Two iconic writers, one intoxicating city.
Joan Didion and Eve Babitz are both literary It girls. Their influence transcends the afterlife. They’re pop stars of sorts. Not the kind who sing, dance, and power through live shows in pouring rain, but the kind who read, write, and contribute meaningfully to our collective cultural consciousness by telling us their stories. Although the contemporaries are considered two of the classic California authors, and both of them wrote some of the most quintessential books about Los Angeles, they’ve often been looked at as opposites.
There’s a feeling that a binary exists–you’re either a Babitz person or a Didion person. Because their unique cults of personality are so distinct, it’s easy to forget they were actually friends.
This is partly the way Babitz positioned herself as Didion’s opposite, going as far as thanking Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, for “having to be who I’m not” in the dedication for Eve’s Hollywood. Their biographer Lili Anolik calls Babitz’s dedication, “A definition of Joan that was really a definition of herself as the un-Joan.” In Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece that inspired her new book about the women and their relationship, Didion and Babitz, Anolik flips Babitz’s dedication to give further insight into Didion’s view of the relationship. “What it means to be the un-Joan, i.e., Eve,” Didion wrote.
If Didion was a master of restraint, Babitz was a mistress of excess. Physically, Didion was as slim as her prose. She felt her lack of physical presence was good for her journalism. Babitz referred to herself as a “stacked eighteen-year blonde” who was proud of the power of her own ample bosom. Didion thought of herself as a serious writer, Babitz as a multidisciplinary artist and bon-vivant who happened to have stories to tell. Didion was a careerist, Babitz a non-conformist. Didion liked to be called by “Mrs. Dunne,” a proud wife and mother, while Babitz was a partner-less, childless adventurer who glowed with the aura of Samantha Jones a few decades before Sex and The City premiered (at least in her prime).
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Didion and Babitz, which was released last month, contorts our binary ideas about the two authors and places them into a Venn diagram. Anolik paints a picture that their lives and work had more in common, more in the center of that Venn diagram than previously thought. It’s also a trove of smart, hot, historical gossip (what more could one want!).
While reading Anolik’s new book will undoubtedly make you want to revisit Didion and Babitz’s work, or compel you to read it for the first time, it will also make you want to spend time in their world. Or at least, their Los Angeles. So this is a list of places you can go to feel like Babitz or Didion or both for the day. It’s incomplete but lovingly curated for your enjoyment.
Eve Babitz’s Los Angeles
Santa Monica Beaches
Just a mile from the Santa Monica Pier, Sorrento Beach is the northernmost beach in Santa Monica and where the kids from Babitz’s high school congregated. Of course, Babitz thought this was a “dispassionate” beach and had little interest in its culture of “polite society, sororities, Seventeen magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet.” Babitz preferred Roadside Beach, which was full of tough guys and lowriders and void of any of her schoolmates.
Wherever you choose to enjoy the Pacific Coast, keep in mind Babitz’s description of the pull of the sea in L.A. Woman:
“Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach until finally there I’d be, at 8:00 a.m. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun-glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.”
Eve had an incredible amount of lovers over the course of her life, but perhaps none more incredible than the Pacific Ocean itself.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (Known today as TCL Chinese Theatre)
In L.A. Woman, Babitz’s protagonist Sophie Lubin (a fictionalized version of herself) spots Marilyn Monroe as she presses her hands into wet cement outside the Chinese Theatre.
She’s there alongside her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes co-star Jane Russell, who’s also there immortalizing herself through her prints. This makes Sophie’s day. She calls the experience “American poetry.” She’s only a little girl at the time, but the encounter proves to her that miracles could happen as she dawdles down the boulevard on hot, summer days.
“The only time I looked at a newspaper in Rome was that summer Marilyn Monroe died all by herself in Hollywood when suddenly she became an indelible missing person on the cover of every newspaper and magazine in the world. It was half my lifetime ago since I’d seen her when I was ten cutting through the smog, but I’d been waiting for her to show up somehow again all that time and suddenly, she just stopped in her frame and her images went on without her,” Babitz wrote.
Later, when Babitz laments her belief that Georgia O’Keeffe is the only woman artist because she’s the only one she knows, her mother reminds her that Marilyn Monroe is an artist. This is the perfect encapsulation of Babitz’s West Coast, a high-low frame of reference, unafraid to see the genius in pop stars and pop culture. Born into an intellectual family, with famed Russian composer Igor Stravinsky as her godfather, Babitz had nothing to prove when it came to knowing the right thing (unlike, some may argue, Didion). She seemed to take more pleasure in knowing the wrong thing…
See a movie at the theater today, but don’t forget to pay your pilgrimage to Monroe’s prints first.
Musso & Frank
No trip to Hollywood is complete without a visit to one of the oldest restaurants in town, Musso & Frank. Known today for its perfect martinis and singular lore more so than its food, the red-booth restaurant has served the Hollywood community (and legions of tourists and local fans) since its opening in 1919. Today, the same classic menu exists and the same mahogany bar stands (even if it’s been moved around). Even the grill where steaks and chops are prepared remains the same after all of these years. Rumor has it, it’s only broken once in all of the restaurant’s 105-year history.
Beloved by everyone from Greta Garbo and Humprey Bogart to Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, to name only a few of the joint’s legendary fans, Babitz may seem like barely a blip on the radar. But this was Babitz. And while she seemed to consider every inch of Hollywood Boulevard her home, Musso’s was clearly of great importance to her. It’s one of many people, places, and things she in which she dedicates her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, in one of the best dedications ever found in literature (or at least, my favorite).
“And to the Sandabs at Musso’s, the Eggplant florentine, the guy who makes the pancakes, and my friend in the parking lot (not the one on the ground, the one who parks your car, the young one),” Babitz wrote.
You can pull into that same parking lot today, and you can order the sanddabs inside. (Sanddabs are flat-faced flounders that Musso & Frank’s prepares lightly breaded with lemon and butter.) Loyal to her ways, biographer Lili Anolik says Babitz ordered the sanddabs when they dined there together near the end of her life, more than 40 years after this dedication was first published. Babitz had other favorites there too–the creamed spinach perfumed with garlic and nutmeg.
Angels Flight Railway
A Los Angeles landmark since 1901, Angel’s Flight is a narrow vertical railway that runs on a cable in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown. The distance it travels is less than 300 feet, but the incline is extremely steep. The railway was created for practical use, intended to get passengers up to Bunker Hill without having to scale the massive hill. Even if you’ve never been to L.A., you might recognize it as a filming location in Golden Age films such as The Turning Point, Cry of the Hunted, and The Glenn Miller Story (or perhaps the Jason Segal Muppets movie from 2011). It’s now located half a block away from where it first operated.
Today, you can ride the railway for just a dollar or two (two if you want the commemorative tourist ticket). In Eve’s Hollywood, the ever-adventurous Babitz uses the railway as a reminder that safety’s never guaranteed:
“It cost a nickel to go on Angels Flight, the world’s shortest railroad, located once in downtown L.A. and now gone. The car went up and down the steep side of Bunker Hill all day so people with groceries wouldn’t have to walk up endless steps, which were parallel. It was a luxury railroad. There was a man at the top only who collected the nickel from the people coming up and took the nickel before you could go down … I asked the man once, ‘Didn’t it ever just … crash?’ We directed our gazes to the store across the street at the bottom which lay ready for a direct hit. ‘Oh, once,’ he said, ‘the cable broke.’”
Dodger Stadium
While being a Dodger fan may not feel like a surreal experience for most Angelenos, realizing she was a Dodger fan certainly was for Babitz.
Raised in her parent’s world of haute bohemians and international artists, America’s pastime wasn’t a priority in the Babitz household. However, when a date brought Babitz to Dodger Stadium for the first time, she felt punctured by a previously unknown pride for a team she still knew virtually nothing about, a testament to her status as the true daughter of Los Angeles.
As she wrote in Slow Days, Fast Company, “Somehow, before the thing even started, I had acquired an intense, fierce loyalty to the Dodgers, and I don’t know how it happened. I never expected that my external personality, which had hardened into that of a blase Hollywood lady of fashion, could rupture at the first sight of those Americans down there in their white uniforms, but there it was. I was hooked.”
Located in Chavez Ravine, a neighborhood that was predominantly Latino due to housing discrimination in much of the rest of the city, Dodger Stadium is widely known as one of the best ballparks in the world.
Babitz describes the setting in a way only someone who truly loves L.A. could: “Our seats were way up. They were around third base so we could see over the tops of the bleachers on the other side and out to the green hills in the coming twilight beyond. The green hills had violent purple ice plants on them and looked like a scratch in the world bleeding purple blood. The baseball field below was gorgeous. It was the first I’d ever seen, but I’m sure other people must think it’s a beautiful one. The grass all mowed in patterns like Japanese sand gardens and the first all sculpted in swirling bas-relief…All the people were beginning to fill up the seats around us and the whole event just took over; it became completely itself, in a kind of very loose tension like inside a love affair.”
Pasadena Art Museum (Known today as the Norton Simon Museum of Art at Pasadena)
Born to a family of artists, Babitz knew her away around a museum collection by the time she was a young girl (although during their travels, it was her sister Mirandi that had to drag her into galleries). In 1963, Babitz found herself with family at the public opening of the museum’s Marcel Duchamp exhibition, the first landmark retrospective of his work ever. Little did they know she was more than a little bothered by the fact that the museum director, the older, married man who she was sleeping with, had refused her an invitation to the private (and thus much more alluring) opening party in favor of his wife.
When the photographer Julian Wasser saw Babitz at the public opening, familiar with her through mutual friends, he asked her to model for him–with Duchamp. By this time, Duchamp had retired from making art. He said he would now be focusing on playing chess. So when Wasser was hired to shoot promotional images of him for Time magazine, he decided to stage a shot with a chess game. In the photo he imagined, Duchamp was playing against a woman. A nude woman. Wasser cast Babitz for the part, unaware of her affair with the curator and her vendetta against him. This photo became the most important of Wasser’s entire career, and the most iconic representation of the museum in the culture at large. According to the Smithsonian, it was also purported to be Duchamp’s favorite photograph.
Metaphorically, Babitz was able to play chess with such giants with relative ease:
“I didn’t know what modernism was. I knew they gave him two ballrooms at the Pasadena. You know, that beautiful Pasadena Green Hotel. So I figured they must know something I don’t,” Babitz said in an interview.
But you can’t forget Babitz was an accomplished visual artist herself. She loved to create collages, some of which went on to become album covers for bands from the iconic Laurel Canyon rock scene. Babitz first discovered collage as a medium at the Pasadena Art Museum, where she was intrigued by the works of Joseph Cornell (the LSD she was on helped fuel her fascination).
The museum changed names when it acquired the Norton Simon Collection, but it remains an art museum worth visiting. Just don’t get nude and strike up a game of chess.
Cielito Lindo
Like the origin of the margarita, the origin of the taquito is a bit of a mystery. It’s not like there isn’t a documented history, it’s just that multiple histories exist. In one such story, the taquitos are born at Cielito Lindo on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles. Olvera Street is one of L.A.’s protected historical landmarks. It’s not only a celebration of the Mexican culture that so deeply impacts L.A. but also a reminder that L.A. (along with the rest of California) was once part of Mexico. Wherever taquitos were invented, Babitz believed they were perfected at Cielto Lindo, where Angelenos have been enjoying them (and their accompanying avocado salsa) since 1934.
The menu consists of other offerings, but none parallel the taquitos that drove Babitz crazy.
According to Eve’s Hollywood, Babitz preferred to order eight taquitos from Cielto Lindo at a time. She believed these taquitos were so good, they could have prevented Janis Joplin from overdosing in 1970. Frustrated by a newspaper columnist whose response to the death seemed to ask, “What else is a Janis Joplin going to do on a Sunday afternoon in L.A.?’” Eve answered that question by extolling the virtues of Cielto Lindo:
“I am only talking, really, about the food you get in downtown L.A. where a degree of perfection has survived and even improved upon itself, outdistancing the Rest of the World and certainly a landmark in the tides of man. And Janis Joplin, all she had to do was get in her car and go down there. And she would especially have liked it on a Sunday, because on Sundays they have confetti and mariachi bands in the adjacent Plaza.”
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
An Eden-like oasis with 130 acres of botanical gardens and a robust library and cultural center to boot, The Huntington is a must-visit for anyone spending a significant amount of time in L.A. Just before she died in 2022, the Huntington purchased a vast archive of Babitz’s work (a collection spanning writing, photographs, artworks, and more). According to her sister Mirandi, when she told Babitz the Huntington was acquiring her work, she said, “It’s as classy as the Beverly Hills Hotel so I know I’ll be happy there.’”
As L.A. Magazine reported, the collection consists of “six boxes of visual material and six more of her letters and other writings, including the only known manuscript of her first book, Travel Broadens, written when she was 20 and never published.”
In the same L.A. Magazine story, Babitz’s sister Mirandi speaks to the memories they shared there as children. “I know she was attached to the place. She said that she wanted to hang out with ‘The Blue Boy’ and ‘Pinkie’ again,” Mirandi is quoted as saying. Although these two paintings aren’t intended as a pair, the sisters (and many other visitors) associate them as such. Author William Wilson has gone as far as calling them “the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture.” Both are portraits of individual children done in extraordinary color.
There is something touching not only about the idea of the young (and old) Babitz sisters enjoying these two paintings of children but also about the idea of Eve’s work living on in eternity with them.
Babitz acknowledged, to some degree, that there was something childlike about her and her art. As she wrote in Slow Days, Fast Company, “It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here.”
The Huntington Library is open every day but Tuesdays and its archives are open to the public (18+, with appropriate identification and registration).
See’s Candies
See’s Candy is a California institution. A Los Angeles original, just like Babitz. Known for its fine chocolates and endlessly satisfying flavors, See’s is a candy lover’s paradise. It’s no surprise that Babitz had a particular affinity for its chocolate, especially her beloved Bordeaux, which features chocolate poured around a creamy brown sugar center and topped with chocolate rice (God forbid you call it a sprinkle!). Amid the extensive dedications in Eve’s Hollywood, Babitz wrote: “And to See’s Candy, the Bordeaux being an unforgotten favorite.” Pick up a piece of Bordeaux at any See’s Candy store today, with locations peppered throughout the city’s many malls and shopping centers. No See’s near you? Order a pound of Bordeaux for just under $40 online. Make Babitz proud!
Joan Didion’s Los Angeles
The Freeway
Clueless may have the most iconic freeway scene in movie history (“Getting on the freeway makes you realize how important love is”), but Didion’s Play As It Lays may have the most iconic discussion of freeways in all of literature. The main character, Maria, devotes her days to driving them.
Her schedule is so serious that if she doesn’t get on the freeway by ten o’clock every morning, that “she lost the day’s rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum.” Didion wrote, “Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura.”
Her favorite stretch of them all? Where the Hollywood Freeway becomes the Harbor Freeway for those brave enough to attempt the “diagonal move across four lanes of traffic” that it requires. Didion wrote about how tackling this freeway interchange became a personal milestone for Maria: “On the afternoon she finally did it without once breaking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night she slept dreamlessly.”
This description always reminds me of Lauren Conrad in The Hills driving herself to fashion school at FIDM downtown from her West Hollywood apartment, but that’s probably just me. In a more potentially resonant comparison, it’s clear Brett Easton Ellis took inspiration from Didion’s use of freeways while writing his classic debut Less Than Zero. His protagonist, Clay, returns home to L.A. from school back east and realizes he’s afraid to merge. A powerful comment on the liminal space between past and present selves? Yes. But not one without its roots in Didion’s work.
So get in a car and drive around, remembering that it’s not important to actually get anywhere in L.A. What matters is you’re on your way!
7406 Franklin Avenue in Hollywood
This is a private residence, not somewhere you can actually visit or tour, but for the Didion-obsessed, it’s definitely worth walking by. This address is at the heart of Anolik’s new book (and her Vanity Fair piece the book was based on). Didion and her husband not only lived here for a period of time, but also opened it up to their community at large (or, at least, the community they were hoping to cultivate in L.A. after moving from New York) as a social hub.
This is where Babitz and Didion first got to know each other. Juicy, juicy!
“In the big house on Franklin Avenue, many people seemed to come and go without relation to what I did. I knew where the sheets and towels were kept but I did not always know who was sleeping in every bed. I had the keys but not the key. I remember taking a 25-mg Compazine one Easter Sunday and making a large and elaborate lunch for a number of people, many of whom were still around on Monday… I remember a babysitter telling me that she saw death in my aura. I remember chatting with her about reasons why this might be so, paying her, opening all the French windows, and going to sleep in the living room,” Didion wrote in The White Album.
Walk by on your way to enjoy breakfast or lunch at Clark Street Diner (which those in the know will always know as the 101 Coffee Shop) or go people-watching outside the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center International.
Zuma Beach and Broad Beach
Head to Malibu. Go way past the pier and even the Country Mart, just past Paradise Cove and Point Dume too, and you’ll be in Didion’s Malibu. Didion and her family moved to Malibu in 1971, partly in response to the havoc in Hollywood in the late sixties. A self-imposed exile to the beach, and her first time living “in a place with a Chevrolet named after it.” This is what she says in “Quiet Days in Malibu,” the last chapter in The White Album. Sit on the beach (or swim in its waters) and pay respect to the lifeguards the way Didion does in this chapter, documenting the peculiarities and specialness of their 40-hour workweek on the sand. Visit Trancas Market, the same place where Didion “exchanged information” with her neighbors (although the ownership has changed!).
Didion’s eager to expand or refine the way Malibu was typically thought of in the collective consciousness. “In fact, this was a way of life I had not expected to find in Malibu. When I first moved in 1971 from Hollywood to a house on the Pacific Coast Highway I had accepted the conventional notion that Maliby meant the easy life, had worried that we would be cut off from ‘the real world,’ by which I meant daily exposure to the Sunset Strip. By the time we left Malibu, seven years later, I had come to see the spirit of the place as one of shared isolation and adversity, and I think now that I never loved the house on the Pacific Coast Highway more than on those many days when it was impossible to leave it, when fire or flood had in fact closed the highway,” Didion wrote.
Funny enough, the owner of this very home today purposefully twists Didion’s description to help market their AirBnb. You can rent “The Didion House” for a few thousand dollars a night (just keep in mind Didion hadn’t lived there since 1978).
Zuma Canyon Orchids
This commercial orchid nursery was an absolute favorite of Didion’s. She wrote about it at length in The White Album, charting its transition from Arthur Freed Orchids to Zuma Canyon Orchids, when her friend and the head grower Amado Vazquez took it over.
Initially, Didion wasn’t particularly drawn to orchids. It was the greenhouses that caught her attention. She called them “the most beautiful greenhouses in the world” with “the most aqueous filtered light, the softest tropical air, the most silent clouds of flowers…”
“It was very peaceful there in the greenhouse with Amado Vazquez and the plants that would outlive us both,” Didion wrote.
Over time, she developed a deep respect for Vazquez and his relationship to the orchids. “It seemed to me that day that I had never talked to anyone so direct and unembarrassed about the things he loved,” she wrote.
As he predicted to Didion, Vazquez died “in orchids,” but his son George still runs the business today. You can visit it yourself, every day except Sunday.
The Getty Villa
Ok, this will be the last of the Malibu selections, but Didion’s take on The Getty Villa as “one of those odd monuments” is too good. The 64-acre property was originally John Paul Getty’s private home, which he built as a replica of the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (a home that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. and only rediscovered centuries later). Today, the Getty Villa is an art museum and educational center on the Pacific Coast Highway. The collection is full of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art. Didion has an entire piece called “The Getty” somewhere in the first half of The White Album.
Didion calls The Getty Villa “giddily splendid,” but explores the mixed reactions to its exorbitant displays of wealth and style among the intellectual class. Basically, the museum people at large thought it was tacky. They hated it. The general public, most of whom didn’t regularly visit museums, loved it (flocking to it in such droves an appointment system had to be created).
According to Didion, who read Getty’s memoir As I See It, Getty was “neither shaken nor surprised” when “certain critics sniffed” at his choices. Admittedly, before reading Didion’s piece, I never once thought of The Getty Villa as a symbol of anti-elitist thinking. Quite oppositely, I thought of it as a billionaire’s pet project. But Didion’s work paints a different picture.
As Didion wrote, “the Getty tells us that the past was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it…The Getty advises us that not much changes. The Getty tells us that we were never any better than we are and will never be any better than we were, and in doing so makes a profoundly unpopular political statement.”
Today, the Getty Museums (there’s also the Getty Museum on the 405) are not just two of the most popular in Los Angeles, but in the whole country. The Getty Villa is open to the public (every day but Tuesdays) and admission is always free.
Celine
Didion may never have sold official merchandise to her fans (besides her books, that is), but she did become the face of the French fashion house Celine in 2015. In the campaign image, she wears brown tortoiseshell sunglasses and a black knit dress. Both pieces reflect her signature style, but are given the Celine treatment. Shot by Juergen Teller when Didion was 80, it’s hard to imagine the Celine campaign didn’t inspire some new Didion fans. While Phoebe Philo may no longer be at Celine, you can still find a pair of glasses like the ones Didion wore in their shops in Beverly Hills and Canoga Park in the Valley.
