I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  I couldn’t be mean to him. If the phone rang at night and there was a long pause after I said hello, I knew it was Jim. He and I had a lot of ESP in some kind of laser-twisted, wish-fulfillment kind of way. I always wished he were there, and every so often, he zoomed in.

  “The thing that really made people mad at him,” my sister reminds me, “was that he drank. And it wasn’t cool to drink in those days.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “he did drink.”

  Of course, I drank, but I tried to keep my drinking within the psychedelia-prescribed boundaries of okayness. I drank Dos Equis, wine, and tequila. Jim drank Scotch.

  Scotches.

  Adults drank and got drunk and were uncool. I myself drank, got drunk, and was uncool. But I myself didn’t drink, get drunk, and become so uncool I flashed an audience in the South. I myself didn’t drink, get drunk, and then jump out of windows, get busted, stick my fist through plate glass, show up three days late for an interview with Joan Didion from Life magazine, drunk, unshaven, and throwing lit matches in her lap.

  But Jim did.

  Jim drank, got drunk, and woke up bloated and miserable and had to apologize and say he loved you, the alcoholic’s ancient saving grace. Jim drank and got drunk and then was so uncool he had to walk home.

  I never saw him drive—he was always on foot in L.A. He didn’t dare drive himself anywhere. He knew in his worst blackouts not to drive. Just as I knew in my worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out.

  Jim drank, got drunk, and wanted to be shown the way to the Next Whiskey Bar. Whereas the Rolling Stones were ripping off Otis and Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry, and the cool and hip Buffalo Springfield were riffling through Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams with folkie touches or else trying to achieve soul, Jim was ripping off Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and Lawrence Durrell. While the Rolling Stones were making it cool to be black and folk rockers were making it cool to be white trash, Jim was making it cool to be a poet. If Jim had lived in another era, he would have had a schoolteacher wife to support him while he sat home writing “brilliant” poetry.

  One night I was in the bungalow of Ahmet Ertegun (this was when I wised up and quit aiming at rock stars and went for record-company presidents instead—but cool ones, not Clive Davis). It was the night of the 1971 moon landing, and when I came in wearing my divine little black velvet dress, my tan, my blond art-nouveau hair, and my one pair of high heels I used for whenever Ahmet was in town, who should be sitting in front of the TV watching the moon landing but Jim, a Scotch and Coke (no ice) in his hand.

  Ahmet proceeded to tell a rather gross story about midgets in India, and when he was through, Jim rose to his feet and bellowed, “You think you’re going to win, don’t you?! Well, you’re not, you’re not going to win. We’re going to win, us—the artists. Not you capitalist pigs!”

  You could have heard a pin drop in this roomful of Ahmet’s fashionable friends, architects from France, artists, English lords, W-type women. Of course, Ahmet was a capitalist pig, but still, he did write some Drifters lyrics and produce records and his acts sang in tune. Anyway, everybody was silent (except for the moon-landing reporter on the TV) until I stood up and heard myself say, “But Ahmet is an artist, Jim!”

  I became so embarrassed by how uncool I was, I ran down the hallway and into the bathroom, where I stood looking at myself in the mirror and wondering why I didn’t get married and move to Orange County and what was I doing there.

  There was a knock on the door.

  I opened it and Jim came in and shut the door behind him.

  “You know,” he said, staring straight into my eyes, “I’ve always loved you.”

  Later that night he came back and apologized to Ahmet. But it was too late; by then he was too fat to get away with it. The people who were there refused to remember that it had happened. It was one of those tricky nights when Ahmet was trying to make up his mind whether he was going to seduce Jim away from Elektra Records (whose contract was nearly up). Ahmet had lured Mick away from his label the year before. Ahmet bespoke elegance, Côte d’Azur loafers with no socks, Bentleys and Rolls-Royces. Ahmet knew everybody. Jac Holzman of Elektra was an awkward bumpkin compared with Ahmet. Jac was a Virgo, Ahmet the world’s most sophisticated Leo. Ahmet had Magrittes in his living room in New York, his wife was on the Ten Best Dressed list, he’d been everywhere, done everything, and spoke all these languages. Jac liked camping.

  Of course, today Ahmet might deny this was going on, but at that time Ahmet never saw a rock star who made money whom he didn’t want. Especially if he could sing in tune. Jim might also have denied anything was going on, or maybe he did notice he was being seduced, maybe that’s why he was on about the capitalist pigs not winning. But then, Jim was drunk and uncool, so maybe what he said wasn’t about anything. That’s the thing with alcoholics: Their resentments are a condition of their disease and not really political at all. A condition of their allergy to alcohol—and allergies mean if you’re allergic to strawberries and eat them, you break out in hives. If Jim drank Scotch, he broke out in fuckups.

  But as long as Jim was on foot in L.A.—as long as he was signed to Elektra and in a world where if he fell, it would be into the arms of emergency rooms or girls who knew and loved him—he was, if not OK, at least not dead. There was always somebody around who would break down the door. He could never get away with killing himself in L.A.

  •

  Someone in Paris told me that when she met Jim at a party after he had moved there, he looked into her face and said, “Would you mind scratching my back? It itches.” Her arm went around him, their bodies facing as she scratched. Then Jim said, “You know what? I can’t feel a thing.” Which was really humiliating to her, since having your arm around someone who says he can’t feel it is . . . well, it sounds like one of Pamela’s tricks.

  Jim burned his bridges in Paris. He got fatter and fatter, drank more and more, sampled Pamela’s heroin, and piled up suicide notes on a table in their rooms. Since Jim had rheumatic fever in his youth, his heart was not in condition for what he did to it there—combining insult with fuckups until finally one day Pamela came into the bathroom and Jim wasn’t kidding.

  She pulled him out of the tub and there she was—stuck in Paris in early July, forced to put him into a too-small coffin wearing a too-large suit. (Since no one in those days had suits, she had to buy one for him. She didn’t know his size.)

  Pamela told me she fled to Morocco with an eighteen-year-old French count, a junkie who also OD’d on her and died. And then, having worn out her stay abroad, she returned to the West Coast and sued for her share of Jim’s estate until she got it and then, since three years had passed and she was now the same age Jim was when he died, she, too, OD’d and died.

  She left behind a VW Bug, two fur coats, and Sage, Jim’s dog. A quarter of the group’s estate was split between her family and his, and her father saved Jim’s “poems” and put them in a safe place in Orange County. The wonderful Julia Densmore Negron, who had divorced the drummer, John, was given royalties as a settlement because, as she said, “By 1971 they were worth practically nothing. But they’ve gone up more than 1,500 percent in the past eleven years.” Since she was only married to John during the last two years of the Doors, when their records didn’t sell much anyway, sales must have really gone up, but why?

  Because Francis Ford Coppola used the song “The End” to make Jim a star in Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979. And now Vietnam’s about to do it for Jim again.

  •

  If, in the sixties, you were white and political and had noblesse oblige drummed into you (Yale’s big selling point), you might have gone to Vietnam as a soldier, as Oliver Stone did, so you could come home and write a book the way Kennedy did and then be elected president.

  Being Kennedy was not entirely uncool, but I knew a guy who went to Yale and then officer school at Annapolis and then Guam and then a ship in the harbor at
Saigon (if it has a harbor, I don’t know; it was someplace with a harbor). And all he did there was drink, and when he got home and went into seclusion to write his book like Kennedy, he couldn’t write it. It was one thing being a World War II hero and writing a book. In Vietnam there weren’t any heroes.

  In Salvador (one of the last Oliver Stone movies I’m ever going to see), he created two sleazeballs who can’t handle women, who are so incapable of having a real life in a real place that they have to slop down to hell, where they are the richest and most powerful people around. And still these guys manage to make victims out of themselves. Stone’s heroes always wind up as victims, no matter how sleazy they are.

  It has been rumored around L.A. that Oliver Stone is asking everyone in connection with the Doors movie if Jim was impotent, and it makes you think Oliver Stone doesn’t know much about Jim’s main disease. You’d think he’d at least read up on the symptoms that show up in a person who takes depressants as a cure for depression. Taking Seconal and Tuinal and drinking brandy will bring your sex life to a grinding halt.

  But what I want to know about Oliver Stone is not whether he can get it up or not, but why anyone in the sixties would join the army, would go to Vietnam and become part of the war and murder and atrocity, when the action for Real Men was on Sunset Strip, the Lower East Side, and in San Francisco. Why did he join them, and why is he now in love with our Jim?

  The thing is, we in Los Angeles have always been willing to give a lot of slack for looks—for beauty—but Oliver Stone doesn’t have any. He doesn’t even like it. His movies are always about horrible men doing awful stuff, horrible men who are too far into their vileness to look beautiful. It’s as though everything he’s done is against the very premise of looks; he can’t even show Daryl Hannah and understand what she’s about. His idea of a good thing is a man bellowing about how being stupid is not that bad. (But it is.)

  If being stupid is not that bad, then Jim’s poetry would be OK, but it’s not. Fortunately Jim had looks.

  Maybe like Jim’s other nerdy fans, Oliver Stone really believes that Jim was “serious” about breaking on through to the other side. But what does that mean—death, the way it sounds? It meant death to Jim personally, if what Pamela told her neighbor Diane Gardiner is to be believed, if he really died in Paris, his suicide note against a lamp, “Last Words, Last Words, Out.”

  By the time Jim left L.A., everyone thought he was a fool; he was fat, getting fatter, and even his fans were unwilling to look at his cock. He didn’t have enough ideas in his head to keep people interested any longer.

  Underneath his mask, he was dead.

  But then, by 1971, who wasn’t?

  I certainly had washed ashore, without illusions. Everyone was afraid of Manson (Jim looked like him in his obit picture in the Los Angeles Times), acid had suffered a defeat, and cocaine was up for a long, ugly ride. Until Jim died, I had made a living doing album covers—psychedelic valentines for groups I loved, like Buffalo Springfield. I was in France in 1962 when Marilyn Monroe died, and now Jim was in France, dead, and I was nearly twenty-eight, unmarried, no future, no going forth in glory, only waking up at 3 a.m. with free-floating anxiety (which someone said was “the only thing floating around free anymore”).

  Someone said the sixties was drugs and the seventies was sex, but for me the seventies was staying home.

  It was a time when I began to write for a living, and though I never wrote movies, they began seeming not that bad to me. Actors suddenly became OK (at least from afar). I began running into women who kept Jim alive—as did I—because something about him began seeming great compared with everything else that was going on. He may have been a film-school poet, but at least he wasn’t disco.

  People began trying to make a movie about Jim, and everyone I ran into who tried either died or wound up in AA. They wanted . . . John Travolta! Casting anyone to play Jim was just totally ridiculous to me.

  My incredibly beautiful neighbor, Enid Karl, had two children by Donovan in the sixties, and their son, also Donovan, worked as an extra in the Doors movie (the daughter, Ione Skye, is an actress, too, but she was in a play in New York during the filming). The experience left Donovan thrilled, excited, and completely on Oliver Stone’s side. (Everyone I talked to who worked on the movie—wardrobe women, actors—was on Oliver Stone’s side. Le tout L.A.)

  “In the first scene at the Whisky, I played my father—because I asked. There were four hundred extras, but I got to sit in front and wear a caftan like my father wore. I thought I was going to end up lost in the crowd with an AD in front of me and not in the movie, but Oliver saw me and called out from the stage, ‘Donovan! Donovan!’ and suddenly they put me in the front row.”

  Then they gave Donovan a blond wig to wear as an extra in the Ray Manzarek wedding scene, and once he added muttonchops and a mustache he looked so much like Ray’s brother that they let him sit with the wedding party.

  “The extras were all too young to have been around in the sixties,” young Donovan reports, “but really, it felt like everyone loved the Doors, and it was a happening. You didn’t feel you were on a movie set.”

  I heard that once shooting began, Val Kilmer sent around a memo demanding that no one speak to him except as Jim. And that no one was allowed to come within ten feet of him. Plus, he wore a sweatshirt with a hood so he could hide his face. Not at all like Jim, who was all things to all people, like Marilyn, but how else can a boy stay in character if he’s not actually Jim? (When Dustin Hoffman arrived on the set of Marathon Man looking worn and exhausted because he had deliberately avoided sleep for two nights, Laurence Olivier remarked, “Dear boy, you look absolutely awful. Why don’t you try acting? It’s so much easier.”)

  According to everyone, Val Kilmer is supposed to have gotten Jim’s looks exactly right, but what can Val Kilmer know of having been fat all of his life and suddenly one summer taking so much LSD and waking up a prince? Val Kilmer has always been a prince, so he can’t have the glow; when you’ve never been a mud lark it’s just not the same. And people these days, they don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to fuck every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that—back when rock and roll was in flower and movies were hopelessly square. And we were all so young.

  Esquire

  March 1991

  I WAS A NAKED PAWN FOR ART

  “HIS POSITION was extraordinary,” my wonderful friend Walter Hopps informed me. Walter was the One, when it came to all this—long ago, when hardly anyone knew—who knew. “One way to look at it—these things are never set in granite—is that Picasso and Matisse fulfilled the dream of the nineteenth century, and the two artists who hold the really extreme positions unique to our time are Duchamp and Mondrian. Art for the mind and not for the eye. The irony is, Duchamp did so many beautiful things. But not just stuff you decorate walls with. His great contribution to art was elsewhere.”

  Meaning that in the nineteenth century a urinal could only say—if it could say anything—“I’m a urinal.” But after Marcel, a urinal could also say, “I look like a urinal, but Marcel says I’m art.”

  “In other words,” Walter may or may not have ended, “Duchamp playing chess with a nude in a photograph may be art.”

  Of course, if you’re the nude, being “art” seems beside the point. At least with the Naked Maja, you could be airbrushed and posterity would think of you as perfect, whereas on that day, sitting naked in the museum, having to play chess with someone who hardly spoke English and was so polite he pretended that the reason he’d come was to play chess—well. And afterward, when the photograph began showing up on things like posters for the Museum of Modern Art, and Nude Descending a Staircase became almost interchangeable with Nude Playing Chess, and Duchamp being so immortal, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be identified. Maybe it would be better to be “and friend.”

  On the other hand, if they’d asked anyone else—or if I’d chi
ckened out and some other woman was immortalized—then, hmmph. . . . Recently, when a woman called and said she was doing a book on Duchamp on the West Coast and could she please use that picture, I said, “You’re not going to use it on the cover, are you?” But when I found out the cover photo was to be of Marcel alone, I felt insulted. Mixed emotions hound me after nearly thirty years of mixed emotions. I want to be on the cover, immortal, but I don’t want anyone knowing it’s me. Except my friends and people who like it.

  Otherwise, I’ll just be “and friend.” Anyone who thinks the nude should have been thinner, or in any way different—to them, I’ll be a floating image of “elsewhere.”

  Immortality or no.

  •

  In the 1913 Armory Show in New York, there was a scandal over Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. If you look at that picture today, you might ask yourself—Pourquoi? It’s not as though it’s a photograph or anything naked you could see. It was so diffracted and cubistic, who could tell? Maybe it was a scandal because people had to take it on faith that there was anything there at all besides olive-green, beige, and black corners that may or may not have been a staircase. That painting, however, made Duchamp famous and laid the way clear for twentieth-century art to be not what it seemed.

  The interesting thing about that painting is that it was bought (for $350 or so) not by some hip New Yorker but rather by a print dealer in San Francisco, who put it in his office as a publicity stunt.

  In Hollywood, there was a genuine collector couple, Walter and Louise Arensberg, who amassed Duchamp works as though Los Angeles were a totally cultivated city where you’d expect people to know what was happening artwise in the twentieth century—like Gertrude Stein and her brother, who knew what was what practically before anything was anything. Only the Steins were in Paris, where art was in the air, whereas the Arensbergs were in Los Angeles, where if you could draw, you’d be good if you were Walt Disney.