Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world--a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA, and Vanity Fair writer "Lili Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve's singular irresistible glitz" (The New Yorker).

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.

Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered--as a writer--by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she's since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she's on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential--as the essential--LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.

For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Hollywood's Eve, equal parts biography and detective story "brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way" (Vogue) and "sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz" (The New York Times).

Author: Lili Anolik
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 09/03/2019
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781501125805
ISBN10: 150112580X
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Entertainment & Performing Arts
- Art | Popular Culture
- Biography & Autobiography | Literary Figures

About the Author
Lili Anolik is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Her work has also appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and The Paris Review. She's written Hollywood's Eve and created the podcast Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.