Book Review: Hollywood's Eve

Eve Babitz 1943-2021

Lili Anolik's Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. is more than a character sketch and something less of a biography. The book grew out of an profile Anolik wrote for Vanity Fair which sparked renewed interest in Babitz's books. Several of Babitz's books crept back into print and Anolik deserves some of the credit. However, Hollywood's Eve resembles an extended and misshapen magazine article. The full story of Babitz's tumultuous life remains to be written.

Anolik is good on Babitz's interactions with the L.A. art scene and her literary output, but frustratingly incomplete on her dalliances with titans of the music and film business. Some of Babitz's more sordid trysts are written as blind items for fear of litigation, but Anolik was unable to gain access to such Babitz intimates as Jackson Browne, Earl McGrath, Don Henley, and Harrison Ford; among many others.

Babitz's life and work cast a wide net. She was a writer, groupie, artist, and muse. She was also a needy narcissist with a mean streak who liked to play Queen Bee. Her personal life provided grist for her fiction and helped her concoct a mythos about herself. Her insatiable starfucking seems to have been fueled by the need to feed her voracious ego. Why else would anyone claim to be the inspiration for Michael Franks' "Popsicle Toes"?

Hollywood's Eve is more than a gossipy read, but it is a tantalizingly frustrating book. It namedrops on nearly every page, but has no bibliography or index. Anolik covers Babitz's family well, but shrinks away from revealing too much of her subject that might be unappealing to her audience: Babitz's substance abuse, her cruelty to those close to her, and her late life attraction to conservatism. Like Anolik, I respect Babitz's talent and feel that she is more of a full blooded writer than her friend/rival Joan Didion. Anolik is right to call Slow Days, Fast Company Eve's best book, but Hollywood's Eve suffers from Babitz's guardedness and Anolik's adoration of her subject. Perhaps the answer to the book's shortcomings partially lies in a quote from Eve's Hollywood, Babitz's first book, that Anolik approvingly cites: 'You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost..."