Conversations with James Ellroy

James Ellroy

20 James Ellroy Fleming Meeks/1990 From Publishers Weekly (June 15, 1990), vol. 237, no. 24. Reprinted by permission of Publishers Weekly and Fleming Meeks. Dressed in seersucker shorts, tennis shoes, and a crisply starched white shirt, James Ellroy greets PW at the train station on a Saturday afternoon looking like he just stepped away from a backyard barbecue. At forty-two, the solidly built 6'2", 195-pound crime novelist, who last month moved with his wife Mary into a rambling fourteen-room colonial house in New Canaan , Connecticut, looks more like an ad exec and an ex-Ivy League footballer than a high school drop-out and former petty thief, golf caddy, and one-time chronic alcoholic. But Ellroy’s readers—his ninth novel, L.A. Confidential, is just out from Mysterious Press—know better. Ever since his first book, Brown’s Requiem (Avon), appeared as a paperback original in 1981, fans of the hardboiled crime genre have been privy to Ellroy’s vivid renderings of street life in Los Angeles. Ellroy’s unflinching view of this violent landscape perhaps is born of his experiences. His mother was murdered when he was ten years old, and his father, an itinerant accountant, died when he was seventeen. His knowledge of the seamy side of life was reinforced by the twelve years, from 1965 to 1977, that he spent on the streets of his native L.A., drinking, using drugs and sleeping in parks, deserted buildings, and flophouse hotels. Thrown out of high school for disruptive behavior in 1965—he says the last straw came when he insinuated himself into a meeting of the school’s folk song club and sang an obscene song of his own creation—and following the death of his father, he took up burglarizing houses by night to steal liquor, food, and fresh clothes. In all, through 1975, he was arrested and FLEMING MEEKS / 1990 21 convicted twelve times on misdemeanors and served some eight months in jail—a record for which he seems strangely proud. Compared to the criminal careers of the characters in his novels, however, he calls it “a bunch of minor Mickey Mouse crime activity.” He says that, during his hellraising period, he spent daytime hours in libraries, “to get out of the sun,” and there he’d “sit back in the stacks with a bottle of sneaky pete and just read and drink.” In such fashion, he says, he worked his way, chronologically, through twentieth-century American fiction , topping off his literary education with hundreds of paperback crime novels he shoplifted from local drug stores and bookshops. With no family to fall back on—he was an only child whose parents divorced when he was six—he drifted around his old L.A. neighborhood, a mile-and-a-half south of Hollywood, sneaking into friends’ basements to sleep or bunking down in a goodwill box in front of the Mayfair supermarket at Fifth Street and Western Avenue—one of the most treacherous neighborhoods on the West Coast. Through it all, did he have the dreams to sustain him? “Yeah,” Ellroy says, with a guttural groan that frequently punctuates his conversation. “I did a lot of fantasizing about being a great writer.” And then, with a chortle that breaks into an almost maniacal laugh, he launches into a series of hilariously obscene stories—so provocative that their subjects can’t even be hinted at here—which make it clear that writing has never been his single obsession. Ellroy didn’t start writing until 1979, two years after he sobered up, but he says the dream of being a writer never faded. “Booze and drugs,” he says, “are powerful inducers of fantasy.” However, it wasn’t, perhaps, until 1973, when he read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, that he began seeing how his own experiences could be molded into novels. “Wambaugh gave me real street corners that I had walked on—a real sense of here and now.” In 1977, after recovering from a severe lung abscess and a bout with postalcoholic brain syndrome, Ellroy, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, put away the bottle for good. And with an introduction from an old drinking buddy, he landed work as a caddy at the Bel-Air and Hillcrest Country Clubs in Los Angeles, where he carried golf bags for, among others, George C. Scott, Telly Savalas, and Dinah Shore. Two years later, while living in a dingy twenty-five...