Didion and Babitz
“speaks to both the mystery and thrill of becoming completely preoccupied with someone else and its accompanying pains and intense pleasures.”
One must never underestimate the power of a book’s first pages. An author has the shortest of moments to pull you into their world. In Didion and Babitz, writer and Vanity Fair contributing editor Lili Anolik snatches you before you catch your first breath. We don’t care if we don’t yet understand her relationship with Eve Babitz who was a 1970’s party girl with huge upright breasts that gained her great notice. Babitz was also a writer who captured the zeitgeist of her era with her overflowing luscious prose.
We aren’t worried we don’t yet know about Babitz’s relationship with Joan Didion, whose cool detached prose, we all are familiar with. Author Lili Anolik wrote an earlier book about Eve Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. in 2019, but a treasure trove of new letters written between Babitz and Didion has just been discovered, and Anolik knows immediately she must return to her subject and give her a fair hearing. Some might wonder why she seems overly eager to do so. Anolik tells us up front, “If intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babitz.”
Anolik tries to explain to us her obsession with Babitz and seems to feel embarrassed. She writes “My preoccupation was unbalanced, fetishistic. Sick is what it was. And it made me sick-anxious and grasping and, in some obscure yet vital sense, self-abandoned. I needed to stop living her life, reclaim my own. I needed to get violent . . .”
We are not certain what it is that draws Anolik to Babitz, but we are sure her obsession has taken hold of her, and ironically Anolik suddenly becomes the object of our fascination. She describes enthusiastically Babitz’s wild playfulness, her erotic sparkle, and her insistence life be an ongoing treasure hunt for pleasure. Babitz wasn’t just another girl beautiful girl in L.A., she was “special” Anolik insists. She was a collagist, an album cover designer for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. And of course, she was a confessional writer who wrote about her wild nights at Sunset Boulevard’s Chateau Marmont and the legendary tiki bar The Luau with an expressiveness that was effervescent and yet had an ironical undercurrent.
For example, when Babitz introduced us to one of her characters she wrote “In L.A. when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool.” She was a heavy drug user, using acid and cocaine, and had liaisons with Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, and Steve Martin, but never told anyone much about them.
We start to grasp where Anolik is going, but we remain tethered to her mind since she speaks with a devastating intensity that draws us in. Anolik writes about Babitz, “It wasn’t that I didn’t love her. It was that I loved her too much. I’d been in thrall with her for nine years. . . . My appetite for details about her was gnawing, unappeasable.”
When she finally contacted Babitz in her old age she hung on her ever word. She pestered Babitz’s sister, or her cousin, or her old friends and lovers for anyone who could fill in some of the blanks for her. Ironically, it was an article Anolik wrote about Eve Babitz in Vanity Fair that got the NYRB to reissue some of her books. This brought Babitz the attention and praise she had always longed for. Babitz died in 2021 at 78. Her best-known novels are Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days Fast Company, and Sex and Rage.
When Anolik gets her hands on the newly found letters she devours their contents thinking “the idea was to give in to my obsession, submit to it, let it derange me, so that, by the end, either it would be gone or I would. A kind of autoeroticism.”
Anolik is transfixed by a letter Babitz wrote to Joan Didion, and possibly never mailed, that addressed Didion’s perfection with the art of “feigned littleness.” Babitz asks her point blank if she thinks she could write as she does if she were five foot eleven and not cocooned inside a long-term, if loveless marriage to John Gregory Dunne, who edited her work and tended to her every need.
When Didion and her husband went to parties and she was asked a question that made her uncomfortable, he would answer for her. Babitz implies that Joan Didion’s success is built on a fraudulent premise and the real Joan Didion remained removed from the world, much like Babitz did herself. Didion stayed away from Babitz during her drug fueled rages but was instrumental in showing her prose to her publisher, which got Babitz started. Didion offered to edit her work, which was excessively overwritten and in need of a good editor. At first, Babitz agreed, but then she dropped her, perhaps not liking the feeling of being dependent on anyone. Both women seemed to understand the dangers implicit in all sorts of female vulnerability.
Anolik lets us peek into Babitz’s love life as she got older. There were always boyfriends of one sort or another. There was John Densmore who was the drummer of Sound Machine. And an endless stream of producers, promoters, and managers—rich men who had little regard for the women they were screwing.
Anolik seems surprised that Babitz, whose father was a Jewish violinist and whose mother was a beautiful girl from Texas who still drank too much, was such a wild untethered woman. Babitz loved her parents with an almost infantile like affection. She never criticized either one of them. Her freewheeling lifestyle seemed odd somehow considering how she had been raised. Perhaps it was in part the tumultuous times.
Babitz had a longer affair with Ahmet Ertegun that began in 1969 and was eventually dropped unceremoniously when she brought a collage she made for him to his office. Ertegun was an art collector who owned paintings by Matisse and Degas, sketches by Picasso, and an etching by Egon Schiele. He was the son of a diplomat and eventually became the manager of the Rolling Stones whom he stole from Decca Records. Other men came and went, but usually didn’t stay too long. Babitz was a loner at heart as was Didion the author seems to suggest.
We learn Didion’s husband has died, and she would soon write her bestseller, The Year of Magical Thinking about mourning his death. Anolik sees the entire project as a deception reminding us how flawed their marriage was. She paints Joan Didion as a performance artist who used everyone for her own ends. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne cheated on her with men, drank excessively, and had a terrible temper. There were rumors he was violent toward her.
Anolik spends a lot of time with Didion watcher David Thomson who watched her marriage for years. He tells Anolik many stories about them, including one about how John Gregory Dunne often answered questions his wife was asked at parties leaving her to stand next to him in silence. Yet, he conceded they were a productive pair, and told her “Joan simply couldn’t afford to lose Dunne. All this was doable because of him, because of the life they’d built together.” Didion had an early love that was her true passion, but he wound up on the pages of her books disguised as many of her characters.
Neither Babitz nor Didion labeled themselves as feminists. Anolik describes Babitz as believing the women’s movement offensive due to its lack of style. Besides that, Babitz felt it didn’t accomplish what it set out to do, which was to give women more agency in the workplace.
Didion never recognized the feminists that were clamoring through the streets of America’s great cities; almost as if they were beneath her. It occurs to Anolik that both women had already jettisoned themselves into a post-feminist era that didn’t exist then, or now. They learned to swallow their hurts and not let anyone see how vulnerable they were to criticism of their art. But Anolik knew Babitz was sensitive to everything. When one of her boyfriends questioned the shade of blue she was using in one of her paintings, Babitz stopped painting.
Anolik remains in love with Babitz throughout; and uses Didion as a foil to show off Babitz’s superiority. She relishes her sassiness, as well as her melancholy insightfulness. She’s seduced by the West Coast glitter Babitz sprinkles over her scrumptious prose. But we never really figure out why Babitz takes up so much space in Anolik’s mind. Perhaps that is the nature of obsession; it’s incomprehensible. We don’t understand the genesis of her adulation for Babitz or its ability to remain undiminished over so much time. But perhaps that’s the point. Her book speaks to both the mystery and thrill of becoming completely preoccupied with someone else and its accompanying pains and intense pleasures. We finish this stunningly original piece of work in awe of Anolik’s ability to convey it to us.