Before apps were invented, doing celebrity profiles was how I dated. I didn’t drink or take drugs, so I wasn’t going to meet anyone at bars or clubs. And who’s going to make a pass at someone who spends her time alone listening to Leonard Cohen? For me, the only one who tried was Leonard Cohen himself, backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. Almost Famous has a very different tone if the precocious teenage writer is female.
The one man I married was also the only one who wasn’t intimidated by my list of exes. When it did emerge, and I awaited his disapprobation, still haunted by the judgment of previous men, he merely shrugged and said: “I take it as a compliment. You’ve got great taste in cock, girl.”
I imagined, when he proffered the engagement ring, it would be one of those Victorian acrostic-style bands where a loving phrase is spelled across the gold in gems, but instead of DEAR (Diamond, Emerald, Amber, Ruby), it would spell out “Great Taste In Cock Girl” (Garnet, Topaz, Idocrase, Carnelian, Garnet).
But times and social mores have changed, and I won’t do profiles now because, if the interviewee and I fell for each other, as very occasionally happened, that sort of thing would not sit properly. And though I could most likely “get away with it”, I don’t have secrets any more. At some point I published enough books to be an open book.
There are said to be 12 tribes of Israel and, on reading her novelistic memoirs, I understood that I come from the line of Eve Babitz. Either you don’t recognise that name, or you worship her. The top note in her writing is her lovers, anonymised, but who we know to be pre-stardom Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, Ahmet Ertegun, Stephen Stills, Jim Morrison and Ed Ruscha. Some were very famous, others on their way up. She wasn’t a “star fucker” but a power magnet, whether or not like Atlantic records founder Ertegan’s, the power was literal; or like Ford’s, the palpable charisma of one who was destined to make it: “That’s my pot dealer!” she gasped, when he strode on screen in Star Wars.
I see myself in her writing because, though she was driven by corrosive love affairs with men, it was other women she idolised. She worshipped them: see her rapturous essays about Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, or her recollections of the girls at Hollywood High: “These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave and foolhardy, who had left their homes and travelled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”
Eve’s books Hollywood, Sex and Rage and her masterpiece, Slow Days, Fast Company were all published in the 70s. She has such a compelling writing style that even the Fiorucci fashion book she wrote the words for because she needed money, is a delight. Her life and her writing were both overflowing. She can’t turn the volume up or down on her allure except when it’s taken out of her hands – which it was, by a freak 1997 accident, which left her disfigured, racked with pain and largely a recluse.
Lust and longing are Babitz’s raison d’etre, so it’s appropriate to say that when her books were reissued in 2010, I was “turned on” to her. Her books made so much sense to me, their rhymes and wants matched my own rhythm so well, I felt like a restless kid who could finally sleep peacefully by climbing in bed and lying next to her mother.
Until it was re-evaluated, Babitz’s writing was dismissed as lightweight because it dealt in diets and obsessive love and hairstyles – mere “women’s issues”. I’d say she’s also in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s DNA, conscious or otherwise, except that Waller-Bridge can obviously concentrate whereas productivity was Babitz’s achilles heel.
Though they were writing about the same place at the same time, she was very much the anti-Joan Didion, who had such discipline with her writing and with her eating – and who stayed within a longterm marriage. After the accident, Babitz didn’t write again. She died in 2021, one week before Didion, living long enough to see her writing rediscovered and embraced.
In my brief time as a 16-year-old writer at NME, I was dismissed as being “too much of a fan”. The inference by most men in the office was that we could just be sleeping with the bands we wrote so lovingly about. And that was true. We could! And? When you fall for someone you are sent to interview, it writes large the hope that anyone would truly see any for us for who we truly are. That’s all humans want from any lover. So I’m content to be in the similarly accused company of Eve Babitz, not to mention Linda McCartney and Yoko Ono. That we’re not the most beautiful is a frequent accusation, as if the only currency exchange for male power is perfect female beauty when, as Babitz worked out and wrote down, an equal conversion for a woman is self-possession.
In the litany of things that went wrong from being out in the world as a teenage music journalist, I think of sexual assault – something I’ve written about in my book – but I also think of my review of Tom Petty’s Wildflowers being marked down from a 9/10 to a 7/10 by my editor at the NME. That I have confidence in my good taste matters, as it did to Babitz.
