by Lili Anolik
Or is there?
Mirandi, born Miriam, on April 18, 1946, shares with Eve family, genetics, and a past. An extended one. (The sisters’ lives ran on parallel tracks all the way up until early middle age.) So Mirandi can be viewed as another version of Eve, Eve’s alter ego—sane and commonsensical, present and tangible, a solid citizen who believes there are such things as too much and too far—as Eve is Mirandi’s alter id. Mirandi is simultaneously a point of comparison to Eve and a point of contrast, as well as a, as the, point of entry. Which is why Mirandi’s story can be viewed as another version of Eve’s story, Eve’s story told from a different angle and perspective.
Now, listen to Eve and you’ll think her and Mirandi’s childhood was out of a fairy tale. Their family life was conducted not just lovingly and intelligently, but gloriously. Their parents, the brilliant Sol and the magnetic Mae, were what an imaginative, sensitive kid born to parents who were neither might conjure. And their house, which looked like any other from the outside—a typical Southern California two-story Craftsman—was, on the inside, something rare and wondrous: the lemons Mae laid out instead of flowers scenting the air; the latest compositions by Schoenberg or Stravinsky, Sol writing the violin fingering, scenting the air, too; plus, for fairy godparents, Igor and Vera Stravinsky, better even than actual fairy godparents because the Stravinskys’ magic wasn’t the hocus-pocus kind. It was a place where nothing bad could happen. Was, in a word, charmed.
Listen to Mirandi and you’ll also think their childhood was out of a fairy tale. Only bad things happen all the time in fairy tales, which, as every little boy and girl knows, are really horror stories in disguise. To be clear, Mirandi felt about Sol and Mae as Eve did, speaks of them even now with an admiration that borders on adoration. And the privilege of growing up among such accomplished artists still leaves her breathless. Yet, for her, 1970 Cheremoya Avenue wasn’t all light and fragrance and frolic. Darkness and stench and fear dwelt there as well. Sol and Mae, while doting parents, weren’t always mindful ones. They could get distracted—by each other, by their art, by the art of their lives. This was less of a problem for Eve, spunky by nature, and fiercely self-preoccupied. But Mirandi’s personality was softer, gentler, more dependent. She needed protection in a way that Eve didn’t.
Needed protection, in fact, from Eve. Dan Wakefield: “Did Eve tell you what she said when Sol and Mae brought Mirandi home from the hospital? ‘Take her back!’ ” Sol and Mae laughed at Eve’s joke, except it wasn’t one. A few months later, Eve would throw an electric heater into Mirandi’s crib. (As you can see, fire is, for Eve, an abiding theme.) At the last second, she called for Mae, and Mirandi was saved, but Mirandi’s left hand was badly burned, requiring extensive plastic surgery. Wrote Eve, “To this day I can remember how surprised I was when I realized that she was actually on fire and that it hurt and that I hadn’t meant to hurt her, I’d only meant to dispose of her permanently.” Which Eve never quite succeeded in doing, though she did take several more cracks at it. As a girl, Mirandi would be forced to endure fly spray in the eyes, a knitting needle in the ear, a boulder dropped from on high and missing her skull by mere inches, not to mention cruelties of the psychological sort. Recalls Laurie, “When I’d come over, Evie would pull me into her room. She’d slam the door in Mirandi’s face. And Mirandi was darling. She looked just like a baby animal in a Disney cartoon—big-eyed and fawnlike.”
Eve’s murderous impulses toward Mirandi would operate less urgently over the years. She’d even express misgivings about them: “I try not to imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t changed my mind and gotten my parents in time. Setting your own sister’s crib on fire is a hard one to forgive yourself for.” And, in her way, she’d atone. When the girls were teenagers, living with Sol and Mae in Paris, Eve talked Mirandi into coming with her to see trumpeter Chet Baker, a favorite of Brian Hutton’s. (“All of Brian’s friends were jazz musicians or junkies or actors or cat burglars. He absolutely worshipped Chet.”) The club was in a dicey section of town. Mirandi: “The show ended late—at eleven or midnight. We were on the rue de la Huchette, and these drunk French sailors were walking toward us. They linked hands and charged. Eve skirted around them, but they pushed me against the wall. Eve hit and punched them and screamed, ‘You leave my sister alone!,’ until they backed off. Then she grabbed my hand and we got out of there.”
In fairy tales, princesses and monsters abound. Mirandi, her aura so like that of the former—delicate, tender, pure of heart—had to contend with more than her share of the latter, Eve not the only she faced, Eve not even the only she faced in the house. Says Mirandi, “We had a gardener. Mr. Sorenson. He lived in a shed out back. Oh, Mr. Sorenson.” Laurie: “I never knew what Sorenson was doing there. Well, I did. Sol was a musician. He couldn’t risk his hands. Art was the same way. Mae needed a man around the house. So she went to skid row.”
Sorenson, dirty, derelict, alcoholic, without family or friends, embodies so many clichés about men who prey on children that he’s a near-allegorical figure. When Mirandi was five, he started coming to her room on Saturday nights, invading first her ears—“He wore clogs, I could hear the sound they made on the floor”—then her nose—“He always smelled like apricot brandy”—then her doorway, where he would stand and masturbate—“I was too young to know what he was doing, but that’s what he was doing.” When she was seven, and taking zither lessons from him in his shed, he forced her to perform oral sex on him, this after failing to rape a neighbor boy in her presence. “Mr. Sorenson said he’d put one of my kittens into a sack and beat it to death with his shovel if I told anybody, so I didn’t. Not even Mother.” (That Mirandi still refers to her abuser by his honorific, as if he were the adult and worthy of respect, and she a little girl, minding her manners and eager to please, is, for me, the most heartbreaking detail in a heartbreaking account.)
Fortunately, Mirandi, in addition to being a waif and imperiled, was also a plucky American kid. She kept her mouth shut around Mae about what Sorenson was doing to her, but she did tell Mae she hated him, and Mae, baffled, let her quit the lessons, which got her out of his shed and clutches. And she would, eventually, confess her secret to her best friend, Janie Corey, who lived across the street. The Coreys’ house offered precious escape. Says Mirandi, “All that fabulous stuff was going on at my house, but I was happiest not there. Evie called me the white sheep of the family, and she was right! I was like some sort of changeling. I arranged my room, kept track of my allowance. The Coreys were a more conventional family than ours. I tried to move in with them at one point. Evie was treating me miserably, and I thought, If you hate me so much, I’ll leave. I thought I could live in Janie’s closet.”
A source of consolation to Mirandi: though she may have been on the outside at home, she was in the thick of things everyplace else. “I loved to be assimilated, in the middle of the pack. I really loved school. I felt safe there and in control. I excelled. And I had a million friends.” It’s from Mirandi that I learn Eve did not, had difficulty, in fact, fitting in. Which wasn’t the impression of Eve’s younger years that I’d received from her books. From Sex and Rage: “It was an easy life, growing up by the beautiful sea with her tan sister, her beautiful mother and black-curly-hair genius father.”
Eve’s popularity as an adult would be vast, terrific, legendary. As a kid, however, she was, according to Mirandi, a loner and a four-eyes and something of a misfit, prone to mood swings and bursts of temper, head in the clouds or a book, a little klutzy. Says Mirandi, “Evie hung around more with our parents’ friends than with people her own age. I had these gigantic birthday parties—my entire class would be at our house. Evie never did. She was constantly reading. I mean, she’d walk reading. She loved, loved, loved the Arabian Nights, which is, I think, why she was so crazy about Hollywood High and Valentino and the Sheik, and, later on, Ahmet Ertegun—‘the Turk’ was her nickname for Ahmet. Then, in junior high, it was Colette she was obsessed by
. Scheherazade and Colette, those were her models. And she was extraordinarily nearsighted. Plus, whatever we used to call ADHD [attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder], she had that, too. So she had a tough time connecting. The situation changed a bit when she went through puberty, and socially things picked up for her then because she had friends and they were good ones. She was thirteen or fourteen when her breasts came in. By fifteen she was built to the walls. That gave her power. I remember her saying to one of my little friends, ‘You’—of course she didn’t bother to learn the girl’s name—‘you, light my cigarette.’ But I don’t think she knew how gorgeous she was.”
Hearing these words, I’m shocked. Completely flabbergasted. I immediately call Eve to ask her if this was so, expecting her to demur, and violently. (Eve, unlike so many good-looking women, isn’t sheepish about her physical assets, doesn’t feel the need to downplay them or apologize for them. “Falsely modest” is about the last charge you could level against an Eve Babitz self-description. From Slow Days: “Any fool can want to sleep with me. . . . Men take one look and start calculating how they can get rid of obstacles and where the closest bed would be.”) But she does not demur. Instead she says, “I go through old pictures of myself, and I see I was perfectly fine. Only back then I thought I was a total washout. My forehead was huge, and I tried to hide it by bleaching my hair and growing out my bangs. Do you know what my hat size is? It’s seven and seven-eighths. That’s big for a man.”
Still, Mirandi maintains that the improvement in Eve’s appearance helped. So did alcohol. (Mirandi: “Drinking loosened her up.”) So did Ritalin. (Mirandi: “The pills calmed her down.”) So did Dexamyl, marketed as an appetite suppressant/antidepressant but really just speed. (Mirandi: “Sally got it from her doctor and shared it with Evie.”) And pot, which Eve’s friend from Le Conte Junior High, Sue Shaffer, was smoking before anybody else. (Mirandi: “Sue was a wild one. Has Laurie told you about the time Sue pierced her ears? All right, so Laurie was at our house. Sue drove up onto the front lawn in a new Volkswagen as tiny and cute as she was. She pierced Laurie’s ears with an ice cube, a peeled potato, and a sewing needle. Then she got back in her car and drove away. It must have been a few weeks later that she ran off with that sculptor, Vito, a friend of Laurie’s father’s. Sue was sixteen. Vito was almost fifty.”)I
And because Eve’s writing about Hollywood High was rapturous, I assumed that her experience there was, too. (From Eve’s Hollywood: “In my high school, I was pretty and smart and impatient. . . . I was usually triumphant and had fun being wide-eyed and sarcastic in class.”) Not so in Mirandi’s view: “Evie wanted out. That’s why she graduated a semester early. I don’t think she ever really felt part of things. She and Sally certainly had a social life, but it was mostly outside of school.”
Once again I go to Eve. Once again I’m confident that when I hold up Mirandi’s memory to hers, I won’t get a match. Once again I do: “I was so scared of Hollywood High and the sororities that I lied and gave a fake address so I could go to Marshall. That’s where I did the tenth grade. I came to Hollywood High in the eleventh grade, after rushing was over. Sally came in the eleventh grade, too. Neither of us rushed the Deltas or any other sorority, even though sometimes the sororities made an exception for newcomers. We decided to duck instead. That was our solution. Evade the issue. Then Sally met Sandra Kirchner in acting class and knew the rest of the Thunderbird Girls through Sandra. Sandra was twenty-four and the living end. Her waist was tiny and she wore sexy-starlet clothes from Jax [a boutique in Beverly Hills]. Every time she left the house, her grandmother, this little old Jewish woman in black, would follow her out the door and try to get her to put on a sweater. ‘Fuck you, Grandma,’ she’d yell over her shoulder. Lenny Bruce loved that line even more than I did. He put it in his act. Sandra was just great. She rescued me and Sally from oblivion. Actually, you want to know who really rescued me from oblivion? At LACC was a girl everyone hated, Myrna Reisman. Myrna walked up to me one day and asked me if my godfather was Stravinsky, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Great, I’m going to pick you up at eight.’ Myrna came by in a little silver Porsche. She took me to Barney’s. I was nineteen and suddenly life was fun. Up until then, I couldn’t stand being a teenager. Being a teenager was awful!”
And then there was Mirandi, for whom being a teenager was a snap and a breeze and nothing to it. Mirandi had the kind of looks that were just what boys and men liked: a few inches over five feet, and slender, barely ninety pounds, with large breasts, lips, and eyes; small nose, waist, and hips. And the kind of temperament that kept girls from holding those looks against her: thoughtful, caring, loyal. She was a lock for the Deltas, though sisterhood would have to wait. Her actual sister was heading to Europe along with her parents for Sol’s Bach grants, and she’d drop out of the tenth grade to join them.
After a year of correspondence courses, Mirandi insisted on returning to L.A. to finish high school. “Can you believe what Mother and Dad did to me? Those rats! No, no, Daddy had to be in Europe for his work, and Mother stayed with him, naturally. It was hard for me to leave them, though. I was very attached to Mother and always by her side. And I was afraid to travel all that way by myself, but I was falling further and further behind. Evie was home by then. I couldn’t live with her, of course, so I decided to live with Aunt Tiby.”
And Step-Uncle Milt. Milt did as step-uncles have done since time immemorial and tried to put the make on his step-niece. Mirandi might have looked like a sex kitten, but she wasn’t one. Was fifteen and never been kissed. Says Laurie, “The truth was, Mae abandoned Mirandi at the most important age. Mae loved Evie and Mirandi, but she loved Sol more, and when he got those grants, she went with him.”
To get Milt to cool off, Mirandi found herself an age-appropriate boyfriend, a cute, wholesome football player, Rick Mosher. “Rick was in the Kingsmen. That was the brother fraternity to the Deltas. He couldn’t have been sweeter and we made out so much we gave each other pimples. I lost my virginity to him right before I went back to Europe with Evie.”
And two years after first sex, first love—for Mirandi a much more traumatic experience. That 1963 celebration at the Hotel Green, Duchamp’s retrospective party that Eve turned into her coming-out party, was also, in a considerably quieter way, Mirandi’s.
Mirandi had gone as Julian Wasser’s date but, because Wasser was on assignment, had spent most of the evening unattended. The artist Joe Goode swooped in. Says Mirandi, “I still had a year of high school to go. Joe was twenty-six. He was from Oklahoma, like Ed [Ruscha], and the two were best friends. Ed told Joe he was cradle robbing, but Joe didn’t care. And when he met my dad a few days later, he asked if he could ask me out and my dad thought it was fine. Joe and I were a couple for about six months. It didn’t end well. I was at the house in Pasadena he lived in with Walter and Shirley [Hopps]. We were in the bathtub together when he told me that he was also sleeping with a woman who worked at his gallery. I’d been faithful to him and assumed he’d been faithful to me. I became hysterical. I jumped out of the tub and threw on my clothes and ran out the front door barefoot, wet hair, no purse. My parents came and got me. I never dated Joe again. I was devastated, really devastated.”
She’d recover.
Mirandi with artist Larry Bell and photographer Irv Glaser, 1963
It was half a year later, August 24, 1964. Mirandi, eighteen, had, at last, graduated from high school. Not from Hollywood High—her second trip to Europe had ruined her forever for saddle shoes and letterman jackets—from Hollywood Professional School, intended for students with show business careers, but open, too, to regular students eager to get on with it, start working. (Another milestone passed: her first abortion. A few months prior to receiving her diploma, Mirandi got pregnant by a flamenco-guitar player at Chez Paulette, the coffeehouse on the Sunset Strip where she waitressed. “The whole family drove down to Tijuana. Dad and Evie went shopping to make it look like any other vacation, whil
e Mother and I headed to the clinic. Abortions were illegal in Mexico in that Mexican way—like, Who do I have to bribe to make this happen?”) Mirandi was no more compelled by the prospect of college than Eve had been, and her long-term goals were hazy. Not her short-term, though. She wanted to do what the band’s most recent album cover said to do and Meet the Beatles!, John, Paul, George, and Ringo on their first US tour and still in town after playing the Hollywood Bowl the night before. Says Nan Blitman, “Did you hear the story about how Mirandi got Ringo? Oh my God, it’s like hearing about how some other kid got into Harvard. The planning, the maneuvering, what it took to land him!”
The story: Mirandi was tooling around the city that afternoon in her aunt’s car, radio blasting the Beatles, a group she’d been onto before everybody else in America thanks to an English boyfriend who’d mailed her their first record (she’d loaned it to Beach Boy Carl Wilson, her Hollywood Professional School classmate, and he’d given it back with a shrug—“Carl thought that the music was good and the harmonies were interesting, but he didn’t see what the big deal was”), and feeling blue because she’d failed to score a ticket to the previous night’s show. A motorcade forced her to the side of the road. On a hunch, she followed it to a mansion in Bel Air. She spotted an agitated-looking girl in a limo parked across the street. Mirandi began chatting up the girl, a journalist covering the Beatles for a fan magazine. The journalist had lost her driver and was frantic to return to her hotel since she had a daily report to file. Mirandi offered the journalist a lift on the condition that the journalist get her into that evening’s party. The journalist agreed. Mirandi dropped off the journalist, sped home to rat her hair and change into a Frederick’s of Hollywood bra, picked up the journalist, drove back to Bel Air. When Mirandi and the journalist reached the road manager with the guest list, the journalist finked, pretended she didn’t know Mirandi. Mirandi made it past the road manager anyway. Once inside, she drank soda pop and did the Mashed Potato with Peggy Lipton [future star of counterculture cop show The Mod Squad, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks], another Hollywood Professional School classmate, and, after beating out actresses, models, and cage dancers, enjoyed a passionate interlude with the Beatle of her choice, Ringo, twenty-four, in a walk-in closet.