Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine. Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are, regardless of who she wants them to be . . . In Eve’s Hollywood, she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the wide-angle perspective of a woman much older—and she’s only in her 20s.”—Holly Brubach, The New York Times Eve Babitz is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz. 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, L.A. Review of Books

This is a review of the audiobook edition of Eve Babitz’ legendary memoir, Eve’s Hollywood. It was very well read by Mia Barron, who bites off every word like Kirk Douglas in a shitty mood. I enjoyed Turning 70 this year has done a little something to me. It’s very clear there are less years ahead to live than years already lived—- In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion.

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I love what Eve brought to this book —- her life experiences growing up in Los Angeles - BEING HERSELF!! 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.’ I’ve done Eve a disservice over the years, thinking of her as just a society girl. She certainly did have a lot of fun, but she wasn’t just a famous pretty face. She started out her career as an artist for a record studio. She designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. She wrote short stories that were published in Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. She also wrote four books. Eve is easy to dismiss because she doesn’t wear her seriousness on her sleeve. Her concerns are the seating arrangements at dinner parties, love affairs on the skids. She offers up information commonly known as gossip. Girl stuff, basically. (By that standard, of course, Proust was writing girl stuff, too.) But her casualness has depth, an aesthetic resonance. She achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe.

Eve’s Hollywood is a well-written, artfully wrought time capsule that captures the smoky, surly LA nights as ’60s idealism gave way to ’70s excess. Sure, it’s a wee bit overblown and melodramatic in certain passages. But how the hell could anyone write about a period of such bacchanalian overindulgence without being a wee bit overblown and melodramatic?First, Babitz – who lived long enough to be famous, forgotten, and rediscovered – recently passed away. Claiming that going to Olvera Street requires a leisurely drive down Sunset Blvd. -- “taking the freeway when you’re on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to go visit your cat, the texture’s all wrong” --she paints a picture of the working class east end of Sunset, ambling through the “hills and flowers and the car part places.” Yeah, Janis should have done that. As she had no health insurance, her friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. She became more reclusive after that. Her last books were TWO BY TWO: TANGO, TWO-STEP, AND THE L.A. NIGHT (1999) and I USED TO BE CHARMING: THE REST OF EVE BABITZ (2019). However, whilst all of the vignettes that make up this collection are fascinating insights into Babitz' life, there doesn't seem to be any common connecting factor threading them all together. Reading this book is like hopping along the stepping stones of Babitz' memories and not stopping until you reach dry land. Everything seems to crash together and there is no semblance of a structure or timeline. Thus reading this book can be quite a disorientating experience. Much like listening to Stravinsky actually.

Among the hundreds of anecdotes in the marvelous Live from New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, several stand out, one much more than the others now that I've read Eve's Hollywood. Here's film director John Landis, who dropped by Studio 8H to visit John Belushi prior to beginning production on National Lampoon's Animal House in 1977. So what’s her writing like? Eve 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.

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In 1971, Joan Didion passed a personal essay Babitz had written about Hollywood High to an editor at Rolling Stone. Babitz would be commissioned to write many magazine articles. Unlike Didion, she was appreciated less for her writing and more for her openness to discuss her social life. In 2014, a tribute in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik launched a revival that includes magazine profiles, Babitz's books reissued by the New York Review Books Classics, a biography by Anolik and a TV series in development at Hulu based on Babitz's memoirs. Our first born daughter (in the entertainment industry), has lived in West Hollywood for twenty-three years…… claims to be— hip, Metropolitan, Bohemian, the movie and music industry of Walt Disney, Universal Pictures, MGM, Paramont, Warner Bros, The Academy of Arts and Science,……