Chapter 21: Squalid Overboogie

CHAPTER 21 Squalid Overboogie

A new decade was about to dawn: the 1980s. Eve scarcely noticed. She was too busy sliding downhill.

The situation at Wilton Place was grim. Agnes was no longer dying in the kitchen, but only because she was already dead. (“She weighed about 40 pounds—she [was] like a fire that won’t go out,” wrote Eve to Sarah Kernochan. “She waited for my sister to come sing her a Freddie [sic] Fender song before she died.”) And Mae’s alcoholism was worsening at the same rapid clip as Sol’s Huntington’s.

Unable to stand the sight of her parents falling apart, Eve fled Hollywood. She moved to Santa Monica, renting the top floor of a house owned by Femmy DeLyser. “Femmy was this crazy Dutch woman,” said Laurie. “Ate vegan, macrobiotic, all that. And she was the birth coach to all these movie stars, including Jane Fonda, and in the eighties she wrote Jane Fonda’s pregnancy workout book, which was a big, big bestseller.”

Soon Mirandi was also renting a floor at Femmy’s. “Evie always had one foot where Mother and Dad were. Since it was too much for her to live near them at that time, she demanded that I move into Femmy’s with her. I didn’t mind. I loved the beach. And it was convenient for me. I was already working for Jane [Fonda, Mirandi was putting on benefit concerts for Fonda’s then-husband, political activist Tom Hayden] and hanging out with Jane all the time. Femmy’s place was close to where Jane lived.”

Mirandi with her boss and friend, Jane Fonda.

Close, too, to where Eve’s coke dealer lived. “He was only a block away,” said Mirandi. “And whenever she took a break from writing, she’d wind up at his apartment.”

Cocaine did bad things to Eve’s personality. “Eve started getting crazy with the coke,” said Paul. “I would wake up in the morning to her pacing around in circles. She’d say that Erica wasn’t doing enough for her, and that she wasn’t happy with not having complete access to Vicky. Neither were taking her obsessive calls. I felt sorry for anyone who had to work with her.”

Cocaine did worse things to Eve’s prose. Recalled novelist and screenwriter Henry Bromell, “I thought Eve was this beautiful, original voice. Completely from L.A. She told great stories. She’d say to me, ‘Look at these breasts.’ I’d say, ‘Nice.’ And she’d say, ‘Nice? Nice? These breasts have conquered the world!’ She was so much fun. But she was in a battle with drugs, which was ultimately a losing battle. And the work suffered. Her language was really disintegrating.”

And yet, there’s something Eve wrote during this period that I absolutely love, Fiorucci: The Book, though it isn’t a book, not really. Is really an extended magazine piece, which is to say, an extended spurt, on the fashion label started by the Italian designer Elio Fiorucci.

Fiorucci: The Book has none of Slow Days’ depth. But then, it isn’t trying to, surface is what it’s all about, and why risk spoiling so alluring a one by scratching?

The opening:

Fiorucci is the name of a man, the name of a look, the name of a business. A phenomenon. Walking into a Fiorucci store is an event. Milan. New York. London. Boston. Beverly Hills. Tokyo. Rio. Zurich. Hong Kong. Sydney. Fiorucci is Fashion. Fiorucci is flash. Fiorucci stores are the best free show in town. The music pulses; the espresso is free; the neon glows. Even the salespeople are one step beyond—they often wear fiery red crew cuts. But it is, after all is said and done, a store—a store designed to sell clothes. But the difference is all that sex and irony.

Fiorucci: The Book is totally off the wall and so minor it almost isn’t there. But it is, in its way, perfection. A daft delight.

The publishing house, Harlin Quist, had sent Eve to Milan to interview Fiorucci. Earl McGrath found her a place to stay. “The woman Earl introduced me to was the most beautiful woman in Italy who wasn’t a movie star,” said Eve. “She looked like a Botticelli rising out of the sea. And she was rich, an heiress. Her family was the only family in the country allowed to import Scotch or something. I was kicking drugs and everything else, so I slept the entire flight.” Eve turned her head on its side, mimed someone snoring. “I had shoes when I got on the plane but not when I got off. I guess I lost them.” I asked her what she walked around in, and she explained to me that the Botticelli woman gave her a pair of boots. “They were suede,” she said. “I wore them every day I was in Italy. Those suede boots with the same baby-blue skirt and black sweater because I guess I forgot to pack a suitcase.”

Eve brought Fiorucci back to America with her. “She took him down to Laguna to stay with Aldo and Petey,” said Paul. “Once they were there, they got into this weird sex fit where Fiorucci was asking Eve to fist him, just not letting up on the subject.^I And of course he and Eve were doing so many drugs. Fiorucci was shooting up. Eve was sticking to cocaine, but it was like, good Lord. Aldo called me and said that he and Petey had had it, that they loved me and that they loved my friends, but that Eve wasn’t welcome at their house for a while. Eve really could push every boundary there was. And she pushed one too many with Aldo and Petey. She was pushing one too many with a lot of people in those days.”

In mid-1980, Eve finished a draft of her new book. “This time she did what Joan did,” said Mirandi. “She gave it a rock ’n’ roll title. Took the name of a Jim Morrison album [L.A. Woman, the Doors, 1971].”

Eve submitted L.A. Woman to Erica Spellman and Vicky Wilson. “Vicky and I read it and we were both, like, ‘Hey, wait a minute,’ ” said Spellman. “It needed a lot of work. Eve basically said, ‘Fuck you, I’ll get somebody else to publish it.’ And that was the end of our relationship for a while.”^II

Eve was acting like a star, haughty and demanding, but only to keep people from seeing how much like a loser she felt. She was ashamed of what had happened with Sex and Rage, as she’d reveal in a letter written on September 30, 1981, to journalist Becki Klute:

Becki Klute,

I read your review of Sex & Rage for the first time yesterday in my mother’s backyard and I had to write and thank you, even though I know you wrote it 2 years ago and probably don’t remember. For some reason, Knopf only sent me the really mean reviews—yours, they sent to my parents, and I might never have read it at all except my mother and I were cleaning out the garage…

I am no longer on Knopf… It was too hard for me to be that prestidgeous (I can’t even spell “prestiege”). I couldn’t have enough fun. They told me “keep yourself out of it” and “Read War & Peace” all the time. I mean, they expected me to be a hardcover author—and I want to be in supermarkets. And worst of all, my editor at Knopf would always look at me for a long time and then say “… think!”

It was depressing.

(Maybe I’ll go back once I figure out how.)

Anyway, thank you,

Eve Babitz

P.S. Anyway, even if I could think, I loved Knopf so much that after Sex & Rage got so many bad reviews, I was too mortified to face anyone in that office ever again.

L.A. Woman was acquired by Joni Evans, editor in chief of Linden Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “John Gregory Dunne was one of my writers then,” said Evans. “I’d spend a lot of time with him and Joan at their house in Brentwood [Joan and Dunne left Trancas for Brentwood in 1978]. John and Joan were crazy about Eve, John particularly. He said, ‘Eve is great. You must publish Eve.’ ”

The advance Eve received for L.A. Woman was substantial. It was also insufficient. Cocaine was an expensive habit, and Eve’s habit was getting more habitual by the day. “I was worried about her all the time,” said Mirandi. “She had this weird Mexican boyfriend. I don’t know where she picked him up. All they did was fuck and snort, snort and fuck. The relationship finally came to an end because they ran out of coke money. It was not a good situation.”

Eve and her coke mirror.

And Eve, at some level, knew how not good. “Eve had blown her L.A. Woman advance on coke, fucked up her nose,” said Paul. “She called me, begged me to come over. I drove all the way to Femmy’s place in Santa Monica. When I walked into Eve’s room, I couldn’t believe what I saw. There wasn’t an inch of floor not covered in bloody Kleenex. The cats were running around high. I boxed Eve up and took her back to my Western Avenue apartment, and she was quite happy easing herself into a long, languid bubble bath. My mind was still trying to get over what it had seen when Eve got out of the tub and insisted that I fuck her. I was dumbfounded. She looked like a Dalmatian she had so many bruises covering her body. I told her to go to bed, alone, and she got really pissed off and started to scream and pummel me. I took her by the shoulders, shook her, and forced her to turn around and face a full-length mirror. I cried and told her that she was breaking the hearts of those of us that loved her by letting herself get so goddamned low with her life, and did she want to die?”

Paul’s words seemed to reach Eve. He wasn’t convinced, though, that they’d truly broken through, so he called Mae. “Paul had the good sense to rat out Evie to Mother,” said Mirandi. “Mother said to her, ‘This is not working. You’ve got to come home.’ ”

I. In Hollywood’s Eve, I mentioned the fist-fucking but declined to identify the fist-fucker. On Easter weekend in 2021, while on a vacation with my husband and two sons in the Berkshires, I received through my website an email from a woman named Kathryn Ruskin. It read:

I just finished Hollywood’s Eve and was fascinated by her lifestyle. In the chapter where you don’t name names, by any chance were the fist fucker’s initials [BLEEP]? I had occasion to be in the ladies room and in the next stall there was a couple and I could hear the goings on. She protested at first but the act was completed. I left first and when they came out it was a woman I knew and this actor with the initials [BLEEP]. I am the widow of Mickey Ruskin.

After looking up Mickey Ruskin (Mickey was the owner of Max’s Kansas City, a favorite hangout of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Patti Smith in the sixties and seventies), I called Kathryn to find out which actor the initials belonged to. She told me but I’m not going to tell you, Reader. I’m not even going to tell you the initials, the actor being as famous as he is and libel laws being as punitive as they are.
II. According to a letter Eve sent Sarah Kernochan, she and Spellman parted ways slightly earlier, in late 1979. She believed that Spellman, who’d left ICM for William Morris, was paying too little attention to her. (“The reason I fired Erica,” she wrote, “was because she dumped me into Candace Lake’s lap [Candace Lake, an ICM agent] and deserted me over at Wm. Morris and forced me to have lunch with horrible Lynda Obst [producer] and otherwise did her Scorpio behind-the-scenes manipulations.”) But Eve continued to drop Spellman’s name in letter after letter, alluded to conversations with her, exchanges, meetings. So, my sense is that the break didn’t take until L.A. Woman, as Spellman said.