Hungry Like a Dog: James Ellroy Will Not Stop Being James Ellroy

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James Ellroy, now 74, is known for his sprawling, densely plotted and highly-stylized novels about America in the mid-twentieth century and the desperate and corrupt men, real and fictional, who populated it. He’s the type of literary iconoclast that was discontinued long ago. A street-fighting, loud mouthed prose practitioner who bucks polite discourse. He possesses an almost mythic origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered in an infamous unsolved homicide case in his native Los Angeles. From the furnace of this grief sprung an obsession with crime and the invisible, corrupt forces that drive politics and the underworld. If you were to focus only on his venomous presence in television interviews or with his self-identifying as an authoritarian, or with the fact that his novels can portray violence and human cruelty on a nauseating scale, it would be easy to forget that Ellroy is also uproariously funny. 

“Listen brother, I’ve got a 17-year-old boy’s hard-on for being great and doing great work,” he tells me over the phone in his signature low, booming voice. “And I’m 74 and it ain’t going away.” His humor is on grand display in his latest novel, 2021’s Widespread Panic, which finds Freddy Otash, a Hollywood fixer who knows where all the bodies are buried, stuck in purgatory and forced to confess his evil deeds if he wants to get to heaven. There’s a scene early in the novel where Otash hosts a private screening of a surreptitiously filmed celeb sex tape for an audience that includes Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson, Ronald Reagan and Jean Paul Sartre. In the back of the darkened room Charlie Parker nods off on heroin while James Dean jerks off by the pizza buffet. It’s hard not to get the sense reading this stuff that Ellroy, firmly in his third act, is having the time of his life writing. 

Ellroy isn’t bluffing when he says he isn’t going away. On top of Widespread Panic and its sequel, which he is halfway through writing, Ellroy is working on the third novel in his second “LA Quartet’ series and, in a surprising move for the self-proclaimed luddite, he has produced two podcasts with Audible. One, Hollywood Death Trip, largely based on a suite of articles he wrote for GQ and Vanity Fair, was released last month and sees Ellroy exploring notorious unsolved murder cases beginning with his mother’s. The second is an upcoming audio production of perhaps Ellroy’s most celebrated novel American Tabloid, due in early 2023, with Ellroy reading the underlying narration and an impressive cast of actors including Brian Cox, Bobby Cannavale, Elliot Gould, Matt Dillon and more reading for the characters. I recently spoke to Ellroy about Widespread Panic, his surprising foray into podcasting, his love of dogs and his hatred of James Dean. 

You seem to be having a lot of fun in Widespread Panic. Here’s a line that exemplifies this to me. You write: “The moment vibrates in VistaVision and swervy Swish-O-Scope. A piano noodles a nocturne and pounds a polonaise.” (Ellroy cackles madly through the phone) Are you having as much fun as it seems? 

I was having a blast. And you got right to the heart of it right off the bat. It’s a goof. It’s a fucking comedy. It’s laughs at the expense of Hollywood and Freddy’s a buffoon and he’s suffused with stupid maleness. He’s always falling in love. Women are always leaving him for shitheads. He’s always on the prowl. So you have to appreciate this kind of male humor to appreciate the book. And yeah, I was also just having a lot of fun sticking it to movie people I hate like James Dean and Nick Ray and movies I hate like Rebel Without A Cause. 

What do you hate exactly about James Dean? And what made him an effective character to slot into this story?

Well, he did have a verified relationship with the real life Freddy Otash. They did meet in the manner that they meet in Widespread Panic where Freddy catches him shoplifting at the Hollywood Ranch Market and enlists him as his provocateur and spy. But I never liked him. I always thought he was full of shit. And he treated people very poorly. He was intemperate. He was full of shit. He was phony baloney to the nth degree. And Nick Ray perved on Sal Mineo, underage boy. Perved on Natalie Wood, underage girl. 

He carried on a sexual relationship with Natalie Wood throughout the production of that film, right? 

Yeah well if it moved and it was young he didn’t give a shit what gender it was. He was a horseshit communist fuckhead and I had fun sticking it to him. And I can’t wait to hear what they had to say about it in France where, you know, they have the auteur theory and all that bullshit. Film directors are gods over there. So, yeah, I make him a communist and a fascist and a criminal. It was fun to do. 

Do you see any of yourself in Freddy? Like him you scandalize these iconic figures and you often employ the language of tabloids in your novels. You’ve written extensively about the voyeuristic impulse that drove you when you were younger, the desire to prowl and peep into windows. Freddy’s also an amphetamine addict, which I know you once were. 

Yeah exactly. He’s a peeper, he’s a dope fiend. He’s a booze hound. He’s an amphetamine fiend, which I was. But I’ve been sober for a long time. He likes looking in windows. He’s prone to peeping in Hancock Park. I grew up, after my mother’s death in the Southside of Hollywood and Hancock Park had all these bit ritzy pads and good looking girls who all went to Marlborough School and wore pastel colored long dresses and saddle shoes. So yeeaaaah, that’s Freddy and that’s me.

One last question on Widespread Panic. The atom bomb looms large over this novel. Freddy says “the bomb blast made me.” Bob Dylan once referred to Elvis and Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis as being “atom bomb fueled.” Don DeLillo has touched on this idea too, that the atom bomb was a kind of catalyst in American culture in some intangible way. Do you think that’s true and why was it a symbol you wanted to play with? 

I was having fun with the atom bomb. Freddy thinks the atom bomb is cool. And you know, I’ve always liked the atom bomb. I never thought the atom bomb was gonna go off in America. I’m glad we had the atom bomb. I’m glad we dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and you know if we nuked Moscow we wouldn’t be in the shit we are in today. George S. Patton and Winston Churchill wanted to go and take the reds out, to my mind a very, very good idea. But you know, hindsight is 2020. If you think about it…. Do you like Jazz? Duke Ellington renamed his band briefly in ’58 to Duke Ellington and his Spacemen. And Count Basie played a long summer engagement in ’58 billed as Count Basie and his Atomic Band. It’s the idea that there’s something that powerful. So the Count and the Duke. These powerful and genius musicians had to go atomic. There was the atomic drive-in and the a-bomb burger. All kinds of stuff.

Now tell me a bit about these podcasts you’ve been working on. 

Well, there’s James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip, which is five pieces of mine from GQ and Vanity Fair and I read them in my punchy style. Man, I don’t even have a computer so all this shit is completely green to me. 

Well that’s why I was surprised when I heard you were doing a podcast. It seemed to be a curious choice. On one hand it feels like a perfect marriage since you’re a great orator and I think people would listen to you read the phone book, but on the other hand I’ve heard that you’ve never even used the internet. So I was sort of shocked. 

Well, here we are. And by the way, we also did, this is the second podcast, in 12 parts – verbatim, unexpurgated, unabridged – American Tabloid. I read the narration all the way through and then name actors read the major roles. There’s period music, there are period radio clips, the actors who play John and Robert Kennedy are astonishing. 

Is there part of you though that resents that you have to take this novel which is so great on its own and shoehorn it into another medium. Why shouldn’t the book be enough? 

No. Because it’s unabridged. Because it’s 100 percent the book. I can’t tell you how people will intake the podcast. Are they gonna be scratching their nuts or something, walking around their pad, doing the dishes, playing with their kids or are they gonna sit down in a chair and listen? What will the listener retain? We don’t know. 

What made you turn on the film adaptation of L.A. Confidential. It seemed like you were a public champion for it for quite some time and then at some point you turned. What happened? 

Well, Curtis Hanson was alive and more than anyone else he made the movie happen so at first I was enthusiastic and then through repeated viewings I became ever more conscious of the flaws of the movie and the fact that it’s about as deep as a tortilla. The film is caught between wanting to be a social statement, though it’s very namby-pamby in that way, and with its other pole, wanting to be a crowd pleaser. I think the performances are god awful. I think Russell Crowe is impotent. Guy Pierce is like a good looking, blinky-eyed male model. The 6’8 James Cromwell is just a slimy villain with a bad brogue. And the 4’9 Danny DeVito is just a jabbering midget. And Kim Basinger, the big Academy Award winner, floats through the movie like a fucking zombie. It’s awful! It’s done on the cheap, the plot doesn’t even make sense and Curtis Hanson, God bless him, has left us so I just cut loose on it now. It’s a turkey. 

Are there any adaptations of your work that you’ve enjoyed? Did you like De Palma’s The Black Dahlia? 

No. (laughs) They give you some money brother. They give you some dough for work you’ve already done. And it may or may not sell books. The Black Dahlia movie sold me a shitload of books. L.A. Confidential did not.

I’m surprised to hear that seeing that L.A. Confidential was a far more successful film than Black Dahlia. 

Well, and this is just off the top of my head, looking at royalty statements over the years, the Black Dahlia movie, universally reviled, sold in about seven weeks three hundred times the books than the universally revered L.A. Confidential would in twenty odd years. 

This is a bit of a random question but I have to ask you about this because I just read about it and I’m a fan of both of yours. What ever happened with the film you were brought on to write for William Friedkin to direct? How did that fizzle out?

He fired me. He didn’t like me. It was about the mob lawyer Sidney Korshak. A provocateur and power player. Friedkin didn’t like the work I was doing. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. You know something interesting though? I never liked Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. Too midwestern. Too Protestant. Not a New York guy at all. And when I told Friedkin this he totally agreed that he was wrong for the role. Do you know who he wanted for the role?

Who? 

Jackie Gleason. 

Wow. Yeah that’s an entirely different film. 

Yeah it is. The 54 year old Jackie Gleason. A fat slob Irish guy from Brooklyn. 

I don’t know how much I can picture Jackie Gleason in those big action sequences in The French Connection but it’s a cool what-if. 

There’s a bit in the middle of that movie which is soundless and they’re just all over the East Side of Manhattan in the cold leapfrog tailing people and following them up and down streets. It’s great. 

Just to get back to your writing real quick. Your novels are not read for purely escapist purposes and you continue to find new converts. I know you’re not interested in contemporary culture or the political world of America these days but I’m wondering what you think it is that keeps people interested in your work, it seems as if it maybe speaks to the times they live and not just the times in which they are set. 

The reason my books have lasted this long, the reason I am held in such high esteem is I have never faltered. I have written great book after great book. I have taken all kinds of risks. I write enormous books set in different historical periods. I mean, Perfidia is 700 pages long. The ambition, no other crime writer has gone out, consciously, to carve out the path that I have. So whoever the other crime writers might be today or the people of my generation who have stuck around, I know and they know they are not of my league and not of my caliber. And so there’s enduring literary value there. I am the most honored crime writer if you look at mainstream honors. I’m considered in Europe and in academia as the greatest crime writer ever. The books are great, you know, they are calculated to be great. Listen brother, I’ve got a 17-year-old boy’s hard-on for being great and doing great work. And I’m 74 and it ain’t going away. It feels good to be 74 and get up and be writing one big ass, wild ass, crazy, provocative, offensive, heavily plotted, wildly corrupt and insanely funny book after another.

So there’s no part of you that wants to retire and just put your feet up? 

Brother, I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment of that. I’m looking to American Tabloid, the big podcast and seeing what kind of ruckus that creates but what I’m really looking forward to is the next page I write in this book, the second Otash book and then the third book in the second “LA Quartet.” And I got a biography coming out from a British writer. I live in the work that I do. I’m a hungry mother fucker. I’m hungry like a dog. I identify with dogs. I love dogs. I’ll walk up to any pit bull in the street and get down and lay some love on him, on his good lookin pit bull ass. I’ll walk up to pit bulls I’ve never met and kiss ‘em. Shit like that. Dogs love me because they know I am of them.

Is it true that you have an imaginary dog? 

Yeah I do. Her name’s Ingrid. She’s a badass bull terrier. She’s an immortal corrupt cop in the Denver Police Department. Good lookin motherfucker too. She shoots armed robbers in the back and you know, amphetamine addict. A lot like the characters in my books. 

Police and crime itself has become such a political football and in some ways they always have been, but feels like in the last few years it’s reached a boiling point. I’m wondering what you think the role of the police are in the collective American imagination? 

I don’t know. And, you know, I don’t like talking about politics. I’m very uninformed and I don’t follow the media. It’s always 1962, 1964, 1950, 1958, 1942. You know, I think about the past. You know how I spend my evenings? See, I never finished high school. I grew up on the southern edge of Hollywood but I didn’t go to Hollywood High School. I was in the Fairfax district. So boo-hoo boo-hoo, I didn’t get to go to Hollywood High which had the grooviest girls in the world. And that’s no shit. So I had an old assistant of mine track down a bunch of Hollywood High yearbooks from that time and I just look at pictures of high school girls. Oh yeaaah. Claudia Cohen! I remember her. Oh yeah. Lynn Howke. Hubba hubba. And these fuckin women are 70-80 years old now. I just live in the past. 

Well, James have you considered getting on Facebook where you could probably just reconnect with all these people? 

I don’t want to reconnect with them! These girls were all temporary goddesses to me, you know. It’s always 1964 and maybe I’ll get a date to the prom. Did I? No. But, you get it. 

Maybe the paramount thing that comes up when you’re written about is your mother and her murder. I think it strikes people, endlessly, as just a very compelling origin story for a crime writer. But I’m wondering if that whole narrative has gotten old or tiresome to be confronted with again and again, or if it’s just something you’ve accepted as being unavoidable? 

The story is old. You’ve read My Dark Places so you know, I tried to find my mother’s murderer with Bill Stoner a brilliant retired sheriffs homicide detective, and we failed. I did my job though and the book honored her. Now that said, there’s a disingenuous quality to My Dark Places that I didn’t acknowledge at the time. It’s a dynamic. The older I get the more I realize I don’t know why I did what I did. I came to My Dark Places and I was already a very accomplished novelist and a very skilled fabricator and weaver of facts and fiction so my natural instinct was to make my mother’s death the deus ex machina, the fount of whatever genius I produced and the fount of my fixation on American history and L.A. history and crime in general. And it isn’t that simple. I don’t know why I did what I did when I did it. I was always a remote kid with a furious inner life and a wild imagination, a loner kid and fabricator. My parents had a closet full of Life Magazine’s and I would look at them and concoct narratives to go with the pictures. And it makes me happy to live in the past. I have a high old time looking at the pictures of the Hollywood High girls. And people probably think that’s crazy. And people think it’s crazy that I love the cops as much as I do. The genesis of that was probably a cop on the fateful day my mother was killed, buying me a candy bar out of a vending machine at the El Monte Police station. I’ve been a fool for cops ever since. So you write from police perspectives in 1945 or 1958 or 1962 and people attribute their every thought, their every untoward statement or prejudice to you, they don’t understand. It’s not a moral statement. It’s a picture of a character that I invented. So now what I stand up for is fiction, most specifically the novel. I tell people at book gigs, don’t ask me what’s real and what’s not, I make this shit up. If you believe it when you read it then it’s real.

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