num_pages: 288
description: Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the worlda movie factory a music factory a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl a pure product of LA.The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High Babitz posed in 1963 at age twenty playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph cheesecake with a Dadaist twist 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 discoveredas a writerby 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 shes since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies shes on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essentialas the essentialLA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose maintains its cool and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.For Babitz life was slow days fast company until a freak fire in the 90s turned her into a recluse living in a condo in West Hollywood where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anoliks elegant and provocative new book is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist writer muse and one-woman zeitgeist Eve Babitz.
language: English
title: Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
publisher: Scribner