Book of the week
Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik (Scribner, $37)
Frankly, I’d never heard of Eve Babitz, the ‘‘louche, wayward, headlong, hidden genius of Los Angeles’’, and was (am still) willing to believe she was wholly an invention of Lili Anolik.
Babitz, we are informed this dazzling book, is the author of Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days,
Fast Company (1977), which Anolik describes as ‘‘classical yet audacious, sublime yet offhand’’.
Everything about her sounds magnificently improbable. Babitz
was the godchild of Igor Stravinsky and an extra in The Godfather Part
II, for example. She ate muffins with Andy Warhol and drank chartreuse with Salvador Dali. Babitz knew Steve Martin, and encouraged him to wear a white suit. She listened to Dennis Hopper droning on about his screenplay –
Easy Rider. In 1963, she was photographed nude, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. Babitz had an affair with Jim Morrison, who still knew ‘‘in his worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out’’.
Sex does loom large in
Hollywood’s Eve, as it is part of the ‘‘trashy-profound glamour’’ of
California, with its mix of desire, volatility and spectacle, an endless chain of dangerous liaisons, culminating in the Sharon Tate massacre. ‘‘It was Eve’s friend, Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day, who was the intended victim.’’ Eve had also lived with one of the Manson gang ‘‘for a week in 1964’’. Another of her flatmates, most likely less psychotic, was the person who ghosted Jane Fonda’s pregnancy workout book.
Babitz, apparently, both revered matrimony and didn’t take it seriously. ‘‘My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster,’’ she declared. She had affairs with the electric violinist from The Mamas and the Papas, Brian Hutton, and Harrison Ford – before he was an actor. Apparently, Ford was capable of sleeping with nine people a day. ‘‘Warren Beatty could only do six.’’
It was part of the LA charm to succumb to men and women whose erotic allure was ‘‘so powerful it was a black hole’’. In her writings, Babitz was always drawn, says Anolik, to suicides, homicide victims and those who’d endured brutal reversals of fortune. One such was Eve herself, who gained weight, acquired a puffy no-sun pallor and consumed heaps of Quaaludes, Mogadons, LSD, mescaline ‘‘or mushrooms if it was a nice day’’.
In 1997, driving home under the influence, she struck a match, fumbled, dropped the cigarette, and was engulfed in flames. Babitz suffered third degree burns and spent six weeks in intensive care. Harrison Ford and Steve Martin covered the medical bills.
Lawyers (unfairly) sued the dress company. Babitz received a settlement of US$700,000, plus $2000 a month for life – with which she purchased a modest condo in West Hollywood. (She also packed in writing.) It is here that Anolik tracked her down, finding the former beauty ‘‘a ruin and gorgon’’, a ‘‘wizened crone’’.
Today, aged 76, and still a spinster, Babitz is unkempt and taciturn, refusing to engage in dialogue and proof, argues Anolik, that ‘‘an artist must be wilful, selfish, ruthless, calculating, egoistic’’. Maybe Babitz is just obnoxious – as a child she made attempts to kill her own sister, who survived to have sex with Ringo Starr in a cupboard. On the other hand, why should any writer cooperate with biographical intruders? When a professor at the University of Nevada got in touch to see if Babitz would address his class, her reply was not what he’d hoped. ‘‘She told me to go f... myself.’’ I do applaud her for that.