On February 9, 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show and, in Eve’s words, “changed It All.” Only It didn’t change. Not for her. Not right away.
She spent a few more years as an artist (using as a studio the bungalow behind Sol and Mae’s house, where she also slept) and an artist’s moll (was one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends). She lived briefly, very, with Ron Cooper. Cooper: “Eve decided she wanted to move in with me. I wasn’t convinced this was a good idea. I’m not going to tell you what she did to convince me, but convince me she did. I drove over to her parents’ place in my 1954 Ford station wagon and packed up her stuff. We went back to my loft downtown. She stayed a couple weeks, then she told me she’d had enough.” During the day, she was at the L.A. Free Press, an underground paper, working as a receptionist. (“I learned how to type because my mother said I should.”) During the night, she was at Barney’s. (“The floor was covered in sawdust and the chili cost ¢35 and it was everything that was new and terrific and exciting.”)
It isn’t that Eve was unaware of rock ’n’ roll as a phenomenon. It’s that she was unpersuaded by it. Until January 1966. “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 David Crosby took me to see the harmonica player Paul Butterfield at a club on Sunset called the Trip. I couldn’t believe it. Paul was so good and his band was so good.”
And so Eve’s ur-groupie phase gives way, at last, to her groupie groupie phase. “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. And I was so in love with Paul Butterfield. I wore all these weird outfits and fake eyelashes out to here and went to see him everywhere. Nothing I did worked. Well, it turned out he only liked square girls. I found this out later when I was at a bar with my friend Lucille, and I was wearing this tweed suit that my mother had made. He walked in and saw me and said, ‘Eve, you look wonderful!’ So I guess I was on the wrong track.”
With Paul Butterfield maybe, but not with Jim Morrison, on whom her ever-roving eye would also alight in early ’66. Eve wrote a piece about the Doors’ frontman for Esquire in 1991, timed to the release of the Oliver Stone biopic of the band. Her description of their initial encounter: “[It] took place . . . at a now-forgotten club just down on the Strip called the London Fog. . . . There were only about seven people in the room. . . . [I] propositioned him in three minutes, even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing. . . . ‘Take me home,’ I demurely offered when we were introduced.” He’d oblige, though not until the next night. It was worth the wait. “His skin was so white . . . [his mouth was] so edible.”
Eve thrilled to Morrison the heartthrob, an object of desire so supreme he was also an object of art: “Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.” Morrison the artist provoked another reaction entirely: “The Doors were embarrassing, like their name. . . . It was so corny naming yourself after something Aldous Huxley wrote. . . . Even [Jim’s] voice was embarrassing, sounding so sudden and personal and uttering such hogwash. . . . If [he] had lived in another era, he would have had a schoolteacher wife to support him while he sat at home writing ‘brilliant’ poetry.” It was Morrison’s girlfriend, Pamela Courson—erratic, aggressive, violent, sexual, nasty—who was rock ’n’ roll. Wrote Eve, “[Pamela] had guns, took heroin, and was fearless in every situation. Socially she didn’t care, emotionally she was shockproof. . . . [She was someone with] a heart embroidered on her pants over the place where her anus would be.” In short, all the things Jim pretended to be, Pamela was.
(Something I should probably have the good taste to leave out, but here goes: When I first opened the March 1991 issue of Esquire that I’d purchased on eBay, saw Eve, in its pages, make sport of Morrison’s intelligence and sensibility, his posturing and pretention—calling his poetry “brilliant” rather than brilliant was an especially brutal and welcome touch—I almost wept with relief. The piece was the second-to-last thing of hers I read, and it would have been the very last except her Fiorucci book couldn’t be had for less than $2,000 on Amazon, and I wasn’t in the mood to stick up a bank. Morrison loomed large in Eve’s private mythology. Public, as well. She used a song he wrote as the title of one of her books and referenced him in nearly all. I was scared, is what it came down to. Was afraid of finding out that she regarded him as an existential hero and symbol of brooding, youthful fatalism, the Arthur Rimbaud of her time. The idea that she had even the slightest bit in common with the girls in college who irritated me most, the preeningly sensitive arty ones, a retro “Young Lion” poster invariably, inevitably, tacked to their dorm room walls, made my stomach twist, go watery. My love for her was pure, without irony or qualification, and I wanted to keep it that way. Which is why I ducked the Esquire piece for so long. And, yes, my feelings were unreasonable, but they lay beyond reason, and I was at their mercy. Morrison, to me, was just such an appalling figure. Mawkish and moist, striving to be taken seriously and therefore impossible to take seriously—a joke, basically. Final point, and then I’ll move on: the renewal of faith in Eve that I experienced while reading “Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood” wasn’t an isolated incident, would become a recurring theme in our relationship.)
And yet, though Eve rejected Morrison, she didn’t, couldn’t, not fully anyway. When they first got together, he was twenty-two and newly slender, having dropped thirty pounds after a summer of LSD—“a mud lark . . . [who woke] up a prince.” He had, until the drinking and drugging left him bloated and ravaged, remarkable beauty, and beauty made Eve reverent. He had, too, remarkable fame, which did likewise, fame being to Eve what money was to F. Scott Fitzgerald. The very famous are different from you and me, she believes, have about them a gorgeousness, a romance, a theatricality, an air of boundless possibility and promise. She wrote, “[People] don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to fuck every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that—back when rock ’n’ roll was in flower.”
But aesthetics were only part of it. Between Eve and Morrison was an emotional pull. Morrison got to Eve. At least some aspect of him did—his mournfulness, his incomprehension, his sweetness, his grace. (Her portrait of him is extraordinary, utterly unsentimental yet deeply moving. The tenderness she feels for him sneaks up on you as you read it, as, I suspect, it did on her as she wrote it.) “[Jim] wasn’t cool, but I still loved him. . . . I couldn’t be mean to him. . . . He knew in his worst blackouts to put my diaphragm in and take my contact lenses out. . . . [And] something about him began to seem great compared to everything else that was going on.” And her impulse was to protect him from Stone, a director who “[didn’t] even like [beauty]” and whose movies were “always about horrible men doing awful stuff.” Morrison might have been a poseur, but he was also the real thing: a genuine phony. Kind of like Hollywood.
A few weeks later, on March 6, 1966, Eve moved to New York. “I decided to spend a year there, even though I didn’t want to. Why? To complete my education.” She worked as the office manager of a counterculture newspaper called the East Village Other, the type of publication that featured doctored photos of Lyndon Johnson with his head in the toilet; comics by R. Crumb; inscrutable sex ads (“Dominant iguana seeks submissive zebra”). John Wilcock, EVO’s editor in chief, met Eve when she was at the L.A. Free Press. He couldn’t get over her. Wrote Eve, “[He] talked about me so much that some girl who got around started calling me ‘Wondercunt’ before I’d even shown up, I was so famous.”
Her first task was to throw an April Fools’ Ball. Says Eve, “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.”
Playboy had a Playmate of the Month, EVO a Slum Goddess. Eve: “The Slum Goddess title was nothing, it wasn’t anything, it was something fat men with cigars came up with, but I had to have 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.”
Eve spent a lot of time with Andy Warhol. “The first time I saw Andy it was at the opening of his second Ferus show [September 30, 1963] and he was standing next to this Elvis that was silver and, like, twelve feet tall.” Eve and Warhol took to each other immediately. “Andy complimented me on my tan. He said, ‘With that tan you can do anything. Anything you do goes perfectly.’ And I thought his work was great. I got it immediately. When I was in New York, we used to meet at Bickford’s. We both ordered the English muffins.”
Eve spent a lot of time, as well, with Timothy Leary, the pied piper of LSD, though that was a less happy association. Says Eve, “New York is hot in the summer, so I got a boyfriend who had air-conditioning. Ralph Metzner. Ralph was part of Timothy Leary’s team. I hated Tim. He was an alcoholic, and he always ordered everybody around as soon as he walked into a room. 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. Ralph was the brilliant one, and everybody loved him better than Tim, and so did I. And so did Robin. Ralph’s the boyfriend of mine she stole.”
Metzner remembers the breakup slightly differently: “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. So that’s why we split. The other girl had nothing to do with it. She didn’t come until later. Oh, but Eve was a babe then. Gorgeous, just gorgeous!”
While in New York, Eve would also: introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí (“We drank Chartreuse”); get busted by G. Gordon Liddy, soon-to-be 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—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”); testify, along with Walter Bowart, EVO’s publisher, about the ameliorative effects of LSD and other narcotics before a Senate committee that included Teddy Kennedy (“They asked me how many people I knew used marijuana, and I said, ‘Everybody I know uses it except my grandmother.’ Afterward, a reporter from the New York Times wanted to know why I hadn’t turned my grandmother on, and I said, ‘Because she’s high already’ ”); become a secretary on Madison Avenue (“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”); and attend an exhibition of the artist Joseph Cornell.
It was the last that had a significant impact. Eve: “Walter [Hopps] told me to go. It was at some teeny gallery. I went with my friend Carol. Carol looked just like me except she was black. We were both on acid. I looked at Joseph Cornell’s collages and I looked at Joseph Cornell’s boxes, and it was just, like, ‘Oh.’ I’d always considered myself a prodigy at art and drawing. 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. 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 so surprising. His work is homespun and pie-faced and Americana, and, at the same time, sophisticated and European and surrealist, each box a private reverie or fantasy. A private movie theater, as well. Cornell was an idolater of Hollywood. He made box tributes to Lauren Bacall, Greta Garbo, Hedy Lamarr, and—of course, naturally—Marilyn Monroe. Custodian II (Silent Dedication to M.M.), featuring a fragment of a constellation chart, a chunk of driftwood, and a gold ring with a chain, is one of his most mysterious, romantic, and moving pieces.
Eve stayed in New York a year to the day, leaving on March 5, 1967. She put a duffel bag of her magazines for collages (“the main part of my life being centered around collages”) on a bus, and herself on a plane. She barely even told anybody she was going, so eager was she to be gone. It wasn’t so much that she hated the city as that she was temperamentally incompatible with the city. She wrote, “There are no spaces between the words [in New York], it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.”
When Eve returned to L.A., she did the same things she was doing before she left, but she was different. “I was renting my own apartment on Formosa. That’s where I was when a friend called and told me Paul Butterfield was playing in Huntington Beach. I’d finally got my license, but driving the freeway made my hair white. I could do side streets, though, so I borrowed my mother’s car and drove down. Nobody was in the audience except Stephen Stills [of Buffalo Springfield]. The rest of the band had gone, and Stephen needed a ride home. I said, ‘I’ll give you one if you let me do the art for your new record.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ I was thinking business, weird as it seems.”
And so, from the only pictures of the band she could find, a spread in the fan magazine Teen Set—“Win a Dream Date with Buffalo Neil!”—Eve created a Joseph Cornell–style collage. It became the now-iconic cover of Buffalo Springfield Again. Eve: “I also bought one of those little Brownie cameras and started bringing it with me everywhere. I figured photos would be another way to get the record companies to pay me. What I’d do was print the pictures in sepia and then hand-color them so they looked like they’d been taken thirty years before. That’s how I liked things to look—old, out of the past.”
As an album-cover designer and photographer, Eve was part of the rock ’n’ roll scene in a way she hadn’t been, was a legitimate player. Later she’d shrug off this career, laughingly refer to it as “a hoax.” What she really was, she claimed, was “a slave to skinny boys with long hair who sang and played guitar” posing as a cool-eyed professional—a groupie-plus, basically, her designer-photographer guise providing her with both a front and an alibi, as well as an all-access backstage pass. Because I’ve read her books and talked to her and talked to those off whom she cadged jobs during this period, however, I know the truth. She was serious about her art. Says John Van Hamersveld, art director of Capitol Records when he first met Eve in 1967, “She came into my office. She had her collages and her Buffalo Springfield album with her. Her reputation was as a predator. And she chased me around my desk a few times, asked me on dates. But that was just Eve playing around. Work is what she wanted from me. She was looking to get hired.” A thing about Eve I’ve learned: though she never lies, she’s not always to be believed. And I’m inclined to put more trust in this line of hers—“Become art, not decoration”—the closest she ever came to articulating an ethical code, or, for that matter, giving advice.
Eve had a hungry heart. She wrote, “I was twenty-three and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fervor, wanting to fuck my way through rock ’n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip, prowling the nights of summer.” So eagerly does Eve court corruption, so exuberantly does she participate in her degradation, so merrily does she roll along the path of sin, that she’s incorruptible, undegradable, and beyond reproach. (Has there ever been a less jaded debauchee?) She’s naughty, certainly, but bad, never. Is an innocent no matter how depraved her conduct. A lewd angel.
The Sunset Strip had, by the mid-sixties, become the place where youth and beauty, talent and ambition—art and commerce, too—met. A point of collision that was also a point of explosion. And of orgasm. In other words, the Sunset Strip, in West Hollywood,I had become Hollywood. As Eve was the first to recognize: “I was already much further into HOLLYWOOD than most of my parents’ friends. It was like all they ever knew was the movies about Hollywood whereas to me the Sunset Strip was ten times more immediate than a movie. Plus, it was alive.”
Eve wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. But boyfriends, ah, now that was a different story. Her romances were fleeting, casual, legion. In one of her books, a conversation is recounted. It’s between Eve, though called “Sophie” or “I,” and her cousin Laurie, though called “my cousin Ophelia” or “she.” (Eve’s books, while frequently billed as fiction—“novel,” “confessional novel,” “stories”—are not. Says Eve, “Everything I wrote was memoir or essay or whatever you want to call it. It was one hundred percent nonfiction. I just changed the names. Why? So I wouldn’t get sued!” Mirandi corroborates, “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?’ ”) From L.A. Woman:
“But you know so many men,” Ophelia said, “isn’t there even one for you?”
“They’re all adjectives,” I said, “they all make me feel modified; even a word like girlfriend gives me this feeling I’ve just been cut in half. I’d rather just be a car, not a blue car or a big one, than sit there the rest of my life being stuck with some adjective.”
Eve is saying a lot of words here, but really she’s only saying four: Don’t tread on me. (She’s also using the words, near exact, that she used when explaining why she couldn’t be a Thunderbird Girl.) It’s an extraordinarily aggressive statement, for a woman especially, even if the language it’s delivered in is groping, unsure. She wanted sexual freedom, yes, a genuine possibility for the first time in history, thanks to advances in medicine and science. Biology no longer called the shots. Wrote Eve, “Stuff like jealousy and outrage and sexual horror tactics like that . . . now suddenly didn’t stand a chance because [I wasn’t] going to get pregnant, die of syphilis.” What she truly wanted, though, was freedom in general, sexual freedom, dreamy and cat’s meow as it was, just a stand-in for something larger. She believed in the myth of the open range, had the cowboy’s ethos: no borders, no fences. Certainly no little woman or little man tying her down or, worse, up in a wedding knot. “My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster,” she wrote, and when there was still plenty of time to change her mind, except she never did. The idea of answering to somebody or explaining herself, of another person having rights over her, a say in what she did, was, to her, abhorrent and not to be countenanced.
Yet during this period, she did enter into a relationship with a man that was passionate, perilous, mutually dependent, and all-consuming. Says Eve, “It was around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival [June 1967]. I’d just turned twenty-four, and I had this boyfriend, Peter Pilafian. He played electric violin for the Mamas and the Papas, and he was their road manager and unbelievably cute. Before he was with me, he was with Rusty Gilliam. Rusty was the sister of Michelle Phillips [one of the Mamas in the Mamas and the Papas, later an actress]. Rusty was just as beautiful as Michelle, only more realistic. She and Peter had a couple of kids together. Anyway, I’d stayed over his place, and we were in bed, and it was seven in the morning, and, would you believe it, in walks Earl McGrath.”
I. West Hollywood was not officially incorporated until 1984. But I have on excellent authority—Eve’s—that West Hollywood was always called West Hollywood by natives, so I’m going to call it that, too.