R.I.P. Eve Babitz

“What I wanted, although at the time I didn’t understand what the thing was because no one ever tells you anything until you already know it, was everything. Or as much as I could get with what I had to work with. I wanted, mainly, a certain kind of song.
Like scents, certain songs just throw me. And I wanted to be thrown into that moment of perfume when everything was gone except for the dazzle. It doesn’t last long, but in order to have everything you must have those moments of such unrelated importance that time ripples away like a frame of water. Without those moments, your own heaven party can die of thirst. They’re like booster shots, they make you stronger. You know it’s worth the twinge of envy when you’ve recovered from the dazzle because the mystery of life fades when death, people having fun without you, is forgotten. Time escapes unnoticed and time is all you get.
If you live in L.A., to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters. There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people. And songs.” — Eve Babitz, Eve’s Hollywood

This one hurts. Eve Babitz, “It Girl” of the 1970s L.A. scene – music/literature/art – she was central in all of it – has died. She was a wild child, a child of Hollywood, attending Hollywood High, and eventually moving into the burgeoning music scene, where she partied with – and loved – several legends, including Jim Morrison. She published a number of books back then, and she also worked as a journalist, covering everything from surfboard designers to The Doors to the best taquito stand in Los Angeles. She was a hard worker. Her output was impressive during that one decade. Her obsession with California is everywhere in her work – all of her books are about Los Angeles:

Eve’s Hollywood (1977)
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (1977)
Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time (1979)
L.A. Woman (1982)

A book of short stories came a decade later.

In 1997, while driving, she went to light a cigarette, the lit match dropped onto her skirt – made of gauze – and she went up in flames. She threw herself out of the car, and was brought to the hospital. She had third degree burns over most of her body. She also had no health insurance. Eve Babitz had always been a beloved extrovert, with good friends, multiple lovers, boyfriends, dalliances – whatever – she connected with all of them. The proof of her powers of making relationships comes during this terrible time when her life hung in the balance. All of these people pitched in to cover her medical bills. This includes many rich and famous people, her former lovers – I am looking at you, Steve Martin. I am looking at you, Harrison Ford. She “dated” them back in the 1970s. Twenty years later, when she needed them, they were there. It says a lot about THEM that they would step up like this, but more importantly, it says a lot about HER that she would generate so much love and support. I’ve said this often: People hear about my friendships and sometimes say, “I wish I had friends like that.” Okay. Yes. I’m lucky. I have great friends. But I also AM a great friend. I give as much as I get. I work my friendships like a JOB. I have great friends from the time I was 10 years old (we all just had a Zoom call earlier this week.) Great friends don’t just drop out of the sky on a lucky few. Those people who have great friends also ARE great friends. And Eve Babitz was a great friend.

At the time of her accident, she had been working on a book about the tango scene in Los Angeles. She had been taking tango classes and – as was her wont – she got totally obsessed.

But something about the accident brought on writer’s block. Or maybe she felt so altered from her former breezy gorgeous self that she couldn’t find her way back into language. Whatever the case may be, she stopped writing.

Her work fell into obscurity. Joan Didion was the only woman writer who “got” California (if you didn’t know about Eve Babitz, that is.)

But then the New York Review Books began to bring out new editions of her books. They came out one by one in the mid-2000s, and created an explosion of interest in Eve Babitz. That’s when I discovered her. All four of her novels/memoirs were published, as well as a collection of short stories (Black Swans). Even more thrilling, just two years ago, New York Review Books brought out a collection of her journalism and reporting and personal essays, called I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz (the book’s title came from a new essay, the first time she wrote about her accident, and the first new prose we had from her in almost twenty years. Those words – “I used to be charming” – were said by Babitz herself, to the physical therapist who helped her learn how to move again following the accident. Seen in context, those words are so completely heart-breaking.)

This is all so sad, particularly for a woman of her pleasure-hound sensibility. Nobody writes about pleasure like Eve Babitz does: she was unembarrassed about her hedonism, about her sexuality, about how much she loved men and sex. She was nobody’s fool, and she was also picky – but her biggest fear in life was “a fucking picket fence”. When she was in high school, a guidance counselor asked her what she wanted to be, what she wanted to do with her life. Her answer was, “Be an adventuress.”

And so … to hear her words – “I used to be charming” – it’s a clue as to why she stopped writing.

What is so heartening, though, is that she lived long enough to see all of her out-of-print books re-issued, and she lived to see a wide-spread passion EXPLODE about her work. She wasn’t just some quirky relic of the wild ’70s. She was a MAJOR writer, with her own style, unmistakable, and yet almost impossible to replicate – since it came so directly from her guts and sensibility. The New York Times put out a huge piece about the “Eve Babitz Revival”. Babitz re-emerged. She gave interviews. She was on the radio. She was in the spotlight. She was special. She was here to enjoy all of it, and enjoy it she did.

I read all her books when the NYRB issued them, and became obsessed by the second page of Eve’s Hollywood, the first one I read. I re-read them all during the pandemic. They helped. Her life was so different than mine. There are almost no parallels except for one thing. I was an adventuress too. I paid a similar price. I was someone who feared the picket fence. And I didn’t compromise. I regret a lot of this. Because being left alone and left up to your own devices sometimes means that when disaster strikes you are unable to cope on your own. You don’t have the backup of a partner. Your life looks different than your peers’ lives. You are still having sexual and romantic adventures long after your peers have “settled down”. You’re an outsider. Sometimes you are judged. You are seen as immature. Well, yes. I am immature. But I am mature enough to honor my obligations, to keep up my relationships, to write what I want to write and meet my deadlines, to hustle when I need to hustle. I have plans, goals, dreams. Our world values monogamy and marriage and the conventional, and there is nothing wrong with people who go that route. They are not lying to themselves, they are not hood-winked or brain-washed. Well, maybe some of them are. Not everyone is meant to be married, marriage – as it is set up and understood – is not meant for everyone. But if you “opt out” of that major experience – the one that gives you the stamp of respectability (yes, this is still true!) – you find people being taken aback … or, worse, they see your life as a judgment on theirs. So you get condescended to. “If you had children, you’d understand.” And let me say this: women are the main aggressors in this particular realm. Men don’t give a shit. Women care deeply, and gather together to shun their sisters who opt out. The obligatory “not all women” placed here, but I’ve experienced so much of it – and still do – and it’s always women who try to pierce your pleasure in yourself and your own choices, if those choices look different from theirs. I will say this: I cared about this sometimes, and sometimes I’ve been hurt by those kinds of comments – although not recently. Besides, I look at many of the married people I know and think, “you all trying to tell me your life is preferable to mine … you’re out of your mind.” I travel alone, I go to movies alone, I have free time to myself – to think, dream, obsess. I’m GOOD.

And Eve Babitz was GOOD. Joan Didion is also a fave of mine, and pitting the two writers up against each other is regressive. Like there can only be one great woman chronicler of California. Didion’s California is very different from Babitz’s. And Didion had a conventional life – marriage, adopted child, a house in Malibu, financial stability – compared to Babitz’s free-wheeling peripatetic no-rules whirlwind, of orgies, lovers, late nights at Whiskey a Go Go, and eccentric dalliances with world-famous musicians.

Eve Babitz was an outlaw. I refer to her as a “swashbuckling romantic”. It’s the closest I can come to expressing her style and life outlook. She cut a SWATH through 1970s L.A., an “It Girl” who could write circles around everyone else.

Let’s hear it for the outlaws of this world, particularly women outlaws. Let’s hear it for the swashbuckling romantics, the adventuresses dancing outside the perimeter of the picket fence, unprotected but free. Eve Babitz was their patron saint.