by Eve Babitz
“Is Ivan still there?” I asked Karen one day.
“Ivan who?” she replied.
“You’re sure there’s no one there named Ivan?” I insisted.
“That must have been a long time ago,” she said. “Now they’ve just got Eric and Patricia and Chad.”
So I found my old brown leotard, some tights, and a barrette, and I agreed to meet Karen for one class.
There was a guy in the center of the room who was bending over to touch his toes, only instead of touching his toes and getting up, he kept his hands flat on the floor and his legs went up in a handstand. I gasped because nobody had ever done handstands when I was there before, and I’d never seen one done like this. This man removed one of his hands from the floor, folded his legs in the lotus position and just held it.
And that was Eric.
Anyway, as I recall, he only made us hold the warrior pose until our arms fell off, and not forever, which I felt was a nice change. But I did notice that we didn’t do the sun salutation right at all—for instead of the liquid series of moves that I remembered, this thing involved the amazement of push-ups and these tiny jumps that seemed to me very undignified and unyoga-like. Suddenly, I had the feeling that Eric had made this routine up that minute out of a perverse impulse to throw yoga to the wind and just go crazy.
I had never seen anything like it. I made a mental note to ask Eric to please never make us do this again, but by the end of the class, I forgot and decided to sign up for a month.
At the Yoga Center you can pay for one month and take as many classes as you like, and I decided to take maybe three a week—except with me, I can’t do anything in moderation, and before I knew it I was there the next day. When I realized another teacher was making us do the same weird variation of the sun salutation, spiked with push-ups and stupid little jumps again, I was extremely incensed.
The name of this exercise, I found out later, is Ashtanga yoga. Two things I noticed right away: One, nothing that happened to me the rest of the day, no matter how terrible, even remotely struck me as painful. Nothing, not emotional things like getting rejected, nor spiritual crises, nor dragging three bags of groceries straight uphill, which left everyone else panting, came close to just a few minutes of burning with shame, unable to do push-ups. All my pain was in that room and the rest of my life was simple. No wonder Karen had looked so noble and serene.
And two, I had a flat stomach. In a month.
In fact, I began to look great, and after just a few months of all this, I was up to my ears in an affair with a man I thought of as the Last Rock Star. The thing is, I never really liked rock stars. Only now I was living with one.
The only good thing about it was that the way he behaved, which had in the past driven other women up and over walls, was—compared to yoga—a distant disturbance.
The Ashtanga routine I was doing—ten minutes of perhaps an hour-and-a-half class—was nowhere near what a true Ashtanga class did: solid movement, push-ups, jumps, and sweat for an entire class. After my friend Lois took the class, she told me, “It’s two hours, Eve. I thought my wrists were going to snap—and the thing is, I loved it. But when I came home afterward, my husband. . . .Well, I was just too much for him. I decided, for the sake of my marriage, to stop. Because unless you’re both doing it, it’s too weird. You become too advanced, in this metaphysical and physical and spiritual way—and the other person, they know.”
“What do you mean,” I said, “ ‘they know’?”
“They can see it,” she said, “you’re sort of—I don’t know—too radiant.”
“Too radiant?”
“You sort of get, I don’t know, drained of impurities,” she explained, “and it makes you look radiant. Like you were having an affair. Or at least in love.”
“No kidding,” I said, feeling tempted.
But the next time I was there when the class was going on, I looked in the room and all I could see was push-ups.
By this time, I knew that the point was not to do a pose perfectly, but rather to become so warmed up that your body could do things you never thought possible.
Of course, there are those teaching yoga in Los Angeles who think doing Ashtanga is courting disaster, that people’s wrists can’t stand the constant push-ups, and one man told my sister, “No one over twenty-five should even think of stuff like that.”
But the thing about Ashtanga is that everyone, once he or she starts doing it, comes face-to-face so quickly with the brick wall of their own physical resistance that the challenge is—or was for me, anyway—too much to ignore.
It struck me as odd that in this day and age of instant trends and people with glints in their eyes looking for the ultimate in physical insanity, Ashtanga had kept such a low profile—except that it’s so hard. Too hard, in fact.
It’s not just brute determination, it’s something else—something more. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I knew the Rock Star had to go.
The day I came back from yoga and found the woman in red in our living room, I moved out, and a friend of mine, a woman from New York, asked me to come with her to the Hollywood YMCA and do Nautilus machines. The Y was noisy and filled with old people and kids, and I felt so at home there, it was as though I’d just returned from the moon.
At first I joined the Y, thinking I’d go to yoga at the same time. But the truth is that the Nautilus machines made my stomach so effortlessly flat, my arms so apparently toned and my legs so willowy, I didn’t really care if it was all fake—I’m so shallow, cuteness is its own reward.
So when people now hear that I walk five miles a day with weights, swim, skate, do Nautilus, and I’ve even signed up for ballroom dancing at the Y, a lot of them think I’ve gone crazy.
But physical insanity is in the eye of the beholder.
And now that I am no longer locked in my balancing act with the Last Rock Star, I no longer need any physical insanity to make my emotional life pale by comparison.
If I learned anything about push-ups, it’s that.
Los Angeles Times
March 6, 1988
SUNSET TANGO
I USED to think that Le Dôme was a ridiculous bastion of iniquity. I mean, from the moment the restaurant opened, it was infamous for things rock stars did there at night, reflected in mirrors opulently framed in gold rococo, and the things movie stars did there at lunch against the walls of forest green. It reminded me of some Northern Italian palazzo that had been commandeered by the Nazis.
But then we are, after all, in Hollywood.
And Le Dôme is where you go for lunch when you are involved in a Hollywood scheme so preposterous you need to remind yourself that just because something’s impossible, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.
Today, in fact, I am on my way to Le Dôme to meet two friends, both agents, both women, both victims of the cocaine wars that raged inside my head back in the days when I fired my original agent, Janet Wilton, because Megan Stanton, who wasn’t an agent but a lawyer, had—I am ashamed to admit it—such great hair.
I recently went back to the first agent, having just fired the second (who didn’t care), and now all I want is for Janet to meet Megan and see for herself what great hair she has, which is, I’ll admit, probably impossible and definitely unbusinesslike.
•
But then, business has always escaped me.
After all, I grew up in Hollywood and graduated from Hollywood High School with a very strong sense that nothing on earth mattered except looks and romance.
What has been happening in my life lately though, is that looks, which I used to consider my inalienable birthright, have suddenly stopped mattering so much—because everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop in the AIDS mess, and no matter how irresistibly gorgeous anyone is, everyone else has begun to resist. Even me.
And without lust to inspire me to some mad obsession, my urge to describe it all on paper had dwindled to going to the gym and wandering around looking for
something mature and adult to capture my imagination. It wasn’t until I saw this movie, Dirty Dancing, that I felt myself again.
•
Eight years ago, my casting director/producer friend, Fred Roos, called, and said, “I’ll pick you up in a few minutes, we’re going to Westwood.”
“Westwood?”
“A movie,” he said. “I want you to see something.”
Only instead of a movie, we saw this horrible kids’ picture called Skatetown U.S.A, which is about two skate gangs—the good boys, loathsome dorks led by Scott Baio, and the bad boys, motorcycle-gang types led by this guy who could skate to music so intensely he put me under a spell. The plot was that the good guys won.
“How did you like that guy?” Fred asked, on our way to Dan Tana’s afterward.
“Scott Baio?” I cringed.
“No, the other one,” he said, “in black.”
Fred so seldom went in for rotten teenagers that I was surprised, until he told me he was looking for kids to cast in The Outsiders. Anyway, he knew enough about my brand of lust to believe me when I said, if the guy who could skate could talk, he should go find him right away.
It was Patrick Swayze.
I never saw The Outsiders, but when Dirty Dancing came out and I saw him again, I fell under a spell. The spell was Patrick Swayze to music.
He does a mambo at the beginning of the film that is so good, I found myself unable to breathe, sitting on the edge of my chair. If you can’t have sex, at least you can have dancing.
I told everyone I knew to go see it right away. My aunt Tiby, who’d been a dancer with Martha Graham, went so nuts she told all her friends, too. I wound up taking my mother to see it, my second time, and the thing was, I loved it even more, because I knew how great he was and what was coming next.
Then I went alone.
And then I was hooked.
I began thinking about it all the time, and because the theater where it was playing was just two blocks from my gym, I began going more and more often. My sister thought I was endangering my sanity, but what sanity? All that actually happened to me was that I began taking ballroom dancing lessons at the Hollywood YMCA and, except for the tango, I wasn’t that bad. The tango is harder than it looks, danced entirely on bent knees with the woman continuously backing up.
I arrive at Le Dôme five minutes early, so I go to the ladies’ room downstairs, which looks like a set from a Bertolucci movie. In the dark mirror, I check out my blond hair, cut in a long, shaggy, semi-hysterical mess, which on good days, if it’s spiked right, causes truck drivers to think I have great legs. But on normal days, like today, if I shake my head upside down enough, I look like Rod Stewart’s idea of a good time, which is, unfortunately, slightly passé. I’m wearing black pants, a black jacket, and a silver art nouveau pin that someone gave me back in the days when Gene Clark was still in the Byrds. I don’t look like a businessperson at Le Dôme. If I look like anything, it’s Talent. Talent stands out loudly against the suits, especially Music Talent.
Once my hair is as good as it’s going to get, I leave the bathroom and emerge into the small forest-green oval foyer, where I stand for a moment, suddenly imagining a man dressed in black, holding a shadowy woman in his arms, bursting into a wicked tango.
When Rudolph Valentino arrived in New York at the age of eighteen in 1913, Irene and Vernon Castle were so hot, people were doing Castle imitations down the aisle to get married, and tango dancers were so sought after that women who danced married society millionaires, and men, like Valentino, who worked at Maxim’s, were paid fortunes to dance with rich matrons in special ballrooms set aside just for the tango. Valentino hated rich matrons so much (except a cute one named Bianca from South America), he became too good to be a gigolo and danced professionally on the stage for hundreds of dollars a night.
Unfortunately, Bianca, who was married to a complete lout named Jack de Saulles, shot her husband dead one day, and her lawyers suggested that the farther Valentino got from New York, the better her case in court would be. So he wound up in Hollywood, where nothing was impossible even then, and left behind that lavish life in New York, where the girls wore chiffon frocks and satin shoes and were newly brazen and free. And it all must have seemed like madness, even to Americans, much less to boys from small towns in Italy just learning to speak English, tangoing the nights away.
The idea of a whole city wild over tangos, all that money, Bianca with her gun—
But I’m at Le Dôme, where nobody cares about Valentino except crazy old ladies and me.
The hostess leads me to a table in the back of the restaurant where Janet Wilton is sitting with the sun in her hair, because we are at the Wrong Table, the fault of whoever made reservations without explaining to the maître d’ Who She Is. The Right Table would be in front, where we could be interrupted by everyone who comes in. But this room is almost empty enough to be cleared out for the tango. This room, in fact, could be Argentina with a little more Joseph Cornell ruin around the edges.
“Hi,” Janet says. “You’re still thin.”
“Eternal vigilance,” I reply. “I’m so glad to see you.” I’m still unable to believe my luck that she agreed to take me back, after everything. Gratitude is the only emotion I seem to enjoy these days. To me, Janet is the ultimate New Yorker, and those people don’t suffer fools gladly, whereas I always am one.
“You still seeing that movie?” she wonders (she knows).
Janet is all in green, which makes her resemble some edible cloisonné object, especially with her glistening lips of purple opal. Her hair is titian and curly, and the sun frosts it like halos from behind.
“What are you doing now?” she asks, hoping it will be about sex.
“The last guy I was with,” I sigh, “was such a dork, I haven’t touched anyone else with a stick in maybe decades. What I do now is date tall men with good manners whose names I can’t remember. If I can even remember to kiss them goodnight.”
“French kiss or what?”
“Shy, sisterly, dry things,” I reply. “You wouldn’t be interested.”
“So what are you doing?”
“I’m learning to tango, sort of.”
“And seeing that movie,” she remarks.
“Well, at least he wears shoes in this one,” I explain, and proceed to tell her how much better life would be if they made a movie of Valentino in New York starring someone who could really dance, smolder, and look embarrassed and young.
“He’s not going to make another dance movie,” she says abruptly. “They won’t let him. They’ll want him to play real people.”
That’s all we need, more real people.
“Look,” I say, “everything about him, the interviews, says he’s a dancer. He grew up studying ballet in Houston—his mother taught dance. He’s not going to stop just because nobody else can dance.”
Janet lives in New York, where flamboyant careers like Swayze’s can be overlooked, and she’s surely never seen Skatetown U.S.A. In New York, as soon as the fake-o dancers like Jennifer Beals or John Travolta can be yanked into normalcy, everyone’s relieved.
“Maybe. . . .” she shrugs, although New York wisdom is against dancers who aren’t Russian.
I can see that this is one of those green occasions, when anything I want to convey has to get through a forest of New York prejudice. This has happened before with me and Janet, but the great thing is that if you can convince her, you can convince anyone.
At which point, Megan arrives looking like an Irish Valentine—her lacy collar, her bulky sweater, her low-heeled shoes, her pale skin, her hair swirling out the way I’ve always wished mine would.
I thought, wrongly of course, that if she represented me, I might become her. Fortunately, we are in Hollywood where being a fool for beauty doesn’t always end unhappily.
“Hello,” Megan laughs. “I’m late.”
She sits down, and I can feel Janet Wilton beside me, all alert. Megan’s sweater is p
erfect for Wuthering Heights.
“What are you doing in that sweater?” Janet blurts out. “People in California don’t dress like that.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” Megan shakes her head. I have nothing to wear. I . . . never know where to go.”
She sits down.
I suddenly realize that this is my dream come true, having two people I love not hate each other. Of course, I realize that rival agents aren’t that likely to fall madly into eternal friendship just because I think they’re both gorgeous, but I still hope that two such powerful women can rise above the fact that this is the eighties and business is business and just trade lipsticks.
Seeing the three of us, sitting at our Wrong Table at Le Dôme, people might think—because we laugh so much—that we’re the Wives, instead of the Biz. But the Biz takes over the conversation as Megan and Janet swing into primary gear, feeling around for subjects that they can safely discuss without betraying themselves. Whether, for example, some guy who reads Proust is really an asshole, or if the fact that he reads at all is an extenuating circumstance.
“When you consider,” Megan says, “how many of the people out here come up through the mailroom and have never even heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald—”
Megan comes from a family of Irish readers. She’s read every Irish writer who ever went into print and read Joyce’s Ulysses while she was preparing for the bar exams, graduating from Harvard number one in her class with one hand tied behind her back—so she has a soft spot for people who read anything. Janet, however, comes from a family of Jewish writers, editors, agents, and general New York literati so, to her, Proust is no excuse.
•
Their conversation lets me slide out from under and back into the past and into possibilities of how much better the large room would look, slightly empty of tables, chairs, dessert carts, bald men—with the light casting itself from the south, slashing smokily through the dark green and gold windows, with my friends speaking, to and fro, of F. Scott and Michelangelo—while Carlos Gardel spills out in heartbroken tango of exile and a slender-waisted young man clasps his partner against his midriff, she all shimmering in beads, sagging slinkily through layers of light, layers of time, layers of romance and lust and memory.
