Hollywood's Eve

by Lili Anolik

  Though Earl was married to Countess Camilla Pecci-Blunt, a descendant of Pope Leo XIII, his preference was for men. Says Pilafian, “There was so much to like about Earl, so Harrison and I just sort of put up with his ridiculous advances.” And yet, Earl’s relationship with Eve was sexual, even if, technically, it was chaste. He stole her from Pilafian. That is, stole the object of affection of his object of affection. Or, rather, his objects, plural, of affection. (Eve engaged, too, in bouts of “clashes-by-night” sex with Ford, Earl’s other crush.) The question becomes: why Eve? Why not, say, Joan Didion, with whom Earl was close before Eve and stayed close long after? My guess is because Eve, in spite of having “guys coming out [her] ears like streetcars,” was, same as Earl, fundamentally unattached, alone in the deepest sense. She was available in a way that Didion wasn’t. And Didion didn’t just have a husband, she had a reputation, as well. When Didion met Earl in 1962, her byline was already appearing in national magazines. Her first book, a novel, Run River, would come out a year later. And by 1968, with the publication of her second book, a collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she’d be famous. So Didion was protected twice over. Eve’s position in the group was far less secure. She had nothing tangible or durable to rely on, only such delicate and fragrant qualities as an ability to captivate, a talent for amusing. She was there on the pleasure and whim of people better known and more powerful than she. Again, same as Earl.

  Earl and Earl’s scene absorbed much of Eve’s energy, not to mention time (Cooper: “It seemed like at least three nights a week, Eve and I and Joan and John and Earl would have dinner, either at Joan and John’s house, in their kitchen or their backyard, or at Eve’s place, or at Earl’s, or at my loft”), but not all. In 1968, she started hanging out at a folk club turned rock club called the Troubadour, a few blocks down from the Sunset Strip on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. More specifically, at the Troubadour’s bar, where, according to Eve, “the semen potential . . . was so intense it was enough to get you pregnant just standing there.” Says Dickie Davis, road manager of Buffalo Springfield, “Eve had a favorite table. It was in the corner. She’d say to me, ‘Look around, Dickie. This is Paris in the 20s. This is café society. And sitting here, at this table, I can control the whole room.’ ”

  Eve took photos of Troubadour regulars: singer-songwriter Gram Parsons, singer-songwriter Jackson Browne, singer-songwriter J. D. Souther, founding members of the Eagles Don Henley and Glenn Frey, banjo player and comic Steve Martin. Slept with all these guys, too (see: semen potential), except for Browne and Parsons, whose room at the Chateau Marmont she made it into, but whose bed never. They spent their afternoon together on the balcony, snorting pure cocaine imported from Germany and discussing the rhinestones in “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”—even better than sex. Business was pleasure, and pleasure was business.

  Eve continued to make her fine-art art, the Cornell-inspired collages, and a series of white Coca-Cola bottles, a variation on Warhol’s Green Coca-Cola Bottles: “I took a bunch of glass Coke bottles and painted them white and then took two flowers and painted them white and stuck them inside the bottles. I was copying Andy. He was so brilliant.” She didn’t have a gallery, but that was okay. (“No, it didn’t bother me. I thought I was too good for everyone. I was a snob, you see.”) Eve continued to make, as well, her non-fine-art art, collages for West, the L.A. Times’ Sunday magazine, accompanying pieces on topics such as Liza Minnelli and the L.A. pop music scene. And her album covers, for friends such as Noel Harrison (Santa Monica Pier) and the Byrds (Untitled), though she was more getting by as an album-cover artist than taking off. Her description of her life as a freelancer: “Some art director would say he loved [my work] in the morning and get drunk at lunch and call and change his mind before dinner. . . . In the free-lance art world [art directors] felt they were doing me a favor. . . . And maybe they were.”

  Still, she was able to pay her bills, and when she wasn’t able to, she was able to find somebody who was. “I looked upon men, in those days, as people who’d never miss my incredibly reasonable fifty dollars for cabfare, which was much too cheap to make me feel like a hooker.” Everything was casual, easy, there for the taking. And even though she was in her mid-twenties, her existence remained as footloose and improvisatory as that of a teenager. Years later she’d write, “Life . . . [in] West Hollywood during the 60s was one long rock ’n’ roll.”

  A year or two into their friendship, Earl introduced Eve to Ahmet Ertegun, called Etienne Vasilly in Sex and Rage:

  Max decided to arrange a meeting between Jacaranda and Etienne on the spur of the moment, one afternoon. . . . [He] asked if Jacaranda minded if he used her phone. “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. But I’m going to play a trick on him. Is that O.K. with you?” . . . She just waited, looking out the window at the smoggy afternoon, while Max dialed.

  “Hello?” Max began, “You’re there! . . . Listen, I want you to come over right away, it’s important. . . . I met a woman in the supermarket. . . . Her husband is in [Phoenix]. So you’ve got to come at once. . . . She says she wants to meet you. She says she makes the best frozen potatoes au gratin in L.A.” . . .

  Twenty minutes later, a new beige Lincoln Continental pulled up sharply across the street. . . . Out of the Lincoln stepped one of the most powerful men in the world.

  And Ertegun would become the most powerful man, in his world if not quite the, when, in 1971, he stole Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones away from Decca Records. Yet while Ertegun was a suit and a shark, a killer by instinct as well as by trade, he was other things, too. He wrote lyrics for Ray Charles and the Drifters; launched Aretha Franklin; recorded, in addition to Sonny & Cher and the Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin, John Coltrane and Charles Mingus and Ornette Coleman. From Sex and Rage: “Etienne had Magrittes in his living room . . . his wife was on the Ten Best Dressed list, he’d been everywhere, done everything, and spoke all these languages.” Which is to say, Ertegun wasn’t the usual cigar-chomping, money-grubbing music-mogul vulgarian; rather he was an impresario-potentate, the Monroe Stahr of rock ’n’ roll. He clearly delighted in Earl’s rascality and wit—Trow, in that New Yorker profile, described Earl as “the person, perhaps, with whom [Ertegun] was best able to relax”—Earl serving as a kind of courtier and companion. And Ertegun, in turn, looked after Earl. Earl’s career was strange and implausible. That he had one at all, however, was due in large part to Ertegun, Ertegun hiring Earl to run Clean Records, an Atlantic subsidiary, and then Rolling Stones Records, also an Atlantic subsidiary.

  But what Ertegun really hired Earl to do was run his social life. Earl’s job was to know what Ertegun liked, and Earl, with his “quick gaming eye,” knew Ertegun would like Eve. Stated plainly, Earl was Ertegun’s procurer. And he was offering Eve to Ertegun. (That he didn’t do so immediately, that he hesitated, is what interests me most. Did he have pangs? Scruples? Misgivings? Did he want to protect her? Keep her for himself? Or at least away from Ertegun?) It’s irrelevant that the manner in which he offered her was playful and entirely un-coercive.

  Eve didn’t cry or balk or even give a moment’s pause. She went along with it. Became the mistress of the married Ertegun. He was an attractive man, intelligent and worldly, and she felt more than respect for him, felt fondness. Yet there was about the relationship an unsavory quality. Maybe because it wasn’t, properly speaking, a relationship, but an arrangement. Underneath the sophistication and suavity, the conversations about Marshall McLuhan and the bottles of French wine he had delivered to her apartment, a studio with two folding chairs and an upside-down orange crate for furniture, it was mercenary, transactional, brutal.

  Recalls Mirandi, “Ahmet would call up Eve late at night, and she’d go over to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ahmet always stayed in a bungalow, the same one, I think, set back among the palms. He always had the best drugs. Not just the best drugs, the best exotic drugs. He’d have things like opium. And there was ro
om service all over the place, and champagne on ice. Evie loved all that. And she’d service him or whatever, and then she’d go home.” Eve’s version is different, but only slightly. From Sex and Rage: “The parties would last till 2 or 3 a.m. The girls would tempt Etienne, and he’d choose one, perhaps a pretty little laughing blonde. . . . At about midnight, suddenly . . . Etienne would start spewing insults at the little blonde. Or, worse yet, forget her and start on some new woman. . . . Jacaranda, of course, being in love with Max, didn’t care too much about Etienne’s intentions. . . . Since [she] cared so little about what Etienne was doing, she usually wound up being the one with whom Etienne slept. . . . She, Max, and Etienne would have a nightcap and discuss the evening, until one of them was sent home in a Rolls-Royce limousine—Max.” It’s ugly emotions that are being expressed and exchanged here, or, I suppose, not expressed and not exchanged. Eve sounds, for the first time, bored. As if the deadly torpor of the people she’s surrounded herself with has, at last, infected her. Sounds, too, hard, cold, contemptuous of self and others. Sounds fallen.

  Mirandi: “There would be times that we went to Earl’s, after a show or a concert. I’d see the mix of people who were there, top music people, people like Mick Jagger. And I remember all of them talking around a table. They were half-cocked, drunk, and full of whatever. And the talk was so mean and mean-spirited. It would be directed at the girls, sometimes at Eve—these horrible put-downs. Most of the girls would just crumble. Not Eve. She’d figure out what the deal with you was and just go for the jugular. She’d say things that would cut you in half. And drugs like cocaine made her even more surly. So she’d give it right back to Ahmet. I worried she’d get slapped, but I think he liked it.” Eve thought the same. She wrote, “As for Etienne, he seemed pleased with Jacaranda’s bravado. . . . It pleased him to watch her drunkenly delude herself that she was sailing along, walking on water. [Her] kind of foolhardy determination made [his] eyes grow madly hot.”

  And it’s when Eve started up with Ertegun that it ended with Earl. “Somewhere along the way, Max’s tender-hearted, gleeful mastery turned to tears of poison.” So their love story had a surprise twist, and the twist was that their love story was—surprise!—a hate story. Did Eve loathe Earl for pimping her? Did Earl loathe Eve for allowing herself to be pimped?

  Eve’s romance with Earl wasn’t the only thing going blooey. Joan Didion, from The White Album: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the 60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community.” The murders Didion is referencing are, of course, that of model-actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, and four others, by the followers of cult leader Charles Manson, at the house Tate shared with husband Roman Polanski on 10050 Cielo Drive. Says Eve, “The first time I saw Sharon was at the Café de Paris in Rome. It was 1961, the same year I saw the pope. I couldn’t believe anyone was that beautiful.”

  Cielo Drive was a bloodbath and an atrocity and a horror. Not just death but death in the family. Michelle Phillips: “It was so sad and so revolting and it had happened to our friends. Roman and Sharon were close with all of us.” And not just death in the family but death in the family at the hands of the family. Manson and his followers weren’t outsiders in Hollywood. They were part of the community that Didion mentioned. It was Eve’s friend, Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day and producer of the Byrds’s Untitled, who was the intended victim. (Manson, an aspiring singer-songwriter, was introduced to Melcher by Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, at whose house he and a few of his women had crashed for several months in the summer of ’68, and he blamed Melcher when he failed to secure a recording contract. Melcher and Melcher’s girlfriend, actress Candice Bergen, had been the tenants of Cielo Drive before Polanski and Tate.) Catherine Share, the Manson member known as Gypsy, went to school with Eve, first at Cheremoya Grammar, then at Le Conte Junior High, and finally at Hollywood High. Says Eve, “Cathy—that’s what she was called then—was in the orchestra. And she had the locker next to mine in gym class. She was perfectly fine, except she was a little gullible.” And Bobby Beausoleil, the Manson member known as Cupid, whose stabbing of musician Gary Hinman on July 27 had kicked off the killing spree, lived with Eve for a week in 1964. She wrote, “Bobby Beausoleil had romped with his dog in my house. He’d worn a sign that said ‘I am Bummer Bob.’ I let him stay but hadn’t slept with him because anyone who called himself that, I figured, must have the clap. . . . He sent Christmas cards from Death Row.” Cielo Drive looked like an act of random, senseless violence, but it wasn’t. It was a Greek tragedy.

  Didion was right: the sixties in L.A. were finished. The decade that began with the suicide of Marilyn Monroe ended with the murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Wojtek Frykowski, Abigail Folger, and Steven Parent. Only it took Eve almost two years to realize it. “I was too stupid to know I was in the wrong place. Joan knew, but I didn’t. She had to go through the horrible awakening of finding out that California was in dire straits. I never had to find out because I was too drunk and stoned.”

  If Eve missed the chimes at midnight, however, she caught the echo. On July 3, 1971, Jim Morrison overdosed, an event she connected with Charles Manson—“Jim looked like [Manson] in his obit picture in the Los Angeles Times”—as though Morrison and Manson, who looked like Morrison in his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone the year before, were two faces of the same phenomenon, or, rather, two faces that had merged into one: the rock star who dreamed of becoming a homicidal maniac, and the homicidal maniac who dreamed of becoming a rock star.

  Eve wrote of the sixties, “We were all . . . under a spell of peace and love and LSD that we thought had changed the world.” When Morrison’s body was found in the bathroom of his apartment in Paris, the spell broke for her. Disenchantment set in. With the Troubadour scene: “I was getting too old to be a record album photographer. I was losing my groupie touch and had begun telling rock ’n’ roll stars I hated rock ’n’ roll and nobody is that cute.” More painfully, with the Earl scene: “[Max’s friends] talked about the newest places to eat and the newest places to become slender. They talked about the very newest people, and then they talked about the very most fabulous oldest people. They talked about how ‘boring’ anyone was who behaved with the least bit less surface élan than Cole Porter. Anyone who was serious about something other than what color to do the hall was boring.” And most painfully, with Earl himself: “It was only art anyway, Max’s attitude seemed to say—a dismissal of all he’d been before—and suddenly he smelled like suitcases and dry cleaning, not a birthday for an eight-year-old at all.”

  Once a fantasy lover and soul mate, Earl was now a stranger and an enemy, and Eve was convinced he wanted to destroy her: “Jacaranda felt Max was truly dangerous because of her painting. She’d drawn and painted all her life: ladies with whips, bluebirds, clouds in the skies. But then one day Max paused, stood back . . . and said, ‘Is that the blue you’re using?’ After that, [Jacaranda] just stopped painting.”

  And so did Eve.

  So there you have it, the answer to the question, Who’s afraid of Earl McGrath? Eve. Eve was afraid of Earl McGrath.

  Before I conclude this section, which marks the end of Eve as a painter and a collagist, a note on “Is that the blue you’re using?”—the words that wiped out Eve’s artistic assurance, until that moment absolute. They were originally spoken by Earl. Obviously. I just quoted Eve quoting him. But Eve speaks them, as well, in other contexts. Several years ago, I asked Eve how come she’d never gone into the local business, movies, and written scripts in more than a half-assed, quick-buck way. She replied, “Because you show a Hollywood person your screenplay and the person asks, ‘Is that the blue you’re using?’ ” And then, more recently, when she and I were discussing the Duchamp retrospective, and I wondered aloud why Duchamp had really left the art world back in the twenties (a sudden and overwhelming passion for a board game struck
me as a fake-out, a cover story), she said, with total surety, “Because some terrible person who was supposed to be his friend asked him, ‘Is that the blue you’re using?’ ”

  So “Is that the blue you’re using?” is, clearly, for Eve, shorthand for a type of remark that sounds benign but is not. Odorless, tasteless, lethal, it’s a kind of rhetorical arsenic, invading and then annihilating the recipient’s self-belief. She puts it in the mouths of people who radically and profoundly fail to understand how art is made, how an artist suffers to make it. Like the dumdum studio executive. Or of people who pretend to radically and profoundly fail to understand how art is made, how an artist suffers to make it. Like Duchamp’s insidious confrere. Like Earl.

  Intuition tells me that Earl was jealous of Eve. The jealousy was sexual—he was jealous of the other men for sleeping with her, jealous of her for sleeping with the other men—but only in part. Mostly the jealousy was artistic. Earl resembled, in so many ways, a character in one of those sprawling nineteenth-century realist novels about lost illusions. A young person of humble origins with grand hopes and dreams is lured to the big city, where his hopes are dashed, his dreams crushed. Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir or Dickens’s Great Expectations À la recherche du temps perdu by Proust and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the American Proust, are the twentieth-century versions. While Earl, through a combination of deft timing and exquisite manipulation, had climbed the heights socially, there was to him a sadness—sensed rather than seen, guessed at rather than known—a disappointment, a melancholy, an ache. And Eve, who both sensed and guessed, was as drawn to his dark depths as she was to his radiant surface. Moreover, the two derived energy from the same sorts of situations and people, but only Eve was able to convert that energy into something beautiful. Or soon would be. (As a painter and collagist, she never quite made the grade. She would, though, in her next incarnation. And, in any case, she wasn’t ever not trying. Art, beauty, transcendence—these were always the goals.)