I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  I showed a guy I know photos of the latest Perry Ellis, Betsey Johnson, and especially Anna Sui designs and asked him what he thought. He said, “It’s 1968, right?”

  In the actual sixties there were no designers; there were girls who made clothes for their friends or small shops selling one-of-a-kind things. In Los Angeles it started with a store on the Strip called Belinda’s and with people like Trina Robbins who made Renaissancey clothes to wear. People wanted to look like storybook characters, to wear clothes that meant something. One of the things our clothes meant was “We don’t believe a thing they say.”

  My sister began by making a maroon suede dress. Her boyfriend had learned about leather from a sandal maker in Chicago. He knew what tools you needed to work with leather, and together they made this dress, in 1967. “I wore this dress into this shop on the Strip, Belinda’s, and the girl took one look and asked if I could make four more, and I said yes.”

  A month later, she’d followed her boyfriend to London and the next thing she knew, her boyfriend had designed a line of suede and leather hunting shirts they took to Blades on Savile Row, one of London’s oldest tailors, who loved this line so much, my sister told me, that “they said, ‘we’ll take lots, but you don’t know how to cut, we’ll show you.’ ”

  So, it being the sixties when anything went, my sister, a twenty-one-year-old American with a talent for sewing, was taken down to the basement of a Savile Row tailor and taught how to make real patterns, because, before then, all leather clothes had been boxy and depended on fringe or people not caring if things really fit or not, and these old men taught her, in three weeks, how to cut patterns that really fit—and from then on, she was in business in a very big way.

  Eight months later, they returned to Los Angeles and opened a shop on the Sunset Strip named for my sister, Mirandi (she’d changed her name from Miriam, another thing you could do in the sixties without being thought too weird), and there, in 1968, with rock and roll coming into full bloom—next door to a place called the Psychedelic Conspiracy, everyone’s favorite paraphernalia store—she had her own store.

  “Our first customer was a guy in the Mafia who had rolls of hundred-dollar bills in his boots, and he put in a thousand-dollar order and we were off . . .” She made clothes for Steppenwolf, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash, Cream, the Jefferson Airplane, Sharon Tate, “and this black suede tuxedo for this drug king to get married in.”

  She also made clothes for Jim Morrison: “Two suits, leather, with extra pants and a laced crotch, like sailor pants. And snakeskin lapels. With a stash pocket concealed in the lining.” Mica Ertegun wanted a black glove-suede calf-length coat with snakeskin lapels, double-breasted with a fitted bodice and flared at the bottom—like a Russian princess, lined with green brocade silk. This was the year she was named to the ten best-dressed list. She sounds awfully well dressed to me now—“glove suede” sounds divine.

  •

  Eventually, my sister got divorced, quit making clothes, and began a career as a rock-concert promoter. But then she realized rock and roll was too hard. Today she’s a therapist, seeing young girls in their early twenties with major crushes on very bad boys—which is recycled revenge, if you ask me.

  I myself, in those days, was nothing if not in love with very bad boys, the worse the better, I realize now, although in the sixties the boys were very sweet and the only flaw you could find in them was that they were dealers or else rock stars, which made faithfulness impossible. Except that it didn’t matter then because the worst things you got were social diseases that were only embarrassing—they didn’t kill you.

  In the sixties, nobody wore padded shoulders; they wore tiny fitted jackets and shirts. Men weren’t supposed to look “buff,” they looked scrawny and poetic. Guys on the streets, tan, dressed like pirates with long blond curly hair flowing past their shoulders, and eyes of periwinkle blue, and high cheekbones would look at me as I passed and say I was beautiful. I couldn’t believe it. “You’re the beautiful one,” I would say, “look at you!”

  “Hey, I live over there in that house with the blue door, if you want to come hang out,” they’d say.

  In those days I learned to tell people they were beautiful, and indeed, everyone seemed to be.

  On Hollywood Boulevard yesterday I saw two young men, in their early twenties or late teens, both with long flowing hair—the high cheekbones, the tans, etcetera. I was in a shoe store, looking at these great purple shoes that reminded me of the old days, when these boys came in and one said, “Hi, we’re both vegetarians and don’t like animal products, do you have any boots not made of leather?”

  They were both in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers (no leather), and the girl managing the store said, “No, we don’t.”

  Later, on the street, I came upon these boys again and said, “Are you from San Francisco?”

  “Yes,” they said, “how did you know?”

  “Something about you,” I said, “reminded me.”

  In San Francisco, of course, there are still hippies and in Berkeley, lots of them. And they have “raves” where two or three thousand people stay up all night, outdoors, and dance. If that isn’t hippieness, I don’t know what is.

  In Miami Beach there’s a renaissance of recycling old buildings, those gorgeous art deco two-story hotels and bungalow-court places that we still have in L.A., except not as well tended, and there I met a beautiful guy with a yin-yang tattoo on his shoulder and that laid-back intensity kids used to have in the sixties, and it seemed to me that Miami Beach right now, with all its thrift stores, very cheap rents, and nonstop nightlife, might be a perfect place for the sixties to be recycled too.

  The weirdest thing in the world is seeing a style return that only a year ago was considered ugly by everyone who was anyone, i.e., bell-bottoms—in fact, a friend of my sister’s just flew into L.A. from London and said, “I’m so happy to be here so I can buy some pants that aren’t bell-bottoms.”

  A friend of mine, Caroline Thompson, who wrote the screenplay for Edward Scissorhands, told me that in London, where she went recently, “the kids are all in platform shoes with bell-bottoms, the guys have long hair and wear John Lennon glasses. And they were hanging out in Leicester Square singing ‘Hey Jude.’ ”

  According to a girl in her twenties I know in L.A., what really galled everyone enough to not mind the sixties coming back in a major way was the Gulf War. “That really made everyone mad,” she said. “I was at UCLA and the kids were just furious. And Rio. And Clarence Thomas.”

  It’s no wonder that kids have taken to wearing old clothes and hanging out in beatniky coffeehouses and talking about psychedelics.

  Near my neighborhood in Hollywood, hippieness has sort of sprung up overnight. There’s a block on Franklin Avenue where a coffee shop called the Bourgeois Pig is right next to an alternative-magazine store called the Daily Planet, which sells wild tracts from Berkeley and tattoo and piercing quarterlies. Not too far away is Big & Tall Books, which is also a café and is open until 2 a.m., jammed with aspiring hippies eager to talk all night and all day. On Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood, there are almost three blocks of hippieness, beginning with Chatterton’s, which was always on the beatnik side; the Onyx coffee shop, which is cappuccino city; the Los Feliz theater, which runs great movies from far and wide; a men’s store called X-Large, partly owned by Michael “Mike D” Diamond of the Beastie Boys, which has such great clothes that artists I know in San Francisco drive down just to shop there; and other little places, like the Amok bookstore, which has this great catalog entitled Fourth Dispatch: Source Book of Extremes of Information in Print. And the Dresden Room, where old people living in Los Feliz Hills used to eat prime rib but which is now jammed with just plain weirdos from around the neighborhood in their twenties, thirties, and forties, eager for a dark place to hang out and drink beers. The Dresden Room is the kind of place hippies would never have enjoyed because they had no ironic detachment, but nowadays
the innocence of the sixties has been cut by extremes of information, and ironic detachment is all the rage. It adds balance.

  It occurred to me that when things on the outside get too disgusting and wretched or boring, kids will turn to things on the inside to see beauty. A friend of mine who manages rock groups said, “In London right now they’re drinking Ecstasy punch as we speak. It’s like mescaline, acid without the side effects. It makes everyone happy and stay up all night. Things are so bad there.” Psychedelics are everywhere—mushrooms, DMT, Ecstasy. I hear that LSD is having a comeback—and I’ll tell you, it can be a refreshing spiritual experience akin to selling your house and moving to Tibet. Even the rumor of LSD could make people rethink their idea of what to wear.

  When I was a hippie, the main social rule was under no circumstances was anyone to be a bummer—you had to have a personality so full of sweetness and light that someone completely wrecked on LSD could run into you and think you were holy. We used to think that if only we hung on with enough of a vengeance, things would have to get better—kinder and gentler and certainly more colorful. Every time we saw the remotest evidence of this, we’d sigh, “It’s happening, it’s happening.”

  By which we meant “they” were getting it, that pretty soon the war would end, police would blend into the scenery, and Latin American dictators would divest themselves of their worldly goods and even Richard Nixon would show up wearing flowers. We thought beauty was power.

  Of course, we were wrong.

  •

  In the sixties going to thrift shops and dressing up in the styles of another era became de rigueur: we began recycling the past and using it to bring romance, drama, and “it’s happening” into the room with us. For very little money, girls could wear great clothes of days gone by and, because we were young and beautiful, get away with it. “Their” wives wore stuff from Paris, the couture creations that could make entrances at charity balls and opening nights at the opera, and things to wear shopping while buying other things to wear shopping.

  The fact that the things in Paris now look like things you can get in the thrift stores, is, to me, amazing.

  If today the women who lunch in New York are going to begin having dinner parties wearing long fringe, platform shoes, low-slung bell-bottoms, and headbands, or cut-velvet vests, brocaded-satin jacket lapels, tons of colors, tons of bracelets, and Cher-type short-skirted dresses with full sleeves and a renaissance flavor (Cher avec Bob Mackie), if thirties-style dresses by Marc Jacobs for Perry Ellis cut on the bias with tons of sequins and transparent blouses, if faux-fur vests and crushed velvet from Betsey Johnson and turquoise blue gloves, if Janis Joplin–type floppy hats with ridiculous feathers return, then it’s happening, it’s happening.

  But what, really, is happening?

  In the early sixties, before the big buildup in Vietnam had begun and the Beatles hadn’t even left Liverpool, the polls showed that nearly 80 percent of the American public trusted the government in Washington “. . . to do the right thing.” In the summer of 1992, only 20 percent feel that way. The numbers are completely reversed. It’s hard to believe that everything we tried to free up in the sixties—the heavy-handed police dealing with “people of color,” the small minds who championed backwater values and regarded women as a “splinter group,” the ones who hated sex (or said they did, from pulpits, before they were photographed sneaking out of motels), the ones who didn’t want anyone to have fun except them, the ones who savaged the coastline with oil rigs and polluted—is still with us; it’s hard to believe that the sixties ever happened. It’s enough to make you throw out your clothes from those days, but I never did. I suffered the eighties in silence, partly because it took me a whole decade to get sober and partly because I couldn’t believe that such ugliness was so merrily multiplying. That people would forget about each other and settle for BMWs instead.

  Perhaps people are just so tired of how awful everything is, they’ve given up and decided to just have fun in a cheap and simple way. We’re afraid of the environment and extinction, we’re afraid of the future, we’re afraid of “urban unrest,” and perhaps this is a way to stave off the stares of the homeless, because hippies had a great way of making being homeless seem a sensible idea. They had crash pads, and as my sister remembers, “In the sixties, panhandling meant you refused to be part of the system.”

  Since today you can’t get in the system even if you’re dying to compromise your politics, recycling seems our only hope. If we can recycle the spirit of “it’s happening, it’s happening” along with those expensive clothes from Paris, maybe having fun will come back into fashion. And fun isn’t to be sneezed at. The sixties were fun. The trouble was, we thought fun was enough. But if we don’t watch out, the only people having fun are going the be the three people who own everything.

  Of course, this sixties surge of Anna Sui, Perry Ellis, and even Christian Lacroix could be a “trend.” But if these platform shoes, hip-hugger bell-bottoms, and long fringe are just another “trend,” I’ll eat my Italian red straw hat.

  Because one of the things one learned from the sixties is that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance and, though thinking about running things wrecks your peace of mind, even MTV is airing “Choose or Lose” ads to get kids to vote.

  When an entire generation gets dazzled by a drug with the density, force, and newness of LSD, we can’t really blame ourselves for hiphugger bell-bottoms—we couldn’t get our pants all the way up. And when through our marijuana-clouded living rooms we saw the nonwar on TV or the napalm photographs on the pages of Ramparts in 1968, and when suddenly an entire generation became As One waiting for the next Beatles album to come out, and it does, and it’s Sgt. Pepper, and when Jim Morrison calls himself an “erotic politician,” and when an entire generation laces itself into high boots and long, flowing street clothes, giving each other flowers and beads, and sets out to prove we didn’t “need” war, alcohol, or families because we were each other’s family, and when the new star is Jack Nicholson, then not just a girl dressed like a psychedelic princess, blessing an old man from the old school, but an entire generation was met with the words, “You don’t scare me!”

  But she did. We did. That was the point.

  Vogue

  October 1992

  BILLY BALDWIN

  IN THE lobby of the hotel where I was supposed to meet him, I thought a man sitting in a chair might be him. He was sort of cute, but washed-out. Then I thought, suppose in real life he is washed-out. “Are you . . . um, William?” I asked.

  “No,” the washed-out man said, “I’m not.”

  Suddenly I see him enter the almost-empty lobby in this Santa Monica hotel by the ocean, and of course this ordinary man I thought was him is nothing like him. He is tall, he is gorgeous, he is wrapped in a charismatic aura that, from afar, is unmistakable. He comes closer and I say, “You are . . . ?”

  And he says “Are you . . . ?”

  His voice is exact—the exactness of a New Yorker who doesn’t want to be mistaken for an Angeleno. He’s just passing through on business, otherwise he’d be where they are smarter and faster.

  Even though William Baldwin (his friends call him Billy) was in Flatliners and Backdraft, two movies that weren’t exactly the greatest shows on earth, most women know who he is, partly because of his more famous brother, Alec. “You mean, the cute one,” they all say. But in the next few months everyone is going to know who William Baldwin is because he has two new movies coming out—Sliver, with Sharon Stone, opening in May, and Three of Hearts, with Kelly Lynch, due out this fall.

  “What’s Sliver about?” I ask, after translating his order, “A breakfast shake,” into L.A.-ese—“A smoothie.”

  “Sharon Stone’s character moves to a building where Tom Berenger and I live. . . .”

  “What’s Sharon Stone really like?” I ask.

  “Classic Hollywood sexpot,” he says, facetiously. “Anyway, a love triangle emerges among the three of t
hem, and that’s where the fun starts. One of the characters is a voyeur, which is an interesting topic. I think everyone is a voyeur.”

  “I agree,” I agree.

  “You pick up the phone, you overhear a conversation because the lines are crossed, do you hang up?”

  “Not me,” I confess.

  “Something similar happened to me recently. I was in my apartment in New York looking out the window when I saw this completely nude woman standing in front of her window. I was fascinated. All of a sudden she walked away. I waited fifteen or twenty seconds, but she didn’t come back. I was hoping she would come back.”

  “Yeah, and take off some more clothes!”

  “There were no more clothes to take off,” he reminds me.

  We both gaze out of the window, but there are no naked ladies outside, only the blue Pacific Ocean, so I decide to change the subject to something less naked.

  “So,” I say, “does Chynna live in New York?” He goes out with Chynna Phillips of Wilson Phillips, which is one reason men never say mean things about him. They see he’s completely unavailable to other women.

  “She lives here,” he says.

  “How did you meet?” I ask.

  “We met in the MGM Grand Terminal at the Los Angeles airport.” It seems that everyone in Hollywood thought they would be a good couple, and then, oddly enough, it worked out. They’ve been together for a year and a half.

  “She seems like a shy person,” I say, remembering when I saw her once at a birthday party, hovering around the edge, not joining in with total abandon as the other kids did.