Anolik: Whiz journalist roars in a whisper

LILI ANOLIK's Didion & Babitz has been in my thoughts like a guilty conscience. All the wrong reasons are why I've read it.

Didion's name would have been cause enough for journalists wishing to pursue their own kind of creative writing in the wake of New Journalism. But Neelsie has a greater admiration for Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, whose True Confessions is one of my all-time favourites. Not cool to admit it, but there you have it. The movie, with the two Roberts, De Niro and Duvall, was as sweet as the wind blowing in the opening and closing scenes after the Black Dahlia is cut in half and the Monsignor tries to pull the wool over the cops' eyes ...

You get the feeling? Don't you? Now here's another reason:

Naked like uncooked gnocchi

Eve Babitz, naked like uncooked gnocchi, facing Marcel Duchamp – with a chessboard between them in the Pasadena Art Museum.

Julian Wasser took the famous photo in 1963, iconic in the way you use words like “iconic". The same Eve Babitz who made the collage on the cover of the LP Buffalo Springfield Again.

Another one: Lili Anolik is in a hurry to get to that photo. How it happened. Chapter 1. Eve and Marcel play chess. Writes Lili: “Maybe she has something on. The radio, for example, or Chanel No 5.”

Anolik has got this. Didion and Babitz's essence. Almost like James Elroy setting out to portray Hollywood's indulgence with that rabid coyote style of his. It's just that Babitz and Didion are better journalists than Elroy. Didion writing about Charles Manson and Jim Morrison, Babitz taking Jim Morrison to bed to explain that The Doors is a silly name for a band.

The terroir of bitchiness

These are the things I hoped to find in Didion & Babitz. I didn't expect the abundance of sensations I had. I was looking for the two souls who were the dynamos of the writing styles I so envy. I was surprised to find the terroir of bitchiness. Two women who were friends while they despised each other.

In the armpits of this book, Didion and Babitz's afterthoughts linger like a roll-on that loses the battle against the summer heat. Didion's attitude, aloof and calculating, a sphinx with a smoking habit and an addiction to knowing it all. Babitz with her admirable libido and her haste to be the anarchist in any situation. Wears 35DD at the age of 15, reports Anolik. To know that Michelle Phillips's mid-1960s marijuana dealer, the young Harrison Ford, bedded nine (9!) women in one day. And that Keith Richards is living so long because he never mixes his drugs.

Anolik knows everything about Babitz. She wrote a book about her, Hollywood's Eve. She wanted to thrust a stake through Babitz's vampire heart with it – to dispel her obsession with Babitz, she says. Anolik writes with the finesse of a stalker – someone who has forced herself on all of Babitz's family and friends in an attempt to move closer to her. Anolik is as present as Didion and Babitz in the book, which renders the account of the two women's rivalry, anger and friendship (despite their hatred for each other) with such jollity.

She is the ideal person to write a biography of Babitz. Didion is a bonus, even if Anolik doesn't really succeed in portraying Didion in the same depth. Close, but not inside the Didion skull. Didion enters the book through her strange bond with Babitz. The two know each other well. Too well. And when they begin to hate each other, they write about each other via that patient vehicle of pure slander, fiction.

The falling out comes over Babitz's debut, Eve's Hollywood. Didion and Dunne are hired to edit the manuscript, but Babitz dislikes their comments and cancels them. Contempt develops between the two women who have often been favourably compared by critics.

Only fools marry fornicating alcoholics

Anolik's book chronicles this. It's wonderful reading, especially the gossip that accompanies Babitz's flamboyant life. Didion, however, is a different story. Anolik does reveal that Noel Parmentel was the man Didion wanted to make her life partner, but only fools marry fornicating alcoholics. Didion knew better than to tell tales on herself, so we're left to guess about the skeletons in her closet. Someone as intensely in love with herself as Didion, by her very nature was meticulous in ensuring that nothing got known about her that she didn't want to get known. Babitz tried, but couldn't get around that.

Anolik suggests what an uncomfortable, often unsavoury person Didion could be. These little trinkets for the rubbernecks, however, pale in comparison to the shrieks of wonder that Babitz provokes. That the woman was ultimately crazier than a rabbit (she believed she had an affair with Trump during his first term) only makes the book more interesting; Didion, despite her narcissism, becomes, for me, only more iconic in the Garbo sense of the word. Iconic is the new boring.

And Lili Anolik, the scribe of this double chronicle? An excellent journalist like her can roar in a whisper.

Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik is published by Atlantic Books and costs R730 at Amazon SA.

♦ VWB ♦

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