Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

Product Information

On the phone, she talked like she looked. On the phone, she talked like she wrote. On the phone, she was what Laurie said she no longer could be: She was Eve Babitz.

Have you ever had an appetizer and asked why don't they turn that into an entree? That's what this novella is. Towles took one image from Rules of Civility and turned it into six interwoven stories about Evelyn Ross in old Hollywood. Just as Rules of Civility left you wanting more, which presumably resulted in this book, Eve in Hollywood leaves you wanting more of whatever Towles is cooking up next. Simply put, the book is great -- there is just not enough of it. And to Glen Frey of the Eagles so he'll still talk to me. And to the New York Times book review section and every critic in it. And a minute after that, Mirandi was at the table too, and an energetic discussion ensued about the best route to take from the Eastside to Hollywood at midday. After most of her work went out of print, she was praised in a 2014 Vanity Fair article by Anolik as an overlooked and unbowed genius. Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and other books were reissued, a well-regarded biography by Anolik was published in 2019 and Babitz was discovered by a generation of younger women, leading her to joke: “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.”In a decade, people are going to be teaching courses centered around his work. As creative as Dinesen, but with a thoroughly American voice. Maybe the next Twain? And to Derek Taylor. Tell them, Derek, how great I am. Like you once introduced me to a Beatle as "the best girl in America." Hollywood was in her blood. Her father was a violinist in the Twentieth Century Fox Orchestra, her mother an artist and her godfather Igor Stravinsky. She didn’t have to work hard to drop names, because names seemed to fall from the sky. At Hollywood high school, her classmates included Linda Evans, Tuesday Weld and Yvette Mimieux, a “movie star, even when she butted in front of you in the cafeteria line”. I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness. For me, it isn't about what Towles writes as much as HOW he writes. Elegant, thoughtful. I fall into his stories and just go wherever they take me. This time it was to Hollywood and Los Angeles in the ‘30s, with some interesting characters and stories.

The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Read more.

About the Author

And to Anne Marshall, the beautiful friend to us all. And to Michelle Guilliane for calling first before bringing Kim Fawley into my house. She mined the most unusual and the most everyday moments – ice skating, shopping, a screening of the surfing movie Five Summer Stories, a Los Angeles Dodgers game. In The Answer, she drops acid with a local hippy-bohemian who decides he needs to go to the bank. Brief yet marvelous, Eve in Hollywood is the sonnet for LA, whereas Rules of Civility was a love letter for New York. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. I loved seeing Eve from the points of view of innocent bystanders (including Olivia DeHaviland!) instead of her Rules of Civility co-star, and then, finally, hearing from Eve her herself. She is a freight train.