Ellroy - Crime Wave
Raised by his father, a rakish "Hollywood bottom feeder" (James's words), who
did or did not "pour the pork" to Rita Hayworth, James grew to be a teen punk, a
peeping torn and a petty thief who broke into houses to sniff women's panties.
He filed away, in his mind, everything he saw when he was strung out on drugs or
drunk on cheap booze or spending nine months in local lockups--nightmarish,
photographic visions that would fuel his noirish fiction.
These complex tales of Los Angeles's seamy underside provide the truest social
history of the city in the 1940s and '50s, an era of "bad white men doing bad
tings in the name of authority." Ellroy's stories are as dense as an overcrowded
prison, but his syiicopated style is deceptive: short, staccato, often
alliterative bursts. But they are not riffs. Each muscular sentence follows the
next and orderly advances the plot. His protagonists are deeply wounded men on
both sides of the law, scarred and corrupted by what they have seen.
James had achieved a reputation as the best American hardboiled crime writer
when his novel _L.A. Confidential_ was turned into a critical and commercial hit
movie, which happily introduced him to a much larger audience. He writes about
that experience here in "Bad Boys in Tinseltown." In this volume, too, are three
short fictions that continue where _L.A. Confidential_ ended: "Hollywood
Shakedown," "Hush-Hush," and "Tijuana, Mon Amour." James reprises Danny
Getchell, the cannily corrupt star writer of _Hush-Hush_ magazine, who has the
grisly goods on almost everyone in Tinseltown and will blackmail anyone to
obtain exclusive dirt. Ellroy gleefully dips in the muck his band of merry
miscreants, including Jack Webb, Mickey Cohen, Frank Sinatra, Lana Turner,
Johnny Stompanato, Dick Contino, Sammy Davis Jr., Oscar Levant, and Rock Hudson.
There is a raunchy ring of verisimilitude, a truly bizarre believability, to the
way Ellroy makes them behave.
Two years ago I hosted a dinner party at The Four Seasons for another '5os icon,
7 1-year-old Tony Curtis, who arrived wearing a ruffled white shirt, a tuxedo
jacket without lapels, a medal from the French government on his chest, and his
stunning 2 6-yearold, 6'1" girlfriend, Jill Van Den Berg, on his arm. James was
there as were Tom Junod, who had written a brilliant profile of Curtis for GQ,
and an editor whose name will come to me in a moment. When I suggested that Tony
be seated away from the other diners, James thought it would be better if he sat
near them. James, of course, was right. All evening, middle-aged suburban
matrons fawned over Tony, pleaded for his autograph, touched him, told him he
was the handsomest movie star ever.
We drank some surpassingly good wine, laughed a lot, and listened raptly to Tony
and James, back and forth like a shuttlecock, tell ribald tales of Hollywood in
the '5os. It became clear to me that no one alive knows more than James about
that particular time in that particular place. He seems to know everything about
the famous, the near-famous, and the infamous. Especially their penis size. His
novels, like his conversation, abound with references to it. Some of his
characters are "hung like a donkey," others "like a cashew." Why he is so
obsessed is best left to Freudians, but for Ellroy, more than any other writer,
anatomy is truly destiny.
Ellroy's destiny was to be a moralist. But he doesn't ride his moralism like
some hobbyhorse. When he is outraged by some wrongdoing, he gets really juiced.
Shortly after 0. J. Simpson committed the double-slash of ex-wife Nicole and her
friend, Ron Goldman, I asked James if he'd write an essay on the Crime of the
Century. Yes, indeed, he replied. The result made the hair on the back of my
neck stand up. "Sex, Glitz, and Greed: The Seduction of 0. J. Simpson" is a
passionate, powerful piece that skewers Simpson and the horrific Hollywood
celebrity culture that spawned him. Several months ago, James was in moral high
dudgeon again, this time outraged at Bill Clinton's sexual dalliance with Monica
Lewinsky and his rather bizarre pronouncement that a blow job really isn't sex.
James was itching to rip Bubba, and I, perhaps unwisely, declined.
Side 2