by Lili Anolik
Chances, at first, seem pretty good. There was, of course, Eve’s and my initial awkwardness. Once we got past that, though, the thing I was struck by most forcefully was her frankness, a frankness so frank it made candor blush. In an early conversation, she told me a story in which she and a famous lover shot coke at the Chateau Marmont:I
“Actually, it was BLEEP who was shooting the coke. I was just watching. I mean, I snorted coke to death, but I never liked needles. BLEEP didn’t like needles either, but BLEEP liked to see blood geyser. BLEEP liked the patterns the blood made on the Chateau’s ceiling and the white Martha Washington bedspread. BLEEP thought it was art. And it was sort of. The blood looked like a Rorschach test, but beautiful.”
I heard this and I knew I was in the presence of someone splendidly, magnificently, thrillingly indiscreet, about herself, about others.
Except I was wrong, at least about the about-others part, though I didn’t realize it for a long time—years. It wasn’t until I was rereading all my interview transcripts in order to highlight certain quotes, assist the Vanity Fair fact-checker, that it hit me: the choicest bits of Eve sex gossip hadn’t come from Eve. It was from family and friends that I’d learned of the famous lover (a different famous lover) who insisted on showering immediately postcoitus, didn’t even wait long enough for the sweat to dry before he was soaping up, and the famous lover (a different different famous lover) for whom it was fist-fucking or nothing, the only depravity that would do. Eve will tell tales on other people about drugs. She will tell tales on herself about drugs and sex. She will not, however, tell tales on other people about sex. She’s a born courtesan, naturally circumspect.
Come to think of it, I was even wrong about the about-self part so far as sex goes. Or, that is, I was right but only selectively. Says Paul, “When Eve and I were together, especially in those early days, we had this mystique. The way we’d look at each other in public, or kiss—it got attention. Eve loved this. Once we were at a party. There were a lot of people there, getting stoned or drunk. We started making out, which we would often do. Then we moved to the bathroom to really nail each other. The door either fell open or somebody opened it. I didn’t care, I never minded having an audience. But Eve was fucking because she wanted to fuck, not because she wanted other people to watch her fuck, and that’s why she shut the door.” (So much for her waving me across the threshold.) There are, for me, two big takeaways from this story: (1) the purity and intensity of Eve’s desire, how elemental it was, how once it took her over, it took her over completely, her focus solely on it, everything else a distraction to be ignored; (2) the Duchamp photo and the manner in which Wasser captured a fundamental psychological truth about Eve—her need to reveal herself and conceal herself simultaneously.
In Slow Days, Fast Company, Eve wrote, “I’d always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind . . . better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust . . . that sex is art.” Aha, so it’s not sex and art for Eve, it’s sex is art. And sex, as much as writing, is her métier. (Interestingly, writing, the craft of, is the other topic on which open-book Eve is closed. I ask her a question related to it, and I get the same answer she gave the jerk guys in Slow Days who wanted to know, “How do you write?”: “On the typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.” In short, buzz off. It’s only because of Paul that I know how compulsive she was, what a perfectionist, the high number of drafts—nine or ten—each piece was subjected to.) Sex is undeniably the source of her energy. It’s what’s propelled her through her ambiguous and complicated life.
Which is why I refuse to let my better self prevail, refuse to do the decent thing and brush off my knees, straighten my spine, step back from the door. (Not that you could pry me from it with a crowbar.) I need to find out what goes on behind it. To know Eve carnally might be the only way to know her at all.
* * *
Let’s start with Eve’s virginity, when she lost it and to whom. Her testimony on this point is conflicting, in writing as well as in conversation. In Eve’s Hollywood and L.A. Woman, she refers to herself as a virgin while at Hollywood High. But in “Sins of the Green Death” in Eve’s Hollywood, she recounts a run-in with the girls’ vice principal before graduation: “Mrs. Standfast . . . gave me the ‘You are now about to embark upon the road of life speech,’ which, I hoped, would keep her mind off the fact that come was dripping down my leg.” Eve’s bitched to me about the lack of action she saw in high school. (“I didn’t get asked on a single date!”) She also, however, has laughed with me at the memory of picking up Tony Santoro at the beach with Sally on that day she and Sally played hooky. (“He was fucking us both when he wasn’t fucking Mamie Van Doren!”) I once asked her directly who her first boyfriend was, and she replied airily, “Which first boyfriend? I had a lot of first boyfriends.” This answer is so purely her that it’s the truest she could have given even if it isn’t one. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter who was technically first. The first who counted was Brian Hutton.
Eve met Brian the day she turned eighteen at a party in Laurel Canyon. She’d re-create the moment in Eve’s Hollywood, calling Hutton “Graham”:
It was a fast crowd. . . . This guy who knew everyone was having about 2 years of winning at the race track, so he threw parties all the time and lechery for young girls was de rigueur. . . . [Graham] came in with a friend from an overcast night, so how is it that I remember him still as coming in alone from the stars? . . . I half rose up against the impact and he saw me across the room. . . . He was swamped by girls, deluged in a tangle of beautiful arms and feminine exclamations of flower-petal softness. Three of the prettiest had twisted free of their conversations and it was like Santa Claus in an orphanage.
I, it turned out, wasn’t the only one.
Hutton had trained at the Actors Studio in New York before moving to L.A. He’d booked jobs, and steadily, mainly Westerns, mainly TV. By the time he moseyed into that party, though, he was saddle sore. He told Eve, “I’m a director. I used to act but they make you ride horses all day and I got sick of breaking my ass.” While he became known as a director of men’s pictures (Where Eagles Dare and Kelly’s Heroes were his biggest hits, both starring Clint Eastwood), it was women who aroused his imagination. He was a lady-killer of the most lethal type—the type that loved his prey even as he showed it no mercy. Wrote Eve, “All really enormous charm, the kind that Graham exuded, does much more than it needs to. It gushes out so much that you can live inside it. . . . I have girl friends who have met him and are actually frightened of him like people used to be afraid of witches.”
When I ask Eve about Hutton, she says, “Brian had the greatest voice in the world, like a Dead End kid’s. He called everybody ‘darling.’ He knew Marlon Brando, and that’ll get you a million miles in my direction. We used to get in these terrible fights, only they were just my fights, he wasn’t in them. He’d just wait until I was done being mad.” This description has Eve’s usual free-associative lucidity and nutty verve, but it isn’t enough. Hutton is someone she mentions all the time, repeating a remark he made, a joke he liked, a preference he expressed. And a Hutton character is featured in four of her books. Obviously he meant a great deal to her.
So I press, ask again, and she recalls the time Hutton was supposed to get together with the actor Al Lettieri (Virgil Sollozzo in The Godfather). “They were meeting at Ben Frank’s, an all-night coffee shop on the Strip. Brian had ulcers, which is why he never really drank. He had tea instead. I hated Al. I thought he was a violent monster, but Brian liked him. Al was late, and when he finally showed up, he was trailing cop cars, a whole string of them. What had happened was he’d left his wife in pieces. Not dead but almost. Brian had to bail him out.” It’s a honey of a story, no question, and I listen to it, rapt, though it’s more revealing of the relationship between Lettieri and Hutton than her and Hutton. And, besides, something about the way she tells it—carefully blasé—makes me know to drop the subjec
t. So I do.
It’s December 2017. I’m in Los Angeles for the week. Mirandi’s driven up from San Pedro to show me Babitz Hollywood: the various dwellings—all within blocks of one another—occupied by the clan; her and Eve’s elementary school; the street she, Sol, Mae, and Eve would walk to after Christmas dinner for an annual family photo because Mae liked the looks of the palm trees that lined it, vertiginously tall and evenly spaced. A literal trip down memory lane. We’ve taken one already, a few years back when I was dipping a toe into this book, just starting out, and I want to take another now that I’m neck-deep to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
It’s a beautiful morning, the sky a hard, clear blue and cloudless. And though Southern California has endured among the driest autumns on record as well as wildfires of near-biblical proportions, everything I see is blooming, the colors of the flowers and plants and trees glowingly, psychedelically vivid, and Mirandi and I always have fun together, and we’re not due to collect Eve for lunch for a full two hours and so aren’t in any rush. Plus, there’s no place I like to talk and be talked to more than in a moving car.
We’ve just left 1970 Cheremoya Avenue, the Babitzes’ house before they went to Europe, and are now on our way to 1941 Bronson Avenue, the Babitzes’ house after they came back from Europe. We’re at a stop sign, and Mirandi is about to turn onto Franklin, when I bring up Hutton.
“Oh, Brian, Brian,” says Mirandi, craning her neck to see if the break in oncoming traffic is big enough to accommodate her little Acura, settling back into her seat with a frustrated sigh after concluding it’s not. “Brian was really important to Evie. He was very cute and very hilarious and very married. He was absolutely her sexual teacher. He showed her how to give head brilliantly, and she showed me, and then we passed it on to Laurie.”II
I fiddle with the sun visor. “So—what? Head was starting to become a thing even nice girls did?”
“Right, in the early sixties. We used to be able to get away with hand jobs, but those days were over. What guys wanted was for a girl to give head and do it well.”
“Did girls get head?”
“Funny you should ask. No, we didn’t. Eventually we’d clear that one up, but it took us a while. Not Evie, though. Evie got head from the beginning. She was nobody’s fool. Unlike the rest of us.”
In my mind, I hear Paul’s voice telling me, There was one thing that Eve loved and taught me very well, and that was how to go down on her. Before Eve, it was like I was eating watermelon in Rush Springs, Oklahoma. After Eve, I didn’t slobber. I laugh.
Mirandi gives me a look of soft puzzlement, followed by a sweet, slightly unfocused smile, then returns her attention to Franklin. All cars having safely passed, she makes a left onto it. She says, “Brian also taught Eve that guys would cough up. Taught her the value of her product, I guess you could say. He was the first to give her money—for that plane ticket after Marilyn died so she could come back to L.A. And financially he got her out of a lot of jams over the years. Really what Brian was, was a mensch. Only Evie wanted him to leave his wife, and he wouldn’t do that. Not that she wanted to marry him. Well, she did, but I don’t think she actually did.” A long exhale. “Evie never really got marriage.”
Mirandi continues to talk, but I’m no longer able to listen. Evie never really got marriage. This sentence strikes me as so profound, so essential—as maybe the key to unlocking everything—that I can’t move beyond it. I want to take it back to my hotel room and turn off the lights, think about it alone in the dark. Is it true? Do I agree with it? Was marriage a concept Eve fundamentally failed to grasp? And then I recall another sentence, a sentence of Eve’s, and one I’ve already quoted: “My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster.” It’s from her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, written, of course, when she was in her late twenties. And a form of it would appear in every book, save Fiorucci, thereafter. A form of it, however, also appeared much earlier, as I’ll soon discover.
I roll down the window, let the breeze slap me in the face a few times, snap me out of my trance, and force myself to tune back in to Mirandi’s voice, which is saying cheerfully, “Here we are.” I look. See we’ve arrived at 1955 North Wilton Place, the Babitzes’ house after Bronson. Mirandi squeezes my hand. “Should we step out of the car, get a closer view?”
I squeeze her hand back, unfasten my seat belt.
It’s after Mirandi and I have finished our tour, after we’ve brought Eve to the Village Idiot for a lunch of ale-steamed mussels and deep-fried brussels sprouts and cinnamon-sugar-dusted churros, after Eve has dragged me to a nearby 7-Eleven so I can buy her $100 worth of British tabloids and disposable e-cigarettes, after Mirandi has dropped Eve at her condo and me at Palihouse, after I’ve typed up my notes and made phone calls and taken a shower, and right before I walk out the door for a drinks appointment, that I receive an email from Mirandi, now home in San Pedro. Its subject heading is “Found this thought you might be interested . . .” When I click to open it, I see three photos: the front of a letter, the back of a letter, and the envelope the letter came in.
The letter is from Eve to Mirandi, still Miriam, dated October 21, 1966, and postmarked New York City. The information contained therein is mostly unremarkable: Eve thinks working for a living is the pits; she’s taking too much acid but so is everybody else; she’s spending entire weekends holed up in her apartment making collages. Yet it’s fun for me to see. Young Eve just sounds so touchingly young. (She recommends that Mirandi read Hermann Hesse while stoned!) And though Eve is recognizably herself, she’s a rawer, blunter, less complicated, more manic version of that self. Rough-draft Eve.
Thoughts such as these are floating around cloudlike in my head as I skim pleasantly along. Then I come to the last paragraph before the sign-off and almost fall out of my chair. Eve writes:
These days I’m trying very hard to figure out what it is I’m doing. I’ve thought of a lot of things and one day the thought that I might never live with a man or get married dawned on me. I thought in my mind that there are only three men I got smashed on anyway and two of them were inaccessible (Brian and Chico) and the third was John Barry [an artist], for some reason. And then I got a letter from John Barry. So he wants me to come to Oklahoma, drop everything and marry him and live in Oklahoma. Only, shit! Heaven forbid—Oklahoma! My God! So it turns out I can’t do it.
It isn’t the words that so floor me. I’ve heard them from her before, obviously. It’s the tone in which she says them. When she declares her spinster aspirations at twenty-eight and beyond, it’s with a jollity, a bravado, a swagger. She knows who and what she is, and more than accepts her identity, glories in it, seeing the artistic intelligence that isolates her not as a thorn in her side but as a star in her crown. Only it wasn’t always thus, as this letter, written when she was just twenty-three and still unformed, shows. She’s getting an inkling here of where her personality is driving her, of what her destiny might be—how stark, how lonely, how extreme—and it scares her. On the one hand, of course it does, she’s human and how could it not? To be Eve Babitz is a daunting prospect even if you happen to be Eve Babitz. On the other hand, though, her humanness is a quality I’ve taken largely on faith. Meaning intellectually I know she’s human, while emotionally I know no such thing. It’s why Mirandi is, for me, so vital. She’s Eve in a human guise. This letter is the first proof I’ve had that Eve has her own human guise, no matter that she shed it early and for good.
All artists, male and female, have to battle against convention as well as their own demons to forge a style and sensibility. For women, however, especially pre-boomer women (it wasn’t until the sixties that the nineteenth century truly ended in America), the battle against convention is even bloodier, even more brutal and protracted. An artist must be willful, selfish, ruthless, calculating, egoistic. In short, not nice. And niceness is considered by many to be the sine qua non of womanhood, the most essential characteristic. And what happens so often with wome
n artists is that, at some point, they need to sacrifice—or believe they need to sacrifice—the artist for the woman, relinquish their ambition to helpmate a husband or raise children or tend a home, to perform the duties required of the traditional feminine roles of wife and mother, basically. But that didn’t happen to Eve. While she encountered difficulties of her own, principally in finding her art, she seemed immune to the biological and social imperatives that were doing a number on the rest of her gender. Yet, as it turns out, she, too, felt the fear and the pain, that her obliviousness to such things was feigned, a kind of gallant posturing, a species of whistling in the dark.
When I first quoted that spinster line back in the early part of this book, I followed it up by remarking that it was an ambition Eve was always true to, which she was. But she was untrue to it, as well, and near constantly. With just about every important romance in her life, and a few trifling, her thoughts took a conjugal turn. They did with Brian Hutton. And with Walter Hopps. She’s told me more than once the story of Hopps presenting her with a small box and how she felt upon opening it and discovering a silver bullet where a gold ring should have been: “I was cheerless and fucked-up for days, and how could he?” I’ve also listened to her refer to both Grover Lewis and Dan Wakefield as “the One,” her eyes growing misty as she expressed the conviction that these relationships were bound to end in matrimony until they didn’t.