James Ellroy
Author
of L.A. Confidential
talks with Robert Birnbaum
 Posted:
(Unknown Date), 2001
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print this interview.
Writer James Ellroy, who once announced
his ambition "to be known as the greatest crime novelist who has
ever lived," was born is Los Angeles in 1948. He has written Brown's
Requiem, Clandestine, Blood on the Moon, Because
the Night, and Killer Road. His LA Quartet novels — The
Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA
Confidential and White Jazz — have
been best sellers and critically acclaimed. In 1995, he published
the first book (which he referred to as a "sewer crawl" through
history) in his Underworld USA trilogy, American Tabloid,
which takes us up to November 22, 1963. In 1996, Ellroy reinvestigated
the unsolved homicide of his mother, in his memoir, My Dark Places.
In 1999, he published a collection of short crime pieces, both fiction
and non-fiction, entitled Crime Wave. His newest book, The
Cold Six Thousand, begins on the day of John Kennedy's assassination
in Dallas and moves through the early summer of 1968. James Ellroy
is also a writer-at-large for GQ magazine and lives in Kansas
City.
Robert Birnbaum: …six years in the making. The second
book of your trilogy, A Cool Six Thousand…
James Ellroy: Not quite six years in the making because
I wrote My Dark Places and reinvestigated my mother's murder
in the interim.
RB: …and what's Crime Wave?
JE: It’s a collection of my GQ pieces. Short
fiction as well as crime reporting.
RB: You are still going to do the third book in this trilogy?
JE: I'm still going to do the third. I would look for the
third in 3 or 3 1/2 years.
RB: Any chance you'll go further?
JE: No, no. I'm going to stop this trilogy in the summer
of 1972 short of Watergate. Because Watergate bores me. It's been
done to death. And most of the characters are still alive; thus
you can't use them fictionally.
RB: Watergate apparently shocked Americans because it exposed
the rampant clandestine activities that were a part of politics
and government. American Tabloid and A Cool Six Thousand
show an American political system that was rife with crime, intrigues
and conspiracy. Should people have been shocked?
JE: No. The essential contention of the Underworld USA trilogy
volume one, American Tabloid, volume two, The Cold Six
Thousand, is that America was never innocent. Here's the lineage:
America was founded on a bedrock of racism, slaughter of the indigenous
people, slavery, religious lunacy ...and nations are never innocent.
Let alone nations as powerful as our beloved fatherland. What you
have in The Cold Six Thousand — which covers
the years '63 to '68 — is that last gasp of pre-public-accountability
America where the anti-communist mandate justified virtually any
action. And it wasn't Kennedy's death that engendered mass skepticism.
It was the protracted horror of the Vietnamese war.
RB: The last time I thought about it — there
was a film based on a book by Melvin Van Peebles novel, Panther — raising
the issue of government dealing drugs in the ghetto. This was something
that was dismissed and ridiculed when proffered by African-American
activists.
JE: I believe it is stupid. I think the movie Panther
is a joke. They were a bunch of dope-dealing idiot thugs, the Panthers
themselves. And the cops were the relative good guys in that whole
operation. In The Cold Six Thousand it's not the government
that's dealing drugs, it is a confluence of hoodlums and profiteers
who are fueling the Cuban exile cause.
RB: Your character John Stanton, who sets up the drug dealing
in Black West Las Vegas, is a CIA operative.
JE: The character is fictional.
RB: In the book he is a CIA agent.
JE: He is a CIA agent but it is a clandestine, non-CIA-sanctioned,
wholly autonomous operation. It isn't the CIA as an entity.
RB: How can we be sure he didn't, in any way, represent
government policy?
JE: No, no. When you have a book this complex... When you
have a book with shifting and overlapping webs of conspiracy, it
is sometimes difficult to really figure out who is gaming who. Who's
doing who, who's doing what? For instance, in this book, J. Edgar
Hoover is passively complicit in a number of rather shady deals.
It's a semi-firm belief — because in the end, I am
a purveyor of fiction, not of fact — that J. Edgar
Hoover, who was ordered by Robert Kennedy, then Attorney General,
to remove many of his organized crime bugs circa 1962, left these
bugs in place and picked up great glimmers and imports of resentment
against John Kennedy and perhaps prophesied his coming assassination
and then did nothing about it. Hoover might have sensed that it
was coming and did not warn the Kennedy White House. I don't think
Hoover had any thing to do with it actively.
RB: The issue would seem to be what is fact and what is
fiction. At about the time of American Tabloid's publication,
Anthony Summers, a British writer, published a book on Hoover exposing
every rumor...
JE: I don't for a second believe Summers' contention that
J. Edgar Hoover went in drag to the Waldorf-Astoria...
RB: ...with Roy Cohn...
JE: ..with Roy Cohn. For one thing he was much too discreet.
Secondarily, he was much too ugly to ever successfully impersonate
a woman. Parenthetically, I think Hoover and Tolson were a Victorian
gay couple who probably never had sex with man, woman or beast.
The way that I portray Hoover, J. Edgar Hoover, known to many as
Gay Edgar Hoover in this book, is as a joshing repressed homosexual
whose repression manifests itself in the form of verbal sparring
with the many dangerous men in his employ that he is attracted to
but would never consider, obviously, having sex with.
RB: Do you believe that he was on the take from a California
racetrack he and Tolson visited yearly?
JE: No. He was a two-dollar bettor. What J. Edgar Hoover
was, was a voyeur, an antique collector, a fan of various pedigree
dogs and a person obsessed with accruing derogatory data. The true
evil of J. Edgar Hoover is that he disingenuously contended that
organized crime did not exist for many years. It wasn't until Robert
Kennedy exposed him, when Kennedy was chief counsel for the McClellan
Senate Rackets Committee forcing Mr. Hoover, belatedly, to form
an anti-organized-crime operation. Hoover's chief evil was that
while ignoring the presence of organized crime and its cancerous
growth in the United States, he put the full resources of the FBI
behind hassling harmless left-wingers.
RB: What is your sense of obligation to historical fact?
JE: I never specifically answer what's real and what's not
in my books. I think that my vision is true to the moral thrust
and the psychological thrust of history. Thus The Cold Six Thousand,
which so far as I know is the first time in one novel, the whole
of the social tumult from 1963 to 1968 has been encapsulated in
one contiguous narrative. It's largely the story of, again, that
pre-public-accountability America. Bad men, enacting a repressive
agenda trying to derail the civil rights movement. Specifically,
the thrust of the profoundly heroic Martin Luther King and at the
time before the Vietnamese War largely discredited this notion — the
anti-communist mandate ran supreme and justified virtually anything.
RB: You don't want to talk about what is true or not, but
one of the fun things about reading your books are the tantalizing
factual tidbits interspersed...for instance, [jazz saxophonist]
Wardell Gray's murder was never solved. He was dumped in the desert...
JE: Dexter Gordon always contended — people
have called me on this — the estimable Dexter Gordon
contended that Wardell died of a drug overdose and they were afraid
that they (Dexter and some of his confreres) would get popped for
this. So they took him out to the desert and dumped him. What the
hell he was dead anyway and they didn't kill him. Of course, I give
another explanation and Dexter Gordon — God bless
him — is not alive to dispute it.
RB: And you mention Karen Kupcinet? If you didn't grow up
in Chicago she would mean nothing...
JE: Right. I wrote a magazine piece on Karen Kupcinet's
death called Glamour Jungle. She was the daughter of the
Chicago Sun Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, big cheese in Chicago.
Karen died several days after John Kennedy's assassination in West
Hollywood, in Los Angeles it was an LA County Sheriff's case. For
years it was commonly believed that she was murdered. She was a
young woman being floated by her father as an actress not doing
that well. She was an amphetamine user and by all accounts a very
neurotic but soulful young woman, may she rest in peace. I reinvestigated
the case. I interviewed Irv Kupcinet, Irv's wife, Essy Solomon Kupcinet.
And Cary Kupcinet, Karen's young niece who was born in 1971, eight
years after Karen died. I don't think it was a murder. I think it
was an accidental death. Yet it assumed some stature as an unsolved
murder. The Karen Kupcient case, be it accidental death or homicide,
would have been a much bigger story had it not occurred in direct
proximity to John Kennedy's assassination. This is a very convoluted
answer to your question. Imaginative, highly imaginative conspiracy
theorists have tried to link her death to John Kennedy's assassination,
which is preposterous.
RB: What kind of research are novels based on?
JE: I hired two researchers who compile fact sheets and
chronologies so that I would not write myself into factual error.
And then it becomes a point of extrapolating. You can not have egregious
error. There is one error I can tell you right now...I have Nicorette
gum in 1968 in this book and Nicorette gum did not appear until
1992. Oops! You want to buttress your period sense with as much
fact as you can without appearing overly factualized. One of the
ways that I do this in The Cold Six Thousand is that the
book is written largely in the language of racism, because it is
seen from the perspective of racist characters bent on enforcing
a racist agenda. And frankly if this creates controversy around
this book and sells me some copies and gets me some more ink and
some more spotlight, so be it.
RB: There was a mention in yesterday's local daily quoting
a USA Today review which said your book is unreadable.
 JE:
What they are talking about is the style of this book. It is written
in a direct sentence, declarative sentence style. It is full of
the American idiom, racist invective. Yiddish. Elements of French
and Spanish. Good plain hard old American slang. It is a deliberately
proffered vulgarization and coarsening of the American idiom. The
style, which is very easy to read, runs to shorter rather than longer
sentences. No compound sentences. Only direct sentences and there
is a design behind this. This book is a linguistic rendition of
the violence of the text. It is a melding of form versus content.
It is a representation of the violence of the events themselves
and of the inner and outer lives of the three main characters, bad
white men, doing bad things in the name of authority. These bear
full brunt of both my empathy and my moral judgment. That said,
it is a propulsive read. And it is a book that reads like nothing
else. To compare this to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake
may be at first complimentary but those are deliberately obscure
exercises in language, and this is a very blunt, forceful and easy
rendering of the American language. Also, you get to this point
very quickly. Do you want to write a book that will be magnanimously
praised or do you want to take the risk and piss off some people?
All of us go for the latter. And why is somebody quoting somebody
else's review [as was the case of the Boston Globe's Alex
Beam quoting a USA Today review of Ellroy's book]?
RB: I'm not the person to ask.
JE: It's what I would call — this is my wife's
line — the specious proximity of media. It's as if
we are all in the same media bag. It's like me being on tour for
this book for seven weeks in Europe and the first question is always,
"What do you think of George W Bush?" My answer is, "What does he
have to do with me?" This is a book about the American 1960's when
Bush was a callow youth.
RB: You were also quoted as liking Bill O'Reilly...
JE: Again that's the specious proximity of media and that's
media-defined. Why should any human being have to be up to date
on shit as diverse as the dealings of the Vatican, my new novel,
abortion activism, George Bush' s latest malapropism or gaffe or
Dick Cheney's latest heart attack? Why should we have to care and
be that diverse and that multi-faceted in our curiosity? It's an
unreasonable demand of media.
RB: Does it seem to you that as we are distanced from the
period you are writing about that the revelations about that period
make it harder to distinguish what is fiction and what is not?
JE: I think so. I think as the facts have been obscured
more and more. And as the facts have been overly dissected and overly
scrutinized and facts have overly proffered both as theory and fact,
it gets very very murky. So here is the ultimate thesis sentence
of the grand design of The Cold Six Thousand: if my human
infrastructure to great public events attended by fictional characters
and real life characters mixed seamlessly, this drama is humanly
plausible, then I have rewritten and encapsulated history successfully
to my own specifications. If you believe the personal stories of
Pete Bounderant, Ward Littell and Wayne Tedrow, Jr., and their horrible
transit through five years of American history, then I've done my
job. I'm fifty three now and healthy and planning on staying healthy
and eating a lot of soy and doing everything right. I don't know
much about corporate politics, and I don't know much about corporate
corruption, but we have most profoundly corporatized presidential
administration in history going on now.
RB: Our first court-appointed president.
JE: Yeah. He is more corporatized than Reagan or Bush 41
so who knows what I'll write about thirty years from now when I
have some perspective. And right now I have none.
RB: What are your plans beyond the third book in the Underworld
USA trilogy?
JE: I'm going to write a book about Warren Harding's presidency
in the 1920's.
RB: Because?
JE: It's interesting. There's a wonderful book called The
Shadow of Blooming Grove by Francis Russell published in 1968.
Blooming Grove is a little town near Marion, Ohio, where Harding
was from, born there in 1865. The Shadow of Blooming Grove is a
rumor that Warren Harding was black or had black blood. That's an
Ellroy story. I don't know where it's going but I know I'm going
to write the book.
RB: Mark Hannah, Harding's s sponsor and creator, a fascinating
character...
 JE:
Right, there was also Harry Daugherty, who was his attorney general
who allegedly met Harding walking out of a whore house to the privy
circa 1900 — Harding was a big handsome guy, they
called him the Roman idol — and he said, "Jesus,
that guy looks like a United Stated Senator." Well, damned
if they didn't make him a United States Senator and later the President.
RB: Is this intended book fiction or non-fiction?
JE: Oh, it's fiction. I'm a novelist.
RB: You live in Kansas City. Is that Kansas or Missouri?
JE: Well, there's a distinction here.There are five counties
that comprise suburban and urban Kansas City: three in Missouri
and two in Kansas. Kansas City, Kansas, is a dump. I live in Johnson
County, Kansas, which is a block and a half from the Missouri border
and which is quite nice. Then there is Jackson, Clay and Platte
Counties in Missouri and it's a beautiful place. It's quiet. It's
peaceful. It's a great place to live.
RB: How does it look when you look out upon America from
your vantage point in the American Heartland?
JE: I don't think about it much. I like to pull the Kafka
routine. Sit perfectly still. Do nothing. This is a raw paraphrase,
I've never read Kafka, frankly, but I know this quote. "The
world will show itself to you." And that's what I do. I have
a nice wood-paneled den. And I just sit there and listen to Brahms,
Bruckner, Mahler, Schubert, and Schumann. Beethoven...
RB: Lots of Germans.
JE: Yeah, lot of Krauts and Austrians and some Ruskies,
too. I sit with my dog and think about things. I rarely think about
America today. I often think about the given periods of history
that I write about.
RB: Have you left behind your noir period?
JE: I made a conscious decision after I wrote the LA Quartet
books [The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential
and White Jazz] that I would never write another book that
could be categorized as a mystery or a thriller. I wanted to become
a historical novelist. That's what I've done with American Tabloid
and The Cold Six Thousand. That's the grand design of the
rest of my career, to recreate 20th-Century American history through
fiction.
RB: You may be a latter-day Gore Vidal? Have you read him?
JE: Burr, 1876 and Lincoln. Yeah, I
read Burr many years ago and I enjoyed it. I want to read
1876. I have always been perversely interested in Grover
Cleveland, and I know nothing about him. Except that he was the
only guy to serve two non-consecutive terms as president.
RB: The 19th century seems to be dim for many Americans.
JE: None of us have lived through it...
RB: Well, of course, but other than the occasional resurrection
for TV, we as a nation seem to be ahistorical. Do you think people
are receptive to historical novels as a version of history?
JE: I think they see them as historical novels. I think
it's an evergreen genre. I don't know how well it's practiced today.
And the 20th century is my school of study and my literary stomping
grounds for the foreseeable future. And I was fortunate to have
lived through the American 1960's. Fortunate enough now that I am
exploiting it. I was almost twelve when the decade began and almost
twenty-two when it concluded. Even though I was a messed up kid
with a kid's self-absorption and a kid's self-obsessed agenda, I
sensed that there was a human infrastructure to these great public
events and that there were satellite characters who on some levels
were influencing public policy. So to be able to go back and write
a book from the perspective of bad men, the unsung leg breakers
of history and be the guy who guns down Martin Luther King and Robert
Kennedy and be there as Gay Edgar Hoover hatches his plots is tremendously
seductive. Now I am tapping into the memory banks of all of us — middle-aged
or older folks now — who have lived through that
era. And I'm having a blast with it.
RB: Your fictional version of history may be the version
that sticks with people. I'm thinking more of younger readers...
 JE:
That would be ironic and it comes back to an assertion I made a
few minutes ago; if the human infrastructure of the human dramas
attending these great public events are plausible in this book,
then it will have that effect. But again, this is a novel. Let me
quote William Butler Yeats, "Poetry makes nothing happen, it
survives a way of happening, a mouth." It's not like this is
Uncle Tom's Cabin and I'm an abolitionist and as a result
of this I will have served the purpose of furthering the abolition
of slavery.
RB: You don't have an agenda? You are writing to entertain?
JE: Shock. Horrify. Appall. Move. Terrorize and obsess before
entertain. And I think all those things, on some levels comprise
and form entertainment. Divert...
RB: You are doing an extensive tour of this country.
JE: I just did seven weeks in Europe and Great Britain,
where the book is a big smash. We published early there so I could
make one continuous trip to Europe. Boston is the second city of
25. I will go home on the July 8.
RB: You're a trooper.
JE: I come to work.
RB: And your reception in Europe?
JE: The book's a best seller in all of the five countries
that I went to. The critics were four to one positive. And the fifth
the critic hated the book. Said it was unreadable. Said it was racist.
Said it was a horrible linguistic indulgence. And as always, in
the bluntest and politest possible way, I will state that any critics
that don't like my book can kiss my fucking ass.
RB: What is the conversation like in Europe about such an
American book?
JE: Wonderful dialogue over there with the critics and English-speaking
readers because of the love/hate relationship they have with America.
America is the great exporter of culture for the world. The Europeans
and the Brits acknowledge this and they view America as a strange,
young and very wild place, and they are appalled by their love of
America and wholly seduced by America as well. So they have a powerfully
ambivalent relationship to our culture, and a book like The Cold
Six Thousand that advances a wild-assed view of America is their
meat.
RB: How well-versed are they in our history? Do they quibble
with you?
JE: They don't quibble. The 60's are permanently embedded
in their memory banks. It is the recent past and the most scrutinized
decade of America's recent past. It is a period that is ripe for
deconstruction, reconstruction and speculation.
RB: Interwoven into the text are documentary insertions
are transcripts of conversations. Are those fiction?
JE: Yeah, they are fiction.
RB: The newspaper headlines that are presented as documentary
insertions, are those fiction?
JE: They are factually valid, chronologically valid encapsulations
of events that occurred.
RB: But not literally the headlines?
JE: No, I rewrote them. I rewrote them to my specs.
RB: Some transcripts have the instructions that they are
to be destroyed after they are read...
JE: You have to assume that everything in direct time and
that you the reader are reading the actual "Burn after reading documents"
as they are proffered. Everything is immediate, everything is in
the present tense even though the text is written in the present
tense.
RB: Tell me about this movie that's been made about you?
JE: This is the fifth Ellroy documentary. And it is in a
league of its own. James Ellroy's Feast of Death was
directed and produced by Vikram Jayanti who is the Academy Award
winning producer of When We Were Kings. He came to me — wanted
to make the documentary — we made it. It's largely
me in conversation with friends of mine from Los Angeles Police
Department and the LA County Sheriff's Department. We shot in Dallas.
We shot in Rowe, Wisconsin. My mother's stomping grounds. My home
in Kansas City. Los Angeles and Las Vegas, which is a primary locale
of my book It's about my life. It's about my work. It's crime. It's
about misogynistic violence. It's about American history. It's 89
minutes. I think it will have a theatrical release in the fall.
RB: I wasn't aware that there were other films about you.
JE: There is an Austrian documentary called James Ellroy:
Demon Dog of American Literature from 1992. There is a British
documentary called White Jazz for a Channel 4 show called
The Red Light Zone in Great Britain. There was an episode
of E TV, True Hollywood Story about me and there was a French documentary
about me directed by a friend of mine, Benoit Cohen. This was for
the French TV series Great Writers of the Twentieth Century.
RB: And White Jazz with Nick Nolte and John Cusack
is scheduled to begin shooting soon?
JE: From your mouth to God's ears.
RB: From your publicist to my eyes...
JE: Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it, yeah.
RB: Have all your books been optioned for movies?
JE: With the exception of The Cold Six Thousand,
and some fool will option that and give me some option money and
then will screw up the development process and it will never get
made. The motion picture business is richly dysfunctional. It's
a snake pit. And, as I used to tell people back when I was paying
alimony payments, "If my movie option income exceeds my alimony
payment I am ahead of the game." Now the alimony has been paid
off and I am very happily married and alimony is a thing of my past
I can only say to Hollywood, 'Thanks for the option money and don't
tell me who is going to be in it because you are never going to
make the fucking thing.'"
RB: You wouldn't be excited to see your books as movies?
JE: I actually wrote the script of White Jazz. They
say they are going to shoot it in the fall with Nolte as Dave the
Enforcer, John Cusack and Uma Thurman and I hope it happens but
I'm not going to lose any sleep if it doesn't.
RB: Any interest in producing movies?
JE: No. I'm a novelist, and I delegate badly, and I have
to be able to control everything, and I have a horror of dealing
with unreasonable people. And Hollywood has cornered the market
on unreasonable people.
RB: Is that part of the reason you moved to Kansas City?
JE: No, I moved out of L.A. in 1981. I'd just been there
too long.
RB: Do you see a lot of movies?
JE: No.
RB: Read a lot?
JE: No. I think a lot. I listen to classical music. I exercise.
I watch boxing on TV and go to the fights occasionally. The only
television show I watch is "The O'Reilly Factor." I like O'Reilly.
I profiled him for GQ.
RB: What do you think about his political ambitions?
 JE:
Let me put it this way. If Bill O'Reilly ever decides to run for
office, I will reach into my checkbook make the maximum allowable
individual campaign contribution and assist him in his quest for
public office to the limits of my ability. He is not a Republican
and is no where near as right-wing as most people think he is. He
shares my hatred and moral concerns about the death penalty among
other things. And he is a pro-environment guy. And I am the world's
biggest lover of wildlife, and I want to secure the lives of the
polar bears. Whatever it costs, whatever it takes.
RB: How is your dog?
JE: Dudley is doing great. Dudley is lean, mean, obscene,
and barely out of his teens. Dudley, my bull terrier, is cross-species
heterosexual. And loves human women. He is an ardent lover of human
women. If you want to walk Dudley — and he won't
go for a walk into Kansas City — you go to the corner
where our house is situated, and you wait for woman to jog by and
he just follows them. Frankly, he has stalker tendencies.
RB: Where do you think he got those?
JE: From his dad, me.
RB: Do you have a working title for the next book?
JE: No I don't. Not yet. I'm thinking about it.
RB: Stylistically, are you inclined to continue the staccato,
short sentence style of...
JE: Whatever the new book mandates in the way of style,
that's where I'll go.
RB: How will it mandate that style?
JE: I don't know. I gotta figure out the new book yet. I
have to outline it. I have to do some research. My researchers have
their marching orders. From that point on, it's a question of thought.
RB: Do you immerse yourself in the period? See a lot of
movies, watch TV footage, read a lot? Or do you just think about
it?
JE: Think about it. I sit in that quiet peaceful, dark paneled,
air-conditioned den of mine with my dog, blast a little Bruckner
and let my thoughts go...
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