Since enjoying Eve and her book — I’ve already started listening to another: “Slow Days, Fast Company”….. As she had no health insurance, her friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. She became more reclusive after that. Her last books were TWO BY TWO: TANGO, TWO-STEP, AND THE L.A. NIGHT (1999) and I USED TO BE CHARMING: THE REST OF EVE BABITZ (2019).

A journalist, party girl, bookworm, author, artist, muse by the time she hit thirty, Eve Babbitt had played all these roles”. Eve’s Hollywood”…..(essays and vignettes), is the perfect antidote to depression, grief, psycho-therapy, breathwork, yoga, Pilates, Taoism, and boredom….. Like an epic poem, Eve’s Hollywood draws the reader into a lilting, hypnotic cadence. Yes, Babitz meanders through the alleyways of consciousness at times. But there’s something beautiful, sad and maybe even a little bit scary in each of these alleys. Babitz is our tour guide on a glamorous, decadent path through an era of Hollywood that may or may not have really existed as it is told – but who cares?I enjoyed how she kept defending West Coast against its East Coast relegation to ‘cultural wasteland’:

Eve was learning how to be a pinup on the surface, an artist underneath. Just like her idol, Marilyn. A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure . . . The joy of Babitz’s writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it.Sharp and funny throughout, Babitz offers an almost cinematic portrait of Los Angeles: gritty, glamorous, toxic and intoxicating. Eve Babitz is a little like Madame de Sevigne, that inveterate letter-writer of Louis XIV’s time, transposed to the Chateau Marmont in the late 20th-Century—lunching, chatting, dressing, loving and crying in Hollywood, that latter-day Versailles.”—Mollie Gregory, The Los Angeles Times

And the story about Rosie the Cat, I had to call my mother and read her the whole thing. But then, we like cats. These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting--like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it's fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what. In the depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.” All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. Now, no one will sit, staring into Persia—now when it’s raining. The Sheik is extinguished by dark skies and forecasts. And now it’s almost Christmas, an impatiently suffered imposition tolerated only until the clear hot skies return with shining palms, and the beautiful, scornful eyes of the new 20 gaze out of the windows of Hollywood High.”Claiming that going to Olvera Street requires a leisurely drive down Sunset Blvd. -- “taking the freeway when you’re on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to go visit your cat, the texture’s all wrong” --she paints a picture of the working class east end of Sunset, ambling through the “hills and flowers and the car part places.” Yeah, Janis should have done that. Eve's Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book."

Wherever a highly successful or talented man is to be found, so is a Rosie Shuster or Eve Babitz. They might not consider themselves writers, but they're recording. Eve's Hollywood gives these magnificent women their due. Who are they? "Wife," "Girlfriend" or "Groupie" are typically used terms. Some achieve success as writers or producers, like Shuster, while Babitz is in a class by herself as a memoirist. Her quips are radiant. Her ability to illustrate an emotional landscape is skilled. Her defense of her hometown as a city with culture is commendable. Eve's Hollywood is less a straightforward story or tell-all than a sure-footed collection of elliptical yet incisive vignettes and essays about love, longing, beauty, sex, friendship, art, artifice, and above all, Los Angeles. . . . Reading West (and Fante and Chandler and Cain and the like) made me want to go to Los Angeles. Babitz makes me feel like I'm there." Her articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. She did? Why? What had happened? What had caused this most profoundly and abidingly social of creatures to go J. D. Salinger? Howard Hughes? Norma Desmond? An accident, as freakish as it was horrific.She's a genius prose stylist with a glamorous, gossipy and winsome voice. But while she's having a bit of a revival at the moment, thanks to a Vanity Fair piece by Lili Anolik that came out in February 2014, and the New York Review Books' reissue of "Eve's Hollywood" in October, she still seems criminally underrated. So what’s her writing like? Eve is to prose what Chet Baker, with his light, airy style, lyrical but also rhythmic, detached but also sensuous, is to jazz, or what Larry Bell, with his glass confections, the lines so clean and fresh and buoyant, is to sculpture. She’s a natural. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.A. in its purest, most idealized form. And in doing so — I want to read the JUICY ENJOYABLE THOUGHT-PROVOKING MOVING BEAUTIFUL TOUCHING AFFECTING MIND BLOWING WONDERFUL BOOKS ….. Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz . . . reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila . . . Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning'—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. Early in Eve’s Hollywood, Babitz recounts her relationship with the dancer Vera Stravinsky in a telling passage: