by James Ellroy
Newspapers taught us how to look Then. Evil deeds, bad behavior, snappy prose and pix. Newsprint pixels obscured details and whetted our appetite for high-contrast black and white. The L.A. Times, L.A. Herald, L.A. Examiner and Mirror News. Big local coverage. Crime stories serialized as breaking leads accrued. Jazzy murder cases recounted—from the time the body is found to the moment the killer sucks gas in the green room at Big Q.
Accompanied by news pix. Bodies tucked under sheets, with morgue tags hooked to big toes. Arrows pointing to death houses, pads, cribs, shacks. Stern cops attending hellhound fiends in extremis. What Don DeLillo called “the neon epic of Saturday night.”
One crime ruled the L.A. dailies in 1953. Burbank caught the squeal and brought in LAPD for more muscle. We’re bebopping back to 3/9/53. I’ve got the words, the LAPD archive’s got the photos. That big black arrow is pointing to a pad on Parkman Avenue. It’s the Mabel Monohan snuff.
You know this caper. It inspired the Hollywood weeper I Want to Live! Susan Hayward wins the Oscar. She burns in the green room for a crime she did not commit. Fuck that shit!!!!! Barbara Graham was a stone junkie and a stone killer!!!!! She deserved to fry!!!!! The wages of sin are death!!!!!
Here’s the real gist. I am not speaking with forked tongue, readers! I am telling it like it is!
Mabel Monohan was yo old gray-haired granny. Her son-in-law was an L.A./Vegas gambler named Tutor Scherer. A bullshit rumor circulated throughout the underworld. Said rumor: Mabel Monohan always held a hundred G’s to help the cat out of scrapes. It was apocryphal jive and urban legend. But two vicious slime-bags named Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo believed it.
These cocksuckers were as evil as evil gets. They were strongarm 211 men and coldhearted killers. They went on a spree in the gold country, up near Sacramento. They slaughtered a local family for six grand in grocery store receipts. Dad, mom, three children. One kid survived. Perkins and Santo shot them and dumped them in the trunk of dad’s car.
Perkins and Santo—evil motherfuckers. Now, they’re hipped on Mabel M’s hundred G’s. That’s a score—and they’ve only got to snuff one old lady to get it.
The humps round up a home-invasion gang. There’s a deep sea diver on the skids named John True. There’s a 211 pro named Baxter Shorter. Perkins and Santo are jivedup with a hype/ho/gang cooze named Barbara Graham. Oooooooooh, my rasty readers—she’s got fallen-patrician good looks, a calculating hophead mien—and she probably wears high black boots and nothing else with Dorothy Malone panache!!!!! Oh, yeah—five-year-old Ellroy’s got it baaaaaaaaaad for Bad Babs!!!!!
Here’s the plan:
Babs knocks on Mabel M’s door. She acts distraught, reports a traffic accident and asks to use the phone. The good-hearted Mabel opens the door a crack. The muscle boys crash in.
It’s cake from there on. They squeeze Mabel. She forfeits the gelt. They kill her and get away clean.
Yeah, it seems sound. But—there’s no gelt. It’s a zero-sum proposition.
Mabel opens the door. Barbara Graham ladles on the boo-hoo. Our boys crash in behind her. Mabel delivers the dish: there’s no hundred G’s.
Babs pistolwhips her. Santo and Perkins beat on her. Baxter Shorter and John True look on, horrified. They weren’t up for this.
Shorter flees. He splits to a pay phone and calls an ambulance. He reports an accident and mistakenly spiels the wrong address. Mabel Monohan dies. The gang disperses. Burbank PD grabs the squawk. LAPD provides backup. A massive manhunt begins.
Underworld informants come forth. This crime horrified a slew of low-tide losers eager to violate gangland snitch codes. The cops clock that hundred-grand rumor and soon peg it as the source of the crime. And—the grapevine’s buzzing that two plug uglies have been talking up a Mabel Monohan score. Their names: Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo.
An APB goes out.
Perkins, Santo and Bad Babs go underground.
The fuzz grab John True and Baxter Shorter. They turn snitch and blab state’s evidence. Perkins and Santo kidnap Shorter from his pad on Bunker Hill, drive him to nearby mountains and whack him. Tips flood the Burbank PD and LAPD switchboards. One proves valid. Cops raid a nearby lust nest/hideout. Perkins, Santo and Bad Babs are caught in a thigh-throbbing threeway!!!
Homicide, May 6, El Monte
The case is a sinsation. It gets huge ink and local TV play. Barbara Graham nests in stir and launches a hankie-holding campaign to save herself from the green room. It better work, sister—J. Miller “Gas Chamber” Leavy is prosecuting the case for the L.A. D.A.’s Office. He’s the Kapital Kase Kahuna—and he comes to win.
There’s the prelude to the trial. Bad Babs waxes weepy and protests her innocence. She’s got a little boy from an absentee marriage. He’s good for beaucoup boo-hoo. Behind-the-scenes machinations begin.
LAPD brings in a rookie cop to soft-soap Babs and get her to admit Murder One. He’s a handsome, heavy-hung Harry—just Babs’s type. No soap—Babs don’t dish shit. The fuzz fear that Babs will get pregnant, in an effort to thwart the hot seat. Any and all men visiting her are carefully monitored. It’s rumored that Babs goes lez in stir. A bitchin’ babe fighting a drunk-driving beef is enlisted to seduce and entrap her. Racy napkin notes bounce back and forth in the women’s jail. Alas—there’s no Sapphic seduction, no furtive footage, no audiotape and no snitch. Barbara Graham, Emmett Perkins and Jack Santo go to trial.
Hear those low chords pop pianissimo? It’s the funeral march from Chopin’s Second Sonata. J. Miller Leavy’s coming in for the kill.
The trial proceeds. It’s a rout. Graham, Perkins and Santo are convicted and sentenced to death. The green room wails their names.
Babs sticks to her innocent-woman-wronged tale. She mainlines public sympathy. Her little boy is a great P.R. foil. San Quentin, death row, protracted appeals. The green room on 6/3/55.
Babs admits her guilt to Warden Harley Teets the preceding night. Perkins holds his shit. Sissified sinner Jack Santo bitch-squeals fo his momma.
Aaaaaaaaahhhhh—the pellets drop. Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh—that burnt-almond smell and exsanguination.
The wages of sin are death.
It’s the ugliest crime story I know. Check the police bulletins reprinted in this book. Scrutinize Graham, Perkins and Santo. Read their faces. Look for indications that they possess such sheer cruelty. Read their eyes. You’ll see nothing but attitude and emptiness. You’re looking at the cold heart of L.A. ’53.
But hurt hearts, hot hearts and hard hearts pulse more prominently in our Pueblo Grande. It’s the throb of the boomtown masses. It begets epidemic opportunism. L.A.’s building up and out. The San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys are exponentially increasing growth zones. Pastel-painted hotbox huts and faux ranch houses—more and more built every day. No down payment. G.I. Bill loans. Returning World War II and Korean War vets hitting L.A. in swarms. The two valleys run heat-hazed and humid. These cheap new cribs absorb and trap heat. Sometimes that heat gets to you and unleashes this kraaaaaaazy jungle juju. A cat named Fredericks chops up his wife and buries parts of her in his backyard. He dumps the bulk of her in the trunk of his car and takes his kids on vacation. They know that momma’s missing, but they don’t know that she’s closer than they think. Dig the photo spray in this book. Note the cops wielding shovels in their shirtsleeves. Note the size of the pad. It’s roughly the dimension of a POW camp sweatbox. It’s the same size and same style as the cribs all around it. No down payment. Easy credit terms. It’s a compression cave. The Korean commies are shrieking gobbledyGOOK and want you to repugnantly renounce the U.S.A. Your old lady’s jabbering in the next room—and you start thinking KNIFE. L.A.’s an opportunist’s zone. Murder feels like an opportunity. The walls are closing in on you. It’s fucking hot. The houses all around you look just like yours. You could chop her and get away with it. You watch Dragnet every Thursday night. You know how the L.A. cops act and think. You know you can fool them.
The valleys are hot. T
he L.A. opportunities are hotter. Fuddy-duddy Mayor Fletch Bowron is out. Gladhanding growth czar Norris Poulson is in. There’s talk of major league baseball teams to oust the Gilmore Field bush leaguers. There’s Wrigley Field down in darktown—a mingle zone for Whitey and the Black Man. Colored folk stick to themselves, whatever their color. Negroes stick south of Washington Boulevard and east of the U.S.C. campus. Mexicans inhabit Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights and far-flung Pacoima. The Japanese are more widely assimilated—despite their status as our World War II foes. This suits Whiskey Bill Parker—because it serves the greater good of the ordered society. The emerging L.A. freeway system is hemming it all in. We’re two freeways in, with many more slated to go. The Arroyo Seco has been running since ’40 and links downtown to Pasadena. The just-completed Hollywood Freeway links downtown to Hollywood and bleeds into Route 101 northbound. “Bleed” says it all. Freeway systems are handy escape routes for hit-and-run armed robbers and all criminals of the smash-and-grab/go-in-hard-and-stupid school. Freeway on and off ramps are nesting spots for winos and body-dump spots for itinerant killers.
There’s the issue of elevated perspective, as it pertains to this book. There’s L.A. Now, there’s L.A. Then. More-recent crime scene pix feature the classic freeway overpass shot of a dead dude splattered on the pavement. You don’t get that in the L.A. Then of LAPD ’53. We’re dealing with flatland and hillside L.A., linked by surface streets. The relative absence of freeways explains the lack of zoom-lens, wide-angle, high-vantage-point, Hollywood-Sign-in-the-background art pix in this august volume. We’re in tight. The photo framing replicates the L.A. of the time. We assume limitless growth, we’ve engaged the concept, we know we’ve got growing room. There’s valleys to populate, mountain ranges to plunder, slum-land to bulldoze. All that is horizontal. Don’t forget the vertical. City Hall is the tallest building in L.A. ’53, and it’s no skyscraper. That’s why growth czar Mayor Norris Poulson is always smiling that year. He knows that L.A. will get a major league ball club sooner or later—but he doesn’t know that he’ll have to pull a huge landgrab and evict impoverished Mexicans in order to break ground for the home field. Whiskey Bill Parker is always smiling in ’53. Why? He’s got L.A. right where he wants it—which is exactly the way it is Now—back when Then was Now and there was no Then and Now between ’53 and ’15. It was Whiskey Bill Parker’s town, and we just lived in it Then. Now, it’s 2015—and Whiskey Bill’s 48 years muerto. And L.A. Now is beyond cosmetic repair and control—while L.A. Then is a wiggy land of naiveté, beauty and stratification.
Nostalgia. You indulge the practice for all the right and wrong reasons.
Police nostalgia.
Why are pictures of dead people at crime scenes so beautiful?
Because they’re always somebody else, and it’s unlikely that we’re going to get shivved at a flophouse on East 5th Street. Because the accretion of filmic detail suggests a world both akin to and apart from our own. Because the subconscious roils with buried images and synaptic fragments culled from racial memory and our lifetimes aswirl in the ever-evolving spiritus mundi that we call History—and to touch the borders of horrific life Then affirms our own earthly transits of Now, as it reaffirms them as both luminously unique and flat-affect banal—because in the end we are all united as one being possessed of one soul, and in the end art is the merger of the living and the dead, enjoined in reconciliation.
I believe that the theocratic William H. Parker would have understood this metaphysic. I believe that he likened his LAPD stewardship to that of a Utopian ruler—all the while knowing that said Utopia would ultimately ripen, soften and decay into the ever-expanding, overpopulated, billboard-blighted shithole that is L.A. Now. Parker saw the beginning of the descent and erroneously chalked it up to rowdy black folks enlivened by dope, watermelon and rebellion. He made petulant and intemperate remarks, racist by all sane standards, and permanently besmirched his sterling legacy. William H. Parker was Il Gattopardo—L.A.’s equivalent of the Sicilian patriarch in Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s novel and Luchino Visconti’s film. The Leopard’s world changed out from under him. There was always trouble in paradise—and he superbly interdicted and suppressed it. Sicily, 1830. L.A., 1953. It was Bill Parker’s town. We just lived in it. And in those early days of Parker’s reign, the entire populace lived swaddled in properly militaristic and patriarchal safety. Crime is a continuing circumstance. Crime is individual moral forfeit on an epidemic scale. The crimes so artfully pictured on these pages are equally balanced between rank predation and heartbreaking human folly. William H. Parker was a heartbreakingly stern and rigid man with the grandiose and chaotic inner life common to drunks. He accounted himself only to God and lacked the earthly quality of pity. This vacancy buttressed his astonishingly fierce devotion to task and blinded him to the portents of change swirling all around him. His tragic flaw was inextricably linked to the source of his greatness. William H. Parker would have admired the cold proficiency of the photographs in this book. William H. Parker would deride their sad humanity.
Dead body, February 23, Harvard Heights
Our photographs largely depict low-rent L.A. and the sad demography of trouble in paradise. The viewer must supply the expanded context of Greater L.A., buffed and gleaming. The streets were wide. There was no bumper-to-bumper traffic to blitz egress and spatial perspective. The Spanish colonial building style predominated. The lack of tall buildings made the bright blue sky fall flat, in the manner of Bill Parker’s native South Dakota prairie. The Pacific Ocean and a long mountain range enclosed us to the west and north. The south and east were nothing but sheer exploitable land.
My mother first saw L.A. in 1938. She was wowed by it and thought she might be happy here. She was murdered in L.A. 20 years later. William H. Parker died eight years on. Ciao, Gattopardo. We all owe you more tears than you shall see us pay.
The funeral line ran hundreds of cars and at least two miles long. It was 1966 and a new Then much different than the 1953 Then of this book. I watched the hearse move westward on Wilshire Boulevard. I was 18 years old. Wilshire still sparkled but did not quite gleam.
LAPD was out in force. There were thousands of blue uniforms. A great many American flags swirled.
Time toss. 1953, 1966, 2015. Pictorial history as a shared stream of consciousness. The blue forge. The red, white and blue. Progress brings devolution. It may yet create a fresh wave of interdictive constraint. Only our one soul united remains. †
Homicide, July 19, Watts
Suicide, August 15, University Park
* * *
BOARD OF SUPERVISORS BEEF
* * *
MARCH 6
Here’s a change-up pitch. It’s a welcome relief from all our preceding gore. We’re inside the chambers of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. Note the dark wood and marble, the kids’ Christmas drawings on the walls—holdovers from the ’52 holiday season. They backdrop strange juju on 3/5/53.
It started with a zoning hearing in the Hall of Records. Mr. Sam Emerson and his wife requested a zone change for their subdivision in the far-flung L.A. County hamlet of Palmdale. Their request was denied by a vote of four to one. That one pro-Emerson vote was cast by Supervisor Raymond V. Darby. Yeah, Supervisor Darby thought that the Emersons were within their legal rights—but he told Mr. Emerson this:
“All you want to do is sell this land to a lot of suckers.”
Emerson demanded an apology.
Darby refused and said, “Well, I think you’re a nasty person.”
Emerson launched a right hand and clipped Darby on the chin. Darby teetered, but did not fall.
Bailiffs seized Emerson. Darby made them release him. Darby went to his office and began breathing hard. He soon collapsed, unconscious. Two firemen were summoned and administered oxygen. Darby was wheeled out on a stretcher.
