Didion and babitz, p.6
Didion and Babitz, page 6
The thank-you letter that Eve started, stopped. It contained the date: June 16, 1964. A greeting: “Dear Mr. Gottlieb.” And a single incomplete sentence: “I’m very grateful to you for your kind note on June 1st and I meant to [reply] only things got very confused—”
She would not make another serious attempt to write for seven years.
* * *
And Eve’s failures weren’t just artistic. They were romantic, as well.
“Brian and Eve were in love,” said Mirandi. “Both of them, with each other. Eve was sexually in the bag for Brian, but so was Brian for Eve. He couldn’t get enough of her in that way. Not that it mattered in the end. Brian was never going to leave his wife. Eve fought him on this, but he just wasn’t going to do it, and that’s all there was to it. So they’d get together on Thursdays—that was their night for years.”
The situation was even bleaker with Hopps. “Eve and Walter dated each other passionately,” said Mirandi. “They broke up over the Duchamp thing but got back together. Meanwhile, Walter was still married to Shirley, though he swore up and down that he was going to divorce her. But he was also seeing another girl—at least one other. Then Eve said, ‘I’m so great you should be with me.’ He said, ‘Okay, let’s talk.’ They went to a restaurant for dinner and, afterward, for a drive. He pulled the car over and out of his pocket brought a beautiful little jewelry box—Moroccan, if I remember right, a mauve-y color. He presented it to her and naturally she thought there was a ring inside. But it wasn’t a ring. It was a silver bullet. And she understood from it that he was telling her something. He was saying, ‘This isn’t going to happen. We aren’t going to be a couple like that.’ She was very young, and very disappointed. The dramatic effect of the box spoke to her. And she kept it, always, never lost it or threw it out.”
There’s a photo that captures what I imagine Eve was feeling in that moment. Charles Brittin took it in early 1966, and I regard it as the companion to the Wasser-Duchamp photo because it features the two non-present presences in the Wasser-Duchamp photo: Walter Hopps and Eve’s face.
One man, two mistresses: Walter Hopps, Eve, Jay DeFeo.
The photo is of a party that’s gotten out of hand—people packed together, singly and in groups, vibrating with energy, ready for anything. At the still center is a table, bodies breaking and eddying around it. On the far side is Eve. Hopps, in his signature G-man suit, sits next to her. He’s in mid-lip-lick, and light glints off the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes, making him appear a bit wary, a bit compromised. As well he might, out in public with his baby-doll mistress.
Another mistress, the woman with the high cheekbones and dark hair, chicly short, is leaning into him: Jay DeFeo, thirty-six, from San Francisco, the rare female artist represented by Ferus. Her head is almost touching his. What suggestion—or threat—is she about to whisper in his ear?
It’s Eve, though, who’s the revelation. She seems out of sync with the party, her mood serious, subdued. And, in contrast to the other guests, all of whom, except for Hopps, are done up in the contemporary style, she looks timeless—out of time—in a simple black frock. Her face is turned to the camera, and as I gaze at it, I suddenly understand why she hid it with her hair when she was with Wasser and Duchamp: it’s so naked. (As exposed as her body is in the Wasser-Duchamp photo is as exposed as her face—i.e., her soul—is in the Brittin.)
Eve, while scarcely out of her teens, has been assured and decisive in her actions. There was the chess match with Duchamp, of course. And the fan letter–cum–mash note to Joseph Heller. Also, the liaisons with married men. She refused to be intimidated by the opacity of adult sexual life, immersed herself in it instead, and in a way that was beyond reckless, was willfully oblivious to risks and consequences.
Her actions, though, are at odds with her feelings, which are considerably more delicate, nuanced, tentative. As this photo reveals. It’s unfinished Eve that’s on display here. The Eve whose rawness and tenderness are still raw, still tender, haven’t yet hardened into an attitude or style, an armor to protect her from the world. Discernible in her expression is the pain that the romance with Hopps was causing her, the romance with Hutton already had.
And so she runs away from the pain. Runs all the way to New York City.
* * *
Two months before she ran, Eve had a conversion experience. “I was not culturally deprived, okay? My father had the same hat size as Albert Einstein. He got a Fulbright grant, a Ford grant, and then another Fulbright grant. He was this genius violinist and musicologist, and the only rock ’n’ roll record he allowed in the house was Chuck Berry. And when I first heard the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and the Byrds—I mean, I didn’t think they could play. Then [in January 1966] David Crosby took me to see the harmonica player Paul Butterfield at a club on Sunset called the Trip.”
One performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was all it took. “I couldn’t believe it. Paul was so good and his band was so good. Up until then, I’d thought of the Sunset Strip as older. You know, as a place for Bing Crosby and people like that. But then came rock ’n’ roll.”
Rock ’n’ roll, which was fueled by sex. Rock ’n’ roll, which burned clean.
By early March, Eve had a new boyfriend: John Densmore. Densmore was the drummer for a band called Sound Machine, the lead singer of which, Clem Floyd, was Mirandi’s boyfriend. Densmore was also the drummer for a band called the Doors, the lead singer of which, Jim Morrison, was Mirandi’s best friend’s boyfriend.
“I already knew Jim through Pam [Courson],” said Mirandi. “But I didn’t know him as a singer since I’d never watched the Doors perform. Then one day, after John Densmore had rehearsed with Sound Machine, I drove John and his drum kit to this little hole-in-the-wall club on the Strip called the London Fog. The Doors were doing a sound check. I was at the beginning of an acid trip and sat in the back and listened. Well, I mean, my mind was blown. I couldn’t believe that Jim, who I’d never found particularly attractive or interesting, was the same person crooning and shouting into that microphone. After I got home, I called Eve. I told her, ‘You have to see this guy. He’s Edith Piaf with a dick.’ ”
A description that was hard to resist. Eve didn’t even try. She headed straight for the London Fog. “The first time I saw Jim, he didn’t want to be onstage. He wanted to be three seats away. There were only about seven people in the room. He was in love with Pam at that time and I was actually dating another guy in his band. I managed to fuck him when no one was looking.”
An excerpt from “Jim,” a piece Eve wrote for Joan (above the title, a note: “Joan—for your Morrisoniana files—Eve xoxoxo”), but never gave to Joan:III
“Uh, hi,” Jim drawled.
“Take me home,” I replied.
“Home?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re not really going to just stay here now, are you, playing?”
“We don’t play. We work.”
“Oh,” I said, “well, what about tomorrow night?”
So he came over the next night.
But he refused take her to bed until she consented to take him to see her dad. More from “Jim”:
One of the things I told [Jim] was how my ridiculous father happened to be playing in an early music concert before a bunch of old ladies in Pasadena that night.
“Oh, let’s go,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” I replied.
“No, I’m not,” he said. “I’m really interested.”
So there we were, parking this ’52 Cadillac I had outside Cal Tech where all these old ladies were going inside an auditorium to hear chamber music. And there was Jim wearing this suede outfit [with] pants tight enough to look like paint and this jacket which was bad enough except that without a shirt underneath his perfect lithe young rock n’ roll torso shone through like a marble statue.
By the end of the first half during Intermission, I had had enough and I said, “We just have to go.”
“Why?” he pleaded.
“Because,” I said, “you can’t be here. Listening to this. You just can’t.”
The tone of this passage is comic. Eve is telling a funny story about Morrison and herself. But you know that tragedy is coming because of who she compares him to: “Those cheekbones of his, which made the way he looked with his vulnerable, yearning gaze, like Marilyn Monroe.”
Morrison got to Eve. And a bond formed between them. Not a bond of the flesh. (“I can’t remember what it was like sleeping with Jim Morrison because around him you were bound to be so drunk that things like that just slipped your mind.”) A bond of the spirit. And this bond would prove taut yet elastic, evocative yet uncertain, improbable yet unbreakable. I’ll talk about it more, but later.
What you need to know now: that Morrison was the start of a new life in L.A. for Eve. Only that start couldn’t get started yet. “Three days after I met Jim,” she said, “I moved out of L.A.”
* * *
On March 6, 1966, Eve’s world went from color to black and white when she left the lustrous pastels of her Umbrellas of Cherbourg–themed bungalow on Bronson Avenue in Hollywood for the urban-blight gray of a one-bedroom in a tenement on the Lower East Side.
A snatch of dialogue between me and Eve on the subject:
ME: Living in New York—how was it for you?
EVE: That experience was, like, totally downhill and bananas in every way possible.
ME: What made you go?
EVE: I decided to spend a year there even though I didn’t want to.
ME: Well, so, why did you?
EVE: To complete my education.
Complete her education, by which Eve meant, of course, reach maturation. She wasn’t an adult yet, and she knew instinctively that she couldn’t become one in L.A. She had to go elsewhere. To the opposite of L.A. And not just the opposite of L.A., in opposition to L.A. L.A. was, for her, effortless, a piece of cake. And she needed to be in a place that demanded exertion, endurance, defiance. “Anything difficult, as far as I’ve been able to determine, seems to work, and anything easy is just kidding yourself,” she once wrote.
New York was Eve not kidding herself.
* * *
Her first job was at the East Village Other, an underground paper. Job as what, though, is the question. “I thought I was supposed to be EVO’s publicist,” she said, “but I never could actually figure out what my job there was. So I threw a party.”
A giant one. “It was an April Fools’ Ball. It was held at some place on Bleecker and it was so packed I couldn’t move. I was on acid. The Fugs played. A group that staged happenings—Fluxus—was there. Yoko Ono was part of Fluxus, so she was there, too. Her job was to make crepe paper streamers and then toss them all around. It was a den of iniquity, but the streamers made it look like a high school gym on prom night.”
Later that spring, Eve, along with EVO cofounder Walter Bowart, testified about the ameliorative effects of LSD before a Senate committee that included Ted Kennedy.IV The event was covered by the New York Times. From the article “Senators Urged to Take LSD ‘Trip,’ ” in the paper’s June 16, 1966, edition: “Eve Babitz, 23, a strawberry blonde, remarked of marijuana: ‘It’s not fattening, you don’t get a hangover, it’s not addicting… Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother.’ Asked after the hearing why she had not persuaded her grandmother to try, Miss Babitz replied: ‘She’s turned on already.’ ”
And it wasn’t just Eve’s name appearing in print. As Playboy had a Playmate of the Month, so EVO had a Slum Goddess. Eve was April’s. Alongside two photos of her in a low-cut sweater, her hair windblown, her smile white-toothed and ear-to-ear, was a brief introduction: “I’m Eve, fresh from California Beatle-people. Hollywood & Vine, it’s hard to make up my mind.”
Hollywood & Vine, it’s hard to make up her mind.
The Slum Goddess title simultaneously couldn’t have mattered less and couldn’t have meant more. “It wasn’t anything,” said Eve. “It was something fat men with cigars came up with, but I had to have it.” Maybe because it offered irrefutable proof that she was a young woman making noise, a splash. In any case, she went to considerable trouble to obtain it. “There was this girl—Robin. And Robin was supposed to be Slum Goddess for that issue. She was prettier than I was and she wore peacock earrings. She should’ve won, only I did. She’d get me back, though. She’d steal one of my boyfriends.”
The boyfriend: Ralph Metzner, German, a PhD from Harvard, co-writer with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert of 1964’s The Psychedelic Experience. Robin, according to Metzner, was not the problem. “At the time Eve and I were together, I was using the I Ching. In one of our lovers’ discussions around the issue of ‘where is this relationship going,’ we decided to consult it. The main pronouncement was ‘The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden.’ I interpreted that to mean we should discontinue our relationship. Eve, understandably, was pissed. But the oracle was right! The maiden was powerful.”
* * *
Eve, it seemed, was falling into the same florid patterns in New York that she’d fallen into in L.A. Except something was different. She was different. There was in her an underlying sadness or dismay over what had happened—what hadn’t happened—with Brian Hutton and Walter Hopps. And that she would have to go it alone in life was starting to look like a distinct possibility.
The feelings you could see in that Charles Brittin photo you can hear in this letter, written by Eve to Mirandi on October 21, 1966:
These days I’m trying very hard to figure out what it is I’m doing. I’ve thought of a lot of things and one day the thought that I might never live with a man or get married dawned on me. I thought in my mind that there are only three men I got smashed on anyway and two of them were inaccessible (Brian and Chico) and the third was John Barry [an artist], for some reason. And then I got a letter from John Barry. So he wants me to come to Oklahoma, drop everything and marry him and live in Oklahoma. Only, shit! Heaven forbid—Oklahoma! My God! So it turns out I can’t do it.
Clearly, Eve was struggling to come to terms with who and what she was. It wasn’t until 1974, at age thirty, that she’d declare for the first time, in print, her intention never to marry—“My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster”—and she did it with a jollity, a bravado. She more than accepted her identity, she gloried in it, seeing the artistic intelligence that isolated her not as a thorn in her side but a star in her crown.
Yet it wasn’t ever thus, as this letter, written when she was just twenty-three and still unformed, shows. (That thing I said earlier about her being immune to the biological and social imperatives doing a number on the rest of her sex? Not true. She only appeared immune.) She was getting an inkling of where her personality was driving her, of what her fate might be—how stark, how lonely, how extreme—and it scared her.
To be Eve Babitz was a daunting prospect even if you happened to be Eve Babitz.
* * *
Eve left EVO midsummer. “Walter Bowart said I was embezzling. But I didn’t know how much I was supposed to be paid, so I took as much as I thought I deserved. I guess it was too much. He had to find me another job uptown. I worked for a guy who was an ad salesman for magazines. I hated it. I hated being put on hold.”
It was more, though, than being put on hold. To her mother, she wrote, “The girls around here—where I work—cannot look beautiful. The whole system’s against them looking beautiful. They have to have their hair done and they have to look a certain way and it is impossible for them to look decent.”
Reading these words, I think of something Nick Carraway said at the end of The Great Gatsby: “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us unadaptable to Eastern life.” Eve, too, possessed that deficiency. She had a heightened sensitivity to a type of beauty that New York refused to acknowledge—worse, sought to destroy—and therefore she and New York could not comfortably coexist.
Could not even uncomfortably coexist. What Eve wasn’t able to say at the time in a letter to her mother, she was able to say years later in a letter to Joseph Heller:
Remember when I lived in New York and had to go to work on the subway every day and I had LSD relapses in the Pan Am Bldg when I went deaf and all the visuals looked cardboard flat?… A guy sat on my back and woke me up one morning there in N.Y., Joe, with his [hand] over my mouth and his voice telling me ‘Don’t scream.’ Me being shallow me, I said “why not?” and he was so de-romanticised he finally grumbled ‘Oh, o.k., shit,’ and swung his legs off me and departed back out the fire escape… The worst thing about that gullible rapist was that I had a brand new kitten which I was positive he’d thrown out the window because it was obnoxious and mewed all the time. I went looking out all the windows and into the street in the 13° weather in my bathrobe with a butcher knife[,] and the kitten was nowhere, not in the garbage cans, not out any windows, just nowhere. I finally had to come inside and there the stupid cat had been inside the bedsprings throughout… She hadn’t woken up. Of course the guy and I did keep our voices down, not wanting to disturb anybody.
It was as though New York to Eve wasn’t a city in the real world so much as a forest in a fairy tale—grotesque and disjointed, glinting with menace, drenched in id. And to make it out was her hero’s journey, a test of her entire being.
* * *
Yet if Eve was wretched in New York, she was often too excited to notice. Things she did while there:
