A Review By STEVE WASSERMAN
Last things first: Eve Babitz is a major minor L.A. writer who died five years ago at age 78. She spent nearly a quarter-century as a recluse, having suffered in 1997 a shocking and disfiguring accident while striking a match to light her Tiparillo. Her thin Indian skirt caught fire, searing her pantyhose into her flesh, leaving her with third-degree burns over more than half her body. She was lucky to survive. She had no health insurance. But she had famous boyfriends and a devoted sister who raised funds to save her. She never published again though many championed her work, including me. At the time of her misfortune, I was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I had long admired her, especially the rollicking and indispensable Slow Days, Fast Company, first published in 1977, a charming and insightful series of stories bursting with pluck and sass. I recommended to John Carroll, the then-editor of the paper, that he make her a columnist and urged Babitz to write him directly. She did and that letter from October 2000 is the last included in Too L.A., a book of her letters, expertly edited and chosen by Lili Anolik, recently published by New York Review Books. Babitz tells Carroll that “what the paper needs is some writers that cause such an uproar, people will have to read it in order to stay abreast of the edge. Of course, what Los Angeles is really about is figuring out what the next big thing is, and hitting it at exactly that moment, so you ride in with the tide, home free. Maybe I could do a column called ‘What’s Next,’ if that’s not too presumptuous.” Babitz knew what she was talking about. She’d been living on that edge since she was a teenager at Hollywood High in the late 1950s.
The posthumous resurrection of the writings of Eve Babitz is most welcome. Yet there is a risk of overpraising her merits. She was a perceptive chronicler and avid participant in the several overlapping scenes from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s of partygoing and artistic and musical invention that came to define much—but not all—of what is now a commonplace notion of Los Angeles pop culture. In many ways, she was an unabashed booster of the glossy L.A. that became synonymous with a rising L.A. creative elite whose élan and narcissism she found irresistible.
Lili Anolik makes the case in her perfervid introduction: “The letters are everything you could want. They’re vivid, funny, responsive, full of fresh turns of thought and phrase.” Anolik tells us they are often “profound” and “frequently brilliant, invariably amusing.” She says they deserve to be put on the short shelf next to Virginia Woolf’s imperishable A Room of One’s Own for they are “every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf’s celebrated manifesto.”
If only.
Regrettably, Anolik, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for Babitz’s literary exhumation in a decades-long quest that more nearly resembles the behavior, as she herself admits, of a stalker than a disinterested biographer, has so fallen in love with her subject as to almost blind her to Babitz’s defects, both with respect to her writing and to the life. With two previous books—Hollywood’s Eve (2019) and Didon and Babitz (2024)—prompted by Anolik’s March 2014 Vanity Fair profile, Anolik has become Babitz’s greatest champion. Now with Too L.A., a title taken from Babitz’s own over-oxygenated writing, she has gathered together and edited a trove of letters and brilliantly mined the rich vein of Babitz’s eye for the deep shallow as well as the porous boundary between the largely self-inflicted injuries of her private life and the glittering sheen of her public persona. Babitz herself, on the strength of these 197 letters, only thirty of which she ever mailed, understood in a way Anolik doesn’t the limitations of her talents, even as she strives to slip the shackles of a mansplaining culture which at almost every turn tried to blunt her ambitions, both artistic and writerly, even as her editors and admirers sought (often with her ardent encouragement) to slip between her sheets.
Eve Babitz was born in 1943 to Hollywood neo-royalty. Her Brooklyn-born father Sol was a gifted violinist and musicologist and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts in 1932, the year before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor. He was hired as first violinist for both the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony and then the Twentieth Century Fox studio orchestra. Sol would ultimately marry Lily Mae Laviolette, a beautiful Cajun Catholic shiksa willing to convert to Judaism. Together, their artistic enthusiasms summoned an entire solar system of brilliant musicians and artists and actors that swirled about the household. Among them was Igor Stravinsky who named her and was her godfather. When puberty burst upon her at age fourteen, Babitz’s blossoming made her a prime candidate for induction by the fast-track girls at Hollywood High who called themselves the Thunderbird Girls and cruised the Sunset Strip in their cool cars, looking for the main chance.
At twenty, Babitz posed nude playing chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp to promote Duchamp’s retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. The photograph was staged and taken by Julian Wasser. At the time, Babitz was having an affair with the museum’s 32-year-old married director, Walter Hopps, which perhaps explains Babitz’s reluctance to have her face photographed so as not to unduly give the game away to Mrs. Hopps who attended the opening. A month later, Babitz confides in an (unsent) letter: “Everything’s so fabulous for me now I can’t believe it. There’s nothing like two boyfriends to do it for you every time. There are such fabulous boys around and they take you out on dates and to movies and I feel just like a teenager. (I’m recapturing my lost youth.) I get to get dressed up and I flirt outrageously and put people on and I do things like look soulfully out the window and man it’s just too hoozie for words. . .And the other boy is one I’ve reduced to a quivering mass of anxiety. That’s even better. Nothing like a quivering mass of anxiety around to do worlds for one’s ego—especially if he’s an artist around town. . .If only all of this could last forever—not that it will, but I can.”
Meanwhile, Babitz confesses “I’m still working on my dirty novel, and I should get it done before I’m 21 or it’ll lose half its charm. If I could only get hold of a whole lot of Benzedrine then I’d be happy, and I’d be able to finish this thing.”
She spent the rest of her life torn between the excitements of everyday life—cruising the hangouts du jour (Barney’s Beanery in the early 1960s where she met many of L.A.’s up-and-coming artists—Ed Keinholz, Billy Al Bengston, Laddie Dill, Peter Alexander, and the Ruscha brothers, Ed and Paul, both of whom she’d bed, Paul becoming an on-again, off-again boyfriend whose bisexuality made for a sometimes tenuous connection; and after seducing Jim Morrison before he became famous; and later the Troubadour in the late 1960s which was a happy hunting ground—Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Country Joe McDonald, Jackson Browne, to name only a few, and then Ports restaurant where she anchored a corner table)—and the seductions of drugs—uppers, acid (which she seemed to ingest with an alarming frequency), pot, of course, and then by the mid-1970s, tragically, an Everest of cocaine. She had entered what she aptly called the era of “squalid overboogie.” She battened on the higher gossip of the ersatz salons she frequented with a true believer’s zeal and thrived on the Day-Glo mashup of the movie and music and art scenes.
The name-dropping is relentless and if, like me, you have an insatiable appetite for hoovering them up, this volume will not disappoint. Still, there are many pages of vapid jottings—“I cleaned the house, did the laundry, and vowed to quit smoking”—that suggest why Babitz was a failure as a novelist (see her dud Sex and Rage) and a superb writer of short stories and essays that stylishly plumbed the depths of her own sensibility precisely in the degree to which she was uninterested in other people. There is also a faint whiff of casual and unexamined bigotry which insists on calling gay men “faggots” and refers to Black men as “spades.” Anolik, Babitz’s forgiving editor, makes excuses for the use of such derogatory slang, and quotes Babitz’s surviving younger sister who claims that “’Spade’ was an expression of respect in our crowd. . .It meant the person was hip.” Reader, you decide. Babitz wondered how her girlfriend Diane Gardiner could stand her “male chauvinist pig” of a married boyfriend Chuck Berry who nonetheless had bought Gardiner an L.A. mansion in 1969 for $100,000 cash (worth more than a three-quarters of a million dollars in 2026 greenbacks). Still, she conceded, “he was so cute, you made excuses.” In 1965, while Watts burned, Babitz and a friend repaired to the terrace atop the Chateau Marmont to safely watch the smoke of the rebellion darken the summer sky. Suffice to say, the late Mike Davis would likely have taken a dim view of the suffocations and entitlements of Babitz who is set on sealing herself up in the self-enclosed world of the rich and powerful and beautiful.
Generally drawn to handsome rich (and often married) men, apart from an affair with Rolling Stone photographer Annie Liebowitz, well detailed in these letters, or at least dashing artists and rock ‘n’ rollers on the make, she made an exception for Gram Parsons whom she didn’t like, especially when she discovered he lived off an inheritance of $30,000 annually which in today’s money amounted to nearly a quarter-million dollars. Parsons had said he’d heard that her collages—one of which Stephen Stills insisted be used as a cover image for an early Buffalo Springfield album—were too expensive. For Babitz, Parsons was both “stupid” and “a coward.”
Nearly thirty years after she stripped to please her married lover and startle the unsuspecting Duchamp, the father of Dada, and eight years after she joined AA in 1982—the year her beloved father died of Huntington’s disease at age 70 which ultimately would also kill her—and gave up drugs and alcohol and (almost entirely) writing as well, which had always been seen by her as enabled by dope of one kind or another, she boasted that, looking back, “Everybody wanted to be me—they looked at me with yearning faces, and said, ‘Boy, you sure had fun.’” She was not entirely wrong. She had struck many admirers both then and now, as the quintessential California girl, a daughter of Dionysus, whose devotion to pleasure was free of misgiving or regret. She detested the East Coast avatars of apocalypse, like Nathanael West, who saw only doom and gloom in sunny L.A. And even Joan Didion, whose approbation she craved (and got), was suspect as a depressed descendant of Donner Party survivors who could see only the unacknowledged cannibalism that underlay California’s treasured conceits of reinvention and optimism. Babitz, by contrast, saw things sunny side up. If Didon was unsettled and made anxious by the hot Santa Anas that regularly kicked up, Babitz luxuriated in them, recalling how she and her sister would as young girls rush to embrace them, spinning madly round and round. In a 1972 letter Babitz describes a sleepless hot early morning, writing “Outside the air is blue, and it’s 5:30, and the palm trees are absolutely still, but the avocado leaves are moving. The pigeons are cooing, and it won’t be long before the blue jays join in, and then the day will start, peach-colored, like all L.A. dawns—the only sound besides this typewriter is a plane. I love these dawns, you know. They’re so private and blue—you get a chance to think. I hope you don’t mind if I think about you.” In a 1977 unsent letter to Joseph Heller, who had championed her work when she had sent him an unsolicited fan letter after having read Catch 22 when it was first published and she was barely twenty, she confesses that “I love being virginal and pure [and] alone [because] the anticipation of cracking the thing open and finding out everything is such fun. (I know I’m not supposed to think things are fun, it’s not ‘serious’ enough.)” She confesses proudly: “I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L.A. rather than hates it. . . .Maybe I could invent a new form of storytelling and I know just what to call it: spurts.” She refers to her “shallow nature,” writing that “I feel like an upstream salmon, determined to reach the shallow water, no matter how fast the river is running the other way.” In an unsent letter to of all people G. Gordon Liddy, one of the Watergate masterminds, she insists that “I am shallow and weird and passionate.”
In a late letter, one of the few in this volume that Babitz actually sent, she describes her efforts at self-improvement: “Lately I bought a stair machine—a small one for home use—and put it in front of the TV, where I do it religiously every day. My ass is now as close to Bardot’s as it’ll ever get. I mean, if I had had this machine when I was eleven, my entire life would have been completely different. I would have married a tycoon, lived happily ever after, and never been a writer at all. . .”
On the evidence of these letters, she had two great loves: Ahmet Ertegun, a principal founder of Atlantic Records, and Tom Dowd, renowned recording engineer and producer who worked for Ertegun. Of the two, Ertegun had the edge, if for no other reason than he came with buckets of dough, making possible assignations at his regular bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with limo pickup and drop-off services, and the best champagne and other assorted stimulants. Ertegun was the married multimillionaire legendary music whisperer, the well-heeled cosmopolitan son of a Turkish diplomat. He was effortlessly elegant and erudite and there was no one he didn’t know and who wouldn’t return his calls. He was forty-five, twenty years older than Babitz, when they fell for each other in 1969. She began sleeping with him even as she agreed to profile him for Jann Wenner’s newly launched Rolling Stone. The writing didn’t go well. Wenner wanted a tougher piece than she was willing to write. Ultimately, she abandoned the assignment, claiming (not unreasonably) that she didn’t see how she could write objectively about a man she loved. She returned the advance, an act of generosity unheard of in the annals of the magazine and which alarmed other writers and staffers fearing it would set a dangerous precedent.
She courted danger with heedless bravado and exemplary recklessness. She once had the moxie to rid herself of a would-be rapist: When told not to scream, she said with unimaginable sangfroid: “Why not?” The man bolted. It might be said of Babitz, as Oscar Wilde said of his life, that she spent her talent on her writing and reserved her genius for her life. Sculpting her natural gifts of wit and brazenness into a living artwork, she dazzled all who came within her orbit. Her lust for life was palpable. The letters are proof. She came at people without fear. She left them without apology. She was the boss of herself. She was the girl who seemed to have it all. The only thing she lacked was inexperience.
Steve Wasserman, a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, is publisher of Heyday Books, a nonprofit, independent publishing house founded in 1974 in Berkeley, California. He is the author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays. A shortened version of this review originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
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