“It isn’t enough to be a genius”: How the creative relationship and uneasy friendship between Joan Didion and Eve Babitz shaped their work, and their lives.
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 shenuts. But she wasn’t only nuts, and she wasn’t always nuts. There were plenty of lucid moments.
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.
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.
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“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 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
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 theshower scene—and member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Eve dropped out of LACC almost as soon as she enrolled. Her education thereafter would be of the sentimental variety. Joseph Heller, writer ofTravel Broadens, 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,“I knew my early days of fucking around would pay off,” she told Walter Hopps in a letter from that year.
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.
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.” 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.
.” 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.So would Janis Joplin. And McGrath was the co-dedicatee.
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