Conversations with James Ellroy

James Ellroy: To Live and Die in L.A.

132 James Ellroy: To Live and Die in L.A. Craig McDonald/2006 From Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations about the Writing Life, published by Bleak House Books, Madison WI, 2009. Reprinted by permission of Craig McDonald. In May 2001, I sat down with James Ellroy in the lobby of an Ann Arbor, Michigan hotel to discuss the second volume of his Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy , The Cold Six Thousand. The novel, the sequel to his hugely successful and much acclaimed American Tabloid, had just become the first of the author’s hardcovers to crack the New York Times’ best-seller list. At fifty-three, Ellroy was three-quarters of the way through an international book tour that had taken him across France, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain. Ellroy was starting to push across North America. It was an ambitious publicity campaign far exceeding all previous junkets attempted by an author already renowned for the most audacious of book promotions. But Ellroy was racing toward a wall he would later write that friends and family couldn’t stop him from slamming into. As the time for my 2001 interview with Ellroy neared, I started noticing strange and ominous comments Ellroy made to interviewers in the days leading up to our exchange. He increasingly remarked about the rigors of his world tour as the campaign continued. “Really, frankly, when you’re on a tour like this you’re too busy staying alive. The logistics and prosaics of this kind of tour more than anything beats you down,” he confided to me. He talked of his inability to get sleep, and his growing obsession with his own health. Eventually, Ellroy would write about the psychological and physical toll taken by his Cold Six Thousand tour in one of his last articles for G.Q. (Ellroy ’s long-standing gig with G.Q. Magazine abruptly ended when he and a CRAIG MCDONALD / 2006 133 host of other authors were booted following the ousting of revered editor Art Cooper.) But his ordeal was far from over. What followed was a five-year struggle that stalled the author’s writing of the final installment of his ambitious Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy and changed his life forever. Ellroy, who had many years before beaten back addictions to alcohol and drugs, found himself increasingly reliant on sleep medication. As he would later describe it, his remarkable brain turned in on itself. “My mind looped obsessively . . . I could not cut myself off from the world. All my compartments were sieves . . . My work habits were megalomaniacal . . . Anxiety drove me back to my desk at all hours . . . I did interviews with cold sweats . . . I was at the height of my public recognition and going insane.” As he would reveal in a long, blunt, and candid essay published in Los Angeles Times Magazine in the late summer of 2006, in the summer of 2003, Ellroy overdosed three times. He enrolled himself in a rehab program, and, eventually, endured the end of his marriage to novelist/journalist Helen Knode. The following exchange consists of two interviews conducted with James Ellroy. The first took place in autumn of 2004, when Ellroy was starting his climb back. He was promoting Destination: Morgue! L.A. Tales, an omnibus of his uncollected nonfiction and essays penned for G.Q., as well as three new novellas featuring L.A. homicide detective “Rhino” Rick Jenson and his alliterative inamorata Donna Donahue—a thinly disguised version of actress and Ellroy friend Dana Delaney.1 (Delaney was also the author’s choice to portray his mother in any adaptation of his memoir My Dark Places.) Jenson is obsessed by the unsolved murder of Stephanie Gorman2 —a particularly brutal unsolved sex crime that also receives nonfiction treatment in Destination: Morgue! James Ellroy had recently resettled from Kansas City to Carmel, California , when we spoke in 2004. He had also made news when he penned an introduction for the book Black Dahlia Avenger in which retired LAPD detective Steve Hodel claimed his own father, George Hodel, killed Elizabeth Short—the woman at the center of Ellroy’s breakthrough novel, The Black Dahlia. While Ellroy questioned some aspects of the case as laid out by Hodel, he expressed his belief that Hodel’s solution was likely as close to the correct one as can ever be expected. 134 CONVERSATIONS WITH JAMES ELLROY Ellroy had also recently taken...