by Eve Babitz
I opened the bottle, and my God, the stuff was the best perfume I had ever smelled.
Horrible as it was to steal perfume, I put some on, fearing that in five or ten minutes or an hour, it would smell terrible.
But it didn’t. It smelled divine.
It was not a knock-’em-out, drag-’em-down-the-stairs kind of scent. It was just the most elegant, ladylike, pretty perfume ever invented by God or man. It was exactly what you’d think Audrey Hepburn would wear, to go with her pearls, her eyes, and her voice. It was the scent of unbelievably good taste, with just an edge of blissful sex.
It was happiness.
It was not a statement about the dark side, it was not vampire history, it was not black. It was sunshine and beauty, something you could wear with a bathing suit or jeans.
•
Maybe it was an L.A. perfume, because most people I knew in L.A. just loved Le De, whereas in France and in New York, people couldn’t smell it at all.
I’ve heard it referred to as a “green” scent, which I suppose is the same category Vitabath falls into, but it has a subtle violet-and-rose smell and yet it lasts and lasts. It doesn’t reach out and strangle anyone. You have to lean close—no, closer . . . no, really close; here!—to smell it at all. But once you do, you want to drown in it, like in a lake of heaven.
My father, who smoked cigars, so he should talk, claimed that anyone who wore perfume gave him a headache (except for my mother in Chanel No. 5), but even he didn’t mind Le De, because he couldn’t smell it, and when he did, it didn’t overpower his cigar.
And then the unthinkable happened. They took Le De Givenchy off the market—or at least cut back its distribution to the point where it became impossible to find. This is something Andy Warhol would have picketed Givenchy with me for (Andy Warhol has an extremely funny section in his autobiography The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B & Back Again, in which he says that whenever a product is “improved,” the manufacturer should leave the original, unimproved product on sale, too, because a lot of people don’t want what they already like pulled from the shelves). I used to buy $140 bottles of this stuff so as to be sure to have enough for any eventuality (it would take me about two years to run out). Then one day I woke up, and I couldn’t find Le De anymore—not even in France, as I discovered when I sent my adorable friend Paul Ruscha to Paris to a sort of “perfume museum,” where they kept a stock of perfumes that had been rudely removed from your life without so much as a fare-thee-well.
I went on a quest for my Holy Grail, Le De Givenchy. Without it, I never felt I was on full power—I met a man who was unbelievably funny, smart, and tall, and we did have a relationship, but the thing that was missing was Le De. It was as if I were trying to have a passionate affair without my inner scenery, without my ability to flirt, without my elegance and femininity. It was really sad and embarrassing, lying in bed with someone, totally naked, without my Le De.
I longed for Le De Givenchy, the way my sister and I wore it for everyday, just for all over everything (Le De had staying power, especially if you tried to funnel some into an atomizer—it would stay on wood forever). It made us feel like the Persons of Elegance we aspired to be and thought we were in Le De, whereas real Persons of Elegance—those rich people—wore the worst perfumes, things you’d have to really love them a lot to tolerate the smell of. In my opinion, that’s what some of those perfumes were invented for. “If you can stand me in this perfume, I know you really love me” is the secret code of some of these terrible heavy perfumes and the ones that smell like old ladies’ candy. (In Carousel, there is that great song sung by the girl who falls in love with a fisherman: “The first time he kissed me, a whiff of his clothes knocked me flat on the floor of the room. / But now that I love him, my heart’s in my nose / And fish is my favorite perfume!” So you never know, do you?)
Anyway, miracle of miracles, they have rereleased Le De Givenchy, suddenly, and it’s now available at Saks. My cousin has already gone out and bought three bottles, my sister’s rushed there and gotten one, and I have broken out a small quarter-ounce of perfume that I had saved but feel I can now wear again anywhere, even to fall in love, because we’re going to get enough this time to last the rest of our lives. It isn’t fair that they take these things off the market. They should at least warn you when your persona is about to be pulled.
Vogue
March 1997
I USED TO BE CHARMING
HERE’S what you would have witnessed if you happened to be standing outside the Raymond restaurant in Pasadena on April 13, 1997: A ’68 VW Bug comes to a stop, a woman flies out, skirt aflame. She drops to the ground by the side of the road, rolls on the grass, setting the grass along the side of the road on fire, and then against the green bushes, setting those on fire too. “Oh no, oh no!” is all she can manage. That woman was me.
In fact, about thirty feet away, a poor Sunday-brunch couple getting out of their car did see the whole thing. They stopped in their tracks and watched as my skirt burned off, as my skin turned to char. “Can we do anything to help—?”
“Oh no.”
The thing is, this wasn’t the first time I had been nakedly embarrassed in Pasadena. Years ago I was immortalized in the old Pasadena Art Museum playing chess against Marcel Duchamp totally naked. But now it seemed more likely that the result of the embarrassing episode would be the very opposite of immortality: it might possibly be death itself. Back then I’d said “oh no” too—but to myself.
I got back in my car, grabbed my pink wool sweater, and put out the rest of the fire the best I could with it. The brunch couple watched in horror as I drove off.
•
I had just finished brunch with my mother; my aunt Tiby; my sister, Mirandi; and my cousin Laurie. Mirandi would be driving my mother back to her place, where I was also living at the time, and I looked forward to smoking the Tiparillo I’d been saving for the ride in peace and quiet. The cigar was one of those fashionable but hideous cherry-flavored ones I loved because smoking them made me feel like Clint Eastwood; everyone else hated them. I grabbed one of those wooden matches, struck it against the sandpaper side of the box, when all of a sudden the match fell from my hand. The gauzy skirt I’d put on to go out dancing later went up in flames; my pantyhose melted to my legs. Thank God for sheepskin Uggs, which protected my lower legs from burns. I tried swatting at the fire with my hands, but it was hopeless. At that moment I remembered the words of a fireman I’d met long ago, who told me that the real danger from fires isn’t external burns but the damage that smoke inhalation does to the lungs, so I jumped out of the car. The skirt’s wraparound ties made it impossible to remove. If only I’d had a nice swimming pool nearby to jump into, I would have been fine.
Here I was, I thought, over fifty years old, still so stupid that I was risking my life for a smoke. Was this the brick wall that Mrs. Hurly, my fifth-grade teacher, so confidently warned me that one day I’d end up crashing into “if I didn’t pay attention”? Had I managed to avoid all the damage I had done up to this point, breaking hearts, being unreliable, only to hit that brick wall because of a match? I imagined how pissed off my friends would be if they heard I actually died from trying to light a cigar.
I got back into the car. My hands felt like fire, but I managed to shift gears, steer, brake, and otherwise accomplish what any driver whose lower half didn’t resemble a blackened mermaid could do. I was filled with adrenaline, unstoppable. News came over the radio of a fire in Pasadena. Was it the one I’d started? Thank God, no. I was still craving that cigar, but it was too late, the matches were somewhere melted into the car. And obviously I couldn’t be trusted with such a luxury.
First-degree burns really hurt, like getting boiling water splashed on you or a serious sunburn; second-degree burns are those horrible things you don’t want to have either; but third-degree burns, which is what I had, meant that my nerve endings were burned off. So I wasn’t in much pain at all.
I
drove slowly through Eagle Rock and then Glendale, because it was Sunday and the cops would be out, ready to give tickets. Now I was getting close to home. All I had to do was turn onto Franklin, make it the final few blocks to where my mother and Mirandi would be waiting. Unlike them, I was too chicken to take the freeway, so I knew they’d beat me home.
I pulled into the driveway and got out of the car, minus my skirt. I saw Mirandi standing with our next-door neighbor Nancy Beyde. Nancy’s face had a look of pain; I knew her Sunday was completely wrecked and my sister looked just as horrified.
“What did you do?” she asked, following me back into the house.
“My skirt caught on fire, can you believe it? I’m going to put aloe on it.” I still planned to go dancing with my old boyfriend Paul Ruscha later.
“Aloe?” she said, looking serious.
“Would you get a scissors and cut the waistband? I want to sue the skirt company.”
Mirandi got scissors and cut the waistband, and there on the label was the name of the clothing company. She borrowed a codeine pill from my friend Holly, who happened to have some left over from a surgery, and called 911. A woman paramedic arrived, looking like I’d wrecked her Sunday too, even if she was a paramedic. I said, “It’s OK. I was trying to light a cigar in my car and my skirt caught on fire.”
She looked like she was sure I would die, but she didn’t know me. My friends would kill me if I died.
•
I was admitted into the burn intensive care unit at Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center. I once read in The Village Voice that an artist was anyone over twenty-five without health insurance—well, that was me all right: over fifty without health insurance. Did that make me a real artist? My sister had explained the situation to admissions, and I’d been enrolled in the hospital’s special program for people like me. My condition was listed as “grave”; burns, mostly third-degree, covered nearly half of my body, which is to say that the skin was gone. And I used to have such great skin.
The last thing I remember before falling into a heavily sedated sleep was meeting my night nurse, David. He was exactly the type to prevent me from dying.
“Oh, you’re going to save my life,” I said.
“You won’t remember me,” he explained, calmly.
But he came every night for the first six weeks I was there, so I did remember him. And later, he did save my life.
The doctor showed up the next morning, bright and cheery, with the news that I had a fifty-fifty chance for survival. The doctors confirmed that my jumping out of the car had in fact protected my lungs, so the prognosis wasn’t as dire as it could have been. Mirandi burst into tears, but I took it the opposite way. To me, fifty-fifty meant I had a good chance. I’d have guessed something closer to seventy-thirty. But on the way to the hospital it occurred to me: All my life I had been very lucky, and why should my luck run out now? Having been through getting sober in a twelve-step program, I knew that even when things seemed horrible, there was always a chance that they could turn around. It was only later I’d learned that in addition to my main doctor, Dr. Nguyen, the famous and heroic Dr. Zawacki, the best burn doctor on earth, would be overseeing my case. He looked just like Jim Caan from The Godfather and his specialty was severely burned patients, the kind who, years ago, couldn’t be saved.
I was being drugged into oblivion, yet not so much that I didn’t wake up now and then and beg David to give me a cigarette. Finally, he called Mirandi on the phone. “She’s begging for a cigarette, what should I do?”
“Put a patch on her,” she said.
“There’s no skin,” he replied.
Kicking nicotine, as everyone knows, is the worst thing in the world, worse than kicking heroin, according to friends who should know. You can imagine what I was going through: not only was I in the burn unit but I was being forced to kick tobacco cold turkey. Well, I’d been miserable from kicking stuff before. Funny thing was, in recent years I’d been in the best physical shape of my life. I was working on a book about the ballroom-dance scene in L.A. and going out dancing every single night. I still smoked, though. If you’re a writer, tobacco is all that works. I wanted to finish my book, so I had to smoke, is how I looked at it.
•
“So, Eva, a cigar, eh?” Someone had written my name wrong on the band around my wrist.
Every morning a different person would come in and ask the cigar question.
It was the only thing in the burn ICU that gave them a laugh, because the other guy in there, a Mexican man who’d burned 30 percent of his upper body trying to help someone on the freeway undo a radiator cap, was really not good for a laugh at all. But me? They just had to laugh.
“Have you always smoked cigars?” they wondered.
“No, it was just a fad,” I tried to explain. “A Demi Moore type of thing.”
The previous fall Demi Moore had been on the cover of Cigar Aficionado, a fat cigar in her mouth. I thought that would ring a bell, at least if they bothered looking at magazine covers.
But I couldn’t tell them the whole thing, because once they began laughing, they didn’t really want to hear about Demi Moore, much less about the fashionableness of smoking cigars.
•
It was decided that I would undergo two twelve-hour surgeries. In the first one, the doctors would remove skin from my scalp, shoulders, back, and arms. Two weeks later, they would staple it back on, reupholstering me with my own skin. And afterward I would be on a respirator and a feeding tube for weeks.
The first surgery took place on April 18. All through it, it seemed to me that I was floating above my body, I was watching the bloody operating room. The hospital had warned my family that it wasn’t worth waiting around during the surgery, but my cousin Laurie insisted. When she first saw me after the surgery, I was bundled up like a burrito, my face and body swollen to three hundred pounds. We looked at each other and the word came to us at the same time: abattoir, the French word for slaughterhouse. All my life I had wanted to have a reason to use the word abattoir, but it usually escaped me, no matter how determined I was to remember it. Laurie didn’t sit through the second surgery—one butchery in a lifetime is quite enough.
•
After some weeks on the respirator, I was well enough to have the intubation tube removed, though the feeding tube remained. Still, breathing was hard. It was from all the morphine, I suppose. I just couldn’t breathe with enough conviction. David, my lifesaver, tried to warn me: “Eve, if you don’t breathe, we’re going to have to ask your friends to leave!” But my lung collapsed anyway.
It was practically a third operation, getting me on the respirator. God, it all comes back to me, what I put them through.
•
Now began the routine. Every day I was taken to a horrible weighing machine. I had been unable to get true REM sleep for weeks, and in my paranoid dreams, it seemed I’d been kidnapped by terrorist orderlies and taken to a secret place where they tortured the patients.
I was so weak, strong arms were my ideal. I began to regard the men able to move me to the weighing machine with the least fuss as my saviors. I’d never gone in for muscles, but now they were all I looked for in a man.
My other torment was physical therapy. Christine, the therapist, put me through an ordeal where I had to sit up and crawl across the hideously impossible bed (which I was too weak and mad to do). Once I was seated, the bed would be lowered with a loud wham, so I dropped about a foot, right into what felt like a pile of broken glass.
Pain was the whole point of the exercise. Only later did I realize that that crushed-glass feeling was probably exactly what jump-started my nerve endings, which had been completely burned away. One of the reasons nobody but saints wants to work with burn patients is that they only get better when there’s more pain. Screaming from pain is the signal that you’re getting better.
•
Burn patients are also susceptible to infection, so the number of friends allowed to
visit during my recovery was limited to five: Mirandi, Laurie, Paul, my writing partner Michael Elias, and Carolyn Thompson, whom I’d known since the 1970s. Nancy Beyde, the neighbor who witnessed me pull up in my VW, naked from the waist down and burned to a crisp, wasn’t on the official list, but she snuck in anyway.
It was Nancy who, when the doctors feared that I wasn’t healing and there was talk of another surgery, consulted her homeopathic doctor friends. She smuggled in cantharis pills, something usually reserved for bladder ailments and blisters. She told me to relax (relax?) and slipped this smallest of tablets under my tongue. The doctors were amazed at my progress. I wasn’t about to clue them in to Nancy’s secret pills, because I was sure they’d regard them as ridiculous or else take them away. They were my secret.
•
My only consolation was the wonderful warm therapeutic Jacuzzi. Even though it was the world’s hottest summer, and Carolyn was fainting from the temperature in my overheated room, the bath was the only place I ever felt warm enough.
The Jacuzzi was the first place I’d seen the staples, so many staples. And my legs: from my waist to my ankles, black, black, black. It seemed impossible that I’d ever stand on them again.
“How did they get black?”
“This is just the first stage,” someone explained. “Eventually, they’ll turn pink—and then red.”
At least I hadn’t burned my face, or run into a traffic pole headfirst. I was trying to remember my good luck. I held on to the happy thought of being well enough to go back to the Glendale Galleria, not far from my house. I dreamed of shopping at the Gap and Nordstrom, as shallow as that sounds.
•
To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land. Even though everybody knows that since time immemorial sleep is about the only thing that lets people get better, I was never allowed to doze more than two hours at a time without someone coming to take my vitals, putting one of those blood pressure things on, turning me over on my side, sticking needles into my wrists, and doing it so ineptly that I was bruised all over. Immobile in bed, on opiates, the constipation is terrible and enemas the only, horrible, solution. Everyone keeps telling you to “relax,” which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.
