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Babitz: “I can’t really stand fiction anyway, basically,” a bit of gallantry on her part, saying, in essence, that the fault for her not liking Joan’s novels lay with her instead of the novels. “The first piece I read by Joan, I was standing in line at Ralph’s, reading Life magazine. She wrote that she’d just gone to Hawaii in lieu of divorce. I thought that was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.”

The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the not sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is. By saving the letter, we are in some sense “sending” it after all.

Loves are often born unforeseen, of spontaneous conception. One evening we suspect their existence because of some barely noticeable itch, and by the next day we realize they have already settled into us in such a way that if it is not permanent, it at least seems to be.

“Eve used to say that Annie was the son John and Joan never had,” an old boyfriend of hers told me.

*on Annie Lebowitz

“All those years I lived alone in a giant apartment and everyone asked me wasn’t I lonely. Yes, I was lonely, but the way I am built, lonely is better than guilty and other people make me guilty. I need a giant huge apartment again and friends who travel a lot. Like Ahmet.” - Babitz

“I’ve always associated San Francisco with retirement,” said Eve. “So I moved there to become a square..”

Lmao

“..And there were friends of mine who spotted John in certain gay bars late at night, very drunk. Not the chic, hip gay bars, the Times Square gay bars.”

- Bret Easton Ellis on Joan’s husband..

👁️👄👁️

Said Ellis: I would walk into their apartment, and Joan would hand me a drink and she would just stand there and not say anything— terrifying, terrifying. Looking back, I often wonder why there were so many young, good-looking guys who were surrounding John..

And Don Bachardy told me this, “Chris and I felt that Joan didn’t love queers much. As queers, we were highly conscious of whether or not our being queer bothered people. And we believed it did bother Joan. It had to have been a very sensitive subject for her.”

🤡🤡🤡

In a May 9, 1965, letter to friend Mary Bancroft, she wrote, “If I hadn’t thought before that Tom Wolfe was queer, I might have suspected it when John got a more or less business letter from him written on colored construction paper.”

🤡🤡🤡

In a 1971 interview with New York magazine, she said, “[Infidelity] isn’t really that important except as a betrayal. If you can make the promise over again, then the marriage should survive.”

‘a fiction . . . that recalls a time both real and imagined,’

- Dunne on Vegas

Joan looked at [her husband John] and said, ‘Don’t think poor.’”

👁️👄👁️

You tend to learn a lot from the animals you live with, even fish. They are like mirrors that reflect the buried emotions and behaviors we don't dare see.

My guess is that Dunne got rough physically when he felt he’d gotten roughed up emotionally. In other words, he had to show how strong he was in order to cover up how feeble. Scratch a bully, find a crybaby.

.. Joan seemed afraid of him. Moore sighed. “He was violent. And one was a little bit afraid. After he left the table that night, I was angry because I thought he had behaved just irrationally and so rudely. I said to Joan, ‘I’m leaving.’ And that’s when she grabbed my arm and said, ‘No, no, please don’t leave me.’ She didn’t want to be alone with him.”

exactly what I feared… ㅠㅠ

Eve dropped a clue. Dunne, according to her, was a rager. “Joan had migraines because she was married to John. He’d give anyone a migraine. He was an alcoholic and he broke down doors. That’s why Quintana was always trying to get Joan to leave him.”

In “7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38,” her piece on Howard Hughes, she wrote of the “apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.”

Of her courtship with Dunne, Joan would say, “I don’t know what ‘fall in love’ means . . . But I do remember having a very clear sense that I wanted this to continue.”

Her hope, too, was that he would not just film the book—what Perry ended up doing—but reimagine the book, so that he might, as she said in her letter, “[bring] back a picture of the very edge.”

Peckinpah seems a counterintuitive choice. Play It is urban, contemporary, feminine, delicate. He was a director of Westerns, often set in the past, often preoccupied with masculine dilemmas, and invariably extremely violent. Yet his violence was beautiful: sensuous and painterly. And he was a fatalist, and thus close to Joan in terms of sensibility.

The movie is the book, but without the magic of Joan’s prose. And absent that magic, Play It is exposed. Suddenly you see how purest-corn and junk-Hollywood it is—the glamour of desolation, the hollowness of fame, how lowlife are those living the high life. You’re watching, you realize, intellectualized trash. A soap opera with the look of an art-house film. The Bad and the Beautiful, the Antonioni version.

“[Hollywood’s] spirit is speedy, obsessive, immaterial,” she wrote. “The action itself is the art form, and is described in aesthetic terms: ‘A very imaginative deal,’ they say, or, ‘He writes the most creative deals in the business.’” In short, art isn’t the art in Hollywood, business is the art, and only a sucker would think otherwise.

“It could seem like she wasn’t particularly present, but then she’d remember things I said or wore, and she probably even had an opinion on how I fit into the group. John did the talking for both of them. He was friendly, and he loved to gossip, which was fun. There was always a sense of mystique around Joan.”

- Salt on Didion at dinner parties

In brief, books were art, movies were commerce. Only, that was changing.

So, Eve found herself in a tricky position: the person to whom she owed the largest debt was the person making her see red. And the debt would only get larger, the red redder.

With “The Sheik,” Eve was giving readers her L.A., an L.A. of blue skies and pink sunsets, of rampant bougainvilleas, of beautiful girls and the cruel fates closing in on them. The piece was thus a response to—and a rebuttal of—Joan’s novel.

With Play It, Joan was, in Eve’s view, pandering to the chauvinism of New Yorkers, telling them what they wanted to hear—sucking up, basically. (Why sucking up? Because New York ruled the roost high-culture-wise. If you hoped to make it as a serious writer, it was New York you had to impress.) How could Eve see Play It as anything but a flagrant act of betrayal by a native daughter?

She’d tell off West for Locust as she’d never dare tell off Joan for Play It in a piece titled “And West (né Weinstein) Is East Too.” (Though her telling off West for Locust was, of course, really her telling off Joan for Play It.)

The year before, in 1970, Joan came out with Play It as It Lays, a novel set in an L.A. that’s hell on earth even if it looks like an earthly paradise. It’s the same L.A. depicted in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. Eve despised West and Locust and said so.