Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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And to Mr. Major, I'm sorry I turned out this way. And to the land, the beach, the trees, the hills, the sky, the Bradbury Building, the Broadway Hollywood and all the flowers in spring. I appreciate the author's sense of restraint. There seems to be as much in what he doesn't say, as what he does. I love the way he develops his characters. He doesn't overplay them, but lets me find each character in my own way. I like how he respects each character, thereby respecting the efforts of the reader as well. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland.

Near the end of Amor Towles’s bestselling novel Rules of Civility, the fiercely independent Evelyn Ross boards a train from New York to Chicago to visit her parents, but never disembarks. Six months later, she appears in a photograph in a gossip magazine exiting the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles on the arm of Olivia de Havilland. She mined the most unusual and the most everyday moments – ice skating, shopping, a screening of the surfing movie Five Summer Stories, a Los Angeles Dodgers game. In The Answer, she drops acid with a local hippy-bohemian who decides he needs to go to the bank.And to David Giler who couldn't have turned out the way Mr. Major wanted either. What with Nancy Kwan and everything . . . Here in this book, we discover Eve's adventures after she doesn't catch that train home in The Rules of Civility. Brief yet marvelous, Eve in Hollywood is the sonnet for LA, whereas Rules of Civility was a love letter for New York. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. I loved seeing Eve from the points of view of innocent bystanders (including Olivia DeHaviland!) instead of her Rules of Civility co-star, and then, finally, hearing from Eve her herself. She is a freight train.

In a series of six detailed stories, each told from a different point of view, Towles tells of Eve's adventures in Hollywood which take her from the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the Santa Monica Pier, to the set of Gone With The Wind. On the phone, she talked like she looked. On the phone, she talked like she wrote. On the phone, she was what Laurie said she no longer could be: She was Eve Babitz. I really loved the debut novel Rules of Civility, so I was delighted to find this book of six linked stories, which looks at what happened to character Evelyn Ross after she left New York. "Rules of Civility" was based around three friends - working girls Katey Kontent and Evelyn Ross, plus the wealthy and handsome Tinker Grey. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel centres on Katey but, at the end of the novel, Eve leaves for home and somehow ends up in LA. These stories tell you how she made her way to Hollywood and what happens to her while she is there. However, it is not necessary to have read "Rules of Civility" to read these stories, which do stand alone. And to Annie Leibovitz and her trusty companion, Citizen Wenner, gathering moss to the North. And to Grover Lewis who dispels gloom with blue eyes in a blue town with blue rugs, Texanly. And Sara and Charlie and the girl with the coke. And to the Tartuffo con panna on the via Buffalo or the Piazza Navona where you think at last you're getting enough chocolate. And you might be.Hollywood was in her blood. Her father was a violinist in the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra, her mother an artist and her godfather Igor Stravinsky. She didn’t have to work hard to drop names, because names seemed to fall from the sky. At Hollywood high school, her classmates included Linda Evans, Tuesday Weld and Yvette Mimieux, a “movie star, even when she butted in front of you in the cafeteria line”.

All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. And to Glen Frey of the Eagles so he'll still talk to me. And to the New York Times book review section and every critic in it. Eve Babitz, the Hollywood bard, muse and reveller who with warmth and candour chronicled the excesses of her city in the 1960s and 1970s and became a cult figure to generations of readers, has died. She was 78.

About the Author

Fall, 2017. Musso & Frank Grill, the old steakhouse on Hollywood Boulevard. We were having lunch, celebratory, because it had been announced in the trades that Hulu was developing a show based on Eve’s books. Mirandi and Laurie were also there, only in the case of Laurie, not yet—traffic; and in the case of Mirandi, yet, but not at that particular second—bathroom. Eve and I were alone. I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. Like the movie stars who had fascinated her since childhood, she was a master of entrances. Her first major public appearance came in 1963, aged 20, in one of the art world’s most famous photographs: Babitz, in the nude, plays chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp.

had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “ Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a fewHave you ever had an appetizer and asked why don't they turn that into an entree? That's what this novella is. Towles took one image from Rules of Civility and turned it into six interwoven stories about Evelyn Ross in old Hollywood. Just as Rules of Civility left you wanting more, which presumably resulted in this book, Eve in Hollywood leaves you wanting more of whatever Towles is cooking up next. Simply put, the book is great -- there is just not enough of it. Following up on his impressive debut, Rules Of Civility, Amor Towles has written an excellent novella featuring one of the main characters from that novel, Evelyn Ross. Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something. She actually could act. surfeit of style. In “ Sex and Rage,” Babitz’s novel from 1979, reissued this month by Counterpoint, the protagonist is a Babitz double named