|
John Gilmore’s
Desolate Landscape
by Anthony Mostrom
"Suffering
is permanent, obscure and dark
And
shares the nature of infinity." William
Wordsworth
L.A. DESPAIR: A
Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times is a fascinating work
of true-crime literature and a singular book by one of the most defiantly
original authors of our time. For those already steeped in the canon of John
Gilmore's work, L.A. DESPAIR arrives as the long-awaited true-crime
capstone to a collection of books, both fiction and nonfiction, celebrated for
generous helpings of bloody violence, sex and sordidness, notorious as well for
their author's first-hand participation in the lives of his colorfully
questionable subjects (Charles Manson, James Dean, Ed Wood), and for the
consistent, crosshair-focused obsession spanning many decades of a restless,
globetrotting life, that has dominated so much of Gilmore's unique literary
career: the high and lowlife of "Hollywood" and Los Angeles, the author's native
city.
In the clear-eyed and unsparing portrait that unfolds in books like Laid Bare;
Manson: The Unholy Trail of Charlie and the Family; and the universally-acclaimed
Black Dahlia
nonfiction classic, Severed, Gilmore has chronicled both the radiantly
creative, flawed artists he knew as a young and aspiring actor and painter in
the 1950s and '60s, and the lowest, blackest specimens of feral, predatory
criminals; wary “friendships” and encounters spanning a lifetime and filtered
through a unique and independent perspective, both hawkish and sympathetic,
formed while growing up as the son of an LAPD cop during the city's postwar
"heyday" as the "City of Headline Murders."
Thus one of the uniquenesses of
L.A DESPAIR; it would be difficult to think of any other book in the
true-crime category that contains anything like the detailed description of a
savagely brutal murder (written from the viewpoint of the murderer) that
climaxes the book's chapter Ice Blonde—in which the author reconstructs
for the
first time the true story of the once famous and headline-grabbing
robbery and beating death of an old lady in Burbank in 1952, by the notorious
Barbara Graham—written in such a way that can only be described as beautiful,
even moving: "Barbara had never been so totally in control; no doubt or
pain or confusion. Everything was crystal-clear—cold as ice and perfect as a
diamond." I would defy anyone to read the entire dramatic passage, from which
this is culled, only once. While empathy would not be too strong a word
to describe Gilmore's method and intent in a passage like this (though
"sympathy" surely would), the artistry he demonstrates—the biographer-artist's
ability to "live into" the mind of his subject—reflects not only Gilmore's
fascination and his exquisite craftsmanship, but insights gained from many years
of encounters with those shady and dangerous characters whose lives played
themselves out, as he says, in the shadows: "It's like she squared it," he says
about Barbara Graham. "I knew—I knew that that's what had happened with
Barbara, from all my knowledge, all my travels, all the talks I've had with
killers over the years....it's a moment of absolute completion of your life. For
the first time, everything comes together...”
“There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but
which are too entirely horrible for legitimate fiction,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote
in 1844, introducing his short story The Premature Burial. “They are
with propriety handled, only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctity and
sustain them.” Whatever Poe meant by ‘sanctify’ (and it was a long
time ago), he went on to note that we “thrill…with the most intense of ‘pleasurable
pain’,” when reading newspaper accounts of earthquakes, plagues and other
disasters. “It is the history,” Poe asserts, not mere fiction, “which
excites.” Heavy on the severity and light on majesty is Gilmore’s
account of young William Edward Cook’s 1951 cross-country murder spree
by automobile, Hard Luck. Cook, described as “squint-eyed” by
the newspapers thanks to the unnerving effect of an immovable right eyelid that
could not close, was a monosyllabic hater of the human race who nonetheless left
to posterity the memorable phrase, “I’m gonna live by the gun, and roam.”
Gilmore writes proudly in Hard Luck, “Blythe, another railroad
dump, blistered in the summer and froze in the winter. Billy Cook hung
around the town like a spider in someone’s garage.” Hard Luck’s
meticulous reconstruction of the scabrous crimes of Cook, the brutal, subhuman
drifter in a black leather jacket, instantly solidifies L.A. DESPAIR’s eerie
significance as a cultural signpost (or tombstone) at the end (the far, far end
beyond the pale) of a crumbing old American road, its actors’ destinies played
out in a landscape of dead ends.
“LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities” wrote Jack
Kerouac in On the Road (1952). Reviving the malignant spirit of Billy Cook
over Route 66, Hard Luck will stand as John Gilmore’s ultimate, ugly inversion
of the Great American Road saga.
“I’ve undertaken these projects as extensions of myself,” Gilmore
said during the writing of
L.A. DESPAIR. “This has, indirectly, become the clarification
of a vision—of a landscape seen from a single perspective; a landscape
peculiar to myself.” Taken as a psychological fact of the mind (and
life) of John Gilmore, the powerful pull of this archetypical image is
irresistible. As wanderer and native son of Los Angeles, Gilmore knows the
desert, has worn out shoe leather in pursuit of the facts, seeking out
long-forgotten witnesses, victims, and old policemen finishing their lives in
far-flung desert towns; perhaps these, too, have become a part of the landscape
of desolation.
“Feedback on my work suggests it is not ‘judgmental’ in the normal
sense,” Gilmore says, acknowledging a point known to have bothered certain
reviewers of his earlier nonfiction books. “I do not protect the reader
by offering buffers or holding their hands,” he says. “I thrust them
into the lion’s den,” and the reader will encounter scenes of terrifying
exhilaration in L.A. DESPAIR, as the author casts a cold, steady eye on each
second of events ghastly beyond belief, sparing nothing but explicit
judgments. “I have compromised nothing and I’ve taken the reader to
the dark side of the moon. Moralizing, editorializing are things they tend
to do.” Who can think of a more deadly serious writer, working today,
than John Gilmore? “There is nothing to be learned from fantasy,” he says, echoing a
sentiment most true-crime readers would agree with. The question of what
there is to “learn” from the unbelievably sordid story of Seventies porn
star John Holmes, however, seems quite moot; all the reader can do, reading
Gilmore’s detailed chronicle of Holmes, the Wonderland murders and L.A.’s
drug-king crime boss Eddie Nash (in Bad Eddie & Other No Good People), is to
endure, with inverted awe, lunkheaded Holmes’ slide from “fame” into
murder and ghastly self-destruction—fueled (not surprisingly) by the usual
tedious goals of Hollywood hustlers like these: money and drugs, in huge
quantities, neither one for any particular purpose. “Holmes is the
personification of the L.A. mutant,” says Gilmore, “from half a million
bucks a year to sleeping in alleys and swiping radios out of cars.”
“Franchot Tone,” actor Burgess Meredith told the young actor Jonathan
Gilmore in 1959, “is nuttier than a fruitcake, so don’t let the genteel
frosting fool you.” At the time, Meredith was directing Gilmore in an
episode of the old U.S. Steel Hour live drama showcase on CBS. The
inquisitive Gilmore tucked the information away and (we can safely say), took it
to heart, as the reader may want to keep in mind when reading Kiss Tomorrow
Goodbye, a vivid reconstruction of the
very Gilmore-worthy quick-rise, decline and fall of 1950’s film star Barbara
Payton, a figure largely forgotten today except by hard-core Hollywood scandal
nuts. Our author, who of course also wrote Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked
Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip (and worked briefly for Confidential
magazine in the summer of 1956), knew all three players in the ruinous Payton—Franchot
Tone—Tom Neal love triangle that tipped their destinies so violently and
decisively off the proverbial cliff, and here masterfully and briskly brings
back to life the time and the place (Gilmore’s immortalizing of the original
poolside meeting of hot-blooded Payton and muscular Tom Neal—based on the
recollections of Neal himself—is an instant classic: “Tom said, ‘So
I hear you did a picture with Cagney?’ She nodded, her glance at his
stomach.”). Lest such Hollywood fare sound like a lightweight entry in
what the author has called his “five bleeding sides of beef,” let me ask the
reader, where else will you find true-like quotations like this: “‘That
night,’ she told Ann, ‘he shaved off my pubic hair and put it in his mouth…he
tried to swallow it, washing it down with Black and White, but he couldn’t
swallow all of it and he started gagging’”?
The finale of Gilmore’s dark quintet, Shame on You,
ushers in the unhappy figure of Spade Cooley, once loved by millions as the “King
of Western Swing,” a popular fixture on KTLA TV back in Nifty Fifties as “Your
Fiddlin’ Friend,” a pal of Roy Rogers and cowboy actor in his own right,
Cooley is remembered now only the wife-killer responsible for stomping to death
his beautiful bride. Though Gilmore does not call her death a “justifiable
homicide,” he does reveal the tortured life Cooley and his (at one time)
lovely wife inflicted on each other, offering a troubled portrait of the tragedy
as inevitable. “Cooley was ravaged by emotional chaos,” Gilmore says, “by
tremendous loss, alcohol and unendurable psychic torture. His despair
overrode his reason and saneness.” So the unavoidable question is posed:
Is John Gilmore stepping forward now as an apologist for Spade
Cooley?
While those familiar with Gilmore’s unusual, kaleidoscopic life would
find it hard to take literally a recent statement by the writer that his “sensibilities
were frozen in 1947,” one does want to think that somehow, in a sense that
exists beyond chronological time, all five of these bleeding sides of beef,
these “chunks of life,” sad, brutal and pathetic traces of errant humanity
long since gone, are being eternally watched by a twelve-year-old L.A. boy
addicted to Black Cat magazine, the screaming headlines of the Los Angeles
Examiner and horror comics, listening to spirited dinner-table talks about “bathtub
murders,” and whose mind—whose memory—still carries inside it the
unbelievably beautiful sight, smell and sound of a famous murder victim,
laughing; who would grow up to remember both her and L.A. after “the war,”
in books, and in lines of scattered poems like this one:
Long glued to the glass,
the rotting headlines
collapse in chunks of decrepit black,
echoing the face of a future lost,
snatched by a rusty knife
in a dim room without a window.
Her screams were never heard.
Slippers of Elizabeth Short
--the Black Dahlia
|
L.A. DESPAIR:
A Landscape of Crimes
and Bad Times
available NOW on AMAZON
PREVIEWS
BARBARA GRAHAM
the notorious murderous Ice Blonde
BILLY COOK
HARD LUCK
remorseless hitchhike murderer
EDDIE
NASH-BAD EDDIE::
WONDERLAND CRIME SCENES
Crime Kingpin + King of Porn = Murder
BARBARA PAYTON
A shining star's fall from grace
SPADE COOLEY
SHAME ON YOU
a candid glimpse into a tortured psyche
REVIEWS
"There's nothing to be learned from fantasy," claims Gilmore, and his true
tales of Hollywood wreckage are madder, badder and more shocking than
anything Ellroy or Tarantino could dredge from the darkest reaches of their
imaginations. There's John Holmes, the porn legend turned killer; Barbara
Peyton and her horrific descent from screen-siren to the gutter; Barbara
Graham, the Hollywood hooker who was sent to the gas chamber for murder and
Spade Cooley, the family entertainer who stomped his wife to death. The horrific authenticity shines through in every quote: "That night he shaved
off my pubic hair and put it in his mouth," says Peyton of an ex-lover. "Then tried to swallow it down with Black and White." Jesus Christ alive.
~ Sam Delaney, Guardian
The noir underbelly of La-La Land is [Gilmore's]
territory, that seething realm of killers, pushers and whores that lies
just beneath Tinseltown like the safety net in a circus high-wire act,
catching anyone who slips in its web. He's written the definitive book
on LA's most notorious slaying with Severed: The True Story Of The
Black Dahlia Murder, detailed the crimes of Charlie and the Family
in Manson, and ripped away the façade of Hollywood's glamour
with his tell-all memoir Laid Bare. Now he's back with a quintet
of true-crime tales from the dark side of the moon, titled LA
Despair: A Landscape Of Crimes & Bad Times. ~
Bizarre
Mag-True Crime
"L.A. DESPAIR goes beyond hard boiled, beyond the mundane horror of true-crime reportage, to recreate the vile, gutter reality glossed over by so many. Here is murder in all its stench and filth, with human animals gleefully rutting in the gore. If you're seeking a patina of respectability or entertainment, or redemption of any sort, Gilmore is not your man." ~
Stephen Lemons, New Times
|
and