FAST COMPANY
September 2022 Issue

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz Shared an Unlikely, Uneasy Friendship—One That Shaped Their Worlds and Work Forever

In a trove of never-published archival material, their fraught relationship comes to electrifying life.
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The letter Eve Babitz wrote Joan Didion lives at the Huntington Library in California. Middle: A 1972 correspondence in which Babitz castigates Didion.DIDION: LOS ANGELES TIMES PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE/LIBRARY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, CHARLESE. YOUNG RESEARCH LIBRARY, UCLA. BABITZ: ED RUSCHA. LETTER: EVE BABITZ PAPERS, HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

When I met Eve Babitz in the spring of 2012, she was living in a one-bedroom condo in a sun-faded building on a quiet block in West Hollywood. Entering was difficult, nearly impossible. Why isn’t easy to explain. There was, first of all, Eve’s radical strangeness. This sounds, I realize, like a polite way of calling her nuts, and she was nuts. (Huntington’s disease had been eating away at her brain for years.) But she wasn’t only nuts, and she wasn’t always nuts. There were plenty of lucid moments. The problem was the stench—black, foul, choking—that surrounded the condo like a force field.

If intense fascination with someone is love, then I loved Eve. And the intensity of my fascination was what finally allowed me, six months after our first encounter, to breach the force field, make it past the front door.

The lights were off, the shades drawn tightly against the California sunshine. I waited for my vision to adjust. It did, and I gasped. What I saw was full-scale filth: trash—several years’ worth—piled on every surface, crammed into every crevice so that it seemed to be growing from the floor, the furniture, the walls, so that it seemed alive, like a species of jungle plant. There was no room to sit, or even stand, really. And the smell, that thick, hot stink, was so strong my nostrils were clogged with it. (When the people from Jewish Family Services came to clean the condo, they worked in hazmat suits, lest you think I’m exaggerating or overstating.)

If I had any hopes that Eve kept records or personal papers, they were dashed the instant I crossed the threshold of unit 2 at 951 North Gardner Street. Nothing could survive an environment so putrid and putrefying. Not even Eve, who succumbed to Huntington’s on December 17, 2021, age 78.

Yet something did survive. In the deepest reaches of a closet was a stack of boxes packed by Eve’s mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside: journals, photos, scrapbooks, manuscripts, and letters. No, inside a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and was centered in a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of L.A. The Franklin Avenue scene, I call it for reasons that will become apparent. And it had all the explosive vitality that the scene at Les Deux Magots on the Left Bank had for Ernest Hemingway and his fellow Lost boys. It was the making of one great American writer, the breaking and then the remaking—and thus the true making—of another. These two writers were friends. Enemies as well. They were also women, a fact fundamental rather than incidental, as you’ll see from the below letter.

It’s dated October 2, no year, though the year is 1972. It’s unsigned, though is from Eve. It’s addressed to “Dear Joan,” “Joan” as in Joan Didion, though the “Dear” is either sarcastic or misplaced. And it’s got the boisterous, clamorous, surging, sprawling, lewd, destructive glee of a predawn, reeling-drunk temper tantrum, though it was written in the bright light of day (the closing line, “Good-bye morning letter”) and stone-cold sober (in ’72, Eve was far more likely to fuck herself up on acid and/or ludes and/or coke than alcohol):

This morning I telephoned and wanted you to read A Room of One’s Own.… It’s so hard to get certain things together and especially you and [Virginia Woolf] because you’re mad at her about her diaries. It’s entirely about you that you can’t stand her diaries. It goes with Sacramento. Maybe it’s better that you stay with Sacramento and hate diaries and ignore the fact that every morning when you eye the breakfast table uneasily waiting to get away, back to your typewriter, maybe it’s better that you examine your life in every way except the main one which Sacramento would brush aside but which V. Wolffe [sic] kept blabbing on about. Maybe it’s about you and Sacramento that you feel it’s undignified, not crickett [sic] and bad form to let Art be one of the variables. Art, my God, Joan, I’m embarrassed to mention it in front of you, you know, but you mentioned burning babies in locked cars so I can mention Art.

The enigmatic Earl McGrath poses for a photograph. Jackson Browne in his kitchen in Glencoe. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

Didion photographed in 1968. Babitz photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Eve’s Hollywood. The famous photo of Marcel Duchamp and Babitz taken by Julian Wasser in 1963.

BABITZ: ANNIE LEIBOVITZ . BABITZ AND DUCHAMP; DIDION: JULIAN WASSER. 

I’m cutting Eve off. Watching her let rip is great theater. But you need a little context in order to follow.

We’ll go back by first going forward, jumping ahead two years:

1974, the year Eve published her first book, Eve’s Hollywood. In the dedication, she wrote, “And to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.” A definition of Joan that was really a definition of herself as the un-Joan. (I’m ignoring Joan’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, here on purpose because he failed to capture Eve’s imagination—“I don’t like the way [he] writes,” she noted in her journal—and I suspect she only lumped him and Joan together to needle Joan.) So who was Joan in 1974? One of the biggest writers in America. A celebrity writer in the way that Norman Mailer was, or Tom Wolfe, or Hunter S. Thompson. Still more remarkable, that other writers, i.e., male writers, allowed her to be a writer who was also a woman, rather than insisting she be a capital-W Woman Writer. No modifier on writer, no flies on Joan.

And now we’ll go back by going back, five years into the past:

1967, the year Eve met Joan, though the Joan Eve met was not yet Joan Didion. So who was Joan in 1967? A promising but obscure writer. Her first book, fiction, Run, River, published in 1963, when she was living in New York, was assured and arresting. It was also traditional—a generational drama set in an earlier period—probably the reason critics and audiences paid it little mind. (“Traditional” can so easily translate to “unadventurous,” “corny,” “irrelevant.”) A painful outcome for any writer, extra painful for one who wanted to be noticed—nay, spectacular—so badly.

Joan was, undoubtedly, a genius, but it isn’t enough to be a genius. You must also be lucky: right place, right time. It was both for her next book, the nonfiction collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, published in 1968, when she, Dunne, and their adopted daughter, Quintana, were living in L.A., at 7406 Franklin Avenue. Just as Run, River felt traditional, so Slouching, with its title piece set in Haight-Ashbury, the counterculture capital, felt contemporary. Alarmingly, dangerously contemporary. (Remember “High Kindergarten,” where five-year-olds tripped on acid?) It was and it wasn’t. What it was was an old-fashioned gothic horror story tricked out in New Journalism’s clothing. Sometimes, though, a costume change is all it takes.

Slouching was a cultural phenomenon. That made Joan one too. In an outtake from Betsy Blankenbaker’s 2001 documentary, New York in the Fifties, Dunne said to the camera, “[Slouching] was reviewed by someone in The New York Times,” then to Joan, “And it was—boom!—all of a sudden, you were a figure.” Time commissioned portraits, sending photographer Julian Wasser to the Franklin Avenue house. Wasser’s series is familiar to you even if his name isn’t, because the picture you have of Joan in your mind is likely one he took. I’ll jog your memory: Joan, hair flowing past her shoulders, in a long jersey dress, loose yet clinging, the expression on her face defiant, dreamy, a little bored. In several shots, she’s leaning against a Corvette, or sitting in the driver’s seat. Her presence is romantic, yet chaste. (How could Joan be sexual? That savage appetites, erotic or otherwise, might snarl for satisfaction within a form so slight, an aura so cool, seems inconceivable.) She’s a master of the intimate close-up, gazing through the eye of the camera and directly into your eyes. It’s an actor’s trick rather than a writer’s, fitting since Joan didn’t have readers, as writers do. She had what movie stars have—she had fans.

Joan, 33, had, at last, become Joan Didion. And she’d done it on the Franklin Avenue scene. Her house; Earl McGrath’s scene.

How to explain Earl McGrath, a person who defies explanation? Eve took a crack in a letter written in late 1970 to artist Chris Blum. “Would you like to hear about my friend Earl?” she asked, and then proceeded to detail his early life as a runaway Catholic schoolboy from Wisconsin; his amour with a future Zen monk in Big Sur; his stint as head of production at 20th Century Fox in New York. “[Finally] he moved to California and away from his wife[,]… a lame Italian countess.… Earl is wonderful at social masterpieces.”

7406 Franklin Avenue was, in 1966—the year Joan moved in—a ramshackle house in a neighborhood in Hollywood that nobody wanted to go to. 7406 Franklin Avenue was, in 1967—the year Eve came along—the place to be.

It was McGrath who brought Eve in. They met on an early morning in June 1967. Eve, 24, was lying in the bed of Peter Pilafian, electric violinist and road manager for the Mamas & the Papas, when through the front door breezed McGrath. McGrath was infatuated with Pilafian. Once he got an eyeful of a sleep-tousled Eve, though, he redirected the flow of his lovey-dovey. A romance, passionate but not sexual, began. From Eve’s letter to Blum: “Earl invited me to dinner.… I was uncomfortable at first but Earl’s personality and energy are such that once the people got inside his house all outside social factors were dropped.… He loved us with this funny intelligent brilliant radiance like a diamond net. The next day he would call us all up and ask us questions like ‘What did you say to Mrs. Dunn—she thinks you are the most brilliant person in California?’ ” (“Mrs. Dunn,” and please note the misspelling, is how Eve refers to Joan in journals and letters from this period.)

Babitz and one of her collages. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

McGrath had a circle. “When Earl came here two or three years ago, he knew no one.… After about six months he had created a society of people who were not only the most talented around but who also all shared these incredible parties.… He has the best young artists, writers, actors, poets with established people like Larry Rivers[,] Jasper Johns, Uri (a white Russian who discovered the jet engine and was in the U.N.), Henry Geltzelher [sic].” Even Natalie Wood “[who] breastfeeds her baby while wearing a mask so she won’t get germs on it.”

McGrath also had an inner circle. In it: Joan and Dunne; Michelle Phillips, a Mama in the Mamas & the Papas; Peter Pilafian; and Harrison Ford, before he was Han Solo (said Phillips, “I didn’t even know Harrison was an actor. I remember getting dragged to Star Wars at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. I was sitting there, watching the screen, and all of a sudden Harrison comes on and I gasped and said, ‘That’s my pot dealer!’ ”).

The relationship between Joan and McGrath was a long-standing one, deep and full of funny gallantry—another courtly romance in which consummation was unthinkable. In 2016, Joan told Vanity Fair, “Earl and I met in 1962, immediately loved each other, and never stopped.… I very clearly remember sitting on the front steps [of the Franklin Avenue house] talking to Earl.… We gave parties together.”

The most storied took place on September 6, 1968, in celebration of the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Joan’s nephew Griffin Dunne, in junior high and up way past his bedtime, was a guest. “I just wandered around and watched adults. Earl and Harrison went as movable art objects. Earl wore all white and Harrison wore all black. They stood back-to-back. And Earl, in white, would start a conversation with someone, then Harrison, in black, would continue it. I think they were stoned out of their minds. I was just waiting for Janis. And no one was really wanting to talk to a 13-year-old, except this bald guy in a Nehru jacket. He said, ‘Boy, come here quick, quick.’ And he holds my wrist really tight, and goes, ‘I have taken the acid, and I’m having the bummer. You are the only ray of light in this horrible place.’ It was Otto Preminger [Austro-Hungarian-born director of Laura]. Anyway, there was a parking valet, but most of the cars were stolen in front of the house. Joan complained, and the valet said, ‘Well, I didn’t know you lived in such a ratty neighborhood!’ ”

In 1970, Joan published the novel Play It As It Lays, as alarming and dangerous in its contemporaneity as Slouching. And Play It was truly a product of the Franklin Avenue scene, because a nightmare version of the Franklin Avenue scene served as its backdrop—the L.A. of the very fast and very famous; Hollywood L.A.—but also because the Franklin Avenue scene was where Joan got her ending. Said Eve, “Michelle Phillips told the best stories in town. I remember her once lying down on the floor of my apartment [during] a dinner party—Joan and John were there, Earl was there—and telling that amazing story about her friend Tamar.”

That amazing story about Tamar: Tamar Hodel, in her mid-20s, in despair over a failed love affair, decided to kill herself. She asked a 17-year-old Phillips to help. Phillips: “I begged Tamar for three days not to commit suicide. Finally I said, ‘If that’s what you really want to do, I’m not going to stand in your way.’ Tamar took 26 Seconal, then said, ‘I want to be dead, but I don’t want to look dead.’ She went to the bathroom and was putting makeup on. The Seconal hit her all at once, and she went down. I managed to rock her back and forth into the bed. I lay down next to her and went to sleep. The next thing I remember was John [Phillips, Michelle’s soon-to-be husband] tickling my feet.” An ambulance was summoned; and Hodel, fortunately, saved. “Joan called me up the next day and said, ‘Is it all right if I use that story you told in the book I’m working on?’ ” In Play It’s climax, the protagonist, Maria, lies in bed with her best friend, BZ, as he overdoses on Seconal. Maria and BZ fall asleep. They’re found by Maria’s husband. It’s too late to summon an ambulance; and BZ, unfortunately, isn’t saved.

Play It wasn’t just an instant best seller, it was an instant classic. Joan was in the stratosphere now. Even ranking divinities genuflected before her. Recalled writer Josh Greenfeld, “John used to say, ‘Guess who I just met on the beach? I met Jesus. Jesus said he loved Joan’s work.’ ”

That Joan wasn’t straitjacketed into the role of Woman Writer was neither luck nor chance. She did it by being very, very good, and a very, very particular kind of good. A masculine kind of good is the way I would, with some trepidation, characterize it. She was the child of Hemingway, and eager to acknowledge her paternity. “When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out [Hemingway’s] stories to learn how the sentences worked,” she told The Paris Review. In fact, she was the son Papa always wanted, even if she was the daughter he never knew he had. Her sentences were, like his, as cold and clean as spring water. Feelings were there, and strong to the point of overpowering, though they were addressed only obliquely. To address them directly would be to violate the cowboy code—baring your soul? yikes, sissy stuff!—and Joan was from Sacramento, technically a city in Northern California, really the Old West.

Yet alongside this emotional reticence was an impulse to emotional pornography—to wit: Joan letting drop in Life magazine that she and Dunne were vacationing in Hawaii “in lieu of filing for divorce”—an impulse I would characterize, with more than some trepidation, as feminine. These contradictory extremes, of reserve and exhibitionism, of male and female, should’ve canceled each other out, but didn’t. The paradox was riveting, thrilling.

What it means to be the un-Joan, i.e., Eve.

Joan famously wrote, “It had not been by accident that the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations.” It’s a good line—self-revelation disguised as social commentary. Only the self being revealed is false. The people with whom Joan spent time in high school were, on the whole, middle-class strivers, like herself. (Joan was on Student Council, Sophomore Ball committee, Junior Prom committee, and worked not just on newspaper but yearbook.) Or upper-class already-theres. (Joan was in the Mañana Club, known locally as the “rich girls’ sorority,” as was Nina Warren, daughter of Earl Warren, then governor of California.)

The statement was true, however, of Eve: a low-high, pop-trash, bohemian-aristocrat by birth. Her mother was Cajun, a hash house waitress turned artist, from Sour Lake, Texas. Her father was Jewish and a virtuoso violinist from Brooklyn, a studio musician—you can hear his bow and strings shrieking along with Janet Leigh in the Psycho shower scene—and member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Once, at a party given by her parents, she led Russian composer Igor Stravinsky by hand to American jazzman Stuff Smith just before Smith, afflicted mightily with the d.t.’s, was carried off on a stretcher. (This was the first improbable introduction she’d make in a lifetime of: Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, Steve Martin to white suits.)

Eve was a bohemian-aristocrat by inclination, as well. At Hollywood High, she decided that the sororities weren’t for her, as the Brownies hadn’t been for her at Cheremoya Elementary. (Joan was both a Brownie and a Tri Delt.) And after Hollywood High, Eve picked LACC, a community college, over UCLA because UCLA, in her view, wanted to turn its female students into “educators,” and no way was she letting anyone make an honest citizen out of her.

I believe that every true artist is, in a fundamental sense, an outsider artist. Joan was a true artist; therefore, Joan was an outsider artist. But she was an outsider artist from the inside. And she treated writing, a renegade pursuit and improvisational, as a career, with steps to follow, a ladder to climb. Her way of keeping herself from looking down perhaps. (If she saw that the ladder was actually a tightrope, she might lose her nerve.) Again and again, she opted for conventional modes and stratagems. As a senior at Berkeley, she won the Vogue-sponsored “Prix de Paris” essay contest. During her seven years at the magazine, she’d go from promotional copywriter to feature associate. In 1963, the year she got her book, Run, River, published, she also got a husband, or at least a fiancé: Dunne, a Princeton man, the son of a Hartford surgeon.

Babitz’s photograph of the Byrds, which would become the art for their album Untitled. Babitz with Dan Wakefield in 1971. Gram Parsons photographed by Babitz at the Chateau Marmont. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, HUNTINGTON LIBRARY. 

Steve Martin, a lover of Babitz’s while she was on the Franklin Avenue scene. A young Harrison Ford, circa 1968. The Didion-Dunnes at their Malibu home. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, HUNTINGTON LIBRARY. 

By 1963, Eve, too, had a husband, though he wasn’t hers: Walter Hopps, director of the Pasadena Art Museum. To get back at him for inviting his wife, not inviting her, to a party he was throwing for French surrealist Marcel Duchamp, she posed for Julian Wasser. (Yes, the Time photographer again.) A few days after the party, Wasser shot a 76-year-old Duchamp, wearing a suit, playing chess with a 20-year-old Eve, wearing not a thing. In his photos of Joan and the Corvette, Joan’s face is the focus. In his photo of Eve and Duchamp, Eve doesn’t have a face, her features obscured by her hair. She’s just a body, and that body is the antithesis of Joan’s—an explosion of voluptuous flesh, and helplessly carnal.

Eve getting naked for the camera was more than an act of revenge against her lover. It was an act of homage to her idol: Marilyn Monroe. Eve wrote, “I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then…[my mother] told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry.” It’s worth noting that Eve’s artistic model was the opposite of Joan’s. Hemingway, supremely macho, a man of action as well as letters, was a winner—of Pulitzers and Nobels, of Bronze Stars and Silver Medals. Contrastingly, the intensely femme Monroe was the ultimate victim, an artist who was treated as a bimbo, a loser even if she was the biggest star in the world.

In Slouching, Joan wrote, “[Self-respect] has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.” Another good line. But again, one that doesn’t apply to Joan, who worked on her reputation as diligently, as carefully as she worked on her books. (The statement itself is Joan working on her reputation.) It was Eve who couldn’t be bothered. How having a well-managed versus a carelessly managed reputation plays out for a woman in practical terms: When I asked Julian Wasser if he’d told Joan how to dress or where to stand during their session, he replied, his tone reverent, “With a girl like Joan Didion, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone contemptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”

Eve dropped out of LACC almost as soon as she enrolled. Her education thereafter would be of the sentimental variety. Joseph Heller, writer of Catch-22, married and in his 40s when they began their affair, tried to help her with Travel Broadens, the autobiographical novel she’d started as a teenager. “Your spelling, my dove, is even more scandalous than your impertinence,” he told her in a 1964 letter. “I think it is eminently readable, but probably not publishable.… I thought we ought to try anyway.”

The attempt would fail. And Eve, who, early on, was as interested in becoming an artist as a writer, switched her focus to art. She was already a regular at Barney’s Beanery, an artists’ bar in West Hollywood. Eve, however, was not considered an artist by the other artists, all men, it goes without saying. The best she could do was inspire the Barney’s artists, “inspire,” of course, being code for “fuck.” The Barney’s artists Eve “inspired”: Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Ken Price, though she stayed away from Dennis Hopper (“too weird”). A few of them understood what she was—an original and profound and for real. But most saw her the way Wasser did: as a piece of ass. No gallery showing was offered. She paid her bills by doing secretarial work. (Eve spelled poorly, typed quickly.)

Yet in 1967, when she joined the Franklin Avenue scene, things were looking up. She’d switched her focus again, this time from fine arts to rock and roll arts. And from fine artists to rock and roll artists. Now, the term groupie is one Eve often assigned to herself. And, in the strictest sense, she was a groupie; that is, a woman in hot sexual pursuit of rock and rollers. But, really, she was a courtesan; that is, a woman in hot sexual pursuit of the men of her era who moved and shook. It just so happened that the men who moved and shook in late-’60s L.A. were rock and rollers. Playing the courtesan-groupie was how Eve filled herself with the spirit of her time and place.

In 1966, Eve spotted a pre-fame Jim Morrison at a club on the Sunset Strip. Her first words to him were “Take me home.” Soon after, she set her sights on Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Glenn Frey. And in 1967, she got Stephen Stills to let her do the cover art for his band’s next album, Buffalo Springfield Again. “I knew my early days of fucking around would pay off,” she told Walter Hopps in a letter from that year.

For a while everything was golden. Eve was mixing business with pleasure and they mixed just fine. Until they didn’t. Abruptly, inexplicably, McGrath turned on her. From the letter to Blum: “Earl decided I was beyond the pale about 8 months ago. He decided I was vulgar or something.” My guess is that McGrath’s jealousy rather than Eve’s vulgarity was the reason for the about-face, since the guys he was pining for, she was sleeping with. Not only Peter Pilafian, but Harrison Ford. Said Eve, “Earl was in love with Harrison. One time Earl and Harrison and I were taking acid at the beach. I suddenly decided we had to go home because there were too many cops around. We stopped for breakfast. Harrison started talking about working on a movie with Elliott Gould. He thought Elliott was a nice guy. Well, Earl stood up and threw all the dishes on the floor.”

McGrath would attack Eve where she was vulnerable. A year into their friendship that had morphed into something else, he introduced her to Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, then the ruler of the music world. McGrath must’ve known when he brought Ertegun to Eve’s apartment on an afternoon in 1968 that he was bringing her an apple from a fairy tale—something as irresistible as it was deadly. Eve, in the letter to Blum, on the McGrath-Ertegun origin story: “Earl and Ahmet met at a superformal dinner party.… [They] disappeared after dessert and weren’t heard from for 3 days.… Earl telephoned Ahmet’s wife and told her to send the car down from Southhampton [sic] to the most sordid tawdry street in Baltimore.” Though McGrath began working for Ertegun in an official capacity in 1970, when Ertegun gave him a record label, Clean Records, to run, he was already working for Ertegun in an unofficial capacity. He was Ertegun’s social director; in other words, a kind of pimp.

Ertegun was a cultivated man, an artist as well as an operator. (In his pre-mogul days he wrote songs for Ray Charles.) But there was a barbarous side to his nature, and he’d reveal it in his relationship with Eve, which wasn’t a relationship at all, which was an arrangement. Said Eve’s sister, Mirandi, “Ahmet would call up Eve late at night, and she’d go over to the Beverly Hills Hotel. He always had the best drugs. Not just the best drugs, the best exotic drugs. He’d have things like opium. And there was room service all over the place, and Champagne on ice. Evie loved all that. And she’d service him or whatever, and then she’d go home.”

Eve had always been about overindulgence: profligacy and promiscuity, reckless and spectacular consumption. Yet she’d remained unspoiled. Her capacity for pleasure was large—movingly so. Any delights or diversions that came her way, she accepted with gratitude. Which means that her depravity was all on the surface. Underneath, she was an innocent. This changed with Ertegun.

Another memory of Mirandi’s: “There would be times that we went to Earl’s, after a show or a concert. I’d see the mix of people who were there. Top music people, like Mick Jagger. They were half-cocked, drunk, and full of whatever. And the talk was so mean and mean-spirited. It would be directed at the girls, sometimes at Eve—these horrible put-downs. Most of the girls would just crumble. Not Eve. She’d figure out what the deal with you was and just go for the jugular. So she’d give it right back to Ahmet. I worried she’d get slapped, but I think he liked it.”

Eve could not, would not flinch. And her bravura, her stupid physical courage, allowed her to hold on to her self-respect. (If Joan’s definition of self-respect has a living embodiment, Eve is it.) But at what cost? The experience with Ertegun was coarsening, brutalizing. Her behavior was, on one level, admirable; on another, bitter, frustrated, self-destructive—redundant since McGrath was already so intent on destroying her. Something he could do without consequence. She wasn’t famous or attached. Who was going to kick up a fuss?

One day in 1970, he’d look at a painting she was working on and ask, “Is that the blue you’re using?,” a question as tasteless and odorless as arsenic—and as fatal. It wiped out her artistic confidence. Her art career would continue for a few more years, but was effectively over at that moment.

Leibovitz, Babitz’s lover and Rolling Stone colleague. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

As McGrath was laying waste to Eve, he was shielding Joan. From Eve’s 1970 journal: “Last night I had a good party.… Wickhem got here with this ex-Marine[,] whose name was Jack Clement. He discovered Jerry Lee Lewis.… [Jack] made a pass at Mrs. Dunn which caused her, John & Earl…to run out the door.”

This vignette exposes Joan. She might have balked at the safety of the drawing room where the well-bred young ladies clutched their pearls; yet she wasn’t quite willing to risk the mean streets, at least not unescorted. Eve, on the other hand, prowled the mean streets alone, after dark, dressed hot and trashy, a bloody lip for a badge of honor. She faced death every single night. The situation got too real, the smell of a rumble too sharp, and Joan was out of there.

“You married a protector,” Griffin says to Joan in his documentary of her, The Center Will Not Hold, and she readily agrees. Dunne, though, only looked like the dominant one. Said Josh Greenfeld, “I told [Michiko Kakutani, then the Times book critic], ‘What you see in John, you get in Joan.’ He came on as tough and blustering, but he was soft. Don’t forget, she handled all their finances. And that shyness—that weakness—was actually her strength because it got John to run interference.”

When discussing her courtship with Dunne, Joan said, “I don’t know what ‘fall in love’ means.… But I do remember having a very clear sense that I wanted this to continue.” It isn’t true that falling in love was a concept Joan had no truck with. In a piece on Howard Hughes, she wrote of the “apparently bottomless gulf between…what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” Are we to assume then that Dunne was someone she married but did not love? In any case, she and Dunne were very married, presenting themselves to the world as a unit. Joan, in fact, insisted on being addressed as “Joan Dunne” by friends. (“Mrs. Dunn” was, I think, Eve taking a dig at Joan for this insistence, for playing the little woman to Dunne’s big strong man.) And not only were Joan and Dunne a couple, they were also coworkers, editing each other’s books and articles, writing screenplays jointly. As Eve put it, “They were connected at the typewriter ribbon.”

The relationship, though, was more symbiotic even than that. It was Dunne who made it possible for Joan to be Joan. Joan told Griffin, “People often said that he finished sentences for me. Well, he did.” And his willingness to do her talking for her allowed her to be silent. Said writer Dan Wakefield, a friend of the Didion-Dunnes from their New York days, “I gave a party. A guy was there—Norman Dorsen—a law professor at NYU, involved in liberal politics and all that shit. Joan was just standing there, not saying a thing. She had on this pair of dark glasses. Norman goes up to her and says, ‘Ms. Didion, why do you wear those sexy, intriguing, dark glasses?’ I cracked up and said, ‘I think you’ve answered your own question.’ She was like the sphinx. And when the sphinx spoke, everybody listened.”

Also making it possible for Joan to be Joan: Earl McGrath. Eve described the parties at Franklin Avenue as “nonstop.” When I asked if the parties were Joan’s or Earl’s, she replied, “Both. They were the same person.” As Dunne supplemented Joan professionally, so McGrath supplemented her socially. Joan was, by all accounts, a withdrawn and inward person, yet one with a strong desire to be on the scene. How to do that? Create the scene. Or rather, get somebody to create it for you. Get McGrath, whose charm is the stuff of legend, but who’s lacking—an artist with no art. (Social masterpieces don’t, alas, count. They’re gone by morning.)

So the man who was doing Eve in was nourishing Joan. Eve was getting eaten alive; Joan had her teeth sunk deep in his throat, was drinking, drinking, drinking with glassy-eyed, sweet-sucking bliss.

Then, the Franklin Avenue scene ended, in January 1971, when Joan left it, moving with Dunne and Quintana to Malibu. Joan would, however, return at the close of the decade with the essay collection The White Album, the title story set in the years 1966–1971, while she was “living in a large house in a part of Hollywood that had once been expensive and was now described by one of my acquaintances as a ‘senseless-killing neighborhood.’ ” She’d quote the psychiatric report of a patient at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica in the summer of ’68. “In [the patient’s] view she lives in a world of people moved by strange, conflicted, poorly comprehended, and, above all, devious motivations which commit them inevitably to conflict and failure.” The twist? Joan was the patient. So under her controlled exterior: tumult. The same tumult as under Eve’s uncontrolled exterior. And the thoughts and feelings that Eve had blurted out spontaneously and unselfconsciously in journals and letters, written in the as-it-happens present, Joan shaped, artfully and with premeditation, in an after-the-fact book.

Michelle Phillips would make an appearance in The White Album. So would Janis Joplin. And McGrath was the co-dedicatee. Eve was in there too, though just out of sight, tucked behind Jim Morrison, dropping lit matches down the fly of his vinyl trousers during a Doors recording session. (It was Eve who got Joan in front of Morrison—yet another of her improbable introductions.)

The White Album was a critical and commercial triumph. It was also a return to form for Joan, whose hot streak had gone cold since she abandoned Franklin Avenue for the Pacific Coast Highway. (Her 1977 novel, A Book of Common Prayer, was a flop.) So Joan’s best books, her definitive books, the books on which she built her name and on which that name now rests—Slouching, Play It, White Album—are her Franklin Avenue books.

Various Babitzes and Eve’s godfather, Igor Stravinsky. 

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

Back to Eve. Had the Franklin Avenue scene not died, she might’ve. So excessive had her excesses become by late 1970 that she had to invent a term to describe her condition: “squalid overboogie.” She was washed up sexually, emotionally, artistically. Away from McGrath and McGrath’s crowd, though, she began to recover. “I don’t really need to be told things like what Earl tells me nowadays—things like about how…gross I am,” she wrote to Blum. “The less I see them the more human I seem to be getting.”

Who Eve was seeing more of: Dan Wakefield. Wakefield, who came to L.A. in early 1971 to adapt Going All the Way, his best-selling novel, was an outsider. Not that much of an outsider, though, because he was already close with Joan and Dunne. Recalled Wakefield, “I called up Joan and John. I said, ‘I’ve met this terrific girl.’ I told them her name, and there was laughter. And then John said, ‘Ah, yes, Eve Babitz, the dowager groupie.’ ” (Proof of the couple’s sly careerism: It was Wakefield who wrote the rave of Slouching for the Times. Wakefield, an intimate of many years, is the person Dunne referred to as “someone” in Blankenbaker’s documentary.)

In the fall of ’71, Eve wrote a short piece, a reminiscence that was really a rapture, about the girls of Hollywood High, titled “The Sheik.” A few months later, it appeared in Rolling Stone, the hippest magazine of its day. And Joan made it happen.

Joan made it happen in an obvious way. After Eve showed “The Sheik” to Wakefield and Wakefield crabbed—Wakefield, “I’ve always made it a point to never have a girlfriend who was a writer”—and after Wakefield’s agent sent Eve a letter with detailed instructions on how to get it into publishable shipshape—Eve, “I hate people who tell me what to do to improve”—Eve thrust it into the hands of Joan, who then thrust it into the hands of Rolling Stone editor Grover Lewis.

Joan made it happen in a subtle way as well. She wrote Play It As It Lays, a novel set in an L.A. that’s hell on earth even if it looks like paradise. Eve expected this sort of hysterical, Puritan nonsense from Nathanael West, a New Yorker and the writer of The Day of the Locust, which Play It was, in so many ways, an updated version of. And Eve would use West to go after Joan by proxy: “People from the East all like Nathanael West because he shows them [L.A.’s] not all blue skies and pink sunsets.… [I]t’s shallow, corrupt, and ugly. I think Nathanael West was a creep.” With Play It, Joan was, in Eve’s view, telling people from the East, once again, what they wanted to hear—sucking up, basically. It was an act of betrayal by a native daughter. “The Sheik” was Eve defending L.A.’s honor.

Eve was in a tricky position: The person to whom she owed the largest debt was the person making her see red. And the debt would only get larger, the red redder.

In the summer of ’72, Eve was no longer with Wakefield. Or Lewis. (After Lewis accepted “The Sheik,” Eve moved up north and in with him. She wrote, “I was living in San Francisco until two things happened, one, I decided to murder the guy I was living with and two, I suddenly found out I had an advance for a book.”) The advance was from Seymour Lawrence, who ran an imprint at Delacorte. The book, Eve’s Hollywood, as in Not-Joan’s Hollywood, was to be a collection. Lawrence suggested Eve think of a unifying principle, adding, “Joan may be able to give you advice along these lines.”

Joan would give more than advice. It was she and Dunne, not anyone at Delacorte, who edited Eve’s Hollywood. In a 1973 letter, Eve wrote, “Joan Didion and her husband are editing [the book]. They are terrifyingly exacting, they nearly scared me to death a week ago telling me I was sloppy and they were right. They are like my best self and who can live with that?”

Nor did Joan’s promotion of Eve stop with Eve’s writing. Eve, in a letter from the summer of ’72: “Am in vogue this month in the Dunne’s bathroom.… One of my posters [a collage of drummer Ginger Baker] is in there and they say, ‘California artist, Eve Babitz,’ which is about time.” It was about time, and it was Joan who recognized it was about time.

Really, Eve had no stauncher supporter or more ardent ally. As she seemed to understand. (Why else start using Joan’s proper name, spelling “Dunne” correctly?) Also to resent. In a letter to Wakefield, she describes Lewis as the editor who “opened the doors of stardom to me.” Then, sounding considerably less cocksure, “I suppose I should be grateful but all I can think of is that if Joan hadn’t sent him a letter in the first place, he never would have taken the story.” The aside tells the tale. She knew what Joan had done for her.

And yet, on October 2, 1972, Eve wrote Joan that letter, the one so blazingly angry it’s still, 50 years later, hot to the touch.

You said that the only thing you liked to do was write.… Just think if it were 200 years ago and the only thing you liked to do was write.… I know I’m not making sense, but the thing beyond what your article was about was what A Room of One’s Own is about.… The whole women’s thing that is going on now is so stark and obscene most of the time that no wonder one recoils in horror.… But for a long long long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do.… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?… Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous. And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size.

The article of Joan’s that Eve is alluding to: “The Women’s Movement,” New York Times, July 30, 1972. It’s written with Joan’s usual intelligence and grace. Yet there’s something insidious about it. And borderline dishonest. The women’s movement had its problems—classism, for one, as Joan noted. (She zinged the women who claimed trauma from catcalls made by “uppity proles” working construction sites.) It also, though, had a point, and Joan was pretending it didn’t. She wrote, “That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news, but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.”

Joan, in her career, had beat men at their own game. That didn’t mean the game wasn’t rigged, though, or that you could win without also losing. For example, so that her writing might be formidable, flashy, and self-possessed, Joan made herself itsy-bitsy, meek, and self-doubting—a tongue-tied wallflower. As Eve points out, Joan emphasized, almost fetishized, her frailty. From the closing paragraph of the preface to Slouching: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” What Eve doesn’t point out, but which is also true: Joan used her frailty to conceal her deadliness. She was a predator who passed herself off as prey. The rest of that paragraph: “And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.

It was Eve’s belief that Joan was selling out women to get in good with men, as Joan had sold out L.A. to get in good with New York.

It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Wolffe [sic]. I feel as though you think she’s a “woman’s novelist” and that only foggy brains could like her and that you, sharp, accurate journalist, you would never join the ranks of people who sogged around in The Waves. You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose about Maria [Wyeth of Play It] who had everything but Art. Vulgar, ill bred, drooling, uninvited Art.

Eve was tracing the connection she believed Joan made between women and art: alike in their volatility, their illogic, their emotional extremes and lurid chaos. And both, in Eve’s view, were appalling to Joan, an affront to Joan’s orderly and austere intellect. Which means that Eve, with her double-D breasts and overlapping love affairs and big, unwieldy, slovenly talent was also appalling to Joan. And she was. Didn’t McGrath, Joan’s proxy, reject Eve as “gross”?

Except Joan, unlike McGrath, was an artist. (Perhaps in spite of herself.) And Joan didn’t reject Eve. On the contrary, Joan, whose relationship with so many in her orbit strikes me as vampiric, nurtured Eve. Why? How to account for the sympathy that Joan felt for Eve. Was it the sympathy that Thanatos feels for Eros, yin for yang? Meaning, could Joan and Eve have been two forces that were, on the surface, opposed, yet secretly in concert? This is certainly true of their books. Eve’s Hollywood—sunny, casual, meandering, the littlest bit slipshod—and Play It As It Lays—dark, airless, precise, every word placed on the page just so—make for natural companions. They complete and reveal one another. And to understand a particular postwar L.A., you must read both.

Babitz hits the photo booth.

EVE BABITZ PAPERS, THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY.

I imagine, too, Joan intuiting that Eve, who didn’t care about prizes or husbands or careers, who was interested only in following her own vector, was going to run into trouble. And Eve wouldn’t disappoint. Every pitfall that Joan avoided, she fell—practically jumped—into. For most of her literary life she’d be treated like a California cutie-pie with a typewriter. A piece of ass who thought she was an artist. When critics weren’t ignoring her, they were trashing her. That’s what happened with the very good Eve’s Hollywood. And Slow Days, Fast Company, published in 1977 and even better—her masterwork—fared much the same.

By the early ’80s, Eve had squalid-overboogied herself into incoherence, and then A.A., the moment she definitively broke with Joan and McGrath. (Though she’d put the moves on Griffin at a Hollywood Hills party first. “He was way too young. Everyone pounced on him. I got him.”) “They were too seductive,” she said. Post-sobriety, she’d write more and she’d write well, at least in bursts. But she’d never write another book that came close to Slow Days. She’d publish her final book, also her weakest, Two by Two, in 1999, after which she’d go quiet, and nobody seemed to care. Only in the last few years did she begin to receive her due. By that time her mind was shot, and she was living in the kind of helter-skelter filth that would give Joan a thousand nightmares.

I wonder whether the key to solving the mystery of the Eve-Joan relationship hasn’t always been in the Eve’s Hollywood
 dedication. What if it cut both ways? Sure, Eve was grateful to Joan for “having to be who I’m not.” Perhaps, though, Joan, whose life wasn’t without pain—first Dunne dying, then Quintana—but whose life made sense, and who was lauded up until the end—a National Book Award in 2005, a National Medal of Arts in 2013—was even more grateful that the reverse was also true. And Joan’s response, unwritten, which isn’t to say unthought, might have been:

To Eve Babitz, for having to be who I’m not.