by Lili Anolik
And then I began doing my research. Eve was technically the class of ’61, though she completed her requirements a semester early, so was suspended between the classes of ’60 and ’61. In those two years alone was enough talent to fill the stables of an MGM or a Paramount. It’s as if Hollywood High were both an American high school and an American high school as portrayed by Hollywood, i.e., an idealized version of an American high school, the teenagers played by actors, i.e., idealized versions of American teenagers. Not a pimple or a pair of braces in sight. There was Tuesday Weld, shooting Wild in the Country with Elvis Presley and Hope Lange (Eve, “Tuesday Weld was a rumor, as far I was concerned. I never saw her at school”); Yvette Mimieux, already a headliner by 1960, co-lead, at eighteen, in the sci-fi classic The Time Machine (Eve, “I knew Yvette was going to be a movie star, even when she cut in front of me in the cafeteria. With that face there was nothing else for her to be”); Linda Evans, Mrs. John Derek before Bo took over the role, and Dynasty’s Krystle Carrington; Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers; Barbara Parkins, the bad girl in Peyton Place, the good girl in Valley of the Dolls, released in 1967 and re-released in 1969 after the death of Parkins’s co-star Sharon Tate; television actress Carole Wells. And a few years behind Eve, in the class of ’63, was her friend Mimsy Farmer, who’d have a film career, too, if mostly in Europe. There were also the children of movie stars: Dana Andrews’s daughter, Kathy, for one. And Rosalind Frank blew them all clean away.
It’s not easy finding information on Rosalind. Near impossible, in fact. She’s not even in the 1961 Hollywood High yearbook (though neither, for that matter, is Eve). She is, however, in another book, Upper Cut, a memoir by Carrie White, a well-known L.A. hairstylist. Carrie was, like Rosalind, in the Deltas—“the top sorority, absolutely the prettiest, cuntiest girls in school,” says Eve—and was Rosalind’s best friend.
I wrote Carrie a message on Facebook and we met at the coffee shop at the Beverly Hills Hotel when I was in town a few weeks later. Carrie, pert, blond, slender, is the most girlish-looking seventy-two-year-old I’ve ever seen, a former Playboy Playmate, Miss July 1963. She’s also a lively, funny talker. (“Oh, I was an alcoholic way before high school. The first time I was picked up for public drunkenness, I was nine. A police officer came up to me on the street and said, ‘How old are you?’ I said, ‘I’m fine. How are you?’ ”) And her recollections of Hollywood High and Rosalind have the same shimmer as Eve’s:
Let me tell you, Hollywood High was church. There was something almost spiritual about it. I’m not kidding. It was so beautiful—the trees, the quad, the girls. And, my God, the sororities. If you weren’t in a sorority, it was, like, ‘Do you exist? You’re just an extra in our movie.’ The Deltas were it. We were the rock stars and the beauty queens. We ran everything, including the teachers, who wanted to give up their degrees and date us. It seemed like all the girls in it were famous or about to be famous. Linda Evans was already at Paramount. I think Barbara Parkins had already been cast in Peyton Place. Years later Barbara and I were both at Sharon Tate’s wedding to Roman Polanski in London. I did Sharon’s hair. Stefanie Powers—she was called Taffy Paul then—was discovered by Ann Sothern [actress and singer] in a Hollywood High musical. Even I got a contract with MGM. I was supposed to be the girl in an Elvis Presley movie called Roustabout, but then it fell through. And Roz was the best of us. Everybody in school knew who she was. Everybody. She was that glamorous. We were all like deer in headlights when we looked at her. She had these blue cat eyes, and this delicious skin that was always tan, a perfect straight nose, perfect lips, always with the Max Factor Essence of Pearl lipstick. She wore her hair like Veronica Lake, one strand sort of over her eye. And her clothes! The black dresses that tapered at the knee, black spaghetti-strap sheaths. She kept her diet pills—her Dexedrine—in this little gold box in her purse. I’d cover my awe, but most of the time I just couldn’t get over her perfection. She seemed to have the script to life. All the boys were crazy about her. She didn’t date high school boys, though. None of us did. We wanted to be grown up, in contact with the world. We dated men. I dated an actor named Danny Zephyros. He was a muscleman in the Mae West Revue. Then, to get over him, I dated another actor, Jack Nicholson. Jack was twenty-three or twenty-four then. He’d done one of those Roger Corman horror pictures, not much else yet, but he already had that smile and those eyebrows. He took me to an acting class and said, ‘Okay, Carrie, your first acting job is to act eighteen.’ Roz was tortured over this married guy, I remember. Some music mogul. He’d call her at midnight and she’d go see him.
Carrie and I talked for more than three hours that morning. As I left her at the counter, taking the stairs to the lobby in bunches because time had flown and I was already twenty minutes late to my next appointment, my heart began to beat so hard and fast I could feel it in my throat, the tips of my fingers. I was experiencing one of those renewals-of-faith-in-Eve moments. She’d got it right again. No way could she have got it right again, but she’d got it right again.
A refusal to let the occasion go unmarked was, for Eve, a hereditary trait. Her mother, Mae Babitz, born Lily May Laviolette in Crowley, Louisiana, in 1911, was the daughter of a French Cajun teenager, Agnes, and the man who raped Agnes. Agnes was pressured by the church to marry her rapist, resisted, was excommunicated. She took Lily May and moved to Sour Lake, Texas, birthplace of Texaco, pitched a tent beside the oil rigs so that she and Lily May would have somewhere to sleep, and began cooking chili for roughnecks.
The Depression had just started when Lily May finished high school. She went to work for $4 a week at her mother’s hot dog stand. Her days were spent fending off passes and collecting nickel tips in the pink-checked uniform she made herself. Says Mirandi, “Mother was so close with Agnes. They were only sixteen years apart. Agnes had bad husbands. The worst was Joe Forman. He was a bootlegger and an alcoholic and a wife beater, and he was after Mother since she was very young. And I don’t think Mother felt she could leave Agnes with him.” The hell Lily May was trapped in was a particularly American kind: hard luck, hard times, mother love, self-destructive loyalty.
And then, five years later, deliverance. It came in two forms. A priest, who found Lily May a driver headed West, saving her train fare. And a gambler on whom Agnes decided to roll the dice. Mirandi: “Charlie Spillars became Agnes’s next husband. Either he got rid of Joe or Joe just left. Charlie was always losing money, but he was an absolute sweetheart. He and Agnes adored each other. And I think that’s what finally freed my mother.”
Lily May arrived in Hollywood in 1934. She must’ve blinked her eyes, dried out from the Dust Bowl and the fluorescent Texas sun and the ugly, oil-reeking air. Maybe she also rubbed them because it would be hard to credit what they were seeing: palm trees, the leaves heavy, fleshy, swaying gracefully under a sky of blue both deep and soft; slanting, honeyed light spilling densely across the fronts of the buildings, horizontal rather than vertical and sleepy-looking, the cottages, wooden and A-frame or Spanish-style, white stucco with red-tile roofs; trolleys moving people unhurriedly to and fro and back again on wide streets that still had, as she’d soon discover, long rural stretches, orange groves on either side; and, most thrillingly of all, in the near distance, above Bronson Canyon, on Mount Lee, the HOLLYWOODLAND sign, erected in 1923, an advertisement for a real estate development, and the site, the year before, of a spectacular suicide, a young woman named Peg Entwistle jumping off the H after failing to make it in motion pictures (Lily May had no interest in those, but she very much did in enchantment, the other local product). And as she stood there, breathing in the delicate scent of the jasmine blossoms, feeling the lazy, languid weight of the breeze—ocean, even though the Pacific was miles away—its touch on her face as gentle as a caress, she probably wondered if she wasn’t dreaming or dead. Reality here simply wasn’t real.
Lily May immediately dropped the Lily, along with the country accent, and changed regular old American May to th
e more exotic Mae. A whiz typist thanks to a class she’d taken at the Chenier Business School in Beaumont, she had no trouble finding work: as the receptionist at the office of Dr. Franklyn Thorpe, a prominent gynecologist. The job was unrelated to show business in any way, except through marriage. Thorpe’s wife was actress Mary Astor. Two years after he hired Mae, Thorpe took a peek inside Astor’s diary. The ink she used was plain brown, but the writing was gaudiest purple, especially when describing an affair with playwright George S. Kaufman. Thorpe promptly filed for divorce, and the custody battle between him and Astor over their daughter became the scandal of 1936. The diary was the star witness, the one whose testimony everybody had been dying to hear ever since Thorpe began leaking passages to newspapers: “[George] fits me perfectly . . . many exquisite moments . . . twenty—count them, diary, twenty.”
Marital discord was something Mae knew plenty about. Her husband, the Italian with the Mexican name, Pancho, kept irregular hours. Maître d’s at the city’s most exclusive nightclub didn’t come home until dawn, and Pancho often came home later than that because he believed having a wife was no reason not to also have a girlfriend. There were other problems, too. The big one: he wasn’t what she wanted. So when in 1942 she met Sol, a not-quite-divorced New York violinist with an unshakable conviction that the Wagnerian style of playing Bach was wrong as wrong could be, and a cute William Powell gigolo mustache, plus an aunt who was under contract at RKO (it wasn’t Sol’s genius that landed him the job as a studio musician, it was Aunt Vera’s connections), the timing and circumstances weren’t as dire as might initially have been supposed. Mae, in this order: got pregnant, converted to Judaism, divorced Pancho, married Sol. And, a scant four months following the wedding, on May 13, 1943, gave birth to Eve. And since Sol and Mae Babitz were those rare lucky someones for whom love actually worked out, they lived happily ever after.
Sol and Mae Babitz, 1942
Now, Mae was a woman of immense daring. She put it all on the line. Born into the situation she was, poverty and obscurity a near given, she pretty much had to. But she understood the value of what she’d won, was careful never to risk it. She’d been so close to having no kind of life at all. (She was almost twenty-three when she escaped Sour Lake, twenty-nine when she found Sol.) Which is why she saw L.A. for what it was: a heart-stopping mixture of blue sky and green pasture and blue-green sea, and virtually untouched. She didn’t need to lose Paradise to realize she was in it.
She even tried to save it. In 1958, Mae became one of the founders of the committee dedicated to rescuing Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers from destruction. (She got Picasso to sign the petition.) In a letter to the Los Angeles Times, she’d write, “History’s tallest structure ever built by a single person shall survive intact.” And so it did.
Then there was her own art. A rage for newer, bigger, better swept through L.A. in the fifties. Buildings and houses from the turn of the century, elegant and majestic, were being torn down left and right, junked like old movie sets, to make way for monstrosities, bland and anonymous. Mae’s method was, in her words, “to stay one step ahead of the smashing ball.” Says Mirandi, “Mother used to bump into the man who ran the Cleveland Wrecking Company at sites. They became friends. He started calling her when he got a job. He’d tell her, ‘We’re going to be at such and such a place in three months.’ She’d grab her card table and her folding chair, her pencils and pads, and go. Usually she’d take me and Evie with her. I’d bring my homework, and Evie would bring a book, and we’d just sort of hang out while she drew.” Mae’s sketches of the Hollywood Hotel, the original Los Angeles High School, the Angels Flight Railway at Hill Street, are among the only records of these structures that exist. And to see her work in its entirety is to see a city that’s vanished, a city that wasn’t a city at all, but a drowsy Spanish outpost, the ghost town called Los Angeles that haunts the sleek, tense, ultramodern urban experience known as L.A.
Eve inherited her mother’s eyes, no matter that they were the exact color and shape of her father’s. Eyes that stayed bright, stayed devious, that always saw for the first time even when they saw for the thousandth. And what Eve did for Rosalind Frank was what Mae did for the Victorians on Figueroa. She made sure something remained. “The Sheik” is a record, a testament, a firsthand account of a natural phenomenon—a beauty so powerful it was a black hole, sucking up everything around it, including its possessor. It appears to have left Rosalind without character or ambition or even a distinct personality. If ever there was a shoo-in for movie stardom, she was it. It didn’t happen, though. The reason: she was already a star in life. How could she be expected to audition, to hustle, to cope? Wrote Eve, “People took care of [Rosalind]. Usually, her sorority sisters, but if they weren’t there, then anyone who was would automatically assume responsibility. It wasn’t that she was retarded; it was just that she couldn’t scrape up even a sliver of interest in the proceedings and couldn’t see why she should, and no one else could think of a good enough reason, either—at least, one that made sense when you looked at her.” In short, Rosalind was too much the thing to be the thing. Hollywood High was her movie, and when the movie ended, she was adrift, without an arc or a script to follow, supporting actors to keep her from missing her cues or flubbing her lines, a director to tell her where to stand or how to look. Her suicide was a confession of her vacancy. She faded to black because she couldn’t think what else to do.
Which is to say, I accept that her death is the reason Eve wrote “The Sheik.” Or, rather, I accept it is a reason. In the story, the narrator finds out that the Rosalind character OD’d two months prior. In life, however—and this to me is a crucial difference—Rosalind OD’d almost two years prior, in early 1970. Says Carrie White, “Roz was always in a heartbreak. The man-trap business was the only thing she developed. So if a man left, it just destroyed her. She came into my salon one day. She was hysterical, was so freaked-out from all the Dexedrine pills she was seeing spiders. I grabbed them from her and said, ‘You’re still taking these rough-housers?’ And then I flushed them down the toilet. She lost it, ran out. Soon after that, I got the call. Her family said it was an accidental overdose, something to do with a miscarriage. I don’t know. There were mixed stories.” So Eve had been sitting on this knowledge for a while before she started feeding paper into her typewriter. A more urgent impetus, therefore, must exist.
* * *
Now for the public reason. Eve gave it in her 1982 book, L.A. Woman. The Eve character is an artist-photographer, Jim Morrison her on-again, off-again lover. She calls him her “tar baby” and credits him as her inspiration. Or, I suppose, properly speaking, anti-inspiration:
I was so mad at [Jim Morrison’s] L.A., [Jim’s Morrison’s] Symptom of the Apocalypse attitude, that every picture I began to take was proof he was wrong—and they really worked. They were casual but in an obsessed kind of way since I wanted to make L.A. look as though even a child could see that the bungalows and palm trees were only bungalows and palm trees and not out to kill the rest of the world.
“The Sheik,” so full of freshness and wonder, did precisely that, which is why I buy the above reason without qualification. Without qualification but with a substitution: swap out Jim Morrison, put in Joan Didion.
Eve’s Esquire piece makes clear that she had great affection for Morrison, but little respect. It’s highly doubtful, therefore, that any idea rattling around his pretty head would get her blood so boiling she’d feel the need to seek aesthetic revenge. She didn’t take him seriously enough to pay him that compliment. And besides, when she wrote “The Sheik” in 1971, Morrison was in a bad way: mired in troubles both legal and personal, physically deteriorating, spiritually depleted. After a disastrous concert in New Orleans on December 12, 1970, he’d stopped performing live. John Densmore, the Doors’ drummer, from his memoir Riders on the Storm: “Jim wasn’t even drunk, but his energy was fading. Later Ray [Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist] remarked that during the set he s
aw all of Jim’s psychic energy go out the top of his head. . . . I knew the band’s public life was over. I saw a sad, old blues singer who’d been great once but couldn’t get it up anymore.” In other words, Morrison of 1971 was not Morrison of 1967, a figure of youth and beauty and potency, a modern-day Orpheus. He was fat, flaccid, loaded, going through the motions. A stricken man. And by July of that year he’d be a dead one. So the timing’s off with him, same as it is with Rosalind.
How’s this for timing? Didion, in 1970, when Eve was as intimately involved with Earl McGrath and his crowd as she’d ever be, published a novel, Play It as It Lays, about an actress named Maria Wyeth. Maria spends her days going everywhere, going nowhere, just driving the freeways, as her marriage and life fall apart: “Again and again [Maria] returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly.”
(What, by the way, I mean by “intimately involved”: Eve, because of her association with Earl, is responsible, if inadvertently, for the ending of Play It. Says Eve, “Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town. I remember her once lying down on the floor of my apartment—I was having a dinner party, Joan and John were there, Earl was there—and telling that amazing story about her friend Tamar. [Tamar Hodel, twenty-six, decided to kill herself after a failed love affair. She asked a then seventeen-year-old Phillips to help. Phillips, believing it wasn’t her place to tell Hodel, an adult, what to do, agreed. Hodel swallowed a bottle of Seconal. Phillips fell asleep beside Hodel in bed. Fortunately, friends came home in time to call an ambulance.] I guess Joan was listening.” I phone Phillips, relay Eve’s words to her. Phillips laughs. “Oh, yeah, Joan was listening. She called me up the next day and said, ‘Is it all right if I use that story you told in the book I’m working on?’ And I said, ‘Go ahead, it’s all yours.’ ” In Play It’s climactic scene, Maria cradles the married-but-homosexual producer, the Earl-like BZ, as he overdoses on Seconal. She falls asleep beside him in bed. Friends come home, though, unfortunately, not in time to call an ambulance.)
