![]() And, yes, I understand that these feelings are grasping and beady-eyed and more than a little creepy-lovesick edging into sick puppy-but there you have it.Īnyway, the plan was for me to do a little piece on a party-well, technically an opening, but really a party-that was The Party, held at the Pasadena Art Museum on October 7, 1963, 52 years ago this month, celebrating the retrospective of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. I still believe that I’m the realest and truest and lovesickest of all and that I discovered Eve, and that she’s mine, mine, mine, not just L.A.’s secret genius and sharer, but my own personal secret. I recognize that Eve had fans-real, true lovesick fans, too-long before I came on the scene. So, as I said, VF.com has already commemorated the reissuing of Eve’s Hollywood. So I wound up using those eight pages to, more or less, reconstruct her life: “O.K., Evie, so in the dedication you wrote, ‘And to Earl McGrath to whom I admit I owe Everything.’ Who’s Earl McGrath and qu’est-ce que c’est ‘Everything’?” She’ll answer any question you ask, but will volunteer nothing. As an interview subject, Eve is the most curious (read: perverse) mixture of candor and evasion. The feature was more than three years in the making, mainly because it took two and a half years to get Eve to talk to me. I wrote about Eve in Vanity Fair’s 2014 Hollywood Issue. At least the hog-wild, bedbug-crazy part. You could preface them, annotate them, index them, and proof-correct them, go, in other words, completely hog wild, bedbug crazy over them. So little minx-insolent is the tone-“And to the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in”-so evocative are the names-Ahmet Ertegun, Jim Morrison, the Didion-Dunnes, “the Fords, the Harrisons not the Henrys”-so suggestive are the citations, several of which are richly textured enough to be short stories in and of themselves-“And to Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel and the guy who ran off with the baby sitter”-that you could do to the eight pages what Charles Kinbote did to the 999 lines of John Shade’s poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The pages tell the whole tale, not just of Eve and her facts-masquerading-as-fiction book (me: “But, Evie, it’s all about you and everyone you know, is pure memoir, why did you call it a novel?” Eve: “Because I didn’t want to get sued!”), but of a particular place and time: Los Angeles, pre–W. VF.com had already commemorated the occasion by excerpting the dedication page, actually, page s plural-a full eight in my original hardcover edition-which sounds like a dopey idea until you’ve read them. Last week, New York Review Books Classics reissued the first work of Eve Babitz, her “confessional L.A.
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