Ed Wood Jr.

Justifiably cited as one of the worst film-makers in history, Ed Wood Jr. was also in the business of writing dirty books. When I met him he was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt with a pair of bilious neon-yellow pants that sort of shimmered under the fluorescent tubes in Lou Kimzey's office at International Publications. The tub in one of the bathrooms was used as a storage dump for the books they published under the "France" imprint: "your guarantee of exciting and entertaining reading."

Ed Wood often wrote under his own name, as opposed to using a pseudonym, and he'd been writing a little longer than I. But Lou Kimzey's operation wasn't giving Ed the edge he needed-meaning money paid on the barrelhead. Their excuse was always that the book was still at the lawyer's, still in "editing," still being read, and so on and so forth. Ed Wood couldn't wait through the run of Kimzey's lame-brain excuses as to why he hadn't coughed up the hard-earned dough when due, so eventually he went to another publisher, then another, writing book after book at a pace like dribbling a basketball.

Gena's father was also writing for "France," and warned me, "You have to go in there and yell. You have to scream and pound on the desk before he'll pay you. If you call on the phone, you'll never get paid. They're all thieves. Rotten fucking thieves. Go in threatening that you won't leave until he pays you. They're scared of the law, so they won't call the cops to haul you off. He'll pay you something-part of it, all of it-something to get your ass out of there."

Ed wasn't screaming or pounding the furniture. He told me, "I know the fucker and I'm afraid of him, because I'll fucking work myself sick and have to fight like a son of a bitch to get the money." For a man who had written and directed movies for a grand a crack, he was looking at easy cash with Kimzey. Collecting it was the trick. Kimzey would hit someone low for maybe three-fifty a book, maybe four-hundred if the writer spilled the beans that he had something hot. Kimzey would get the hungry ones. For the others he'd slug out half a grand to seven-hundred. A few months later, he was paying close to a grand a book-which Ed had made elsewhere. Some a few bucks less, others a little more.

The law was hard and fast: no dirty words, no "cock" or "cunt," you couldn't directly mention the sexual organs, and even pubic hair was taboo. Sex scenes had to result from relationships-couldn't be promiscuous or they would be considered pornography. The books had to have a moral. Good had to shine through in the end. They couldn't even smell dirty.

I wrote Brutal Baby in nine days and followed it with Dark Obsession, another nine-day novel. Then came Strange Fire, inspired by a black chick I knew in the Village, and a bunch of bikers. Lesbos in Panama was next, another midnight express.

"I've read Brutal Baby," Ed told me. "Maybe there's a picture in it. Don't let Kimzey have any rights except First North American. No one's ever asked him for that, so he'll think you're a hot shot."

Ed and I met a couple of times when he was wearing a woman's rayon blouse, which had a sort of metallic sheen except where he'd sweated through the armpits. He looked disheveled and stoned, talking about getting a few grand together to a get a picture on the board. I thought maybe it was pills-he had a pill-head's agitation over things that rubbed him wrong, and he smelled bad. It was fish he reeked of, and he said he'd just been to San Pedro goosing a tuna merchant to invest in a movie. I'd just finished a real gem with Curtis Harrington called Meat House. Ed loved the script-humans being canned for sale as food, and a detective-spy sort of cop who's called in to straighten things out but gets an arm chopped off instead, which then goes into one of the cans.

Ed said the same idea could be used in Brutal Baby. "In face of fact," he said, it was the very heart of the idea. "That's what's so brutal about it!" Ed had an extraordinary ability for jamming together bunches of disparate material, which he could somehow present with a kind of coherence. Two or more totally unrelated stories could be crammed into the middle, the beginning or end of another story, and somehow it would seem intended- and if the continuity was flawed, at least it was consistently flawed from start to finish.

Unconcerned with the bumps and patches, he rushed to get the stuff released. I felt he wanted to pay attention to the glaring faults in what he was doing, but the world he operated in-the insane nine-day novel-writing and ten-day movie-making world-never allowed him a moment of reflection.

He was plagued with nightmares, he told me. He'd plunge into their weird midst, he said, yet somehow couldn't bring their "true horror" into his work. So, he said, he had to "skim the surface as a dreamer, a man possibly dangerous to himself . . ." He always made me think of the worst possible scenario-about what could and would go wrong-and it was all uphill from there.

From LAID BARE: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip