Didion and babitz, p.16
Didion and Babitz, page 16
And at the Trancas house, Eve would often encounter Franklin Avenue people.
People such as Griffin Dunne. “I was at Joan and John’s a lot,” said Griffin. “They weren’t getting along with my father during that time, which was hard because I loved them as much as I loved him. I could make them laugh—that’s some of why they liked having me around, I think. And maybe some of it was torturing my dad. You know, ‘We won’t be nice to you, but we’ll be nice to your kid.’ For whatever reason, they included me in their dinner parties. I was so young, fifteen, sixteen years old, and they’d sit me in between a movie star—Warren Beatty or someone like that—and some homicide cop John had just met. And Joan would let me borrow her car, the yellow Stingray. I’d cruise up and down the PCH in it, trying to pick up girls. She and John were just a huge part of my growing up.”
And such as Anne Marshall, who was also now living in Trancas. “I was on a farm on a hill with Don Everly. I’d been engaged to Don’s brother Phil when I was younger. Phil left me on my twentieth birthday, I’d leave Don on my thirtieth.”
Living on that farm, too, Harrison Ford. “Harrison stayed on our farm in a teepee during the week,” said Marshall. “For rent, he built us a chicken coop and a corral for our goat. On weekends, he’d go home to Mary [his wife] and their kids. He still wasn’t acting because he refused to do television. So he was a carpenter instead, working on Joan and John’s house, building them a deck.”
Building and building, never finishing.
“Joan and John let Harrison get away with murder as far as his carpentry was concerned,” said Eve. “They had to wait years for him to finish their balcony or deck or whatever it was. I mean, John actually expected Harrison to act like a carpenter and do the job he paid him to do. But Harrison wasn’t going to get around to it. He was just going to lie around smoking pot. The only one who understood how to deal with him was Fred Roos.” Roos, an on-again-off-again boyfriend of Eve’s, would be the casting director on American Graffiti (1973), Ford’s first break, and later the casting consultant on Star Wars (1977), Ford’s big break. “Fred bought this house in Laurel Canyon that was falling apart, needed new everything. Fred made Harrison complete all the tasks he gave him and only then would he make Harrison a movie star.”
The Trancas scene, though, was not a continuation of the Franklin Avenue scene, the Franklin Avenue scene picking up where it left off in a different location. Joan and Dunne had found a new scene. On it: movie people, which is what they, all of a sudden, were. The Panic in Needle Park, scripted by them and starring Al Pacino and Kitty Winn—the one-liner: “Romeo and Juliet on junk”—premiered that summer.
Joan and the Dunne brothers on the set of The Panic in Needle Park.
“Joan and John already had the movie stuff going,” said Wakefield. “I think that shift happened when they bought the house in Malibu.” After buying the house in Malibu, Joan and Dunne would be asked to write a script for, variously, a remake of Rebel Without a Cause; a sequel to The Graduate; a Western version of Serpico. They’d take meetings with Shirley MacLaine, Julie Andrews, Faye Dunaway. Paul Newman would invite them over for dinner. Barbra Streisand would introduce them to her pet lion. And Charlie Sheen, a local kid with a few uncredited appearances in his dad’s movies, would become Quintana’s first boyfriend. (“Quintana was sweet,” said Sheen. “I think I was in the sixth grade.”) More from Wakefield: “Joan and John looked at me and Eve—and I don’t mean this in a bad way—but they kind of looked at us like we were the riffraff of their friends. They’d started moving in higher circles. Now, listen, we were all perfectly friendly. There was no problem or anything like that. It was just, they were in the movie world.”
Wakefield didn’t mind being excluded from Joan and Dunne’s world because he had access to Eve’s. “Eve’s world was the rock ’n’ roll world,” he said. “And the music business then was what you think of as Hollywood—so extravagant, so lavish. The movie business was small-time compared to it. You don’t do too many drugs if you’re working on a movie because there’s a lot at stake, and you have to be up early.” (This, incidentally, is why Eve had contempt for the movie business—its middle-classnik, nine-to-five quality; its inability to accommodate truly wild or wicked behavior; its tendency, in brief, to emphasize business over movie.) “I remember Eve taking me to a party for the release of a new album. It was on the side of a hill in this enormous tent. Beautiful girls in harem costumes were holding gold trays with perfectly rolled joints on them. It was unbelievable!”
One night, Eve and Wakefield ducked into the Liquor Locker, a hundred feet or so from the Chateau Marmont, to pick up a bottle. There, checking out the selection, was Jim Morrison. “Now, I’d got into a terrible fight with Eve over Jim the month before,” said Wakefield. “What happened was, it was morning, and that’s when Eve liked to talk on the telephone. She never whispered or even lowered her voice. She just figured that if my eyes were closed, I was asleep. I wasn’t. So, she was talking to her friend Diane Gardiner. And I heard her defending me to Diane, saying that my private parts were a, quote, nice change, unquote, from Jim’s, evidently much larger. Well, I jumped out of bed, stormed out of the apartment. Oh, I was so mad—and embarrassed, my God, was I embarrassed! A couple of hours later she called me at the Chateau to tell me that she’d talked it over with her mother—with her mother!—and that her mother had explained to her that men were sensitive about size. That was her apology! So, we spotted Jim in the Liquor Locker. This wasn’t long before he died, by the way. He had his back to us. Eve came up behind him and sort of goosed him. They were friendly, they talked. But he seemed a little scared of her, if you want to know the truth. I think he was nervous of what she might say. And I understood how he felt!”
* * *
The year Eve spent with Wakefield—the first three-quarters of it, at any rate—was a restful and recuperative one. It gave her time and space to think, particularly about what she was going to do next. And then, almost without thinking, she did it: “The Sheik,” written in a mad two-day rush in the middle of summer.
Wakefield knew nothing of Travel Broadens or Joseph Heller or how close Eve had got to becoming the next Françoise Sagan. When they were together, she’d already given up the visual-arts ghost. She was still going through the visual-arts motions, though, her collages appearing routinely in the Los Angeles Times, her cover appearing on the self-titled album of Black Oak Arkansas. Which is why he was under the misimpression that making collages and album covers was the only dream and desire of her heart. It was certainly the only dream and desire of his heart for her. “I’ve always made it a point to never have a girlfriend who was a writer,” he said.
But his point became beside the point when she told him what she’d been working on in secret. (“Dan says I did it in secret?” said Eve. “I don’t think I’ve ever done anything in secret in my whole life. But maybe I did. Maybe I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”) He didn’t take the news well. “Dan smashed every cocktail glass I had.”
So, Wakefield was supportive of a girlfriend who was an artist. And of women friends who were writers. Not, however, of a girlfriend who was a writer. So much for evolved, secure, sane.
If he was acting unevolved, insecure, insane, though, at least he had the grace to know it. And to stop it. With a minimum of grumbling, he passed along “The Sheik” to his agent, Knox Burger. “Knox was very smart. And to be nice to me, he sent Eve a two-page, single-spaced letter telling her all the things she had to do to the piece to get it published, and he sent me a copy. So I went over to her place that night and said, ‘What did you think of Knox’s letter?’ She put her hands on her hips in her particular way, then said, ‘I hope Knox Burger burns in hell!’ ”
Her own efforts to place the piece were no more successful. “I’d already sent ‘The Sheik’ to Jim Goode at Playboy and he’d rejected it and told me what was wrong with it,” she said. “I hate people who tell me what to do to improve my stuff. They get nowhere with me.”
Eve talked tough about Knox Burger, talked tough about Jim Goode. But as her reaction to Robert Gottlieb’s turn-down made clear, she was, when it came to her writing, as self-doubting as she was self-confident. How many more rebuffs would she have endured before she stuffed “The Sheik” into the same drawer she stuffed Travel Broadens seven years earlier? We’ll never know because someone stepped in to save the day.
Joan.
Joan is the reason “The Sheik” got into print. “Joan liked ‘The Sheik,’ thought it was a little tour de force,” said Eve. “She was all the rage then. Grover [Lewis, an associate editor at Rolling Stone] asked her to write for him. She couldn’t because of her contract with Life. She recommended me.”
The recommendation:
July 28, ’71
Dear Mr. Lewis—
A friend of ours in Los Angeles, Eve Babitz, a few days ago showed me a piece she had written—about Hollywood High, where she had gone, but really about more than that. The piece surprised me—she is a painter, not a writer—& I liked it very much & suggested she send it to you to see if you might be interested in publishing it. So please watch for it.
What’s more, Joan is the reason—at least in part—that “The Sheik” got written in the first place.
I’ll explain: The year before, in 1970, Joan came out with Play It as It Lays, a novel set in an L.A. that’s hell on earth even if it looks like an earthly paradise. It’s the same L.A. depicted in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Eve despised West and Locust and said so. She’d tell off West for Locust as she’d never dare tell off Joan for Play It. (Though her telling off West for Locust was, of course, really her telling off Joan for Play It.)
An excerpt from her piece, titled “And West (né Weinstein) Is East Too”:
People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them [L.A.’s] not all blue skies and pink sunsets, so they don’t have to worry: It’s shallow, corrupt, and ugly… [Locust is] a little apologia for coming to the Coast for the money and having a winter where you didn’t have to put tons of clothes on just to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes… [and for] the bougainvilleas [that] are rampant…
All the things that Nathanael West noticed are here. The old people dying, the ennui, the architecture and fat screenplay writers who think it’s a tragedy when they can’t get laid by the 14-year-old doxette in Gower Gulch, the same 14-year-old who’ll ball the cowboys any old time. But if there had been someone, say, who wrote a book about New York, a nice, precise, short little novel in which New York was only described as ugly, horrendous and finally damned and that was the book everyone from elsewhere decided was the “best book about New York there ever was,” people who grew up knowing why New York was beautiful would finally, right before dessert, throw their sherry across the table and yell, “I’ll pick you up in a taxi, honey, and take you for a fucking guided tour, you blind jerk.”…
I think Nathanael West was a creep.
Eve must’ve thought Joan worse than a creep since Joan, unlike West, was born and bred in California. With Play It, Joan was, in Eve’s view, pandering to the chauvinism of New Yorkers, telling them what they wanted to hear—sucking up, basically. (Why sucking up? Because New York ruled the roost high-culture-wise. If you hoped to make it as a serious writer, it was New York you had to impress.) How could Eve see Play It as anything but a flagrant act of betrayal by a native daughter?
And my sense is that Eve started writing again in order to honor the passing of Rosalind Frank, yes; though also in order to right the wrong that she believed Joan had done her city. With “The Sheik,” Eve was giving readers her L.A., an L.A. of blue skies and pink sunsets, of rampant bougainvilleas, of beautiful girls and the cruel fates closing in on them. The piece was thus a response to—and a rebuttal of—Joan’s novel.
So, Eve found herself in a tricky position: the person to whom she owed the largest debt was the person making her see red. And the debt would only get larger, the red redder.
I. Phillips went deeper on the Christian Marquand–Marlon Brando connection, which I can’t justify including in the main body of this book but can’t bear cutting either. So I’ve decide to split the difference, stick it in a footnote. “You know,” said Phillips, “I think there was probably something going on between Marlon and Christian. There’d been rumors but I didn’t believe them until Marlon gave me a wallop on the jaw. Yeah, I’ve never told this story. Christian was in from Paris and staying at Marlon’s. He and I came home from a black-tie event. I was in this long Missoni dress, and I had gardenias in my hair. Christian said, ‘I’m going to make us a drink.’ I sat down at the piano and started playing. And then I don’t know if I heard something or what, but I kind of sensed someone behind me. I turned and Marlon was standing over me with this furious face. He hauled off and hit me so hard and said, ‘You’re lucky that’s all you got.’ Later he apologized. He told me he thought I was one of the Manson girls, which was crazy because they’d already arrested Manson at that point.”
CHAPTER 8 An Epistolary Interlude
We’re nearly up to 1972, the year Eve fired off that letter to Joan about Virginia Woolf. The letter so blazingly angry it was still, in 2022, hot to the touch. The letter that made me want to run out and start a riot, or at least stay in and write a book.
You first encountered the letter, Reader, in the preface, before you had enough context to really understand it. Now, though, you’re up to your eyeballs in context. So let’s take another look, shall we?
Jumping to the second paragraph:
It’s so hard to get certain things together and especially you and VW because you’re mad at her about her diaries. It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries. It goes with Sacramento. Maybe it’s better that you stay with Sacramento and hate diaries and ignore the fact that every morning when you eye the breakfast table uneasily waiting to get away, back to your typewriter, maybe it’s better that you examine your life in every way except the main one which Sacramento would brush aside but which V. Woolf kept blabbing on about. Maybe it’s about you and Sacramento that you feel it’s undignified, not crickett [sic] and bad form to let Art be one of the variables. Art, my God, Joan, I’m embarrassed to mention it in front of you, you know, but you mentioned burning babies in locked cars so I can mention Art.
I’m breaking in. Eve is criticizing Joan for what she regards as Joan’s obsessive and inexplicable machismo. For Joan, strong and hard and clear signifies masculine, while doubts and unsettled feelings are weak, dithery silliness: feminine. And Joan not reading Virginia Woolf isn’t, in Eve’s mind, Joan making an aesthetic error in judgment but a moral.
Back to the letter:
You said that the only thing you like to do was write. Just think if it were 200 years ago and the only thing you liked to do was write. I know I’m not making sense, but the thing beyond what your article on the women’s movement was about was what A Room of One’s Own is about. The whole women’s thing that is going on now is so stark and obscene most of the time that no wonder one recoils in horror. But for a long long long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan.
Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff—people’d judge you differently and your work, they’d invent reasons… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous? And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size. And so what you do, Joan, is live in the pioneer days, a brave survivor of the Donner Pass, putting up the preserves and down the women’s movement and acting as though Art wasn’t in the house and wishing you could go write.
I’m breaking in again. The article that Eve is alluding to—“The Women’s Movement,” Joan Didion, New York Times, July 30, 1972—is written with Joan’s usual intelligence and grace. Yet there’s something insidious about it. Something dishonest. The movement had its problems, sure. Classism, for one, as she rightly observed. (She zinged the members who claimed trauma from catcalls made by construction workers: “This grievance was not atypic in that discussion of it seemed always to take on unexplored Ms. Scarlett overtones, suggestions of fragile cultivated flowers being ‘spoken to,’ and therefore violated, by uppity proles.”) The movement, though, also had a point, and she was pretending it didn’t. “That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news,” she wrote, “but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.” Basically, she’s saying to women, “It’s all in your head,” that sexism is imaginary, which is what people who didn’t have migraines would say to her, a chronic migraine sufferer, that migraines were imaginary, only worse because the non-migraine people had never experienced a migraine and she’d certainly experienced sexism.
(It should be said, Eve was as turned off by the women’s movement as Joan. In a 1971 letter to Robert Doty, curator of the Whitney, she wrote, “My last boyfriend drove me into the arms of women’s lib which didn’t take very well, but at least I don’t mind being a ‘lady artist’ anymore. The whole idea used to make me cringe with shame. Not that I have joined or even know any of the ‘lady artists’ who have banded together to unite under the stern eye of Judy ‘Boots’ Gerowitz.” Judy Gerowitz, real name of artist Judy Chicago, was, in the early seventies, cofounding Womanhouse, a feminist art collective, at CalArts. Among the best-known works to come out of Womanhouse, Chicago’s 1972 installation Menstruation Bathroom, depicting a white-tiled, antiseptic-looking space; a toilet; a trash can filled with tampons and sanitary napkins, used. It’s impossible to imagine Eve reacting to Menstruation Bathroom with anything other than derision and disgust. Feminism offended her sense of style: it had no style. Beyond that, feminism offended her sense of efficacy: the conundrum it set out to resolve—women’s inability to get a fair shake—it didn’t. Joan, though, offended her more by refusing to admit that there was a conundrum.)
