A HEEL GETS HIS DUE
Sleazy former cop and onetime supporting character Freddy Otash is out front in James Ellroy’s latest
James Ellroy lives in a black-and-white Hollywood, his novels set in a midcentury Los Angeles filled with faded film stars and corrupt cops, movie moguls with morals missing, and beautiful, beleaguered women.
It’s a world he’s captured in books from “The Black Dahlia” to “American Tabloid” to most recently “This Storm.” And in his new book, “Widespread Panic,” Ellroy gets personal. Its protagonist, Freddy Otash, was a real person, an LAPD cop turned private investigator for Confidential, a ruthless rag in the ’50s that sold millions with its sleazy, salacious
celebrity gossip. Otash is a supporting character in Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy and the focus of the novella “Shakedown,” which was reworked as the first third of “Widespread Panic,” and Ellroy knew him before his death in 1992.
“For years, he used to go to Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen in Beverly Hills,” Ellroy says by phone from his Denver home recently. “And I knew he was a shakedown man and the guy who verified stories for Confidential magazine.”
“Widespread Panic” opens with Otash in Purgatory, locked out of heaven until his earthly sins are forgiven. The lords of limbo offer him a deal: Write down all your crimes and misdemeanors and they might spring him for a permanent residence, so Freddy starts to write.
“Freddy gets what he deserves for his abysmal behavior throughout all three of these pieces” of “Widespread Panic,” Ellroy says.
Finding Freddy
In 1989, as Ellroy was finishing “White Jazz,” the final book of novel group L.A. Quartet, he flew to Miami to meet with Otash, hoping to use a fictionalized version of him as the protagonist for “American Tabloid.”
“I thought because he was around the mob and Jimmy Hoffa I would make him the hero,” he says. “So I had a series of conversations with Freddy, and I was going to pay him some good money for this.
“And I immediately knew he was atrocious and a [BS] artist, and I judged him sternly,” Ellroy says. “You don’t go out and wreck lives en masse the way he did with Confidential and retain your humanity.”
For what Ellroy says would have been $30,000 to use the still-living Otash as a character in the book, he wanted him to agree to a few things, key among them that he wouldn’t contradict the fictional narrative of “American Tabloid” on the record.
“It’s a novel, Freddy,” he says of the case he made to Otash. “The mob knows you didn’t collude with them to kill JFK. So does the CIA. It’s a [bleepin’] novel.” Otash refused, and Ellroy says he cut his losses. “I gave him some go-away money, we shook hands, and I concocted the character of Pete Bondurant,” he says. “And then Freddy crapped out in October of ’92 and I could have used him for free. But I’d already committed to Bondurant, who would have been a better character anyway.”
Novella to novel
The 2012 novella “Shakedown,” Ellroy’s first onlineonly work, was on its way to joining a pair of his longform journalism pieces in a paperback edition when he realized he could expand it into an Otash novel. Now “Shakedown” opens “Widespread Panic,” followed by the linked sections titled “Pervdog” and “Gonesville.”
Otash is at the center of all the action, but as with nearly every Ellroy novel, a cast of long-gone and libelsafe real-life characters fleshes out the story, from Bmovie stars like Joi Lansing and Steve Cochran to Alisters like James Dean (the filming of “Rebel Without a Cause” is the focus of “Gonesville”) and Rock Hudson.
“I just went wild,” Ellroy says. “If you look at this Freddy Otash, he’s largely comedic and satirical. I mean, he’s a buffoon, with his stupid [stuff] with women, his self-pity, his brutality, his gleeful greed and avarice.”
The rough-and-tumble world of Confidential magazine and its ilk flourished in the ’50s in part because of the tight-laced strictures of society at the time, says Ellroy.
“The shroud of repression and censorship created the desire in Joe and Jane America to refute the movie magazine culture, which portrayed all of these horndogs and drunks and fiends as good family people who are lawabiding and patriotic, go to church on Sunday,” Ellroy says. “And instead show [them as] demoralized, desiccated and perverted as they really are.
“The language had to fit,” he says of the ring-a-dingding zip of tabloid talk in “Widespread Panic. “The whole book is about the male id. It’s about the transcendently [bleeped]-up, crazed American male at midcentury, who embodies all these attributes — rage, self-pity, grandiosity.
“And it’s a religious book,” Ellroy says, though a Sunday school teacher would blanch at most of it. “He’s paying for his numerous sins, and God’s given him this out: ‘Well, you can pay for your sins … .’ ”
Podcast and paramour
Ellroy is working on a second Freddy Otash book now.
But before that arrives, the man who famously doesn’t own a TV or computer, and has never personally gone on the internet, will debut as a podcaster with “James Ellroy’s Hollywood Death Trip” in August.
“What appealed to me was the money, because they optioned six of my GQ and Vanity Fair pieces and they’re paying me a nice fee to read the pieces unabridged,” he says of the deal that was struck with Audio Up and its partner and Ellroy acquaintance, actor Dennis Quaid.
One of the pieces, “My Mother’s Killer,” is his investigative journalism piece that explored the murder of his mother, which later was expanded into the memoir “My Dark Places.” Others deal with homicides of people from the well-known, such as actor Sal Mineo, who also shows up in “Widespread Panic,” to the less so, like a high school contemporary of Ellroy’s who was killed in 1965.
Those pieces offer hints of the lost and lonely women for whom Ellroy has carried a torch in fiction and journalism and his heart over the years. Actress Lois Nettleton, to whom “Widespread Panic” is dedicated, lived long and died of natural causes, but she might be the quintessential role model for the type.
“I only saw her in four episodes of ‘Naked City’ and four episodes of ‘The Fugitive,’ and it was just sort of, ‘Ooh, baby,’ ” he says.
Years later, a friend and editor at Movieline magazine asked him to write a piece on “The Fugitive” TV series of the ’60s, and Ellroy decided to focus on the love interests of David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, wrongly accused of killing his wife, on the run across the country in search of the one-armed man he believes did the dirty deed.
“Wherever he goes, he falls in love with the swingingest, grooviest, most individual, most intelligent, most forceful woman in the town,” Ellroy says. “He’s a lightning rod, and just, boy oh boy, he can sense romantic and sexual discontent.”
After the story ran, he tracked down Nettleton’s address and sent her flowers and a note, to which she replied with a card. Nettleton died in 2008.
“I send her flowers a couple of times a year at a Catholic cemetery, St. Raymond’s, in the Bronx,” Ellroy says.
He recently rewatched “To Dream Without Sleep,” a 1961 episode of “Naked City” in which Nettleton plays “a lonely hearts girl” who falls for a philanderer she doesn’t know is married.
“She’s devastating in this,” he says of the actress. “She is the lonely, haunted, love-starved woman and she owns it.
“And that’s where I got the whole thing with these women for my books.”
“If you look at this Freddy Otash, he’s largely comedic and satirical. I mean, he’s a buffoon, with his stupid [stuff] with women, his selfpity, his brutality, his gleeful greed and avarice.” — James Ellroy, about the main character in his latest book, “Widespread Panic”
“The whole book is about the male id. It’s about the transcendently [bleeped]up, crazed American male at midcentury, who embodies all these attributes — rage, self-pity, grandiosity.”
— James Ellroy