Hypertext of the 2000 interview by Paul Karlstrom, made for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Oral History Project. Maybe more texts later. The interview will be serialized as the text is hypertextualized and media enriched, and collected HERE, where linking will probably continue after the initial posts. Eve Babitz is an artist, writer and formerly, a self-described art groupie. She achieved international fame when in 1963, at the age of 20, she got her photo taken playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum, a photo that has become one of the iconic images of the artist. It was also one of the seminal events in the birth of the native Los Angeles contemporary art scene. But such an introduction damns her with faint praise, for as Babitz’s numerous, smart, exuberant and hilarious books amply demonstrate, the L.A. of the 60s, 70s and 80s was pretty much her oyster, and she knew how to set the pearls from it. Along with Nathaniel West and Joan Didion, she is in my opinion one of the best writers on the city. The mystery remains: Why is she out of print?
I wrote a big piece about Hollywood High called “The Sheik” about the girls and how beautiful they were.
Mm-hmm. Do you think of yourself as sort of a popular culture writer?
Yes, I do. When Tom Wolfe came out I was so happy.
Did you-how many books have you published?
About five or six or seven.
I noticed a lot of them are collections of stories, short stories.
That’s right. That’s what I’m good at.
So you do think of yourself as a short story writer?
Right.
And are they pretty much based-the ones I know about are based [located] around here.
My memoirs.
Yeah, you write about your life. That’s a smart thing to do.
That’s right.
No one else can know [as much] about-
Right. Right, and even that you don’t know about.
Well, that’s true. Some people-some of the models I’ve interviewed for, well, for that piece I wrote, “Eros in the Studio”. And in fact all of them seemed to think—they obviously thought before they posed, they were asked to pose, in this case by a friend which is not unlike your situation, somebody whom they liked and trusted, but he was a painter and drawer and he would ask them to pose in his studio alone usually, just one on one
Right.
And invariably they would say that part of the—I would ask them why did you agree to do it, you know, trying to get at motivation as we have been with you.
Mm-hmm.
There were several answers. One of them was the idea of being a muse. That they somehow provided energy or inspiration to make a nice picture.
Right. I like that muse thing too.
Did you think of yourself at all in that way?
Yes. I did.
Did you think-
But, I couldn’t like sit still for actually having things painted so this was my one chance. I figured if I was ever gonna be a muse this was it. If these things turned out then I’d be a muse, but I wouldn’t have to be there.
You know, when you think about that image of you—or the images of you playing chess with Duchamp. You know there are so many ways, of course, that that itself can be analyzed and investigated in terms of symbolism and to a metaphor, you know, what does it stand for? It stands for art representation. One can go on and on.
Yeah.
I gather from what you’ve said that that certainly was the furthest thing from your mind.
Right.
And yet—
But, I knew what art was and we were artists in the City. My mother was an artist.
Yeah, that’s right she did wonderful—a lot of drawings.
Yes.
And prints and buildings.
We knew a lot of artists, and we’d been to New Mexico, and I met Georgia O’Keeffe.
You had?
Yeah.
And you went to Rome?
Yeah, I went to Rome. I’ve been around. I wasn’t as dumb as I pretended.
Did you know-did you hang out with the Rudi Gernreich crowd at all at that time?
No, I didn’t.
You didn’t know Leon Bing [Gernreich model]?
No, I didn’t have black hair.
You didn’t [know] Peggy Moffit [Gernreich model]?
I knew them—I knew that he took great photographs [inaudible] of jazz people.
Gernreich Models Peggy Moffitt, Léon Bing and Ellen Harth.
Mm-hmm.
But I didn’t hang around with them. I was not skinny enough.
Oh, yeah. You said something to me the other day about that.
That’s right.
That, in part—
I was standing up for the Rubenesque crowd.
Is that it?
Right.
Was that part of your thinking?
That’s right.
You didn’t like the skinny ones?
Well, I mean, you know, I could never do it myself.
Not the body type.
No. It just doesn’t look good on me. I wanted to stand up for the other kind which I’m sure people like just as well.
Yes, those photos of you are great. Everybody thinks they are terrific.
That’s right. I know, but, you know, at that time like all the skinny girls were coming out and then when the Beatles came the skinny girls took over.
So this was partly your chance to—
That’s right. Marilyn had died, you know. She had died like two years before.
She wasn’t skinny.
Nope. She was my—I’m telling you, she was my ideal.
So you were really a standard bearer for your body type?
Right, for the Hollywood, for that, in Hollywood and also I loved Anita Ekberg too.
You said that earlier, yeah.
Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1961)
Right. I mean, I think that woman, like, stick—it’s funny because most of my friends all my life have worn the same size bra I have.
Really?
Yes, isn’t that funny? It’s like, I don’t know why.
So you would hang out with people who had the same size boobs?
That’s right. Isn’t that weird?
I’ve never heard of such a thing; is it true?
It turned out to be true when I thought about it. I thought I better get some other friends ’cause this is just like, you’re just sticking to your own body type, isn’t that weird?
So did you ever think—this may seem a little strange as a question, but you know, we’re so much now even, perhaps more than ever, young people are into body image—[even] and boys a lot.
I know, isn’t it horrible?
It is horrible. But, did you feel that you were more—you were voluptuous, more womanly as a result, did you equate that with your-the whole idea of being a woman? That if you weren’t curvaceous—that these stick figures really weren’t real woman?
Well, I thought they were very stylish and I wanted to be stylish too but I didn’t know if I could, like, bear to be that skinny in order to be stylish.
Well, you would’ve had to—
I mean, I love fashion. I spend, like, you know, I was a model when I was 12 years old downtown in the schmata business. They’d have these things in the Biltmore Hotel like model clothes. I just absolutely loved clothes. When I was 14 years old Bess Cooper who ran The May Company, she was the number one buyer for the woman’s department, she hired me to help her figure out clothes for the girls because I was like really smart at clothes. But, I didn’t want to be, like—I didn’t want to not have tits. Let’s face it. If you get one or the other it’s hard to choose.
You can’t have them both.
Well, clothes, you know, everybody in clothes is flat-chested.
Well, speaking of tits, as you used the word, one of your writings; you used to write for Ms. magazine. You told me that on the phone yesterday, because of the rich collection of the Archives of American Art, we were able to—actually it was ‘76, April of 1976.
Isn’t that funny?
You said sometime in the ’70s, mid-’70s, you wrote an article. I guess you were in your early 30s. You were like about 33.
Right.
And you wrote a wonderful article, I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s amused some friends of mine already since yesterday afternoon. It’s called “My Life in a 36-DD Bra”.
Right.
Was part of the—well, besides selling a piece, you were a writer. You wanted to sell a piece.
Right.
Was part of the motivation again to make a case for buxom woman, bosomy women?
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
That is an okay thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
But, of course, these are the same women who were not burning, but at least doing away with their bras.
Well, I went over there to Ms. magazine one day and I was wearing this hat, you know, that I got in Laguna that was made out of horse hair from Brazil, it looked like it was from Gone With the Wind and this fuchsia outfit and wedgies and, you know, grape purple nail polish, pedicured nail polish and I sort of like wander into this place looking for work, and she says, well, you know, this was like 1976—she says “You know, Eve, we have learned here now lately that the way you dress can stop, you know, can attract certain attention and if you don’t dress that way, you won’t get that attention”. I said, “That’s why I’m wearing this”.
Duh.
She was dressed like a Yukon miner.
What do you-obviously you were never a feminist in the sense of early ’70s activist.
No, I hated that. I hated it.
But—
I hate direct political confrontation. I think it’s just, like, horrible. Maybe it’s necessary, but I don’t know.
I mean, it does—I’m trying to think within the framework of feminism because people, of course, aren’t interested, now it’s like a historical movement. It’s transforming—
Yes. Now it’s gone.
The new feminism is something quite different. You’ve got these young women who are really keen on being sexy and attractive and yet they are also feeling very strongly about the importance of equality in the work place and all that, which is right. You know, equal pay and so forth. They focus on those important issues. But in terms of that period in the history of feminism, even though you were writing for Ms. magazine, you, again from what you’ve said, had—you didn’t buy it, or you didn’t buy aspects of it.
I thought it was ugly.
Uh-huh. It was an aesthetic thing—Was it an aesthetic thing as much as anything else?
Yes. Uh-huh.
A matter of style.
That’s right. I mean, I cannot believe when, like, people expected me to remember their name when they didn’t wear lipstick and didn’t dye their hair blonde.
Uh-huh.
I mean, well, I’ve met you 14 times before; why don’t you remember me? Well, you look like a door mouse. You know.
It does seem interesting—
I mean, I am pretty obvious. People—I can recognize obvious people. You know, people that are trying.
Uh-huh.
Everybody else I can’t see. It’s a terrible flaw. It’s part of my shallowness.
Well, I don’t know you don’t have to remember so many, it’s better for your mind. You don’t have to remember so many people.
That’s right. I remember stars basically.
They have to earn it.
Right. That’s right.
They have to have some style.
That’s right. They’ve got to do something.
Well you certainly positioned yourself to be remembered in that photograph. Does it sometimes maybe annoy you?
I don’t—I didn’t know that that was going to work so well but I’m glad it did.
Yeah. So, you don’t mind at all.
It hardly took any—I considered it work at the time but I guess it was worth it.
But, it does interest you that how you’re—I won’t say best known-but certainly within a narrow field, which is Duchamp studies.
Yeah. I think it’s great.
But, here it is. Why are you well-known? Because of your body?
That’s right. I think it’s great.
You have a voluptuous body and here’s this chick playing young [inaudible]
I think it’s great. I’m sticking up for Hollywood.
Image is everything.
I told you, it’s the Marilyn Monroe thing.
Marilyn Monroe, there she is again, she’s the best. Did you ever meet her?
No, I didn’t. I saw her on Hollywood Boulevard putting her hands on the sidewalk, wet cement.
What year did she die? I forget.
Sixty-one.
Okay. So, she was already gone.
Right.
Did you go to her funeral?
No. I was in France.
You were also—you said you went to Rome, to Italy. You were also in France; huh?
Uh-huh.
How come?
My father had a Fulbright and a Ford grant.
What did he do?
He was a Baroque musicologist.
Wow.
Stravinsky was at our house all the time.
You had a really interesting life. You make yourself sound-you actually make yourself sound sort of superficial, in a way. I kind of like the way you do it.
I can be superficial because I know what I’m turning down.
What I like about it is you’re most comfortable with this image, even though I think if you scratch your superficiality you’d find something quite different, but you seem to think that that’s worth declaring. You know, that this is, hey yeah, these are the things that I was interested in. Instead of making it sound like you were into, you know, your favorite subject was the harpsichord or something.
No, I hated it. Anyway, I had a horrible—I was a terrible musician. I saw this movie called River of No Return which is like Marilyn Monroe’s first movie, with Robert Mitchum. I went and saw it like five times. My mother was a big enabler of obsessions. My first obsession was Tony Curtis, but, you know, he only made one movie that I could see over and over again. Then I moved on to Marilyn Monroe.
What was that The Thief of Baghdad or something?
Yeah. The Prince Who Was a Thief.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s what it was called.
That’s right. Piper Laurie.
Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thie
I remember that.
I talked to Piper Laurie recently and told her about that movie. She said she was 17 and a Hassidic Jew and her family disowned her when she made that movie.
You never think about these things.
I do.
One doesn’t.
I know. Isn’t that wild?
Well, what about the, I mean, there are very interesting parts to you in your life and Duchamp was an incident and just is the thing that everybody knows about you.
I know.
And I know about you also because you wrote a nice essay for my friend Peter Alexander’s catalogue and such.
That’s right. That’s right.
What was my question here? I like the-you were in the art world even though you are saying you didn’t know what modernism was, you didn’t really know modern art.
I went to the Ferus Gallery. The first time I went I was 18 years old.
Uh-huh.
This girl named Myrna Riceman took me. She knew I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter so she-said she had a Porsche and she was going to take me over to meet these Ferus Gallery people, that I had to meet them. Other people had told me I had to meet them. My mother, too.
Because she was an artist.
But she had a Porsche. This girl had a Porsche so she convinced me.
That was the reason.
I’ll pick you up in a Porsche. Yes. I’d never seen one. I’d never been in one. I wanted to ride in one. You know?
Well. So, were you at all interested? Do you remember what you saw at the Ferus Gallery?
She took me to-first she took me to her boyfriend’s house. Her boyfriend was Jim Elliott [art historian; museum curator/director].
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I know Jim.
And he was living at the merry-go-round [Santa Monica pier].
The Santa Monica Pier Merry-Go-Round in 1960
Ed’s going to think it’s interesting that I met you and that, because we’re pretty good friends. A couple times I’ve stayed out in the desert with him just the two of us. We’re on the same board, the Noah Purifoy Foundation.
Oh, great.
Noah lives out in—he’s this famous African-American—
Uh-huh. Well, I don’t think Ed’s suppose to mention me anymore, ’cause I’m Paul’s girlfriend now.
He’s not supposed to mention you?
I don’t know what the deal is, but, you know.
Well, alright. We’ll respect all that, of course.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about your—oh, look at that. Looks like a Ruscha from ‘63; and it says “Eve”. But in very broken line, block letters. Wonder what that means?
Blocking it out.
Oh, yeah? It was 1963.
Yes.
You’ve got your own Ed Ruscha. Did you start, tell me, let’s just talk a minute about the collages; okay?
Yeah.
Because that is, we’ve determined, we’ve talked about your brief career as a model.
I love Ed’s book.
His books are great.
So funny. The first time I ever saw the one Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, we were driving down to have dinner at La Esperanza downtown in the Plaza, downtown.
Uh-huh.
That was my favorite place to go and I took him there and once he went there he would never stop going. So, we used to go get enchiladas rancheras, which he couldn’t believe, you know, like, sour-cream, melted cheese, avocados, you know. Wow. It was a lot better than Oklahoma City.
I guess.
So, I look at this book and I said, “Why did you make this book?” and he said “Somebody had to do it”.
That’s his artistic statement. Were you inspired a little bit by that to start making your collages?
I didn’t make collages until after I saw Joseph Cornell’s artwork in 1966, in New York.
Uh-huh.
[END OF INTERVIEW.]
"Tilly Losch,” circa 1935, by Joseph Cornell, Construction, 10 x 9 inches
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
I do things like play around with concentrated nitric acid in my kitchen late at night. This time, I was trying to put photographic emulsion (uranium-based) on a small sheet of beryllium copper (they make golf clubs out of this alloy) and it didn’t work so I decided to put a patina on the BeCu by just dumping several chemicals on it. I also used egg white and sesame oil when I was trying to paint the emulsion on it.
When you pour nitric acid on copper you get a fuming cloud of the brown gas nitrogen dioxide, which stinks and is toxic. Yes, this is how I often amuse myself. Samuel Johnson, the 18th century author of the first true English dictionary, has much to say (in The Rambler) about the psychological benefits of amateur chemistry.With some hypo (Sodium Thiosulphate), the egg white, the sesame oil, the uranium and the acid, you get some beautiful colors, sort of like what you might see flying over a Jupiterian moon.
Also interesting: the alpha particles radiating from the uranium are knocking neutrons off the beryllium atoms, making more neutrons. The ones that fly out back into the uranium mayby, occasionally, are captured by some uranium atoms, and transform them, very occasionally, into plutonium. So there is a lot of secret stuff going on here. But the point is they look cool. Less cool than the Thousand Year Patinas on Stephen Sack’s coins though.
Artist Stephen Sack makes pictures of the patinas on unearthed ancient coins, made over thousands of years. Quite different from my whip it up on the stove patinas. Can anyone ID the coin here: I think it’s a Roman denarius. The actual coin is the size of a quarter. I don’t recognize the flamingo or ibis (?) motif, though. Perhaps from the Egyptian colonies. Click on the image twice to get the full, amazing detail. That’s the real attraction. Quite lovely.
Stephen Sack, 2004. Reverse of an ancient bronze coin (Roman denarius?), c-print, 43″ x 31.
Past, present or future. Which do you think of most?
I don’t think about the present so much because I’m in it, being it. As for the past and the future, I’m equally exalted and fretful about both. It’s 50-50.
I often have painful cringes of embarassment or regret. But I also love to relive the glory.
As for the future, I worry–you know, I fully expect doom to strike but also get jazzed about great stuff that is coming.
When did you first begin to understand the word or concept of “past”?
The abstract concept of the past first appeared to me via photos and home movies. When I was three years old, did I really take a bite out of the red Christmas bulb or do I merely believe I remember that because it was captured on film?
Past, present or future. Which do you think of most?
The past. My life began when I was 17 and ended around the time I was 25, 27. Ten years. When I grew up in L.A. I had a fairly normal life. I liked the Owens Valley, then I got into the cowboy life. Met my wife (we were married in a cowboy wedding only), then she got killed, a friend was killed and I had to restart my life.
When did you first begin to understand the word or concept of “past”?
It wasn’t so much the concept as the passing of time. When I was four or five years old, I was obsessed by the idea of whether or not I would still be me when I grew up. Would my mind still operate the same way? I would periodically reassess if I was still me.
The past is past—is it real? Why?
Well, as you get older, the past gets more real. I find myself thinking about it more and more the older I get, dreaming about it more and more. So it has become a present reality of mine.
Past, present, or future; which one do you think of mostly?
I wish it were the present but I think it’s the future. Because I’ve already left my past but my future has not entirely revealed itself so I feel like I’m in a hallway between the two.
When did you learn the meaning of the word (the future)?
I feel like it’s very elementary but when I began to feel the rhythm of birthdays and Christmas, and school starting I feel that I began to imagine a time that was not right now and that I had not experienced yet. Like there will be another birthday, another school year.
What about “future” in the sense of “futuristic”? When did you begin thinking of that?
My father read Dune to me out loud when presumably all the other dads were reading Clifford the Big Red Dog, so I grew up with a sense of temporal difference. Future was other, but it felt like a different place, not just a different time.
Past, present, or future; which one do you think of mostly?
I’m thinking about what to call crawling around in bed at night making lists of things to do. Future.
When did you learn the meaning of the word (the future)?
As soon as a kid becomes aware of birthdays, Christmas and so on, they begin to become aware of the future. After Halloween, you have Christmas decorations (the stores just can’t wrangle it out of Thanksgiving).
I remember when my brother and I were really little and would go to my grandmother’s house, have a lot of food and open presents. And there was a great sense of security there. When the streetlight banners would go up, it would be like the forerunner to that, so I’d see those and think ahead to what was surely coming soon.
Past, present or future. Which do you think of most?
The past. It gives me the context for, well even in some forms, thoughts of the future so everything is in the context of my past.
For example, when I see baseball games at Dodger Stadium, I have expectations, the parking hassle, the hot dogs, the guys who throw the peanuts at you—and so it doesn’t surprise me.
The past is past—is it real? Why?
I don’t think it’s tangibly real, only insofar as it interacts with the present. But we have residues of the past in terms of buildings, antiques, museums, relics and so on. But these are products of the past, not the past itself.
For example, there is a Christmas photo on one family album of me and my sister embracing each other, but the reality was we were fighting all the time.
Past, present or future. Which do you think of most?
The Present. Why? Because the past already happened. The present is the only thing I have.
When did you learn the meaning of the word (the present)?
When I got sober. Why? Before then I always lived in the past. And feared the future. Some sort of lie was going to catch up with me or I wasn’t going to be able to get drugs in the future. There was a constant fear of homelessness.
Do you ever have the experience of the present as “looking out of your own eyes”?
Oh yeah. Is this my perception? How do I try to look at it from another perspective? Very hard sometimes.
Past, present, future: which do you think about most?
You mean like me personally? The past? Or like the Past, like Charlemagne? Mostly about the historical past. Roman history, Greek History, Medieval, Dark Ages.
Why?
The future is going to suck badly.
Do you remember when you first began to understand the word (“past”)?
Sometime around Jr. High, and I realized that after about 4-5 years I could not remember any date I read in a book, and even people like John Kennedy and FDR were not like things I could understand, and so I realized that the things I could understand began in 1970.
There are only about 100 generations or 60 lifetimes between us and Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ. My Great great grandfather was born around 1825 which makes him just a little younger than Abraham Lincoln. So the past is not really that long.
So you mentioned your great great grandfather, and Lincoln, so its not just the historical past, but a personal one too.
I’m not really too interested in my own historical past, that was for illustrative purposes. It was to show that in the life of someone as ordinary as me that even my family’s history goes back as far as historical figures. The fact that every president except for Van Buren is descended from an English monarch in only about 10-12 generations just shows how close we are to history.
Also interesting: the alpha particles radiating from the uranium are knocking neutrons off the beryllium atoms, making more neutrons. The ones that fly out back into the uranium mayby, occasionally, are captured by some uranium atoms, and transform them, very occasionally, into plutonium. So there is a lot of secret stuff going on here. But the point is they look cool. Less cool than the Thousand Year Patinas on Stephen Sack’s coins though.
BaBits: The Hyper Eve Babitz (V and end).
Eve Babitz towards the end of the 1980
Hypertext of the 2000 interview by Paul Karlstrom, made for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Oral History Project. Maybe more texts later. The interview will be serialized as the text is hypertextualized and media enriched, and collected HERE, where linking will probably continue after the initial posts. Eve Babitz is an artist, writer and formerly, a self-described art groupie. She achieved international fame when in 1963, at the age of 20, she got her photo taken playing chess in the nude with Marcel Duchamp at the Pasadena Art Museum, a photo that has become one of the iconic images of the artist. It was also one of the seminal events in the birth of the native Los Angeles contemporary art scene. But such an introduction damns her with faint praise, for as Babitz’s numerous, smart, exuberant and hilarious books amply demonstrate, the L.A. of the 60s, 70s and 80s was pretty much her oyster, and she knew how to set the pearls from it. Along with Nathaniel West and Joan Didion, she is in my opinion one of the best writers on the city. The mystery remains: Why is she out of print?
Continued fron Part IV.
Hollywood High, Home of "The Shieks"
MS. BABITZ: There’s Hollywood High.
MR. KARLSTROM: Mm-hmm.
I wrote a big piece about Hollywood High called “The Sheik” about the girls and how beautiful they were.
Mm-hmm. Do you think of yourself as sort of a popular culture writer?
Yes, I do. When Tom Wolfe came out I was so happy.
Did you-how many books have you published?
About five or six or seven.
I noticed a lot of them are collections of stories, short stories.
That’s right. That’s what I’m good at.
So you do think of yourself as a short story writer?
Right.
And are they pretty much based-the ones I know about are based [located] around here.
My memoirs.
Yeah, you write about your life. That’s a smart thing to do.
That’s right.
No one else can know [as much] about-
Right. Right, and even that you don’t know about.
Well, that’s true. Some people-some of the models I’ve interviewed for, well, for that piece I wrote, “Eros in the Studio”. And in fact all of them seemed to think—they obviously thought before they posed, they were asked to pose, in this case by a friend which is not unlike your situation, somebody whom they liked and trusted, but he was a painter and drawer and he would ask them to pose in his studio alone usually, just one on one
Right.
And invariably they would say that part of the—I would ask them why did you agree to do it, you know, trying to get at motivation as we have been with you.
Mm-hmm.
There were several answers. One of them was the idea of being a muse. That they somehow provided energy or inspiration to make a nice picture.
Right. I like that muse thing too.
Did you think of yourself at all in that way?
Yes. I did.
Did you think-
But, I couldn’t like sit still for actually having things painted so this was my one chance. I figured if I was ever gonna be a muse this was it. If these things turned out then I’d be a muse, but I wouldn’t have to be there.
You know, when you think about that image of you—or the images of you playing chess with Duchamp. You know there are so many ways, of course, that that itself can be analyzed and investigated in terms of symbolism and to a metaphor, you know, what does it stand for? It stands for art representation. One can go on and on.
Yeah.
I gather from what you’ve said that that certainly was the furthest thing from your mind.
Right.
And yet—
But, I knew what art was and we were artists in the City. My mother was an artist.
Yeah, that’s right she did wonderful—a lot of drawings.
Yes.
And prints and buildings.
You had?
Yeah.
And you went to Rome?
Yeah, I went to Rome. I’ve been around. I wasn’t as dumb as I pretended.
Did you know-did you hang out with the Rudi Gernreich crowd at all at that time?
No, I didn’t.
You didn’t know Leon Bing [Gernreich model]?
No, I didn’t have black hair.
You didn’t [know] Peggy Moffit [Gernreich model]?
I knew them—I knew that he took great photographs [inaudible] of jazz people.
Gernreich Models Peggy Moffitt, Léon Bing and Ellen Harth.
Mm-hmm.
But I didn’t hang around with them. I was not skinny enough.
Oh, yeah. You said something to me the other day about that.
That’s right.
That, in part—
I was standing up for the Rubenesque crowd.
Is that it?
Right.
Was that part of your thinking?
That’s right.
You didn’t like the skinny ones?
Well, I mean, you know, I could never do it myself.
Not the body type.
No. It just doesn’t look good on me. I wanted to stand up for the other kind which I’m sure people like just as well.
Yes, those photos of you are great. Everybody thinks they are terrific.
That’s right. I know, but, you know, at that time like all the skinny girls were coming out and then when the Beatles came the skinny girls took over.
So this was partly your chance to—
That’s right. Marilyn had died, you know. She had died like two years before.
She wasn’t skinny.
Nope. She was my—I’m telling you, she was my ideal.
So you were really a standard bearer for your body type?
Right, for the Hollywood, for that, in Hollywood and also I loved Anita Ekberg too.
You said that earlier, yeah.
Anita Ekberg in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1961)
Right. I mean, I think that woman, like, stick—it’s funny because most of my friends all my life have worn the same size bra I have.
Really?
Yes, isn’t that funny? It’s like, I don’t know why.
So you would hang out with people who had the same size boobs?
That’s right. Isn’t that weird?
I’ve never heard of such a thing; is it true?
It turned out to be true when I thought about it. I thought I better get some other friends ’cause this is just like, you’re just sticking to your own body type, isn’t that weird?
So did you ever think—this may seem a little strange as a question, but you know, we’re so much now even, perhaps more than ever, young people are into body image—[even] and boys a lot.
I know, isn’t it horrible?
It is horrible. But, did you feel that you were more—you were voluptuous, more womanly as a result, did you equate that with your-the whole idea of being a woman? That if you weren’t curvaceous—that these stick figures really weren’t real woman?
Well, I thought they were very stylish and I wanted to be stylish too but I didn’t know if I could, like, bear to be that skinny in order to be stylish.
Well, you would’ve had to—
I mean, I love fashion. I spend, like, you know, I was a model when I was 12 years old downtown in the schmata business. They’d have these things in the Biltmore Hotel like model clothes. I just absolutely loved clothes. When I was 14 years old Bess Cooper who ran The May Company, she was the number one buyer for the woman’s department, she hired me to help her figure out clothes for the girls because I was like really smart at clothes. But, I didn’t want to be, like—I didn’t want to not have tits. Let’s face it. If you get one or the other it’s hard to choose.
You can’t have them both.
Well, clothes, you know, everybody in clothes is flat-chested.
Well, speaking of tits, as you used the word, one of your writings; you used to write for Ms. magazine. You told me that on the phone yesterday, because of the rich collection of the Archives of American Art, we were able to—actually it was ‘76, April of 1976.
Isn’t that funny?
You said sometime in the ’70s, mid-’70s, you wrote an article. I guess you were in your early 30s. You were like about 33.
Right.
And you wrote a wonderful article, I haven’t finished it yet, but it’s amused some friends of mine already since yesterday afternoon. It’s called “My Life in a 36-DD Bra”.
Was part of the—well, besides selling a piece, you were a writer. You wanted to sell a piece.
Right.
Was part of the motivation again to make a case for buxom woman, bosomy women?
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
That is an okay thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
But, of course, these are the same women who were not burning, but at least doing away with their bras.
Well, I went over there to Ms. magazine one day and I was wearing this hat, you know, that I got in Laguna that was made out of horse hair from Brazil, it looked like it was from Gone With the Wind and this fuchsia outfit and wedgies and, you know, grape purple nail polish, pedicured nail polish and I sort of like wander into this place looking for work, and she says, well, you know, this was like 1976—she says “You know, Eve, we have learned here now lately that the way you dress can stop, you know, can attract certain attention and if you don’t dress that way, you won’t get that attention”. I said, “That’s why I’m wearing this”.
Duh.
What do you-obviously you were never a feminist in the sense of early ’70s activist.
No, I hated that. I hated it.
But—
I hate direct political confrontation. I think it’s just, like, horrible. Maybe it’s necessary, but I don’t know.
I mean, it does—I’m trying to think within the framework of feminism because people, of course, aren’t interested, now it’s like a historical movement. It’s transforming—
Yes. Now it’s gone.
The new feminism is something quite different. You’ve got these young women who are really keen on being sexy and attractive and yet they are also feeling very strongly about the importance of equality in the work place and all that, which is right. You know, equal pay and so forth. They focus on those important issues. But in terms of that period in the history of feminism, even though you were writing for Ms. magazine, you, again from what you’ve said, had—you didn’t buy it, or you didn’t buy aspects of it.
I thought it was ugly.
Uh-huh. It was an aesthetic thing—Was it an aesthetic thing as much as anything else?
Yes. Uh-huh.
A matter of style.
That’s right. I mean, I cannot believe when, like, people expected me to remember their name when they didn’t wear lipstick and didn’t dye their hair blonde.
Uh-huh.
I mean, well, I’ve met you 14 times before; why don’t you remember me? Well, you look like a door mouse. You know.
It does seem interesting—
I mean, I am pretty obvious. People—I can recognize obvious people. You know, people that are trying.
Uh-huh.
Everybody else I can’t see. It’s a terrible flaw. It’s part of my shallowness.
Well, I don’t know you don’t have to remember so many, it’s better for your mind. You don’t have to remember so many people.
That’s right. I remember stars basically.
They have to earn it.
Right. That’s right.
They have to have some style.
That’s right. They’ve got to do something.
Well you certainly positioned yourself to be remembered in that photograph. Does it sometimes maybe annoy you?
I don’t—I didn’t know that that was going to work so well but I’m glad it did.
Yeah. So, you don’t mind at all.
It hardly took any—I considered it work at the time but I guess it was worth it.
But, it does interest you that how you’re—I won’t say best known-but certainly within a narrow field, which is Duchamp studies.
Yeah. I think it’s great.
But, here it is. Why are you well-known? Because of your body?
That’s right. I think it’s great.
You have a voluptuous body and here’s this chick playing young [inaudible]
I think it’s great. I’m sticking up for Hollywood.
Image is everything.
I told you, it’s the Marilyn Monroe thing.
Marilyn Monroe, there she is again, she’s the best. Did you ever meet her?
No, I didn’t. I saw her on Hollywood Boulevard putting her hands on the sidewalk, wet cement.
What year did she die? I forget.
Sixty-one.
Okay. So, she was already gone.
Right.
Did you go to her funeral?
No. I was in France.
You were also—you said you went to Rome, to Italy. You were also in France; huh?
Uh-huh.
How come?
My father had a Fulbright and a Ford grant.
What did he do?
He was a Baroque musicologist.
Wow.
Stravinsky was at our house all the time.
You had a really interesting life. You make yourself sound-you actually make yourself sound sort of superficial, in a way. I kind of like the way you do it.
I can be superficial because I know what I’m turning down.
What I like about it is you’re most comfortable with this image, even though I think if you scratch your superficiality you’d find something quite different, but you seem to think that that’s worth declaring. You know, that this is, hey yeah, these are the things that I was interested in. Instead of making it sound like you were into, you know, your favorite subject was the harpsichord or something.
No, I hated it. Anyway, I had a horrible—I was a terrible musician. I saw this movie called River of No Return which is like Marilyn Monroe’s first movie, with Robert Mitchum. I went and saw it like five times. My mother was a big enabler of obsessions. My first obsession was Tony Curtis, but, you know, he only made one movie that I could see over and over again. Then I moved on to Marilyn Monroe.
What was that The Thief of Baghdad or something?
Yeah. The Prince Who Was a Thief.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that’s what it was called.
That’s right. Piper Laurie.
Piper Laurie in The Prince Who Was a Thie
I remember that.
I talked to Piper Laurie recently and told her about that movie. She said she was 17 and a Hassidic Jew and her family disowned her when she made that movie.
You never think about these things.
I do.
One doesn’t.
I know. Isn’t that wild?
Well, what about the, I mean, there are very interesting parts to you in your life and Duchamp was an incident and just is the thing that everybody knows about you.
I know.
And I know about you also because you wrote a nice essay for my friend Peter Alexander’s catalogue and such.
That’s right. That’s right.
What was my question here? I like the-you were in the art world even though you are saying you didn’t know what modernism was, you didn’t really know modern art.
I went to the Ferus Gallery. The first time I went I was 18 years old.
Uh-huh.
This girl named Myrna Riceman took me. She knew I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter so she-said she had a Porsche and she was going to take me over to meet these Ferus Gallery people, that I had to meet them. Other people had told me I had to meet them. My mother, too.
Because she was an artist.
But she had a Porsche. This girl had a Porsche so she convinced me.
That was the reason.
I’ll pick you up in a Porsche. Yes. I’d never seen one. I’d never been in one. I wanted to ride in one. You know?
Well. So, were you at all interested? Do you remember what you saw at the Ferus Gallery?
She took me to-first she took me to her boyfriend’s house. Her boyfriend was Jim Elliott [art historian; museum curator/director].
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I know Jim.
And he was living at the merry-go-round [Santa Monica pier].
The Santa Monica Pier Merry-Go-Round in 1960
Ed’s going to think it’s interesting that I met you and that, because we’re pretty good friends. A couple times I’ve stayed out in the desert with him just the two of us. We’re on the same board, the Noah Purifoy Foundation.
Oh, great.
Noah lives out in—he’s this famous African-American—
Uh-huh. Well, I don’t think Ed’s suppose to mention me anymore, ’cause I’m Paul’s girlfriend now.
He’s not supposed to mention you?
I don’t know what the deal is, but, you know.
Well, alright. We’ll respect all that, of course.
Yeah.
Absolutely. Well, tell me a little bit about your—oh, look at that. Looks like a Ruscha from ‘63; and it says “Eve”. But in very broken line, block letters. Wonder what that means?
Blocking it out.
Oh, yeah? It was 1963.
Yes.
You’ve got your own Ed Ruscha. Did you start, tell me, let’s just talk a minute about the collages; okay?
Yeah.
Because that is, we’ve determined, we’ve talked about your brief career as a model.
I love Ed’s book.
His books are great.
So funny. The first time I ever saw the one Twenty-six Gasoline Stations, we were driving down to have dinner at La Esperanza downtown in the Plaza, downtown.
That was my favorite place to go and I took him there and once he went there he would never stop going. So, we used to go get enchiladas rancheras, which he couldn’t believe, you know, like, sour-cream, melted cheese, avocados, you know. Wow. It was a lot better than Oklahoma City.
I guess.
So, I look at this book and I said, “Why did you make this book?” and he said “Somebody had to do it”.
That’s his artistic statement. Were you inspired a little bit by that to start making your collages?
I didn’t make collages until after I saw Joseph Cornell’s artwork in 1966, in New York.
Uh-huh.
[END OF INTERVIEW.]
"Tilly Losch,” circa 1935, by Joseph Cornell, Construction, 10 x 9 inches
This transcript is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Eve Babitz, 2000 Jun 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.