Eve Babitz: I don’t know why I didn’t want to go with Julian. I guess because it would have felt like crashing and it didn’t seem like the kind of party you could crash. It says right here on the brochure,” George showed me, “he’s supposed to speak, but I don’t even know if he’s in LA.” The nude photo of Duchamp and Babitz playing chess has become iconic, not just for Babitz’s nudity, but for the way it embodies the spirit of that moment. Perhaps the greatest significance of this scene lies in the origins of the two individuals and their contributions to art and culture. Babitz’s indifferent attitude and Duchamp’s indifference make the painting an emblem of the artistic and cultural rebellion of the 1960s. There is youth facing age. It also captures the sexual revolution of the time, which was changing social norms and challenging the status quo. In Pasadena, Walter was fairly well known for forgetting where he was supposed to be and being someplace else. So just because his name was printed on a brochure didn’t mean he’d be there. At 12:30, when we broke for lunch, Walter still hadn’t shown, but he wasn’t actually scheduled to appear until the afternoon, so who could tell? For a long time afterward, I thought he might have been pretending to be surprised, but he told me later, “I had no idea. I came into the museum as usual, a few minutes before it opened, blind and cold. I could feel weird vibes in the air, it was so quiet. But then I go into the gallery, and there you both were.”

I arrived late, elevenish, though it started at nine and the experts onstage were sunk into flagrant detail about the Arensbergs, who had moved to LA in 1927, and the print dealer in San Francisco who bought Nude Descending a Staircase. Art is filled with criminals. He was a very singular type of person,” recalls Ruscha, an artist whose career was just beginning at the time of the first retrospective. “He was very mysterious. And compared to other artists, like the abstract expressionists who were two-fisted tough guys, suddenly Duchamp comes along and he is a more suave continental answer to aesthetic questions. Anyway, he proved to be a real guiding light. All of his works, they kind of went counter to what we learned in school. The fact that all of these works finally got together in this very unlikely little museum in Pasadena was a surprise and also a real jewel.” Somehow it was decided that we were all going to Kienholzes house in Laurel Canyon. It was crowded and rustic and I was beginning to feel left out when Walter sat beside me and offered to show me Ed’s show, “among other things,” if I came to the gallery the next day. Not drugs,” George said. “Art. He was holding art. Probably stuff he stole from me or some other guy’s studio. If you caught him, he’d always say he was saving things from being stepped on, but I always knew he was stealing!”Some have drawn parallels between her image and Nude Descending a Staircase while others have compared it to Manet’s monumental Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, with its casual approach to nudity. “It’s nothing like that,” Wasser sets the record straight. “It’s Hollywood. Girls got naked, man. It was not artistic, it was sexual.” As for Duchamp’s reaction to the beauty before him: “He was very cool.” George and I walked to Fred Segal’s, this fancy clothing store with a café inside. And sitting there, George told me Chico stories, the one I especially loved being about how, when Walter curated this huge California Art show in San Francisco, he wanted to go to the party thrown by the artists who’d been omitted—and George said he’d go with him as his bodyguard if Chico would give George money for his rent in exchange. Since Walter couldn’t possibly go into this room full of people he’d personally excluded without a bodyguard, he agreed. “He promised to give me the money before he left,” George explained, “but suddenly I looked up and he’d gone. Without paying me. The party lasted all night. The next morning, Chico shows up again ” Of course, by now even I have forgiven Walter for leaving LA, and we are happy to give him any chance we can, and though most of those Ruscha fans probably had no idea the man sitting beside him was really the One as far as art in LA is concerned, we who were there realize that Ed couldn’t have happened without the strange days of long ago.

Eve Babitz: I was introduced to Julian by my friend Marva Hannon. Marva got her mother to pay for her nose job, and her mother was a socialist. Do you know how hard it is to get a socialist to pay for a nose job? Jewish girls were just starting to get their noses done, and Marva was the first. Whatever Marva did was the height of style. When the guy who owned Fred Segal met her, he fell at her feet and said, “Come to my store, do anything you want.” Anyway, Marva told me Julian took the most marvelous pictures—you know, naked pictures that you could show guys. She met him when she was at Beverly Hills High. He had an apartment across the street, and was always trying to think of ways to get girls to take their clothes off. A month or so later, I went to Barney’s and found Walter sitting at the counter alone with tacos and a beer, and I said, “So, are you going to forgive me?” George was one of the people who called Walter by his secret name, Chico, like a lot of the artists who knew him early on.) Since Walter had left L.A., I’d seen him twice in Washington, but then he’d gone to organize the Menil Collection, in Houston, which is famous for having more money than the mere Smithsonian. He was probably down there, filling Mrs. de Menil’s head with his digressions.It was hard to believe that only about 50 years earlier, in 1907, in The American Scene, Henry James had written: “I had the foretaste of what I was presently to feel in California—when the general aspect of that wondrous realm kept suggesting to me a sort of prepared but unconscious and inexperienced Italy, the primitive plate, in perfect condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made.” Still, Nazi Paikidze flipped the bird at a country forcing Sharia law. Wanting her to wear a garb and cover herself. And she’s like nah I’m hot and I want everyone to see it. Late in 1990, when the Duchamp-on-the-West-Coast book ( West Coast Duchamp, Greenfield Press) was being prepared, the Shoshana Wayne Gallery used our picture, blown up big on silver paper, to announce its own show of his work in conjunction with a symposium to be held in the Santa Monica Public Library. Unlike the party at the Green Hotel, to this thing I was very invited. I never met his parents, but nobody else did either, they never set foot inside the Ferus, the Pasadena Art Museum, or anyplace else they were likely to run into him. They probably were home wondering where they went wrong, why they’d ever allowed him to go into that program for gifted children, ruing the day he set off on that field trip for the Arensbergs’, the only people in L.A. with a houseful of Duchamps.

Still no ChessBase Account? learn more > Sac, sac, mate! Solve tactical positions of your playing strength. Boost your calculation skills. Enjoy adrenalin rush with tactic fights! No matter what they thought in New York about everyone else being totally out of it and hopeless, on the West Coast things were happening. Pasadena, whose sole claim to fame was the Rose Parade, was now anxiously awaiting the Big Private Party at the Green Hotel before the Public Opening of the Duchamp show.Of course, by now even I have forgiven Walter for leaving L.A., and we are happy to give him any chance we can, and though most of those Ruscha fans probably had no idea the man sitting beside him was really the One as far as art in L.A. is concerned, we who were there realize that Ed couldn’t have happened without the strange days of long ago. I have it still. It’s in a little red morocco-leather box and I hold it now in my hand for memories as I write this. The cotton inside is yellow with age.)