Corvettes, Chess, and Cigarettes

 

The iconography and interiority of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz through the lens of Lili Anolik’s new biography

by Mia Foster

One naked, playing chess with Duchamp, the other, cigarette in hand in front of a white Corvette: Eve and Joan. Their iconic images preceded them, intertwined in our minds as “Daughters of the Wasteland,” L.A. ladies. In her new book, Lili Anolik argues that these women were counterpoints to one another, creating a kind of cosmic balance.

Anolik originally met Babitz in her one-bedroom in West Hollywood, where a ‘black, foul, choking’ scent lingered, and the blinds were closed against the California sun. At the time, she was writing a Vanity Fair article on Babitz. For months, she had been searching for archival material from Eve’s life but, after seeing the state of the apartment, assumed she had hit a dead end. Eve’s archives were probably lost – thrown out somewhere, misplaced in a move, or just victims to Eve disregarding the sanctity of her files. But Anolik couldn’t get Babitz out of her mind. For the next two years, even after the article was published in Vanity Fair, she kept reading about Babitz, thinking about her, falling in love with her. She was obsessed. 

Ever since New York Review Books—famous for their colorful spines and republished forgotten classics—reissued Eve’s Hollywood (2015) and Slow Days (2016), there’s been a revival of interest in Babitz. As Anolik uncovered Eve and her forgotten works of L.A. genius, the world too began to remember her: Jim Morrison’s lover, a Didion protégé, the double Ds in the Duchamp photo, “A Hedonist With A Notebook.” The world would never again forget Eve, with her “movie-star profile” and “cleavage deeper than the San Fernando Valley.” 

All the while, in the depths of a closet, untouched for years, remained a stack of cardboard boxes: the archives. After her death in 2021, that crucial piece of the puzzle was discovered. At the top of one of the boxes was a letter asking “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” The boxes uncovered a “lost world:” the uneasy and unlikely friendship between Eve Babitz and Joan Didion. 

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7406 Franklin Avenue, a white two-story house with a Greek-columned facade, was Joan’s L.A. home. And it was a scene. Imagine the outsized figures of Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Eve Babitz, Michelle Phillips, Ron Cooper, Harrison Ford, and Tom Wolfe together in the living room. It was the LA of the late sixties. Artists and writers and musicians like Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Annie Leibovitz, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp all spent time in Hollywood. And so did Didion and Babitz: one listening and jotting down notes on a legal pad, the other with a drink in hand, flirting with her subject.

When we think of Didion, we picture the following: “hair parted down the middle and flowing past her shoulders, in a long jersey dress, loose yet clinging. Her expression is defiant, dreamy, maybe a little bored.” There is a severity here, but also an effortless sense of cool. Who you believe Joan Didion to be is Eve Babitz; “Eve is Joan’s ideal self.” The cultural imagination surrounding Didion is wrong. The introduction closes with the realization that “I knew only the Joan that Joan wanted me to know. I’d always taken Joan at her persona, which I’d never, until this moment, noticed was one.” 

In a letter, Eve wrote: “It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ and that only foggy brains could like her.” She goes on to say that Didion distances herself from “Art. Vulgar, ill-bred, drooling, uninvited Art.” For Joan, art is a ladder to be climbed, success intertwined with each rung she ascended. For Eve, art is life, it is “salvation.” It’s everywhere—a field from which she could pick whatever memory and make it into something brilliant. Joan, the ever “sharp, accurate journalist,” couldn’t help but be at odds with Eve, “artist as pinup.”

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While wistful about Babitz, Anolik is realistic about Didion: “She did anything and everything necessary to go all the way. And if she wasn’t squeamish about it, what excuse have we?” We can picture Didion on her Trancas balcony, overlooking the ocean after two bestsellers. In Malibu, she was distant from the world of bohemian chic that made her famous. Now, she was attending parties and hanging out with Spielberg, Keitel, Scorsese, De Niro, and De Palma, eating burgers on the beach. Didion, already a star then, would sit among these little-known Hollywood personalities, always on the outside, always a “distant observer.” That distant observer would write many scripts after her strategic move to Malibu. All her moves were calculated.

Buttoned up and more concerned with keeping her image intact than getting her hands dirty in her art, she was a writer before she was anything else. Anolik paints an unfavorable portrait of Didion throughout the book: Didion, the mother of Quinatana Roo, hosting her daughter’s friends in her apartment, handing guests a drink, silent, and always staring. As she sipped her large glass of vodka (no ice), guests later described the experience as “no picnic.” Anolik describes her as a presence that makes you tense. This vision shows what she was “willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything).” 

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From the start, Anolik admits her bias: “I’ve picked my side: Eve’s. A no-brainer since I’m crazy for Eve, love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon.” Even so, it is not Eve’s story alone; the book attempts to elucidate Didion but struggles to claw past her cool facade, ultimately accessing only a glimmer of her reality as provided by Eve’s voice.

Anolik’s book is a biography of Didion, Babitz, and their intertwined lives. Only it’s not really a biography. It’s a labyrinthine approach to Joan Didion’s career and Eve Babitz’s life. This split mode of storytelling reflects Anolik’s analysis: Didion’s curation of her persona and writing as her life and Babitz’s life as her art. The book balances Babitzian excess with Didion-esque seriousness. In the first half, Anolik establishes Didion’s influence on Babitz (Didion got Eve’s first story in print and edited her first book), analyzes their images (Norman Mailer described Didion as “a perfect advertisement for herself;” Babitz is painted as “a totemic figure, particularly to young women in the arts”), and illustrates their respective L.A.s (Malibu, bourgeois idyll versus Hollywood, the place of art and weirdness and bohemia). Didion & Babitz does not entertain the previous romanticization of these writers – effortlessly cool, careless, and free. Instead, it addresses the aspirations of these women, the constraints of their friendship, and their contrasting approaches to life, love, and writing. 

The book can feel slanted in its analysis, but what begins as a critique of Didion becomes a balanced approach to the subjects. While Anolik admits that “Joan is somebody I naturally root against,” she also praises her as “sentence for sentence, among the best [writers] this country’s ever produced.” Similarly, she acknowledges Babitz’s shortcomings; when Eve’s drug problems got worse, so did her writing, and without Slow Days, Fast Company “she’d be relegated to literary history’s honorable mentions.” She is not condemning Didion’s ambition and cold-bloodedness, nor praising Eve’s tendency towards excess, but rather attempts to show how these qualities defined their respective careers and lives. In the end, Anolik argues that Didion and Babitz cannot exist without one another; together, they form the “two halves of American womanhood.” In their careers, they feared and longed to be who the other was: an inspired amateur, a true professional. The dichotomy between them lay in their approach to their scenes: “Joan, an observer; Eve, a participant.”

For Anolik, Didion, in all of her chainsmoking splendor, was an image that functioned as an extension of her work. Her “cool customer” aura was carefully constructed, “a contrived act… requiring calculation.” Leaving a funeral to talk with her editor, asking if her grief memoir would be a bestseller, Didion put her writing before anything else. Didion was a stoic: untouchable, rational, and strategically lacking emotion. Conversely, Babitz’s image inhibited her literary success. Her refusal of East Coast seriousness defined her writing but rendered her “Eve Babitz, 23, a strawberry blonde” forever. Unlike Didion, whose legacy was created by viewing art as her career “with rules to follow, a ladder to climb,” Eve made art through the passions of life. The book seeks justice for Eve, unveiling the life that gave Babitz’s readers the sumptuous pleasures of her L.A. of “blue skies and pink sunsets, of rampant bougainvilleas, of beautiful girls and the cruel fates closing in on them.” She shows us Babitz’s life as her art in all of her naked chess-playing, boa-wearing, Dionysian glory; and conversely all of the severity, seriousness, and cigarettes needed to make Joan into Joan Didion.  

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In many ways, Didion & Babitz provides some much-needed perspective to our images of the writers. It is easy to be charmed by the initial likeness and to ignore the people behind them. I used to feel very defensive about Didion, ignored many conservative essays in favor of the photo I had of her in my mind. Anolik isn’t dismissive of Didion as much as she is honest.  

It is easy to pass their writing off as mere extensions of those images, when, really, their writings complicate our visions of them. Didion in all her gravity is diffused by standing in front of the white Corvette, and Eve is easily dismissed as she poses in intimates on the balcony while her writing makes it clear she was an avid reader of Proust.

Beneath my senior yearbook photo reads “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget,” a quote from Joan Didion’s On Keeping a Notebook. At eighteen, I found this to be the best senior quote imaginable. Didion was my Bible. I grew up in Los Angeles and Joan was the only writer I knew who wrote about it with the same opaqueness through which I saw my strange hometown. But as I grew up, Babitz sang a different tune, one that loved LA with a reverence I was jealous of instead of dismissing the strange city as a sign of the apocalypse. Babitz taught me LA was fun, not a symbol of catastrophe, and for that, I’m forever grateful. Anolik’s book serves as a reminder of perspective; one can choose to look at and move through the world in the way Babitz did, and one can conversely choose to strive for success like Didion.  

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Didion & Babitz succeeds in creating vivid, and more realistic portraits of these writers and rejecting the bios that have come before. However, Anolik fails to make these images as vivid and sumptuous as they could be. Their lives, their world, the gossip of it all feels too lush to not be played with more. Joan and Eve are humanized though the text, yet ultimately, Anolik draws them out still as two sides of American womanhood, rendering them symbols instead of people. Still, she has fun with it, bringing the reader into her corner (“Don’t worry, Reader,” “Bear with me, Reader,” “In case you haven’t noticed, Reader”) and gossiping extensively while balancing this with scholarly discourse. I only wish that she had played with their scene and its visceral imagery more, and kept them people instead of making them into contrasting likenesses – I wished it had had a little more of a Babitzian flare, not taken itself too seriously.

Like the epigraph for Eve’s Hollywood thanking Joan “for having to be who I’m not,” the book concludes with the balance they created, impossible for each one to be the writer she was without the other. As Anolik tears down the Duchamp photo and the Stingray negatives, she reveals a more honest image of Eve and Joan. She concludes that “each was the closest the other had to a secret twin or sharer. To a soul mate.” While I don’t know if I completely agree, the two certainly understood each other in ways we as readers never will (but perhaps will always wish to). For me, Didion and Babitz will always embody two visions of what it means to live in LA and what it means to be a writer. As a love letter to its subjects, Didion & Babitz leaves Eve and Joan to stand in all their glory and flaws, forever foils to one another. In the end, Anolik’s biography suggests that once one is rendered an icon, it is impossible to escape becoming a symbol.