Didion & Babitz
By Lili Anolik
(Scribner, 352 pages, $30)
When I saw that a new book was out entitled Didion & Babitz, my first reaction was to ask: “Who the hell is Babitz?” My second reaction was to buy the book.
Why? Well, uncharitable souls might say that I’m unable to let Joan Didion, dead or alive, rest in peace. My own answer is that I’m unable to stop thinking about the fact that Joan’s popularity, which magnified over the decades into something almost unparalleled in modern American letters, owes less to her merits as a writer than to her cultivation of a certain image — distant, inscrutable, stylish. The mystery woman behind the big dark glasses.
Lili Anolik’s outsized adoration of Eve notwithstanding, this is a smart, absorbing, and very snappily written book.
In June 2021, I wrote here about the terrible screenplays that she churned out in collaboration with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and about the 2017 Netflix documentary about her, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne. That film, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, contained an exceedingly telling anecdote. When, in 1967, Joan was researching a piece on the drug-addled hippie community in Haight-Ashbury and ran across a five-year-old girl on LSD, her reaction was not that of an empathic mother — perish the thought! — but that of a soulless hack: “it was gold!” she tells Griffin, her face alight.
That wasn’t an uncharacteristic moment. Chilling callousness, as Didion & Babitz confirms, was her default setting. As I wrote shortly after her death on December 23, 2021: “Rarely if ever was a writer more self-absorbed, more inclined to self-romanticizing, more impressed with and fascinated by her own wonderfulness. And rarely, by the same token, was a writer so capable of breathtaking snobbery when writing about the kind of people whom Hillary Clinton would eventually refer to as deplorables.”
After writing yet another piece about Didion in 2022 (she was, I noted, still a hot commodity: her 2007 play The Year of Magical Thinking, based on her 2005 memoir, was being revived in Manhattan; an L.A. museum was hosting an exhibition about her; and a gallery in Hudson, N.Y., was holding her estate sale), I honestly didn’t plan to revisit Didion any time soon.
But how could I ignore Didion & Babitz? The Babitz of the title, I discovered, was Eve Babitz, who back in the 1970s was a fixture in certain trendy L.A. circles — at once a writer, an artist, a muse, a groupie, a courtesan, and a hanger-on — and a friend and protégé of Joan’s. Think of Eve as a West Coast Edie Sedgwick; reviewing Eve’s Hollywood (1974), the first of her several books — some of which were marketed as fiction and others as non-fiction but all of which were largely autobiographical — Alice Adams compared her to Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly.
Whatever the merits of her work, Eve, like Joan, had a keen sense of the Zeitgeist. She was quick to “get” Warhol; she viewed Marilyn Monroe as a sublime artist. (Consciously or not, she echoed Marilyn’s character, Sugar, in Some Like It Hot, who confessed to having “this thing about saxophone players…. All they have to do is play eight bars of ‘Come to Me, My Melancholy Baby’ and my spine turns to custard, and I get goose-pimply all over.” Eve’s version of this confession: “I’ll go for any violinist no matter what. I see a violinist and I go insane.”)
Like Joan, too, Eve was a native Californian. Born in L.A. in 1943 to parents who had one foot in the film industry (her father played — guess what? — the violin in Twentieth-Century Fox’s studio orchestra) and the other in high culture (her godfather was Igor Stravinsky), she attended Hollywood High and Los Angeles City College. At around that time, she began to dabble in the arts — modeling for photographer Jules Wasser, making collages like Joseph Cornell, designing album covers for music mega-producer Ahmet Ertegun. She also set out upon a career of befriending, sleeping with, and taking drugs with a whole bunch of people who were (or would soon be) famous.
Lili Anolik, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair who is the author of Didion & Babitz, met Eve in 2012, and, mesmerized by her, published a biography, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A., in 2019. Anolik then moved on to other topics. But in 2021, the same year in which Eve died at age 78, Anolik became aware of a trove of letters that Eve had accumulated over the years. The first one she read was a powerful j’accuse addressed to Joan.
At once, Anolik felt her “love for Eve’s astonishing, reckless, wholly original personality and talent” resurging, and knew that she had to “tell Eve’s story again. Except this time I’d tell it differently. Better. Because I wouldn’t be telling just Eve’s story. I’d be telling Joan’s story, too. Joan, Eve’s opposite and double, completing and revealing Eve as Eve completed and revealed her.”
Anolik also wants to evoke Seventies L.A., especially what she calls “the Franklin Avenue scene,” which was centered on the Hollywood house in which Joan and John lived between 1967 and 1971. For both Joan and Eve, that scene had “all the explosive vitality that the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald,” and during that period it absorbed “most of Eve’s energy, emotional and psychic.”
Diving into Didion & Babick, I was delighted to discover that if Anolik is (perhaps unaccountably) bewitched by Eve, she has no illusions about Joan, who these days is a figure of near-universal worship. Yes, Anolik acknowledges Joan’s talent, but she also perceives “her greedy and grinding ambition” and “the coldness at her core.”
Anolik grasps that Joan never “received real dividends from domestic life, no matter how frequently she referenced her husband and daughter,” and that what really “made her heart skip” was “the splendor of achievement, the mastery of artistry, the glitter of fame,” for which she was willing to exercise “a brute force of will,” to do “anything and everything necessary.” Yep.
Hence, while Anolik loves Eve “with a fan’s unreasoning abandon,” she admits that “Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona — part princess, part wet blanket — tough going; and resent her for siccing on us, the innocent reading public, an army, seemingly unending, of middle-class young-women personal essayists who take their feelings very ultra- seriously and expect us to do the same.” Hilarious — and spot on.
I’ve mentioned Joan’s coldbloodedness in connection with that story about the drug-addicted little girl. Anolik supplies a few more such anecdotes. The morning after she sent Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta the manuscript of The Year of Magical Thinking, about her husband’s sudden death and her first year as a widow, she phoned Mehta and asked him with a “fierce and almost desperate” urgency: “Will it be a bestseller?” As Anolik puts it, Joan would “crawl over corpses to get to where she had to go”; in Year, she was “crawling over the corpse of Dunne.”
Anolik hates Year because of its “fundamental narcissism.” But it’s this naked narcissism, as I wrote in my December 2021 piece, that makes me think of Year as Joan’s “best book, because, finally, she wasn’t pretending to be writing about anything other than herself.”
Anolik also cites the “fundamental dishonesty” of Year, noting that Joan, in writing about John, doesn’t mention his terrible temper or his heavy drinking. Similarly, Anolik notes that in Blue Nights (2011), Didion’s book about the 2005 demise of her daughter, Quintana, at age 39, she omits the cause of death — alcoholism — and chooses not to address the fact that Quintana had obviously picked up her drinking habit from Didion and Dunne, both of whom were also alcoholics. Yet Didion’s goal throughout her work was not to grapple honestly with such unpleasant facts but to run them selectively “through her typewriter” and thereby transform them into “the gold of literature.”
Another anecdote that shows the real Joan: in 1982, after her niece, actress Dominique Dunne, was strangled by her ex-boyfriend and lay in a coma in Cedars-Sinai (she would die five days later), Dominique’s father, Dominick, walked into Joan’s bedroom to find her on the phone, going over the galleys of her book Salvador with an editor in New York. Dominick, “appalled” by her callousness, never forgave her.
In this and other ways, Eve was the antithesis of Joan — reckless, promiscuous, and self-destructive, yes, but also empathic, affectionate, identifiably human. As Anolik puts it, Joan and Eve were “each other’s shadow selves. Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur…. An amateur as in someone who is innocent as opposed to calculating; someone who believes in messy and rough, distrusts polished and well-crafted; someone who does a thing only for love or fun, never for money or recognition. And Joan was what Eve both feared becoming and longed to become: a fierce professional.”
They were opposites not just as writers but as women. In her entire life, Joan slept with two men: the first being the love of her life, a writer named Noel Parmentel (who got her into National Review and was instrumental in getting her first book published, although Joan always avoided giving him credit) and the second being Dunne, Parmentel’s wingman, whom Noel passed her on to because he wasn’t interested in marriage and children.
Meanwhile Eve’s body count was off the charts. Her long list of bedmates, over the years, included Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, a young Steve Martin (it was her idea for him to wear white suits), a very young Annie Leibovitz, and the writer Dan Wakefield. (Eve apparently didn’t sleep with Carrie Fisher, but it was she who told one of George Lucas’s underlings that Carrie would be perfect casting for Princess Leia in Star Wars.)
Noting that both Joan and Eve wrote essays on Jim Morrison (whom Eve also slept with, and whose idea to name his band The Doors she tried to talk him out of), Anolik points out that Joan’s take on the rock scene was that of an observer who bought into Jim’s bad-boy, lizard-king image, while Eve, a participant in the scene (and her subject’s girlfriend), saw through the image to the insecure former fat kid beneath.
Yet Joan was drawn to her shadow self, and Eve was drawn to hers. Remarkably, Joan, who was not in the habit of helping other writers — but was good at getting others to help her — went out of her way to help Eve, getting her articles into Rolling Stone and her artwork into Vogue. Most remarkable of all, Joan and Dunne, who edited each other’s work but never anyone else’s, agreed to edit Eve’s Hollywood. In fact Joan “shepherded it, championed it, allowed her reputation to be traded on to help Eve sell it.”
Ultimately, however, the radical difference that drew these two women to each other ended up driving Eve away: before Joan and John could finish editing her book, she took it away from them. Why? Because she “needed to risk sloppiness. Had to stay loose, resist the urge to tidy or trim, tamp down or cover up, suppress or restrict in any way [her] anarchic instincts.” In short, she had to escape from Joan’s influence.
And over the ensuing years, “[m]utual disenchantment set in. Where Eve once seemed wild and inspired to Joan, she now seemed slack and slothful. Where Joan once seemed meticulous and masterly to Eve, she now seemed dogged and doctrinaire.”
To be sure, the two women had some things in common. Both despised the women’s movement. Both were put off by hippies, whose “naïveté” they “regarded … as akin to idiocy.” For all of Eve’s readiness to bed rock stars, moreover, she shared Joan’s distaste for rock music and for the rock stars’ politics: what drew her to the rock scene was “the ebb and swirl, the heat, the light, the noise.”
And, quite simply, Eve’s stardom. She revered stardom. Like Joan, Eve collected stars. To be sure, Joan and John pretended to their Manhattan friends that although they wrote movies, they weren’t really a part of the film community and certainly weren’t impressed by it. This was a lie: as Anolik makes clear, the Dunnes were desperate to socialize with Tinseltown bigshots, and while living in L.A. were known to turn up at as many as four high-voltage parties in a single evening. Eve was a party hound too, of course, but was totally open about it in her work.
Also, both women were, at least before Joan and John moved back East for good, L.A. writers at a time when the New York intelligentsia looked down on the Coast. Eve, for one, was devoted to L.A.; in her writings, she depicted it as a vibrant, thrilling hub of culture, both high and low, and was irked that Joan, in order to impress her literary friends in Manhattan, wrote about L.A. in a way that played into their condescension.
After Eve’s Hollywood, Eve went on to write Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., which was published by Knopf in 1977. Anolik describes it as covering such topics as “the politesse of threesomes,” “how to properly ingest a Quaalude (circumspectly),” and “what to wear when taking cocaine on acid (a Finnish cotton kaftan).” Other books followed, with titles like L.A. Woman (1982) and Two by Two: Tango, Two-step, and the L.A. Night (1999). They won Babitz a small-scale notoriety that was, alas, nothing compared to the international fame that Joan was accruing at the same time.
And in their later years the difference in their degree of professional success intensified: while Joan, thanks to her two volumes of navel-gazing memoirs about the loss of her husband and daughter, enjoyed an extraordinary third-act career renaissance, Eve became an unproductive semi-recluse, living in a flat that stank to high heaven (she had become a hoarder) and listening to Dennis Prager, Larry Elder, and Rush Limbaugh on the radio (she had become a Republican — who, during Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, believed “that she and Trump were having an affair … at the very bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel where she met Ahmet Ertegun for trysts half a century earlier”).
Lili Anolik’s outsized adoration of Eve notwithstanding, this is a smart, absorbing, and very snappily written book. “Joan and Eve,” writes Anolik, “are the two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned — the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.” (To my surprise, Anolik never uses the words Dionysian and Apollonian, so I‘ll throw them in myself.)
Strikingly, the two women’s long journeys came to an end almost simultaneously. Just as Adams and Jefferson, those two embodiments of opposing political philosophies in the early Republic, shuffled off this mortal coil on the same day, so Eve, who was too hot not to cool down, and Joan, the quintessential ice queen, died six days apart: Eve, on December 17, 2021, “of complications from Huntington’s”; Joan, on December 23, “of complications from Parkinson’s.” I’m not about to rush to read through Eve’s oeuvre, but I’m glad to know about her — and thankful to Anolik for the stories about Joan and John that confirm my own lack of enthusiasm for both of them, as writers and as human beings.
READ MORE from Bruce Bawer:
Bidding Adieu to a Pioneering Poet of Racial Grievance
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