Shakedown Read online

  Wooooooooo! Bravura breath control and artful articulation! Bondage Bob: flabbergasted and flushed behind Beefeater’s gin.

  He fidgeted. He licked his lips. He crossed his legs like a submissive sissy. I saw restraint-rope scars on his soft and sockless ankles.

  “Nuisance suits are costing us 25 thou a month. Those Commie lawyers are coming out of the sewers like rats.”

  I sailed into my second soliloquy:

  “Informants must be both credible and coercible, as well as vulnerable to exposure of their own misdeeds. I served as an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for close to a decade. I have access to every crooked cop in this town, and they will rat out any celebrity, socialite, Communist, miscegenist, or alluring lowlife that they know of for a simple retainer. The scum that they rat out will rat out six others to stay out of your magazine, and the mathematical equation that I am positing will extend indefinitely. I can tell that you’re thinking, Informants alone will not suffice, and that assumption is correct. You may know that we are entering a bold new era of electronic surveillance. I propose that we install standing, full-time bugs in every high-class hotel in Los Angeles. I will bribe the managers and desk clerks of said hotels to steer celebrity adulterers and queers to specific rooms, where their sexual activities and conversation will be captured on tape. The best bug man on earth is a hebe named Bernie Spindel. I will meet with him soon. Mr. Spindel would love to enter your employ and has a gift for you. He bugged a bungalow at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica last week. The manager of the hotel is a masochistic child molester with a quite understandable urge to be punished for his aberrant behavior. I will physically chastise him on a monthly basis, which will deter him from hurting children as well as keep him under my thumb. He will have strict orders to place all celebs in bungalow number 9. Bernie’s gift is a tape of Senator John F. Kennedy fucking Ingrid Bergman and detailing his preposterous plans to run for president of the United States to her, while she yawns and prattles on about her kids. Be forewarned: the fucking is short-lived. I’ll be frank: Senator Kennedy is a two-minute man.”

  Bondage Bob: Ga-ga, goo-goo-eyed, gone.

  “So, we—”

  I cut him off. “So we also bug all the fag bathhouses. So I have extortion wedges on the informants who supply the dirt for our most explosive pieces. So I polygraph-test them to assure their veracity. So I create a climate of fear in Hollywood, which is the most gorgeously perverted and cosmetically moralistic place on God’s green fucking earth. Because I have an unerring nose for human weakness and have sensed for some time that we have entered an era where the gilded and famous all secretly harbor a desire to be exposed. Because I am willing to burglarize any psychiatrist’s office in order to get the dirt on their celebrity patients. Because I am willing to quash lawsuits through the threat and application of physical force.”

  Bondage Bob guuuuuuuulped. “What won’t you do?”

  I saw Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I said, “Commit murder or work for Communists.”

  Hold now. Hear that pin-drop silence. Let it linger loooooong.

  “Would you consent to an audition? To test your inside knowledge?”

  I nodded. Harrison hit me. I bopped to his beat, beatific.

  “Senator Estes Kefauver?”

  “Whorehound. Shacks with Filipino prosties at the downtown Statler when he visits L.A.”

  “Sinatra. Give me the latest.”

  “Caught his new girlfriend muff-diving Lana Turner at the Beverly Wilshire, went on a six-day bender with Jackie Gleason, and wound up with the DTs at Queen of Angels.”

  “Otto Preminger?”

  “Mud shark. Currently enthralled with a sepia seductress named Dorothy Dandridge.”

  “Lawrence Tierney?”

  “Brawling, psychopathic brother of noted grasshopper Scott Brady. Digs the boys at the Cockpit Lounge and the occasional girl who looks like a boy.”

  “John Wayne?”

  “Quasi drag queen. Fucks women and looks stunning in a size 52-long muumuu.”

  “Johnny Weissmuller?”

  “King Schlong. Well known to have fathered nine kids out of wedlock with nine different women. Current holder of the White Man’s World Record.”

  “Duke Ellington?”

  “Current holder of the Jigaboo World Record.”

  “Van Johnson?”

  “The Semen Demon. Sucks dick at the glory hole at the Wilshire May Company men’s room.”

  “Burt Lancaster?”

  “Sadist. Has a well-appointed torture den at his pad in Beverly Hills. Pays call girls top dollar to inflict pain on them.”

  “Fritz Lang?”

  “Known to film Burt’s torture sessions and screen them for a select clientele.”

  “The Misty June Christy?”

  “Nympho size-queen. My shakedown bait Donkey Don Eversall gives her the big one on a regular basis. Donkey Don’s got a wall peek at his crib. My pal Jimmy Dean made an avant-garde film of their last assignation. It’s called The Stacked and the Hung. The premiere is Friday night, in my living room. You’re cordially invited.”

  “Alfred Hitchcock?”

  “Peeper.”

  “Natalie Wood?”

  “Child actress in transition. Rumored to be ensconced at a dyke slave den near Hollywood High.”

  “Alan Ladd?”

  “Dramatically underhung cunt hound. A man on the horns of an existential dilemma worthy of those Communistic philosopher chumps.”

  He’s ga-ga, goo-goo, pulled into putty. He’s martini-mangled and mine.

  “Mr. Otash, the job is yours.”

  “Fifty grand a year and expenses. My operating costs will go at least double that.”

  Now he’s green at the gills. Now he knows there’s No Exit. It’s a felicitous fait accompli.

  “Yes, Mr. Otash. We have a deal.”

  We shook hands.

  Bondage Bob said, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s a pal of mine. He’ll love The Stacked and the Hung.”

  That talking bug rocked across the rug and waved at me. I swear this is true.

  8

  Jimmy timed the fuck: 1:46. The fuckers: future prez and mick martyr JFK, Swedish sweetie Ingrid Bergman.

  Pillow patter tapped the tape. Jack coughed and said, “Aaaaah, that was good.” Ingrid yawned and said, “Vell, for vun of us, perhaps.”

  I roared. Jimmy howled. The market was 3 a.m. quiet. We passed the Old Crow back and forth.

  Jimmy said, “We wrapped GE Theater. I invited Ronnie Reagan to the premiere.”

  I said, “He hates the Reds. I’ll hit him up for some snitch-outs.”

  The tape groaned and ground to squelch. Jimmy turned it off. I looked out the mirror. The kid with the red wagon was unloading Confidential. The wagon was white-print-emblazoned. I couldn’t quite read the words.

  Jimmy said, “The kid gets to you.”

  “He shouldn’t be out this late.”

  “You’ve got the same employer now.”

  “I know.”

  “When I’m famous, keep me out of the magazine.”

  “When you’re in it, you know you’ve arrived.”

  * * *

  The first check arrived. I retained Bernie “the Bug King” Spindel. He was an Orthodox Jew with eight kids and six schvartze girlfriends. We discussed the mud-shark metaphysic. Bernie said, “Once you’ve had black, you can’t go back.”

  We spent a week whipping wires to wainscoting and laying mike mounts into mattresses. I bribed hotel honchos up the yammering ying-yang. We drilled, bored, spackled, threaded, planted, and wired all the high-end hotels. Regular retainers would result in records of sicko celebs sacking up in those rooms. Bondage Bob had bountiful bucks. We wire-whipped full-time listening posts at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Bel-Air Hotel, the Beverly Wilshire, the Miramar, the Biltmore, the downtown Statler. A Biltmore bellboy tipped us right off: Gary Cooper and a jailbait jill jumped into that bugged bedroom. BAM!—our system socks i
n sync. Bedsprings bounce, voices vibrate, mikes pick up tattle text and lay it to the listening post. BAM!—my Marine Corps mastiff retrieves the tape. BAM!—the babe is 16 and a Belmont High coed. Coop says, “You’re built, honey. Tell me your name again.” The girl gasps, “I’ve always loved your pictures, Mr. Cooper. And, wow, you’re really big.”

  The dirt, the dish, the scandal skank, the lewd libels revealed as real. It was all starting to come to me and to Confidential.

  Jimmy edited his movie and dubbed in a sizzling soundtrack. The priapic premiere was the L.A. moment of fall ’53. I served pizza, booze, and pills from a felonious pharmacy. My pad was packed with movie machers and Marines, stupid starlets, stars, and studs. Dig: Liz, Joi, Ward Wardell, Race Rockwell, Donkey Don. Ronnie Reagan, Harry Fremont, Arthur Crowley, Bondage Bob, and Jean-Paul Sartre—existentially seeking the scene. A six-foot-six drag queen, Rock Hudson, ex–U.S. senator Helen Gahagan Douglas. Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, nodding on Big H.

  It’s the egalitarian epicenter of postwar America. It’s a colossal convergence of the gilded and gorgeous, the defiled and demented, the expatriots of exultant extremity. This seedy summit set the tone for the frazzled and fractured society that is our nation today.

  I dimmed the lights. Race Rockwell ran the projector. The soundtrack hit: Bartók, Beethoven, bebop by way of Bird. There’s the opening titles: “The Stacked and the Hung, starring Donkey Don Eversall and June Christy.” “Photographed, Edited, Produced and Directed by James Dean.”

  The applause was apoplectic. There’s the establishing shot—a coontown motel room, shot surreptitiously through a hole-in-the-wall peek.

  June Christy enters the room and drops her purse on the bed. She looks apprehensive. She lights a cigarette, she checks her watch, she taps her toes and paces. It’s soundless cinema. The camera stays static—the lens is lashed to that wall peek.

  There—June hears something. She smiles, she walks offscreen, she walks back on with Donkey Don. Donkey winks at the wall peek—he’s in on it. June sits on the bed. Donkey Don whips it out and wags it. My pad shakes and shimmies. There’s gasps, wolf whistles, shrill shrieks.

  I looked around for Jimmy. June devoured Donkey Don, tonsil-deep. Where’s Jimmy? Fuck—he’s jacking off by the pizza buffet!

  * * *

  Calendar pages flicked, flew, sheared, and shape-shifted. They’re sales graphs now.

  ’53 into ’54. Vertical lines in escalation. Confidential hits a million a month. Confidential makes a million and a half in rabid record time.

  It’s all ME. I’m awash in the sicko secrets I’ve cruelly craved my whole life. I’ve got L.A. hot-wired. My city teems with tattle tipsters on my payroll. Hotel rooms are hot-sheet hives hooked up to my headset. I know everything sinful, sex-soiled, deeply dirty, and religiously wrong. It’s wrong, it’s real, and it’s MINE.

  My Marines lived in listening posts. They caught Corrine Calvet cavorting with a car-park cat at the Crescendo. They caught Paul Robeson, ripped to the gills at a Red rally. They caught Jumping Johnnie Ray again. I verified all of it and fed it to Confidential. Gary Cooper and Miss Belmont High? Quashed for ten grand.

  ’53, ’54. A-bomb blast parties on Liz Taylor’s rooftop. Those cavalcades of color against the dim dawn. The camaraderie and opportunity. The sense that this march of magnificent moments would never stop.

  Calendar pages, sales graphs, Confidential covers. Dipsos, nymphos, junkies, Commies, feckless fools all. That cover I regret, that ball I dropped, that malignant moment. That page in purgatory as I pause my pen.

  May 16, 1954. I’m at my pad. I’m booking a threeski for the Landing Strip. I quashed a story on Marilyn Monroe’s secret Mexican marriage. Marilyn grovels, grateful. She knows a sapphic sister with a sometimes yen for men.

  The phone rang. I picked up. Arthur Crowley said, “There’s trouble, Freddy.”

  I said, “Hit me.”

  “I got a tip. Johnnie Ray’s been to a libel lawyer. He’s suing the magazine. I know that you verified the story, but he’s going forward anyway. I strongly suggest that you nip this in the bud.”

  Men’s Room Mishegas: Jittery Johnnie Strikes Again.

  I verified the story. Confidential ran it. This was unprecedented grief.

  “My Marines are on maneuvers, Arthur. There’s no one to handle it.”

  “You handle it, Freddy. Take care of it before that tip gets back to Bob Harrison.”

  I hung up. My nerves were nuked. I took three quick pops of Old Crow. Joi was tight with Johnnie. They girl-talked regular. I liked Johnnie. Jimmy screened The Stacked and the Hung for him personally.

  I dropped three yellow jackets and obliterated the day. I woke up at midnight. Johnnie always hit Googie’s after his closing set. He always parked in the same spot.

  A short stroll, spring heat, a brisk breeze. I walked over and leaned on Johnnie’s Packard Caribbean. Johnnie swished out at 1:15.

  He saw me. He got the gestalt. He said, “Hi, Freddy.”

  I said, “Don’t make me, kid. I’ll keep you out from now on, but you’ve got to stop it here.”

  Johnnie said, “You’re a parasite, Freddy. You feed off the weak. I’m not backing off. I don’t see any of your goons around, so you’ll have to do it yourself.”

  Parasite, parasite, parasite—

  “Let it go, Johnnie. You can’t win this one.”

  “You’re the weak one, Freddy. Joi told me that you cry out for your mother in your sleep.”

  I trembled. “One more time. No lawsuit.”

  “You’re a mama’s boy, Freddy. Joi told me you fucked a tranny, which makes you more queer than me.”

  I saw red and black-red. I hit him. My signet ring slashed his cheek. He went down on his knees. I picked him up and tossed him into his car. I heard bones crack and teeth shear. The bumper ledge gouged his head at the hairline. I kicked him and tore a chunk of his scalp free.

  He said, “Okay, okay, okay.” No whimper—strong.

  I said, “I’m sorry, kid.”

  Johnnie spit blood and twirled a fuck-you finger at me.

  9

  The market was 2 a.m. quiet. Jimmy and I quaffed Old Crow. I was spritzed with Johnnie Ray’s blood.

  Jimmy said, “I’m up for the lead in East of Eden. Elia Kazan’s waffling. It could go either way.”

  “I’ll lean on Kazan. He’s susceptible. There’s some pinkos he didn’t rat to HUAC.”

  Jimmy walked to the mirror and pointed down at the floor. My hands hurt. My signet ring was missing stones.

  “That kid’s down there, Freddy. You know, the one with the wagon.”

  I got up and looked. The kid off-loaded magazines. The wagon was positioned sideways. red ryder was painted on it.

  “Jimmy, do you know why you’re a freak?”

  “I don’t know, Freddy. Do you know why you are?”

  I thought about it.

  I said, “I don’t know.”

  10

  I’m perched in purgatory. I’ve purged the most perverted part of my hellacious history. My brain waves broiled in seditious sync with James Ellroy’s. It was a carcinogenic collaboration. We collided over commas, colons, and alluring alliteration. Ellroy finally dumped his Otash TV show on a cable network. He’ll get more rich and famous. Did he do a deal with the devil? Has my heartfelt hope of heaven gone pffft?

  It has.

  My keepers have convened a kangaroo court. My transfer to heaven has been stamped “still pending.”

  I’m deep in the dumps. They took my old body back. I’m perpetually 70 years old and dead.

  My ass hurts. Johnnie Ray pitchforked me an hour ago. Kate Hepburn was next. Sweetie, you did do Rex the Rottweiler—all I wanted was ten grand for the pics!

  Aaaaaah—I’ve got third-degree burns!!!!

  I’ve petitioned my head keeper for a heaven day pass. A conjugal visit with Liz Taylor would put me up on my paws. More malignant memories are crawling through my cranium. I’
m jumping Joan Crawford and socking it to Simone Signoret. Jerk-off James Ellroy would be digging this shit.

  Where’s Ellroy when I really need him? Fuck—my ass hurts!

  My head keeper just passed on the word: no heaven day pass. Consolation prize: I’ll have an hour in my cell with an earthly “old flame.”

  I put on a spiffy sweat suit. I spritzed on Lucky Tiger cologne. I prepped some withering one-liners—L.A. in the ’50s, ring-a-ding-ding!!!!!

  A tall woman approached the bars. Oooooooh—blasphemous-blond and boss-built! She got closer. She boded biiiiig and seemed fatalistically familiar. She wore stewardess blues, replete with pillbox hat. She smiled. What’s that bulge in her skirt? Holy Homo Hannah—it’s Barb Bonvillain, pre–sex change!

  I screeched and screamed.

  I cringed and crapped my pants.

  I cried out for my keepers.

  Am I hurtling to hell? Did this memoir make the prince of darkness send up for me?

  Barb’s outside my cell now. Call it karmic comeuppance. You get what you pay for. I sure as shit learned it late.

  About the Author

  James Ellroy is the author of the groundbreaking Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy—American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. The novels of his L.A. Quartet—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international bestsellers. My Dark Places, a memoir, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book. The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.