Conversations with James Ellroy

The Beatrice Interview: 1995

53 The Beatrice Interview: 1995 Ron Hogan/1995 From Beatrice.com (1995). Reprinted by permission of Ron Hogan. Dig it: Howard Hughes holed up in a hotel suite, strung out on heroin and receiving daily blood transfusions. James Riddle Hoffa at war with the Kennedys . Jack Kennedy ready to jump on anything in a skirt. Sam Giancana and Carlos Marcello scheming to get back the casinos in Havana. Jack Ruby in over his head with some bad, bad men. J. Edgar Hoover sitting in the shadows, watching over everything, listening in through the wiretaps. This is the world of James Ellroy’s new novel, American Tabloid, a world where just about everybody’s working two or more different angles. There’s Pete Bondurant: disgraced L.A. County sheriff, errand boy for Hughes, and private investigator specializing in getting dirt for divorce cases. He ends up taking on side jobs for Hoffa that lead to contract work with the CIA, organizing the Cuban exiles in Miami. There’s Ward Littell, alcoholic FBI agent: sick of harassing pathetic, ineffective Communists, he itches to take on the Mob, but his rash decisions have violent repercussions. And Kemper Boyd: G-man who hustles his way into the Kennedy brothers’ inner circle, and liaison between the Mob and the Company. Since the publication of The Black Dahlia in 1987, James Ellroy’s star has been rapidly climbing. Each subsequent novel in the L.A. Quartet (The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) sold more and garnered higher praise than the last, and Ellroy’s prose developed an increasingly baroque, telegraphic style—his books are what Rudy Rucker is talking about when he asks, “How fast are you? How dense?” Ellroy’s novels are so fast and dense that you can whip right through this book, and hours after you’ve put it down, the ugly parts will still be rebounding inside your head. They combine the dark, shadowy world of film noir with ultraviolent atrocity in a nonstop 54 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY torrent through which his protagonists—and sometimes his readers—try to find some last vestige of morality to which they can cling. When I spoke to Ellroy in Los Angeles, I could see that he’s genuinely excited about the success that his last two novels have achieved, on both the financial and literary levels, and it shows in his exuberance as he speaks. “You know what the biggest thrill of my career is?” he tells me. “Being published by Alfred A. Knopf.” In person, Ellroy drops the psychohipster spiel and talks seriously about his craft and his life. Interviewer: You’ve said recently that “noir is dead” for you now. Ellroy: It’s gone. Interviewer: What’s going on, and what do you see developing in your style as you get out of the noir of L.A. and into the big national story of American Tabloid and beyond? Ellroy: American Tabloid is history as noir on an epic scale. One of the chief ironies of the book is that Boyd, Ward, and Pete get fucked out of the assassination ; they don’t get to kill him. These guys all start out enamored of Jack to one degree or another, and all end up hating him. Their motives for killing him are really very personal, but they are in the grip of events bigger than themselves and don’t even get to kill him. Kemper Boyd dies; he gets off easy. The two surviving protagonists have tried to force history and history has ended up getting them where it hurts the most. The men are getting older. Littell is fifty. Bondurant is forty-three: he’s desperately in love with a woman; he’s heavily compromised. Kennedy is about to die; he knows who’s doing it. He was part of a number of botched plots, but it’s going to happen, and there’s hell to pay. He and Littell have been exiled to Las Vegas, and they’ve got a five-year span coming up in the next book in which to confront themselves; I want that confrontation to be gradual and subtle and dramatic and to push them in some very, very odd directions. I want to show a greater diversity of character and motive, and I want to see these bad, bad, bad, bad men come to grips with their humanity. Noir is dead for me because historically, I think...