LA DESPAIR : A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times

LA's literary prince of darkness John Gilmore on the porn stars, pushers, murderers and Hollywood losers of his latest true-crime masterpiece.

Dressed in black, with a shock of platinum hair and sharp aquiline features that hint at his past as an actor, John Gilmore could pass for a courtly angel of death in his home of Los Angeles, the City of the Angels. The noir underbelly of La-La Land is his 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.

The stars, or rather black holes, of these lurid accounts include 70s porn king John Holmes and LA hood Eddie Nash, both implicated in the infamous 1981 quadruple-homicide known as the Wonderland Murders; Barbara Graham, executed in 1955 via California's gas chamber for the brutal slaying of a 62-year-old widow; lazy-eyed hitchhiker-killer Billy Cook, who had the words 'Hard Luck' tattooed across his knuckles and went on a blood-drenched murder spree in 1951 that ended the lives of at least six persons; bandleader Spade Cooley, the 'King of Western Swing', who stomped his wife to death in an alcohol-fueled rage over her infidelities; and celluloid bombshell Barbara Payton, who starred alongside James Cagney in crime drama Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, but ended it all turning two-dollar tricks in the gutters of Hollywood.

I've been working on these subjects for many years. Two or three were ideas I had for books, and two were actually contracted as books. But I realised I did not want to write a book about each one of these subjects. So I thought of putting them together because they all have a relationship to LA.

I've been working on the Eddie Nash thing since it broke, really, in the 80s. And the Barbara Payton thing goes way back to my friendship with actor Tom Neal, her lover. Ultimately, the Payton story fit because nothing could be more despairing than Barbara Payton, except maybe the Eddie Nash/ John Holmes piece. Totally disheartening. From $500,000 a year Holmes was making, to stealing stereos out of cars and sleeping in alleyways.

I met John Holmes when he was just starting in porn. He was kind of an asshole, a self-important asshole. But that's what the drug scene's like. Like that section in the book where I describe a porn film where the girl ODs as they're fucking her, and they decide to finish it anyway, so they reverse angle and shoot it from behind.

John Holmes is like an LA Frankenstein monster. He comes here. He prospers. And then through drugs and sex and the whole scene, he becomes a Frankenstein. To me, that section, Bad Eddie, represents the core, the basis of what LA is all about. It's a whole other world. The whole Laurel Canyon scene. The hip Hollywood world of the cheesy nightclubs and dope. Nash owned this club called Starwood, and all the kids went there because all the major rock groups went there. It was a major disco place, and they'd give kids dope as they walked inside. They'd actually dish out coke. It was their policy. Nash was a major crime figure. You could not touch Eddie Nash. He was too fucking smart. There were murders and everything going on all the time, but they could never pin anything on Eddie.

Well, if you're evil, you can come to LA and you can do your thing. From day one, Eddie Nash was like a hungry wolf. I don't think Eddie Nash ever did anything for anyone where he could not exploit it or benefit from it. His whole raison d'être was to get what he could out of everything and be on top. He always felt like he was on the run. So he had to keep running, and grab things as he went, like nightclubs. He bought judges, jurors, people downtown [in city government]. Have murders going on. Pay people off. LA is the place where you can do your thing. The city doesn't care what you do. You couldn't pull off what Eddie Nash did in New York, it'd be of a whole different structure. But out here it's the West. And there's still kind of a shoot-'em-up mentality.

John Holmes, though, mutated from that innocent thing you mention. He liked to work with his hands. He loved thrift shops and buying old furniture and fixing it up. Even in the porn scene, he was kind of an outsider. But drugs took him to the other extreme. He was a lost cause with drugs. It destroyed him. And drugs were available. It was part of everything out here. It's interesting that the juries trying the Wonderland murder cases [where four members of a drug den were bludgeoned to death] hated everyone who got killed. They felt it was good all these people got killed because they were rotten people anyway.

I'm not interested in making a historical document. I recreate these things. My presentation is a very clear portrait of the city. The only part that drifts from the city, although it starts there, is the Billy Cook case. This is a book about the way things are, not the way Hollywood wants to see them.

The truth of the matter is these are human beings and they've gone to extreme lengths. The lengths they go to and the why of how they get to that place has always fascinated me. Like if you went in and visited John Holmes when he was dying of AIDS, as a skeleton on a bed, how did he get there and why was he there? Of course, some people have endured a lot of shit in their lives, like Billy Cook. When Cook was a kid, all he ate was biscuits because his teeth were so bad. He wanted a bicycle, and the foster mother he's with gives him one, but then takes it back because it's part of a scam to get the money for it. He never had any emotional closeness because he was a runt, an ugly runt. Cook was very similar to Charles Manson in that way. You have an ugly little runt, you beat him and put him in a cage. Finally, when this runt gets loose, look out! Like a dog. If you whip it all the time, it becomes a fucking vicious animal. Don't turn your back on that son of a bitch.

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