Hollywood's Eve

October 22, 2018
Vanity Fair contributor Anolik (Dark Rooms) takes on the colorful story of Los Angeles It-Girl and writer Eve Babitz from her heyday in the 1960s and ’70s to her unexpected literary emergence in 1974 with her novel Eve’s Hollywood. Anolik, who fell in love with Babitz’s work after reading her 1977 novel Slow Days, Fast Company decades later, tells readers that she “won’t attempt to impose narrative structure and logic on life, which is (mostly) incoherent and irrational,” and her book, while not chronological, is entertainingly anecdotal. Babitz—the daughter of Sol Babitz, first violinist for the 20th Century Fox orchestra, and artist Mae Babitz—grew up in a Hollywood Hills home that was visited by such L.A. luminaries as Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Fats Waller. After posing nude for Time photographer Julian Wasser in 1963 at age 20, Babitz achieved notoriety and hung out with artists (Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí), politicians (Teddy Kennedy), and musicians (Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills, the Eagles). Anolik admiringly looks at Babitz’s life, even while revealing careless accidents, such as incurring third-degree burns trying to light a cigar while driving. Perfect for fans of Hollywood in its glory years, this is a biography energetically told.

November 1, 2018
Hero worship meets compelling biography in Vanity Fair contributing editor Anolik's (Dark Rooms, 2015) nonfiction debut.A cultural fixture in Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s, Eve Babitz (b. 1943) eclipsed the label of groupie. She was a socialite who managed to intertwine herself with Steve Martin, Warren Zevon, Jim Morrison, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol, a Hollywood High graduate-turned-author whose teen years defined her writing. She was well-known but also dismissed by some, including novelist Julia Whedon: "I discern in Babitz the soul of a columnist, the flair of a caption writer, the sketchy intelligence of a woman stoned on trivia." However, Anolik shows that Whedon was shortchanging the woman who famously posed nude over a chessboard with Marcel Duchamp (he was clothed). The author is entirely up front about her obsession with her subject. A love for Babitz's writing turned into a deep dive to uncover the woman who pitched her first novel, Travel Broadens, in 1961 to Catch-22 author Joseph Heller with a letter that read, "Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer." As Anolik shares, the provocative message was classic Babitz: "playing the sexy, boobalicious girl." That character certainly made a significant impression during her heyday, but it was Babitz's style and fictive memoirs that defined her as something of a female Hunter S. Thompson, a drugged-out sex kitten with brains. Throughout the book, Anolik shares deep cuts from Babitz's writing and influence over the major players of the era. But as with any dishy tale, there are times when the narrative gets caught in its own name-dropping cyclone and feels just as shallow as some of the stars it portrays. Fortunately, the author counters this problem with a poignant rendering of Babitz's tragedy: a freak fire that destroyed her once-renowned beauty--but not her chutzpah.Come for the LA intrigue; stay for the surprising moral of the story.

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December 1, 2018

Author (Dark Rooms), ghostwriter, and editor Anolik can be credited for much of the recent Eve Babitz revival. Her 2014 Vanity Fair profile of the party girl, muse, collagist, and chronicler of fast-lane 1960s and 1970s California life, now a recluse, helped put Babitz back in the spotlight. Reprints and reissues of Babitz's seven autobiographical novels-cum-memoirs followed, and recognition of her talent spread beyond a small, devoted following. Opening with nearly the same text as the Vanity Fair piece, Anolik moves in many directions, trying to tell Babitz's story; explain her mystique then and now; critique her body of work; compare it to that of her peers, including Joan Didion; recount the golden days of L.A., and discuss the freak fire that nearly killed Babitz in the late 1990s. The author cobbles together an oral history of the scene and her subject's place in it by interviewing lovers (those still living), family members, and friends, as well as extrapolating from Babitz's books. After a brief discussion of the "New Journalism," Anolik puts herself in the narrative, describing awkward meetings and obsession with Babitz and contrasting their lives and lifestyle choices. VERDICT Anolik's portrait of an original L.A. woman is addictive and gratifying. For Babitz followers and social historians. [See Prepub Alert, 7/2/18.]--Liz French, Library Journal

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