by Lili Anolik
Léon Bing, during our interview, mentioned a guy, an artist, Eve was hell-bent on marrying in the mid-nineties. (His name was unfamiliar to me, so I questioned Eve about him, only I couldn’t because she barely remembered who he was.) It was déjà vu all over again in my interview with Sarah Kernochan, except the guy Eve was hell-bent on marrying in Kernochan’s account was different from the guy in Bing’s, an actor instead of an artist, and the madness struck in the early eighties instead of the mid-nineties. (Eve remembered even less about this amour.) And, according to Paul, she was forever trying to browbeat him into a proposal: “It was something we fought over and fought over. But I knew marriage would have been a disaster for us. The last thing I wanted to deal with was Eve’s motherhood. She’d probably have eaten our children.”
Yet, in spite of all this, I believe I had it right the first time, that, in a fundamental sense, Eve stayed true to her spinster ambition. If she’d really wanted a husband, she’d have got one is my strong feeling, so therefore she didn’t. Nor should she have. The notion of her deriving satisfaction from the continuity and regularity of la vie quotidienne, or that the bourgeois solution could ever have been hers, is ludicrous, demented. She and the institution of marriage were incompatible, both theoretically and practically. And she knew it even when she forgot she knew it. Or at least when she forgot she knew it, she forgot she knew it with guys who could be counted on to know it for her. My suspicion is that she occasionally indulged in fantasies of being taken care of by a man, of having a house and security and stability, the way a young suburban matron might occasionally indulge in fantasies of being a wicked single chick, hustling for her keep in the big bad city—a harmless bit of self-deception.
Marriage was the topic Eve couldn’t leave alone. She returned to it obsessively, helplessly, resolving her feelings about it only to experience the need to examine those feelings one more time. And I believe that this tension wasn’t just her great theme, it was the very mechanism of her art. The pressure of her internal interrogation—to say I do, to say I do not—is what caused her to move from lover to lover, in eternal pursuit, but it’s also what produced the work itself. Marital apprehension was the coal, Slow Days, for example, the diamond. The marriage plot, even if she never got married, even if her best plots were plotless, was her plot, too.
Well, well. So for Eve it was Madame Bovary (and, for that matter, Isabel Archer, Emma Woodhouse, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, and Dorothea Brooke) c’est moi, after all.
* * *
I. I’m not going to identify this famous lover or any of the other famous lovers mentioned in this section. Why not? To paraphrase Eve, so I don’t get sued!
II. There’s some dispute as to who in the family was sentimentally educating whom. Laurie: “Mirandi is the youngest and she thinks she remembers, but she doesn’t. Evie asked me to tell her how to give head. I was already married at that point. I went home and started drawing her a diagram. Yes, a diagram. But when I told her I was ready to explain it, she said, ‘That’s okay, I found out.’ From Brian, I assume.”
To Eve—with Love and Squalor (Also, Squalid Overboogie), Part II
I said at the start that this book was, more than anything else, a love story, and love, as those of us much past the tender age of sixteen are only too aware, isn’t all rainbows and buttercups, German-imported cocaine binges, and fly-by-night affairs with groovy young actors on the cusp of super-stardom. It also has a dark side, and occasionally I’d go over to it.
In the fall of 2015, eighteen months after my piece appeared, New York Review Books Classics reissued Eve’s Hollywood, and then Slow Days, Fast Company; Simon & Schuster reissued L.A. Woman; and Counterpoint Press reissued Sex and Rage and Black Swans. That much of Eve’s oeuvre, all of it previously out of print, was suddenly available, though, doesn’t give the full picture, convey just how ubiquitous she’d become in certain bookish circles, and how fast. When I began writing about her in early 2012, there was an interview she’d done with Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, a brief article by Holly Brubach in T magazine, and a blog post by cultural critic James Wolcott. That was it, the whole shebang, the entirety of her internet presence.
By 2018, she’d be featured in—and keep in mind, this is an incomplete list—the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, the Guardian, the Jewish Journal, the Seattle Review, the New Republic, GQ, Aperture, Bookforum, Newsweek, W, O, Vice, Vogue, and, obviously, Vanity Fair. Plus, the New Yorker blog, the Paris Review blog, and the Tin House blog, along with HuffPo, Buzzfeed, PopSugar, The Millions, and Vulture. Every newspaper, magazine, and website you can think of, in short. Esquire was reprinting her 1991 piece “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art” for its eighty-fifth anniversary April issue. Elle was offering to teach anyone who wanted to know “How to Live Like Literary Icon Eve Babitz.” Actress Emma Roberts was posting glamour shots of herself reading Sex and Rage—named, by the way, an NPR Best Book of 2017—on Instagram, getting 310K “likes” a pop. Most gratifying of all, on May 4, 2017, there appeared in the New York Times, a periodical hostile to Eve when it wasn’t being dismissive of, an affectionate tribute that was also a belated apology. Stated the critic: “I’m here to talk about Eve’s Hollywood, and thus to right a historical wrong: This potent cocktail of a book was never reviewed for this publication.”
Eve wasn’t being rediscovered because to be rediscovered you must first be discovered, and she never was, not properly. No, she was being discovered. In 2012, Victoria Wilson said to me of the writer she’d started publishing in 1977, stopped publishing in 1993, “It seemed like Eve was on the verge of breaking through, always on the verge, but it didn’t happen.” Who could have predicted that Wilson was speaking too soon? That in a few short years, Eve would be It, the latest craze and the hottest topic, the new now and next of the literary world? After spending her life ahead of her time, her time had come.
Eve Babitz: in her eighth decade and an overnight success.
To witness all this was beyond exciting, was thrilling. And more for me, I think, than Eve, who commented on the subject just once, the very droll, “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.” At last Eve was receiving the recognition she so richly deserved, and I’d got to play some small part in it. (Isn’t that the writer’s ultimate fantasy, that a thing he or she writes has an actual effect, changes the world in a visible, tangible way?) Yet, there was bitter—just a touch, the faintest hint—to go along with the sweet. For a period of three or four years, I’d looked upon Eve not merely as L.A.’s secret genius and sharer, but as my own personal secret. Except I’d blabbed and the secret was out. No longer was she mine mine mine. Others were laying claim to her now, too.
When “All About Eve—and Then Some”I came out, readers got in touch. These readers were mostly young women who saw in Eve a model for how to live life, or Hollywood executives who saw in Eve a chance to fill the void left by Sex and the City. Both sets seemed to regard Eve as the original Carrie Bradshaw: an adorable kook who went to evil, sexy parties and tumbled into bed with evil, sexy men, then journaled about it. On the one hand, how great, new fans for Eve, and who cares if they were fans for the wrong reasons, and is there such a thing as a wrong reason, and bless their ingenuous little hearts in any case. On the other hand, though, Jesus fucking Christ. And as they talked, I’d nod and make appropriate remarks, all the while internally sighing and muttering sarcastic comments to myself. Because unh-uh, because give me a break, because absolutely not. Eve is nothing like Darren Star’s heroine, a tough cookie with a gooey marshmallow center. Eve’s sleep-around, troublemaker front is real. There’s no doe-eyed snookums looking for the right fella behind it, no twinkling heart of gold. She isn’t an Every Girl, or relatable—the opposite. She’s about as far out as you can get: an existential outlaw plus a demon plus an artist. Straight down the line.
Of course, I’m partially to blame for the yo
ung women and Hollywood people regarding Eve as the original Carrie Bradshaw, though it took me a long time to realize this, even longer to admit it. In my piece, I showed Eve in the present, but I smeared the lens with Vaseline. Her fear and loathing, and my horror at her fear and loathing, I didn’t include, or only subtextually. Instead I turned Eve into a lovable eccentric. In other words, I sentimentalized her, diminished her. Eve is not eccentric, she’s seriously, radically strange. And Eve is not lovable, one of the reasons I love her.
Surrounding Eve is the unmistakable whiff of danger. She’s ill-fated, certainly—the match falling in her lap was the worst kind of bad luck. But that only partly accounts for what I’m talking about. If the fault is in her stars, it’s also in her nature. There’s an avidity to Eve coupled with a purely reckless streak. It’s the source of much of what is visceral and exciting about her. It’s the source, too, of much of what is macabre and frightening. In the early sixties, Laurie took a trip to Rome and visited the Babitzes, staying in the city at the same time: “Evie was eighteen, witty, and sexy. She had these horrible hip friends, the 81/2 crowd. God, those people were awful. Later I had this dream. In it, Evie was living at the top of this very beautiful building. And I was jealous that she got to live in it because it was so beautiful. I went in and started to climb the stairs to get to her. Inside, the building was falling apart. The staircase was rickety and crumbling. It was a really terrifying place to be. And I thought to myself, ‘You couldn’t pay me to live here!’ And I left Evie where she was and backed down the stairs.”
Laurie’s dream wasn’t just revealing but prophetic, less a dream than a vision. The beautiful building would come crashing down, leaving Eve underneath the rubble, buried alive, my, and probably everyone else’s, idea of hell on earth. Which is the only way to describe her present circumstances: body ravaged by fire; not quite broke but close enough; the desire and perhaps the ability to write gone; alone and in an apartment that’s somewhere between slovenly and foul. And yet, they’re hers. Meaning if ever anyone’s been true to herself, it’s Eve, unremittingly and unrelentingly. She’s fulfilled her destiny rather than fallen short of it. Has lived a life without compromise, and so it’s a triumph even if it’s also a tragedy. Yes, I’m appalled by her. Yes, I recoil. But I still see her as the epitome of artistic audacity and impudence. My attitude toward her is still a mixture of reverence and rhapsody. Her nobility is authentic, undeniable. Her originality, as well. And I suspect that as time passes, she will seem braver to me, sexier, scarier, more mysterious, and more remarkable. She’s a supreme figure. A hero.
I’ll say this for Eve, too. Self-pity is entirely absent from her makeup. She hasn’t succumbed to lethargy or depression. She remains buoyant, to an almost pathological degree. A quick illustrative anecdote:
Last March, Eve mistook a glass of lemon Pine-Sol for a glass of lemonade in the middle of the night (the glass of Pine-Sol had been left, unlabeled, in the fridge by the cleaning woman), and wound up in Cedars-Sinai. The next morning, Mirandi FaceTimed me from the hospital. I asked Eve, in an ID bracelet and one of those crinkly blue gowns, if she was okay. She turned to the lens of the camera phone, her slack features suddenly sharpening, the bleariness in her eyes falling away, and said, “It’s the vacation I never knew I wanted.” I gasped even as I laughed, the line as grotesque as it was funny, which, of course, made it that much funnier. The sheer heartlessness of it, the hauteur, the malice—and toward herself. Breathtaking.
And her capacity for joy is large, movingly so. She takes such pleasure in things. Food. Books. Aretha Franklin records. Getting her way.
I’ve already likened Eve to a femme fatale, a comparison, I believe, both instructive and apt. But there’s another creature, equally seductive, equally sociopathic, to whom she bears an even more striking resemblance—a child.
In Eve’s Hollywood, she has an imaginary dialogue with a theoretical “they”:
“But how will you toughen up and mature?” they ask.
“No,” I say. “Who says you have to mature? I don’t want to get old and die. I just want to die.”
“But . . .”
“Why mature?”
“But . . . you can’t do that!” They are scandalized.
“I’m doing it, though.”
And is, to this day, doing it. Eve didn’t fail to mature, she refused. You stick around long enough, reach a certain age, and maturity is all but unavoidable. If you don’t come to it on your own, life thrusts it upon you. Yet every time life tried, Eve blocked or parried, danced away laughing. It was always boyfriends, never husbands, positively never children. Apartments, never houses. Living from assignment to assignment, book to book, taking an odd job here and there, cadging cash off a lover or an ex-lover, never a career. A cult favorite, never a mainstream success. She was beholden to nothing and no one—not a man or kids, or a piece of property, or a boss, not even to an audience. Adulthood was a condition she simply wouldn’t submit to, and that was that.
Eve is now in her mid-seventies. Her hair is no longer a silvery shade of platinum but straight-up silver. The drugs she takes are to ward off pain rather than induce psychosis and are paid for by Medicare. And yet she remains a beloved and brilliant little girl: beautiful, serenely self-absorbed, wholly without conscience or remorse, and an unending source of marvel and freshness and delight.
* * *
I. This was not my title, it was Vanity Fair’s. I tried to have it changed, the “and Then Some” striking me as particularly egregious. Eve, on the other hand, loved it, the “and Then Some” especially.
Epilogue, or the Four Faces of Eve
Eve is a product of Hollywood. And though Hollywood and the movies are not technically synonymous terms, they are de facto synonymous terms. What could be more fitting, therefore, than to end Eve’s story with a montage, among the most suggestive—and poignant—gestures in the cinematic lexicon, a feat and frenzy of editing, capable of conveying an entire life in a few carefully chosen images, one dissolving into another into another.
Early on I quoted Julian Wasser, the photographer who gave us the best-known image of Eve. I’d asked him why he picked Eve as his model, and he’d said, “She had a very classic female body.” But, in fact, he’d said a good bit more than that. His response, unedited:
“You’re asking me why I picked Eve to pose with Duchamp? You’re really asking me that? Oh, Jesus. You have a husband, don’t you? Ask him.” A long pause. “Those girls I was talking about before, the ones hanging around Barney’s—Eve was different. Okay, yeah, she was there to wreck relationships and steal guys, but she wasn’t just a lame-o flake, an out-of-town groupie idiot who found her sexual nirvana in L.A. She had a plan. She was the real thing.” A second pause, even longer. “I asked Eve because she had a very classic female body, okay? I asked her because I knew she’d blow Duchamp’s mind. And you know what? She did. She blew his mind!”
There are people who don’t show up in photographs. Not as vampires don’t show up in mirrors. Physically, obviously, they’re present. But spiritually, emotionally, they’re nowhere to be seen. They regard the camera’s scrutiny as an invasion and, consciously or unconsciously, guard against it, close themselves off. They flunk their screen test, in essence. Not Eve. Eve, on camera, comes across. Her intelligence, her sensitivity, her agitation, her discontent, her humor, her natural-beingness are on full display. Wasser’s intuition bore out.
Eve Babitz, Walter Hopps, Jay DeFeo, 1965
I regard this photo, shot in January 1965 by Charles Brittin, as the companion to the Wasser-Duchamp because it features the two non-present presences in the Wasser-Duchamp: Walter Hopps and Eve’s face. The background is a party, glamorously bohemian, full of smart talk and nervy, cruel-looking beauties. Eve and Hopps, in his signature G-man suit, sit at a table. He’s in mid-lip-lick, and light glints off the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes, making him appear a bit wary, a bit compromised. As well he might, out in public with h
is baby-doll mistress (he and Eve did not split after the Wasser-Duchamp, were involved for several more years). Another mistress, the woman with the high cheekbones and dark hair, chicly short—Jay DeFeo, thirty-five, an artist from San Francisco, the rare female represented by Ferus—is leaning in close to him. What suggestion or threat is she about to whisper in his ear?
It’s Eve, though, who’s the revelation here. She’s wearing a dress, sleeveless and black, and little if any makeup. In contrast with the others, all of whom, except for Hopps, are done up in the contemporary style, she appears simple, classical, slightly out-of-time. She seems to be looking directly into the camera’s eye, which is both mechanical and human, since the camera’s eye is, too, the photographer’s eye. Our eye, as well, and that’s the magic of this extraordinary picture: the feeling of connection it gives, the electrical charge of two gazes touching across great spatial and temporal divides. And as I lose myself in Eve’s face, I start to understand why she hid it with her hair when she was with Wasser and Duchamp. Not that it’s ugly or strange. On the contrary, it’s lovely—so lovely. But it’s also so round, so soft, so pale, so unmarked, so bare. (As physically exposed as she is in the Wasser-Duchamp photo is as emotionally exposed as she is in the Brittin, another reason I regard the Brittin as the companion piece to the Wasser-Duchamp.) I can’t stop staring.