Eve Babitz - I Used to Be Charming

EVE BABITZ was born in Hollywood to Sol Babitz, a violinist and musicologist, and Mae Babitz, an artist. She is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. She lives in Los Angeles.

MOLLY LAMBERT is also a writer from Los Angeles who was born in Hollywood. She has written for publications including The New York Times Magazine, and co-hosts the podcast Night Call.

OTHER BOOKS BY EVE BABITZ PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

Eves Hollywood

Introduction by Holly Brubach

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

Introduction by Matthew Specktor

I USED TO BE CHARMING

The Rest of Eve Babitz

EVE BABITZ

Edited by

SARA J. KRAMER

Introduction by

MOLLY LAMBERT

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

The publishers wish to thank the following people for their help in tracking down some of the more difficult-to-find essays collected here: Joie Davidow, Boris Dralyuk, Ellie Duke, Zac Frank, Elisabeth Garber-Paul, Courtney Garcia, Leonard Koren, Susan LaTempa, Sylvia Lonergan, Manjula Martin, Carolyn Vega, and Morgan P. Yates. Special thanks is extended to Mirandi Babitz and Erica Spellman Silverman for their assistance throughout.

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 2019 by Eve Babitz

Introduction copyright 2019 by Molly Lambert

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Marilyn Minter, Wave, 2006; courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Babitz, Eve, author. | Lambert, Molly, author of introduction. Title: I used to be charming : the rest of Eve Babitz / by Eve Babitz; introduction by Molly Lambert.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021978 (print) | LCCN 2019022407 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373799 (alk. paper)

Classification: LCC PS3552.A244 A6 2019 (print) | LCC PS3552.A244 (ebook) | DDC 814/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021978

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022407

ISBN 978-1-68137-380-5

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

And because we were in Southern Californiain Hollywood eventhere was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.

Eve Babitz

MY GOD , isnt it fun to read Eve Babitz? Just holding this collection in your hand is like being in on a good secret. Babitz knows all the good secretsabout Los Angeles, charismatic men, and supposedly glamorous industries like film, music, and magazines. Cool beyond belief but friendly and unintimidating, Babitz hung out with all the best rock stars, directors, and artists of several decades. And she wrote just as lovingly about the rest of L.A.the broad world that exists outside the bubble of the Industry. Thanks to New York Review Books putting together a collection of this work, we are lucky enough to have more of Babitzs writing to read.

Alongside the Thelemic occultist Marjorie Cameron (whose husband, Jack Parsons, cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and the Bay Area Beat painter Jay DeFeo (Babitzs romantic rival), Babitz was one of a handful of female artists associated with L.A.s landmark Ferus Gallery, which showed local contemporary artists and launched the careers of people like Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. Babitz knew (and dated) many of the Ferus personalities; she was a mainstay at their hangout, Barneys Beanery. As she details in I Was a Naked Pawn for Art, the famous photo of a nude Eve playing chess with Marcel Duchamp was the result of her trying to make her married boyfriend, the Ferus Gallery founder, Walter Hopps, jealous.

A bridge between the Beat movement and burgeoning sixties psychedelic culture, the Ferus group rejected all prescribed rules of art to follow a strict internal code of its own, dictated only by individual interests. What her boyfriend Paul Ruschas brother Ed did with paintings, Babitz did with essays. Reading her is like looking at Ed Ruschas gas station paintings. She makes you reconsider things you might have dismissed as ugly, strange, or even boring, and look at them as if for the first time to find that they are in fact the most beautiful things youve ever seen in your life. Everything Babitz writes is both pop and intellectual, shiny but deep, like an artificial-snow-flocked Christmas tree, every bit as real and sentimental for a Tinselt-owner as a Douglas fir. She makes sure you are stimulated, and when she occasionally does say something portentous, youre never far from a punch line. She always writes with an eye toward entertaining the reader because, well, Hollywood. Women are automatically dealt low culture; Babitz doubles down, writing about Archie comics, ballroom dancing, what its like to have big tits. She doesnt care about being high art because high art is humorless.

The ideas you have about cities that youve always known dont work in L.A., and once you toss those aside youll be much better off, she writes in My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?, explaining the whole city in one elegant swoop. (People still ask how we can stand to live in L.A., although they tend to do it months before they themselves move here and decide they invented it.) Los Angeles does not have one center because it has many centers. It does not have a mono-culture because it has so many cultures that coexist, and none of them require validation from East Coast Yankees. This baffles the Yankees, who are used to thinking worlds have centers and they are somehow in them. Its freeing to give up on the delusion that you matter and can control anything at all.

To navigate L.A. the Eve Babitz way is to give yourself over to the unpredictability and slow tempo of your environment. Sure, you could complain about the heat and the freeways, or you could eat this perfect sandwich and listen to the birds sing. She tells you where to go to see whats off the beaten path, and where to go if you want exactly the clich Beverly Hills luxe surrealist experience you imagined L.A. would be. The garish architecture and people are there if you want them, just dont go mistaking one part for the whole. The real tourist attraction in L.A. is not the shitty, pay-for-play Walk of Fame, or any museum or arena, its the chance to immerse yourself in the human carnival. Around the time you make peace with being in a city that makes you feel anonymous, you come to realize that Los Angeles is a small town, just spread out, and if you stay here long enough you will eventually keep running into the same twelve people over and over again (and thats when you move to the desert).

The loping Western pace that those transplanted from faster-paced, European-style cities so often bemoan is likewise celebrated by locals like Babitz. It allows for constant detours and longer looks. L.A. doesnt dictate an agenda, and like all of the American West it celebrates restless individualism. Babitz is at home anywhere, and everywhere she goes she finds the most interesting person, the weirdest place, the funniest throwaway detail. She makes writing seem effortless and fun, which any writer can tell you is the hardest trick of all.