Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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I was in LA almost every weekend. (hitched a ride from UC Berkeley to UCLA to visit Larry—a boyfriend of few years-who sadly died last year), and to visit my sister at the same time. What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Didion or Nathanael West . . . is that no matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast in pursuit of ‘movie dreams.'”—Steffie Nelson, The Los Angeles Review of Books

In 1971, Joan Didion passed a personal essay Babitz had written about Hollywood High to an editor at Rolling Stone. Babitz would be commissioned to write many magazine articles. Unlike Didion, she was appreciated less for her writing and more for her openness to discuss her social life. In 2014, a tribute in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik launched a revival that includes magazine profiles, Babitz's books reissued by the New York Review Books Classics, a biography by Anolik and a TV series in development at Hulu based on Babitz's memoirs. A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure… The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.”—Naomi Fry, New Republic Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating.”—Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times Since enjoying Eve and her book — I’ve already started listening to another: “Slow Days, Fast Company”…..Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating. Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate letter-writer of Louis XIV's time, transposed to the Chateau Marmont in the late 20th-Century--lunching, chatting, dressing, loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles." --Mollie Gregory, L.A. Times Babitz is not a gossip and if she were once a world class party girl, her adventures here remain relatively clean and sober. Her topics range from the mystique of violin players, the oddity of girls you went to high school with becoming film ingenues, the effect Marlon Brando had on her as a teenager (in Viva Zapata!), Xerox machines and the wonders of taquitos. In "The Landmark," she extols the virtues of small taco stands on Olvera Street and how if Janis Joplin had known about them, she wouldn't have overdosed alone in a nearby motel room.

As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with and better still, made herself felt in every encounter." --Daniel Bernardi, PopMatters

About the Author

Eve has not written a book since the fire. She did, however, have a new set of business cards printed up: It’s a testament to Babitz’ eye for a story that these essays aren’t dated. She continued writing into the 1980s and late 1990s. In 1997, she accidentally dropped a lit match onto a gauze skirt that caught fire and left her with life-threatening, third-degree burns over more than half her body. So what’s her writing like? Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.

This “memoir” is filled with similar frustrations… who’s that? It’s all a flu-like bout of the worst simpering frustrations and L. A. turn-arounds and dead-ends covered in ivy and dead flower attempts at poetry. The young lady is simply dedicated to everything Southern California, a gauzy, wistful mist clouds her true vision and she settles on youthful memories of a Los Angeles of the 50s and early to mid 60s… pre-Manson. Except for that odd out of time portrayal of the young Gram Parsons and Keith Richards which would have occurred sometime in the late 60s - early 70s. I love what Eve brought to this book —- her life experiences growing up in Los Angeles - BEING HERSELF!! A journalist, party girl, bookworm, author, artist, muse by the time she hit thirty, Eve Babbitt had played all these roles”.

Success!

Look- this is a perfectly acceptable book for a sixteen year old girl to read. It might even offer inspiration for that young girl to become a writer herself. It just wasn’t for me. Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz . . . reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila . . . Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning'—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.

She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among other magazines and her books included Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. Some were called fiction, others non-fiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life – with only the names changed. Like the divine Marcel, Eve Babitz is here concerned with memory and consciousness. “Eve’s Hollywood” is a wide-ranging inventory of anecdotes that make up something like an autobiography of the early Eve, the Eve who grew up to be a near-ubiquitous figure on the Los Angeles cultural scene. And if you just snorted “ WHAT Los Angeles cultural scene?” this is a book you need to read, even more than you need to read “City of Quartz” or “City of Nets,” two other notable tomes on the same theme. While those two books make the case from the perspective of the philosopher and the historian, Babitz gets her cred from a boots-on-the-ground perspective that once found her playing chess nude with Marcel Duchamp. Which is one way of saying that Babitz’s explanation of Cultural L.A. is more fun than Mike Davis’ or Otto Friedrich’s, not to mention Joan Didion’s. Babitz skips around time with ease and writes with the airy, knowing offhandedness of Renata Adler's Jen Fain, except she eschews Manhattan sophistication in favor of a Hollywood unpretentiousness"--Alison Herman, Flavorwire Unfortunately, Eve Babitz is not writing for publication anymore. She had a horrible accident when ash from the cigar she was smoking set fire to her skirt, leaving her with third degree burns over half of her body. Because she didn’t have health insurance, people she had known as lovers, friends, and acquaintances all donated money to make sure she received the care she needed. I hope she does find the will to write again, one more book, a summation of a life of being almost famous.I went up to the SNL offices. John was giving me a tour, when a very sexy girl walks by. Tight jeans and a T-shirt, no bra, curly hair. "Oh my God, who is that?" And John says, "That's Rosie Shuster. That's Lorne's wife and Danny's girlfriend." Which is true. It was wild. Rosie's the one who coined the best line about Aykroyd. Danny had studied in a seminary to be a Jesuit priest the same time he was doing second story jobs in and around Ontario. Rosie's the one who said, "Danny's epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself." From that point on, Eve always took my calls, and I made them, several times a week, for years and years. The rapport that eluded us in person, where every encounter was abrupt, stilted, awkward, was, over the phone, effortless. The Sheik” is wonderful for its descriptions of the extraordinarily beautiful but dumb girls at Hollywood High who wielded enough power over students and teachers alike to throw things into chaos on a regular basis. “There were 20 of them who were unquestionably staggering and another 50 or so who were cause for alarm, or would have been in a more diluted atmosphere.” The beauty-as-power theme is a lesson learned, but not resented. It made life more interesting, and Eve is nothing if not an appreciator of beauty for its own sake. There are lovely moments too relating a teenager’s awareness of being in a special time and space during a SoCal summer: “. . . the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.” I love the rhythms of the last paragraph, a great example of Eve’s style that I enjoy so much.