When Eve Babitz Met Marcel Duchamp

I t’s 1959. You’re 16, in the 11th grade. And you’re at where you’re at any time you’re not in class: the girls’ room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts Building of Hollywood High.

You’re doing what you’re doing any time you’re in the girls’ room on the second floor of the Liberal Arts Building of Hollywood High: sharing a cigarette with Holly, though you’ll call her Sally when you write about her years later in “Rolling Stone.”

The bell tolls and you take a final drag on your cigarette. As you turn to flick the butt out the window, you see it: the 50-foot-tall mural of Rudolph Valentino, the exquisite Latin androgyne with almond-shaped eyes, in the role that drove the 1921 moviegoing public into a state of rapture; of frenzy; of insanity. The Sheik, Hollywood High’s mascot. The giant close-up, painted on the side of the boys’ gymnasium, depicts him in windblown headdress, gazing moodily past the track and football field. Perhaps at Paramount Pictures, a few blocks away on Melrose. Perhaps at Persia’s desert splendor, oceans away on the other side of the world.

This reproduction of the silent-screen icon, crude as it is, corny as it is, transfixes you. You can’t look away. Now, don’t forget. You’ve got, on the one hand, your high-culture background: Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, laughing as you and your sister Mirandi, younger by three years, get stuck together with bubblegum during the premiere of his latest piece at the Ojai Music Festival; Edward James, the art collector, telling you that your beauty surpasses that of the Marquis de Sade’s great-granddaughter; Vera Stravinsky, the dancer and costume designer, teaching you the point of caviar. And you’ve got, on the other hand, your pop-culture context: Roadside Beach, where you bodysurf and eat pineapple snow cones, eye the juvenile delinquents eyeing you; Hollywood Boulevard, where you join the crowd in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, watch Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, in matching cleavages and clashing polka dots, press their palms into wet cement as cameras click and flash; the Luau in Beverly Hills, where you and Holly buy Vicious Virgins (two kinds of brandy, five kinds of rum, a splash of lemonade and a gardenia floating on top) with your fake IDs, bat your lashes, also fake, at men twice your age.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s your disposition, naturally romantic. Consequently, the melodrama of the image before you—larger-than-life, large as the movies—grips and beguiles. The longer you stare, the more susceptible you become to its dark fascination, its trashy-profound glamour.

And then, just like that, your imagination is captured, your tastes formed. Even if you don’t think much of the movies or the people who make them, your sensibility will be, from this moment on, cinematic. Hollywood, with its appeal to the irrational and the unreal, its provocation of desire and volatility, its worship of sex and spectacle, will forevermore be your touchstone and guiding light. Its ethos is your ethos, its values your values.

You’re Eve Babitz, future muse and artist, observed and observer, chronicler of scenes, stealer of them, too; and you’re poised to enter a new decade.

E ve’s first successful artistic act: a photograph, taken on October 12, 1963. Only in order to understand the how and why of it, never mind the what and when, we need to back up slightly to the spring of 1961.

Eve, 18, was drowsing her way through classes at Los Angeles City College (LACC) during the day, wide-awake and running wild with the Thunderbird Girls at night. And then her mother told her that her father was moving to Europe—“It was to study the six violin solos of Bach or something, I don’t know, Bach was his obsession”—and that the family would be moving with him. They’d be gone for a year, maybe two.

Eve lasted eight weeks. “The only place I liked was London and we spent most of the time in Paris,” she said. “I hated Paris because it’s actually horrible. It’s cold. And French men are so short. In heels I towered over them. I couldn’t stand it. I needed to come home.”

Eve went back to LACC. Not, however, to the Thunderbird Girls.

The cause of the break, a book. William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness,” about the very beautiful and very doomed Peyton Loftis. “The Thunderbird Girls stuck to one book,” said Eve. “And I read every book. They all loved ‘Lie Down in Darkness.’ They thought they were the girl in it. I thought it was a miserable excuse to commit suicide, which seemed to be its purpose.” (“Lie Down in Darkness” is, in so many ways, an early version of Joan Didion’s “Play It as It Lays,” a novel that will also give Eve fits. Peyton Loftis winds up in a body bag for much the same reason that Maria Wyeth, the heroine of “Play It,” winds up in a loony bin: because, according to Styron, the only way to save your life in a compromised world is to take it; because, according to Didion, the only sane response to the modern condition is insanity.) “I never got headaches but I got a headache from that book. And for the Thunderbird Girls, it was their bible. I’d had enough.”

The break, though, was about more than bummer taste in literature. The Thunderbird Girls, with their garter belts and merry-widow corsets, their dreams of alimony checks as big as the Ritz, were the last of a line. They were the height of style yet also, Eve sensed, on the verge of extinction. “They’d perfected a way to be that made them obsolete from just two strokes of God’s Japanese paintbrush—Marilyn dying and the Beatles,” she later wrote. She was looking for something new.

New came in the form of a friend she didn’t like: Myrna Reisman. “Myrna managed to get her way no matter what,” said Eve. “Myrna walked up to me one day at LACC and asked me if my godfather was Stravinsky, and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Great, I’m going to pick you up at eight.’ She took me to Barney’s. I was 19 and suddenly life was fun.”

Barney’s was Barney’s Beanery, a bar at the intersection of Holloway and Santa Monica in West Hollywood where young artists did their drinking. There that night, sitting in the back with the young artists—Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin—was a young non-artist, Walter Hopps. Hopps was cofounder of the Ferus Gallery, around the corner from Barney’s on La Cienega.

Hopps was just 30 in 1962, but he was already one of LA’s wisest seers. A fourth-generation Californian, he grew up in Eagle Rock, the son, grandson and great-grandson of doctors. When it was time for college, he obligingly registered for science classes at Stanford and then UCLA. It was his art history classes, though, that moved him.

Wrote Eve:

I remember him telling me, somewhere in my past, that while he was majoring in premed he happened accidentally to open some galleries just for diversion. But it wasn’t until 1957 or so, when he opened the Ferus Gallery with John Altoon and Ed Kienholz, that the myth of the West began to solidify: “Whatever Walter says goes.”

And what Walter Hopps said, subliminally but with perfect control, was, “This is the place.”

“This,” we all sort of wondered, “is the place?” We thought New York was the place. New York says it’s the place, and we all know New York’s right, so how could this—LA—be the place?

That LA is the place was an unstated statement as simple as it was radical. And it was already familiar to Eve because her parents and parents’ friends had been unstating it to her since she was a child. How exciting it must’ve been, though, to hear it unstated by somebody who was nearer her own age. Somebody who all the right people thought was the right person. Somebody who was serious business.

LA’s primacy was the premise on which Hopps’ gallery was based. Unlike, say, the LA County Museum, once picketed by Mae and Vera Stravinsky for deeming not a single LA artist worthy of space on its walls, Ferus exhibited the work of locals. Its first show was of Boyle Heights’ own Wallace Berman and resulted in a bust by the vice squad: Berman led away in handcuffs. (One of his assemblages contained an erotic drawing. “Okay, where’s the dirty stuff?” said the cops as they broke down the door.) The scandal didn’t hurt Hopps’ standing any with LA art patrons, an easily scandalized bunch. Maybe because in his Brooks Brothers suit, starched shirt, narrow tie and owlish glasses, he looked the very picture of respectability, every inch the doctor he never became.

At the end of the night, Hopps told Eve that if she swung by Ferus, he’d show her things. She swung, he showed: installations by Ed Kienholz; paintings by John Altoon; ceramics by Ken Price; and then, the inside of his apartment, one floor above the gallery. Afterwards, he said he’d call her.

When he got back from Brazil.

In a couple of months.

“You know ‘Sex and the City?’” said Eve. “Well, if there’d been a ‘Sex and the City’ out here, Walter would be Mr. Big. He’s the guy who’s always pulling the rug out from under you.”

W hile Eve waited for Hopps, she killed time with his artists. There was Ed Ruscha—“the cutest”—and Ken Price—“maybe cuter.” Also, Ron Cooper—not an artist Hopps showed at Ferus, but an artist nonetheless and “cute too in a Toshiro Mifune way”—with whom she’d move in, and then, eight days later, out. (“She told me she’d had enough,” said Cooper.)

Eve was evidently too busy rolling around on her bed to make it. Recalled a friend who’d drop in on her periodically, “That girl was such a slob. And she had all these guys coming over all the time. I’d look around and be like, ‘Where the fuck do they fuck?’”

She couldn’t help herself. “She thought the LA artists were terrific,” said Laurie Pepper, Eve’s cousin. “And sex was how she showed her appreciation. She had a crush on the whole scene.”

And it was the scene more than any guy in it that Eve thrilled to. “I have always loved scenes,” she wrote. “Bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip and brilliance, and the scene at Barney’s was just fabulous.”

So fabulous, in fact, that the moment she discovered it is steeped in a kind of personal and historical significance. “Paris in the 1920s was what all of us were searching for,” said Mirandi. “What Hemingway and Fitzgerald had found in the cafés is what we all wanted—the Moveable Feast. And Eve and I had just been to Paris. There was no sign of that scene. None. We went to La Coupole. We went to Le Dôme. Those places were empty. Nothing was happening. We were so disappointed. And that disappointment is why Eve understood that Barney’s was something special. She thought of herself as an artist—a painter—and wanted to be around other artists. And Barney’s was where the artists were at. The people there had been drawn by who knows what forces and they really had been drawn because they came from everywhere. I think Eve looked around and saw the level of talent, saw all that youth and hope and drive, and said to herself, ‘Barney’s in LA in 1960-whatever-year-it-was is Paris in the 1920s.’”

Hopps was a formative influence on Eve. He taught her how to see.

Hopps’ vision, Eve believed, was visionary, his perception extrasensory. What was hidden from other people—i.e., the future—was revealed to him. He could discern it in the present. For example, Andy Warhol was, in the early ’60s, viewed as a commercial artist and therefore not an artist at all. It was Hopps, along with Ferus co-owner Irving Blum, who, in July 1962, gave Warhol his very first fine-arts show: those Campbell’s soup cans, 32 mouthwatering flavors.

Wrote Eve:

If Walter Hopps decided someone was cool, the person was (in my opinion) cool for all eternity. So when he explained to me one night over chile [sic] at Barney’s that Andy Warhol was going to have a show at the Ferus, I said, “What? The soup can guy? You’re kidding!”

How could that soup can guy be cool? (And his hair?)…

“He’s seven jumps ahead of everyone else,” Walter may have said.

To understand the scope and magnitude of Andy Warhol in 1962 was also to be seven jumps ahead of everyone else. And Eve understood because Hopps made her understand. “Suddenly I had the eyes to see,” she said. “Walter gave me the eyes.”

And Hopps was about to demonstrate, once again, that his timing was right, his pitch perfect.

O ctober 1963. Hopps had convinced Marcel Duchamp, who, in 1917, turned a urinal upside down and signed it, thereby bringing into being pop art and postmodernism—Duchamp: “It’s art if I say so”—as surely as he’d laid waste to Western culture and thought—Duchamp: “It’s art if I say so”—to let the Pasadena Art Museum host his first retrospective. That is, had convinced arguably the most influential artist of the 20th century, inarguably the most revolutionary, that a landmark moment in the career he was too hip, too avant-garde, to have—in 1921, he retired from art, took up chess—was best handled by an institution nobody had ever heard of in a town about to become synonymous with the word “geezer.” (Jan and Dean’s “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena” would drop within the year. Go granny, go granny, go granny, go!)

The epochal shift had begun. LA: from cultural wasteland to cultural hot spot.

The cultural-wasteland talk was nonsense, obviously. Geniuses aren’t dumb. To those with established reputations in the arts, the movie industry meant easy money. The reason LA was lousy with geniuses, which Eve knew better than anyone since, as a kid, all she had to do was walk from her living room to her kitchen and she’d trip over three at least. And now LA was about to announce itself not just as a civilization but as a civilization in its ideal state—“This is the place”—and she wouldn’t be there to utter a single “I told you so.”

Eve’s name had been left off the invite list to the party for the show’s private opening. Hopps was notoriously absentminded. This oversight, though, was deliberate. How could he bring his girlfriend to the party when he was already bringing his wife?

The Duchamp party began on the evening of October 7, careened into the early-morning hours of October 8.

It wasn’t the typical slapdash, slop-pot LA art affair—people wearing whatever clothes they’d thrown over their bathing suits, drinking cheap Chablis out of plastic cups, wandering from gallery to gallery. (Monday Night Art Walks, they were called.) It was high style and high gloss and altogether ultra-super-duper: black ties and pink champagne and the Green Hotel.

Guests included movie stars (Dennis Hopper); the children of movie stars (Hopper’s wife, Brooke Hayward, daughter of Margaret Sullavan); underground movie stars (Taylor Mead); people played by movie stars (Beatrice Wood, the real Catherine—the Jeanne Moreau role—in Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim”); as well as LA artists who looked like movie stars (Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell); and a non-LA artist who was making his own version of movie stars, superstars (Andy Warhol).

Also: Mirandi Babitz, the date of Julian Wasser, a contract photographer covering the event for “Time” magazine. “My little sister went and I didn’t,” said Eve. “The humiliation and so forth.”

Eve hugged her pillow that night and cursed her faithless lover. “I was only 20, and there wasn’t a way I could really get to Walter. But I decided that if I could ever wreak any havoc in his life, I would.”

Not an idle threat.

Eve was holding a glass of wine, standing in front of Duchamp’s best-known painting, “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” at the public opening, which she was attending with her parents, home from Europe at last. Every so often, she’d slide her eyes over to Duchamp and Hopps, themselves on exhibit, playing chess on an elevated platform. She was unable to track the game’s progress, though, because Julian Wasser wouldn’t stop pestering her. “Julian kept coming up to me and saying lewd things like ‘Why don’t you fuck me?’ and being his usual boring self.”

And then Wasser came up to her and said something unusual and not in the least boring.

Their conversation, according to draft number six of Eve’s optioned-but-never-produced screenplay, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slut,” went something like this:

Wasser, unhooking the Nikon from his neck, said “I’m going to take a picture of Duchamp and a girl. You want to be the girl?”

“Okay,” said Eve.

He popped open the camera, replaced old film with new. “Playing chess.” A beat.

Then Eve said, “Oh, right, because that’s what he gave up art for.” Wasser, his eyes on the film as he pulled it taut. “And naked. You, not him.” Another beat.

Then Eve said, “Oh, right, because—” She gestured to the painting. “Still in?”

“Still in.”

Wasser bared his teeth in a grin. “Great. Then we’re all set.”

“Have you told Duchamp about this?”

“As the French would say, Non.”

“Don’t you think you’d better? What if he doesn’t like it?”

Wasser, Nikon back around his neck, started to walk off,
on the job again. “He’ll like it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He’s a man, isn’t he?”

Eve watched Wasser disappear into the crowd, then drained her glass in a single swallow.

S aturday, October 12, early morning. Eve sat beside Wasser in his shiny toy of a car, a Ford Fairlane convertible, top down. They were headed to the Pasadena Art Museum.

Eve was on the road, but really she was on a cloud. The more she thought about Wasser’s idea, the more she liked it: he’d be making “Nude Sitting at a Chessboard,” a sequel to “Nude Descending a Staircase,” with her in the starring role. How brilliant.

How Hollywood, too. What could be more hopeful-ingénue than baring all? It was practically a local rite of passage, the de rigueur desperate act of the camera-ready cutie when the wolf was howling at the door. Even for Marilyn. Especially for Marilyn. (Admitting she was the golden girl and wet dream in the Golden Dreams calendar did as much for Marilyn’s career as any movie.) Except Eve wouldn’t be baring all to make money. She’d be doing it to make mischief.

And art.

Suddenly, though, Eve wasn’t on that cloud anymore, was plummeting to earth. Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all. Maybe this was just Wasser laying a line on her. Maybe only a fool wouldn’t have known she was about to be played for one. At least there was still time to call it off.

Eve had just opened her mouth when Wasser turned to her. “You aren’t going to chicken out, are you?” he said, his tone accusatory.

Not trusting her voice, she shook her head.

Wasser patted her hand, laughed. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be ruined.”

Twenty minutes later they arrived at the museum. After exchanging her blouse and skirt for a smock, she sat at the chessboard in the center of the room. As she waited for Duchamp to appear, Wasser to set up, she chain-smoked, tried to fend off the panicked thoughts swarming her like bees.

At last, everybody was accounted for, all arranged. Wasser gave the signal. Eve rose, her mother’s advice ringing in one ear—“Never put anything in writing or a photo”—her father’s in the other: “Take his queen!”

She dropped the smock.

Eve and Duchamp were in the middle of their third game and engrossed when Hopps entered the room, stopped short. The gum he’d been chewing fell out of his mouth.

“Hello, Walter,” said Eve, barely looking up from the board. Duchamp inclined his head in a slight bow. “Bonjour.”

Hopps just stood there, staring, until Wasser said, “Walter, do you mind? We’re working here.”

Hopps, making apologetic noises, backed out the door.

In the resulting photograph, Eve and Duchamp sit at a chessboard. Duchamp’s hand is raised, his wrist cocked, in anticipation of his next move. Eve, legs crossed at the ankle, chin propped on her palm, waits for him to make it. She might have something on. The radio, for example, or Chanel No. 5. You wouldn’t know it from looking at her, though. Not that Duchamp, his sangfroid as immaculate as his suit, is. He has eyes only for the game. Willful obliviousness is essential here. Neither Duchamp nor Eve can acknowledge her state in any way. If he leers or smirks, if she betrays the faintest hint of nerves or self-consciousness, she’ll be truly exposed—naked rather than nude. Art will have become cheesecake, and that will be that. It’s a walk across a high wire without a net. Yet both Duchamp and Eve reach the other side, pas de sweat. Their mutual aplomb carries the day.

“Take his queen!”

Eve had certainly progressed since Hollywood High. No longer was she content to be a mere looker-on, a member of the audience. She was ready for her close-up now. Only she refused to take it. Wasser’s finger clicked and clicked that morning. In most of the shots, her features were visible. She chose one in which they were not. (Wasser, a rogue but also a gentleman, granted her final say.) And, in so doing, she turned an extroverted gesture into an introverted one, a demand for attention into a plea for privacy, stardom into anonymity. The photo was thus a fulfillment of her paradoxical desire: to reveal herself to the world so a single person would see.

What else the photo was: her chance to be Marilyn. In “The Seven Year Itch” Marilyn was The Girl, a gorgeous ninny bringing the midlife crisis of shy married man Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) to climax. In Wasser’s rendering, Eve was the American Dream made lush, nubile flesh, as though sprung full-blown from the imagination of the European aesthete, lean as a blade, dry as a bone, opposite her. Like Marilyn, Eve was a sex object who was also a sex subject, exploiting herself every bit as ruthlessly as any of the men—Wasser, Hopps, Duchamp—exploited her. She wasn’t just model and muse, passive and pliable, but artist and instigator, wicked and subversive.

“Walter thought he was running the show,” Eve told me, her voice cool, deadpan even. “And I finally got to run something.”

Posing with Duchamp did for Eve what she hoped it would. It allowed her to get even with Hopps. Get one up on, in fact. He’d achieved the impossible by landing the retrospective, but it’s her image that’s forever associated with it. (“Every artist on the planet knows [that photograph],” said Wasser.)

She didn’t just run his show, she stole it.

An excerpt from the book “Didion and Babitz” by Lili Anolik © 2024 by Writerish LLC, published by Scribner (U.S.) on Nov. 12 and Atlantic Books (U.K.) on Nov. 14.