by Lili Anolik
Which is why he and Eve, a sinner and a sadist, were matchlessly mismatched and thus a perfect match. Even the fact that her passion for him far exceeded his for her worked in their favor, like her too-muchness and his not-enoughness came to exactly the right amount. The enemy for Eve had always been boredom, and with Paul she couldn’t get bored. His ambivalent sexuality—drawn as he was as powerfully to men as to women—his ambivalence in general—drifting along as he did aimlessly, pleasantly, in a free-form, episodic way—allowed her to maintain her equilibrium by keeping her off balance. And it had the same effect on him. In his memoir Full Moon, he wrote, “[I’d] become one of those odd birds who seem to be attractive to others, but cannot commit themselves to . . . any of them.” Because without the weight of Eve’s emotionalism, her intensity, her breasts and flesh and need, you feel that Paul, so pretty, so passive, so captivatingly noncommittal and gossamer light, would have floated off into the ether, dissolved like a dream in the warm Southern California air.
And between them was an instinctive understanding and sympathy. Paul: “Eve could be wonderful in a way no one else could. I regret not saving a letter she wrote me. It was about my color blindness. In it, she described the colors, what moods went with which. It was sweet and romantic and totally Eve. Much of her chutzpah came from her blind belief in herself, and I fed into it. When we were together, she was, as I said, quite hefty. I just likened her to a masterwork odalisque by Rubens. Friends would ask me how I could stay with her when she was obviously so crazy, but I felt she was as exotic as she thought I was. She certainly had the most interesting mind I was ever privy to. And Ed very much approved of her. He loved her for her notoriety, for the Duchamp photo, for the men, for the fact that she wrote as well as she did. Eve was my main squeeze—that’s what she liked me to call her—but I was hot on the market then and seeing other people. So was she. Annie was around a lot. Eve used to say that Annie was the son John [Gregory Dunne] and Joan [Didion] never had. And Eve kept old boyfriends in her life. Every few days, one would call, and she’d talk to him about his new girlfriend or wife, about books or movies or restaurants. I loved being the guy in her bed listening to her laughing with former beaux. She’d walk around the tiny apartment, tripping over the clutter or her cats, Mario and Sympathy, tangling the hell out of the phone cord. After she hung up, I’d untangle it for her.”
Eve and Paul found a way of being together that largely involved being apart. “I spent the night at Eve’s once or twice a week, two or three times when we were really lovey-dovey. I could never have lived with her, couldn’t have stood the mess. There’d be cat fur—cat fur!—in her food. She was a great cook, though.” And not only was Paul able to give Eve both the intimacy and distance she required as a woman, but also as a woman who wrote. “On Eve’s door was a sign that said, ‘Don’t knock unless you’ve called first.’ She always told me she liked me because I knew when to go home. What would usually happen is, we’d go out the night before, and then we’d come back to her place and fuck and fall asleep. In the morning, she’d drop two scoops of coffee in a pan of boiling water and bang the spoon against the side of the pan loudly so I’d wake up. Then she’d thrust the cup of coffee at me and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to start writing now.’ And I’d say, ‘Okay, okay, I’m leaving.’ Then she’d say, ‘Would you read something first?’ And she’d go over to her typewriter and grab some pages. I’d read them, and she’d ask my opinion. If she liked what I had to say, she’d let me stay a little longer. If she didn’t, she’d kick me out. And the next time I came over, she’d show me the piece or the chapter again and ask my opinion. So I ended up reading everything she wrote nine or ten times.”
I’d begun linking Paul and Mae in my mind long before I realized that’s what I was doing. The writer Caroline Thompson, close with Eve since the late seventies, was the first to mention Paul. “Have you met Paul yet?” she asked, almost in a whisper, as if she were sharing with me a thrilling secret. “Paul’s wonderful.” The more people I interviewed, the more times I had to lean in, cock my ear, as their voices dropped to an enchanted hush. “Oh, Paul? Paul’s wonderful.” Their voices would do the same thing when Mae’s name came up, and there was that word wonderful again. As in “It’s too bad you didn’t get to meet Mae [Mae died in 2003]. You’d have loved her. She was just wonderful.”
I contacted Paul shortly after my conversation with Thompson and found him to be wonderful indeed. So wonderful, in fact, that I decided then and there to make him my friend. A few weeks later, I was on the phone with my brother, telling him what I’d been up to. I heard my voice go small and soft when I said Paul’s name, and that’s the moment I explicitly made the connection: Paul was Mae; Mae was Paul. (Incidentally, Mae made this connection herself. Says Laurie, “When Evie started going with Paul, bringing him around, Mae said, ‘I thought it was supposed to be sons who married their mothers.’ ”) Like Mae, Paul was the quintessence of loveliness and charm, with the manners of someone from a part of the country nowhere near a coast. And, like Mae, Paul was an artist who served a more dominant artist and served that artist superlatively. In Paul’s case, Ed and Eve—double duty.
So if Paul is Mae, who does that make Eve? Why, Sol, of course. Laurie: “My mother, Tiby, didn’t marry until she was twenty-five, which was late in those days. She said the reason was that she never found a man as amazing as her brother Sol. If we had any religion in my family, it was that Sol was a fucking genius, the smartest guy in the world. There was a time where I sat down and thought, Gee, maybe that wasn’t true. But I couldn’t face the possibility. I still can’t. He formed us all. He had this magnificent collection of 78s, and Eve and Mirandi and I used to listen to his Bessie Smith records, the dirty ones, on the sly. But then we couldn’t anymore because we got caught when Eve sat on Empty Bed Blues and broke it in half. And Mae started drawing, became an artist, because Sol told her she could be. His power and judgment ruled everything. I don’t say I started going with Art [Pepper, famed jazz alto saxophonist and junkie] because I knew it would make a splash. But it did. I can’t think of anyone Sol would have thought was cooler or hipper than Art Pepper. Getting Sol’s attention wasn’t easy. Evie would say something clever. That got his attention. She started writing, and the writing was good. That got his attention, too. Besides, she demanded his attention. If it meant she had to bite him on the leg, which is what she did when she was four—burst into his studio when he was practicing, which none of us ever dared do, and bit him on the calf—then so be it. Mirandi was in a state of despair because she could never get his attention. Sol was sitting in the house talking to a friend, and Mirandi—adult Mirandi—walked through the door, and he said, ‘Oh, that’s my daughter, but she’s not the one.’ What a thing to say! Do you think Mirandi ever forgot that? Listen, I’m sure Evie, smart a kid as she was, looked at Sol and looked at Mae, saw Mae running around, doing everything to make Sol happy, and thought, Yeah, he’s the one I want to be.”
Another important person came into Eve’s life during this period, Erica Spellman, a hotshot agent from ICM in New York who represented Fran Lebowitz and Hunter S. Thompson. Spellman, now Spellman-Silverman: “Kit Carson introduced me to Eve. When I got to town, he said, ‘There’s someone you’ve got to meet.’ Eve and I had lunch—at Ports, naturally. She gave me a copy of Eve’s Hollywood. I read it. I loved it. I called my sister, Vicky [Victoria Wilson, editor at Knopf]. I said, ‘Vicky, you’re not going to believe this woman I met. She’s fabulous and she’s going to write this amazing book for you and it’ll be essays.’ And Vicky said, ‘Okay.’ You could do that in those days, call someone up and say, ‘Here’s this person, let’s do something,’ and they would. I never considered calling anyone other than Vicky. Knopf has always been the best publisher, and Eve needed credibility. She was seen as this sexy girl who somehow got Seymour Lawrence to publish her book. A lot of people knew she’d slept with him, which wasn’t helping. I wanted her to be thought of as a serious writer
, not just as this strange creature floating around L.A. Eve and Vicky really loved each other, and I think Eve felt, for the first time, like she had protection—me and Vicky, ICM and Knopf. What I did was call her up every single Monday morning for a year. ‘How’s the book coming?’ I’d say. She sent in pages to Vicky, and Vicky helped her get those pages into shape. And that’s how Vicky and I dragged Slow Days, Fast Company out of her.”
* * *
I. A precise definition of Pachuco is hard to come by. A hoodlum of Mexican extraction, is my best guess. As for the Choke, here’s Eve’s definition: “a completely Apache, deadly version of the jitterbug.” How’s that for precise?
II. After learning who Mr. Major was to Eve, I attempted to track him down on the off chance that he was still alive, could describe for me Eve as a student. He wasn’t, but I’d only just missed him. He died on February 10, 2014, at the age of eighty-two. He was murdered by an ex-con named Scott Kratlin in his apartment on North Vista Street, only a handful of blocks from Hollywood High. Kratlin and Major had struck up a correspondence while Kratlin was serving a twenty-one-year sentence at the Marcy Correctional Facility in Oneida County, New York, for manslaughter. Major promised to give Kratlin a place to stay when Kratlin was released in exchange for sex. (Major had extended a similar offer to hundreds of state and federal prisoners all over the country.) Kratlin lived with Major for ten days, then moved out, though not before strangling Major and bashing in his head. Poor Mr. Major indeed.
III. Dietz misspelled Nathanael West’s first name. Some schoolmaster.
IV. In 1976, Eve and her old Capitol Records contact, graphic designer John Van Hamersveld, got loaded together, hatched a harebrained scheme: the L.A. Manifesto, an underground paper. In the first issue were, among other contributions, songs by the Eagles, poems by Ronee Blakley, and stories by Steve Martin (his first). It was supposed to be a monthly thing, but Eve and John lost steam and/or interest, and so the first issue became the only. I stumbled across a copy early in my research and used it the way I used the Eve’s Hollywood dedication—as a combination Rosetta stone and little black book. All the people in it had, presumably, once been important to Eve and were thus potential interview subjects. Since Carrie Fisher was featured twice, a poem and a story, I figured I’d start with her. Fisher, though, according to her publicist, had no recollection of Eve. I picked up Fisher’s then-still-new memoir, Wishful Drinking, hoping Eve would be in it. She wasn’t. A transcript of the outgoing message on Fisher’s voice mail, however, was. “Hello and welcome to Carrie’s voice mail. Due to recent electroconvulsive therapy, please pay close attention to the following options. Leave your name, number, and a brief history as to how Carrie knows you, and she’ll get back to you if this jogs what’s left of her memory. Thank you for calling and have a great day.” I dialed Eve, extracted from her what history I could, and it wasn’t much (Eve’s drug consumption increased in the mid-to-late seventies, and so her memory of this period is spotty)—“Carrie was a Ports person, and Ports was dark, so it was great if you were someone who wore hats, and I was, and so was Carrie”—relayed it to the publicist, except it failed to jog anything. A promising lead turned dead end. No big deal, I simply backed out, moved on. The only reason this anecdote even rates a mention is because it, more than any other, captures what I so often felt was my role in Eve Babitz’s life: half the nameless narrator, that would-be biographer and “publishing scoundrel” in Henry James’s The Aspern Papers, half an extra in an Abbott and Costello routine.
V. Eve does not believe that Léon made a mistake. She believes that what Léon made was mischief, and is still, to this day, mad about it.
Bluer Streak
Slow Days, Fast Company (1977) is, like Eve’s Hollywood, a collection of stories and reminiscences, though considerably sleeker, ten pieces to its predecessor’s forty-five. It picks up roughly where Eve’s Hollywood left off: the beginning and end of her romance with Lewis; the beginning and middle of her romance with Paul; other romances in between and during; the publication of her first book; near-fame; stupid questions; the politesse of threesomes; the cats, tabby, sleeping on the roof of the patio of the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel; the spinach, creamed, at Musso’s; how to properly ingest a Quaalude (circumspectly); what to wear when taking cocaine on acid (a Finnish cotton kaftan); which restaurant to go to for garlic and easy sex (Dan Tana’s); which restaurant to go to for Mexican mineral water and erotic tension (Ports); jaunts to Bakersfield, to Palm Springs, to Laguna Beach.
The sensibility Eve was feeling her way toward in Eve’s Hollywood has been refined here, the style perfected. Gone is the profusion of Eve’s Hollywood, that teeming, overabundant quality, which aroused and thrilled but also dismayed and exhausted. Slow Days is the achieved work, an authentic masterpiece. It’s classical yet audacious, sublime yet offhand. It’s sheerest bliss to read. It’s the book that made me want to write this book.
How to account for the difference between Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days? It isn’t entirely a matter of sexual experience. Close, though. With Eve’s Hollywood, Eve was throwing herself at the reader, that Leibovitz cover the most blatant of come-ons, Eve not giving the reader the chance to spot her across a crowded room, strike up a conversation, lean imperceptibly closer to get a whiff of her perfume, catch the hazel glints in her brown eyes, instead propositioning him/her as quickly and bluntly as she, at twenty-two, propositioned Jim Morrison. This guns-blazing aggression makes her seem not like a woman of the world, the persona she’s going for, but like a high school girl attempting to pass for older, pure bravura and bluff.
With Slow Days, on the other hand, Eve is all grown up. The book, with its stylish, low-key cover by her friend, artist Chris Blum—a sexy saluki in a sweater waiting for a glass of wine—is adroit, expert, mysterious, wicked. It’s infinitely permissive. Infinitely subtle, too. It would no more say, “Read me,” than its writer, thirty-four and wise, would say, “Fuck me.” Nor is it merely seductive. No, it’s a seduction, quite literally, of an unnamed man in Eve’s life (I’ll name him, it’s Paul), and, by extension, us. Seduction is, in fact, the structure of the book, its unifying principle. In the opening, Eve writes:
Since it’s impossible to get this one I’m in love with to read anything unless it’s about or to him, I’m going to riddle this book with Easter Egg italics so that this time it won’t take him two and a half years to read my book like it did the first one. . . . Virginia Woolf said that people read fiction the same way they listen to gossip, so if you’re reading this at all then you might as well read my private asides written so he’ll read it. I have to be extremely funny and wonderful around him just to get his attention at all and it’s a shame to let it all go for one person.
Eve is playing with Paul, playing with us, knowing that he—and we—are in her thrall, confident that he—and we—are going to stay there. She’s languid, serene, digressive, so totally in control she can abdicate it.
Eve has acquired patience, but, even more crucially, restraint. The dedication is five words long: “To Sol and Mae Babitz.” And though Slow Days is as star-studded as Eve’s Hollywood, you wouldn’t know it. The stars are incognito, Eve bundling them up in trench coats, slipping Groucho Marx glasses on their faces: The character called Terry Finch, the country singer and actress who dabbles in heroin, is Ronee Blakley; the character called Nikki Reese-Kroenberg, the socialite married to a rich and powerful man from San Francisco, is Jane Wenner, wife of Jann; and the character called Gabrielle Rustler, the ingénue whose evil allure has not yet translated to the screen—“The trouble was that the men who cast her thought she was beautiful, so they put her into wistful, dreamy dresses when they should have handed her a whip and got out of the way”—and with whom Eve spends a debauched afternoon at the Chateau Marmont, is Michelle Phillips. In other words, Eve is writing about stars because she’s writing about her life, in which stars just happen to be supporting players; she’s not writing about stars be
cause she’s trying to validate her writing.
What’s more, Eve is now letting L.A. fend for itself. She writes:
People with sound educations and good backgrounds get very pissed off in L.A. “This is not a city,” they’ve always complained. “How dare you people call this place a city!”
They’re right. Los Angeles isn’t a city. It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio. Everything is off the record. People don’t have time to apologize for its not being a city when their civilized friends suspect them of losing track of the point.
So instead of putting up her dukes, as she did in Eve’s Hollywood, she’s shrugging her shoulders. She understands that L.A. doesn’t require explanation or justification any more than she does.
Something else Eve is doing: inventing a form. In the book’s first piece, she declares:
You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost. . . . No one likes to be confronted with a bunch of disparate details that God only knows what they mean. I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel. I can’t keep everything in my lap, or stop rising flurries of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse or sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.
And, by God, the pulse and sense do emerge. And the space can be understood. And a novel has been made, even if it’s an unstraightforward one, one that looks nothing like a novel. Eve’s pulled off the trickiest of feats. Has found a way, technically, through this narrative device she’s created, to convey her romanticism, her desolation, her irony—herself.