Didion and babitz, p.7
Didion and Babitz, page 7
Spend time with Andy Warhol. “We used to meet at Bickford’s [cafeteria]. We both ordered the English muffins. He was so wonderful and sweet.”
Made time with Joseph Heller. “I saw Joe and I couldn’t resist. He was great because his idea of a date was to take me to a Chinese restaurant.”
Befriended Carol Granison, a proofreader at EVO. “Carol looked just like me except she was Black.”
Didn’t befriend Edie Sedgwick, a fellow Slum Goddess. “I never met Edie. I didn’t want to. I knew she was obnoxious, so I stayed out of her way.”
Ran into Jim Morrison. “I saw him in the Village and couldn’t believe it. He stayed over in my one-room, no-room apartment in the slums. We drank enough Italian Swiss Colony Vin Rose that night to make anyone outside rock ’n’ roll sick.”
Worked for Timothy Leary. “He made me type all his lectures, and he couldn’t write. He loved speed and gave it to everybody. I love speed, too, but it was still too high a price to pay, typing up all those goddamned lectures of his.”
Got busted by G. Gordon Liddy, future mastermind of the Watergate break-in. “Actually, it was Tim Leary who got busted, but I was there. It was at that estate of his [in] Millbrook—that mansion with the Buddhas all over the place. I don’t know why the cops didn’t bust me, too. Maybe they thought I was cute.”
Connected Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí. “One of my favorite things I ever did. Dalí was at the St. Regis, and I took Frank Zappa with me. We drank Chartreuse and ate hash candy.”
And, most important, took a tip from Walter Hopps.
From a letter she wrote to Sol and Mae:
What happened was that one day [Carol Granison and I] took a little LSD (about last May 12th) and we wandered into this gallery that Chico told me to go to and there were those Joseph Cornell collages that I’ve mentioned about five thousand times in the past months and that’s when it was all over about what I was going to do as far as art is concerned.
Cornell was the Eureka! moment for Eve. “I’d always considered myself a prodigy at art,” she said. “But what Joseph Cornell was doing was so beyond anything I’d ever seen or even thought of. Afterward I went out and bought all these magazines to make my collages, which is when I started doing art madly.”
That Eve should have received Cornell as a revelation isn’t altogether surprising. His work was homespun and pie-faced and Americana, and, at the same time, sophisticated and surrealist and European. He did boxes as well as collages, and every box was a private reverie or fantasy. A private movie theater, too. Cornell was an idolater of Hollywood. He’d make boxed tributes to Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, and—of course, naturally—Marilyn Monroe. “Custodian II (Silent Dedication to MM),” featuring a fragment of a constellation chart, a chunk of driftwood, and a gold ring with a chain, is one of his most mysterious and moving pieces.
* * *
Seeing the Cornell show both clarified and advanced Eve’s artistic ambition. She’d found her new passion: collage. What’s more, she’d found a way to fuse it with her other new passion: rock ’n’ roll. She’d make rock ’n’ roll album covers from her collages, and thereby outmaneuver the insult and condescension of the Ferus-Barney’s artists. (In rock ’n’ roll, fucking didn’t disqualify you; it put you in the running.)
Realizing that she’d got what she came for and didn’t have to stay a second longer, Eve put her collages on a bus, herself and her cat on a plane. “In New York, I was blind, thrusting myself here and there,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to leave.”
And then, one year to the day after she arrived, she was gone.
I. Eve also remembered meeting Hutton on her eighteenth birthday and at a party, though at a different party, a wild party she went to after her family party. But Mencher was absolutely adamant that she had it right; Eve had it wrong. “Of course I introduced Eve to Brian,” she told me. “What the fuck do you think? Brian was my dear, dear friend. We were very thick. Very, very thick. I was in his acting class. He thought I was a brilliant actress, which made me love him even more. He would have jazz people over to his place, and we’d hang out until three, four in the morning. Eve didn’t have anything to do with any of that. Not a fucking thing.”
II. Though it’s probably Welles. Mel Welles was an actor, best known for playing Mr. Mushnik in the 1960 low-budget classic The Little Shop of Horrors.
III. I know for certain that Eve never gave it to Joan because Mirandi gave it to me. It’s tacked to the corkboard above my desk.
IV. In one of the boxes was a postcard addressed to “Senator Theadore [sic, plus wrong—Ted wasn’t Theodore, he was Edward] Kennedy c/o Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.” It read: Dear Senator Kennedy,
Thank you for your tolerance and good manners at the hearing. Mr. Tannenbaum said that you might get furious with us, but you were very understanding.
I can see that you people must be in a very tough spot. You will surely be able to arrive at a thoughtful conclusion.
Good luck.
Peace Love
Eve
P.S. We like answering questions.
Eve couldn’t have actually mailed this postcard, otherwise it would be in a box in Ted Kennedy’s closet, not hers. But she got close. On it, a return address (147 Avenue A / NYC, NY / 10009). A stamp (George Washington, 5¢), too.
CHAPTER 2 Social Masterpieces
Eve has made it, Reader. It’s 1967, the year she first walked into Joan’s house on Franklin Avenue.
So, who was Joan in 1967? A Joan who was not yet Joan Didion.
She’d published her first book, a novel, Run River, in 1963, when she was living in New York. Run River was assured and arresting. It was also traditional, a generational drama with marriages and divorces, christenings and funerals, changes of fortune, betrayals—probably the reason critics and audiences paid it little mind. (“Traditional” can so easily translate to “dated,” “corny,” “irrelevant.”) A painful outcome for any writer, extra painful for one who wanted to be noticed—nay, spectacular—so badly.
Undoubtedly Joan was a genius. But it isn’t enough to be a genius. You must also be lucky: right time, right place.
Joan published her second book, the nonfiction collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in 1968 (right time), while she was living in L.A., at 7406 Franklin Avenue (right place). In contrast to Run River, Slouching, its title piece set in the counterculture capital of Haight-Ashbury, where the center isn’t holding, not even close, felt contemporary. Dangerously contemporary: a drug dealer eating macrobiotic, a five-year-old tripping on hallucinogens.
It wasn’t. What it was: an old-fashioned Gothic tricked out in New Journalism clothing. Sometimes, though, a costume change is all it takes. Slouching was a cultural sensation. It made Joan one, too.
In an outtake from Betsy Blankenbaker’s 2000 documentary, New York in the Fifties, Joan and John Gregory Dunne sit side by side. Dunne says to the camera, “[Slouching] was reviewed by someone in the New York Times,” then to Joan, “Boom!—all of a sudden, you were a figure.” Time magazine commissioned portraits, sending a contract photographer, Julian Wasser (yes, him again).
Joan Didion, 1968: Cool Rider.
(© Julian Wasser. Courtesy of Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, California)
Wasser’s name might be unfamiliar to you, this book the very first time you’re hearing it, but the picture you have of Joan in your mind is likely one he took. I’ll jog your memory: Joan, hair parted down the middle and flowing past her shoulders, in a long jersey dress, loose yet clinging. Her expression is defiant, dreamy, maybe a little bored. In several shots, she’s leaning against a Corvette Stingray, or sitting in the driver’s seat, elbow on the window frame, a Pall Mall smoldering between her fingers. Her props give her an authority, a swagger even—the cocksure tilt of that cigarette, the blunt phallic force of that car—but her presence is chaste. (How could Joan be sexual? That desire, erotic or otherwise, might snarl for satisfaction within an aura so cool, a form so slight, seems inconceivable.)
Joan, thirty-three, had at last become Joan Didion. And she’d done it on the Franklin Avenue scene.
* * *
7406 Franklin Avenue was Joan’s house; 7406 Franklin Avenue was Earl McGrath’s scene.
How to explain Earl McGrath, a person who defies explanation? Eve gave it a shot in a 1970 letter to artist Chris Blum. “Would you like to hear about my friend Earl?” she asked, and then proceeded to detail McGrath’s early life: first as a runaway Catholic schoolboy from a one-horse town in the Midwest; next as a short-order cook, a merchant marine, the amour of a Zen monk (Richard Baker), the amour of an avant-garde poet (Frank O’Hara). After moving to New York, he took a wife (Countess Camilla Pecci-Blunt) and a job at a studio (Twentieth Century–Fox) before taking acid, at which point he headed to California. “Earl is tall & slim & has a mustache & laughs & says funny things & gets shocked at even funnier things,” she wrote. “Earl is wonderful at social masterpieces.”
It was McGrath who met Eve first. On a June morning in 1967, Eve, twenty-four, lay in the bed of Peter Pilafian, road manager for the folk-pop group the Mamas and the Papas, when through the door breezed McGrath. McGrath was infatuated with Pilafian. Once he got an eyeful of a sleep-tousled Eve, though, he redirected the flow of his lovey-dovey. A romance, passionate yet sexless, began.
“Earl invited me to dinner & I went & didn’t know what to wear,” Eve told Blum. “I was uncomfortable at first but Earl’s personality and energy are such that once the people got inside… all outside social factors were dropped. We might as well not have had names. We were at a benefit for Mr. Kite (Earl) and he loved us with this funny intelligent brilliant radiance like a diamond net. The next day he would call us all up and ask us questions like ‘What did you say to Mrs. Dunn—she thinks you are the most brilliant person in California?’ [“Mrs. Dunn”—and please note the misspelling—is how Eve refers to Joan in her letters and journal from this period.] The best party he had was one where everything finally got so splendid, so soft like gold silk & so graceful that I really thought I was in heaven.”
Mr. Kite: Earl McGrath.
McGrath had a circle. “When Earl came here two or three years ago, he knew no one except the upper crust jet set he’d been accustomed to hanging out with,” wrote Eve. “After about six months he had created a society of people who were not only the most talented around but who also all shared these incredible parties… He has the best young artists, writers, actors, poets with established people.” The established people included Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Larry Rivers, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, Dennis Hopper.
McGrath also had an inner circle. In it:
Michelle Phillips, a Mama in the Mamas and the Papas. (Eve on Phillips: “Beautiful and completely impossible.”)
Anne Marshall, a fashion model and Phillips’s closest friend. (Eve on Marshall: “Anne went on dates with Cary Grant and Mike Nichols. She was blonde and fox-furred and was always flying to New York and London for the weekend. But she was still a lady. She had manners and wrote thank-you notes. I once saw her wear a lynx coat to a rock ’n’ roll concert, and it brought down the house. She and Michelle did everything together.”)
Ron Cooper, the Toshiro Mifune–looking artist. (Eve on Cooper: “If you think Satyricon was weird, you should get into Ron Cooper’s clutches for a while.”)
Peter Pilafian, not just the road manager for the Mamas and the Papas, the electric violinist, as well. (Eve on Pilafian: “I’ll go for any violinist no matter what. I see a violinist and I go insane.”)
Harrison Ford, before he was Han Solo. (Phillips on Ford: “I didn’t even know Harrison was an actor. I remember getting dragged to Star Wars at ten a.m. on a Saturday morning. I was sitting there, watching the screen, and all of a sudden Harrison comes on and I gasped and said, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’ ”)
Michelle Phillips’s pot dealer, Harrison Ford, identified in Eve’s 1969 scrapbook as “Harry.”
And, of course, Joan and Dunne. (Cooper on Joan and Dunne: “I’d go over to their house all the time. Joan and I had a crush on each other, a junior high school kind of crush, but nothing happened. We’d hang out in her backyard, talk, have a beer, a cocktail, whatever.”)
The relationship between Joan and McGrath was a long-standing one, deep and full of funny gallantry. Another romance in which consummation was unthinkable. “Earl and I met in 1962, immediately loved each other, and never stopped,” said Joan to Vanity Fair in 2016. “I very clearly remember sitting on the front steps [of the Franklin Avenue house] talking to Earl… We gave parties together.”
The most storied of those parties took place on September 6, 1968. Joan’s nephew Griffin Dunne, in junior high and up way past his bedtime, was a guest. “My aunt Joan had written this big deal book. I mean, Slouching Towards Bethlehem was over my head. But when I saw an ad for it on a billboard on Sunset even I understood that something important was happening. So, Joan and John were having this party for Tom Wolfe, who was in L.A. promoting The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Joan called my mother to invite her and said, ‘Janis Joplin is going to come after her show. Why don’t you bring Griffin?’ I just wandered around and sort of watched adults. Earl and Harrison went as movable art objects. Earl wore all white and Harrison wore all black. They stood back-to-back. And Earl, in white, would start a conversation with someone, then Harrison, in black, would continue it. I think they were stoned out of their minds. I was just waiting for Janis. And no one was really wanting to talk to a thirteen-year-old, except this bald guy in a Nehru jacket and a chain around his neck. He said, ‘Boy, come here quick, quick, quick.’ And he holds my wrist really tight, puts me in a seat next to him, and goes, ‘I have taken ze acid, and I’m having ze bummer. You are ze only ray of light in zis horrible place.’ It was Otto Preminger [Austro-Hungarian-born director of Laura and Saint Joan]. Anyway, there was a parking valet, but most of the cars were stolen in front of the house. Joan complained, and the valet said, ‘Well, I didn’t know you lived in such a ratty neighborhood!’ ”
Griffin Dunne and his mother, Lenny, guests at the Tom Wolfe party on Franklin Avenue in 1968.
In 1970, Joan’s novel Play It as It Lays came out. Play It was a true product of the Franklin Avenue scene because a nightmare version of the Franklin Avenue scene served as backdrop: the L.A. of the very fast and very famous; Hollywood, L.A. But also because the Franklin Avenue scene was where Joan got her ending.
“Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town,” said Eve. “I remember her once lying down on the floor of my apartment [during] a dinner party—Joan and John were there, Earl was there—and telling that amazing story about her friend Tamar.”
That amazing story about Phillips’s friend Tamar: Tamar Hodel, twenty-six, in despair over a failed love affair, decided to kill herself. She asked a teenage Phillips for help. “I begged Tamar for three days not to commit suicide,” said Phillips. “Finally I said, ‘If that’s what you really want to do, I’m not going to stand in your way.’ You know, when you’re seventeen, you’re really vulnerable and very insecure about everything. So, anyway, Tamar took twenty-six Seconal, then said, ‘I want to be dead, but I don’t want to look dead.’ She went to the bathroom and was putting makeup on. The Seconal hit her all at once, and she went down. Small as I was, I managed to rock her back and forth into the bed. I lay down next to her and went to sleep. The next thing I remember was John [Phillips, Michelle’s soon-to-be husband] standing there tickling my feet.” An ambulance was summoned, and Hodel, fortunately, saved. “Joan called me up the next day and said, ‘Is it all right if I use that story you told in the book I’m working on?’ I said, ‘Go ahead, it’s all yours.’ ”
In Play It’s climax, Maria Wyeth lies in bed with her best friend, BZ, as he overdoses on Seconal. Maria and BZ fall asleep. They’re found the next morning by Maria’s husband. It’s too late to summon an ambulance, and BZ, unfortunately, isn’t saved.
Play It was an instant classic. A great Hollywood book, to be placed on the same shelf as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. And Play It is a Hollywood book not only because it’s about Hollywood people, but also because it’s a book that’s (subliminally) a movie.
As the lead, Maria Wyeth, Joan cast herself. Check out the author photo—another Wasser—on the jacket and you’ll see what I mean. It could be a headshot: a young woman, delicately pretty, with a slightly pained look on her face, as if she felt a migraine coming on. (Those who’d read “Migraine,” Joan’s piece in the June 29, 1968, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, would know that she suffered from the malady; and one of the first things Maria tells us about herself is, “From my mother I inherited my looks and a tendency to migraine.”) This young woman has a gaze so direct it goes straight through the eye of the camera and into the viewer’s eye. An actor’s trick. Or a movie star’s. Fitting since Joan is playing a sometime actor and movie star. (Primary among Maria’s credits are the exploitation biker picture Angel Beach and the verité-like Maria.) Fitting, as well, since Joan didn’t have readers, as writers do. No, she had what actors and movie stars have. She had fans.
And if you’d caught the Wasser shots of Joan in Time, you’d know that, like Maria, who soothes her jangled nerves by cruising the nerve pathways of the city—the San Diego Freeway to the Harbor to the Hollywood, etc.—Joan drives a Corvette. As you read Play It, you can’t help but picture Joan cracking hard-boiled eggs on the steering wheel, as Maria does; or drinking Coca-Colas at Union 76 stations, one of Maria’s habits. And you can’t help it because Joan has designed it so you can’t. She’s as deliberate a creation as any of her books. (In 1965, Norman Mailer, watching her at a party, observed, “She’s a perfect advertisement for herself.”)
