by Lili Anolik
Alas, it wasn’t always Eve with whom Zevon was having his fun, playing his games. (Now we get to addiction #4.) Eve: “Warren was so wonderful and funny, but he almost did me in. If he went downstairs in an elevator, he’d come back up with a woman. He couldn’t help himself. The only way I could stand to be with him was by going to Ashtanga yoga class every day. Ashtanga yoga is so horrible to do that when you stop doing it, you feel like you’re floating on air. But after a while even that didn’t work.”
Eve moved out of Zevon’s, back into Mae’s.
In the early nineties Eve stirred again creatively, striking up a relationship with Esquire magazine. Recalls editor Bill Tonelli, “Terry McDonell [Esquire’s editor in chief] put me in touch with Eve. She did that Jim Morrison profile for us, and it was great and people loved it, and I wanted her to do more. It never occurred to me to assign her anything. I didn’t feel like you could do that with Eve. I thought, What else has she lived through that she could write up?” The Duchamp photo for one. The Manson killings for another. She would also cover surfer-businessmen, the Chateau Marmont, the James Dean–looking actors on the popular teen soap Beverly Hills, 90210, and other L.A.-ish topics.
The Esquire stint gave her confidence, plus the urge to stretch her legs, attempt something longer. In 1993, she returned not only to Spellman-Silverman and Wilson, but also to form, when she published the collection Black Swans. Says Mirandi, “That was big for Eve. She really didn’t know if she’d be able to write a book sober.” With Black Swans, she proved she could. In it are pieces about Rodeo Drive, Hollywood’s centenary, a friend’s death from AIDS, her romance with Dan Wakefield, jealousy. Black Swans isn’t up to Slow Days, doesn’t have that breadth or magic. It’s a good, serious work, though, and a marked improvement over Sex and Rage, certainly over L.A. Woman.
A year later, Eve noticed that something funny was going on with Mae. “It was right around the time that O. J. Simpson killed his wife. My mother came into the room when the freeway chase was on TV. ‘What’s this, darling?’ she asked. I explained what was going on and she went blank halfway through.” Alzheimer’s, early stages.
Another change: mother and daughter now had a roommate. Eve’s old Hollywood High pal Sally. Says Mirandi, “Sally had a rough time of it after high school. The acting thing never worked out. She was a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard, with pimps and all that. And she was a junkie. Once Evie got straight, she went and found Sally, who was also trying to get herself straight and was in this fleabag dive of a sobriety house. Eve took her out of there and stuck her upstairs at Wilton Place. Eventually Sally went back to school and paid for it by doing phone sex. She was good at it—those old acting skills. She wanted to become a teacher, which she did.” The arrangement lasted for the rest of the decade.
An obsession that began for Eve in the eighties when she first saw Dirty Dancing—“I was in love with Patrick Swayze for years, but I tried to stay out of his way and never to meet him because I knew if I did, he’d want to talk about yogurt or some weird dietary restriction”—grew in the nineties. Says artist Mick Haggerty, “I was with Eve when she got into tango, and that whole L.A. tango-dancing scene. To me it was ghastly, about as crude and sad and frightening as possible. But not to Eve. She was having the time of her life. She projected enormous amounts of romance and fantasy onto things. She was an artist doing what she did. Her personal viewpoint was just so heightened. We’d be at some gruesome studio in Glendale or someplace, and I’d look at her face, and she was just entranced.”
In fact, Eve was working on a book about tango when she dropped that match.
It happened on April 13, 1997, a Sunday, late morning, warm even for L.A. Eve, Mirandi, Laurie, Laurie’s mother, Tiby, and Mae, now deep into both Alzheimer’s and alcoholism, were having brunch at a restaurant in Pasadena called the Raymond. They were celebrating the birthdays of Mirandi and Tiby, only a week apart. When the meal was over, Eve got behind the wheel of the ’68 VW Bug that Steve Martin had given her all those years ago. She took out a cigar. She attempted to light it. She failed.
Mirandi: “She was wearing an Indian skirt, very, very thin, and it burned up like tissue paper. Her panty hose melted into the skin of her legs. She stopped the car and rolled on the grass and actually set the grass on fire. But she did manage to put herself out. Then she got back into the car and drove to Wilton Place. I was there because I’d taken Mother home. When she pulled into the driveway, I was talking to Mother’s neighbor, Nancy Beyda. I saw Eve, and I was aghast. She was naked from the waist down, and the lower half of her was just this awful charred orange. She was clutching a wool sweater to her crotch, which, if you can believe it, is what saved her crotch. Good wool is hard to burn. ‘It’s okay,’ she said to me. ‘I’ll put some aloe on it. I can still go dancing.’ I guess she was supposed to have some kind of date that night with Paul. I followed her into the house and called an ambulance.”
Eve spent six weeks in the ICU, several months after that in a rehab hospital. She survived two twelve-hour operations in which the skin from her scalp, shoulders, back, and arms was grafted onto her midsection, groin, and legs; the removal of the hundreds of staples and stitches that were keeping those grafts in place; hallucinations from ICU-induced psychosis; bedsores that had to be cut off with a knife; relearning to walk. And all while kicking smoking. The doctors tried to help her cope with the withdrawal symptoms by giving her a nicotine patch, but they couldn’t because there was nowhere to put it, not a single inch of undamaged skin. Eve: “If you have third-degree burns, your nerve endings are gone, but I still screamed in pain. I was always screaming in pain, morning and night, drugs or no drugs. If I sat up in my bed, it felt like I was sitting on crushed glass.”
It wasn’t the first time that Eve had set herself on fire. Paul: “I went to spend the night with Eve when she first moved into that garage apartment behind her folks’ house at Wilton Place. I got there and her bed was a bed of charcoal. She’d thrown a fur coat I’d given her over a space heater at the base of the bed and it caught fire. She would have died because she was dead drunk, but Mae saw it or smelled it and threw water on it, and Eve was okay. I was horrified by the bed. Eve was pissed I’d noticed. That’s the fire that should have gotten her. She was loaded on coke and drinking to come down from the coke. But the fire that actually did get her, the fire she started with that ridiculous cigar—that was just Eve being her inattentive, absentminded, accident-prone self. She didn’t even smoke cigars. That was Mae.”
I’ve got to break in here, say something. If Eve were my character instead of my subject, she wouldn’t have set herself on fire once, never mind twice. She plays with fire metaphorically and then goes up in flames literally? Too on-the-nose, such plot contrivance strictly for hacks. I mean, how cornball can you get? And, yet, that’s exactly what happened. God, that old sentimentalist, just couldn’t resist.
Eve was, of course, without insurance. Her medical bills ran to half a million dollars. Six months after the accident, to raise money, Mirandi, Laurie, and Paul, along with Michael Elias, Caroline Thompson, Nancy Beyda, and artist Laddie John Dill—Friends of Eve, the group called itself—arranged a benefit at the Chateau Marmont. An auction was staged with works donated by, among others, Ed Ruscha, Kenny Price, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, John Baldessari, and Dennis Hopper. Even Jack Nicholson, who knew Eve from Barney’s—“Jack and I didn’t have sex, oh, but I loved him!”—helped, sending a white cowboy hat, bought by artist Ed Moses. Steve Martin showed up. So did Jackson Browne and Don Henley, Henley’s girlfriend, actress Lois Chiles. And Eve, just out of the hospital, was able to make an appearance, accepting a kiss on the hand from Ahmet Ertegun. Says Eve, “Ahmet was carrying a cane that had belonged to Victor Hugo. One of his French girlfriends gave it to him.”
Prior to the benefit, Friends of Eve had sent out a letter soliciting donations through the Allisa Ann Ruch Burn Foundation. That’s what brought in the big money. (The Foundation was tax-exem
pt.) Laurie reported back to Eve, still at County General, told her how Steve Martin and Harrison Ford had kicked in $50,000 apiece. A prostrate Eve raised her head. Through dry, cracked lips she croaked out, “Blow jobs,” before collapsing on the pillow.
A year and a half after the cigar, in 1999, Eve’s tango book, the slight Two by Two (Simon & Schuster again), came out. But other than the final chapter, Two by Two was written before that fateful day in April. Says Mirandi, “Every time Eve tried to write, she kept going back to the fire. I suggested she write about it, just get it all out, and then see if she could write anything else. It didn’t seem like she could, though. Getting burned tore apart her breezy attitude.”
Mirandi, on this last point, is, I think, both on the money and off the mark. In life, Eve’s breezy attitude remained intact, in spite of the trauma she endured. As evidence, I’ll cite the mermaid comment. I’ll cite the set of business cards she had printed up after she got out of the hospital:
Eve Babitz
Better red than dead
And I’ll cite this anecdote of Laurie’s: “When we finally took Eve home, she looked at us and said, ‘People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.’ ” Eve was telling her family, in so many words, that she would not allow the catastrophe that had befallen her and changed her so utterly externally to change her a whit internally, because even to change for the better would be to change for the worse. It was a promise, and a defiant one, and so far she’s kept it.
In Eve’s work, however, her breezy attitude met a harsher fate. I read the forty or so unpublished pages she wrote about the fire in the months immediately following her release from the hospital. It’s a collection of false starts. She begins to tell the story. Stops. Begins to tell it again. Stops. Begins to tell it yet again. Stops. And so on and so forth. She was unable, try as she might, to turn what happened to her into a cohesive narrative, or to even get to the narrative’s end, never mind find a tone or determine a theme. Was unable, in short, to master it, stayed its victim. My guess as to why: Eve has always maintained her aesthetic distance, regardless of how crazy things got, how drug-addled or upsetting or chaotic. She looked at life, its complications and unhappinesses, through an artistic prism. The fire melted that artistic prism. Therefore she could no longer function as an artist. It’s that simple. It’s that sad.
In good news, Eve could afford not to write. There was the money from Friends of Eve and the Chateau benefit. And when Mae died in 2003, and the Wilton Place house was sold, Eve was persuaded (read: begged, hectored, cajoled) to use the $225,000 she received to buy the condo on G— Street. And, thanks to a fast-thinking Mirandi, she had coming, as well, a small annuity. Says Mirandi, “I’d saved the burnt-up waistband of her skirt, pulled it right out of the trash. And Michael Elias showed it to a friend of his who just happened to be Larry Feldman, the lawyer who’d gotten Michael Jackson off for molesting that boy [in fact, Feldman represented the boy, winning a twenty-five-million-dollar out-of-court settlement against Jackson in 1993]. Eve’s case was ridiculous—she didn’t have one. There’s no warning on clothes for adults that says, ‘This garment may be flammable.’ Eve hadn’t even bought the skirt at a store. She’d bought it at a Goodwill. But the clothing company was scared to death of Feldman, so they settled for $700,000. $450,000 of that went to medical bills and legal bills. Eve was given a choice as to what to do with the remaining $250,000. She could either take it as a lump sum, or get paid two thousand a month for the rest of her life. She wanted the lump sum, but I was able to convince her that the two-thousand-a-month was a better deal for her.” And then there were people like Michael Elias, Caroline Thompson, Steve Martin, Ed and Paul Ruscha, who could be relied on to pitch in from time to time.
Not that there’s much need. Eve lives cheaply, quietly, no computer and, as of a few years ago, no TV either. (She was yielding to the temptation of the Home Shopping Network too frequently.) Just a radio, portable, with a huge antenna, always tuned in to KEIB or KRLA, Los Angeles’s conservative talk stations. Says Mirandi, “Eve started getting into conservatism sometime after 9/11 with Dennis Prager and his show. Dennis is Jewish, from Brooklyn, with a voice exactly like Dad’s. Then it was funny guys like Dennis Miller and Larry Elder. I think part of it was that she liked the male company.” Her only excursions are her morning strolls to the Farmers’ Market, her Sunday AA meetings, her Saturday lunches with Mirandi and Mirandi’s husband, Alan, Laurie or Dickie Davis occasionally joining.
The phone still rings, though not as often as it used to. Eve’s friends are mainly artists and writers, and artists and writers tend toward liberalism, as she herself once did if never quite wholeheartedly (she’d quote this maxim of her mother’s, “I don’t know anything about politics—or rather I know too much to care”), and are therefore uneager to discuss whether or not Israeli ambassador Danny Danon has the sexiest sneer since Jim Morrison, or listen to her express the desire to possess a blouse “the same shade of blue as Melania Trump’s eyes.” But I’ll discuss, and I’ll listen. Or at least I’ll stay on the line until she exhausts herself on these topics, after which she’ll let me guide her to ones I find more congenial. Her growl scares off other people. Not me, though. Not anymore.
My Vanity Fair piece helped, too, by renewing interest in her. Interest would have renewed no matter what—her story is so good, her books are even better—but the piece got it going. Eve’s Hollywood was reissued in October 2015; Slow Days, Fast Company ten months later. (Eve has used some of the extra cash to hire a cleaning woman. Her condo isn’t spick-and-span by any stretch. It is inhabitable now, though, the wall-to-wall junk cleared out.) Also in 2015, Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Sex and Rage, and L.A. Woman were optioned through Sony Pictures TV’s TriStar Television. Eve, the rare local girl who never dreamed silver-screen dreams, might wind up there anyway, irony of ironies.
* * *
I. As I mentioned in an earlier section, Fiorucci was the very last work of Eve’s that I read. I did not have to pay $2,000 for the privilege as I feared I might. In the summer of 2016, Jewish Family Services cleaned Eve’s condo. A copy was found. She let me borrow it for an afternoon.
II. A stray detail I can’t resist including: At a meeting, Eve introduced Kernochan to Steve Reuther, an ex–William Morris agent who’d hit bottom and was in the process of bouncing back. (Says Kernochan, “Steve was really handsome, so of course Eve noticed him.”) Reuther hired Kernochan to do a rewrite on a picture he was associate producing. It led to Kernochan’s first screen credit and the most famous soft-core porn of my youth, 91/2 Weeks (1986). I remember being eight years old and in my suburban video store and trying to shake my mom, leave her in the Family section with my brother, so I could look at the poster—Kim Basinger in a white slip, standing next to a window, razor slits of light bleeding through the closed venetian blinds—contemplate its tagline—“They broke every rule”—in private.
The Little Sister
I first met Mirandi the day after I first met Eve. I took a cab from my hotel in West Hollywood to her condo in San Pedro, a working-class port town on the southern end of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The condo was in a gated community, the entrance difficult to find, and she was standing on the sidewalk outside, hand raised in a wave, a pretty, open-faced woman, younger looking than her sixty-odd years. She wore eyeglasses, the frames of which, I noticed, were the same as Eve’s but not the color, and a thin gold chain around her neck with an AA pendant on it. She helped me with my bag as I got out of the cab, her manner an appealing mixture of shyness and friendliness. We’d spoken on the phone several times at length, so hugged rather than shook hands. When I told her how quickly Eve had blown me off after lunch, she laughed, mock-sighed. While we waited for the driver to print a receipt, she pointed out Terminal Island prison, where Art Pepper served a stretch for narcotics possession in the mid-fifties, a few other San Pedro sights. Then she led me through a maze of little walkways, cool and surrounded by greenery, to
her front door. On the opposite side of it was her husband, Alan, Japanese-American, a pharmacist, and very warm.
Alan retreated discreetly to the bedroom to watch a baseball game as Mirandi and I settled in the living room, bright and airy, the shelves filled with books, Eve’s, of course, and Straight Life, Art Pepper’s memoir, co-written with Laurie, along with various psychology texts. (Mirandi has been a cognitive-behavioral therapist specializing in addiction and anxiety disorders for the past twenty-plus years.) The walls were covered in family photographs and Mae’s drawings. Advertisements, too, for rock concerts Mirandi had produced in the seventies and eighties.
Mirandi and Alan have two cats, a boy and a girl, but only the boy made an appearance that afternoon, Blackie, big when you look at him, small when you pick him up—all fur. He drowsed on the floor in a patch of sunlight while Mirandi and I drank tea and talked, occasionally reached down to stroke his silky ears. My morning sickness had gotten worse during the cab ride. I confessed to Mirandi what was happening, even though you’re not supposed to say anything until the end of the first trimester, because I wasn’t eating the cookies she’d laid out and didn’t want to seem unappreciative, and because her demeanor was so sympathetic. The impression she gave that day and every day since was of extreme sweetness: sweet face, sweet voice, sweet nature.
Now Eve, Eve’s great, but sweet she isn’t. It’s not that she’s abrasive or rude—she’s too thoroughly a blithesome California girl to be either. It’s that in her cheerful, un-mean way, she doesn’t give a fuck. She really and truly doesn’t, and never did. How many people can you say that about? Virtually none. And women? Closer to actually none. She’s a genuine bohemian, and thus a genuine renegade. A genuine aristocrat, as well. A queen, no matter that she’s spent much of her life living in squalor, or a hair’s breadth from. Even the squalor is part of the queenliness. Queens don’t Ty-D-Bol the toilet, don’t wipe down the stove after each use or vacuum under the bed ever, don’t recycle. There’s something unfathomable about Eve. She’s too wild, too radical, too singular. And then there’s this: for all her apparent sociability, the profusion of friends and boyfriends, of dinner parties and house parties and party parties, shows and aftershows, Eve is, essentially, solitary and perfectly self-sufficient. (Self-sufficient in an emotional sense. In a practical sense, God, no. She’s as helpless as a newborn, the helplessness also part of the queenliness, since a queen wouldn’t stoop to take care of herself. What, after all, are servants for? And Eve has a talent for turning everybody into one of those.) Stated plainly, Eve is impenetrable. There’s simply no way in.