Lili Anolik introduced a new generation to avant-garde literary star Eve Babitz ina 2014Vanity Fairarticle.
Read on below.Hollywoods Eveis now available for purchase.
Joan Didion was there and Michelle Phillips.
Credit: Michael Benabib; Scribner
Wow.So youre finding out all these backstories and secret stories of how L.A. was constructed then.
Peoples relationships with one another and how they were influencing each other.
Right.Look, Joan Didion is great.
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Shes a great stylist, shes a great writer.
But sensibility-wise, I dont match up with her.
I match up more with Eve.
Didion and Eve its night and day, yin and yang.
I think [Didions]White Albumand [Babitzs]Slow Days, Fast Companyshould be read together almost.
I think both books are L.A. masterpieces.
And theyre illuminating; they illuminate each other.
Eves Los Angeles is much more funny, much more casual, much more loose.
And Joans vision of Los Angeles, to me, is much more rigid.
She sees it as Sodom and Gomorrah, as a place that looks like paradise but is really hellish.
Its two radically different viewpoints of the same place.
For me, they feed off of each other.
Theyre linked for me, and Id imagine theyre linked for other people at this time and place.
What is your relationship to L.A.?
So what was your relationship to it then?
[Laughs] I loved the city.
To me, Los Angeles was sunny and loose and great.
But I didnt understand it all.
Just geographically, I would walk to work and have no sense of it.
Thats the place where all the artists hung out.
I was too dumb and too clueless to understand anything about the city at that point.
My brother went to business school there, and I would stay with him a ton.
Once I started working forVanity FairI also started working there a lot.
But Eve was my passport into the city.
Having her explain things to me: Shes like the insiders insider.
She would explain things to me and then I would get it.
She was like a guide in that way.
I didnt call the bookLos Angeles Eve; I called itHollywoods Evebecause shes so specific.
She was in Hollywood or West Hollywood [almost] her entire life.
Im interested in that generally, too.
So many Hollywood icons are in this book!
Were there any stories or encounters that intrigued you the most?
And how did you track them all down?I was falling down rabbit holes all the time.
But I always had to know exactly how to phrase the question to get a real answer from her.
She never volunteers information.
Its a wild thing.
Shes totally open, but youve got to know exactly how to ask her stuff.
I used this [underground paper] called theL.A.
Manifestothat an old boyfriend of Eves gave me.
It was a one-issue thing [Babitz started] that was supposed to be ongoing.
It had work in there bySteve Martin,Carrie Fisher, by the Eagles, Ronee Blakely.All these people.
Eve wasnt just going to tell me.
I fell into rabbit hole after rabbit hole with this because everybody you met was so interesting.
Youd get these little stories, these little glimpses.
Going over notable figures like that, and her relationship to them, did you feel any trepidation?
Something crazy like that, its so ridiculous.
[Laughs] And weirdly accurate.
Or sometimes it would be slightly inaccurate and you just had to chase it down.
Like when she told me she was inThe Godfather.
We watchedThe GodfatherandThe Godfather II.
Its exhausting work because youre looking for her in a crowd scene.
I loved the way you described that moment when youre suddenly like, Oh!Exactly!
You keep watching and keep watching, and then shes there.
She got it wrong.
But there she is.
Her memory is really good, but shed sometimes flub the details.
I was anxious about fact checking.
But if she said anything really scandalous, Id always verify I got it from a couple of sources.
Its there the whole time.
Because its the milieu.
Or the Eagles before they were the Eagles.
Harrison Ford when he was in his pot-dealing phase.
My sense is that Hollywood was a much smaller world back then, and she was part of it.
I dont know if you could write about Eve without famous names.
Shes designing album covers for bands that go on to be famous.
How would you do it?
So how would you describe your relationship to Eve now?
Has it evolved?I read these books by her back in 2012 and I was totally infatuated.
It has the rhythms of a romance: I felt like I had to meet her.
It was a pursuit that went on for a couple of years.
Shes so unwilling to be pursued.
Then she gave in and agreed to meet with me, and we became close.
She was always my subject.
She was always my subject; it was never a personal thing.
It wasnt just that I wanted to be her friend.
I wanted to write about her.
So I always came at her in that way.
The way it evolved is we got closer….
But we still never have a give-and-take conversation.
Its me asking her questions.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
