Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Books Classics)

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And to Glen Frey of the Eagles so he'll still talk to me. And to the New York Times book review section and every critic in it. For me, it isn't about what Towles writes as much as HOW he writes. Elegant, thoughtful. I fall into his stories and just go wherever they take me. This time it was to Hollywood and Los Angeles in the ‘30s, with some interesting characters and stories. Company,” her essay collection from 1977—also recently reissued—Babitz stops by the Chateau Marmont for a drink. Mid-conversation, she starts And to Sara Harrison, Noel Harrison, Simon Harrison, Harriette Harrison, Kathy Harrison, Zoe (my friend) Harrison, Margaret Harrison and the new twins. I sat down on the grass, waited for the nausea—from the smell but also from being six weeks pregnant—to pass, for my emotions to settle. I kept expecting to feel some particular way about the lunch, like upset or sad or frightened. Instead I felt a jumble of all those things. What I also felt and what I mostly felt, though, was excitement. Eve and I were in a story together, like I’d thought. I’d just been mistaken about the kind. It wasn’t a romantic comedy. Was something far more primal, far more urgent—a Greek myth. And she wasn’t in the phone book or West Hollywood or anyplace else I’d looked because, really, she was in Hades, the underworld, where she was being held captive by a ferocious dog with three heads, the heads: isolation, madness, and despair. ( That’s what her person and space stank of. Filth, decay, and squalor, yes; but actually isolation, madness, and despair.) My task was to rescue her from that monster, deliver her from darkness.

And to Mr. Major, I'm sorry I turned out this way. And to the land, the beach, the trees, the hills, the sky, the Bradbury Building, the Broadway Hollywood and all the flowers in spring. And to the Sandabs at Musso's, the Eggplant Florentine, the guy who makes the pancakes and my friend in the parking lot (not the one on the ground, the one who parks your car, the young one). And to the crabpuffs at Don the Beachcomber's. surfeit of style. In “ Sex and Rage,” Babitz’s novel from 1979, reissued this month by Counterpoint, the protagonist is a Babitz double named Toward the end of Rules Of Civility, Eve boards a train from New York to Chicago, but never arrives. Six months later, she is seen in a photograph in a gossip magazine leaving the Tropicana Club in Los Angeles with Olivia de Havilland. Really, though, and in fact, the ending for Eve was ambiguously ever after, those gardenias sometimes blowing rancid, sometimes sweet. One of the last scenes she and I played together:

About the Author

And to L. Rust Hills for the ice cream story and the one about taking sides and anagrams. That Esquire is falling apart. Mine is Babe Vizet. Brief yet marvelous, Eve in Hollywood is the sonnet for LA, whereas Rules of Civility was a love letter for New York. While essentially a novella, Eve in Hollywood is made up of six short stories, each from the perspective of a different character. I loved seeing Eve from the points of view of innocent bystanders (including Olivia DeHaviland!) instead of her Rules of Civility co-star, and then, finally, hearing from Eve her herself. She is a freight train. 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.” The six delightful stories, told from six different perspectives, take Eve from that cross-country train trip to just before the snapping of that celebrity photograph. In between, the Reader meets some wonderful characters. They aren’t “wonderful” in the sense that they are all pleasant, but they are all vivid and quite memorable. (One even foreshadows A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW!) In this chain of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio’s, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs of Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with The Wind.

A frozen moment. And then the moment passed when Laurie collapsed theatrically in the seat beside me. “The drive here was craaaazy,” she said. And to Paul Butterfield over yonder's wall, a har­monica lays playing and it must be greener than here, I've always thought. All this sounds a little overblown and hysterical, I’ll grant you, and yet I believe now as I believed then that it’s accurate and true. I really loved the debut novel Rules of Civility, so I was delighted to find this book of six linked stories, which looks at what happened to character Evelyn Ross after she left New York. "Rules of Civility" was based around three friends - working girls Katey Kontent and Evelyn Ross, plus the wealthy and handsome Tinker Grey. Set in Jazz Age New York, the novel centres on Katey but, at the end of the novel, Eve leaves for home and somehow ends up in LA. These stories tell you how she made her way to Hollywood and what happens to her while she is there. However, it is not necessary to have read "Rules of Civility" to read these stories, which do stand alone.Overall, the takeaway is, this man can WRITE. From his description of the opening of the great west as “…giving way to the high, lonely deserts west of Exodus and east of John,” I’m hooked, impressed, envious. I’ll read anything he ever writes. Please let there be more. And to Anne Marshall, the beautiful friend to us all. And to Michelle Guilliane for calling first before bringing Kim Fawley into my house. To a lot of people, the idea of an extended bed rest sounds like heaven. But the truth is, lying in bed you get no respect and being a burn patient is a visit to torture land,” she wrote. “Everyone keeps telling you to relax, which you have absolutely no way of doing anyway.”