by Lili Anolik
Eve, while scarcely beyond her teens, has been assured and decisive in her actions. There was the nude chess match, of course. There was also the dropping out of college, the liaisons with married men. She’d opted for intrigue on her eighteenth birthday, the very day she reached the age of consent, refusing to be intimidated by the complexities of adult erotic life, instead immersing herself in them, jumping in with both feet. Her thoughts and feelings, however, are considerably more delicate, nuanced, tentative. As her expression helplessly reveals. Observe it and observe the mingling of innocence and experience, of hope and jealousy, of bewilderment and grief, which the romance with Hopps was no doubt causing her, the romance with Hutton already had. It’s rough-draft Eve you’re witnessing. The Eve who would appear in that letter to Mirandi a year later. It’s the Eve whose rawness and tenderness are still raw, still tender, haven’t yet hardened into attitude or style, an armor to protect her from the world. The Eve who is so young she only half understands what’s in store for her, though fully intuits.
Seeing Eve naked couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is Google her name. The Wasser-Duchamp photo is the first image that pops up. And so much of this book has been an attempt to look past her uncovered body, which tells us one thing, and get a glimpse of her covered face, which tells us another. (The impulse is the opposite of pornographic, yet is still—someway, somehow—pornographic. It’s the chaste view that becomes the forbidden.) Brittin’s photo, obviously, provides such a glimpse. So does the letter to Mirandi that I just alluded to, though less obviously. And so, even less obviously, does Mirandi herself. This isn’t to say that the covered face is the authentic Eve and the uncovered body the inauthentic. In spite of the contradictory claims face and body make, both are the authentic and both are the inauthentic. Meaning, taken individually both are the inauthentic, but taken together both are the authentic because their authenticity depends on each other, their authenticity and their contradictions are one and the same.
Eve Babitz, 1972
This photograph, taken by sometime girlfriend Annie Leibovitz, shows Eve at the opposite end of her twenties. She’s in profile and on the move, wearing a short-sleeved print shirt and a pair of sunglasses as big and round as her hoop earrings. In her right hand, she clutches a straw hat; in her left, a set of keys. Her skin is tan and clear, her hair dark, the cut cool and vaguely rock ’n’ roll (Marva’s work), her body slender, supple. She’s sucking on a lollipop or a toothpick. Behind her is a sign in a giant store window that reads MOVED TO HOLLYWOOD, these hopeful, glamour-struck words made ironic by their context: the cracks in the white stucco wall; the partially smashed windowpane; the piles of debris on the sidewalk. A man who looks simultaneously down-and-out and dapper sits on the window ledge, one leg crossed loosely over the other, eyeing her as she struts past.
Eve no longer has to fake the sexual brazenness, the give-a-shit imperturbability—they’re for real now. In the intervening years, she’s survived, barely, life on the Sunset Strip, the birth and death of her career as an album-cover designer, Earl McGrath, Jim Morrison, the bar at the Troubadour, to become a writer with a byline in the most happening magazine of the era. She’s been put through the ringer (put herself through the ringer is closer to the mark) and is the better for it. Knowledge, hard-won, has given her a confidence, a defiance. Her fears have been subsumed by the will to create. She’s a tough little chickie now, and way beyond Walter Hopps and his fickle tastes.
Eve here is a dead ringer for Eve as played by Jeanne Moreau in the 1962 Joseph Losey movie Eve: moody, sullen, sensual, wreathed in cigarette smoke and ennui, and with an ageless quality, by which I mean she looks older than she is, only thirty-two. The loneliness, the eccentricity, the anxiety, that underlay her surface ebullience are right on top in these shots. They were taken at the time she was with Paul and writing Slow Days, so the moment it was all coming together for her, the very moment, of course, it all started to fall apart. The delicate balance of liberty and restraint, passion and cunning, madness and clarity, was about to be tipped.
Eve Babitz times three, 1976I
I once asked Paul how Eve viewed herself. I meant as a writer, but he thought I meant as a woman. His answer: “When we were together, I noticed that she was always standing in front of the mirror. I used to be awestruck watching her. She was simply transfixed by her own image and truly unaware of how funny her elaborate posing was. I think that’s why she wrote about herself in such glamorous terms, because she saw herself in such glamorous terms. Eve was really big on what she looked like.”
Eve Babitz at the Farmers’ Market, 2011
Eve Babitz, 1957
The woman in this photo, taken by Lloyd Ziff in 2011, no longer cares what she looks like—her clothes are stained, her bangs greasy, her nails dirty and broken. And she certainly no longer feels the need to pose or present glamorously. Instead she sits at a table, smokes, thinks her thoughts. This, to me, is the photo that was implicit in all the other photos, just as all the other photos are implicit in it. As evidence, I’m including a fifth photo: Eve, fourteen, sitting, smoking, thinking. The body language, the facial expression, the haircut—identical. Even the ashes on the ends of the two cigarettes are the same length. Gazing at the pictures side by side is like gazing at that famous optical illusion of the pretty girl who is also the wizened crone. Both are always present, one part of the other, the young and the old, the past and the future, the dream and the nightmare.
Ziff’s photo seems the inevitable conclusion to the life. But maybe what the photo is, is the inevitable unfolding of the truth. You can see in Eve’s face uncommon intelligence and character. Stoicism, as well. She understands her fate and, in this moment of calm, of Chekhovian wisdom and resignation, accepts it. She has become the simplest version of herself, another way of saying she has become the achieved version of herself.
She is Eve, distilled.
* * *
I. It was difficult to determine a date for this photo strip. Eve and Mirandi were convinced by Eve’s clothes that it came from a booth in New York. And Eve didn’t get to New York much. A trip was taken in the spring of 1971. Except that would put her at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and she doesn’t look twenty-seven or twenty-eight to me in these pictures, an awkward observation to make, so I didn’t. Finally, though, I did, and both Eve and Mirandi agreed. Eve was silent for a while, then she said, “I know! It must’ve been when Ms. flew me to their New York offices. They thought they wanted me to write for them, but they didn’t. I came in wearing platform shoes and a floppy hat, and they said, ‘You’re obviously trying to attract men.’ They hated me! And they hated me even more when I turned in a piece about how great it is to have big tits [“My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, the All-American Obsession,” Ms., April 1976].”
Eve Babitz and the author at a prop lot on Melrose, 2013
Acknowledgments
First of all and most of all, thank you to Eve, who picked up the phone practically every time I called, which was constantly over the past six and a half years.
And to Mirandi Babitz, Laurie Pepper, and Paul Ruscha, also on my speed dial. I’m in your eternal debt, is what it comes down to.
I want to thank my editor at Scribner, Colin Harrison. (Colin, I’m in your eternal debt, too.) And Sarah Goldberg, who is so nice that when she criticizes me I hardly notice that’s what she’s doing. Also, Katie Monaghan and her calm, reflective intelligence. And, of course, Nan Graham. Additionally: Kara Watson, Dan Cuddy, Jaya Miceli, Jill Putorti, and Steve Boldt—the entire Scribner team, basically. I’m wildly appreciative for your work on this book, and I love how it looks.
I want to thank, as well, Bruce Handy, Dana Brown, and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair. The words “Vanity Fair” were my “open sesame” as far as this book was concerned. They provided me with access to people who otherwise wouldn’t have given me the time of day. Plus, the magazine took a chance on me and Eve when no one else would. And, Peter Biskind, it all started
with you.
I am so grateful to my agent, Jennifer Joel at ICM, that she gets her very own paragraph.
Thank you to the following people for submitting to interviews, often multiple, either in person or on the phone or both, for the magazine piece and/or the book: Peter Alexander, Colman Andrews, Bob Asahina, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Léon Bing, Ronee Blakley, Nan Blitman, Chris Blum, Irving Blum, Lois Chiles, Ron Cooper, Dickie Davis, Laddie John Dill, Ned Doheny, Frederick Eberstadt, Michael Elias, Bret Easton Ellis, Joni Evans, Paul Fortune, David Freeman, Robert Gottlieb, Mick Haggerty, Judy Henske, Dave Hickey, Sarah Kernochan, Gerard Malanga, Steve Martin, Ralph Metzner, Bob Neuwirth, Tom Nolan, Peter Pilafian, Michelle Phillips, Fred Roos, Ed Ruscha, Erica Spellman-Silverman, J. D. Souther, Caroline Thompson, Bill Tonelli, John Van Hamersveld, Dan Wakefield, Julian Wasser, David Weddle, Carrie White, Victoria Wilson, and Lloyd Ziff.
Thank you to the following institutions for their assistance: the Getty Research Institute, the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
Thank you to Pierre Chanteau, Annie Leibovitz, Julian Wasser, and Lloyd Ziff for contributing photographs.
Susan Haller, Hugh Kenny, Kristine McKenna, Ruth Young-Baker, John Zilliax, Karen Mulligan and Laura Cali at Leibovitz Studio—you helped, too. So did David Thomson. And Blake Bailey.
I’m sorry to say that Henry Bromell, Josh Greenfeld, and Ed Moses are no longer alive to be thanked.
And, finally, thank you to my mom and dad, Marjorie and Bill Holodnak. To my brother, John, whom Eve always preferred to me. To my sons, Ike and Archie, who only pout a little when they hear the words “Mom’s working.” And to my husband, Rob. He turned my initials into L.A.’s initials, just one of the many great things he’s done for me.
About the Author
© MICHAEL BENABIB
LILI ANOLIK is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, and The Believer. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.
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Interior design by Jill Putorti
Jacket design by Lauren Peters-Collaer
Jacket photograph of Eve Babitz by Pierre Chanteau
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018035881
ISBN 978-1-5011-2579-9
ISBN 978-1-5011-2581-2 (ebook)
Photo Credits
Photograph on page 20 by Julian Wasser, courtesy of Julian Wasser; photograph on page 87 by Hy Hirsch, courtesy of Mirandi Babitz; photograph on page 106 by Annie Leibovitz, courtesy of Annie Leibovitz; photograph on page 120 by Paul Ruscha, courtesy of Paul Ruscha; photograph on page 153 by Lloyd Ziff, courtesy of Lloyd Ziff; photograph on page 212 by Julian Wasser, courtesy of Julian Wasser; photograph on page 266 by Charles Brittin; photograph on page 269 by Annie Leibovitz, courtesy of Annie Leibovitz; photograph on page 271 from photo booth, courtesy of Mirandi Babitz; left photograph on page 272 by Lloyd Ziff, courtesy of Lloyd Ziff; right photograph on page 272 by Mae Babitz, courtesy of Mirandi Babitz; photograph on page 274 by the author, courtesy of the author