Hollywood's Eve

by Lili Anolik

  From a letter Mirandi wrote Laurie in the fall of ’64:

  As far as Ringo, what was really going on was I was balling him. . . . I met him at a party on Monday and I finally went home to change Tuesday night. He is the saddest little tiny guy that I’ve ever met but the greatest. . . . Reporters are after me but I’ll be damned if I’m going to open my mouth and ruin everything.

  Spending a hot-and-heavy twenty-four hours with Ringo was a dream Mirandi didn’t want to wake from. So she didn’t. She decided to treat his casual parting words—“Why don’t you come to England?”—as a serious invitation, moved to London and Liverpool for six months.

  She got pregnant again, this time by Robert Whitaker, the Beatles photographer, whom she met in London, but continued to see after she returned to L.A. There was a second Mexican abortion. Not in the Tijuana clinic, which had been shut down, in a motel room in Ensenada. Mirandi: “I remember white sheets draped over wire strands around an operating table. I remember the table had stirrups. It was stark and terrifying. But my first trimester was almost over. I felt like I had to go through with it.” The procedure was, unsurprisingly, botched. “As soon as I got back across the Mexican border, I started hemorrhaging. My gynecologist admitted me to Cedars of Lebanon, the hospital I was born in. He finished the abortion because it was a matter of life or death. Why didn’t I ask Robert or any of the other guys to wear a condom? I didn’t want to be seen as a drag—that was my highest aspiration at that point. Asking a guy to please put on a condom seemed unromantic and like too much of a hassle. I was unable to take care of myself in that basic way.”

  Mirandi was still recuperating, physically and emotionally, when, in the summer of 1965, she walked into a club on the Sunset Strip called the Fred C. Dobbs. There she first encountered musician Clem Floyd. Clem was twenty-nine, Cockney, runty, ugly, sexy, dynamic, and sitting at a table with David Crosby, his bandmate, and Taj Mahal of the Rising Sons—a studly trio. The men began fighting over Mirandi, half in jest, half not. Clem won. He seemed destined for fame, yet it turned out he was destined only for almost fame. (Crosby’s other band at the time was the Byrds; and Clem’s other band was the Sound Machine, its drummer, John Densmore, whose other band was the Doors.) Says Mirandi, “I put my money down on Clem for rock ’n’ roll stardom. He was my horse in the race, the one I bet on. I was a lot dumber than I thought.”

  On that hot August night, though, Clem was a sure thing, a when-not-if as far as making it was concerned. He and Mirandi moved in together. They’d wait for darkness to fall, then hit one of the canyons, Laurel usually, but sometimes Topanga or Coldwater, get high, jam, or just hang out, with David Crosby, obviously; fellow Byrd Roger McGuinn; also Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, Graham Nash; Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir when the Grateful Dead were in town; Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane; the Lovin’ Spoonful’s John Sebastian. Says Mirandi, “It wasn’t just that these musicians treated Clem as an equal, they looked up to him. For a moment there, the Sound Machine was it, the best band around.”

  Clem was also heavily involved in politics, as was Mirandi, the daughter of a Trotskyist (“Dad was a member of the Socialist Workers Party, though a hidden member because he worked at the studios and didn’t want to get blacklisted”), and a self-proclaimed hippie. But so was almost everyone under thirty. The mid-to-late sixties was, after all, a tumultuous time. Draft cards were being burned on college campuses; the National Organization of Women was being founded in a D.C. hotel room; the civil rights movement was more than gaining momentum, was becoming unstoppable. Clem and Mirandi went from protests to marches to rallies to—

  I’m cutting myself off here, interrupting, because I need to make a point, or maybe just an observation. When I listened to Mirandi talk about fleeing the cops cracking flower-child heads with batons at the 1966 Sunset Strip riots, or driving a limo full of guitars for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in 1969 at Altamont, Hells Angels, flat-eyed and greaseball-looking, flanking her, I suddenly realized how outside history Eve was. Eve seldom referenced anything beyond her own feelings or experiences. (One of the few political events I can recall her writing about is the 1965 Watts riots, which she watched on TV in a penthouse suite at the Marmont that she was sharing with a Stanford-educated oil heir with a sideline in racehorses she’d picked up the night before.) She certainly wasn’t a hippie, a category of humanity she disdained. “It wasn’t just that [hippies] were poor, though that was about half of it. . . . I was also enormously horrified by Eastern religions . . . Buddhism with that fat guy in lotus position. . . . I always wondered what his cock could ever be like in all that flab.” Wild when you consider how closely identified she is with sixties and seventies Los Angeles.

  But I suppose the same is true of F. Scott Fitzgerald, chronicler of the Jazz Age. Catching mood and magic is one of the great gifts of these two writers, the reason why their prose, period-associated as it is, seems so paradoxically undated, so fresh, and why their books stand among our enduring monuments. Fitzgerald’s already do, of course. The best of Eve’s—Slow Days—I believe will. Getting older was problematic for both Eve and Fitzgerald in life. Yet their work has aged beautifully, that is, hardly at all. Looks, in fact, better as the years pass, their frivolity, in retrospect, profundity. This in contrast to so many of their contemporaries who were far more engaged by the issues of the day, and whose subjects and themes felt far more urgent and important. How much do you want to bet that counterculture vulture Hunter S. Thompson will go the way of John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell, once essential thinkers turned curiosities and relics? Nothing becomes passé faster than au courant.

  Back to Mirandi and Clem: Clem had a domineering personality, a serious turnoff, except for Mirandi it wasn’t. “My relationship with Eve was one of being controlled, so it was a familiar place for me. It sounds ridiculous, but it felt comfortable.”

  Clem was a kind and considerate mate for the first year he and Mirandi were together, unkind and inconsiderate thereafter. Out of the blue, he announced that he could only be with one woman if he could sleep with other women. He generously allowed that she could sleep with other men, which she had no interest in doing, though she sometimes did to please him. Mostly she ended up sleeping with him and the other woman, which she also had no interest in doing. Out of the blue, he started hitting her. He generously allowed that she could hit him, which she really had no interest in doing. “I was a hit-ee. My sister had always hit me, but I didn’t hit back.”

  Since paying the bills was a middle-class fetish and Clem was an anti-bourgeois, nonconformist rebel-stud-genius, it was up to Mirandi to earn the money. She waited tables and answered phones. (Clem, to be fair, did have a part-time job. He dealt drugs so he could buy his own.) She also made clothes and began selling them to local stores. “I guess it was an art, but I thought of it as a craft. I couldn’t think of it as an art because I didn’t want to be an artist. I saw what being an artist did to Mother—not getting recognized, never selling a painting, and she was good! She was good and she still couldn’t get anywhere. It’s what made her drink. I thought, No thanks. And, besides, of us girls, Evie was the artist.”

  Mirandi and Clem married and started a fashion label called Mirandi, the moment Miriam became Mirandi. “I thought it would be a great name for a line of clothes. And everybody was changing their names at that point, though it hurt my parents’ feelings, and I didn’t know what I was going to tell the Stravinskys [Igor had named Mirandi as well as Eve]. Actually, it was Eve who was the most bothered. She refused to call me Mirandi for the longest time because she thought it was a Clem thing—a name he came up with.”

  In March of 1968, Mirandi and Clem opened a custom-leather boutique at 8804 Sunset Boulevard. They stuck two signs in the window: CLOSED and BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. The brush-off/come-on worked. Steve McQueen’s wife, Neile, became a customer. As did British actor Terence Stamp. And Celeste Yarnall, the pretty girl in the latest Elvis movie. And John Kay of
Steppenwolf. Christian Marquand, who’d just directed the porno-spoof Candy, co-starring, of all people, Ringo, stopped by with his producer, Peter Zoref. In no time, Mirandi and Clem were doing private fittings for Marquand at the house of Marquand’s close friend Marlon Brando.

  They’d do private fittings, too, for Sharon Tate, in acting class with Yarnall, at the house Tate lived in with Roman Polanski. Says Mirandi, “Sharon was so beautiful. The house we went to was the one before the Cielo Drive house. Roman was there, and some kind of weird flirtation was going on between them and us. Clem was necking with Sharon. He would have loved the opportunity to get in her pants, but I was so repulsed by Roman that I couldn’t imagine any of it. I said to Clem, ‘We’re leaving.’ I never wanted to go back.”

  By far the boutique’s most important customer, however, was Jim Morrison. Mirandi went way back with Morrison, whom she’d met through his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, her classmate at LACC. (Mirandi would, as Eve had done before her, enroll in and drop out of the school practically simultaneously.) Further back even than Eve. In fact, it was Mirandi who introduced Eve to Morrison, if indirectly. Mirandi watched Morrison perform at the London Fog, then called Eve. “You have to see this guy,” she said. “He’s Edith Piaf with a dick.” Eve stopped by the club the next night, seduced Morrison the night after that, which, for Mirandi, rankled because it made things awkward for her with Courson, though she must’ve realized she had only herself to blame. Her description of Morrison was pretty irresistible, and Eve, as a rule, didn’t resist.II

  Mirandi and Clem would live with Morrison and Courson, sharing for a period the couple’s house in Laurel Canyon on Rothdell Trail, nicknamed Love Street by Morrison and immortalized by him in song. While Mirandi was closer to Courson, she felt a deeper kinship with Morrison. Says Mirandi, “Pam was tiny but tough. Once, when she and Jim were fighting, she wrote FAG in huge letters on the back of his favorite vest in India ink. I guess at some point in the past there was the possibility that he’d been with a guy—you know, sexually, in college or something. And she’d get physical too. Would tear into him with her nails. I related to Jim because I felt he and I were the more vulnerable ones in our relationships. We were both being pushed around and bullied by our partners.”

  In June of ’68, Morrison would walk into the store.

  An aside that’s also to the point: During the year that Eve spent in New York, March 1966 to March 1967, she ran into Morrison in the Village. Recalls Eve, “Jim and I just fell into each other’s arms. Strangers in a strange land, you know. I brought him to my hopeless little apartment on Avenue A. He was in town to play Ondine [a club on East Fifty-Ninth Street, a favorite haunt of Warhol’s]. After his set, I took him over to meet Andy.” Present, too, that night was Warhol’s right-hand man, Gerard Malanga. Malanga was possessed of a striking and distinctive personal style—part Lord Byron, part juvenile delinquent, part sexual sadist. Says Malanga, “I was always into clothes, even as a teenager. The next step for me was leather pants. No one else was wearing them at the time. There was a shop on Christopher Street, the Leatherman, and that’s where I bought my first pair. This meeting between Andy and Jim must’ve taken place in October or November of 1966 [the Doors played Ondine for a month that year, starting on November 1]. I don’t remember seeing Jim, but I would’ve been there. I can almost pinpoint the night. I was with my girlfriend, the Italian model Benedetta Barzini, and we broke up in early November.”

  Morrison commissioned his first pair of leather pants in the summer of ’67 from designer January Jansen. He loved how Jansen’s pants, made of brown snakeskin, looked, though not how they felt. Mirandi: “When he came into our store, I could see his guilt. January was his friend. He believed he was betraying January getting his pants from someone else, but snakeskin is difficult to move in, and it’s also incredibly noisy.” Mirandi and Clem fashioned Morrison a new pair using a soft brown cowhide imported from France. They fast became Morrison’s favorite stage pants (and are now behind glass at the Hard Rock Cafe in Hollywood). “It was glove leather, basically. Very dainty, very sexy, very tight.”

  Morrison returned in August. Mirandi: “This time he was fully on board with the idea of us dressing him. We worked through a lot of ideas before we came up with the primarily black-leather look. We’d been making colorful clothes for all the other rock people, but Jim wasn’t into colors. And by this time, he was looking older than his twenty-four years. His skin had become puffy from drinking. Up close he wasn’t a pretty sight and he knew it.”

  Morrison wasn’t the first rock ’n’ roller to strut his stuff in black leather, but he was the first famous rock ’n’ roller. Black leather is what Elvis would wear later that year when he staged his celebrated “ ’68 Comeback Special.” And it’s been rock-star de rigueur ever since, the signature look of Freddie Mercury, Billy Idol, Tina Turner, the Clash, the Ramones, Def Leppard, the list goes on and on.

  A cultural phenomenon traced all the way back to its origins: Eve and Mirandi Babitz.

  Soon after visiting the store, Peter Zoref invited Mirandi and Clem to a dinner party at his house in Malibu. French director Roger Vadim and American actress Jane Fonda, Vadim’s third wife and the lead in his comic-strip, sci-fi, sex-romp extravaganza, Barbarella, one of the biggest movies of 1968, were guests. So was Nouvelle Vague screenwriter Paul Gégauff, older, handsome, depleted, and Danièle, his lovely young wife. Says Mirandi, “Jane was either filming or about to film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? She was a hotshot. A major, major movie star. I remember how beautiful she was—those long limbs and cornflower-blue eyes. I also remember she sat next to me and ate off my plate, even though she kept saying she wasn’t hungry. I got the feeling that Clem and I had been brought in as fresh meat. But I actually found Vadim creepy. Paul was the one I wanted. He’d worked with all those great auteurs like Claude Chabrol and René Clément. And everybody thought French movies were so important then. I used to go and see them with Eve.”

  Vadim and Fonda moved the party to their house, a mile or so up the road. As the night wore on, Clem and Danièle paired off, as did Mirandi and Gégauff. Gégauff was, as his looks promised, too jaded-sophisticated and spiritually bereft to achieve an erection. In spite of Mirandi’s repeated objections, a substitute was brought in: Vadim, on his own after Fonda disappeared to take care of their new baby. Says Mirandi, “I guess my ‘Stops’ and ‘No, nos’ were taken for ‘Well, okay, sure, I guess.’ ” (Chabrol: “When I want cruelty, I go and look for Gégauff.”) Still, a more or less good time was had by all. And the next day, Gégauff invited Mirandi and Clem to live with him and Danièle and their two small children in the French countryside.

  In March of 1969, Mirandi and Clem closed their extremely successful store, only one year old, and hopped on a plane.

  Vauréal was a magical time for Mirandi. The entire Nouvelle Vague seemed to wash up on the shores of the Gégauffs’ house during her stay. Chabrol, Godard, actress-singer Françoise Hardy all came for meals, or to spend the weekend. So did Barbet Schroeder, whose first movie, More, was written by Gégauff and featured Eve’s Hollywood High classmate Mimsy Farmer. And Mirandi was happy with Gégauff, no matter that the only thing they did in their shared bed was sleep.

  Clem, however, got restless. And after six months, the ménage à quatre broke up. (In 1975, Chabrol would make Une partie de plaisir—translation: “a piece of pleasure”—scripted by Gégauff, and starring Gégauff and Danièle as Gégauff and Danièle, though their characters would have different names. There’d even be characters based on Mirandi and Clem. The movie ended with the husband killing the wife, which would, spookily enough, happen in real life, except it was the wife killing the husband, and it wasn’t Danièle who killed Gégauff but Gégauff’s second wife, Coco, stabbing him to death with a kitchen knife on Christmas Eve 1983. At the trial, Coco claimed that the “psychological terrorism” Gégauff subjected her to had driven her to murder.)

  Mirandi and Clem r
eturned to L.A. in late 1969. She would finally work up the courage to ask him for a divorce, but not until 1971. After giving her a beating to remember him by, he consented.

  For the next few years, Mirandi cut loose, bouncing back and forth between Barney’s and the Troubadour. Though she had a boyfriend—“Oh Ted, Ted was this sweet hippie carpenter guy who, believe it or not, was the former roommate of Tex Watson [Charles ‘Tex’ Watson, member of the Manson Family, stabbed Sharon Tate and her unborn baby and reported afterward to Manson, ‘Boy, it sure was helter-skelter’]”—there’d be affairs with famous artists, like Chuck Arnoldi and Boyd Elder, even more famous musicians, like Jackson Browne and Don Henley. Eve: “There were A-list groupies and B-list. You had to be under a size three to be A-list. My sister was A-list.” Laurie: “I don’t think you can tell from pictures just how great-looking Mirandi was in her heyday. When Mirandi was young, she was Brigitte Bardot’s twin. She could attract anyone—Ringo, Jackson, the Eagles, all those guys. But she didn’t get to keep them.”