Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. Audiobook (Free)

Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s was the pop lifestyle capital of the world—a movie factory, a music manufacturing plant, a dream manufacturer. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory lady, a pure item of LA, and Vanity Good article writer “Lili Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz” (THE BRAND NEW Yorker).

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess using the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was about Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret Background of L.A. naked; he had not been. The photograph produced her an instantaneous icon of art and sex. Babitz spent all of those other 10 years rocking and rolling over the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There have been the album addresses she designed: for Buffalo Springfield as well as the Byrds, to name but a few. There have been the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to mention but a very few.

Then, at almost thirty, her It lady times numbered, Babitz was found out—being a article writer—by Joan Didion. She would go on to create seven books, generally billed as books or short story collections, generally autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she’s since experienced a breakthrough. Right now in her mid-seventies, she’s in the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential—as the essential—LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its great, and is indeed simply enjoyable as to be recognised incorrectly as simple entertainment.

For Babitz, lifestyle was slow times, fast firm until a freak fireplace turned her right into a recluse, surviving in a flat in Western Hollywood, where writer Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Hollywood’s Eve, identical parts biography and detective story “brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back again to existence, adding a few shadows along the method” (Vogue) and “sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz” (THE BRAND NEW York Instances).