JOHN GILMORE

By Alex Ness

AUTHOR JOHN GILMORE has cost me a lot of money. While his books are great, and I find them fascinating, I have talked about them enough to sort of friends, loaned the books out, and never get them back. This is especially true regarding SEVERED, the story of the Black Dahlia and her killer. It is true crime, and the book went far to produce a viable argument regarding who might have been the killer. But, beyond the argument, the writing is incredible. I find myself entranced by the works, and whatever I might think of the subjects, the time spent reading the books is well worth it. So I am 4 copies of SEVERED short and when I find a new copy you can’t have mine. Bite me. No more loaning books out.

John Gilmore has lived a life in Los Angeles that has brought him into the world of stars, criminals, psychopaths and beauty queens. He has lived a life in the L.A. sunshine filled with sushi, sunshine and man made breasts. He writes about it. He has been an actor and director. He has become a sort of commentator upon the human condition in L.A. You can find out much more about him at JohnGilmore.com.

What inspires you to write? Were you born needing to express yourself or did it gradually evolve?

I imagine I was born needing to shriek. Munch’s painting, THE SCREAM, always mirrors something that was pushing in me to get out, as did less directly Max Beckmann’s work in the Museum of Modern Art; amputated, mutilated, raped, butchered; I can’t deny those dark images gripping my brain as a kid and giving a squeeze and a half for good measure. Born in the Charity Ward of L.A. General Hospital (same as Marilyn Monroe), estranged emotionally from my mother and my father who split up when I was six months old. I was raised by my grandmother in L.A.'s Silver Lake area. My step-grandfather, his legs scarred by machine gun bullets in the First World War, was head carpenter at RKO studios until the violent studio strikes. Locked out, losing all after 17 years at RKO, he built houses in the neighborhood and stayed addicted to Black Cat pulps and the detective magazines which I’d sneak out from beneath the couch cushions, and drink in the twisted subjects in glorious black and white. The world was black and white and I never knew war wasn’t a constant. I’d help my grandmother stir pots of black dye on the old kitchen range, dying bed sheets to cover windows during blackouts. The skies would sometimes fill with B-17s and B-29s. It’d block the sun. We hated Ratso, Japso and Fatso, and I played handball against cartoons of them painted on the garage wall. I made my own houses out of cardboard boxes and peopled them with mad scientists and naked girls. I created a cardboard world or I’d sit on the floor in my grandmother’s closet, beating out stories on the old Underwood typewriter, caped or masked heroes or prizefighters slugging it out for championship.

My mother remained a shadow figure I loved and never knew why she couldn’t love me, or why I wasn’t with her—couldn’t be with her. Once under contract to MGM, she did bits in pictures and was a drinking pal of Jean Harlow. She knew Johnny Darrow who starred with Harlow in Howard Hughes’ HELL’S ANGELS. My mother knew a lot of movie extras, and one day Elizabeth Short, as aspirant actress who was called the Black Dahlia, visited my grandmother. She came with two movie extras. I was eleven years old, and she was asking about a member of the Short family—a whole breed on my grandmother’s sister’s side—all Shorts. She asked about one of the Short girls who had died from blood poisoning due to a self-abortion with pieces of wire. A few months later Elizabeth Short found fame as L.A.’s most famous murder victim. Her beauty had haunted me, her head-to-toe black garb and black gloves, topped with a white makeup on her face, her beaming blue eyes and bright red mouth branded into my brain. Her real-life murder compounded my puzzlement, and I wrote scraps of stories, stayed glued to the radio with Inner Sanctum and Lights Out, and carried a torch for the Black Dahlia. Around this time, I acted in some police safety films, did some stuff on radio and gradually became a kid actor. But it wasn’t enough. I needed more and didn’t know what I needed, only that I had to express the rolling, churning feelings and I couldn’t get them released through acting. Way back, my kindergarten teacher said, “The boy is emotionally disturbed…” and needed some “help” but my father, an L.A. cop at the time, said she was crazy. Was I disturbed? Yeah… The need to shriek brewed through the years like a disease. It showed in the paintings I did, like it was always standing behind my desire to be an artist in a Paris garret, yet torn between acting and painting and the need to write that plagued. Only holing up and scribbling notes seemed to ease the confusion. Fast-forward a bunch of years to the same kid hitting almost eighteen and waltzing through Hollywood—the clubs on the Strip, boozing with stars and writers and directors, and producers and casting agents chasing me. But soon mentors like Ida Lupino and John Hodiak urged me to get to New York— “Get serious, act for real…” So I did. I made pals with James Dean and he told me I should write a movie about the poet Rimbaud. Dean would play Rimbaud. He loved the idea of ripping pages from the Bible, wiping his ass with them and throwing them out the window. I kept making notes—lots of ideas, things took shape like running a stick around and around in the sand and not knowing what I was sketching—the tide taking it away, knowing only the need to sketch the notes had overpowered any need to do otherwise. I fought the impulse but wrote a couple of bastard novels. Through an Actors Studio director friend, author Calder Willingham read one of my short novels and said I was wasting my time as an actor. “You’re a writer,” he said. “You just need to get born…” Well, it took about three more years in gestation for the hardship life of being a writer to plop out like an ugly, unwanted, squalling infant. So yeah, it evolved—gradually.

When you teach about writing, isn’t that hard? I mean, beyond basic skills aren’t people born to their gifts?

When I taught, I hammered at getting at the uniqueness of my students’ individual abilities. I was fascinated with the special creative seeds that lurked behind all the conventional ideas. Each had something to say, so much of it bottled up and dormant, yet festering and causing that general unhappiness with themselves as individuals. But how to get at it was the question. The basics didn’t matter. How to uncover the innate sense that could string a story from personal experience—like the unseen string through a bunch of beads. Without that ability, the rest is meaningless. Some are born to their gifts. You can pound in techniques and forms that can be forgotten as easily as phone numbers, but if they are going to make art, they have to ride a different horse—usually a bucking bronco. I said it was tough and brutal to devote your life to an inward journey. Maybe I scared them off, but my particular teaching centered on making art—not “How to be a writer in Ten Easy Lessons.”

Except for one girl, a poet, I don’t think any others succeed to make art or get published. But I don’t think it was my fault for showing them Charlie Chaplin’s genius and how the hard road was probably the only road to artistic success.

You would seem to be someone who has a statement to make about something through the subjects of your work. You pursue the information behind the murder, greed, vulgar excess... do you have an agenda regarding your work?

My personal agenda--for myself, is to do all I can do in the time I have to do it in. Be all that I am and everything else must be secondary. I guess that’s why I’ve had three divorces and so many unsuccessful relationships. The question regarding a statement in the work presents an obscure area… because it is the work itself that makes the statement. Of course I’m speaking through it, and is it the shriek? Does the body of my work reflect Munch’s midget man, alone, screaming on the bridge of desolation? Perhaps that is the theme—the scream; I’m reminded of Antonin Artaud’s statement that rings true for me: "If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames."

I feel the only conscious effort is the shaping of the language. I fell in love with the computer screen a dozen or more years ago, realizing I could shape the language like I was painting or sculpting. Perhaps most do not see it that way, but the visual artist in me fused with the language into a single entity. “Murder, greed, vulgar excess…” That’s the path, maybe the old concept of wigging out like Dennis Hopper and I used to fart around with, shocking the senses to see what falls out. It can be a lonely chase--ask Kerouac when you get to see him. If you're being burnt at the stake, you're not likely to get others elbowing in to join you.

With Garbage People and Manson, with Severed and Laid Bare and L.A. Despair you’ve delved into the darkest aspects of the human soul. Since L.A. is involved in some fashion in all those stories/events, what role does L.A. play in the work you do, and your life?

I sprung forth from L.A. General Hospital (Marilyn Monroe nine years ahead of me), a long time ago and in the heart of the Depression. I understand this crazy city as I understand no other. It’s my native soil, my feet are ankle deep in it and the city’s in my blood. I’ve hated it and I’ve loved it. Right now we’re sucking the worst air in the country. Cheyenne, Wyoming’s the best air. What the fuck would I do in Cheyenne? I played Lone Ranger and Tonto back before the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. Do it again in Wyoming? Montana? Drink Bud with the cowboy poets or do they now sip cappuccino or cafe latte? I’ve tried many times to shake L.A.’s grab on my neck by rambling and wandering around. Fuck hot Louisiana girls sweating in the blue bayou sun or screwing cuties in Tombstone. Aw, to be drunk and raising hell in Tucumcari. After years of bouncing around I realized L.A. didn’t give a shit and she sat there saying, “Do what you want, man, you’ll be coming home or you’ll die…” ! None of my ex-wives or girlfriends ever told me that.

Being that you write True crime as well as Noir, what is the line between reporting and creating, and without being accusatory, in whose service are you in there?

I don’t write genre or for any mainstream slot, no matter what they call it once it’s written and out there. I’ve been published by some of the biggest houses in New York, in London, in Japan and France, and to date the only writer published by the three major alternative or underground U.S. presses.

I get involved in people and I keep getting involved until I find what I am looking for—going for the heart of it, the thing-in-itself. The truth. Doesn’t matter if it’s fact or fiction; I go to work the same and dig until I find what I’m looking for. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m looking for—it’s only a scrap or a feeling for something dirty to take beyond the breaking point. Get at the yolk by breaking the shell. To eat the nuts you gotta break inside. If you plaster it with a conventional approach or means, you never get at the truth. You never reach uncharted territory. To do that you have to be an obsessed explorer and that’s too hard for most, it’s too rough a road. I have one goal, and that’s to get at the thing inside the shell and take it to its ultimate, know what makes it tick. Sometimes I reach a point and I don’t want to know any more. The killings, the pain…things that make it tick can be a black ugly spider that’s full of black ugly venom. You’re looking at ! the distilled evil in the world, if you will, and I know if I keep exposing myself to it I’ll burn out or start bleeding inside.

What crime authors do you read?

I don’t really read anyone anymore, just research that has something to do with what I’m writing about. I don’t read any other authors unless the subject they’re writing about has something to do with what I’m writing or dealing with and overlaps in some way. I don’t care what others have done or are doing with a subject I’ve already written about. I’ve read others in the past, but you’re not asking me that, are you?

No, I am not.

How do you make certain that you are telling your story from your muse?

You mean like Urania? I’ll take her home. Maybe that’s what I’ve done all along! My “muse” is probably not as romantic but more an abnormality because I guess I’m a workaholic, driven by the discipline of the job to be done. Oh, I may take a long time sometimes and think and moan around for weeks scribbling on napkins and placemats, but the work has a life of its own, an energy I have over all these years come to recognize as a big snake wriggling through the subject. I just go with that and that tells me I’m on the right track. Plus I know instinctively when I’m on the wrong track. I know instinctively when a word isn’t right, I can smell it; because a single word can get your feet headed on a wrong track. Why not call her Urania… Sounds okay to me.

Do writers need to insulate themselves against soaking in other influences?

Yeah, if you want to be all you can be in the time you’ve got. It’s difficult at the starting line because you want to be accepted into the race and have someone say, “Hey, that’s great!” You think if you can create like so-and-so you too will be great and accepted. But hopefully sooner than later you see you can never be accepted that way if your path is one seeking to express some quota of originality, something like what I used to teach, that you must go to that core to recognize the shriek and become one with it so you can be heard.

Your life was lived out loud so to speak, you were a child actor, an actor, a writer, a poet and director of film, what is it that causes you to live in the public eye and perform in public eye?

The search, the sense of needing to know, the never-accepting at face value or without question… I think the public eye sees me as a kind of auto wreck and they’re turning their heads to see the blood. That’s what the public’s after—the blood and the broken glass, though they sure won’t admit it! Most are conditioned to blinker the black spider and See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, like the three little wooden monkeys or like Ernie Kovacs’ Nairobi Trio, beating out some meaningless tune. I am told that the general public craves

Photo by HELMUT NEWTON.

to be told the truth about something and I say to them I’m here to do that service, but I think the conditioning has focused their attention to the mass media and the poor public accepts this Newspeak, as George Orwell put, as gospel when in fact it is only a polite form of profiteering. Often the truth-seeker gets left out in the cold. The door doesn’t open unless he subscribes to the club and buys the Newspeak program. Truth that doesn’t hold to convention can offend as well as excite. However, as a writer living in the public eye, I’m afforded an open pipeline to those genuinely following my work; there is communication and from the abundance of positive inquiries I gather a kind of sense of solidarity, validating I’m on the right path.

You’ve spoken to many talented celebrities. You are one. What does being a “celebrity” do to your sense of reality?

Reality defined as being the quality of being true, a fidelity to nature—the fact of being real… I can only say being a celebrity is kind of something that came, was accepted, and is no longer a question. A couple or so documentaries have been made about me, one called FAME-EATER by a New Mexico film company, and it’s a kind of floating concept, but fastens itself to the idea that when I was younger I wanted fame—I thought I wanted to be a movie star like Jimmy Dean and Marilyn and others did, but it was like shoes that were too tight or too big. Like I said, I was torn inside between a choice of roads, a choice of lanes to fulfill some destiny or else wind up a hobo riding the rails until I fall off and the train runs over me. In all that, I was an infidel to my real nature. I was not being true to life—to myself and in fact I was being unreal and had placed myself in an unreal mess, and only the mess was real. I fed off the fame of others—all the stars and people I knew, I ate at their fame like a rat nibbling cheese. Perhaps the same with everything I’ve written: personal involvement. I had to get my self inside this other being and only then does it take its shape of being real for me.

So my fame has rolled into the driveway slow and easy, no rush, no banging over the bumps, and I am comfortable. I do not even question what I am or what I’m doing or where I’m going. I have no doubts or questions about what I am or my status. I keep working and the work is without end, it’s never over. There are five books in front of me to write. November will see another book written and by then there will be another come at the end of the line so it’ll be five more, and just keep on going that way until I fall over dead and they say, “hey, he’s retired now.” My amazing son and his half-sister, my beautiful daughter, will have me cremated and the ashes jammed into a brown paper sack with instructions to throw them off the end of the Santa Monica pier and I’ll hit ocean where my mother’s ashes were dumped the same year I got my second divorce. Until then, my celebrity and sense of reality is rock solid, unbending, and I love it.

I realize that as you are a celebrity it might be difficult to say, but as a writer is your job not to dispense words with enough power and truth as to be valuable and if your perception of reality is askew ...

I guess yes, and I have no worry about the power, truth, or value of what I do. I seem to have found some individual niche that allows my signaling through the flames, as it were, and the signals come back, just like the Indians in an old Republic picture saying they got the message. Not sure what is “askew” and figure it’s probably not my place to appraise a position like that, as I’m sure the critics will and do.

Had he not died so early would we still revere James Dean?

I don’t hypostasize because it’s an open field with no rules for the player. I can only say we DO revere him and will continue to because we have Marilyn Monroe, Coca Cola, James Dean, Elvis and Levis. James Dean. These are our gods and icons.

Was the Dahlia case a moment that changed L.A. and the perception of it, or was it a snap shot of the time?

It was both—but more than a snapshot. It was a massive portrait of pushing something unusual way beyond the limits and creating, as it were, another sort of icon—the Black Dahlia a goddess of the night, strange, unknown, haunting; shadows of the noir L.A. of the old movies, of tough detectives and mean streets. The crown jewel of downtown L.A., in glorious black and white: 1946-1947, the birth of the dark side, L.A. the capital of the night.

Who was Marilyn Monroe?

Now we jump to the light—to the bright, Technicolor sunshine, to swaying palms and poodle skirts, to sweater girls and tin, pink flamingos stuck in suburban lawns. Pink Cadillacs and the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The studio, the cameras, the lights… then early death. She was the biggest and most important movie star in the world. Studio contracts screwed her every step of the way. The promise of a final reward was short-lived. She was dead before it could be bestowed. For me, Marilyn was and still is a tragic talisman, a concern so close at times I felt she was inside my skin. I wrote one brief little scene including her in LAID BARE, a memoir about Hollywood. The first time I met her. I have not written anything to be published about her in almost ten years. Recently I was asked for a piece by a French publisher doing an anthology on her. I wrote the piece and was offered a book contract for a memoir on Marilyn. I was in her company five times; three of them she was talkative and pleasant, and the other two she was tense, preoccupied, withdrawn and at moments in some kind of pain. My memories of her are sharp and in focus and I am steeping myself now in all that I have complied for almost half a century. For me, someone who has spent his life in Hollywood (in this environment hermetically sealed from the real world), I can say for certain there was no other like her and no one could possibly take her place. The magic remains, as it will for generations. I visit her crypt and rub tarnish from her plaque, mentally trying to sort out some impenetrable part of her personality that was always at odds with the magic of her wedding with celluloid. Suffice to say for now she was a fine artist with magic beyond the calling, but who waged a battle solitarily and lost.

Do you believe that the creative community is respected in this culture's society or are they just paid for their work and used?

The creative community is “respected,” if you want to use that word, as long as what it produces turns a profit. The word respect is wrong; it should be “rewarded.” The artist is rewarded if he plays ball in the mainstream, producing art, music, books that can be mass produced and marketed accordingly. The thing of most importance is profit. Yes, the creative community is used, abused, then dumped the second they no longer show a profit. However, there is room to function and create and do your own thing, and perhaps you will turn out an incredible work that cannot be denied or ignored. You will be “rewarded” and “respected” by other members of the creative community. Times have changed drastically re: respect for the creative personality since the 1960s.

If you did not write, what would you do instead to express that urge?

I would probably be dead.

Do you believe that Charles Manson should have been executed for the crimes his followers committed?

Sharon Tate was a beautiful person; her beauty and charm was a ray of sunlight. She was eight months pregnant, expecting her baby, the father, kooky at times, one of the finest filmmakers to find himself in Hollywood’s embrace. More death. Brutal, grotesque murder, so brutal it staggers even the creative imagination. An impressive body count with Sharon on top of the pyre, the dead, unborn baby murdered in her womb.

Charlie Manson dreamed up the killings of people he had no dealings with. He murdered many strangers two nights in a row. In California and elsewhere, you plan first-degree murders and are instrumental in the execution, in essence you’ve bought a ticket that’s bound to get punched. Hitler didn’t personally butcher Jews. Should he have been executed for the crimes his followers committed? Charlie’s ticket and the tickets of the Family members didn’t get punched. They got secondary tickets to live but locked away to keep them from executing further crimes against society.

You worked with William S. Burroughs, how did he impact your writing thereafter?

There are writers I admire for who they are and how they live. I often don’t identity with their work, but with their lives, yes. Kerouac was one and Burroughs is another, a highly intelligent, brilliant, serious man who helped me unselfishly, believing my work was such that it had to be published, “…regardless of how the world accepts it,” he said. “If you know what you’ve done is right, tell the rest to go fuck themselves.” Essentially Kerouac told me this, though Jack spoke in general. I have followed Burroughs’ words to the letter. We’re different sorts of writers, but what he was and how he held himself, apart from the problems he suffered, he was and has remained a lightning rod for me. In a planned second book of memoirs—one of the five books in front of me, I am going to get more into Burroughs, showing my genuine gratitude and admiration for his having lived and impacted my decisions and posture as a writer.

The world and reality of people in the dark worlds you write about have a completely different understanding of reality than those people who do not live in the dark places. Does it ever offer a tempting alternate reality to the writer about those dark places?

It’s true, the fiction and nonfiction, from the onset when I did my apprenticeship—fast, hard-boiled, sexy action novels which I’d write in nine days—225 pages each—then into the big Egyptian novel, set in Alexandria and Cairo, an American couple, not coming together and finding the stereotyped happiness, but breaking apart and discovering the abject desolation in each separately, knowing the reason they fused was to avoid the inevitable emptiness each life was unsuccessfully hiding. The young, handsome, exceedingly wealthy (all the right bestseller ingredients!) protagonist engages in a pedophiliac feast until he kills a man (a la Camus and The Stranger); his estranged wife wallowing in liquor and drugs and sex and finally commits suicide by jumping overboard off an Egyptian rug dealer’s yacht. Dial Press, a prestigious New York house, wanted the book but I got involved in the Charles Schmid murder case in Arizona, got involved with Schmid personally—the killer, and the Egyptian novel never got finished. Dial published the Tucson murder book, along with a novel by James Baldwin.

I immediately got involved in the Manson killings, I must add all this time keeping my nose in the Black Dahlia case. Tom Neal, of Detour fame, was working with me until he murdered his own wife and went to prison. San Quentin, like most prisons, is the darkest “corner of life.” At that level what you knew of life snaps drastically and you learn if you are still capable of learning, a different set of rules normal for the life you’re going to lead in this new corner. It is not related at all to the outside world. The alleys and dingy bars or dark holes of violent existence, whether in Hollywood or the High Sierra desert, reflect a rush from the same throbbing desolation the young couple ran from in the Egyptian novel, only to face when circumstances jolted them over the edge—out of convention and into chaos.

All my work has focused on the darker corner of life, or I sprang from such a condition. It stems from my wallowing in the dark side of L.A. as a child, from the desolation I personally faced which I translated into smashed bodies and victimizations. I didn’t know how to do it and I was faced with doing it on my own. So a child’s wild, creative, supercharged imagination can be like a big roaring vehicle with no driver behind the wheel.

To grasp a “different reality” it is necessary to understand the light side and the dark side as fused—two sides of a moon so there is only a sphere, whole, not simply the one-sided saucer we set our cup of life upon. I think through everything I’ve written—through the bleeding body of the work, the unconscious drive has been to GRASP these two sides, the black and the white, and wrestle them into a union in hopes of comprehending the nature of what we are and the strains of the human condition. Think of the smiling policeman who lives in the neat suburban tract house, mows the lawn, drives a new SUV, throws barbecues, and on Tuesday night he comes home to shoot his wife and three children and blows his own brains out.

The "dark" is an ever-moving, always shifting blob that easily bypasses the prisoners, thugs, the flimflammers and hunks of walking rot. It is in the eyes of the smiling, kindly face, the blond hair and blue eyes, but to see it you must stretch beyond your limits of acceptability and convention and encompass it all--a whole, not just single pieces and bits, and it must be done without judgment.

I think the impulse to understand and accept the dark and the light as one, no division, no light SIDE or dark SIDE, and then it is ready to be seen for what it really is. We sleep in the dark and we move in the light but either without the other and we perish, or worse, we deaden that impulse to comprehend and jerk the rug from beneath our creative legs.