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Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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Bret Easton Ellis is a big fan of her subject matter and her style. She is writing about the mothers and fathers that spawned the generation that Ellis writes about in Less than Zero. Eve’s California generation was self-indulgent, self-absorbed, bored, too rich, too pretty, and self-destructive, but the children of the 1980s took those negative tendencies and expanded them into an art form of how to squander an infinite amount of opportunities.

The first time I came across Eve Babitz was in a 2015 Vanity Fair article dedicated to a famous 1973 photograph in which she was the subject. The picture in question, snapped by Julian Wasser, showed Babitz playing chess with the French painter Marcel Duchamp. The thing about this photograph – the reason it merited its own Vanity Fair piece – is that the two competitors are a study in contrasts. On one side of the table, almost forgotten, there is Duchamp, an older man, fully clothed, carefully studying the board. On the other side is Babitz, a young woman without a stitch of clothing anywhere on her body. She’s not even wearing a watch. 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. Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz."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 Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating. Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather. 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. After most of her work went out of print, she was praised in a 2014 Vanity Fair article by Anolik as an overlooked and unbowed genius. Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and other books were reissued, a well-regarded biography by Anolik was published in 2019 and Babitz was discovered by a generation of younger women, leading her to joke: “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.”

She knew Bobby Beausoeil who was a talented upcoming musician until he was recruited and “brainwashed” by Charles Manson. Bobby’s good looks were used by Manson to lure attractive women into “the family”. Because of Bobby’s glumness, Eve and her friends always called him Bummer Bob. Thinking about the fact that Eve actually spent the night under the same roof with Bummer Bob on more than one occasion, although she does make it clear that she never had sexual relations with him, has to produce an involuntary shiver from time to time when she contemplates his role in the Manson murders. In the depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” I’ve done Eve a disservice over the years, thinking of her as just a society girl. She certainly did have a lot of fun, but she wasn’t just a famous pretty face. She started out her career as an artist for a record studio. She designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. She wrote short stories that were published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. She also wrote four books.

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All of that was somewhat overshadowed by the attention of the media regarding her liberal views about sexuality. She was romantically involved with Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, and Harrison Ford, just to name a few. One could get the impression she was famous for just being the plus one. And in doing so — I want to read the JUICY ENJOYABLE THOUGHT-PROVOKING MOVING BEAUTIFUL TOUCHING AFFECTING MIND BLOWING WONDERFUL BOOKS …..

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. What makes this book so classically great is —EVE —her input on love, relationships, beauty, sex, friendships, the city she grew up in, from normalcy to eccentricity.Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz. Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.”—Deborah Shapiro, The Second Pass Which of course isn’t the case, at least not for me, so sometimes I really didn’t know what she was talking about until the final sentence. But I pretended I did nevertheless; just like we affirmatively nod our heads in happy ignorance at parties where everybody seems to know everybody else and we’re left to our own devices to figure out what’s going on. It’s kind of frustrating, if not altogether risky when it comes to books (because you easier leave a book than you leave a party). 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.

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