Eve Babitz (Author)

About Eve Babitz (Author)

Eve Babitz was an author and artist who gained fame and notoriety through her chronicles of the cultural life of Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, 20-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being "among the key documentary images of American modern art".

Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again.

Her articles and short stories appeared in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire. She was the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company, Sex and Rage, Two By Two, L.A. Woman, and Black Swans. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz's writing of this period is marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references to and interactions with the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

Babitz was notorious for having a very long list of sexual conquests, including Jim Morrison, Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, and many others. She reportedly was the person who suggested Steve Martin begin wearing his iconic white suit.

In 1997, Babitz was severely injured while in her car when she accidentally dropped a lit match onto a gauze skirt, which ignited and melted her pantyhose beneath it. While her lower legs were protected by the sheepskin Ugg boots she was wearing, the accident caused life-threatening third-degree burns to over half of her body. Following the accident, Babitz spent the remainder of her life mostly in seclusion until her death in 2021.