The strange rivalry of California’s two most glamorous writers

Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, stalwarts of the 1970s scene in LA, are brought to life in Lili Anolik’s entertaining double biography

4/5
Eve Babitz lived, and wrote, outrageously. As a child, she nearly killed her baby sister with an electric heater she put in her cot. She wrote her best letter straight out of Hollywood High, to the author of Catch-22: “Dear Joseph Heller. I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on ­Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.” Two years later, she posed in one of the most famous photos of the era, playing chess nude with Marcel Duchamp. She went on to date Jim Morrison, of the Doors (“Michelangelo’s David, only with blue eyes”) and Harrison Ford (“the thing about Harrison was that Harrison could f—”).
To read her essays – delicious distillations of California in the 1960s and 1970s – is to be seduced. She’s funny, dirty. She has an innocent way of boasting that isn’t arrogance so much as charming reportage: “I [have] nearly perfectly teeth, which I believe is the secret to the universe.” But her books could well have slipped into obscurity were it not for the journalist Lili Anolik, whose Vanity Fair profile and 2019 biography put Babitz back in print and triggered more media attention than the 76-year-old, by then a recluse, had for a long time received. The “lewd angel” of Los Angeles had been rescued, and in the nick of time: Babitz died two years later, in 2021.
In her new book, Anolik returns to Babitz, this time placing her next to the more famous writer and essayist, Joan Didion. Sceptics may question the need for a double biography, but in Didion & Babitz Anolik lays down her facts early: the two shared a complicated ­relationship, at times pastoral and at others competitive. They were never close friends. But theirs was a rare alliance of women writing about California, back then seen as far less serious – practically ­provincial – in comparison to the glamorous New York.
They meet in 1967. Didion, 33, is about to cement her reputation with her essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem; Babitz, 24, wanders into one of her Hollywood house parties. These are the cornerstones of what emerges as Anolik’s third subject, “the scene”, not so much a physical place as it is a ­sensation: the pursuit and anticipation of a good night. Didion and her husband take a shining to this “dowager groupie”, help her get her first piece published, in Rolling Stone, and later, as Anolik reveals through unseen letters in Babitz’s archive, help to edit her first book.
Anolik traces the next two decades with fastidious detail. Her research and sources are unparalleled; she interviews so many ­people on the scene, including ­Babitz herself, that most of this book is direct speech: cool people, talking at you. There’s the 1970s, full of druggery, parties with Dalí and bad boyfriends. Babitz says she “fired” Didion for her “merciless” editing in a fit of self-destruction. Then there’s the Alcoholics Anonymous phase, which becomes LA’s new “social scene”. As Babitz tells ­Anolik: “The last straw was different for everybody. My friend Connie said she had to f— two midgets before she knew it was time to join.”
If, during this period, Babitz’s writing career was a beautiful if ­collapsing sandcastle, Didion was building a house. Her discipline was so ruthless – unlike Babitz, who had to have a book coaxed out of her – that even as her niece lay dying in the next room, in 1982, Didion worked. Babitz saw this as a kind of masculine hardness, writing in an extraordinary letter she never sent to the older writer: “For a long time… women were considered unfeminine if they shone like you do, Joan… Could you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would you be able to if you weren’t so physically unthreatening?”
This is the real meat of Anolik’s book: not just how the two women were “shadow selves”, but how they also composed “two halves of American womanhood”. Didion stood at 5ft; Babitz was, in her own words, “Rubenesque”; Didion was married, though possibly, as Anolik theorises, to a gay man; Babitz was promiscuous and yet had a great “ambition to be a spinster”. Didion was “an observer of the scene”, Babitz its “participant”; Didion was widely lauded, and Babitz nearly wasn’t, particularly after a bad accident with third-degree burns made her retire from public life aged 54.
The risk with a book such as ­Didion & Babitz is that it pits two women against each other, reductively and familiarly. (The website Lit Hub has already released an early review – “Are you a Joan or an Eve?” – which might as well be asking whether you’re a Madonna or a whore.) Anolik is right, though, that her subjects were rivals, and that relationship is as recognisable today as it was in 1973. Competitiveness can exist between women, partly because our space at the top is finite. If this fun, brilliant book was missing anything, it’s that gesture to the wider culture, to why female relationships can become so uniquely awash with both jealousy and ambition. But perhaps Anolik thought that such an explanation would be a comedown – not least after so many, and such admirable, highs.
Didion & Babitz is published by Atlantic at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books