Eve Babitz

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.

Eve's Hollywood

Macy HB

Her brilliant innocence is something that is so charming and so sexy and so purely about life that you have to have been there, you have you have heard her laugh, you have to have seen her roomful of flowers and her purple satin capes made in Rome lined with iridescent taffeta to know that it is possible, Anything is Possible and that a woman spun out into the finest silk makes the strongest rope. I waited until I got around her to eat caviar, otherwise, I knew I’d never get the point.

and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

Our 18-year-old vast jadedness came out in little puffs from our ears, like steamboats.

There are some aspects of the East Coast which people from LA regard as color-blindness, just as I cannot understand, ever, about Harvard or Boston, a certain tunnel quality that cuts off periphery vision and stops one from looking across restaurants, I guess it is. Or not knowing where you’ll be in a month.

Her cheeks glowed out of girlish and adult confusion, the whole thing was a manic act of God.

Here she’d wanted this polished finish, and what it looked like she’d done was a jagged prologue.

Eve's Hollywood quotes

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