Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world--a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory.
Hollywood\'s Eve , equal parts biography and detective story brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way ( Vogue ) and sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz ( The New York Times )..
For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012.
Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment.
Now in her mid-seventies, she\'s on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential--as the essential--LA writer.
Under-known and under-read during her career, she\'s since experienced a breakthrough.
She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals.
Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered--as a writer--by Joan Didion.
There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.
There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few.
Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex.
She was naked; he was not.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp.
Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA, and Vanity Fair writer Lili Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve\'s singular irresistible glitz ( The New Yorker ).
Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world--a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory
