ALL ABOUT EVE (BABITZ)
Her Unending Lust for Life and Glittery L.A.
Eve Babitz knows a thing or two about how to live decadently. As a free spirited, California-born memoirist and writer who came of age in the heady days of ‘60s and ‘70s Los Angeles, she’s done it all, biting into life’s forbidden fruits and living to tell her joyous tales of excess and infatuation. She’s posed in the nude for Julian Wasser while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, romped through the Chateau Marmont, indulged whims both in between the sheets and out of them, and brought us along for the ride.
Born into an industry family schooled in Hollywood’s magic, illusion, and excesses, Eve grew up surrounded by the beautiful, the flawless, and the fantastic. The goddaughter of musician Igor Stravinsky, and raised attending Hollywood High, Eve learned early on how to live life with pleasure on her own terms, the rest of the world be damned. After all, “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and was Stravinsky’s goddaughter,” Eve unspools for us in her book Eve’s Hollywood.
But more than just living it, Eve tapped into her exploits and escapades as inspiration by writing about them, too. Through the lenses of memoir and fiction, and in books like Black Swans, Sex and Rage, Slow Days, Fast Company, and Eve’s Hollywood, she wove together tales of falling in and out of bed, of obsession, and of finding her own surefootedness in a tumultuous and crazy world.
Counting stage-strutting and luminous icons like Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, Harrison Ford, Annie Leibovitz, Glenn Frey, and Ed Ruscha among her lovers, friends, and associates, Eve showed an equal ambition in her out-of-bed creative pursuits, with Leibovitz even shooting the cover photo for Eve’s Hollywood.
Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin
Even though her most prolific writing days may be behind her, Eve is still active in the game, publishing the collection of irresistibly bite-sized writings I Used to Be Charming in 2019.
As Eve herself told us recently, “I didn’t think about how I lived my life, I just did it! It never occurred to me to do anything other than what I was doing. I wish I could say there was a grand plan, but that’s not me. I never saw myself the way readers today see me…I really like their version of me! I was too busy to see myself as Eve Babitz…I was just me.”
Here’s to embracing Eve’s joie de vivre, to biting into whatever juiciest fruits we choose for ourselves, and to being…just us, no regrets needed.
