Jacaranda Leven

Eve Babitz

Jacaranda grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Her father was a musician who worked for  20th Century Fox and her mother was an artist. She and her sister spent all their time in the ocean, and had tar on the bottoms of their feet. “She looked as if she’d washed up on the shore, a piece of driftwood with blonde seaweed caught at one end.”

Jacaranda, the protagonist of Eve Babitz’ novel, Sex and Rage [1979], paints surfboards, buying an old Plymouth with the money. Her “sentimental education” begins when she moves to West Hollywood at 19 to live with Coleman. She immerses herself in the rock and roll scene of musicians, artists, models. “It was like an open city, a port at the crossroads of all directions.” But after five years, she is tired of living in a place with the blinds down during the day, tired of rock and roll. “I think I’ll move back to the beach.”

In Maui she runs into Gilbert Wood, surfing during a hurricane. Gilbert introduces Jacaranda to Max, who is curious about the affair between Jacaranda and Gilbert. He is homosexual, but once Max notices Jacaranda, “the only truth was Max’s truth.” He was tall with bright golden hair and blue eyes. “Every move was like spring water, clear and salt-free.” She had never met a man who was passionate about elegance.

Max invites Jacaranda to one of the parties he gives in a penthouse apartment. Everything is perfect, including his rich friends. For a while Jacaranda goes to all of Max’s parties, but then Max’s attention turns poisonous. Jacaranda drinks too much, becomes boring. One day Max steps back from a painting Jacaranda is doing and asks, “Is that the blue you’re using?” Jacaranda stops painting. Even Gilbert tells her he doesn’t hang around Max any more. “Too dangerous.”

Meanwhile, Jacaranda begins writing. A piece of hers is accepted by a major magazine and she is paid for it. Max’s friends tell her, “Don’t write, darling. It’s not nice.” But in a cafe, Jacaranda is handed a card by a New York agent who wants to represent her. She also runs into her old friend Shelby, whom she has known since she was 14. He is still surfing, a master of balance, “wicked and more coyote-looking than ever.” He had been hers from the beginning.

Every Monday at 7 am, Janet, the New York agent, calls Jacaranda to ask how her book is going. Jacaranda fears she cannot write a whole book. She has always known she wouldn’t be successful. “She is much too LA to be taken seriously.” She is frightened of the way people have begun to treat her, of the money she makes. She would rather have kept her fly-on-the-wall anonymity.

“But real pain only came to Jacaranda when she thought about Max … she only sometimes heard the sound of Max laughing.” Max and his friends have decamped to New York. 

After almost a year of phone calls from Janet, Jacaranda pastes all of her pieces together into a book, titles it and sends it off to New York. Janet hands the book to the best editor at the best publishing company in town, who makes a smooth, perfect book out of Jacaranda’s harem, scarum stories. From then on, Janet’s phone calls insist that Jacaranda come to New York. She must meet people.

But these requests throw Jacaranda into a tizzy. She has been drinking too much, is getting fat. New York is too public, there’s no ocean and Max is there. She is growing dependent on Shelby, but treats him badly in her growing anxiety. She resolves to wreck an upcoming party by inviting an old flame who broke the heart of the host.

At the party, Sunrise Honey, blonde and gorgeous, is knocked down by her boyfriend. “I told you not to dance,” he yells. Jacaranda feels terrible. It is all her fault. The next day Jacaranda convinces Sunrise Honey to run away with her to Mexico. They only get as far as La Jolla, but there, together, they solve their problems. The sky is very blue and they walk on the beach. Sunrise Honey calls her mother, who sends her money enough to become independent. Jacaranda buys a round-trip ticket to New York.

Two days before she leaves, Jacaranda stops drinking, which isn’t as hard as stopping smoking, she finds. New York is beautiful in the spring. Jacaranda stays with her friend Winnie and walks around the city, anthropomorphizing everything. She is alternately euphoric and emotional. Visiting her editor Walter, the last gentlemen publisher, she finds him in jeans and a plaid shirt. She tells him she is terrified. He smiles at her, very young.

Janet, by contrast, is worldly-wise, a paragon of cosmetic beauty, but a dear friend. Between Walter and Janet, at lunch at the Russian Tea Room, Jacaranda feels safe. New York is madly beautiful, full of all the treasures on earth. On the newsstands, Gilbert Wood’s face, a newly-minted film star, shines up.

By the end of the week, Jacaranda has begun to look ten years younger and has to buy new slacks as the ones she brought are falling off. Janet takes her to Elaine’s, along with Winnie. Jacaranda’s senses are awry and vibrant. “She could smell Max.”

At 2 am, Gilbert Wood calls and asks her to come to the Plaza Hotel. She and Winnie walk over. The Plaza is enchanted, but there, opening the door, is Max. Max felt like home, he was a tango partner Jacaranda couldn’t escape. But “she couldn’t afford Max. She couldn’t afford that much truth. If she ever caught him, he would stop being Max.” 

When Gilbert Wood comes in, Winnie clasps her hands to her breast. Gilbert kisses Jacaranda, bites her neck. Max juggles three oranges. Another friend comes and whisks Winnie and Max off to his party. Gilbert and Jacaranda talk of the perfect parties Max used to give. She is pleased someone besides her had noticed that something from Max still glowed in the dark. “For him it was art,” says Gilbert. “For me it was love.”

Before she leaves for Los Angeles and home (where Shelby will pick her up), Jacaranda goes to her godmother Sonia’s apartment. Sonia is 90 and lives off Central Park. She had always sat Jacaranda down and said, you must tell me everything. “The reason she had remembered details, kept track of people, fixed things in her mind, was all to keep Sonia thrilled. Sonia listened with rapt silence.” Knowing a woman like Sonia, watching her have a good time, “left you with the feeling of having experienced truly great art.”

At the airport, Jacaranda thinks, “tomorrow she would be out on her board in the ocean. She had always been lucky. She had seen the worst of the old world seductions. Here she still was. She’d lived to tell the tale.”

When I knew I would be moving to Los Angeles, I looked around for local writers and discovered Babitz. Reading her, you find that all of her work is semi-autobiographical. Unlike some writers, who look only for apocalyptic disaster in the city and see it as a wasteland, Babitz, is sunny, casual, meandering and unpretentious. “It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in LA, to choose it and be happy here,” she said. Babitz died December 17, 2021. “Her sentences split trees,” said Ethlie Ann Vare, in memoriam. “She scared powerful people, and it kept her work from getting the recognition it deserved in her time.”