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Summary
Summary
The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (1943-2021), the brilliant chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time.
"I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve's singular irresistible glitz." --Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
"The Eve Babitz book I've been waiting for. What emerges isn't just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous." --Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world--a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz, age twenty, posed for a photograph with French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1963. They were seated at a chess board, deep in a game. She was naked; he was not. The picture, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. She spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, rocking and rolling, and honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.
Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered--as a writer--by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieved that American ideal: art that stayed loose, maintained its cool; art so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. Yet somehow the world wasn't paying attention. Babitz languished.
It was almost twenty years after her last book was published, and only a few years before her death in 2021 that Babitz became a literary star, recognized as not just an essential L.A. writer, but the essential. This late-blooming vogue bloomed, in large part, because of a magazine profile by Lili Anolik, who, in 2010, began obsessively pursuing Babitz, a recluse since burning herself up in a fire in the 90s.
Anolik's elegant and provocative book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.
"A dazzling, gossip-filled biography of the wayward genius who knew everyone in Seventies LA." -- The Telegraph (UK)
Genre:
| Nonfiction. |
| Biographies. |
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Vanity Fair contributor Anolik (Dark Rooms) takes on the colorful story of Los Angeles It-Girl and writer Eve Babitz from her heyday in the 1960s and '70s to her unexpected literary emergence in 1974 with her novel Eve's Hollywood. Anolik, who fell in love with Babitz's work after reading her 1977 novel Slow Days, Fast Company decades later, tells readers that she "won't attempt to impose narrative structure and logic on life, which is (mostly) incoherent and irrational," and her book, while not chronological, is entertainingly anecdotal. Babitz-the daughter of Sol Babitz, first violinist for the 20th Century Fox orchestra, and artist Mae Babitz-grew up in a Hollywood Hills home that was visited by such L.A. luminaries as Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Fats Waller. After posing nude for Time photographer Julian Wasser in 1963 at age 20, Babitz achieved notoriety and hung out with artists (Andy Warhol, Salvador DalA-), politicians (Teddy Kennedy), and musicians (Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills, the Eagles). Anolik admiringly looks at Babitz's life, even while revealing careless accidents, such as incurring third-degree burns trying to light a cigar while driving. Perfect for fans of Hollywood in its glory years, this is a biography energetically told. (Jan) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Hero worship meets compelling biography in Vanity Fair contributing editor Anolik's (Dark Rooms, 2015) nonfiction debut.A cultural fixture in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s, Eve Babitz (b. 1943) eclipsed the label of groupie. She was a socialite who managed to intertwine herself with Steve Martin, Warren Zevon, Jim Morrison, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, a Hollywood High graduate-turned-author whose teen years defined her writing. She was well-known but also dismissed by some, including novelist Julia Whedon: "I discern in Babitz the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia." However, Anolik shows that Whedon was shortchanging the woman who famously posed nude over a chessboard with Marcel Duchamp (he was clothed). The author is entirely up front about her obsession with her subject. A love for Babitz's writing turned into a deep dive to uncover the woman who pitched her first novel, Travel Broadens, in 1961 to Catch-22 author Joseph Heller with a letter that read, "Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer." As Anolik shares, the provocative message was classic Babitz: "playing the sexy, boobalicious girl." That character certainly made a significant impression during her heyday, but it was Babitz's style and fictive memoirs that defined her as something of a female Hunter S. Thompson, a drugged-out sex kitten with brains. Throughout the book, Anolik shares deep cuts from Babitz's writing and influence over the major players of the era. But as with any dishy tale, there are times when the narrative gets caught in its own name-dropping cyclone and feels just as shallow as some of the stars it portrays. Fortunately, the author counters this problem with a poignant rendering of Babitz's tragedy: a freak fire that destroyed her once-renowned beautybut not her chutzpah.Come for the LA intrigue; stay for the surprising moral of the story. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.