by Lili Anolik
Yet Eve’s formal daring is easy to miss, her art so artful it appears artless. The absence of the clanking of plot can make it seem as if there isn’t one. Not true. There’s the sustained drama of her boredom, her endless orchestrations and machinations, sexual and social and chemical, to keep that boredom at bay. It’s just that the style in which she tells her story is so organic as to be invisible. The handful of pieces that make up Slow Days—stand-alones that overlap and reflect on one another, characters surfacing, vanishing, then resurfacing—gain in power and fascination, scope and grandeur, as the book progresses. They’re airy without being lightweight, blithe without being scatterbrained. And while they’re full of gaiety, they’re also full of something else. Tune in to Slow Days’ music and you will catch the strains of melancholy.
In “Dodger Stadium,” for example, a married lover (Tom Dowd, from the Eve’s Hollywood’s dedication) invites Eve to a baseball game. She writes, “People take me to screenings of obscure films, they drag me along to fashionable new nightclubs, they have me meet them in a taxi, honey, and whisk me off to dangerous Cuban samba places to bailar the night away. They don’t take me to baseball games. . . . No wonder I’m such a sitting duck for this man.” Eve is in raptures over the players, the crowds, the sharp, yellowy smell of mustard in the air. Dowd is in raptures over her raptures. Afterward, at dinner at an out-of-the-way restaurant, the tender moment of enchantment is shattered when an agent stops by the table to talk business with Dowd, ignoring Eve because she isn’t Dowd’s wife and is therefore someone to whom courtesy is not owed:
I felt myself fading into the background and let their voices wash over me, well aware of my place in this traditional back-street romance. There was plenty of time to worry about who was taking advantage of whom in the war between men and women or the future of the country or any of that. I felt [his] hand reach under the table and come to rest someplace just above my knee, and I suddenly thought how fortunate it was that I hadn’t had my car washed that afternoon.
There’s loneliness here, maybe even a little heartbreak, but there’s also wit and grace and a glancing touch, so that her pain never becomes maudlin or morose. It’s just swiftly acknowledged, and then she moves on to her next emotion: gladness to be in Dowd’s company, that the evening happened at all.
In the penultimate piece, “Emerald Bay,” Paul, not only the book’s impetus but one of its main characters, Shawn, brings Eve to the house of an older married couple, Mason and Jo Marchese, in Laguna Beach. Jo’s best friend since girlhood is Beth Nanville, a brittle rich woman. (“[Beth] wore dismal colors always, powder blue and mustard, and I put her into my ‘Empty Lady Hanging On’ category.”) Eve wounds Beth’s feelings, avoidably though unintentionally, by adding dressing to a salad that Beth has already dressed. That’s the climax of the story—salad dressing—until the very end, which is almost a coda, and so brief your eye nearly skips over it.
Eve, back in L.A., gets a call from Shawn informing her that he’s driving down to Laguna to be with Jo because Beth has committed suicide. She writes:
I wish, now, that I could remember [Beth’s] face or the sound of her voice. But the only things that I really remember are that she left her children $2,500,000 in her will and when I tasted her lettuce I was sure there was nothing on it.
It’s an extraordinary moment. There, right in the middle of that upscale little beach town, the jewel of coastal Southern California, where “anything that [is] fascinating, a new idea, a breakthrough, [is] kept outside the gates,” is Death.I
The tone of “Emerald Bay” is casual, hard (never does Eve take back or modify her original assessment of Beth, she certainly doesn’t apologize for it), yet the piece is also drenched in emotion. Eve here is showing herself a master of the juxtaposition of mood and action. There’s the unceasingly delightful flow of her narrative, her characters—clever, overgrown children, self-centered and self-indulgent—and their constant pursuit of pleasure, the charming triviality of it all, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, a flash of genuine anguish, reality intruding on the artifice, interrupting the fools at their revels. And, suddenly, you understand that what looks like a comedy and trifling is actually a tragedy and lyric, the laughter growing out of sadness, disappointment, failure. The book is alert to the startling abruptness of life, the brutality of it, how harrowing it can be, and that one person’s devastation is, for the rest of us, gossip, worth a few minutes’ diversion and no more.
Slow Days is every bit as close to despair as Play It as It Lays. Unlike Play It, however, it’s never a bummer. While the writing of Play It is sophisticated and nuanced, the attitude is not. The attitude is callow and simplistic, is that, basically, of a teenage cynic, what many of us are deep-down apparently. How else to account for the work’s enduring reputation and popularity? Play It flatters the reader. Tells the reader what the reader already thinks he or she knows: that Hollywood is rotten and corrupt; that the beautiful people have ugly souls; that the game is rigged. Slow Days, with its panoramic, kaleidoscopic view not just of Hollywood but of Los Angeles, its total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals, and its amused, worldly skepticism, is far too tough-minded—and hip—for that crybaby stuff. Sure, there are unhappy women overdosing on Seconal, leaving behind hugely expensive beach cottages and no notes, but there are also private bays as green as emeralds until they’re as blue as lapis lazulis; parties with guest lists and armed Pinkertons; girls in chiffon who resemble tulips; actors in tennis shorts, their legs tan and limber, springy with muscle. To quote Eve, “Ahhhh, me.”
Now, I suppose, is the time to come clean. Eve was right. I do have homicidal designs on Didion. I think Play It is a silly, shallow book. I think Slow Days should replace it, become the new essential reading for young women (and young men) seeking to understand L.A. There. I said it.
With Slow Days, Eve achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so purely enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Howard Hawks, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Ed Ruscha, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.
* * *
I. Beth Nanville is, like every other character in Slow Days, a real person. Her name was Peg Thorsdale, and she was the best friend of Petey Mazza (“Jo Marchese”), wife of Aldo Mazza (“Mason Marchese”). And, same as Beth, Peg killed herself. Petey was, says Paul, “upset by Eve’s story and what she thought was an unfair swipe at Peg.” And Slow Days became a source of tension between Petey and Eve, which Eve being Eve scarcely noticed. A strange coincidence: New York Review Books Classics reissued Slow Days in 2016. The publishing house had a single copy of the original book. Petey and Aldo’s. Sara Kramer, managing editor at NYRB Classics, sent me a photo of the inscription:
4/24/77
To Petey and Aldo
Without you I’d be nothing.
Love,
Eve Babitz
Under Eve’s name was a lipstick kiss, the pink still bright, even after all these years.
Eve, Present Day
1977 was Eve’s finest year, her peak both artistically and emotionally. She’d managed to gouge out of herself a book that was great in spite of, yet also very much because of, her turbulent life, her crippling vices, her idiosyncratic talent. Equally vital: the people around her. Wilson, who understood her—“Eve was an extraordinary voice, an extraordinary sensibility”—and understood how to better make that voice and sensibility come through on the page, was her ideal editor, no matter that she hated to be edited. (Recalls Paul, “Eve thought Vicky was brilliant and gave her credit for pulling Slow Days together.”) Spellman-Silverman, who babied her and bullied them that dared mess with her, was her ideal agent. (Eve, in a November 5, 1975, letter to Dan Wakefield, recounts with obvious glee a conversation between Jim Goode, the editor at Playboy who’d rejected “The Sheik,” now an editor at Playgirl, and Spellman-Silverman: “In
his bright urban way [Jim] said, ‘Ahh, yes, Eve Babitz, I remember her when she was just a collagist. We really would like to use more of her things.’ And Erica looked at him with this ingrown sneer she has for all business dealings and said, ‘Well I’ll tell ya one thing. You ain’t gettin’ none of her stuff for no lousy $500 like the last time so you can just forget that shit.’ ”) And Paul was her ideal guy, even if she was with other guys too, even if he was with other guys too. (When friends asked Eve why she’d chosen for a mate somebody whose heterosexuality was as touch-and-go as Paul’s, she’d reply, “He’s not that gay, and besides we have fun.”)
The thing about peaks, though, is they’re not sustainable, Eve’s less sustainable than most. So let’s give her a chance to enjoy hers, take in the view, maybe enhance the experience with a shot of tequila, a hallucinogen or two, and jump to 2010, when my romance with her began.
At the time I was thirty-two, living in Kips Bay with my boyfriend, Rob, in a 350-square-foot apartment subsidized by NYU, where Rob was a medical resident. I was a writer, though I mumbled when I told people this since I wasn’t a published one. It was a weekday evening, rush hour, and I was on the subway, hanging from a pole, reading Hollywood Animal, the memoir of screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. I turned the page and came across this terrific quote about sex and L.A., attributed to a person I’d never heard of before. Eve Babitz. (A curious thing: I can’t tell you the exact quote because, evidently, it doesn’t exist. At least not in Hollywood Animal, or any other Eszterhas opus. I’ve searched and searched. And yet I’d swear to you that’s how I found Eve, one Hollywood animal giving me the scent of another.)
As soon as I got home, I went on Google, discovered that Eve was a writer, went on Amazon, discovered that all her books were out of print. Used copies, however, were available from third-party sellers. I picked the title I liked best, then clicked on the cheapest option. The book arrived the following week. I read it fast, in a single swallow, skipping meals, barely even taking pee breaks. It wasn’t just that I thought she was good, though I did—very, very—it was that she was telling me everything I wanted to know. I had to talk to her.
Eve wasn’t on Facebook or Myspace or Twitter. But she was in the phone book. The last place I looked, naturally. I could’ve reached for my cell, called her. I have vampire manners, though, need to be invited into a house in order to enter it; so instead I wrote her a note on a postcard, a shot of a young Marlon Brando straddling a motorcycle (I didn’t know then that he was a heartthrob of hers, lucky guess). No response. I was disappointed, but I’d bought more of her books, had them to keep me company. And I forgot about the whole matter until a few weeks later, when I found myself standing in front of her condo building in West Hollywood.
I can give you the day. October 27, 2010. I usually have zero recall for this kind of thing, except my brother, John, who was in his second year of business school at USC, and with whom I was staying for the week, had come out to me the night before. (Like Claude Rains in Casablanca, I was shocked, shocked, only I really was shocked. John and I were so close! Why had he waited so long—he was twenty-nine—to tell me he was gay?) Which is the reason that that period isn’t at all hazy or grainy in my mind, but sharp, vivid, detailed. And, yes, memory is notoriously unreliable. To wit, Hollywood Animal. Old emails, however, time-stamped, date-stamped, back mine up.
I’d woken early. Wanting to give John privacy, myself fresh air, I’d grabbed my sneakers, tiptoed out the door. I headed south on Crescent Heights, took a left on Santa Monica, and just kept going, lost in my thoughts, until I saw a sign for G— Street, Eve’s street, and stopped cold. I was so reeling from the kismet of it all that I was halfway down the block before I realized I was walking again. I’d forgotten which number Eve’s building was, but it was easy enough to look at the names on the mailboxes.
And then, at the corner of R—Street, voilà: E. BABITZ. The mailbox was attached to a quiet, house-looking building, two stories high and pleasantly slummish, the paint a faded pastel, originally pink or brown-pink, overgrown shrubbery in front, garage below, a lawn chair on the second-floor balcony. I stood there for several minutes, smelling the wet smell of hosed-down pavement, feeling the air, cool and shadowy as it always is in L.A. in the morning before the sun’s burned through the haze, on my skin, and stared at the closed blinds of the bottom right unit. Eve’s.
I considered what to do. I couldn’t very well press her buzzer. It wasn’t quite 7 a.m. yet. And even if it were a more civilized hour, I still couldn’t press her buzzer, ambush her. But I couldn’t just turn around either, retrace my steps to John’s apartment, pretend I’d wound up on her front lawn by dumb coincidence rather than fateful design. Finally I grabbed a flyer off the windshield of a parked car, scrawled on its blank back a few words along with my cell number, folded it in half, then slipped it under the locked foyer door.
I didn’t hear from Eve that day. Or the next day. Or the next next day, which was the day I was returning to New York. That really is that, I thought, if I thought about it at all. (I had a lot on my mind at that particular moment.) And I didn’t think about it again for a year and a half.
It was February 2012. Rob and I were now married. He was in private practice and we were renting an eight-hundred-square-foot one-bedroom in Chelsea. My professional situation was slightly less dire. I’d done some intellectual-property work for Penguin, written a young-adult series under a fake name. Under my real name, I’d published a few pieces in semi-prestigious, semi-obscure literary magazines. If I wasn’t quite living the dream, at least I could look people in the eye, speak in a clear voice, when I said what I did.
And then I got a chance to pitch Vanity Fair. I pitched Eve. I never considered anything or anybody else. She’d been at the center of the most stylish kinds of action in and around Hollywood for decades, a member of both the beau monde—very fast, very rich, very famous—and the demimonde—artists and geniuses and other assorted riffraff—plus, was an artist-genius herself and under-recognized. And of course there were the notches on her bedpost. (Or the notches that would’ve been on her bedpost had she bothered owning a bed.) She was, in short, an ideal Vanity Fair subject. Over drinks, the editor, Bruce Handy, expressed cautious enthusiasm, and I, incautiously encouraged, was off to the races.
I wrote Eve yet again, this time a proper letter on white paper. After reintroducing myself, I told her I was doing a feature on her for Vanity Fair (I was speaking with false authority, though I didn’t realize it, had no clue how long and arduous the process of getting a pitch officially approved at Vanity Fair can be, never mind for a non–Vanity Fair writer, never mind for a non–Vanity Fair writer with a résumé as skimpy as mine), and asked if she’d let me take her to lunch. The response was the same: none. I overcame my aversion to cold-calling, but she didn’t answer her phone, ever.
And it wasn’t just me who couldn’t get anywhere with her. Dave Hickey had attempted to mount an Eve Babitz revival the year before. Then a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hickey assigned Eve’s pieces to his students. They’d flipped. He got in touch to see if she’d speak to the class. Her reaction to his request was not what he’d hoped. “She told me to fuck myself,” he informed me cheerfully. “That’s okay. She blows everybody off these days.” She did? Really? The woman who went to every party worth going to in L.A. in the second half of the twentieth century no longer wanted to come out and play? Say it ain’t so. What happened?
A fire.
In the spring of 1997, Eve, fifty-three, was driving home from a family gathering. She struck a match to light a cigar and dropped the match on her skirt. Seconds later, she was engulfed in flames. She suffered third-degree burns over half her body. The doctors gave her a fifty-fifty chance of survival. The odds broke in her favor, and she pulled through. Her life, though, was forever altered. Whether from shame or pain or plain lack of interest, she stopped going out, turned increasingly inward, increasingly reclusive.
&nbs
p; Hickey could take a hint. I couldn’t. Or, I suppose, wouldn’t. And, at long last, I established contact. Not with Eve, with those close to Eve: Mirandi and Laurie, Caroline Thompson, Julian Wasser, Paul. Either Eve got curious or hungry or both, because three months after I mailed that letter asking her to lunch, she sent word through Paul that she accepted the invitation. I booked my ticket, flew to L.A. the next morning.
I arrived at Short Order straight from the airport. I was the first customer of the day, the hostess unlocking the door as I reached for it. The restaurant was Eve’s choice, a fifteen-minute walk (she hadn’t driven in years) from her condo, in the Farmers’ Market at Third and Fairfax. It looked like the kind of place that would have sold hamburgers and hot dogs to beach bums and bunnies had it been located on the water, only fancy. I sat at a table by the window, sipping a seltzer, my stomach a mess from nerves and travel and being six weeks pregnant, and waited for the woman who once said she believed “anyone who lived past thirty just wasn’t trying hard enough to have fun,” now sixty-nine.
And then the second customer of the day entered. I stood up from my chair, half sat back down, stood up again as I thought, It’s Eve, wait, it can’t be Eve, wait, it has to be Eve. She no longer looked like a bombshell, her hair gray, the cut short and blunt, her clothes a way of covering up her nakedness and nothing more, her glasses, black-rimmed, the lenses thick. She didn’t, however, look like a burn victim either. (Her face had been spared, as had her feet, thanks to UGGs.) She looked, remarkably, unremarkable, an older woman who didn’t give much thought to her appearance out for lunch. She picked up a paper takeout menu from the hostess’s stand, began studying it.
I walked over to her, touched her shoulder. She smiled, toward me rather than at me. And I saw immediately that I’d been wrong about her looking unremarkable. That was the impression she gave from a distance. Up close it was another story. Her glasses were smudged, greasy. She’d applied lipstick to her mouth, only she’d done it haphazardly, a streak of pink on her front tooth, on her chin. She had, too, a smell about her. Not body odor—it wasn’t tart or tangy. Something else, something I could almost identify but couldn’t quite, something heavy, sweetish. She said she was starving.
