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. She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among other magazines and her books included Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. Some were called fiction, others non-fiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life – with only the names changed.

You can tell that Towles wrote it, his voice shines through, but it’s pretentious, incredibly unorganized, and just a pain to read. I thought that maybe this was scrapped material from Rules, but all of the prose is B-grade when placed against the other novel. And to Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel and the guy who ran off with the baby sitter. And Milo Minderbinder's inspiration.I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness. No one chronicled–or lived–the 60s in LA like Eve Babitz. Her work has languished out of print for much too long. 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. It is not absolutely necessary to have read RULES OF CIVILITY before reading EVE IN HOLLYWOOD, but I would suggest doing so. It not only removes some Spoilers, but it also provides side references that will cause the “knowing” among us to smile.

And to Sara Harrison, Noel Harrison, Simon Harrison, Harriette Harrison, Kathy Harrison, Zoe (my friend) Harrison, Margaret Harrison and the new twins. Here in this book, we discover Eve's adventures after she doesn't catch that train home in The Rules of Civility.

had already begun. “Predictably, and now a bit tiresomely,” a Kirkus review observed, the novel was about California, and “ Babitz’s L.A. weltschmerz has gotten rather clotty and overdone.” And still, Jacaranda was a few I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland. The ending doesn't feel as much like an ending as a segue into the next chapter, which, sadly is not there. I would like to journey on with Eve to the rest of the places on her "list".

And to the future good will of Consumer's Liquor, the best liquor store in America and aptly named.

And to L. Rust Hills for the ice cream story and the one about taking sides and anagrams. That Esquire is falling apart. Mine is Babe Vizet. In this chain of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs of Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with The Wind. The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Read more. And to Paul Butterfield over yonder's wall, a har­monica lays playing and it must be greener than here, I've always thought.

After most of her work went out of print, she was praised in a 2014 Vanity Fair article by Anolik as an overlooked and unbowed genius. Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and other books were reissued, a well-regarded biography by Anolik was published in 2019 and Babitz was discovered by a generation of younger women, leading her to joke: “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.” She wrote of being driven home in her teens and kissed by an older man, Johnny Stompanato, who, in one of Hollywood’s most sensational scandals, was later murdered by the daughter of Lana Turner in what was ruled a justifiable homicide. A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said.

From that point on, Eve always took my calls, and I made them, several times a week, for years and years. The rapport that eluded us in person, where every encounter was abrupt, stilted, awkward, was, over the phone, effortless. I didn’t respond because I didn’t know how to. She wasn’t thanking me, and I don’t think I’d have been able to bear it if she was. (Eve didn’t do humbug emotions like gratitude.) There was a half smile on her face, and she was looking at me intently, something I couldn’t recall her ever having done before. I felt the need to speak, only I couldn’t think what to say. Couldn’t think, couldn’t think. Just as he did for the New York City of 1938 in Rules of Civility, he paints a vibrant portrait of Tinsel Town in it's Golden Age. And to Derek Taylor. Tell them, Derek, how great I am. Like you once introduced me to a Beatle as "the best girl in America." In a series of six detailed stories, each told from a different point of view, Towles tells of Eve's adventures in Hollywood which take her from the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the Santa Monica Pier, to the set of Gone With The Wind.