Naked Chess: How to Win

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Laurie Pepper: I didn’t know Myrna, but Evie always had the best female friends. They were so far out. Eve Babitz: You know Sex and the City? Well, Walter was the Mr. Big of L.A. He was always pulling out the rug from under you. Late in 1990, when the Duchamp-on-the-West-Coast book ( West Coast Duchamp, Greenfield Press) was being prepared, the Shoshana Wayne Gallery used our picture, blown up big on silver paper, to announce its own show of his work in conjunction with a symposium to be held in the Santa Monica Public Library. Unlike the party at the Green Hotel, to this thing I was very invited. Laurie Pepper, not at the party but in the vicinity of the party, 23: Cousin of Eve and Mirandi. She’d later marry jazz musician and junkie Art Pepper and co-write his memoir, Straight Life, also a dynamite Southern California book.

Somehow it was decided that we were all going to Kienholzes house in Laurel Canyon. It was crowded and rustic and I was beginning to feel left out when Walter sat beside me and offered to show me Ed’s show, “among other things,” if I came to the gallery the next day. From then on, I saw Walter frequently, which meant I was in the midst of much excitement and momentum going public in L.A. One night, we were leaving Musso’s when he looked at his watch and said, “Good, I still have time to get to Bel Air and sell that Duchamp.”Laurie Pepper: When Mirandi was young, she looked just like Brigitte Bardot. She was Brigitte Bardot’s twin. Still, this was Pasadena, the home of gracious ladies painting watercolors on afternoon outings, so I said, “You better ask people, Julian, and make sure it’s OK.” But now get this. The 2017 Womens World Tournament is in Iran this year. Nazi won’t be going, because she refuses to adhere to hijab dress code. And thats not a joke by the way.

Some have drawn parallels between her image and Nude Descending a Staircase while others have compared it to Manet’s monumental Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, with its casual approach to nudity. “It’s nothing like that,” Wasser sets the record straight. “It’s Hollywood. Girls got naked, man. It was not artistic, it was sexual.” As for Duchamp’s reaction to the beauty before him: “He was very cool.” In the years I spent listening to Walter—from 1962 to 1966, when he left LA and went to Washington, DC, where he was with the Smithsonian—I lived in a sea of his digressions. And though I never saw what he saw, I at least learned to see through things and into and under and over what was in plain sight. Being with him, looking at anything, was an experience, and though when he left LA I felt he had forsaken us, I now feel grateful we had him for so long, since after the Duchamp show everyone on the East Coast suddenly noticed how brilliant he was and wanted him there, where art was art and people knew a genius when they saw one. Duchamp’s influence on art is still felt today, and Babitz’s life and writing have become part of California’s cultural history. In other words,” Walter may or may not have ended, “Duchamp playing chess with a nude in a photograph may be art.” I never met his parents, but nobody else did either, they never set foot inside the Ferus, the Pasadena Art Museum, or anyplace else they were likely to run into him. They probably were home wondering where they went wrong, why they’d ever allowed him to go into that program for gifted children, ruing the day he set off on that field trip for the Arensbergs’, the only people in LA with a houseful of Duchamps.Mirandi Babitz: My mother and dad knew Walter and Evie were seeing each other, and they knew Walter was married. But they liked Walter. They thought he was good for the art scene, good for L.A. The only trouble was, I had been taking birth control pills for the first and only time in my life, and not only had I puffed up like a blimp but my breasts had swollen to look like two pink footballs. Plus they hurt. On the other hand, it would be a great contrast—this large, too-LA surfer girl with an extremely tiny old man in a French suit. Playing chess.