Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

Product Information

Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate letter-writer of Louis XIV’s time, transposed to the Chateau Marmont in the late 20th-Century—lunching, chatting, dressing, loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles.”—Mollie Gregory, The Los Angeles Times

In 1971, Joan Didion passed a personal essay Babitz had written about Hollywood High to an editor at Rolling Stone. Babitz would be commissioned to write many magazine articles. Unlike Didion, she was appreciated less for her writing and more for her openness to discuss her social life. In 2014, a tribute in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik launched a revival that includes magazine profiles, Babitz's books reissued by the New York Review Books Classics, a biography by Anolik and a TV series in development at Hulu based on Babitz's memoirs. Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.”—Deborah Shapiro, The Second Pass

About the Author

Babitz had a highly privileged upbringing, her father was a violinist who worked on movie scores for Fox and her mother was an artist. Stravinsky was her godfather, seriously. She became one of the most famous 'It girls' of 60s and 70s LA and knew everyone from Jim Morrison to members of the Manson Family. Eve's Hollywood is a part-memoir and part-novel of Babitz's early life and her attempt at a vindication for her beloved childhood home of Hollywood.

The 1960s and '70s are viewed as a boys' club compared to the workplace of today, which is considered much more equal. The office of the mid-20th century in all its chauvinism is dramatized across many seasons of Mad Men. Yet Babitz writes with such passion, articulating such a strong sense of independence and freedom that it makes me reconsider how much progress has really been made. People are under such intense scrutiny today and most of us long for a time when our personality or comments could wander free. Eve's Hollywood lets us revisit that world. So what’s her writing like? Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. First, Babitz – who lived long enough to be famous, forgotten, and rediscovered – recently passed away. Eve is easy to dismiss because she doesn’t wear her seriousness on her sleeve. Her concerns are the seating arrangements at dinner parties, love affairs on the skids. She offers up information commonly known as gossip. Girl stuff, basically. (By that standard, of course, Proust was writing girl stuff, too.) But her casualness has depth, an aesthetic resonance. She achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.

She did? Why? What had happened? What had caused this most profoundly and abidingly social of creatures to go J. D. Salinger? Howard Hughes? Norma Desmond? An accident, as freakish as it was horrific.

Become a Member

Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz. I’ve done Eve a disservice over the years, thinking of her as just a society girl. She certainly did have a lot of fun, but she wasn’t just a famous pretty face. She started out her career as an artist for a record studio. She designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. She wrote short stories that were published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. She also wrote four books. Her romp through ’70s L.A. winkingly fulfills the promises of pleasure and delight so often scorched to nil by writers like Joan Didion. A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure... The joy of Babitz's writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it." --Naomi Fry, New Republic A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure . . . The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.