In December 2021, two women, once friends, died six days apart. Joan Didion was the goddess of “new journalism”, worshipped for her chillingly pure prose. Eve Babitz, also a writer, was renowned as a seductress and muse. They met in1960s Hollywood, with Didion as Babitz’s mentor before the relationship took an irredeemable turn. Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz is literary biography styled as suspense, with oodles of drugs and sex and a rapier-witted cast.
Its plot is hatched with a letter. “Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?” Babitz pens. “Would you be allowed to if you weren’t physically so unthreatening?” The central mystery is Didion, whom many call a Sphinx. Didion’s writing was a paragon of authorial truth, her opinions transparent barbs, but she revealed little about her actual self. She is Du Maurier’s Rebecca, her charisma empowered by her absence.
Anolik’s earlier biography, Hollywood’s Eve, was about Babitz, much of it comprising interviews with its subject. Anolik’s hope is that her intimacy with Babitz will make her account of Didion distinct. Polarities abound. In contrast to the tight-lipped Didion, Babitz is “a free spirit, refusing to let the chains that shackle anywhere near her”.
Her lovers, who included Jim Morrison and Annie Leibowitz, clash with Didion’s monogamy and marriage; her rapacity for life casts relief upon Didion’s habit of observing from the shadows. Also, Anolik argues, Babitz provided Didion glimpses of a world she was keen to record but too prim to experience first-hand.
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Moreover, Didion and Babitz is less a sequel than a retelling of Hollywood’s Eve, with Didion now cast as the lead. The opening chapters of both books are almost identical, as are many other passages, including the account of the Manson murders of Sharon Tate and her friends (“Cielo Drive was a bloodbath and an atrocity and a horror”) and a disturbing flashback to Babitz’s childhood. It’s helpful perhaps to consider Didion’s role as a footnote so extensive that it manipulates the original story to craft its own wildly different tale.
[ In praise of older books: The White Album by Joan Didion (1979)Opens in new window ]
Anolik’s style is unabashedly salacious. On Didion playing emotional vampire with Babitz and music mogul Earl McGrath: “Eve was getting eaten alive by him (McGrath). Joan had her teeth sunk deep in his throat, was drinking, drinking, drinking with glassy-eyed, sweet-sucking bliss.” However, the sexiest character is neither Didion nor Babitz, but writer Noel Parmentel, the love of Didion’s life, although she married someone else. “Rhett Butler, only from New Orleans instead of Charleston,” Anolik describes him. “He’s too dashing, too devastating, built on too grand a scale to be real.” A casual mention found among Babitz’s papers brings Anolik to Parmentel, who, in this book, offers the freshest Didion insights. After all, he claims, “I invented Joan Didion.”
It’s almost unfair for a biography to be such fun. Its people are more alive, their quips sharper, their scandals more arousing. Things end tragically, for Babitz spends her last days like a spoiled child addicted to right-wing pundits, and Didion outlives her husband and her daughter. Still, Didion and Babitz is a party with two formidable hostesses, and while it is at times carried away by its own thrall, it’s enjoyable to bask in its blaze.
