Saint Joan and saucy Eve: a single woman split in two

Fresh out of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz introduced herself to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.’ It was 1960, and while her writing was the sheerest bliss, ‘Eve Bah-Bitz with the Great Big Tits’, as she was known, was herself a work of art. Beauty, she learned at school, was power and ‘the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty’.

So it was her stack (36 DD) that opened doors for her until, in 1972, her friend Joan Didion told Rolling Stone magazine to publish Eve’s first story, ‘The Sheik’. That same year, Didion also got Eve’s art into Vogue. As a result, Eve was ‘fucked up in the extreme’ about Joan. When, in 2016, Lili Anolik wrote about Didion’s L.A. years in Vanity Fair, Eve called her up: ‘Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion. I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me.’

Everyone has heard of Joan Didion and few people of Eve Babitz, but when they became friends in 1967 it was Babitz with the big reputation. The daughter of a violinist and the goddaughter of Ivor Stravinsky, Eve was what Anolik describes as ‘a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat by birth’. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, called Eve ‘the Dowager Groupie’, but she was, Anolik explains, a courtesan. She was also a painter, photographer and collagist who designed a classic album cover for Buffalo Springfield, slept with Jim Morrison before he was famous, went on diets with Linda Ronstadt, knew Harrison Ford when he was a bum, and got Carrie Fisher cast as Princess Leia in Star Wars.