Eve Babitz (1943-2021)
She designed album covers for the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, was photographed at age 20 playing chess nude with Marcel Duchamp, had romantic relations with Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Harrison Ford, et al. partied with everyone, and wrote like a hippie Colette. The same Rufus as myself covered her biography and her radiant debut book last February here:
So, I checked out Babitz’s 1974 debut “Eve’s Hollywood” from the library and, well, Anolik was right: Babitz was a fantastic writer. She relates anecdotes and observations about “the surface of things” in a funny, zippy style that stays on the right side of “breezy” until you realize that she’s so funny because she’s so smart. Scary smart. Jewish smart. Babitz can toss off epigrams like “Death to me has always been the last word in people having fun without you” or “Beauty, unlike money, seems unable to focus on the source of the power.” She can slip in lines like “She knew exactly, sort of, what she was going to do” and be onto the next quip before they register.
Reading her makes you realize that the secret to good writing is to be yourself, only more so.
The unforgettable Eve Babitz has died at age 78. May her memory be a party invitation.
She became a right-winger and Trumpist in the last part of her life. The catalyst for this was apparently a bad accident that left her burnt and a recluse in the 1990s*. She spent the rest of her life as a recluse and her company was talk-radio. The Times obit mentioned that someonee who tried to repopularize her writings in the aughts wooed her with MAGA hats. This was morally uneasy for me.
*According to the Times obit, she was trying to light a cigarette while driving and the lit cigarette fell on her acrylic skirt.Report
Yeah, the biography which repopularized her writing talks about the accident and a bit about her politics. It seemed a mixed blessing that she became newly popular- good for her finances no doubt, but it had the effect of putting her whole life in the past tense. She was ‘rediscovered’ about a decade ago and didn’t really write anything new, so really anything about her life after was by her biographer, who was a decent writer, but nothing like Babitz herself.
On the other hand, maybe it’s best to just have her old books and articles about Hollywood in the 70s.Report
And now Joan Didion is gone as well.Report