In this very special bonus episode, I talk to Lili Anolik, the author of the Eve Babitz biography Eve’s Hollywood, and the recent release, Didion and Babitz, which continues Eve’s story, this time through writings discovered after Babitz’s death that reveal new light on her relationship with her frenemy, Joan Didion. After I read Didion and Babitz, I wanted to talk to Lili about the essay Joan Didion wrote about John Wayne and the masculinity he represented, called “John Wayne: A Love Story.” This is the starting point of our conversation, which also touches on Didion’s marriage to her frequent screenplay collaborator John Gregory Dunne, the John Wayne-esque “third man in their bed” who served as an inspiration for Didion’s fiction, Howard Hughes, Didion’s hidden-in-plain-sight conservative politics, the difference between the late-60s Hollywood rock-centric scene and the budding new-Hollywood Malibu scene, Paul Schrader, William Faulkner, Didion and Babitz’s different approaches to being a woman in man’s world, and much more.
Above: a still from Reunion in France, the Joan Crawford/John Wayne movie I talk Lili's ear off about near the beginning of the episode.
Below: Didion and John Gregory Dunne working at home in Trancas. Photo borrowed from this Vanity Fair story by Lili from 2016.
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