Who’d you like to have lunch with?

I’ve got so many people on my list that I’m considering making this a regular feature, but for today, let’s talk about Eve Babitz. She wrote about late 60s and 70s L.A. from the perspective of the bemused insider that she was, and I’m a fan of both her work and her story. She went to Hollywood High but graduated early, eager for her life to start. She designed album covers for acts like Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, and Linda Ronstadt; suggested to Steve Martin that he try wearing the white suit that became his early trademark; and introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dali. In 1974, when she was 30, her first book of essays, Eve’s Hollywood, was released. Babitz is a romantic when it comes to L.A. and so am I, and her essays just enchantingly describe the city, and the era.

She was definitely something of a sexual libertine: Babitz wrote frequently and compellingly about her sex life; her boyfriends included Harrison Ford, Warren Zevon, and Jim Morrison, the last relationship of which she chronicled in this fantastic 1991 piece for Esquire. She inspired one ex-boyfriend to state that “In every young man’s life comes an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.”

She dated Steve Martin too, and one of my favorite anecdotes from this great biography of her involves that. In 1997, after a lunch date, a match she was trying to light a cigar with ignited the gauzy skirt she was wearing, resulting in life-threatening third-degree burns over half of her body. As she lay in her hospital bed recovering, too weak to talk, she learned that Steve Martin had given her a generous sum to help with medical expenses. Somebody in the room remarked that that was awfully kind.

“Blowjobs,” Babitz whispered.

She’s also famous for this iconic shot with Marcel Duchamp.

After she was burned, Babitz became at bit of a shut-in, listening constantly to conservative talk radio and rarely leaving the house. She died in 2021, but lived long enough to see her books, which had long been out of print, be reissued. Here’s a pretty definitive guide to them.

OK, your turn: who’s your dream lunch date?