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In a new tell-all memoir, a ZeIig of Tinseltown's underbelly remembers the ones who got away
The movie-going public may not recognize the name John Gilmore, but back in the '50s and '60s, if you were young, beautiful, famous and fucked up, your path and his undoubtedly crossed.
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Practically every troubled legend you can name, from Hank Williams to Jim Morrison. Natalie Wood to Ed Wood, turns up in Gilmore's remarkably candid survivor's tale.
Laid Bare: A Memoir of Wrecked Lives and the Hollywood Death Trip. (In fact, the only name missing is Elvis Presley's- further evidence that the King's still out there somewhere.)
The Hollywood-raised Gilmore recalls how he got his first acting break in LAPD safety films before he landed a part in a Gene Autry movie and went on to be, as he puts it, "conditioned and worked on to try and become a young star." After a string of roles described In
Laid Bare as "pretty-boy mixed-up kids and neurotics," Gilmore was blackballed for turning down lousy parts and for palling around with the erratic James Dean, and eventually he turned his attention to writing. On an extended trip to Paris, he penned a novel, which was bought by Henry Miller's publisher, Maurice Girodias, but never released. (Now titled
Fetish
Blonde, it will be published by Creation Books next spring.) Back in L.A., he cranked out cheapo paperbacks before finally earning a reputation for straight-up, unsentimental prose with true-crime exposes of the Black Dahlia murder and the Manson slayings. In
Laid
Bare, Gilmore returns to his Hollywood roots for a fascinating, warts-and-all account of his drug-addled, post-beatnik adventures.
"I always identified with the tough kids and the rebels, the ones who were on the outside," says Gilmore from his home in New Mexico. (He asks me not to disclose the city "because there's a lot of Manson people and James Dean freaks who like to come find me.") Perhaps the most noteworthy of these rebels was Dean, with whom the author remembers at least one endearingly clumsy sexual encounter. (Their relationship Is addressed in greater depth in Gilmore's recently published
Live Fast-Die
Young: Remembering the Short Life of James Dean).
Gilmore notes that the homogeneous, intolerant quality of mainstream culture in those days forced artistic-minded people to the fringes. "Now, there are alternatives to getting a business degree and succeeding and getting married," he says. "But back then. If you didn't want that sort of life, you were instantly branded an outlaw. You were not a part of the 'right' world, and there were no exceptions to that." To many, the option to "Just wig out," he adds, seemed perfectly
justified.
What's most valuable about Gilmore's memoir isn't the dirt he dishes but the disarmingly frank style and the vivid detail with which he serves it up. Calling upon his Actor's Studio training In "sense memory recall," he dips into a seemingly bottomless supply of astonishing anecdotes, which effortlessly puncture the celebrity mystique with their quirky Intimacies. There's the time Gilmore went in search of absinthe with William S. Burroughs, who "kept staring at my crotch and almost obscenely licking his lips, or making strange remarks about 'a penis colony in the desert.'" Dean fantasizes about being a matador, puncturing himself with safety pins. Montgomery Clift emits a stream of vomit mid-conversation. Steve McQueen crows that Dean's death "makes more room for me." A pregnant Bardot struggles over whether or not to get an abortion. Hank Williams pisses his pants before a concert ("Well,
sonovabitch")
Asked how he managed to survive when so many of his
acquaintances - who also included Lenny Bruce, Jean Seberg and Sal Mineo
- died young,
Gilmore, currently at work on several novels and another memoir, is blunt: "Basically, I just wasn't going to kill myself. I've ridden my whole life on the edge, but I don't think it's In me to go over. It Just Isn't there. I think
in my deeper parts, there really is a kind of conventional side."
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