The previous chapter came to a close in the fall of 1982, where this chapter is picking up. Eve, thirty-nine, is at the dead center of her life. She’ll be doing her thing on our big blue planet for another thirty-nine years. Which puts her at the halfway mark exactly. Yet somehow that’s not where she is, somehow she’s at the beginning of the end. (Isn’t that so like Eve, a creature of extremes, to skip the dreary middle, just sidestep it altogether?)
After 1982, nothing happens to Eve. Or nothing much. The key works have already been written; the key fights already fought; the key love affairs already consummated; and the key turning points—save one—already turned. The narrative suddenly loses its drama and tension, goes slack, and her story becomes just a chronology of facts and events, another tale of time passing. Until 1997, when she sets herself on fire. (The fire is that last key turning point.)
So, my plan is to do what they do in the movies: Fast-forward with montage. Cover the fifteen years between 1982, the year she got sober, and 1997, the year she got burned, with an assortment of moods, moments, and impressions. Make a long, dull period feel short and (comparatively) lively by condensing. Sacrifice temporal accuracy to energy and impetus.
Here goes.
Once Eve committed to the straight and narrow, she found herself at loose ends. It wasn’t only her behavior that needed modifying, it was her instincts. Since birth, she’d had a propensity for jumping on the tiger’s back, throwing her body on the live grenade, and now she was eschewing tigers, eschewing grenades. Which meant she wasn’t quite she.
British-born, L.A.-based designer Paul Fortune noticed. “When I was with Lloyd [Ziff] and Eve was with Paul [Ruscha]—this was in the late seventies—the four of us would go on these excursions,” he told me. “We’d slip a Dimitri Tiomkin soundtrack into the tape deck and drive downtown on rain-slicked streets to get to some weird bar out of The Big Sleep. Or we’d stop by Paul’s apartment on Western Avenue. He had a sculpture of a hand by his door and in the palm were Quaaludes. We’d take a couple, then catch the Starlight express, spend the weekend in Seattle. And Eve was so much fun. She was happy to do drugs, have sex, go on these strange little adventures. And her writing, it was good. She had that combination of European sensibility and trashy old-movie Hollywood that I love. She really nailed it with Slow Days, Fast Company. The things she wrote about in that book—I knew them, I did them. But it all seems so magical and mysterious now. Like a dream.” Fortune went quiet, and a silence—contemplative, dense—swelled between us. It was he who broke it: “At a certain point, it all got to be too much for Eve. She had to reform or whatever you want to call it.” A second silence. And then: “You know, there were these girls—these women—and they had it all, the life they’d always wanted. Then, one morning, they woke up and it was gone. And once it’s gone, you can’t bring it back. That was Eve in the eighties. You felt she didn’t really know what she was about anymore.”
Didn’t know what she was about as a person. Didn’t know what she was about as a writer.
“You have to understand,” said Laurie, “Eve was an artist in her soul. The collages and album covers were an outpouring of that. So were the books. And she lived her life like it was art. The incredible evenings she put together, the incredible people she put together—that was art. And she wrote about sex masterpieces somewhere—in Slow Days, I think. Well, she created those, too. In everything she did she was an artist. But so much of that was over once she got sober. For a couple of years, she didn’t even try to write. She still had her eye, though.”
And that eye homed in on one of the biggest books of 1985. “This is the novel your mother warned you about,” she proclaimed on the jacket of the hardcover edition of Less Than Zero. And she went on to compare its writer, twenty-year-old Bret Easton Ellis, to a paragon—her paragon—of Dionysian excess and youthful rebellion: Jim Morrison.
There are more ironies than can be counted in the fact that Eve was an early booster of Ellis, the spiritual child of Joan; and of Less Than Zero, a young-adult version of Play It as It Lays. (When I asked Ellis if he’d considered asking Joan for a blurb, he replied in a voice glitching in panic or horror, “Are you kidding? I hoped she’d never even see the book. It was such an homage to Play It as It Lays. God!”)
Eve and Ellis met for dinner shortly after Less Than Zero’s publication. “She was very buxom, very flirtatious, great smile,” said Ellis. “She wasn’t a ditzy Southern California girl. She was almost a parody of that idea. And then, through the parody, this no-nonsense intelligence would come out. She laughed a lot and just seemed really friendly and was all over me in this nice way. I knew Joan through her daughter, Quintana, who went to Bennington with me. And, let me tell you, sitting around with Joan Didion is no picnic. It’s the most awkward thing in life. Eve, though, was delightful, so warm and accessible.”I
Eve’s appetite for scenes hadn’t dulled. And she understood that if she didn’t want to return to her dissolute ways, she’d have to find a new one. Not that her old was there to go back to. Ports was also on the wagon now. “After Jock died [in 1980], everything changed,” said Michaela Livingston, Ports cofounder and Jock’s wife. “No one drank like they did before, not after sparkling water was created.”
Eve, too, had cultivated a taste for sparkling water. And what Ports once was to her—what Barney’s, what Franklin Avenue, what the Troubadour—was what AA became. “AA was the social scene of all time,” she said. “All of L.A. was there. And the last straw was different for everybody. My friend Connie said she had to fuck two midgets before she knew it was time to join.”
It wasn’t enough to just join AA, though. You had to join the right meeting. “The Rodeo Drive was my favorite. It was movie stars galore and a nonstop party. Bobby Neuwirth [musician, former road manager of Bob Dylan] ran it. He used to say he was in AA to recover from terminal hipness. Before AA his nickname was ‘the Angel of Death,’ because everybody around him kept going kerplunk.”
Eve felt she was onto something good, and was, as always, eager to spread the word. “I had Evie as an example,” said Mirandi. “Whatever she was doing—coke, alcohol, guys—I was doing a third of it, so I thought I was okay. I wasn’t. It was Eve who pushed me into AA. I remember her saying, ‘Come on, where else are you going to meet so many good-looking sober guys?’ ”
Part of AA’s appeal for Eve was, undoubtedly, the primo pickup opportunities it afforded. (She and Paul were still together in the eighties. Loosely, though. Paul was engaged to a woman who wasn’t her in 1982, again in 1985, is how loosely.) Just her luck that her primo pickup happened to be loaded. “I called him the Last Rock Star,” said Eve of singer-songwriter Warren Zevon. “Warren wasn’t actually in AA, but he should have been. I guess he came that night because somebody was trying to get him to go. He was addicted to heroin—heroin, Scotch, and the pork at Musso’s.”
Eve moved in with Zevon. “Warren was so wonderful and funny, but he almost did me in. If he went downstairs in an elevator, he’d come back up with a woman. He couldn’t help himself. The only way I could stand to be with him was by going to Ashtanga yoga class every day. Ashtanga yoga is so horrible to do that when you stop doing it, you feel like you’re floating on air. But after a while even that didn’t work.”
Maybe because his womanizing was the least of it. “Evie told me a story about how she did Warren’s laundry and then he hit her,” said Laurie.
As quickly as Eve moved in with Zevon, she moved out.
It was in the late eighties that Eve began to stir creatively. She and Michael Elias sold a script. “I can’t think of the title,” said Elias. “Whatever Send in the Violins translates to in French [Envoyez les Violons, 1988]. It was about an American in Paris. His wife leaves him and he gets back to life by playing the flute. They ruined it by making it a Frenchman in Paris.” And short pieces of hers were appearing, scattershot but regularly, in places like L.A. Style, American Film, Playboy.
And then, in 1990, Terry McDonell, an admirer of Eve’s work, took over at Esquire. For McDonell and Esquire—the March 1991 issue—she wrote the very splashy “Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood,” an expansion of “Jim,” the reminiscence she wrote for Joan all those years ago. It’s one of her best pieces, the sole instance of her at the top of her game post-sobriety. “She did that Jim Morrison profile for us, and it was great, and people loved it, and I wanted her to do more,” said her Esquire editor, Bill Tonelli. “It never occurred to me to assign her anything. I didn’t feel like you could do that with Eve. I thought, ‘What else has she lived through that she could write up?’ ” There was the Duchamp photo for one (“I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” Esquire, September 1992). The Chateau Marmont (“Life at Chateau Marmont,” Esquire, January 1992) for another. Cielo Drive (“The Manson Murders,” Esquire, August 1994) for yet another.
Eve’s success at Esquire helped restore her confidence. She decided she was ready to attempt something longer. “I sent a manuscript to Vicky and am waiting to be rejected,” she told Sarah Kernochan in a letter. “Erica called me up and insisted she be the agent if Vicky likes it. But I don’t think Vicky will like it because it’s [too] much of a mess.”
Wilson, however, did like it. And, in 1993, she and Knopf brought out Eve’s third collection, Black Swans.
The title piece contains the following passage:
Recently someone asked me when was the last time I was in a serious relationship, when I thought I might get married, and I said, “Oh, 1971. Before I got published and knew I was home free.”
“Black Swans” is—obviously—about 1971, Eve’s year of triumph and defeat, the year in which she became a published writer and had her heart snapped in two by Dan Wakefield, the cost, she believed, of becoming a published writer. In other words, it’s a retelling of her origin story. And once again, Eve has excised Joan. Or at least obscured Joan, stashing Joan behind “a friend” and “she.” Wrote Eve, “I [sent] off the piece about Hollywood High to one last editor, whom a friend had suggested, at a hipper publication; she’d sent the guy a note already.”
And yet Eve can’t keep Joan’s name out of her mouth. Twice she references Joan in “Black Swans,” both times unnecessarily. The first: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” The second: “Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like.” (Eve, as you can see, Reader, is as ambivalent about Joan as ever: the first reference is a kick; the second a kiss.) It’s as if Joan is Eve’s secret that won’t stay buried because Eve won’t stop digging her up.
Grover Lewis also makes an appearance. “Shep Welles,” he’s called. (Dan Wakefield, incidentally, is called “Walter,” Eve exchanging the name of one pivotal boyfriend for another.) “[Shep] really was a cowboy, lean, with great cheekbones, the meanest laugh, and a great east-Texas accent,” she wrote.
Lewis sent Eve a letter:
January 3, 1994
Dear Eve,
I ran into our old pal Shep Welles not long ago on the Third Street Promenade. It had been years since we had last seen each other and we sat down at one of those little yuppie outdoor greasy spoons to catch up.
We talked about, oh, shoes and ships and sealing wax for a while, and then your name somehow entered the conversation and we discussed your book Black Swans, which by chance we had both read recently.
“You came out rather well in Eve’s title story,” I remarked, signaling for the check.
“Well, yes,” Shep agreed, dropping some coins for the tip. “But compared with what?”
“Oh, come now,” I said. “Surely you’re not impervious to praise, no matter how circuitous or concealed.”
“I’ve always looked pretty good next to no-talent New York assholes,” Shep said a little stiffly. “Or Boston, Omaha—whatever it was.” He stood and stretched, and I noticed he was wearing point-toed Texas cowboy boots, just like he’d done in the 1970’s. (I have a pair just like them that I haven’t taken out of the closet for ten years, the times being what they are.)
“I’m writing my own account of those days,” Shep said as we started walking toward Santa Monica Boulevard.
“Not fiction, I take it.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Oh my. Wenner and Annie and Hunter and Eve and all those…?”
Shep laughed and lit one of those unfiltered Camels he still smokes. “Overall, I guess I liked Black Swans well enough—but I preferred that one long story to anything else in the book. And not because I entered into it, either. Eve may never really know, but I was honored to publish her first story. At her best, when she’s being truest to her gifts, she mixes tenderness and loss and a kind of dumb courage as well as anyone I ever read.”…
“What are you calling your own book?”
“Goodbye if you call that gone,” Shep said, waving and striding away through a congestion of baby prams. But I couldn’t tell if he meant that was the title or he was just saying goodbye in his usual curious way.
Anyway, Eve, I thought you might want to know about our meeting and conversation. I guess I can safely say that Shep Welles thanks you and I thank you.
Best wishes,
Grover LewisII
Black Swans is a serious and worthy attempt, a marked improvement over Sex and Rage and L.A. Woman. It is, too, a kind of homecoming. Eve, I think, knew she’d made a wrong turn after Slow Days and was now trying to find her way back. (No more novels, just spurts from here on out.) In fact, the breadth and magic of Slow Days is precisely what Black Swans aspires to—and falls short of. The ease of Slow Days, the effortlessness, has been replaced by counterfeit ease, counterfeit effortlessness. Things that once came naturally to her no longer do. The strain and insecurity are palpable. As you read, you can almost hear her asking, Is this okay? Am I getting by with this?
“I keep thinking of Scott Fitzgerald,” said Laurie. “I read The Great Gatsby a million years ago and I was overwhelmed by it. And, of course, there’s The Crack-Up—wonderful, wonderful. But the book he was working on when he died, The Last Tycoon, I don’t think is wonderful. It’s like, time had passed him by. The world wasn’t his anymore. That’s what happened to Evie. She wrote that one book that was great, Slow Days. And my attitude is, why should people demand more of her? Look, Eve had this desperation when she was younger. It made her try the hardest she could—at painting, at collage, at album covers, and then at writing, which is what finally worked for her. Really, she tried so hard it almost killed her. She got sober, and the desperation was gone. And so it—her talent, or whatever ‘it’ is—was gone, too.”
When I pointed out that Eve wrote Sex and Rage and L.A. Woman while still deep into coke and other drugs, Laurie threw up her hands. “So it was gone before she got sober. She was putting herself through hell when she wrote Sex and Rage and L.A. Woman. And you’re right, they weren’t anywhere near as good as Slow Days. So, yeah, she’d already lost it. She’d lost it, and she knew she’d lost it, but she kept writing, wrote Black Swans, because what else was she supposed to do? She was Eve Babitz, even though she couldn’t be Eve Babitz anymore.”
Yet being Eve Babitz had cachet again in Hollywood. She’d formed a new friendship. It was with actor Joshua John Miller, the trigger-happy twelve-year-old in River’s Edge (1986), the baby bloodsucker in Near Dark (1987), now in his early twenties.
“Eve and I understood each other on the level of willing guilelessness when it came to Hollywood,” said Miller. “Hollywood is a jungle, like John Huston said in that Lillian Ross book [Picture]. And in the jungle, you need to tread carefully. But Eve and I didn’t. We didn’t want to get jaded, get hardened, even though that probably would’ve been the smart thing to do. We wanted to stay romantic about Hollywood. Eve was doing some writing for Vogue then. And, because of that, she knew the young stars coming up—Ione Skye and Ione’s Beastie Boy boyfriend [Adam Horovitz] and Norman Reedus, who was with the supermodel Helena Christensen then. They saw her as this kind of den mother, Earth Mother, sixties voluptuous iconic character. Why wouldn’t they invite her to all their parties? And she usually brought me as her date. I remember Eve and I playing Celebrity—you know, the parlor game—with Ashley Judd and Matthew McConaughey. Playing Celebrity with celebrities is such a—I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance.”
Miller was less interested in making the transition from child actor to adult actor than actor to writer. “I was young, and, I guess, horny for experience,” he said. “And I felt I could live the literary history of L.A. through Eve. So, I’d just finished my novel, The Mao Game, which Eve had worked on with me. And I said to her, ‘I’d do anything to have Joan Didion blurb it.’ I was like every other L.A. homo writer—I wanted to be taken seriously. Eve said, ‘Joan won’t do it. She doesn’t do anything. But why don’t you send her your grandfather’s picture of John Wayne [Miller’s grandfather was Bruno Bernard, known as Bernard of Hollywood, photographer to the stars]?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. Do you think I should?’ She said, ‘Yeah, send Joan the John Wayne picture with your book.’ Well, I sent Joan the book and the picture, and she sent them both back with a note that said, ‘I don’t give blurbs,’ and then told me to fuck off, basically. The undercurrent was, ‘I don’t respond to bribes, kid.’ God, I was embarrassed! I was like, ‘Thanks, Eve.’ She just laughed. I’m not sure what the inside joke was but I’m sure she was making one. She was being mischievous. She wanted to get a rise out of Joan.”
Old habits, and all that.
Not long after the publication of Black Swans, Eve noticed that something was off with Mae. “It was right around the time that O. J. Simpson killed his wife. My mother came into the room when the freeway chase was on TV. ‘What’s this, darling?’ she asked. I explained what was going on and she went blank halfway through.”
Alzheimer’s, early stages.
What else was different for Eve: Wilton Place, which had gone from a two-member household to a three. “Eve’s old Hollywood High crony, Holly, was living with her and Mother,” said Mirandi. “Holly had a rough time of it after high school. The acting thing never worked out. She was a hooker on Hollywood Boulevard.”
“Like with a pimp?” I said.
A nod.
“Oh boy.”
“And she was a junkie. Once Evie got straight, she went and found Holly, who was also trying to get herself straight and was in this fleabag dive of a sobriety house. Eve took her out of there and stuck her upstairs.” Mirandi shook her head, let out a laugh that was like a wince. “Eventually Holly went back to school and paid for it by doing phone sex.” Mirandi shook her head again, let out a laugh that was like a laugh. “She was good at it—those old acting skills.”
What stayed the same for Eve: a change in scene. “I was with Eve when she got into tango,” said artist Mick Haggerty. “To me [that world] was ghastly, about as crude and sad and frightening as possible. But not to Eve. She was having the time of her life. She projected enormous amounts of romance and fantasy onto things. She was an artist doing what she did. Her personal viewpoint was just so heightened. We’d be at some gruesome studio in Glendale or someplace, and I’d look at her face, and she was just entranced.”
So entranced that she started writing a book about the L.A. tango scene. Was working on it, in fact, when she struck that match.