by Lili Anolik
In 1976, Mirandi, thirty, left the third custom-leather store she’d started. “The second was on West Washington Boulevard, the cool part of Venice. But Venice was dangerous then. I was regularly getting violently mugged. So I closed that store, opened a new store on Santa Monica in West Hollywood, and that wasn’t much better. I filed five police reports in one year. And then I got hit by lightning outside Mother and Dad’s house. I thought, What is happening to me? I felt almost like I was being contacted by a higher power. I decided I’d better fucking behave myself and think about what I was doing in the world. I called Evie and told her I’d had a kind of spiritual awakening. There was a pause and then she said, ‘Well, do you want a Valium?’ ”
Mirandi began working for Ronee Blakley, just nominated for an Academy Award for playing Barbara Jean in Robert Altman’s Nashville, and warming up crowds for California governor Jerry Brown, then running for president. Mirandi: “Ronee took Evie on the road with her, as sort of an assistant-compadre. But Evie was getting drunk and high and being generally not-helpful. When Evie came home, she said to me, ‘This is too crazy. You do it.’ So I did. I became Ronee’s tour manager, and I was good at it.”
In 1978, Mirandi reconnected with Jane Fonda, now married to political activist Tom Hayden. Mirandi would stage benefit concerts for various Hayden-related causes with such artists as Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat, the Grateful Dead, Willie Nelson. In 1981, she struck out on her own with Ocean Front Productions. Professionally, she was smoking. The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, though, was taking its toll. “I had Evie as an example. Whatever she was doing—coke, alcohol, guys—I was doing a third of it, so I thought I was okay. I wasn’t.”
Mirandi joined Eve in recovery, entering a program in 1983. In 1986, at age forty, she’d enroll in Antioch University to become a therapist. (That point of divergence I mentioned earlier.) Says Mirandi, “When I started at LACC, they gave me a test to determine my aptitude. Social worker was at the top of the list. I was horrified! I was Stravinsky’s godchild, surely not a social worker. Well, I could’ve saved myself a lot of time if I’d just listened.” It was while she was in training that she met Alan. They’d marry in 1988.
For me, Eve is Dorian Gray, Mirandi the Portrait of. The sisters would so often have the same or a similar experience, and it would mark only Mirandi. Mark emotionally, I mean, not physically, though physically, too, sometimes. There’s the scar from the electric heater, obviously, and the cuts and bruises from Clem. And her second Mexican abortion, the one that at nineteen nearly killed her, doomed her chances of ever again conceiving a child, and she’d have been a wonderful mother. If Eve is the artist, and invulnerable, Mirandi is the woman, real and broken.
And here, I suppose, is where I confess that I needed the woman as badly as the artist, that if it hadn’t been for Mirandi I’d never have made it to the end of a piece on Eve, forget a book. I’d have lost heart. Forming an emotional bond is beyond Eve at this point. Mirandi, though, would be my friend, and, perhaps more importantly, she’d let me be hers. I could give to her the affection that Eve was unwilling or unable to accept. Eve understood this, and probably better than I did, certainly faster. I remember her saying thank you to me just once, and it was for a small thing I’d done for Mirandi. (I’d edited a bit of Mirandi’s writing, easy and a pleasure.) I was taken aback. Eve didn’t say those two words on her own behalf, yet here she was saying them on her sister’s—why? It was only as I was responding with a graceless, mumbled “You’re welcome” that it dawned on me that Eve was saying thank you on her own behalf, that of course the favor was as much for her as it was for Mirandi. She was acknowledging what lay between us, the peculiar psychological arrangement we’d made. It’s the one time she would.
When I called Mirandi broken before, I didn’t mean broken beyond repair. She is, in her way, as tough and resilient as Eve. She survived Clem. And cancer, two bouts. Her second marriage has been a success, as have all three of her careers. But damage is sustained.
Much of it, I suspect, comes down to sex, or, rather, to Eve and Mirandi’s respective attitudes toward sex. To use the example of the Duchamp party: both sisters were or would soon become involved with older men, and these older men would betray them. Mirandi was heartbroken. Eve was heartbroken with quotation marks around it. And the revenge Eve exacted on Hopps had quotation marks around it, as well. She posed naked with Hopps’s idol in a fit of pique, not rage. It wasn’t thwarted passion she was expressing, but something altogether lighter, looser, brisker, drier. Ironic thwarted passion, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. Sex, as she saw it, wasn’t tragic (her view of life is too amused to easily accommodate pathos), it was comic, a farce. Or, more precisely, a game: a lover would do her wrong, she’d do a lover wrong; a girl would steal her guy, she’d steal him right back; she’d get the clap, she’d give the clap. If she won, a smile. If she lost, a shrug. It didn’t matter. Either way, she’d play again. It was musical chairs, only never-ending and, instead of chairs, beds.
For Mirandi, in contrast, sex was this fraught and freighted thing, tangled up and weighted down with love and longing and men and women and birth and death and self and other. How it is for most of us, I think. To the casual observer it might have seemed that Mirandi was, like Eve, bold, and into getting around. Yet even at her most unbridled—when it was rock stars, and threesomes, and couple-swapping—Mirandi yearned for convention and tradition, to do what her mother had done: find that special someone and stay with him forever and ever. Says Mirandi of her time with Clem, “At heart, I was a woman of the fifties. I wanted to feel safe in my relationship, and for me that meant being monogamous. My desire was crushed by the great hippie ideal of free love, an ideal that went against every instinct I had.”
Another revealing detail: Mirandi always knew how many people she’d slept with. She kept count, no matter the number of fingers and toes she needed to use and reuse. Which means she was playing at abandon rather than experiencing it; was not a libertine but a bourgeois posing as one.
If the times goaded Mirandi into acting wilder and more sexually subversive than she actually was, then they hid how wild and sexually subversive Eve actually was. Eve hit her prime at the height of the sexual revolution—even squares were swingers—so it looked as though she was doing what everyone else was doing, just more of it. Only she would’ve been doing what she was doing regardless of the decade her prime occurred in, regardless of the century. She was a true hedonist and incorrigible, and, on top of which, polymorphously perverse. No path to pleasure was barred. (I remember my surprise when, casually, over lunch one day early in our acquaintance, she mentioned Annie Leibovitz, referred to Leibovitz as an ex-girlfriend. “But, Evie,” I said, “you’re straight.” And she, reaching for a roll, buttering it, replied in that voice of hers, sexy, lazy, insatiable, “Me? I love everybody.”) And pleasure is fundamentally what beauty is all about, the giving and receiving of. Art, too.
Hang on a second, though, because I’m afraid I’m giving the wrong impression here. I don’t mean to suggest that sex was never ugly or brutal or scary for Eve, that its dark side was known only to Mirandi. Sorenson also raped Eve. Not when she was a child, when she was eighteen. She’d snuck out to see Brian Hutton one night, then climbed back through her window, drunk, diaphragm still in, and fell into bed. Sorenson climbed in after her and on top of her. Nor was Mirandi alone in getting knocked around. Eve had her share of rough boyfriends. Grover Lewis got violent on occasion. Warren Zevon, too. Says Laurie, “Evie told me a story about how she did Warren’s laundry and then he hit her. And she took that and went back for more. I can understand it because she would repeat things he said, and it sounds like he was one of the only guys smart and funny enough for her.”
What’s more, the sex Eve was having wasn’t always sexy: billowing curtains, discarded garments on the floor leading like a breadcrumb trail to a four-poster bed, orgasmic firecrackers popping outside the window, etc. Says Mirandi,
“Ahmet [Ertegun] was charming, very, very. It’s the first thing you noticed about him. But he could be cruel. To women. To Eve. There was some S & M club or bar in Manhattan that he just loved to go to and talk about—the whips and chains and dominatrixes. And I have no idea what Eve and Jim [Morrison] were doing together in bed. Neither does Eve, they were both so drunk.” Says Laurie, “I don’t know how willing Evie has been in her life to debase herself for these guys and just not think about it.” Pretty willing, I would guess. Though I would also guess that she wasn’t debased by it, that the sex was good for her even when it was bad. Ertegun was an artist-tycoon, a princely figure; Morrison an Adonis in skin-tight leather; and Zevon, one of rock ’n’ roll’s slyest and wittiest lyricists—“Gets a little lonely, folks, you know what I mean / I’m looking for a woman with low self-esteem”—made her laugh. Therefore all three gave her pleasure. See what I mean? Polymorphously perverse.
Something else to chew on: I’ve never heard Eve speak less than fondly about one of her exes. She recollects them—all of them—it seems, with a kind of unregretful, slightly vague, yet very real affection. Even Dan Wakefield, whom she says cheated on her (Wakefield, by the way, pooh-poohs this claim). “Dan didn’t just dump me, he fucked my friend! Dan was darling, though. And he had the bluest eyes. It took me years, but I got over it and we became friends again.” When I sent her Jean Stein’s book on L.A., West of Eden, I told her how stiff and portentous I found the Walter Hopps bits, and she said, “Walter was a genius but he was a stuffy writer.”III A stuffy writer. That’s as close to disloyal as she ever got.
Sex was essential to Eve, and procreative, if not in the traditional child-bearing sense. It, along with alcohol and drugs—any and all ingredients for a high good time—was a stimulus to her, allowing her to give vent to herself, tap the source. I compared her earlier to F. Scott Fitzgerald. But she’s Zelda Fitzgerald, too: the party girl who became the madwoman, and without whose inspiration and example Fitzgerald would never have written his best books, as Fitzgerald himself was well aware. (After the critic Edmund Wilson drew up a list of Fitzgerald’s influences—the Midwest, Irishness, liquor—Fitzgerald declared that the most vital had been left off, “the complete fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill-mindedness of Zelda.”) In fact, Eve was both Scott and Zelda. She’s the artist and the artist’s muse. Or, rather, the artist’s muse and the artist, the one necessarily preceding the other. She was out of control and debauched once the sun set, disciplined and focused once it arose, ready to cast a cold eye on the previous night’s antics, reap the fruits of her beauty and daring. Says Eve, “Even at my worst, I usually never stayed out that late since I got up in the mornings. That’s when I wrote.” Michael Elias confirms, “After a while I refused to take Eve to parties because she always wanted to get there before it got started and leave before it got good.”
It’s a perilous way to work, a kind of desperate gambling. Yet, against heavy odds, Eve won, at least for a period. Dissipation, blight, madness, ruin (and that’s if she was lucky, death if she wasn’t) were inevitable. That she managed to produce one brilliant book and several very good is astonishing—a miracle, really—since her method wasn’t just self-destructive, but self-immolating. She’d burned herself up long before she’d burned herself up.
* * *
I. If ever there was an anecdote that’s a short story waiting to happen, this is it. After I heard it, I fell down the Sue Shaffer rabbit hole, lost three days. What became of this marvelous creature? I had to know. Well, the former high school cheerleader married Vito—full name Vito Paulekas—and changed Sue to Szou. Paulekas was a pioneer of the “freak” scene. He and Szou operated L.A.’s first official crash pad on 303 North Laurel Avenue, around the corner from Szou’s old stomping grounds, Fairfax High. It became home to countless female runaways. In 1964, Paulekas, along with Karl “Captain Fuck” Franzoni, started a dance troupe called Vito and the Freaks. Vito and the Freaks were associated initially with the Byrds, later with Frank Zappa’s band, Mothers of Invention, at whose performances they’d dance and “freak out,” get the crowd going. (It’s through Szou that Eve knew Zappa, why she was able to set him up with Dalí that year she was living in New York.) Paulekas and Szou would have a son, Godot. At two, Godot was brought by his parents to one of their all-night party-orgies. A witness: “They passed that little boy around, naked, in a circle with their mouths. That was their thing about ‘introducing him to sensuality.’ ” Godot died soon after, falling from the scaffolding in his father’s studio.
II. A fun bit of trivia: Eve’s Morrison was a collaboration between her and Mirandi. Says Mirandi, “A lot of Eve’s time with Jim was a blur—all the alcohol. So when she was writing that Esquire piece, she’d call me and ask, ‘Now, what happened then?’ And ‘What was Pam like with Jim?’ And I’d tell her what I remembered, and she’d sort of put it together with what she remembered. And that’s how it worked.”
III. West of Eden is an oral history, so Hopps didn’t write his lines, he talked them. Still, I knew what she meant.
To Eve—with Love and Squalor (Also, Squalid Overboogie), Part I
Eve, as I said, is an artist, was one when she hadn’t quite found her art, and is one now though she hasn’t made or written anything in twenty years. And she operates the way an artist operates, thinks the way an artist thinks: is both exquisitely sensitive and totally unfeeling; is simultaneously immersed in life and detached from it; is having the experience yet is already, even in the midst of it, transmuting it into something else; is there but not.
Paul Ruscha and I were in his car in the summer of 2015. We’d just had dinner—social, for fun, not an interview—at the restaurant we always go to, Il Forno Caldo, a little Italian place near his house in Beverly Hills. He was driving me to my hotel, and we were both stuffed and relaxed, a bit sleepy. As we turned onto Sunset, I mentioned that I’d taken Slow Days with me on the plane. It was the first book of Eve’s I bought, all the way back in 2010, and I was ravished by it, completely seduced. Eve’s voice was so alive and so happy and so forlorn and so bewildered and so delirious, and it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. The experience was transcendent, there’s no other word for it. And that’s why I’d avoided having it again. Or, rather, not having it. Was I so in need of a transcendent experience five years ago, when I couldn’t get anything going with my own writing career, was in a rut, spinning my wheels, that I’d invented one? Did I over-like—over-love—Slow Days? If that was indeed what had happened, I’d just as soon not find out. (Disillusionment is usually inevitable, a matter of time. Why court it?) Only I had to because I was under contract to Scribner for this book, so I dropped Slow Days in my bag as I left for the airport, giving myself no choice but to read it since the flight was six hours and since those tiny JetBlue TVs make me motion sick.
I needn’t have been afraid. After the second go-round, I was as under Slow Days’ spell as ever, deeper even. And knowing the principals as I did now added nuance to my appreciation. Paul was a stranger to me in 2010. He’d become a close friend. I told him how struck I was by Shawn, the character based on him, as richly conceived and finely wrought as any Eve ever wrote, how good he must’ve looked to her, how good she made him look to the reader. She’d captured his physical presence, but also his metaphysical—his deftness, his tact, his almost otherworldly radiance. (“[Shawn] always looked wonderful at a party, like a Henry James fortune-hunting prince—weak and kind—marrying the heiress from Poughkeepsie and being worth every penny she spent on him if it was only for how well he listened. How he looked in those white pants and blue blazers was extra. Slender and smiling with white teeth and sympathy.”) Paul was quiet for a moment, then spoke in that halting way people speak when they’re saying something that’s hard for them—hard emotionally, or hard because they’re expressing an idea they’ve never before put into language, or both. “I recognized myself in Eve’s books. I mean, I recognized that it was supposed to be me. B
ut I never felt that it was me, or that I was really like that. I felt she made me up.” A disbelieving laugh. “But I liked what she made me and I tried to become it.”
In other words, Paul is Eve’s creation. Her imagination, roiling, surging, bursting, its potency enormous, staggering, is fundamentally generous. She makes things better than they are, which is lovely and sweet but, finally, incidental because the impulse is neither. Paul was already a creation, his own or God’s. For Eve, though, he was material, to do with what she chose. And looked at from a certain angle, her art—all art—is a form of exploitation, and totally and utterly barbarous, as amoral as it gets.
The Keyhole, an Interlude
Eve is not my character. I’m stating the obvious—restating—and less for your benefit than my own because it’s a truth I’m sometimes able to trick myself into forgetting. When a writer is writing fiction, he or she can be, should be, inquisitive to the point of intrusive, and guiltlessly, needn’t suffer a single pang of conscience, as the people whose privacy he or she is violating so egregiously aren’t real. Eve, however, is. Which makes it harder for me to sustain the illusion that my interest is only of the most elevated order, that I’m a scholar and an aesthete engaged in a sublime literary experience, that I’m not also a snoop and a peeper, creeping down the hallway on stockinged feet, crouching in front of a closed bedroom door and pressing my eye to the keyhole, the sound of my ragged breaths filling my ear. Particularly since the bedroom door I’m crouched in front of belongs to Eve, about whom my curiosity is savage, unappeasable, and on no subject more than her love life. Is the fascination she exerts over me simply that of the Other—she’s an adventuress and sexual outlaw, and I’m married to my college sweetheart, have never taken a drug, am as compulsively abstemious as she is compulsively excessive, and I therefore can’t get enough? Or am I fulfilling a desire still more illicit, profound, and secret, so secret, in fact, it’s unknown even to me? Either way, my show of reluctance is just that. What I’m wondering is: will Eve fling open the door, wave me across the threshold, tell me to pull up a chair, to take notes or pictures, whatever I’d like, that between beholder and beheld nothing is concealed, all is transparent?