In 2019. Vanity Fair contributing editor Lili Anolik published “Hollywood’s Eve.” The biography, based on an earlier article in the magazine, helped revive interest in Eve Babitz, a loose, libidinous artist and writer who chronicled Hollywood’s celebrity scene in the 1960s and ’70s.
Few writers, of course, have the stature of Didion, and Babitz does have a contingent of ardent and influential admirers. Her biggest fangirl might be Lili Anolik, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair whose 2014 article about Babitz, followed by her 2019 biography “ Hollywood ’s Eve,” fueled a revival of interest in her work.
Now Anolik is back with a new book, “Didion & Babitz,” in which she explores the complicated relationship between the frenemies and declares her devotion to the less well-known of the two: “I’m crazy for Eve, love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon.
The two women met in 1967 when Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, were living at 7406 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, a louche time and place that Didion immortalized in her breakout collection of nonfiction, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”Book Review: ‘Those Opulent Days’ is a mystery drenched in cruelties of colonial French IndochinaIn 1971, Didion helped Babitz get a story published in Rolling Stone magazine — “She is a painter, not a writer,” Didion told the editor.
Anolik makes a convincing case for Babitz’s literary genius and sets up an interesting contrast between the two women— one loose, libidinous and joyfully debauched; the other shy, cerebral and tightly controlled. But don’t expect the calm, organized, even-handed approach of a literary critic or biographer. In the breathless, gossipy style of the tabloids, and with frequent, winking asides to the “Reader,” Anolik dishes dirt on all the major and minor players in their haute bohemian circle, especially Didion and Dunne. In the end, everyone ends up looking bad, including, sadly, Babitz.
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