Didion and babitz, p.26
Didion and Babitz, page 26
With Slow Days, Eve attained that American ideal: Art that stays loose, maintains its cool. Art so purely enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Andy Warhol, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.
* * *
The miracle of Slow Days wasn’t performed in a vacuum.
To write Eve’s Hollywood, Eve believed that she had to disappear into it, leave the world behind. By Slow Days, she knew better, and she wrote it while very much in the world. And once you understand how to look for her, you see her everywhere. She’s the laughing, buxom Zelig in the corner of the frame of so many key scenes and happenings in Seventies L.A.
There she is, on the campaign trail with Governor Jerry Brown, running for president in 1976. “Ronee [Blakley] had just gotten nominated for an Academy Award for playing Barbara Jean in Nashville,” said Eve. “She was warming up crowds for Brown. And Brown told Ronee she could bring someone with her, and she told him that she wasn’t going anywhere without me. The whole time I and everybody else was totally stoned on as many drugs as we could get away with.”
There she is—well, not her, but her photograph—on the cover of one of the biggest albums of the decade, Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel. “Linda and I used to try to lose weight together. We did that diet where we ate nothing except citrus fruit. After a week, we were both twelve pounds thinner. That’s when I took the picture. She looked so beautiful and pure, like a girl in a French convent.”
And there she is, in one of the biggest movies of the decade, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II, the Senate hearing scene. (She’s sitting at a table to the right of Al Pacino’s and Robert Duvall’s.) “I wanted to see what it was like being an extra, so I had Fred Roos get me the job,” she said. “Fred was Francis’s casting director and producer, and sometimes my boyfriend. He must’ve been my boyfriend when Francis was filming.” I asked her how she liked it on set. She sighed. “They had me in this horrible jacket and it was hot, so I took it off. They had to reshoot the whole scene because the shirt I was wearing was polka-dot and polka dots ruin everything.”
And though she isn’t in the very biggest movie of the decade—Star Wars—her handiwork is. “Eve knew Carrie [Fisher] from Ports,” said Griffin. “She called Fred Roos and told him, ‘You’ve got to meet this girl for Star Wars.’ Fred did, and then he called George Lucas and said, ‘I’ve found Princess Leia.’ But Lucas thought he’d already found her and was going to cast that actress. I forget which one—was she British? Anyway, Fred forced him to see Carrie and that was it for the other actress, the maybe British one, whoever she was.”I
Nor was the miracle of Slow Days performed alone.
Providing crucial aid to Eve were the sisters, Erica Spellman and Vicky Wilson. “I think Eve felt, for the first time, like she had protection—me and Vicky, ICM and Knopf,” said Spellman. “I never considered calling anyone other than Vicky. Knopf has always been the best publisher, and Eve needed credibility. She was seen as this sexy girl who somehow got [Sam] Lawrence to publish her book. A lot of people knew she’d slept with him, which wasn’t helping. I wanted her to be thought of as a serious writer, not just as this strange creature floating around L.A.” (Sam Lawrence, by the way, didn’t try to buy Slow Days, though he did try to buy A Book of Common Prayer. Joan would politely turn him down.)
Eve needed credibility not just with the publishing industry, but with herself. She’d landed Erica Spellman and Vicky Wilson on her own. Joan had nothing to do with it. A moment of vindication for her, surely.
“What I did was call her up every single Monday morning for a year,” said Spellman. “ ‘How’s the book coming?’ I’d say.”
When I asked how Eve responded to supervision, Spellman shrugged—a gesture of amusement or exasperation—and said, “Eve sent me pages. Really, a mess of pages—not organized at all, just pages jumbled together. I mean, I was lucky the pages came in an envelope is how much of a mess.”
“And then Vicky took over?”
Spellman nodded. “Vicky helped her get those pages into shape.” Deep breath, long exhale. “And that’s how Vicky and I dragged Slow Days, Fast Company out of her.”
Erica, who babied Eve and bullied them that dared fuck with Eve, was the perfect agent for Eve. In a letter to Dan Wakefield, Eve repeats with glee a conversation between Jim Goode, the editor at Playboy who’d turned down “The Sheik,” and Erica: “In his bright urbane way [Jim] said, ‘Ahh, yes, Eve Babitz, I remember her when she was just a collagist. We really would like to use more of her things.’ And Erica looked at him with this ingrown sneer she has for all business dealings and said, ‘Well I’ll tell ya one thing. You ain’t gettin’ none of her stuff for no lousy $500 like the last time so you can just forget that shit.’ ”
And Wilson, who had a vision of the book that Eve could write, poked Eve, prodded Eve into writing it, was the perfect editor for Eve. In fact, it’s impossible to overstate how perfect.
Eve had understood early on what Eve’s Hollywood required of her. “I still haven’t figured out how I am going to tie all the stories together and make them fit into one single thing so people’ll think of it as a book ‘book’ BOOK,” she told her aunt Leah in a 1972 letter. “But maybe I’ll just have to make them think of ‘books’ as something other than what they’re used to. After all, The Canterbury Tales [is] not War and Peace.” What Eve is saying is that for her book to come off, she’d need to find a way to make it in her image. As Chaucer found a way to make The Canterbury Tales in his image. As Tolstoy found a way to make War and Peace in his image. As any writer who produces a work of wild originality must find a way.
Only she couldn’t find a way. Not with Eve’s Hollywood. Perhaps she could’ve with Joan’s help, but she refused Joan’s help.
Wilson’s help, however, she would accept. From a letter Wilson sent Eve about Slow Days:
As you can see, I’ve taken out quite a bit of material. But what I thought the book needed, when I first read it, was, above all else—thinning. There was just too much. Too much of a particular kind of characterizing that in the end detracts from the more subtle texture that you are trying to recreate that makes up L.A…. Before I go over each piece separately and tell you what I did and why, and what I think you should do, I just want to go over the Table of Contents, because I’ve rearranged the order in which the pieces appear. I think the first part of the book, up through HEROINE, is a slow but somewhat direct seduction into the book. It is less atmospheric than the latter part and is sufficiently plotted and directed to make that L.A.-ness accessible. The latter part of the book is the hardcore. The writing gets more sophisticated, it’s more tangled, and much more textured… I’ve ended with THE GARDEN [OF ALLAH] piece because I think it’s the strongest one in the book and to follow it would be a tough act…
Work fast but carefully.
Wilson knew that Eve had the goods but not always. And she was able to separate the first-rate pieces from the second-rate, and then to sequence the first-rate pieces so that they gathered and gained momentum.
What else she was able to do: give Eve, who was magnificently discursive, i.e., couldn’t structure if you paid her, if you put a gun to her head, a structure. The brilliant idea of using the wooing of Paul as Slow Days’ throughline, a means of linking the pieces together, was, according to Eve, Wilson’s. “Vicky made me do that. She said to me, ‘This book makes no sense.’ I said, ‘Oh, really?’ She said, ‘Make the whole book to Paul.’ So I did.”
In Wilson, Eve had more than an editor, had an intuitive, stabilizing, gift-from-God collaborator. Slow Days was the product of a talent no longer spinning its wheels. All of a sudden, Eve had found the asphalt, was shooting forward.
And then there’s Paul, who provided aid every bit as crucial. He was the perfect muse for Eve. “My boyfriend who I love so well is actually coming closer to me than anyone ever has without stepping on my feet,” she wrote to a friend. “It’s as though we fit together in a marvelous way.”
Eve loved how Paul looked: his tall-drink-of-water-ness, the precise opposite of her more-bounce-to-the-ounce-ness. She loved, too, how he conducted himself, his manner: calm, courtly, decorous. The precise opposite of her own: nervy, barnstorming, sensation-seeking. “There was this one time when Eve and I were leaving Ports,” said Paul. “Marva Hannon, an old friend of Eve’s from, I think, LACC, was walking in. The next thing I know, a catfight’s erupted—slaps, pulled hair, feathers flying. I got Eve back to the car and cooled her down. ‘What was that about?’ I said. And she said, ‘Oh, Marva and I are just that way.’ Like, no big deal.” He laughed, shook his head. “You know, Eve was destructive to herself more than anyone else. That only made me want to save her. I felt she did better when she was with me, that she was less agitated.”
With Paul, Eve achieved a kind of balance. His ambivalent sexuality—drawn as he was to both men and women—his ambivalence in general—drifting along with the current, amiably, absently—kept her off-kilter in a way that allowed her to maintain her equilibrium. And she did the same for him. Because without the weight of her emotionalism, her intensity, her breasts and flesh and need, you feel that Paul, so pretty, so passive, so captivatingly noncommittal and gossamer light, would have floated off into the ether, dissolved like a dream in the warm Southern California air.
* * *
Slow Days certainly made more of an impression than Eve’s Hollywood. Knopf put money, muscle, and hoopla behind it, buying half-page ads in major American newspapers, sending Eve on a series of tours and interviews and promotions. Clearly the publishing house believed in it. As did Eve. “I thought what Knopf thought—that it would sell a million copies,” she said. “But nobody read Slow Days either.” An exaggeration. The book didn’t become a blockbuster. It had its fans, though, as Eve knew. “Jackie Kennedy read it. She loved it. She gave people copies of it before they went to L.A.”
And Slow Days was widely reviewed, including twice in the New York Times. The first review—of the hardcover—was a pan. Novelist Julia Whedon surveyed and rejected Eve in three short paragraphs. In the last, Whedon wrote, “I discern in [Babitz] the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia.” But the second review—of the paperback—by critic Mel Watkins, was near glowing and twigged to Eve perfectly. “Eve Babitz is philosopher, quidnunc and wit here, and the amalgam makes for a collection that is light enough not only to entertain and flaunt the West Coast glitter but also insightful enough to reveal its somber underside.”
Perhaps even more gratifying, though, was the rave in the San Francisco Examiner from the much admired short-story writer Alice Adams. Adams likened Eve (the character) to Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles and Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, except Eve (the character) was realer than either. Beyond that, she was, wrote Adams, “infinitely more alive than Didion’s trendily alienated heroines,” a line that must’ve sent Eve (the writer) into ecstasy.
Eve wrote Adams a thank-you note. She opened with:
As I sit here with your review before me, I can’t seem to shake the eerie feeling that all my most immodest daydreams about how wonderful I am have appeared in print, almost as though I’d written them myself, only better written.
She closed with:
The only fly in the sky [as far as Slow Days is concerned] is my horrible past when I used to be a piece of ass… And now even if I get the Nobel Prize, I’ve got a whole lot of High Society friends who will forever send me their dirty linen… I’m not the Camille type, dying of TB just because I once sashayed around town in black limousines… I told Joe Heller to start a rumor that I’d [gone] to Switzerland to have my hymen resewn.
Love,
Eve
Even if Slow Days didn’t top the bestseller list or become a darling of the East Coast critical establishment, the experience of publication was a joyous one, and Eve was at peace with it. The experience of publication was also, however, a miserable one, and it drove Eve to the point of crack-up, something I never would have known had her mother not saved her other letter to Joseph Heller.
This second letter, written in 1977, is a feminist cri de coeur as A Room of One’s Own is a feminist cri de coeur. Is just as reckless, just as careful, just as brutal, just as exquisite as Woolf’s essay. And it is, after Slow Days, the best and most consequential thing Eve ever wrote.
I. It was Amy Irving, an American actress. Though, according to Sheila Weller’s biography of Fisher, Irving, in her audition, spoke in a “soft and stately near-English accent.” Which could account for Griffin’s transatlantic confusion.
CHAPTER 18 Joan, 1977
Before we get to Eve’s other letter to Joseph Heller, a quick check-in with Joan:
Nineteen seventy-seven was an artistic high point for Eve; for Joan, an all-time low. Trancas did indeed have a deadening effect on her creatively, exactly as Eve predicted it would. Movies had given her financial security, but they’d taken away her cultural relevancy. The Panic in Needle Park was a respectable effort, nothing more. Play It as It Lays was less than that. And she and Dunne got axed from their one hit, the Barbra Streisand vehicle A Star Is Born, a tearjerker musical about the marriage of two singers, John Norman Howard and Esther Hoffman, the problems that ensue when her star eclipses his. (Write what you know, as they say.)
“I never see the Dunnes either,” Eve told Grover Lewis in a letter. “This horrible thing happened to them where they worked on this damn screenplay for two years only to have it tossed out by Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser.”I
A Star Is Born was a remake of a remake of a remake. There’d been a 1932 version with Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman; a 1937 version with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March; and a 1954 version with Judy Garland and James Mason. It wasn’t just not New Hollywood, wasn’t even just Old Hollywood, was Dead-and-Buried Hollywood, was Exhumed-Corpse Hollywood.
For Pauline Kael, who’d won the National Book Award in 1974 for Deeper into Movies, the very book Dunne had slammed in the Los Angeles Times, A Star Is Born offered another opportunity to mock Joan, which she did with lip-smacking relish. “The picture has had the worst advance press I can recall,” she wrote in the January 19, 1977, issue of the New Yorker. “And those who have written pieces exonerating themselves include John Gregory Dunne, who—along with his wife, Joan Didion, and the director, Frank Pierson—gets the screenplay credit.” She’d accuse A Star Is Born of having “no controlling dramatic intelligence,” and of being “slow and slurpy” to boot. In closing, she’d zero in on the most embarrassing scene in a movie that was, in her opinion, nothing but:
At the end, there’s some sort of commemoration service for John Norman [Howard], and Esther is introduced to sing. Here is the spot for Janet Gaynor’s and Judy Garland’s great mawkish moment: “This is Mrs. Norman Maine.” Streisand does a compromise update on it: she’s introduced as Esther Hoffman Howard—which is worse.
How could Joan, who made such a fuss about being addressed as “Joan Dunne” or “Joan Didion Dunne,” take Kael’s criticism any way other than personally?
Joan did manage to publish that year A Book of Common Prayer, but response to the novel wasn’t what she’d hoped—or come to expect. The reviews were respectful yet unenthused, the sales so-so. In fact, besides alienating Noel Parmentel, A Book of Common Prayer made almost no impact at all.
Joan was floundering.
I. I interviewed Jon Peters, Streisand’s former lover, co-producer, and, yes, hairdresser, about A Star Is Born in his penthouse apartment on the Wilshire corridor in 2015. He wore black silk pajamas and his hair in a silver mane and was very charming and likable. He requested that I hand over the magazine sticking out of my bag so that he could read a page from it aloud, and thus prove that he did know how to read (according to Hollywood rumor, he didn’t). I assured him that I required no proof, but that didn’t stop him from giving it to me. Peters remembered little about Joan and Dunne’s involvement in the movie. He did, however, remember this: “I wanted Elvis to play John Norman Howard. I mean, can you imagine how that would’ve gone over—Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand, together? I went to Vegas to meet him. He was heavy at the time. He didn’t sit in a chair, he sat on the floor. And he seemed upset. ‘What’s wrong?’ I said. He said, ‘I had a fight with my girlfriend.’ I said, ‘Oh yeah? Where is she?’ He said, ‘She’s in my 747, circling above Vegas.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘I’ve had her up there for three hours,’ he said. ‘I haven’t decided whether or not to let the plane land.’ He wanted to play the part, but the Colonel made him turn it down. I don’t know what happened to the girlfriend.”
CHAPTER 19 Spurts
Now for Eve’s other letter to Joseph Heller.
It’s five pages, single-spaced, with cross-outs and add-ons and multiple postscripts. There’s repetition and excess, not to mention digression. Which is why I’m going to do to it what Vicky Wilson did to that early draft of Slow Days: thin it out. Clean it up, too, because Eve’s punctuation is as freewheeling and devil-may-care as ever, her spelling the usual alphabet soup.
First, though, a few thoughts on Eve and letters generally.
Letters for Eve served as a kind of workshop. They were a place to try out new material, see if it connected with a reader. And since she wasn’t attempting to write deathless prose for publication, was just gossiping with a friend for a page or two—as if gossip of a high order is ever “just”!—the pressure was off. She could relax, let loose, riff unselfconsciously. In other words, her letters, the best of them, anyway, are lasting literary works in large part because they were intended as ephemera, their timelessness inextricable from their fleetingness.
