In October 1969, Eve Babitz threw a dinner party. Before the guests arrived, she wrote a letter to a friend, fretting lightly over the guest list. “I think I didn’t invite enough girls.” She needn’t have worried. Tonight, nearly six decades later, the girls have shown up. In fact, there are too many of us.
It is a Monday evening and the Moth Club in Hackney, east London, is hosting a night of Eve Babitz readings. At 7.23pm, seven minutes before the event is due to begin, a queue stretches around the corner from the club, so long that people who join have to check they’re in the right place: “This is for Eve, right?” The boy behind me (one of six I count across the whole night, including the two men running the event and a bartender) asks if I think they’ll be tough on the door – he doesn’t have a ticket, and it’s sold out.
Babitz was at the centre of Los Angeles’ cultural scene from the Sixties through to the Eighties, chronicling her life and those around her in what was ostensibly fiction, but actually memoir with slight name changes (“You know I was never one for lying very much”). Her books were mildly successful cult classics: Jackie Kennedy used to give copies of Slow Days, Fast Company to friends who were off to LA, and Joan Didion thought Babitz was “brilliant”. Babitz was reviewed by the New York Times, but it was a pan, and she never made it to their bestseller list. In the Nineties, just before Babitz accidentally set herself on fire and suffered burns which largely prevented her from writing, her books fell out of print. She remained a recluse, unknown outside LA (and barely known within it) until 2014, when the writer Lili Anolik tracked her down and profiled her for Vanity Fair. Eighteen months later, the New York Review of Books reissued Babitz’s first book, Eve’s Hollywood (first published in 1974), and then, the next year, her second, Slow Days, Fast Company (1977). Other publishers who owned rights to Babitz’s work followed suit, and Anolik has since released two biographies of Eve.
This resurgence has generated a new following. A few years ago Kendall Jenner was photographed on a yacht with a copy of Black Swans. This evening’s readings are taken from Anolik’s latest book: a compilation of Babitz’s letters, Too LA: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were). There is a thank-you on screen to Caroline Calloway, and the organiser, Steven, met Anolik through Emma Roberts’s book club, Belletrist.
Babitz would probably like her new celebrity fans. It is impossible to write about her and not write about the people she knew. She is the naked woman playing chess with Marcel Duchamp in Julian Wasser’s iconic photograph; she’s an extra in The Godfather. Her lovers included Steve Martin, Harrison Ford, Annie Leibovitz and Jim Morrison (“I can’t remember what it was like sleeping with Jim Morrison because around him you were bound to be so drunk that things like that just slipped your mind.”)
Babitz’s connection to fascinating people and places – and her ability to make them even more fascinating through her writing – is what readers look for in her books. And it is what people are looking for tonight. For the past year or so, and without abating, the British press has breathlessly chronicled Gen Z’s attempt to foster a “London literary scene” with Attenborough-esque levels of anthropological awe. Magazines and Sunday papers have marvelled that not only are young people still reading, smoking and shagging (three things they had been told we did not do), but they are doing all of these things at small, artistic events where people say poetry or prose into a microphone. I am not the only journalist covering the Eve Babitz reading tonight.
Babitz practically went out every night. In the Sixties, this was mostly to Barney’s Beanery, an LA watering hole that Babitz described as “the weird bar around here that is crawling with actors, artists, truck drivers, directors, poets, cinema experts, chippies, the youth from neighboring high-schools, furniture movers, art gallery owners, high fashion models, surfers, movie-stars’ kids, movie stars, whores, alcoholics, dope-addicts and political science majors from UCLA”. People tonight are looking for their own Barney’s. And they want to be the Babitz. In her introductory remarks, via video, Anolik tells the sold-out crowd: “Don’t take any drugs Eve wouldn’t take. Don’t have sex with anyone Eve wouldn’t have sex with.”
Her warning seems unnecessary. Can reading about a thing – as is happening tonight – get close to living it? As bookish teens reading about sex, drugs and rock’n’roll in bed on a Friday night will evidence: it’s unlikely. This evening, though our wrists are stamped on entry and there are ear plugs by the bar, this is not quite Eve’s scene. The girl in front of me is made to pour her open can away before entering Moth, but it’s just water, and though the bartender tells me the drink of the night was rosé, most people aren’t drinking. As we wait for the readings to start, someone in the front row has cracked the spine of a Penguin classic. When Steven introduces the readings, he drops pages on the floor. “Fuck it,” he says. It’s the closest to Barney’s we’ve got.
In Hollywood’s Eve (2019), Anolik writes that after she first wrote about Babitz:
“Readers got in touch. These readers were mostly young women who saw in Eve a model for how to live life, or Hollywood executives who saw in Eve a chance to fill the void left by Sex and the City. Both sets seemed to regard Eve as the original Carrie Bradshaw: an adorable kook who went to evil, sexy parties and tumbled into bed with evil, sexy men, then journaled about it. On the one hand, how great – new fans for Eve, and who cared if they were fans for the wrong reasons? And is there such a thing as the wrong reason? And bless their ingenuous little hearts in any case. On the other hand, though, Jesus Fucking Christ.”
And maybe this legion of fans – of which I am one – have forced ourselves on Eve where we are not wanted. Showed up to the dinner party to which we were not invited. Rosie, who writes a zine and lives in London, jokes that she resonates with Babitz because “I’m a G-cup. No, it’s how timeless her writing is. It feels like how people talk now.” The letters from Too LA are read tonight by a series of Eves, all dressed in outfits of varying translucence and imbuing her sentences with the cadences of our generation. Which is not hard, since fragments of the letters are Substack catnip: “Did you know your moon was an Aries? What time were you born?” Like Didion, her sentences and aesthetic are transmutable, easily clipped and decontextualised. Eve saves her darkness, literally, for the PS: “Sitting around watching my father die of what I’m going to die of is a hell of a strain on my shallow nature.” A minute later, there are laughs and whoops as a stand-in-Babitz reads about what it’s like to be a “girl”, or from her letter which wittily takes down a lover who has been rude about her shoes.
When the readings wrap up, I spy two girls who came in late sitting in a booth. One is dressed all in black, and they are giggling, their legs pulled up on the banquette. Finally, there are the real Eves, I think. Georgia and Milla accidentally missed the show, they say. What raucous event was the cause of their delay? “We were having a San Pellegrino round the corner.” This doesn’t mean they don’t love Babitz, though. “Oh, you just read [her books] and you want to be her. You do, she’s just fabulous.”
After the show, there is another queue. Not for books (Too LA isn’t available in the UK yet), but for merch. There are postcards with black and white photos of Eve for a fiver, or bumper stickers declaring: “If you can’t handle me at my Didion, you don’t deserve me at my Babitz.” And you can’t escape Joan tonight. The only letter read aloud which is not by Eve is by Didion, about Eve. The series of readings put on by Deeper into Movies, of which tonight is one, are called “Play It as It Lays”. And most people I speak with found Eve through Didion, as did I. As a teenager, I asked my mum for The White Album for Christmas, and when she ordered it online it recommended Eve’s Hollywood, too. To some extent, Didion and Babitz have become inextricable in recent years – they died six days apart, in 2021, and Anolik turned their formerly invisible strings to cement in her 2024 dual biography Didion & Babitz. But you are either Babitz or Didion, and the girls here have chosen a side. Or, they know on which side they hope to fall. “I feel like I’m more neurotic like Didion, but Eve Babitz is what I want to be,” Maria, a political consultant, tells me. “My best friend, I always see her as more like Eve Babitz and me as Joan Didion, and then we were having a conversation a couple of months ago and she told me she feels the opposite way.”
It’s ironic, of course, that these girls have shown up, eager and early and bookish, to drink from the font of Babitz’s debauchery. It would be easy to mock. But stripping back the pretences at Eve-ness, there is also a way in which the enthusiasm and the girlishness is very Babitz. She was always early (naming her book LA Woman before Morrison wrote his song; having sex with the not-quite-famous just before they became stars), she never smoked (by the end of her life she didn’t drink either) and, above all, she was a fan. In a letter to Joseph Heller, who she first wrote a groupie-style missive to at the age of 18, she thanks him for blurbing her book: “In your little quote you say that I make ‘even the shoddiest characters interesting and attractive, and even the dreariest of relationships fascinating and exciting.’ But, Joe, I don’t think anyone’s shoddy and I think all my relationships are fascinating and exciting and I want you to think so, too.”
On stage, girls pretend to be Eve and in the audience they pretend a little bit, too. But Babitz was also performing, in a way. “I am the character,” she wrote in that same letter to Heller. And besides, who keeps a box of unsent letters – which is what NYRB are publishing – unless they think someone might eventually want to read them?
When I leave at about 9.30pm, most people have filed out, though a few linger in the merch queue. I don’t think there have been any drugs consumed or, to my knowledge, any sex had. There has been some reading, though. In one letter from the latest collection, Babitz writes: “There is so much happening in London.” That might still be the case. But the crowd here wouldn’t know it. For them, the most happening thing in London tonight is Eve Babitz.
[Further reading: Hollywood failed Marilyn Monroe]
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