There is usually very little space for hesitation in stories like hers. This is an intriguing sort of fear, one so strong that Jacaranda seems hesitant to even articulate to herself. But to the reader she admits a secondary reason: “Jacaranda was afraid of New York… she was terrified of going someplace and being drunk all the time.” She tells someone that the reason she is avoiding New York is that Max is there. She ignores her agent’s repeated entreaties that she come to New York. But instead of embracing her fame and success, Jacaranda avoids it. “For the first six months” that Jacaranda occupies a particular apartment in Santa Monica, Babitz tells us, “all she wanted was honest labor, finely crafted novels, and surf.”īabitz (now 74 and retired from public view) is a very charming writer and egotism can actually go over pretty well, if you’re winning about it.īut through it all, Jacaranda will manage to write enough small bits of prose to cobble together a book, a novel good enough to get her a publisher in New York, which in this late 1970s cosmology is the indication that Jacaranda has Arrived. And she is not, exactly, your typical party girl. It takes falling in love with someone to make her beautiful. She starts out as a wayward teenage surfer with calcium deposits on her knees. Despite the title, there’s not much actual rage on view here, either. Jacaranda rarely seems very glamorous to us. “Jacaranda wanted to see things before her luck ran out and she came upon the prophesied brick wall.” “People told Jacaranda she was lucky,” Babitz remarks early on, but luck is not enough. And though the book is plotless, told in vignettes, and this will bedevil some readers, there is something about its portrait of an It Girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown that softens and opens the type. Jacaranda shares some of her biographical markers but not all of them, giving her room to experiment. “Sex and Rage” is less controlled, and in my view, a more interesting work from Babitz. It’s all very self-consciously iconic, so much so that in “Sex and Rage,” a novel Babitz first published in 1979 that has now been reissued by Counterpoint Press, the main character, Jacaranda Leven, sees the photograph and thinks to herself that she would have to be an idiot “to spend all her time around artists and not see this photograph.” In the photograph, she is naked, and he is not, and they are playing chess. (Did everyone date Harrison Ford? It’s beginning to feel like it.)īabitz had her photograph taken with Marcel Duchamp. She dated musicians and artists and, yes, Harrison Ford. She hung out at the famously debauched Garden of Allah hotel on Sunset. As a 14-year-old, she found herself in the car of a man who turned out to be Johnny Stompanato. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, just in time for its seedy-but-cool era of the 1960s and 1970s, when the Golden Age of Film crossed over into the Golden Age of LSD.
Everybody, in theory, wants to be an It Girl, no matter the cost.Įve Babitz, a writer of the 1970s and 1980s who has been recently rediscovered and reprinted by prestigious literary presses, was very much an It Girl. If the status also generally comes with some kind of debilitating addiction - as it did for, say, Edie Sedgwick - well, even that is sort of glamorous. She has to be at the right parties in orderfor to be discovered. She has to be beautiful for the artist to become obsessed.
The glamour of the position is naturally implied.