Didion and babitz, p.21
Didion and Babitz, page 21
Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naivete responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar… At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed awkward beside them—in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.
I have a feeling, Walter, that I’m Rosemary.
I’m afraid I’ve always been Rosemary.
It’s clear that Eve imagined she was writing a book she’d lived, and that book was an updated version of Tender Is the Night. She saw herself as the updated version of the wide-eyed teenage actress, Rosemary Hoyt. Which made Joan and Dunne the updated version of the catastrophically sophisticated married couple, Nicole and Dick Diver (a corrupting influence on Rosemary, incidentally). Which made the scene of spoiled and successful artists at the Didion-Dunnes’ Franklin Avenue house in Hollywood the updated version of the scene of spoiled and successful artists at the Divers’ villa on the Riviera. Which made Southern California at the twilight of the Swinging Sixties the updated version of the South of France at the twilight of the Jazz Age.
This second book—the Franklin Avenue book, as I think of it—Eve would shelve. She’d focus her energies and efforts instead on the first book, Eve’s Hollywood, which was now Eve’s Hollywood as we know Eve’s Hollywood.
The list of reasons Eve was beholden to Joan grew ever longer. The thank-you she laid at the feet of Jann Wenner—“[Rolling Stone] helped me so much in my life, it practically saved my life”—she mislaid; should’ve laid at the feet of Joan, as she well knew, even if she liked to pretend she didn’t.
She’d acknowledge the truth, though, to Dan Wakefield. In a letter, she tells him about her “last abortive ‘happily ever after’ love affair in San Francisco with some punk southern journalist with a ‘drinking problem’ who is the editor at R.S. who accepted my piece The Shiek [sic].” And then, almost as an afterthought, “All I can think of is that if Joan hadn’t sent him a letter in the first place, he never would have taken the story.” In other words, Rolling Stone only gave her a chance because Joan already had.
And not just Rolling Stone.
The 1971 letters between Dan Wakefield and Sam Lawrence that trace Wakefield’s courtship of Eve, trace, as well, Lawrence’s courtship of Joan, Wakefield serving as Lawrence’s proxy.
On August 11, 1971, Wakefield wrote:
In the more delicate mission I am on for SL [Sam Lawrence] Inc, I am having dinner tonight with Joan Didion and John Dunne. This one, as you know, has to be all mysticism, but I have all my Vibes working; because in fact I know it would be best for her, too.
Eve also served as Lawrence’s proxy, though in her case unknowingly.
On November 21, 1972, Lawrence sent to Joan and Dunne a letter, ingratiating to the point of toadying, about the movie version of Play It as It Lays. He opened with:
I saw your film yesterday and it was a shattering experience. The substance and mood of the book were recreated in an incredible way and dialogue rang true throughout the picture… Accept my congratulations for helping to make a film I’m planning to see again and probably again.
Then, at the end of the letter:
Help Eve and you’ll help us all.
With this line, Lawrence puts himself, Joan, and Dunne in one group, Eve in another: they are the adults, she the child; they the experts, she the greenhorn; they the charity, she the charity case. It’s an act of bad faith made worse by pretending to be one of goodwill.
My guess is that Lawrence’s principal interest in working with Eve was in working with Joan. (How else to explain why he didn’t bother assigning Eve’s Hollywood a proper in-house editor?) And Eve must’ve sensed this.
Sensed something, at any rate. Evidence of her animal panic can be found in a February 7, 1973, letter from Sam Lawrence. “I’m sorry you were so troubled yesterday,” he wrote, “and I could readily sense how anxious you are about your book. You have no cause to worry. I re-read your Rolling Stone pieces last night for the third time and they hold up supremely well. You’re a true writer and a very fine one. So. Please. Do. Not. Worry.”
But worry Eve did. She sought out her mother’s therapist, Mrs. Alcerro. “I am going to kick and scream and follow [Mrs. Alcerro] through the streets until she agrees to Take My Case or whatever you call it,” she wrote Dan Wakefield. “Joan of course thinks pain is a Given that we have to accept, but I can’t do that and won’t do that. It seems to me cowardly rather than brave.”
What had Eve so worked up, I suspect, was the fear that she wouldn’t be able to pull it off, make the book happen. That’s the subtext of all the letters of this period. Pent-up tension had her practically vibrating. The way she finally released that tension was by blasting the real source of her anxiety: Joan.
Joan was wrong about pain. Joan was wrong about her.
CHAPTER 13 Unsent Letters
That first morning I spent at the Huntington Library, I read Eve’s letter to Joan from start to finish. The rest of Eve’s letters, though, I barely skimmed. Rather, I used my cell to photograph their pages, as many as I could in the allotted time. It was only hours later, lying across the bed in my hotel room, that I was able to look them over properly.
When I came to the opening line of a 1972 letter to Carol Granison—“Today I’m going to mail the letter I write to you instead of sticking it into a file of unmailed letters I’ve started because they’re practically a diary”—I bolted upright.
That’s what the boxes were: Eve’s file of unmailed letters. Which meant Eve had never mailed that letter to Joan. Or any of the letters she wrote to various friends and lovers about Joan. And yet, she didn’t throw away those letters either.
I flashed on something the journalist Janet Malcolm once wrote:
The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the not sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is. By saving the letter, we are in some sense “sending” it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy (as we do when we tear up a letter); on the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its worth, so we “send” it to his equivalent in fantasy, on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading.I
* * *
The things Eve couldn’t say to Joan, she was saying to me. (Me, posterity; not me, Lili Anolik.)
But also the things she couldn’t say to me. (Me, Lili Anolik.)
For instance, I hadn’t a clue that Joan edited Eve’s Hollywood. And Eve and I had discussed Eve’s Hollywood constantly when I was writing Hollywood’s Eve. My fascination with the subject of her first book was endless because my curiosity about it was bottomless. Never, though, did she mention Joan’s pivotal role.
Pivotal from the perspective of Eve. Unprecedented from the perspective of Joan, who, as far as I can tell, didn’t edit the books of people not named John Gregory Dunne. “Joan wasn’t particularly helpful to young writers in my experience,” said Susanna Moore. “Last night I called my sister Tina—Tina worked for years as Joan’s private secretary—to make sure I was right. I asked her what her recollection was because she was with Joan and John day in, day out, for so long. And she remembered it as I did. Joan did not edit people’s manuscripts.”
Could it have slipped Eve’s mind? A detail misplaced, then lost altogether? That seemed impossible to me. She was too preoccupied with it at the time to forget it later on. In her 1972/1973 letters, she makes continuous, compulsive reference to the fact that Joan is editing Eve’s Hollywood. It’s something she can’t not say.
In a letter to Walter Hopps written just after Christmas 1972, she lists the gifts she received, including an Instamatic camera (from Ahmet Ertegun), a case of French wine (from Ertegun, as well), earrings (from “everybody”), cocaine (from nobody, at least nobody she cares to identify), a pair of light blue sunglasses (from “a girl in San Francisco,” Annie Leibovitz—has to be). And: “a book of poems by Berryman from Joan Didion who’s editing my book, thank heavens.”
There is, too, this sentence, from a letter she wrote to Rolling Stone cofounder Jann Wenner in early 1973:
I am working on this book and its… editors [the Didion-Dunnes] are the creme de la creme so if it turns out badly it won’t be my fault.
And, finally, there’s this paragraph, from a letter Eve wrote to friend Sara Harrison, also in early ’73:
Joan Didion and her husband are editing [the book]. They are terrifyingly exacting, they nearly scared me to death a week ago telling me I was sloppy and they were right. They are like my best self and who can live with that? They actually asked me if someone had edited my early things (which they liked) and nobody had, that was the trouble, I had gotten sloppy.
The tone Eve assumes in all three letters is lighthearted, even breezy. But she’s whistling in the dark. Only in the last letter does she come close to dropping the pose, acknowledging her anxiety about the strictness of Joan’s judgment.
Anxious or not, Eve was clearly aware of how valuable Joan’s patronage was. Patronage that extended, by the way, beyond Eve’s literary work. The same year that Joan got Eve’s writing into Rolling Stone, Joan got Eve’s art into Vogue. Eve tells an identical story in two different letters. From the first: “These friends of mine, the Dunnes (they’re writers who live over this cliff on the Pacific in a beautiful house—the wife is called Joan Didion and wrote Play It as It Lays and is the one who told everyone what a good writer I was). Anyway, Vogue came to do [the Dunnes’] house in one of their mythic ‘California living’ epics, and there, caption and all, is my Ginger Baker collage done by ‘California artist, Eve Babitz.’ ”II In the second, she adds, “which is about time.”
It was about time, and it was Joan who recognized it was about time. And Eve was both appreciative of and grateful for this recognition. (How you know she was appreciative and grateful: in letters, she started calling Joan “Joan” and spelling “Dunne” correctly.) In turn, Joan—and Dunne—couldn’t have been prouder of her and her success.
On May 10, 1972, Dunne sent a letter to “Darling, Eve” congratulating her on a piece for Rolling Stone’s “The Los Angeles Flyer”: “I simply love what you’re doing, and the marvelous thing is that it grows better and more confident every time out,” he wrote. “1958 on Roadside [Beach]—it seems so distant and far away that I feel as if I came upon a diary about an ante-bellum plantation family in Georgia in 1853, fresh, strange and wondrous, a complete picture of a society foreign to most of us.” He signed off, “Keep it up. Love you, John.” In the P.S., he does tumble into condescension: “The Stone is going to be inundated with letters, probably, from people saying that Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter lived at Manderly and not Mandalay [Ed. note: actually, Rebecca and Maximilian de Winter lived at Manderley, not Mandalay or Manderly], but fuck them, the piece was about Roadside.” He tumbles right back out, though: “Love you again.” And then, at the bottom of the page, written by hand (the letter was typed): “Eve—I love the pieces too—they are terrific—the Hollywood and the surf piece—XX Joan.”
But, somewhere along the way, Eve’s feelings toward Joan changed. Appreciation and gratitude vanished. In their place, indignation and scorn. She didn’t want Joan editing Eve’s Hollywood anymore and told Joan so.
Recalled Paul Ruscha, Eve’s boyfriend in 1973, “Eve started saying, ‘I fired Joan.’ I thought that was crazy. Joan didn’t work for Eve. But Eve loved to sort of throw that out there—‘I fired Joan.’ She was very dramatic about it. I just sort of looked cross-eyed at her and said, ‘What? Why did you do that?’ Eve didn’t explain anything to me, except to say that she felt Joan had made errors in judgment about her writing.”
There is in Eve’s Hollywood a piece titled “The Luau,” a veiled (but not very) account of how Eve’s Hollywood came to be.
From “The Luau”:
I have never had any money and suddenly I thought that if I sent a publisher a letter in just the right tone, I might get an advance to do a book… As proof that I could write, I sent the publisher a Xeroxed copy of a letter from [Lady Dana Wreaths,] a writer, an extremely fashionable writer, who thought that a few short pieces I’d written in a local L.A. paper were terrific. I’d known the woman for years and always kind of shrugged off her New Yorky quality, a kind of serious professionalism which didn’t allow for any fun. Her books were so brutally depressing that the only way you could be happy about them was to appreciate the style…
The Xeroxed copy of [the] letter got an advance from an East Coast Publisher… The publisher asked the woman to edit my book, and she said yes and her extreme fashionability was almost a guarantee of an important success… All at once I was home writing. I stopped going out and met no one. My only friends were my perpetual girl friends and I didn’t fuck anyone new… The writing got dismal and you couldn’t read it… But by that time I couldn’t tell anymore. I’d lost my nerve.
[Lady Dana] read the manuscript and called me up to Santa Barbara for a purge. With wrinkled brow she asked me if someone had edited my previous pieces which had appeared in the local publication or what? Its implication was clear: the person who had written those first pieces was not the same person who was writing these. She told me that everything needed a vast amount of work, that I could not have written those earlier pieces in two days like I’d claimed. Read Graham Greene, she told me.
So there I was sitting dry-eyed wondering why I should be allowed to live… [A day later I] decided I could go ahead and live and I had also decided that Lady Dana was not going to edit my book, it was a contradiction in terms, mutually exclusive… I decided suddenly that her life was ridiculous and her worried brow was merciless and that she, in fact, knew nothing about what I knew.
No prizes for guessing who the real Lady Dana is. (“Lady Dana,” so close to “Mrs. Dunn” in its ghastly primness, its lily-livered gentility. If Eve has put Joan in a disguise, it’s a disguise carefully designed to be seen through.) Before you lose all faith in my competence, Reader, let me assure you that I did guess. But when I went to Eve with that guess, asked her if Lady Dana was based on Joan, she said, “You know, I can’t remember, I was on so many drugs…” her voice trailing off into vagueness. And because I never considered the possibility that Eve’s Hollywood was edited by anyone other than Sam Lawrence or some equally qualified person at Dell, I dropped the matter.
(Something to keep in mind: Earl McGrath is also a character in “The Luau.” The “connection,” he’s called. Eve portrays him as a cutup and a charmer—an entirely winning personality. No mention is made of the fact that it was he who ended her art career by asking her the kind of question that should never be asked of somebody engaged in creative work: “Is that the blue you’re using?” Lady Dana and Lady Dana alone is the story’s villain.)
What I did know, however, was that Eve was fucked up in the extreme about Joan. I’ll get into all the ways in which she was fucked up. First, though, a characterological observation: emotionally Eve was direct. She loved and hated purely. Had the clean eyes and cold heart of a child.
A case in point: Eve and I were at lunch—the Village Idiot, a gastropub on Melrose—and a woman, Eve’s age, pleasant-seeming, waved from a neighboring table. Eve didn’t wave back. Instead, she stared at the woman, stone-faced, holding her fork the way Bette Davis held a cigarette in Dark Victory. At last, the woman dropped her head, tried to dip her embarrassment in her soup. Eve resumed eating her steak and potato pie. I asked her who the woman was, and she said, “That’s my enemy.” I searched her expression for signs of irony, found none. (Later, I was told by Mirandi that Eve and the woman had, briefly, shared a boyfriend in the seventies. I was also told by Mirandi that Eve didn’t like to share, which I didn’t need to be told.)
Never, in the entire time that I knew Eve, was she cagey with her feelings. She was utterly straightforward.
Only not when it came to Joan.
When it came to Joan, things got splintered, stunted, thwarted, twisted. Got, in a word, complicated. There were these remarks she’d make that you weren’t quite sure she’d made because they were muffled (said under her breath). Or smeared (said as she was turning her head). Or snatched back (said and then unsaid).III And they were brutal beyond belief. Also, sneaky beyond belief. So devastating and yet so sly you thought your ears were playing tricks on you.
For example: in the winter of 2015, I sent Eve, at her request, a copy of Blue Nights, Joan’s anguished if oddly elliptical account of Quintana’s death. (Joan never makes clear what exactly is wrong with Quintana. Why does this apparently healthy thirty-seven-year-old suddenly fall so very sick?)
I’d forgotten I’d even ordered the book—a few unthinking clicks on the Amazon website—which is why it wasn’t on my mind when, a day or two later, I called Eve.
She answered on the first ring. Rather than say hello, she said, “It was the baby advertisements that got to her.”
A beat while my brain scrambled to decipher her meaning. “Are you talking about Joan?”
“Yes,” she said, exasperated. Like, who else?
“You think baby advertisements are why she adopted Quintana?”
“If you’re going to adopt somebody, and you say you have a passion for children, which Joan said she did, you should adopt two.” Eve’s voice pivoted away from the receiver as she adjusted the dial on her radio—I could hear the theme song to The Larry Elder Show rise, fall—then came back. “That way the children can amuse each other. Instead, Joan had one to amuse her.”
