NEW YORK, NY.- Eve Babitz, the voluptuous bard of Los Angeles, who wrote with sharp wit and a connoisseur’s enthusiasm of its outsize characters and sensuous pleasures — from taquitos to LSD — and found critical acclaim and a new audience late in life, died Friday at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. She was 78.

The cause was complications of Huntington’s disease, Mirandi Babitz, her sister and her only survivor, said.

She was 30 when her first book, “Eve’s Hollywood,” a memoir in shardlike essays, was published in 1974. In the dedication, which runs to many pages, she thanked her orthodontist, her gynecologist, the Chateau Marmont, freeways, sour cream (Babitz was an unsung food writer, a Colette of the Sunset Strip), Rainier ale (an aid to losing her virginity) and “the Didion-Dunnes, for having to be what I’m not.”

To Babitz, Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, represented the chilly East Coast literary establishment, which did not quite embrace Babitz, though Didion did help her find work at Rolling Stone magazine.

“She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,” said her longtime agent, Erica Spellman Silverman. Just an “It” girl of California’s 1970s-era bohemia. “But from the beginning I found her work startling and honest.”

Babitz was a precocious child of Hollywood, born May 13, 1943, stopping traffic at 13. (A soon-to-be famous actor, spying her on her front lawn in a leopard print bathing suit, cruised her in his convertible before realizing her age and speeding away, she recalled in “Eve’s Hollywood.”)

Her mother, Mae Babitz, born Lily Mae Laviolette in Texas, was an artist and preservationist. Her father, Sol Babitz, was a concert violinist and musicologist who taught Eve to love Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. Igor Stravinsky was her godfather.

At Hollywood High, from which she graduated a year early, eager to get on with life, Eve was already taking notes. She clocked the popular girls, “the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who left their homes and traveled to movie dreams,” as she wrote in “Eve’s Hollywood,” observing: “People with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.”

“When they reach 15,” she added, “and their beauty arrives, it’s very exciting — like coming into an inheritance and as with inheritances, it’s fun to be around when they first come into the money and how they spend it and on what.”

Eve’s inheritance was her appetite, her curiosity and her zaftig beauty, like Brigitte Bardot with a shag haircut and hip huggers. She was a hedonist with a notebook.

Eve hung out at the Troubadour, the West Hollywood club that nurtured Jackson Browne, the band Buffalo Springfield, for whom she made album covers, and Steve Martin, whom she made over by showing him a book of Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs featuring crisply dressed men in white suits on the beach in France at the turn of the century.

In 1963, she wrote to Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22,” angling to find a publisher for a nascent novel that never materialized: “I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.” She was 20, but thought it was more alluring to present as a teenager.

That same year, she made a stir with “that photo,” taken by Julian Wasser, another chronicler of the Los Angeles counterculture. There was Eve, nude, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, a black-and-white image that became so famous it showed up in a poster for the Museum of Modern Art. It began as a stunt to irritate a married lover, curator Walter Hopps, a founder of the Ferus gallery, who took his wife instead of Eve to the Duchamp retrospective he had organized in Pasadena, California.




Wasser, for his part, said in a phone call this week that the composition was his idea. “I had always wanted to see Eve naked, and I knew it would blow Marcel’s mind,” he said.

Babitz’s paramours were legion — Harrison Ford, Stephen Stills, Jim Morrison, Annie Leibovitz and Martin, to name a few. “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,” Earl McGrath, the record executive, famously said. “It’s usually Eve Babitz.”

At 23, she spent a year in New York, made miserable by its shabby grayness, working for a time at an alternative Village paper. She also introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí and worked as a secretary for a Madison Avenue ad salesman.

Babitz would go on to write five more books — autobiographical novels like “Sex and Rage” (1979) and “L.A. Woman” (1982), featuring her alter-egos, the lovelorn Jacaranda and Sophie — and essay collections like “Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh and L.A.” (1977), as well as countless magazine articles. The books sold modestly. Yet the misadventures they recounted, delivered in Babitz’s luxurious, undulating prose, were required reading for those who had a taste for deeply personal writing by female authors like her peers Nora Ephron, Cynthia Heimel and Laurie Colwin.

Writing in The New York Times, Dwight Garner said her work “reads like Nora Ephron’s by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila.”

F. Scott Fitzbabitz is what Spellman Silverman, her agent, called her, because, as she said, “she was the voice of her age.” Spellman Silverman, a New Yorker, phoned her author every Monday morning to make sure she was awake and writing. Babitz got sober in the 1980s and published her sixth book, “Black Swans,” a collection of essays, in 1993.

Then in 1997, trying to light a cherry-flavored Tiparillo while driving her Volkswagen Beetle, her clothing caught fire, searing most of her body. She had no insurance, and her celebrity friends pitched in with an auction of their artwork at her old canteen, the Chateau Marmont; her sister was able to get a small settlement from the company that made the acrylic skirt that had scorched her body.

Holed up with her cat in her West Hollywood apartment, Babitz became a recluse — and a pugnacious conservative, converted by the talk radio that became the backbeat to her new life.

But in the past decade she has had a revival, with a generation of young book influencers like Emma Roberts, Instagram’s Belletrist, trumpeting her work, reissued by several publishing houses starting in 2015. Babitz is now published in 12 countries and has made 10 times her earnings from the first go-round, Spellman Silverman said.

It was Lili Anolik who presaged Babitz’s comeback. Anolik began pursuing Babitz in 2010, a labor of love and obsession that became a Vanity Fair article in 2014, and then a very personal biography, “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.,” published in 2019. As Babitz faded — battered by her injuries and the progression of her disease — Anolik was one of the few visitors Babitz tolerated. She brought gifts to tempt her, like out-of-print books, chocolate strawberries and MAGA hats.

In 2019, NYRB Classics published “I Used to Be Charming,” a collection of previously printed essays and one new work, the title essay drawn from the vivid but unrefined and unfinished notes Babitz took after her accident, at the encouragement of her sister. But you can hear her distinctive voice, thanks to the efforts of her editor, Sara J. Kramer at NYRB Classics. She writes of driving naked to her sister’s house, charred and in shock. She tells the parademics, “My friends would kill me if I died.” To a male worker at the rehab center she spends months in, she declares, “I used to be charming before I got here.”

“She was happy and grateful that people were reading her and writing about her,” Spellman Silverman said. Her revival made the last years of her life possible. (After rehab, she had business cards made that said, “Better red than dead,” referring to her scars, but the euphony works. )

“She was writing about women in a way that doesn’t exist anymore,” Spellman Silverman said. “A new generation is responding to her abandon and her grit. I think women no longer have that kind of freedom. Eve never saw herself as a victim. She was a free spirit and living her life the way she wanted to.”

In an essay in “Eve’s Hollywood,” she writes about a failed collaboration on a novel with a grim English editor. But after quitting the arrangement, this happens: “I woke up the next morning with a hangover and a good idea for a story. The story was written quickly and fell together like a just right deck of cards being shuffled and it had the kind of crazy deftness that my other stories had always managed to run away with.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.