I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Monday nights, “Hoot Nights” leftover from the folk-club hootenanny days, were the most insane evenings, because the Troubadour’s stage was flung open to any kid or band determined to wait in line Monday morning and pass the audition, and the audience only had to pay a dollar to get in. The bar was just jammed with record-company people, friends of the bands, the bands themselves, and groupies. Passion licked through the room, burning with wild desires.

  “You had to wear a diaphragm just to walk thought,” Susan Smith, one of the waitresses, told me. “The semen potential was so intense it was enough to get you pregnant just standing there.”

  It seemed like anyone who went home alone Monday nights had to be supernaturally unlucky.

  Tuesday night was almost as insane as Mondays because new acts opened Tuesdays and the record companies were paying. Every journalist and friend and rock and roller got a tab for free drinks and ended up in the bar trying to get laid, get high, or get a deal together.

  The rest of the week was just a usual mixture of youth, beauty, fame, and unknowns, aflame with lust—just like Mondays and Tuesdays—only less touristy.

  People immersed in the business of living could tell at a glance that the Troubadour bar was “too L.A.” for anything more serious than trying to look like a cowboy surfer—if you were a guy—and young-but-dangerous, if you were a woman. Looking back on it, the whole time seems like the longest one-night stand in history. Anyway, I bet the people having lunch every day at the Algonquin back in the years when they were all so witty and brilliant looked back eventually and thought of it as all one lunch.

  Perhaps when a certain group of people enters a certain place for a while, the time is so electric and crackling that later it all looks the same—washed in a blur of amazing grace. And I don’t think it was just the tequila, either, at least not entirely, though I’m not saying all those double margaritas poured over ice cubes in large tumblers with no salt didn’t have something to do with the rosy glow in which it all still basks. Coming into the bar early some Thursday night, slipping through the crowd in line outside, it was almost a relief to see that hardly anyone was there yet except Jim Dixon, a yachtsman who was one of the earliest people to hang out with the Byrds. He’d be talking to the bartender, John Barrack, about sailing to Maui.

  Sullenly, leaning against the bar, was the waitress Reina, the queen who ruled that room all those years, in sickness and in health, with exactly the same attitude: not amused. (Indifference and scorn were the only variations.) She was gorgeous, with long brown hair down past her waist and a face like a pinup girl. But then, all the waitresses at the Troubadour were too much. It seemed like the place had a laissez-faire arrangement with them, allowing them to do anything they wanted as long as they didn’t mix up the orders or let anyone escape the two drink minimum. The waitresses at the Troubadour, therefore, were infamously hot.

  •

  “Hey, Babitz, you still here?” A smug voice in the corner would demand.

  I knew it was Glenn Frey, because though I was there early, Glenn always got there earlier. In those days, Glenn was not in the Eagles amassing a portfolio of stocks so he can retire and play softball like Bob Hope plays golf. In those days, he was just another cowboy in patched-up jeans at the Troubadour every night with no other ambition, seemingly, but to misspend his youth.

  One of the two members who went to on to make up Longbranch Pennywhistle, Glenn Frey and J. D. Souther, it was difficult to say which was skinnier, since both of them together weighed about 208 and combined to look like one toothpick. I met them on a Monday night and thought they were much too cute and way too young, which made me feel old, but not old enough to go home and get married. By 1971, it seemed like Glenn and I had been hanging out drinking tequila in the corner of the bar forever, and that we never went home, that one or the other was “still here.”

  “What do you mean, you were here first,” I’d say. “You’re always here. You’re worse than Jackson.”

  I’d bring my drink over to Glenn’s table, and just as I’d be sitting down, Jackson Browne would appear from the kitchen, where he’d apparently moved from Orange County when he was seventeen, or else had such a casual arrangement with the place that they let him come in the back, through the kitchen, like he lived there and didn’t have to go around to the front like everybody else. He’d get a beer and go back into the kitchen, having nodded to Glenn and me like the host’s teenage son being polite.

  If you’re going to drink the way Glenn and I did, you should do it when youthful exuberance and an iron constitution let you wake up the next day ready for more trouble and not wait till you’re so old that you wish you were dead the morning after and are unable to appreciate plummeting headlong into oblivion the way God intended.

  Anyway, that’s how it seemed to me then.

  Maybe everyone saw it like that.

  Everyone but Steve Martin of course. Steve, sitting at the bar drinking a single glass of white wine in the midst of all that cigarette smoke, could never bring himself to look on the bright side of total debauchery or “overboogie,” as it came to be known. It was almost as though he didn’t realize that if it weren’t for the Beatles, we’d all be stuck pursuing reasonable lives. In fact, sometimes I’d look at Steve sitting there and say to myself, “Oh, poor Steve, he just has no sense of humor.”

  By about 9:30, the bar would begin to fill out and get that padded look I liked so much, and which melted into my second margarita and blended with everybody there. Low-powered, hyphenated groupies (photographer-groupies, Topanga-groupies, etc.)—beautiful girls with tans and Marlboros and soft hair and clear eyes and without that look of contemptuous impatience that one sees nowadays in this age of cocaine (this was B.C., Before Cocaine)—would settle down to tables and laugh at things. Young musicians from places like Tucson and Boulder and Lubbock would watch and be funny, having smoked dope behind the Troubadour before they came in.

  Glenn Frey, by this time, was making diabolical observations about some poor tourist who soon realized that white folks in suits and ties weren’t supposed to be there (unless they were presidents of record companies).

  Outside by now the traffic had thinned. At the light would be a chartreuse Lotus, a ’52 Lincoln Continental painted cream, dentless and virginal, and a beat-up hearse full of kids from West L.A. who were on their way back from cruising Hollywood Boulevard and who were listening to Jim Morrison’s apocalyptic lullabies on AM, while out back, Jim Morrison, drunk, would be flung into a Red & White cab, having hung by his knees from the balcony, among other things. A girl would be trying to bribe the cabdriver into taking him to the Alta Cienega Motel and not worry, and finally the cab would be just about to pull away when Jim, totally sober and out of nowhere, would tell her: “You know, I’ve always loved you.”

  Anyone could see he’d die young.

  Inside at one time or another during this one-night stand, strange combinations came together at the bar—like Gram Parsons and Mike Clarke drinking champagne and Wild Turkey, or Arlo Guthrie falling in love with one of the waitresses. Hoyt Axton and Jack Elliott and David Blue made things seem legit even on nights when Gatsby, Steels and Nosh (what someone dubbed Crosby, Stills and Nash during a particularly horrendous time when they were in the middle of recording that first album and everyone was thinking it should be called Music From Big Ego) came in and made things seem too Hollywood for words. Janis Joplin would sit in her nightgown with a pink boa, all by herself, drinking. Paul Butterfield would hit the Troubadour the minute he came to L.A. and didn’t wait till he opened to order adult drinks like gin and tonic. Van Morrison glowered in corners, and Randy Newman was all innocence and myopia. Nothing was impossible. Unknowns became stars.

  •

  Steve Martin used to say, “You’re like Linda. You’ve got opinions about things.”

  I used to worry about that, since having opinions about things—if you were a woman in those days—didn’t seem to inspire mink coats or
foaming lust or even songs written about you, but it was true that Linda and I were somewhat alike, because we both read (Linda’s house was piled high with thick novels, history books, and amps), and we both were always on diets. In our opinion, the best way to lose weight fast was to go on a fruit fast, and we did this once together—telephoning the other when we ate so much as a single orange—until at the end of one week, we’d each lost twelve pounds. At this transcendent moment, I took a bunch of pictures of Linda to document her perfection: she looked like a French convent girl on her way to seduce a lecherous old count.

  “Look innocent,” I told her.

  Like most people, I was in love with Linda’s voice, and when she sang “Long, Long Time” (her biggest hit around then), I turned into one large, aching teardrop.

  John David Souther used to come to the Troubadour and scorch the bar with his eyes, ignoring all the girls in case they thought their souls their own. He hardly had to be there at all to make you worry, and he was only twenty-three. “Everybody knows boys from Texas are conceited,” Linda once told me. He burned with an amber light so that his green eyes seemed on fire with it. He’d drink San Miguel beer (he’s probably still the most elegant gourmet from Texas the world has ever known), his long fingers curling around the glass. It made you think that the amber from the beer bubbled down his throat and ignited him further, he was so intense.

  Jackson Browne was always the Kid. You couldn’t help but love him (nobody even tried), for when he stood there with his too-large shirt on and his determined stab at becoming Robert Mitchum by not shaving for three days (which made him look like a Botticelli that needed dusting and not like Robert Mitchum at all), the world came to a complete stop.

  “And those cheekbones,” one of the waitresses used to sigh. “Those eyelashes and those cheekbones. God.”

  Now of course, if J.D. and Jackson weren’t bad enough already, all of a sudden Ned Doheny would come in from outside, wearing his gray serape jacket and his eight-by-ten glossy smile, looking like one of those kids who went to Beverly Hills High and who got a convertible for his sixteenth birthday (only Ned would drive Jeeps).

  And of course there was always Glenn Frey. Glenn and Jackson wrote the Eagles’ first song, “Take It Easy.” But I was so used to seeing Glenn all the time that I took him for granted and didn’t have any idea he could even tune a guitar, much less go out onstage and make girls scream.

  *

  Sometimes it all got to be too much for me—all that beauty showing all that promise—and I’d grow morbidly paranoid and filled with grave doubts, comparing us there—that all-one-night at the Troubadour—with the hero in Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle,” who starts his life knowing that something so great and special is going to happen to him that he never attaches himself to anything real, and finally, just before he is about to become old, he realizes that the special thing—that beast in the jungle waiting to jump out at him—is indeed unique, because it’s nothing—nothing will ever happen to him. Sometimes I’d think that nothing would ever happen to us either, or at least that it would be all downhill from then on. The latter isn’t far from wrong, I think sometimes.

  But then other times I knew everything would be all right and that no matter how terrible we were or how great our futures were, it was inevitable that some beast was lurking, if only Doug Dillard. He laughed at everything and smiled this regrettable smile that had a way of convincing you to let the devil take the hindmost and fling caution to the winds. Standing there six feet two or so, Missouri wiry, wielding a violin case or—worse—playing the violin, his eyeballs would spiral out in opposite directions. And then a look of saintly seriousness would fall over his face, like Prince Mishkin in The Idiot—practically religious. And wiping his lips free of beer foam, he’d open his mouth and a note of sheer angelic beauty would ring through the bar.

  “Amazing grace . . .”

  And he’d raise one eyebrow, waiting, mock holy.

  Minding her own business, Linda Ronstadt would just be coming into the bar, talking a mile a minute about where can she find a bass player, but at the sound of his voice, she’d be flattened.

  “How sweet the sound . . .”

  Linda, challenged, couldn’t resist and her voice would lift in perfect a cappella harmony. Since she lived upstairs from Doug Dillard, they might have planned this, but I rather doubt it. Her voice was always the same: perfect, like an angel.

  “That saved a wretch like me . . .”

  Gene Clark and Jackson and David Crosby would all be in it by this time, suddenly Baptists. It was Sunday morning.

  “I once was lost

  But now am found . . .

  Was blind but now I see.”

  By 1972 nearly everyone had signed recording contracts and went straight. By 1975 the Troubadour bar was a shell of its former self.

  Outside a few nights ago at only 8 p.m., two twenty-year-old kids sat on the cement sidewalk by the Troubadour box office like they’d been there for a while. The box office was closed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “We’re waiting for it to open,” the girl said.

  “To buy tickets?”

  “To see the Pages,” she said. “And we’re first in line.”

  I’ve never heard of the Pages, but by 8:45 the line was halfway to Doheny, four deep. From outside, the Troubadour, as usual, looked like its mild-mannered self located on the wrong side of Doheny Drive. Lots of silver Porsches, pastel Cadillacs, limos, and beat-up vans from West L.A. wait as—even now—you can hear Jim Morrison’s lullabies of fire in the AM air. Inside in the bar, anything might happen—a beast in the jungle. Back at the Tropicana it’s mostly punk now. Ahead, God knows, the future—checkered with amazing grace —will always belong to unknowns.

  “. . . Was blind but now I see.”

  Rolling Stone

  August 23, 1979

  A CALIFORNIAN LOOKS AT NEW YORK

  “LADY, with that hat,” he said, “you gotta be from California.”

  The hat wasn’t that different from lots of hats on the streets of New York. It was one of those little crocheted coffee-with-cream-colored hats; only on the part next to the brim, I’d pinned these silk flowers from the dime store which looked exactly like bougainvillaea. Anyway, he must have meant that only a Californian would go around in a city already ablaze with color with flowers pinned to her hat against the mere terror of trying to get a cab.

  “Oh, please come,” my friend Sarah had said, “The leaves . . .”

  Everyone said that the six weeks I’d be in New York—from the end of October to the first week in December—were the best ones to be on the East Coast.

  “You’ll be able to see the fall,” they all said.

  “But still,” I said, “New York.”

  “But don’t you like New York. It’s so exciting!”

  And I’d be able to see all my friends and finish the grisly last details on my book and meet all these people in New York who run everything and find out how to write for television.

  Writers have been hired to go out to the coast and work on unlikely projects since before anyone was born but it was always the West Coast they went out to, not the East Coast as I was. I’d been asked to come to New York to work on a TV play about New York models. The reason this was unlikely was that I knew nothing about New York models and had only gone along with the project in the first place because it sounded like so much fun who could resist.

  Plus I’d be able to see Sarah, my best friend, and she had invited me to stay with her for a few days up in Connecticut before New York.

  And so there we were, Sarah and I, driving through blurry blazes of leaves of crimson, marigold, and blood rust, past stately Henry James mansions with low stone fences. We sat together on a boat pier jutting into a bay where sailboats in the distance looked so crisp in the fall air that the perspective seemed out of one of those Renaissance architectural drawings where a few stray people linger
in the foreground. It hardly took us any time, in this illumination of leaves and horizons, to get back into our old ways of spending hours together without speech.

  On our way back to Sarah’s house in the car, we drove past heaps of raked-up leaves.

  “Would you like to jump in the leaves?” she asked.

  “Jump in the leaves?” I asked.

  “Oh, I forgot,” she said, “you didn’t grow up here. Whenever I fall in the leaves now, it brings back everything—my whole childhood.”

  In the sky were those Kennedy clouds—little white wispy ones which they surely must have had at Hyannis Port and which there never will be in California.

  Sarah and I took the train into the city together from Greenwich and passed miles and miles of more gorgeous leaves until at last the train was flying above Harlem and I knew we weren’t in Kansas (which is a lot like L.A., people complain) anymore. It was New York full blast from then on and the last I remember of peace and quiet.

  The park, Central Park, was not quite as ablaze with color as Connecticut had been. It must take something out of the leaves to have to contend with being stared at every daylight hour by the hungry eyes of people determined to get their money’s worth out of fall. In New York, they make a great issue out of something they call the Exhilaration of the Seasons and here one was. So the leaves had better be good. The leaves in Central Park looked drained and numb with overwork; however, they performed valiantly and did not simply drop off all at once into a swooned faint as I would have.

  For a long time, I felt that the “energy” of New York was not for me because it was all I could do to buck death crossing the street going to and from the office. I didn’t even work at an office, really; because it seems that when you write TV plays, in the beginning you never actually do anything until you’ve gotten “the feel” of things. This meant I slept.