Hollywood's Eve

by Lili Anolik

  And yet, there’s something Eve wrote during this period that I absolutely love, Fiorucci: The Book,I though it isn’t a book really, is really an extended magazine piece—mostly pictures, huge text—and, like a magazine piece, assigned—a publishing house’s idea—on the fashion label and chain of shops started by the Italian designer Elio Fiorucci.

  Fiorucci has none of Slow Days’ depth. But then, it isn’t trying to, surface what it’s all about, and why risk spoiling so alluring a one by scratching? The opening:

  Fiorucci is the name of a man, the name of a look, the name of a business. A phenomenon. Walking into a Fiorucci store is an event. Milan. New York. London. Boston. Beverly Hills. Tokyo. Rio. Zurich. Hong Kong. Sydney. Fiorucci is Fashion. Fiorucci is flash. Fiorucci stores are the best free show in town. The music pulses; the espresso is free; the neon glows. Even the salespeople are one step beyond—they often wear fiery red crew cuts. But it is, after all is said and done, a store—a store designed to sell clothes. But the difference is all that sex and irony. Anyone who knows anything can see that finally the entire operation is motivated by the very same energy that lights the fire under rock ’n’ roll.

  Fiorucci is totally off the wall and so minor it almost isn’t there, and yet it is, in its way, perfection. A daft delight.

  Eve recalls writing it. Sort of. “There was this weird girl and she was always trying to get me to write this book on Fiorucci, and I would say to myself, ‘Who is this weird girl and why is she bothering me?’ I’d never been interested in Fiorucci. But then I met another girl, Carolyn, and she was the ultimate sharpie from San Francisco, and she wore Fiorucci. Carolyn wasn’t beautiful, but because of the clothes she was beautiful. So I said yes to the weird girl. And the weird publishing house she worked for, Harlin Quist, which published children’s books, only they wanted to start publishing adult books, sent me to Milan. I had shoes when I got on the plane but not when I got off. I guess I lost them. The woman I was staying with gave me her boots. They were suede. I wore them every day I was in Italy. Those suede boots with the same baby-blue skirt and black sweater because I guess I forgot to pack a suitcase.”

  Eve found herself once again in need of an agent. Enter Nan Blitman. “I already knew Eve through Annie [Leibovitz]. I was a writer when Annie and I first met in 1975. Annie had taken the pictures for a story I’d done for Ms. magazine. In those days, Annie was driving—not flying—back and forth from San Francisco to L.A. She amassed a tremendous number of speeding tickets. I’d gone to law school, so I helped her out with the tickets, and then with her contracts with Rolling Stone. Before I knew it, I was an entertainment lawyer. And, when Eve left Erica, she asked me to represent her.”

  The advance Blitman secured Eve for L.A. Woman was substantial. It was also insufficient. (For a cheap thrill, cocaine is expensive.) Eve toyed with the notion of writing a screenplay. Says Bromell, “Screenplays were a kind of distraction for Eve, a get-rich-quick scheme. The idea was that she’d strike it big and then go back to doing what she wanted to do. Her screenplays would finance her books.”

  And her habit, getting more habitual by the day. Blitman: “Eve was hired by Don Henley and Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager, to write a screenplay about the rise of the Eagles. She never really wanted to do it. And she didn’t. I mean, she sort of did. She turned something in, but it wasn’t what the Eagles wanted. They wanted the screenplay to be about them, and she made it about a groupie, about herself, basically. So she had a hard time getting her money. And she really needed it, probably because she owed a drug dealer or something. Finally she called up Azoff and said to his secretary, ‘If I don’t get paid today, I’m going to kill myself. I’ve already bought a body bag and I’m going to kill myself.’ Well, Azoff paid.”

  A brief note on Eve’s attitude of cheerful indifference toward the movies, and during a period, the late sixties through the end of the seventies, in which movies were driving everybody else mad with desire. (Wrote Pauline Kael in her introduction to Reeling, her book of collected New Yorker reviews covering 1972–75, “A few decades hence, these years may . . . be the closest our movies have come to the tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the early 1850s.”) The attitude was genuine. Not a put-on or a defense mechanism, a way of inoculating herself against rejection. My proof, definitive: it wasn’t until the sixth year of our friendship that I learned she’d appeared in one of the greatest films ever made in this country.

  The day before, Mirandi had emailed me a bunch of photos from an old scrapbook of Eve’s. In one was a man I didn’t recognize. I called Eve, described him.

  “That sounds like Mario,” she said.

  “Mario who?”

  “Puzo.”

  After a confused pause, I said, “The guy who wrote the gangster book? The Godfather?”

  “Mm-hmm. Mario was a friend of Joseph Heller’s. And when the studio bought The Godfather, Joe came to Hollywood with Mario as Mario’s bodyguard. He wanted to make sure Mario got a good deal.”

  “The Godfather is my dad’s favorite movie,” I said, more to myself than her. “He quotes it a lot. It’s actually kind of irritating.”

  “I was in it, you know.”

  After another confused pause, I said, “In The Godfather? The Godfather The Godfather? Best Picture of nineteen-seventy-whatever? Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Marlon Brando? That The Godfather?”

  “Yes. Well, no. Not the first one, the second one. As an extra. Just one scene.”

  “Because of Mario Puzo?”

  “No, because of Fred Roos. Fred was Francis’s casting director and producer, and sometimes my boyfriend. He must’ve been my boyfriend when Francis was filming.” All at once her voice changed, got sly. “You know those chocolate-covered strawberries you sent me?”

  I’d ordered her a box from Amazon the week before for Christmas. “Yeah?”

  “They were good.”

  She was quiet for a while, letting the subject float. I didn’t bite, though. Instead I said, “Which scene?”

  She sighed. I was being difficult. “The Senate committee. It looked like it was filmed in Washington, but it was filmed in Hollywood, right on the studio lot. They had me in this horrible jacket and it was hot, so I took it off. They had to reshoot the whole scene because the shirt I was wearing was polka-dot and polka dots ruin everything.”

  It’s always a cinch to get off the phone with Eve. I say the words, “Evie, I’ve got to go,” I think the words, “Evie, I’ve got to go,” and she’s already hung up. Not angry, just on to the next thing. This time was no different. I turned my cell to vibrate, clicked the iTunes icon on my computer, and downloaded The Godfather, Part II, started watching. I didn’t believe I’d see her. I figured she’d either gotten The Godfather mixed up with a lesser-known gangster picture on which she’d worked as an extra; or that she had worked as an extra on The Godfather, but hadn’t made it into the finished film; or that she had made it into the finished film, but it was in some enormous crowd scene where she was impossible to pick out—one among hundreds.

  And then, there she was, in front of the Senate committee. Or, rather, just off to the side of the Senate committee. I leaned forward in my chair, my face practically touching the screen. She wore a dark jacket, a polka-dot blouse visible underneath, and was sitting at the table to the right of Al Pacino and Robert Duvall’s, one of the few women, other than Diane Keaton, in the scene. She appeared bored throughout, though she did manage an expression of mild interest during Pacino’s heated back-and-forth with a bald senator whose name I didn’t catch.

  I picked up the landline—better reception—and called her, punching in the numbers so fast I got them wrong and had to punch them in again.

  “I told you,” she said, after I’d reported back on what I’d found.

  Doing my best not to sound defensive, “I believed you.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “But I—”

  “It’s okay, my
feelings aren’t hurt.”

  I waited a beat before trying to jolt the conversation onto a different track. “Your second Senate committee, though. Quite a coincidence.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember? In the sixties? You told Teddy Kennedy your grandmother was a pothead?”

  “I didn’t tell Teddy Kennedy that.”

  “You did. I’m sure you did.”

  “No. It was the New York Times reporter.” She cleared her throat to indicate that I’d do well to mull over this distinction for a bit. “That’s who I told.”

  “Sorry, right.”

  “You know”—her tone grew thoughtful—“both my grandmothers were still alive when that Times piece ran.”

  “Did you get disinherited?”

  “No, they weren’t mad. Each said it was the other grandmother who was high.”

  “Ahh.”

  In the silence that followed I could hear her shift the receiver from one ear to the other. “So, about those chocolate-covered strawberries. I really liked them. Hint, hint.”

  I laughed. “All right, Evie, I’ll send another box.”

  “Good. The same as before. Only instead of strawberries, cherries. And more of them.”

  “How about I send two boxes?”

  “Yes, that would be fine,” she said, suddenly businesslike. “One cherry, one strawberry.”

  “You got it,” I said. As usual, I bid my farewell to her dial tone.

  By 1981, that body bag was looking more and more like it was going to come in handy. Paul: “Eve had blown her L.A. Woman advance on coke, fucked up her nose. She called me, begged me to come over. I drove all the way to Femmy’s place in Santa Monica. When I walked into Eve’s room, I couldn’t believe what I saw. There wasn’t an inch of floor not covered in bloody Kleenex. The cats were running around high. I boxed Eve up and took her back to my Western Avenue apartment, and she was quite happy easing herself into a long, languid bubble bath. My mind was still trying to get over what it had seen when Eve got out of the tub and insisted that I fuck her. I was dumbfounded. She looked like a Dalmatian she had so many bruises covering her body. I told her to go to bed, alone, and she got really pissed off and started to scream and pummel me. I took her by the shoulders, shook her, and forced her to turn around and face a full-length mirror. I cried and told her that she was breaking the hearts of those of us that loved her by letting herself get so goddamned low with her life, and did she want to die?”

  Paul’s words seemed to reach Eve, but he wasn’t convinced he’d truly broken through, so he called Mae. Mirandi was grateful he did: “Paul had the good sense to rat out Evie to Mother. Mother said to her, ‘This is not working. You’ve got to come home.’ Eve moved into Wilton Place with Mother and Dad. There was a little garage apartment in back of the house, and that’s where she lived. She didn’t stop with the coke, though. And then, when Dad went into the hospital with a bacterial infection, she started drinking again. So she was doing coke and drinking, taking Valium, too. I think she was using so hard because she was upset about Dad and not dealing with it.”

  Sol died on February 18, 1982, of a combination of congestive heart failure and endocarditis. Paul: “Art [Pepper] and I were standing in Sol’s bedroom before he died. Downstairs Mae was cooking up a storm, and Eve came in and led us over to his bed and said, ‘Talk to Daddy.’ I looked at Art, and we both nodded and sat down awkwardly. Sol was staring straight ahead and clacking his teeth. Art leaned over and said into Sol’s ear, ‘Don’t worry, Sol. Everything will be all right and you’ll be back.’ I thought it was wonderful of Art to encourage Sol to accept the Great Whatever, and I noted that Art had so much more time to live than Sol. It shocked me when he didn’t [Art died four months later, on June 15, at fifty-six, of a stroke].” Mirandi: “ ’Eighty-two was a big year for the family. First Dad went, and then Art, and then Evie got into AA.”

  If the seventies were the party, the eighties were the hangover. Says Eve, “We were all addicted to everything. If you took cocaine, you could drink longer and insult people more brilliantly. But I knew I was doomed if I didn’t get a new idea of glamour. And, on top of that, there was a review of L.A. Woman in the Times, a horrible hideous pan by that P.J. person [P. J. O’Rourke, “Not a Bad Girl but a Dull One,” New York Times, May 2, 1982]. See, I was sure I’d written a book so wonderful I’d never have to do another thing in my life, only apparently I hadn’t. Which meant I needed to clean up my act. And, anyway, AA was the social scene of all time. All of L.A. was there. And the last straw was different for everybody. My friend Connie said she had to fuck two midgets before she knew it was time to join. It was great.”

  So great, in fact, that Eve encouraged non-substance-abusers to attend meetings, just for kicks. Eve’s friend, writer Sarah Kernochan: “The way Eve got me to go to AA—and I wasn’t an alcoholic—was by telling me, ‘The best stories are in AA. You’ll hear the best stories.’ And the stories were the best. A lot of people in Los Angeles are performers, and the zeal with which they talked about their high highs and low lows was enthralling.”II

  This isn’t to say Eve took her sobriety lightly. Recalls Michael Elias, “Eve had the best of the AA ethic. If anyone had a problem, you could send them to Eve and she’d jump on it. She could be the most generous, kind person.”

  The eighties were a mostly fallow decade for Eve. Staying on the straight and narrow took up a good deal of her emotional energy. There was, too, the worry that she didn’t just want alcohol and drugs, she needed alcohol and drugs, to have fun, sure, but also to create. And she spent much of this period treading water—not writing, not not writing. She and Elias collaborated on a couple of screenplays. Elias: “One became a French movie. I can’t think of the title. Whatever Send in the Violins translates to in French [Envoyez les violons]. It was about an American in Paris. His wife leaves him and he gets back to life by playing the flute. They ruined it by making it a Frenchman in Paris.”

  Eve wasn’t attempting books, though she did blurb one, the debut of a Valley Boy, a mere sixteen when he completed the first draft. “This is the novel your mother warned you about,” said Eve of Less Than Zero (1985), and went on to compare its writer, Bret Easton Ellis, to an old flame. (“Jim Morrison would be proud.”) That Eve was an early booster of Less Than Zero, about a disaffected and dissolute L.A. teenager named Clay and his disaffected and dissolute L.A.-teenager friends, is ironic since Less Than Zero was, as Ellis freely admits, “such an homage” to Play It as It Lays. Ellis: “Did I want a blurb from Joan Didion? Are you kidding? I hoped she’d never even see the book.”

  Though Ellis grew up close by, just over the Hollywood Hills in Sherman Oaks, he and Eve didn’t meet until after Less Than Zero was published. Recalls Ellis:

  It was a dinner with my editor, Bob Asahina, who was a big fan of hers. My memory of Eve in the semidarkness of Ports in 1985 is that she was very buxom, very flirtatious, great smile. She wasn’t a ditzy Southern California girl. She was almost a parody of that idea. And then, through the parody, this no-nonsense intelligence would come out. She laughed a lot and just seemed really friendly and was all over me in this nice way. I knew Joan through her daughter, Quintana, who went to Bennington with me. And, let me tell you, sitting around with Joan Didion is no picnic. It’s the most awkward thing in life. Eve, though, was delightful, so warm and accessible. It’s funny to be talking about this now because I just reread Slow Days, Fast Company. The first time I read it I was in high school. I liked it when I was fifteen, sixteen, but it certainly wasn’t speaking to me in the way that Play It as It Lays was speaking to me, in the way that punk was speaking to me. But reading Slow Days, Fast Company again in my fifties was a revelation, and kind of breathtaking. It’s got this friendly, wandering, expansive, open-to-anything vibe that’s the polar opposite of Play It as It Lays, which is very locked and rigid. Eve is doing something so difficult—comedy is hard, harder than drama. And she sustains that comic mood and tone.
But because her mood and tone is comic, she runs the risk of having her work seem lighter, airier, fruitier than it actually is. What she achieves in Slow Days, Fast Company I appreciate more now that I’m older. And I consider it one of my favorite books ever about L.A.

  At AA, alcohol and drugs were, obviously, off the table. Not men, though. And it was at a meeting that Eve encountered “the Last Rock Star,” Warren Zevon. Says Eve, “Warren wasn’t actually in AA, but he should have been. I guess he came that night because somebody was trying to get him to go. He was addicted to heroin. Heroin, Scotch, and the pork at Musso’s.” To something else, too, but it would take a while before she clued in to that one.

  Eve moved out of Mae’s, into Zevon’s. Says Caroline Thompson, “I ran into Eve outside a thrift shop. She’d just bought a nurse’s uniform. It had a nametag on it—Trish, Trudy, something like that. She held it up to me and said, ‘For fun and games with Warren.’ ”