by Lili Anolik
No exaggeration as it turned out. Our grass-fed burgers and russet potatoes fried in truffle oil arrived and she barely came up for air. I flashed to Paul’s description of her M.O. at fetes during her party-girl heyday: “She’d bypass the host or hostess and first head to the buffet table and dive into it like Esther Williams on Dexamyl. She’d bolt if something made her uneasy, then barge back in and demand that I take her home. I’d ask her why. After all, we’d just gotten there, and she’d say, ‘So we can fuck!’ ” The second she cleaned her plate, she pushed it away.
“I’m ready to go,” she said.
I blinked at her. The whole meal had taken twenty minutes.
I threw cash down on the table, afraid she’d get impatient, walk out if I used a credit card. Trying to buy myself a little extra time, I offered to give her a ride home, even though I didn’t have a car. I called a cab and we talked a bit as we waited for it, a bit more when we were in it. But the conversation never really got off the ground. We couldn’t get any rhythm going, any flow. I was uptight and overeager. And she, no doubt, was bewildered: Who was I exactly and what did I want from her? Or maybe she was just checked out. The few remarks she made were addressed to an invisible point above my head or to herself. The cab turned onto G— Street and she was opening the door almost before the driver braked, disappeared into her building without so much as a wave.
* * *
I didn’t sleep that night. Was too upset. Because I’d blown it with Eve, of course, and felt hot with shame at my failure. But also because sitting across from Eve at that restaurant table had been such a deeply alienating experience. Technically she’d looked at me, though she’d refused to acknowledge my presence in any of the usual ways. Technically she’d spoken to me, though she’d refused to engage in dialogue other than of the Mad Hatter variety, each sentence unconnected from the sentence that came before. She never once said my name.
Yet as strong as my urge to back away was, my urge to come closer was stronger still. You could even say that my repulsion was a form of attraction. That Eve, famous for her beauty and seductiveness, was now a ruin and a gorgon excited me. It heightened the beauty and seductiveness of her books, reinforced my conviction that she was an artist and an original. That her life had descended into either tragedy or folly or both also excited me. It meant that there was a grandeur about her, a magnificence. Logically this made no sense, but intuitively it rang cherries, one, two, three in a row. Besides, I believed that Eve was trying to repel me. (Reduce everything she said to me in those twenty minutes to a single word, and it wouldn’t be a word, it would be a growl.) And if she was putting obstacles in my path, the jewel she was guarding must be precious indeed. Then there was this: she was my ticket out of publishing purgatory—anonymous writer-for-hire assignments, dry-as-dust magazines that barely paid—I was sure of it. It was starting to dawn on me how ambitious I was, how far I was willing to go. It was starting to dawn on me that I might be a gorgon too.
In the morning, I forced myself to call her, thank her for coming to lunch. I was certain she wouldn’t pick up. But she did, even sounded pleased that it was me on the other end of the line. It was a brief exchange, three minutes at most. She brought it to a close by saying, “And next time, I want you to take me for barbecue.” Next time. The sheer relief at hearing those two words made my vision blur. As I said good-bye, which she didn’t catch (already hung up), my heart lifted, lifted, lifted.
I was in.
With Eve maybe, but not with Vanity Fair. From interest in my pitch to approval of my pitch to publication of my piece was a long haul, close to two years. I was six weeks pregnant with my second baby when the issue finally hit stands. The wait was frustrating, exasperating, maddening, yet ultimately a blessing. During that time, I traveled to L.A. every twelve weeks or so and took Eve to lunch. I got to know her better. Understand her better, as well. No small thing because she often spoke in a private code, which I learned—started to learn—to crack. “Is that the blue you’re using?” was, of course, one example of Eve-speak. Another was “so-and-so likes baseball.” That meant the so-and-so in question, male, was heterosexual and serious about it, macho in terms of outlook and attitude. As in “Oh, Fred Roos [the famed casting director, an ex of Eve’s] liked baseball too much to be friends with Earl.” (This in answer to my query as to whether Roos, who cast Harrison Ford in Ford’s breakthrough movie, American Graffiti, met Ford through Earl McGrath.)
Though perhaps the phrase most crucial to grasping Eve’s speech is “whatever.” She pronounces it in a very particular way, putting a space between the what and the ever, the emphasis on the what. She uses it, as many do, to signify indifference or annoyance, but also as a kind of verbal ellipsis. It’s what she says when she’d rather not say anything at all, wants to glide right over a subject. (For instance, I once questioned Eve about Ahmet Ertegun’s caddish side—I knew he had one since Etienne Vasilly in Sex and Rage had one—and she replied: “Ahmet would be charming a girl and then he’d make her jump out of the limo or run out of the party, leave Earl to chase after her, because he’d insulted her, said something awful or done something awful or whatever.”) In nearly every circumstance, her “whatever” defies response and ends the conversation.
While Eve was always up for meeting, she never seemed totally sure of who I was. Anytime I saw her after a few months had passed, I’d begin by giving my name, first and last, then mention Vanity Fair. Though her lack of interest in me was distressing, I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn’t that I was so easy to forget, it was that she had such difficulty remembering. And I never lasted with her long. As soon as the food was finished, so was she, no lingering over coffee or tea. Forty-five minutes tops.
Except for once. My brother arranged to be in L.A. for work at the same time I was in L.A. for lunch with Eve. After she and I ate, he picked us up outside the restaurant. She got a load of him, and her face lost its vague expression. “I know you,” she said, a serious gleam coming into her eye. “You’re the one who played the jukebox at Astro.” And, unbelievably, he was. When he was renting that apartment on Crescent Heights, he used to stop by Astro, a few blocks from Eve’s, at least twice a week for the avocado burger and to hear Blondie’s “Call Me.” John, though, hadn’t lived in L.A. for more than two years. Apparently her obliviousness was selective and did not extend to cute young hunk types.
Instead of having John drive her home, Eve had him drive us around Hollywood so she could point out her old haunts. Afterward, she even let me walk her up the steps of her building, though she didn’t invite me inside her condo. I got an idea of why the moment she opened the door—a sliver, just wide enough for her to slip her body through and for me to realize that Paul hadn’t been going for cheap laughs when he called her “the world’s biggest slob.” I saw filth and I saw stuff, so much filth and so much stuff that moving a foot in any direction other than toward the kitchen or the bedroom (two very narrow pathways had been forged) would be impossible. There was also that cloyingly sweet stink, a more potent version of the smell she carried on her person, so potent, in fact, it made me dizzy. I still couldn’t quite identify it. And then, all at once, I could: decay. I held my breath as I leaned in to kiss her good-bye, which she normally didn’t permit me to do, only this time she did. It ended up being our best afternoon together.
The wait was a blessing in another sense, as well. It allowed me to get a feeling for her rhythms and moods, her quirks. So that when it came time, finally, finally, for her Vanity Fair shoot, I knew what to do. She requested that a former boyfriend of hers (also of Paul’s), the photographer Lloyd Ziff, take the pictures. Ziff: “I was gay but Eve was still my type—funny, sexy, a smile like Marilyn Monroe’s. It’s not as if she and I were some big romance. We didn’t make the columns or anything like that. But we were an item for a while back in, I think, ’73. Or maybe it was ’74. Could it have been ’75?I I don’t remember the year we were together, but I do remember when w
e broke up. Eve came to dinner with me and my mother. Afterward she said to me, ‘Anyone who has to deal with a mother like that cannot be my boyfriend.’ And we were done! We stayed friends, though.”
Ziff scouted out a number of locations in advance: Hollywood High, a prop lot on Melrose, Bronson Canyon, the Sunset Tower Hotel. He suggested that we start at Musso’s for an early celebratory lunch, spend the afternoon hitting the spots. It was a good plan. The only problem with it was that it would never work. Food is, obviously, a big thing for Eve. If we gave it to her first, no way would she cooperate. She’d wolf it down and, having got what she wanted, demand to be driven home. We had to make her earn it. Use the spinach (and sandabs) as a carrot. I explained all this to Ziff with much self-conscious shuffling of the feet, many an embarrassed clearing of the throat, before proposing we reverse the order. Ziff gave me an is-this-really-necessary? look. I nodded. He sighed, laughed—made an attempt at a laugh, at least—then nodded back.
Eve was cranky by Bronson, there were dark mutterings at the Sunset Tower, but she stuck it out, made it to Musso’s, which is where, as it so happened, Ziff got his best shot, the one that would appear in Vanity Fair’s 2014 March/Hollywood issue. It showed Eve sitting at one of Musso’s famous red booths, a half smile—exactly half, neither more nor less—on her face; Mirandi on her right, Laurie on her left, both smiling hugely.
Mirandi Babitz, Eve Babitz, Laurie Pepper at Musso’s, 2013
* * *
Though Eve and I were eventually able to achieve a certain level of comfort with each other in person, perfect ease was beyond us. Is beyond us still, frankly. It’s difficult for me to relax with her since I always feel like I’m playing beat-the-clock. I know how quickly she’s going to want to leave wherever it is we are, so I tend to overdirect the conversation, get impatient if she wanders off on one of her tangents: a sugar substitute found only in Japan, the Queen of England’s bra-maker, the health benefits of unpasteurized milk. And I’m sure my wound-up intensity is unnerving for her, that habit I can’t seem to break of looking at her too hard, of lunging at her every remark as soon as it drops from her lips. Nor have I managed to completely shed my awe of her, my neediness around her, and it’s a strain on us both. Another issue: physical pain, hers, which she never mentions but which I guess at. I learned from Laurie and Mirandi that a number of her burns didn’t fully heal, are still open. And her body can no longer efficiently rid itself of heat because the fire destroyed so many of her sweat glands. Sitting in a chair at a table for an extended period, especially in warm weather, must be excruciating.
On the phone, however, where my gaze isn’t merely averted, is eliminated, the story is entirely different. Our rapport is not just reliable but surefire, not just easy but instinctive. She takes my calls now, has ever since that lunch at Short Order. “Oui, oui?” she says, her favorite greeting. I tell her who it is though I know she already knows. Caller ID. And she says, “Lili!” the exclamation point audible in her voice, which—and I think this every time I hear it, the same thought, without fail—is so charming, unusually charming. It’s girlish and lilting, the enunciation softly crisp, laughter always bubbling up in it; yet it’s drowsy, too, as if the phone’s ringing has pulled her out of a heavy slumber. And this is what I start to picture, despite my knowing exactly what Eve looks like now: Eve then, Eve’s Hollywood–era Eve, sitting up in bed, tousle-haired and mascara-smeared like a good bad-girl movie babe, a sheet wrapped around her torso, the receiver cradled between her chin and shoulder as she lights her first cigarette of the day and lets fly some deeply unfair, deeply funny observation, a man beside her, only his back visible, trying to stay asleep.
I should add: my fantasy is, I suspect, really our fantasy, mine and Eve’s, not just shared with her, but co-created by her, and necessary to us both. I’d bet money that Eve is picturing the same Eve I’m picturing when we’re on the phone. It’s obvious she’d rather talk on it than face-to-face. And who can blame her? To have changed forms so abruptly, gone from, if no longer, in her early fifties, a sexual paragon, then still vital and enticing, fully capable of attracting, in her words, “fun and men and trouble,” to mundane in the span of a few seconds, must’ve been beyond disorienting, must’ve been dislocating, as if her life had suddenly become a case of mistaken identity. Small wonder that she prefers her communication to be disembodied.
Mostly Eve and I talk about the past. What she says is invariably sharp and amusing, and her recall is exceptional. On the disagreeableness of Edie Sedgwick: “I never met Edie. I didn’t want to. I knew she was obnoxious, so I stayed out of her way. I did see her, though, a few times at Max’s Kansas City, sitting at the bar with Bobby Neuwirth. She used to buy her clothes in the boys’ section.” On the strange case of Walter Hopps: “Chico [Hopps’s nickname] had a room in his house filled with Joseph Cornells. He stole them from everybody. He even stole them from Tony Curtis. Don’t ask me why Tony Curtis had a huge collection of Joseph Cornells. All I know is that he did, and that Chico took them.” On fame: “There was a period there where it looked like a book I wrote might become a bestseller. It didn’t. But for about a week people thought that it might, and that I might become famous. It was one of the most horrible weeks of my life. Why? Because I thought being famous would cramp my style.” By the way, “cramp my style” is more Eve-speak, a phrase invoked by her here in response to fame, earlier in response to the Thunderbird Girls. But I’ve also heard her invoke it in response to higher education, to deadlines, to black-widow corsets—to anything, basically, that threatens her ability to do exactly as she pleases.
She’s great on the present as well, if you’re willing to wait out the political rants. (Her views took a sharp right turn post-fire.) She tells me about the book she’s reading, Life, Keith Richards’s autobiography: “The reason Keith doesn’t die is because he doesn’t mix his drugs.” Why she isn’t writing: “I’d rather do nothing for as long as I can stand it.” What her skin looks like: “I’m a mermaid now, half my body.” It’s the last remark that knocks me out the most. I love it not simply because it shows how tough she is, how unbowed, what a sport and a champ and a trouper, but because of its sneaky eroticism. She’s comparing her burned epidermis, a painful and grisly condition—a disfigurement—to the scales on the tail of a mermaid, the seductress of the sea. As an image, it’s grotesque and romantic at once. Not just sexy, perversely sexy. Not just perversely sexy, triumphantly perversely sexy. On the phone, she talks like she writes.
* * *
I. A question I frequently asked myself when I was researching Eve: Do West Coasters have, in general, worse memories than their East Coast counterparts? Most of the people I spoke to about Eve are Angelenos, and I noticed that they have difficulty fixing dates, even the vaguest of ones, to events. The reason for this is, I suspect, climatological. Southern California lacks definitive seasons. Days, weeks, months, years become indistinguishable in the drift and the haze of sunshine and smog, of dope and frolic, of an existence so absolutely temperate and free of friction that time passes and nobody realizes. Anyway, it’s a theory.
Novel Est Morte!
Back to the past.
Slow Days made more of an impression than Eve’s Hollywood. Knopf put money, muscle, and hoopla behind it, taking out half-page ads in major American newspapers. Clearly the publishing house believed in it. As did Eve. “I thought what Knopf thought—that it would sell a million copies.” (This is the book of hers around which hopes of bestsellerdom hovered.) That didn’t happen. “Nobody read Slow Days either. Well, Jackie Kennedy read it. She loved it. She gave people copies of it before they went to L.A. That’s what she did with X, my AA friend.”I
Still, Slow Days was widely reviewed, including twice in the New York Times. The second review, by critic Mel Watkins, was near glowing and twigged to Eve perfectly: “Eve Babitz is philosopher, quidnunc and wit here, and the amalgam makes for a collection that is light enough not only to entertain and flaunt the W
est Coast glitter but also insightful enough to reveal its somber underside.” The damage, however, was done by the first. Novelist Julia Whedon surveyed and dismissed Eve in three short paragraphs. In her closing, Whedon wrote, “I discern in [Babitz] the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia.”
In any case, by the time Slow Days was released, Eve was already at work on her third book.
Sex and Rage (Knopf, 1979) was about the same thing Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days were about: Eve and Los Angeles. Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days are both autobiography, and yet I’m drawn to them as literature. Sex and Rage is also autobiography, and I’m drawn to it only as that. By which I mean, I’m interested in it because it gives me insight into the context and mind-set that led to the creation of the works that actually interest me—Eve’s Hollywood and, more particularly, Slow Days. In plain English, I don’t like Sex and Rage and regard it, in spite of its killer title, as a failure.
On the one hand, so what? If a writer takes risks, doesn’t just concoct a formula, follow it again and again, he or she is sure to produce an uneven book or two. You can’t knock it out of the park every time is what it comes down to. And it isn’t that Eve whiffed with Sex and Rage that’s noteworthy or compelling, it’s why she whiffed. Because what’s changed isn’t her style. No, her prose has its usual dash and luster. (Of the Harrison Ford character: “His mouth looked as though he’d just been hit with the news that he had a week to live and he didn’t care.”) Nor is it her content, similar, as I said, to that of Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days. It’s her form.