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Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. by [Lili Anolik]

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Lili Anolik

Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. Kindle Edition

by Lili Anolik (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA, and Vanity Fair writer “Lili Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz” (The New Yorker).

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph 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 Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered—as a writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she’s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Hollywood’s Eve, equal parts biography and detective story “brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way” (Vogue) and “sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz” (The New York Times).

Length: 289 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A swooning, sometimes madcap look at Babitz...compelling.” —The Washington Post

“Fills in many of the gaps in our knowledge of Babitz’s life and work...What Hollywood’s Eve has going for it on every page is its subject’s utter refusal to be dull… It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Anolik’s book brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way to give Babitz’s sun-bleached biography more nuanced contours.” —Vogue

“Anolik’s fantasy Eve reflects Babitz’s brilliance at self-presentation.”—Harper’s

“Anolik now presents the full jaw-dropping drama of Babitz’s on-the-edge life and complicated personality, paired with an account of Anolik's pursuit of her wily subject. With the recent reissue of Babitz's books, this radical American writer of stunning verve, candor, and insight is truly a phoenix rising.” —Booklist

“The Eve Babitz story you've been looking for—a true page-turner about an icon of Los Angeles' 1960s art scene that'll satisfy your thirst for glitz, glam, and drama.”—Women’s Day

“[A] loving and perceptive new book on Babitz… [Babitz’s] unique and entertaining body of work is now crowned by Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Vital and clarifying….wonderful.” —NPR.org

“Perfect for fans of Hollywood in its glory years, this is a biography energetically told.” —Publishers Weekly

“[A] smart, fast-paced meditation on Babitz … Anolik sees her as ruthless, unencumbered, unapologetic. In other words, an artist.” —BookPage

“Hollywood’s Eve does not fit the mold of a biography—it’s a bona fide love story. Anolik achieves an incredible intimacy with her subject, who talks to almost no one these days.” —Kirkus Reviews

“From Joan Didion to Harrison Ford to Steve Martin, the book is chockablock with stories both salacious and soulful, exactly the kind of poetically enticing account (with just the right amount of tawdry) Babitz herself delivered so sharply.”—The AV Club

“There’s no doubt that Anolik is daffy for Babitz but she is also clear-eyed in her critical assessment and paints a portrait that is beyond smitten, always smart, and an awful lot of fun.” —Esquire

“An intimate biography of a glamorous writer and a portrait of the city she called her playground.” —Town & Country

“A dishy, splashy biography filled with more celebrity cameos than a table at the Polo Lounge.” —Entertainment Weekly

“Fascinating…it’s impossible not to be infatuated.” —Oprah Magazine

“Anolik has expanded her magazine piece into a book of her own, calling it ‘a biography in the non-traditional sense.’ But Hollywood’s Eve is richer and stranger than that.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Lili Anolik delves into the mysterious life of Eve Babitz in this revealing, anecdote-packed biography.” —InStyle

“One golden tale unravels into another in Lili Anolik’s stylish portrait of writer and bon vivant Eve Babitz. …Anolik’s inventive biography, which began as a magazine profile, prompted the reissue of all of Babitz’s books, ushering in a Babitz revival.” —NPR

“Lili Anolik has hunted and captured her favorite forgotten author and helped to save Babitz’s long out-of-print books from the dustbin of cultural history. Now, like Babitz before her, she has created her own genre: fan nonfiction. In fevered, up-all-night-chain-smoking-at-the-Chateau prose perfectly suited to her subject, she excavates the lost world that Babitz so deftly wove into her autofiction.” —Karina Longworth, creator and host of You Must Remember This

“Read Lili Anolik’s book in the same spirit you’d read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the writing. Both are extraordinary.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

“The first injectable biography.” —James Wolcott, Vanity Fair columnist and author of Lucking Out

“There's no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused, and abused everyone. And then there's Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening-and seductive-as its subject.” —Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

“Lili Anolik's love letter to Eve Babitz is as probing and intelligent as it is outrageously fun, swirling with secrets and gossip, celebrity and art, feminism and literature and tragedy and sex and sex and sex. A glorious trip through the looking glass of a golden-age L.A., Hollywood’s Eve makes the case for Babitz as chronicler and muse of an era even as it paints an unsparing picture of its lost illusions.” —Joe Hagan, author of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine

“Let other writers worship at the banal altar of L.A. Thanatos; Anolik’s Eve is the fearless beating heart of L.A. Eros, and her inimitable voice comes alive in Anolik’s own lovingly warm and penetrating celebration of Babitz’s magnificent beauty, wildness and art.“ —Elizabeth Frank, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cheat and Charmer

About the Author

Lili Anolik's work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Harper's, and Believer, among other publications. Dark Rooms is her first novel.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN : B07CMXZM8Q
Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (January 8, 2019)
Publication date : January 8, 2019
Language: : English
File size : 7522 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 289 pages
Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #432,908 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #12 in Postmodernism Literary Criticism (Kindle Store)
- #77 in Postmodernism Literary Criticism (Books)
- #177 in Pop Culture in Graphic Design

Customer Reviews:
74 ratings

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2 star		7%
1 star		17%

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michael saitta

Did we all read the same book?

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2019

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I have read Eve Babitz's books. She made a career of having gone to Hollywood High School and through her family knew lots of important people and posed for a naked photo playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She wasn't beautiful. That was it. Except for sleeping around. At the beginning the author tells us what she is attempting to write about. That should be a clue.

To fill a whole book about very little requires talent and that is missing here. The same material is gone over and over.
The writing style is a third (forth) rate attempt at channeling Joan Didion.

I quit at a third of the way through. If you want to find out about Eve Babitz go to wikipedia and save your money.

37 people found this helpful

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While Successful Artistically...

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2019

Verified Purchase

Hollywood’s Eve is without question an artistic success. It offers the reader a view of Eve Babitz as the ultimate 21st century feminist icon who both owned and used her sexuality to get who and what she wanted and as a form of artistic self-expression.

It also offers a vision of Los Angeles in line with Babitz’s novels: Anolik neither praises L.A. as the city of earthly delights nor condemns it with the fire and brimstone of a Didion novel. It is the land where everyone is on stage and some act their parts better than others. Both pink sunsets and Skid Row make their appearance. Those who think that the subtitle of the secret life of L.A. means only debauchery and decadence are in for a surprise.

And there is a certain unity between the work and Babitz’s own life and writings. This is prose and life at full speed: the glories of beautiful people, fabulous wealth and easy access to the full range of narcotics.

The author even explicitly confesses her infatuation with Babitz: the gorgeous girl from Hollywood High who slept with many A listers then turned to writing about both the joy and agony of the Hollywood fast life. The L.A. girl who could successfully act a part and then turn that part into her personality.

My only hesitancy about this book is that Eve Babitz’s life could be viewed very differently. Drug addiction, unfulfilled artistic promise and being pimped to powerful Hollywood suits are not exactly the features that most people would want in their lives. The fact that Babitz now spends her days listening to conservative talk radio and rarely meeting anyone outside a small inner circle also seems like a depressing coda for someone who was once the quintessential it girl.

But if one enjoys prose that captures the young Eve Babitz—both courtesan and writer—one is sure to be delighted by Hollywood’s Eve. Anolik states in the introduction that the story is less a factual biography and more an appreciation. Where truth ends and legends start is anyone’s call. I just wonder if, at root, the whole account is something of a Hollywood illusion. That behind the many men, money and artistry Babitz starred not in a comedy but in more of a tragedy. But to Lili Anolik she is an exemplar for the modern woman. The reader can determine the veracity of this for themselves.

31 people found this helpful

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Debra Moore

Could have been so good

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2019

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I am interested in the subject. How a woman in the early 1960s found power. A cultural look at the so-called sexual revolution and its effect on women. A closer look at Eve Babitz's writing, some of which is great (the pre-cocaine addiction books are great). And it was blurbed by many writers I admire! Well, the author must be well-connected. Because what should have been a great boo is silly, due in part to the the trying-too-hard, fan-girl, faux-gonzo prose full of alliteration: "lucky, luscious, lewd lady from L.A." (If you think that's good writing, then this book is for you.) Also it tries and fails to be be intellectual--saying, for example, that the novel as a genre died when the pill was invented--but lacks any kind of informed sense of the history at all. It's an elongated gossip magazine article. And Eve Babitz is important enough--historically--to deserve better. Oh, and the author inserts herself in the story about 40% of the time, and she's not at all notable.

29 people found this helpful

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more about the author than the subject and mostly about nothing

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2019

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really was not looking for a fan girl book ....as for originality: not to my pov

13 people found this helpful

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Joel Drucker

fantastic portrait of place, time, person

Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2019

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More inventive than a biography, more intimate than a history, Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve is best viewed as a portrait, certainly of a place and time – Los Angeles, broadly over the last 75 years, deeply in examining those intriguing decades, the ‘60s and ‘70s. But even more, at once with proximity and distance, attraction and repulsion, Hollywood’s Eve is a portrait of a certain kind of cultural avatar, Eve Babitz – subject, object, observer, participant. Let’s be candid: mostly participant, emphatically so in her era’s synthesis of hedonism and confrontation, creation and destruction, along the front lines of sex, drugs, art, music, cultural change and a city that exerts a gravitational pull on the American sensibility. With delicacy and just the right amount of self-exploration, Lili Anolik (LA, ha ha) has told an excellent tale.

4 people found this helpful

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Peter Bloch

Compulsively fascinating!

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2019

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Even if you’ve never heard of Eve Babitz, if you’re a movie fan or just enjoy great writing about one of the most compulsively fascinating women ever, get this book and start reading. You won’t be able to stop

5 people found this helpful

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J X K

Totally the C Word

Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2019

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After reading this book I thought I was going to have to go to the clinic and get treated for VD. Incredible, did she really have sex with this many people?

4 people found this helpful

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Jake

Some good dish makes for good if not great reading

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2019

Verified Purchase

It is not a terrible book. Eve is not boring and the dish about famous people in this book is delicious.
The way it is written is not particularly engaging, an indirect approach to remembering place and things that went before, although the author makes every attempt at verification. I enjoyed the read liked it without loving it. The Harrison Ford tidbits are wonderfully wicked.

One person found this helpful

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