Eve Babitz was born and grew up in Hollywood. She began to write in 1972 after designing album covers for such artists as Linda Ronstadt, Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds and Lord Buckley. Her articles and short stories have appeared in Vogue, Rolling Stone, Esquire and The New York Times Book Review.
PRAISE FOR EVE’S HOLLYWOOD
“Sharp and funny throughout, [Babitz] offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating.”
—The New York Times
“Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of L.A. life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book.”
—Steve Martin
“Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form.”
—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair
“Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate letter-writer of Louis XIV’s time, transposed to the Chateau Marmont in the late 20th Century—lunching, chatting, dressing, loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles.”
—Mollie Gregory, Los Angeles Times
“Eve’s Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I’m there.”
—Deborah Shapiro, The Second Pass
“Her writing took multiple forms, from romans à clef to essayistic cultural commentaries to reviews to urban-life vignettes to short stories. But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl . . . The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.”
—New Republic
“What truly sets Babitz apart from L.A. writers like Didion or Nathanael West . . . is that no matter what cruel realities she might face, a part of her still buys the Hollywood fantasy, feels its magnetic pull as much as that Midwestern hopeful who heads to the coast in pursuit of ‘movie dreams.’”
—Steffie Nelson, Los Angeles Review of Books
“As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with and better still, made herself felt in every encounter.”
—Daniel Bernardi, PopMatters
PRAISE FOR SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY
“Her writing took multiple forms . . . But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl.”
—Naomi Fry, New Republic
“Babitz takes to the page lightly, slipping sharp observations into roving, conversational essays and perfecting a kind of glamorous shrug.”
—Kaitlin Phillips, Bookforum
“What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of movie stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.”
—Hermione Hoby, Times Literary Supplement
“Babitz’s collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”
—Lee Grove, The Boston Globe
“Eve Babitz was Los Angeles’ greatest bard. Promiscuous but discerning, the bombshell with a brain bonded with Joan Didion and bedded Jim Morrison . . . Babitz is finally getting the literary comeback she deserves.”
—Lili Loofbourow, The Week
“Her dishy, evocative style has never been characterized as Joan Didion–deep but it’s inarguably more fun and inviting, providing equally sharp insights on the mood and meaning of Southern California.”
—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
“Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been missing from almost all the fiction about Hollywood . . . The accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing.”
—Larry McMurtry, The Washington Post
“In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much.”
—Vogue
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Eve Babitz, 1979
First published in the United States in 1979 by Knopf
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 274 4
eISBN 978 1 78689 275 1
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: T.B. Harms Company: Excerpt from “Beyond The Sea” (“La Mer”) by Charles Trenet and Jack Lawrence. Copyright © 1945, 1946 Raoul Breton. Copyright renewed 1973, assigned to T.B. Harms Company. Copyright © 1947 T.B. Harms Company. Copyright renewed 1975, assigned to MPL Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Edward B. Marks Music Corporation: Excerpt from “Manhattan” by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright © MCMXXV by Edward B. Marks Music Corporation. Used with permission. MPL Communications, Inc.: Excerpt from “Beyond The Sea” (“La Mer”) by Charles Trenet and Jack Lawrence. Copyright © 1945, 1947 T.B. Harms Company. Copyright renewed 1973, 1975 Whale Music Company, a division of MPL Communications, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros., Inc.: Excerpt from “Autumn in New York” by Vernon Duke. Copyright © 1934 Warner Bros., Inc. Copyright renewed. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Book design by Domini Dragoone
For Paul, Vicky, and Sarah
Three phases have succeeded each other during the span of my life. In the first the questions would be: “But who is she, dear? Who are her people? Is she one of the Yorkshire Twiddledos? Of course, they are badly off, very badly off, but she