Hollywood's Eve

by Lili Anolik

  I’ve already quoted that wonderfully self-aware line of hers from Slow Days: “I can’t get a thread to go through to the end and make a straightforward novel.” Yet that’s precisely the task she’s forced herself to perform here. She’s abandoned indirection and disorder, arguably the making of Slow Days, that willingness to forgo the tidy linear narrative, instead presenting life in all its unruly complexity; to be oblique, elusive, elliptical; to tell a story that “turn[s] around in the middle or get[s] lost.” Sex and Rage is, contrastingly, structured as a classic three-act setup-conflict-resolution bildungsroman—L.A. girl artist falls in with a fast crowd, suffers heartache and disillusionment, reinvents herself as a writer—and it’s the structure that does the book in. The wild, heedless energy, which ran amuck every so often in Eve’s Hollywood, was perfectly channeled and commanded in Slow Days, is constrained in Sex and Rage, bound and gagged.

  The expressive potential, too. Eve is no longer Eve. Eve is Eve posing as Eve. Eve is a character named Eve. Well, technically Jacaranda. “[Jacaranda] was a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves, with a bookcase full of the kind of reading matter that put her in touch with the rest of the world.” (It’s like she’s describing a talking dog!) Eve has, in short, novelized herself—her background, her experiences, her thoughts, the way she looks and talks and moves—and, consequently, both vulgarized and trivialized herself.

  What’s more, she now does consciously what she once did unwittingly. Spontaneity has become premeditated, and, poof, the magic is gone. The most striking example of this occurs when Eve-Jacaranda enters the living space of Max, the Earl McGrath character, and is looking around:

  There was art all over the walls. Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, a David Hockney swimming pool, and a huge pornographic watercolor by John Altoon. In the front to the right, where people came in, was a carefully framed photograph by Julian Wasser of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked girl. The contrast between Duchamp’s dried-out ancient little person and the large young girl’s Rubenesque flesh was not (unlike chess) at all subtle. This photograph was the only thing on Max’s wall that people actually looked at; even Altoon’s pornography was a little too tasteful to arouse real interest.

  “You’ve got a print of this,” she said, her voice filled with hurt surprise. She’d never imagined that anyone might own a print and not have to tear it out of an art magazine as she had had to do.

  “You know this photograph?” Max asked.

  “Well, I mean . . .” (She’d have to be an idiot to spend all her time around artists and not know this photograph.)

  So Eve the character is examining and then commenting on a work featuring Eve the person. The scene is coy, contrived, mannered, too cute by half—is, in other words, everything that the photograph could have been but wasn’t. (It’s as if the Eve in the photograph turned to the camera, peeked out from behind her hair, and winked obscenely at the viewer.) Art has been replaced by artifice, mystery by mystique, and all is lost.

  The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that Eve isn’t a natural novelist, and I’m not going to suggest otherwise. And neither, by the way, is Eve. “Writing a novel was my idea, but I didn’t really want to do it. I preferred short stories, short essays—whatever you want to call them. Nobody told me I had to write a novel. Vicky didn’t tell me, nobody at Knopf told me. They didn’t have to tell me. I just knew. If you were a serious writer, then a novel is what you wrote.” And it was. The novel, in America, at the time Eve started to write, in 1961, the year of “Travel Broadens,” was considered not just a vocational calling but a spiritual. Tom Wolfe: “It’s hard to explain what an American dream writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon.”

  The problem is with Eve’s novel in particular. Sex and Rage flat-out doesn’t come off. The problem, however, is also with the novel in general. Only the worst kind of blowhard engages in that the-death-knell-ringeth-for-the-novel talk, yet here I go. The novel as the dominant—nay, supreme—medium of literary expression is doomed, sunk, toast, and has been for decades. It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway: good novels, some better than good, continue to get written year after year. I’ll say this, too: Jane Austen’s description of the novel as a “work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language” is as true now as it was in 1817. And, to top it off, this: I spent the second half of my twenties, the first half of my thirties, trying to write a novel. The idea of writing a novel still, to this day, makes me go moody and tender and wistful. Doesn’t matter. And the reason it doesn’t matter is because it fails to change the fact that the novel’s historical moment has passed, that cultural centrality has given way to cultural marginality. We want to believe that the art forms of our time are the art forms of all times, and it simply isn’t so. Just think, five hundred years ago lyric poetry was the hot thing, what all the pale-faced, dreamy-eyed young men were doing.

  The wind went out of the novel’s sails with the advent of women’s equality and the Pill and the no-fault divorce, the point at which the marriage plot, the novel’s greatest plot, lost its tension and urgency. Wait, I want to withdraw that statement—it’s extreme, off its rocker—or at least modify it so it’s less extreme, less off its rocker: a wind went out of the novel’s sails with the advent of women’s equality and the Pill and the no-fault divorce, the point at which the marriage plot, among the novel’s greatest plots, certainly in novels by women—Austen, Eliot—or featuring women characters—Madame Bovary, Portrait of a Lady—lost its tension and urgency. (If Charles Bovary had, on his and Emma’s wedding night, whipped out his doctor’s pad, written her a prescription for Enovid, told her he was cool with an open relationship, wouldn’t sexual tragedy have been averted? Why scarf arsenic when what happens in Rouen stays in Rouen? And if prenups had existed in 1881, would Gilbert Osmond have come sniffing around Isabel Archer in the first place? Probably not.)

  And the possibilities of any form are finite; they get exhausted. What was there left to do with the novel after James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were through with it? For a while, writers such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos found something. They wrote books that were less interior, more exterior, that were, in effect, more like their new rival, the one that had sprung up out of nowhere and whose dust they were already eating: the movies. By midcentury, though, those limits, too, were being reached. Plus, there was the fractured nature of modern life, the manic pace, the near-constant interruptions. The novel—meditative, leisurely, requiring long stretches of concentration—couldn’t answer the needs of the reader as it once did.

  So where to go from there? Where to go if fiction, if story, seemed not like a link between our inner selves and the outer world, but like a falsehood or trick? Why, to fact, of course, otherwise known as nonfiction, where story wasn’t story at all, it was a thing that actually happened. Which is the place it’s been since Norman Mailer, in 1960, in the pages of Esquire magazine, wrote the following line: “I had some dim intuitive feeling that what was wrong with all journalism is that the reporter tended to be objective and that was one of the great lies of all time.” New Journalism and the personal essay (not quite interchangeable, but close) had arrived. On the heels of Mailer were Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Michael Herr. And Eve Babitz. Moreover, New Journalism/the personal essay was a supple and wily beast, could assume many guises. Truman Capote wrote New Journalism/personal essay in the form of true-crime reportage; Pauline Kael in the form of movie reviews; Janet Malcolm, slightly later, in the form of exposés on journalism itself.

  Fiction has always treated real people and true events as raw material and fai
r game. Engaged in what the impish and perverse Malcolm called “Promethean theft, of transgression in the service of creativity, of stealing as the foundation of making.” Used nonfiction for its own ends, in essence. With New Journalism, the using would be the other way around. Now nonfiction would avail itself of fiction’s techniques: the reporter would become a character in the story he was reporting on; the reporting of the story would become part of the story itself; the old unobtrusive no-style style was out, a stylish style, whistles and bells, in; subjectivity would, as Mailer decreed, reign supreme; dialogue would play a crucial role, livening up the narrative, goosing it along; and details and timelines would be elided and condensed to avoid redundancies or losses of momentum. The short writings, often appearing initially in magazines, would read like short stories, and the collections like short-story collections (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, for example), the extended writings like novels (Dispatches, for example). And even if the extended writing read like a novel and was categorized as a novel, as was the case with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it was still New Journalism. Nobody believed Raoul Duke was a figment of Hunter S. Thompson’s imagination. Raoul Duke was Hunter S. Thompson hiding in plain sight.

  And now for a final twist: the New Journalism short writing was the new short story, and the New Journalism extended writing was the new novel. Fiction has, as I said, traditionally ripped off fact. Yet facts are inanimate. Imagination, in both fiction and nonfiction, is what sparks them, brings them to life. Nonfiction, therefore, is doing the same job as the form considered its antithesis. The novel didn’t die, it just found a different host to inhabit.

  The novel is dead, long live the novel.

  If New Journalism was actually the same ol’ same ol’, though, it was repackaged cleverly enough to seem new. And the writers beginning their careers in the sixties and seventies, the ones for whom it was the Great American Novel or bust, must’ve needed desperately to believe it was new. With the novel, the pressure for them to measure up, not just to the giants from their own country but from Europe, too, and not just to present-day giants but to giants going back centuries, would have been more than daunting, would’ve been crushing. They were defeated before they’d uncapped their pens. With New Journalism, in contrast, the pressure was off—why, journalism wasn’t an art, was barely even a profession—and there wasn’t any tradition to follow. It was the Wild West. No laws or rules, all danger and opportunity. They could make it up as they went along. Which is doubtless the reason that so much of the writing was fresh and inventive and outrageous. Yippee-ki-yay.

  * * *

  I. X, a lawyer-turned-actor-turned-back-to-lawyer, takes the Anonymous part of Alcoholics Anonymous seriously and prefers not to be named.

  Or Was It the Coke?

  If Sex and Rage was Eve’s attempt to shape up, get with the program, write something with broad appeal, it was a flop. Says Eve, “Sex and Rage didn’t sell any better than Slow Days did.” The book got thumped by reviewers, too. (The title of the L.A. Times’ assessment: “Surf’s Up on a Sea of Mediocrity.”) So it was a failure both commercially and critically. What I wonder is, did this failure secretly gratify her?

  I think back to the comment she made about fame cramping her style. To be un-famous, in Hollywood terms—the only terms Eve would ever consent to live by—is to be a failure. Yet fame, if you’re talented enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, willful enough, lucky enough to even get it, isn’t something you’re allowed to keep. Which means that failure is inevitable. (Marilyn Monroe found the loophole. By killing herself at thirty-six, perhaps not her final year of sex-symbol viability but close to, she let go of the fame that was about to be torn from her grasp anyway in order to reach for immortality.) Did Eve, sly and instinctive as she was, understand this? That fame wasn’t a gold ring, it was a fool’s-gold ring? That an aura of romantic ruin and mystery, properly cultivated, won’t dissipate, will linger? That losing has a power over the imagination that winning can never hope to match?

  Eve’s creativity had always been, at heart, morbid, operating as it did on the edge of self-destruction. After Sex and Rage, it went over.

  By the late seventies, Eve had a drug problem. Of course, Eve had had a drug problem since the late fifties—her Hollywood High days—and her drug problem was never a problem. Until it was. What changed? The drug. Cocaine, always around but suddenly around a lot more. And perennially unfaithful Eve had eyes only for it. It was all the stimulant she wanted or needed, and depressants could take a hike, too. Says Laurie, “Evie was living in Santa Monica then, in Femmy DeLyser’s house, renting the apartment on the top floor. Have you heard about Femmy yet? Femmy was this crazy Dutch woman, ate vegan, macrobiotic, all that. And she was the birth coach to all these movie stars, including Jane Fonda, and in the eighties she wrote Jane Fonda’s pregnancy workout book, which was a big, big bestseller. Anyway, I remember Evie calling me from Femmy’s and telling me she’d stopped drinking—you know, bragging. And I was so impressed because she was like Mae. She really loved to drink. Except later I found out she wasn’t drinking because she was hooked on coke instead. Yeah, that part she forgot to mention.”

  Cocaine did bad things to Eve’s personality. Chris Blum: “Eve was a hard-core consumer. I couldn’t have lasted a week with her. She never ever stopped. And she became moody, difficult. And when Eve was difficult, she was really difficult. Eve could be, like, ‘Eat shit and die.’ ” Paul: “Eve started getting crazy with the coke. I would wake up in the morning to her pacing around in circles. She’d say that Erica wasn’t doing enough for her, and that she wasn’t happy with not having complete access to Vicky. Neither were taking her obsessive calls. I felt sorry for anyone who had to work with her at that point. I mean, the tirades! I remember her calling me and saying, ‘I just fired Joan Didion.’ Well, obviously Joan didn’t work for Eve. What I’m sure happened was that Joan got tired of dealing with Eve’s enfant-terrible actions and cut her off. So to save face—although Eve wasn’t ever aware of anyone being fed up with her—she said she fired Joan. I started to stay away from her. I couldn’t take it.”

  Cocaine did worse things to Eve’s prose. Novelist and screenwriter Henry Bromell: “I met Eve in the summer of ’79. Caroline [Thompson, Bromell’s girlfriend, soon-to-be wife] and I drove across the country with our dog, Ariel. Vicky Wilson was my editor, too, and she’d given me a couple of Eve’s books. I thought Eve was this beautiful, original voice. Completely from L.A. She told great stories. She’d say to me, ‘Look at these breasts.’ I’d say, ‘Nice.’ And she’d say, ‘Nice? Nice? These breasts have conquered the world!’ She was so much fun. But she was in a battle with drugs, which was ultimately a losing battle. And the work suffered. Her language was really disintegrating.”

  The social life that fed Eve’s artistic life was now eating it. Inspiration had turned into devastation.

  Eve submitted her new book, L.A. Woman (this is the one with the Morrison-penned song for a title), to Spellman-Silverman and Wilson. Neither was pleased. Says Spellman-Silverman, “Vicky and I read it and we were both, like, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ It needed a lot of work. Eve basically said, ‘Fuck you, I’ll get somebody else to publish it.’ And that was the end of our relationship for a while.”

  L.A. Woman was acquired by Joni Evans, editor in chief of Linden Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Evans: “John Gregory Dunne was one of my writers then. I’d spend a lot of time with him and Joan at their house in Brentwood. John and Joan were crazy about Eve, John particularly. He said, ‘Eve is great. You must publish Eve.’ So I did. And I’d loved her earlier work, books like Slow Days, Fast Company. She handed in L.A. Woman, though, and I thought, This is not one of her better efforts. But I couldn’t think how to fix it, and she seemed in a hurry.”

  With Sex and Rage, Eve took a step in the wrong direction. With L.A. Woman (1982), also a novel, also a roman à clef, also a bildungsroman—L.A. girl artist falls in with a fast crowd, suffers heartac
he and disillusionment, reinvents herself as a (screen)writer—she took a leap. I hadn’t cared much for her first novel/roman à clef/bildungsroman; I cared even less for the second. Do I sound bitter? Disappointed? Spiteful? That’s because I am. Really, I’m putting down L.A. Woman more than I mean to here. It isn’t Eve at her most inspired, yet there are still wonderful passages. (I can’t sit across from Laurie without Eve’s description of Ophelia, the Laurie character, running through my head: “big brown eyes and the look of a Russian wolfhound about her when she laughed.”) The truth of the matter is, L.A. Woman is my bête noir.

  During the years I spent toiling away on the Vanity Fair piece, I’d occasionally run into someone who’d actually read an Eve Babitz book. And, invariably, this was the Eve Babitz book that had been read. (A case of bad timing. People were starting to hear about Eve in the early eighties because of what she’d done in the mid-to-late seventies. L.A. Woman happened to be the book of hers in stores at the moment her reputation caught up with her talent.) Consequently, the person didn’t understand why I was carrying on so. I’d argue that you judge a writer by his or her best work, not his or her worst, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I could see that the person, behind the mask of polite attentiveness, was unmoved. The cause was lost. I was wasting my breath.

  Dave Hickey was one of the first people I interviewed about Eve, and I often think back to a remark he made: “Eve only has one story to tell, but she tells it better than anybody.” At the time, I believed this a sage observation and incontestably true. I’d nearly snapped my head off my neck I’d nodded yes yes yes so hard in response. Now I believe the opposite. It’s when Eve is telling other stories, not hers, that Eve isn’t just at her best but at her most Eve. It’s when Eve is using her brains and feelers to interpret the world around her—what it’s like to dance at a honky-tonk in Bakersfield with a gentleman grape farmer, for example, or on a lawn in Hollywood with her sister while the Santa Anas blow—that her persona emerges with vividness and specificity and force. Here’s when her persona does not emerge with vividness and specificity and force: when her persona is her subject, as it is in Sex and Rage and again in L.A. Woman, at which point her persona becomes simultaneously blurry and cartoonish. In short, if Sex and Rage was the beginning of downhill for her, L.A. Woman proved that the slide wasn’t stopping soon.