Hollywood bard, muse and reveler Eve Babitz dies at 78

Eve Babitz, the Hollywood bard, muse and reveler who with warmth and candor chronicled the excesses of her native world in the 1960s and 1970s and became a cult figure to generations of readers, has died. She was 78.

Few writers captured a time and place so vividly as Babitz did. Her dispatches from the Troubadour nightclub and the Chateau Marmont, from the Sunset Strip and Venice Beach, became as much a testament of her era as a Jack Nicholson movie or an album by the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac. 

She was likened at times to fellow Californian Joan Didion – although Babitz often found magic where Didion saw ruin – and to the French author-sage-confessor Collette.