Sex & Rage. Eve Babitz
anarchists, and Jacaranda’s mother was born illegitimately, because her mother refused to marry the man who was the father. “I’m not marrying a rapist,” Jacaranda’s maternal grandmother explained. She moved to Texas and lost her illusions about the Catholic Church in one fell swoop—she was excommunicated, not him!
The Ocean
They lived in Santa Monica near the ocean. Jacaranda’s father was a studio musician and they lived in a bungalow house, one with a mortgage, about two blocks from the ocean. Jacaranda grew up tan, with streaky blond hair, and tar on the bottom of her feet. Her sister, April, grew up three years younger, with a darker tan, and streaky reddish layers in her darker hair, and tar on the bottom of her feet. They looked absolutely nothing alike.
From the very start, Jacaranda was the big one with the large head who, till she was three, had to be swathed in pink for people not to say, “My, what a nice healthy boy you’ve got there . . .” April was a girl, a girlish girl with curly brown curls and a rosy-cheeked smile, delicate bone structure, and a small head. Neither Jacaranda nor April looked anything at all like the parents, Mort and Mae Leven, except that Jacaranda’s head and Mort Leven’s head were 7 ⅞ in hat size—one of the largest hat sizes, even for men.
The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden. All Jacaranda cared about was surfing. First it was body-surfing where she would stare at the edge of the water, watching the waves to see which side the riptide was twisting back out on; then she’d slowly force herself upon the sea though it resisted. She’d walk out till she was up to her waist and all tangled up in the problem. The waves would now be coming and it was her choice, as they came, whether to slide on through under them in the glassgreen water and ignore them crashing toward L.A. behind her—or to match herself up with the ocean’s rhythm, to swim out just far enough, then stop, wait, push herself forward to catch the wave, and tumble into shore. Sometimes, if she miscalculated, she’d be swung back under the wave’s lip and squashed down into the sand. When she was twelve, Jacaranda was given a surfboard.
No matter what the waves were doing, no matter what tides and thunders went on beneath her, she stayed on the board. The board tilted and tried to buck her off, the whole world slanted suddenly, the board would shoot out from under her before she knew it—the trick was to get the board back and keep going.
Jacaranda would surf before school and after school, and during school if she could, if the day was too nice. Mae Leven was “understanding” and would write notes to Jacaranda’s teachers about her daughter “coming down with a cold.” If Jacaranda tried it too often, Mae would turn into a black mamba snake and whirl around like a whip, snarling something darkly Southern.
Mort Leven played in the orchestra at Twentieth Century-Fox. They paid him $150 a week, which, in 1949 when he went “under contract,” was a comfortable salary. It allowed him to put a down payment on their house in Santa Monica where they could live happily ever after for as long as ever after would bear up. Mort Leven’s great-aunt Sonia was a major star in the early twenties and thirties, and two decades later was still so powerful with the studio executive system that she was able to get Mort a job. (In Hollywood, if you can’t have a father in the Industry, the least you can have is a great-aunt.) It didn’t matter that Mort Leven had been a concert violinist or that he had studied with the greatest masters of his time and toured Europe; it didn’t matter that he was probably one of the finest violinists in the world—not to Twentieth Century-Fox. What mattered to the studio was Sonia, Jacaranda’s great-great-aunt and “godmother.” Sonia was able to get Mort the interview with Harry Katz, the studio’s chief musical administrator, an interview that in those days only a miracle or a father in the Industry merited.
Harry Katz had started out in the Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side and had a brother in the Industry, who in 1931 had sent for him to come out on a train to Hollywood. The pictures had sound and Harry could conduct the orchestra. After all, he’d been doing it since he was a kid in Toronto, a Jewish refugee like everybody else, a friend of Sonia’s from “the old days” before Toronto, in Kiev. So “For Sonia’s great-nephew, I put aside the official rules,” he declared. “I let a total unknown try out in my office.”
Mort was told to “bring something with a piano part” so Harry could play along and see just how well Mort could keep up. Mort Leven couldn’t quite bring himself to debase his musical worth either. So he brought a piece, a new piece by Igor Stravinsky that he’d purchased in Paris, a piece that hadn’t even been published in America yet, a piece where every measure was in a different time signature—so that it went from two-four to three-four (the waltz) to seven-eight to two-two to five-eight . . . Mort Leven casually handed the piano part to Harry and, on a music stand, set up his violin score.
“Who is this guy Stravinsky?” Harry asked. “That how you pronounce it?” He opened the music, took one look at the time signatures, and burst into roaring laughter. “Is this a joke?” To Harry Katz, this was the funniest thing a job applicant had ever done—faked up a whole score of music this way! (Later, when Harry found out a certain Igor Stravinsky did exist, and was the musical genius of the century, and was the man who had just left Jacaranda’s sixteenth birthday party with his glorious wife, Vera, he asked, “Morty, tell me the truth, a man like that, he can’t be making more than twenty-five grand a year, can he?”)
IT WAS AN easy life, growing up by the beautiful sea with her tan sister, her beautiful mother and black-curly-hair genius father, the Twentieth Century-Fox money rolling beautifully in every week, allowing Mort to save enough to buy real estate in Santa Monica. “Income property,” it was called. (So many musicians at the studio had apartment houses and courts that the joke, one day, became “Tenants, anyone?”)
In the days of her childhood, she was formally educated in three city schools where she mostly sat drawing pictures of Frederick’s of Hollywood models dressed in comic-book high boots and masks, with garter belts, knives, and whips, with long wavy blond hair down to their waists in the back, cleavage in the front, and beauty marks dotting to the left of their left eyes. She had not been raised in any religion, though she assumed she was Jewish. She found matzah hidden underneath her grandparents’ brocaded satin couch cushions, over at their West Los Angeles house every Passover. She really believed that the great religions of the world so far had come into being before anyone had grown up by the ocean. She believed in the ocean. Jacaranda believed that the ocean was a giant lullaby god who could be seduced into seeing things her way and could bring forth great waves. “Great waves, great waves, great waves,” Jacaranda used to chant on bland days. On days when there were great waves, she would in silence bow her head toward the sea and thank it. She would talk to the water, implore it to hotten up. When the surf was hot, everything reached a state of hurling glory and perfect balance between her body and the tides and eternity. “You children who’ve grown up in California,” she was often told, “you don’t know what life is. One day you’re going to run into a brick wall.”
“Like what?” she asked. “Snow?”
Jacaranda spent the first summer after graduating from high school custom-painting surfboards for twenty-five dollars apiece in her parents’ garage and bought a new old ’59 Plymouth station wagon.
By the time she got out of Santa Monica High School, she was a spare figure out on the beach wearing torn blue shorts or a torn blue bikini. From afar, she looked as if she’d washed up on the shore, a piece of driftwood with blond seaweed caught at one end. She had calcium deposits on her knees and on the tops of her feet that were caused by the pressure of paddling huge older boards out into the ocean. (These bumps were called “surf bumps” and even the scientists down at the Scripps Institute in La Jolla didn’t know exactly what they were.) From far away, she looked like all the other girls her age who were growing up near the water.
Up close, her expression—when she wasn’t smiling—gave people the impression that she was brand-new—a child, almost. When she smiled, her perfect white teeth slashed the air with sudden beauty, giving her a glow of confidence that smacked of rude invincibility. (“Are those teeth real?” was the common question.) Her bangs