Without intending to, Ive redefined some of the most famous writers public personas.
It was out of love as much as aggression.
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Its you singing your praises in the voice of another, basically.
And yet it is the done thing, what editors and publishing houses expect.
Long story short, I knuckled under.
I agreed to use a blurb on the jacket of my new book,Didion & Babitz.
The rebel spark in my heart, though, wasnt completely snuffed.
Im so happy somebody killed her at last and it didnt have to be me.
But not that much of a fake-out.
Now, obviously I didnt kill Didion.
Didnt kill her in a literal sense, didnt kill her in a figurative sense.
Nobody could kill her.
Shes too good to kill.
But I was flattered that BabitzthoughtId killed her.
It made me me, with my too-ready smile, my wouldnt-hurt-a-fly ponytail feel fearsome.
Like a literary assassin.
Scribner, to my surprise, was into the idea of a blurb from Eve.
Just not that particular blurb.
And I backed off because Scribner was right.
Scribner, though, was also wrong.
The violence I committed was inadvertent.
But then, Id committed inadvertent violence before.
(The definitive YA novel as well.The Secret HistoryisHarry Potterif Harry fucked and did drugs instead of magic.)
The book was a cultural touchstone of my teen years.
Ellis and Lethem would talk to me for the podcast.
The notoriously reticent Tartt, however, would not.
I therefore had to report on her more thoroughly, more rigorously, more relentlessly.
I even found the real Richard Papen, the books protagonist: Tartt herself.
Same as Papen, Tartt felt the blight and taint of her origins.
They just had a general reputation as not being liberal in terms of race.)
Same as Papen, Tartt had a father who ran a gas station.
(The Southland Service Station on Highway 51.)
Same as Papen, Tartt was on financial aid.
And, same as Papen, Tartt took pains to conceal these facts.
Shed later claim Sleepytown was fiction mislabeled as memoir.
And fiction it assuredly was, as both her maternal great-grandfathers died before she was born.
How, in other words, she went from Donna Tartt to Donna Tartt.
I pulled back the curtain on Tartt she was as much an autobiographer as a novelist!
She was as deliberate a creation as any of her characters!
Tartt was less than delighted.
There was a spate of fire-breathing letters from her lawyers.
(From George Sheanshang, Esq.
Id discovered a cache of letters shed written Lethem in the winter of 198283.
Tartts anger brought me no pleasure, only consternation.
I felt the podcast was an act of love, a tribute to the enduring power of her book.
Yet she construed it as an act of aggression.
And its entirely possible that her interpretation is the more accurate.
There might have been an unconscious malice a glee to my pounce.
(Remember Eves line, Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion?)
That I didnt intend to be cruel doesnt mean I wasnt.
So perhaps the podcast was both: an act of loveandan act of aggression.
A kiss that was also a kiss-off.
Joan Didion, like Donna Tartt, isnt just a writer is a celebrity writer.
The two are famous in a way that writers so rarely are.
Are famous in a way that actors are famous, or singers.
They have a romance, a glamour, a theatricality.
Theyre known for their books, obviously and of course.
Which is to say, it isnt only their prose that fascinates and beguiles, itsthem.
Or, rather, their personas.
Baitz, then in his 20s, was a playwright.
Ellis continued: My boyfriend Jim was blond, blue-eyed a lawyer, very straight-acting, very good-looking.
So, look, I always assumed John was gay.
I never assumed he wasnotgay.
It was a gay man and a wife living the way you were supposed to live.
Thats how it was back then.
You couldnt be open.
And there were friends of mine who spotted John in certain gay bars late at night, very drunk.
Not the chic, hip gay bars, the Times Square gay bars.
That Dunne may have been inclined toward homosexuality isnt especially noteworthy.
(It makes their 20th-century marriage seem 21st-century, frankly mixed orientation.)
So he wasnt her lover boy.
He was pretty much her everything else: her co-writer, her co-parent, her co-dependent.
Well, he did.
And because he did, she had the power of silence.
It was a power she wielded masterfully.
A tongue-tied girl from the provinces.
Mouse was what journalistNoel Parmentel, her first love, maybe her one true love, called her.
She was so small, so quiet timorous, really, said Parmentel.
Only in the early 60s did she start to change.
Its breaking her heart.
Didions motives for marrying Dunne might have been confused, compromised even.
Once she was with him, though, she flowered.
Now she didnt speak on purpose.
She understood that not speaking gave her mystery and mystery gave her magnetism.
People were fascinated by her.
I remember I gave a party.
Joan was just standing there, not saying a thing.
She had on this pair of dark glasses.
I cracked up and said, I think youve answered your own question.
She was like the sphinx.
And when the sphinx spoke, everybody listened.
Listened even harder when the sphinx didnt speak.
A memory from writer David Thomson: I saw Joan and John do an event together once.
They had this double act going.
Someone asked Joan a question, and she waved a hand at John, and he answered for her.
It was quite extraordinary, really.
He did all the talking, but all the attention was on her.
And Dunne did more than her talking.
Talent wasnt enough to secure the literary pinnacle.
Cunning was every bit as necessary.
Dunne, never in contention for the spot of Major American Writer, hustled overtly.
Hed just broken his arm.
It was in a cast.
But he wasstillgoing to a party.)
Which allowed Didion, very much in contention, to hustle covertly.
John was dominant, and Joan was happy to have him so, said writer Susanna Moore.
Their relationship was a bit good copbad cop.
Shed let him execute the cut or the criticism, make the attack.
That way she could stay above it all.
Without Dunne, Didions persona near silent, above the fray, cooler than cool wouldnt have been possible.
She presented as totally and utterly self-sufficient.
Would Didion have felt the same aboutDidion & Babitz?
But also, maybe not.
Because the thing about Didion: She was always blurting out her own secrets.
A love story, except not between a man and a woman, between a man and a man.
If Didion was hiding, it was in plain sight.
Eve Babitz knew Joan Didion well as a person.
But it was Didions persona that obsessed her.
Would you be allowed to if you werent physically so unthreatening?
And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size.
She ingratiated herself with men, Babitz believed, by betraying women.
My book on her,Hollywoods Eve, was released in 2019.
Then Kendall Jenner was photographed reading Babitz on a yacht, and she was name-checked twice on theGossip Girlreboot.
She was officially launched, the sensation and phenomenon she was always meant to be.
I have a theory.
(Why would she worry about presenting as the thing?
It was one hundred percent nonfiction.
I just changed the names.
So I wouldnt get sued!
Babitz is now a cultural heroine as well as a literary, same as Didion.
In short, Babitz is now a brand.
And that brand is the un-Didion.
Theres no question that I puff up Babitz in the new book.
(Puff her up with good reason.
At the same time: Do I cut down Didion, in revealing so much about her?
Do I take this larger-than-life figure and reduce her, reveal her as puny, unworthy?
The answer is an emphatic no.
As I emphatically do not cut down Donna Tartt inOnce Upon a Time … at Bennington College.
On it, the daily schedule of young Jimmy Gatz.
Self-exhortations include Study electricity and Bath every other day and No more smoking or chewing.
The schedule is a how-to guide to becoming Jay Gatsby.
Or that Jay Gatsby started out Jimmy Gatz.
Even if Nick Carraway is letting you in on the trick behind Gatsbys transformation, Gatsby is still Great.
