by Lili Anolik
The scandal didn’t hurt Hopps’s standing any with L.A. art patrons, an easily scandalized bunch. Maybe because in his navy-blue Brooks Brothers suits, his starched white shirts, his dark-framed glasses, he looked like the doctor he never became and incapable of an un-straight-arrow thought or deed. Wrote Eve of Hopps, “It was as though someone from the other side, the public side of L.A., had materialized on . . . our side, the side of weirdness, messiness, and art.” L.A. artists Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Kenny Price, Larry Bell, and Ed Ruscha would have their first solo shows at Ferus. Andy Warhol, a New York artist geographically but an L.A. artist spiritually, as well—those Campbell’s soup cans, all thirty-two mouth-watering flavors.
In 1962, Hopps left Ferus in the hands of partner Irving Blum in order to accept the position of director of the Pasadena Art Museum. His September show, New Paintings of Common Objects, featuring Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, and Andy Warhol, among others, was the first pop-art exhibition in the U.S., beating out New York, still under the sway of the abstract expressionists, by nearly six months.
And Hopps was getting ready to turn the art world on its ear again. Hopps had convinced the great dadaist-surrealist Marcel Duchamp, who’d forsaken art back in 1921 to devote himself exclusively to the game of chess, to allow a museum that nobody had ever heard of in a town that was famous for a Jan and Dean song in which it was synonymous with the word square—“the little old lady from Pasadenaaaaaa!”—only not yet, not for another year, so was famous for nothing but the Rose Bowl, worse than nothing, to host his first retrospective. Though Duchamp’s best-known work was a painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, it was the Fountain, the urinal he’d flipped over and signed, that had, to quote critic Peter Schjeldahl, “opened a trapdoor at the bottom of Western feeling and thought.” In short, Duchamp was the original pop artist, the one who’d started it all. Suddenly, old was the new new, and Los Angeles, not even in the race art-wise, was ahead of the pack by a full length, two lengths, three. The shift had begun: the cultural wasteland was about to become the cultural center.
Of course the cultural wasteland talk was always so much hot air. Geniuses aren’t dumb. To those with established reputations in the arts, the movie industry meant easy money, which was why L.A. was geniuses galore, as Eve knew better than anybody, since all she had to do was walk from her living room to her kitchen and she’d trip over three of them at least. The world was about to find out, though, and she wouldn’t be there to utter a single “I told you so.” She’d been left off the invite list for the party for the show’s private opening. Hopps was notoriously absentminded. This oversight, however, was deliberate. What happened was this: his wife, Shirley, was supposed to be out of town, then she wasn’t.
So Eve stayed home with her parents the night of October 7, flinging herself prostrate across the furniture, refusing dinner, or at least partaking of it less heartily than was her custom, getting annoyed with her father when, provoked by one of her many deep sighs into asking, “What’s wrong?,” was satisfied with her response of, “Oh, nothing,” and went back to tuning his violin.
Eve was right to sulk. The party wasn’t at all the usual slop-pot, slapdash, beatniky L.A. art affair, people wearing whatever clothes they’d thrown over their bathing suits, drinking cheap Chablis out of plastic cups, wandering from gallery to gallery. (Monday-night art walks, they were called.) It was high style and high gloss and altogether ultra super-duper, black ties and pink champagne, a band, held in the ballroom of the elegant old Hotel Green. Guests included movie stars (Dennis Hopper), and the children of movie stars (Hopper’s wife, Brooke Hayward, daughter of Margaret Sullavan), and underground movie stars (Taylor Mead), and people played by movie stars (Beatrice Wood, the ceramist and the real Catherine—the Jeanne Moreau role—in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim), as well as L.A. artists (Ruscha, Bengston, Bell), and non-L.A. artists (Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, who was in L.A. for the first time for his Elvis Presley–Elizabeth Taylor show at Ferus and who’d get sick on that pink champagne), and assorted society types. And, naturally, the guest of honor, Marcel Duchamp, his wife, Teeny, former wife of Pierre Matisse, the art dealer and youngest son of Henri, on his arm. Oh, and Mirandi Babitz, the date of the Time magazine photographer covering the event, Julian Wasser.
Eve hugged her pillow that night and cursed her faithless lover. “I was only twenty, and there wasn’t a way I could really get to Walter. But I decided that if I could ever wreak any havoc in his life, I would.”
Eve proved as good as her word. She was holding a glass of wine, standing in front of Nude Descending a Staircase at the opening—the public opening—held several days later when Wasser made his approach. Their conversation, according to her screenplay, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slut,” optioned but never produced, went something like this:
Wasser unhooked the Nikon from around his neck. Without looking at Eve, he said, “I’m going to take a picture of Duchamp and a girl. You want to be the girl?”
“Okay.”
Wasser popped open the camera, replaced old film with new. “Playing chess.”
After a beat, Eve said, “Oh, right, because that’s what he gave up art for.”
Wasser kept his eyes on the film as he pulled it taut. “And naked. You, not him.”
After another beat, Eve said, “Oh, right, because—” She gestured to the painting.
“Still in?”
“Still in.”
At last Wasser looked at her, bared his teeth in a grin. “Great. Then we’re all set.”
“Have you told Duchamp about this?”
“As the French would say, no.”
“Don’t you think you’d better? What if he doesn’t like it?”
Wasser, Nikon back around his neck, started to walk off, on the job again. “He’ll like it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He’s a man, isn’t he?” Wasser threw these words over his shoulder, then disappeared into the crowd.
Eve drained her glass of wine in a single swallow.I
Wasser had a reputation for being one of the most exciting photographers on the scene. He also had a reputation for having a reputation. Says Eve, “I met Julian through a friend of mine from LACC, Marva Hannon. Jewish girls were just starting to get their noses done, and Marva was the first. Whatever Marva did was the height of style. Marva told me Julian took the most marvelous pictures. You know, naked pictures that you could show guys. She met him when she was at Beverly Hills High. He had an apartment across the street and was always trying to think of ways to get girls to take their clothes off.” Laurie Pepper, a conquest of Wasser’s in the late sixties, remembers a Seconal tablet “appearing like a magician’s rabbit in his hand” after sex; a drawer full of toothbrushes, “individually wrapped,” in the bathroom; and “candy bars for the Beverly Hills High girls in the fridge, but you can’t say that!”II And this: “Julian was terrifically kind and friendly, and he gave great head along with great conversation. I admired him. I was a professional photographer, too, then, but I wasn’t making a living. I thought he was an artist, and, oh, wow.”
Wasser had his pick of young lovelies. He chose Eve. “She had a very classic female body,” he says. More classic even than usual. Eve: “My breasts were big normally. For the first and only time in my life, though, I was taking birth-control pills. My breasts blew up. I couldn’t get into any of my dresses they were so huge, and I thought they should be photographed, documented. For posterity.”
A few days later, Wasser, in his shiny toy of a car, a Ford Fairlane convertible, white, picked up Eve bright and early at her parents’ house. She’d left the public opening on a cloud and hadn’t come down. The more she thought about Wasser’s idea, the more she liked it. Nude Descending a Staircase would become Nude Sitting at a Chessboard—how brilliant. The more she liked her role in it, too, the only one worth having: the starring. This would, in fact, be the most Hollywood thing she�
��d ever done, including writing her number on the palm of Tony Santoro, boyfriend of Mamie Van Doren, when she met him at Roadside Beach on the day she and Sally ditched school to work on their tans. What could be more Hollywood than posing for dirty pictures? It was practically a local rite of passage, the de rigueur desperate act of the camera-ready cutie, flat broke, wolf howling at the door. Even for Monroe. Especially for Monroe. (Admitting she was the golden girl and wet dream in the Golden Dreams calendar did as much for Monroe’s career as any movie and brought her public love besides.) Except Eve wouldn’t be baring all to make money. She’d be doing it to make mischief. And art. She’d out-Marilyn Marilyn.
But suddenly Eve wasn’t on that cloud, had lost her footing and was careening toward earth. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. Maybe this was just Wasser getting yet another girl out of her clothes and in front of his camera. Maybe only a fool wouldn’t have known she was about to be played for a fool. At least there was still time to call it off.
Just as she started to open her mouth, though, Wasser turned to her. His tone accusatory, “You aren’t going to chicken out, are you?”
Not trusting her voice, she shook her head.
Minutes later they arrived at the Pasadena Art Museum. After exchanging her blouse and skirt for a smock, she sat miserably at the chessboard Wasser had dragged to the center of the room and chain-smoked, waited for Duchamp to appear, for the lights to be set up. At last, everybody was accounted for and all arranged. Wasser gave the signal. Eve rose, her mother’s advice ringing in one ear: Never put anything in writing or a photo; her father’s in the other: Take his queen.
She dropped the smock.
Eve and Duchamp were in the middle of their third game and engrossed. Hopps entered, stopped short. The gum he was chewing fell from his mouth.
Eve, who understood when the moment called for sardonic insolence, said, “Hello, Walter,” barely looking up from the board.
Duchamp inclined his head in a slight bow. “Bonjour.”
Hopps just stood there, staring, until Wasser said, “Walter, do you mind? We’re working here.”
Hopps, making apologetic noises, backed out the door.
Eve Babitz and Marcel Duchamp play chess in the Pasadena Art Museum, 1963
In the resulting photograph, Eve and Duchamp sit at a chessboard. Duchamp’s hand is raised, his wrist cocked, in anticipation of his next move. Eve, legs crossed at the ankle, chin propped on her palm, waits for him to make it. She might have something on—the radio, for example, or Chanel No. 5. You wouldn’t know it from looking at her, though. Not that Duchamp, his sangfroid as immaculate as his suit, is. He has eyes only for the game. Willful obliviousness is essential here. If Duchamp or Eve acknowledge her state in any way—if he leers or smirks, if she betrays the faintest hint of nerves or self-consciousness—she’ll be truly exposed, no longer nude, a classically accepted form of beauty, but naked; art will have become cheesecake, and that will be that. It’s a walk across a high wire, net-less. Yet both Duchamp and Eve reach the other side, and without stumbling or flinching or even breaking a sweat. Their mutual aplomb carries the day.
Eve has certainly progressed since Hollywood High. No more is she content to be a mere looker-on, part of the audience. She’s ready for her close-up now. Yet—and here’s the kicker—she refuses to take it. Wasser’s finger clicked and clicked that morning. And in most of the shots he captured, her features were visible. She chose a shot in which they were not (Wasser, a rogue but also a gentleman, granted her final say), and, in so doing, turned an extroverted gesture into an introverted one, a demand for attention into a plea for privacy, stardom into anonymity. The photo was thus a fulfillment of her paradoxical desire: to reveal herself to the world so a single person would see.
What else the photo was: her chance to be Marilyn Monroe. Eve, in Wasser’s rendering, was the American Dream made lush, nubile flesh, as if sprung fully blown from the imagination of the European aesthete, lean as a blade, dry as a bone, opposite her, as Monroe, in The Seven Year Itch (1955), was the Girl, a gorgeous ninny bringing Tom Ewell’s midlife crisis to climax. In other words, both Eve and Monroe were exploitable sex objects. Only Eve was a sex object who was, too, a sex subject, meaning she exploited herself every bit as ruthlessly as either of the men exploited her. She wasn’t just model and muse, passive and pliable, but artist and instigator, wicked and subversive. Says Eve in a voice cool, even deadpan, “Walter thought he was running the show, and I finally got to run something.”
Posing with Duchamp did for Eve what she hoped it would. It allowed her to get even with Hopps. Get one up on, in fact. Yes, he’d achieved the impossible by landing the retrospective. It’s her image, however, that’s associated with it. In effect, she upstaged him, stole the occasion right out from under his nose, so high in the air it didn’t twitch to the foul deed going on below.
And the photo, a lark and a prank and a bit of fun, a self-dare and a self-double-dog-dare, became famous (“Every artist on the planet knows it,” says Wasser), as well as an emblem of the era, appearing in promotional catalogs and advertisements for Pacific Standard Time, the sprawling, grand-scale series of exhibitions in 2011–12 that commemorated the birth of the L.A. art scene. Which is to say, the birth of the pop-art scene. And what is pop but the coupling of dadaism and surrealism, embodied by Duchamp, the dada of dadaism, the sir of surrealism, with Hollywood, embodied by Eve, her sultry splendor laid bare and made available to our most delirious erotic fantasies? And adhering to the picture is something of the evocative poignancy of pictures of our parents together before they had us; it invokes the same nostalgia, a nostalgia so strong it amounts to an ache, by showing us a time and place from which we are and always have been exiled.
Eve had come of age.
* * *
I. Eve has told this story both orally and in writing many—many as in many, many—times. Though the major details remain constant, the minor change: what Wasser said to her, for example, or where she was standing when he said it. I could have gone with any number of versions. I went with this one for no better reason than because I like it best.
II. Laurie changed her mind. I can say it.
“What Are Tits For?”I
And now for Eve’s groupie period, which, by the time she was getting checkmated by Duchamp (well, he was a chess master), she was already deep into. First, though, a bit on the term groupie, just then coming into vogue. It wasn’t one of distinction or affection, obviously. Groupies saw themselves as muses, capable of inspiring artistic and commercial achievement; the rest of the world saw them as bimbos, capable of inspiring erections and nothing else. They never got the joke, which is that they were the joke. Another way of saying they were the starlets of a new generation.
Within Eve’s groupie period were two distinct phases, and the first phase can’t rightly be characterized as groupie since, during it, she ran around with artists, and groupies, at least in the early days, were a perk lavished strictly on musicians, specifically on rock ’n’ roll musicians. So, technically, it was an ur-groupie phase. And in it, Eve set a pattern she’d follow for the rest of her life: stay in one place, get around.
The place was Barney’s Beanery, a “wreck of a West Hollywood chili joint,” where she met Hopps. (And, incidentally, where Sol took Mae on their first date.) Barney’s was not just a place. It was a scene, meaning a place + enchantment. The source of enchantment was the place itself, but also Eve, a fantasist at heart, her imagination possessed of a vitality, raw and raging, for which reality was no match. Suddenly the spot Eve was standing on began to glitter and glimmer and, in a flash, transformed into an earthly paradise and the sweetest of dreams, a locus of madcap and mayhem and romantic possibility. She wrote, “I have always loved scenes, bars where people come in and out in various degrees of . . . despair, gossip, and brilliance, and the scene at Barney’s was . . . fabulous.” No doubt it was. But seen through Eve’s ecstatic eyes, it was more than fabu
lous, was irresistible. “LACC was the closest I ever got to college, and I dropped out of LACC for Barney’s. After Barney’s, I couldn’t see the point.”
Barney’s was on Santa Monica Boulevard, a stone’s throw from La Cienega and Ferus, and where all the artists drank. Says folksinger Judy Henske, “Barney’s was outré, but not really. Let me put it this way, if you were part of the Jane Fonda crowd, Barney’s was outré. The people who hung out with Jane Fonda thought they were hip, but they were movie people, and how can movie people be hip? They can’t. And Barney’s was hip. It was the inside of the inside. Eve was on it, and so was I.”
Barney’s was where all the artists picked up girls, too. Eve, more often than not. Eve, if she didn’t pick them up first. (Laurie: “Evie was dressing to go out one night, her boobs properly elevated and all that. And Mae looked at Eve and said in her sideways way, ‘You do know that a guy will hump a tree, don’t you?’ ”) Art critic Dave Hickey: “I knew Eve through Barney’s, and I knew people she knew, but we did not chat. She never had interest in guys she wasn’t going to fuck.” And, according to Henske, a little ditty was composed in Eve’s honor/dishonor: “Eve Bah-bitz / With the great big tits.”
A bit more on the term groupie, particularly as it pertains to Eve, who used it, to the exclusion of almost all others, when describing her young-woman self. It’s not that she was unaware of the built-in sneer, it’s that she was unfazed by the built-in sneer. Maybe because the sneer only looked as if it was directed at her. Groupie wasn’t Eve’s identity, no matter how frequently or gleefully she claimed it as such. It was her disguise, and good enough that many were fooled. Her giddiness, wide-eyed and all-out, her enthusiasm, not just vivid, incandescent, always made her seem slightly bananas. And if you didn’t catch her darting asides, her observations that sounded dumb when you first heard them, so smart you couldn’t believe it when you thought about them later, you’d take her for a daffy ding-a-ling, a nitwit nymphet, Eve Bah-bitz with the great big tits. Which is what Larry Bell, for example, did: “Eve was a funny, goofy kid who pushed her way onto the scene. I never paid too much attention to her.” And Billy Al Bengston: “I liked Eve, but I didn’t like being around her. She was always trying to get in your pants.”
