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B I O G R A P H Y through to send their condolences to my mother while Joan was editing her piece”, he recalled. “But it is quite possible that Joan was not aware that was the only line in the house. And yes, my father was incensed but [I] do not recall him actually asking her to get off the phone so my mother could use the line, although he very well may have eventually done so. Very tense couple of hours there for a while.” This is quite a different case, and suggests that Anolik has been somewhat selective in her presentation of certain events. Throughout, she dispenses with the farce of objectivity. Much of the book is written in a gossipy tone – there’s a lot of “that thing I said earlier? Not entirely true …”. Anolik makes no apology for being an “Eve girl”, giving Didion credit where it’s due while eagerly exploring traits that are at odds with her prevailing image. “People are inclined to get a little soft in the head where Joan Didion is concerned”, she states early in the book. They “prefer to emphasize the romantic aspects of her literary ascent” (her wifehood, her motherhood, her widowhood) while “dismissing or ignoring the unromantic” (her “greedy and grinding ambition”, and “brute force of will”). Echoing Leadbeater’s assertion that people tend to see fragments of Didion as opposed to the whole, Anolik argues that we should not be squeamish about this harder side of her. Didion certainly wasn’t. Whatever the specific details of the phone-call saga, it’s a striking example of her tendency to prioritize work above all else – a narrative Anolik leans further into. The book is more about Babitz than Didion. For starters, Anolik is Babitz’s biographer and has a clearly stated predilection for her work. Her book Hollywood’s Eve (2019) is a blazing account of Babitz’s life as an artist, muse and social force in 1960s and 1970s LA – an era of pleasure and rebellion that she helped to shape through her participation and chronicled in her writing. After Babitz died of complications from Huntington’s disease in 2021, Anolik discovered a stack of sealed boxes in her apartment containing a “lost world” of letters, which this book uses as “the key to unlocking Didion”. It was Didion, after all, who championed Babitz as a writer rather than just “Eve Bah-bitz with the great big tits”, as the West Hollywood milieu used to call her; Didion who stuck her neck out for Babitz and recommended her to editors and publishers when she hardly did so for anybody; Didion who agreed to edit her first book, Eve’s Hollywood (1974). (Babitz “fired” Didion in the end, but, as Anolik points out, the manuscript probably wouldn’t have sold in the first place without her co-sign.) Both were interested in the same scene, at the same time, dissecting its politics of social upheaval and liberation with their own razor-sharp wit while “on the same drugs” (in Babitz’s words). Babitz has three novels, two collections of semi-fictionalized memoirs and three works of nonfiction to her name (which have found their biggest audience in recent years, owing to a Vanity Fair profile by Anolik published in 2014), and her prose is as dazzling as LA itself. A bodily romp of sun-soaked sex, drugs and ro c k ’ n’ ro l l , her wr i t i ng has a s e a r i ng qu a l i t y informed by the hedonism of her life and vice versa. She was born in Hollywood to bohemian parents, goddaughter to Igor Stravinsky, lover to Harrison Ford, Annie Leibovitz and countless others, but her contribution to the scene came largely from the inside. A one-woman industry, she was a self-assured writer, sex goddess and social butterfly whose artistic W H E R E D O E S C R E AT I V I T Y H A P P E N ? ‘A must-read for those interested in music, literature and the synthesis of art’ R O L F H I N D , C O M P O S E R A N D P I A N I S T 4 TLS “Those who see her portrait of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking often find it hard to reconcile with her merciless drive Emma Garland is a writer and editor based in London. Her first book, Tell All Your Friends: A cultural history of mainstream emo 2000–2013, is due out in 2026 eye became the catalyst for so much household lore. It was she who put Steve Martin in his first white suit, who introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, who “dragged Jim [Morrison] into bed” before he was famous and tried to dissuade him from calling his band the Doors because it was “corny”. As a young hopeful, she sent a draft of her first novel to Joseph Heller, accompanied by two sentences: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer”. In short, Babitz was the counterculture. She didn’t just write about it, she helped to create it. But in the end it was Didion who got inside and broke it open. Her first nonfiction collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (1979), cut through the tensions leading up to, during and after the Summer of Love with surgical precision: an outsider carefully positioned on the inside, happy not to be noticed. The hypnotic clarity of her writing and exactitude of emotion – everything observed, processed and refined or withheld for effect – secured her reputation as serious and faithful to fact. It also made her a cultural institution. Despite her acclaim in recent years, Babitz remains as she always has been: the underdog. You might say that where Babitz lived, Didion performed. (“I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse”, she said in an interview with the Paris Review in 1978.) Where Babitz was hot-blooded and hands-on, Didion was calculated and distant – constantly looking to expose the truth, rather than embracing the fantasy as Babitz did. (“In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one”, she said). Coming from a more removed perspective than Leadbeater or Dunne’s books, Didion & Babitz dispels the notion that their lives ran parallel, but in rivalry. Rather, it takes two literary darlings who assembled an armour of mythology to protect themselves – Didion through work, Babitz through reputation – and sets out a convincing thesis that they had more in common than either would have cared to admit. The selective omission of certain details – Didion’s desire, Babitz’s ambition – only serves to highlight their reflections in one another. Ultimately, Didion & Babitz suggests that the most irreconcilable difference between the two was a matter of how they navigated their careers, which Anolik argues was a reflection of how they lived their lives. At a time when the terms of literary success were harshly determined by men, the rebellious Babitz refused to capitulate. She didn’t dim her sexuality, carve out a “reputable” character or make “smart” moves to further her work. The careerdriven Didion was more willing to play by men’s rules and more realistic about the fragile ground on which women’s success is determined. For that reason, as Anolik writes, “It was through Joan’s eyes, not Eve’s, that generations of readers would see LA”. On the afternoon of Didion’s death, the author Bret Easton Ellis reflected on her work and influence in an episode of his podcast. He made his way to her via memories of writing his novel The Shards (2023), an autofictional account of his last year of high school in 1980s LA. In that book, “Bret” reads Didion while the narrative picks away at the city’s glamorous surface to reveal the psychotic numbness beneath it (making, in effect, the same point Didion made about the hippie movement, which is that it was a cultural breakdown dressed up as a revolution). “[W]riters shape their … narratives about the world in ways that are different from people who aren’t writers – and sometimes to the detriment of everyone around them.” They are, Ellis believes, “doomed to be alone, creating false narratives so people will pay attention”. This was Joan Didion’s life’s work. She wasn’t just a writer. She was a celebrity, an institution, a cultural assassin who embedded herself with the runaways and acid heads of Haight-Ashbury, then made her name by tearing them apart – and she never pretended otherwise. As she put it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Writers are always selling somebody out”. n FEBRUARY 28, 2025
page 5
J O U R N A L I S M New York, New York! Celebrating the rats, mobsters and little people of the Big City ZOE GUTTENPLAN A TOWN WITHOUT TIME Gay Talese’s New York GAY TALESE 432pp. Mariner. £20 (US $29.99). NEW YORK SKETCHES E. B. WHITE 152pp. McNally Editions. Paperback, £15.99 (US $18). When the late city edition of the New York Times hit the pavement on April 8, 1972, it was following in the final footsteps of “Crazy Joe” Gallo, the mob boss whose austere gaze met readers’ eyes from the front page. The previous day, Gallo had dined at Umberto’s Clam House, a two-month-old restaurant on the corner of Mulberry and Hester Streets in the Manhattan neighbourhood of Little Italy. The mafioso and his party had been eating scungilli (sea snails) when a 5ft 8in tall balding man wearing a tweed car coat walked in. In his hand was a .38-caliber pistol. He opened fire. Gallo, hit, staggered out the front door. The assassin kept shooting through the transom window. Gallo collapsed on Hester Street and died. Umberto’s has long since moved down the block. Walking past its new(ish) location late one December night, I paused to tie my shoelace. I was removing my second glove when a large, shaggy rat scuttled over my winter boot. Rats, like the slow-walking tourists who throng to the middle of Mulberry Street to look for the non-existent bullet holes in Umberto’s new location, are despised by most New Yorkers. The controversy-riddled mayor, Eric Adams, has even appointed a “rat czar” as part of his campaign to crack down on, in his words, “public enemy number one”. That term was popularized in 1930 by Frank J. Loesch, chairman of the Chicago Crime Commission, to describe Al Capone. Other prominent gangsters of the age were given the moniker. Richard Nixon used it when talking about drug abuse. So far as I can tell, Adams is the first to apply it to rodents. But in some ways rats and mobsters occupy the same shadowy underworld. Rarely seen in daylight, they nevertheless form part of New York’s foundation. The importance of such characters to the mythology of the city is a common feature of the writing of both E. B. White and Gay Talese. White was born in 1899 in a suburb of New York. There was college (Cornell) and a stint in Seattle before he returned to the city in 1924. After the New Yorker was founded the following year, White began writing for the magazine; he joined its staff in 1927 and continued to publish in its pages for more than half a century. New York Sketches mostly comprises scribbles and scrawls about the city from his vast New Yorker archive. It is full of animals that people tend to ignore. Snails “have a kind of nobility”. Pigeons are “city dwellers by choice” and live in nests one might classify as baroque, modern, gothic or military. In “The Wings of Orville”, a stubborn sparrow flies from the statue of Admiral Farragut on Madison Square to Hastings-on-Hudson carrying a bottle cap, simply “to prove the practicability” of such a trip. His wife watches as he leaves, knowing he’ll be “all tuckered out when he gets back”. A few days later, she grudgingly helps him pull a string from their nest so he can “prove the feasibility of FEBRUARY 28, 2025 towing a wren behind a sparrow”. After the birds crash, despite her scepticism, she wraps sandwiches in paper for him to take on his next attempt. I first encountered White’s spry, winking writing as a child, reading Stuart Little (1945) and Charlotte’s Web (1952). It was therefore no surprise to find that, years before American children were looking for messages such as “Some Pig” in wispy barn corners, he was already giving human neuroses and tics to maligned animals. Talese was more interested in the city’s maligned people. Born in New Jersey in 1932, he started his career as a copy boy and sports reporter. He spent the 1950s working for the New York Times, and in 1960 began writing for Esquire. Between 1964 and 1971, he researched and interviewed members of the Bonanno crime family. The result was Honor Thy Father, a bestselling book the first few chapters of which were excerpted in Esquire under the heading “The Kidnapping of Joe Bonanno”. It is telling that Talese’s tale of the disappearance of a crime boss, and the subsequent power struggle, begins not with the glint of a gun barrel, but with a doorman. He stands in the lobby of a Park Avenue building, chatting to the elevator operator, when, outside, Joe Bonanno is snatched. And although the doorman is adamant that he saw nothing, Talese helps us see it all. In prose that is never florid but always evocative, Zoe Guttenplan is a writer and book designer. She works at Literary Review PARIS CONCEALED Masks in the City of Light JAMES H. JOHNSON “There is nothing quite like Paris Concealed. Its sources are exceptionally rich and rewarding, the writing is elegant and sustained, and the overall work is highly interdisciplinary.”—Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London Cloth £36.00 ISBN: 9780226836461 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS press.uchicago.edu Trade Enquiries to Yale Representation Ltd. yalerep@yaleup.co.uk 020 7079 4900 TLS he shows us how Bonanno “shivered from the cold rain and wind, feeling it seep through his gray silk suit”, before being shoved into the back of a beige s edan and whi sked away. What f o l l ows i s an immersive view of the paranoia and tedium of mafia life, full of details such as the memory of “boyhood moments waiting in a confessional, fretful seconds before the stern priest slapped open the sliding screen” that hits Bonanno’s son while he is waiting in a phone booth for a call that might never come. The extract is reprinted in A Town Without Time, nestled among other Talese classics such as “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, a profile first published in 1966, and the entirety of his book The Bridge (1964), as well as less familiar pieces like “Mr Bad News” (1966) and “Journey into the Cat Jungle” (1957). In each article, Talese turns hi s high beams towards the “tall shadows, sharp angles, and crooked people” of New York, not discriminating between celebrit y and invisible citizen. The Bridge introduces us to “Benny the Mouse”, the best cableman in America for thirty years who “fumed, fretted, and cursed” for three days when he was told he would not be stringing cable for the Verrazzano-Narrows bridge. In “Mr Bad News”, the chief obituary writer of the New York Times “prefers being everyman, anyman, nobody – Times Employee No 97353, Library Card No 663 7662, the possessor of a Sam Goody Courtesy Card, the borrower of his mother-in-law’s 1963 Buick Compact on sunny weekends, an eminently unquotable man” to having the “glory” of a byline. These are people at whom the average passerby would not blink twice. But in Talese’s telling we can almost feel them sitting next to us, stirring sugar into a cup of coffee, turning the pages of the morning edition. The collection’s thesis is laid out in the title of its opening piece: “New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed”. Luckily, Talese is an expert noticer. As well as the doormen who are “an obliging, endlessly articulate group of sidewalk diplomats”, he shows us the “coins, paper clips, ballpoint pens, and little girls’ pocketbooks” fished out of the sea lions’ pool in the Bronx Zoo, and the way people “slump behind newspapers or walk aimlessly about” when it starts to rain. White also has an eagle eye for human habits. New Yorkers crossing one-way streets “glance in the right direction as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind”, but after that there is always “one small, quick, furtive look in the opposite direction”. He knows that New Yorkers make this “last sacrifice on the altar of human fallibility” for the same reason Bonanno’s son waits at his apartment’s peephole with a gun, even when his associate has buzzed up using the correct code: an unshakable sense that , even “ in the maze of well-regulated vehicles and strong, straight buildings, something will go completely crazy”. A Town Without Time is an excellent introduction to one of America’s defining journalistic voices. It’s hefty and varied, and, in a master stroke, it includes scans of Talese’s notes. New York Sketches is slim and light, but its poetry, fiction and prose are full of an exuberant love for the city – complaints about it too, though in New York that’s often the same thing. One great joy of reading these professional noticers is that you become a noticer as well. As I walked through Grand Central station, I became attuned to what White called “the noise of destinations” – Tannoy announcements and the click clack click of heels strutting out of the Oyster Bar. After December’s first snowfall, I looked towards “the upper chambers of the high apartment buildings, the campsites of the cloud-wreathed people ... connected to earth only through an elevator shaft”, who couldn’t see the snowman balanced on a fire hydrant below. Ascending from the subway near Condé Nast HQ, I spotted “a group of suave and wrinkle-proof women” and wondered if they were professional progenies of the Vogue employees Talese described in 1961. These chroniclers of Gotham are united in their understanding that while New York is skyscrapers, checkered cabs and a martini at midnight, it’s more than these things too. They showed me the astounding beauty in the mundane. Even in a rat skulking in the shadows of a mobster’s favourite restaurant. n 5

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B I O G R A P H Y

through to send their condolences to my mother while Joan was editing her piece”, he recalled. “But it is quite possible that Joan was not aware that was the only line in the house. And yes, my father was incensed but [I] do not recall him actually asking her to get off the phone so my mother could use the line, although he very well may have eventually done so. Very tense couple of hours there for a while.” This is quite a different case, and suggests that Anolik has been somewhat selective in her presentation of certain events.

Throughout, she dispenses with the farce of objectivity. Much of the book is written in a gossipy tone – there’s a lot of “that thing I said earlier? Not entirely true …”. Anolik makes no apology for being an “Eve girl”, giving Didion credit where it’s due while eagerly exploring traits that are at odds with her prevailing image. “People are inclined to get a little soft in the head where Joan Didion is concerned”, she states early in the book. They “prefer to emphasize the romantic aspects of her literary ascent” (her wifehood, her motherhood, her widowhood) while “dismissing or ignoring the unromantic” (her “greedy and grinding ambition”, and “brute force of will”). Echoing Leadbeater’s assertion that people tend to see fragments of Didion as opposed to the whole, Anolik argues that we should not be squeamish about this harder side of her. Didion certainly wasn’t. Whatever the specific details of the phone-call saga, it’s a striking example of her tendency to prioritize work above all else – a narrative Anolik leans further into.

The book is more about Babitz than Didion. For starters, Anolik is Babitz’s biographer and has a clearly stated predilection for her work. Her book Hollywood’s Eve (2019) is a blazing account of Babitz’s life as an artist, muse and social force in 1960s and 1970s LA – an era of pleasure and rebellion that she helped to shape through her participation and chronicled in her writing. After Babitz died of complications from Huntington’s disease in 2021, Anolik discovered a stack of sealed boxes in her apartment containing a “lost world” of letters, which this book uses as “the key to unlocking Didion”. It was Didion, after all, who championed Babitz as a writer rather than just “Eve Bah-bitz with the great big tits”, as the West Hollywood milieu used to call her; Didion who stuck her neck out for Babitz and recommended her to editors and publishers when she hardly did so for anybody; Didion who agreed to edit her first book, Eve’s Hollywood (1974). (Babitz “fired” Didion in the end, but, as Anolik points out, the manuscript probably wouldn’t have sold in the first place without her co-sign.)

Both were interested in the same scene, at the same time, dissecting its politics of social upheaval and liberation with their own razor-sharp wit while “on the same drugs” (in Babitz’s words). Babitz has three novels, two collections of semi-fictionalized memoirs and three works of nonfiction to her name (which have found their biggest audience in recent years, owing to a Vanity Fair profile by Anolik published in 2014), and her prose is as dazzling as LA itself. A bodily romp of sun-soaked sex, drugs and ro c k ’ n’ ro l l , her wr i t i ng has a s e a r i ng qu a l i t y informed by the hedonism of her life and vice versa. She was born in Hollywood to bohemian parents, goddaughter to Igor Stravinsky, lover to Harrison Ford, Annie Leibovitz and countless others, but her contribution to the scene came largely from the inside. A one-woman industry, she was a self-assured writer, sex goddess and social butterfly whose artistic

W H E R E D O E S C R E AT I V I T Y H A P P E N ?

‘A must-read for those interested in music, literature and the synthesis of art’ R O L F H I N D , C O M P O S E R A N D P I A N I S T

4

TLS

“Those who see her portrait of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking often find it hard to reconcile with her merciless drive

Emma Garland is a writer and editor based in London. Her first book, Tell All Your Friends: A cultural history of mainstream emo 2000–2013, is due out in 2026

eye became the catalyst for so much household lore. It was she who put Steve Martin in his first white suit, who introduced Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí, who “dragged Jim [Morrison] into bed” before he was famous and tried to dissuade him from calling his band the Doors because it was “corny”. As a young hopeful, she sent a draft of her first novel to Joseph Heller, accompanied by two sentences: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer”.

In short, Babitz was the counterculture. She didn’t just write about it, she helped to create it. But in the end it was Didion who got inside and broke it open. Her first nonfiction collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album (1979), cut through the tensions leading up to, during and after the Summer of Love with surgical precision: an outsider carefully positioned on the inside, happy not to be noticed. The hypnotic clarity of her writing and exactitude of emotion – everything observed, processed and refined or withheld for effect – secured her reputation as serious and faithful to fact. It also made her a cultural institution. Despite her acclaim in recent years, Babitz remains as she always has been: the underdog.

You might say that where Babitz lived, Didion performed. (“I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse”, she said in an interview with the Paris Review in 1978.) Where Babitz was hot-blooded and hands-on, Didion was calculated and distant – constantly looking to expose the truth, rather than embracing the fantasy as Babitz did. (“In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one”, she said). Coming from a more removed perspective than Leadbeater or Dunne’s books, Didion & Babitz dispels the notion that their lives ran parallel, but in rivalry. Rather, it takes two literary darlings who assembled an armour of mythology to protect themselves – Didion through work, Babitz through reputation – and sets out a convincing thesis that they had more in common than either would have cared to admit. The selective omission of certain details – Didion’s desire, Babitz’s ambition – only serves to highlight their reflections in one another.

Ultimately, Didion & Babitz suggests that the most irreconcilable difference between the two was a matter of how they navigated their careers, which Anolik argues was a reflection of how they lived their lives. At a time when the terms of literary success were harshly determined by men, the rebellious Babitz refused to capitulate. She didn’t dim her sexuality, carve out a “reputable” character or make “smart” moves to further her work. The careerdriven Didion was more willing to play by men’s rules and more realistic about the fragile ground on which women’s success is determined. For that reason, as Anolik writes, “It was through Joan’s eyes, not Eve’s, that generations of readers would see LA”.

On the afternoon of Didion’s death, the author Bret Easton Ellis reflected on her work and influence in an episode of his podcast. He made his way to her via memories of writing his novel The Shards (2023), an autofictional account of his last year of high school in 1980s LA. In that book, “Bret” reads Didion while the narrative picks away at the city’s glamorous surface to reveal the psychotic numbness beneath it (making, in effect, the same point Didion made about the hippie movement, which is that it was a cultural breakdown dressed up as a revolution).

“[W]riters shape their … narratives about the world in ways that are different from people who aren’t writers – and sometimes to the detriment of everyone around them.” They are, Ellis believes, “doomed to be alone, creating false narratives so people will pay attention”. This was Joan Didion’s life’s work. She wasn’t just a writer. She was a celebrity, an institution, a cultural assassin who embedded herself with the runaways and acid heads of Haight-Ashbury, then made her name by tearing them apart – and she never pretended otherwise. As she put it in Slouching Towards Bethlehem: “Writers are always selling somebody out”. n

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

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