I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  This was definitely the place. And those were really the days. At least I, in my twenty-two-year-old wisdom, didn’t see how things could be improved upon. In fact, it’s been mostly downhill from there as far as Great Scenes are concerned. (Although, at the time, I did think the Velvets were too loud and not cute enough. Not as cute as Jim Morrison, anyway.)

  Most people think that in the sixties Andy was one way, in the seventies another, and by the eighties he was purely a party-mad businessman. However, when I knew Andy in the early sixties he was already so party-mad that people who were serious about art were worried that a hustler had tricked the poor public into thinking he was an artist when all he was, was a manipulative genius able to marry fine art with popular culture. I thought all the people who thought Andy wasn’t an artist were dragging their feet.

  In fact, if you asked me, what had passed for art for the twenty years previous to Andy—that portentously tormented abstract expressionism, that Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell stuff, was a lot harder to swallow than a nice can of soup where you could look at the picture and know where you stood. And if Andy chose to make a nightly career out of hanging around Max’s Kansas City and going to parties and being surrounded by the most emaciated and gorgeous cheekbones of his generation—who could begrudge him that?

  Well, if my experience is any indication, Chuck Workman has given a lot of people some very happy moments by giving them the opportunity to think about their lives with Andy. He had the knack for being around when you were having a great time (even if having a great time meant a two-day crying jag).

  There’s a line from Thomas Hardy about how most men at the end of their lives discover that rather than finding they’ve gone forth in glory, it’s all they can do to retire without shame. Andy went forth in glory, and the great thing about being a real artist is that even your bullet-hole scar can be an Annie Leibovitz poster.

  Movieline

  November 1989

  BLAME IT ON THE VCRs

  WHEN I was a madwoman in the 1960s, everyone I knew was getting laid like crazy. Everyone was wild for sex: they heard the phrase free love and ran amok across the land. Married men, married women, squares, hippies—everyone was on the prowl, cruising for the Answer in the form of sex. Of course, if you found the Answer, you were stuck with it for all eternity, like being married, so the Answer would often change.

  In the meantime, the gay men and the feminists were in the background, girding their loins against the Farrah Fawcett spun-gold hair of the seventies, trying to ruin everything. And they succeeded. Yes, men were pigs, women were exploited—yet gay men were, well, out of the closet and staying out and up till three in the morning, having more fun than anyone else ever did in the history of mankind. They made straight people jealous. Buck Henry once told me that he used to pass those bars and really get mad because the gays were having so much more fun than the straights. What the gay guys seemed programmed to prove was that, if we thought the sixties were far-out, they really knew how to have a party. Andy Warhol and Truman Capote über alles. The gay scene had a sense of mad adventure, high gossip, bitter wit, and a determination to make people beautiful, glamorous, marvelous, fabulous. The feminists, meanwhile, were having none of it. The most they’d do was buy frames for their glasses at L.A. Eyeworks, once the eighties occurred. (In Cheap Chic, Fran Lebowitz says that if the way people look calls attention to their clothes, they are badly dressed.)

  Today the normal people who just wanted to get through life having children and going camping have discovered that being married means both partners have to work full-time at hard jobs that take every ounce of strength and don’t leave enough money—once the car insurance is paid—to go camping. And the peripheral women, women like me who were too neurotic to get married and have children and wanted only to stay young forever and fool around, have discovered that the available men are getting less and less interested in running amok with unbridled passion, even with women in their twenties. In fact, some of the twenty-year-old women I know never even have dates. And didn’t have any as teenagers.

  These days women are always telling me that “there are no men out there.” This is not a new idea: Cosmopolitan is based on that premise, and the magazine is now twenty-five years old. But I myself have noticed that there aren’t any men unless you go forage in the brush and drag them kicking and screaming into, say, a movie. But what’s really amazed me lately is the number of women I know who actually have “relationships” (i.e., boyfriends, husbands, locked-in lovers) who say, “But we haven’t had sex in, oh, three years.” Or, “We had sex twice two years ago but . . .”

  If you ask me, videos are what have put the damper on most people’s sex lives. People have all these incredible Glory of Western Civilization-type choices in the video stores, and they say to one another, “Oh, goody, I know what we’ll do Saturday night. We’ll watch the complete Godfather, parts one and two, and then we’ll watch all these Preston Sturges movies.” Their eyes are bigger than their stomachs—or some organ down there. It used to be that you’d go to a sexy movie on a thing called a “date” and come out totally inspired to go home to bed—your boyfriend with Kim Basinger, you with Mickey Rourke (or me with Mickey Rourke). But now Kim and Mickey are right there in the bedroom with you—because you’ve been too lazy to go see the movie and waited till it came out on video—and they’re too small to inspire anyone to do anything but go to sleep. Sex has to be really twisted for it to do any good on a small screen.

  For some reason I got the idea when I was growing up that the thing we should all be doing is having fun, but now it hardly surprises me when I learn that yet another of my women friends has packed up and left for Santa Fe, hitting the trail for the lure of cowboys and artists or other archetypes who are still supposedly interested in having fun. I can’t help teasing these poor girls, insisting that heading for the hills in pursuit of romance is ridiculous and reminding them that Santa Fe is the color of pancake makeup, which makes it very difficult to take seriously.

  Of course, after they get a load of what cowboys and artists are actually like, they come back older but wiser, which makes things even worse. Who needs more disillusioned people after all? Perhaps we are going to have to become dignified and resigned to a quieter, droopier time. Maybe we will all become like Henry James, eager to discover virtue, rather than vice, in situations and people.

  That, I suppose, will be a nice change. Or a change anyway. But not yet. Not me.

  Smart

  June 1990

  JIM MORRISON IS DEAD AND LIVING IN HOLLYWOOD

  J.D. SOUTHER once told me he spent his first years in L.A. learning how to stand. Jim knew how to stand from the start. He stood pigeon-toed, filled with poetry against a mike with that honky-tonk Berlin organ in the background, and sang about “another kiss.”

  And there is something to be said for singing in tune. Jim not only sang in tune, he sang intimately—as Doors producer Paul Rothchild once pointed out to me, “Jim was the greatest crooner since Bing Crosby.”

  He was Bing Crosby from hell.

  In those days, in the sixties, people in L.A. with romantic streaks who knew music went for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Paul Butterfield—and for clubs like the Troubadour and the Trip and the Ash Grove. The Whisky, where the Doors flourished, was the kind of place where the headliner would be Johnny Rivers, a white boy who covered Chuck Berry’s “Memphis.” By the sixties, white boys weren’t supposed to cover soul anymore, but at the Whisky it was still groovy. The Carpenters played the Whisky.

  At the Whisky, the bouncers were bouncers, the management was from New York City, and the women wore beehive hairdos long after it was cool.

  Rock groups who went to college and actually got degrees were not only uncool, they were unheard-of.

  Jim went to college and he graduated. My friend Judy Raphael, who went to film school, too, remembers Jim as this pudgy guy with a marine haircut who worked in the library at UCLA and
who was supposed to help her with her documentary term paper one night but ended up talking drunkenly and endlessly about Oedipus, which meant she had to take the course over that summer.

  The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. I dragged Jim into bed before they’d decided on the name and tried to dissuade him; it was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. I mean, The Doors of Perception . . . what an Ojai-geeky-too-L.A.-pottery-glazer kind of uncool idea.

  The Beatles were desperate criminals compared with them. The Beatles only had one leg to stand on—rock and roll. The Doors, though, were film majors. Being a film major in the sixties was hopelessly square. If you wanted to make a movie, even if you went to UCLA like Francis Coppola and then to the Roger Corman School of Never Lost a Dime Pictures, you still weren’t cool. Even Jack Nicholson wasn’t cool in the sixties. Being an actor wasn’t cool in the sixties, because all movies did was get everything all wrong. At least until Easy Rider, being in the movie business was a horrible thing to admit.

  Of course, Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Oliver Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn’t understand that in the sixties real men were not soldiers. A real man was Mick Jagger in Performance, in bed with two women, wearing eye makeup and kimonos. Or John Phillip Law, with wings, in Barbarella. Of course, Bob Dylan was even cooler than Mick Jagger, so cool he couldn’t sing. He didn’t bother, and he was so skinny, with those narrow little East Coast shoulders and that face. And he was mean.

  •

  Like everyone back then, Jim hated his parents, hated home, hated it all. If he could have gotten away with it, Jim would have been an orphan. He tried lying about having parents, creating his life anew—about what you’d expect from someone who’d lost thirty pounds in one summer (the summer of ’65, from taking drugs instead of eating, and hanging out on the Venice boardwalk). I mean, he awoke one morning and was so cute, how could he have parents?

  According to some health statistics I recently heard about, the fifties was the decade when the American diet contained its highest percentage of fat—over 50 percent. And these fifties children, over-fed, repressed, and indignant, waited in the wings, lurking and praying to get big enough to get the fuck out. Jim Morrison had it worse than a lot of kids. He was fat. And his father was a naval officer.

  Then the ultimate dream of everyone who weighs too much and gets thin happened to Jim. He lost the weight and turned into the Prince.

  Into John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

  Into Mick.

  I met Jim early in ’66, when he’d just lost the weight and wore a suit made of gray suede, lashed together at the seams with lanyards, and no shirt. It was the best outfit he ever had, and he was so cute that no woman was safe. He was twenty-two, a few months younger than I.

  He had the freshness and humility of someone who had been fat all his life and was now suddenly a morning glory.

  I met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes, even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing. This great event took place not at the Whisky but at a now-forgotten club just down on the Strip called the London Fog, the first bar there the Doors played. And there were only about seven people in the room anyway.

  “Take me home,” I demurely offered when we were introduced. “You’re not really going to stay here playing, are you?”

  “Uh,” he replied, “we don’t play. We work.”

  I suggested the next night. And that’s when it happened (finally!). Naturally, I dressed my part—black eye makeup out to there, a miniskirt up to here—but the truth was that I did, in fact, have parents. On our first date I even confessed to Jim that my ridiculous father was on that very night playing violin in a program of music by Palestrina. To my tremendous dismay, Jim immediately expressed his desire to drive to Pasadena. I packed him into my ’52 Cadillac and off we went, but by intermission I had had enough. He whined that he wanted to stay for the second half, but I put my foot down.

  “You just can’t be here,” I said. “Listening to this. You just can’t.”

  Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes. His skin was so white, his muscles were so pure, he was so innocent. The last time I saw him with no shirt on, at a party up in Coldwater, his body was so ravaged by scars, toxins, and puffy pudginess, I wanted to kill him.

  •

  He never really stopped being a fat kid. He used to suggest, “Let’s go to Ships and get blueberry pancakes with blueberry syrup.”

  “It’s so fattening,” I would point out.

  I mean, really.

  Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. It was his mouth, of course, which was so edible. Just so long as he didn’t smile and reveal his too-Irish teeth, just so long as he kept his James Dean smolder, it worked. But it takes a lot of downers to achieve that on a full-time basis. And no fat.

  Just so long as he stood there in the leather clothes my sister had hand-made for him, the ones lined with turquoise satin, trimmed with snakeskin and lizard. The black leather pants, the leather jackets. My sister never thought Jim was that cute, but then my sister was one of his girlfriend Pamela’s friends, and it was in her best interest to ignore Jim, even though, for a month, my sister and her boyfriend lived with Jim and Pamela, and it was almost impossible. “He was always a very dark presence in a room,” she said. “In fact, if you asked me today the feeling I got, I’d say it was of a person who was severely depressed. Clinically depressed.” She’s now a psychologist, so she knows.

  “He thought he was ugly,” she said. “He’d look at himself in the mirror trying on those clothes, but he hated looking at himself, because he thought he was ugly.”

  My sister and Pamela had to fight to persuade him to leave his hair long, because left to his own devices he’d get it cut preppy-short and break everyone’s heart.

  Even his voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash in a time when, if you were going to say words, they were to be ironic and a little off-center. Jim just blurted things the fuck out. My artist friends found him excruciating, too, but my movie friends (who were, by definition, out of it and behind the times and got everything all wrong) loved him. He said what they meant. They might not have understood Dylan—they thought he couldn’t sing—but in Hollywood they loved Jim.

  Jim as a sex object and the Doors as a group were two entirely different stories. The whole audience would put up with long, tortured silences and humiliation and just awful schmuck stuff Jim did during performances. He could get away with it because his audience was all college kids who thought the Doors were cool because they had lyrics you could understand about stuff they learned in Psychology 101 and Art History. The kids who liked the Doors were so misguided they thought “Crystal Ship” was for intellectuals.

  Jim as a sex object lasted for about two years.

  In fact, once he and Pamela became entangled in their fantastic killing struggle—once he finally found someone who, when he said, “Let’s drive over this cliff,” actually would—he became more of a death object than a sex object. Which was even sexier.

  •

  When Pamela Courson met Jim, he began putting his money where his mouth was. Whereas all he had previously brought to the moment was morbid romantic excess, he now had someone looking at him and saying, “Well, are you going to drive off this cliff, or what?”

  She was someone with red hair and a heart embroidered on her pants over the place her anus would be. He was a backdoor man, and Pamela was the door. Pamela was the cool one.

  Everything a nerd could possibly wish to be, Pamela was. She had guns, took heroin, and was fearless in every situation. Socially she didn’t care, emotionally she was shockproof, and as for her eating disorders—her idea of the diet to be on while Jim was in Miami going to court was ten days of heroin. Every tim
e she awoke she did some, so she just sort of slept through her fast. Once, when she did wake up, she went with some friends to the Beverly Hills Hotel see Ahmet Ertegun and fainted. Voilà, there she was back at UCLA, diagnosed as dying of malnutrition.

  Good old Pamela, what a sport.

  She would take Jim’s favorite vest and write FAG in giant letters on the back in india ink. She would go through Rodeo Drive’s Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, piling her arms higher and higher with more stuff, muttering under her breath, “He owes it to me, he owes it to me, he owes it to me.”

  Pamela was mean and she was cool. She liked to scare people. Pamela had control over Jim in real life. He made his audience suffer for that.

  And I mean, he was so cute, you would.

  Pamela looked sunny and sweet and cute—she had freckles and red hair and the greenest eyes and just the country-girl glow. It was hard to believe her purse was stuffed with Thorazine (that horrible drug they used to give acid freak-outs). She wore mauve, and large, soft, expensive suede boots and large shawls, but even her laugh was mean.

  She was so mean, she told Ray Manzarek (the worst nerd worldwide, known to his friends as Ray of the Desert) that Jim’s last words were, “Pam, are you out there?” even though he actually left a note. And she knew that the note would establish forever the literature-movie myth of Jim’s Lizard King image. Everyone hated Pam except Jim.

  A friend of mine once said, “You can say anything about a woman a man marries, but I’ll tell you one thing—it’s always his mother.”

  “Mother,” Jim sang, “I want to . . . aggghh.” Pamela was more than happy to supply the lip back: “Oh, you would, would you? Well, fuck you!”