LAPD '53

by James Ellroy

  That’s why I can so soaringly summarize the era. I was five years old Then. I’m 67 Now. My superpowers have metamorphosed into magical memory. That’s how you know I can deliver the dish with valid verisimilitude.

  I’m out on the prowl. I’ve seen everything that you’re about to see in this book. I’m preemptively precocious. I’m crime-crazed. I’m invisible and crawl through the crazy cracks in my all-L.A. world. I know things. I know this above all else:

  It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town. We just live in it.

  William H. Parker III. The greatest American policeman of the 20th century.

  LAPD Chief: ’50 to ’66.

  Reformer. Reactionary. Town-tamer. Progressive. Profligate, pious, soused on the sauce.

  Bill Parker was Los Angeles ’53. He was a tub-thumping theocrat. He possessed a pulsing passion for the stern rule of law. He was a brilliantly gifted attorney-at-law. He tempered his deeply held belief in the ordered society with a reluctant—but still pointed—regard for civil liberties. He knew the law and understood the limits of aggressive policework. He stamped out monetary corruption in the LAPD and vigorously punished crooked cops. He loathed and feared chaos—in large part because of his alcoholic affliction and chaotic temperament. His authoritarian mind-set was stunningly suited to the implementation of large-scale urban policing. Bill Parker believed in interdicting crime as it occurred and preempting it whenever possible. He deployed proactive methods. Stop potential suspects. Isolate and detain them. Determine their criminal intent or the lack of it. The ordered society comes with a price. That old saw proves itself true: Freedom isn’t free.

  Parker enraged civil libertarians. His brusque manner drew heat. He defended his methods with ineluctable logic and sterling wit. Cops are cops. They are ad hoc investigators, disruptors and interdictors of crime. They are not sociologists. They do not judge the perpetrators and victims of crime, nor do they or should they plumb the societal causes that might cause crime to exist. Rigorous enforcement saves lives and reduces the level of depravity and chaos in society—moment to moment, crime to crime, roust to roust. If crime rates are higher in Negro and Mexican enclaves, those indigenous populations will sustain the highest level of interdiction. Said interdiction will provide for a greater degree of safety for the law-abiding majorities of those enclaves. If this creates a sense of persecution, too bad. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. The root causes do not apply. Your right to hit your neighbor ends where his nose begins. Your shitty childhood and the established facts of historical racism do not mean shit. William H. Parker championed the ideal of the ordered society for all citizenries. William H. Parker’s cops interdicted and suppressed too vigorously on some occasions. Overzealous interdictors and suppressors were rebuked and punished or ducked under the radar of detection. William H. Parker surely erred on the side of aggressive policework, but hardly in proportion to the degree that his methods succeeded. Bill Parker and the LAPD—“occupying fascist army?” Bullshit—Then and Now. Crime was—and is—individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. It remains a continuing circumstance that must be interdicted and suppressed—Now as Then. And—why mince words or mince at all—cops must feel free to judiciously kick ass.

  L.A. looked gooooood in 1953. Bill Parker’s boys provided full-time cop sanitation. Bill Parker was L.A.’s El Jefe. I was the five-year-old dipshit kid with wild powers. Why mince words? I was a peeper, a voyeur, a baby fiend gassed on it all. I grooved the ordered society with lunar-looped Lutheran fervor and snout-snagged subversive subscents.

  Bebop—blazingly blasting, blasphemously black.

  Film noir—fractiously fronting its main theme: You’re fucked.

  Let’s talk bop. All the heavies were then gigging on South Central Avenue. Bill Parker’s boys surveilled the surface, but did not join the scene. A pity, that. I would have grokked Whiskey Bill, flying on a snootful of jungle juice. Dig it: He’s grooving to mud shark miscegenation at the Club Alabam. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker—no relation—is bleating, blatting, honking and hiccuping “A Night in Tunisia.” Reefer smoke hangs humid. The music is decadently discordant. It’s the sock-it-to-me sonics of interminable chord changes off a recognizable main theme. It’s music for cultured cognoscenti that Bill Parker cannot acknowledge. It takes brains and patience to groove the gist of this shit. It’s the musical equivalent of the chaos Bill Parker deplores.

  Five-year-old Ellroy is there, watching the Bird take flight. Everybody’s chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. The place is one big corroded iron lung. I’ve got a spike in my arm, I’m orbiting on Big “H,” I knew I’d write the text for this book one day, so I’ve got my voyeur’s cap on. My babysitter is an LAPD Narco cop named John O’Grady, aka “The Big O.” We drove down to darktown in O’Grady’s narc ark. O’Grady’s notorious. He’s a rogue cop. He’s got a hard-on to hurl hurt on hopheads. Jazz musicians gore his goat. They’re instigators of insolent insurrection—but he instinctively digs their shit. He’s gone too far, already. He popped a drummer named Geordie Hormel and got his dick in the wringer. Hormel was a scion of the Hormel meatpacking clan. He popped William Hopper, later to co-star as Paul Drake on the Perry Mason TV show. Bad Bill Hopper was the son of Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper. Oops.

  Bebop is insurrectionist music. It’s all about oppression, musical taboo and breaking with the slavery of established form. De facto segregation is implicitly portrayed in many of the pix in this book. Note the Negroes in the margins of white crime scene photos. They’re bebop balefully eyeballing the upshot of the White Man’s bad bidness, while the LAPD takes charge. The southside pix are Jim Crow de-luxe. Colored folk congregate and gesticulate within them. It’s ’53. The year is Then and a training ground for chants of “Freedom Now!” Those chants will take hold a decade hence. Bill Parker could not, would not, and did not heed them—because they came backed by civil disorder, and he would not acknowledge the solvency of any grievance that caused chaos and served to disrupt the ordered society that he wished so dearly and served so assiduously to preserve. He sought to quash chaos in the ’65 Watts riot and was right to do so. William H. Parker was a visionary law-enforcement officer. William H. Parker was a hidebound drunk. Saul Bellow wrote, “Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” Parker did not know that, or chose not to integrate it into his professional thinking. Parker’s inflexible police methods did not cause the ’65 riot, nor was the ’92 riot caused by the actions of his police chief successors or LAPD cops on the street. Violent reaction to any perceived injustice is never permissible within a free society. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale.

  You dig the trade-off, don’t you?

  We needed Whiskey Bill Parker’s methods in 1953. We need a reinstatement of them today. Parker’s beloved Pueblo Grande built up and out during the time of his stewardship. He could not contain its growth nor curtail its change of complexion. He wanted to keep it the way it was Then. I cannot fault him for that. It’s why I’m writing the text for this book. Then to Now. All notions of the civil contract and the ordered society have been trashed. Where’s Whiskey Bill Parker when we really need him?

  Now to Then. We’re back at the Club Alabam. Five-year-old Ellroy’s geezing Big “H.” The Big O is rousting Lenny Bruce for maryjane and making him his sniveling snitch. Bird has flown off the bandstand and has been replaced by tenor sax king Dexter Gordon.

  Dex is a six-foot-six mulatto with a billy-goat beard. He’s a whole string of cars on a loooooooooong soul train. He resembles a kold kat you’ll see in a daily bulletin later in this book.

  The scurvy skeezix pictured is your ultimate low-life hype. He’s known to “play the saxophone.” He “habituates pool halls and can be found at jam sessions.” He lives off of women. He’s an occasional pimp. He’s a low substrata 459 man—an “acquaint
ance burglar.”

  He befriends people. He wins their trust. He acclimates himself to their pads and makes sure that their doors are left unlocked. He enters the pads while his friends are out and robs the fools blind.

  The nomenclature of criminal activity fascinates and enthralls us. This is not 211 armed robbery or 187 homicide. This is the low-end, feed-your-arm, lazy-man hustle. You can laugh at it and still feel good about life on earth. “Acquaintance burglar.” Nobody could make this up. I couldn’t make this up. Wait!!!—isn’t that him, right now?

  Yeah, it is. He’s hitting Miles Davis up for a handout, right there at a ringside seat. John O’Grady drops Lenny Bruce like a hot turd and takes off after the cat. Lenny’s at loose ends. He sees me and sidles over. He says, “Hey, Ellroy. What’s shaking, baby?”

  I say, “Nuthin’ but the leaves on the motherfuckin’ tree.”

  An invigorating dialogue ensues. It’s all bebop, boss bitches and our priapic prospects on this noxious night in L.A. ’53. Lenny tells me there’s a sneak peek at the Wiltern Theater. Dig it: Sterling Hayden in Crime Wave.

  It’s L.A.

  It’s ’53.

  It’s film noir.

  Of course—we’ve gotta go.

  Bebop soundtracks this book. Film noir serves as our sinematic subtext and kineticized visual cohort. Both genres deride authority and yet ride shotgun to a book that honors authority and extols America’s most august police agency. Film noir has been overanalyzed and scrutinized as much as the LAPD. It’s most immediate cinematic precedent is German Expressionism. It is allegedly a reaction to, and rebuttal of, excesses of the postwar Red Scare. The latter is both true and false and must be judged as philosophically self-serving. The Hollywood Ten pilloried is small potatoes when compared to Stalin’s postwar purges and iron curtain aggression. Film noir is most tellingly a reaction to the 30-year transit of horror that began with World War I and lasted through V-J Day and the beginning of America’s noble effort to resuscitate Europe with the Marshall Plan. 1953 found us 40 years into an all-new world terror. War, famine, totalitarian alliance, hundreds of millions dead. War profiteering, coups, overthrows, the A-bomb. Refugee film talent, adrift in Hollywood—many artists Jewish and left-wing. The Russian left betrayed them as Hitler rounded up and murdered them. Now, they’re in Hollywood—working on cheap-o crime flicks and suffused with justifiably paranoid heebie-jeebies. The film studios are here. It’s cheap to work on location here. The crime film has a built-in latitude that allows for social critique. Thus, film noir is primarily L.A.-based and oozes pervert potential. Thus, any police film shot on location in L.A. is implicitly a film about the LAPD. Thus, this book targets film noir aficionados. Thus, this book is seamlessly compatible to film noir. Thus, five-year-old Ellroy and Lenny Bruce are jungled-up at the Wiltern Theater for André De Toth’s Crime Wave.

  Suicide, May 26, Hollywood Hills

  De Toth had solid film noir cred. He was European. He lost an eye in a Nazi-Commie street brawl, circa ’28, and wore a rakish eye patch. Sterling Hayden stars in Crime Wave.

  Hayden was a onetime pinko. He ratted out fellow travelers to government committees and harbored unnecessary guilt. Said guilt did not stop him from going for the gelt in his portrayal of an LAPD bruiser.

  Hayden’s Lieutenant Sims is a vivid explicator of Bill Parker’s mission of interdiction. He’s maladjusted and vexed from a recent withdrawal from cigarettes. He’s uncannily intelligent. His physical presence is on a par with many of the cops pictured in this book. Street presence promotes suppression without the use of force. The implied threat of “we’ll kick your ass” carries more pop than asses kicked wholesale and packs a humanist punch that even pinkos and peaceniks can groove. The LAPD was an ass-kicking entity in 1953. The LAPD kicked my ass on three notable occasions in the late ’60s and early ’70s and stretched me onto the straight and narrow. Read these words and skim the photographs that follow this text. You may well make a startling connection. It may prompt you to wonder what came first: the chicken or the egg.

  Were the police photographs collected in this book suggested by the film noir style, or was film noir a stylistic offshoot of cop pix?

  Crime Wave suggests a reciprocal synchronicity. It was shot in ’52 and released in ’54. It’s got that transitional look that so informs LAPD ’53. The old L.A.’s getting a modernist makeover. Spaceship cars are on the rise, humpbacked cars are on the wane. Buildings are going low, flat and angular. Isolated structures stand out, juxtaposed against vacant lots. Chinatown looks freshly painted and garishly redone. City streets look significantly wider than they do today. That’s because of a scarcity of parked cars and passing motorists. Crime Wave bids the viewer to watch this—L.A.’s on the rise, and what you’re seeing won’t last much longer.

  Crime Wave is our bebopped sister flick. It’s as kinetic as LAPD ’53 is gorgeously static. The action carries us through nonstop days and nights. The film has a “hopped-up/fuck sleep/we’re out to score” feel. It’s all roadblocks, APBs, LAPD squadrooms. Oooooooooooooh, Daddy-O—the heat is on!!!!! Crashed-out cons are out to take down a Glendale B of A. The heist is masterminded by noted film noir greaseball Ted de Corsia. The hunky young Charles Bronson is Bad Ted’s aide-de-camp. They need a skilled pilot to fly them down to Mexico, post-heist. Ex-con Gene Nelson fits that bill. Gene’s shacked up with his she-wolf wife, Phyllis Kirk. He’s a small-plane pilot trying to go straight. “Straight” doesn’t quite fit Gene Nelson. He’s a tad minty and seems unequal to the She-wolf. Nelson was a onetime Broadway dancer. That marks him suspect from the get-go.

  Crime Wave abounds with psychopathic bad behavior. The great Timothy Carey chews scenery as a lunatic lech out to loin-lock the She-wolf. Lieutenant Sims lets the heist go down and busts it up in progress. Death reigns in the end. Sims cuts Queen Gene and the She-wolf loose to return to their shitty lives. He lights a cigarette, takes a drag and tosses it.

  Ooooooooooooh, Daddy-O—there’s that film noir rush! The ambiguous gesture, the futile undercurrent, the pervading knowledge that the whole game is rigged. Winner take nothing. No exit, baby. Film noir makes us smug even as it belittles our status as human beings. Who gives a shit? It’s L.A. ’53, and we’re making the scene.

  Crime Wave is a tight flick and a vivid visual toast to L.A. Then. It’s the ultimate companion piece to LAPD ’53—because it codifies period archetypes and gives you what the book can’t.

  Great police interiors.

  The LAPD Detective Bureau at City Hall.

  It’s open all nite.

  It’s small compared to every other squad bay that you’ve seen in movies.

  We tried to dig up archival squadroom shots—and failed. Crime Wave delivers the goods. André De Toth shot his film on the actual locations. Note the tightly pressed office spaces and low ceilings. Note the crammed-in desks and the welter of night creatures smooshed up on hard wooden benches. Groove it—there’s NO EXIT!!!!! It’s Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and your ass is fucking grass!!!!! There’s Lieutenant Sims, played by six-foot-five Sterling Hayden. He’s having a shit day. He’s got the big bone for the She-wolf, but she just slinked off with her homo hubby. Sims is looking for a scapegoat punching bag—and YOU fit the bill!!!!!

  It’s film noir.

  You’re fucked.

  The green room up at San Quentin calls your name.

  Vous êtes l’Étranger.

  You are Camus’ The Stranger—striated and stripped bare. The gas chamber looms.

  Why do we live for this shit?

  In large part, it’s this:

  It allows us to time travel. We’re back in a less circumspect time, constrained by rigid laws that we believe in but violate with a wink. Booze and tobacco are not yet demonized. Sex has not been overscrutinized, debunked and vulgarized past comprehension. We’re hip, slick and cool. We’re denizens of a private world within the real world. The constraints and moral censures of 1953 protect us. We’re time travelers wit
h the gift of retrospection. We know what happened in the end and feel securely at home. “Home” is film noir’s fatalistic worldview—which condones our bad conduct, because the game is rigged. You can’t go home again, but art allows us to linger. I’ll never shack with the She-wolf at the Beverly Hills Hotel—but the photographs in LAPD ’53 place me within the context to dream.

  Every photograph in this book is a flashpoint rendering of the chaos that Whiskey Bill Parker sought to suppress. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Our flashpoints are a daily occurrence. It’s all juxtaposition.

  Suicide, July 18, Lincoln Heights

  Juxtapose Crime Wave against the LAPD propaganda vehicle Dragnet. The former gives us the proportionate topography of 1953. The latter gives us the language and buttoned-up professionalism of the LAPD, exactly as Bill Parker wished to see it portrayed. Cops spew penal code numbers. The number 459 connotes a panty-sniffing hot-prowl burglar, out to peep brassieres draped over a bathtub ledge. Maybe the lady of the pad is sleeping in the next room. The hot-prowl man can snatch her purse and catch a glimpse of skin. Of course, Dragnet left the good shit to your imagination. The number 187 connotes a stiff and demands the explication of motive. Dragnet seeks to render the pix in this book prosaic. Crime Wave renders them brutally poetic—because it provides us with the ever-vivid context of the time that Dragnet does not. We look at pictures because we’ve looked at pictures and we’ve learned how to look at pictures along the way. “Every picture tells a story” is bullshit. Captioned pictures provide perfunctory vignettes and urge us to turn the page. Great pictures urge us to create our own stories. Pictures depicting horror and pathos make us look once, turn away and look again. Dragnet was TV pabulum. It was moderately entertaining and whitewashed the menace and brute glamour of policework. Jack Webb’s Joe Friday was a snooze compared to Sterling Hayden’s Lieutenant Sims. You have a book in your hands. Stunning photographs are crying out, “Look at me and ponder what this means.” Bebop, film noir, slinky she-wolves. What’s the overall connection? It’s art and sex in a time of stratification and repression. Bill Parker was our main man Then. He’s keeping the L.A. streets safe—and in that capacity he’s granting art and sex and the two commingled an astoundingly subversive power. Bill Parker’s our main man Now. Art and sex are in the shitter, because subversion has been branded, Internetted and malignantly monetized. Movies and TV shows are visual aids to help us more cogently appreciate still pictures. The converse equally applies. L.A. Now is vilely explicit. It’s all safe-sex billboards and glittering light displays for alcoholic beverages and apocalyptic feature films. L.A. Then was elliptical and implicit. Look once, look away, look again. Compose a story as you view those feet sticking out from under that morgue sheet. Glimpse the swervy details of sudden catastrophe and the moment of police intervention. Pretend that you’re viewing these pix in their historical moment. You cannot digitally alter, enhance, or denude them. Your sole options are look again or look away.