And to Paul Butterfield over yonder's wall, a har­monica lays playing and it must be greener than here, I've always thought. It's quite a while since I read Rules of Civility and I would perhaps have enjoyed these stories about how Eve got on in Hollywood after she had left New York at the end of that book, if I'd read them earlier. I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness.

In this chain of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs of Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with The Wind.And to the Sandabs at Musso's, the Eggplant Florentine, the guy who makes the pancakes and my friend in the parking lot (not the one on the ground, the one who parks your car, the young one). And to the crabpuffs at Don the Beachcomber's. In a series of six detailed stories, each told from a different point of view, Towles tells of Eve's adventures in Hollywood which take her from the Beverly Hills Hotel, to the Santa Monica Pier, to the set of Gone With The Wind. She was published in Rolling Stone and Vogue among other magazines and her books included Eve’s Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage. Some were called fiction, others non-fiction, but virtually all drew directly from her life – with only the names changed.

Babitz lived for a year in New York and for a few months in Rome, but Los Angeles was her home and inspiration, a playground for self-invention, a “gigantic, sprawling ongoing studio”. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. Independent Eve was intriguing in Rules of Civility and when she headed on a whim to Los Angeles, it was her that Towles wanted Moto write about. So it was good to lestn where her restless spirit had taken her. Towles’ elegant writing is a celebration as usual. Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland. A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said. She mined the most unusual and the most everyday moments – ice skating, shopping, a screening of the surfing movie Five Summer Stories, a Los Angeles Dodgers game. In The Answer, she drops acid with a local hippy-bohemian who decides he needs to go to the bank.

The day I was 18, Sally and I had a reunion because we were still friends though we saw less and less of each other. We went to Pupi’s, a place devoted to cake, overlooking the Strip. I invited her to this surprise birthday party my mother was giving me that night (though she would never do anything so unforgivable as actually surprise me; I hate surprises). Read more. In a decade, people are going to be teaching courses centered around his work. As creative as Dinesen, but with a thoroughly American voice. Maybe the next Twain?