L.A. Woman. Eve Babitz

      Chapter Four

      AT THE AGE OF FIVE Lola was brought by her family to California, along with the German silverware, the mahogany tables, the twenty-four dining room chairs, the lace tablecloths, the candelabra, the servants, from the home with a clothes hamper chute where when the cloth used for Kotex in those days was soiled, you just lightly tossed it down the little wall door and one week later it was returned to you nice and clean and neatly folded by some woman who came once a week to launder, a woman nobody ever saw – or at least Lola never even remembered. Until she ran away from home at the age of twenty-six to join a Martha Graham-type traveling modern dance troupe and became radicalized into a Trotskyite, she lived in that house with that furniture and for a long time, though she refused to speak that Berliner German they spoke at home to keep the tone up and the servants in Mars where they belonged in 1911.

      It wasn’t as though a lot of German silverware and candelabra weren’t already out in Southern California by the time Hein Vogel, Lola’s westward-destined mother – one of those Jews too elegant to have left before any pogroms squeezed her out like my grandmother’s exit from Kiev – arrived, it was just that most of it was in Pasadena on North Orange Grove Drive. The mansions in Pasadena even today are perfect for trainloads of European treasures brought from the Midwestern fortunes – the Bambols, the Wrigleys – coming to California for “the climate.” Because if you were from the Midwest, and you wanted to breathe air that wasn’t all taken up by the fortunes breathing in the Newport Beach-style mansions, Henry James tablecloths, and already organized society which wasn’t going to let anyone in until endless formalities transpired, then “the climate” of California, the orange groves, the purple mountains’ actual visible majesty – the San Gabriel Mountains there, brightly purple – was a good place for your servants to polish your teapots.

      Perhaps Lola’s German Midwestern fortune made from stockings was refused in Pasadena because it was Jewish and that’s why it all had to come to Hollywood and that’s why Lola was raised in the middle of Hollywood during the twenties with Hollywood Boulevard four blocks away; the Hollywood School for Girls, the private school she attended; Jean Harlow sitting next to her in class, Jackie Coogan, the only boy and the school mascot, while at home she was strictly bound to a classic Germany, a Germany of violin practice two hours a day, of culture, of table manners that got Bobby Hall – one of those Panthers of the sixties whom she traveled with when she married Luther, her black second husband – so mad he shot a hole through her dining room ceiling. I mean Lola eating ribs with a knife and fork was just too much for him. But Lola, who was sixty by then, could never have picked something up with her fingers – after all her mother, then ninety-four, was still alive even if it was in Honolulu (that woman really meant West) and even though Lola was now officially into The Movement with a vengeance, she just wasn’t about to not use silverware.

      Of course it was nothing to be too much for the Black Panther Party when you’re sixty if you’ve been too much for the Hollywood School for Girls when you were fifteen. She’d go to school there in 1926 dressed in her navy blue middy outfit and wait till school let out to change into a black skirt slit up to her thigh and a lot of blood-red lipstick smashed on the front of her face, so she could go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and try and pick up guys, trying to look older than a schoolgirl yet still unable to quite look old enough by then. Even though the Hollywood School for Girls believed the worst, Lola dropped out before she could graduate so as not to spread sin around the virgins in her class. L.A. It was impossible for her strict German upbringing to stop Lola from being too much. For L.A. women became L.A. women if they got there young enough, no matter what they had been born into.

      When Lola was sixteen, her mother gave Lola a Model T Ford, a reward because Lola won the state violin gold medal – though how Lola focused herself into the discipline it takes to practice a violin during the Hollywood School for Girls is simply paradoxical enough for some L.A. woman like her to prove was possible.

      The Model T Ford gave her exactly everything. She could drive down Sunset Boulevard, which in 1927 when she began taking the car to the beach wasn’t much of a street at all and still isn’t, though at least today it’s paved.

      Lola became a muscle beach aficionado, the top of four layers of musclemen – the girl with her arms raised in graceful triumph, wearing a horrible black wool bathing suit which did purposefully Bermuda shorts-type things to her gorgeous thighs and crowded her 36DD breasts into squashed-out spongecakes. The neckline was modesty itself and it was necklines like these that were probably responsible for people, the minute they could, turning into Jean Harlow by the thirties and letting the devil take the hindmost.

      Mountain climbing – in those days, all you had to do in Hollywood was go outside to go mountain climbing – was Lola’s idea of where to take boyfriends and get pregnant and by the time she was nineteen she’d had three gold medals for violin state champion and four abortions, her life having finally, I suppose, proven that you can’t go around being an L.A. woman and expect society not to notice when your bowing begins to sound a little off – not screechy, naturally but, well, she simply wasn’t gold medal material finally, and they gave her a silver one, second prize. My father got the gold one. Even though Lola insists that my father’s tone was then and always has been enough to make you leave the room.

      “Mort,” she says to my father, the minute he tries to play anything in front of her for as long as I can remember, “for God’s sake! Not more Bach!”

      And he looks around like a cat does when it pretends it wasn’t doing what it just did that you caught it at, and was really licking its foot, or wondering if it were going to rain.

      Lola and my father never saw anything in each other. My father would never have liked any woman crazier than my mother. And as for Lola – looking at a particularly outstanding old photograph of her standing beside this six-foot-tall extra who looked like a Hindu (as he was billed in his mystic-prince capacity for those who wanted a “reading”), both Lola and he wearing this rattan shadow falling across what would have otherwise shown them to be as naked as you thought – Mort was simply too square.

      From the beginning, from the time she was standing outside that mountain cabin and she was wearing her Cleopatra haircut which she wore all her life, turning it oranger and oranger with henna as time went on until today Colette would have tripped if she saw her, Lola’s preferences weren’t socially bogged down. And a trust fund kept her from letting what she wanted get in the way of wolves at the door, for wolves never threatened her door and she never had to turn to the idea of respectability just to tide herself over for a decade or two until she could figure out how to indulge her flagrant tastes for the out-of-the-question. Or for men who, English mothers have always told their daughters, simply “won’t do.”

      Even she, Lola’s mother, didn’t seem to get overburdened by the problem of men who “didn’t do,” once her only husband’s brisk demise allowed her to pack up and leave for L.A.

      “Nobody ever knew why Hein was such a rebel,” Lola said. “The family wanted her to take the three of us home to Berlin and be brought up with the better things. Minneapolis,