by James Ellroy
My mother won a beauty contest and flew to L.A. in December of'3 8. She was a 23-year-old registered nurse from the Wisconsin boonies and the Elmo Beauty Products' newly crowned "America's Most Charming Redhead." She toured L.A. with the most charming blonde, brunette, and gray-haired winners, took a screen test, and flew back to her job in Chicago with $i,ooo in prize money. L.A. kicked around in her head. She learned she was pregnant, aborted herself, and hemorrhaged. A doctor acquaintance fixed her up. She got the urge to start over in a sexy, new locale. She took a train back to L.A., found a pad and a job and met a schmuck who may or may not have been an heir to the Spalding sporting-goods fortune. She married the guy and divorced him within a few months. She met my father in '40 and fell for his good looks and line of bulishit. My father deserted his wife and shacked up with my mother. They were married six years into their shack job and seven months before my birth.
They told me stories, took me to movies, and encouraged me to read books. They force-fed me narrative lines. I grew up in the film noir era in the film noir epicenter. I read Confidential, Whisper, and Lowdown magazines before I learned to ride a two-wheel bike. My father called Rita Hayworth a nympho. My mother wetnursed dipsomaniacal film stars. My father pointed out the twoway mirrors at the Hollywood Ranch Market and told me they were spy holes to entrap shoplifters and disrupt homosexual assignations. I saw Plunder Road and The Killing and learned that perfectly planned heists go bad because daring heist men are selfdestructive losers playing out their parts in a preordained endgame with authority.
Johnnie Ray was a fruit. Lizabeth Scott was a dyke. All jazz musicians here hopheads. Tom Neal beat Franchot Tone halfdead over a blonde cooze named Barbara Payton. The Algiers Hotel was a glorified "fuck pad." A pint-size punk named Mickey Cohen ran the L.A. rackets from his cell at McNeil Island. Rin Tin Tin was really a girl dog. Lassie was really a boy dog. L.A. was a smog-shrouded netherworld orbiting under a dark star and blinded by the glare of scandal-rag flashbulbs. Every third person was a peeper, prowler, pederast, poon stalker, panty sniffer, prostitute, pillhead, pothead, or pimp. The other two-thirds of the population were tight-assed squares resisting the urge to peep, prowl, poon stalk, pederastically indulge, pop pills, and panty sniff. This mass self-denial created a seismic dislocation that skewed L.A. about six degrees off the central axis of planet Earth.
I knew an inchoate version of this at age 9. I knew it because I came from L.A. and my parents told me stories and lies. I knew it because I read books and went to movies and eschewed the gospel of the Lutheran Church in favor of a scandal-rag concordance. I knew it because my mother was murdered on June 22, 1958, and they never got the guy who did it.
My mother's death corrupted my imagination and reinforced my sense that there were really two L.A.'s. They existed concurrently. I bebopped around in the cosmetically wholesome Outer L.A. I conjured the Secret L.A. as a hedge against Outer L.A. boredom.
The Secret L.A. was all SEX. It was the shock and titillation of a child slamming up against the fact that his life began with fucking. It was my father's profane laughter and scandal-sheet deconstructionism. The sheets rendered beautiful people frail and somehow available. Common lusts shaped and drove them. Their pizzazz and good looks made them more and less than you. If the wind blew a certain way on a certain night, you could get lucky and have them.
The Secret L.A. was all CRIME. It was Stephen Nash and the kid he slashed under the Santa Monica Pier. It was Harvey Glatman and the cheesecake models he strangled. It was Johnny Stompanato shanked by Lana Turner's daughter two months before my mother's death.
CRIME merged with SEX on 6/2 2/5 8. My Secret L.A. obliterated the Outer L.A.
I've been living in it for thirty-nine years. I've reconstructed L.A. in the '50s in my head and on paper. I did not come on vacation or go home on probation. I lived in the literal L.A. and dreamed my own private L.A. I left the literal L.A. sixteen years ago. It was simply too familiar. I left the Secret L.A. one book and one memoir ago. I made a conscious decision to drop L.A. as a fictional locale. I had taken it as far as I could.
I've been jerked back to L.A. '53. A man made a movie and reinstated my L.A. life sentence.
Curtis Hanson is serving life himself. His sentence carries binding permanent-residence clause and a work-furlough waiver. He's got ten five-year hash marks on his jail denims and the beach pad characteristic of all successful L.A. lifers. He splits town to make films and comes back to L.A. rejuvenated. He's serving his life sentence voluntarily.
He made Losin' It in Calexico, California, and Mexicali, Mexico. He made The Bedroom Window in Baltimore and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in Seattle. He made The River Wild in Montana and Oregon, and Bad Influence in present-day L.A. It's the Faust tale retold for yuppies and hipsters and a symphony in bold colors and smog-kissed pastels. It doesn't look like any other L.A. film.
Hanson has provocative L.A. roots. He's second-generation L.A. stock. His birth certificate is stamped "Reno, Nevada." His father, Wilbur, was working on a government road crew there when Curtis was born.
Wilbur Hanson was a conscientious objector. He refused to fight in World War II and served out his draft commitment with a pick and shovel. The Hanson family moved back to L.A. in '46. Curtis and his older brother banged around a big, run-down house at Fifth and Hobart. His mother rented out their spare rooms. His father taught at the Harvard Military School and chauffeured rich kids to school for extra money.
Wilbur Hanson was a gifted and thoroughly dedicated teacher. He took his students on field trips and gave them more time than he gave his own sons. The Harvard School was an upscale dump site for the sons of the Hollywood elite. Darryl E Zanuck's son matriculated there. Old Man Zanuck got a hard-on for Wilbur Hanson. He didn't want no fucking CO teaching at his kid's school. He applied the big squeeze and had Wilbur Hanson bounced from Harvard.
Wilbur Hanson caught a Red-scare bullet but dodged another one. He got certified to teach in the L.A. city school system. He was not excluded on the basis of his expressed pacifism or his documented CO status. The family moved out to the San Fernando Valley. Wilbur Hanson began teaching at a school in Reseda.
Wilbur and Beverly June Hanson encouraged their sons to read. Beverly June loved movies and dragged Curtis and his brother to bargain matinees all over the Valley. He had seen dozens of film noir flicks before he knew the term "film noir." He watched Dragnet, M Squad, The Lineup, Racket Squad, and Mike Hammer every week. School bored him. His real curriculum was films, novels, and TV shows. His major course of study was narrative. His minor course of study was crime.
He wrote a story called "The Man Who Wanted Money" and read it to his fifth-grade class. His teacher found the story and Curtis's general crime fixation disturbing and ratted him off to his parents.
Curtis had a dual-world thing going. He had his family/school world and his film/book/TV-show world. He figured he'd grow up, become a screenwriter and director, and pull off a two-world merger.
He developed a dual-L.A. thing. It grew out of a dual thing with his dad and his uncle Jack.
Wilbur Hanson was a morally committed schoolteacher with $1.98 in the bank. Jack Hanson was a morally desiccated rag merchant who sucked up to movie stars and showbiz players.
Dad had a shack in the Valley. Uncle Jack had a big pad in Beverly Hills. Dad spent most of his time with schoolkids. Uncle Jack hobnobbed with Hollywood swingers. Dad took kids on uplifting field trips. Uncle Jack owned Jax--the grooviest, sexiest, most altogether bonaroo boutique on Rodeo Drive.
Curtis spent weekdays in the Valley and weekends in Beverly Hills. Uncle Jack loved having him around as a companion for his son. Curtis's two worlds were regulated by his school duties and divided by the Hollywood Hills. Uncle Jack gave him access to a world within his world. It was the fast-lane world of aggressive people out to get all they could and flick the cost. That worldwithin-a-world dovetailed with Curtis Hanson's crime fixation. Uncle Jack's movie-biz fixation dovetail
ed with Curtis's ambition to grow up and become a filmmaker.
Jack Hanson was noir personified. He was a movie-biz toady straight out of The Big Knife. He hoarded money and paid his people the minimum wage. He was arguably the cheapest cocksucker who ever walked the face of the earth. He opened up the Daisy in the mid-'6os. It was the first members-only dance club in Beverly Hills. Jack sold memberships to showbiz hipsters and employed it as his vehicle to suck his way further into the in crowd.
Curtis watched. Curtis took mental notes. Curtis finished school and got a chump job with Cinema magazine. He drove copy to the typesetters and film to the photo lab. The magazine started to go belly-up. Curtis convinced Uncle Jack to take over the operating costs and let him do all the work.
He did it. He wrote the critical pieces and feature interviews and took the photographs. He took some shots of Faye Dunaway and was paid with a plane ticket. He flew to Texas and watched the filming of Bonnie and Clyde.
It was a period film and a crime film. Curtis Hanson wrote it up in Cinema magazine. He prophetically called it "the most exciting American film in years."
I read that issue of Cinema magazine thirty years ago. I was 19 and strung out on pills and Thunderbird wine. I was breaking into houses in a ritzy L.A. enclave and stealing things that wouldn't be missed. I was shoplifting and reading crime novels and going to crime movies.
Hanson got me hot to see Bonnie and Clyde. I saw it and wigged out on it. I stole the money that paid for my ticket.
A year ago, I drove out to Lincoln Heights to watch a day's filming of L.A. Confidential. It was mid-August and very hot and humid.
A northeast-L.A. street was doubling for a street in south L.A. Nineteen ninety-six was doubling for 1953.
Period cars lined the curb. A dozen equipment trucks and trailers were parked just out of camera view. Twenty-odd technicians and gofers were standing near a catering van. They were snarfing cookies and ice-cream bars in the hundred-degree heat.
The focal point was a shabby wood-frame house. It was a near perfect match to the house I'd described in my novel. I visualized the scene I wrote in 1989.
A cop vaults a backyard fence and walks up a flight of outside stairs in broad daylight. He slips the catch on a second-story door and enters a cramped apartment. He sees a woman gagged and tied to a bed with neckties. He walks into the living room and shoots her presumed assailant in cold blood.
My cop was named Bud White. He was a huge man with a football-injury limp and a gray flattop. The movie Bud White is an actor named Russell Crowe. He is a compact and muscular man with dark hair and a quasi-flattop.
I watched Crowe nosh an ice-cream bar and bullshit with extras in cop uniforms. The actors playing Lieutenant Ed Exley and Captain Dudley Smith were standing across the street. My Exley was tall and blond. Guy Pearce, the film Exley, is medium size and dark haired. My Smith was burly and red-faced. James Cromwell, the film Smith, is pale and imperiously tall.
I felt like I was entering a brand-new L.A. world and a multimedia extravaganza. Period snapshots and scandal-rag headlines formed the visual borders. The audio track was the sound of my written words spoken by the actors around me. My mother's ghost was somewhere in the mix. She was eating popcorn with a spoon and humming Kay Starr's 1952 hit, "Wheel of Fortune."
I reeled behind a jolt of heat and a thousand quick-cut blips of my own private L.A. I had written L.A. Confidential as an epic hometown elegy. It was established fact and half-heard scandal and whispered innuendo. It was the world of horror I had first glimpsed the day my mother died.
It was Mickey Cohen and his henchman Johnny Stompanato. It was Hush-Hush magazine, my stand-in for Confidential. It was sex shakedowns and perverts modeled on Stephen Nash and Harvey Glatman. It was the "Bloody Christmas" police-brutality scandal and the twisted story of a theme park disingenuously disguised to remind readers of Disneyland.
L.A. Confidential was conceived and executed as a large-scale novel. It was not written with an eye toward movie adaptation. I did not expect it to bushwhack me six years after its publication.
I read the screenplay. Two writers had taken my milieu, my characters, and a good deal of my dialogue and fashioned their L.A. world within my L.A. worlds.
I walked into the wood-frame house. I was entering their visual world now. I passed the bedroom where the woman would be gagged and bound with neckties. I found Curtis Hanson framing a shot in the living room.
He saw me and smiled. He said, "What do you think?"
I said, "It looks inspired."
I had dinner with Hanson that night. We met at our mutual favorite restaurant.
The Pacific Dining Car is a swanky steak pit on the edge of downtown L.A. It's been there since 1 921. It's dark and wood paneled. It's a self-contained time warp in a city of time warps and dark continuums.
Hanson's uncle Jack brought him to the Car for steak dinners that his father couldn't afford. My father brought me to the Car on my tenth birthday, in 1958. I met my wife at the Car. A minister married us a few yards from my favorite booth.
I sat down in the booth and stretched my legs. I was exhausted.
I'd watched Bud White shoot the rape-o two dozen times. I'd watched Hanson refine and perfect the scene. I felt dispersed. I was losing track of all my L.A.'s.
Hanson showed up a few minutes later. A waiter brought us our drinks automatically.
We discussed the day's shooting and the thematic shifts between my novel and his film. Our conversation drifted back to L.A. in the '5os and the dark corners we had peered into as children.
I said, "There's a phrase that puts it nicely."
Hanson said, "Tell me."
I said, "L.A.: Come on vacation; go home on probation."
Hanson laughed and said, "It's inspired."
October 1997
LET'S TWIST AGAIN
Seasons of grace come and go. People never designate them in th moment. They look back individually or en masse and imposc narrative lines. It all comes down to what you had and what you lost.
The lines apply to nations, cities, and people. Kodachrome snapshots offset them. Faded colors send out a glow. Gooey music fills in the rest of the picture and tells you what to think.
It was better then. We were better then. I was younger then.
It's specious stuff all the way. It's schmaltzy hindsight built from verisimilitude. It obfuscates more than it enlightens. There's just enough hard truth in it to keep it running strong.
One season defines the whole mind-set. A formal name denotes it. Knights and maidens in a savage time. A three-hanky weeper on stage, screen, and CD.
A corny musical and a worn-out media concept. With a threepoint intersection running soft and sure in my head.
I had my own Camelot. It ran concurrent with the Broadway show and Jack Kennedy's spin in the White House. I lived in a dive apartment with my pussy-hound father and our unhousebroken dog. I had a fancifully corrupted mind and poor social skills. I had a Schwinn Corvette with gooseneck handlebars, chrome fenders, rhinestone-studded mud flaps, fringed saddlebags, and a speedometer that topped out at 150 miles per hour. I had a great city to roam and a shitload of kid lore to assimilate.
Our pad straddled Hancock Park and lower Hollywood. To the south and southwest: Tudor castles, French chateaus, and Spanish haciendas. To the north: small houses and studio back lots. To the east: wood-frame cribs and apartment dumps on a hilly plumb line downtown.
My beat covered Hollywood to Darktown. The southern border was a race line that white kids never crossed. It was pre-riot L.A. L.A. was pre-hysteric. Parents told their kids not to stray south of Pico and let the little flickers roam.
I started roaming at age i i. It was summer I had to start junior high in September. It scared the shit out of me.
I bike-roamed. I shoplifted books and candy bars. I ran into strange kids in bike cliques and picked up information.
How this girl popped some Spanish fly and impaled herself on a shift
knob. How Hitler was still alive. The word on aspirin and Coke. The word on Liberace and Rock Hudson. The word on your local junior high schools.
Le Conte Junior High, AXA "Le Cunt": Coool guys. Fast girls. Partyville, U.S.A. A breeding ground for studs in the "Lochinvars" and "Celts." Be cool or stay out.
Virgil Junior High: Full of cholos with Sir Guy shirts and slitbottomed khakis.
King Junior High: Full ofJaps and creeps from Silverlake--the "Swish Alps." Lots of homos who wore green on Thursdays.
Louis Pasteur Junior High: Full of uppity spooks who thought they were white.
Berendo Junior High: Danger zone. Pachuco rumbles. Full of Catholic girls who smoked Maryjane and had babies out of wedlock.
Mount Vernon Junior High, AKA "Mount Vermin," AKA "Mau-Maunt Vernon": Niggerland, U.S.A. Beware! Beware! Frequent homicides and race riots on campus.
I was slated to attend John Burroughs Junior High, AKA "J.B." I asked about it. Nobody had a riff down pat.
I spent three years at J .B. It was the buffer zone between my dark childhood and bleak postadolescence. J.B. was Camelot writ small and contained and unimpaired by hokey images of lost innocence to come. It was my taste of earned privilege and potent destiny and the unacknowledged secret pulse of my wild L.A. trip.
J.B. stood at 6th and McCadden. It was the southwest edge of Hancock Park. Kosher Canyon kicked in a few blocks away. J.B. divided two diverse and significant hunks of Central L.A.