Eve's Hollywood

Eve's Hollywood

Eve Babitz

Book - 2015

"Journalist, party girl, bookworm, muse, artist: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had been all of these things. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing Duchamp over a chessboard and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, it turns out that Babitz was a writer with stories of her own. In Eve's Hollywood she gives us indelible snapshots of southern California's haute bohemians, of surpassingly lovely high school ingenues ("people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West") and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of burnt-out rock stars in the Chateau Marmont. In her deceptively conversational prose, we are brought along on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight: to a joint serving t...he perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a rollerskating hooker, through the Watts Towers, and shopping at Central Market. This "daughter of the wasteland" is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all, but a glowing landscape, swaying with fruit trees and bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and Santa Ana winds. By the end, there is little doubt that Babitz herself is proof there's more to Hollywood than meets the eye"--

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FICTION/Babitz Eve
1 / 1 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor FICTION/Babitz Eve Checked In
Subjects
Single women > Fiction.
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) > Fiction.
Autobiographical fiction.
Genres
Autobiographical fiction
Published
New York : New York Review Books [2015]
Language
English
Main Author
Eve Babitz (author)
Physical Description
xxvi, 296 pages, 24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781590178904
Contents unavailable.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this reissued collection of autobiographical essays, first published in 1972, Babitz (L.A. Woman) describes coming of age amid the glamour of 1950s and '60s Hollywood. Her chronicle is laced with acerbic wit and sparkling charm. Babitz peppers her writing with cultural references that include Marlon Brando, Janis Joplin, and Igor Stravinsky. The essays cover Babitz's family history, the halls of Hollywood High (where the school mascot is the Sheik, after Rudolph Valentino's character in the silent film of the same name), and her early adulthood. Babitz is a keen observer of her social milieu and the effects of beauty on power, and comes across as both a savvy cosmopolite and an ingénue in the same breath. "I got deflowered on two cans of Rainier Ale when I was 17," she begins her essay "Sins of the Green Death," an unflinching look at her sexual awakening and disillusionment with education and the values of her parents. Babitz takes the reader on travels to New York and Rome, but California provides her main canvas: a place where movie stars are discovered, earthquakes reverberate, and beautiful women overdose on drugs. Hollywood is, she says, quoting Jim Morrison, "trapped in a prison of her own devise," but it is a prison she seems glad to be trapped in. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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