I don’t mean for those of us who live here: I mean for those on the outside, those for whom “L.A.” meant a plastic place and a plastic people, with no culture and no soul.
Novel” before kicking it off with a facetious comparison of herself to James Joyce and then an eight-page dedication canvasing rock stars, restaurants, foodstuffs, colors, like an Oscar winner gone berserk in her acceptance speech, like she wanted to be sure we knew that she knew this place was ridiculous.
The 2015 reissue of “Eve’s Hollywood” shows her in a boa and bustier, the kind of carnal power move it’s hard to imagine, say, Joan Didion making for her author photo, while the titles of later books — “Sex and Rage,” “L.A.
You wouldn’t think that matters, as a great writer is a great writer and L.A.’s soil is fertile enough to nourish all kinds of transplants, but it does.
Open any book of hers almost at random and you’ll likely find something.
Like any great writer, she understood that the only thing worth contemplating was death, that everything that stands between us and the grave needs to be written down lest it disappear without being registered at all, and that the only way to contemplate time is to contemplate place, which she did with everything she had.
Of the same Los Angeles wind that Chandler and Didion described in terms that were murderous, she wrote, “The Santa Anas were blowing so hard that searchlights were the only things in the sky that were straight.” Of Dodger Stadium, she described “the grass all mowed in patterns like Japanese sand gardens and the dirt all sculpted in swirling bas-relief.” Of Ports, her most beloved Hollywood restaurant, which closed in 1992, she notes a brand of mineral water “served in brandy snifters with lots of ice and a slice of lime.” Her writing overflows with local detail that veers into elaborate metaphor , and it saturates throughout with both erotic and narcotic languor.
And yet, behind all this erotic joy opens not with a Quaalude haze or a late night at the Chateau but with a riff on Forest Lawn cemetery.
Read it now, because time is all we get, because it’s something you should do before everything else she described — the desert oases of Palm Springs and Bakersfield; Emerald Bay; the old bones of the Garden of Allah; the houses of Bunker Hill — all disappears.