t stand a chance because [I wasn’t] going to get pregnant, die of syphilis.” What she truly wanted, though, was freedom in general, sexual freedom, dreamy and cat’s meow as it was, just a stand-in for something larger. She believed in the myth of the open range, had the cowboy’s ethos: no borders, no fences. Certainly no little woman or little man tying her down or, worse, up in a wedding knot. “My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster,” she wrote, and when there was still plenty of time to change her mind, except she never did. The idea of answering to somebody or explaining herself, of another person having rights over her, a say in what she did, was, to her, abhorrent and not to be countenanced.
Yet during this period, she did enter into a relationship with a man that was passionate, perilous, mutually dependent, and all-consuming. Says Eve, “It was around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival [June 1967]. I’d just turned twenty-four, and I had this boyfriend, Peter Pilafian. He played electric violin for the Mamas and the Papas, and he was their road manager and unbelievably cute. Before he was with me, he was with Rusty Gilliam. Rusty was the sister of Michelle Phillips [one of the Mamas in the Mamas and the Papas, later an actress]. Rusty was just as beautiful as Michelle, only more realistic. She and Peter had a couple of kids together. Anyway, I’d stayed over his place, and we were in bed, and it was seven in the morning, and, would you believe it, in walks Earl McGrath.”
* * *
I. West Hollywood was not officially incorporated until 1984. But I have on excellent authority—Eve’s—that West Hollywood was always called West Hollywood by natives, so I’m going to call it that, too.
Who’s Afraid of Earl McGrath?
Before I get to Earl McGrath and Eve, Earl McGrath and me. Cross out the “afraid of” in my little subheading there and you have the question I posed, for several years, to anyone who seemed even remotely capable of providing an answer, though not to Earl McGrath himself since he denied my multiple interview requests. And once that answer came and it failed to satisfy me—and it failed to satisfy me no matter how detailed or juicy it was—I let go with a second question. Feeling my cool, disinterested journalist façade cracking, revealing the curiosity, hot and naked, underneath, I’d lean in and say, “No, but I mean, really, who is he?” And while McGrath died in early 2016, my questions did not. I kept asking them, just changed the “is” to “was.” (Also, the “is” to “was.”) The way other people collected baseball cards and postage stamps, I collected information on McGrath, who from here on out I’m going to call Earl, which I wouldn’t normally presume to do as we weren’t acquaintances, never mind friends, but obsession has its privileges.
“In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It is usually Eve Babitz.” That, as far as I’m concerned, is the best thing anybody has said about Eve ever. It’s an insult, yes, but it’s also Oscar Wilde, and therefore a compliment, and none higher. I saw it on the inside flap of Eve’s first book, and though it’s attributed to Anonymous, Anonymous, I later found out, was Earl, and that’s when my fascination began. I started bumping into him in other places—all chic, all glamorous, all in—as well. There he was in Joan Didion’s monumental The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979), a co-dedicatee. Then a friend lent me his copy of Within the Context of No Context, George W. S. Trow’s book-length essay on television and its discontents, which contained a profile, originally published in the New Yorker in 1978, of Ahmet Ertegun, cofounder and president of Atlantic Records. At Ertegun’s side, boxing out a pre–David Geffen David Geffen, was Earl. And then, a few weeks after Earl died, I was researching a piece on Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol’s 1965 Girl of the Year, Edie Sedgwick, and received a message from Frederick Eberstadt, a photographer and society figure who’d known both. He needed to reschedule the day of our interview. “Earl’s memorial service has been postponed to let the smart set at Jerry Hall’s wedding to Rupert Murdoch fly across the Atlantic, including the bride and groom,” he wrote. He assumed I’d know th
at “Earl” was Earl, and I did know, but why did I know? Another way of asking, Who’s Earl McGrath?
Eve’s answer now: “Oh, Earl was fabulous. He was from Superior, Wisconsin, or some crazy place like that. He read Proust when he was sixteen and it changed his life. He ran Bobby Kennedy’s career, that was his original thing. Then he was head of production for Twentieth Century–Fox. He came to Hollywood to write screenplays. He had a penthouse at the Chateau Marmont, but I didn’t know that until later. For a while he was in charge of record companies. He had an art gallery in L.A. and one in New York. Earl gave Steve Martin his ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ routine. He was Joan Didion’s best friend. Also Harrison Ford’s. He had one hundred and thirty-seven godchildren. His wife was an Italian countess and her father ran off with the chauffeur. He made the best chicken salad.” Not only is this answer wildly, extravagantly interesting, so interesting, in fact, that my brain keeps short-circuiting from attempting to pursue multiple trains of thought at once, it’s almost all true. (I can find no mention of Earl in any biography of Robert Kennedy. According to Peter Pilafian, it was a suite Earl rented at the Chateau Marmont, the notorious Sunset Boulevard hotel—“If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont,” advised studio boss Harry Cohn in 1939—not a penthouse. And Eve rounded up on the godchildren; the official count at Earl’s death was twenty-four.) And yet, it isn’t the one I want. It’s Eve’s answer then, in the late sixties and early seventies, when she and Earl were a daily presence in each other’s lives, that I’m after. Tough luck for me since I can’t get it.
Or can I?
Janet Malcolm in The Silent Woman, her meditation on the art—and the con—of biography, which reads like a cross between a Kafka short story and a Patricia Highsmith psychological thriller, wrote, “Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to unmediated experience.” I don’t have Eve’s letters to Earl, if ever she wrote any. But I do have Sex and Rage, which she did write, and in the mid-to-late seventies, when her emotions had not yet cooled or healed, were still burning, still raw. It’s an intimate book, and immediate. And rereading it, knowing Eve now as I do, and having the keys to the characters, feels excitingly, shamefully forbidden. As if I’ve snuck into her bedroom, am snouting around in her underwear drawer, dropping crumbs in the pages of her diary.
Earl is a central character in Sex and Rage. He’s called Max; Eve, Jacaranda. Jacaranda first encounters Max when he pays an early-morning visit to Gilbert, the handsome young man with whom Jacaranda is sleeping: “[Max] emerged out of the Jaguar like a tall drink of water, like Cooper in Morocco; all he needed was a palm frond and a straw fan and he’d be complete.” He doesn’t stay long, the duration of a single cigarette. And as he leaves, having knocked Jacaranda dead with his simple style—“every move he made was like spring water, clear and salt-free”—his complicated charm—“a sort of seamless wicked, sarcastic, teasing temperament”—he invites her to a party. Delighted, she wonders what she’ll wear “now that everything was going to be perfect.” This is, unmistakably, the language of infatuation, no matter that Jacaranda intuits immediately that Max is gay. And the infatuation appears to be very much mutual. Max looks at her “as though at last he’d found her and now they had nothing else to do but spend the rest of their lives discovering the mysteries of each other’s perfections.”
Jacaranda’s feelings intensify when she observes Max in a social setting, his natural element: “He smelled like a birthday party for small children.” As a host, he’s peerless, an artist. She recognizes this instantly, appreciates it as only a fellow artist can: “There was something special about [his] parties. . . . Within the first few moments after [the guests had] arrived, they’d be drenched in [his] delight with them and everything would become smooth and golden, and soon . . . the whole place would ascend to heaven.” And the spectacle of him practicing his art hypnotizes her, puts her in a childlike, trancelike calm: “Max’s penthouse had filled up and people were sitting everywhere, humming and purring, a tight golden roll running through the air. . . . [Max] never let the ball drop for a moment, and was always ducking in and out of silences, laughing at how brilliantly things were going. . . . Gilbert was standing, leaning against the same wall that Jacaranda leaned against, and the two of them had been watching in smooth dreamy pleasure for nearly twenty minutes, not saying a word to each other.”
And apparently Earl’s parties were something else. Says Michelle Phillips, “If you went to Earl’s, you were going to a party that you knew would be staffed and stuffed with the most beautiful, interesting people you could find. Always, always, the most fuckable people.” Adds Ron Cooper, “Earl was an incredible cat. He knew everybody in the world. He was the Gertrude Stein of our era. He had a salon like Stein. I met Jasper Johns through him, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jann Wenner and Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson—oh, just an amazing roster of people.”
But it wasn’t the gaudy glitter of celebrity that so dazzled Eve. It was all that brilliance assembled in one place, on one scene (shades of her parents’ house in the forties and fifties), a magician—Earl—passing his hand over it and bringing it to life. Dave Hickey: “What Eve found at Earl’s is, I think, what Warhol and a lot of us found at Max’s [Kansas City, a New York nightclub]. Now, Max’s was a bunch of low-end social climbers and psychotics and drug addicts, but it had an elevator to the penthouse. Get there and you might get to go to Baby Jane’s. It’s where the money and the fame was, the silver bowls of cocaine on glass tables.”
Yet while most of Earl’s friends were indeed known, they were not famous, at least not in the way of a Warhol or a Wenner or a Nicholson. From Sex and Rage: “They were . . . the names you read in W and on lists at weddings in Vogue or Queen, only instead of being in black-and-white, they were in color and moved. . . . [The women] were never quite in the mood for Los Angeles and often got tired in one day of Rodeo Drive and shopping. . . . The men all wanted to become movie producers. . . . Jacaranda thought of [them] living on a drifting, opulent barge where peacock fans stroked the warm river air and time moved differently from the time of everyplace else.” In other words, they were the jet set, considerably less stimulating company. Though, as it turns out, that isn’t entirely true. Not for Earl and Eve, anyway.
Eve mentioned the transfiguring effect reading Proust had on a young Earl, this upstart from the provinces, son of a short-order cook who would grow up to become the man who knew privately nearly all the great public figures of his day. For much of his youth and slightly beyond, Proust flitted around the bon ton, squandering his time on endlessly trivial pursuits and unrelievedly fatuous people. (Fop was Proust’s mask in the same way that groupie was Eve’s.) Only he was actually investing his time, and wisely, and those pursuits and people were essential, providing him with both education and preparation, as well as material, enough to last him the rest of his life. And just as Proust is rumored to have looked at an empty-headed duchess and seen the embodiment of several centuries’ worth of duchesses, so Eve imagined Earl looked at some overdressed socialite twit too rich and bored to push her voice past her teeth and saw a modern version of the Duchesse de Guermantes. His vision, she believed, had an extra dimension, was capable not merely of perception, not even merely of extra-perception, i.e., a special keenness, but of extrasensory perception: it discerned the past in the present, ghosts walking among the living.
Eve was quick to pick up on Earl’s powers because she possessed them herself. She must’ve felt he’d been made for her—the playmate of her dreams. And between the two of them existed a sympathy so perfect it verged on the uncanny: “[Jacaranda] felt very, very close to [Max] and heard him breathing and saw exactly what he saw and knew exactly why he did things and understood everything without a hitch.” They were one being.
Earl had other
friends, too, a smaller, cozier set, “the handful of people he took up with . . . in Los Angeles.” The handful: Eve, obviously; Michelle Phillips and Peter Pilafian; Ann Marshall, daughter of thirties leading man Herbert Marshall, and Phillips’s best friend; artist Ron Cooper; Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, the couple having moved to L.A. from New York in 1964 to break into screenwriting; and Harrison Ford, before he was a movie star.
Says Phillips, “I didn’t even know Harrison was an actor. I remember getting dragged to Star Wars at ten a.m. on a Saturday morning by my stepbrother, who’d done some animation for the movie. I was sitting there, watching the screen, and all of a sudden Harrison comes on and I gasped and said, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’ ” Says Eve, “Harrison carried his dope in a base-fiddle case, which he brought to Barney’s.” Ford was supplementing his dealing with a little carpentry. Though, in Eve’s opinion, he should’ve stuck to dealing: “I don’t think Harrison knew anything about architecture or engineering or anything like that. He built a deck for Joan and John, and John almost killed him because he never finished it.” In Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, Dunne wrote, “[W]hat had started as a two-month job . . . [stretched] into its sixth month and the construction account was four thousand dollars overdrawn. . . . I fired the contractor. ‘Jesus, man, I understand,’ he said. He was an out-of-work actor and his crew sniffed a lot of cocaine and when he left he unexpectedly gave me a soul-brother handshake, grabbing my thumb while I was left with an unimportant part of his little finger.”
The thing about carpenters, though, is they really know how to nail it. Says Eve, “Harrison could fuck. Nine people a day. It’s a talent, loving nine people in one day. Warren [Beatty] could only do six. Earl was in love with Harrison. One time Earl and Harrison and I were taking acid at the beach in Malibu. And then I suddenly decided we had to go home because there were too many cops around, so we drove all the way back to Hollywood. We stopped for breakfast at the Tropicana. Harrison started talking about working on a movie with—what’s the name of Barbra Streisand’s first husband? Elliott Gould? Harrison said he thought Elliott was a nice guy. Well, Earl stood up and threw all the dishes on the floor. It was weird. I mean, weird. He was jealous.”