Destination: Morgue!: L.A. Tales

by James Ellroy

  It encompassed the Reds and the Negroes. It indicted the Mob and the foreign unwashed. It bowed to the Glamour World and ceded their right of access.

  The Glamour World was a confluence. It publicly cohered in the ’50s. The scandal rags linked the divergent strands and mythologized the players. The rags built the world from photo files and innuendo.

  Socialites. Film stars. Politicians. Jazz horns and playboys. Mobsters with crossover appeal.

  The celebrity matrix. Revised and deconstructed for rube readers of a distinct demographic.

  The estranged. The horny. The bereft and aggrieved. The worshipful stargazer ablaze with self-hatred. The chronically optimistic.

  The rags were cynically optimistic. The rags were prophetic. The rags presaged the media age and the age of tabloid TV. The rags told us that the Glamour World was Our World hyperbolized and restricted for those with coin and good looks. The rags ran rancorous and riffed off their readers’ resentment. The rags ran riot with one rich subtext.

  THEY are YOU. YOU could get lucky.

  Joe and Jane Reader, rejoice.

  The rags ratted out Johnnie Ray’s men’s-room misadventures. They were sneeringly snide and priapically pro-gay in the pre-pride era. The rags ran Ava Gardner’s murky memoirs of miscegenation. It reviled racists and revitalized race-mixer rectitude. The rags roasted rabid Sonny Tufts. Sonny bit showgirls on the thighs. The rags routed showgirls out of harm’s way. The rags put Sonny on a choke chain.

  Disillusionment is enlightenment. Some pundit popped that platitude and clipped a clear chord in our souls.

  The rags boomed for six years. They explicated the Glamour World. They enlightened. They emboldened. They obfuscated. They told trenchant truths and launched and licked libel litigations. They raised rubber and scored skidmarks on square America.

  They gave us an alternative American family. They rebutted Ozzie and Harriet. They reinforced rapacious buffoons like Sergeant Bilko. They stamped stereotypes in stereophonic sound. They violated their own validity with loopy lyrics like the ones on this page. Scandal-rag language distanced and seduced. It read as contemporaneous satire. Rag writers moralized. Rag writers attacked Reds. Rag writers rallied behind the restrictions of their time. Rag writers wistfully winked and inferred a more insidious intent.

  The rags loved to go after marginal Hollywood characters, like Johnnie Ray, a crooner who, the mags would allege, was involved in homosexual high jinks. (Culver Pictures)

  Scandalanguage. Scopophiliac. Scarifyingly complex and multifaceted in motive.

  The scandal-rag family of the ’50s is the dysfunctional family of today. Their voyeuristically viewed behavior is the hyper-analyzed behavior of today. The sedate backdrop of the ’50s gave it a compensating panache. The hopped-up pace of the ’90s depletes its power and underscores the behavior as prosaic.

  Dipsomaniacs, hopheads, nymphos, fruits, dykes. Satyrs, Commies, miscegenators, hoods, provocateurs. Car wrecks, bar brawls, paternity suits.

  Gang bangs. Three-ways. Toilet-stall assignations. Euphemized for the censors. Scandalanguaged to tell you exactly what it meant.

  With appropriate pix.

  Mug shots. Nightclub snaps. Outtakes from low-rent paparazzi.

  Booze bloat. Stretch marks revealed. Loose shirttails and gaping flies outside whorehouses.

  THEY are YOU. YOU could get lucky.

  The scandal rags gave us the epic of hijinks gone wrong. They titillated. They linked US to THEM. They proudly promulgated the egalitarian spirit. They mocked celebrity culture. They put the “id” in “idiot.” They underscored the “I” in “Idolatry.” They mainlined a message in ellipsis.

  Only character counts.

  I dug the rags. It started about ’56. I was eight years old.

  I lived in L.A. I was a fucked-up child of divorce. My dad was a Hollywood bottom-feeder. He used to work for Rita Hayworth. He told me he porked her.

  I allegedly met Rita at a hot-dog stand. I was three years old. I allegedly spilled a grape drink in her lap. My dad said there was a dyke bounty out on Rita. He did not explain what that meant.

  My dad worked for a schlock producer named Sam Stiefel. My dad told me Hollywood tales. My mom disapproved.

  She was a drunk. Her boyfriends looked like film noir psychopaths. She sent me to the Lutheran church.

  Martin Luther would have been a scandal-rag fave. He talked to himself and talked to God on the john. He kicked papal ass and renounced his celibate vow. He had beady brown eyes like my own.

  I dug Luther’s story more than the Bible. The prose style was flat. I preferred Whisper and Confidential. That was literature.

  My dad left his copies out. I got the goods. It corrupted my imagination.

  My Sunday-school class went to see The Ten Commandments. I fidgeted and dozed. Yul Brynner played the Pharaoh. My dad said Yul was a poonhound. He had the goods.

  I read a rag piece on Porfirio Rubirosa. “Rubi” was a shitbird. He hailed from the Dominican Republic. His dad was a wheel. Rubi ran guns. Rubi ran a white-slave racket. Rubi wrecked cars and married heiresses.

  Rubi lived in the rags. He rarely made the mainstream press. I asked my dad about him. My dad had the goods.

  Rubi had a monster shvantz. It caused internal damage. A Rubi conquest called it “Yul Brynner in a turtleneck.”

  I put it together. Yul Brynner was bald. I now had the goods.

  The rags worked their voodoo on me. They showed me the adult world unvarnished.

  Money was everything. Sex was everyone’s secret. Sex was taboo. Fucking precipitated childbirth. This implied a wholesome endeavor. I didn’t believe it. The rags said otherwise. I caught my mom in bed with a man. It looked like a scandal-rag pic.

  The pictures scared me. High-contrast black-and-white on pulp paper. Flashbulb glare as truth.

  Every photo reduced beauty. Every photo tagged the price of fame.

  THEY are US and THEY will die young.

  The rags died slow.

  They beat back lawsuits. They pissed off people with pull. They pissed off movie magnates and publicity flacks. The rags outed homosexual actors. Flacks traded dope on minor stars to protect their high-end homos. Rock Hudson remained sacrosanct and un-outed. Some Rock lovers took the Rock’s fall.

  My dad had the goods on Rock. I had a crush on a 4th grade girl. She slathered the Rock all over her notebook. I told her Rock was queer. She said, “You’re just jealous of him.”

  Outing minor actors was the rags’ bread and butter. Stars rarely got nailed. Rock Hudson remained untouched. (Universal/TheKobal Collection)

  The studios built up a slush fund. They targeted Confidential. They tied it up in litiginous tape. Maureen O’Hara sued Confidential. They said she groped a guy at Grauman’s Chinese.

  She won her suit. Confidential doused the heat on its sinuendo. The other rags followed. Their collective circulation fizzled. They flatlined into the ’60s.

  The decade was not kind.

  Rubi kicked in a car crash. The new Prez had sex shit in his closet. The new Prez was too powerful to fuck over.

  ’50s sex was a leer and a gulp. The rags capitalized. ’60s sex was a wink.

  The rags flourished under suppression. Bad juju spawns subversive literature. American culture was reconfiguring. The rags couldn’t keep up.

  Hootenannies. Folk music. Deep roots on the left. A globalistic message.

  Foreign films. Wild stuff that glorified adultery and ennui. Moral turpitude imported from Catholic countries.

  JFK in the White House. His implied message: Be cool like me.

  Sex spoofs on screen. Beehives and bikinis. The American male as a pussy-whipped shlub. The implied message: Don’t sweat it—it’s the human condition.

  The Twist. Negro music for white stiffs. Interracial dancing on TV.

  The rags couldn’t compete.

  They latched their lenses on foreign film stars. They spilled their sordid stories.

  Snor
e.

  They lobbed softballs at JFK and the Rat Pack.

  Yawn.

  They exposed Dr. Feelgoods and their loose prescription plans.

  Snoresville, U.S.A. Joe and Jane America had their pills. They didn’t want to know from the dangers.

  JFK bought it. America bought that jive “Loss of Innocence” line. The Vietnam War raged. The civil-rights struggle mulched the “m” off “miscegenation.” Joe and Jane’s kids became freaks. Some geek coined a term: “the Sexual Revolution.”

  The rags were passé. Everybody was stoned and fucking. They got their titillation firsthand.

  They didn’t want the goods. Gossip was uncool.

  The rags died.

  I survived without them. I had the goods. I was one unhip cognoscente.

  I had the dirt, the dish, the scopophile skank. No one cared. They had their own sex lives and dope habits. The rags were prophetic. THEY were US. The Glamour World had merged with the Real World—at least in L.A.

  Dubious mortar. Sex and dope. Promiscuous egalitarianism. The whole city was bombed. It was fried, fragged, zorched, zonked, blitzed, and blotto. It stayed stoned to the late ’70s. I stayed stoned and stupefyingly chaste. I had the goods. It was innocuous information.

  I utilized it twice.

  I spotted an actress on Wilton and Melrose. She had a flat tire. She looked helpless. I knew she was a nympho. The rags said so.

  I was bombed. She was bombed. I changed her tire. I suggested a drink at her place.

  She said no. She gave me a dollar and a pat on the head.

  The goods did me no good.

  I was hitchhiking. I was bombed. A car pulled up. I recognized the driver.

  He was a name actor. The rags ratted him out. A buddy confirmed it. He had firsthand knowledge.

  The actor craved young males. He was indiscriminate. He picked up hitchhikers. He offered them cocaine and head.

  I declined his ride. The goods did me some good.

  I cleaned up my life. L.A. stabilized and de-stoned. The rags resurrected in partial spirit. They metastasized into supermarket tabloids.

  I noticed them in the early ’80s. I’d quit shoplifting. I was walking through check-stand lines.

  I watched housewives shag the tabs. I watched hipsters goof on them. I read over their shoulders. I glommed the gestalt.

  The tabs pushed minor gossip. They dick-teased their readers. The headlines promised spice. The text was coitus denied.

  Bait-and-switch. Buy the tab off the headline. Jump from implied incest to kids rescued by movie stars.

  The tabs pushed the lives of monarchs and TV actors. The tabs reported cancer cures and mystical amulets. The tabs reported double-digit births. The tabs tattled tales of thousand-pound women confined to their beds. The tabs detailed abductions to Mars.

  The tab readership was the rag readership expanded and lobotomized. Tab readers craved reassurance and surrogate lives more than they craved the goods. They did not want their idols deidolized and rendered attainable by chance. They wanted their fear of death assuaged. They wanted their disbelief smothered. They wanted to blunt their boredom with yarns of the gilded and blessed. They wanted to extend their realm of possibility past all sane boundaries.

  The tabs delivered.

  Amazing rescues. Chocolate diets. January-December romance. Miraculous healings and saves at death’s door. Firsthand sightings of God.

  Full circle.

  The rags disillusioned. The tabs reillusioned. The rags proferred sex in a sexless time and succumbed to sex abundance. The tabs metamorphosed from profligacy. They offered a fulsomely lunatic love.

  Outsiders crave the goods to grease their way in. The rags said you might not want to go there. The tabs showed the insider’s world as one of your limitless options.

  The rags and the tabs showed their venal colors. The rags and the tabs showed some balls and some heart. The tabs pandered lower and kinder. They warmed more souls and showed more legs in the end.

  AMERICANS ARE SUCKERS for dish and redemption. The tabs and the Bible notch big numbers still. The goods remain the goods. Hard data to hoard in yearning—or judgment.

  Tabloid TV slimed out of the rags and the tabs. Large-scale entertainment reporting hatched concurrent. TV shows and magazines devoted to gossip and scandal. Chroniclers of the NEW Glamour World.

  Puerile actors and rock stars. Fashion moguls with anorexic models in tow. Doomed and fatuous royals. Homicidal halfbacks. Sex-harassing politicians.

  Entertainment reporting arrived at a wild-ass juncture. Movies were bad. Mindless blockbusters ruled. Stupes reveled in their brainlessness. They wanted to know all about them.

  It was voyeurism sans sex or soul. The goods as box-office numbers and deal memos revealed. The deal as the foreplay. The boffo opening weekend as the climax.

  Glamour World arrivistes: feral film execs and agents. Officious and prim. Seductive because they choose what movies get made. Sexy names in a prostitute’s trick book.

  Entertainment reporting merged with tabloid TV. Film criticism was subsumed by back-page plot summations and televised yeas or nays. Hard news got mauled in the flow. O.J. updates ran between premieres and bikini-waxed starlets.

  Narrative lines blurred. The late-breaking goods:

  The Glamour World is the Real World for stupes. Conglomerates dictate the aesthetic. They own the TV stations. They own the film studios. They run the entertainment mags. They collude in their shared interest.

  The dish is an advertisement.

  Let’s huckster the new epic of hijinks gone wrong. Let’s pull for the kids in our dysfunctional brood. Let’s juke our ratings and bait the stupes out to the multiplex.

  Robert Downey’s in the slam. His new flick debuts next week. O.J.’s got a new babe. Will he off that one? Buy his doofus comedies on DVD.

  Our kids are unruly and beautiful. They eat the poisoned fruit that we’re afraid to touch. We’re their flunkies and their enablers. We cosign their shit. We buy them their dope and urge them to drive drunk.

  We’ve got the goods. It allows us to live vicarious and judge harshly at whim. It makes us feel alive.

  Our new brood is soporific. Everyone’s got their goods. That tops the “t” off “titillation” and vaps the “v” off of “voyeur.”

  I don’t want the new goods. I live in Kansas. I don’t want to exploit movie stars with flat tires. I’m a Lutheran. I live by the scandal-rag message in ellipsis.

  Only character counts.

  I’m full of Midwestern fervor. I judge sternly. I hate Bill Clinton. I love Bill Bennett and Bill O’Reilly. I mess with notions of the Lutheran ministry. I know a pastor of some renown. He said he could get me into divinity school. They’ll waive the high-school-diploma requirement in my case.

  My wife finds this calling dubious. She sees me as a man of soiled cloth. I wouldn’t hack divinity school. I’m too joyous and profane. I see God in foul language and sex. I’m more L.A. than Kansas City. The Lutheran Church would disdain me. They’d quash the dirty tales I write for GQ.

  The notion persists. The calling calls. My wife has successfully countermanded it.

  She’s got the goods on me. She’ll go to the tabs in a hot fucking flash.

  The Trouble I Cause

  Blind Item. Hush-Hush Magazine,

  March 1957 issue.

  COP CONTRETEMPS—

  CALL IT COERCION OR????

  We won’t waste words. What paparazzi-plagued police department deploys proactive propaganda via a vivid TV show? Said show: sadly sagging into retrograde ratings. A ripe rumor: The star of the stale show shivers in the shadow of a politically potent police chief.

  The chief chirps. The star stutters and stammers. That’s the standard stamp of their relationship. Hot news: Has the hell-bent El Jefe handed the star a startlingly malevolent mandate?

  Item: A certain PD circumvents civil rights routinely. During the Depression they deep-sixed the dispossessed and deported t
hem to distant states or whipped them into work camps. The cops called it the “Bum Blockade.” It kept hungry hordes out of Hollywood. It hustled homeless herds out of

  Hermosa. Hell—it kept a scintillatingly sinful city cosmetically clean.

  Item: Has the pissed-off police chief told the stuttering star to scrawl a scurrilous script? Will said script scrutinize the Bum Blockade and blasphemously blast the need for its reinstatement? Do you smell a smoke screen to finagle a Fascist agenda? Will the servile serfs of a certain PD implement it?

  Remember, dear reader, you heard it first here: off the record, on the Q.T. and very Hush-Hush. . . .

  1.

  Jack Webb: a jejune jerkoff jacked around by the LAPD. A punk pawn in the paws of Chief William H. Parker.

  A script reader skimmed me the skank. She perused paper at Paramount and perched in my pocket. I owned her. She dove dusky girls at a dyke den in Duarte. I had snappy snapshots.

  The script was surreptitiously submitted. Jackoff Jack wrote it. Sapphic Sally noted notes in the margins. She pounced on the PARKER penmanship.

  She recognized the round R’s and tall T’s. She’d dragged herself through three years on Dragnet. Parker penned moronic margin notes on all the scripts she screened. She hated Jumpy Jack. Jack tried to juke her into bed with a muff-munching mulatta. Jack loooved to watch.

  I paced around my pad. I mixed a morning martini. It mingled through my membranes and mesmerized me. The March issue was a motherfucker. I rained rancor on a randy boy who rammed Rock Hudson. I blasted that blind item.

  Dick Contino called me. He dished more dirt. Baaaad blood bopped between Bill Parker and Juvenile Jack. It bipped back to ’54. Parker partisaned Bum Blockades then. Parker the facile fascist with fangs. Jive Jack the unctuous Untermensch under his thumb. Dick demurred on more details. Impetuously implied:

  Jack Webb was so convincing in his role on Dragnet that the LAPD would receive constant calls asking for Sergeant Joe Friday’s help. (Los Angeles Times Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)