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From Washington Post: Eve Babitz, who chronicled and reveled in Hollywood hedonism, dies at 78.
Ms. Babitz, who once reportedly said that “anyone who lived past 30 just wasn’t trying hard enough to have fun,” was 78 when she died Dec. 17 at a Los Angeles hospital. Anolik said the cause was Huntington’s disease, which causes a progressive degeneration of nerve cells in the brain.
Eve Babitz was in her teens when she declared to her mother, “I think I’m going to be an adventuress.” Then she added, “Is that all right?”
Ms. Babitz would have more adventures than most, growing up fast and voluptuous in Hollywood, reveling in almost every form of excess from sex to drugs to booze and still more sex — and never feeling the least bit of shame over any of it.
She was 20 when she sat down at a chessboard opposite the 75-year-old conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp. He was fully clothed. She was wearing nothing at all.
Ms. Babitz designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Linda Ronstadt. She had affairs with famous men when they were still unknown, including actor Harrison Ford, artist Ed Ruscha and comedian Steve Martin.
She recalled her first encounter with rock star Jim Morrison: “I met Jim, and propositioned him in three minutes. … Being in bed with Jim was like being in bed with Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes.”
But Ms. Babitz was far more than just a Hollywood party girl or rock-and-roll hanger-on. She was one of the most incisive chroniclers of late 20th-century Los Angeles, drawing on her experiences to write several novels and essay collections that have come to be recognized as modern classics. Her books, written in a bold, gossipy, wry and unsentimental prose, were largely ignored when they first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, but a recent revival of interest has made Ms. Babitz a literary touchstone for a younger generation of writers, many of them women.
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