writing

Last things first: Eve Babitz is a major minor L.A. writer who died five years ago at age 78. She spent nearly a quarter-century as a recluse, having suffered in 1997 a shocking and disfiguring accident while striking a match to light her Tiparillo. Her thin Indian skirt caught fire searing her panty hose into her flesh, leaving her with third-degree burns over more than half her body. She never published again, though many championed her gifts, including me. At the time of her misfortune, I was book editor of the Los Angeles Times. I had long admired her, especially the rollicking and indispensable “Slow Days, Fast Company,” first published in 1977, a charming and insightful series of stories bursting with pluck and sass. I recommended to John Carroll, the then-editor of the paper, that he make her a columnist and urged Babitz to write him directly. She did, and that letter from October 2000 is the last included in “Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were),” a book of letters expertly edited and chosen by Lili Anolik. Babitz tells Carroll that “what the paper needs is some writers that cause such an uproar, people will have to read it in order to stay abreast of the edge.” Babitz knew what she was talking about. She’d been living on that edge since she was a teenager at Hollywood High in the late 1950s.

The posthumous resurrection of Babitz’s writings is most welcome. Yet there is a risk of overpraising her merits. She was an unabashed booster of the glossy L.A. that became synonymous with a rising creative elite whose élan and narcissism she found irresistible.

Lili Anolik makes the case in her perfervid introduction: “The letters are everything you could want” and often “profound” and “frequently brilliant, invariably amusing.” She says they deserve to be put on the short shelf next to Virginia Woolf’s imperishable “A Room of One’s Own” for they are “every bit as candid, every bit as lucid, every bit as brutal, every bit as delicate as Virginia Woolf’s celebrated manifesto.”

If only.

“Too L.A.: Letters Never Sent (But Some Were)” by Eve Babitz

(New York Review Books)

Regrettably, Anolik, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for Babitz’s literary exhumation, has so fallen in love with her subject as to almost blind her to Babitz’s defects, both with respect to her writing and to the life. With two previous books — “Hollywood’s Eve” (2019) and “Didion and Babitz” (2024) — prompted by Anolik’s riveting March 2014 Vanity Fair profile, Anolik has become Babitz’s greatest champion. Now with “Too L.A.,” a title taken from Babitz’s own over-oxygenated writing, she has gathered and edited a trove of letters. They brilliantly reveal Babitz’s eye for the deep shallow as well as explore the porous boundary between the largely self-inflicted injuries of her private life and the glittering sheen of her public persona. Babitz herself, on the strength of these 197 letters, only 30 of which she ever mailed, understood in a way Anolik doesn’t the limitations of her talents, even as she strives to slip the shackles of a mansplaining culture which at almost every turn tried to blunt her ambitions, both artistic and writerly, even as her editors and admirers sought (often with her ardent encouragement) to slip between her sheets.

Eve Babitz was born in 1943 to Hollywood neo-royalty. Her Brooklyn-born father, Sol, was first violinist for both the Los Angeles Philharmonic Symphony and then the 20th Century Fox Studio Orchestra. Sol would ultimately marry Lily Mae Laviolette, a beautiful Cajun Catholic shiksa willing to convert to Judaism. Eve’s godfather was Sol’s good friend Igor Stravinsky. When puberty burst upon her at age 14, Babitz’s blossoming made her a prime candidate for induction by the fast-track girls at Hollywood High who called themselves the Thunderbird Girls and cruised the Sunset Strip in their cool cars, looking for the main chance.

From left, Sol Babitz, Mae Babitz, Mirandi Babitz and author Eve Babitz gather at a launch party for her book “Slow Days, Fast Company” in 1977.

(Photograph by Paul Ruscha; courtesy of Mirandi Babitz / The Huntington Library)

At 20, Babitz posed nude playing chess with the fully clothed Marcel Duchamp to promote Duchamp’s retrospective exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum. At the time, Babitz was having an affair with the museum’s 32-year-old married director, Walter Hopps, which perhaps explains Babitz’s reluctance to have her face photographed so as not to give the game away to Mrs. Hopps, who attended the opening. A month later, Babitz confides in an (unsent) letter: “Everything’s so fabulous for me now I can’t believe it. There’s nothing like two boyfriends to do it for you every time. There are such fabulous boys around and they take you out on dates and to movies and I feel just like a teenager. (I’m recapturing my lost youth.) I get to get dressed up and I flirt outrageously and put people on and I do things like look soulfully out the window and man it’s just too hoozie for words. … If only all of this could last forever — not that it will, but I can.”

She spent the rest of her life torn between the excitements of everyday life — cruising the hangouts du jour (Barney’s Beanery in the early 1960s where she met many of L.A.’s up-and-coming artists — Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, Laddie Dill, Peter Alexander, and the Ruscha brothers, Ed and Paul, both of whom she’d bed, Paul becoming an on-again, off-again boyfriend whose bisexuality made for a sometimes tenuous connection; and after seducing Jim Morrison before he became famous and later the Troubadour in the late 1960s which was a happy hunting ground — Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Don Henley, J.D. Souther, Country Joe Mcdonald, Jackson Browne, to name only a few, and then Ports restaurant where she anchored a corner table) — and the seductions of drugs — uppers, acid (which she seemed to ingest with an alarming frequency), pot, of course, and then by the mid-1970s, tragically, an Everest of cocaine. She had entered what she aptly called the era of “squalid overboogie.”

Eve Babitz and her frequent companion Paul Ruscha celebrate the 1977 release of Babitz’s seminal “Slow Days, Fast Company.”

(Photograph courtesy of Mirandi Babitz / The Huntington Library)

The name-dropping is relentless and if, like me, you have an insatiable appetite for hoovering them up, this volume will not disappoint. Still, there are many pages of vapid jottings — “I cleaned the house, did the laundry, and vowed to quit smoking” — that suggest why Babitz was a failure as a novelist (see her dud “Sex and Rage”) and a superb writer of short stories and essays that stylishly plumbed the depths of her own sensibility precisely in the degree to which she was uninterested in other people.

Nearly 30 years after she stripped to please her married lover and startle the unsuspecting Duchamp, the father of Dada, and eight years after she joined AA in 1982 — the year her beloved father died of Huntington’s disease at age 70 which ultimately would also kill her — and gave up drugs and alcohol and (almost entirely) writing as well, which had always been seen by her as enabled by dope of one kind or another, she boasted that, looking back, “Everybody wanted to be me — they looked at me with yearning faces, and said, ‘Boy, you sure had fun.’ ” She was not entirely wrong. She had struck many admirers both then and now, as the quintessential California girl, a daughter of Dionysus, whose devotion to pleasure was free of misgiving or regret. She detested the East Coast avatars of apocalypse, like Nathanael West, who saw only doom and gloom in sunny L.A. Babitz, by contrast, saw things sunny side up. If Joan Didion was unsettled and made anxious by the hot Santa Anas that regularly kicked up, Babitz luxuriated in them, recalling how she and her sister would as young girls rush to embrace them, spinning madly round and round. In a 1977 unsent letter to Joseph Heller, who had championed her work when she had sent him an unsolicited fan letter after having read “Catch-22” when it was first published and she was barely 20, she declares proudly: “I’m a gossip storyteller who likes L.A. rather than hates it.” She refers to her “shallow nature,” writing that “I feel like an upstream salmon, determined to reach the shallow water, no matter how fast the river is running the other way.”

Eve Babitz, the ultimate Hollywood reveler, on Sunset Boulevard in 1980.

(Los Angeles Times)

On the evidence of these letters, she had two great loves: Ahmet Ertegun, a principal founder of Atlantic Records, and Tom Dowd, renown recording engineer and producer who worked for Ertegun. Of the two, Ertegun had the edge, if for no other reason than he came with buckets of dough, making possible assignations at his regular bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel with limo pickup and dropoff services, and the best champagne and other assorted stimulants. Ertegun was effortlessly elegant and erudite, and there was no one he didn’t know and who wouldn’t return his calls. He was married, age 45, 20 years older than Babitz, when they fell for each other in 1969. She began sleeping with him even as she agreed to profile him for Jann Wenner’s newly launched Rolling Stone. The writing didn’t go well. Wenner wanted a tougher piece than she was willing to write. Ultimately, she abandoned the assignment, claiming (not unreasonably) that she didn’t see how she could write objectively about a man she loved.

Babitz courted danger with heedless bravado and exemplary recklessness. She once had the moxie to rid herself of a would-be rapist: When told not to scream, she said with unimaginable sangfroid: “Why not?” The man bolted. It might be said of Babitz, as Oscar Wilde said of his life, that she spent her talent on her writing and reserved her genius for her life. Sculpting her natural gifts of wit and brazenness into a living artwork dazzled all who came within her orbit. Her lust for life was palpable. The letters are proof. She came at people without fear. She left them without apology. She was the boss of herself. She was the girl who seemed to have it all. The only thing she lacked was inexperience.

Wasserman, a former book editor of the Los Angeles Times, is publisher of Heyday Books, a nonprofit, independent publishing house founded in 1974 in Berkeley. He is the author of “Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even if It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays.”

Thirty years ago a teenage boy, traveling abroad and without parents for the first time, came upon a scene of staggering destruction.

At Pompeii, when Tom Hiddleston saw the casts of the bodies killed by the explosion of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79, he wasn’t just horrified, he was mesmerized, even excited; amid all that death it felt like the past was alive.

“Until that point, it had existed in books in the classroom, but I felt like was going back in time, walking into the past,” he said in a recent video interview about “Pompeii: Out of Time With Tom Hiddleston,” his new series that’s a hybrid of travelogue, documentary and extensive dramatic reenactments (with a meta touch).

“I was knocked sideways by the quality of the preservation,” he recalled of that teenage visit. “You can hear that these buildings carry the echoes of the lives they contained because of the frescoes, the mosaics, the furniture. You feel 2,000 years compress and collapse. It’s like magic.”

Hiddleston knows something about magic and time travel. After studying classics at Cambridge, his acting career led to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the role of Loki, the god of mischief and “the boundary crosser.” Loki’s movie misdeeds get him “removed from the timeline of history,” and in the “Loki” spinoff TV show, he faces his past while bouncing through time.

One place Loki lands is Pompeii. Hiddleston was actually on a set in Atlanta, but there he was speaking Latin and revisiting his own past. “I felt this extraordinary confluence of my passions.”

Tom Hiddleston in a scene from the series, where he speaks to experts about Pompeii and how the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius unfolded.

(Christian Black / National Geographic)

Hiddleston had been talking with producer Kevin R. Wright about his fascination with the ancient world, and after seeing Hiddleston in fictional Pompeii, Wright got the ball rolling on “Out of Time,” co-writing and helping to produce the series, which debuts Wednesday on NatGeo and Thursday on Hulu and Disney+.

On the show, Hiddleston travels back to Pompeii and the lip of the volcano, speaking to experts of Pompeii’s history and volcanoes but also one in surviving disasters to help him understand people’s behavior as the sky was falling on them. “It’s about trying to gather as much evidence from different disciplines,” he explained.

Hiddleston’s enthusiasm for the project is evident throughout our interview: Each question earned a five-minute response, all delivered with passion (and incredibly articulate with no verbal fillers or talking in circles) and fascinating digressions — he broke down the Greek and Latin roots of the words “democrat” and “republican,” mentioned the classical references in the architecture of the New York Stock Exchange and British Museum, and tied in the relevance of Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.”

Here, for instance, is a portion of his answer to my first question about whether the driving force of the series was the importance of facts in understanding history, using storytelling and imagination to create empathy for the people of Pompeii, or to show the way our past still has lessons to offer today:

“I wanted a series with an original dynamism, which could be immersive and propulsive and emotional, and bring the story of Pompeii and its people back to life in a way that could be different and innovative. I wanted to evoke for the audience the feeling that I had when I first went to Pompeii.

“At university, I had teachers who taught me to live in the question and that our relationship with the past is a two-way street. One cannot examine the past without acknowledging that we look back from the perspective of where we stand. We tell stories to understand something about ourselves — we need to know who we were to think about who we are now.

Darius Arya, an archeologist and historian, with Hiddleston in the ancient city of Herculaneum. (Paolo Verzone/National Geographic)

Human remains inside of boat sheds, where people took shelter from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. (Paolo Verzone/National Geographic)

“The engine of my commitment was centered on empathy, trying to honor the lives of the people of Pompeii. If we could gather enough evidence, enough fragments of truth, they might add up to a picture of history, which would generate great reserves of feeling and compassion so we could see ourselves in their predicament, their instincts, their choices, their capacity to help each other. And that experience of empathy and compassion would connect us to a thread across time to people experiencing a terrifying and traumatic event, and to see that in our world now.

“But we were very careful about the idea that the truth matters. In writing history, there must be intense rigor — evidence is important and if you have evidence that should counteract any bias or hypothesis.

“But the evidence here is incomplete so at some point, you have to take an educated guess, a leap of imagination. The past is a two-way street with the present, but it’s also an eternal mystery and all of our questions will never be answered so there’s that joy of living in the question.”

When the publicist said our time was up, Hiddleston stepped out of time and took one more question. And then another and another, nearly doubling the time allotted, thrilled to be exploring the connections between past and present.

While many people think that the city’s population was wiped out, the vast majority actually escaped and modern research has found the names and details of hundreds of survivors. Hiddleston notes that “one great gift of Pompeii is that the Romans didn’t have paper, so the walls, the columns, the houses, the public buildings are covered in writing: deeds, business contracts, advertisements, gossip, doodles.”

In this behind the scene photo, director of photography Jim Jolliffe runs with a camera, following Frankie Treadaway playing Avianius, a teenage boy whose story is reenacted in the series.

(Darrin Zammit Lupi / National Geographic)

The three episodes track the stories of a teenage boy, a successful businesswoman and a soldier in the nearby town of Herculaneum, with a sprawling cast and special effects bringing those scenes to life. “We thought that in the words of Pliny the Younger, ‘their lives were worthy of our memory.’ ”

While there have been other more traditional Pompeii documentaries, Hiddleston felt he had something distinctive to offer, thanks to his “day job.”

“I take a piece of writing and a character, real or imagined, and research as much as I can, and then imagine it and try and breathe life into a person,” he says. “Even when I’ve played real people, I’ve run out of evidence. That’s when you just have to extend your empathy and compassion, your knowledge of human beings and the breadth and range of human experience, the things we all share and can connect with to find an internal world of variety and depth.”

Hiddleston wanted to extend that to the people of Pompeii. “They were three dimensional people with rich lives,” he says. “We follow the trail of breadcrumbs as far as we can, and then try to bring them to life with empathy and compassion.”

AFTER years of “neglecting” Europe and the UK, Aussie duo Empire Of The Sun return for three sold-out nights at London’s Alexandra Palace next week, proof they are making up for lost time. 

“The Empire surges on,” says singer Luke Steele in a quiet moment away from the tour.  

“Empire still feels as intense as ever. It’s like being in a vortex. It’s like Lord Of The Rings when they put the ring on, or when you’re surfing and you’re caught in the wave. Being on this tour is always like that.  

“We’ve changed a few things and added a few new songs, and suddenly it changes the ripples of everything else.” 

Nearly 20 years after track Walking On A Dream first introduced Empire Of The Sun’s fantastical universe, Steele and non-touring band member Nick Littlemore are bigger than ever. 

“It’s incredible because these are our biggest shows and it’s the biggest following we’ve had,” says Steele proudly on a video call. 

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“It’s exploded in a completely different way, to a whole new generation who are my son and my daughter’s age.  

“My daughter Sunny is about to turn 18 and Walking On A Dream came out the week she was born. Nearly 20 years later, it has hit that next generation and it is so reinvigorating. I’m running into kids who are 15 asking, ‘Who’s this new band?’.  

“A lot of people have been asking about the band’s outfits — they’re fascinated by the fashion. 

“But for so many people, they just hear the songs on the radio or at a party and don’t even know what the band looks like. They’re just captivated by the melodies.” 

Steele is in Budapest to perform, and he has just got back from a scooter ride around the city’s sights on a rare day off. 

The pair have survived near burnout and band tensions, but Steele says the music always pulled him back and now he feels the healthiest and sharpest he has ever been. 

“We always had great shows in the UK, but it felt like we’d lost a bit of steam by not touring there frequently. Then the pandemic was tough — five years not being able to tour and stuff — so maybe now we’re making up for lost time.” 

Last summer’s sold-out Labyrinth On The Thames show at Greenwich’s Old Royal Naval College was Empire Of The Sun’s first London performance in more than six years. 

“That was special. It was amazing,” Steele says. “So it’s great we are coming back to the UK — to London and also Cardiff and Halifax — which I am told is right at the top of the UK but not as far as Scotland.” His music is better than his geography. 

Empire’s return has meant more than just filling venues. It is about the band’s influence on the fans, who have found their own lives reflected in the songs. 

“The music is so important. It’s important for us, for our sanity, but it’s amazing what the records have been doing to people,” he says. “I feel a bit more like a conduit now. I’ve been handed these keys, and it’s like, what are you going to do with them? What doors are going to open?” 

“I have to harness that power of influence in a clever, natural way. 

“Coming back with the new show and writing new records post-pandemic, it feels like the songs need to have new revelations and new messages in this crazy world.” 

Steele reckons part of the success of Empire Of The Sun’s performances has been down to his live band, which includes former Gomez guitarist Ian Ball and drummer Olly Peacock.  

“They are the greatest players — really seasoned musicians, which is incredible to have,” says Steele. “People with experience are worth everything in touring. Ian is my right-hand man. The one and only.  

“You rehearse for three months, then you get up in front of 80,000 people and suddenly my in-ear pack goes down, or the pedalboard dies. Ian is so calm. He just mooches over, cool as a cucumber, sorts it out and comes back before I’ve even noticed.”  

Steele says having a great team behind him means he can execute the ideas he has been inspired by. 

“There are quite a few songs from Ask That God in the set.  

“We always play the hits, like We Are The People and Alive, because that’s important for people’s memory, and then there are a couple of throwbacks from the earlier records. 

“It’s about trying to fit it all in without it becoming an exhausting meal for people.  

“The first show probably had too many songs — like eating that last chicken wing at the Chinese buffet, where you walk out thinking you’ve had too much. It’s a fine line. 

“I don’t like those shows where bands play for three-and-a-half hours. I want to see a concert, get blown away, and go and put my pyjamas on. You don’t want to lose people.” 

Almost two years into the Ask That God tour, Steele is still pushing the show forward. 

He says: “It’s so exciting and exhilarating, and then there are the fans who mean so much. 

“It always sounds so cliched to me, to talk about ‘the fans’ but as I’ve got older and seen their dedication they become like your friends. It’s more than someone buying an album. The music seeps into their lives. 

“The other day I met this girl who showed me a video of her three-year-old kid dancing to one of our songs. It’s amazing to be so far away from home and see how much the music touches people.  

“We played Poland recently and this girl had spent months making these elaborate Salvador Dali and Escher-style collage illustrations for each song. She printed them all in a book and had written a personal note at the end. 

“People really go on the journey with us, so I’m pretty thankful.” 

Being away for long periods from his own family in Australia is what hits Steele the hardest. 

“I’m not really going home until Christmas. We go from here to the American tour and it just keeps going, but they’re all coming out to the UK shows. 

“I find it hard. I go through different stages of exhaustion and depression, excitement and exhilaration. It’s like a wave.  

“I feel quite fragile because I’m so emotional. Being on the road is a real vortex. And when you get home it’s not easy — this pipe burst in the front bathroom of my new house I bought in Perth, and 700,000 litres of water flooded the whole house.  

“When I came back from tour in January from Miami, it was just like a swimming pool, so everything’s been gutted now. It’s just all concrete, so we’re in a rental for a while — we’re pretty much homeless now.” 

After living in the US then New Zealand, Steele moved back to Perth to be closer to his family. 

Steele, who was living in America during Donald Trump’s first presidency, says the country’s extremes fed into his songwriting. 

“I had to go because I was writing so many aggressive songs. Now I’m back where I grew up and it’s been awesome,” he says.  

“I haven’t lived there for 20 years, so it’s a perfect amount of time to get over the regret, you know? 

“And it’s been good to be the hometown hero.  

“Walking On A Dream became the soundtrack for Tourism Western Australia’s global campaign and it is even named after that song.  

“There’s also a music room at my school named after the family. It feels kind of cool to be given the keys to the city, where it all started.” 

Steele lost his dad, blues musician Rick Steele, last year and he recently paid tribute to him with a night of blues. 

“It was the one-year memorial and it was awesome to come back together, remember him and play the blues. The blues club he belonged to is stronger than ever, which is great. 

“I didn’t want him to pass away and then the club to fall over. His legacy moves on, and we’re about to do a grant the Steele family has started — the Rick Steele Music Grant. 

“We’ve also got a plaque on a park bench just down the road from his house, where he lived his whole life. He used to go there most mornings, get a coffee and sit on that bench. I think he’d think that was pretty cool. He’s got his own bench there.” 

For Steele, that sense of legacy, home and survival has fed back into the music. 

“It’s a good spot to be, because I feel the sharpest I’ve ever been and the healthiest. I got rid of all of that garbage, all the drugs and alcohol, years ago.  

“It was music that helped me to heal by writing every song and playing, recording and mixing it myself.  

“Music is still such a powerful phenomenon and medium. It’s a healer. It brings renewal, hope and vision.  

“Music was always the vessel, even after I said the band was done and went off to write a solo record.” 

That sense of purpose also seems to have softened the creative tension between Steele and Littlemore.  

They have not always seen eye to eye, but time, distance and their separate lives have made the partnership easier to understand. It’s like a marriage that works because both know when to step away. 

“I think Nick and I have been good at that,” he says.  

“We probably spend more time apart than together and, when we come together, it’s quite focused on the job at hand.” 

After side projects — Littlemore is the frontman of electronic trio PNAU — and an eight-year gap between third album, Two Vines, and the release of 2024’s Ask That God, time apart now seems to be part of how Empire Of The Sun have survived.

Steele says: “When we came back, it was like, OK, we’re older now — what are we actually talking about? What’s the real meaning? So we’re trying to bring more of that into the show and the theatrics.  

“But I think now we can sit back and soak in the fruits of our labour a bit.  

“For a while, you’re just trying to hold on to it, because you spend your whole life trying to get to a point where people are actually listening. 

“Now we have people’s attention, we have to treat that with respect and not take it for granted. 

“I haven’t spoken to Nick for a while, but we’ll probably start talking more now we are about 45 songs into the new record and trying to finish a huge batch of songs. It’s definitely going to be a little bit more edgy.  

“We’ve been working with different producers and in Hawaii, LA and Sweden. Each territory brings different colours.  

“Working with these different people, from different places gives you beautiful ingredients.” 

But before new music arrives, there is the small matter of shows in Halifax, Cardiff and three sold-out nights at Alexandra Palace. 

It is surely a pinnacle moment, which Empire Of The Sun have been building towards for nearly 20 years. 

“We’re going all out on that,” he insists.  

“They’re going to be massive shows.” 

Authorities have identified the hiker who suffered a fatal medical emergency in Runyon Canyon as 78-year-old screenwriter William Hasley.

Hasley was a veteran TV writer who taught screenwriting classes at UCLA Extension. He was also a friend of Caitlyn Jenner and helped write the former athlete’s motivational book “Finding the Champion Within,” according to his biography.

The L.A. County medical examiner released Hasley’s identity Tuesday but had yet to rule on his cause of death.

More than two dozen personnel with the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a report of a hiker in grave medical condition off Nichols Canyon Road near Hollywood Boulevard shortly before 7 p.m. Saturday.

A helicopter was used to reach the patient and allow paramedics to provide urgent medical care. They were unable to save him, and he was declared dead shortly after, according to the LAFD.

Hasley hailed from Pittsburgh and played university football before venturing to Hollywood to pursue his dreams as a writer. He wrote on 37 episodes of “The Smurfs” in the late 1980s and early ’90s as well as several episodes of “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids,” according to IMDB. His TV writing credits also included “Swift Justice,” “Ghost Stories,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Young Riders” and “Highway to Heaven.”

He was able to channel his love of sports while working with NBC on the network’s project “Star Salute to the U.S. Olympic Team,” where he met Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner, according to his professional biography.

The pair became friends, and Hasley went on to help write a book about Jenner’s philosophy on overcoming adversity in sports and life. He was commissioned to ghostwrite several other motivational books including “Passion, Profit, & Power” for hypnotist Marshall Sylver and “The Slight Edge” for self-help expert Jeff Olson.

Hasley loved sharing his passion for writing with students at UCLA and described the process of writing as akin to assembling a puzzle, where one tries many different combinations of pieces before finding the perfect fit, according to his teaching biography.

“I personally believe that when you know your characters well enough they will start dictating their actions,” he wrote. “When that happens writing becomes a euphoric experience.”

In addition to teaching and writing, he enjoyed golfing, horseback riding, fighting City Hall over an environmental issue, volunteering in soup kitchens and speaking to youth organizations, according to his bio.

Hasley was formerly married to actor Robin Riker, best known for her roles on “Brothers” and “The Bold and the Beautiful.”

He lived in the Hollywood Hills not far from where he suffered the medical emergency. A neighbor told the New York Post they had seen him earlier Saturday carrying groceries home. “It’s very sad he had to die all alone like that,” the neighbor said.

Times staff writer Sonja Sharp contributed to this report.

Freshman pitcher Ainsley Jenkins is a big reason Sherman Oaks Notre Dame has advanced to the Southern Section Division 1 quarterfinals in softball. In the Knights’ first two playoff victories over Anaheim Canyon and Oaks Christian, she has been called out of the bullpen to pitch exceptionally well in relief.

Next up is a quarterfinal showdown with No. 2-seeded Norco on Wednesday at Encino’s Franklin Fields.

If Jenkins needs any help with writing for school work, she has two parents with distinguished writing backgrounds. Her father, Lee, was a highly regarded reporter at Sports Illustrated before becoming an executive with the Clippers. Her mother, Elizabeth, is a magazine writer.

Notre Dame is expected to face Norco’s top one-two pitching duo of Coral Williams and Peyton May. Jenkins will be available if needed. Mom and Dad are also available to write up a pleasing ending if the Knights pull off the upset.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.