by Lili Anolik
Eve, by contrast, was L.A. from the top of her (often) platinum head to the tips of her (always) painted toes. She was born and raised there, obviously. Hollywood High was the extent of her formal education, not counting the semester or so’s worth of classes she daydreamed her way through at LACC. And, apart from those three brief stints—in Europe, New York, and San Francisco—all served prior to her thirtieth birthday, she never left. Moreover, she declared her allegiance to L.A. before she declared anything else, before she declared anything period. The book’s cover is a photo taken by Annie Leibovitz: Eve in a black bikini and white boa, face in profile, breasts straight on, almost 3-D. Her appeal is as immense, as flagrant, as no-brainer as that of L.A. itself. She’s a true native daughter.
Eve Babitz, 1972
Little surprise then that she took L.A. personally. And the condescending attitude toward it adopted by the rest of the country, New York especially, galled. (Eve will defend her city as she would never defend herself, but, of course, that’s what she’s really doing when she squares off against those “travel[ing] to Los Angeles from more civilized spots,” as she sarcastically refers to the snooty out-of-towners, the “stupid asshole creep[s]” and “provincial dopes”—she gets mad enough, and sarcasm goes out the window—who miss the “pink sunsets” and the “sk[ies] of rain-swept blue” and the “true secrets of Los Angeles [that] flourish everywhere” because they’re so determined to believe that something with obvious superficial charms cannot also have subtle deep ones. She fumes, “It’s perfectly all right [for them] to say, ‘Los Angeles is garish’ . . . as they sit beneath the arbors and pour themselves another glass of wine though it’s already 3 p.m. and they should be getting back to the studio to earn their money.”) As a matter of fact, she was alluding to that classic put-down of L.A.—“cultural wasteland”—as well as to Didion, with the title of her opening piece, “Daughters of the Wasteland,” refuting the charge simply by listing the people who walked through the front door of her childhood home: Stravinsky, Herrmann, Schoenberg, et al.
So Eve’s parents conferred cultural legitimacy upon L.A. Who, though, would confer it upon Eve? She could’ve conferred it upon herself, and easily, sheerly through the force and originality of her voice and sensibility and observations. Only she didn’t trust these things yet, believe they were sufficient to compel attention. Which is why the skimpy bathing suit, and the cleavage deeper than Bronson Canyon. Which is also why the name-dropping, so out-of-control compulsive it’s practically a form of Tourette’s.
Before even the table of contents is the dedication page, or, I should say, pages, eight of them in my first-edition copy. Eve thanks the greats in her life—“And to Joseph Cornell. A Real Artist . . . And to Steve Martin, the car”—the greats formerly in her life—“And to Marcel Duchamp who beat me at his own game . . . And to Jim Morrison running guns on Rimbaud’s footsteps”—the greats she wished were in her life—“And to Orson Welles, the light of my life . . . And to Marcel Proust”—along with a few intriguing non-greats—“And to Mr. Major, I’m sorry I turned out this way . . . And to the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in.” The style is half Oscar-acceptance-speech, half yearbook-inscription-ese, all those inside jokes: Joseph Cornell was another pen pal of Eve’s (“I wrote him a letter after I went to that show in New York with Carol. He wrote me back asking for a pinup picture. I knew what he meant but I couldn’t give him one. I loved him too much. I just wanted to be his fan”); Steve Martin bought her a VW Bug when they were together (“Linda Ronstadt was his girlfriend and I was his girlfriend and we were both doing him wrong!”); Mr. Major is Harry Major, Eve’s English teacher at Hollywood High (“Poor Mr. Major”);II and the guy with the unforgiving spouse is Tom Dowd, a renowned producer and engineer for Atlantic Records (“Tom and I used to go to a place on the Sunset Strip called Gino’s. It’s where people took people they were having affairs with. You could order weird things like venison”).
The dedication is completely over-the-top, and it tells you that Eve, at this stage, is unsure of herself, the implicit message being that if her famous friends think she’s all right, so should you. And insecurity is the reason Eve’s Hollywood takes a while to get going. It’s not until nearly the one-quarter mark, with “The Choke,” the story about the sexy Pachucos, that Eve stops trying to throw stardust in the reader’s eyes, dazzle or blind. She breaks out of Sol and Mae’s social circle, and her own—vicious circles, they had become—to talk about what she sees, the world around her. The pace and interest pick up immediately.
But again, this flaw, non-niggling though it is, isn’t damaging, not nearly as much as it should be, at least. It’s almost the reverse. It gives the book—and I know how peculiar this sounds, I’m fully aware—a quality similar to the one found in Marilyn Monroe’s smile. When Monroe smiled, her upper lip quivered slightly because she was trying to lower it to cover the gums she believed over-large. And this quiver, a flaw, or rather an attempt to mask a flaw, or rather an attempt to mask an imaginary flaw, is, I think, the source of the smile’s special power, what saves it from being merely pretty, blandly, boringly perfect, makes it instead unsettling, as poignant as it is entrancing, and totally unforgettable.
Eve’s Hollywood, good as it is, however, was still in the promising category. That promise would be fulfilled with her next book.
The publication of Eve’s Hollywood went mostly unnoticed by critics—the all-mighty New York Times declined to weigh in. And it didn’t exactly fly off shelves either. Says Eve, “It sold, like, two copies. I mean, nobody in L.A. read it. Well, except for Larry Dietz.” Lawrence Dietz, a writer and editor, someone with whom Eve had a nodding acquaintance from Barney’s, sized up the book for the L.A. Times. In the review, he cast himself as the stern yet loving schoolmaster; Eve as the naughty little girl in need of a spanking. Index finger wagging, he chided her for not taking greater care to cultivate her gifts (“To deny the full range of [your] talent because you don’t want to work in developing it is not only to diminish yourself, but also all of us who could have been enriched by it”), and for failing to live up to the shining example set by Joan Didion (“Play It as It Lays—a book so cruelly accurate that it made Nathaniel West look like Shecky Greene”III). He ended with a direct address to the reader: “[Eve’s Hollywood] is a seriously flawed book, but if you don’t mind some sloppy and self-indulgent writing, you’ll be rewarded with four or five chunks of good work.” Eve was angered by the piece, though not surprised by it. “The main thing about Larry was that he was a twat.”
Still, Eve’s Hollywood, lackluster reviews and sales figures notwithstanding, changed things. No longer was Eve a groupie, in a tongue-in-cheek sense or any other, or a struggling artist and album-cover designer. She was a writer with a book to her name. Consorting with rock ’n’ roll royalty and trash—and it’s almost always one or the other—at the Troubadour bar wasn’t for her anymore, even if a photograph she took of Linda Ronstadt did make it onto the inside sleeve of Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel album (Capitol Records, 1974). She needed a new hangout.
Sticking to West Hollywood and Santa Monica Boulevard but moving a few blocks east, Eve found a recently opened restaurant, Ports. In a January 7, 1975, letter to Grover Lewis and his wife, Rae, she wrote, “I have so entangled my life with Ports that they no longer bother to charge me for food or drink and I’m interior decorating the new room and otherwise inflicting my personality on the place. It’s like a salon, just what I’ve always wanted.”
Ports was run by Micaela Livingston and her husband, Jock, an intermittent actor (his best-known role was as Alexander Woollcott in the 1968 Julie Andrews turkey of a Gertrude Lawrence biopic, Star!), who lost his temper when he was drunk, which was most of the time, regularly giving customers the heave-ho for offenses both real and imagined, occasionally choking the help. Says Eve’s friend, British-born L.A.-based designer Paul Fortune, “L.A. then was still a small town, the same one hun
dred people everywhere you went. It wasn’t groovy, that hadn’t happened yet. It was like this great, weird blank slate—you could write yourself into the story. And even though it was the seventies, it was also still the forties. The old cars were there, the old buildings, the rain-slicked streets out of Raymond Chandler. Ports harkened back to forties Hollywood. It was erratic. It was personal. It was strange. It had real soul.”
Ports didn’t care whether you liked it or not, doubtless the reason it inspired such fanatic devotion, from famous people in particular. (The chance to wait more than an hour for a table, to be given the wrong order, to get treated like nobody in the least special, was evidently irresistible to them.) Warren Beatty would bring in Julie Christie for romantic dinners. Robert Redford conducted business lunches at a booth in the back. Sculptor Claes Oldenburg ate at Ports when he was in L.A.; so did graphic designer Milton Glaser, and Italian art-house director Michelangelo Antonioni. Other habitués included actress-singer Ronee Blakley; singer-songwriter Tom Waits; the guys from the Eagles, usually separately though sometimes together; actor Ed Begley Jr.; director Francis Ford Coppola, especially after he set up his studio, Zoetrope, across the street. Steve Martin was also a regular. And Candice Bergen. And Carrie Fisher.IV
Says Eve, “Ports had this weird little library with Max Beerbohm in it. And Django Reinhardt was coming out of the speakers. I felt like it was my restaurant, that it had been made for me. I stayed in the same apartment for years because it was close to Ports. It’s where I met Michael Franks [singer-songwriter]. We were in bed and my feet got cold. I said I had Popsicle toes. That’s where the title to that song came from [“Popsicle Toes” was on Franks’s 1976 Warner Bros. album The Art of Tea, reached No. 29 on the Top 40, and has been covered by, among others, Diana Krall and the Manhattan Transfer].” Eve, a favorite customer, was given a brass plaque, hung above her preferred table. She even served food on occasion, when one of the waitresses quit or took the night off. Wrote Eve, “I loved it more than anything I’ve ever done before or since because deep down inside every woman is a waitress. The act of waitressing is a solace, it’s got everything you could ask for—confusion, panic, humility, and food.”
Though musicians and painters and actors and directors frequented Ports, most of the people for whom the restaurant was a second home were what Ed Ruscha termed “artists who do books,” i.e., writers: Colman Andrews, the food writer, who’d devote a chapter to Ports in his excellent memoir, My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants; Michael Elias, the comedy writer (co-wrote The Jerk with Steve Martin and Carl Gottlieb); Kit Carson, the screenwriter (David Holzman’s Diary); Nick Meyer, the novelist (The Seven-Per-Cent Solution); Warren Hinckle of the muckraking political magazine Ramparts; Julia Cameron, journalist for Rolling Stone; and, when in town, Tom Wolfe, steering clear, no doubt, of the stuffed game hen in plum sauce for the sake of his white suit. Elias: “Ports was for people who were too hip for disco. It was like a club. I was there every night. You could do coke, fuck in the bathroom. There was a piano that this terrific jazz guy, Freddie Redd, used to sit at. Sometimes there’d be performance art, or someone would put on a play. Jock used to get drunk and decide he was going home. He’d toss us the keys and tell us to lock up when we were done. There really wasn’t anything else like it in L.A. When my first wife and I got divorced, it wasn’t ‘Who gets the Lakers tickets?’ It was ‘Who gets Ports?’ Eve was the queen of it all.”
And every queen must have her king.
* * *
Eve, at twenty-three, en route to a wedding at which she’d been engaged to the groom and the best man (“I’d broken off with both . . . because I was impatient with ordinary sunsets”), asked Mae whether Mae believed she would ever get married. Instead of giving an answer, Mae gave advice: “If you do, marry someone you don’t mind.” Trickier to follow than it sounded. At least for Eve. Not minding might have been where she started out with a guy. It sure wasn’t where she ended up, though. Besides, she was too restless, too imaginative, too wayward, too independent for connubial bliss to be anything but abject misery, as she was beginning to realize after calling it quits with Grover Lewis. She simply wasn’t cut out to be a wife, or even a girlfriend in the conventional sense. Mistress, a role that was part-time and no-strings, fantasy-based rather than reality, was far more suitable to a woman of her tastes and temperament. Still, it was with genuine regret that she decided “those songs of love were not for [her].” And, since life is as perverse as it is perplexing, that’s the precise moment she met Paul Ruscha, younger brother of Ed.
Paul: “I left Oklahoma City the summer of the Watergate hearings. I remember the exact date, June 25, 1973, because it was the half Christmas. My relationship with Larry, the man who owned the restaurant I worked at, had become unbearable after eight years. He’d started fucking his son’s friends, and they were just high school kids, and I’d had it. Ed didn’t approve of that side of me—the gay side. But he understood what I was going through in his Ed way because he’d split with his wife, Danna, the year before and was living with Samantha [Eggar, the actress]. So Ed sent for me, and I was glad of the fresh start. I worked for him as an artist’s assistant and stayed with Danna. One afternoon Danna took me to Jack’s Catch-All, a thrift store on Alvarado. That’s where I first saw Eve. She and Danna talked. After we left, Danna said, ‘I think she likes you.’ I was surprised because I didn’t think she’d even noticed me. Eve was heavy then, but I was so skinny that when I had sex with girls who were also skinny, our bones would just bang together and it hurt! So I didn’t mind heavy. Eve invited me over for dinner. Eve was friends with Léon Bing [the fashion model], who used to go out with Ed, and she called Léon and said, ‘How can I get him?’ Léon told her that I love cilantro. Actually, I hate cilantro, but Léon just remembered that I had a strong reaction to it. She made a mistake.V Eve put cilantro in the soup, in everything, so I couldn’t eat a bite. She called me the next day and said, ‘Can I have a second chance?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ She made me a wonderful dinner that night. And she showed me a story she’d written, and I was blown away by it. We were together from then on.”
Paul, thirty, was, same as Ed, an artist, and talented. Unlike Ed, however, who was laconic, solitary, a little aloof—a cool, cool customer—Paul was gregarious, expansive. Says Paul, “L.A. then was the Endless Party. Ed would look at me and say, ‘Don’t you ever stay home?’ When I first arrived, we went to events together often. Then I started to notice that he’d ask me if I was going to a certain party, and if I said yes, he didn’t come. I always threw myself into the action. I guess he was afraid I’d make a fool of myself and, because we were related, make a fool of him.” The isolation, the rigor—the egotism—that’s necessary to make a career out of art, where there’s no objective criteria, where you can’t look for an endorsement from the world or you undercut the authenticity of the work, where you must be obsessed, absolutely and utterly consumed, with getting something great out of yourself, was against Paul’s nature. Art became a thing he was content to do on the side. “In the early sixties I went to the Chouinard Art Institute, where Ed had gone, and began to paint. I was having so much fun that I thought I wanted to be a painter. I asked Ed’s artist friend Joe Goode about my becoming an artist, and Joe advised me to be anything but unless there was nothing else I could do better or loved to do more. Ed’s success was quite daunting. He liked that I could make art. He didn’t like that I couldn’t keep up with his rise to art stardom. He had the burning desire. I just didn’t. It’s hard being Ed’s brother sometimes, but it’s great working for him. He’s the best boss I’ve ever had, and incredibly generous.”
Also, same as Ed, Paul was a dreamboat, though a different make and model. Ed, small and compact, had the flinty, lean-faced handsomeness of a Gary Cooper or a Henry Fonda, actors who could easily play cowboys and other classic American male archetypes. Women took note. Says Eve, “Everybody threw themselves at Ed, and, when he had a couple of spare mi
nutes, he’d reach.” For starlets, most often. Eggar, Michelle Phillips, Lauren Hutton were all girlfriends at one time or another. Paul was taller than Ed, and rangier, with a considerably wilder dress sense: monkey-fur coats, contact lenses that turned his brown eyes silver, and a mustache that was part porn star, part Salvador Dalí. Wrote Eve, “It seemed to me that [Paul] was possessed by the Angel of Sex. . . . He was approaching my ideal in record time and even [Brian Hutton] was beginning to pale by comparison. . . . When he first took off his clothes in front of me and I saw him standing there, there—in my very own bedroom . . . [it] caused me to gasp.”
Yet it wasn’t just Paul’s looks that Eve responded to, it was also his style—calm, courtly, decorous—which happened to be the exact opposite of her own. She wrote, “[Paul was] always trying to smooth things over and [I was] always trying to rumple them up. . . . Perhaps [he], in the beginning, looked upon me as a challenge. Maybe he felt he could show me the path to . . . gentle society.” He couldn’t, of course, but Eve appreciated the effort. Says Paul, “Eve was destructive, to herself more than anyone else. That only made me want to save her. I felt she did better when she was with me, that she was less agitated. I was forever apologizing for her. I remember a guy came up to her at a party and told her that she was his favorite writer, and she just looked at him and said, ‘Beat it.’ ” If bad behavior was so loathsome to Paul, though, why would he be with someone who refused to behave any other way? Eve knew. “[Paul] would dry lepers’ feet with his hair; [I’d] often feared that he would leave me not for some prettier or richer person, but to perform some Christian act of atonement.” In other words, Paul was a saint. Or in different other words, Paul was a masochist.
Paul Ruscha, 1976