West LA Noir
As is his style James Ellroy goes deeply into the
underbelly of Hollywood. Most of the activity takes place in Brentwood, Pacific
Palisades, and Malibu. His vehicle is a novelized version Freddy Otash, a
private investigator and police officer who was a well-known Hollywood fixer. The
time is Spring/Summer 1962 when Otash was hired by Jimmy Hoffa to find dirt on
the Kennedy’s, especially with their involvement with Marilyn Monroe. Monroe
comes off as a drug addicted psychotic who was just fired from what would have
been her last movie, “Something’s Gotta Give.” She dies of an overdose with
suspicions something more was involved.
Along the way we meet Peter Lawford who is married to
Kennedy sister Pat. Lawford’s role is to find young women for the Kennedy
brothers. Meantime his wife Pat rekindles her affair with Otash.
Ellroy take us into the drug dens and sex pads of
Hollywood. Most of the debauchery is known to LA police chief William Parker
and LA sheriff Peter Pitchess. We also have a younger Daryl Gates who would
later become LA’s chief of police.
Mixed into all of this is Darryl Zanuck’s 20th
Century Fox which is hemorrhaging cash coming from huge overruns on “Cleopatra”
an epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. As a side note Fox would
later sell half its movie lot in what was to become Century City.
Otash is a pill-popping alcoholic who kills a couple of people as the somewhat convoluted plot moves along. I arrived in LA two years later with little knowledge of the depravity the book depicts, probably exaggerated. My warning for the reader is that this is a long book, 448 pages in the print edition.
For the full Amazon URL see: West LA Noir (amazon.com)
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