Lili Anolik - Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

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More Praise for
Hollywoods Eve

Hollywoods Eve is an extraordinarily felicitous meeting of subject and biographer. Let other writers worship at the banal altar of L.A. Thanatos; Anoliks Eve is the fearless beating heart of L.A. Eros, and her inimitable voice comes alive in Anoliks own lovingly warm and penetrating celebration of Babitzs magnificent beauty, wildness, and art.

Elizabeth Frank, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Cheat and Charmer

The first injectable biography.

James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Lucking Out

Theres no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitzs eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused, and abused everyone. And then theres Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anoliks electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddeningand seductiveas its subject.

Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

Lili Anoliks love letter to Eve Babitz is as probing and intelligent as it is outrageously fun, swirling with secrets and gossip, celebrity and art, feminism and literature and tragedy and sex and sex and sex. A glorious trip through the looking glass of a golden-age L.A., Hollywoods Eve makes the case for Babitz as chronicler and muse of an era even as it paints an unsparing picture of its lost illusions.

Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

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Copyright 2019 by Lili Anolik

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First Scribner hardcover edition January 2019

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Interior design by Jill Putorti

Jacket design by Lauren Peters-Collaer

Jacket photograph of Eve Babitz by Pierre Chanteau

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018035881

ISBN 978-1-5011-2579-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-2581-2 (ebook)

Photo Credits

Photograph on by the author, courtesy of the author

To Mirandi, Laurie, and Paul

The pure products of America go crazy

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

In L.A. when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool.

EVE BABITZ

Hollywoods Eve isnt a biographyat least not in the traditional sense. It wont attempt to impose narrative structure and logic on life, which is (mostly) incoherent and irrational, lived moment-by-moment and instinctively rather than by grand design and purposefully; or to provide explanations, which (mostly) dull and diminish; or to reach conclusions, which are (mostly) hollow and false. In other words, it doesnt believe, or expect you to, that facts, dates, timelines, firsthand accounts, verifiable sources tell the tale.

Heres what Hollywoods Eve is: a biography in the nontraditional sense; a case history as well as a cultural; a critical appreciation; a sociological study; a psychological commentary; a noir-style mystery; a memoir in disguise; and a philosophical investigation as contrary, speculative, and unresolved as its subject. Heres what Hollywoods Eve is above all else: a love story. The lover, me. The love object, Eve Babitz, the louche, wayward, headlong, hidden genius of Los Angeles.

A book can be infatuatedhopelessly, helplessly, heedlesslysame as a person. Im telling you this not as a way of asking for allowances, but for understanding. In the following pages, things might get a little heated, a little weird, a little out of hand. Now you know why.

Imagine, for a second, this:

Its 1959. Youre sixteen, a junior at Hollywood High. Its that dead time between classes and youre in the girls room, sharing a cigarette with Sally, not her real name but what youll call her when you write about her years later in Rolling Stone . Sally, whos already been through the wringer at Twentieth CenturyFox, signed to a contract and then summarily dropped because she bleached her hair a glowing, white-heat shade of blond (Marilyn Monroes exactly) the night before her first day of work, blowing her chance at the very moment she took it, as, unbeknownst to her, the studios plan was to turn her into the next Jean Seberg, the fresh-faced beauty plucked out of Iowa and obscurity to play Otto Premingers Joan of Arc. Sally, who finds mornings so onerous she has to chase fifteen milligrams of Dexamyl with four cups of coffee just to drag herself to homeroom. Sally, who is rich and surly and sex-savvy and who has been adopted by a group of twenty-somethings from her acting class, the Thunderbird Girls, knockouts all in blue eye shadow and cinch-waist cocktail dresses, cruising around town inwhat else?Thunderbird convertibles, spending their evenings on the Sunset Strip, letting Lenny Bruce steal their best lines, their weekends in Palm Springs, making ring-a-ding-ding with Frank Sinatra. Sally, who saved you from the Deltas and the other sororities that ruled the school. Sally, who is your best friend.

The company you keep is fast, just your speed as it so happens. No woof-woof among sex kittens you. Not with your perfect skin and teeth, hair the color of vanilla ice cream, secondary sexual characteristics that are second to none. Last year, you went to a party you werent supposed to go to. An adult male and the right type of wrong, a big-beef dreamboat galoot, exactly what youd had in mind when you snuck out of the house, told you hed give you a ride. You jumped at the offer. But as soon as you confessed your age, fourteen, he pulled the car to the side of the road. Dont let guys pick you up like this, kid, you might get hurt, he said, undercutting this gruff piece of fatherly advice by laying a five-alarm kiss on you. He drove off without telling you his name. A few months passed and there was your white knight in black and white, on the front page of every newspaper in town. Hed had a run-in with another fourteen-year-old girl, only this encounter ended in penetration: her knife in his gut. Johnny Stompanato, Mickey Cohen henchman, dead at the hands of the daughter of his inamorata, Lana Turner. Bad luck for Johnny but a good sign for you. You caught the eye of the infidel who stormed the temple of MGMs love goddess nightly. That might not make you a movie star yourself. It does put you in the same firmament as one, though.