Eve Babitz, the Hollywood It Girl, reflects on her wild lifestyle and trysts with Harrison Ford

Eve Babitz was an unquenchable Los Angeles groupie who bedded some of the world’s biggest stars. And now the 75-year-old is reflecting on her heyday of being a wild party girl. 

Babitz shared some of her fondest memories about the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle she led in the 1960s and 1970s when she sat down with author Lili Anolik for her new book Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

The brunette with unmissable 36DD breasts and famous bohemian parents became an icon of art and sex when she was photographed at age 20 playing chess naked with artist Marcel Duchamp in 1963 for a retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum.

‘People don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to f*** every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that – back when rock ‘n’ roll was in flower’, Babitz is quoted in the book. 

Some of her conquests include actors Warren Beatty, comic Steve Martin and Harrison Ford, who she claims ‘could f***. Nine people a day. It’s a talent, loving nine people in one day’ as she noted that ‘Warren could only do six’.

She also fell into a hot affair with Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors – despite the fact they were both always drunk when in bed together. But even during his worst blackouts, he knew to put in her diaphragm and take out her contact lenses.

‘People don’t know what it was to suddenly possess the power to f*** every single person you even idly fancied, they don’t know the physical glamour of that – back when rock ‘n’ roll was in flower’, Babitz (pictured in 1959) said

Some of her conquests include singer Jim Morrison (left) and actor Harrison Ford (right), who she said ‘could f***. Nine people a day. It’s a talent, loving nine people in one day’ as she noted ‘Warren [Beatty] could only do six’

Now the 75-year-old (pictured in 2011) is reflecting on her heyday of being a wild party girl. Babitz shares some of her fondest memories about the glitz and grittiness of the 1960s and ’70s as she sat down with author Lili Anolik for her new book 

Anolik writes that Babitz was a hybrid of bohemian intellectual and an unquenchable party girl, who even slept with famed photographer Annie Leibovitz.  

She was the ultimate groupie who carried her diaphragm in a matchbox in her purse, always at the ready and was proud of her voluminous breasts.

Once when Anolik visited Babitz for one of many interviews, Babitz said: ‘Look at these breasts’. 

‘Nice’, the author responded. ‘Nice? Nice? These breasts have conquered the world’, was Babitz’s reply. 

Lili Anolik interviewed Eve Babitz about her wild life for her new book Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.

‘I was 23 and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fever, wanting to f*** my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the nights of summer’, Babitz confessed to Anolik.    

Babitz designed album covers for musician friends and shot some cover photographs, giving her an-all access backstage pass to the hottest musicians.

‘Later she’d shrug off this career, laughingly refer to it as ‘a hoax’, writes Anolik in her book, published by Scribner.

‘What she really was, she claimed, was ”a slave to skinny boys with long hair who sang and played guitar – a groupie plus,” the author quotes Babitz.

‘Sex was essential to Eve…along with alcohol and drugs—any and all ingredients for a high good time—was a stimulus to her, allowing her to give vent to herself, tap the source,’ writes Anolik.

‘She was out of control and debauched once the sun set, disciplined and focused once it arose, ready to cast a cold eye on the previous night’s antics, reap the fruits of her beauty and daring’.

‘Eve wasn’t interested in having a boyfriend. But boyfriends, ah, now that was a different story. She wanted sexual freedom,’ the author writes.

Babitz wanted to be one of the boys, so ‘she traded sex and sexuality for access – sex and sexuality for sex and sexuality’.

Barney’s Beanery was the place where the artists picked up the girls – if Babitz didn’t pick the artists up first.

It was the only place she could hang out with them and she was an artist herself with her watercolors, sketches and collages – although her true medium was still undiscovered.

‘I was 23 and a daughter of Hollywood, alive with groupie fever, wanting to f**k my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the nights of summer’, Eve confessed to Anolik 

Babitz came out of Hollywood with Marilyn Monroe as her idol and her famous bohemian parents always entertaining hip musicians, writers and artists. Pictured: Eve with her younger sister and parents Sol and Mae Babitz 

Eve wasn’t really a groupie but posed as one to get access to men, and she wasn’t interested in anyone she wasn’t going to f***.

‘Eve was a funny, goofy kid who pushed her way onto the scene’, observed artist and sculptor Larry Bell – with her weird outfits, long fake eyelashes and confrontational personality. She was always right – or so she thought.

The Beanery gang even composed a little ditty about her: ‘Eve Ba-bitz/With the great big t**ts’.

‘I liked Eve, but I didn’t like being around her. She was always trying to get in your pants’, stated artist Billy Al Bengston’. But others didn’t seem to mind.

Eve was becoming a pinup on the surface – just like her idol, Marilyn Monroe and she was proud of those 36DDs that she elevated in her bra.

In 1966, she briefly moved to New York where she became friends with Andy Warhol and hung out with Timothy Leary’s psychedelic inhaling team and she started designing album covers and shooting photographs.

Eve attended an April Fools Ball high on acid in Greenwich Village where Yoko Ono was tossing crepe paper streams around as part of a group that staged happenings.

Back in Los Angeles by 1968, Eve fell into a lusty affair with the married but bi-sexual Earl McGrath, former music-industry executive with art galleries in New York and Los Angeles.

She was also sleeping with Harrison Ford, who McGrath was hot for as well.

Ford, before he was a big movie star, he worked as a carpenter.

Eve’s interests soon included rock ‘n’ roll and she started hanging out at the bar at the West Hollywood club, the Troubadour, where ‘the semen potential was so intense it was enough to get you pregnant just standing there’, Eve said.

In 1966, Babitz (left in 1959 and right) briefly moved to New York where she became friends with Andy Warhol and hung out with Timothy Leary’s psychedelic inhaling team and she started designing album covers and shooting photographs

Eve’s interests soon included rock ‘n’ roll and she started hanging out at the bar at the West Hollywood club, the Troubadour (pictured in 1967), where ‘the semen potential was so intense it was enough to get you pregnant just standing there’, Babitz said

It was so hot that Babitz said she often had to have a quick tryst behind the club.

She photographed the club’s regulars, singer-songwriters Jackson Brown and J.D. Souther, the Eagles’ Don Henley and Glen Frey, Steve Martin – sleeping with them all.

But not with Dennis Hopper, an artist and a movie star, who was too weird for Eve.

‘He once kept me up all night telling me about a screenplay he was writing. Easy Rider. It was better than anything I could think of so I hated it’, Babitz said.

‘Life in West Hollywood during the 60s was one long rock ‘n’ roll’, writes the author  and Babtiz viewed the scene as a cafe society in Paris in the 1920s.

The seemingly never-ending party came to an abrupt and shocking end on August 9, 1969 with the Manson murders but Babitz was too drunk and too stoned to realize that until two years later when her ex-lover Jim Morrison overdosed.

The spell of peace, love and LSD was shattered when Morrison’s body was found in the bathroom of his Paris apartment in 1971.

Babitz started losing her groupie touch and was now feeling too old to be a record album photographer.

By 1971, Babitz’s looks had dissipated and she was no longer the seductress.

‘I gained weight and my legs were scuffed with alcoholic black and blue stains. My beauty had long ago sunk into the sludge of gray-green-no sun pallor, the look with broken pink-eyed blood veins from someone who drinks.

‘All I took was speed, painkillers like Percodan and Demerol for fun or Mogadons’ – (a hypnotic drug used for relief of anxiety). ‘Oh, and LSD or mushrooms or mescaline if it was a nice day’, Babitz said. 

In the spring of 1997, a match she was using to light a cigar dropped onto her skirt while driving home from a party in a ’68 VW bug given to her by Steve Martin. She quickly became engulfed in flames and suffered third degree burns over half of her body. Doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of survival. Pictured: Babitz in April of 1997 

Eve produced seven books billed as novels or short story collections — based on her own life as the It girl. In her mid-seventies now, the author suggests that Babitz will be recognized as ‘the essential LA writer’

‘There’s a term for this condition, and Eve coined it: squalid overboogie’, writes Anolik.

Babitz was able to resurrect herself from the near dead as a writer in 1971 and started writing short stories about her years at Hollywood High where she and her girlfriend, Sally, smoked 87 cigarettes together daily.

‘Nobody was famous yet. Eve knew who the talented one were,’ stated comedian Steve Martin.

She wasn’t just a star f***er because the stars she was f***ing weren’t stars at the time, the author writes. 

One of Babitz’s stories was featured in an issue of Rolling Stone. A book deal followed and her friend, photographer Annie Leibovitz shot the cover.

‘If the seventies were the party, the eighties were the hangover’, writes Anolik.

‘We were all addicted to everything. If you took cocaine, you could drink longer and insult people more brilliantly’, remembered Babitz.

Babitz eventually turned to AA, the addictive social scene of all time in Los Angeles, to clean up her life where the creative confessional stories were themselves seductive.

She encouraged friends who weren’t substance abusers to attend just to hear the best stories.

Babitz met Warren Zevon there, who was a rock singer and songwriter of the hit song ‘Werewolves of London’.

He wasn’t in AA but he had a heroin addiction and a friend was trying to get him to go for help.

Babitz fell into a mad affair with Zevon. She cleaned for him and he beat her. And she accepted that.

Eventually, Eve turned to AA, the addictive social scene of all time in Los Angeles, to clean up her life where the creative confessional stories were themselves seductive. She encouraged friends who weren’t substance abusers to attend just to hear the best stories

Babitz (pictured right with a friend)  lived a perilous life, but ‘dissipation, blight, madness, ruin were inevitable’, writes the author

In the spring of 1997, a match she was using to light a cigar dropped onto her skirt while driving home from a party in a ’68 VW bug given to her by Steve Martin.

She quickly became engulfed in flames and suffered third degree burns over half of her body. Doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of survival.

It was a tough recovery after ‘six weeks in ICU, rehab, two 12-hour operations where skin was grafted on to her midsection, groin and legs with stitches holding those grafts in place’.

Add to that — hallucinations from the ICU that induced psychosis, bedsores and having to relearn to walk again. 

And she needed money to pay the astronomical medical bills.

Steve Martin and Harrison Ford contributed $50,000 each, payback for the many blowjobs, suggests the author.

Her lawyer, Larry Feldman, who won a multi-million dollar settlement from Michael Jackson in 1993 over molesting a young boy, used the waistband from Eve’s skirt to argue that the garment had been flammable.

Eve had purchased the skirt used at Goodwill – with no nonflammable clause but the clothing company was afraid of Feldman and settled for $700,000.

That paid off medical bills, Feldman and left $250,000 that Eve took in payments of $2,000 a month for the remainder of her life.

Eve now lives a quiet life. Few of her old friends call her.

She lived a perilous life, but ‘dissipation, blight, madness, ruin were inevitable’, writes the author.

‘That she managed to produce one brilliant book and several very good is astonishing. She’d burned herself up long before she’d burned herself up’. 

Eve produced seven books billed as novels or short story collections — based on her own life as the It girl.

In her mid-seventies now, the author suggests that Babitz will be recognized as ‘the essential LA writer’.

Lili Anolik’s new book Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. is available here.