Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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The ending doesn't feel as much like an ending as a segue into the next chapter, which, sadly is not there. I would like to journey on with Eve to the rest of the places on her "list". To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land,” she wrote. “Everyone keeps telling you to relax, which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.” And to Annie Leibovitz and her trusty companion, Citizen Wenner, gathering moss to the North. And to Grover Lewis who dispels gloom with blue eyes in a blue town with blue rugs, Texanly. And Sara and Charlie and the girl with the coke.

Brief yet marvelous, Eve in Hollywood is the sonnet for LA, whereas Rules of Civility was a love letter for New York. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. I loved seeing Eve from the points of view of innocent bystanders (including Olivia DeHaviland!) instead of her Rules of Civility co-star, and then, finally, hearing from Eve her herself. She is a freight train. 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. And to the Sandabs at Musso's, the Eggplant Florentine, the guy who makes the pancakes and my friend in the parking lot (not the one on the ground, the one who parks your car, the young one). And to the crabpuffs at Don the Beachcomber's. 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.” And to David Giler who couldn't have turned out the way Mr. Major wanted either. What with Nancy Kwan and everything . . .

And to Anne Marshall, the beautiful friend to us all. And to Michelle Guilliane for calling first before bringing Kim Fawley into my house.

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. On the phone, she talked like she looked. On the phone, she talked like she wrote. On the phone, she was what Laurie said she no longer could be: She was Eve Babitz. Really, though, and in fact, the ending for Eve was ambiguously ever after, those gardenias sometimes blowing rancid, sometimes sweet. One of the last scenes she and I played together:

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!) Eve Babitz, the Hollywood bard, muse and reveller who with warmth and candour chronicled the excesses of her city in the 1960s and 1970s and became a cult figure to generations of readers, has died. She was 78. And to Desbutol, Ritilin, Obertrol and any other speed. It wasn't that I didn't love you, it was that it was too hard. 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.