Joan Didion, Eve Babitz + the writerly personality

In conversation with Lili Anolik

“One of the things I’m starting to think about is that serious people just don’t think that gossip, the spécialité de ma maison, is serious. It’s always been regarded as some devious woman’s trick, some shallow callow shameful way of grasping situations without being in on the top conferences with the serious men. Gossip has always been considered tsk tsk. Only how are people like me - women they’re called - supposed to understand things if we can’t get into the V.I.P. room? And anyway, I can’t stand meetings. I’d much rather figure things out from gossip.”

—Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joseph Heller

Joan Didion is an easy sell. She’s intellectual lifestyle babe catnip, the writer made myth: her infamous quotes (“we tell ourselves stories in order to live”) scrawled across mugs, t-shirts, tote bags; the subject of a 2015 Celine campaign; her writing compared to Henry James, Hunter S. Thompson, Virginia Woolf (ironic, as she wasn’t a Woolf fan.) But Eve Babitz? Not a chance.

That is, until Vanity Fair writer Lili Anolik made Babitz - known for her love affairs more than her writing - her mission. A profile of 2014 turned into a book of 2019 and now there’s another book, Didion & Babitz, told in slick, gossipy, prose, at ratatat speed — and this time it’s about Joan Didion, too. About hers and Babitz’s “friendship that went bad, amity turning to enmity.” Because while these writers would never be put together in a canonical sense, they were (briefly, it should be noted) close. Didion was even Babitz’s unpaid book editor — until Babitz fired her.

A teenage Babitz and Marcel Duchamp, shot by Julian Wasser, 1963

How does Anolik know all this? Because when Babitz died, her sister, Mirandi, gave Anolik a box of letters (including one golden goose of a letter - furious, in tone - that Babitz had written, and never sent, to Joan Didion) that she’d found at the back of Babitz’s closet. You couldn’t make it up: a writer given a box of secret letters to do with as she pleased.

Through these letters — and extensive reporting of her own — Anolik discovered that from 1969 to 1979, the two writers occupied the same ‘scene’, which operated out of a two-story rental in a scrappy part of Hollywood, 7406 Franklin Avenue, where musicians, writers, artists and movie stars colluded, collaborated and romped. The writers were tied together in a way few people knew, in what Anolik sees as the golden era of their writing. She writes:

“What this book attempts to do: See Joan Didion plainly, see Eve Babitz plainly. Except Joan Didion can’t be seen plainly. She’s opaque enough, elusive enough, withheld enough, far-fetched enough, that she’s almost a ghost. Not a person so much as a presence. (By design, I believe. She’s emotionally secretive to the point that she’s very nearly rendered herself emotionally invisible.) And it isn’t possible to look at her directly. Only from the corner of the eye, in - and I’m borrowing a phrase of hers here - “fitful glimpses”. Or through a glass darkly. Eve Babitz is that glass.”

Didion was 9 years older than Babitz and her opposite in almost every way: cool, calm and tiny, to Babitz’s racket and lust. (Strangely they died only 6 days apart, in 2021.) Babitz, a rock ‘n roll album cover artist turned writer, burned bright for a very short-time (quite literally: she set herself on fire in 1997) publishing three books, while Didion went on to have a long and legendary career in fiction, non-fiction and journalism.

Joan Didion by Julian Wasser for Vogue, 1968, after Slouching was published

That box of letters laid bare the LA of this time: the drug-taking, the anxieties, the sex and the personalities behind so many famous pop-culture figures: Jim Morrison, a one-time boyfriend of Babitz’s; Harrison Ford, best known on ‘the scene’ as an easy-going pot-dealer; Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, whom Mirandi almost had a foursome with. (The murders of Cielo Drive, in 1969, was the end of ‘60s LA, Anolik writes.) And at the centre of this crowd - or rather, observing, smoking and reporting from the sidelines - was Joan Didion.

But enough of all that. It’s time to speak to Lili Anolik.

Lili - hi! Before we get to Joan Didion – why did so few people know of Eve Babitz and her work, before you archive moled her out of obscurity? I was familiar with Babitz’s name, probably because it’s a memorable one, but I’d never read anything by her until a few weeks ago, when I picked up Sex and Rage (1979) from McNally Jackson, which has been re-published thanks to you.

Sex and Rage is actually my least favourite of her 3 books. Eve didn’t catch on when she was actually writing. She kept missing her moment. If Slow Days, Fast Company (1979) had made the impression it should have done, someone would have brought her to the light before I did. When I found her back in 2010, I had never heard of her; it seemed like nobody had ever heard of her. I felt like she was the secret of Los Angeles. Before she became famous, and before she became reprinted, half the people I spoke to could not believe I was writing about this person. But she’s a cultural person as much as a literary heroine. She was into the idea of ‘writer as personality’.

The idea of the ‘writer as personality’ is the driving force of this book. You posit that Eve Babitz and Joan Didion are the birth of the female writer as personality - in entirely opposite ways - and you write fascinatingly about their overlap, during a specific period of time in LA, ‘the Franklin Avenue scene’ you call it, between 1969 and 1979. Why was it important to put them together? To use Babitz, as “collaborator and colluder” to tell the story of Didion?

I think these women have to be read through each other. In order to understand LA in this period, you really need both. Joan is a presence on the literary scene in the UK, but in America, Joan is so big she blots out the sun. She’s this titanic figure. She’s so big she needs a counterbalance. Here comes Eve. They are writing about the same scene, same crowd, and Eve is the anti-Joan. The world was just dying for it. Ying needs yang.

This book came around because Babitz’s sister Mirandi gives you a box of letters, some unsent, that she finds at the back of Babitz’s closet. Did you waver over whether to publish the letters?

I think the genre of the unsent letter is particularly interesting. It’s not the letter you throw out. That’s the letter you don’t want anyone to read. The unsent letter is something that you think is too valuable, too raw, too naked, too personal, to send it to the person you are writing. But you are saving it for someone. You’re saving it for posterity.

Of these letters, there are some brilliant ones featuring some extremely famous names, like Babitz’s letter to Catch-22 author, Joseph Heller, on the importance of gossip. And of course, the most important one for your book, a particularly scathing one to Joan Didion. Writes Babitz:

“Just think, Joan, if you were five feet eleven and wrote like you do and stuff - people’d judge you differently and your work… Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to, if you weren’t so physically unthreatening?”

Babitz is suggesting that Didion is contrived. Which is shocking, in a sense, because Didion has always come across as so artless. So effortlessly cool.

Eve’s main issue was with [what she saw as] Joan’s artificial personality. She felt like Joan fetishised her slenderness; like she was trying to make herself un-intimidating to men; to let herself in, in that way. Joan’s talent was intimidating, but Eve thinks that she presented as a child.

So who is the real Joan Didion? You write that she’s impossible to truly know - deliberately on her part - but you do a pretty good job at painting a portrait.

Joan figured out her writerly personality in the 1960s [when she was in her mid-late twenties]. Finding [famous political journalist of the time] Noel Parmentel was the key thing. We all know of Joan as a silent, smoking type, wearing the sunglasses, but when she comes to New York from Sacramento [in California] aged 21, 22, she’s just like a nervous, scared hick. She’s awkward and never speaks - Noel’s nickname for her is Mouse - she’s had the same boyfriend from college. Noel, who becomes her boyfriend, is straight out of Hemingway story: he fought in Miyajima, he wears white suits, he’s a womaniser, a hard drinker, he’s the guy getting Norman Mailer to run for mayor – and he thinks Joan is brilliant.

They begin an affair. Joan is writing at Vogue but she isn’t a writer yet and he is an aggressive pusher of her work, he gets her into print, he bullies [publisher] Ivan Oblensky into buying [Joan’s debut] Run River (1963) – Joan dedicates the book to Noel and he’s one of the main characters in it. She wants to get married but Noel won’t marry her and she has a nervous breakdown, which he writes about in Goodbye to All That (1967). Noel picks a husband for her – this acolyte, who hangs around - John Gregory Dunne. The origin story you get later on is this smooth ascent. But Joan struggles the same way everyone struggles.

Didion is 9 years older than Babitz, but they hang out in the same circle. For a time, Didion was Babitz’s champion.

Joan loved Eve’s writing, she got Eve into Rolling Stone and she edited Eve’s work. It was a pure act of kindness. She was doing Eve a solid. I think she appreciated Eve and she knew how hard Eve was going to have it, fucking around too much, that she wouldn’t be taken seriously. Joan knew if she put her reputation behind her, it would help how she was received.

Then Babitz ‘fired’ her (which as you say, is hilarious, because Babitz hadn’t hired her - Didion wasn’t being paid, she was doing a favour to Eve’s publisher).

Eve purposefully fucked things up for herself so often, it was just what she did. She was her own worst enemy.

And that was that: friendship kaput.

My guess is that after 1979, Joan never gave Eve another thought. Eve was just burned out from the ‘70s. She thought she was going to have her moment and she didn’t. Joan liked winners, and Eve was not, after 1979, a winner. But for a short time, Joan was very preoccupied with her. They were both attracted and repelled by one another. They were only friends for a decade, but I think that was the most important decade of work, for both of them. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Play It as It Lays (1970) and The White Album (1979) - that’s Joan’s golden period, when Eve is in her life. And Eve’s best work is Hollywood’s Eve (1974) and Slow Days, Fast Company (1977).

They are total opposites, you posit, two halves of womanhood.

I feel like it’s kind of a choice that women make, at a certain point. Take this Franklin Avenue scene. Eve chooses to be in it: she takes every drug, she sleeps with every guy. Joan is an observer. She’s married, she’s in fancy magazines, she has a distance. I don’t think you can be both - have both - at the same time, even though everyone has a little of both.

Eve didn’t feel shame in the way that was typical and nor does [her sister who Anolik interviews over 100 times] Mirandi. Neither of them has kids, so they aren’t worrying what their kids might think. They were also raised in a very open family. It was this high/ low mix: Eve grew up in a house of high European art and intellectuals - Stravinsky was her godfather - but also very bohemian, sensual values, quite vulgar. Her father was the first violinist at 20th Century Fox and he did the violin sound in Psycho when Norman Bates pulls back the shower curtain.

Whereas Joan, she was all middle-class morality. Often when Joan describes herself, she’s actually describing Eve. In [her 1961 essay] On Self-Respect, Joan quotes Rhett Butler: “Self-respect is not dependent on the approval of others or reputation”. That’s Eve. Joan was obsessed with reputation. Nobody had a better career - nobody ran their career better - than Joan Didion. But Eve is high bohemian, she comes up with a different value system.

Does that mean you think everyone is a Didion or a Babitz? Which are you?

I am much closer to Joan. I’m an uptight person. But I love how Eve is.

Who would be Didion now and who would be Babitz?

Lena Dunham for Joan, Caroline Calloway for Eve.

Didion was very famous in her own lifetime. But Babitz wasn’t famous in her own day, except briefly and among a certain scene - and that was mainly for who she was sleeping with. Did she envy Didion, for this?

Eve had such a nose for people who were going to be famous. She found it thrilling to be around fame and power. But I think she was ambivalent about fame for herself. She was always broke. But she never tried to write for movies, like Joan did. I think she thought it was anti-art.

I do think she envied Joan, but I don’t think she envied her career. I think the way Joan managed things so smoothly and managed to have this huge career, I think Eve was envious of all of that – but the money or the movies, I don’t think so. Eve believed in art above anything else.

“What man could take advantage of me?” Babitz says in an interview to you, “I usually slept with them first”. Babitz’s insatiable sexual appetites (her lovers included Jim Morrison and Annie Leibovitz) turned her into something of a pariah. Some women wouldn’t even let her into their house!

If you ever ate with Eve, you would see what her appetites were like. She was just all about pleasure. Her boyfriend, [American artist] Ed Ruscha, said they would be at a party and she would want to go to the bathroom and have sex. She was sensual in the realest sense. It was food and it was men.

There’s that infamous 1963 photo of Babitz by Julian Wasser, when she’s only 18 or 19 (which she talks about in the autofictive Sex and Rage) where she is naked, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. I’d seen that photo so many times before, without knowing who the woman was. I’m curious about this, because you write that Babitz hates being seen as “airhead trying to be an egghead” — but to an extent, she very much feeds it.

Absolutely. There are writers that embody the age. They are exciting, they capture the public imagination, their personas are huge. That’s Joan. Her role model is Hemingway and she gets to his level. She picked a winner. Eve’s role model was Marilyn Monroe. She’s still superfucking famous - there’s probably no bigger cultural figure in the 20th - so it’s a good choice in that sense, but Marilyn is treated like a bimbo. Eve made that her destiny. To be treated like a piece of ass: Eve Ba-bitz with the great big tits. That’s what the male artists called her.

I was surprised to read, given her bohemian appetites and progressive views that Babitz was anti-feminist – and so was Didion. Was this because of the perception of feminism, at that time? Were women’s rights seen as cringe?

Eve thought the movement was humourless, but she knew they had a point and she felt like Joan didn’t. That’s why she writes that angry letter to Joan – it’s after Joan trashed the women’s movement for The New York Times. In that piece, Joan basically says that sexism is in women’s heads. The way that Joan was operating – and I am not unsympathetic to this – she grew up in 1934, and I think she felt to be a big writer – not a women’s writer, a big writer – she felt like she had to get into the boys club to do this. But it really made Eve angry.

Eve to Joan, in the unsent letter of 1972:

“For a long, long, long time, women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan… You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women”.

The book is about Babitz and Didion, but it’s also about LA from 1969 to 1979. The names on that ‘scene’ are astounding: Annie Leibovitz, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, Harrison Ford, Joseph Heller, Ed Ruscha, Roman Polanski, Janis Joplin, Joan of course - I kind of expected for Jack Nicholson to be there.

Well, Jack’s almost-wife wouldn’t let Eve in the house. Famously. She didn’t trust her! But generally, the new Hollywood guys, like Warren Beatty, were part of another scene.

The obsession with skinniness is pretty hard to read - we think it’s bad now! You write that people didn’t take Babitz seriously because of her boobs – Eve Bah-bitz and the great big tits, people used to call her. Mick Jagger, she says, hated her because he thought she was fat. Jim Morrison worried constantly about being chubby — he had a summer on LSD and lost 30 pounds and was thrilled. And of course, there’s Babitz’s letter to Didion, about her thinness.

Eve may have been projecting – we don’t know if Mick Jagger actually said that. Jim Morrison was really moving to her. He was a former chubby kid, and she knew what that was like. I think, like we’ve experienced at other times, it’s more like whether you are the type of the moment. If Eve had been born in ‘34 [the year Didion was born] and come up in the ‘50s, when everyone wanted a bombshell, she’d have had an easier time. Eve would always say to me that she thought that men liked her type just as much as they liked the thin type, but she was seen as too much of a sex object to be taken seriously.

Do you think Babitz is a better writer than Didion? Are you about to break the internet with your answer?

Here’s what I think. Joan had a sustained career with a number of very, very good books. Eve had one masterpiece and two very good books. Slow Days, Fast Company is my favourite book of either of them – but that’s just a personal opinion.

Not The Year of Magical Thinking?

Not for me, I don’t think it’s an honest book.

You make no bones about it: hot mess as she is, Babitz is your gal. Do you think you are harsh on Didion?

I don’t think so, no. But also, I think the truth is harsh. Here’s why I tell readers not to be baby: Joan did some things that on a human level are kind of ugly, or upsetting, and that’s only a problem because people want to sentimentalise her. But to be Joan Didion, to be at the top, she paid a very high price. I want to be honest about that price. I love the ruthlessness, incidentally, the dead eye quality – I find her totally thrilling in that way. The things that bothered Eve don’t bother me.

You’re referring to the story of how after her niece Dominique was brutally murdered in 1982, Didion goes next door to take a phone call. Her brother-in-law [Vanity Fair writer and Dominique’s father] Dominick Dunne comes in, and discovers her on the phone to her editor, about her latest book. It paints Joan in a shockingly bad light.

That story is shocking, but it isn’t a secret. Dominick was very open about that.

It’s a very revealing book. Do you think Babitz and Didion would like it?

Oh, Jesus Christ. I’m sure they’d both be pissed at me. The thing is, if Joan just thinks in terms of her career, I’m probably telling some of her secrets, but for a writer to remain vital, they have to keep being reappraised. That’s what happens with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and that’s what keeps them alive. And Eve? Eve would only be happy with it.