James Ellroy's magnificent obsessions

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on April 19, 2008 at 10:00 PM, updated April 19, 2008 at 10:15 PM
"I'm very grateful to Hollywood because of the money," says novelist and screenwriter James Ellroy. "I've got some expensive tastes."
He is the demon dog of American fiction, daddy-o, barking his appreciation for all things redolent of jazz and satin and after-midnight, howling at the moon when the clouds finally scatter and you see Los Angeles in all its pimply corruption and damp-palmed lust. Watch him, listen to him, marvel at him.

But don't get too close, babies. He bites.

James Ellroy's teeth are firm and sharp from use. He likes cops, dogs, women and classical composers. Everyone else approaches at their own risk. He detests comparisons to other writers. Dashiell Hammett "only wrote two good books." Charles Bukowski was "depraved." He prefers to compare himself to Tolstoy.

It's a kind of defense mechanism.

He needs it. He was born in 1948, raised by a couldn't-care-less father and a mother who slept around. When Ellroy was 10, she was strangled by a sex killer; the murderer was never caught. Ellroy lived with his dad, broke into houses, bounced in and out of drunk tanks. Then he sobered up and started writing.

"I can't talk about this stuff anymore," he says halfway through our phone conversation. "I just can't tell those same stories again. People asking 'What did you think of ...' "Ah, f-- you.' ... I'm done. This is one of the last times I'm ever going to talk about that stuff."

But then, over the phone, he does -- speaking about his adolescence and his writing and the movies, decorating his highly quotable pronouncements with deliberately obscene and offensive remarks. Like it or not, the devil dog is unleashed, hepcats and kittens.

And no way are you tricking it back into its safe little pad.

Ellroy has long known that he was his own most marketable character, his past his best commercial hook. He dedicated "The Black Dahlia" to his mother, and offered up her story to journalists; he turned her murder into a full-length remembrance, "My Dark Places." This month brought the DVD release of "James Ellroy's Feast of Death," one of the many documentaries that paw over his personal life.

The marketing is all done with Ellroy's cooperation and can take some peculiar turns; not long ago he hosted a morbid bus tour through Southern California.

"It was a deadening level of self-obsession," he says. "I took them to my mother's crime scene, murder scenes here there and elsewhere, talking non-stop for four hours while someone fed me lozenges. And at the end I thought, 'F-- this s--, enough, you uncultured geeks, you've fought me to a standstill, it's over.'"

But not quite. Not yet. Not while he still has scabs to pick, wounds to revisit. Not while he still has books to sell, projects to promote.

The one thing he won't discuss is the new movie "Street Kings," which carries his name as one of three screenwriters. At least, he won't talk about it on the record. He has many things to say about what Hollywood has done with his work, even about adaptations he dutifully praised at the time. But that's shared only on the QT, and strictly hush-hush.

"I'm not going to say a word against them," he says, back on the record. "I'm very grateful to Hollywood because of the money. I've got some expensive tastes... And even an imperfect movie will attract readers, which has proven to be the case through all these adaptations. But the movie business is dysfunctional."

Ellroy digs dysfunction. He comes from a family where his father spun stories of sexploits with Rita Hayworth but couldn't hold a job, where his mother went trolling for pickups until one night she didn't come home.

"It's always the same thing," he says of the paragraph you're about to read -- the paragraph in all the stories about him in which his miserable youth is recapped. "My mother got whacked, I got obsessed, broke into houses, stole panties, popped pills. It's the same old story." Except it got worse. The disasters piled on -- a dishonorable discharge, his father's death, homelessness, alcoholism, blackouts.

"And then I got sober, and quit using drugs," he says. "I never think hypothetically about what might have happened if I didn't, and I'll give God credit for the save. But I knew I couldn't stay on this self-destructive, horrifying course. I wanted to have a girlfriend, or maybe girlfriends. I wanted to write great books, and I just happened to have the drive and I happened to have the talent."

Ellroy caddied during the day, then went home and wrote. His first book, a paperback mystery called "Brown's Requiem," came out when he was 33, and paid a little over $3,000. He finally hit with "The Black Dahlia," a gruesomely great crime story that used a famously unsolved 1947 torture murder as a way to talk about Los Angeles, corruption, the movies and the late Mrs. Geneva Ellroy.

The one thing the book was never meant to be about was a solution to the real case. Since Ellroy's novel, at least four other writers have offered theories; he calls "Black Dahlia Avenger," in which a son implicated his own father, "the best of them, but it's unprovable. They all are. What these people don't realize is that we're never going to know and it doesn't really matter. It's not about who did it. It's about what this means."

What it meant to Ellroy was a way to slowly merge pulp noir with historical fiction. From now on, his books would be set in the recent past -- always more real to Ellroy than the dull present anyway. They would be studded with non-fictional characters doing fictional things. They would have complicated stories told from multiple points of view, and a jazzy prose style that fractured syntax.

They spoke emphatic. They swung eclectic. They sold electric.

They also dove into Ellroy's own obsessions. He had been too young to protect his loved and loathed mother, and now the fallen women of his novels would be tortured and saved and then sometimes tortured again. He was both in awe and ashamed of his weak and powerful father, and now the heroes of his books would be broken cops who busted peepers and pervs, then reached shakily for redemption like a wino going for the Mad Dog.

"I'm always pushing things," Ellroy says. "Putting my hand in the fire, and withdrawing it. Improper behavior shocks me, but I know I have my own tendencies. I have an ambivalent relationship to authority, yes -- but I am also deeply and consistently religious and conservative."

The "consistently religious" line startles a bit (Ellroy recently went through his second divorce, and is in anguish because "my girlfriend won't leave her husband"). But the conservatism is clear. His disgust with pop culture and casual manners is evident; despite the blue bursts of language, we carefully address each other as "Mr. Ellroy" and "Mr. Whitty." (Interviewers who make the mistake of calling him "James" are greeted with "Have we met?")

As for Ellroy's politics -- well, his own description of them as "Tory" is too kind. His last few books -- "American Tabloid," "The Cold Six Thousand" -- read like telegrams from hell, excoriating the Camelot era as a fraud and American politics as just another crime scene. He praises Bill O'Reilly extravagantly and, after years of opposition, has become a glib death-penalty booster ("Some innocent guy gets fried once in a while, I can live with that").

So, throwing red meat to the demon dog, I ask him what he thinks of the current candidates.

"Hillary looks like a bull dyke in a pantsuit, but at least she seems serious," he snarls. "McCain looks like Mr. Magoo. Obama looks like a f---ing lemur, a little rodent-like creature, a marsupial or something, I don't know. Jesus, I have no idea of what's going on in the world anymore. Where's Ronald Reagan, now that I really need him?"

And where is the real James Ellroy in all this appalling invective? His last wife, the feminist writer and critic Helen Knode, says in "Feast of Death" that his provocations aren't to be taken seriously; his friend Joseph Wambaugh has called it an act. Perhaps it's just a way to make people listen. Perhaps it's just a way to invite the blow, to pre-empt the fight he assumes is coming anyway -- like in his predominantly Jewish high school, where he passed out Nazi pamphlets.

"People are complex," Ellroy says, and few are more complicated than him. He says he hates talking about his mother's death, and then hosts a bus tour. He castigates himself for exploiting his past, and then exhumes it, again. He says he won't do another interview like this when the next book -- tentatively titled "Blood's a Rover" -- comes out next year. But he also says, once that book's finished, he's going to write yet another autobiography.

"I don't buy the whole idea of closure," he says. "It's good to get it off your chest, but that s-- stores itself in your pores and keeps you up nights and just because you've exploited it in a book doesn't mean that it doesn't still own you. And you'll see that when I write this next memoir."

It's hard to imagine what Ellroy has left to brag about or confess, who's left to shock or titillate or provoke. Yet it's impossible to imagine him stopping.

"I'd like to be at peace," he insists. "I don't equate that with the cessation of passion -- I'm 60, but I've got a young man's appetites. I would like greater peace of mind, though. A woman from the New York Times interviewed me once and said what do you do at night? I said I talk to women who aren't in the room with me. She said, are they in your bathroom? She really didn't get it. I said no, they're in my brain. And that's the truth. They're in my soul, and by and large, at night, that's what I do. I lie in my bed, in the dark. And I talk to women who are not there."
