Eve's Hollywood*—her first book, originally published in the 70s and to be reissued next month from New York Review Books Classics—was billed as a "novel" but is clearly a memoir, and her voice on the page is no less mesmerizing than her presence in a room. This is a very quick read of six short tales centering around my favorite character from RULES OF CIVILITY. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. On the page, the novelist and memoirist Eve Babitz, pictured here in the early nineteen-seventies, is pure pleasure—a perpetual-motion machine of no-stakes elation and champagne fizz.

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”. At Hollywood high school, her classmates included Linda Evans, Tuesday Weld and Yvette Mimieux, a “movie star, even when she butted in front of you in the cafeteria line”. The question is: Was the smell any sweeter when she was in her 70s and not just near fame but at it, in it, of it? Towles has a wonderful way with setting - just as I loved Old New York in Rules, I loved Hollywood of the 1930's in this story.My curiosity was not completely satisfied with this short story collection, but it does provide six fascinating glimpses into the life of a remarkable character. And to Jock, Michaela, Nini, Jacky, Brook the impossible and deviled marrow bones, watercress and cheese pie, anything vinaigrette and decent wine. He looked like a beautiful advertisement for the Wall Street Journal in the New Yorker and he was my friend with wide blue eyes. 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. A follow-up to Amor Towles' debut novel Rules of Civility, Eve in Hollywood contains six short stories focusing on the character of Eve, the secondary protagonist from the first book.

The answer to the question I’m most frequently asked about Eve: Yes, Eve, raised by Trotskyist parents and uninterested in politics but undoubtedly liberal her entire life, was far right in her final years.Having worked as an investment professional in Manhattan for over twenty years, he now devotes himself fulltime to writing. 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.

A. Woman: “I used to wander down Hollywood Boulevard hoping that Georgia O’Keeffe wasn’t really just a man by accident because she was the only woman artist, period, but then…[my mother] told me Marilyn Monroe was an artist and not to worry. And Times chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of Black Swans (the “last review” that Laurie just referenced) in ’93, closed with the wish that Eve “maybe take a vacation from L. And to Pauline Kael who we discovered on KPFA one glorious day and whose sentences don't parse either. Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something.I flashed on a line from Slow Days: “I also have nearly perfect teeth, which I believe is the real secret to the universe. She talked more in it than she did in the restaurant, but I couldn’t follow the sentences: One was about Evita Perón, the next about carob trees. Could not find it in the library, nor on sale, so I read it online at Booksvooks: https://booksvooks.

Over the following decade, she designed the cover for the classic rock album Buffalo Springfield Again and for records by the Byrds and Linda Ronstadt, hung out with Nicholson and Michelle Phillips and dated everyone from Harrison Ford to Morrison (“I met Jim, and propositioned him in three minutes”) to music executive Ahmet Ertegun. In her essay Daughters of the Wasteland, she remembered her disbelief that others could find Los Angeles empty and unlivable. Her dispatches from the Troubadour nightclub and the Chateau Marmont hotel, from the Sunset Strip and Venice Beach, became as much of a testament of her era as a Jack Nicholson movie or an album by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac. She created the art that graces a number of iconic records from the 60s and 70s (Buffalo Springfield’s Buffalo Springfield Again, the Byrds’ Untitled*).

In case you haven’t: In 1997, Eve was lighting a cigar, dropped a match in her lap, went up in flames. Babitz dished about her sex life (“I got deflowered on two cans of Rainier Ale when I was 17”), her outreach (“Dear Joseph Heller,” she once wrote to the Catch-22 author, “I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard”), her thoughts on marriage (“My secret ambition has always been to be a spinster”) and her affinity for the wicked.