LET'S PLAY RUSSIAN ROULETTE JOHN GILMORE

by Chris Campion

John Gilmore is what you would call "connected". Circulating in an orbit-populated by the brightest and darkest stars of our time, he has consorted with movie stars and murderers, investigating the flip-side of fame firsthand. This writer's journey so far is contained in five compelling books.

Sex, crime and glamour - the staples of Hollywood - are inextricably intertwined in Gilmore's work. Born in Hollywood in 1935, his mother Marguerite LeVan was a studio contract-player for MGM, his father, Robert Gilmore Jr, an LAPD cop. His parents separated when he was a baby and he was raised for the most part in his paternal grandmother's house. He started acting as a child, but the dawning of his adolescence brought home the harsh reality of what it took to make it in Hollywood as a young actor, where sex was hard currency. Rejecting the casting couch, his mentor, actor John Hodiak, suggested he seek work on Broadway. So, aged 16, Gilmore moved to New York where he led a bohemian life as an aspiring painter, poet and actor attending Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio.

A mutual friend introduced him to James Dean at a Broadway drugstore in Spring 1953.

These bad boy spirits bonded over bullfighting and motorbikes and they became close friends; sharing knowledge, experiences and girls. Their paths crossed again in LA, while Dean was shooting Rebel Without A Cause. Gilmore became known as one of the "Night Watch" - Dean's notorious group of motor-hiking buddies and one of Googies' drugstore cronies - and was subsequently blacklisted as an actor by the major studios as a troublemaker.

In the late '50s, Gilmore spent time in Paris, waiting for a movie he was contracted to star In with Jean Seberg to start shooting. It never did, but he met Bardot at a party and hung out with Burroughs and other ex-pats staying at the Beat Hotel. Holed up in a garret with a typewriter Gilmore wrote a novel about a young screenwriter's affair with an actress. Maurice Girodias (who ran Olympia Press and published work by Burroughs, Miller, Genet and Anais Nin) bought the rights to the novel but it remained unpublished, (it will finally surface next year through creation Press, now titled Fetish Blonde.) Returning to America, writing became Gilmore's primary occupation. He worked as a freelance journalist, penned pulp novels - through which he met Ed Wood Jr., who wanted to film one called Brutal Baby - wrote teleplays and screenplays. He directed a couple of long-lost B-Movies - Blues For Benny, a gritty docudrama inspired by the French Nouvelle Vague, and Breaking Hard, an unfinished surfing flick starring Dennis Hopper. Later, Gilmore claims to have shown Hopper a treatment he had written for a biker movie called Out Takes based on his experiences with James Dean - an idea which Hopper and Peter Fonda apparently used as the basis for Easy Rider.

In Laid Bare (subtitled A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip), Gilmore exactingly dissects the Hollywood mythology. He smashes fragile icons rooted in fantasy and picks over psychological shards left embedded in memories. The clarity and immediacy of the images Gilmore conjures up brings these characters into sharp focus. In some cases, their actions suggest a grotesque distortion of pathology, in others, a bawdy comedy: Hank Williams so sozzled he pisses his pants in a parking lot before a show; Steve McQueen as a virulent misanthrope stalked by his drunken mother. Dennis Hopper, in trying to ape James Dean, goes over the edge of the abyss.

In 1959, living in a Hollywood apartment with his second wife, a former Hungarian freedom fighter, and their newly-born child, Gilmore was approached by tough-guy actor Tom Neal to script a movie based on The Black Dahlia murder, at that time the most notorious murder in LA. The body of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet known as The Black Dahlia (in reference to a Raymond Chandler femme fatale), was found naked, mutilated and severed in a vacant lot in January 1946. Shots of the crime scene show the body cut in two and positioned like two offset halves of a photograph, legs thrown invitingly open, arms flung above her head as if in the throes of ecstasy, it was obviously the work of a psychopathic artist, but the creator of this gruesome artifact was never found. Gilmore began researching the case using his father's LAPD connections, chasing leads and interviewing anyone involved in the case. Two years later, Tom Neal shot his wife in the head and was incarcerated, effectively killing the project.

In 1967, Gilmore was asked by novelist Bernard Wolf to help cover a murder case in Arizona for Playboy. It was the trial of Charles Schimd, a baby-faced thrill-killer styled like Elvis who had murdered three of his girlfriends and buried their bodies in the Arizona desert. Gilmore gained exclusive access to the charismatic killer in prison and turned his research into a book. The Tucson Murders recently re-released as Cold-Blooded by Feral House). During Schmid's second murder trial, Gilmore assisted hi-flying attorney F. Lee Bailey (later to represent OJ Simpson).

He became acquainted with the Manson Family in the early '70s, visiting Manson in jail for a series of prison interviews which resulted in The Garbage People (Amok Books), a psycho-geographical history of Manson and his 'Family'. Charlie had read Gilmore's book on Schmid and considered him a suitable medium for his messianic message. But while Gilmore remained unaffected by Manson's hypnotic psycho-babble, he recalls watching his partner in the enterprise, producer Bob Levy, become progressively deadened to life. Gilmore says he soon dropped out of producing movies to become an insurance salesman. Throughout this period, The Black Dahlia case was at the periphery of his vision. In 1969, at a party populated by Hollywood low-lives, John Gilmore was introduced to Arnold Smith, a man who claimed to have known the murdered girl. Over the years this character would periodically contact Gilmore to talk about the girl. In 1980, Gilmore appeared on an evening news show in LA in connection with the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by John Hinckley, who amazingly had approached the writer four years earlier in an LA bar and talked to him about presidential assassinations. After this, Smith contacted Gilmore again. Over a series of meetings he related intimate details of the crime, which he claimed had been committed by a female impersonator friend of his. To corroborate his story, Gilmore took his taped interviews to the LAPD, who determined that Smith was the chief suspect in the unsolved murder. Gilmore's 20-odd years of extensive research on the case is contained in Severed (Amok Books), a reconstruction of the life of Elizabeth Short and her murderer, which has been optioned by producer Edward G. Pressman. David Lynch has considered directing the film version.

Now in his 60s, Gilmore divides his time between homes in LA and New Mexico. He is finally being accorded recognition in his own right as a writer of what he calls "true-crime Literature" (the capitalization is his own) and currently the subject of a documentary-in-progress called Fame-Eater In a recent photo, taken by his wife Marie, Gilmore still wears the accoutrements of his rebel stance. The bad boy glare he shoots to the lens has, if anything, grown more intense with age. Looking back on his remarkable life has given him a startling insight into the motivations of himself and others he has collided with on his chaotic roller-coaster of a life.

THE INTERVIEW

Dazed & Confused: What's your first reminiscence of the Black Dahlia case?

John Gilmore: When the case first broke, the body was found near where we lived in LA. I lived with my grandmother in the Silverlake area. One day, these two fellows came by the house and brought this girl with them. My grandmother's sister, who lived just a few doors away, had married a man years before named Pat Short. There was a very large side of the family which was "The Shorts". This girl came by to connect with her father. As I understand it, they didn't find a connection. But this girl was Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. When she came to the house I was probably only 11 years old. I can recall her very clearly. She was dressed in black and her hair was stark black, like a black shining wig. Her face was very pale. She had whitish powder on her face and red, red lipstick that clashed against everything else. And she wore tight, black leather gloves all the time. I remember having a long talk with her about magic. As a child, I was interested in magic. My father was a member of the Shriners (a Masonic organization), and all the major circuses and magic shows came to the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. I had a lot of magic stuff in my room. She was sitting on my stepbrother's bed, I was sitting on the floor and l was looking at her legs. (Laughs) When that girl was murdered, which was a matter of months after, my grandmother called me aside and told me, 'not to mention the fact that someone had brought that particular girl here that day, because it might not be her. And if it was, it wouldn't be too good.' My father was working on the case, in a patrol capacity. He was going round various neighborhoods in the area where the body was found and interviewing people to find out if they had heard or seen anything. He had this police briefcase that contained a whole wad of these renderings of the girl for identification purposes. I used to snoop in his briefcase a lot. l knew that Elizabeth Short was the same girl, because her name was Short and that was the reason she came to my house. She was so intriguing to me, she was a figure that remained in my consciousness. She just radiated this tremendous amount of sex appeal. There was a dark, mysterious quality to her, as if she wasn't really real. Over the years, everyone that l encountered who had met her had the same feeling. That she just came into their lives and caused a kind of confusion. A confusion that never left. That had no answer to it.

D&C: That confusion strikes home with things you've said about the effect James Dean had on people?

JG: With James Dean it would have probably been more direct. Jimmy had a way of tweaking people by things he would do. Because he knew they were in awe of him, he would try to shock them. Like for example he'd take off his jacket and drop it on the floor rather than setting it on a chair. He'd do odd things so people would remember them. Jimmy had a tremendous impact. His intensity seemed to have this penetrating intelligence behind it, which he didn't really have. He was perceptive, very bright and very intuitive about people, but he wasn't really an intellectual. He hardly read at all. He had severe reading problems. So you'd tell him something and pretty soon he had it alt evolved in his own head. He could carry the whole thing as if he had real insights from it all. But he had never sat down and read the book. in particular, we talked about Patrick Mulhey's Study Of interpersonal Relations, which was a really great book that I loved. This one particular essay in there had to do with the proximity senses - taste, smell and feel - and how very early we try to shut these ail down. We shift our children towards the visual and audio, so that we can get away from shit and piss and the smells of people which are so definitely taboo in our Judeo-Christian culture, I love that quote by Franz Kafka that the whole structure of education is to frustrate a child's assault on truth. You begin to twist it slowly, step by step by step, until you have taken the humiliated child and convinced him of the lie, That was Kafka's guiding force and, over the years, I've had to admit that it's really true. It's just amazing how at a young age we're twisted to be conditioned in a social way. And Jimmy would try to break these patterns.

D&C: In The Garbage People, you talk about Manson's childhood in that way too. Do you think the reason that people like Manson and James Dean tried to break through so vehemently was due to their violent conditioning as children?

JG: In someone like Charlie Manson's case, where you throw them into a dungeon before they are even able to be conditioned and begin to condition them to that, In his case being beaten with a stick, kept In chains half the time and thrown in a little cell. He had intelligence, skill and talent to fall back upon He was a highly imaginative person. So he withdraws into his own world. He becomes a very puzzling creature.

D&C: Do you see any similarity between Dean and Manson in terms of the strengths of their characters and the way in which they were able to manipulate people?

JG: Well, yes. But when you ask me that. If we look at ourselves there's a part of us that wants to have a god. Something that has an answer for us and that we can look up to and admire. Something that we are drawn and attracted to. Both Dean and Manson had a particular charisma as human beings to attract other people. It's probably something that they were not even deliberately trying to do. Although, once they learn that they can, they become very skillful at using it. which both of those people did, Adolf Hitler probably had the same kind of charisma, when you break off from the mainstream way you have to fall upon your natural resources, something that both Jimmy and Charlie had in common - and I think a great many people like this that we're talking about do - is this ability to manipulate. Jimmy could really manipulate people and Charlie was a master manipulator. I mean, you've got to find a particular type of person that's gonna want to want to be manipulated.

D&C: Do they end up drawing the right type of people to them? Like magnetism, they attract natural opposites.

JG: Well, I think in the world that they are traveling in and living in, they are continually going to come across people who are attracted to them. It's like cause and effect. It just continues to perpetuate itself. The overall being towards survival and the attainment of certain goals you might have. Jimmy was able to go from one person to another without ever having any problems. He never starved. He never had lean days, He was always able to go and get some money or something from somebody. He spent a lot of his time wandering through a labyrinth of places and areas which I think reflected in some way a motor activity he had. Wandering as a stranger in a strange land looking for something substantial that's going to give you solidarity as a human being. But really not knowing fully what it is you're after. Neither one of them--Jimmy or Charlie--ever really knew what it was they were after, but they were certainly after something.

D&C: Were you attracted to the manipulative side of Dean's personality?

JG: I was attracted to him initially because he was a bad boy. Not 'bad' in that you'll go out and do anything really bad or destructive, but you're not in the mainstream of something. Looking back at the psychological landscape of myself, I can see my attraction to the 'wrong' people. It could go back to my childhood. I used to watch the wrestling with my father and I would root for Baron Michel Leoni, who was the bad guy. My father used to get really upset because I wasn't rooting for Gorgeous George. That disturbed me greatly as a child. I had a sense of withdrawing from my father, who was a policeman, I think in some strange sense, murderers, criminals and artists (I put them all in the same category) can recognize something in me. I am not judgmental. My relationship with Jimmy was not judgmental in any sense. If when we were out riding, I had said something like, 'Jesus, slow down!' I would have found him drifting away from me and I did not want that. I did not editorialise our relationship, and haven't done that with anyone else. In certain moments with Janis Joplin as well, there was a union. And the union was open and uncomplicated by where it was going to go or not going, was wrong or not wrong. One time, I was drinking In a bar in Sausalito with Janis and she went into the can and shot up. She came out and had blood running out of her nose. I said, 'how do you feel?' She said, 'I feel far out.' And it just went like that. When I was out riding with Jimmy, he would go through stop signs, and there was a certain risk there, certainly if you're riding fast on Sunset at night. I was 20 years old and this was exciting and stimulating, it was kind of like we were two astronauts in a nose-cone charging through space. My formative years as a young person were spent living through the Cold War. We had no future and the biggest thing going was to dig dug-out shelters in the backyard and stock them with Shredded Wheat, Coke and Spam. That was a major thing to do, because at any time an atomic bomb is going to be dropped. That's what we actually lived with. The beginning of the end had already started. Any time this thing is going to happen, it's going to blow us all to smithereens, so why the fuck bother with any of this? Your entire system is wrong. You had so many people who were rigidly and sociologically conditioned to accept that only they were right. 'In God we trust. We are arrogant. We are white. And we're right.' That's what it was all about and if you weren't part of that, you were wrong and an outlaw. When the beatnik thing broke, they were the people that understood this and said, 'No! I'm not going to buy insurance policies because there's no guarantee that we're going to be here tomorrow. The only thing that's worth something is my own individual self-expression, so I'm going to express myself and try and find some meaning in a very Individual sense.' I was very tightly involved with a number of those people but I never really thought of myself as a beatnik. My original goal was to be a painter. I did a lot of paintings during that period, I had a lot of showings in beatnik coffee houses in New York and sold a lot of stuff. I was very close to a lot of people who were junkies. I was attracted to it and interested in it, but I've never really done anything to any great extent in those areas. I shot heroin but I wasn't a junkie. I've done just about everything. In 1968,I was on extended acid trips for about three months. It was all very pleasant.

D&C: What saved you from burning out or self-destructing?

JG: I've never had the self-destructive tendency. I always felt that I was on a journey and that I am looking for something. I'm beginning to feel that my life is what my living has been about. That's kind of an awkward statement. It's not that I have eaten fame as a diet but it has been moving me towards something. I've sort of been in an orbit. When I was very young l used to spend a lot of time down at the Venice amusement pier. There was something called the 'Drone Of Death', which was a giant barrel which a guy on a motorcycle drove all the way around. I was probably about 10 or 11 and I rode on the motorcycle with this guy, who was a stunt man in the movies called Spider Madlock. He was a friend of my cousin's and used to race midget autos at the Gilmore Stadium in LA. l have always looked back at that time on the Drone of Death and felt that I was spun off into some kind of orbit, it's like I've been moving in a different type of world. I've met a lot of people and done a lot of things, I think that Charlie Manson, in a weird sort of way, was also an explorer. Jimmy Dean certainly was. They died, but I haven't yet. It's like at the end of that movie The Fly. The boy's father is dead and he asks Vincent Price, 'Why did my daddy have to die?' Vincent Price says, 'Well, your father was a scientist. He was an explorer and sometimes their exploration takes them to places where they can die.' Some people don't die, but a lot of people do, and that's the way I think of people that I've known. Dennis Hopper felt that he was an explorer and was going to push himself to the ultimate limit. And he did. But In Dennis' case he went absolutely bananas! I know someone who actually saw Dennis when he was locked up in a room and sat there catatonic for days. He went over the far side. Before my time, there was the 'Black Ship To Hell', and that was the romantic concept of death and poetry, of art and dying. After the war, through existentialism that became known as 'wigging-out'. That's what Rimbaud did. He blew all his circuits. A lot of people do that now with absolute ultra-volume. It's like the big wave riders I knew in the '60s. They were a breed unto themselves, nothing like what you see in the Frankie Avalon movies. These were iconoclastic outlaw people who were dedicated to one goal: to ride the waves. And it was real dangerous.

D&C: You're talking about a death trip. People that are sailing as close to death as possible.

JG: But see, the way it really is, it's a 'life' trip. You're going as close to the living truth as you can get. But there's also the possibility that if you are exploring there, that you could die as well. It's only 'death' to certain conventions that we're clinging to. The standards we are protecting ourselves by because we don't want to see. God and religion teaches you that there's only the bright side. The good is good and the bad belongs to the devil. And there isn't any in-between area. Now, of course, we know that there's alternatives and options to everything in the universe. Everything! Consequently what I'm saying is that what we've done -through people like G.G. Allin and Darby Crash (late singer with LA punk band the Germs)-is to move society and experience to a fresh wave that's breaking upon the beach of reality. We're out there on the middle of this wave and suddenly all these things that were so bloody important before are not important at all. In other words, in the whole concept of chaos, we are suddenly seeing that there might be a whole new vista of experience. In my time as a young person, there wasn't anything more to want than what you were told you needed. But I'm beginning to see that the experiences are in us. The interior journey is about being able to see that there are vast horizons of untapped territory. With some people, yes, it is a death trip. They have a very self-destructive urge. But If they have to go to that point, they have to go there for a reason. As I've walked along the ledge of life holding someone's hand - be it Janis Joplin, James Dean or Jean Seberg - something inside has let their hand go and they've gone down the other side. I've had to move on. And in that moving on I've found that life is not meaningless. So let's just play Russian Roulette.

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