by James Ellroy
What?--a pristinely private bulletin to bag me. A BHPD exclusive--to swing with the sweaty swish "suicide."
I felt bad boogie bopping my way. I bombed to Burbank and breezed by Brad's Auto Dump. I boosted fresh plates off an old Oldsmobile and placed them over my plates. I plowed back to L.A. and mainlined myself to the L.A. Times morgue.
I felt intertwined intrigues interdicting me. I played a Hush-Hush hunch and read reports on recent Beverly Hills burglaries.
Six--slickly slotted from late '57 to last week. Ulceratingly unsolved. Salivatingly similar stats: bedroom boosts while Mama and Papa went out to separate parties. Large losses and no standard talk of stakeouts to bag the B&E bad boys.
Bad BHPD boogie bopping my way? Twisted twirls and circles circumscribing me--
I popped to a pay phone and called Steve Crane. I told him to light out to the Luau lickety-split.
I beelined to Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. I Bausch & Lomb'd Lana Turner's backyard. I saw Johnny Stompanato jump on Lana and lash out with limitlessly lewd language. Lana lashed back. She julienned Johnny with jive on his jilt-happy gigolo ways. She spritzed spite. She shot shit at him shamelessly. She pounced on his pint-sized penis and his wicked welterweight dupe Don Jordan. She called him a guinea gangster and said he poured the pork to her Mexican maid with his poquito pee-pee. She said he pandered and pimped her and got her gussied up in her own Givenchy gown.
Some show: A bracing breakfast bash on beautiful Bedford. Dig the all-star audience, perched on their porches with pancakes and poached eggs:
Dino, Duke Wayne, Walt Disney, wolfing Wheaties. That white-haired wimp on The Webster Webfoot Show.
Steve Crane said, "So I'm letting Don Jordan run girls out of here. So Yolanda Paez brings me back the latest on Lana and Johnny. So what? You want to write the story up, great. But it's the last you'll ever peep out of my peepholes."
The Luau was listlessly still. Steve opened up early to meet me. My meth jolt was melting down. I mixed a mammoth martini to remagnetize it.
"I think Johnny crashed Jordan's whore racket and lured Yolanda into it. And I think the girls are the advance team for a burglary angle thatJohnny and Jordan are working."
Steve stirred his planter's punch and braced his back into the bar. "I'm sure there's lots of angles in this thing. Yolanda told me the girls are hooking so they can bring their families up from Mexico and that Jordan will smuggle them across the border, get them kitchen jobs, and take a cut of their pay. I can't complain. He's promised me three dishwashers off his next run."
I said, "Don's a flicking sweetheart."
"Yeah, and he may be the next welterweight champ. I heard he's fighting Honeybear Akins in the fall."
"And Mickey Cohen's got a piece of his contract."
"Right, which is not exactly a news flash."
"Does Mickey have some truck with Don?"
"He can calm him down and get him to call off some of his crazier stunts. Why?"
I gulped Gilbey's and Vermouth. "Nothing, but let me run some names by you. Jack Hanson, Chick Nadell, James B. Harris, Ted Jaffe, Russ Pearce--"
Steve stopped me. "All Luau regulars, all men with big fucking money."
I said, "All burglary victims that Don and Johnny's girls picked up here, all married men too embarrassed to cop to the fact that they let whores into their pads and got B&E'd as a result."
Steve said, "Jesus fucking Christ." I said, "No--Daniel Douglas Getchell. And listen--Johnny and Don are operating a bit too freely in Beverly Hills. Can you throw some light on that?"
Steve drained his drink and munched a Maraschino cherry. "Clinton Anderson's got a regular john thing going with Yolanda. He met her here, and she told me thatJohnny knows all about it."
Circling circles. Puzzle pieces popping into place.
Chief Anderson chewed up Ben Luboff at Delores's Drive-In. Ben blew the word: He'd dished me dirt on Don Jordan's doings. The Chief charged him to silence. The print pros took my prints off the closet door. The Chief chewed things over and decided not to swear out a warrant on the sweaty swish homo-cide. The Chief wanted to check me out up close and clip me--I might be Hush-Hush hip to his yen for Yolanda. I might make him as a Mexican whoremonger and Stompanato stooge.
Steve made himself a massive mai-tai. He said, "Lana, it was so goooooooood with you, baby."
I said, "Call Yolanda. Tell her I can get her a permanent green card, if she beds a guy who doesn't like girls."
I was Hush-Hush hot. I was warrant-wanted and baited by a BHPD bounty. I traded my boss Buick for a busboy's boogied-out wheels. A real congo coach: coon maroon paint matched to matted mink seats. I left the Luau in lieu of a new hideout hut.
I rocked up to the Rock's pad on Roscomare Road and rang the bell. Rock opened up--regal and righteously razzed off in a royal blue kimono. I caught sight of a kimono-clad cutie behind him--a pretty punk pouting into page two of today's paper.
Rock ripped into me. "You're getting bold, Danny. I usually find you going through my garbage or trying to crawl in my bedroom window."
The playmate flipped me the finger. I blew him a bitchy kiss and latched a look on his Herald-Express. Wow! A sharp shot of the sweaty swish sheet-shrouded and dead.
Rock reripped me. "An old friend of mine killed himself last night, and I'm in no mood to fuck around with a lowlife like you."
I deflated his diatribe. "I'm moving in with you. You're going to hide me out, so I can flick Ben Luboff for fucking me, and fuck him for fucking you with that kid you flicked at the Fine Arts last night."
Rock rocked, rolled, listed, lurched, and landed in my arms.
I moved in. I moved out of my Methedrine mode with Miltown and Macallan scotch. I made machinations to save myself and rescue the Rock.
I called Mickey Cohen. I tipped him to Candy Barr's barrage of shit behind his back and begged him to call off Don Jordan. Mickey tossed a tantrum and told me he'd try. I called in a cautiously coded note to Clinton Anderson. I told the Chief's chief chump to check this: I chomp at the chance to be the Chief's chief informant--and I need to stay alluringly alive. Let's talk later-- I've got lots of lovely dirt to drop on the BHPD.
Steve Crane did his duty and duped Yolanda Paez into my plan to play out here at Rock's playpen. Said plan: to plant Yolanda and Rock in the sack and sock in a prank prowler call to my plant with the LAPD. The plant plants calls to his private press contacts-- prowler prowls at Rock's Roscomare rancho right now! Blackand-whites bomb to Bel-Air! Reporters run to Rock's ranch! I fire shots out a back bedroom! Cops kick the door in and find Rock and his Mex mama flicking feverishly! Reporters find them and flood them with flashbulb flares! I sell my pre-shot sex shots to Randy Rothstein at Rave and Terry Tompkins at Tattle. Ben Luboff gets skinned alive and scooped by the scoop of the scopophiliac century: ROCK HUDSON IS STRAIGHT!
I yanked Yolanda to the playpen and played her through rehearsals with the richly reluctant Rock. The Rock's live-in lover took it all horrifically hard. He drank himself into dramatic hysterics and hurled hate hexes at me in a slithery and scintillating silence. I had constellated his self-contempt and crisply crystallized it. He hated himself for his love for hunky hound dog Hudson. He'd sweated the sweaty swish story out of the Rock. Rock's call-boy carousing blistered and blackened his heart. He was afraid that Rock would renounce his rump-happy ways with a real revisionistic yen for Yolanda. He blamed all this multiplied mishigaas dead on me.
Rock promised to drop some graft gelt and glom Yolanda a green card. Yolanda laid out some lurid Lana-Johnny tales of late. Lana and Johnny were wrapped in a ripe roundelay of sex and self-hatred. Brazen brawls and licentious language. Lana was ready to cut the cord and juke Johnny out of her life. Yolanda said she'd pay prime pop to liberate her love letters. I called Lana and laid out a deal. I said I'd latch onto the letters. She said she'd lure Johnny to her lair and call Yolanda at Rock's rancho. I'd run to Johnny's pad and pounce on her packet of purple prose then.
&nb
sp; I set the date for the prowler-prowl press gig: 4/4/58.
Good Friday. A good day to crucify and crush the rumor that Rock ran the Greek way. A good way to resurrect him and hail him as heterosexual.
We waited. We worried details. Rock and I belted bonded bourbon and bullshitted our way down to D-Day.
Rock psyched me out and psychoanalyzed me. I told him about my chickenshit childhood in Chillicothe, Ohio. I told him how my meshugenah mom mistreated me. She only let me read one book: a thick thesaurus. Rock bestowed a bourbon-bombed benediction on me. I told him that Hush-Hush would always run and rag him as a raging pussy hound. I think we might have hugged once--but don't tell anyone.
8:10 P.M., Friday, 4/4158. The lilac-colored carpet on Rock's living-room floor.
Rock jumped out of his jockey shorts. Yolanda yanked off her dress and stamped herself with the stations of the cross. I bored my eyes in on her and buzzed the fuzz.
My cop buddy caught the call. "Los Angeles Police Department. Sergeant Helgeland speaking."
I said, "Prowler at 841 Roscomare, Bel-Air. Shots fired." I hung up, hauled upstairs, and smoked two Smith & Wesson rounds out a rear window. I heard the live-in lover boohoo and beat his fists on the bed he bounced on with the Rock. I bounced back downstairs and went big-time bug-eyed.
It was supposed to be a faux-fuck. It wildly and willfully wasn't. Rock had Yolanda priapically pinioned. She had her eyes shut. She couldn't catch Rock surreptitiously centered on a malecenterfold spread.
The phone rang. Yolanda yelped and rocked off of Rock. She said, "It is Good Friday. I have a premonition." She pounced on the phone. I perched by the earpiece and heard what she heard-- hissingly Hush-Hush.
"Johnny. . . hitting me. . . I'm so afraid. . . ."
Yolanda wrapped herself in Rock's robe and ran out the door. She ran to Rock's lavender Lincoln and raised rubber. I ran out and tailed her in my coon coach. We passed a big bevy of blackand-whites rolling toward Rock's rancho.
We bombed to Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. We lashed into Lana Turner's house sixteen seconds apart. We bombed up to an upstairs bedroom. I froze in the doorway and caught a frightful freeze-frame frisson:
Lana--terrified, tear streaked. A teenage girl--shiny eyed, in shock, and scared shitless. Johnny Stompanato staring at the knife Yolanda just jammed in him.
That's the real story: off the record, on the Q.T. and very Hush-Hush.
I latched onto Lana 's letters late that night. I leaked two to Ben Luboff and bought Rock back into the closet. I closed the closet door on Ben's big toe. I told him to clear me with Clinton Anderson or I'd clip him for that sweet smack he swung on the sweaty swish,
He capitulated and kowtowed and called me back. He passed me a cautiously codified Anderson aside.
I know where you were Good Friday. YE going south. Let's go with the public version.
A deal went down behind BHPD doors. Anderson could not afford to yank Yolanda and push her public and stamp her for the Stompanato snuff The Chief chiseled out a deal and chilled himself out of trouble and chipped Cheryl Crane into a chump child charge. Lana let it go down. Anderson addressed her with a big bag of dirt he took from Terry Tompkins at Tattle. Lana liked to lez with Lila Lee once in a soft sapphic moon. Terry had a pack of Polaroids.
Don Jordan decided to let me live. He decisioned Honeybear Akins and wore the welterweight crown for fifteen fat months. Benny "Kid" Paret mugged him and took his title in May 1960. Some malefactors mugged him for real and murdered his mulatto ass in the mid- '90s.
Yolanda moved back to Mexico. Hollywood had its hooks in her She transcended the tragedies of her life and triumphed as a snuff-film auteur
Steve Crane crapped out in '85. Those lavish Luau liquor libations lopped out his liver
The live-in lover left the Rock for Liberace. He maliciously maintained that I turned Rock straight--despite a massive mountain of definitive data that conclusively contradicted him. Rock and I remained friends. 1 pressed his preposterous straight credentials in Hush-Hush and herded him to a herbalist when I heard he had AIDS. Potent potions prolonged Rock 's life for a small parcel of time. My current prognosis is presumably much better
I want to LIVE. I want to lay out the scopophiliac scope of my life in a NON--mea culpa manner I want to slap myself in serial form all over GQ. I've got an artful array of dirt on Art Cooper--the editor-in-chief I've extorted him into publishing this piece. I've got dirt to illegitimize Ilena Silverman--Art's most artful editor They'll print what I tell them to.
I talked to my doctors today. My red-blood count is oscillating optimistically up. I might make it to the moment that they dig up and discover a cure.
The gonif three gurneys down is still staring at me. He 's looking more and more familiar He 's tripping out of the tableaux that I just tantalizingly tattled. I've got him on the tip of my tongue.
Right there. Right--
The Rock's lachrymose live-in lover. The cuckolded kid who cursed me back in--
He made me make him. He made a geriatric jump in my direction. He's got a hypodermic full of hyper-hazy, health-hazarding shit. He wants to reinfect me and get his revenge on the Rock.
I grabbed the sharp shiv shoved under my bed.
September 1998
TIJUANA, MON AMOUR
I lashed the live-in lover and left him for dead. A night nurse noted his absence and noticed his knees nudged under my bed. She hauled him out. She hydrated him. She tricked up a transfusion and blasted him with black-market blood.
She saved his life. She convinced a kangaroo court to convict me of Assault on an AIDS Ward. She trumped up a tribunal and jerry-rigged a jury. She found five fags and fed them facts on my fag-fragging Hush-Hush heyday. They banished me to a basement stuffed with stacks of old newspapers.
Doctors dip by and drizzle my IV drip. Pill pushers pump me with potions. A homophobic herbalist hops by and hails me as his heterosexual hero. I regale him with riotous riffs on scandal scores and outrageous outings. We ponder my plight as a fag-fragger plowed with the HIV plague.
I mope most mornings and meander most afternoons. I drag my IV drip and stumble. I study the stacks of old newspapers and notice my name now and then. I bop back to better times. I relive my reign as a nihilist knight and dream draconian.
LOS ANGELES HERALD-EXPRESS, JUNE 3, 1955:
MONAHAN KILLERS EXECUTED AT SAN QUENTIN
At 10:00 this morning, Barbara Graham, John "Jack" Santo, and Emmett Perkins, the convicted slayers of Burbank widow Mabel Monahan, went to their deaths in the gas chamber at San Quentin State Prison.
The executions capped a frantic series of appeals and phone calls to Governor Goodwin J. Knight. Governor Knight rejected last-minute pleas to save the lives of the convicted killers and sent them to their deaths for the 1953 murder. Santo wept and squealed as he was dragged to the gas chamber. Perkins and Miss Graham submitted to their punishment stoically. Miss Graham asserted her innocence a few moments before she was put to death. Los Angeles County ProsecutorJ. Miller Leavy, who successfully tried the case, called her statement "poppy-cock. Barbara Graham was just as guilty as her murderous cohorts, and she was justly punished for her grievous transgression."
On the evening of March 9, 1953, Santo, Perkins, Miss Graham, and two men named John True and Baxter Shorter broke into Mabel Monahan's house, convinced that she was harboring $100,000 belonging to a gambler nephew. True and Shorter looked on in horror as Perkins, Santo, and Miss Graham pistol-whipped Mrs. Monahan in an effort to get her to reveal the location of the money. Mrs. Monahan told them that there was no cache of money, a statement which was proven to be true. Enraged, Santo, Perkins, and Miss Graham beat Mrs. Monahan to death.
John True voluntarily surrendered and turned state's evidence. Baxter Shorter disappeared before Santo, Perkins, and Miss Graham were apprehended. It is assumed that Santo and Perkins killed him to ensure his silence.
Santo and Perkins were suspected of having committed several oth
er robbery-murders in northern California, dating back tO 1951. Miss Graham was a narcotics addict and former prostitute. Her good looks and steadfast protestations of her innocence gained her a sympathetic audience among the general public and a small sector of the press. Before Miss Graham, Santo and Perkins's trial, rumors of police-DA's Office "dirty tricks" aimed at finagling a confession from Miss Graham surfaced. Deputy DA Leavy called the rumors "Poppy-cock. Every attempt that the DA's Office and members of the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills Police Departments made in order to get Miss Graham to recant her preposterous allegations of innocence were entirely legal and aboveboard."
The bodies of the three convicted killers will be shipped to undisclosed locations for burial.
LOS ANGELES MIRROR, DECEMBER 17, 1955:
PAYOLA PROBE IN WORKS
HEADED FOR GRAND JURY?
A confidential source within the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office told Mirror reporters that members of the Beverly Hills and Los Angeles Police Departments, along with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, are conducting a probe into "Payola": The practice of bribing radio announcers, or "disc jockeys," into giving certain recordings preferential amounts of playing time on their programs.
The probe will allegedly focus on KMPC disc jockey Flash Flood and his treatment of Linda Lansing's current 45-RPM single, "Baby, It's Cold Inside." Flood (the former Arthur John Beauchamp) has been playing the novelty song at least sixteen times a day since the record was released on October 1 i. When asked to comment on this, Flood told a Mirror reporter: "What can I say? I dig the side, and I dig Linda Lansing, and nobody's paid me to dig either one. And I dig all the publicity I've been getting, because it's boosted my ratings way up, but I don't dig all the heavy treatment I've been getting from the fuzz, although I do dig all the heavy names that are getting caught up in this thing."