Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something. She actually could act. It's quite a while since I read Rules of Civility and I would perhaps have enjoyed these stories about how Eve got on in Hollywood after she had left New York at the end of that book, if I'd read them earlier. I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. Just as he did for the New York City of 1938 in Rules of Civility, he paints a vibrant portrait of Tinsel Town in it's Golden Age.

And to L. Rust Hills for the ice cream story and the one about taking sides and anagrams. That Esquire is falling apart. Mine is Babe Vizet.

It is not absolutely necessary to have read RULES OF CIVILITY before reading EVE IN HOLLYWOOD, but I would suggest doing so. It not only removes some Spoilers, but it also provides side references that will cause the “knowing” among us to smile. Independent Eve was intriguing in Rules of Civility and when she headed on a whim to Los Angeles, it was her that Towles wanted Moto write about. So it was good to lestn where her restless spirit had taken her. Towles’ elegant writing is a celebration as usual.

The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Read more. Anything seemed possible – for art, that night,” she would remember. “Especially after all that red wine.” I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland.Following up on his impressive debut, Rules Of Civility, Amor Towles has written an excellent novella featuring one of the main characters from that novel, Evelyn Ross. The six delightful stories, told from six different perspectives, take Eve from that cross-country train trip to just before the snapping of that celebrity photograph. In between, the Reader meets some wonderful characters. They aren’t “wonderful” in the sense that they are all pleasant, but they are all vivid and quite memorable. (One even foreshadows A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW!)

A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said.

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.