Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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They let her think she was just a shitty Hollywood actress and Arthur Miller was a brilliant genius….

The answer to the question I’m most frequently asked about Eve: Yes, Eve, raised by Trotskyist parents and uninterested in politics but undoubtedly liberal her entire life, was far right in her final years. Now, at last, she’s being celebrated not just for her beauty and for the long list of men she inspired and caroused with before they became art and music superstars, but for her writing. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. She healed enough to describe it in the essay, I Used to Be Charming, the title a joke she cracked to one of her caretakers.To the world at large, this was a happily-ever-after ending: A jewel had been snatched out of the trash heap of history, and in the nick of time. She was likened at times to fellow Californian Joan Didion – although Babitz often found magic where Didion saw ruin – and to the French author-sage-confessor Colette. My curiosity was not completely satisfied with this short story collection, but it does provide six fascinating glimpses into the life of a remarkable character.

It's quite a while since I read Rules of Civility and I would perhaps have enjoyed these stories about how Eve got on in Hollywood after she had left New York at the end of that book, if I'd read them earlier. And then the clothes confirmed my suspicions: a dark yet faded T-shirt, stained; shapeless black pants; glasses with lenses so thick and greasy that the eyes behind them were hugely magnified, distorted. The singular spectrum of her adventures, her friends, and her tastes reveal themselves in her unconventional and delightful dedication page(s). A. Woman: “I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then…[my mother] told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry.Could not find it in the library, nor on sale, so I read it online at Booksvooks: https://booksvooks. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Eve, I think, always knew we were in a Greek myth, only in her view, Hades wasn’t a place to which she’d been forcibly consigned, but voluntarily retreated. Imagine a Joan Didion who likes food and drugs and rock and roll and fun, or a Weetzie Bat a couple of decades early: that’s Eve Babitz.

And Mirandi, by responding to those queries, also shielded the sudden celebrity from Eve, who simply couldn’t be trusted not to blow it up in some spectacular fashion. Here in this book, we discover Eve's adventures after she doesn't catch that train home in The Rules of Civility. Eve Ross washes up in Los Angeles in dying year of the 1930s bringing with her little other than her own unique brand of worldly, seductive cynicism and wit. Eve's Hollywood*—her first book, originally published in the 70s and to be reissued next month from New York Review Books Classics—was billed as a "novel" but is clearly a memoir, and her voice on the page is no less mesmerizing than her presence in a room.Yet she was touching imaginations in a way that couldn’t be explained by the brilliance of her books alone. Really, though, and in fact, the ending for Eve was ambiguously ever after, those gardenias sometimes blowing rancid, sometimes sweet. With the same calm, assured narration of the original, this collection is a good, if very slight, read.