by Lili Anolik
Says the Proust-like narrator in À la recherche du temps perdu, “The essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary sense it does not have to be ‘invented’ by a great writer—for it exists already in each one of us—has to be translated by him. The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator.” Translator is the function and task of any artist. And Earl couldn’t translate. He was blocked, stalled, stymied. Proust also said, in a letter to a friend, that the social life in which he appeared so engrossed was merely “the apparent life,” that “the real life [was] underneath all this,” the real life meaning the artistic life. Earl’s sin was in acting as if he believed the “apparent life” and the “real life” were the same, that being invited everywhere and having your invitations accepted by everyone was an end in and of itself, that a host-artist was an artist-artist, that, in essence, he had no hopes to dash, dreams to crush. Finally, he was a will-o’-the-wisp and a dilettante; a romantic who lacked the courage and conviction to make the leap of faith romanticism requires, and so a cynic; an elegant nonentity. Finally, he was impotent.
I guess it was sexual jealousy, after all.
Out of the Blue
Eve went from ingenue to bawd in the blink of an eye. By the time she and Earl were through in 1971, she’d lost her looks: “[I] gained weight and [my] legs were scuffed with alcoholic black-and-blue stains. . . . [My] beauty had long ago sunk into the sludge of gray-green no-sun pallor; the look with broken pink-eyed blood veins—of someone ‘who drinks.’ ” Her way: “[I] wouldn’t even risk blue paint anymore.” And her mind: “All I took was speed, painkillers like Percodan and Demerol for fun, and painkillers like codeine and Fiorinal for cramps. And I never took downers, except if anyone happened to have any Quaaludes or Mogadons. Oh, and LSD or mushrooms or mescaline if it was a nice day.” There’s a term for this condition, and Eve coined it: squalid overboogie.
If this were the end of Eve’s story, Eve wouldn’t be a story. Eve would be a footnote. A minor figure of glamour in America’s cultural history. A star groupie or a groupie turned semi-star. Basically, Eve would be Edie Sedgwick, so relentless a companion to celebrity that she became a bit of one herself, a few rays of spotlight spilling over onto her, making her luminous, too. Or, rather, Eve would be an alternative version of Edie Sedgwick: L.A. to Edie’s New York; Marcel Duchamp and Jim Morrison to Edie’s Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan; Jewish sexpot to Edie’s WASP gamine. Put slightly differently, Edie and Eve were opposites in ways that only revealed their essential sameness. (And their sameness was essential: born within a month of each other, within a hundred miles, and both Slum Goddesses to boot.) Like Edie, Eve was at the white-hot center of a red-hot scene, then banished. Upon which, Eve, like Edie, found her bloom faded. Became, like Edie, angry, bitter, resentful. And realized, like Edie, that she was less taking drugs than the drugs were taking her. Then, all of a sudden, divergence. Edie went left, Eve right. On November 16, 1971, Edie, age twenty-eight, died. She was in bed with the husband she’d picked up at a recent stint in the loony bin. Zonked from her meds and whatever else she’d ingested, she was unable to lift her head from the pillow, suffocated. An accident-suicide. It was during that very season, fall of ’71, that Eve, age twenty-eight, came back from the dead. She resurrected herself as a writer.
Even before the divergence, though, there was a distinction, key, between Edie and Eve: while Edie and Eve both fucked stars, Edie was a star-fucker; Eve was not. How could she be? The stars she was fucking she was fucking when they were still earthbound, celestial ascension but a dream. Says Steve Martin, “Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented ones were.” Again, it is Eve’s artist’s eye that set her apart. She saw beauty and value before others did. She went home with people or not home with people (behind the Troubadour was a favorite trysting spot) for, I’m sure, many reasons: for the fun of it, for the thrill of it, for the hell of it. Never, though, for the prestige of it. In a funny way, her ego was too big for that sort of thinking.
Post-Earl, Eve cooled it—for her—on the controlled substances. The blowsiness receded, and she once again began to look “what her mother . . . referred to as ‘your age, dear, eighteen.’ ” There was, too, a new guy in the picture, writer Dan Wakefield. Says David Freeman, also a writer, and a friend of Eve’s, “Dan wasn’t Eve’s usual screwball behavior. He was a real person and very serious about what he did. He liked smart, interesting women, which Eve certainly was. That was a real love affair.” Wakefield, thirty-nine, born in Indianapolis but living in New York and Boston since the early fifties, was a big-time journalist. The entire March 1968 issue of the Atlantic was devoted to his piece on the Vietnam War and the state of American politics. And his first novel, Going All the Way, had been a commercial and critical smash the year before, in 1970. He was riding high.
Wakefield: “I came to L.A. in 1971. The second week I was there, John and Sandy Gibson [publicists at Atlantic] fixed me up with Eve. She walked into the bar wearing the shortest skirt and the tightest sweater I’d ever seen, and when she smiled at me I knew the move to California was going to be everything I hoped it would be. I’d spend my days working at the Chateau Marmont, and at night I’d walk over to Eve’s little place on Formosa. She was beautiful and tremendous fun. One night, an earthquake hit. The TV flew across the room, dishes and glasses broke. I jumped out of bed—off the mattress, to be specific—and started getting dressed. Eve simply looked up and said, ‘What are you going to do, run to Boston?’ So I took off my pants and went back to sleep. Eve was brilliant, but in an offbeat way. She liked to make pronouncements, and she convinced a lot of people of a lot of things. Did you know she was the one who put Steve Martin in that white suit?I And I remember her handing me a stack of books and saying, ‘Read these. They’re Proust with recipes.’ It was M. F K. Fisher, the greatest food writer in the world. So a lot of those opinions of hers were shrewd. There were people, though, who were afraid of her. A guy I knew out there wouldn’t go to a party if she was going. That’s how brutally she’d cut him down. And once she banished me from her apartment for three days. I don’t recall what I’d done—probably flirted with another woman in front of her. I was used to seeing her every day and being shut out was painful. When she told me I could come back, and opened the door, I pulled her to me in a mad rush. I said, ‘How could you have been so cruel?’ She seemed gratified by my distress, and said, ‘When a lover hurts you, you must really make him suffer.’ ”
Wakefield’s reason for being in L.A. was a screenplay. But the reason was, in reality, an excuse. “Thanks to Going All the Way, I had some money for the first time in my life. I optioned a novella by a marvelous writer no one knows, Fanny Howe. It was called Dump Gull. I was trying to adapt it, but not very seriously. Mostly what I wanted was to have a good time. So I was in the movie business, sort of. But Eve was in the music business. And the music business then was what you think of as Hollywood—so extravagant, so lavish. The movie business was small-time compared to it. You don’t do too many drugs if you’re working on a movie because there’s a lot at stake, and you have to be up early. I remember Eve taking me to a party for the release of a new album. It was on the side of a hill in this enormous tent. Beautiful girls in harem costumes were holding gold trays with perfectly rolled joints on them. It was unbelievable. Anyway, as far as I knew, Eve was an album-cover designer and a collage artist. I’ve always made it a point to never have a girlfriend who was a writer.”
Wakefield’s point became beside the point, though, when, a few months into the relationship, Eve showed him what she’d been working on in secret: a piece about her alma mater, Hollywood High, entitled “The Sheik.” (“Dan says I did it in secret? I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in secret in my whole life. But maybe I did. Maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”) Wakefield passed “The Sheik” on to his agent, Knox Burger. Wakefield: “Knox was very smart. He’d discovered Kurt Vonnegut when he was the fiction editor at
Collier’s magazine. And to be nice to me, he sent Eve a two-page, single-space letter telling her all the things she had to do to the piece to get it published, and he sent me a copy. So I went over to her place that night and said, ‘What did you think of Knox’s letter?’ She put her hands on her hips in her particular way, then said, ‘I hope Knox Burger burns in hell!’ ” And Eve, as self-confident and self-doubting a writer as she’d been an artist, meant it. “I’d already sent ‘The Sheik’ to Jim Goode at Playboy and he’d rejected it and told me what was wrong with it. I hate people who tell me what to do to improve my stuff. They get nowhere with me.”
She then marched “The Sheik” over to Joan Didion, still her friend even if Earl no longer was. (Wakefield, coincidentally, was also close with the Didion-Dunnes, knew them from New York. Wakefield: “After Eve and I began dating, I called up Joan and John. I said to them, ‘I’ve met this terrific girl.’ I told them her name, and there was laughter. And then John said, ‘Ah, yes, Eve Babitz, the dowager groupie.’ ”) Says Eve, “Joan liked ‘The Sheik,’ thought it was a little tour de force. She was all the rage then. Grover [Lewis, an editor at Rolling Stone] asked her to write for him. She couldn’t because of her contract with Life. She recommended me.”
In September, Eve mailed the piece to Lewis. Two weeks later, she received a check. “The Sheik” would be published as a short story in a forthcoming issue. (“I thought it was an essay, but Rolling Stone saw it as fiction, and that was fine with me.”) She could scarcely believe it: not only had her work been accepted, but her work had been accepted with ease and speed, and by a total stranger. She didn’t have to make threats, as she did with Stephen Stills; or break out the sex appeal, as she did with John Van Hamersveld. More important, she didn’t have to look to anybody else’s example, not to Joseph Cornell’s or Andy Warhol’s, instead setting her own.
The experience was revelatory. Wrote Eve, “It was like something I heard somewhere when a person said, ‘You know you’re doing the right thing if you don’t have to tap-dance.’ ” Lewis wasn’t even asking for edits on “The Sheik,” was taking it as is. Nor was Rolling Stone just any magazine. Started only four years before, in 1967, by Jann Wenner, it was the counterculture’s bible, and one step ahead of hip. Among its contributors were Tom Wolfe, Lester Bangs, and Hunter S. Thompson, who would publish that November, in its pages, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Not among its contributors, however, was Dan Wakefield. Rolling Stone had, in fact, recently rejected a piece of Wakefield’s, which is why, according to Eve, he split with her. “ ‘I’ll see you on Johnny Carson.’ That’s what he said to me when he walked out the door.” Years later she’d write a story, “Black Swans,” about the breakup: “I knew everyone would be glad for me except the one man I actually loved. . . . Normal men aren’t going to love anyone who looks forward to anything but them. And I couldn’t help looking forward to being published.”
And so we reach the point in Eve’s tale where her desire to be one of the boys and her desire to get with the boys become irreconcilable, if only in her head. (Says Wakefield with a laugh, “She gave me the story. I read it and I thought, That’s what she thinks happened? No, no, no, no, no. Our year together was one of my favorite years, but I couldn’t have lived through two of them. My God, the decadence! When I was with her, I tried every drug known to man. At least known to this man. And we were only ever going to be together for a year because I’d already accepted a teaching job at the University of Iowa. From Hollywood to Iowa City—boy, that was an extreme change.”)
It was a drag about Wakefield. Still, the moment was a triumphant one for her, and it altered forever the course of her life. As she herself would marvel, “[I] was twenty-eight. It was time for [me] to O.D., not get published.”
* * *
“The Sheik” is, as I said, about Hollywood High, and set ten years after graduation, the narrator sitting at the bar of the Troubadour, catching the scent of rain on the air, and, for a moment, “the past appear[ed] in all its confusion and doubt and pleasure, and [her] high school days surface[d].” The piece is sad, tender, wistful, and passionately contradictory: a romance, and enthralled with love without believing, even for a second, that love is other than doomed; a rhapsody, but a rhapsody on regret, decay, decline, ruin, so a rhapsody that’s also an elegy; a youthful promise made and a youthful promise broken, and in nearly the same breath. Brightness fades, beauty fouls, time passes, it tells us, such is the way of the world. Nostalgia thus becomes, according to its logic, an almost sacred duty, a species of keeping the faith, honoring our losses. And the style of “The Sheik” matches the mood. The writing has a lushness to it, a warmth, a kind of doleful, sensual languor that is purely ravishing. Is closer, in fact, to poetry or music than it is to prose, dependent as it is on rhythm and tempo, melody and tone.
On the girls at Hollywood High:
The girls at our school . . . were extraordinarily beautiful. And there were about 20 of them who separately would cause you to let go of reason. Together—and they stayed pretty much together—they were the downfall of any serious attempt at school in the accepted sense, and everyone knew it. . . . The school was in constant chaos with whispers of their love affairs, their refusals to go along with anything that interrupted their games, scandals, tears, laughter. . . . These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression . . . people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these girls were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting—like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what.
And on Carolyn, the top of the top twenty:
[Carolyn’s] skin was dark and warm—flawless, clear with mauve cheeks like hidden roses. . . . Her hair was hazel or opalescent. . . . Her eyes were the brazen blue—the same color—as the sky in back of the palm trees on the Palisades in summer. . . . She was a captive in the Sheik’s harem, a stranger from the land beyond the sea who never learned to speak nor the purpose of speech, and it would have been more sensible if she’d been made a mute since occasionally she would unfold and stretch . . . her cupid-bow mouth would unsuccessfully try to suppress a yawn, and her tiny snow teeth would show—then she’d back up, sigh, and say, “Fuck, man, I wish today was Friday.”
How not to read in rapt delight?
Eve gave two reasons for writing “The Sheik,” one public, meaning she revealed it to her readers in a book, and the other private, meaning she revealed it to me over the phone.
I’ll start with the private:
“So, Evie,” I said, “what made you write it?”
Eve cracked something with her teeth, a hard something, something with a shell, maybe a pistachio, which she bought in bulk at Trader Joe’s. “Rosalind Frank died.”
“Who’s Rosalind Frank?”
“Rosalind Frank was the most beautiful girl at Hollywood High, and the most beautiful girl at Hollywood High was the most beautiful girl in the world.”
I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I gave a nudge: “Well, what happened to Rosalind Frank?”
“She killed herself.”
“How?”
“An overdose.”
“All right. And?”
Eve took a drink, likely of coconut water, which she also bought in bulk at Trader Joe’s. I gnawed impatiently on a cuticle as she washed down the pistachio or whatever it was. “And I thought the occasion shouldn’t go unmarked.”
I need to pause for a moment, tell you something. When I first read “The Sheik,” I assumed Eve was exaggerating. She had to be. Th
e school she’s describing, never mind the girls in it, couldn’t exist, not even in Hollywood, not even sixty years ago. And I’ve seen Hollywood High. I have one brother, younger, who went to USC for grad school, rented an apartment in West Hollywood. There was a two-year period during which I drove past Hollywood High semi-regularly. It isn’t the kind of place that inspires romantic and fantastical thoughts, okay? You don’t stop at the red on Sunset and Highland, catch it out of the corner of your eye, and start picturing flower-faced nubiles sitting in its classrooms, wilting of boredom, as a middle-aged teacher drones on about the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby or how to solve for x, when they should be sipping Coca-Colas at Schwab’s, or the contemporary equivalent of, waiting for a genie in the form of a talent scout or casting director to make them rich and famous beyond their wildest imaginings. No, you’re more likely to roll up the windows, fumble for the lock button. It looks run-down and tough and, frankly, scary.
Not that I thought Eve was consciously trying to deceive. She believed what she was saying. Anytime she recounted to me an episode in which she’d exhibited extreme sexual verve at a young age, I’d say, “But, Evie, how did you know to do that?,” her reply would invariably be, “I went to Hollywood High.” Like that explained everything. Because in her mind it did. Except her mind and reality weren’t always a precise match. She was the type of person who saw things as they should be, not as they are. She was a dreamer, another way of saying she was an artist, and preoccupied with deeper truths. Only a fool would take her literally.
