The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
The improbable life of Eve Babitz
Roger Lewis on a dazzling, gossip-filled biography of the wayward genius who knew everyone in Seventies LA
FHOLLYWOOD’S EVE by Lili Anolik 277pp, Scribner, £8.99, ebook £7.99
rankly, 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 – which also looks like a made-up name, like John Shade or Charles Kinbote. For this dazzling book – biography or purported biography – does appear to be taking place in the land of Nabokovian metafiction, its pages aware of their own clever-clever construction and literariness – Babitz embodying and Anolik evoking “the fractured nature of modern life, the manic pace, the near-constant interruption”.
Not that I have seen actual copies, but Babitz, we are informed, is the author of Eve’s Hollywood (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), short stories and reminiscences Anolik describes as “classical yet audacious, sublime yet offhand,” with an air of bejewelled languor, like one of the ghoulish balls thrown by the Duchesse de Guermantes. The subject-matter, in these and other vignettes, was always autobiographically slanted, and what everything adds up to is an epic portrait of post-war California, where majestic mansions and hotels were torn down “to make way for monstrosities, bland and anonymous”. It is a place for socialites “too rich and bored to push their voice past their teeth,” and there are endless parties where “beautiful girls in harem costumes were holding gold trays, with perfectly rolled joints on them”. Eyes sting from the chlorine and the smog.
In this ambience, Babitz, the daughter of a studio musician, thrived as a “lewd angel”, drinking and snorting cocaine, fully believing in an existence with “no borders, no fences” and where the lonely hearts column in the local press printed the appeal: “Dominant iguana seeks submissive zebra”. Everything 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 Dalí. 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 in the nude at the Pasadena Art Museum, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. Babitz had an affair with Jim Morrison, “Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes”, who considerately 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. Everyone was having flings with Frank Sinatra and seemed to have been at school with the louche daughter of Lana Turner, who stabbed a mobster. Babitz had affairs with the electric violinist from the Mamas and the Papas, Brian Hutton, who directed Where Eagles Dare, and Harrison Ford – before he was an actor, when he was still an unreliable carpenter. Apparently, Ford was capable of sleeping with nine people a day. “Warren Beatty could only do six.”
It was part of the Los Angeles charm to succumb to men and women whose erotic allure was “so powerful it was a black hole, sucking up everything around it, including its possessor”. Marilyn Monroe was the chief example, but Babitz, in her books, noted the fates of high school prom queens, who burnt themselves up. In her writings, indeed, she was always drawn, says Anolik, to suicides, homicide victims and those who’d endured brutal reversals of fortune. And 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 with it, dropped the cigarette, and was engulfed in flames. Babitz suffered third degree burns and spent six weeks in intensive care. Harrison Ford
She was Stravinsky’s godchild, ate muffins with Warhol, drank chartreuse with Dalí
and Steve Martin covered the medical bills, which amounted to half a million dollars.
Lawyers (unfairly) sued the dress company, arguing there should have been a label stating “this garment may be flammable”. Babitz received a settlement of $700,000 (£565,000), plus $2,000 a month for life – the most money she’d ever seen, 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 as taciturn as an Asperger’s patient, refusing to engage in dialogue and proof, argues Anolik, that “an artist must be wilful, selfish, ruthless, calculating, egoistic”. Maybe it is just Babitz who is 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 be expected to be all smiles, co-operating with biographical intruders, traipsing around the literary festival circuit, speaking to students and book clubs? Not everyone can be Dame Hilary Mantel. 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.