In 2010, Lili Anolik read Eve Babitz for the first time. She was addicted. At that time, Los Angeles-born Babitz – once an author, artist, muse, groupie and unapologetic sensualist – was reclusive and largely unknown. Four years later, Anolik resurrected Babitz in a Vanity Fair profile that sparked a popular reevaluation of his career. Five years later, Anolik has turned the profile into delirious, kinetic gold of “The Eve of Hollywood,” a biography of Babitz who, as Anolik says, is “desperately, helplessly, inconsiderate” in love with its subject. During her reporting, Anolik became friends not only with Babitz, but also with Babitz’s sister, cousin, and several of her crushes and lovers. In retrospect, it all became too much, an “unbalanced and fetishistic” preoccupation.

Babitz’s death in December 2021 could have ended Anolik’s fixation, but instead it gave rise to a new temptation: Eve’s previously unread journals and letters, which promised perspective without the censorship and the fallibility of memory, a legitimate concern given that she had loved drugs as much as she did. I loved sex, a lot. One item that particularly piqued Anolik’s interest was an unsent letter to Joan Didion from 1972, chastising her, among other things, for not reading Virginia Woolf. The lure of greater understanding drew Anolik back to Babitz’s flame, resulting in his latest book, “Didion and Babitz.”

It is increasingly common to portray the two women as equals and opposites, Janus-faced chroniclers who vied to define the Los Angeles of the 1960s and 1970s, in which “Joan (was) an observer…Eve a participant”. They met in the summer of 1967, when Didion, 32, was already married to John Gregory Dunne and Babitz, 24, was sleeping with whoever she wanted, whenever she wanted. The women remained close friends for four years, caught up in the same star-studded party scene centered around Didion’s Franklin Avenue home, which attracted the likes of Otto Preminger, Tom Wolfe, Jasper Johns and Harrison Ford, at the time a pot-selling carpenter who, according to Eve, “could (please) nine women a day”. (We really were a country.)

“Didion & Babitz” shows how the women’s professional relationships briefly outlasted their social ties, which faded when Didion and Dunne moved to Malibu in 1971, aligning themselves, in Eve’s mind, with the industry “crazily square” cinematography and “the bourgeois idyll”. » Babitz’s lover, Jim Morrison, also died that summer and was instrumental in her refocusing on her writing career. Didion, whose lauded career was well underway, helped publish Eve’s first short story in Rolling Stone, but Anolik reveals that she also briefly edited her first collection, “Hollywood of Eve“, although Babitz “fired” Didion in 1973 for reasons that remain unclear.

Another letter that the new book analyzes as a codex dates from 1977 and is addressed to “Catch-22” Author Joseph Heller, to whom Eve first wrote in 1964, when she shyly – but unsuccessfully – dangled her then 20-year-old beauty (“luckily, I’m beautiful”) in exchange help in publishing a first novel The last letter comes after Babitz’s second book, “.Slow days, fast business”, was released and shows her grappling with her insecurities (“Are my enthusiasms too shallow for words?”) and her legacy (“I’m all that stands between Los Angeles and the same old shit forever and forever).

Anolik’s zealous bias (“I won’t even try to pretend to be disinterested here.”) magically mocks the lesser-known big Babitz, but doesn’t always translate as well to the staid and adored Didion . Some comparisons are strained: “(They) weren’t that far apart in terms of… career either. Joan was a promising novelist, an accomplished magazine editor; but Eve was Stravinsky’s goddaughter, Duchamp’s nude, Morrison’s wife, and the creator of the album cover (for a Buffalo Springfield album). And the presentation may seem too hyped. Anolik writes that she had never heard of Nick Parmentel, Didion’s first and only “great” love, until Eve’s letters. She drops the knowledge of her existence like a bomb (“Say what and say who?”) in chapters titled “The (True) Origin Story of Joan Didion.” But Parmentel spoke at length about his relationship with Didion in Tracy Daugherty’s 2015 biography: “The last love song” and Anolik’s interview with him mostly treads familiar ground.

These acres of familiar terrain are the only fault of “Didion & Babitz.” Although the new book offers many original insights into Babitz’s career and her relationship with Didion, it is heavily weighted toward the ampersand name and recycles an extraordinary amount of material from “Hollywood’s Eve.” Even excluding the new book’s 40-page first chapter, which Anolik says is the only “rewritten” section of his old book, “Didion & Babitz” contains dozens and dozens of repeated quotes, as well as paragraphs, pages and subsections – about New Year’s Eve at the Ports bar; about Eve’s mother, Mae; on the books of Eve; and many more – which are either unchanged, modified, reorganized or tweaked. (“Eve as a naughty little girl in need of a spanking” becomes “Eve as a show-off little girl in need of a scolding.”)

This feels like a calculated attempt to capitalize on the female rivalry that is only a small part of the new book. Instead of deleting parts of the gem that is “Hollywood’s Eve,” I wish this book had simply been updated with quotes from Babitz’s archives and a few new chapters, one on Didion’s letter, one on the letter from Heller, one about recent years. of the life of Eve. It could have been called “(All About) Hollywood’s Eve,” which is really what “Didion & Babitz” is about.

DIDION & BABITZ

By Lili Anolik

Scribner, 352 pages, $29.99

Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer.