Didion and babitz, p.5
Didion and Babitz, page 5
Eve wasn’t happy about leaving L.A. She really wasn’t happy about leaving Hutton. But it didn’t matter. Even though she was eighteen now and, in a legal sense, an adult, she was, in a practical sense, a child, and she’d go where her parents told her to go.
* * *
From Rome, the only place in Europe she liked because it reminded her of a place in America she loved—“Rome was distilled Hollywood for me”—Eve sent Hutton a letter. (This letter, incidentally, is from one of those cardboard boxes packed by her mother. Is, in other words, a treasure from a treasure chest. Many more treasures to follow.)
It read:
First & foremost: I didn’t get the money from you but I’m sure to soon because [American Express] is forwarding everything to Rome. Thank you for sending it though. I love you—send more (rather horrible aren’t I). Second, I don’t know when the hell I can get back. The closest chance looks like 6 months from now but even if I do come back I’ll be the same dead weight I was before. [I’ll] go straight to secretary school or prostitution & knowing me it would be prostitution.
I’ll write you lewd fuck letters and do some pornographic drawings for you soon.
Eve
One of the pornographic drawings that Eve made for Brian Hutton, captioned, “Eat your heart out, lifers!”
Eve delivered on her promise, writing Hutton dozens and dozens of the lewdest of fuck letters. And Hutton responded in kind. “We got over the ‘I want to fuck you’ part at the beginning of our correspondence,” she explained, “and pretty soon we were elaborating on these fantastic scenes we would have when I came back.”
Eve’s erotic imagination was being stimulated, certainly. But so was her literary. She was collaborating on a dirty epistolary novel in real time. And then the dirty epistolary novel turned into a different sort of novel entirely.
She wrote:
After a while (about 30 letters or so) it really became rather a chore to think of new scenes and fantasies and maybe that’s where I learned how to write. [Brian and I], sometimes, devoted pages and pages to our respective philosophies and poured out our hearts on paper, folded the paper, put the paper in an envelope, stamped it and sent it off to the person on the other side of the ocean who would understand… I sharpened my wits and tried to be more amusing for him.
Keeping a sexual affair going using no touch, only words, will up your verbal game fast. “Eve was sending letters to Brian pretty much every day,” said Mirandi. “And at some point she had to stop writing the same old tawdry shit and start to really write. That was in Rome, where she was living on her own. Mother, Dad, and I were in Florence. And Rome is when she began to think she could be a writer. It’s when she established her habits. She could be totally on the scene, out every night, at the clubs, doing the boogaloo or whatever the Italian version of the boogaloo is, and then waking up early and absorbing things and writing them to Brian.”
Better training for a young writer is hard to imagine.
* * *
Eve was out of distilled Hollywood, back in undistilled, by March 1963. “I called Brian and said, ‘Give me the money to come home.’ And he did.”
She moved into the new house on Bronson. “Bronson had these little single-room cottages off the main house,” said Laurie. “Income properties—that’s what Mae called them, because she and Sol would rent them out. Evie took one. She painted the walls to look like that Jacques Demy movie—you know, the musical, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. She used those same colors, rose and orange and blue and yellow. The cottage was kind of wonderful, even if it was Eve’s usual pigsty.”
There’d be no more classes at LACC for Eve. What she had left to learn, she decided, school couldn’t teach her. “I got a job at this place called the Galton Institute where they do research and compile a bibliography on creative and cognitive processes in children,” she told a friend. “What I do is type.”
What she also did was write. From an account she gave later:
I was living in this little paper bungalow—one room with a typewriter… I was writing my memoirs, of course, because I’d been to Europe (like Henry James) and wanted to write a book [that was] about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood.
Travel Broadens was the book’s title. Sometimes she referred to it as a memoir; other times, a novel. Either way, it was an expansion of her letters to Hutton.
Eve seemed to know from the jump that she was incapable of invention. She could write only about herself and what had happened to her. “Everything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it,” she said. “It was one hundred percent nonfiction. I just changed the names.” Mirandi corroborated: “I was Eve’s first reader, always. She’d hand something to me and say, ‘Who’s going to kill me if I write this?’ ”
* * *
A month after posing for the Wasser-Duchamp photo, Eve was working like crazy to finish Travel Broadens. In fact, the final scene of Travel Broadens is her posing for the Wasser-Duchamp photo. (Greedy art, scarfing down the raw material of life without discretion or shame, digesting it, reconstituting it, almost before it’d been lived!)
Eve was carefully blasé when she talked about Travel Broadens, downplaying any eagerness or anxiety she might have felt. From a letter dated November 8, 1963, and written to George, no last name, one of her fly-by-night European romances: “The reason I started writing the thing in the first place was because people were always asking me what I did and I’d always have to say ‘nothing’ or lie.” As if the book—“the thing”—were the merest whim, a way of killing time between party invitations and wolf whistles.
From a letter dated one week later, and written to Mel, no last name either,II another one of her fly-by-night European romances: “[Travel Broadens is] written exactly like I talk… It’s got no theam [sic]… and it’s pointless. That’s the depressing thing about it. On the other hand it’s got just tons of style, everyone says, and it’s about the most honest (I don’t cop out) thing I’ve ever read in that particular style.”
Eve was keeping it light with Mel, same as she did with George. But she was also letting slip a hope and a hunger: she wanted to stun the world.
A definitive Travel Broadens doesn’t, so far as I know, exist. But three drafts—two handwritten, one typed, with inserts and cross-outs, alternate versions of scenes—were discovered in the cardboard boxes/treasure chests. I’ve read them all.
Much of the writing in Travel Broadens is smart, vivid, original. And accompanying Eve’s words are these light-fingered little sketches—very fast, very raffish—that pique and beguile. That’s the good news. The bad news is that more of the writing in Travel Broadens is undisciplined and unconsidered. Which is why Travel Broadens is a creditable effort but, finally, an immature one: juvenilia with pictures. (To be gifted as both a writer and an artist was, I think, a liability to Eve rather than an asset. It kept her from the kind of single-minded focus needed to bring along a talent quickly.)
The work’s primary point of interest, aside from the biographical information it imparts, is “Eve.” “Eve” as in Eve the character, a fictionalized version of Eve the person. “Eve” will appear in every one of Eve’s books, though sometimes she’ll go by a different name—Jacaranda, say, or Sophie. The “Eve” in Travel Broadens is the spunky heroine of her own debauched romantic comedy. And not just the heroine, the plot, too. The drama of the book is the viewpoint, how “Eve” looks at the world, the people in it. “All [Travel Broadens] is is a blow by blow discription [sic] of how I saw what I saw,” she wrote. “Me being a 19 year old, semi-hippy, marijuana smoking, pill taking, balling Sunset Strip cunt.”
Charmingly heartless is the effect Eve’s going for with “Eve,” and she achieves it. The reader is impressed with the speed, the exhilaration, the impiety and incorrigibility, the sheer cheek, of this literary creation.
“Eve,” though, isn’t enough to compel attention for an entire book, even a short one, which Travel Broadens, the longest draft just shy of a hundred and thirty pages, is. After a while, she—or, rather, “she”—maddens, then exhausts. Drawn with a still-childish hand, the strokes bold but crude, “Eve” is Eve without dimension. A cartoon. The complexity of the real-life human has been excised for the sake of maintaining a comic tone. Eve, as a writer, doesn’t yet have the deftness or skill to accommodate shifts in mood or mode. Subtlety is beyond her.
An example of excised complexity is the death of Marilyn. (In case you haven’t noticed, Reader, this book treats time in two ways: as linear, continuous, irrevocable; but also as circular, intermittent, flexible. Marilyn will die more than once. So will Jim Morrison. So will Sharon Tate and her houseguests.)
Here’s how “Eve” talks about Marilyn’s death in Travel Broadens:
[My family] arrived [in Nîmes] the day Marilyn Monroe did herself in. We were all heartbroken—most of the women I know are heartbroken about her. But now that I think about it I don’t really mind—I mean if that’s her shot she might as well do it—stop laying the responsibility on Hollywood’s shoulders. Everyone knows she was the biggest chippy in town.
Not-so-charmingly heartless. Grotesquely heartless.
Falsely heartless, as well. Eve, as I mentioned earlier, told me she left Europe after news of Marilyn’s overdose broke. Factually off the mark but emotionally spot-on. Marilyn’s overdose affected her profoundly. Only she couldn’t admit this in Travel Broadens because Travel Broadens is about how amusing it is to be Eve Babitz. Callousness and cynicism are essential to the amusement. Therefore, all non-callous, non-cynical feelings must be denied.
Brian Hutton is another example of excised complexity. Here’s how “Eve” talks about him in Travel Broadens:
Brian is the guy that’s keeping me and I consult him on all my extracurricular romances, just as he does me. We call it gravy since we know we always have each other. We can afford to dabble.
Eve is acting as if her second-class status in Hutton’s life isn’t a source of pain. As if her needs and desires are and always have been perfectly aligned with his. As if he is for her a bit of fun, nothing serious.
Here’s how Eve talks about him in her journal:
Brian’s back… I almost wept when he came in and I felt wildly confused, happy, furious… I feel so hopeless about him—there’s nothing there that’s ever going to work out and he’ll never 1) divorce his wife and marry me 2) see me a lot 3) make me his mistress in some dependable way 4) leave me alone. So I’m helpless and that’s the story of my life with Brian.
But it wasn’t a story she was prepared to tell. Not yet, anyway.
Eve was a man’s woman. What I mean when I call Eve a man’s woman: I’m not saying she liked to have sex with men, and they with her, though she did and they did. I’m saying there was an instinctive ease between her and them. Partly, I suspect, because of her breasts, which put her under the protection of a kind of charm. But only partly. Men were simply drawn to her. Not just as lovers, as friends. They might, at times, be neglectful of her, forget to consider her feelings. Rarely, however, were they deliberately hurtful. She didn’t need to worry that their hearts would close against her suddenly and for no reason. (Earl McGrath—I’ll introduce you to him properly in the next chapter—was the exception to the rule. Or maybe Earl McGrath was the exception that proved the rule since Earl McGrath took pleasure in making social mischief in the way that a certain type of amoral female takes pleasure in making social mischief.) She trusted them. And she looked to them for approval, sensing that they were likely to give it.
As a man’s woman, Eve naturally turned to men—George, Mel, a few others—for advice on Travel Broadens. She’d soon raise her sights.
* * *
It was the spring of 1964. Eve decided to drop a line to the preeminent novelist of the day, Joseph Heller, whose black comedy Catch-22 had knocked her sideways when she read it the year before in Europe. “I had a little office up at my house on Deronda,” said Deanne Mencher. “In my memory, I see Eve sitting at my desk. She’s coming up with the idea to send this guy a letter and is agonizing over what to say.”
What she said:
April 14, 1964
Dear Joseph Heller:
A very terrible thing happened to me. I was born a girl. It would be O.K. if I were ugly or something or even startlingly unattractive, but as luck would have it, I’m gorgeous, occasionally. Here’s the thing. I wrote this fabulous book and I’m trying to get it published. So, I show it to people, and they say, “Gee, this is a fabulous book! Let’s hop into bed. I can get it published for you.” And that wouldn’t be so bad either only everyone is so old and ugly and untalented. It always winds up with me running out of an apartment, clutching my manuscript to my over-developed chest, screaming obscenities all the way home on the bus, usually in a wet bathing suit.
Oh, Joseph Heller, what do you think I should do? I’m only 20 years old and this has happened 8 times already and pretty soon I’m going to run out of people and agents. I’m poor besides.
Sincerely yours,
Eve Babitz
What he said back:
May 26, 1964
Dear Eve:
I did receive the manuscript and did read it with much, much pleasure. I think it is eminently readable, but probably not publishable (there is a difference) but I thought we ought to try anyway. Good as it is, it will require a great amount of editing, more certainly than I could do for you by mail and more possibly than an editor would care to do… But since you have written it, and since I would like to see you grow old, fat, and prosperous at an early age, I will, if you have no objection, show the manuscript to my own editor at Simon & Schuster [Robert Gottlieb] and, after he murmurs some unconvincing excuse, to someone I know at Dell-Delacorte, for I know they are looking desperately for books and go wild over dirty ones like yours.
Joseph Heller
What Eve had done a few months prior with the Wasser-Duchamp photo she’d done again with the letter to Heller: played for a famous and significantly older man—Heller was then forty, a married father of two—the sexy young thing while also kidding the idea of playing the sexy young thing. It was artist as pinup. Eve as Marilyn.
Her second artistic success was thus an extension of the breakthrough she made with her first: same method, different medium.
* * *
And yet both artistic successes were ultimately artistic failures.
The Wasser-Duchamp photo got Hopps to refocus his attention on her. “It made him return my phone calls, which was what I wanted out of life,” she told me. But it wasn’t what she wanted out of life. Or at least it wasn’t all she wanted. She also wanted a show at the only gallery in L.A. that mattered in her mind, the gallery Hopps started—Ferus—and that she didn’t get. She was turned down.
The turn-down she received at the Ferus clubhouse, Barney’s, was of a more subtle variety. Some of the Ferus-Barney’s artists understood what she was, how special. “Eve was our Kiki of Montparnasse,” said Ed Ruscha. Others, though, did not. “I liked Eve, but I didn’t like being around her—she was always trying to get in your pants,” said Billy Al Bengston. (Victorian notions of feminine decorum had no place in twentieth-century bohemia, yet there they were.) A little ditty was composed in Eve’s dishonor: “Eve Bah-bitz / With the great big tits.” Observed art critic Dave Hickey, in and around Barney’s during this period, “Men artists are very, very welcoming of women artists who are ugly, but if they happen to be beautiful and sexy, the men hate them. A lot of those guys were scared of Eve. Most guys don’t deal well with erotic charisma.”
Eve put up a defiant front in response. “I thought I was good and my mother who was good thought I was good, and those were the only two opinions I cared about,” she said. Still, it was a nasty reception, and I’m sure her feelings were hurt.
And then there was her letter to Heller. It worked better than she ever could have imagined. It led to an introduction to Robert Gottlieb, one of the most powerful editors in the land. In the end, though, it didn’t work at all, because Gottlieb would pass on Travel Broadens.
I asked Eve why he passed.
“Gottlieb said the book needed more. I didn’t know what he meant by ‘more,’ and I didn’t try to find out. I just thought, ‘Uh-oh,’ and that was it.”
Because I, unlike Eve, am incapable of leaving a cryptic remark alone, I said, “What does ‘Uh-oh’ mean? Were you upset? You must’ve been.”
“Not really,” she said. “I didn’t care.”
“No?”
“They wanted me to be the new Françoise Sagan and Travel Broadens to be the new Bonjour Tristesse [Sagan’s scandalous novel, published in 1954, when Sagan was eighteen].”
“They told you that? They said that’s what they wanted?”
Eve bit her thumbnail, impatient. “No, but I knew they did. And it seemed horrible to me to wind up like Françoise Sagan—miserable.”
I waited for her to explain miserable how. When she didn’t, I said, “Explain—miserable how?”
“Françoise Sagan was a psychotic depressive.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“I could just tell. And it was fame that made her that way.” Eve said this with a flat finality.
I sighed, changed the subject.
* * *
Eve’s ambivalence about fame was real. (After all, she’s the person who posed nude and then edited out her face, choosing the photograph in which her hair functioned like one of those black censor bars.) Her indifference to rejection, however, was not real, was fake, a cover for devastation. “Eve was so woundable,” said Mirandi. “She didn’t seem it, only she was. She could barely bring herself to write a thank-you letter to Robert Gottlieb. She couldn’t bring herself to, actually. She started, but then she had to stop.”
