Eve Babitz first came to fame as a naked beauty at the chess table with Marcel Duchamps and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends. But her first book shows Babitz as a writer with her own voice and her own stories. She tells of adorable high school beauties, enviably tattooed chicanas and rock stars sleeping off their intoxication at Chateau Marmont. In her seemingly casual anecdotes, glamour, wit and tragedy are condensed in a unique way.
Perhaps this is why the rediscovery of the Eve Babitz in the last half decade has only affected the Eve Babitz of the 1970s. The future of this Eve could, indeed had to, be considered. But she captivated, beguiled, inspired precisely in that seemingly out-of-time glistening – not a seeker of lost time, but its lotus-eating mayoress. Again and again we are thrown back to the image of young Eve on the beach from “Eve’s Hollywood”: “It was hot to us, the sea was a long wave to ride, our skin was dark and time even stopped from time to time and made things shimmer. After all, time is not immune to beauty and sometimes stops for a moment.” Eve Babitz died on December 17 at the age of 78.
