‘A spy in the land of the privileged’: why Eve Babitz’s cult Hollywood memoir still matters 50 years on

In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sibling’s spunky request. Their mother said no. But she cushioned the blow by offering to get her a leopard print swimsuit instead. “There’s a picture of her wearing it reading Elinor Glyn,” Mirandi continues. “I mean, there you go,” she chuckles. “That’s what she gravitated to.”

British novelist Glyn, though largely forgotten today, scandalised the public in the early 20th century with her erotic fiction. She also popularised the word “it” to denote something that “draws all others with magnetic force”. How better to describe Babitz? “I didn’t want a vine-covered cottage, stability, children, a college degree or a dog,” Babitz wrote in Eve’s Hollywood, her coming-of-age memoir – which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

Babitz described her California odyssey as a “confessional novel”, but this seems too limited a category for the author’s syncopated melodies: part memoir, part fiction, and essayistic in form. Perhaps we need a new genre tag to encapsulate what Babitz was doing in 1974. Mirandi calls Eve’s Hollywood “a collection of stories”. The New York Review of Books (who republished her work for a new generation in 2015) likens it to “an album” – a description that seems in keeping with her side hustle at this time in her 20s: designing collage album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield.

“I have always loved scenes, bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance,” she wrote in an essay for Esquire in 1991. In Eve’s Hollywood we get these scenes in all their vivid coloration. Spanning from her childhood in the 50s to Janis Joplin’s death in 1970, Babitz takes us on a cerebral joyride through Los Angeles’s dive bars and beaches, riffing off her many lost nights at Sunset Boulevard’s Chateau Marmont and legendary tiki bar The Luau.

“In LA when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool,” she deadpans as she introduces us to the fictionalised character of James Byrns (or is that really Gram Parsons?) who, to Babitz, “was an alarm clock that aroused me from sameness.” For Babitz, “It’s all only frames from which the content arises.” And it’s the frames she liked to play with. Unsentimental and wry, her flâneuse-like curiosity about the city she lived in gave her the material she needed to become, in her own words, “a spy in the land of the privileged”.

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This fly-on-the-wall approach began in childhood. “The people that were in our lives were all brilliant,” Mirandi tells me, “including Igor Stravinsky and his wife, Vera, who were around a lot.” Home for Babitz was only 10 blocks away from Hollywood and Vine (the intersection most famous for its Hollywood Walk of Fame). Her father was a studio musician under contract at 20th Century Fox and the family’s artistic open house gave Babitz an easygoing attitude towards fame and celebrity that comes across in her later writing. “I once saw Cary Grant up close,” she coolly mentions in a 16-word chapter entitled “Cary Grant”. “He was beautiful. He looked exactly like Cary Grant.”

Her longtime agent, Erica Spellman-Silverman, pays tribute to “the freedom” of her prose. She had never read anything like Eve’s Hollywood before it was published. This was “not just sexual expression but expression,” she emphasises on a call from her office in New York, “a woman who was living her life with a great deal of: this is it, this is me.” Babitz’s self-assurance was there from the get-go. As a teenager, she sent a two-sentence letter to the novelist Joseph Heller soliciting help with her new novel. “Dear Joseph Heller,” it read, “I am a stacked eighteeen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.”

Spellman-Silverman first met Babitz two years after the publication of Eve’s Hollywood. “She said, ‘I don’t know why we’re meeting, I know I wrote this book but I don’t really want to be a writer.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s too bad because you are a writer.” Over the next year Spellman-Silverman called her every Monday morning at 7am. “I said to her: you have to get up and work, you have to get up and write.” At the end of the year, she sent Spellman-Silverman a pile of pages which she, in turn, sent to her sister Victoria Wilson, an editor at Knopf, who would go on to edit her much lauded second essay collection, Slow Days, Fast Company, published in 1977, followed by the novel Sex and Rage in 1979.“A lot of people had a very provincial view of California and we didn’t think that maybe it was as serious as New York,” Spellman-Silverman admits as we discuss Babitz’s first love, her leading character, Los Angeles itself – a coastal plain so sprawling and impermanent she once described it as “a city laid out in lace”. Like Joan Didion, Babitz was a psychogeographer in this land without seasons. And yet: “Joan Didion was always the smart one and Eve was the sexy whatever,” Spellman-Silverman says. Over the years, I’ve often wondered whether we’ve placed more emphasis on Babitz as a scattered party girl as opposed to the razor-sharp essayist she was. Sure, she had fun. There were the A-list sexual conquests (Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin – to name three), the acid and the cocaine. She introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí. And she is well known for playing chess naked with Marcel Duchamp. But I’d argue that more attention still needs to be paid to what the American novelist Matthew Specktor called her “compression of thought”.

Beauty, for Babitz, was power, and she wanted to explore what that meant – especially for women such as her role model, Marilyn Monroe, or Carolyn, her classmate at Hollywood High, who despite her “mauve cheeks like hidden roses” is “trapped in the prison of her own devise”. You can see that in her recollections of the girls at Hollywood High: “These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave and foolhardy, who had left their homes and travelled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” Nobody writes about high school and adolescence better than Babitz, argues the writer Holly Brubach in her introduction to Eve’s Hollywood. “Scrupulous and unsentimental but sympathetic to her former self, she documents that brief space of a few years when fledgling minds attempt to make sense of social hierarchy, injustice, and sex.”

Related: Like me, Eve Babitz was driven by corrosive relationships – and idolised women | Emma Forrest

Which is something that Didion recognised early on. “She took Eve seriously when nobody else did, when Eve was still Eve Bah-bitz with the great big tits – that’s what the artists who hung out at Barney’s Beanery [a West Hollywood] hangout in the early sixties used to call her,” Babitz’s biographer Lili Anolik tells me over email. Later this year, Anolik will publish her follow-up Didion and Babitz, exploring their personal and literary relationship. Not only did Didion give Babitz her big break, helping her publish her first piece in Rolling Stone. She also “sponsored Eve’s Hollywood and agreed to edit itsays. “Sure, Eve ended up ‘firing’ Joan off the book. But no way would it have sold in the first place without the Didion seal of approval.”

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In 2012, Anolik tracked down Babitz, who had been living as a recluse, and agreed to meet her at a burger joint. She was shocked by the figure who arrived: a decade before, Babitz had accidentally dropped a lit match on to her gauze skirt, leaving her with third-degree burns over half her body. She never fully recovered. “Her clothes were ragged. Her hair was in a kind of buzz cut. Her glasses were smudged. And when we began talking, her conversation was strange, the sentences disconnected,” Anolik remembers. Out of print and cloistered from the world, Babitz was also in pain. “You know, her body never recovered from the fire,” she tells me. “She had wounds that didn’t heal. And, because of the skin grafts, she couldn’t sweat. On the phone, though, when she could lie in bed in the cool dark, she was heaven, she was her old self.”

Babitz died in 2021, and whenever Anolik is complimented on her role in the “rediscovery of Eve Babitz”, she smiles. “She couldn’t have been rediscovered because she’d never been discovered in the first place,” she says. Eve’s writing had “so brief” a time in the sun,

For Mirandi, Babitz’s renaissance over the last 10 years is both “dazzling” and “hard-won.” Three years after her death, at the age of 78, her younger sister is keen to remind me of the Babitz she knew with her eyes on Glyn or Virginia Woolf. Writing as she did, with such effortlessness, it would be easy to assume that words “just fell out of her head.” But the truth couldn’t be more different, Mirandi insists, taking me back to the publication of Eve’s Hollywood. “She was very serious about her first book. It was the first time that she really felt like she was recognised: as herself, for herself, you know?”

To quote Babitz: “What I wanted, although at the time I didn’t understand … was everything. Or as much as I could get with what I had to work with.” It is this lust for life that, 50 years later, keeps us coming back for more. For, as Babitz wrote in 1974, the dazzle doesn’t last long. Time ripples away. “If you live in LA,” she wrote, “to reckon time is a trick since there are no winters. There are just earthquakes, parties and certain people. And songs.”

• Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz is published by The New York Review of Books, Inc (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.