Loading summary
Transcript9 lines
- [00:01]
Jackie Danziger
When history buff Eric Roper buys an.
- [00:03]
Lily Analick
Old house in Minneapolis, he wants to know everything he can about the people who lived there before him. But one couple become his obsession, and as he pieces together their lives through genealogy records and old recordings, he realizes they're showing him a side of his city he never knew existed. This is Ghost of a Chance from the Minnesota Star Tribune.
- [00:27]
Jackie Danziger
Subscribe now, wherever you get your podcasts. Lemonada Joan Didion and Eve Bab the cool girls of Los angeles in the 1970s. They were authors, writers, journalists, artists, and ultimately cultural icons. For two writers who wrote about their own lives a fair amount, they remain a source of mystery and interest in many ways. For the author of this unique cultural history journalist Lily Analick, Eve Babitz is her particular object of fascination. She starts out the book admitting this plainly. She says, if intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babs. Analick had already completed one biography of Babitz in 2019, pulling her deep into a nearly obsessive immersion of Babitz's life when she passed away in 2021. Shortly after her death, Analik was granted access to a treasure trove boxes of personal papers and letters discovered among the clutter in Babitz's decrepit apartment, many of which were unsent correspond addressed to Joan Didion. Using these letters as a jumping off point, Enelik dives into a chronicle of the complex relationship between the two women who we would probably call frenemies today. The book is packed with thrilling anecdotes. I mean, after all, both Didion and Babbitts led rich cinematic lives, always rubbing shoulders with the literature snobs, cycling in and out of intense relationships and producing great art. Ultimately, their lives diverged significantly, and Babbitts ended up dying in poverty, squalor, and poor health, both mentally and physically. But these letters remain a testament to the time when their paths seemed aligned. The fascinating and occasionally frustrating part of this narrative structure is that we're looking through multiple overlapping lenses of perspective. We see Eve through Lily's eyes, Joan through Eve's eyes, and then Lily's perspective is again layered on top of everything. As a final gloss, as she relays the story, Anelik is certainly aware that she is an unconventionally key player in the story. The Prelude centers her feelings and experience when she finds out about the boxes of papers, and there are many other points in the book where she brings her own point of view to the front. That said, it's an effective way to get across the nature of Joan and Eve's influence on each other and how they both influenced so many writers to come. Analick herself narrates the audiobook and actress Emma Roberts reads the letters, which adds this really fun pop to the recording. Today we'll be sharing Chapter one with you in light of the horrific wildfires in Los Angeles, the rich cultural history and incredible beauty that has come from that city. So it's a great time to give a listen to this story of two of the women who helped make LA everything that it is.
- [03:09]
Lily Analick
Chapter one. Eve Babitz with the great big tits Eve, apart from being a good and important writer herself, is the key that unlocks the very good and very important Joan. We will therefore establish Eve first before we cue the Once Upon a time though a note. There are no sections in Didion and Babbitts that are rewritten versions of sections in Hollywood's Eve, except for this one. I think that's because I can't start Eve's story any place but the beginning. Not the beginning beginning, since I'm about as interested in where people were born and their lousy David Copperfield childhoods as Holden Caulfield was the true beginning, which for me is the moment a person becomes aware, socially aware, sexually aware, self aware. That moment happened for Eve. So I've always believed in the bathroom at Hollywood High School. And now cue the Once upon a time. It's 1959, you're 16 in the 11th grade and you're where you are anytime you're not in class, the girls room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts building of Hollywood High and you're doing what you're doing anytime you're in the girls room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts building of Hollywood High, sharing a cigarette with Holly, though you'll call her Sally when you write about her years later in Rolling Stone. Holly, who blew her chance the moment she took it, signed to 20th Century Fox, then dropped the next day for bleaching her hair, an atomic bombshell shade of blonde Marilyn Monroe's. Exactly. The studio didn't want the new Marilyn Monroe, as it had the old under contract and shooting let's Make Love right on the lot. It wanted the new Jean Seberg, the fresh face beauty plucked out of Iowa in obscurity to play Joan of Arc and under contract at Columbia, Holly, who's taken up with a group of 20 somethings from her acting class, the Thunderbird Girls, knockouts all in blue eyeshadow, in cinch waisted cocktail dresses, cruising the Sunset Strip in what Else Thunderbird convertibles spending their weekends in Palm Springs making Ring a ding Ding with Frank Sinatra. Holly, who chases 15 milligrams of Dexamil with four cups of coffee just to drag herself to homeroom. Holly, who is your best friend. And then there's your family. Your father, Saul, from Brooklyn, New York, is a studio musician, 20th Century Fox, a former member of both a philharmonic, the Los Angeles and an orchestra, the Hollywood bowl, and a one time regular at Central Avenue dance sessions with Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton. Your mother, May, from Sour Lake, Texas, is an artist. Her medium, quill and ink, also parties. She's known for her beauty and charm. Her chignon with the rose in it, her chiles rellenos. The chiles just hot enough. Your godfather, Ikar Stravinsky, from St. Petersburg, Russia, is a mercurial and massively influential composer. His most famous work, famous to you because it was featured in that Disney perpetrated kitsch atrocity, Fantasia. Every time you hear Le Sacre du Printemps, you picture those stupid cavorting cartoon dinosaurs. He gave you your name in a sense of life's supreme possibilities. You gave him an ant farm. Your house on the corner of Cherimoya and Chula Vista at the foot of the Hollywood Hills is packed so full of musicians that there's barely space for their instruments. Kid Ory and Joseph Segetti, Marilyn Horne and Ingoff Dahl, Marni Nixon, whose voice has already come out of the mouths of Sophia Loren, Boy on a Dolphin and Deborah Kerr. The King and I will soon come out of the mouths of Natalie Wood, west side Story and Audrey Hepburn. My Fair lady rehearses in your living room in your front yard, mowed once a week by Mr. Sorenson, the hired man. No household chores for Saul can't risk his violinist's hands. The two Kenneths, Rexroth and Patchen, deliver readings. Poetry, though, bores you blind, so you ask Lucy Herman to tell you stories. Inside, Lucy's husband, Bernard, Uncle Benny to you, is putting the finishing touches on the score for Hitchcock's latest thriller, Chiller Psycho. When in a year's time you go to the theater to see the movie, you mostly don't because you're covering your eyes with your palms. You do, however, hear Saul's bow and strings shrieking along with Janet Leigh in that shower in Cabin one of the Bates Motel. There are tales of picnics along the LA river with Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, the Huxleys, the picnickers arriving by limousine with baskets prepared by Chaplin's wife, actress Paulette Goddard, because she was quite a gourmet, your godmother, Vera Stravinsky explains to you. Once, on a vacation to Santa Fe, Saul took a detour, drove to the middle of nowhere so you could meet the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. Tall, ancient, flinty eyed. Observe how she lived. You'd like the handsome boy who sat at her feet and rubbed them. You hadn't liked the chow dogs who barked at you. The bell tolls and you take a final drag on your cigarette. As you turn to flick the butt out the window, you see it, the 50 foot tall mural of Rudolph Valentino, the exquisite Latin androgyne with almond shaped eyes in the role that drove the 1921 movie going public into a state of rapture, of frenzy, of insanity. The chic Hollywood High's mascot, the giant close up painted on the side of the boys gymnasium, depicts him in windblown headdress gazing moodily past the track and football field. Perhaps at Paramount Pictures a few blocks away on Melrose, perhaps at Persia's desert splendor oceans away on the other side of the world. The reproduction of the silent screen icon, crude as it is, corny as it is, transfixes you. You can't look away now. Don't forget, you've got, on the one hand, your high culture background. Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, laughing as you and your sister, Mirandy, younger by three years, get stuck together with Bubblegum during the premiere of his latest piece at the Ojai Music Festival. Edward James, the art collector, telling you that your beauty surpasses that of the Marquis de Sade's great granddaughter, Vera Stravinsky, the dancer and costume designer teaching you the point of caviar. And you've got, on the other hand, your pop culture context. Roadside beach, where you body surf and eat pineapple snow cones, eye the juvenile delinquents eyeing you. Hollywood Boulevard, where you join the crowd in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, watch Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, in matching cleavages and clashing polka dots, press their palms into wet cement as cameras click and flash the luau in Beverly Hills, where you and Holly buy vicious versions, two kinds of brandy, five kinds of rum, a splash of lemonade and a gardenia floating on top with your fake IDs bat. Your washes, also fake at men twice your age. As if that weren't enough, there's your disposition, naturally romantic. Consequently, the melodrama of the image before you, larger than life, large as the movies grips and beguiles the longer you stare, the more susceptible you become to its dark fascination, its trashy, profound glamour. And then, just like that, your imagination is captured, your tastes formed. Even if you don't think much of the movies or the people who make them, your sensibility will be, from this moment on, cinematic Hollywood, with its appeal to the irrational and the unreal, its provocation of desire and volatility, its worship of sex and spectacle, will forevermore be your touchstone and guiding light. Its ethos is your ethos, its values your values. Your Eve Babbitts future muse and artist, observed and observer, chronicler of scenes, stealer of them, too. And you're poised to enter a new decade. Okay, listener, I want to get Eve to 1967 and Franklin Avenue, when and where she meets Joan with maximum efficiency. I like motion, color, urgency. No explanations or afterthoughts. Full speed ahead. And I assume you do, too. To that end, I'll skip over her young adulthood entirely, except for two key One, the moment she completes her first successful artistic act. Two, the moment she completes her second successful artistic act. Eve's first successful artistic act. A photograph taken on October 12, 1963. Only in order to understand the how and why of it. Never mind the what and when, we need to back up slightly to the spring of 1961. Eve, 18, was drowsing her way through classes at Los Angeles City College during the day, wide awake and running wild with the Thunderbird girls at night. And then her mother told her that her father was moving to Europe. It was to study the six violin solos of Bach or something, I don't know. Bach was his obsession, and that the family would be moving with him. They'd be gone for a year, maybe two. Eve lasted eight weeks. The only place I liked was London, and we spent most of the time in Paris. She said. I hated Paris because it's actually horrible. It's cold, and the Frenchmen are so short in heels. I towered over them. I couldn't stand it. I needed to come home. But home was gone. My father rented out our house, the Terrimoya house, to these crazy people. They ripped up the floors and destroyed the plumbing. And there was electrical wiring all over the place. Then they ran off without paying rent. My father couldn't do anything other than sell it, I guess. He and my mother bought a house a few blocks away on Bronson. And they did it sight unseen because they were still in Europe with my sister. My Aunt Tybee found it for them and it was perfectly nice. But for me, the Past was torn off right there, right when my parents sold Cherimoya. Eve went back to lacc. Not, however, to the Thunderbird Girls. The cause of the break? A book, William Styron's Lie down in Darkness, about the very beautiful and very doomed Peyton Loftus. The Thunderbird Girls stuck to one book, said Eve, and I read every book. They all love Lie down in Darkness. They thought they were the girl in it. I thought it was a miserable excuse to commit suicide, which seemed to be its purpose. Lie down in Darkness is in so many ways an early version of Joan's play It as it Lays, a novel that will also give Eve fits. Peyton Loftus winds up in a body bag for much the same reason that Maria Wyeth play it's heroine, winds up in a loony bin. Because according to Styron, the only way to save your life in a compromised world is to take it. Because according to Joan, the only sane response to the modern condition is insanity. I never got headaches, but I got a headache from that book. And for the Thunderbird Girls, it was their bible. I'd had enough. The break, though, was about more than bummer taste in literature. The Thunderbird Girls, with their garter belts and merry widow corsets, their dreams of alimony checks as big as the Ritz were the last of a line. They were the height of style, yet also, Eve sensed, on the verge of extinction. They had perfected a way to be that made them obsolete. From just two strokes of God's Japanese paintbrush. Marilyn dying and the Beatles. She later wrote she was looking for something new. New came in the form of a friend she didn't like. Myrna Riceman. Myrna managed to get her weight no matter what, said Eve. Myrner walked up to me one day at LACC and asked me if my godfather was Stravinsky. And I said yeah, and she said, great, I'm going to pick you up. At 8 she took me to Barney's. I was 19 and suddenly life was fun. Barney's was Barney's Beanery, a bar at the intersection of Holloway and Santa Monica in West Hollywood where young artists did their drinking. There that night, sitting in the back with the young artists, Ed Kynholz, Billy Albanston, Robert Irwin was a young non artist. Walter Hopps. Hopps was co founder of the Ferus Gallery, around the corner from Barney's on La Cienega. Hobbs was just 30 in 1962, but he was already one of LA's wisest seers. A fourth generation Californian, he grew up in Eagle Rock, the son, grandson, and great grandson of doctors. When it was time for college, he obligingly registered for science classes at Stanford and then ucla. It was his art history classes, though, that moved him, wrote Eve.
- [16:45]
Emma Roberts
I remember him telling me somewhere in my past that while he was majoring in pre med he happened accidentally to open some galleries just for diversion. But it wasn't until 1957 or so, when he opened the Ferris Gallery with John Altoon and Ed Kienholz, that the myth of the west began to solidify. Whatever Walter says goes. And what Walter Hoppe said, subliminally but with perfect control, was this is the place. This, we all sort of wondered is the place. We thought New York was the place. New York says it's the place. And we all know New York's right. So how could this LA be the.
- [17:26]
Lily Analick
Place that LA is the place? Was an unstated statement, as simple as it was radical. And it was already familiar to Eve because her parents and parents friends had been unstating it to her since she was a child. How exciting it must have been, though, to hear it unstated by somebody who was nearer her own age, somebody who all the right people thought was the right person, somebody who was serious business. LA's primacy was the premise on which Hobbs Gallery was based. Unlike, say, the LA County Museum, once picketed by May and Vera Stravinsky for deeming not a single LA artist worthy of space on its walls, Ferris exhibited the work of locals. Its first show was of Boyle Heights own Wallace Berman and resulted in a bust by the vice squad. Berman led away in handcuffs. One of his assemblages contained an erotic drawing. Okay, where's the dirty stuff? Said the cops as they broke down the door. The scandal didn't hurt Hopps's standing any with LA art patrons, an easily scandalized bunch, maybe, because in his Brooks Brothers suit, starched shirt, narrow tie and owlish glasses, he looked the very picture of respectability, every inch the doctor he never became. At the end of the night, Hopps told Eve that as she swung by Ferris, he'd show her things. She swung. He showed installations by Ed Kyleholz, paintings by John Altoon, ceramics by Ken Price, and then the inside of his apartment one floor above the gallery. Afterward, he said he'd call her when he got back from Brazil in a couple of months. You know sex in the City? Said Eve. Well, if there'd been a Sex in the city out here, Walter would be Mr. Big. He's the guy who's always pulling the rug out from under you. While Eve waited for hops, she killed time with his artists. There was Ed Ruscha, the cutest, and Ken Price, maybe cuter also Ron Cooper, not an artist Hopps showed at Ferris, but an artist nonetheless, and quote cute too, in a Toshiro Mifune way, with whom she'd move in and then eight days later, out. She told me she'd had enough, said Cooper. Eve was evidently too busy rolling around on her bed to make it, recalled a friend who'd drop in on her periodically. That girl was such a slob. And she had all these guys coming over all the time. I'd look around and be like, where the do they? She couldn't help herself. She thought the LA artists were terrific, said Lori Pepper, Eve's cousin, and sex was how she showed her appreciation. She had a crush on the whole scene. And it was the scene, more than any guy in it, that Eve thrilled to I have always loved scenes, she wrote, bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip and brilliance. And the scene at Barney's was just fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that the moment she discovered it is steeped in a kind of personal and historical significance. Paris in the twenties was what all of us were searching for, said Mirandi. What Hemingway and Fitzgerald had found in the cafes is what we all wanted. The movable feast. And Eve and I had just been to Paris. There was no sign of that scene. None. We went to La Cupola, we went to Le Dome. Those places were empty. Nothing was happening. We were so disappointed. And that disappointment is why Eve understood that Barney's was something special. She thought of herself as an artist, a painter, and wanted to be around other artists. And Barney's was where all the artists were at. The people there had been drawn by who knows what forces, and they really had been drawn because they came from everywhere. I think Eve looked around and saw the level of talent, saw all that youth and hope and drive, and said to herself, Barney's in LA in 1960, whatever year it was, is Paris in the twenties. That summer, Eve's parents asked her to rejoin them in Europe. This time she'd make a go of was August 6, 1962, and the Babises were driving through the south of France when the Volkswagen bus Sol had just purchased began to sputter and shake. They pulled over in the town of Nimes. The newspaper headlines there less read than screamed Marilyn. A mortal Marilyn. No last name required, since everybody knew Witch Marrow. Marilyn Who? Eve, aged 10, walking home from Swim class, eyes stinging with chlorine and smog, saw immortalized in front of Grauman's handprints and high heel prints. Marilyn, Eve's beacon of hope ever since May pointed out that Marilyn was as much of an artist as the grim faced and forbidding Georgia O'Keeffe. 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, wrote Eve. And so I realized she was right and didn't. A side note. The one unequivocally admiring piece on a woman that Joan wrote was her Georgia O'Keeffe profile. And the reason she was so wild for Okeeffes was precisely because of Okeeffes. Grim faced and forbidding qualities, she exulted in Okeeffes crustiness and pepperiness called Okeeffe a hard woman. The ultimate compliment for Joan. Here's how you know it was the ultimate compliment for Joan. She paid it to herself. In the Year of Magical Thinking, her book about the death of John Donne, she quoted multiple times until it became a kind of refrain or mantra. The social worker who called her a cool customer quoted it ironically, but not really. Really quoted it sentimentally. She was taken with the description. It's how she saw herself, how she wanted to be seen. The barbiturate overdose, a quote, probable suicide, according to the official ruling, was a shock to Eve, even though Marilyn had been falling apart publicly for years. And in Eve's memory, the news drove her to the brink of nervous breakdown. She told me that her devastation was so profound she had to return to la, this time for good. Well, she said, I've never been too stable. But Eve's memory is a mis memory. She remained in Europe for another seven months. It was the fall of 63. Eve had been back in LA since the spring, which meant Eve had been back at Barney since the spring. The scene there still so good she didn't have to care about any other. Almost every night she'd hit up the bar. I exhausted all the possibilities of Barney's. She wrote, it would get so that there would be 10 guys who didn't know each other, who I'd mauled. Eve was chasing so many men at the same time to distract herself from the fact that for her there were only two. Brian Hutton, we'll get to him shortly, was one. Except not at that particular moment, because he and Eve were In a fight. They were always my fights. He was never in them. He used to just wait until I stopped being mad. Which was why her other one and only truly was her one and only Walter Hops. I guess he didn't like South America any more than I liked Europe. Hopps was a formative influence on Eve. He taught her how to see. Hopps's vision, Eve believed, was visionary. His perception extrasensory. What was hidden from other people, that is the future was revealed to him. He could discern it in the present. For example, Andy Warhol was in the early 60s, viewed as a commercial artist. And therefore not an artist at all. It was Hobbs, along with Farah's co owner Irving Blum, who in July 1962, gave Warhol his very first fine art show. Those Campbell Soup cans. 32 mouthwatering flavors, wrote Eve.
- [25:35]
Emma Roberts
If Walter Hopps decided someone was cool, the person was, in my opinion, cool for all eternity. So when he explained to me one night over chili at Barney's that Andy Warhol was going to have a show at the Ferris, I said, what? The soup can guy? You're kidding. How could that soup can guy be cool? And his hair. He's seven jumps ahead of everyone else. Walter may have said.
- [26:04]
Lily Analick
To understand the scope and magnitude of andy Warhol in 1962 was also to be seven jumps ahead of everyone else. And Eve understood because Hops made her understand. Suddenly I had the eyes to see, she said. Walter gave me the eyes. And Hopps was about to demonstrate once again that his timing was right. His Pitch Perfect. October 1963. Hobbes had convinced Marcel Duchamp, who in 1917 turned a urinal upside down and signed it, thereby bringing into being pop art and postmodernism. Duchamp its art if I say so. As surely as he laid waste to Western culture and thought Duchamp, it's art if I say so. To let the Pasadena Art Museum host his first retrospective. Thaddys had convinced arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, inarguably the most revolutionary, that a landmark moment in the career. He was too hip, too avant garde to have. In 1921, he retired from art, took up chess, was best handled by an institution nobody'd ever heard of. In a town about to become synonymous with the word geezer. Jan and Dean's, the little old lady from Pasadena would drop within the year. Go, Granny, go, Granny, go, Granny, go. The epochal shift had begun Los Angeles from cultural wasteland to cultural hotspot. The cultural wasteland talk was nonsense. Obviously, geniuses aren't dumb. To those with established reputations in the arts, the movie industry meant easy money. The reason LA was lousy with geniuses, which Eve knew better than anyone, since as a kid all she had to do was walk from her living room to her kitchen and she'd trip over three at least. And now LA was about to announce itself not just as a civilization, but as a civilization in its ideal state. This is the place. And she wouldn't be there to utter a single I told you so. Eve's name had been left off the invite list to the party for the show's private opening. Hopps was notoriously absent minded. This oversight, though, was deliberate. How could he bring his girlfriend to the party when he was already bringing his wife? A brief meditation on Eve and married men Saul and May Babbitts were, in Eve's view, a perfect couple. For them, marriage wasn't happily ever after. It was ecstatically ever after. My mother was a stacked little hubba hubba from Sour Lake, Texas, who snagged my father, a kind of New York intellectual Trotskyite Jew, she wrote, then added my parents neck a lot. Only before May could marry Saul, she had to get rid of her husband. Oh yeah, May's first husband, said Laurie. Poncho. That's what he was called, if I ever knew his last name. I forgot. What I'd always heard from my mother about Poncho was that he was an Italian, the head waiter at one of those movie star clubs on the Sunset Strip. Zeros maybe, and that May was running around with Saul behind his back. Eve, I don't think my mother thought of it as cheating. She felt like she was in a European situation. All of which is to say Eve was bred to both revere matrimony and not take it altogether seriously. Perhaps adultery even struck her as romantic, Irresistibly so. And it wasn't as if she couldn't keep herself in check. After all, she never slept with a friend's love or ex love, no matter how cute he was, how good the drugs he was, holding honor among thieves, etc. The Deschamps party began on the evening of October 7th, careened into the early morning hours of October 8th. It wasn't the typical slapdash slop pot Louisiana art affair. People wearing whatever clothes they'd thrown over their bathing suits, drinking cheap Chablis out of plastic cups, wandering from gallery to gallery, Monday night art walks, they were called. It was high style and high gloss and altogether ultra super duper black Ties and pink champagne and the hotel green. Guests included movie stars Dennis Hopper, the children of movie stars Hopper's wife Brooke Hayward, the daughter of Margaret Sullivan, underground movie stars Taylor Mead, people played by movie stars Beatrice Wood, the real Catherine, the Jean Moreau role, Intrafoe's Jules and Jim, as well as LA artists who looked like movie stars Ed Ruscha, Billy Albankston, Larry Bell, and a non l a artist who was making his own version of movie stars, superstars Andy Warhol, also Mirandi, Babbitts. The date of Julian Wasser, a contract photographer covering the event for Time magazine. My little sister went and I didn't, said Eve. The humiliation and so forth. Eve hugged her pillow that night and cursed her faithless lover. I was only 20 and there wasn't a way I could really get to Walter. But I decided that if I could ever wreak any havoc in his life, I would. Not an idle threat. Eve was holding a glass of wine, standing in front of Duchamp's best known painting, New Descending a Staircase Number Two, at the public opening, which she was attending with her parents, home from Europe at last. Every so often she'd slide her eyes over to Deschamps and Hopps, themselves on exhibit, playing chess on an elevated platform. She was unable to track the game's progress, though, because Julian Wasser wouldn't stop pestering her. Julian kept coming up to me and saying lewd things like why don't you fuck me? And being his usual boring self. And then Wasser came up to her and said something unusual and not in the least boring. Their conversation, according to draft number six of Eve's option but never produced screenplay, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slut, went something like this. Wasser, unhooking the Nikon from around his neck, said, I'm gonna take a picture of Duchamp and a girl. You wanna be the girl? Okay, said Eve. He popped open the camera, replaced old film with new. Playing chess. A beat, then Eve said, oh, right, because that's what he gave up art for Wasser, his eyes on the film as he pulled it taut and naked. You, not him. Another beat, then Eve said, oh, right, because she gestured to the painting. Still in. Still in. Wasser bared his teeth in a grin. Great. Then we're all set. Have you told Duchamp about this? As the French would say, no. Don't you think you'd better? What if he doesn't like it? Wasser Nikon, back around his neck, started to walk off on the job again. He'll like it? What makes you so sure? He's a man, isn't he? Eve watched Wasser disappear into the crowd, then drained her glass in a Single swallow. Saturday, October 12th early morning. Eve sat beside Wasser in his shiny toy of a car, a Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. They were headed to the Pasadena Art Museum. Eve was on the road, but really she was on a cloud. The more she thought about Walther's idea, the more she liked it. He'd be making New Sitting at a Chessboard, a sequel to New Descending a Staircase with her in the starring role. How brilliant. How Hollywood, too. What could be more hopeful ingenue than baring all it was practically a local rite of passage, the de rigueur desperate act of a camera ready cutie when the wolf was howling at the door. Even for Marilyn. Especially for Marilyn. Admitting she was the golden girl in Wet Dream in the Golden Dreams calendar did as much for Marilyn's career as any movie. Except Eve wouldn't be bearing all to make money. She'd be doing it to make mischief and art. Suddenly, though, Eve wasn't on that cloud anymore, was plummeting to earth. Maybe this wasn't such a hot idea after all. Maybe this was just Wasser laying a line on her. Maybe only a fool wouldn't have known she was about to be played, for one. At least there was still time to call it off. Eve had just opened her mouth when Wasser turned to her. You aren't going to chicken out, are you? He said, his tone accusatory, not trusting her voice. She shook her head. Wasser patted her hand, laughed. Stick with me, kid, and you'll be ruined. 20 minutes later they arrived at the museum. After exchanging her blouse and skirt for a smock, she sat at the chessboard in the center of the room. As she waited for Duchamp to appear, Wasser to set up. She chain smoked, tried to fend off the panicked thoughts swarming her like bees. At last everybody was accounted for, all arranged. Wasser gave the signal. Eve rose, her mother's advice ringing in one ear. Never put anything in writing or a photo. Her father's in the other. Take his queen. She dropped the smock. Eve and Duchamp were in the middle of their third game and engrossed when Hopps entered the room, stopped short. The gum he'd been chewing fell out of his mouth. Hello, Walter, said Eve, barely looking up from the board. Duchamp inclined his head in a slight bow. Bonjour. Hopps just stood there staring until Wasser said, walter do you mind? We're working here. Hopps, making apologetic noises, backed out the door. In the resulting photograph, Eve and Duchamp sit at a chessboard. Duchamp's hand is raised, his wrist cocked in anticipation of his next move. Eve, legs crossed at the ankle, chin propped on her palm, waits for him to make it. She might have something on the radio, for example, or Chanel no. 5. You wouldn't know it from looking at her, though. Not that Duchamp, his sang froid. As immaculate as his suit is, he has eyes only for the game. Willful obliviousness is essential here. Neither Duchamp nor Eve can acknowledge her state in any way. If he leers or smirks, if she betrays the faintest hint of nerves or self consciousness, she'll be truly exposed. Naked rather than nude. Art will have become cheesecake, and that will be that. It's a walk across a high wire without a net. Yet both Duchamp and Eve reach the other side. Pas de sweat. Their mutual aplomb carries the day. Eve had certainly progressed since Hollywood High. No longer was she content to be a mere looker on a member of the audience. She was ready for her close up now. Only she refused to take it. Wasser's finger clicked and clicked that morning. In most of the shots, her features were visible. She chose one in which they were not. Wasser, a rogue but also a gentleman, granted her final say. And in so doing, she turned an extroverted gesture into an introverted. A demand for attention into a plea for privacy, stardom into anonymity. The photo was thus a fulfillment of her paradoxical desire to reveal herself to the world so a single person would see what else? The photo was her chance to be Marilyn in the Seven Year Itch. Marilyn was the girl, a gorgeous ninny bringing the midlife crisis of shy married man Richard Sherman to climax. In Wasser's rendering, Eve with the American dream made lush, nubile flesh, as though sprung fully blown from the imagination of the European aesthete. Lean as a blade, dry as a bone. Opposite her, like Marilyn, Eve was a sex object who was also a sex subject, exploiting herself every bit as ruthlessly as any of the men. Wasser, Hopps, Duchamp exploited her. She wasn't just model and muse, passive, impliable, but artist and instigator, wicked and subversive. Walter thought he was running the show, Eve told me, her voice cool, deadpan even, and I finally got to run something. Posing with Deschamp did for Eve what she hoped it would it allowed her to get even with Hopps, get one up on? In fact, he'd achieved the impossible by landing the retrospective. But it's her image that's forever associated with it. Every artist on the planet knows that photograph, said Wasser. She didn't just run his show, she stole it. Eve's second successful artistic act A letter written on April 14, 1964, only in order to understand the how and why of it, never mind the what and when. We need to back up slightly. Back up slightly again, I should say. Don't worry, listener, we won't be retracing our steps. We'll take a different route. It's generally reckoned that the 60s didn't begin in this country until November 22, 1963, when an assassin took out JFK with a magic bullet. For Los Angeles, however, the beginning came sooner on August 4, 1962, when Marilyn Monroe took out herself with Nembutal. Either way, it was still the 50s when Eve graduated from Hollywood High in 1960. Though Eve loved Hollywood High in retrospect, at the time she wanted to be anywhere but there. The sororities ruled the school, and the sororities were beyond her powers of coping. The Deltas admitting into their ranks only the coolest and most gilded were a particular source of torment. Absolutely the prettiest, cuntiest girls, she said, unbelievably pretty and cunty. She arranged her credits in such a way that she was able to finish a semester early, then knocked off her one remaining semester over the summer. It was her last official day on campus when Eve got word that the vice principal wished to speak with her. She'd later write, I thought, oh no, they're going to tell me I can't spell and now I can't get out, are they? But instead the vice principal gave me the you are now about to embark on the road of life speech, which I hoped would keep her mind off the fact that come C O m e was dripping down my leg. Dripping calm. Geez, Eve really couldn't spell. Was a new phenomenon for her. Surprisingly, maybe even shockingly, Eve wasn't having sex while she was at Hollywood High. Not until the very last week, anyway. To an incredulous me, she said, I was never asked out on a date the whole time I was in high school. I was pretty and everything, but I was an outside Eve was a game woman, born ready and with secondary sexual characteristics that were second to none. She was wearing a 36 double D by the time she was 15. So how come she was lagging in the precocity department. Simple. She was self conscious. There was, first of all, the Mr. Magoo glasses. Evie was so goddamn nearsighted, said Mirandi. I mean, she was practically blind. There was, too, the preoccupation that matched the Mr. Magoo glasses. She was constantly reading. I mean, she'd walk. Reading, said Randy. Mother used to make me walk with her so she didn't get run over by a car. It was Arabian Nights as a little girl. A la rochere du temps perdu as a teenager. I picked up Proust when I was in junior high and I gave him to Eve, said Laurie. She loved him right away. Loved the dirty parts, the sexual ins and outs, the jealousy over Albert Teen, all that. And then there were those 36 double Ds. Now Eve would come to regard her breasts as her glory, showcasing them in the tightest of sweaters, chin up, spine straight, a get a load of these gleam in her eye. But it would take a few years. While she was at Hollywood High. She dressed in loose skirts, baggy shirts, hunching her shoulders so that her body crawled in on itself. Nor did she beguile naturally. It was a learned skill painstakingly acquired. Eve practiced everything, said Laurie. Anybody she thought was seductive and charming, she'd study. How do you have a seductive voice? Well, you keep it to a certain volume and pitch and it was the same thing with her laugh. She worked at it and she measured her smile, which was the exact right three inches that you need to have a really good smile. She did whatever she could. She put herself in training. Eve was spared the indignity of leaving high school a virgin, but only just. Paul Glass, 25, a protege of composer Ingoff Dahl and a friend of her father's, did the honors. Four months into their affair, Glass left LA for Warsaw on a grant. He wrote Eve from Poland. I cry every time I think that I am not holding you in my arms, he told her. I can't even care anything about other girls because they are not my one and only Evie. Eva wasn't fooled. She knew that Glass was just playing his lover boy part, delivering his lover boy lines, and that they'd fallen in fantasy rather than love. She had to have him because of his tawny hair, his silky manners, his movie star friends. He had to have her because she was Stravinsky's goddaughter. Years later, in a piece called Sins of the Green Death, she after a suitable period of faithfulness, I found out for sure that my flashy lover had gone to the Alps with an old girlfriend. And then I felt free to indulge myself in the huge new, unbelievably diverse world of men who wanted to sleep with me. The flashy lover is obviously Paul Glass. Not once in a piece does she refer to him by name or even fake name, though she does identify the ale he used to accomplish his seduction. What I'll remember always was not the flashy lover, who is a watery valentine floating translucently in a half forgotten resort of souvenirs. She wrote, what I'll remember always was the Rainier ale. And indeed Paul Glass seemed to have floated right out of her mind. Never did she mention him to me. She gave my vulgar inquiry, who was your first boyfriend? The response it deserved an eye roll followed by a facepalm followed by a non answer. Which first boyfriend? I had a lot of first boyfriends. And yet I don't believe she found him unmemorable so much as unreal. Less a flashy lover than a dream one. And he dissolved upon waking, because that's what dreams do. If Paul Glass was her first boyfriend, Brian Hutton was her first boyfriend, who counted? And Brian Hutton she talked about all the time. On Eve's 18th birthday, May threw a party. Holly was invited, as were a few of her LACC classmates invited as well, a woman named Deanne Mencher. I was a very serious and talented actress, said mentor. I'm short though, and I've always had a weight issue which limits your roles. But I was a star of the workshop circuit, so I knew a lot of people went out a lot. Eve was quite a bit younger than I was. Well, I've never paid much attention to age. Eve liked me, I think, because I was married at the time to Maurice Sederman. Maurice was this absolute whiz of a makeup man. He's the one who aged Orson Welles and Citizen Kane. Damned. Orson's hair dimmed. Orson's eyes put jowls on Orson's face that he made out of foam plastic or something. And he invented all kinds of things having to do with the contact lens. He gave a pair to Eve, quite a gift back then since nobody had them yet they contributed greatly to her attractiveness. I mean greatly. No more glasses to get in the way of her sex, thank goodness, because sex was about to come at her full throttle. Mentor, you see, didn't show up to the party alone. She brought with her a friend, an actor, but making the transition to director Brian Hutton. If Walter Hopps taught Eve how to see. Brian Hutton taught Eve how to Fucking recalled mentor. Brian said, what are you doing tonight? I said, I'm going to a birthday party. You want to come? He and I must have got separated while we were there. And then I find out the next day that he's met Eve and that they're a thing. Eve also remembered meeting Hutton on her 18th birthday. And at a party, though at a different party, a wild party she went to after her family party. But mentor was absolutely adamant that she had it right, Eve had it wrong. Of course I introduced Eve to Brian. She told me, what the fuck do you think? Brian was my dear, dear friend. We were very thick, Very, very thick. I was in his acting class. He thought I was a brilliant actress, which made me love him even more. He would have jazz people over to his place and we'd hang out until 3, 4 in the morning. Eve didn't have anything to do with any of that. Not a fucking thing. In Sins of the Green Death, Eve describes seeing him. Unlike Paul Glass, Bryan Hutton is accorded a name, fake name. Graham. For the first time. Graham came in with a friend from an overcast night. So how is it that I remember him still as coming in alone from the stars? He was swamped by girls, deluged in a tangle of beautiful arms and feminine exclamations of flower petal softness. Three of the prettiest had twisted free of their conversations and it was like Santa Claus in an orphanage. I, it turned out, wasn't the only one. Not even close. All the women love Brian, said Mentcher. He was just so gorgeous and he was kind of slovenly and he shuffled and he had this earthy sexuality and he carried around a bottle of milk because he had ulcers. I used to talk to my therapist about Brian and go, he's so sexy. He's really sexy, but he's always cursing. I couldn't put it all together. I guess I was quite repressed. But I mean, he looked just like Tyrone Power. And that mouth of his, filthy. Oh, he had the filthiest mouth. It was from Brian Hutton and Brian Hutton's filthy mouth that Eve received her sexual education.
- [48:35]
Jackie Danziger
Ready to hear the Full story? Visit YourNextListen.com Copyright 2024 by Writerish, LLC. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon and Schuster Audio from the audiobook Didion and Babbitts by Lily Analick read by Lily Analick with Emma Roberts Published by Simon and Schuster Audio, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Used with permission from Simon and Schuster, Inc. Your next listen is a production of Lemonada Media in Simon and Schuster Audio. I'm your host, Jackie Danziger. I produced a series with Lizzie Breyer Bowman. Isara Acevez is our associate producer. Bobby Woody is our audio engineer. Music by APM Executive producers are Jessica Cordova Kramer and Stephanie Whittles Wax. Production support from Lara Blackman, Tom Spain, Sarah Lieberman and Lauren Pierce. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Thanks for listening. See you next time.