Naked Chess: How to Win

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It was around this time that Walter called me up and suggested I come meet this friend of his who was very nice, but short.

Billy Al Bengston: I knew Valerie Solanas long before she shot Andy. And I knew she was deranged. Who wouldn’t be deranged with a name like that? 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. 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 ” Nazi won the 2016 U.S. Womens Chess Championship. She was crowned the best female chess player in the world.

Looking Back at the Allure of the 1960s LA Art Scene

Billy Al Bengston: Was Andy intimidated by the L.A. artists? No, I think they were intimidated by him. Those California macho guys are intimidated by anyone who isn’t just like them. But I don’t remember any of the California guys talking to him, except for me, and I knew him from before. And Dennis talked to him, of course. You know how I knew Dennis? From when we were both kids in Kansas. His mother ran the swimming pool in Dodge City.

Laurie Pepper, not at the party but in the vicinity of the party, 23: Cousin of Eve and Mirandi. She’d later marry jazz musician and junkie Art Pepper and co-write his memoir, Straight Life, also a dynamite Southern California book. 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.

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Mirandi Babitz: Evie wasn’t going to go with Julian so she arranged for me to go with him instead. I already knew Julian. He’d photographed me before. He had an assignment for Time to take pictures of girls in their boots on Rodeo Drive, and I was one one of the girls. Actually, come to think of it, so was Myrna Reisman. Mirandi Babitz: Julian, of course, had an invitation, and he asked Eve to go with him. Only she only wanted to go if Walter asked her and he didn’t. 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. 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. 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?

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.

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. All my ideas about Pasadena—about L.A. itself—were undergoing a molecular transformation. We were going from Little League to a home run in the World Series. Even my father thought it was a great idea, driving home in the car, although my mother did say, “If you change your mind, darling, it won’t matter.” Marcel Duchamp being viewed through glass with his major work The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors. Photograph: Mark Kauffman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image