Audiobook7 hours
Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
Written by Lili Anolik
Narrated by Jayme Mattler
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (1943-2021), the brilliant chronicler of 1960s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time.
“I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“The Eve Babitz book I’ve been waiting for. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz, age twenty, posed for a photograph with French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1963. They were seated at a chess board, deep in a game. She was naked; he was not. The picture, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. She spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, rocking and rolling, and honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.
Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieved that American ideal: art that stayed loose, maintained its cool; art so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. Yet somehow the world wasn’t paying attention. Babitz languished.
It was almost twenty years after her last book was published, and only a few years before her death in 2021 that Babitz became a literary star, recognized as not just an essential L.A. writer, but the essential. This late-blooming vogue bloomed, in large part, because of a magazine profile by Lili Anolik, who, in 2010, began obsessively pursuing Babitz, a recluse since burning herself up in a fire in the 90s.
Anolik’s elegant and provocative book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.
“A dazzling, gossip-filled biography of the wayward genius who knew everyone in Seventies LA.” —The Telegraph (UK)
“I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“The Eve Babitz book I’ve been waiting for. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz, age twenty, posed for a photograph with French artist Marcel Duchamp in 1963. They were seated at a chess board, deep in a game. She was naked; he was not. The picture, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. She spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, rocking and rolling, and honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.
Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieved that American ideal: art that stayed loose, maintained its cool; art so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. Yet somehow the world wasn’t paying attention. Babitz languished.
It was almost twenty years after her last book was published, and only a few years before her death in 2021 that Babitz became a literary star, recognized as not just an essential L.A. writer, but the essential. This late-blooming vogue bloomed, in large part, because of a magazine profile by Lili Anolik, who, in 2010, began obsessively pursuing Babitz, a recluse since burning herself up in a fire in the 90s.
Anolik’s elegant and provocative book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist, Eve Babitz.
“A dazzling, gossip-filled biography of the wayward genius who knew everyone in Seventies LA.” —The Telegraph (UK)
Author
Lili Anolik
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Elle, and The Believer. She lives in New York City with her husband and two young sons.
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Reviews for Hollywood's Eve
Rating: 3.8245613578947366 out of 5 stars
4/5
57 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hollywood's Eve is not a conventional biography and its subject, Eve Babitz, is not a conventional person. For one, she is a living work of art in a famous photograph, immersed in a game of chess, completely naked, with a non-plussed Marcel Duchamp. As an artist, her collage LP covers grace the record albums of the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Linda Ronstadt, Leon Russell, et al. And, as an aside, even though she was a mainstay in the LA music scene as it conquered the world, it would be misleading to characterize her as a 'groupie.' You see, if anything, personages like Steve Martin, painter Ed Ruscha, rockers Gram Parsons and other glitterati, were on her radar BEFORE they were household names. If anything, Babitz 'collected' men (and perhaps women) and took from them, not the other way around. She was an artist in need of a muse, and she simply reversed the process. No "male gaze" with Eve! In 1974, however, she found a new pursuit with a literary 'voice' that was romantic yet sardonic. Her prose dripped with irony and heartbreak. For almost two decades, novels, memoir-like vignettes, short fiction, articles, and essays. Her first published book, Eve's Hollywood, exploded into the American literary consciousness; as this narrative makes clear, she was the antithesis of the East Coast literary establishment (listening, Joan Didion?) who despised Southern California with a passion that disguised their envy. Times change, an unfortunate accident took place, in a car no less, and younger generations moved into the scene, and Eve was lost in the times. But not for long. A few articles, this biography, and a host of publisher's reissue programs, brought most of her oeuvre back into print. All of this took place shortly after the publication of Hollywood's Eve, probably the reason for the new impetus; nonetheless, the very best part of this captivating little biography is that Lili Anolik tells her story in Eve's voice. What a bonus! Reading prose dripping with irony over the failures and foibles of the rich and famous is such a treat!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I was hesitant to give this 5 stars at first, but then I realized I read it in an evening so obviously it sucked me in. It would recommend not reading this before reading Babitz so that all the references make sense.