One of Hollywood’s greatest bards, Eve Babitz, has died at age 78. With love and candor, Babitz chronicled the excess of her native world in the 1960s and 1970s and became a cult figure to generations of readers.
“I hadn’t really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds’ husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor,” she once wrote.
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 to music executive Ahmet Ertegun. She was an extra in “The Godfather, Part II,” introduced Salvador Dali to Frank Zappa and helped convince Martin to wear a white suit.
Babitz’s life was romance, farce, melodrama and, almost, early tragedy. She became so addicted to cocaine that in the early 1980s a friend would remember her apartment floor covered in blood and Kleenex. In 1997, she nearly burned to death when she tried to smoke a cigar while driving. She healed enough to describe it in the essay “I Used to Be Charming,” the title a joke she cracked to one of her caretakers.
After most of her work went out of print, she was praised in a 2014 Vanity Fair article by Anolik as an overlooked and unbowed genius. “Eve’s Hollywood,” “Slow Days, Fast Company” and other books were reissued, a well regarded biography by Anolik was published in 2019 and Babitz was discovered by a generation of younger women, leading her to joke: “It used to be only men who liked me, now it’s only girls.
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