- Title: Didion and Babitz
- Author: Lili Anolik
- Genre: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster
- Pages: 352
Eve Babitz lived her life being on the scene. She was a barfly at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, where Gordon Lightfoot, Neil Young and Jim Morrison, among others, played important early-career shows. She was also a regular at Barney’s Beanery, the West Hollywood artist hotspot on La Cienega Boulevard, where she partied with the likes of Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin.
She got involved with a group of serious writers in a house on Franklin Avenue, where the occupants, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, would throw parties. She would go on to immortalize and lightly fictionalize her love of Los Angeles (and the sex and drugs to be had on its scenes) in several books, most famously Eve’s Hollywood and Slow Days, Fast Company. If things weren’t always warm and fuzzy, well, that’s Hollywood, baby. Or maybe that’s cocaine.
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Joan Didion, meanwhile, lived her life with different ambitions, primarily those of a writer, wife and mother. In Lili Anolik’s not-quite-double biography, Didion and Babitz, the two women cross paths and become friends and enemies, but foremost foils. The new book, an expansion of Anolik’s previous Babitz-only project, Hollywood’s Eve, was occasioned by the discovery of a box of Babitz’s unsent letters, including one from 1972 excoriating Didion for, well, not caring for Virginia Woolf.
From only slightly more than the one letter, Anolik creates a grand dichotomy, pitting two Los Angeles legends against each other in what appears to be a lifelong, unruly and intimate catfight. Anolik conducted hundreds of interviews (though none with Joan Didion) to reconstruct gossip from the 1960s and 1970s, stacking and comparing the literary and sexual accomplishments of the two writers in what seems to be a mostly fabricated, definitely one-sided feud.
“Now, I won’t even pretend to be a disinterested party here,” Anolik writes. “I’ve picked my side: Eve’s. A no-brainer since I’m crazy for Eve, love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon.”
Anolik’s devotion has, it seems, compelled her to write a highly juicy, gossip-fuelled book about her theory that Joan Didion, for all of her success, probably wished she could be as cool and free and charming as Eve Babitz. Didion was certainly entranced: She helped Babitz get her first bylines in Rolling Stone and offered to edit the manuscript for Slow Days. By the end of the book, Anolik cheekily suggests the women were probably soulmates.
The fate of Anolik as a writer has been deeply entwined with Babitz’s late career. Her first big break in journalism was landing a profile of the reclusive former writer and retired groupie in Vanity Fair, where she has since become a contributing editor. The profile shortly preceded NYRB Classics bringing Babitz’s books back into print in 2014, when they quickly garnered passionate acclaim from a new generation of party-girl bookworms.
Anolik describes her first encounters with Babitz as nerve-wracking and difficult: in part because of the Huntington’s disease that had by 2012 already been causing Babitz’s brain to deteriorate for decades at that point; and partly because of Babitz’s terrible living conditions, in an airless apartment overbrimming with filth and trash.
“The problem was the stench – black, foul, choking – that surrounded the apartment like a force field,” Anolik writes, lamenting the difficulty she faced early in her decade of reporting on Babitz. She plugged her nose and got to work, surfacing glittering bits of delectable gossip from the detritus.
Her findings include references to the not-small size of Jim Morrison’s penis; Babitz’s love affair with a young Annie Leibowitz; how an infatuation with a famous gallerist led to Eve appearing nude to play chess with Marcel Duchamp; and the childhood sexual abuse of Eve’s sister at the hands of a groundskeeper her artist mother had hired off the street, to which the family mostly turned a blind eye.
Anolik conducted more than 200 interviews with people who knew Babitz and/or Didion at the time, surfacing more and more dirt. The mess begat mess, but readers who love juice and extended fan theories and eavesdropping on once-and near-famous interlocutors won’t be disappointed.
Didion and Babitz, it should be said, is in no way actually about Joan Didion. There are chapters, of course, and sections, that give a brief outline of the facts of her life.
Anolik interviews Didion’s nephew and her first boyfriend, Neal Parmental Jr., whom she delectably insinuates was lovers with both Didion and her eventual husband, Dunne. Parmental also introduces the couple, and allegedly is the source of the heartbreak that inspired the malaise at the heart of Didion’s novel, Play It as It Lays.
“I got [Didion’s] first novel, Run River, published,” Parmental discloses to Anolik. Didion’s debut had been turned down several times and he’d seen how hard it was for her to be rejected. “She cried for one week, for two weeks – a fortnight. It really messed her up.”
Anolik’s prurient muckraking is extremely readable, but her prose sometimes suffers from repetition and overindulgence. She addresses the reader directly nearly 50 times in the course of 300-odd pages – “Now, I’m about to make a tricky point, so pay attention, Reader, follow the ball”– and her metaphors are often brittle from overextension.
Reading Didion and Babitz feels a bit like listening to a friend go too deep on a crackpot theory. You can all but see the proverbial pin board with the red string connecting the dots.
“And yes, Reader – sigh – I realize how deluded I sound, how close to lunacy,” Anolik writes toward the end of her second Eve Babitz biography. “But this is Eve Babitz we’re talking about.”
In the end, her enthusiasm, her unreasoning abandon, proves contagious.