New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion …
— Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Notions of romance—and Didion—were indeed in the air in Greenwich Village last Tuesday night as guests packed the Waverly Inn for AIR MAIL’s book party in celebration of Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz.
Anolik, an AIR MAIL Writer at Large, has a rich history with the Pacific pair. In her 2019 biography, Hollywood’s Eve, she helped deliver Babitz from the relative obscurity into which she’d fallen despite having formerly been an eminent commentator on Los Angeles life in the 1960s and 1970s. Among other things, Anolik revealed how Babitz, with her days as an It Girl on the wane, was discovered for her singular writing on the shifting cultural tides in her home city. Babitz’s champion? None other than Didion, by then a literary force in her own right.
Babitz and Didion’s unlikely friendship—and, later, mutual bitterness—is laid bare in all its complexity in Didion and Babitz. The dual biography draws heavily on archival letters written by Babitz and found sealed away in cardboard boxes in her decrepit apartment after her death, in December 2021.
One couldn’t help but wish that the L.A. Women themselves were surveying Tuesday’s scene from a dimly lit corner. (When asked whom she’d rather have as a guest at the party, Anolik answered, “Both,” and noted that Babitz would “probably go home with somebody famous” and that “Joan was the great party guest … She was at every great party in L.A. from 1967 to 1988.”)
Both writers’ absence was deeply felt in the form of unanswered questions about the party and its attendees. How might director Sofia Coppola, seen chatting with designer Anna Sui and AIR MAIL Look Editor Linda Wells, take shape in a Didion essay? Where would actor Justin Theroux, making the rounds with his fiancée, Nicole Brydon Bloom, appear in Babitz’s pages? Why did everyone’s skin look so good?
For Anolik, a sponge for details in her own right, being a fly on the wall was impossible because of the knotted swarm of guests jockeying for a word with her. The View co-host Joy Behar arrived with her husband, Steve Janowitz, their pet dog trailing closely behind, just before millennial influencer Caroline Calloway burst onto the scene, hair bedecked with flower petals. Others overflowed from the crowded bar area onto the sidewalk: television hosts Megyn Kelly and Stephanie Ruhle; editors Terry McDonell, David Haskell, Tom Beer, Aimée Bell, David Friend, and Ash Carter; authors Emma Cline, Geoff Dyer, Josh Duboff, and David Lipsky (seen fighting with Calloway); and writers Vanessa Grigoriadis, Sloane Crosley, Naomi Fry, Jon-Jon Goulian, Shawn McCreesh, Bruce Handy, George Kalogerakis, David Kamp, Nate Freeman, and Charlotte Klein.
Also inclining toward Anolik were socialite Olivia Palermo, former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, producers Karah Preiss and Laura Bickford, book publicist Sandi Mendelson, actresses Molly Ringwald and Jaimie Alexander, and former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston.
Both Didion and Babitz are gone now, having died less than a week apart in 2021. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that the milieu both understood so well has evaporated, too. Implausible though it may seem, their Los Angeles is the stuff of history.
But, for a brief couple of hours on Tuesday night, if you were willing to suspend your disbelief and pretend that the autumn breeze rushing off the Hudson was actually the Santa Ana winds, and that New York is in possession of a riot of characters like Anolik rather than a precious few—you could fool yourself into thinking that, were Babitz and Didion still around, it was a party they would have liked to write about.
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
