I Used to Be Charming Read online

  EVE BABITZ was born in Hollywood to Sol Babitz, a violinist and musicologist, and Mae Babitz, an artist. She is the author of several books of fiction, including Sex and Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans: Stories. Her nonfiction works include Fiorucci, the Book and Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night. She has written for publications including Ms. and Esquire and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. She lives in Los Angeles.

  MOLLY LAMBERT is also a writer from Los Angeles who was born in Hollywood. She has written for publications including The New York Times Magazine, and co-hosts the podcast Night Call.

  OTHER BOOKS BY EVE BABITZ PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Eve’s Hollywood

  Introduction by Holly Brubach

  Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

  Introduction by Matthew Specktor

  I USED TO BE CHARMING

  The Rest of Eve Babitz

  EVE BABITZ

  Edited by

  SARA J. KRAMER

  Introduction by

  MOLLY LAMBERT

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  The publishers wish to thank the following people for their help in tracking down some of the more difficult-to-find essays collected here: Joie Davidow, Boris Dralyuk, Ellie Duke, Zac Frank, Elisabeth Garber-Paul, Courtney Garcia, Leonard Koren, Susan LaTempa, Sylvia Lonergan, Manjula Martin, Carolyn Vega, and Morgan P. Yates. Special thanks is extended to Mirandi Babitz and Erica Spellman Silverman for their assistance throughout.

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Eve Babitz

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Molly Lambert

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Marilyn Minter, Wave, 2006; courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Babitz, Eve, author. | Lambert, Molly, author of introduction. Title: I used to be charming : the rest of Eve Babitz / by Eve Babitz; introduction by Molly Lambert.

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019021978 (print) | LCCN 2019022407 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681373799 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3552.A244 A6 2019 (print) | LCC PS3552.A244 (ebook) | DDC 814/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021978

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022407

  ISBN 978-1-68137-380-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  All This and The Godfather Too

  My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?

  Needles in the Land of Fruits and Nuts

  My Life in a 36DD Bra, or, The All-American Obsession

  No Onions

  On Not Being a Tomboy

  Losing Weight Made Me a New Person—A Novelist

  Shopping

  Sunday, Blue Pool, Sunday

  Venice, California

  Honky-Tonk Nights: The Good Old Days at L.A.’s Troubadour

  A Californian Looks at New York

  Anna’s Brando

  The Girl from Gold’s Gym

  The Tyranny of Fashion

  Tiffany’s Before Breakfast

  Skin Deep

  Out of the Woods

  The Path to Radiant Pain

  Sunset Tango

  Sober Virgins of the Eighties

  Attitude Dancing

  Ronstadt for President

  Rapture of the Shallows

  The Sexual Politics of Fashion

  Gotta Dance

  The Soup Can as Big as the Ritz

  Blame It on the VCRs

  Jim Morrison Is Dead and Living in Hollywood

  I Was a Naked Pawn for Art

  Life at Chateau Marmont: The Sequel

  They Might Be Giants

  Great Legs

  Chairmen of the Board

  Party at the Beach

  Hippie Heaven

  Billy Baldwin

  The American Scene

  A City Laid Out Like Lace

  Hello Columbus

  Nicolas Cage

  Girl’s Town

  The Manson Murders

  Jackie’s Kids

  Keeping Time in Ojai

  Santa Fe: Angels We Have Heard on High

  Love and Kisses

  Scent of a Woman

  I Used to Be Charming

  FIORUCCI: THE BOOK

  INTRODUCTION

  And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant.

  —Eve Babitz

  MY GOD, isn’t it fun to read Eve Babitz? Just holding this collection in your hand is like being in on a good secret. Babitz knows all the good secrets—about Los Angeles, charismatic men, and supposedly glamorous industries like film, music, and magazines. Cool beyond belief but friendly and unintimidating, Babitz hung out with all the best rock stars, directors, and artists of several decades. And she wrote just as lovingly about the rest of L.A.—the broad world that exists outside the bubble of “the Industry.” Thanks to New York Review Books putting together a collection of this work, we are lucky enough to have more of Babitz’s writing to read.

  Alongside the Thelemic occultist Marjorie Cameron (whose husband, Jack Parsons, cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and the Bay Area Beat painter Jay DeFeo (Babitz’s romantic rival), Babitz was one of a handful of female artists associated with L.A.’s landmark Ferus Gallery, which showed local contemporary artists and launched the careers of people like Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. Babitz knew (and dated) many of the Ferus personalities; she was a mainstay at their hangout, Barney’s Beanery. As she details in “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” the famous photo of a nude Eve playing chess with Marcel Duchamp was the result of her trying to make her married boyfriend, the Ferus Gallery founder, Walter Hopps, jealous.

  A bridge between the Beat movement and burgeoning sixties psychedelic culture, the Ferus group rejected all prescribed rules of art to follow a strict internal code of its own, dictated only by individual interests. What her boyfriend Paul Ruscha’s brother Ed did with paintings, Babitz did with essays. Reading her is like looking at Ed Ruscha’s gas station paintings. She makes you reconsider things you might have dismissed as ugly, strange, or even boring, and look at them as if for the first time to find that they are in fact the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen in your life. Everything Babitz writes is both pop and intellectual, shiny but deep, like an artificial-snow-flocked Christmas tree, every bit as real and sentimental for a Tinselt-owner as a Douglas fir. She makes sure you are stimulated, and when she occasionally does say something portentous, you’re never far from a punch line. She always writes with an eye toward entertaining the reader because, well, Hollywood. Women are automatically dealt low culture; Babitz doubles down, writing about Archie comics, ballroom dancing, what it’s like to have big tits. She doesn’t care about being high art because high art is humorless.

  •

  “The ideas you have about cities that you’ve always known don’t work in L.
A., and once you toss those aside you’ll be much better off,” she writes in “My God, Eve, How Can You Live Here?,” explaining the whole city in one elegant swoop. (People still ask how we can stand to live in L.A., although they tend to do it months before they themselves move here and decide they invented it.) Los Angeles does not have one center because it has many centers. It does not have a mono-culture because it has so many cultures that coexist, and none of them require validation from East Coast Yankees. This baffles the Yankees, who are used to thinking worlds have centers and they are somehow in them. It’s freeing to give up on the delusion that you matter and can control anything at all.

  To navigate L.A. the Eve Babitz way is to give yourself over to the unpredictability and slow tempo of your environment. Sure, you could complain about the heat and the freeways, or you could eat this perfect sandwich and listen to the birds sing. She tells you where to go to see what’s off the beaten path, and where to go if you want exactly the cliché Beverly Hills luxe surrealist experience you imagined L.A. would be. The garish architecture and people are there if you want them, just don’t go mistaking one part for the whole. The real tourist attraction in L.A. is not the shitty, pay-for-play Walk of Fame, or any museum or arena, it’s the chance to immerse yourself in the human carnival. Around the time you make peace with being in a city that makes you feel anonymous, you come to realize that Los Angeles is a small town, just spread out, and if you stay here long enough you will eventually keep running into the same twelve people over and over again (and that’s when you move to the desert).

  The loping Western pace that those transplanted from faster-paced, European-style cities so often bemoan is likewise celebrated by locals like Babitz. It allows for constant detours and longer looks. L.A. doesn’t dictate an agenda, and like all of the American West it celebrates restless individualism. Babitz is at home anywhere, and everywhere she goes she finds the most interesting person, the weirdest place, the funniest throwaway detail. She makes writing seem effortless and fun, which any writer can tell you is the hardest trick of all.

  The flightiness of Babitz’s narrator persona, in pieces like “All This and The Godfather Too,” may have been slightly exaggerated to catch people off guard while she took a good long look, making careful mental notes throughout. In slow-paced Los Angeles it’s easy to get distracted by a good sunset or a flock of butterflies and forget to produce any work at all, but this collection shows Babitz to have been insanely prolific while also attending every good party in the L.A. hills and many long nights at the Chateau Marmont. The parties are part of her process, just like those long drives to the beach she recommends.

  Babitz is the ultimate Hollywood local, and like any true Angeleno she is laid-back and open-minded about seemingly everything—from high-priced stationery to female gym rats. Like Babitz, I am from L.A. and am fond of it in all its weird extremities. I was born in Hollywood but grew up in the San Fernando Valley, and have had plenty of “How can you live there?” questions directed my way—which compelled me to go searching for all the reasons I could. Anyone who thinks Los Angeles is only gorgeous would-be starlets dangling over the maw of destruction has never had jury duty here. It’s just a regular city that is also bizarre in ways that even a local will admit are beyond full human comprehension. The smog makes for gorgeous sunsets.

  California is known for its erasure of visual history—whether through quake, fire, or purposeful human intervention. Like the pictures she takes with the Brownie camera she brings to the set of The Godfather, Part II, Babitz renders perfect snapshots of San Francisco and Los Angeles. She describes the constant California moment of bland apartments and bland people ruining the weird, spooky charm of L.A.’s beach cities, like Marina del Rey, or high-rises in San Francisco turning from funky artists’ spaces into offices for investor-funded media companies. The cost of living in L.A. has gone up absurdly ever since then, even as wages have stagnated, leading to a housing crisis that has pushed thousands of people into tent villages all over the city.

  Although L.A. has changed since Babitz wrote about it in the seventies and eighties, many parts of Eve’s Hollywood remain. You can still take the Raymond Chandler driving tour she suggests through L.A.’s “amazing streets” that run across the whole city, although today there are potholes galore due to civic decay. You can still get the taquitos she raves about in Eve’s Hollywood at Cielito Lindo, and any reader of the great food critic Jonathan Gold will know that L.A. is even now full of cheap incredible meals.

  Despite the timelessness of her subject and style, there are certain things that do mark Babitz as a working writer from another era. The piece about The Godfather, Part II, for instance, would be impossible to pull off today. It’s remarkable for a freedom of access and a forthrightness about difficulties on set that are unimaginable in today’s PR-directed magazine climate. Babitz isn’t afraid to dramatize the ways the powerful are built up by people around them. And gossip is part of her reporting style, because so much of gossip is news that powerful men don’t want made public; it reveals them as silly, or petty, or cruel. Babitz can’t help but make important men look as silly as they really are. But she isn’t gratuitously cruel. Just as she doesn’t shy away from recording men at their most ridiculous, she doesn’t shy away from objectifying beautiful men (and she does it so much better than anyone else). She’s nobody’s sycophant, and that commands a certain kind of respect from her subjects, who’ve grown used to being sucked up to.

  •

  I was nervous to read the title essay to this collection, Babitz’s first sustained writing about the 1997 accident that largely put an end to her writing career, because I worried about what it would do to the intertwined mythoi of Babitz and L.A. Time and again in her work Babitz had crushed the notion that women were objects rather than subjects; she simply effortlessly embodied both roles. Despite being a writer myself and knowing full well that writing is an act of prolonged seduction that involves portraying oneself as maybe a little funnier, sexier, more self-aware than the reality, I was afraid to discover that there was a sadder, more vulnerable soul inside the confident public Babitz. Could she, just like me, have been projecting a fearlessness in her writing that isn’t fully representative of who she really is? The answer of course is yes, of course she is vulnerable and human and cognizant of her own brashness (and so am I), and it’s not only fine, it’s wonderful.

  “My friends would kill me if I died” is what Babitz says about her accident, joking—but telling the truth. To be a female artist is to put your own stubborn obsessions above all else in a world that still expects you to take care of other people while setting your own obsessive interests aside. Throughout her life Babitz moved among stubborn, creative men who did only exactly as they pleased, and she did the same in her own way to more radical effect. To be impulsive is to be accident-prone, to follow your passions is to risk letting them consume you, and women with great appetites for life are often demonized for their desires, just as men are lionized for theirs.

  Eve Babitz was of the first generation of women who really had it in their power to decide to not get married and have children. She didn’t form a nuclear family of her own but she has an artist’s family—composed of her sister and friends and ex-lovers and creative admirers. And after the accident they all took care of her together, in an inspiring way. (In Lili Anolik’s biography, Hollywood’s Eve, when asked why famous and now wealthy exes like Harrison Ford and Steve Martin donated money to help her, she sits up in bed and croaks, “Blow jobs.”)

  Having gotten sober after a youth spent trying every hyped-up high, Babitz comes to see just living as the ultimate high. She is not a death-driven fatalist like her old friend Jim Morrison or some of the sad, beautiful female friends she writes about whose worth is so wrapped up in their looks that they failed to develop any other skills. She’s a writer, who happens to be so charming and good at her job that decades later Han Solo still thinks of her fondly.

  Aft
er the accident and throughout her recovery process, Babitz is humorously deflective about the seriousness of it all. She stubbornly refuses to get bogged down in the tragedy and gore of lighting herself on fire, even as she exposes that gore and tragedy for all to see. Babitz is a proud exhibitionist, in her writing as in the Duchamp photo that first brought her notoriety. Confronted with the transformation of her body by the fire, she does not let us look away. She describes the scene in the operating room, as she is put through multi-hour surgeries, as an “abattoir” then immediately quips, “All my life I had wanted to have a reason to use the word.”

  “I used to be charming,” Babitz jokes with one of the medical aides. The real joke being, she still is! Even with third-degree burns on half of her body and in unimaginable pain, she is recording the details for the story she knows she will inevitably write. The accident is one misadventure among the many misadventures she has turned into art. Yet it feels like a different type of Eve Babitz essay from the reminiscences she’s written before. Here she self-consciously addresses the lapses in her own memory and takes stock of her mortality in a way that seems simultaneously inevitable and contrary to her core beliefs. Babitz’s willingness to go her own way throughout life is inspiring, even as she admits it’s not on purpose exactly. The haphazardness of her own choices comes back to her throughout the essay about the fire, but Babitz does not ascribe any kind of grand apocalyptic or spiritual meaning to it. That’s what outsiders do. To her it is just a fire, and fires happen all the time in Los Angeles. They’re a thing that might happen to you if you live here, a known risk worth taking.

  •

  Babitz writes about the “perseverance of vision” in the work of auteurs like Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s her perseverance of vision that comes through in her own work. Like any artist or auteur, she came to earth with a strong point of view she had no choice but to share with the world. Reading her now, it seems she achieved the ultimate goal of any Hollywood girl—leaving behind a beautiful everlasting afterimage where you are always a little sexier, a little funnier, a little more charismatic than maybe you really were, or anyone could ever be. But Eve Babitz, like her beloved fellow L.A. native and icon Marilyn Monroe, really is that sexy, that funny, that charismatic. And as Marilyn’s films freeze her image, Eve’s writing preserves her voice.