I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  That was just what we wanted to hear, because if old Marcel was right that art was art and not what New York decided was something you had to suffer in pursuit of, then Billy Al and Kenny and Bob Irwin could still surf.

  In New York, of course, having to wait as long as Ed Ruscha has waited in order for New York to think maybe he wasn’t just kidding might be considered suffering, but here it’s just an easily endured reality that you can sigh about but not go overboard or get demented about its being unfair because it’s usually too nice a day to do anything but gloat.

  During that early time, I befriended as many of the Ferus Gallery boys as I could possibly fit into my totally abandoned, twenty-year-old social life. My criterion was cuteness, and of course the cutest has always been Ed Ruscha, who had the added allure of talking with a foreign accent, being from Oklahoma City as he was. Ed used to come to my mother’s house on Thanksgiving and say, after he finished eating, “Boy, Ma Babitz sure is good to her boys.”

  He used his hick-sounding accent to say the most ridiculous things, and I remember an entire winter he worked in a mail-order house, painting names on cups for Christmas presents, so he could publish a small book, wrapped in classy paper and nestled in a small slipcover box, called Twentysix Gasoline Stations.

  Inside were photographs of every gasoline station he had stopped at from Oklahoma City to L.A. When I realized this, I was so flabbergasted that all I could say was, “But Ed, how come you did this?”

  “Why, somebody had to do it,” he replied, sounding like John Wayne explaining some heroic feat. And with that, we both exploded with laughter in his old Citroën on our way downtown to La Esperanza, his favorite Mexican restaurant. La Esperanza is gone now, but Ed is still doing things because somebody has to, and he’s the only one silly enough to care.

  When Joe Goode (one of Ed’s best friends from Oklahoma who moved here also) left L.A. about five years ago and moved to a farm outside Fresno, a lot of people thought he’d gone too far—that you couldn’t be that distant from the water and expect any good to come of it.

  But last winter, at the James Corcoran Gallery in Santa Monica, Joe had a show called Ocean Blue Series that was so beautiful and radiant that just seeing the things made you feel lit from within. The paintings were so blue you could feel your heart go out to them; it was as though light were shining through them from behind instead of on them from above. It was like being underwater and looking up toward the sky. I went back five times to feel those paintings on my eyes, and the whole crowd at the opening just wallowed in elation, as though they were suddenly children again.

  “I’m going to write a piece about Joe Goode and maybe Ed Ruscha and Laddie Dill and . . .” I told my friend Aaron, a New York collector who lives here but hates it.

  “Those phony-baloney bullshit artists,” he scowled. “They all suck. They’re just for restaurant openings, tea at Trumps. They’re all just for company. They’re what you buy if you don’t know about art or care. They’re typical L.A. artists. The only good artist in L.A. is Ed Moses, and you never catch him at any of those places!”

  “You think Joe Goode is phony?” I began, although I had a whole list of objections—I mean, Ed Moses will go have tea at Trumps (or 72 Market Street anyway) as soon as look at you. Well, maybe not tea exactly, but a drink anyway.

  “Joe Goode used to be OK, maybe,” he said, “but that Ed Ruscha hasn’t done a thing but dine out since that Spam painting, and I’m ashamed of you for even mentioning their names!”

  But then this is the deep-down typical reaction of a man from New York who doesn’t think it’s art unless the poor guy stays at home and doesn’t have any fun or eat anywhere cool. I mean, it’s OK for him to go to Spago on Saturday night, but God forbid he should run into Laddie John Dill there. To be an artist, the guy should be on medication, just barely keeping body and soul together on account of nervous breakdowns caused by not being famous.

  Old Marcel would have been quite able to handle both Spago and art, but maybe for some people the two might get confused. Although no matter how much of a hick Ed Ruscha seems, I myself think he too can tell the difference. Of course, my friend Aaron would be a lot happier if Ed were still going to La Esperanza, but it’s not open, and besides, Ed likes movie stars (who are a lot more fun to be around than to be).

  But, jeez, I’m thinking to myself, I know Aaron knows a lot about art because the paintings in his house are too overbearing for words; they clash with your sensibilities here in L.A. They’re like hearing the subway, and you don’t want to hear the subway in L.A.

  “Until five years ago,” another L.A. artist told me recently, “I couldn’t make a living without going through the New York art system. But over the last few years, I’m doing great and haven’t had to go there once.”

  Compared with the fifties, when the county art museum was downtown and the only thing I liked was the mummy, L.A. has changed incredibly—I mean now at the art museum you can see Kenneth Price ceramic cups and saucers and Gila-monster gravy dishes, and you can see Peter Alexander’s huge black-velvet painting, and you can see, well . . . who we are. The artist-priests have converted the locals enough so that the locals have now got a raging case of art fever. They are incredibly busy, buying art hand over fist, building new museums, collecting huge collections, pushing and shoving to get one of everything with a gold-rush mentality that is actually not very dignified but at least it has kept Laddie Dill in a nice lap pool, which he says I can use anytime I want.

  The vision of Walter Hopps III has come to pass, but Walter has been gone forever.

  So you can imagine my joy upon seeing him at the Margo Leavin Gallery that day. Finally, he was wearing more fashionable clothes and looking like an English country gentleman instead of a businessman from Denver. Of course, he’d been gone over twenty years, to New York and Washington, DC, and, I heard, now Houston, where he is running the new Menil Collection, but without him we’d just be curled up in our cocoons here, afraid of New York, mythless and unrealized. At least, maybe we would.

  Anyway, I drew him aside and said, “Walter, tell me really—this is horrible, right? It all sucks?”

  “No,” he said.

  “No?” I replied.

  “It doesn’t,” he said, looking me square in the eye.

  “Oh, no,” I cried, realizing that if this were true, everything I knew was wrong. Which was OK, of course, since whatever Walter says goes.

  I looked around again, this time trying to see with his eyes, to see what he saw, to overcome this rude shock, which Walter, after all, had been subjecting us to since time began. And suddenly the pink-and-black checkerboard with the gold rococo ornaments on top like an Atlantic City bedstead sank in. I looked at it for a long, long time. And you know, I’ve never forgotten it. And if I see it again, I’ll be glad.

  It is true that in New York life is horrible, just as it is true that in L.A. life is perfectly sublime and that all you need to make it interesting are a few sprinkles of cosmic bleeps to keep reins on the mythic blue horizon. Or, like Ruscha, a little wink of silly words that, from across a room, seems like an old friend smiling and saying, “Ain’t life grand, aren’t you great, isn’t it perfect to be here, and aren’t you glad you’re not in New York?” We must remember, I suppose, that for others the truth that life is horrible is as true as rococo Atlantic City bedsteads, and it’s not cool to make light of their plight no matter how certain we are that they brought it on themselves by putting up with the place for one minute. But to them the painful truth is the rapture of the deep, whereas to us the rapture of the shallows is more than enough.

  Even old Marcel might agree to that.

  Smart

  July–August 1989

  THE SEXUAL POLITICS OF FASHION

  FOR ME, fashion is like sex: unless it’s attached to a face I know or at least fantasize about, it’s not worth the candle.

  The trouble with these two books* is that one is about someone—Elizabeth H
awes—we come to know, and to dread in so doing, and the other is a collection of ideas about fashion written by people who aren’t quite as bad as college professors trying to publish so they won’t perish, but still . . . they’re a long way from Diana Vreeland.

  Vreeland can make you see the romance in clothes, whereas the introduction to Men and Women: Dressing the Part begins: “The freedom to choose and to create an image of self, whether in the tangible forms of appearance or the abstract qualities of self-concept, has been a celebrated source of self-expression and a chronic source of conflict.”

  I mean, really.

  And this is after they’ve just run about ten pages of luscious color illustrations of the Beatles, a topless lady, women in satin, and an 1850 etching entitled “the Bloomer Waltz” showing a man and woman waltzing with her pantaloon bottoms peeping out of her knee-length dress—illustrations that would make you think maybe there’s something alive inside this book.

  But the luscious photographs and illustrations are given a continuous cold shower by the prose: Every time you get a romance or fantasy going in your head with, say, the Arrow Collar Man, you are smacked into rectitude by phrases like “gender-specific,” or just the very word “gender” itself, which is enough to keep me from wanting to hear more, no matter how cute the people in the pictures are.

  There’s one chapter entitled “Clothing and Sexuality” by Valerie Steele that has a few faintly arousing things about it (arousing to your curiosity, if nothing else). She quotes a study that says “porters and soldiers preferred photos of large-breasted nudes in ‘bedroom poses’ . . . whereas the psychologists liked young, predominantly dressed girls who were ‘unconventional’ or ‘provocative,’ and who were ‘displaying arms and legs’.” Similarly, working-class women, according to this study, tended to like photos of “mostly undressed ‘muscle men,’ ” while professional women “preferred unconventional, mostly dressed men.”

  She also notes that “recent research indicates that men and women often disagree on which clothes are most sexually attractive.” While women in one study believed that “men were most attracted to clothes such as midriff tops, short skirts and revealing slits,” the men said they were “most attracted by women’s clothing that reveals the bust (such as see-through blouses or the absence of a brassiere).”

  This is such old news, you could die.

  This book attempts to trace all the different fashions and how they were affected by work, sports, Hollywood, haute couture, and what sex you are. The only thing I found gratifying in it was that shoulder pads lasted five years longer than French fashion had decided was good for us because of World War II when (a) French fashion went out of business, and (b) the United States government issued Order L-85 prohibiting fashion from changing so women wouldn’t “discard their existing clothes” and cause a fabric shortage. So women got to have shoulder pads for five years longer—a fact that made their waists look smaller. And if you ask me, we shouldn’t discard them now either—no matter what anyone says—because they still make everyone’s waist look smaller, including men’s, and God knows, as far as waistlines are concerned, we need all the shoulder pads we can get.

  Bettina Berch’s biography of Elizabeth Hawes, Radical by Design, is the tiresome story of a completely tiresome woman who claimed that “fashion is spinach” (i.e., a pain in the neck which we should eschew as utter nonsense) while running a French-as-could-be haute couture salon of her own in New York in the thirties and charging as much as she could for her clothes.

  Her clothes, Berch writes, were “witty, distinctive, practical.” They “didn’t scream status” but were “just sort of easy and flattering and could be worn for ages without going out of style.” In other words, they were cut on the bias; and although this is supposed to be big news, I’ve never seen a dress from the thirties that wasn’t cut on the bias—in fact, I have some cut just that way. And they’re not designed by Hawes.

  As for her clothes being so “witty, distinctive and practical”—well, maybe they were, but in the illustrations all have high necklines, and as far as I’m concerned, you can’t have fun in a high neckline—I don’t care how witty you are.

  Anyway, the point of this book is not about fun but rather politics and the fact that Elizabeth Hawes was determined to be radical. At Vassar she wrote her senior thesis on “the works of Ramsay MacDonald, a leading British socialist.” Berch adds:

  “Not surprisingly, even this very academic exposure to socialist thinking left Liz somewhat dubious about her fashion aspirations. Fortunately, one of her economics teachers . . . was reassuring: Liz’s talents should be put to their best possible use. The world could also be a better place, the two agreed, if more people could be dressed in wonderful clothing.”

  Now I myself agree that “wonderful clothing” is a great idea. I don’t see how this fits into politics, but if you’re a person who’s designing all her friends’ clothes by the age of twelve and earns enough money to go to Paris by selling to a local dress shop, and if you’ve also studied economics at Vassar and everyone’s a Marxist, I guess wonderful clothes have to be political.

  Because having to go into a life of crime so she could stay in Paris and devote herself to wonderful clothes didn’t deter her. Although some people might not think working as a “copyist”—i.e., someone hired to steal designs from the leading couturiers—is such a great political job.

  She also got a job writing a fashion column for The New Yorker, in which she signed herself “Parisite” because much about “the fashion reporting game” offended her “on a moral level.”

  All her life, Hawes attempted to give herself a radical political slant—when she had her salon in New York in the thirties and visited Russia; when she went to work for PM magazine in the forties and then for the UAW in Detroit trying to organize women workers.

  In the meantime, she was writing books, the first one being a 1938 best seller called Fashion Is Spinach, in which she attempted to explain to American women just what poppycock the Paris scene was.

  In the fifties she returned to New York and, Berch writes, her “life at this point becomes quite obscure. She was a lot more isolated . . . she wasn’t published much anymore . . . she was drinking a lot more—it seemed to soften some of the hard edges.”

  •

  She died alone of cirrhosis of the liver in 1971 at the Chelsea Hotel. Berch writes that “though alcohol killed her in the end, she did survive into her late sixties, probably more productively than many who live much longer. After all, a life is measured not in length but in depth.”

  Now it seems to me if I were going to go to the trouble to write someone’s biography and she ups and dies alone in the Chelsea of alcoholism, I would at least check up on what alcoholism is—and to me it is what Elizabeth Hawes was persistently about, not radicalism. I mean, if you want to be radical politically, you don’t go into dress designing unless early on in life you can blur the edges enough so that inconsistencies don’t get on your nerves.

  To say her life had “depth” is surely a crock.

  Dying alone of alcoholism with none of her friends “daring to bring it up” because “who could argue with her—who could tell her the world was worth viewing sober?”

  I mean, really. If the world is not worth viewing sober, it’s not worth designing clothes for either.

  The Washington Post Book World

  July 30, 1989

  *Men and Women: Dressing the Part, edited by Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele; and Radical by Design: The Life and Style of Elizabeth Hawes by Bettina Berch.

  GOTTA DANCE

  MY ONLY recommendation to a man who is even remotely thinking about ballroom dancing is to be careful. Unless you have a very large trust fund or a very strong character, don’t begin at Arthur Murray. Once they hook you, they have you for life.

  “Me?” you say. “Hooked? On ballroom dancing? Come on!”

  I know. The only reason you’d take ballroom dan
cing at all would be as a joke. So that’s why I’m telling you: Don’t. Like a newborn duck, you’ll get imprinted on your teacher and your classmates, and then they’ll sign you up for lifetime lessons. Later, when you ask around, you’ll discover that you could get the same lessons for less from someone who used to teach at Arthur Murray and now gives lessons himself.

  Once you feel what it’s like to dance with someone who knows how to dance, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. You may even come to realize, as I have, that dancing is better than sex. I mean that, I really do. It’s better because it’s a flirtation that can go on forever and ever without being consummated; because you can do it with strangers and not feel guilty or ashamed; because you can do it outside your marriage and not get in any trouble; and because you can do it in public, with people watching and applauding. And when you’re doing it right, you can’t think about anything else, such as what you forgot at work or that the ceiling needs painting.

  Which is why women love to dance.

  There’s a problem, of course. All wonderful things in life come with some sort of problem. For women, it’s finding men to dance with. I’ve been taking ballroom-dance lessons for more than a year now and, in my class, as in most classes, the women seriously outnumber the men. Not taking dance lessons is a common mistake among men. They fail to realize that dancing is one of the few things a man can learn when he’s young that will come in handy later. Men who know how to dance—even a few basic steps—will never end up sad and alone, with nobody to play with, because women will always be looking for that rare man who can dance. They’ll take him to night clubs and parties and on cruises, and they’ll go all mushy after a simple waltz.