
I Used to Be Charming
The Rest of Eve Babitz
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Narrated by:
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Brittany Pressley
About this listen
Previously uncollected nonfiction pieces by Hollywood's ultimate It Girl about everything from fashion to tango to Jim Morrison and Nicholas Cage.
Eve Babitz knew everyone, tried everything (at least once), and was never shy about sharing her thoughts on any subject, be it sex, weight loss, drug use, or her ambivalence toward New York City. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Babitz wrote on a wild variety of topics for some of the biggest publications around, from Esquire to Vogue to The New York Times Book Review. I Used to Be Charming brings together this nonfiction work.
All previously uncollected, these pieces range from sharp personal essays on body image and the male gaze to playful meditations on everything from ballroom dancing to kissing to perfume. There are breathtaking celebrity profiles, too. In one, Nicholas Cage takes her for a ride in his ’67 Stingray and in another she dishes about dragging Jim Morrison to bed before the Doors had even settled on a band name (“Jim was embarrassing because he wasn’t cool, but I still loved him,” she writes). In another essay, the author ponders her earliest days in the spotlight, posing nude with Marcel Duchamp, and in another, the never-before-published title essay, she writes about the tragic accident that compelled her to leave that spotlight behind forever.
©2019 Eve Babitz (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Introduction © 2019 by Molly Lambert.Listeners also enjoyed...
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A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
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Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. In My Name Is Barbra, she tells her own story about her life and extraordinary career.
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Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural capital of the world - a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA. The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
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Black Swans
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
-
-
Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
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By: Eve Babitz
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- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.
By: Eve Babitz
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- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont.
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- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
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obsessed with Eve
- By Debbie L. Smith on 06-25-20
By: Eve Babitz
-
My Name Is Barbra
- By: Barbra Streisand
- Narrated by: Barbra Streisand
- Length: 48 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) and has one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in the history of popular music. She has been nominated for a Grammy 46 times, and with Yentl she became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major motion picture. In My Name Is Barbra, she tells her own story about her life and extraordinary career.
-
-
BARBRA IS LIKE BUTTAH!
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Hollywood's Eve
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- Unabridged
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Performance
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People who viewed this also viewed...
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Overall
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
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Eve's Hollywood
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont.
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Black Swans
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
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- Narrated by: Mia Barron
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.
By: Eve Babitz
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Hollywood's Eve
- Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural capital of the world - a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA. The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
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Tedious
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By: Lili Anolik
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Overall
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Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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Slow Days, Fast Company
- The World, The Flesh, and L.A.
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
-
-
obsessed with Eve
- By Debbie L. Smith on 06-25-20
By: Eve Babitz
-
Eve's Hollywood
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: By the time she'd hit 30, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. She was immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, and Babitz's first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve's Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California's haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont.
-
-
A fun read!
- By Ryan Stanley on 09-11-18
By: Eve Babitz
-
Black Swans
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. A new reissue of Babitz’s collection of nine stories that look back on the 1980s and early 1990s - decades of dreams, drink, and glimpses of a changing world. Black Swans further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.
-
-
Torrid affairs @ Chateau Marmont
- By Ariana Sweany on 10-29-24
By: Eve Babitz
-
L.A. Woman
- By: Eve Babitz
- Narrated by: Mia Barron
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
L.A. Woman is quintessential Babitz, the story of Sophie, a 20-something blonde Jim Morrison groupie gliding through a golden existence in L.A.; and Lola, a German immigrant who settles in Hollywood in the '20s to drive Pierce Arrows recklessly down Sunset Boulevard and who knows that Maybelline mascara cakes and that Rudolph Valentino is the essence of life. Sophie and Lola, like the many other women who move in and out of this electric saga, know that while L.A. is constantly changing, it is essentially eternal.
By: Eve Babitz
-
Hollywood's Eve
- Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.
- By: Lili Anolik
- Narrated by: Jayme Mattler
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural capital of the world - a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA. The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety.
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Story
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? —Eve Babitz, in a letter to Joan Didion, 1972. Joan Didion, revealed at last… Eve Babitz died on December 17, 2021. Found in the wrack, ruin, and filth of her apartment, a stack of boxes packed by her mother decades before. The boxes were pristine, the seals of duct tape unbroken. Inside, a lost world. This world turned for a certain number of years in the late sixties and early seventies, and centered on a two-story rental in a down-at-heel section of Hollywood.
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I’m still Team Joan
- By Dorothy L. Lipman on 11-16-24
By: Lili Anolik
What listeners say about I Used to Be Charming
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lisa Persky
- 08-12-23
Narrator Destroys Narrative
The self-congratulatory, wry tone of this performer’s voice is unnecessary and wrecks the writer’s writing voice. This narrator also knows nothing of the place or the time and thus makes mistakes when speaking the names of areas and products. If I could see, I would have read the book but I can’t and I wanted to know the content of these Babitz pieces so I endured.
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- SusanV
- 10-25-19
Only Thing Wrong - the Narrator
Some of the most popular narrators on Audible.com can really blow it when reading personal essays. The author, Eve Babitz, has a wry wit and off-hand way of describing perverse events in her life. The narrator here reads along, punching up dialogue with stunning tone-deafness. Tolerable at best. I gave up and bought the book to read.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Pasternak
- 10-25-24
A Snicker Salad
I enjoyed remembering roller skates, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a first encounter with little green capers, shopping at Ralph’s and other stuff circa 1976. And the author’s brush with death is stunning - though oddly treated like nothing more than a brief chapter in a book rather than a serious event without long lasting physical and mental consequences. The superficial romp through several decades of popular culture is kind of fun. But I think it’s a shame to meet so many interesting people and find so little of real substance to write about any of them. And I think the breathless rant and rave promotion of the Fioricci label near the last of the book is a good spot to double the playback speed. It struck me as one massive commercial interruption. Babitz and I are roughly the same age. And I spent most of my life in California. It follows, this book rang my bell a few times. And oral presentation captured a bit of suitable snark. Nevertheless, I regret wasting a credit on this one.
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