Naked Chess: How to Win

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I became interested in playing and tried to stop thinking about holding in my stomach, but every time I thought I was so brilliant, like taking his queen on the fourth move, I’d lose. 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 couldn’t believe someone was taking me to San Francisco on a date—nobody at Hollywood High had ever done that. I mean, artists were cute, but all they’d ever give you was a burrito. And so, even though Walter wore glasses, my reservations crumbled. And sitting there, hearing the opening lines— 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.

Anyway, the plan was for me to do a little piece on a party—well, technically an opening, but really a party—that was The Party, held at the Pasadena Art Museum on October 7, 1963, 52 years ago this month, celebrating the retrospective of the French artist Marcel Duchamp. It’s the moment that Los Angeles, until then considered a distant and provincial outpost, a city in name only, became, however briefly, the cultural capital of the world. It’s the moment, too, that Eve, 20, made her move, even if she did it while staying put. (Crazily enough, she was the life of the party she didn’t actually attend. Equally crazy: the photograph she posed for—Eve, Adam-naked, playing chess with a fully clothed Duchamp—which is so associated with the party for the retrospective, was taken days later.) Eve had been, up to that point, an ingénue, promising but undistinguished. Sure, she had youth and beauty. So, though, did every other ingénue, youth and beauty being, of course, what makes an ingénue an ingénue, and L.A. being, also of course, ingénue central. She was a supporting player, essentially. After her move, however, she’d be a star. Since Walter had left LA, 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.

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.” Of all the things that have ever gone on between men and women, this was the strangest, in my experience. But it got stranger. For one thing, there were Teamsters in the next room, moving paintings, and they couldn’t help but be amazed. Larry Bell: A dollar? I once got a whole suit for 10 cents! I could also be extravagant, though. Whatever money I had, I spent. Walter started calling me “Luxury” because of that and because of the thrift-store clothes that Billy Al and I used to buy and wear all the time. Walter also related it to the cigars I smoked. Walter was a chain smoker of cigarettes. I always had a cigar in my mouth, although they were not always lit. Finally I gave them up after 60 years, five a day. Stopped in January. 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? Eve Babitz: I also met Chico that first night at Barney’s. Except it turns out I’d already met him, only I didn’t remember. But he did. My mother had these poetry readings at our house, and he’d come to one of them. I was 14 or something. I guess I made an impression.

Billy Al Bengston: Larry and I got our suits from thrift stores. We’d raid them. That’s how we got our schmattas. What’s a schmatta? Look it up. L.A. had the best thrift stores then. You could get a suit for a dollar.This promise didn’t stop me from going hog-wild at Barney’s, immersing myself in the scene, falling in love as any fool might with Ed Ruscha (the cutest) and Kenneth Price (maybe cuter) and Jim Eller (the “rat man,” who did terrible, dark things to rubber rats with red blood on them, but then, I was so young, I went for cuteness, not content).

Irving Blum: At the beginning, Andy couldn’t have been nicer, couldn’t have been more agreeable, couldn’t have been more open. I mean, all those things totally changed after the shooting. In the years I spent listening to Walter—from 1962 to 1966, when he left L.A. and went to Washington, D.C., where he was with the Smithsonian—I lived in a sea of his digressions. And though I never saw what he saw, I at least learned to see through things and into and under and over what was in plain sight. Being with him, looking at anything, was an experience, and though when he left L.A. I felt he had forsaken us, I now feel grateful we had him for so long, since after the Duchamp show everyone on the East Coast suddenly noticed how brilliant he was and wanted him there, where art was art and people knew a genius when they saw one. 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. 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. Marcel Duchamp was born in France in 1887 into a family of artists. His exposure to Cubist art, literature and the technical developments of his time influenced his artistic work, which included “ready-mades” ( Objet trouvé), where everyday objects were transformed into works of art. Duchamp was known for this type of art, the most famous being the “Fountain”, an upside-down urinal. In the 1920s, Duchamp turned his attention to chess and almost stopped his artistic work to become a professional chess player. He played in five Chess Olympiads for the French national team and even published a book on chess.Mirandi Babitz: Everybody looked so beautifully put together. I’d only ever seen the artists in jeans and a T-shirt. But they knew Duchamp was formal, so they dressed up nicely. Of course, New York was still New York, but right then, in downtown LA, the Museum of Contemporary Art was staging a huge Ed Ruscha retrospective, and Everyone was in town that day and the next for the parties. Plus there was a big Art Expo thing of international renown in some place they usually use for car shows. A couple days later I went to the gallery and Walter was there, alone except for the cow’s skull on the mannequin’s body with an arm holding a cigarette holder, alone except for a papier-mâché model of a woman over a sewing machine you pumped with your foot to make her pump up and down. The installation, titled Roxy’s, was a scale-model World War II–era Nevada whorehouse with a jukebox that played Glenn Miller, and the skull lady was the madam. By 1966 his parents—or his mother, anyway—finally agreed to let bygones be bygones about his dropping out of medical school. “They figured if I was at the Smithsonian,” he said, “I had a job.” Duchamp’s influence on art is still felt today, and Babitz’s life and writing have become part of California’s cultural history.

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 LA with a houseful of Duchamps. Eve Babitz was born in Hollywood in 1943, the daughter of an artist couple. She partied in California bohemian circles and met many celebrities like Jim Morrison, Steve Martin and Harrison Ford. Babitz later published several books about his youth in California, as well as producing several works of art. I will not wear a hijab and support women’s oppression. Even if it means missing one of the most important competitions of my career” – Nazi Paikidze(On missing the 2017 Womens World Tournament)

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Laurie Pepper: Oh, Evie. That skin. Those teeth. Those tits! She was a goddess. That’s how she could just walk onto that scene and be a part of it. Ruscha saw in Warhol the same sort of stylish, anti-macho profile he recognized in Duchamp. At the time of his death, Warhol owned 30 pieces by Duchamp, and the French master’s influence can be seen in works like Two Golden Mona Lisas or 13 Most Wanted Men, and even Warhol’s occasional penchant for cross-dressing. But now get this. The 2017 Womens World Tournament is in Iran this year. Nazi won’t be going, because she refuses to adhere to hijab dress code. And thats not a joke by the way.