Didion & Babitz

CHAPTER 1

Eve Bah-bitz with the Great Big Tits

Eve, apart from being a good and important writer herself, is the key that unlocks the very good and very important Joan. We will, therefore, establish Eve first.

Before we cue the "Once upon a time . . .," though, a note: There are no sections in Didion & Babitz that are rewritten versions of sections in Hollywood's Eve, except for this one. I think that's because I can't start Eve's story any place but the beginning. Not the beginning beginning since I'm about as interested in where people were born and their lousy David Copperfield childhoods as Holden Caulfield was. The true beginning, which, for me, is the moment a person becomes aware-socially aware, sexually aware, self-aware. That moment happened for Eve, so I've always believed, in the bathroom at Hollywood High School.

And now, cue the "Once upon a time . . ."

It's 1959. You're sixteen, in the eleventh grade. And you're where you are any time you're not in class: the girls' room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts Building of Hollywood High. And you're doing what you're doing any time you're in the girls' room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts Building of Hollywood High: sharing a cigarette with Holly, though you'll call her Sally when you write about her years later in Rolling Stone.

Holly, who blew her chance the moment she took it, signed to Twentieth Century-Fox then dropped the next day for bleaching her hair an atomic bombshell shade of blond, Marilyn Monroe's exactly. (The studio didn't want the new Marilyn Monroe as it had the old under contract and shooting Let's Make Love right on the lot. It wanted the new Jean Seberg, the fresh-faced beauty plucked out of Iowa and obscurity to play Joan of Arc, and under contract at Columbia.) Holly, who's taken up with a group of twenty-somethings from her acting class, the Thunderbird Girls, knockouts all in blue eye shadow and cinched-waisted cocktail dresses, cruising the Sunset Strip in-what else?-Thunderbird convertibles, spending their weekends in Palm Springs making ring-a-ding-ding with Frank Sinatra. Holly, who chases fifteen milligrams of Dexamyl with four cups of coffee just to drag herself to homeroom. Holly, who is your best friend.

And then there's your family:

Your father, Sol, from Brooklyn, New York, is a studio musician (Twentieth Century-Fox), a former member of both a philharmonic (the Los Angeles) and an orchestra (the Hollywood Bowl), and a onetime regular at Central Avenue jam sessions (with Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton).

Your mother, Mae, from Sour Lake, Texas, is an artist, her medium quill and ink. Also, parties. She's known for her beauty and charm; her chignon with the rose in it; her chiles rellenos, the chiles just hot enough.

Your godfather, Igor Stravinsky, from St. Petersburg, Russia, is the mercurial and massively influential composer, his most famous work famous to you because it was featured in that Disney-perpetrated kitsch atrocity, Fantasia. (Every time you hear Le Sacre du Printemps, you picture those stupid cavorting cartoon dinosaurs.) He gave you your name and a sense of life's supreme possibilities. You gave him an ant farm.

Your house, on the corner of Cheremoya and Chula Vista at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, is packed so full of musicians there's barely space for their instruments: Kid Ory and Joseph Szigeti, Marilyn Horne and Ingolf Dahl. Marni Nixon, whose voice has already come out of the mouths of Sophia Loren (Boy on a Dolphin) and Deborah Kerr (The King and I), will soon come out of the mouths of Natalie Wood (West Side Story) and Audrey Hepburn (My Fair Lady), rehearses in your living room.

In your front yard, mowed once a week by Mr. Sorenson, the hired man (no household chores for Sol, can't risk his violinist's hands), the two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, deliver readings. Poetry, though, bores you blind, so you ask Lucy Herrmann to tell you stories inside. Lucy's husband Bernard-Uncle Benny to you-is putting the finishing touches on the score for Hitchcock's latest thriller-chiller, Psycho. (When, in a year's time, you go to the theater to see the movie, you mostly don't because you're covering your eyes with your palms. You do, however, hear Sol's bow and strings shrieking along with Janet Leigh in that shower in cabin one of the Bates Motel.)

There are tales of picnics on the L.A. River with Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, the Huxleys, the picnickers arriving by limousine with baskets prepared by Chaplin's wife, actress Paulette Goddard. "Because she was quite a gourmet," your godmother, Vera Stravinsky, explains to you.

Once, on a vacation to Santa Fe, Sol took a detour, drove to the middle of nowhere, so you could meet the painter Georgia O'Keeffe-tall, ancient, flinty-eyed-observe how she lived. You'd liked the handsome boy who sat at her feet and rubbed them. You hadn't liked the chow dogs who barked at you.

The bell tolls and you take a final drag on your cigarette. As you turn to flick the butt out the window, you see it: the fifty-foot-tall mural of Rudolph Valentino, the exquisite Latin androgyne with almond-shaped eyes, in the role that drove the 1921 moviegoing public into a state of rapture; of frenzy; of insanity. The Sheik, Hollywood High's mascot. The giant close-up, painted on the side of the boys' gymnasium, depicts him in windblown headdress, gazing moodily past the track and football field. Perhaps at Paramount Pictures, a few blocks away on Melrose. Perhaps at Persia's desert splendor, oceans away on the other side of the world.

This reproduction of the silent-screen icon, crude as it is, corny as it is, transfixes you. You can't look away. Now, don't forget. You've got, on the one hand, your high-culture background: Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, laughing as you and your sister Mirandi, younger by three years, get stuck together with bubblegum during the premiere of his latest piece at the Ojai Music Festival; Edward James, the art collector, telling you that your beauty surpasses that of the Marquis de Sade's great-granddaughter; Vera Stravinsky, the dancer and costume designer, teaching you the point of caviar. And you've got, on the other hand, your pop-culture context: Roadside Beach, where you bodysurf and eat pineapple snow cones, eye the juvenile delinquents eyeing you; Hollywood Boulevard, where you join the crowd in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre, watch Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, in matching cleavages and clashing polka dots, press their palms into wet cement as cameras click and flash; the Luau in Beverly Hills, where you and Holly buy Vicious Virgins (two kinds of brandy, five kinds of rum, a splash of lemonade, and a gardenia floating on top) with your fake IDs, bat your lashes, also fake, at men twice your age.

As if that weren't enough, there's your disposition, naturally romantic. Consequently, the melodrama of the image before you-larger-than-life, large as the movies-grips and beguiles. The longer you stare, the more susceptible you become to its dark fascination, its trashy-profound glamour.

And then, just like that, your imagination is captured, your tastes formed. Even if you don't think much of the movies or the people who make them, your sensibility will be, from this moment on, cinematic. Hollywood, with its appeal to the irrational and the unreal, its provocation of desire and volatility, its worship of sex and spectacle, will forevermore be your touchstone and guiding light. Its ethos is your ethos, its values your values.

You're Eve Babitz, future muse and artist, observed and observer, chronicler of scenes, stealer of them, too; and you're poised to enter a new decade.

*     *     *

Okay, Reader. I want to get Eve to 1967 and Franklin Avenue, when and where she meets Joan, with maximum efficiency. (I like motion, color, urgency, no explanations or afterthoughts, full speed ahead, and I assume you do too.) To that end, I'll skip over her young adulthood entirely, except for two key moments: (1) the moment she completes her first successful artistic act; (2) the moment she completes her second successful artistic act.

Eve's first successful artistic act: a photograph, taken on October 12, 1963.

Only in order to understand the how and why of it, never mind the what and when, we need to back up slightly, to the spring of 1961.

Eve, eighteen, was drowsing her way through classes at Los Angeles City College during the day, wide-awake and running wild with the Thunderbird Girls at night. And then her mother told her that her father was moving to Europe-"It was to study the six violin solos of Bach or something, I don't know, Bach was his obsession"-and that the family would be moving with him. They'd be gone for a year, maybe two.

Eve lasted eight weeks. "The only place I liked was London and we spent most of the time in Paris," she said. "I hated Paris because it's actually horrible. It's cold. And French men are so short. In heels I towered over them. I couldn't stand it. I needed to come home."

But home was gone. "My father rented our house, the Cheremoya house, to these crazy...