by Eve Babitz
“Reasons?” he’d say. He doesn’t drop things, but his mind goes on the blink.
“The humiliation and so forth . . . you remember?”
“Yes, but I never meant . . . ”
“The reason, actually, that I invited you out to lunch was to help you.”
“Help me?” he’d ask. By this time his mind would have come to a halt.
“Yes, help you, Scott . . .” I’d continue, frowning slightly at the half-eaten shrimp and deciding for once against it. (Around Scott, I always ate everything, perhaps because I knew he didn’t love me.) “Scott,” I would begin, “I’ve been thinking about you. Thinking if there were any way I could help you, you know? The thing is, Scott, that while we were together, going to parties and all that, a lot of people began to think that there was a lot more to you than they’d thought at first. Because at first a lot of people thought you were all manners and no content, you know? At least, the ones who knew about your manners, because your manners are so wonderful.” (I was not about to tell him that people actually thought he was empty-headed because what good’s that going to do when you’re trying to help someone?) “But now that I’m no longer going to go places with you, now that we’re no longer going to be an item—I’ve been worrying about you. I mean, I understand my position pretty well. I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman, but I’m a writer and people think writing is glamorous, so I can go places alone or not go places and people still sort of think I’m doing what I want and not that I am alone because I’m no fun. Now, of course, no one’s going to think that you’re alone because no one loves you, but Scott, you need someone—someone with a certain weight—to give you presence. What was so nice about us together was that people . . . Well, Trina was telling me the other day that when she first met you, she just hardly noticed you, but that when she saw you with me, her whole attitude changed . . .” (No way could I finish this without telling him that people actually thought he was stupid and that when I suddenly turned up beside him, they thought he was charming and marvelous—they saw him through my eyes; it’s the truth. How could I tell him this, this poor sweetness whose only crime was that he didn’t love me and I loved him? I couldn’t!) “Look, Scott, I’ll just say this once and you can think about it at your leisure, but here it is. What you should do, if you decide to get another woman friend, is get one who’s older, even older than me . . . so she’s more frightened and willing to give up a lot more rather than lose you. Get one whom you don’t even have to make love to, who’s just so happy to have you with her. For you are, Scott, a charming companion and a gorgeous escort . . .”
“But, darling, I don’t want another woman,” he would now say. “I’ve . . . never loved another woman as much as I love you.”
(The tag end of that joke is “I’ve never loved another woman as much as you in L.A. with brown hair who’s five feet seven.”)
The trouble with him never having loved another woman as much as he loves me is that the person he really loves is a man. That was the person he went to visit in the hot midwestern city. To this man, Scott tells me, he says, “I’ve never loved another man the way I love you.” That man, says Scott, doesn’t like that sentence any better than I do; that man knows about me. I have to tell you—I’m not happy about this—I’ve known about this guy for a good while. Scott, being Scott, assumed I’d be sympathetic. Jesus! Sometimes he would wipe his brow forlornly and say, “You know, sometimes, between the two of you, I feel like Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” Until finally I snapped, “So what’s going to happen in the end, Scott? Are you going to leave us both and run off to America?” That put a lid on the Sunday, Bloody Sunday grousing.
•
So behold me now, as I am. I am alone at the typewriter. I’ve made an appointment to see the cleaning lady in charge of my head whom I’ve seen before with Scott. She’s under the mistaken impression that what I need is a “real man.” Robert Mitchum wouldn’t fit in my apartment; how could I make coffee with him in the kitchen? What I need is to be alone, to write, and to lie in beds where the man thinks I’m beautiful and will let me swim naked in his pool till his mistress comes home.
The truth is, I will never be able to maneuver Scott into that little scene I devised so gorgeously if we could only be Colette. But, too, he will never ask me where I became tan without marks. Sam would. He notices things like that—it’s why he’s always divorced and divorced and his mistresses don’t trust him, as well they shouldn’t. He was always “in love”; he’d been “in love” with me since I was sixteen—his being in love with me would have given him the right to demand to know how I’d become tan this way. He’s a real man.
Anyway, now Scott has called. He’s back and he’s brought me a present, he says. He brings everyone presents—he can’t go out the door anywhere without nine complicated gift-switching arrangements (he always knows who goes with what—it’s just he’s always going back for more because he remembers how much they liked it last time). He’s missed me, he says; it was dreadful in his hometown; his mother is maniacally lonely. Hot, he says, thank God he’s back in L.A. where there’s a breeze.
We are going out to dinner. Why not?
I’ve been through my closet and found the slight, bluey dress with a square low neckline that, until now, I’ve been too big to wear. It slips over me and fits perfectly—I wore it a night, six months ago, at the party where Scott, whom I’d known for years, suddenly saw me. His eyes lit up, he dragged me into the bathroom and pinned me to the green cool tile wall, insisting that we leave at once. He will love me in this dress; I can just see his eyes the way they narrow when he sees me looking beautiful, but he will be too well-mannered to say, “Oh, Jesus, how beautiful you are”; he will only say, “Well . . .”
My hair has just been washed and now comes curly to my shoulders and I have gone outside and picked a gardenia; they grow here—everything in California grows. I stand back then, from the mirror in this bluey dress and the flower in my fresh hair and behold myself, just as I am. The last two weeks of tragedy without Scott have turned out to seem like a comic to-do at some rich Marienbad spa where ladies pay fortunes to perfect themselves, rest, and sunbathe naked beside blue pools.
Sometimes, as the sun slants against the twilight a certain way, Scott looks like a pillar of strength. It cannot be easy to love me. Maybe if he were “in love” with me, as Sam says he is, he couldn’t be trusted to tell me the truth, and I could not love him so. Which I do. I love him so. Yes, behold this blue pool/bluey-dressed ambivalence that I choose to call love, whose footsteps I hear coming up the path. Whatever scenes I imagine, whomever Scott goes to visit, it doesn’t matter, or at least not enough. Behold me, then, smiling. Waiting for my lover, just as I am.
Cosmopolitan
August 1978
VENICE, CALIFORNIA
I HAVE moved to Santa Monica, into the rafters of this handmade 1906 house that is on a rambling flowery hill overlooking what could be Fairbanks, Alaska, and Maui, and Tierra del Fuego—but not Boulder. I have two bedrooms—and two cats, one for each of me.
Santa Monica and Venice, I’m convinced, are now the center of the universe and nothing happens anywhere that doesn’t happen out here on the boardwalk first. The boardwalk in Venice, three blocks south of me, is screaming with violet fur shorts while Frank Sinatra sings “Violets for Your Furs” from the jukebox in Robert’s. Robert’s is a white gallery-looking restaurant with lots of those obscene red lilies with yellow stalks sticking out the middle, waiting leeringly. Robert’s is so hip, it’s practically in the ocean. People roller-skate there; and, at night, you’ll see Mick Jagger and Lena Horne gorging themselves on strawberries dipped in chocolate topped by amaretto-spiked crème fraîche.
In Venice, looking like Linda Ronstadt—cute satin shorts and cute brown hair and pigeon toes—is all the rage. It’s a little hard doing punk out in broad daylight, though, because all that cerise neon hair loses something when it’s ninety-six degrees and glaring. The men are
all doing L’Uomo Vogue with a vengeance—and “primaries” are screeching across your eyeballs like a chalk on a blackboard every Sunday brunch in Robert’s (where everything starts first, even firster than the rest of the boardwalk). Primary taxi yellow, primary blue, primary red, primary all-in-satin.
In Robert’s, you sit watching people come in, and you say to yourself, “Yes, yes, no, non, no, yes—oh YES!” People’s bodies, what with all these roller-skating, cutie-pie outfits, have gotten so primary themselves that I’ve overheard lines such as “I saw a body yesterday, I mean, it was gorgeous—but then it spoke.”
Where I’m living—two blocks from Main Street—is getting worse than Rodeo Drive. They’ve got these horribly outrageous stores selling neon-purple spiral extension cords and little magpies made of straw from Red—rather the People’s Republic of—China. Across the street is this evil den of iniquity called the Buttery that makes croissants fresh every morning starting at 7:30 a.m. They also bake cinnamon rolls that taste exactly like the ones I used to lust after in Le Conte Junior High in Hollywood. Everything is hot there and people wait in this ravenous line starting so early that the sign still says CLOSED outside.
Also down here on Main Street is the Café California, an exquisite place so L.A. and so French that they practically pick the asparagus out of the garden (California, unsprayed) one minute before they bring it to you cooked perfectly (French). They put capers on anything you ask them to, and I love capers more than life itself. In case you’re wanting things a little richer, they also have those New York desserts that they bring in crystal punch bowls filled with whipped cream.
Fortunately, also on Main Street, there’s a little restaurant called Le Central that hardly anyone knows about. It will never be mobbed, because the food just isn’t anywhere near the Café California’s, which is why everyone who lives down here goes there. The wine cellar of Le Central is upstairs, and the place reminds me of something out of Babar the Elephant because it’s all white-white with smidgens of color from Babar-looking French watercolors that are on zee walls.
My photographer friend Annie Leibovitz is on one of her upswings into health and has been here shooting a magazine cover as well as jogging on the beach in front of my house while I sit home eating milk and honey. We went roller-skating together, maniacally, on a weekday morning when no one was around and it was bliss. I have my own skates which Paul Ruscha (my adorable boyfriend, the only one in captivity, it seems) found for $2 in the Goodwill. Brand-new! And my size!
Michael Franks has a new record (Warner Bros.) called Tiger in the Rain. The title song—about his cat—has purring from a stand-up bass in it. Michael Franks also has another song that goes: “When I saw you there in your Danskin / Then the wolf jumped out of the lambskin.” I just love him. I mean who else has purring on his record?
Vogue
August 1979
HONKY-TONK NIGHTS
The Good Old Days at L.A.’s Troubadour
NOW I WANT it known right off that I was fourteen years old the day I first walked into the Troubadour. That was in 1957 and I was a virgin. The Troubadour was over on La Cienega, a little more east of Doheny but still sort of West Hollywood-ish. It had just opened; Horace Silver was playing “Señor Blues” on the piano, while a friend of mine, Barry Salvin, was washing dishes in the kitchen, claiming that life was worth living because the owner, Doug Weston, had given him a job next to the music. But the original jazz Troubadour closed and my friend Barry Salvin died before the Beatles ever became famous.
In 1961 or so, Weston opened what he called the Troubadour II on Santa Monica and Doheny. It was a kind of beatnik place, a folk club seating about three hundred people, where Odetta or Peter, Paul and Mary would play acoustic sets.
In those days, the only place you could hear live rock and roll in L.A. was up at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip. Johnny Rivers used to rip it up there until the Beatles changed the world; then suddenly the entire Strip was one long problem for the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department, what with the Whisky, the London Fog next door (where Jim Morrison and the Doors used to play in 1966), the Trip, Ciro’s (where the Byrds first started), and even offthe-Strip places like Brave New World and little clubs around Hollywood. The cops were just awful. In those days, they used to just bust kids wholesale as they came out of the Whisky and the Trip and handcuff them and throw them into police buses out of what seemed like sheer exuberance.
It wasn’t until 1967 that Doug Weston allowed rock and roll to darken his doorstep, and that was, according to my friend Dickie Davis, one night when the Buffalo Springfield came and played a set with amps. It was odd that they were the first to play rock and roll in the Troubadour. Stephen Stills’s lyric in “For What It’s Worth”—“a man with a gun over there”—was about the very West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department in question. But after the Buffalo Springfield played, rock and roll took a turn off the Strip and came to the Troubadour, where for some reason the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Department didn’t bother anyone. The Byrds, the Dillards, Joni Mitchell, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Neil Young, Poco, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and all sorts of L.A. surfer-cowboy types played the Troubadour after that.
But as far as I’m concerned, it was in the Troubadour’s bar that L.A. rock and roll really happened, and by the time I walked into Weston’s Troubadour in 1968, I was neither fourteen nor a virgin at all.
•
From the outside during the day, the Troubadour looks like a mild-mannered Swiss restaurant among the shabby commercial realities of West Hollywood; Beverly Hills, only half a block west, is so flat, green, and safe that it seems immune to any reality at all (a disguise that fools no one). At the intersection of Santa Monica and Doheny is an indigenous jumble of Porsches, Rolls-Royces, ’55 Chevys, London taxis, and ramshackle Jeeps driven by movie stars. Half a mile back is the Tropicana Motel, where at least three rock and roll bands are always waiting, ready for anything (though these days they’re punk, whereas in the late sixties when the Troubadour was in flower, they were cowboy Beatles). Half a mile ahead in Beverly Hills, God knows.
From the inside at night, the Troubadour looks surprisingly large and homey. The bleeding-heart folksiness of the club’s original atmosphere still warms the hardest rock and roll. Until a few months ago, people thought the Troubadour’s day was over and that it couldn’t possibly stay open another season; it had been petering out for so long that by the fall of 1977, when Doug Weston got Jackson Browne to do a benefit for the club, most people felt it was more like a farewell performance. But now the lines have begun to form once more, and when I went there for a couple of nights, the place was as mobbed as if the years of emptiness had never happened. Even the bar, a shadow of its former self, seemed prepared for any occasion, though God knows the future would have to be awfully checkered to live up to this bar’s past. Not that I doubt it will be.
•
Like more than one carefully educated young woman watching TV the night the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan, I was a groupie. I posed as an album-cover designer and photographer, while others disguised themselves as tailors, record-company secretaries, or journalists. For women like us, hanging out in the Troubadour bar every night was, you know, business. I mean, I told people—even myself—that I had to do it. But when I dyed my hair the color of a pumpkin, even my sociology professor uncle, who only knows what he sees on The Merv Griffin Show, wondered if I hadn’t become “one of those groupies.”
That I today have some album covers and photographs to show for myself is a monument to the attention-to-detail of my disguise; for by the age of twenty-four, when most young ladies were married, having babies, and immersed in the “business of living,” the Troubadour had traded folk for rock and roll, and I was there in its bar every single night for just about five years, a slave to skinny boys with long hair who sang and played guitar.
Of course, people who had to come to the Troubadour bar—publicists and rock and roll record pr
omoters and reviewers—hated the place. And others who only came to watch the acts didn’t even notice the bar. And there were some who knew about the bar and wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.
“How can you, Eve, every single night!?” they’d ask, frowning.
“I love it!” I’d exclaim.
“Love?” they’d ask. “That place? In God’s name, why?”
“Why?” I’d reply. “The people!”
They’d stare at me a moment longer, sigh and finally leave, sure that if only I applied myself, I could be somebody, but I obviously wouldn’t, so what could they do: I just wouldn’t listen. “The people,” indeed.
•
To those of us who spent all that time in the Troubadour bar, it didn’t matter what was going on in the rest of the club, though hundreds of people paid to get in night after night. It seemed like performers who’d begun their careers there would have to play the Troubadour even after they could fill the Forum, because they had signed contracts with Doug Weston, exchanging his club as a showcase for them when they were obscure newcomers in return for an agreement to get them later on when they were Elton John. People would line up around the block, drooling to get tickets, not knowing that the stars they’d come to see loathed playing the Troubadour and were only there because they couldn’t get out of Weston’s contract, which they’d signed back in the days when they thought a week at the Troubadour was an honor—before they began to think of Weston as a snaggletoothed, greedy son of a bitch who didn’t understand artists. Weston rarely came downstairs into the bar because, people said, he was upstairs cackling over his good fortune. I myself thought that any nightclub owner who let a bunch of rock and roll types like us hang around in his bar for 365 nights a year doing nothing couldn’t be that good a businessman.