by Lili Anolik
L.A., where the story’s set, is presented as a twentieth-century Sodom and Gomorrah, fire and brimstone all it deserves, what it has coming. Play It, whatever your feelings about it are, can’t be dismissed, not the way Morrison’s lyrics (“There’s a killer on the road / His brain is squirmin’ like a toad”) and song titles (“Hello, I Love You”) can. Interestingly, Didion, unlike Eve, wasn’t inclined to dismiss Morrison. On the contrary, she was very much taken with him when she, in the spring of ’68, attended a Doors recording session. She’d write about her time in the studio in The White Album, referring to his band, and without a hint of irony or sarcasm, as “missionaries of apocalyptic sex.” It’s difficult to imagine a description that would be more gratifying to its descriptee.
Play It is a literary achievement—the momentum building along with the dread; the pitch, high and fevered and trembling, sustained; the prose, pared down, charged, electric even—and its writer a serious talent. It was a sensation when it came out, an instant seminal Hollywood book, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its absolute contempt for everything Hollywood. In mood (dark) and vision (doomsday), it’s close to another seminal Hollywood book, Nathanael West’s 1939 The Day of the Locust, the central metaphor of which, a painting by the artist-protagonist entitled The Burning of Los Angeles, is made literal in the final scene: a crowd of starstruck fans turning into a foaming-mouthed mob, a movie premiere into an orgy of violence and destruction.
Now, look sharp because things are about to take a turn for the funky. Eve conflated Morrison and Didion. She also, however, conflated Didion and West, and for essentially the same reasons. She loathed The Day of the Locust, like Play It a formidable work, yet one Eve had no problem sticking it to. In a very angry, very funny piece called “And West (né Weinstein) Is East Too” she wrote:
All of the things that Nathanael West noticed are here. The old people dying, the ennui, the architecture and fat screenplay writers who think it’s a tragedy when they can’t get laid by the 14-year-old doxette in Gower Gulch, the same 14-year-old who’ll ball the cowboys any old time. But if there had been someone, say, who wrote a book about New York, a nice, precise, short little novel in which New York was only described as ugly, horrendous and finally damned and that was the book everyone from elsewhere decided was the “best book about New York there ever was,” people who grew up knowing why New York was beautiful would finally, right before dessert, throw their sherry across the table and yell, “I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey, and take you for a fucking guided tour, you blind jerk.”
Alter a few of the specifics, and Eve could have been describing Play It as It Lays, and the dismal view it took of L.A., pretending to tell the whole truth about the city while telling a partial truth at best.
And here’s Eve on West:
I think Nathanael West was a creep. Assuring his friends back at Dartmouth that even though he’d gone to Hollywood, he had not gone Hollywood. It’s a little apologia for coming to the Coast for the money and having a winter where you didn’t have to put tons of clothes on just to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a beer.
Alter fewer of the specifics and Eve could have been describing Didion, half of a literary couple that the charitably disposed might term “careerist,” the uncharitably “two-faced.” Didion and Dunne were Hollywood people from the mid-sixties until Dunne’s death in 2003. Yet they always let it be known that they were only writing scripts so they could afford to write books, were East Coast intellectuals slumming, basically. They’d cash the studio checks while simultaneously distancing themselves from the resulting crummy movie—one or the other of them often writing a piece for a classy New York publication about the experience after it was over that struck an arch, insiderish tone—even reveling in the resulting crummy movie, as if the crumminess were further evidence of their superiority, proof that they’d sold nothing when they’d sold out. (Dunne would go so far as to write an entire book in such a vein, Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, in which he detailed his and Didion’s involvement with the 1996 Robert Redford–Michelle Pfeiffer clunker Up Close & Personal, alternately boasting and bemoaning.)
And yet Eve wasn’t describing Didion or Play It as It Lays. And she wasn’t calling Didion a “blind jerk” or accusing Didion of copping a “Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude.” She’d go after West or Morrison instead. Or rather in lieu. She could express her feelings about Didion but only by proxy. Why?
In the fall of 2015, I spoke to Eve for a piece I was doing on Didion in Hollywood in the sixties and seventies. Eve, who loves and hates with a child’s purity and holds nothing back,II was reticent, cagey. At least on certain topics. She’d talk to me, on the record, for example, about her memories of Didion’s amphetamine use: “Joan and I connected. The drugs she was on, I was on. She looks like she’d take downers, but really she’s a Hells Angel girl, white trash. I thought [she] was more in control than [the rest of us] were, but I reread The White Album. She didn’t sound in control, did she?” She wouldn’t talk to me, though, about Didion’s work, even after I’d switched off my recorder. She’d say that Didion’s books were “great”—every time, that word and no other—and then shut the conversation down.
When my Didion piece appeared, I didn’t send Eve a copy or breathe a word of it. What I wrote about Didion was respectful but tough, and I was sure Eve would be angry, think I’d elicited information from her under false pretenses. Tricked her, in essence. My hope was that she’d forget we’d ever done the interview, walk right past the issue on newsstands. And then my cell rang, her name flashing across the screen. I hit ACCEPT, a tight, sour ball of dread forming in the pit of my stomach. But before I could stammer out a hello, she crowed, “You did it! You killed Joan Didion! I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me!”
To be clear, I did not kill Joan Didion. I could not kill Joan Didion. No one could. She’s too good. That, though, isn’t the vital thing here. The vital thing is that Eve was overjoyed because she believed I killed Joan Didion. As the ball dissolved, I listened to her talk. And talk. It was as if she’d been under a curse, now lifted, and her tongue, unbewitched, was able to speak the truth: Didion had been the making of her, so she couldn’t say a word against Didion. (Publicly discussing Didion’s taste for uppers is not, in her mind, a betrayal since to her drugs are just things people do, no embarrassment or shame attached.) It was so duh-duh obvious that, for several seconds, I was rendered mute. Eve was grateful. That was the explanation. And if Eve had been anybody else, I’d have guessed it at once. Wouldn’t have needed to guess, would have assumed. In this case, however, it didn’t even occur to me. Gratitude didn’t seem like the kind of emotion Eve would entertain—too modest, too humble, too ordinary. But she did, and there you go.
So I have inside information and it backs up my theory: Eve started writing in reaction to Didion. (If I’d paid closer attention to the dedication pages of her first book, the one in which “The Sheik” appears, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble: “And to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.”) Didion was the tar baby, Morrison and West the decoy ducks. And you could argue—I am arguing—that Eve’s entire literary career was a response to, nay, a rebuttal of, Play It as It Lays.
Eve didn’t become a writer like that, out of nowhere. Not quite, anyway. There’d been an attempt, just the one, earlier.
In her late teens, while she was in Italy with Sol and Mae—“I lived in Rome for almost a year and the only word of Italian I learned was cazzo [slang term for penis]”—Eve began a novel, or, rather, a memoir masquerading as a novel, “Travel Broadens.” “Travel Broadens” was Daisy Miller, except Daisy Miller turned on its head. Instead of the decadent Old World corrupting the innocent American girl, as happened in Henry James’s tale, it was the other way around. (This plot summary, incidentally, is Eve’s, not mine. I’ve got to rely on her memory, can’t consult my own since I’ve never read the book, all known copies having been lo
st.) Eve completed “Travel Broadens” at the tail end of ’61, during a short trip back to L.A. Before rejoining her family, she sent a letter to Joseph Heller, then thirty-eight, who’d published, earlier that year, Catch-22, a landmark cultural event.
The letter, in its entirety:
Dear Joseph Heller,
I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.
Eve BabitzIII
It was a provocative letter. As provocative a letter as the Wasser-Duchamp photo was a photo, and in exactly the same way—Eve once again playing for a celebrated artist and considerably older man the sexy, boobalicious girl while also kidding the idea of playing the sexy, boobalicious girl. Heller was provoked. (This, by the bye, is one of those times when Eve and I had a But-Evie-how-did-you-know-to-do-that / I-went-to-Hollywood-High exchange.) Says Eve, “I heard back from Joe quickly. He wrote, ‘Have you actually written anything?’ So I mailed him one hundred and twenty-three pages, or however many pages I had, and he laughed his head off and gave them to Robert Gottlieb [the young editor at Simon & Schuster who’d discovered Catch].” It was an auspicious beginning, and that’s where it ended. Eve: “Gottlieb said the book needed more. I didn’t know what he meant by ‘more,’ and I didn’t try to find out. I just thought, Uh-oh, and that was it.”
Well, Is that the blue you’re using? isn’t the only way of asking, Is that the blue you’re using?
* * *
I. Wakefield didn’t sound as if he was kidding when he told me this, but I still half thought he was. The white suit is as much a part of Martin’s persona—at least Martin’s early persona—as the prematurely gray hair. How could it have been anyone’s idea but his own? “No, Dan’s right,” Eve said when I raised the subject with her. “That was me. There was this great French photographer, Henri Lartigue. He took pictures of Paris in the twenties. All his people wore white. I showed his photographs to Steve. ‘You’ve got to look like this,’ I said. He actually listened.” It took me a while, but I finally got Martin on the phone. And he confirmed: the white suit was indeed all Eve.
II. Once when were out at lunch, a woman—Eve’s age—perfectly pleasant seeming, waved from a neighboring table. Eve didn’t return the wave. I asked Eve who the woman was, and she said, eyes wide, voice grave, “That’s my enemy.” (Eve and the woman had, as it happened, shared a boyfriend forty years before.)
III. This, I should confess, is only one version of the letter, and it isn’t the first version I heard. The first version I heard was Nan Blitman’s. Blitman, Eve’s friend and former agent, recalled Eve describing the letter thusly: “Dear Mr. Heller, I’m sitting on a bench on Sunset Boulevard in a wet bathing suit. I’ve written a novel. I’m eighteen.” As soon as I hung up with Blitman, I phoned Eve. Trying to tamp down my excitement, I asked her about the letter, but did not repeat Blitman’s words out of fear of contaminating her memory. She gave me the version quoted above. (Eve, by the way, never volunteers information, no matter how relevant or useful. She’s like one of those riddle-speaking figures in myths and fairy tales. She’ll answer any question you ask, except you have to know exactly what question to ask, and how precisely to ask it. That’s the trick and the challenge.) Afterward, though, I did quote Blitman’s words to her, and she conceded that it could be Blitman who has it right. It’s a pick-and-choose-type situation. And just because I picked and chose Eve’s version doesn’t mean you have to.
Blue Streak
At Rolling Stone, Eve found both occupation and vocation. Plus love. With her editor, Grover Lewis, a writer, too, a poet and a New Journalist, originally from Texas. (Eve’s first letter to Lewis after “The Sheik” was accepted, written care of the magazine, on a typewriter, is business formal: “Dear Mr. Lewis: . . . Enclosed is the ‘brief biography’ of myself to which you alluded. And upward, Eve Babitz.” A few months later, Eve sent Lewis another letter, also written care of the magazine, also on a typewriter, though with a cursive PS: “I yearn for you tragically.”) Says Eve, “Grover came up with the line ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out, fuck up, crawl back.’ He was great. I was almost thirty, too old to fuck around, I decided.” And when Lewis asked her to come live with him, she said yes. “I’ve always associated San Francisco with retirement, so I moved there to become a square. I thought that the move was for good, that Grover and I would get married and I’d be a grown-up. I lasted three months.”
Eve called Mirandi. Mirandi agreed to jump in her car, drive the four hundred miles up the coast, retrieve Eve. But Mirandi had a live-in boyfriend, not to mention a business, so she couldn’t jump straightaway. It would be a few days. Lucky for Eve, she just couldn’t help herself and had formed multiple romantic attachments while at Rolling Stone. Well, she was looking especially foxy, slim after an all-juice diet, and she’d been given a drop-dead new haircut—hair that was “too good for her,” as she’d describe it in a letter to Lewis—by her LACC friend Marva, now working at the salon of Gene Shacove, inspiration for Warren Beatty’s cocksman-hairdresser in Shampoo, on Rodeo Drive. (From that same letter: “[Marva and I] met in [introductory] Italian in summer school and she asked me for a match. She was trying to befriend me [during] a break while we stood outside in the arcade. . . . I told her there were matches in my purse and she opened my purse, found this . . . match box I used to keep my diaphragm in and out snapped my diaphragm and rolled down the entire length of the arcade past the other students and down the hall. ‘Go get it,’ I commanded darkly. Marva had the decency to burst into hysterics and she actually did go get it so we became friends.”)
Among those who succumbed to Eve’s charms was photographer Annie Leibovitz. Says Eve, “Joan Didion told the people at Rolling Stone to get me, so they tried, and they couldn’t. I kept dodging out of their orbit. Annie was their one hook in me. She came to my place. I had this book of Lartigue pictures—Lartigue was how I got everyone in those days—and she looked through it, and that did it. She was in my life. We were on and off for a long time.” Julian Wasser, who finally seduced Eve almost ten years after he got her naked, recalls, “As I left Eve’s apartment the next morning, I ran into Annie. She was not happy to see me—the look I got!” And it was at Annie’s apartment that Eve stayed as she waited for her sister.
It was a shame about Lewis, but there’d be other editors. As it so happens, there already was one: Seymour Lawrence, known as Sam. Lawrence, Boston-based, ran his own imprint at Delacorte, and published such luminaries as Katherine Anne Porter, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and J. P. Donleavy. After reading “The Sheik” and a few of the similarly themed pieces Eve wrote for the Los Angeles Flyer, the short-lived insert section of Rolling Stone, he got in touch. She touched back, and there was an affair. Says Eve, “Sam went to Turkey and bought me a pair of gold earrings because that’s what I demanded. But then I didn’t like them.” Fortunately, lousy taste in jewelry only cooked him as a boyfriend, and she let him sign her to a book contract, which included a $1,500 advance. “I blew it all at Musso’s [Musso & Frank Grill, the oldest restaurant in Hollywood]. I ordered caramel custard for everyone, the whole place.”
Eve’s Hollywood, released in 1974, is a series of autobiographical sketches, some already published, some not, arranged more or less chronologically, and forming a loose memoir. It’s not a mature or disciplined work. Has, in fact, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to it. Certain pieces, you don’t know what they’re doing there, and most of them fail to reach the level of “The Sheik,” the high point of the collection. And yet, the riffs are marvelous: on watching the Pachucos dance the Choke in the gymnasium of Le Conte Junior High during Phys Ed;I on vamping at the bar of the Garden of Allah hotel with her friend, Sally, catching men with their jailbait; on eating taquitos on Olvera Street, two for forty cents, forty-five cents if you wanted a second helping of sauce and a paper plate, which you did. And the book, overstuffed as it is, never seems soft or flabby, but rather baby-fat voluptuous, the extra weight appealing, g
iving you something to grab on to, to squeeze, to pinch.
If Eve’s Hollywood has a flaw, non-niggling, I mean—every so often you’ll notice a slight strain in the prose, a bit of grammatical sloppiness, a questionable word choice—it’s related to identity: L.A.’s and Eve’s, one and the same in Eve’s mind. In Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a piece called “Notes of a Native Daughter,” which Didion, who grew up in Sacramento, graduated from Berkeley, lived and worked in Hollywood when Eve knew her best, was. But it was in New York that Didion established herself both professionally (her first job was at Vogue) and personally (there she met her husband, John Gregory Dunne, from Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a surgeon and a member of Princeton’s class of ’54). She was a Westerner, certainly, yet a Westerner who was at home in the East, approved of by the East, part of the East in all the ways that mattered, and it was therefore okay to take her seriously. In other words, she was as much a prodigal daughter as she was a native.