Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary images of American modern art.”

Helpfully, the Vanity Fair article mentioned above had been written to coincide with the New York Review Books Classics reissue of Eve’s Hollywood, which had originally been published in 1972. Babitz, it seemed, was in the midst of a renaissance of sorts, a flared-out meteor being reframed as a Joan Didion counterpart. 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.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Polar Palace” is set in the local ice skating rink and is about the first time someone let the teenaged Eve know that it was okay to like what she liked, rather than what she was supposed to like. (I know 50-year-olds who still don’t get this concept.)

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This is a review of the audiobook edition of Eve Babitz’ legendary memoir, Eve’s Hollywood. It was very well read by Mia Barron, who bites off every word like Kirk Douglas in a shitty mood. I enjoyed Eve’s Hollywood is a well-written, artfully wrought time capsule that captures the smoky, surly LA nights as ’60s idealism gave way to ’70s excess. Sure, it’s a wee bit overblown and melodramatic in certain passages. But how the hell could anyone write about a period of such bacchanalian overindulgence without being a wee bit overblown and melodramatic? 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.” — Publishers Weekly If you enjoy reading rewrites of diary entries written by a precocious 16 year old and then rewritten by the author while in her twenties then this is your bowl of inanities.

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.” In 1964, photographer Julian Wasser photographed the 20-year-old Babitz in the buff playing chess with artist Marcel Duchamp in a gallery of the Pasadena Art Museum. The museum was exhibiting a retrospective of his work and Babitz was having an affair with the show’s curator, Walter Hopps, at the time. 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.

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EVE’S HOLLYWOOD, originally published in 1974, is a blend of fiction and memoir about the cultural scene of Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s. Her publisher reissued the book in 2010 and set off a resurgence of interest in her writing. She wrote of being driven home in her teens and kissed by an older man, Johnny Stompanato, who, in one of Hollywood’s most sensational scandals, was later murdered by the daughter of Lana Turner in what was ruled a justifiable homicide.