In James Ellroy‘s new “Red Sheet,” it’s October 1962 in Los Angeles, and in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the city is on edge with rumors of communist sleeper cells and hit squad conspiracies.
Detective Freddy Otash is back in the Los Angeles Police Department, given a badge to do the dirty work the department wants but can’t or won’t do itself.
Surrounding him as the story spins out is a slate of real-life figures turned into fictional characters, including gubernatorial candidate Richard Nixon, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, and Tom Bradley and Daryl Gates, rising forces in Los Angeles politics and policing, all of them players in the web of secrets and lies drawing Otash into L.A.’s darkest corners.
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“I wanted to stay in ’62 after I wrote ‘The Enchanters,’” Ellroy says of his previous book in which Otash investigated the death of Marilyn Monroe. “And so the first thing I did was think, well, what were the big events, big political events, big historical events, big crime events of the latter part of 1962?
“I’m 78 now,” he continues. “I was 14 then, so, you know, I’m a stupid, horny adolescent … wondering why Donna Wise and Sue Bailey don’t love me. Reading books and watching crime TV shows, going to crime movies and all that.
“I remember the world changing,” Ellroy says. “I remember America changing. And the two big events that popped out to me immediately were Richard Nixon ran for governor of California, and lost resoundingly to a nobody guy in Pat Brown, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“Red Sheet” also brings in Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, whose FBI teams up with the LAPD to hunt communists in the city, and addresses the rising civil rights movement in the person of Tom Bradley, who’d left his LAPD career in 1962 to run for Los Angeles City Council on a political journey that would make him the city’s first Black mayor.
The book also has flashbacks to the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of the city of Guernica ordered by Spain’s fascist leader, Gen. Francisco Franco, to wipe out the Republican forces backed by the Soviet Union.
In “Red Sheet,” fascists and communists are two bites of the same rotten apple that’s threatening to spoil lives and livelihoods throughout Ellroy’s Los Angeles.
“Fascism and communism are the same thing,” Ellroy says. “People still believe it to this day, even though it’s insane, that the Commies aimed higher with their rhetoric. ‘Workers unite,’ you know, ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains.’ And then you’ve got Hitler with ‘Kill all the Jews.’
“Until you start looking into it, it’s hard to believe that they’re very different things. And, of course, they’re going to be dire enemies because they both want to take over the world for their own gains.”
In a way, Ellroy says, the real-world characters and history are a continuation of what he set down in the prologue of “American Tabloid” some 30 years ago.
“It says, ‘Our,’ meaning America’s, ‘narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight,’” he says. “And this is that reckless verisimilitude once again. A lot of fact, a bunch of it’s fiction.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Ellroy talked about his teen life in L.A.,” how Freddy Otash stuck around as a protagonist, and why the real-life folk singer Judy Henske is part of the best love story he’s ever written.
Q: Let’s talk about “Red Sheet.” I have to confess I’m about 75 pages from the end now –
A: – Did you dig the book?
Q: Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic. I love how your plots always have so much going on, so many plates spinning.
A: You’ve figured out by now who the killers are?
Q: I’d guess it’s [redacted] and [redacted].
A: OK, I’m not going to put words in your mouth. The last 75 pages are frenetic, and it’s an Ellroy book, so you know it’s all going to get sorted out. [Note: It was indeed frenetic, and I went one for two on the killers’ identities.]
Q: So we talked about the ’62 events that inspired you. Let’s talk about characters, like Nixon, who wanders throughout.
A: I knew Nixon was prone to these fugue states. He would just have, in effect, what we now know to be a panic attack, and he went out walking. He wasn’t going out looking for women, per se, or to get tanked. That came later in his life at the pressures of Watergate.
He just went to talk to people. He’d stop at a gin mill and have a drink or a beer or go to a coffee shop. Much of the time – I don’t know, a percentage – people didn’t recognize who he was.
Q: He’s famous for the House Un-American Activities hearings in the ’50s, and still has anti-communist issues in ’62.
A: He was bereft over the [1961 ] death of Whitaker Chambers [a former Soviet spy who testified against American communists, famously Alger Hiss.] He always considered the Hiss case his finest moment, and when he was drowning in Watergate, he urged all his henchmen to read his memoir “Six Crises” and to concentrate on the Hiss case.
He knew that Chambers was telling the truth. And this slick as [bleep] guy, good-looking with the good-looking wife, Alger Hiss was bad right out the gate. Just lawyer’s instinct there and damned if he wasn’t right.
Q: I laughed that people didn’t recognize Nixon when he shows up in the integrated nightclubs around La Brea Avenue and Washington Boulevard.
A: I had a job down there. The area always fascinated me. France’s Drive-In, Tommy Tucker’s Playroom, all the motels on the west side of the street, hot-sheet motels, and everything else.
Q: What were you doing there?
A: I had a job with General Motors Acceptance, working at a repossession lot. I kept the paperwork and filed it and took credit applications from some, I mean, very colorful lowlife types. I was one of two White guys there, and the rest of them were Black, and the owner of the lot was Black, who was a character in his own right.
Q: You mentioned you were 14 in ’62. And you went to Fairfax High?
A: My big dream was to go to Hollywood High because the girls were there. I mean, the girls were just sitting on the ground at Hollywood High as opposed to Fairfax, or where I should have gone, which was L.A. High over on Olympic.
My old man thought that L.A. High would be a little bit rugged for me, and he didn’t know anybody whose address we could go on to the Hollywood High district. But he knew an actor. You might know this guy, he was on “Laugh-In” … Alan Sues.
He and my old man were good pals. For awhile they ran a hat store together. Alan, who was a very nice guy, designed the hats, and the old man peddled the mail order and they had a little storefront on Melrose. He actually lived on Fairfax about a block north of Fairfax High.
Q: This is the third book in which Freddy’s been the main guy.
A: The first book, “Widespread Panic,” is really novellas. They’re connected, and they’re written in scandal language [the style of ’50s scandal-sheet tabloids]. They’re satirical, and they’re a hatchet job on Hollywood. I’ve always liked [director] Nicholas Ray and James Dean, “Rebel Without a Cause” and Natalie Wood and Dennis Hopper and all those dinks. So that’s the original book, but they’re comedic.
Then I got the idea to write the serious Freddy book, “The Enchanters,” and everybody went nuts for the proposal. Andrew Wylie, my agent, Edward Kastenmeier, my editor at Knopf, said write the book. You’d think somebody would have written this book before, but they hadn’t.
And after I finished, the reaction at Knopf, at the Wylie agency, Helen [Knode], my second ex-wife girlfriend [After their divorce they got back together but did not remarry], people were crazy about the book and the interplay of the real-life and fictional characters.
I just told Edward, “I don’t want to go back to the second L.A. Quartet [the World War II-set books begun with “Perfidia” and “This Storm”]; wouldn’t you rather have the second big Freddy Otash book? And he said, yeah, I would.
Q: So tell me what you came to like about Freddy and writing about him?
A: You probably know the story. I knew him [the real-life Freddy Otash] for a period of years. What a [bleep]. Unpleasant, abrasive, all that. I mean, in no order is he brilliant and educated, erudite, as I portray him in “The Enchanters” and “Red Sheet.” I was going to make him the hero of “American Tabloid,” the Pete Bondurant slot.
Then he [OItash] died of natural causes, and I could have used him for free. I’d already paid him some money, but I liked Bondurant more.
Then he came back to me, and I saw that he could fit the paradigm of the great detectives. Hence, the device of his forensic expertise. His being acquainted with [fictional Nazi criminologist] Hans Maslick, who’s an invention. His goon squad.
In “The Enchanters,” he gets credentialed [by the LAPD] so he can go around and lean on people and door-knock people and find out what’s going on with Jimmy Hoffa and Marilyn Monroe. And he uncovers that whole criminal conspiracy around Monroe. Then he goes from being a buffoon who gets picked on by guys in the Hat Squad, who are very formidable guys, to being deferred to by them and becoming very close to Daryl Gates, who I knew as well.
Q: What was Gates like?
A: He had his skills. The times changed, the world changed, the idea of race in Los Angeles changed, and he was way behind the times. Affable little guy, smart guy, great careerist, took a great test.
His time came and he was loyal to his men, and he did a good job, but he couldn’t curb the ingrained LAPD tendency for overzealous enforcement. And he wouldn’t. Sherman Block did with the sheriffs; Pete Pitchess did earlier than that. He couldn’t take the step backwards.
Q: Freddy is a great detective, but he’s still corrupt and violent and downing more pills and booze than you should be able to live through.
A: Well, yeah, I can’t credit him with being a dope addict in real life. He was certainly an alcoholic, I mean, it killed him. In the end, cigarettes and a quart of Scotch a day will kill you, and it did. He was 70, and he had a heart attack, and so that was it.
Q: Let me ask you about Judy Henske, who Freddy goes gaga for after he sees her and hears her sing.
A: I had a very, very dim but pithy remembrance of Judy Henske from ’62 to ’63, and I had it bad for her.
Q: I figured. You told me before about that with actress Lois Nettleton, who you saw on the “Naked City” TV series and used in “Widespread Panic” and “The Enchanters.”
A: Yeah, that’s where I saw her.
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Q: So how did she become Freddy’s love interest in “Red Sheet”?
A: Have you ever listened to her sing? I mean, I’d seen pictures of her, and I saw her on “The Judy Garland Show.” Helen found it for me on YouTube, and we looked at it. She sang, “God Bless the Child.” If that doesn’t break your heart, then nothing will.
And then she did this gag thing on folk music with Judy Garland’s doofus sidekick, Dick Van Dyke’s kid brother Jerry Van Dyke, and Mel Tormé, who was the crooner on the show. There’s Judy in the middle, and she towers over these two men. They’re always looking up at her and goofing on her and all of that.
I knew that she was quite tall. I like ’em big, always have. Always have. When I was kid, like 14, 15, I was tall already and it looked like I was going to be pretty tall. And I think I read somewhere that she was 6’1″ and my dad would measure me every so often against the wall in the kitchen.
I kept waiting for being 6’1 and 1/2 or 6’2″ so I’d be taller than Judy Henske so she’d be my girlfriend. I honestly believe this [bleep]. That’s all I got to do. Then one day my dad raised the tape, and I was 6’2″ so I figured I could go and find Judy Henske. I didn’t know where to look for her, though, and then, I was going to school, and real girls caught my attention and that was that.
Then, when I was putting this book together, I started thinking about her, and I sent away for all of her early CDs and played them and I saw that Judy Garland tape with the two short guys goofing on her. The truth is, she wasn’t made to wear high heels. It made her 6’4,” so she was practically teetering as it is.
But she’s in no way self-conscious. She’s great-looking for one thing, but she’s kind of googly-looking at the same time. And that broke my heart.
Q: Broke your heart with love for her?
A: With love, yeah, with love. Then I realized, Freddy Otash, Judy Henske, why not? It’s my favorite man-woman relationship love story in all my books. She gets him in a big way. He’s getting through to his humanity with her, and more will be revealed with her in the new book.
Q: Can you say anything about the next book? Or are you a writer who doesn’t like to do that?
A: I’ll tell you off the record.
Q: [We go off the record for five minutes – ]
A: – and then there’s some Hollywood intrigue and some murders, and, you know, what can I say? It’s another big 550-page Ellroy book. Only there’s no Commies in it at this time.