Didion and babitz, p.3
Didion and Babitz, page 3
The break, though, was about more than bummer taste in literature. The Thunderbird Girls, with their garter belts and merry-widow corsets, their dreams of alimony checks as big as the Ritz, were the last of a line. They were the height of style yet also, Eve sensed, on the verge of extinction. “They’d perfected a way to be that made them obsolete from just two strokes of God’s Japanese paintbrush—Marilyn dying and the Beatles,” she later wrote. She was looking for something new.
New came in the form of a friend she didn’t like: Myrna Reisman. “Myrna managed to get her way no matter what,” said Eve. “Myrna walked up to me one day at LACC and asked me if my godfather was Stravinsky, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Great, I’m going to pick you up at eight.’ She took me to Barney’s. I was nineteen and suddenly life was fun.”
Barney’s was Barney’s Beanery, a bar at the intersection of Holloway and Santa Monica in West Hollywood where young artists did their drinking. There that night, sitting in the back with the young artists—Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin—was a young non-artist, Walter Hopps. Hopps was cofounder of the Ferus Gallery, around the corner from Barney’s on La Cienega.
Hopps was just thirty in 1962, but he was already one of L.A.’s wisest seers. A fourth-generation Californian, he grew up in Eagle Rock, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of doctors. When it was time for college, he obligingly registered for science classes at Stanford and then UCLA. It was his art history classes, though, that moved him.
Wrote Eve:
I remember him telling me, somewhere in my past, that while he was majoring in premed he happened accidentally to open some galleries just for diversion. But it wasn’t until 1957 or so, when he opened the Ferus Gallery with John Altoon and Ed Kienholz, that the myth of the West began to solidify: “Whatever Walter says goes.”
And what Walter Hopps said, subliminally but with perfect control, was, “This is the place.”
“This,” we all sort of wondered, “is the place?” We thought New York was the place. New York says it’s the place, and we all know New York’s right, so how could this—L.A.—be the place?
That L.A. is the place was an unstated statement as simple as it was radical. And it was already familiar to Eve because her parents and parents’ friends had been un-stating it to her since she was a child. How exciting it must’ve been, though, to hear it unstated by somebody who was nearer her own age. Somebody who all the right people thought was the right person. Somebody who was serious business.
L.A.’s primacy was the premise on which Hopps’s gallery was based. Unlike, say, the L.A. County Museum, once picketed by Mae and Vera Stravinsky for deeming not a single L.A. artist worthy of space on its walls, Ferus exhibited the work of locals. Its first show was of Boyle Heights’ own Wallace Berman, and resulted in a bust by the vice squad: Berman led away in handcuffs. (One of his assemblages contained an erotic drawing. “Okay, where’s the dirty stuff?” said the cops as they broke down the door.) The scandal didn’t hurt Hopps’s standing any with L.A. art patrons, an easily scandalized bunch. Maybe because in his Brooks Brothers suit, starched shirt, narrow tie, and owlish glasses, he looked the very picture of respectability, every inch the doctor he never became.
At the end of the night, Hopps told Eve that if she swung by Ferus, he’d show her things. She swung, he showed: installations by Ed Kienholz; paintings by John Altoon; ceramics by Ken Price; and then, the inside of his apartment, one floor above the gallery. Afterward he said he’d call her.
When he got back from Brazil.
In a couple of months.
“You know Sex and the City?” said Eve. “Well, if there’d been a Sex and the City out here, Walter would be Mr. Big. He’s the guy who’s always pulling the rug out from under you.”
* * *
While Eve waited for Hopps, she killed time with his artists. There was Ed Ruscha—“the cutest”—and Ken Price—“maybe cuter.” Also, Ron Cooper—not an artist Hopps showed at Ferus, but an artist nonetheless, and “cute too in a Toshiro Mifune way”—with whom she’d move in, and then, eight days later, out. (“She told me she’d had enough,” said Cooper.)
Eve was evidently too busy rolling around on her bed to make it. Recalled a friend who’d drop in on her periodically, “That girl was such a slob. And she had all these guys coming over all the time. I’d look around and be like, ‘Where the fuck do they fuck?’ ”
She couldn’t help herself. “She thought the L.A. artists were terrific,” said Laurie Pepper, Eve’s cousin. “And sex was how she showed her appreciation. She had a crush on the whole scene.”
And it was the scene more than any guy in it that Eve thrilled to. “I have always loved scenes,” she wrote, “bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance, and the scene at Barney’s was just fabulous.”
So fabulous, in fact, that the moment she discovered it is steeped in a kind of personal and historical significance. “Paris in the Twenties was what all of us were searching for,” said Mirandi. “What Hemingway and Fitzgerald had found in the cafés is what we all wanted—the Moveable Feast. And Eve and I had just been to Paris. There was no sign of that scene. None. We went to La Coupole. We went to Le Dôme. Those places were empty. Nothing was happening. We were so disappointed. And that disappointment is why Eve understood that Barney’s was something special. She thought of herself as an artist—a painter—and wanted to be around other artists. And Barney’s was where the artists were at. The people there had been drawn by who knows what forces, and they really had been drawn because they came from everywhere. I think Eve looked around, and saw the level of talent, saw all that youth and hope and drive, and said to herself, ‘Barney’s in L.A. in nineteen sixty-whatever-year-it-was is Paris in the Twenties.’ ”
That summer, Eve’s parents asked her to rejoin them in Europe. This time she’d make a go of it.
* * *
It was August 6, 1962, and the Babitzes were driving through the South of France when the Volkswagen bus Sol had just purchased began to sputter and shake. They pulled over in the town of Nîmes. The newspaper headlines there less read than screamed: MARILYN EST MORTE!
Marilyn, no last name required since everybody knew which Marilyn.
Marilyn, who Eve, age ten, walking home from swim class, eyes stinging with chlorine and smog, saw immortalized in front of Grauman’s—handprints and high-heel prints.
Marilyn, Eve’s beacon of hope ever since Mae pointed out that Marilyn was as much of an artist as the grim-faced and forbidding Georgia O’Keeffe. “I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then [my mother] told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry,” wrote Eve. “And so I realized she was right and didn’t.”
(A side note: The one unequivocally admiring piece on a woman that Joan wrote was her Georgia O’Keeffe profile. And the reason she was so wild for O’Keeffe was precisely because of O’Keeffe’s grim-faced and forbidding qualities. She exulted in O’Keeffe’s “crustiness” and “pepperiness.” Called O’Keeffe a “hard woman,” the ultimate compliment for Joan. Here’s how you know it was the ultimate compliment for Joan: she paid it to herself. In The Year of Magical Thinking, her book about the death of John Dunne, she quoted, multiple times, until it became a kind of refrain or mantra, the social worker who called her a “cool customer.” Quoted it ironically, but not really. Really, quoted it sentimentally. She was taken with the description. It’s how she saw herself. How she wanted to be seen.)
The barbiturate overdose, a “probable suicide” according to the official ruling, was a shock to Eve, even though Marilyn had been falling apart publicly for years. And in Eve’s memory, the news drove her to the brink of nervous breakdown. She told me that her devastation was so profound she had to return to L.A., this time for good. “Well,” she said. “I’ve never been too stable.”
But Eve’s memory is a mis-memory. She remained in Europe for another seven months.
* * *
It was the fall of ’63. Eve had been back in L.A. since the spring, which meant Eve had been back at Barney’s since the spring, the scene there still so good she didn’t have to care about any other. Almost every night, she’d hit up the bar. “I exhausted all the possibilities of Barney’s,” she wrote. “It would get so that there would be 10 guys who didn’t know each other who I’d balled.”
Eve was chasing so many men at the same time to distract herself from the fact that, for her, there were only two. Brian Hutton—we’ll get to him shortly—was one, except not at that particular moment because he and Eve were in a fight. (“They were always my fights, he was never in them, he used to just wait until I stopped being mad.”) Which was why her other one-and-only truly was her one-and-only: Walter Hopps. (“I guess he didn’t like South America any more than I liked Europe.”)
Hopps was a formative influence on Eve. He taught her how to see.
Hopps’s vision, Eve believed, was visionary, his perception extrasensory. What was hidden from other people—i.e., the future—was revealed to him. He could discern it in the present. For example, Andy Warhol was, in the early sixties, viewed as a commercial artist and therefore not an artist at all. It was Hopps, along with Ferus co-owner Irving Blum, who, in July 1962, gave Warhol his very first fine-arts show: those Campbell’s soup cans, thirty-two mouthwatering flavors.
Wrote Eve:
If Walter Hopps decided someone was cool, the person was (in my opinion) cool for all eternity. So when he explained to me one night over chile at Barney’s that Andy Warhol was going to have a show at the Ferus, I said, “What? The soup can guy? You’re kidding!”
How could that soup can guy be cool? (And his hair?)…
“He’s seven jumps ahead of everyone else,” Walter may have said.
To understand the scope and magnitude of Andy Warhol in 1962 was also to be seven jumps ahead of everyone else. And Eve understood because Hopps made her understand. “Suddenly I had the eyes to see,” she said. “Walter gave me the eyes.”
And Hopps was about to demonstrate, once again, that his timing was right, his pitch perfect.
* * *
October 1963.
Hopps had convinced Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1917, turned a urinal upside down and signed it, thereby bringing into being Pop Art and postmodernism—Duchamp: “It’s art if I say so”—as surely as he’d laid waste to Western culture and thought—Duchamp: “It’s art if I say so”—to let the Pasadena Art Museum host his first retrospective. That is, had convinced arguably the most influential artist of the twentieth century, inarguably the most revolutionary, that a landmark moment in the career he was too hip, too avant-garde, to have—in 1921, he retired from art, took up chess—was best handled by an institution nobody’d ever heard of in a town about to become synonymous with the word “geezer.”(Jan and Dean’s “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” would drop within the year. Go granny, go granny, go granny, go!)
The epochal shift had begun. Los Angeles: from cultural wasteland to cultural hot spot.
The cultural-wasteland talk was nonsense, obviously. Geniuses aren’t dumb. To those with established reputations in the arts, the movie industry meant easy money. The reason L.A. was lousy with geniuses, which Eve knew better than anyone since, as a kid, all she had to do was walk from her living room to her kitchen and she’d trip over three at least. And now L.A. was about to announce itself not just as a civilization but as a civilization in its ideal state—“This is the place”—and she wouldn’t be there to utter a single “I told you so.”
Eve’s name had been left off the invite list to the party for the show’s private opening. Hopps was notoriously absentminded. This oversight, though, was deliberate. How could he bring his girlfriend to the party when he was already bringing his wife?
* * *
A brief meditation on Eve and married men:
Sol and Mae Babitz were, in Eve’s view, a perfect couple. For them, marriage wasn’t happily ever after, it was ecstatically ever after. “My mother was a stacked little hubba hubba from Sour Lake, Texas [who] snagged my father, a kind of N.Y. intellectual Trotskyite Jew,” she wrote. Then added, “My parents neck a lot.”
Only, before Mae could marry Sol, she had to get rid of her husband. “Oh yeah, Mae’s first husband,” said Laurie. “Pancho, that’s what he was called. If I ever knew his last name, I’ve forgot. What I’d always heard from my mother about Pancho was that he was an Italian, the headwaiter at one of those movie-star clubs on the Sunset Strip—Ciro’s maybe—and that Mae was running around with Sol behind his back.” (Eve: “I don’t think my mother thought of it as cheating. She felt like she was in a European situation.”)
All of which is to say, Eve was bred to both revere matrimony and not take it altogether seriously. Perhaps adultery even struck her as romantic, irresistibly so. And it wasn’t as if she couldn’t keep herself in check. After all, she never slept with a friend’s love or ex-love, no matter how cute he was, how good the drugs he was holding. Honor among thieves, etc.
* * *
The Duchamp party began on the evening of October 7, careened into the early-morning hours of October 8.
It wasn’t the typical slapdash, slop-pot L.A. art affair—people wearing whatever clothes they’d thrown over their bathing suits, drinking cheap Chablis out of plastic cups, wandering from gallery to gallery. (Monday Night Art Walks, they were called.) It was high style and high gloss and altogether ultra-super-duper: black ties and pink champagne and the Hotel Green.
Guests included movie stars (Dennis Hopper); the children of movie stars (Hopper’s wife, Brooke Hayward, daughter of Margaret Sullavan); underground movie stars (Taylor Mead); people played by movie stars (Beatrice Wood, the real Catherine—the Jeanne Moreau role—in Truffaut’s Jules and Jim); as well as L.A. artists who looked like movie stars (Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell); and a non-L.A. artist who was making his own version of movie stars, Superstars (Andy Warhol).
Also: Mirandi Babitz, the date of Julian Wasser, a contract photographer covering the event for Time magazine. “My little sister went and I didn’t,” said Eve. “The humiliation and so forth.”
Eve hugged her pillow that night and cursed her faithless lover. “I was only twenty, and there wasn’t a way I could really get to Walter. But I decided that if I could ever wreak any havoc in his life, I would.”
Not an idle threat.
* * *
Eve was holding a glass of wine, standing in front of Duchamp’s best-known painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, at the public opening, which she was attending with her parents, home from Europe at last. Every so often, she’d slide her eyes over to Duchamp and Hopps, themselves on exhibit, playing chess on an elevated platform. She was unable to track the game’s progress, though, because Julian Wasser wouldn’t stop pestering her. “Julian kept coming up to me and saying lewd things like ‘Why don’t you fuck me?’ and being his usual boring self.”
And then Wasser came up to her and said something unusual and not in the least boring.
Their conversation, according to draft number six of Eve’s optioned-but-never-produced screenplay, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slut, went something like this:
Wasser, unhooking the Nikon from around his neck, said, “I’m going to take a picture of Duchamp and a girl. You want to be the girl?”
“Okay,” said Eve.
He popped open the camera, replaced old film with new. “Playing chess.”
A beat.
Then Eve said, “Oh, right, because that’s what he gave up art for.”
Wasser, his eyes on the film as he pulled it taut, “And naked. You, not him.”
Another beat.
Then Eve said, “Oh, right, because—” She gestured to the painting.
“Still in?”
“Still in.”
Wasser bared his teeth in a grin. “Great. Then we’re all set.”
“Have you told Duchamp about this?”
“As the French would say, Non.”
“Don’t you think you’d better? What if he doesn’t like it?”
Wasser, Nikon back around his neck, started to walk off, on the job again. “He’ll like it.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“He’s a man, isn’t he?”
Eve watched Wasser disappear into the crowd, then drained her glass in a single swallow.
* * *
Saturday, October 12, early morning. Eve sat beside Wasser in his shiny toy of a car, a Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. They were headed to the Pasadena Art Museum.
Eve was on the road, but really she was on a cloud. The more she thought about Wasser’s idea, the more she liked it: he’d be making Nude Sitting at a Chessboard, a sequel to Nude Descending a Staircase, with her in the starring role. How brilliant.
How Hollywood, too. What could be more hopeful-ingénue than baring all? It was practically a local rite of passage, the de rigueur desperate act of the camera-ready cutie when the wolf was howling at the door. Even for Marilyn. Especially for Marilyn. (Admitting she was the golden girl and wet dream in the Golden Dreams calendar did as much for Marilyn’s career as any movie.) Except Eve wouldn’t be baring all to make money. She’d be doing it to make mischief.
And art.
Suddenly, though, Eve wasn’t on that cloud anymore, was plummeting to earth. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. Maybe this was just Wasser laying a line on her. Maybe only a fool wouldn’t have known she was about to be played for one. At least there was still time to call it off.
Eve had just opened her mouth when Wasser turned to her. “You aren’t going to chicken out, are you?” he said, his tone accusatory.
