JACK KEROUAC bought a round of
beer for me and an actor pal, and was talking about "making it to
the top of the hill..." Looking me straight in the eye as best he
could keep his two eyes in line, he said, "It doesn't matter what
you do, as long as you do it with every inch of what you've got
individually -- "He said, "It's going to take decades --
if you live -- to even get close to that part of yourself that's got your own
name written on it."
He threw some sentences around, and was saying
something about being committed to doing what you did. "It doesn't
matter what you do," he said, "it's the commitment that makes
the difference and nobody's going to have a chance to get it away from
you."
Back in the Fifties in New
York when I'd sometimes found myself without a place to crash for the
night, I used to hang out in Broadway cafeterias or a couple of bars in
the Village. The Kettle of Fish was one of them, a kind of literary
watering hole for loud-mouthed poets and painters on the skid.
Unless one had the jazz and guts of a seventeen year
old Chatterton or a Rimbaud, the whole sojourn of throwing off one's youth could
get you in a strangle-hold. "Being young's a killer," Kerouac told me.
"I'd rather stand here and die," he said, "than go back and
muscle through all that stupidity." You had to be willing to turn your back
on everything you supposedly knew of the world around you, he said, because that
wasn't your world. "That's their world!" he said, and if one tried
making it their way the results would run through your fingers like sand.
"Get naked, man," he said. "Go naked in the cement jungle and
climb the hill! Be desperate! And here's your shield --" Kerouac thrust up
the middle finger of one hand.
I felt like he was talking directly to some city in
my blood. Certainly I was "desperate". Certainly I was young. How long
would it take? That question would stalk me, snapping after me like a dog.
Going back now--searching through the years, digging
and hunting for a lost bone; for the tap root of myself. Scanning over those
hills and holes, I see it was no easy task -- that getting "naked"
business. You couldn't pin it down. Like looking for the right tilt in a pinball
game, getting those lights blinking and the winning bell to ring.
Until the last few years of climbing on up the hill
-- getting to the top like James Cagney in White Heat-- "Made it, Ma, top
of the world!--" a big part's been the bouncing from pin to pin, always
thinking the bingo light'd pop like flares; not so much in wads of bucks as in
that part of the spirit Kerouac was hammering at -- getting plugged into the life
and whirling like a Dervish.
My problem was some handicap I'd gotten onto myself
like a guy wriggling into a straight jacket: I couldn't see that I wasn't going
towards something as much as I was trying to get away. That was my strangle-hold
if there ever was one. The saving grace was that I'd create stories about people
who did the same thing; I'd prowl through life finding real people who lived
desperately, and write about their lives as factually as real life scenarios
allowed. But I was still a bandit. I didn't know what I was running from. It was
like a shadow that kept leaning towards me.
Most of my love was for my grandmother. I was,
according to my father, the apple of Granny's eye. She'd was be the one who'd
give me the world, but then she was gone--buried on a green hill in L.A.'s
Forest Lawn Cemetery. I'd often dream of her coming back to life, suddenly
sitting straight up in the coffin. Or on the way to the grave she'd jolt from
the casket and start rolling down the grassy slope, long strips of her unwinding
like the wrappings around a mummy, exposing bunches of wires and tubes like the
inside an old radio.
I was around fourteen when Granny died, and since
that time my life's been bouncing around the pinball game. Actor, poet, painter,
writer--always chasing what Rainer Rilke called the "ding en sich"--the
thing in itself.
Fear drives artists and writers to the edge. It's
never the search. Having no fear's a blessing. I had plenty of it. Granny'd
always been close--arm's length; I'd never had too far to fall with her behind
me as a wedge against the fears. To go "naked" as Kerouac'd ordered,
meant going unafraid.
Whatever Kerouac'd said to me kept bubbling up, like
he'd done a little suggestive hypnosis.
I could feel it had changed me, could feel it
flipping around. A few decades were still to come before that thing'd swing into
some stationary place--some core inside myself. Then I'd marvel at how Jack
Kerouac'd had such a sizzling grip on that same thing for himself--at least for
a little while. Maybe that's all it takes to get a hole in the bull's eye.
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Early
Memories
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I was born in Los Angeles in what they called Unit
One--the L.A. County General Hospital, that big white concrete structure looming
east of downtown when you're looking to see if you can see the mountains. The
building had been completed two years before I was pulled out of my mother's
womb with forceps--clamps, arriving a few minutes after midnight in the midst of
the rotten Depression. The same year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed
the Social Security Act. ...
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Clicking on
Early Memories
or the photo will take you to John's early life
in Los Angeles, and then return you back to the next section,
taking up when John first meets James
Dean
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Just seventeen, I met James Dean in the drugstore
near Times Square, and we stayed pals for half a year or so. I did some work as
an actor but mostly half-starved. I didn't learn the survival lessons very well.
I didn't want to do the junk parts, but chased A Place in the Sun. Be Monty
Clift, I told myself. It never would've occurred to me back then that maybe my
talents weren't cut out to be an actor.
Having flopped at landing a Monty Clift role, I
volunteered for induction in the army. I was going to be drafted anyway. In my
head, I pictured hitting Korea as a paratrooper with a tommy-gun. I wanted to go
to war, be triumphant there like some Viking thrusting his lance to the sky.
Like not landing on Broadway my first time out of the gate, I didn't make Korea
or the paratroopers and I didn't wind up in Special Services. My brief career as
a gungho trooper terminated, I was back in Hollywood on a GI Bill, attending
Geller Workshop Theater. The building was just off Wilshire at Fairfax, and a
big vacant dirt lot sat beneath a huge billboard facing Wilshire. I'd cut
figure-eights on a motorcycle, a BSA I'd bought in King City while I'd been in
the army.
Living at the Ojai Apartments in Hollywood, I soon
ran out of money and camped at my mom's apartment. I got a night job pressing
records, and did a couple of plays at the Geller Theater.
Across the street on Fairfax was a big drugstore
where the cast would hang out, drinking coffee, smoking and talking theater.
Lenny Bruce had gone to Geller when he'd tried to make it as an actor, and
Marlon Brando'd on his motorcycle in the Wild One had busted the image of the
hero as Cary Grant. It was the day of the anti-hero, showing another side of the
fence. Acting wasn't just a one-dimensional billboard after all... Neurotics
could get ahead as well. I still wanted to be a serious actor, still wanted to
do Monty Clift, and I wasn't going to be a pretty boy bobbing around a tennis
racket--though that's exactly what I should've been doing to get where I thought
I wanted to go.
Buzzing in and out of Schwab's drugstore on the
Strip, or Googies coffee shop next door, I pulled into the lot one day alongside
a Triumph motorcycle belonging to my New York pal James Dean. He said,
"Hey, atado. What's happening, man?"
Once again, we hit it off, as though there'd been
little break in our friendship. Despite the fact that he was now a big movie
star--only most everyone didn't know it because only one picture, East of Eden,
had been released. He was the hottest actor in town but still playing the bad
boy. In truth, Jimmy was a bad boy--not that he carried a zip-gun or was going
to steal your car, but he was walking the shady side of the street, basically
friendless and agonizing over it. For Jimmy, I mirrored the bad boy-- "the
iconoclastic teenager "(he'd call me with a grin), or "Rimbaud,"
he'd say. "The hillbilly poet." I didn't know why he called me a
hillbilly.
For a couple months we ran the field while he was
making Rebel Without A Cause. He wanted to make another sort of movie--not so
drastically unlike Rebel, but one that actually dug into the fiber of a
"bad" boy. Audie Murphy had made a movie called Bad Boy--his first, in
1949, dealing with a juvenile delinquent who lands in reform school.
Dean expressed the desire to make a movie "like
Murphy's," only going deeper into the boy's criminal personality. He wanted
to shoot it in 16mm, and said, "You write the script, atado." I didn't
know how to write a script.
I went back to New York that summer while Dean was
filming Edna Ferber's GIANT, and I played around with ideas for the story. I
never saw Jimmy again.
When Dean was killed in California on Highway 466 in
a freakish accident in the middle of nowhere, I dumped the whole notion of the
bad boy story.
I worked as an actor in New York on and off between
fill-in jobs, like a waiter, a dishwasher, a bartender, and then started doing
quite a bit of television. I was bouncing between New York and L.A., and at one
point while I was running around with Dennis Hopper, I managed to hole up long
enough to write a quickie novel about a young Beatnik in San Francisco.
A director who read the novel connected me to another
writer, Calder Willingham, who also read the manuscript. Willingham said,
"Why are you wasting your time trying to be an actor? You're a writer
whether you like it or not."
I was seeing a shrink for a while who'd taken me on
free as a subject for a book he was writing on the "artist and
society." He wanted to know if I'd actually experienced the "fantastic
things" I'd written about. Not all of it, I said. "It's a novel. It's
fiction.
I went to Paris on a movie deal, and hung around the
Beat Hotel--met Gregory Corso, William Burroughs and Harold Norse, the poet and
dancer. Norse introduced me to Maurice Girodias, then operating Olympia Press.
Girodias read my novel and said if I goosed up the "physical" scenes,
I'd have a decent "under the counter" seller. To prove it, he said
he'd publish the book through Olympia and my next book when I wrote it. I signed
a contract with Girodias--actually selling the novel to Olympia Press. Though he
paid me money, the book didn't get published. Olympia underwent some serious
financial lumps, and while Girodias assured me we still had a deal, the idea of
seeing the book printed seemed to drift into the haze of the future.
Another year or so of New York's concrete
treadmill--an actor in search of survival, and I was back to Hollywood for a
lead in a television show, a hot role for a serious young "Neurotic."
This sprung me into several other television roles but with the mounting sense
that I didn't want to do what I was doing. It wasn't going anywhere--I somehow
wasn't in charge of what I'd do next. When I did real theater I had the feeling
of accomplishment, of expressing something, getting energy across the
footlights. Communicating.
Marlon Brando's buddy, Sam Gilman, made a director's
debut with William Inge's play, Loss of Roses. It was the play Inge originally
wrote and not the watered version that ran on Broadway. I played the lead, the
young boy who falls for an older show gal. I loved the excitement of working on
the stage, the same as live television--that creative high that translates so
vividly.
Then the let down, the bottling up. I tried to go
back to painting, but the same thing happened. I couldn't get out whatever was
bubbling in me. 
It wasn't translating to the canvas or into the acting, and I
had the nagging sense of failing to get across what I felt.
This became a kind of armor I seemed to wear--the tin
man. If I wasn't comfortable with a role, that's how I'd appear--a tin man.
Certainly no Monty Clift. It puzzled me that Jimmy Dean'd play anything. Conjure
the most absurd part and he'd climb into it like slipping on a familiar glove.
He was truly the actor I wasn't, despite the moments I'd occasionally experience
those crystal moments when some line, some closeup or a few beats on stage where
everything seemed to connect.
The rest of it was wooden, as uncomfortable for me as
for the audience. The parts got worse--the roles downgrading. I didn't want to
do schlock, and while I worked in another movie at 20th Century Fox, I spent a
lot of time talking to Peter Lorre about writing (he was working on a script). I
decided to go ahead and write a movie based on another novel I'd started called
Snake Eyes. Riddled with errors, structurally unsound, but writing it was like a
can of water to man dying of thirst.
I wrote that script and then another, and soon was
directing one--a B-movie called Blues for Benny. Every Method actor's desires
are fixed to someday emerging as a director. Not so in my case. It was fun,
exciting, but my debut would be my curtain as a director. It was a sublimation
of the writing process. I was staging ideas--using people as I'd used the
cut-outs to flesh out the pictures in my head. I was back to the paper dolls.
I was living with a Hungarian dancer who'd come to
the America during the Hungarian Revolution. She was pregnant with my child and
while living north of Hollywood Boulevard, I woke up one day shrugging off my
life as an actor. It wasn't easy--like maybe going cold-turkey. How could I
think I didn't want to act anymore? What would I do?
I'd write. I'd become a writer for real. Where do
West Coast writers go? San Francisco.
I began to write -- not necessary what I wanted to
write, but I began to publish to make a living -- and oh, what a difficult
time that was. Hard times in San Francisco. Even doing some part-time writing
for a Bay newspaper didn't pay the bills. Worst of all, I had to chase the money
owed me for a book I'd sold an L.A. publisher. Mickey Cohen, Hollywood's famous
gangster, was instrumental in helping me collect the balance due. He liked actors
and kids. It didn't bother him that my dad was a cop. Mickey said he even liked
cops.
My daughter, Ursula, six months old, couldn't afford
to pass up the meals my lady and I had been missing. I sold a couple of short
stories to magazines and a television story for New York's Naked City series. At
the same time I was batting out a few quickie novels for West Coast publishers.
By hook and by crook, I'd stumbled into an arena and the small crowd was
cheering. They were buying what I was writing. It was like being able to feel
your own pulse.
I didn't see it back then but I was working within a
firm framework for creative expression. The stories had to work. They had to
have beginnings, middles and endings, and they couldn't contain bad language or
seem "indecent" in any way. They had to work as books. Within that
frame--that form, I'd find a very fertile field to plant ideas and watch them
develop through story--chapter by chapter, white-heat writing (which I'd later
teach as head of the writing program at Antioch University), straight from the
bubbling kettle to the printed page. I kind of felt like Jack Kerouac was
looking over my shoulder.
Without really knowing it, without any fanfare or
even a visible spark of insight, I'd become a writer. I was that guy Calder
Willingham said I should be, the one Bernard Wolf and Herbert Gold told me I'd
find waiting for myself down the road when I'd given the neurotic actor the
brush. The writing was exciting, each chunk of prose a kind of
exploration--hitting out into unknown country, uncharted territory of my own
mind.
But down that same road of being a writer, I'd find
something else equally unexpected. I'd find the "bad boy" in flesh--in
"Living Technicolor," as they'd say. His name was Charles Schmid 
and he'd be the first murderer I'd encounter, the first high-profile killer who'd
recognize in me some peculiar sameness mirroring himself. Of everyone covering
Schmid's trials (he was accused of murdering three girls and burying their
bodies in the desert), from Japan to New York to Paris, the killer singled me
out to tell his "side" of the story. His tale was a self-serving
blanket of inconsistencies and holes, intended to disguise fact, but rather it
became an illuminating tapestry--an almost bottomless view into the
thrill-killer's mind and personality. While what followed was a legal cat and
mouse game, I wanted to understand these dark pools, black as the tar pits, that
I'd encounter again and again in these mysterious yet dangerous human beings.
At the same time I wrote fiction, feeling that
anything away from the imaginative worlds I created was somehow a distraction. I
didn't see it back then a true deepening of my experiences a chronicler of the
darker, soulless streets I'd find myself prowling, always by some peculiar
invitation. I wouldn't make these contact on my own initially--they'd somehow
present themselves as second-party involvements, magazine-related or potential
motion picture deals.
Yet with the connection made, I'd be transformed into
the one that these people could sort of speak through, regardless of the
showcasing.
I was praised by the New York Times Book Review for
my book on the life and crimes of Charles Schmid, and received international
attention for my work on Charles Manson and his so-called Family--all killers.
Cops liked me. I could be one of them. Under their
sanction, I was able to burrow like a worm into files of otherwise
"sealed" information. I could come away from these involvements loaded
with "real life," and without undue sweat, these lumps of experience I
housed would easily translate into a language of story. I recall laying these
bits and pieces in line and suddenly sensing some sort of energy erupting, as
though the long thing became a snake with a will of it's own--a living,
breathing entity. That was the story--the "ding en sich"--the thing in
itself.
I wasn't a reporter, a chronicler; I was the artist
and these experiences and encounters were as paints, hues, tones, values and
varnishes I was laying across a space to form a vibrating picture, mirroring the
human experience.
It was the same as a novel, a short story, a poem;
for me, if it wasn't mirroring the truth--the thing in itself--then it wasn't
working. I could see where I was going, like standing on the edge of a crevice
and looking down, seeing that it's bottom wasn't visible, it wasn't a
"place to start" but rather a kind of creative fire and as long as I
was alive I'd tap into this as if scooping this burning mass upwards in my
grasp. That's what my job was, I told myself, what I was doing on earth and my
first priority would be in clarifying a view, a vision, no matter what I
created.
Could I lead a somewhat normal life and keep my head
fastened to such an ego-centric grindstone? Could I pull my nose up long enough
out of my belly button to see what the heck was happening around me? Or did it
matter what was happening around me? Did it matter if I was married or not, if I
had kids or not, if I made a lot of money or just skimmed the surface--an always
hungry gull snapping at bits and pieces as they'd bob up out of the surface.
Finally, I'd ask myself, do I have a choice in any of
this?
Like Kerouac'd predicted, one's youth keeps one
blinkered. The answer comes with a lot of years stacking up against one like
sticks and old boards. No, I didn't have any choice.
A west coast publisher bought a novel from me,
Blowout, and while waiting for publication, the book won the Southwest Literary
Award, a feather in my cap, while at the same time I was asked by a New York
publisher to write a book on James Dean. A book was being published on Dean that
I felt missed the point and obscured the real picture. I'd toyed with the idea
of writing an article on Dean just to give things a little reality check. My
agent said he'd sell a book on Dean if I wanted to write it. I said if he sold
the article and we got an offer for a book, I'd probably write it.
The next day he called to say he had a book contract.
The Hungarian and I had been legally married for a few years and we talked about
my doing a book on Jimmy. I'd been one of the few friends of Dean who'd kept
their mouth shut, a swearing of silence way back, I figured since a biography
was coming out riddled with flaws, it couldn't hurt if I wrote a straight-on
slice of life piece: I had no interest in writing about the movies or his
background in Indiana. Maybe just the bumming around New York, and the driven,
anxious eighteen months in Hollywood before his sudden death. Out of those
months he'd made three movies. What I was left with was a guy either sleeping in
a dumpy apartment or riding a motorcycle or racing his car. Maybe sitting in a
coffee shop staring at his face in the counter mirror. To focus on the
individual, I'd be writing an existential piece bordering on a kind of spiritual
bound man, like Franz Kafka's short story.
I took the money and wrote the book, honing in on a
tight personal view, a sort of interior glimpse of a lonely, misunderstood
artist living through a personal hell, courting disaster and finally finding it.
In a way so was I. The marriage, after a dozen years,
was shot. She wanted to float her own boat--ala single; to own her own life.
My daughter was the one that'd take the thumping of
divorce blows of it. I hated the idea of it
--the shadows of my own past pressed
close on me. But there was nothing I could do. Uprooting me was easier than
uprooting her.
I was back in little apartment in Hollywood, up
behind Grauman's Chinese Theater, walking around the boulevard as though back in
Hollywood High. I'd wonder which way to turn, which street to take. I was
somehow lost in my own front yard--yearning for a home I didn't have, for
something some voice in me was saying was already a long time gone.
Grants and Fellowships began falling around me like
leaves. Even Taos and the University of Texas wanted me on residency grants. I
accepted one in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, which was starting up in the
fall and sort of open-ended.
The rest of the summer I spent hustling publishers
and agents in New York. I spent most of the hot spell at the Iroquois
Hotel--James Dean's old haunt, and after renewing an old friendship with a
French diplomat's daughter, I almost changed my mind about going to
Massachusetts. I'd found a great loft-like east side apartment on an ultra-cool
block, right over a Big Apple restaurant. I could stay in New York...
More decisions. By the end of the summer the West
Coast publisher had gone down the tube and Blowout was back in my lap.
Without that second advance, staying in New York was
out of the question, and I still had another book to write. I needed to hole up,
I needed to lick some wounds would a season of solid work.
The first few days in the Berkshires, the leaves were
blazing like fires but the temperature was dropping. I'd never experienced the
kind of cold in store in those mountains a few miles west of Northhampton and
from Smith College.
I insulated and re-walled an old barn, redoing the
loft into a wide living space supplied with a new wood burning heater that'd
turn almost white hot in the night. Pretty quickly, I got into a relationship
with a young woman, a fine sculptress, and was so hungry for a passion that'd
never surfaced with the ex-wife, I attempted to devour and lock her
inside of myself.
Our hot romance spanned that frozen, isolated winter
in the Berkshires. We were two shooting stars, streaking across a sky--burning
up as they went. I bought some property in the hills and planned to build a log
cabin, maybe share it with the sculptor. Maybe with no one.
Meanwhile, Henry Robbins who'd been at Dial Press,
had his own imprint at Dutton in New York and sent me a contract for Blowout. He
said, "You've created art with this one... Not everybody's going to love
it, but I do!" But needed another draft was needed, he said. I trusted
Henry--he was a wonderful man and a brilliant editor. We'd shared ideas for a
few years since the mid-60's with a novel I was working on, set in Cairo,
Egypt--a modern day, crazy-mixed-up marriage that falls apart in North Africa.
I did a reading one night at the Art Colony, sharing
the stage with a guest I'd invited, poet Lyn Lifshin. We'd known of each other
since a book had been set featuring both of us, called DEATH & SUICIDE. The
anthology was later canceled due to the suicide death of its editor.
That reading in the frozen mountains was really the
first time Lyn and I got together (there'd be a number of times in the years to
come). She stayed in my loft that night, freaking the sculptor. From that point
on, things started fading on the romance horizon, and with the wet, bug-ridden
Berkshire summer stoking up, I moved out of the art community and into an old
farmhouse in the dinky town. My romance with the sculptor melted as my focus on
the book bloomed open like a Venus fly trap.
A sad blow: Henry Robbins fell dead in a downtown New
York subway.
His imprint, Henry Robbins Books, ceased to be--and
so did the list he'd planned to publish. Another Dutton editor told me they were
dropping my novel. "Your book is too depressing, John," the editor
said. "This awful town you've written about--this heat--the sun and desert
dust blowing about and getting into everything--who'll want to read something
that's uncomfortable and depressing? Readers want to be uplifted! They want to
enjoy and escape this sort of harshness. They do not want to be hit over the
head with such bleak imagery..."
When my daughter came back to Massachusetts spent a
month with me, I gradually saw I needed to escape where I was--for a little
while. So bag and baggage I headed to California, accompanying my daughter on
her trip back.
My mother'd moved to a little house south of Pasadena
where I camped for a short time; bought a pickup truck and headed back to the
Massachusetts to do something with the property.
Lyn Lifshin and I met in a New York park where a
well-known murder had occurred, and we spent a "poetic" afternoon and
night before I rode on. I got rid of the property in the Berkshires, turned
right around and drove back across country, stopping in many towns that seemed
to be dying on the roadside, forgotten, falling apart before one's eyes. America
was changing. The old highways were dead. New interstates bypassed cities,
making ghostscapes of the small towns--what had once been bountiful, rural
communities. My head spun and my heart beat excitedly. I was going to write
about what I was feeling--some sort of wind swept desolation of the American
soul!
I'd been in and out of the Mojave desert a number of
times, but now I sensed it was calling me--a voice echoing in my head. Within a
few weeks I'd left Los Angeles and trucked up to Lone Pine on the edge of the
desert, backed against the great rocky Sierras. I could stare at Mount Whitney
from bedroom window of the little house I rented. Lonely and bandit-like, I
became a desert bar hound, yearning for those long-gone time, the long-gone
loves and the long-gone better times.
Going deeper into desolation as if to taste its
dregs, I moved into a ghost town, Cerro Gordo, high in the lifeless Inyo
Mountains edging Death Valley.
I decided to hole up in Cerro Gordo--eight miles up a
one truck wide, dirt stretch called the Devil's Road. A gal named Barbara Lee
owned the empty town, a one-time blonde cutie, ex-contract player from Paramount
studios, she'd been an eyeful in Hollywood's Golden Days, and remembered half
the town including its dirty laundry.
She'd frequently be gone and I'd be alone in the
ghost town, over nine-thousand feet high on the rocky mountain. Alone except for
a skinny, half-crazy dog called Happy. I'd listen to old Bob Wills '78's and
drink beer until I'd pass out, waking up in the nights with the moon stretching
those long black shadows across the land, like bold strokes of black paint
springing from every scrawny bush and broken board. Sometimes the crazy dog
would attack the black shadows, snapping and biting at nothing. I'd hear its
teeth clattering.
Soon fearing I'd become as unhinged as the spooked
dog, late one evening I loaded the truck with my unused paper and dusty
typewriter, my clothes and books and records, and steered down the Devil's Road,
heading south to my homeland, listening to someone the CB calling himself
"the dust river bogeyman."
I wasn't going to hang around Hollywood. No, I had to
move. The itch was incredible. I took a teaching assignment at Antioch
University, and this led to heading the Writing Program at the San Francisco
campus.
I lived downtown on Bush near Stockton and made
Chinatown my second home. I ran a private writing group called Bay Writers, and
taught three classes a week including the university.
Yearning for some meaningful relationship, I hooked
up with a beautiful young blonde fresh in Frisco from Hong Kong; she'd been
promoting her father's east coast costume jewelry business. Her name was Susan
and we lived together for a year, sharing what we called a "piglet"
life.
I was writing for the London Daily Express News &
Feature Service, and attending almost every play in San Francisco. My own
one-act, written that season, Everyone Has Emptiness at Three O'Clock in the
Morning, opened with another play at Fort Mason. I began to write play another
play, a full-length one, while I was giving talks at San Francisco State
College.
Meanwhile writing--shaping another novel since
Blowout had bitten the dust. It was all coming together, the ideas gelling in
that snake-like, wriggling form, when Hollywood called: another movie script
assignment. Nothing fantastic--the stick now, the carrot later. I took the
assignment, and in the midst of developing the script from a previously produced
play, my San Francisco lady friend and I had a falling out.
Within a month I was heading back to Hollywood, this
time with an unwavering notion that I'd stake a claim to a part of the town
rightfully mine. Instead, living in another apartment, I climbed onto a roller
coaster on the Hollywood fast-lane track, and rode it for the rest of the movie
script.
Another girl, a St. Louis, Missouri, dark-haired
dancer, Ronna Kean, wove into my life intensely and in a short time she believed
she was pregnant. What would we do? Old-fashioned me said "Get married, I
guess..."
She wasn't pregnant, but after the big shindig St.
Louis wedding, we moved into the Villa Carlotta, one of Hollywood's true-blood,
old-time Mediterranean villa apartment-hotels. We set up housekeeping in Louella
Parson's old two-story apartment while I wrote another movie treatment as well
as revising a novel called A Hole in the Sky. At this time, my long-term passion
with L.A.'s most famous unsolved murder was stoking hot on the front burner. The
research I was doing involved many covert situations, people connected to the
old case, to underworld figures and to characters way, way on the other side of
the tracks.
I quickly had another book, entitled, simply, Black
Dahlia. A new agent was convinced I had the hot one, and quickly a draft was in
New York. They were eager to consider the book while I was making the front
pages of the L.A. newspapers with the case.
But it seemed New York was getting cold feet. Their
concern was how to market this "ungodly, bizarre story that's written like
an expressionistic painting!"
Wow, I thought. I knew I still had a ways to go with
the book--work to be done, but had "art" once again overshadowed
practicality?
As things cooled, my on-again off-again love affair
with Hollywood was kicking up. The travel-fever was rising. I needed a break. My
heart or soul or whatever, was looking north to the desert again.
My wife, Ronna, was doing performance art in Santa
Monica, along with an ex-member of the Doors group, but burning out with it. She
wanted something else--something drastically different than what she'd been
doing. She spoke some Russian and via one of my cop pals turned DEA, I managed
to connect her to Military Intelligence--if she'd want to take a breather.
She'd have to enlist, however. It sounded nuts, but
adventurous, too; a ticket to get some distance between myself and Hollywood.
Through a circuitous set of circumstances too stupid to recall, we left L.A. the
small desert town of Mojave. Next came Arizona... Fort Huachuca. Sierra Vista.
We lived in Tombstone, then back to California in Monterey.
For a year we lived in a little fishing house on
Cannery Row before moving across the country into the deep south--a remote area
I'd never experienced. We wound up in a small town north of Lake Charles,
Louisiana, and within a month discovered that Ronna was pregnant--this time for
real. We traced the conception back to a dusty motel in Las Cruces, New
Mexico.
This marriage should've busted up after a year or two
from the start, but history was repeating itself. And
Hollywood was reaching out
again, all the way into the swamps of Cajun country to get a finger in my
collar. Another script--a rewrite; this time a French company. An old director
friend, Curtis Harrington, was set to make this one and I flew to L.A., met the
French producers in Beverly Hills and by the following morning I began batting
out a new outline based on their unshootable script.
The days dragged into weeks, until the French guys
decided I had to go to Paris and write the script there.
So from Rodeo Drive to the Champs Elysee; meanwhile
my wife in southern Louisiana lugging the unborn baby and a shotgun for safety
while I strolled along the Left Bank, revisiting the past.
I hammered out the script but with a real drive, a
verve, in control of the work and not only bringing it in on deadline, but doing
one helluva job as well. I had a real sense of a job well done: I'd delivered a
solid bill of goods for a fair wage; I wasn't trying to rip them off or did I
allow myself to get ripped off.
Paris? It seemed bigger, wider, rolling upwards in
mammoth high rises like thermos bottles pushing up out of the ground.
McDonalds and Burger King were the hot spots. I
roamed around and spent a lot of time in the plush hotel or in the office. The
elegant doorknobs reminded me of the young Brigitte Bardot I knew in Paris
twenty-five years before.
Back to L.A., via Air France, then eastward again,
and to the south, the planes getting smaller to that twelve-seater swamp jumper.
A few months later my son was
born -- Carson Emory Gilmore -- and I quickly found myself with duty calling: diapers, feedings; he was
a restless baby, hardly slept, wouldn't nap, too inquisitive, bright as a
Sealbeam. But it felt like time had gone around again, like I was caught in a
revolving glass door.
A play I'd written, Where Nothing is Sacred, was
performed at the Lake Charles Repertory, and another one, Deep End, was done at
Northeastern University during the three and a half years in Louisiana.
Fast forward through the black woods and Mamou and
the Cajuns, to getting out of Louisiana: crossing the border into Texas with a
great tremor of relief. After the marriage, when still back in Hollywood, we'd
been to Santa Fe to scout land--entertain changes. We'd entered a deal but later
backed out when a script option fell through.
Now we were looking for somewhere to live but Santa
Fe wasn't blowing us away.
We settled just north of Albuquerque, a temporary
situation since we had a moving van of most everything we owned somewhere on the
road between Louisiana and New Mexico.
Back and forth between the high desert and L.A., and
a fast few years--less than three, and the marriage explored into divorce. This
time there'd no do-it-yourself arrangement. It was hard and full of deceit, and
tricks the whole nine-yards.
I went back to San Francisco to catch my balance, and
after I crash-wrote the Black Dahlia book, SEVERED, I returned to New Mexico to
iron out a custody battle with my then ex-wife.
For the next two years I wrote--my son living with me
in a two-story art studio. I wrote and published and then met a woman named
Marie NaVeaux. She was different from anyone I'd ever known, and suddenly I saw
there were real people to get involved with -- they weren't all paper dolls.
We got married a few months after we met and joined
lives in a fruitful, loving partnership. The bandit had found sanctuary.1
Until maybe five years or so ago I was still using a
typewriter. Still batting the stuff out and cutting and pasting -- retyping
sections again and again, going miles of scotch tape and second sheets.
Something happened when I went to a computer. I could
see the stuff on the screen, move it around. It was like I was painting; the
visual artist merging with the word guy. The thing became a piece bringing all
of me into play. I said, what a joy!
Doing what I do, like Kerouac told me, and doing what
I am is what I do.
Okay. I see a lot of work that evolved through early
stages, sort of went to the sidelines, now getting back in line. Oh, and quite a
bit falls aside--never to be picked up again. The writer Bernard Wolf told me he
had a trunk of scripts that he'd never publish and would burn before he died. He
didn't want anyone seeing what a rotten writer he'd been when he'd started out.
But he'd set his pace.
I've set my pace. Three novels are in the works right
now, two lodged with two separate houses. Another publisher has set another
nonfiction by me--this one the last for me unless I do some more memories
someday. In a way it's almost memories -- bad guys and situations I've crossed
paths with -- trend setters, you could say; but what I've done, the research has
been all in the far away corners of those lives, and the lives of those their
drastic acts affected.
Things don't leave my head. I keep working on them.
I've got books there that I conceptualized years ago. They won't go away until I
write them. They've changed somewhat over the years, like Kerouac predicted. I'm
working with my own machinery -- building a body of work.
The Research Library of UCLA in Los Angeles, the
UCLA's Special Collections Department, has been gathering my work, notes,
letters, scripts and bits and pieces for more than twenty years. It's a
substantial collection that I'm quite proud of it.
My home base is L.A., though I'm living in New
Mexico. I work good here. Too many distractions in L.A. The same with New York.
Love hitting those places, doing what I have to do there and the getting out.
The cities have changed so much, and what I relate to--what I miss about them
doesn't exist anymore. So when I'm homesick, I'm yearning for something that's
only in my head.
Deeper and deeper into the fiction now, sort of
tunneling like a mole, and getting more clarified in what I'm trying to set
down. I've arrived at a point where all is possible now in the work, giving that
I live long enough to get the job done.
After living for decades as a kind of psychological
bandit in the "cement jungle," I want to do my work and sit back fat
and sassy like a literary Pancho Villa. And now matter what he did or how hard
he fell, Jack Kerouac was right: if they don't like it, just stick up the middle
finger, sort of shake it a little, and get on with the job at hand.
and