Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz pairs up exemplars of their age to examine how their age let them (and pretty much most women) down. Just as Seligman made the case for an Apollonian Susan Sontag and a Dionysian Pauline Kael, Anolik does the same for the heady, distant Joan Didion and the easily past Dionysus all the way to Bacchus Eve Babitz. This book is not a high-blown literary assessment or simply a twined biography, but cultural criticism told in an engaging, gossipy tone in which Anolik often directly addresses the reader, sets us up for her methods, previews her structure, even offers two versions of one crucial event and then shrugs and says, “You decide.” Didion & Babitz reads as if you and Anolik were cozied up in a red leather booth at Musso & Frank Grill, dishing dirt over bone-dry martinis.
That’s not to say Anolik hasn’t done her journalistic legwork. She singlehandedly rescued Babitz from oblivion with a Vanity Fair profile in 2014, going on to write a definitive biography in 2019, Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. This attention led Babitz’s out-of-print books to find new editions and new readers. Anolik had over a hundred conversations with Babitz up to her death in 2021, a week prior to Didion’s death, and then was sure to reach out to everyone, it seems, who knew Babitz and Didion to write this book, while spending hours in archives and collections of papers.
Why a second book on Babitz? After Eve’s death, Anolik got access to a previously unknown trove of letters and personal effects, hence her entrance (and you can pronounce that both ways) to the story. One of the first items turned out to be an unsent letter to Didion, a mentor-friend in very complicated L.A. and literary ways. It seemed too perfect a hook for Anolik, and who could blame her? Setting them up in opposition is an apt crucible to take in the hope and horror of the 1960s and ’70s. As Anolik sagely suggests, “The Seventies in L.A. weren’t, in my opinion, a decade unto themselves but an extension of the previous decade: the Sixties the flower child, the Seventies the juvenile delinquent that the flower child — a bad seed all along — grew into.”
The book ranges widely over a lot of bad seeds, from another doppelgänger, this time of Jim Morrison and Charlie Manson, to Ahmet Ertegun, head of Atlantic Records and abusive sometimes Eve lover. You could get a sore back bending over to pick up all the dropped names, but that’s, of course, the milieu both Didion and Babitz flourished in, a Los Angeles of music and movies. Babitz’s godfather was Igor Stravinsky and her first big moment was posing nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp for an infamous photo at age 20. Didion’s Malibu carpenter, of all people, was a pre-star Harrison Ford. And Anolik kindly slows down to tell one amazing, not quite related, beyond that it sets quite a scene, anecdote involving Didion’s nephew Griffin Dunne, Linda Lovelace, Sammy Davis Jr., and a Bentley.
Yet the surface dazzle isn’t meant to distract us from a lack of insight. Sometimes that’s Anolik finding the perfect Babitz quote, like when she says of Joan and her husband John Gregory Dunne, “They were connected at the typewriter ribbon.” But more often she wields her own zingers, as when she examines the shift from Didion’s debut, 1963’s novel Run River — “‘Traditional’ can so easily translate to ‘dated,’ ‘corny,’ ‘irrelevant’” — to her second book, 1968’s nonfiction collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, so much of its time and place it felt “dangerously contemporary.” Although Anolik is having none of it: “It wasn’t. What it was: an old-fashioned Gothic tricked out in New Journalism clothing.”
Still it never rankles (at least this reader) that Anolik so clearly sits in Babitz’s corner. The hot mess of the two is obviously going to draw us in, just as Babitz attracted nearly everyone for two decades, with lovers ranging from Annie Leibovitz to Steve Martin. While setting up the Didion-Dunnes in the film world and Babitz in the land of rock ’n’ roll (where Eve had designed album covers for the likes of Buffalo Springfield), Anolik writes, “This is why Eve had contempt for the movie business — its middle-classnik, nine-to-five quality; its inability to accommodate truly wild or wicked behavior; its tendency, in brief, to emphasize business over movie.”
So the “secret” becomes how to walk that fine line. Is it even possible to summon a controlled version of wild abandon? Anolik argues each woman feared becoming the other — Joan feared becoming an “inspired amateur” like Eve; Eve was terrified of turning into Joan, the “fierce professional.” But then Anolik adds, softly, in a parenthesis, the way she sets off so many of her best insights, a means of gently raising a finger to assert a point amid her two titular heavyweights: “(Why would there be fear if there wasn’t also longing?)”
That sweet spot of fear and longing might only get fully resolved in one of the women’s works, Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. “Eve attained the American ideal: Art that stays loose, maintains its cool.” Anolik praises. “Art so purely enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Andy Warhol, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.”
And as you read Didion & Babitz, if all you do is enjoy (not that you won’t), you would be simply mistaken.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
