Widespread Panic

by James Ellroy

  Benzedrine was a groin groper. One thing did come to mind.

  “My Landing Strip’s got two empty runways tonight. Liz told me you’re conversant with the concept.”

  Voices vibrated outside the bungalow. They were mucho male and brazenly brusque. I heard foot scrapes and coughs.

  Crowley said, “Liz explained the concept, so I called you prepared. I’ll send two stenos over.”

  “Mr. Crowley, you’re a pisser.”

  “It takes one to know one, sir.”

  We hung up. The voices vibrated. I caught key-in-lock sounds. I walked into the living room. The door whipped wide.

  It’s William H. Parker.

  With two plainclothes bulls. Both six-four. They live to hurl hurt. They’re mastiffs on a mission to maul for their master.

  “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls—”

  I unpinned my badge and tossed it at Parker. It hit his chest and dropped on the floor. The mastiffs moved. Parker went Get back. The mastiffs pawed the carpet and growled loooowwww.

  I unhooked my gun belt and dropped it on a chair. I called up some cool. Freon Freddy, the Shaman of Shakedown.

  “Hit me, Bill. Shack jobs, living above my means, bending the rules here and there. My head’s on the chopping block, baby. Guillotine me.”

  The mastiffs smirked smug. Pious Parker parsed out a grin.

  “You are currently engaged in an intimate relationship with a Pan American stewardess named Barbara Jane Bonvillain, now in Federal custody for possession of narcotics procured in Mexico. I must inform you that the outsized Miss Bonvillain is a Communist agent and a personal emissary of Marshal Tito, the Red boss of Yugoslavia. As if that weren’t enough, Miss Bonvillain is really a man. She underwent a sex-change operation in Malmö, Sweden, in late 1951, before her stellar efforts impersonating a woman at the ’52 Olympics. You fucked a man, Freddy. You’re a homo. Get the hell off my police force.”

  * * *

  —

  You’re a homo.”

  “You’re a homo.”

  “You fucked a man.”

  “You fucked a man.”

  “You’re a homo, you’re a homo, you’re a homo.”

  I drank myself into a stunned stupor. I passed out on the floor. I got intimate with insects inhabiting the rug. They were dung desperadoes. They were my filthy fellow travelers, lower than lice.

  “You’re a homo, you’re a homo, you’re a homo.”

  I drank, I passed out, I woke up. I went eye-to-eye with a big beetle. We discussed the man-bug metaphysic. It was infused with frissons from that freaky frog Camus.

  The beetle said that life was horrifically happenstance and that we were all fucked by fate. Bugs were biologically bid to live off larvae and leaves. Men were massacred by lascivious lust and bumbled into bed with he-shes. You didn’t know that she was a he. Hit your bennie stash and find your way out of this funk.

  I obeyed the beetle. The Benzedrine outrevved the booze. I talked shit with the beetle for hours. We went feeler-to-feeler on the floor.

  I called Abe Adelman at the State License Bureau. I promised him two g’s for PI’s ducat, quicksville. I bid the beetle adieu and climbed back into my civvies. I drove straight to the Hollywood Ranch Market.

  L.A. looked like Pompeii, postearthquake. The summer sun skimmed the sky and scattered death rays. Hes were shes and shes were hes and the most gorgeous girls were gargoyles. I got to the market and ran up to my office. Jimmy was scanning the August Lowdown.

  He said, “You’re wigged out, Freddy.”

  I said, “I’ve been talking to a bug.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Some shit you wouldn’t believe.”

  “I would believe it. It’s the basis of our friendship. We tell each other shit the world wouldn’t believe.”

  I smiled. “Tell me something typical. I’ve had a jolt. I need to get my feet back under me.”

  Jimmy said, “The barman at the Manhole is pushing horse.”

  I said, “I’ll file it away, in case I need him.”

  Jimmy said, “I’ve got a picture of Marlon Brando with a dick in his mouth.”

  “I’ll give you a C-note.”

  Jimmy passed the Old Crow. I took a pull and felt the floor meet my feet.

  “How was your date with Donkey Don?”

  Jimmy held his hands two feet apart. Jimmy said, “Ouch.”

  I roared. We passed and repassed the jug. Jimmy lit a Pall Mall.

  “I’m up for a role on GE Theater, but this Paul Newman punk will probably get it.”

  “I’ll plant a bag of weed on him, and lay on the fear. You’ll get the gig.”

  “Thanks, Freddy.”

  I thought about the talking bug. I looked down at the aisles. I felt fate beaming back at me.

  “I’ve got all this good dirt and no place to put it. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”

  * * *

  —

  Semper fi.

  I assembled my ex-Marine cadre. My porno-prosty boys proceeded priapically apace. My Camp Pendleton pals came up to L.A. and joined Operation Divorce. The two crews crossed over. I had six certified psychos, culled for my command. My Pendleton pit dogs were blood-blitzed from killing Commies in Korea. They were out for chaotic kicks and required tight tugs on their chains. Our marks were adulterous wives and husbands. Donkey Don lured ladies to hot-sheet hotels and instigated insertion. Flashbulbs flared as I kicked in doors, camera cocked. My Pendleton pits were adroit and adept at rolling surveillance. They tailed wayward wives and whorehound hubbies to hotels and walkie-talkied me. Joi was the mouthwatering man bait. She worked off Arthur Crowley’s craaazy crib sheets on the hubbies’ habits. Joi was sinful seductress and cold cocktease. I kicked the doors in just as Joi’s zipper dropped.

  Operation Divorce was a Marine Corps maneuver and a mad moneymaker. Operation Otash was the ultimate umbrella command. I had an army of snarky snitches on my payroll. My PI’s license arrived and served to cinch my sinful sanction. I did not much mourn my severed service with the LAPD. I paid vulture Vice cops for tips on quivering queers, jittery junkies, dipsos deep in the DT’s. I built fat files on celebrity secrets and hoarded the horrors hard in my heart. Knowledge is power—the Beverly Hills Hotel bug told me that. The one puzzle piece still missing: how to systematically carve cash from all of it.

  Jimmy joined in. I kicked putzy Paul Newman’s ass and held a bag of maryjane primed with his prints. Jimmy got the GE Theater role and groveled with gratitude. I hired him to hump the husband of a divorce-seeking dowager sick of hubby’s hijinks. Jimmy was a swift switcherooer—if it mamboed, he’d move on it. He boffed five babes in one week—topping Donkey Don’s extant record. I camera-caught the wives as Jimmy shot them the schvantz.

  L.A. ’53—radioactive ring-a-ding-ding!!!! That mauve-and-pink sky, ever mine.

  Then, at long last—the confounding convergence.

  I was on the Landing Strip. I was lolling with Liz and a winsome waitress from Biff’s Charbroil. My mail slot creaked. An envelope hit the floor.

  It was a Western Union telegram. I opened it and read:

  Dear Mr. Otash,

  We here at Confidential are looking for a man conversant in the celebrity secrets of present-day Los Angeles, preferably a man with prior police experience. Would you be willing to meet me in a week’s time, to discuss a possible collaboration?

  Sincerely,

  Robert Harrison,

  Publisher and Editor In Chief

  * * *

  —

  Ava Gardner’s Dusky Dee-lite.”

  “Johnnie Ray’s Men’s Room Misadventure.”

  “Bad Boy Bob Mitchum: Back in Reeferland AGAIN?”

  Oh yeah—Confidential contaminated. Confidentia
l kicked up chaos. Confidential came to work.

  I wired Harrison and confirmed the meet. I booked a boss bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I borrowed textbooks from Arthur Crowley’s library and studied libel, slander, and defamation of character. I learned to think and talk like a language-lucid lawyer.

  Jimmy bagged back issues of Peep, Lowdown, Whisper, Tattle, and Confidential itself. I studied linguistic loopholes and cultivated codes of mitigation, equivocation, ambiguity. There’s innuendo, inference, implication. There’s many wicked ways to scandal-skin a cat.

  I alter-egoed myself in a week’s time. I discovered sinuendo and scandal language. I moved into the bungalow a day early. That talking bug and I conferenced and concurred:

  Confidential was the grooved-out grail of this shook-up generation. Disillusionment is enlightenment. Confidential trafficked truth and harpooned hypocrisy. It was a devoutly decorous document. It was the meshugenah Magna Carta of our hopped-up and fucked-up age.

  It’s now 9/21/53. It’s now precisely 10:00 a.m. The doorbell rings.

  Caviar, canapés—check. Martinis mixed magnifico—check. My dossier on Bondage Bob—malignantly memorized.

  I opened the door. There’s the Sultan of Sinuendo. He’s a nervous nebbish in a dreary drip-dry suit.

  He said, “Mr. Otash.”

  I said, “Mr. Harrison.”

  He walked in and went Oooh-la-la. I poured two mighty martinis and pointed to the couch. We raised our glasses. I said, “To freedom of speech.”

  He said, “The First Amendment. What it hath wrought.”

  We clicked glasses. He made the you-and-me sign. He said, “Strange bedfellows.”

  You’re stranger, dipshit. You wear women’s lingerie and love the lash. You published “Honeys in Heels,” pre-Confidential.

  “Get my attention, Mr. Otash. Open strong, baby. I need dirt, and a man to excavate it. Hit me, sweetheart. Show me why the cognoscenti says, ‘Fred Otash is the man to see.’ ”

  I flashed my Marlon Brando snapshot. Bondage Bob perused it. He spazzed and spritzed me with a mouthful of martini.

  It drip-dried on the sofa and my silk suit coat. Bondage Bob coughed and called up composure. He said, “Holy fucking shit.”

  “May I give you a candid assessment of your situation, and explain how I might best serve you?”

  “Hit me, doll. I didn’t fly three thousand miles for some namby-pamby chitchat.”

  I shot my cuffs and showed off my Rolex. Twenty-four-karat gold/diamonds/rubies. I buzz-bombed Bondage Bob with my bold opening thrust.

  “You publish what is rapidly becoming the premier scandal magazine in a very crowded field. You compete with Whisper, Tattle, Peep, On the Q.T., Lowdown, and others. Your competitors rely largely on true-crime exposés, reports of miracle cures for various diseases, and rehashes of your own articles on celebrity misbehavior. The specific strengths of your magazine are its staunch anti-Communist stance and sex. Frankly, I find your articles that play on the greed of your readers are both unbelievable and devoid of the heat that people turn to Confidential for. There are no emerald mines in Colorado, and no Uruguayan herbs that triple the size of the male member in two weeks’ time. You’re lying, sir. You’re hoping that bilking your readers with stories like that will both boost your sales and help defray the costs of the libel suits that are being filed against you with greater and greater frequency in circuit courts all over America. My good friend, the esteemed jurist Arthur Crowley, has informed me that magazines that publish filler pieces chock-full of boldfaced lies create what he calls a ‘gap in credibility and verisimilitude.’ This calls into question the veracity of all the articles published in said magazines over time, leaving said magazines vulnerable to both individual lawsuits and the looming specter of what Mr. Crowley calls the ‘lynch-mob-like and Communistic specter of the emerging class action suit,’ wherein aggrieved parties band together under the aegis of left-wing lawyers in order to posit a common beef and destroy the First Amendment right of free speech that we hold so sacred here in America. The mitigating, equivocating, and temporizing language that runs through your groundbreaking articles on celebrity misconduct will not save you. You may use alleged, purported, and rumored as much as you like, but they will not legally extricate you in the end. My first two salient points are these: you must dramatically boost your sexual content, and everything you publish in Confidential must be entirely true and verifiable.”

  Wooooooooo!!!! Bravura breath control and artful articulation!!!! Bondage Bob’s flabbergasted and flushed.

  He fidgeted. He licked his lips. He crossed his legs and went submissive sissy. I saw restraint-rope scars on his wrists.

  “Nuisance suits are costing us twenty-five thou a month. Those Commie lawyers are coming out of the sewers like rats.”

  I socked him my Second Soliloquy:

  “Informants must be both credible and coercible, as well as vulnerable to exposure of their own misdeeds. I served as an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for close to a decade. I have access to every crooked cop in this town, and they will rat out any celebrity, socialite, Communist, miscegenist, or alluring lowlife that they know of for a simple retainer. The scum that they rat out will rat out six others to stay out of your magazine, and the mathematical equation that I am positing will extend indefinitely. I can tell that you’re thinking, Informants alone will not suffice, and that assumption is correct. You may know that we are entering a bold new era of electronic surveillance. I propose that we install standing, full-time bugs in every high-class hotel in Los Angeles. I will bribe the managers and desk clerks of said hotels to steer celebrity adulterers and queers to specific rooms, where their sexual activities and conversation will be captured on tape. The best bug man on earth is a hebe named Bernie Spindel. I will meet with him soon. Mr. Spindel would love to enter your employ, and has a gift for you. He bugged a bungalow at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica last week. The manager of the hotel is a masochistic child molester with a quite understandable urge to be punished for his aberrant behavior. I will physically chastise him on a monthly basis, which will deter him from hurting children, as well as keep him under my thumb. He will have strict orders to place all celebs in bungalow number nine. Bernie’s gift is a tape of Senator John F. Kennedy fucking Ingrid Bergman, and detailing his preposterous plans to run for president of the United States to her, while she yawns and prattles on about her kids. Be forewarned: the fucking is short-lived. I’ll be frank: Senator Kennedy is a two-minute man.”

  Bondage Bob. He’s gaga, goo-goo-eyed, gone.

  “So, we—”

  I cut him off. “So, we also bug all the gay bathhouses. So, I have extortion wedges on the informants who supply the dirt for our most explosive pieces. So, I polygraph-test them to assure their veracity. So, I create a climate of fear in Hollywood, which is the most gorgeously perverted and cosmetically moralistic place on God’s green fucking Earth. Because, I have an unerring nose for human weakness and have sensed for some time that we have entered an era where the gilded and famous all secretly harbor a desire to be exposed. Because, I am willing to burglarize any psychiatrist’s office in order to get the dirt on their celebrity patients. Because, I am willing to quash lawsuits through the threat and application of physical force.”

  Bondage Bob guuuuuuuulped. “What won’t you do?”

  I saw Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I said, “Commit murder or work for the Reds.”

  A pin-drop silence sizzled. I let it linger loooooong.

  “Would you consent to an audition? To test your inside knowledge?”

  I nodded. Harrison hit me. I bopped to his beat, beatific.

  “Senator Estes Kefauver?”

  “Whorehound. Shacks with Filipina prosties at the downtown Statler.”

  “Sinatra. Give me the latest.”

  “Caught his new girlfri
end muff-diving Lana Turner, went on a six-day bender with Jackie Gleason, and wound up with the DT’s at Queen of Angels.”

  “Otto Preminger?”

  “Mud shark. Currently enthralled with a sepia seductress named Dorothy Dandridge.”

  “Lawrence Tierney?”

  “Brawling, psychopathic brother of noted grasshopper Scott Brady. Digs the boys at the Cockpit Lounge, and the occasional girl who looks like a boy.”

  “John Wayne?”

  “Quasi–drag queen. Fucks women and looks stunning in a size fifty-two-long muumuu.”

  “Johnny Weissmuller?”

  “King Schlong. Well known to have fathered nine kids out of wedlock, with nine different women. Current holder of the White Man’s World Record.”

  “Duke Ellington?”

  “Current holder of the Black World Record.”

  “Van Johnson?”

  “The Semen Demon. Sucks dick at the glory hole at the Wilshire May Company men’s room.”

  “Burt Lancaster?”

  “Sadist. Has a well-appointed torture den in West Hollywood. Pays call girls top dollar to inflict pain on them.”

  “Fritz Lang?”

  “Known to film Burt’s torture sessions, and screen them for a select clientele.”

  “The Misty June Christy?”

  “Nympho size queen. My shakedown bait Donkey Don Eversall gives her the big one on a regular basis. Donkey Don’s got a wall peek at his crib. My pal Jimmy Dean made an avant-garde film of their last assignation. It’s called The Stacked and the Hung. The premiere is Friday night, in my living room. You’re cordially invited.”

  “Alfred Hitchcock?”

  “Peeper.”

  “Natalie Wood?”

  “Child actress in transition. Rumored to be ensconced at a dyke slave den near Hollywood High.”

  “Alan Ladd?”

  “Dramatically underhung snatch hound. A man on the horns of a brutal existential dilemma.”

  Bondage Bob. The big magazine mogul. He’s gaga, goo-goo, pulled into putty. He’s martini-mangled and mine.