Eve Babitz, the voluptuous bard of Los Angeles, who wrote with sharp wit and a connoisseur’s enthusiasm of its outsize characters and sensuous pleasures — from taquitos to LSD — and found critical acclaim and a new audience late in life, died on Friday at U.C.L.A.
“She was seen as too sexy and too lightweight to be serious,” her longtime agent, Erica Spellman Silverman, said.
Her father, Sol Babitz, was a concert violinist and musicologist who taught Eve to love Jelly Roll Morton, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday.
In 1963, she wrote to Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22,” angling to find a publisher for a nascent novel that never materialized: “I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard.
It began as a stunt to irritate a married lover, the curator Walter Hopps, a founder of the Ferus gallery, who took his wife instead of Eve to the Duchamp retrospective he had organized in Pasadena, Calif.
Mr. Wasser, for his part, said in a phone call this week that the composition was his idea.
Ms. Babitz’s paramours were legion — Harrison Ford, Stephen Stills, Jim Morrison, Annie Leibovitz and Mr. Martin, to name a few.
At 23, she spent a year in New York, made miserable by its shabby grayness, working for a time at an alternative Village paper.
Yet the misadventures they recounted, delivered in Ms. Babitz’s luxurious, undulating prose, were required reading for those who had a taste for deeply personal writing by female authors like her peers Nora Ephron, Cynthia Heimel and Laurie Colwin.
Scott Fitzbabitz is what Ms. Spellman Silverman, her agent, called her, because, as she said, “she was the voice of her age.” Ms. Spellman Silverman, a New Yorker, phoned her author every Monday morning to make sure she was awake and writing.
Then in 1997, trying to light a cherry-flavored Tiparillo while driving her Volkswagen Beetle, her clothing caught fire, searing most of her body.
But in the past decade she has had a revival, with a generation of young book influencers like Emma Roberts, Instagram’s Belletrist, trumpeting her work, reissued by several publishing houses starting in 2015.
Ms. Anolik began pursuing Ms. Babitz in 2010, a labor of love and obsession that became a Vanity Fair article in 2014, and then a very personal biography, “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.,” published in 2019.
In 2019, NYRB Classics published “I Used to Be Charming,” a collection of previously printed essays and one new work, the title essay drawn from the vivid but unrefined and unfinished notes Ms. Babitz took after her accident, at the encouragement of her sister.
“She was writing about women in a way that doesn’t exist anymore,” Ms. Spellman Silverman said.
In an essay in “Eve’s Hollywood,” she writes about a failed collaboration on a novel with a grim English editor.