The writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz were both ambitious California natives, moved in similar circles in Hollywood in the 1960s and ’70s and died within days of each other, in December 2021. In “Didion & Babitz,” the journalist Lili Anolik casts them as opposite sides of the same coin: “two halves of American womanhood, representing forces that are, on the surface, in conflict yet secretly aligned — the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.” For all they had in common, the book never quite paints them as the “secret twins” and “soul mates” the author would like us to think they are.
In one of many direct asides to the reader, Anolik states her attempt to “see” both women “plainly”; but if Anolik knows Babitz thoroughly, and personally — from researching her 2019 book “Hollywood’s Eve” — Didion remains a slippery figure. In fact, the author dubiously claims that the only way to see Didion is through the “glass” of Babitz.
About the latter, the author is unafraid of sounding like a besotted teenager: “If intense fascination is love, then I loved Eve Babitz.” The “bohemian” to Didion’s “bourgeois,” Anolik’s Babitz was a “man’s woman” who had an “instinctive ease” with the opposite sex, posing nude at a chess board across from Marcel Duchamp for the photographer Julian Wasser, who also took what is perhaps the most famous photo of Didion, standing in front of her Corvette Stingray smoking a cigarette. Anolik freely admits her bias against Didion, whose “persona” was “part princess, part wet blanket” and who “wanted two incongruous things: the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.”
Soon after Babitz died, Anolik went to her archives at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. Expecting boxes of unpaid bills and takeout menus (“Eve, after all, was the slob of the world”), she instead found a 1972 letter addressed — but never sent — to Didion, about art and feminism and Didion’s reluctance to read Virginia Woolf.
For a long, long, long time women didn’t have any money and didn’t have any time and were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do. … Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous?
This was no simple correspondence, Anolik determined, but a “lovers’ quarrel” that revealed something as yet unknown about their relationship: “that Eve’s feelings for Joan were urgent enough, passionate enough, to compel her to write a letter so blatantly aggrieved.”
Throughout the book Anolik’s tone is self-conscious and conspiratorial, which at first feels like gossipy fun, as if she’s writing beyond the male gaze, the book both taking itself very seriously and not seriously at all. But the podcast-speak (Anolik has hosted one on Traci Lords and another on the Bennington College class of 1986) loses its charm quickly, as the intrusions start to feel cloying. (“I like motion, color, urgency, no explanations or afterthoughts, full speed ahead, and I assume you do too,” she writes. Do we?)
Anolik doesn’t need such stylistic indulgences to bring the reader in; she is a thorough reporter with an ear for humorous detail (apparently Didion’s husband, John Dunne, called Babitz “the dowager groupie”). She manages to bring her midcentury Los Angeles setting to life in a way that feels fresh, despite the era’s well-worn history — Babitz’s casting director boyfriend made her an extra in “The Godfather, Part II”; Harrison Ford was Didion’s carpenter. But her offhand treatment of Didion’s “emaciation”; of her decision to adopt her daughter, Quintana (“It was the baby advertisements that got to her,” Babitz told Anolik); of Dunne’s possible homosexuality; read more as idle rumor than as any new or authoritative information about Didion’s personal life.
By midlife the women have largely parted ways, Babitz enjoying a late-career reappraisal and becoming both Republican and “crazy,” Didion receiving a National Humanities Medal from President Obama and modeling for a French fashion campaign in her 80s.
“What if the competition wasn’t a competition at all? What if the competition was actually a cooperation, Joan and Eve writing L.A. together?” Anolik asks. Maybe. It’s a promise that never pays off. Didion feels like a supporting character in the book and their rivalry feels entirely one-sided. You end up wondering if Didion thought about Babitz much at all.
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