She was a LA Woman like those sung by The Doors, both muse and chronicler of Hollywood excesses of the 1960s and 1970s. Photographer and novelist Eve Babitz died on Friday at the age of 78. The information was confirmed to the American press by his biographer Lili Anolik, who has not communicated more elements at this stage.
Born in 1943 in Hollywood to a violinist father and an architect mother, Eve Babitz plunges from adolescence into the whirlwind of American showbiz, its parties and its drugs. From the age of 14, she began to write her memoirs, which she called I wouldn’t raise my kid in Hollywood. She reads Virginia Woolf and Colette. At 19, through her companion the curator Walter Hopps, she posed nude, playing chess facing Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Museum of Art. The cliché will remain famous.
Eve Babitz pursued a career as a photographer, a Hollywood muse – notably on the arm of Jim Morrison or Harrison Ford – and an amused columnist for Vogue Where Rolling Stone. In particular, she tells very directly about her sex life or her various experiences with psychotropic substances. From her most flamboyant years, she drew a cult novel, Eve in Hollywood, which appeared earlier this year for the first time in French, while it was published in the United States in 1972. She also wrote Sex & Rage, published in 1979 in the United States, again partly autobiographical novel with the airs of descent into hell. We also owe him the album cover Buffalo Springfield Again (1967) by the eponymous group, one of the best rock records of the late 1960s.