Eve's Hollywood Quotes

Not nearly enough. Not recently, anyway.” And she was sad about that. “I know,” he said, and kissed the back of her hand. “We’ll fix it. Get some sleep.” “Night,” she said, and watched him walk toward the door. “Hey. How’d you get in?” He wiggled his fingers at her in a spooky oogie-boogie pantomime. “I’m a vampire. I have secret powers ,” he said with a full-on fake Transylvanian accent, which he dropped to say, “Actually, your mom let me in.” “Seriously? My mom? Let you in my room? In the middle of the night?” He shrugged. “Moms like me.” He gave her a full-on Hollywood grin, and slipped out the door.

So it turned out that power was the quality of knowing what you liked. An odd thing for power to be.

She knew exactly, sort of, what she was going to do.

Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery & then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing & blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her & says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.

We were hot, the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can't see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it's a 'wasteland' and other helpful descriptions.

In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.

You can't read Proust at the Laundromat.

She was sure she wasn’t ever going to go Hollywood, so she went.

Attitude' was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.

The thing about prisons of your own devise is that most of them are designed for traveling and can be taken anywhere, even from small towns in Michigan where you were ugly, all the way to glamorous rock shows where you have to have a pass to get backstage.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version fo the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you "everything" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

That strange mixture that’s always been a major part of Hollywood—self-enchantment mingled with the ever-present fear of total disaster (earthquakes, fires, random murders)—lies beneath the physical reality of Hollywood, which sometimes looks too good to be true, as though we must have sold our souls to the devil for all those swimming pools and orange trees and young hopefuls basking in the sun.

The scientists call it human nature; which is just a fancy term for the God-given flaws we have no intention of giving back.

We drove back through the valley, down to Ventura Boulevard, and over the hills to Hollywood and then west to the Château Marmont, waiting like Tangiers for strangers to find happiness. The land of self-enchantment had, once more, upheld its end of the deal—to be there for those willing to stay. By then, the jacaranda flowers had all fallen and squashed onto the streets in sticky mush, no longer turning the town lavender with clouds, but still they’d be there again next May and so would I.

I dressed next to her in gym (on my other side was this nice girl named Cathy whose only flaw was that she was kind of gullible and that kept me from being too shocked when I saw her in Life magazine crouched under a rock as one of the “Manson Family” and called Gypsy).

New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.

Ophelia said, Isn't there even one for you?They're all adjectives, they make me feel modified (Eve Babitz)

Though I have no kids and Hollywood doesn’t exist, I firmly believe, however, that it did exist. And like Rome, we are living amidst the fallen columns and clothes-lined courtyards, in the ruins of an empire of the self-enchanted which was once, briefly, more devastating than Caesar’s and still brings respectable families to a hot, windy intersection in August to sigh with unnoticed despondence, “…Well…here we are…Hollywood and Vine.

Every article about her sooner or later gets around to the subject of her lovers, who were reportedly legion. (Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stone Records: “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.”)

Hollywood, after all, is the home of those whom silent star Mae Murray called the “self-enchanted.” And having grown up in Hollywood, I’ve known a lot of self-enchanted people. Not since the pharaohs thought they were gods have so many human beings believed that they themselves (and not their publicists or destiny or some larger force) were responsible for the fact that so many other human beings worshiped them.

Hollywood culture is a universal culture now. Everyone wants to step out of life and into the flat perfections of a movie screen. My own wish to drown was not so different from the desire those girls had to leave their real lives behind, to recieve new names and wardrobes and perfectly scripted lines.

It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.

One year on Christmas Eve he told us that Santa wasn’t giving out any presents because he was depressed and suicidal.

Attitude” was the word they used for someone who knew what they liked.

people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West.

I suddenly flew into such a rage that I wanted to beat the shit out of him. "Can't you the fuck... Look at you!" My mother's childhood songs sound like a Southern Cop drunk.

Taquitos are much better than heroin, it's just that no one knows about them and herion's so celebrated.

I refuse to have God dance me off to Texas or blow my bubbles for me. If God wants me to believe in him, he'll have to do better than that. I'll wait under a doorframe.

Once when I testified before a Senate Committee about LSD, Bobby Kennedy asked me how many people I knew smoked marijuana. Brazenly I announced, “Everyone I know smokes marijuana except my grandmother.

Blonde movie stars in the 1950s seem to have been pretty much divided between breathy bombshells (Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield) and slim, elegant swans (Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint). Producers didn’t really know what to do with Judy Holliday, a brilliant, versatile actress who simply didn’t fit into any easy category. Though she left behind a handful of delightful films, one can’t help feeling a sense of waste that her gifts were not better handled by Hollywood (or, for that matter, by Broadway). Perhaps, like Lucille Ball, Judy Holliday would have blossomed with a really good sitcom; but, unlike Lucy, she never got one.

Don't let anyone tell you Joyce Carol Oates is not Shakespeare; she knows everything just like Shakespeare did. She knows what it's like to be beautiful and what it's like to be in a car accident and what it's like to be a gas-station attendant planning a robbery. She knows.

That always seemed like the whole thing; they’ll let you have stories, but you can’t ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it’s one of the charms of the place. Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind. It’s like a tunnel where there’s no sky.

We were always being taken to rehearsals when we were little and it is probably because of that that I like rehearsals better than concerts. There is something about listening to a group of people try over and over to get it right and at last do that provides a tension of drama you don't get when they're all dressed up giving a concert.

They've forgotten about beds, and I understand, because once you set sail on a movie, you are out of touch with ordinary land. Movie-makers between movies seem like you and me; they go to parties, they shop, they swim. But they're just treading water, waiting for another injection, another ship to come take them away in film. And money has nothing to do with it.

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have 'everything,' not success-type 'everything.' I mean, not when the 'everything' isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there's at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own 'everything' and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you get fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood 'everything' in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you 'everything' if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of three terrific films for Capra: Jean played the down-to-earth daughter of an annoyingly wacky family in Capra’s rendition of Kaufman and Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), and she was another hard-boiled city gal won over by a starry-eyed yokel in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). “Jean Arthur is my favorite actress,” said Capra, who had successfully worked with Stanwyck, Colbert and Hepburn. “. . . push that neurotic girl . . . in front of the camera . . . and that whining mop would magically blossom into a warm, lovely, poised and confident actress.” Capra obviously recognized that Jean was often frustrated in her career choice.

But interviews with [Margaret Dumont] reveal her to have been a perceptive and talented comic actress. “Many a comedian’s lines have been lost on the screen because the laughter overlapped,” she said in the 1940s. “Script writers build up to a laugh, but they don’t allow any pause for it. That’s where I come in. I ad lib—it doesn’t matter what I say—just to kill a few seconds so you can enjoy the gag. I have to sense when the big laughs will come and fill in, or the audience will drown out the next gag with its own laughter.” A much harder job, it must be stressed, onscreen than onstage. Margaret Dumont objected to the term “stooge,” with her usual dignity. “I’m a straight lady,” she insisted, “the best straight woman in Hollywood. There’s an art to playing straight. You must build up your man, but never top him, never steal the laughs from him.” She showed great insight into the Marx Brothers’ brand of humor: “The comedy method which [they] employ is carefully worked out and concrete. They never laugh during a story conference. Like most other expert comedians, they involve themselves so seriously in the study of how jokes can be converted to their own style that they don’t ever titter while approaching their material.

Claudette Colbert was not Hollywood’s greatest beauty, but her trim little figure, round, kitten-like face, and obviously intelligent good humor made her a bit of a sex symbol, much to her own surprise. By 1934 she’d adopted the hairstyle she kept for life: a short, auburn bob with a fringe of bangs. Although a partygoer and social animal, Claudette was also known as a tough-as-nails professional, overseeing her lighting and camera angles. Her right profile was known as “the dark side of the moon,” and scenes had to be staged so as not to show it. She was also self-conscious about her short neck—directing her in a 1956 TV show, Noël Coward reportedly snapped, “If only Claudette Colbert had a neck, I’d wring it!” “When it comes to details, I’m a horror,” she admitted cheerfully, though downplaying the profile story. “Why not have your good side showing?

Preparations for war began on New Year’s Eve, 1969. Manson put his followers through a vigorous regime of what he referred to as “desert survival.” Followers were deprived of food and water and given knives and guns, which they needed to learn how to use. Sometime soon, Manson said, a group of black men was going to start Helter Skelter by invading the house of some rich Hollywood family and killing everyone inside, writing messages on the walls in blood. This would be the family’s sign, Manson said, to escape to their underground city in the desert.

How often do you provide this important service for people who aren’t zillionaires, celebrities, or Hollywood power players?

think two cops sucking hard at Hollywood’s tit are in no position to be giving me any shit for offering a courtesy to a studio exec.

The second morning he took me to Carol’s and it was love at first sight to this very day, only she’s up in San Francisco with children and I can’t stand children. Carol was perfect. She looked exactly like me, only she was black. She was from the Bronx and was a proof-reader and she’d once been one of Walter’s girl friends when he tended bar at Stanley’s, a Lower East Side Bar. Carol and I took acid every chance we got.

New York has a kind of push,” he argues further. “I know. You never have time to think. It’s one of its charms.” “Yeah, it is.” He can forgive New York’s shortcomings and think of them as charms, but he cannot forgive L.A. for the spaces between the words, the blandness and the complete absence of push.

Mountain climbing—in those days, all you had to do in Hollywood was go outside to go mountain climbing—was Lola’s idea of where to take boyfriends and get pregnant and by the time she was nineteen she’d had three gold medals for violin state champion and four abortions, her life having finally, I suppose, proven that you can’t go around being an L.A. woman and expect society not to notice when your bowing begins to sound a little off—not screechy, naturally but, well, she simply wasn’t gold medal material finally, and they gave her a silver one, second prize.

Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood “everything” in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They’ll only give you “everything” if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

She just has to have one thing." "What?" I asked. "A father in the industry." To get in, you have to be born in or start at twenty like Daniel or Gabrielle. Or marry in, although others don't like that-pushy wives and husbands are not suffered gladly.

What I have seen of The Act is limited to a clip that was played during one of the prime-time award ceremonies. I think it was a scene of Joey on a bed with a cell phone; it was so far removed from my reality, it was hard to be sure what I was looking at. I just remember seeing Joey glammed out on the red carpet, the stark contrast of our lives casting a dark shadow over me. Here I was in my prison cell wearing my prison uniform, eating my disgusting prison food, while Hollywood celebrated itself.

Never mind the people who wrote huge articles in the New Journalism style about politics or rock stars. But for me to get into this magazine on the strength of no facts, no plodding, no interviews, and just a romance about Hollywood High, meant I must, in the magazine's opinion, be a star myself.

That is The Answer, I thought to myself, that dumb moosh is why all those people are banging their heads against the walls. Well, I thought, I suppose they deserve it.

Jen ended up as a single parent with three children fathered by three different men who were in the entertainment industry, too. Eve spent her teenage years trying to bring order to the chaos at home, raising her two younger siblings while her mom was off chasing roles and men. Eve resented her mother, her absentee father, and Hollywood for stealing her childhood.

You don’t know how lucky you are to have Hollywood knocking on your door. If someone wanted to make a movie about me, I’d quit this job in a nanosecond, move to Hawaii, and spend my days on the beach.

Then, on New Year’s Eve, the duo won the New York Film Critics Circle Award, and the Times threatened to expose Young with or without cooperation,

Earthquakes are only earthquakes, but a good sunset...

Mary had been the object of a war between ordinary solid American values and Hollywood, where even money is lost in the shuffle among the hard floors and 5:00 a.m. wardrobe calls of an invisible city named for a plant that never existed, named by a clan that waits for the next movie to sail away on.

A woman I know who’s been business manager of a national magazine for years, and is still young, took stock of her life and decided that even if she made half as much money, she would rather be a story editor in Hollywood than hold her present executive position. She asked me if I could help her and I thought about it and called around. Carl said, “She just has to have one thing.” “What?” I asked. “A father in the industry.” To get in, you have to be born in or start at twenty like Daniel or Gabrielle. Or marry in, although others don’t like that—pushy wives and husbands are not suffered gladly. I

My mother told me it was more important to be interested than interesting. Have you heeded her advice? Only as a last resort.

Come on, Livvy. Even a churchbells gotta swing if it’s gonna chime.

(In Hollywood, if you can’t have a father in the Industry, the least you can have is a great-aunt.)

The beach from that summer was called Roadside. It was 1958 and a lot of kids from West L.A. went there—tough kids with knives, razors, tire irons and lowered cars. No kids from my school or any of the schools nearby went to Roadside, they went to Sorrento where there were never any fights and where most of the kids from Hollywood High, Fairfax and Beverly spent their summers listening to “Venus” on the radio or playing volleyball. If I had only known about Sorrento, I never would have gone to the beach so passionately, since Sorrento was a dispassionate beach involved mainly in the junior high and high school ramifications of polite society, sororities, Seventeen magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet.

going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach untilfinally there I’d be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.

With the wisdom of age, I see now that what she felt towards me was not scorn but jealousy and that she was terrified that I might turn out to have a future or even be great.

Hollywood courts are a style of architecture peculiar to Southern California, little bungalows facing each other with a walkway down the middle—God’s most perfect housing, in other words, before condos were thrust upon us.

All really enormous charm, the kind that Graham exuded, does much more than it needs to. It gushes out so much that you can live inside it. That was the reason that Graham didn't just mow down women, which most men would have been satisfied with. Graham had men friends who might have died for him and even gas-station attendants felt it and did his windshield better. Animals woke up and came and sat on top of him when he came into a room. Plants that were dying in my house would get better if Graham fixed them. My grandmother met him accidentally one day and still asks about him.

Her hair came halfway down to her waist and was dark auburn and like a lion's mane always. I never saw it combed. It always looked like she'd just risen from a bed of passion that only she could have inspired.

One of the main Brando things is dispensed formalities. If you stand around waiting for the guy to open the door for you, you'll suddenly discover you're with Ernest Borgnine and that Marlon Brando has gone to Ensenada with the car hop.