I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  When roller skating became so big that she couldn’t keep the riffraff out, she decided her own club would be best. And after some wear and tear on those around her, from what I’ve heard, she had her way. And so Helena’s came to pass. And she became queen of all she surveyed and even scarier than before.

  About a year ago, this friend of mine—a man—was invited to Ed Ruscha’s fiftieth-birthday party. This event was the hippest, innest type of occasion, held in Ed Janss’s house, which is the size, I’ve heard, of an airplane hangar but filled with art instead of DC-3s. Le tout L.A. was there—Michelle Phillips, Timothy Leary (can you imagine?—just when you think you’ve seen everything, Timothy Leary becomes a hip insider). It was a grand meeting of the glamorous survivors up to and including Francis Ford Coppola’s producer, Fred Roos, who arrived with a date. And his date was Helena.

  According to my friend, Helena was dressed in a white dress so well fitted a girl of nineteen might feel it showed her flaws. But Helena’s body is taut and dancer-perfect, her black hair is a cloud like Ophelia’s, her shoulder has the rose tattoo, her eyes are filled with smoldering contempt. She was, as always, herself. No flaws.

  “How’s it going, Helena?” my friend asked, not wanting in any way to arouse in her more indignation than is normal in just plain, everyday Helena-at-a-party.

  “Oh, God, I don’t know. I need to find a new location.”

  “You don’t like where the club is located now?”

  “No, no,” she said, “it’s too far away. I need something more in West Hollywood, where you don’t have to drive so far. Someplace big.”

  “Oh,” he said. Obviously, being queen of all she surveys in the place she has now is no longer enough, and if it were she’d be mad anyway because people would think she couldn’t complain—and God knows she doesn’t want anyone to get off that easily. I mean we might just think we could relax and go on a picnic, just when something came up demanding our obedience.

  So, now it’s that Helena’s isn’t big enough.

  I mean, if anyone told me—when she opened her club downtown, where no one in L.A. had ever been except to go to court or renew a passport—that suddenly that entire body of the population whose every move is the envy and focal point of most others, who think being in the right place at the right time with Harry Dean Stanton is what life’s about, if she could drag them all the way downtown, well, anyone else would rest on his laurels.

  She got them down there without moving so much as a shoulder blade. Just the you-better-do-this-for-me-right-now-or-else about her got demographics to shift. But now that she’s queen of Athens, I don’t know. . . .

  For me, I’ve gotta have more than Harry Dean.

  If I’m going to follow Helena around, I want her to wrap a packed roomful of afternoon-in-gray-heat people around her torso, atop a lust-racked oud. I want the red veils, the gold coins, the oud, the money, money, money. I mean, Helena sweeping out from behind the wretched torn curtains—a blaze of Medea red—the Helena of “. . . and then she did a dance like I never saw befo’.”

  For that I would go anywhere.

  Smart

  January–February 1989

  RONSTADT FOR PRESIDENT

  I HAVE been thinking that Linda Ronstadt is more politically effective than Jane Fonda. Linda has made the world safe for Mexican music. I mean, all Jane’s done is to go from being a movie star’s daughter to not quite apologizing for Vietnam with that Tom Hayden, the reason, I’ve heard, the women’s movement was instigated in the first place. The worst that Linda’s ever done is to think Jerry Brown was maybe a little cuter than he actually was, and who can blame a girl for that? At least she didn’t marry him.

  Watching Linda sing that great mariachi song at the Grammys was what gave me the idea—because it was really the first time I’d heard her sing anything where she wasn’t getting a knife in her heart over some man (unless that was what was happening in Spanish and I didn’t notice). Her voice and everything about her was so opulent with happiness and excellence that it seemed to me she could take this entire country for a grand ride that would last at least eight years, if not more, if we elected her to something she deserves, like president.

  She could date all the other heads of state and we’d hear a lot of great songs and meet a lot of new musicians, and there’d be a lot of great parties and the bon temps would definitely rouler. Naturally, it would be a musicological term of office, since there’s really nothing that Linda does better than sing—the notes floating out of her throat into the sky like pale-pink and yellow and lavender clouds one day and hot chili-pepper reds and anaranjados and negros the next, when she’s in a less pastel and more caliente mode.

  I mean, talk about making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear—Linda has gone from what in most of us would lead to heart disease, obesity, and gas (i.e., Mexican-restaurant ambience) and she’s turned it into this great Songs of My Father album and gets to wear the dangling earrings, a rose in her hair, and those cute little boots. It’s really adorable—another adorable episode in a life already strewn with adorable moments. And the great thing about Linda is that none of her adorable moments has involved Republicans even for an instant, proving that no matter how cute a guy is, there’s a point beyond which she will not go.

  I remember the first time I ever saw Linda Ronstadt in person. It was in the Troubadour, and she was on her way into the club part, talking a mile a minute to two gray-haired business types, complaining about not being able to get a band together. This was in the late sixties, after she’d broken up with the Stone Poneys—and all these men in the music business were dreaming of producing a hit album with her, something that would show off her incredible voice. And yet, despite her incredible voice, for a long time, well, she would do albums that weren’t hits, and so another producer would be a thing of the past.

  Meanwhile, men like Hugh Hefner would be propositioning her with “Let’s just shoot you with no clothes on, why don’t we?” and casting directors were trying to interest her in movies.

  “That’s not what I am, Eve,” she said, laughing and laughing. “Me with no clothes, imagine!”

  “But what about movies?” I said.

  “Too boring.”

  That was one thing about Linda: movies were absolutely too boring for her—if she wasn’t singing and on the stage, she preferred lying around reading the Wall Street Journal and adding to the piles of books stacked up in her living room.

  She was sure that one day she’d get around to buying bookcases, but it wasn’t until I saw her house in Brentwood with built-in bookcases that I ever saw one of her living rooms not perilous with volumes you had to step over or around. When she wasn’t lying around reading or finding herself embroiled in some romance and isolated beyond phone calls, she was running around the Hollywood Reservoir, taking aerobics at some gym, or otherwise endlessly battling her constant impulse to make chocolate cakes, brownies, or thick stews. Or going to Lucy’s El Adobe for the wrong kind of Mexican food or eating stuff like the papaya chicken at Nuclear Nuance.

  Her favorite books in those days were political histories and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories. I kid you not. I mean, Linda is just your normal good-time overeater type of person, whereas Jane Fonda, as she mentions in her book, was a bulimic—one of those sneaky people who eat and eat and then throw up. And bulimia is not what I want in a politician at all. I want things to stay down. And I want Linda to sing a slow, sexy double-entendre version of “You’re Just Too Marvelous” to Gorbachev.

  Anyway, we’ve missed Linda, stuck up there wherever she is with George Lucas, making brownies, and it was great to see her on the Grammys, looking so Rosarita-y and confident.

  She certainly has my vote.

  Smart

  May–June 1989

  RAPTURE OF THE SHALLOWS

  L.A. ARTISTS have finally proved that good art and the good life can blissfully coexist.

  Three years or so ago, a woman friend of
mine from SoHo (the type who looked like Laurie Anderson, although I was so dumb and untraveled in those days I had no idea a whole slew of girls looked that way) began telling me about an art exhibit that was coming from New York to the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles and would be here in three months, then two months, then a month, a week—and suddenly we were there. I in this sort of go-to-art-opening, Matisse-looking skirt with my usual because-I’ve-got-a-flat-stomach tank top, which by then no one was wearing and hadn’t for about five years.

  And she, à la Laurie.

  But even the men were dressed like her.

  Anyway, the art was black-and-pink checkerboards with rococo gold ornaments, and I was just saying to myself, “My God, this can’t be true,” when there he was, Walter Hopps III, drinking Scotch, smoking as if his life depended on it, and looking—as usual—as if he were about to become invisible and slide into a two-dimensional cardboard replica of Marcel Duchamp. Just the sight of him made all the difference, for if Walter was there, then surely there was some excuse for it all.

  Meanwhile, my friend Leslie dragged me back to the gallery office, where a woman friend of hers, an artist, was talking on the phone and wearing all black, looking like New York City itself. Finally, her friend hung up and Leslie introduced me, and this artist looked at my passé clothes and said, “God, it must be awful being stuck in L.A., where nothing’s happening and there’s no art.”

  The meaning of being nonplussed filled my body from the top of my too-blond L.A. hair to the bottom of my pearly-pink toenail polish, and l was about to say, “Listen, you uppity bitch, you button your navy-blue lips. Ed Moses was doing hideous pink and black before you were . . .” But then, of course, I didn’t—because in L.A. you don’t. It ain’t cool.

  Surfers don’t.

  Our myth is to smile and nod and say, “Golly, is that right?” and get on with things, since, after all, as my friend Peter Alexander once told me, “they don’t have surfers on the East Coast.”

  In New York, people feel about art the way they feel about wine in France: if it’s from California, it ain’t wine because wine’s French, and if it’s from L.A., it ain’t art because art’s from New York. That’s their mythic definition of art. Art comes from the squalor of Jackson Pollock drunkenly demanding to be famous, to be taken seriously, to be great. Art comes from New York because they’ve got the history, the family trees, the museums that won’t let you in until it’s too late or else will let you in because you’re Willem de Kooning and your abstract-expressionist pictures of women look like Marilyn Monroe in a kind of East Coast depressing angst-filled way. (Whereas our Marilyn Monroe just kept it simple. But then she once lived in Van Nuys.)

  Anyway, the myth—as Joseph Campbell has pointed out repeatedly—is what gives our lives power. Priests used to be the ones who devised the myths, but now artists are doing it. And myths depend on their geography—their places of origin—for their meaning. In other words, you can’t have a myth about kayaks in Peru. In New York you have to have fame to rise from squalor, whereas in L.A. fame is squalor and, for their survival, even the famous look to the Pacific Rim countries for ways to Zen out. In L.A. power is a man alone on a surfboard in a blue atmosphere, walking on water with nothing to do all day but catch waves; in New York power is a limo, the right clothes, the right tables, Leo Castelli, vacations in the South of France (where no self-respecting surfer would last two days because the Mediterranean sucks. I mean, I’ve been to Cannes, and you can’t so much as bodysurf on that ridiculous body of el blando water). The myth of L.A. is Maui. It’s ashrams in India, Tibet, Nepal; Japan in cherry-blossom season; those Japanese woodcuts of mountains, snow, and water. Of course, water means everything if you live in L.A., whereas if you live in New York, water is the least of your problems. In fact, the thing is to avoid water.

  I grew up in L.A. during the fifties, when the only thing in the county art museum that was the least bit alluring to me and my sister was the Egyptian mummy, half unwrapped so you could see its poor ancient teeth. As children, we both decided this would be the way to go, petrified and put in a museum, immortal.

  In L.A. at that time, in other words, if you wanted to see real art, you went to the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery and saw The Blue Boy and Pinkie, those portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Thomas Lawrence. Nobody knew in those days about Joseph Campbell’s theory that every geography has its own myths, that myths are necessary to give life meaning, and that today it is the artist who is the priest, the holy man bringing the local myths back into focus.

  Meanwhile, growing up in Eagle Rock was an intuitive and entrepreneurial young man named Walter Hopps III, whose father was a doctor but who himself had decided to major in art history as well as in premed and to rustle up some galleries.

  I remember him telling me, somewhere in my past, that while he was majoring in premed he happened accidentally to open some galleries just for diversion. But it wasn’t until 1957 or so, when he opened the Ferus Gallery with John Altoon and Ed Kienholz, that the myth of the West began to solidify: “Whatever Walter says goes.”

  And what Walter Hopps said, subliminally but with perfect control, was, “This is the place.”

  “This,” we all sort of wondered, “is the place?” We thought New York was the place. New York says it’s the place, and we all know New York’s right, so how could this—L.A.—be the place?

  But soon Walter was crackling and sparkling, putting on shows at Ferus such as Kienholz’s installation Roxy’s, the whorehouse assemblage with a jukebox playing World War II songs and a madam, made of a cow’s skull on top of a dressmaker’s dummy, brandishing a long cigarette holder. And little by little, what with Wallace Berman getting busted for obscenity in his show, before we knew it people who went to the Ferus Gallery began seeing things. Things they would never forget.

  That is why, to this very day, people who lived here then and remember that time, even if they were eighteen-year-old girls like me, get a reverent hush in their voices and say, “Ohhh, Walter, my God, he taught me how to see.”

  Now at that time, Walter, still in his twenties, was wearing mostly navy-blue suits, white shirts, dark ties, and Clark Kent glasses that chopped his face into rectangular squares and made him seem as square and cool as celery, while everyone else was burning candles at both ends, going to Barney’s Beanery every night, and if an artist didn’t dress like a surfer—relaxed and elegant and tan and cool—he dressed in black capes, exuded an Aleister Crowley aura, and otherwise gave the Powers of Darkness a run for their money. Walter scrupulously upheld his portrayal of a trustworthy businessman in those days when there were already enough businessmen and people were sick of them. Except rich matrons with money to buy art, of course.

  There were lots of art galleries on La Cienega at that time—and one that even sold drawings by Matisse and paintings by Bonnard and Picasso—but there wasn’t another spot besides the Ferus that claimed this town for its own and said, “We don’t care if we are L.A.—this is the place, the rest is all noise, come here and wrap your eyes around these hypnotic Robert Irwins and sublime Larry Bells. Look at these Kenneth Price ceramics; nothing like them has been seen before. Here are Peter Alexander pyramids that’ll sink you into a trance, and regard, if you will, the silly charm of Ed Ruscha, who not only paints but also throws words across his canvases like floating mementos of type and wonder. Think about Billy Al Bengston’s chevron stripes and Billy Al Bengston thinking about these things as he surfs away his mornings on the blue seas of the Pacific, a man alone, walking on water, thinking about art.”

  It was the myth of the place, and the artists who made these myths were all of L.A. because they were nothing if not out for a good time, a few laughs, girls, wine, and roses. Or beer and cactus, at least.

  Was surfing a powerful-enough myth to give New York’s Jackson Pollock—suffering bloody murder, acting like an idiot, being mad because he wasn’t famous—a run for its story line? In New York
the myth was to be famous and to convince people that you were a genius or else; here the thing was that art was what you gave up surfing to do, and it better pay off or the priest would retire back to Maui, to his primary focus. Even people who didn’t surf, who were from Oklahoma City and came here only to go to Chouinard (then one of three art schools), such as Ed Ruscha and Joe Goode and Jerry McMillan, were able to assimilate themselves into the L.A. myth because they had such an adept way of standing. They looked as though wherever they stood was the place—and L.A. was where they chose to stand. Suffering was not in our repertoire.

  Now Walter Hopps did a lot of weird things in his life—things that came as rude shocks, in fact. The first incident I remember is the one where suddenly Irving Blum was running the Ferus and Walter had this job as a director of the Pasadena Art Museum, which was shaped like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, only it was in Pasadena.

  Suddenly, Pasadena was the place, too—except it was not about surfers; it was about rich people with old money.

  Anyway, what Walter did at the Pasadena Art Museum was persuade Marcel Duchamp not only to have a huge show there but also to stay in L.A. long enough to have the Party of the Century at the Green Hotel in Pasadena and to lay that Duchamp ethic on us once and for all—the Duchamp myth being that whatever an artist said was art was art, that art wasn’t serious. You didn’t see old Marcel groveling around in the gutter, drunk, grousing because he wasn’t famous. Old Marcel was a dandy. A French elegance permeated the very smile he smiled, the way he stood, the way he washed his hands of art in 1923 or whenever it was and went on with the myth—playing chess. Of course, he didn’t really retire, but he lied and said he did, making art seem like something you could retire from and lie about rather than something you were driven by Furies to do so you could get famous. And, anyway, once we saw old Marcel in the flesh and realized for ourselves that his smile was in earnest and not just something out of an art book and that he was, indeed, capable of having a good time in the company of outlander renegade surfers who refused to work in New York because either (a) they were from L.A. and thought this was the center of the universe or (b) they were from Oklahoma and just getting out of that place was enough for one lifetime, the Duchamp effect was cemented in. This could be the place.