James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born Lee Earle Ellroy in Los Angeles in 1948. After his parents divorced in 1954, James moved with his mother to El Monte, a low income area in LA where, four years later, she was murdered when James was just ten. That still unsolved murder was the subject of Ellroy's non-fiction work, My Dark Places, published 1996.

Ellroy came late to writing. His teens and twenties were marked by being expelled from high school and receiving a dishonorable dscharge from the army, as well as periods living rough, jail terms for burglary and addiction to Benzedrix (a sinus inhaler) and alcohol.

Ellroy eventually got sober and while earning steady money as a golf caddy began to mentally formulate a mystery plot which would become Brown's Requiem, his first novel, published in 1981 when Ellroy was 33.

Ellroy's best-known books include LA Confidential, the inspiration for the eponymous film, American Tabloid and, now, the latter's sequel, The Cold 6000.

James Ellroy lives in Kansas City.

Danny Ilegems: JFK is seen as a hero in popular American culture, that isn’t the way you seem to think of him in The Cold 6000.

James Ellroy: No way. For me, Jack was second rate. Jack Kennedy fucked the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, he fucked them. But it’s the truth, Jack was a second rate politician. He had taken favours and money from the mob on the way up and then after the Bay of Pigs he pissed everyone off. He kept promising the Cuban exiles that there would be a second invasion, he turns up at the big celebration for the exiles and waves their Brigade flag. All the while promising them that they would go back to Cuba and have their homeland back. But that was shit, it was never going to happen.

Why was that?

Well, Jack’s brother Bobby was fighting organized crime at the same time but Jack had actually taken help from organized crime. So he fucked with them and they got really angry. He pissed them off, and because of the revolution in Cuba they lost $250,000 - $500,000 per day in Casino money. My God, they were pissed with him. He fucked with the exiles, he fucked with the CIA, he wanted to smash it into a thousand pieces at one point. But most of all, Jack knows that he has done a deal with Nikita Krushchev. Krushchev removed the missiles from Cuba in return for the US promising that there would be no second invasion. So all the while Jack is promising that the exiles will go back to Cuba he knows that isn’t true. So this unholy mob: gangsters, the CIA and the Cuban exiles have him killed.

You mention the role of Bobby Kennedy in this as well.

Sure. A lot of it was to get back at Bobby who was the greatest crime fighter of his age. But in the end it came down to the fact that someone had to die for Cuba, and it all came down to Jack. People think he was a great man. That’s shit. He was getting us further into Vietnam, not getting us out, at the time he was killed. I mean Jack was an anti-communist and cold war warrior. He was keen to fight the Vietnamese. But I mean, the Vietnamese communists – you can’t beat them, It’s just like the Muslims; the ones you are fighting want to die. They think they are going to Allah, you can’t beat them.

But at the same time you are dismissive of those getting too involved in all the Kennedy conspiracy theories.

Well, yeah. Here’s the deal as far as the US goes. If we were to know exactly who did it, you know, the exact evidence, physical evidence – all of it – well, it would be a big story, a massive story, maybe for a month, maybe six weeks. Obviously it would be bigger in the US than anywhere else. But afterwards we’d go back to hoof and mouth, George W Bush, Tony Blair, China, Jacques Chirac, all the usual stuff that the networks cover every day. In that sense, it’s irrelevant. These things happen. They still happen though. That is the nature of conspiracies, some are formal and some are informal, and they are generally made by constantly shifting cabals of men who have like-minded repressive agendas. But you can lose your life in these explanations and theories. You can get lost in this thing. The grassy knoll, the multiple killers theory, all of it. But there are people who do it all the time. You know the phrase `get a life`? Well, it was written about these people.

So why is America so obsessed with Cuba?

The Americans want Cuba back so they can have a place where Anglo Saxon people can cut loose. A former girlfriend of mine met Graham Greene on a flight to Cuba in 1957. He told her "I never fuck boys in Cuba and I never fuck girls in America" – these were the kind of people drawn to Cuba. It was their playground, and yeah, they still want it back. There is a CIA guy, still alive, who was big in the Cuban cause. People say he was involved in the Kennedy hit. And the guy talks big about how much he loves Cuba and loves the Cuban people. But the minute you hear him speak you know that he’s a homosexual and he wants to go to a country where he can fuck brown boys. Which is why Cuba was so popular with Americans. But what really hurt them, I think, was that Castro had the last laugh.

And by using fiction and fictional characters do you think you can illustrate this better than all these conspiracy books that say they deal in facts?

Sure. That’s historical fiction for you. Also, no one can sue you, they can’t sue you when they are dead. Take Watergate. I stop there because there are no groovy killings, and much less panache amongst the main Watergate-players. You know, it’s all shoddy break-ins and stuff. By then, people like J Edgar Hoover are already years into getting shot up by Doctor Feelgood, with liquid methamphetamine and male hormones. And the people who are still alive like John Erlichmann, well, they would sue you.

And Hoover? What was he?

I would say that he was the quintessential twentieth century American fiend. People say he was always dressed in women’s clothes, that’s rubbish. I don’t think he was overtly homosexual, not overtly, but he was homosexual. He was some kind of Victorian gay, far too discreet to go out dressed as a woman. Of course he would also have been the worlds’ ugliest drag queen.

Are all the dates and facts in the book real?

That’s right. With The Cold 6000 I had two researchers who lined it all up for me. You know, it’s like this. In reality Bobby Kennedy hated a guy called Carlos Marcello, he was Sicilian Italian. He may have been born in Tunis, maybe even in Guatemala. But he was a mob guy and a rightist, funding anti-communist activity because the mob want their casinos back. So anyway, you know from research that Bobby Kennedy was messing with him. Stuff like Bobby had the border patrol pick up Marcello at his house in New Orleans and try to deport him. You know, fly him out of the country to Guatemala. So, what does Marcello do but walk off to go to the bathroom and then he’s never seen again. Meanwhile, not far away at the same time the CIA was staging exercises to prepare for the Bay of Pigs.

So get this. They go to deport Marcello on April 4th, the Bay of Pigs invasion went down on the 17th and Marcello was definitely around and involved. So, in the book why not have some CIA guys rescue him, like my character Bondurant. That is how, when you go into the writing a book like this, you get your facts and locations sorted out. Then you link the dots there fictionally.

And then what happens?

Well, all these events are intersecting and then three months later basically someone has to go, someone has to pay, and it’s Jack. I mean a few weeks before he gets killed, Jack was due to do a parade in Miami, but an FBI informant leaked this mob threat and the Miami drive was cancelled. But Dallas wasn’t. And I think Carlos Marcello and some of the others thought, “we can get away with this”. And all down the line people know who and why but they themselves are all implicated, they’re all guilty, and that’s why no one has spoken.

Then at the same time up pops Lee Harvey Oswald, supposedly giving out these leaflets saying ‘Fair play to Cuba’, looking like he’s supporting Castro, but in fact the address on his leaflets is the exact same as the heart of the ultra right wing Cuban movement. Why would that be? Why would this little guy giving out commie propaganda have the same address as the Cuban fascists?

But you still try to humanise these right wing killers in the book.

Sure. I mean, your historical perspective has to be sound. Because their rationale was “Hey! This punk motherfucker Jack Kennedy, whose Dad bought him the presidency. The same guy who we did favours on his way up, this motherfucker did this to us!”

But you have to show the karmic cost of these characters actions, what goes around, comes around. It all comes back to get them in the end. But Bondurant (the CIA operative in the book) sees his rationale as “these Kennedys have no excuses.” Even when Bondurant is in Vietnam in the 1950s to shift heroin for the CIA it’s not hard to portray that as a French American anti-communist would see it. And it’s through their eyes that we see the war build-up. Not through the politicians or the press.

You also don’t have much time for the modern press in the USA.

That’s right. I mean I love America. I’m a consuming American but part of me is a conservative and part of me is Marxist. And when you take the media and Clinton you have a great lesson in what situational morality gets you in America. I mean Bill Clinton is a horrible human being. A monstrously ugly, duplicitous, lying, thieving, woman abusing sack of shit. And the media in the USA is basically soft left. They supported Clinton. So they let him get a way with all these things.

I mean, George W Bush is too stupid to know that the death penalty doesn’t work. But Clinton and Gore are smart guys, they know that it doesn’t work but they still implement it, even in their own states because they know that 70% of Americans want it and it will make them popular.

But the karmic bill will come due to Clinton. Just like Bondurant. I don’t know how, maybe by the estrangement of his daughter for example. One day she might say `Dad, my God, you’ve passed on this terrible legacy to me.` Despite all his power the bill will come due...to Bill.

But isn’t the fact that George W Bush is stupid a frightening thing for you? What about the influence of his father, another CIA man?

Well George W isn’t as bad as you think. His father George Bush Snr was just a figurehead, a front, for the CIA. He was picked out because he wasn’t too right wing. He would not make waves. He wouldn’t complain. Ronald Reagan even went around him to do the Contra stuff and all that. I mean after the war it was completely different: Allen Dulles let the CIA go nuts in Guatemala, Persia and Vietnam after the French were kicked out. Eisenhower was basically determined that there would be no more full scale wars after seeing what he saw in WW2. So he let the CIA off the leash. For those eight years under Eisenhower the CIA has never been as powerful as then. Compared to what they were then they are nothing. What you have with Bush Jnr. is a relative social moderate, a relative laissez-faire capitalist. He wants to preserve the status quo and rattle a few sabres around the world, but his money is no dirtier than any other oil man’s. Sure he’s very wrong to drill for oil in Alaska, he’s wrong not to sign the Kyoto agreement. Maybe his supporters will realise this when their golf courses in LA and Atlanta are clouded in smog. But he’s not that bad. I’m not tremendously paranoiac about Bush Jr.

What about his problems with China?

Yeah, I understand what you mean but with China and all that, well, these guys are huge human rights violators and bad motherfuckers. Just like Hussein is a bad motherfucker. I mean what happens if you want to go traveling and some crazy asshole plants a bomb in your bag because you’re flying to Israel, I mean, what’s that?

But isn’t that a big problem for the USA, that they want to dominate the world and take what they want?

Well, I’m not going to take the Marxist hard line on this but you have to be realistic about American history. It is a place with great freedoms but it’s also a place with a great blood thirst. I mean, what about turning Cuba into a slave state, what about propping up the Shah of Iran, what about ousting Salvador Allende and putting in the fascists in Chile?

There is one quote I keep coming back to again and again and if you don’t dig this quote you don’t understand American history. It was from a guy called General Butler who put down the Filippino insurrection in 1911. I think it was the New York Times who asked him to sum up his career in 1945 and he said, "I was a high class muscleman for Wall Street and the bankers. I was a racketeer for capitalism". And if you don’t get that from the twentieth century you don’t understand shit. And George Bush Jr? He doesn’t have a fucking clue.

So who was the greatest American of the last century?

My choice? Well, that would be Martin Luther King Jr. He was arguably the greatest American man of the last century. I’m not an a man who has idols. But he was the greatest I think. That’s my opinion.

ELLROY ON ELLROY

Hats

“One of the good things about getting old and bald is hats. I have a porkpie hat and it looks good. Younger guys just don’t look so good in hats you know.”

Kansas

“It has everything a city needs. A good Italian joint, a good Indian joint, a good Thai joint. Of course if you can make money from another source it’s even better. Take your woman there, there is never a traffic jam, it’s peaceful, it’s quiet. It’s a great place for me. It’s practically bliss if you’re a 53 year old married man.”

On doing 50 interviews in one day for the launch of the film LA Confidential

“I kept waiting for them to ask `Is Kevin Spacey really gay?` But they never said it.”