Walter Hopps, the host, 31: The director of the Pasadena Art Museum (PAM), where, the year before, he’d put on an exhibition called “New Painting of Common Objects,” the first American museum show of what would be called Pop art. It looks pink and cute and couldn’t-hurt-a-fly, but it made Andy Warhol ( of the dedication, “And to Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey who I’d do anything for if only they’d pay”) puke. I’ll whisper parentheticals in your ear-tell you who’s who, provide backstory-when necessary. O.K., now that I’ve snuck you in, I’m going to split. Basically, it’ll allow you to do what Eve thought about doing but didn’t: crash the party. (Before she became an artist “who books,” to quote one of her many exes, Ed Ruscha, Eve was an artist who did collages, including one for the cover of the Buffalo Springfield album, Buffalo Springfield Again, which she still considers her best work.) This collage, if done right, will give you a special kind of access. Eve, I think, would approve of the change. Instead of writing a piece I’m going to make a collage, a verbal one. The people involved in this story can tell it better than I can, which is why I’m nixing the original plan. After her move, however, she’d be a star. She was a supporting player, essentially. So, though, did every other ingénue, youth and beauty being, of course, what makes an ingénue an ingénue, and L.A. Equally crazy: the photograph she posed for-Eve, Adam-naked, playing chess with a fully clothed Duchamp-which is so associated with the party for the retrospective, was taken days later.) Eve had been, up to that point, an ingénue, promising but undistinguished. (Crazily enough, she was the life of the party she didn’t actually attend. It’s the moment, too, that Eve, 20, made her move, even if she did it while staying put. It’s the moment that Los Angeles, until then considered a distant and provincial outpost, a city in name only, became, however briefly, the cultural capital of the world. And, yes, I understand that these feelings are grasping and beady-eyed and more than a little creepy-lovesick edging into sick puppy-but there you have it.Īnyway, the plan was for me to do a little piece on a party-well, technically an opening, but really a party-that was The Party, held at the Pasadena Art Museum on October 7, 1963, 52 years ago this month, celebrating the retrospective of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. I still believe that I’m the realest and truest and lovesickest of all and that I discovered Eve, and that she’s mine, mine, mine, not just L.A.’s secret genius and sharer, but my own personal secret. I recognize that Eve had fans-real, true lovesick fans, too-long before I came on the scene. So, as I said, VF.com has already commemorated the reissuing of Eve’s Hollywood. So I wound up using those eight pages to, more or less, reconstruct her life: “O.K., Evie, so in the dedication you wrote, ‘And to Earl McGrath to whom I admit I owe Everything.’ Who’s Earl McGrath and qu’est-ce que c’est ‘Everything’?” She’ll answer any question you ask, but will volunteer nothing. As an interview subject, Eve is the most curious (read: perverse) mixture of candor and evasion. The feature was more than three years in the making, mainly because it took two and a half years to get Eve to talk to me. I wrote about Eve in Vanity Fair’s 2014 Hollywood Issue. At least the hog-wild, bedbug-crazy part. You could preface them, annotate them, index them, and proof-correct them, go, in other words, completely hog wild, bedbug crazy over them. So little minx-insolent is the tone-“And to the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in”-so evocative are the names-Ahmet Ertegun, Jim Morrison, the Didion-Dunnes, “the Fords, the Harrisons not the Henrys”-so suggestive are the citations, several of which are richly textured enough to be short stories in and of themselves-“And to Joseph Heller, Speed Vogel and the guy who ran off with the baby sitter”-that you could do to the eight pages what Charles Kinbote did to the 999 lines of John Shade’s poem in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The pages tell the whole tale, not just of Eve and her facts-masquerading-as-fiction book (me: “But, Evie, it’s all about you and everyone you know, is pure memoir, why did you call it a novel?” Eve: “Because I didn’t want to get sued!”), but of a particular place and time: Los Angeles, pre–W.
#BOLLYWOOD NUDE FULL#
VF.com had already commemorated the occasion by excerpting the dedication page, actually, page s plural-a full eight in my original hardcover edition-which sounds like a dopey idea until you’ve read them. Last week, New York Review Books Classics reissued the first work of Eve Babitz, her “confessional L.A.
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