JOHN GILMORE:  
THE VALLEY OF DEATH  

By Craig M. McDonald
The Art of the Word

 
AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW IN TWO PARTS

John Gilmore has a deep and varied résumé: actor, screenwriter, director, pulp writer; true crime writer; novelist and writing instructor at Antioch University.

Jonathan Gilmore was born in 1935 in Los Angeles.

His mother, Marguerite LeVan, was, by turns, a "bit-player" movie actress, a "model" and an "elevator operator."

Gilmore's father, Robert T. Gilmore Jr., was a frustrated actor, turned Walt Disney cartoon-painter, turned Los Angeles cop who was eventually dragged in with dozens of other LAPD uniforms to investigate the notorious mutilation murder of want-to-be actress Elizabeth Short — the so-called "Black Dahlia" — in 1947.

Beth Short's murder would inspire Gilmore's best-known, and arguably, his best book — Severed, a true crime account of Short's murder that purports to name her killer.

Gilmore's parents eventually split up and Gilmore and his mother split for El Monte, California — "Ellroy country," Gilmore has remarked, in reference to novelist James Ellroy, an approximate Gilmore contemporary whose break-through novel was a fanciful imagining of the "truth" behind Elizabeth Short's murder.

While Ellroy and Gilmore tend to take occasional shots at one another in interviews, they share a stunning overlap of subject matter and milieu — encompassing 1950's Hollywood, Beth Short's monstrous murder, mobster Mickey Cohen, murdering-musician Spade Cooley and the Manson family.

The difference: Ellroy writes about them; Gilmore moved among them. Gilmore said he met Short in 1946 when he was 11-years-old and the "Dahlia" and some cronies visited his paternal grandmother's house to research Grandma Gilmore's "Short" roots on his grandmother's sister's side. Cohen figures in several Ellroy short stories and novels; Gilmore employed Mickey Cohen as a collection agent to recoup royalties owed on a string of pulp sex novels penned by Gilmore carrying auspicious titles such as Brutal Baby, Strange Fire and Lesbos in Panama. Ellroy incorporated Charles Manson in his serial-killer novel Silent Terror; Gilmore wrote an early nonfiction account of the Manson murders (The Garbage People, 1971).

Gilmore attended Hollywood High. Fellow classmates included Carol Burnett, who edited the high school newspaper.

With an actress mother and a frustrated actor father, a segue into acting for the son was foreordained.

Gilmore's stage appearances included a role in "Season in the Sun". He made the rounds of TV anthology shows and late-1950s, early-1960s TV series, including appearances on "Run To The City", co-starring Susan Oliver, an adaptation of Saroyan's "Human Comedy" for the U.S. Steel Hour, and stints on "Naked City", "The Lineup", "Bonanza", "The Untouchables", "Ripcord" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents".

Experience in screenwriting, coupled with overtures for projects involving sensational murders — both contemporaneous and historical — led to eventual book projects.

Putting aside his sex novels (written under the pen name of Neil Egri), the first of Gilmore's books published under his own name was a true crime account of a series of thrill-kill murders committed by Charles Schmid, a short, musically-inclined psychopath who modeled himself after Elvis Presley and tucked crushed cans in his shoes to bolster his height.

Gilmore forged an acquaintance with Schmid and eventually became recipient of Schmid's jailhouse diaries. Gilmore also drew attorney F. Lee Bailey in as Schmid's defense counsel.

Gilmore published his account of the Schmid murders with Dial Press under the title Tucson Murders in 1970. The book was reissued in a lightly revised version in 1996 by Feral Press under the title Cold-Blooded: The Saga of Charles Schmid, the Notorious Pied Piper of Tucson. A true-crime account of the Tate-LaBianca murders followed closely on Tucson's heels. Gilmore teamed with journalist Ron Kenner and, in 1971, published The Garbage People, The Story of Charles Manson (Omega Press, 1971), considered by many the "definitive" account of the Manson murders. That book was also reissued in a revised form (by Amok Books in 1995) under the slightly altered title, Garbage People: The Trip to Helter Skelter & Beyond with Charlie Manson & The Family.

In 1975 Gilmore penned an account of his friendship with James Dean for Pyramid Books. The memoir was famous for its revelation of an unsuccessful attempt at a physical relationship between Gilmore and Dean — a fumbling homosexual encounter in which James Dean was the aggressor. That admission earned Gilmore inclusion in all subsequent Dean biographies. Gilmore’s Dean book was reissued in the 1990s as Live Fast — Die Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean. The book is still available from Avalon.

1994 saw the release of Severed, from Zanja Press. Gilmore’s account of the Black Dahlia murder met with strong critical reception and it has been optioned for film several times (frequently with David Lynch mentioned as director). The book is notable for its revelations of certain details regarding Elizabeth Short’s anatomy that had long been held in confidence by LAPD investigators as a tool to weed out false confessions to Short’s murder. The book also reproduced graphic crime scene and morgue photos of Short’s mutilated body. Severed, too, was recently reissued in a revised format by Amok Books in 1998. The revised edition includes a new afterword composed by Gilmore and additional (often explicit) crime scene and morgue photos.

Amok also published Gilmore’s memoir, Laid Bare, which recounted the author’s movements through Hollywood during the 1950s and 1960s, his brushes with musical luminaries (Hank Williams, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison) and his gradual transition from acting to writing. Extremely candid, the book also revealed Gilmore’s romantic entanglements with a range of celebrities including James Dean, Carol Lynley, Susan Oliver, Jane Fonda, Janis Joplin and Irish McCalla (of Sheena fame). The book spawned a spoken word CD, on which Gilmore reads from excerpts of Severed and Laid Bare against the music of Skip Heller. Musicians who played on Laid Bare the album included Big Jay McNeely, and Teller (of the magic team of Penn and Teller), playing the theremin.

In 1999, Gilmore published his first novel to appear under his own name, Fetish Blonde, a dark tale of a suicidal screenwriter working on a vampire film in Paris and his obsessive relationship with the film’s much younger star.

Gilmore has just completed a second novel, Hollywood Boulevard. This one turns on a photographer/porn cameraman torn between a beautiful, narcoleptic starlet and a transsexual nightclub singer.

He has a third novel in progress and is also completing what he declares to be his last foray into True Crime: L.A. Despair will be a mosaic of cases that Gilmore has investigated over a period of years, or decades, some constituting stories he says he simply couldn’t bear to tell in long form. (Among them, the story of actress turned drug addict and prostitute Barbara Payton: “Though I had a contract for a separate book on Payton, I dumped it; couldn’t put myself through the wringer to do a full script on her; I’d end up cutting my throat.”) Despair will include short form narratives on Barbara Graham, Eddie Nash, porn star/murderer John Holmes, Billy Cook and Charlie Starkweather, among others.

John Gilmore spoke to interviewer Craig McDonald from his home in New Mexico on April 6, 2002. Part one of this interview focuses on Gilmore’s life and writing. Part two, which immediately follows, explores Gilmore’s True Crime writings.

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McDonald: When did you begin writing prose?

Gilmore:  Way, way back. I think that was my vocation in life although I never wanted to admit it. As a kid I was acting occasionally, I did some movies when I was a kid — I did a Gene Autry film and some other stuff...some radio. My dad was LAPD and I did some police safety films. But I really wanted to be a painter. I had always wanted to be a painter — to be living in Paris and painting. That was always the big dream. But the acting thing was always kind of in there and I think I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I did a lot of acting during this time, but I was always writing. I remember as a teenager there was a very distinct book I wrote called Black Light and it was about a gangster in Hollywood and I did that instead of doing any other work in school. They thought I was very busy, but I was busy writing these things.

McDonald: You found your subject matter early, then.

Gilmore: I guess now-a-days they would be considered “hardboiled” or noir pieces, but back then I didn’t even know what the word noir meant. At 17, I headed to New York from L.A. to become an actor to stake my claim on Times Square, or something, and there I met James Dean. I hooked up with him in a sense, but it never really helped me really truly find myself. I did a lot of work as an actor. Occasionally I’d have parts — especially later when I was doing a lot of TV back-to-back — occasionally there was a part and I’d have moments in it where I’d feel “This is really really neat, I feel complete,” but the overall feeling was that it’s missing, “I’m just missing.” I thought, too, as everybody did way back then, that the big goal was to become a filmmaker and director. I directed a film in 1960 that was a lot of fun. Extremely low-budget and shooting eighteen hours a day. It was fun, but, when I finished it I didn’t want to direct another film.

McDonald: That’s your “lost” film....

Gilmore: I’m sorry to say it is lost, it’s a lost film...it was called Blues for Benny and the reason I really regret it is lost is that I shot it in all of the places in L.A. that no longer exist, the historical spots down on the Long Beach Pike — and it had a really neat feeling to it.

McDonald: Then came the writing?

Gilmore: I was living with this girl and she got pregnant and I started writing. I had written a couple of things in the 1950s, and I had written this short novel. I don’t even recall what it was called. It was all single-spaced and I wrote it on an old Olivetti. A friend of mine read it in New York. I was actually there to see this psychiatrist who wanted me to be part of this study, The Artist in America or something like that, and he wanted me as one of his guinea pigs. I’d go see him and he read that and he asked, “Did you actually do some of these things in here?” I said, “Well, you know, not really, no. It’s just a novel.” At the same time, I was staying with this director. He was the head of the board at the Actor’s Studio. He was friends with Calder Willingham (whose novels included, Rambling Rose and Providence Island and the scripts for Little Big Man and The Graduate) and he gave that thing to Calder who read it. I got together with Calder and he said, “Why on earth are you wasting your time trying to be an actor, for God’s sake? You obviously have a lot of talent for writing and you should really pursue that.” I began to actually think about it seriously then.

McDonald: Yet you continued to work in Hollywood?

Gilmore: I wrote a screenplay, and I went through this kind of transition where I kind of felt and knew that I should probably write more. But I thought I had this calling to be an actor: I finally just had to shut that down. I did three pictures after that, but I even told them going in, “As long as I don’t really have to do anything, I’ll do it,” and I made money at it, but it was the writing that interested me and I began to write seriously. Bernard Wolfe, who used to do all of the fiction in Playboy Magazine, and a number of books, too (Limbo, Trotsky’s Dead), he got together with me on the Charles Schmid thing and it just kind of opened for me. I’ve never decided to write True Crime until now — this next book, L.A. Despair. I never set out to do True Crime.

McDonald: You were born in L.A. in 1935?

Gilmore: I was born there in 1935. In Unit One, they called it — General Hospital. My parent’s marriage only lasted for about six months.

McDonald: I heard that, oddly enough, you ended up in El Monte, where (novelist) James Ellroy’s divorced mother took him as a child.

Gilmore: She took me out there for a couple of months. My parents worked out that they would split six months and six months. My mom took the first round, and she took me out to El Monte, where her mother was living. After about two months, she took me back to my dad and said, “I can’t cope with this, I can’t deal with it, so you take the remaining time and I’ll do the next one.” The next six months came around and she said, “Well, I just can’t — I can’t because I’m doing this and this and that and running around.” And that’s how I wound up with my Dad. He said, “Well, screw this. Forget it. Forget it. He can live here.” So, I was raised by my dad and my grandmother, who raised my father, in the same house he grew up in. They had built the house — my step-grandfather was actually head carpenter at RKO Studios and he built three houses there. It was all dirt at that time. All dirt roads. A long time back. It wasn’t built up.

McDonald: You saw L.A. build up.

Gilmore: Well, I remember when there wasn’t a Hollywood Freeway. I remember when that started. When they built the Hollywood Freeway, we’d climb up there at night and lay down and watch the stars...in those days you could see the stars.

McDonald: Yes, not all those lights — you could actually see the sky....

Gilmore: You could see the sky. I remember a night awash in shooting stars. It was really magnificent. That was during the war, and I used to love to watch the airplanes flying over — leaving from California and heading across the Pacific. Sometimes you could see a hundred airplanes up there, all flying en masse. It was really cool. I’ve known L.A. all my life, all these people...all the hoods and all of the different weirdos and all the creeps. And all the movie people, too.

McDonald: You mentioned that your father was in the LAPD.

Gilmore: Yes. My father is still there. He has a house in North Hollywood which I own with him now.

McDonald: He’s still alive?

Gilmore: Oh yeah. He’ll be 94 in August (2002). I just came back because he had this big deal in L.A. where they were honoring him — the L.A.P.D. Credit Union honored him. He’s one of nine guys on the board of directors there. It’s sort of like the Supreme Court of the LAPD Credit Union. He’s done 55 years with them. There was another old cop named Jack Halstead who had something like 53 years with the Union, and those two guys were honored in a big event. A hundred and some odd years of service to the Union, between them. That’s not even counting his thirty-plus years as an active policeman. Actually he and Jack rode a black and white together back in 1942 and ’43. He’s still there and he’s out all the time. He’s very active. His wife died three years ago — my stepmother. They had been married 60 years — but he has a new girlfriend now so they’re out every night.

McDonald: Great for him.

Gilmore: He’s in fine shape. He was there in this kind of great Nehru sport coat with black shirt and black tie and cowboy boots. He’s the purest form of Leo you could ever experience. So involved with himself in so many ways. I mean, I don’t think he’ll ever die. He likes himself too much. Amazing, amazing man. I’ve only come to realize this in the last three years since my stepmother died. We just never really made it and he deferred everything to her. They were gone all the time. Meetings all the time — the Shriners, the Masons, the Credit Union. My stepbrother and me were latch-key kids.

McDonald: Let’s talk a little bit about your work habits. You hear of morning writers or evening writers....Do you have a fixed time when you write?

Gilmore: I usually try to do something in the mornings. I’m usually up at 5:30 a.m. and ’til 6:30 I’m here at the computer working. Then I have to take a break for a while because my son goes to high school and I walk with him to the school because we’re within walking distance. Then I go to a little market, about a mile away, and have coffee and usually do my rewriting there, by hand. Then I come back and face the day of keying in shit. Just mountains of stuff to key in. In 1991, the wife I had then took off. We were living up in Rio Rancho, a real nowhere kind of place, and I didn't have any money, so I went to San Francisco, and this woman I knew assisted me in typing the manuscript of Severed. The book went through many, many drafts in San Francisco and she assisted. What I would do, was I would write out the stuff in a typewriter and then go over it by hand and make about a hundred corrections. Then she was keying it into a computer, printing it out, and then I would rewrite on that, give it back to her — she was fortunately able to read my handwriting — then she would key it in again until I had it absolutely right.

McDonald: But now you write your first draft on the computer?

Gilmore: I tried a computer in 1991, and I wasn’t really happy with it. Later, when I switched over to a computer for good, the visual artist in me, the painter, merged with the writer to the point that the screen, with the words, became like sculpting in a way. It was a very very interesting experience. I could never go back to the old ways. Just the nightmare of cutting and pasting, by hand. I used to have this big Scotch tape dispenser. I keep coming across old stuff now where pages are Scotch-taped over other pages and the sentences will be cut off and Scotch-taped in. Some of the old stuff is deteriorating, or has fallen off, and it’s like, “Forget it, man — I’ll never figure out where that piece was, or goes.”

McDonald: Someone once said that writing is really rewriting....

Gilmore: I do extensive rewriting, all by hand. I’m aiming for when it is right. There is a moment of truth there for me when the thing is right. I don’t care whether people think it is good, bad or indifferent, it’s just that I achieved the thing that I was aiming for. Sometimes things go easier and other times they don’t. Sometimes I have to rewrite things, Jesus, 30 times. I’d love to do new things. I get ideas and I write them down, but I know it will be a while before I get to them because I’m slated up with the work I have to do. And the damn rewriting...sometimes I just have to stop. I have to obey the law set forth by Paul Valérey, “A piece of work is never finished. You have to abandon it.” I’m slowly learning that lesson, of reaching a point where it sounds absolutely right and leaving it alone and moving on, otherwise I could stay there forever.

McDonald: I know you are aware of some of the comments made about your ability to recall conversations that transpired forty or more years ago. The word “suspect” has been used to describe your recounting of conversations from several decades ago. Were you keeping journals or diaries during the old days?

Gilmore: I kept diaries when I was younger and wrote down events at the time...not necessarily per se dialogue, but certainly the gist of what occurred. I can recall details in a sensual way: If I smell a certain scent, then I can recall something — a memory of a whole incident triggered by that scent. An incident, from, say, 1942. I can see that person and what they are saying and the dialogue follows. I used to be able to interview somebody for an hour or more, then I could go and almost write the whole exchange down verbatim.

McDonald: I envy you that skill.

Gilmore: If they say “suspect,” well....I remember the incidents. I remember the scene. I remember what we talked about. Maybe the words used in constructing a scene after the fact are not verbatim in terms of the way things went down, but I remember the gist of what we said and I just have to reconstruct it. If that is “suspect”, well....

McDonald: You used tape recorders when interviewing many of your subjects.

Gilmore: There are some interviews where I have relied on tape recorders, but as you well know, a simple transcript from a tape sometimes can be the dullest damned thing you can read. I did read a review somewhere that said “Gilmore has been accused of playing fast and loose with facts.” I suppose in some sense I have. But if I’m working for a result and I want to go somewhere with it, I guess I have.

McDonald: Yet you strongly differentiate between your fiction and nonfiction pieces.

Gilmore: There’ll never be a time when I’ll write a book such as (James) Ellroy or others where Mickey Cohen is a character. I was in a bookstore the other day and saw this mystery with Elvis as the hero. I couldn’t believe it.

McDonald: God. I’ve seen that, too.

Gilmore: Even my good friend Warren Newton, who wrote the neat book he did, The Death of James Dean, wrote this other book, Who Killed James Dean? Then these novels with James Dean as a detective....? I’ll never do that. I’ll never write a book about Kennedy...a novel in which Marilyn Monroe and Mickey Cohen are in there. I mean, what is that? What does it represent? A collapse of the imagination? It seems weird to me. Such a hokey, commercial gimmick. That’s not where I am at and I never will be. I had to come to terms with that some time ago. Now I am deeply embedded in that concept. I am only interested in clarifying a particular vision that I have. I don’t even really read fiction anymore. I skim a paragraph here or there just to see what they’re doing, and it usually stinks.

McDonald: I was going to ask if there were any fiction writers who influenced you.

Gilmore: When I was younger, Flannery O’Connor influenced me a lot. We get into the noir area...well, I don’t really like noir. My son is now a major authority on film noir. He’s got in his room about 800 films on VHS and seventy percent of it is film noir. Stuff he’s dug out of a crack somewhere, because so much of it is lost. I’ve glanced at some noir books. Jim Thompson — I couldn’t ever write like that.

McDonald: He wrote a lot of his stuff strictly for money and it reads that way.

Gilmore: This novel I recently wrote, Hollywood Boulevard, someone recently read it and said, “I like the story, but the style wouldn’t let me penetrate the story.” I thought, “That’s interesting. I’ll have to think about that.” Not in terms of changing the story, but it’s interesting in that the style can inhibit one from entering into the story. That’s too bad. Other people have looked at it and absolutely like it. I just have to follow my vision. Plays with words and shape words a certain way and that’s just what I have to do. Let’s say I’m a painter — this crazy guy out in a studio somewhere doing weird paintings of bleeding sides of beef on massive canvasses.

McDonald: Sounds like David Lynch.

Gilmore: (Laughing) Well, yeah. But that’s what I do. There have been critical people whose judgment I’ve respected who have appreciated my work. I cannot hope, and I do not hope that I will be up there with John Grisham writing cheeseball and popcorn balls for the mass market. I’m trying to clarify a vision. Trying to go for a particular place in the human condition. I feel whole doing that.

McDonald: You’ve had some problems with publishers over the years.

Gilmore: I’ve turned down many electronic publishers recently. They want too much of the rights.

McDonald: I’ve seen some of the contracts — they strip you bare.

Gilmore: Yes, but I believe the future lies in electronic publishing. It’s okay. Perhaps we’ll reach more people that way in more languages and not just through a few bookstores. There’s no control over things in New York now. The publishing world is a mess. My agent was telling me about a situation where they told her, “Well, we’re not going to be publishing the book this year,” and the next day, she gets a gigantic box of books.

McDonald: Sounds a little like your old days in the early 1960s with the France imprint.

Gilmore: Oh yeah — three books on the stands and I haven’t been paid a dime.

McDonald: You recently released the novel Fetish Blonde — the first novel to be published under your own name....

Gilmore: (Laughing) It’s too late to change the title, but “Fetish” keeps getting it lumped in with books about hot black shoes, or something.

McDonald: Yes, I was going to thank you for that: I ordered your novel via Amazon.com and I since have been receiving recommendations on bondage books. You know, “If you liked Fetish Blonde, you might also....”

Gilmore: I know, I know. And that’s not what the book is about. I don’t mean “fetish” in that sense.

McDonald: You have a memorable passage in Fetish Blonde: “God created the past so us humans could have waste baskets.” So much of your writing dwells on the past — is that an expression of a sentiment close to your heart?

Gilmore: Well....

McDonald: The novel Fetish Blonde was originally written many years ago, and sold to Henry Miller’s publisher Maurice Giordias. Why did it never appear?

Gilmore: When I first started batting the thing out in Paris it was much different than it is now. Giordias liked it so much that he gave me a contract for it and never published it. I’ve since found out that he has done that a number of times. I talked to William Burroughs about it in Paris, and again in New York. Giordias opened a press again in New York in the 1970s, he had his own imprint, so we set it up again to do it, then he went totally under. He did a couple of things after that. He’d take these manuscripts with no chapters and he was sending them to India and the people typesetting them had no knowledge of English whatsoever. This is absolutely true.

McDonald: I read that J.P. Donleavy had some hideous suit going with Giordias at one point, and, I believe he ended up owning the publishing house, at least for a time. Did Burroughs read the original version of Blonde?

Gilmore: He read chapters. I gave him segments. He read stuff from the 1960s and 1970s. but the book that eventually appeared is all rewritten. The same ideas are there, but the character got older — the protagonist was younger the first time around.

McDonald: I can understand how that might happen, given the book’s evolution. Though it is always a mistake to confuse the writer with his characters.

Gilmore: Absolutely. I’ve had friends since say that the novel disturbed them, but there’s nothing I can do about it.

McDonald: You also can’t help thinking of Roman Polanski when you read the novel: You have a film being made by a Hungarian director about vampires — a director who can’t return to the States because of an outstanding warrant for statutory rape....

Gilmore: Roman was clearly on my mind. I had fun writing it. The actual detective story in it was not intentional, but came out that way. It’s a kind of a mystery book, as well.

McDonald: You’ve led a picaresque existence. Would you change anything?

Gilmore: No. Not a thing. I don’t subscribe to “what ifs?” or hypothesize about that sort of thing. You can’t play with that stuff. I don’t regret any of it. What I am thinking about now — probably in a couple of years — is writing an autobiography. I was part of a scene. I lived in it. And most everyone I knew, who were part of that scene, are dead.

McDonald: Why are you still here?

Gilmore: Well, I feel pretty good. I feel wonderful.

McDonald: But you did move in a crowd whose members burnt themselves out young — James Dean, Janis Joplin, Sal Mineo, Hank Williams, to name just a few.

Gilmore: You know, I don’t think I was that reckless with stuff. I didn’t drink like some of them did. I never drank like Dennis Hopper did. I was not into pot. I tried heroin twice in my life and got sick. I was never into drugs at all. I only tried things because they were there to try. I didn’t live as desperately as they did. There was such a desperation. My voyage was more of an inner voyage.

McDonald: Among them, but not of them?

Gilmore: That’s right. That’s exactly what I was doing with my life. I lived my life being a part of this scene. In Laid Bare, which covers 1950-70, that was my life. I always felt I was an emotional bandit. I’ve always gone and hid out in places. I lived in a ghost town for a while, once. I was moving place to place, person to person and thing to thing. It’s a kind of travelogue including all these different people.

END OF PART 1 — CLICK HERE FOR PART 2

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