I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  Los Angeles was a hick town with a vengeance, artwise. If you judged it by the L.A. County Museum, or by its nowheresville galleries, or by its public philanthropies like the Huntington Library, where they kept all the Gainsboroughs and Joshua Reynoldses, the place was hopeless. It was so impossible that the L.A. County Museum didn’t admit any art from Los Angeles. In the fifties, my mother once picketed the place with her friend Vera Stravinsky, just to call the museum’s attention to the fact that nobody from L.A. was inside. The museum relented and held a contest for local artists, promising to hang the work of the winners, and my mother won for a line drawing of old houses on Bunker Hill.

  New York was ablaze with glamorous guys like Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Motherwell, but in L.A., even if all you wanted to see was French Impressionists, you had to know Edward G. Robinson.

  My parents were sort of a team to combat L.A.’s hickness, and in the fifties, they took it upon themselves to have poetry and jazz things in our living room. And although I liked only Kenneth Patchen and thought everyone else was long and boring (being a teenager who preferred Chuck Berry and Elvis), I could see that the adults were completely elated, and I could see the point in being a beatnik if that’s what James Dean was supposed to be.

  My father was a violinist with taste and determination, and he and his friend Peter Yates began something called Evenings on the Roof atop Peter’s house. There, slick studio musicians who could sight-read anything performed never-before-heard works by, say, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, who both lived in L.A., where the Philharmonic rarely played anything newer than Brahms, and even that nobody went to.

  In 1937, when my father was still playing in the L.A. Philharmonic, Stravinsky came to conduct. And Stravinsky so loved my beautiful and funny father that later on he became my godfather, and his wife, Vera, and my mother were great friends. My parents and Stravinsky and Vera used to go see Jelly Roll Morton or mariachi bands, or my father would jam with Stuff Smith in dives—they double-dated, you might say. Not that Vera ever got over there being no clothes in L.A. or anything else to remind her of Paris, the only city, in her opinion, where anyone sensible would want to live. But Stravinsky loved the climate, and after World War II, when everyone else who had been on the lam (like Brecht and Thomas Mann and Jean Renoir) returned to Europe, Stravinsky stayed—he wasn’t going anyplace it snowed ever again.

  So I grew up listening to adults complain about L.A. and its hopeless cultural condition, but not in that condition myself, being surrounded by such high magic.

  Meanwhile, Walter Hopps was growing up a whiz, kid from Eagle Rock, in a program in high school for the truly brilliant, and once a month they went on strange field trips, one of which, in 1948, changed his life forever. Before that (he was only fifteen) he was supposed to become a doctor—he came from a family of doctors, his mother and father were both doctors, his grandfather and grandmother were “horse-and-buggy” doctors in Eagle Rock, his great-grandmother was a doctor! But then one day he was taken to the home of Walter and Louise Arensberg.

  “And so you saw the Duchamps there?” I asked. “And did you get it? I mean, about Duchamp?”

  “In a word?” He laughed. “Yes.”

  “So it changed your life?”

  “The whole core of my thinking was shifted very particularly within a year,” he said. In other words, he started hanging out with low-life types, going to jazz joints with fake ID, and mingling with Wallace Berman, who wasn’t yet an artist but more just a hipster.

  In 1957 or so, when Walter opened the Ferus Gallery with the artist Ed Kienholz, he finally dropped out of school. He had already opened three galleries by then, and he was only twenty-four. He still looked like a doctor, and he had such a bedside manner he made people feel better just by entering a room. And though he talked all the time, he gave the impression of utter silence.

  Everyone else in the art world, or what little art world there was in those days, may have seemed far-out and beatniky, but Walter, in his neat, dark American suits with his white shirts, ties, pale skin, and blue eyes behind black eyeglass frames, seemed too businesslike for words. It was as though someone from the other side, the public side of L.A., had materialized on La Cienega, on our side, the side of weirdness, messiness, and art.

  One of the first shows they had there, a Wallace Berman exhibit, got busted for obscenity, which got things off properly and sealed our faith in Walter. If someone so classic-American was willing to let a crack of light into fluorescent Los Angeles, a crack of darkness . . . Plus, he had such a convincingly deadpan delivery that rich older ladies might actually buy this stuff.

  In 1962, when I was nineteen, I was going to L.A. Community College (because you could park, unlike at UCLA). One day a girl came up to me, told me her name was Myrna Reisman, asked if Stravinsky was my godfather, and when I said yes, she said, “Great, I’ll pick you up around eight.”

  She arrived in her boyfriend’s Porsche and took me to Barney’s Beanery, where Everyone was that night. Sitting at a couple of tables in the back of the bar were Irving Blum (who by then was the front man at the Ferus Gallery, having a presence and voice like Cary Grant and the greatest eyelashes on any coast) and Ed Kienholz, who was grizzly and manly and who was having a show at the gallery. Also there that night were Wallace Berman, the strange prince of darkness with long, long black hair, and Billy Al Bengston, the first surfer artist I met there, and Larry Bell, who I knew already because he was the bouncer at the Unicorn. I wouldn’t meet Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Peter Alexander, or Laddie Dill until later, but I did meet Robert Irwin, who was so totally a surfer that in those days that’s all he and Kenneth Price, who was also there, ever did. Sitting with the surfers was Walter Hopps, looking much too normal to be in Barney’s, just this wreck of a West Hollywood chili joint.

  “I met you,” Walter said, “at a poetry reading at your house.”

  “You did?” I asked.

  Somehow it was decided that we were all going to Kienholz’s house in Laurel Canyon. It was crowded and rustic and I was beginning to feel left out when Walter sat beside me and offered to show me Ed’s show, “among other things,” if I came to the gallery the next day.

  “What other things?” I asked, although I trusted him because he was so polite.

  A couple days later I went to the gallery and Walter was there, alone except for the cow’s skull on the mannequin’s body with an arm holding a cigarette holder, alone except for a papier-mâché model of a woman over a sewing machine you pumped with your foot to make her pump up and down. The installation, titled Roxy’s, was a scale-model World War II–era Nevada whorehouse with a jukebox that played Glenn Miller, and the skull lady was the madam.

  “I’ll show you other things,” Walter said, and took me upstairs to a garage apartment where I saw a Siamese cat with eyes the same color and weirdness as his. He showed me a bunch of John Altoon works he’d just rescued from one of John’s self-destructive attacks (he used to go after his paintings with an axe or something, I don’t know), and I saw these great, hypnotic Kenneth Price ceramics. I was only nineteen and I said, “What’s this all about anyway?”

  “Is it OK if I write on this?” he asked, noticing the paperback I was carrying, a history of literary criticism. I handed it over and after a minute he wrote: “Eve, baby, this is another place—so walk, (right along) easy.”

  I still have this because I have everything he gave me except a signed Lichtenstein (I always lose the art). I have memories of his voice, a silver bullet, convictions about how to see, and of course, Marcel.

  We walked back down into the gallery, which was now dark because it was night, and he turned on the jukebox so the revolving lights lit up the whorehouse, making the place frightening but cozy because of the Glenn Miller.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m going to Brazil. When I get back, I’ll call you.”

  “Brazil?” I cried, disappointed. “For how long?”

  “Not long,” he said. “A c
ouple of months.”

  “Months!” I moaned. We could all be dead by then.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  This promise didn’t stop me from going hog wild at Barney’s, immersing myself in the scene, falling in love as any fool might with Ed Ruscha (the cutest) and Kenneth Price (maybe cuter) and Jim Eller (the “rat man,” who did terrible, dark things to rubber rats with red blood on them, but then, I was so young, I went for cuteness, not content).

  I have always loved scenes, bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance, and the scene at Barney’s was just fabulous—better than Max’s in New York, which I thought was too mean and too dark. Edie Sedgwick and Bobby Neuwirth sitting at the bar looking untouchable is not my idea of fun. But then, the Ferus was nothing if not fun. Every night I was getting into my car and going to Barney’s or to art openings, since now it had been decided that every Monday night all galleries would stay open, and suddenly, everyone in L.A. was out—en masse. It was stupid but it was fun.

  By that time, I was living in this little paper bungalow—one room with a typewriter—on Bronson Avenue in Hollywood. I had a horrible old Chevy with stalactites growing down from the interior like cobwebs. I was writing my memoirs, of course, because I’d been to Europe (like Henry James) and wanted to write a book called Travel Broadens, about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood. Poor Europe never recovered was the point of my book. I thought of myself as extremely decadent and thought that anyone who had graduated from Hollywood High had nothing to learn.

  Maybe three months passed in that way before Walter finally called me, saying he was driving in from the airport. When he got to my house, car keys jangling in his pocket, he said, “So, shall we hear some music tonight, or do you want to see a play?”

  “A play,” I said, always happier around words.

  In his red station wagon, we drove back to the airport and flew to San Francisco, where a play his friend had written was opening. “I had tickets to see the Dylan concert,” he said, “but maybe it’s better if we see this Michael McClure play, The Beard.”

  I couldn’t believe someone was taking me to San Francisco on a date—nobody at Hollywood High had ever done that. I mean, artists were cute, but all they’d ever give you was a burrito. And so, even though Walter wore glasses, my reservations crumbled. And sitting there, hearing the opening lines—

  In order to pursue the secret of me

  You must first find the real me.

  Which path will you pursue?

  —it seemed to me that there were things going on that I could pursue, that no matter what they thought in New York about everyone else being totally out of it and hopeless, on the West Coast things were happening and that it was art and that Walter was the One and these were the Times. Sitting in the audience, even though mostly I didn’t get it, I at least had the feeling there was something to get.

  From then on, I saw Walter frequently, which meant I was in the midst of much excitement and momentum going public in L.A. One night, we were leaving Musso’s when he looked at his watch and said, “Good, I still have time to get to Bel Air and sell that Duchamp.”

  “Who’s Duchamp?” I asked.

  He seemed stunned.

  “Is he French?” I wondered. “He sounds dead.”

  “He’s not dead,” he said, “but he is French. There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  But since Walter seemed willing to spend every waking hour turning uneducated fools into people with eyes to see, he tried to explain Duchamp to me, telling a story about meeting him once in the Arensbergs’ garden when Duchamp, in a white-and-purple polka-dot satin bathrobe, said to fourteen-year-old Walter, “Perhaps we shall meet again.”

  “I’ve been to New York since to see him,” Walter went on, “and the first thing he said to me was, ‘And so we meet again.’ ”

  Walter was like Proust, he had so many story lines going on in his head. He didn’t restrict his story lines merely to the past and present, he sort of projected them into the future, and once, when we were in Kenny Price’s studio, Kenny told me, “I don’t like Walter to come here like this; when he sees what you’re doing, he suddenly is seven jumps ahead of you. Like he knows what you will be doing. And then, he leans.”

  In 1963 Walter forsook the Ferus Gallery, and even though it was only to become director of the Pasadena Art Museum, someone should have noticed how fast he was moving. He was only twenty-eight and suddenly he was all the way in New York sweet-talking Duchamp into a Southern California retrospective. The thing about Walter was that he was able to persuade not only artists to go along with his ideas but people with money to back him up. He looked so Waspy they figured he was one of them. And he was, it was just that they were changing—suddenly the had eyes to see.

  Suddenly they weren’t just after a nice Matisse.

  Suddenly they were becoming complicated.

  Suddenly everything was a lot more fun.

  Pasadena, whose sole claim to fame was the Rose Parade, was now anxiously awaiting the Big Private Party at the Green Hotel before the Public Opening of the Duchamp show. Elsewhere was going public!

  It was around this time that Walter called me up and suggested I come meet this friend of his who was very nice, but short.

  “How short?” I wondered.

  “Well, he can drive a car,” he said.

  This sounded very suspicious. “You mean he’s a midget?”

  “Well, sort of like Toulouse-Lautrec,” he said.

  Suddenly I felt things had gotten too weird, even for Walter, and for the first time in my life, I realized I had a great reason to hang up on someone—like women do in the movies—a thing I’d never imagined myself doing until just then.

  This was the wrong time, of course, for me to have pulled this move, because in a month the Duchamp show would be happening and the beautiful old Green Hotel would be filled with everyone in the L.A. art world, champagne, bands, clothes! But Walter never called me back, and I wasn’t invited. Everyone I knew was going. Even my sister, who was only seventeen (I was twenty), was going, with this bold photographer, Julian Wasser, a Time photographer who drove around with a police radio in his car.

  When he came to pick up my sister, Julian noticed that I was to be left behind and he invited me, but I felt so banished in spirit and it didn’t seem to me the sort of thing you could crash. And obviously I’d disappointed Walter so much he forgot all about me.

  Anyway, I knew that a couple of days later there’d be the public opening of the show and my parents had been invited, so I could go with them. My father didn’t care about Duchamp but he did have this interest in chess, and since Marcel had announced that he was “retired” from art to only play chess, my father thought he might go and see just what a master this guy was.

  At the entrance to the show, there was an old photograph from a long-ago opening in Paris that showed Marcel and a woman as Adam and Eve. I noticed this as I went in, and it seemed sweet to me, they both were so young and French and skinny.

  The public opening was very crowded and lots of fun. I got myself some red wine and wandered over to a raised platform where Marcel and Walter were playing chess, and my father came by and watched with a cynical expression. (He told me later, “That Marcel is not very good, I could have beaten him on the fourth move. And your friend Walter can’t play at all.”)

  Maybe it was the spectacle of Walter playing chess with Duchamp “for art” that gave Julian the idea. After all, by 1963 it had been about forty years since Marcel had retired to play chess (or so he wanted the world to think). For forty years someone could have come up with the idea of photographing the master of Nude Descending a Staircase playing chess with a naked woman. But nobody in Paris or New York thought it up.

  “Hey, Eve,” Julian said, grinning. “Why don’t I take pictures of you nude, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp?”

  Heretofore, the only nudes in L.A. were calendar gi
rls—starlets trying to make the rent. Of course, me being the nude sort of made me feel like I was pretending I was way bolder than I really was. But then, anything seemed possible—for art, that night. Especially after all that red wine.

  Still, this was Pasadena, the home of gracious ladies painting watercolors on afternoon outings, so I said, “You better ask people, Julian, and make sure it’s OK.”

  I have known plenty of great photographers in my life, and if there’s one thing they can do, it’s trample over objections. Julian disappeared, and when he came back he said, “It’s all set.”

  “Does Walter know?” I asked.

  “They’ll tell him,” he said. “Anyway, he’ll think it’s a great idea. It is a great idea.”

  All my ideas about Pasadena—about L.A. itself—were undergoing a molecular transformation. We were going from Little League to a home run in the World Series. Even my father thought it was a great idea, driving home in the car, although my mother did say, “If you change your mind, darling, it won’t matter.”

  The only trouble was, I had been taking birth control pills for the first and only time in my life, and not only had I puffed up like a blimp but my breasts had swollen to look like two pink footballs. Plus they hurt. On the other hand, it would be a great contrast—this large, too-L.A. surfer girl with an extremely tiny old man in a French suit. Playing chess.

  (After I saw the contact sheets, I never took the Pill again.)

  The next day Julian called to make sure I didn’t chicken out, which seemed a sensible idea after I woke up and realized that I had never taken my clothes off in public—and certainly not in a museum at 9 a.m. to play chess for a photograph. I mean, maybe this wasn’t art. Maybe this was just Julian trying to get the clothes off one more girl—which he was famous for doing, living across the street from Beverly Hills High School as he did and always making lascivious cracks.

  But with Marcel there, I figured he’d cool it, and I knew enough about him to realize that when Julian took pictures, he took pictures. (His greatest photograph was the one of Madame Nhu and her daughter when they heard her husband had been shot, and they stood weeping in each other’s arms—surrounded by news photographers, a sea of flashbulbs—which appeared in a two-page spread in Life.)