Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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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. Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine. Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are, regardless of who she wants them to be...In Eve's Hollywood, she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the wide-angle perspective of a woman much older -- and she's only in her 20s." --Holly Brubach, The New York Times

Eve mentioned in an interview that during this time she had started taking birth control and for some reason her breasts just exploded in size. She thought they were magnificent and should be immortalized. She also hoped that by participating in the photograph that she would be making her married boyfriend, Walter Hopps (31), who was the director of the Pasadena Art Museum jealous. From Aces Butler, a boy with so much attitude he could rattle the adults trying to educate him, Babitz learned to stop using a can of hairspray a day to preserve her roller-shaped curls and look like the popular girls. Blunt in stating his opinions, “The scorn behind his straw-colored eyes was sabotage plain and simple” to his teachers, Babitz writes. “His existence was scorching the hallways and traditions as he shrugged and glanced at the floor that first day he lowered himself into the last row in algebra.” There isn’t a damn thing wrong with this loosely connected series of memoirs masquerading as essays on Hollywood if you enjoy reading this type of thing. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to. She wasn’t thanking me, and I don’t think I’d have been able to bear it if she was. (Eve didn’t do humbug emotions like gratitude.) There was a half smile on her face, and she was looking at me intently, something I couldn’t recall her ever having done before. I felt the need to speak, only I couldn’t think what to say. Couldn’t think, couldn’t think. It was the fall of 1963 now. More than a year had passed since Eve’s adventures abroad. She had a new boyfriend, Walter Hopps, but the same problem: he was married. Hopps, 31, then curator of the Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, had neglected to invite her to the private party for the show’s October 7 opening because his wife had unexpectedly returned to town. (Too bad. It was some party, Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, and Beatrice Wood, the inspiration for Catherine in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, all dressed to the nines and sipping pink champagne at the ultra-swellegant Hotel Green.) Said Eve, “I decided that if I could ever wreak any havoc in [Walter’s] life I would.”

Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine. Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are, regardless of who she wants them to be . . . In Eve’s Hollywood, she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the wide-angle perspective of a woman much older—and she’s only in her 20s.”—Holly Brubach, The New York Times And now for what Eve would call her “groupie-adventuress” phase. It could be argued that, by the time of the photograph with Duchamp, she was well into it. After all, she’d already cut quite a swath through the cute young hunk L.A. artists: Kenny Price, Ed Ruscha, Ron Cooper. But post-photograph, she went on a tear that lasted nearly half a decade. Said Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stones Records, “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.” 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

Books are a major part of her life. She states in this book that Dombey and Sons actually saved her life when her depression was putting her on the verge of suicide. She loaths Nathaniel West because she feels he paints a bleak and harsh view of Los Angeles without giving the city credit for what makes it great. She doesn’t apologize for the culture in California, but she does share some very fond memories of why she finds the city so amazing and so undervalued. Like an epic poem, Eve’s Hollywood draws the reader into a lilting, hypnotic cadence. Yes, Babitz meanders through the alleyways of consciousness at times. But there’s something beautiful, sad and maybe even a little bit scary in each of these alleys. Babitz is our tour guide on a glamorous, decadent path through an era of Hollywood that may or may not have really existed as it is told – but who cares? Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book.” By way of example, my eyes glazed over as Babitz dwelled on her time at Hollywood High, but I was alternatively entertained by her tale of going to New York, hanging out with Timothy Leary, and getting busted by the cops, and beguiled by a short paean to her love for Lawrence of Arabia. Meanwhile, her fierce defense of Los Angeles is almost touching. The Choke” was one of my favorite stories. Here Eve recounts her impressions, as a 13-year-old middle-class Jewish girl, of the mysterious and seemingly glamorous “Pachucos” in her school (defined as anyone with a Mexican accent). Her fascination with this other culture within her high school, so foreign, so dangerous, had its origins in her love for anything stylish, and she found their style irresistible. In her innocence, she believes their lives are “real” because they carry knives, steal, fight and get expelled. But the real draw was their clothing and The Choke, a dance that was “enraged anarchy posed in mythical classicism,” and “so abandoned in elegance it made you limp with envy. ” Her several-paragraph description of the details and nuances of this dance made me hear the music and feel the attitude of these dancers who could conjure up the precision and drama of a bull-fight. Eve learns about racial discrimination here too, when the “washed-out” white girls in their cotton circle skirts, though vastly inferior, would win dance contests, ”no matter how obvious it was.”She writes about her days at Le Conte Middle School in West Los Angeles admiring the Pachuco girls, expelled from dangerous inner city schools and sent to Le Conte’s mostly white, middle class halls to remove them from bad influences. Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating." --Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times 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.

Says Eve Babitz, “irresistible hybrid of boho intellectual and L.A. party girl” according to Vanity Fair. The year is 1972 and this is her first book, a collection of quasi-autobiographical essays. Those three sentences comprising the whole of a chapter called simply ‘Cary Grand’ are a good example of Babitz’s writing (witty, insinuating and intimate – almost conspiratorial) and of the way she shares names and places, moods and yearnings, as though we are all members of the same group of insiders. Babitz lived for a year in New York and for a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was her home and inspiration, a playground for self-invention, a “gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio”. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. 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

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Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm . . . Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and an ingénue in the same breath . . . Babitz takes the reader on travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs. Eve, on the other hand—curvy, sunny, resilient to the point of indestructibility, only gets headaches when she gets hangovers—sees the city as “a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio,” loving it for its “spaces between the words, [its] blandness and the complete absence of push.” Eve is the true spirit of L.A., the pleasure principle incarnate. And, as with Didion, her style is reflective of her sensibility: giddy, gushing, conversational, infused with a kind of hip, happy innocence, sentences that run on and on and on, unable to catch their breath. These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting--like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it's fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.