Didion and babitz, p.12
Didion and Babitz, page 12
Buffalo Springfield, since dropping “For What It’s Worth” at the tail end of ’66, was one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands on the planet. That Eve had done their cover made her, in a smaller way, big, too.
* * *
Rock ’n’ roll in L.A. in 1967 was thrilling to Eve because it was what art in L.A. had been a few years back: Paris in the Twenties, where and when she always wanted to be. (The defining characteristic of the Moveable Feast was that it didn’t stay in one place, one era.) Or it would be Paris in the Twenties once it had a locus and a hub, a combination salon–hotbed–living end. The rock ’n’ roll version of Barney’s, in other words.
In 1968, Eve walked out the front door of Barney’s and headed west on Santa Monica until she hit a Swiss-chalet-looking building just east of Doheny Drive: the Troubadour.
The Troubadour was a folk club that had, the year before, become a rock club when Buffalo Springfield played a set with plugged-in amps. “The folk musicians—Odetta, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary—with their acoustic sets, their harmonies, were on their way out,” said Mirandi. “And this country-music kind of rock ’n’ roll was coming in, and there was just this crazy buzz.”
But it wasn’t the Troubadour stage that was the attraction for Eve. It was the Troubadour bar. “The bar was the best part,” said Mirandi. “That’s where it was all happening. Because it wasn’t about the people playing. I mean, it was but not actually. Actually it was about the people hanging out. They were the real show.”
Of course the stage didn’t command Eve’s attention because rock ’n’ roll didn’t command Eve’s attention. Not rock ’n’ roll in and of itself, anyway. (“God, no,” said Laurie when I asked her if Eve had a good ear. “She couldn’t tell one note from another.”)
And the politics, which were almost as much a part of the rock ’n’ roll of this period as the music, she found corny. From “Jim”:
The rock scene in San Francisco in 1967 when Winterland and the Fillmore and the Park [were] spiked with LSD, flowers and radicalism. All these were childish considerations to a kid from L.A. like me who [thought] politics was something people had to do like play bridge if they didn’t know what was really fun.
And hippies she found even cornier. “It wasn’t just that [hippies] were poor, though that was about half of it,” she wrote, in a near frenzy of dislike. “The other half was a combination of repulsions.” The frenzy building: “I was also enormously horrified by Eastern religions, it was bad enough Western religions.” And building: “Buddhism with that fat guy in lotus position was faintly pornographic because I always wondered what his cock could ever be like in all that flab.” And finally erupting: “I was repelled by an instinct that ran through me from the tips of my toes to the top of my scalp.”
(Interestingly, one of the few people as put off by hippies as Eve was Joan. In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan described heading to San Francisco “in the cold late spring of 1967”—the same spring Eve was there—because San Francisco was “where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies.’ ” Like Eve, she regarded their naïveté as akin to idiocy. “They are less in rebellion of society than ignorant of it,” she wrote. “Their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from ‘a broken home.’ ” She believed, as Eve did, in a world by adults, for adults. I wonder whether she and Eve commiserated about the awfulness of hippies while she was writing “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” They would’ve met shortly after she returned from San Francisco, right around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival, which ran from June 16 to June 18, and the piece wasn’t published by the Saturday Evening Post until the fall.)
So, if it wasn’t the aesthetics or the ideology of rock ’n’ roll that compelled Eve, what did? The energy. She loved the ebb and swirl, the heat, the light, the noise—the scene.
Dickie Davis, manager of Buffalo Springfield, was at the Troubadour bar almost as often as Eve. “Eve had a favorite table. It was in the corner. She’d say to me, ‘Look around, Dickie. This is Paris in the Twenties. This is café society. And sitting here, at this table, I can control the whole room.’ ”
It was the new Moveable Feast and Eve had scored herself the best seat in the house. Mirandi on the view from that seat: “Who was at the Troub then? God, who wasn’t? Okay, well, Jackson Browne, looking like the cutest twelve-year-old you ever saw. And Gram Parsons, who had this suave swankness to him. And Van Morrison—him I just couldn’t believe, sounding like the coolest Black singer but white and from Ireland.” Ticking off the names on her fingers: “Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young, Randy Newman, Paul Butterfield, Crosby, Stills and Nash. Who else? The guys from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Janis Joplin, the Byrds, the ridiculously funny Steve Martin, the ridiculously cute Linda Ronstadt. Steve and Linda were a couple for about five minutes. He kept taking her out and then not trying to sleep with her. She didn’t know what was going on. Diane Gardiner, the Doors’ publicist and one of Eve’s closest friends, practically lived at the bar. So did J. D. Souther and Glenn Frey. J. D. was from Texas and Glenn was from Detroit and their band was called Longbranch Pennywhistle. And then David Geffen told Glenn that if he wanted to get signed, he needed an entire band. So, then Glenn got together with another Texan hanging around the bar, Don Henley. That’s how the Eagles happened. And J. D. wound up writing a bunch of their songs.”
The Troubadour was as overwhelmingly male as Barney’s had been. Women were allowed in, but on one condition. “You had to be fuckable,” said Mirandi. Which Eve was even though she wasn’t, her type—the va-va-voom type, the Marilyn type—no longer everybody’s type. “By the time the Beatles trotted out onto Ed Sullivan’s stage with those heartrendingly sexy toothpick legs—THWAP—everyone had toothpick legs,” she wrote. “Except mine weren’t right. The heart of the problem wasn’t really my legs [but] my ass… It was there, for one thing; and no serious Beatle person’s ass was there.”
Eve, though, was the rare exception in that she didn’t have to be fuckable. She was a relative elder—twenty-five in 1968—and relatively established in a place where public attention had yet to definitively land and pecking orders were still working themselves out. “I loved J. D. Souther,” she said. “And I couldn’t believe it, but he and Glenn Frey loved me. They were fans because of that cover I did for Buffalo Springfield.”
So, on the Troubadour scene, Eve was what she’d never succeeded in becoming on the Barney’s scene: a recognized artist. To commemorate the occasion, she made a sign.
I USED TO BE A PIECE OF ASS, NOW I’M AN ARTIST
“Oh yeah, I remember that sign pasted to the door of her apartment—the Formosa one,” said Blum. “Eve could not abide ignorance or stupidity or bad taste, and any one of those qualities could send her off big-time. So I guess she wanted to make her situation clear to people. She was flat-out telling them, ‘I am an artist.’ ”
Why then did Eve act as if “artist” was her cover story, “groupie”—“groupie” being rock ’n’ roll for “piece of ass”—her truth? Both in print and conversation, she’d shrug off her work as an album-cover designer, refer to it laughingly as “an excuse.” She was, she insisted, “a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck [her] way through rock ’n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.”
Since I’ve read her letters and journal, however, I know how it really was. The album covers weren’t her excuse, they were her reason. My guess is that she worked hard to give the opposite impression because to cop to seriousness was somehow to violate her sense of self.
I’m not serious, but I’m good so what difference does it make?
* * *
Returning, for a moment, to fuckable:
Time was ticking, days becoming months, months becoming years, the Sixties becoming the Seventies. Yet Eve stayed the same. She still drew no distinction between her personal self and her professional self, rejecting the idea that she had a professional self.
She began taking old-fashioned photos of contemporary performers. (“What I’d do was print the pictures in sepia and then hand-color them so they looked like they’d been taken thirty years before,” she said. “That’s how I liked things to look—old, out of the past.”) Of Gram Parsons, who she saw as one of Fitzgerald’s Sad Young Men, and so shot in a blazer and tie, white trousers. Of Steve Martin, who she saw as a thirties matinée idol, and so shot as Errol Flynn, bare-chested and under a palm tree. Of Jackson Browne, J. D. Souther, Don Henley, and Glenn Frey, who she saw as surfer-cowboys, and so shot looking home-on-the-range.
And after making love to these guys with her camera, she made love to them with her body. All but for Parsons,I whose room at the Chateau Marmont she managed to get into, whose bed never.
And she continued designing album covers for lovers and friends.
Lovers such as Eric Andersen (album: Avalanche). Such as Leon Russell (album: Hank Wilson’s Back Vol. 1). But not such as Jim Morrison (album: Waiting for the Sun), though with Morrison she did come awfully close. From a 1969 letter to Doors manager Bill Siddons: “After [the Doors] got back from Phoenix, Jim called up… He asked me to come pick him up as he was hiding in some phone booth… So I found him, [drunk,] his lizard pants torn from crotch to knee with all this peacock blue lining sort of artistically ragged… He tells me that he really loves my collages, A LOT, uhhh, especially the octopus ones, and the Spanish Caravan one, REALLY, only they’re not using them, he explains and then mentions something about their being too strong.”II
And friends such as the Byrds (album: Untitled), but in the case of Untitled she wasn’t hired by Byrd friend David Crosby, was hired by Byrd producer Terry Melcher, also a friend. (From her journal, entry dated January 14, 1970: “Went to a party at Terry Melcher’s last night… I didn’t speak to him except when I came in, he told me he liked my collages. Michelle Phillips has put the Brian Jones collage on the ceiling over her bed, so Terry must be sleeping with Michelle.”)
Eve shoots the Byrds.
Eve was relentless in her pursuit of assignments. John Van Hamersveld was the art director of Capitol Records when she burst into his office in the late sixties. “She had her collages and her Buffalo Springfield album with her. Her reputation was as a predator. And she chased me around my desk a few times, asked me on dates. But that was just Eve playing around. Work is what she wanted from me.”
Sometimes she’d get it, from Van Hamersveld and others, sometimes not. And sometimes she’d get it, from Van Hamersveld and others, and then not. “Some art director would say he loved [my collages] in the morning and get drunk at lunch and call and change his mind before dinner,” she wrote. “In the free-lance art world [art directors] felt they were doing me a favor.”
So, Eve was more getting by as an album-cover designer and photographer than taking off. At least, though, she could pay her bills. Even when she couldn’t. “I looked upon men, in those days, as people who’d never miss my incredibly reasonable fifty dollars for cabfare, which was much too cheap to make me feel like a hooker.” And at least she was having a good time. From her journal, entry dated February 2, 1970, “Michael Clarke [Byrds drummer] told Diane Gardiner he was really happy to run into us because he was so bored. Imagine anyone in this day and age admitting to boredom!”
Eve was moving into her late twenties, yet her existence remained as footloose and improvisatory as a teenager’s. It was as if she’d tapped into a fountain of youth and sex and high spirits, and it would never run dry.
* * *
I can’t let the groupie point go quite yet, Reader, because I don’t think I’ve made it quite yet.
Eve walked like a groupie, talked like a groupie, fucked like a groupie, but a groupie she was not. A groupie, as I understand the term, is a person who bestows sexual favors on celebrity musicians. Only the musicians Eve was favoring sexually weren’t, at that time, celebrities. As Steve Martin observed to me, “Nobody was famous yet.” And besides, Eve wasn’t looking to turn a one-night stand into a long-term partner, the groupie goal and endgame. “God, the last thing Eve wanted was a boyfriend,” said Laurie. “She didn’t want a serious relationship with any of those guys. She just wanted to exchange body fluids.”
So, Eve wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. But boyfriends, now, that was a different story. And all her romances of this period were erratic, casual, fleeting.
A kiss-off letter to “Jack,” last name unknown, best captures, I think, the chaos and confusion of her love life during the Franklin Avenue/Troubadour years. It read:
Dear Jack:
I have done a lot of weird things in my life, but going out with a married psychiatrist is the most bizaar [sic] to date. I rarely feel ashamed of anything I do for long… but the thrill of a rendezvous with the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t make me think I was walking on a crumbling roof more than you… I know the world is polluted, corrupt, and composed of jagged corners and no more pastoral scenes for us. But you, Tory that you are, should not contribute—you should [stay in] your corner and leave bohemian cunts like me to their own destruction…
I can’t think about you anymore.
Love,
Eve
In her novel L.A. Woman—autobiographical because that’s the only kind of novel she wrote—the Eve character, called Sophie, has a conversation with the Laurie character, called Ophelia:
“But you know so many men,” said Ophelia, “isn’t there even one for you?”
“They’re all adjectives,” said [Sophie], “they all make me feel modified; even a word like girlfriend gives me this feeling I’ve just been cut in half. I’d rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.”
Eve is saying a lot of words here, but really she’s only saying four: Don’t tread on me. It’s an extraordinarily aggressive statement for anyone to make, a female anyone especially. That the language it’s delivered in is groping and unsure is irrelevant. Eve wanted sexual freedom, a genuine possibility for women for the first time in recorded human history. Thanks to advances in medicine, i.e., the Pill, biology no longer reigned supreme. “Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that, which had been used to squash girls like [me] for years, now suddenly didn’t stand a chance because [I wasn’t] going to get pregnant,” she wrote.
What she truly wanted, though, was freedom in general, sexual freedom, dreamy and cat’s meow as it was, just a stand-in for something larger. The idea of answering to somebody or explaining herself, of another person having a say in who she saw or where she went or what she did, was abhorrent to her. She would not countenance it.
* * *
I misspoke before when I said that all Eve’s romances during this period were erratic, casual, fleeting. There was one that was steady (even if destabilizing), serious (even if on the side), and abiding (even if intermittent). It was with a man connected to both the Franklin Avenue scene and the Troubadour scene: Ahmet Ertegun.
Ertegun wasn’t the only figure on the Franklin Avenue scene besides Eve who was also on the Troubadour scene. Earl McGrath, in 1970, was given a label to run within Atlantic by Ertegun, so, naturally, he was there. (Was given a label to run within Atlantic by Ertegun but not really, the one hot act he found—Hall & Oates—Ertegun poached.) As were Michelle Phillips and Peter Pilafian, musicians. And Anne Marshall, the girlfriend of a musician, Don Everly, and the ex-girlfriend of another musician, Phil Everly. (“In between the Everly Brothers, Annie had an affair with my husband—well, John and I were separated at the time—and that’s how she and I met and became best friends,” said Phillips. “And we stayed best friends when John and I got back together.”) And Ron Cooper, the boyfriend of a musician, Janis Joplin. (“Ron is bubbling over with stories about the time Janis Joplin gave him the crabs,” Eve told Walter Hopps in a letter.) Harrison Ford swung by in his dealer capacity. (“Harrison carried his dope in a bass-fiddle case,” said Eve.) And though Joan was unpersuaded by rock ’n’ roll as a cultural phenomenon—“On the whole my attention was only minimally engaged by the preoccupations of rock-and-roll bands”—and did not, so far as I know, venture inside the Troubadour, she did occasionally accompany McGrath on his forays into the rock ’n’ roll demimonde. “Saw the Burrito Bros at The Experience Friday,” wrote Eve in her journal, entry dated October 18, 1969. “Earl was there with Mrs. Dunn (who looked horrified at what a toilet The Experience is).”
Ertegun, however, was the only figure on the Franklin Avenue scene besides Eve who was also a figure on the Troubadour scene. He was an omnipresent presence at the club, if largely an absent one. “I did see Ahmet at the Troubadour,” said Mirandi. “He’d come to check out a band, and would maybe go upstairs to the dressing room afterward. But he didn’t go to the bar. He couldn’t. He was a record company president. He’d have been devoured. But he was someone everyone there was talking about, that’s for sure.”
It was through McGrath, of course, that Eve met Ertegun in early 1969. She told me the story:
Ahmet was in from New York, cruising all the bands, trying to get every single one signed to Atlantic. Earl said, “My friend Ahmet is the guy who actually bought that Buffalo Springfield album cover of yours.” I said, “Oh, really?” Earl said, “I want to play a trick on him. I’m going to tell him that you make the best frozen potatoes fricassee. Is that okay with you?” I said it was. So Earl called Ahmet at the Beverly Hills Hotel and told Ahmet he had to come to my apartment straightaway and try my frozen potatoes fricassee or whatever crazy thing it was. And Ahmet did because he knew Earl was testing him. He arrived in a wonderful Cadillac convertible, and I showed him all my collages, and then we were together. Ahmet was so much fun. I don’t know how I fit in his global plan to take over the world, only somehow I did.
