Eve Babitz’s irresistible glitz and the secret history of LA

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world – a movie factory, a music factory and dream factory.

Ultimate factory girl, a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitx, a pure product of LA, whose Cunningly Semi-autobiographical fictions portray herself as the ditsiest of bed-hopping butterflies in 1960s Los Angeles, has solitary forced upon her by a horrific accident in 1997, when she dropped a lighted match on her filmsy skirt in a car and went up in flames.

She was so badly charred that you can see her still fidgeting in a rare interview in 2011.

Sixty-nine-year-old, Babitz said “My friends would kill me If I died”and asked about Barney’s LA’s Favourite  watering hole in the 1960s, Babitz insists that the spirit of Barney’s lives on “ but you have to go to AA to find it now”.

Helped by Babitz’s younger sister Mirandi and a few countless celebrities like Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford and Steve Martin,  to  drop but the latter two who gratefully remember Babitx’s charms , Anolik did finally succeeded in compiling the adultory magazine profile that has morphed into Hollywood’s Eve.

Back in 1960s Eve Babitz and her sister were courted as Hollywood royalty, the bright and beautiful daughters of artist and well known musician and her godfather was Igor Stravinsky, Aged 19, and uncommonly endowned “these breasts have conquered the world” boasted Babtiz.

She was photographed fully naked playing chess with an elderly Marcel Duchamp  who is fully dressed at his first retrospective in LA. Fifty years later, that phtogaph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, went viral and made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed for Buffal Springboard and the Byrds.

Babitz shared an English muffin with Andy Warhol and shared Warhol’s unerring flair for self-promotion.

Joseph Heller, having gained popularity  with Catch-22, was  targeted with a letter informing him  that the writer, an available and gorgeously stacked blonde aged 18) Babitz was then over 30), wished he would read her manuscript.

Joan Didlon didn’t require such incentives  to recognise talent and champion it.  Babitz even msneakly dedicated her first book Eve’s Hollywood (12974) to the “Didlon-Dunnes for having to be everything I’m not”.

Babitx, made her own mark as one of the LA’s Savviest observers with Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), hid ferocious ambition and a well honed wit beneath the mask of the artless groupie she never quite was.

Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA by Lili Anolik, Scribner £8.99, 277 pages.