In the mid-50s, when Eve Babitz was 13 years old, she asked her mother, Mae, if she would buy her a leopardskin rug. “A real one, you know?” Babitz’s sister, Mirandi, reminisces on a video call from her home in Los Angeles – laughing at her elder sibling’s spunky request. Their mother said no. But she cushioned the blow by offering to get her a leopard print swimsuit instead. “There’s a picture of her wearing it reading Elinor Glyn,” Mirandi continues. “I mean, there you go,” she chuckles. “That’s what she gravitated to.”
British novelist Glyn, though largely forgotten today, scandalised the public in the early 20th century with her erotic fiction. She also popularised the word “it” to denote something that “draws all others with magnetic force”. How better to describe Babitz? “I didn’t want a vine-covered cottage, stability, children, a college degree or a dog,” Babitz wrote in Eve’s Hollywood, her coming-of-age memoir – which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
