Widespread Panic
- Автор: Эллрой Джеймс
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Alfred A. Knopf
- ISBN: 978-0-593-31934-5
- Жанр: Мистика
Электронная книга - «Widespread Panic». Краткое содержание книги:
Confidential presaged the idiot internet — and delivered the dirt, the dish, the insidious ink, and the scurrilous skank. It mauled misanthropic movie stars, sex-soiled socialites, and putzo politicians. Mattress Jack Kennedy, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson — Frantic Freddy outed them all. He was the Tattle Tyrant who held Hollywood hostage, and now he’s here to CONFESS.
“I’m consumed with candor and wracked with recollection. I’m revitalized and resurgent. My meshugenah march down memory lane begins NOW.”
In Freddy’s viciously entertaining voice, Widespread Panic torches 1950s Hollywood to the ground. It’s a blazing revelation of coruscating corruption, pervasive paranoia, and of sin and redemption with nothing in between.
Here is James Ellroy in savage quintessence. Freddy Otash confesses — and you are here to read and succumb.
She snitched. It hit me six ways from Sunday. I rolled away from her. I stared at the red walls and faux-Goya garlands of women. Connie clung claustrophobe close.
“ ‘The citadel of my integrity has been irrevocably lost.’ That’s from T. E. Lawrence, in case you were wondering.”
I wasn’t. “Don’t shit a shitter, and don’t playact with me. It was the right thing to do.”
Connie stage-sighed. “I’m twenty years, one month, and nine days older than you. I was born in 1902, and you’re in love with two other women. Why did I do what I just did? Am I really that desperate to keep you?”
I stage-sighed. “You’re just self-absorbed. Are all Communists as self-involved as you?”
Connie laffed. “Frankly, yes.”
“Including Joan?”
“Yes, and Joan more than most.”
I said, “She made the rounds, didn’t she? Men, women — she had the appetite.”
Connie said, “She was faithless, yes.”
I said, “I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t be, dear. You’re like that yourself.”
I pulled down her skirt. I caught her scent and kissed her breasts.
“I’ve fulfilled my part of the bargain, dear. How will you derail the evil senator and save me?”
“I’ll do something brave and stupid, and it will damn well cost me a great deal.”
The Downtown L.A. Public Library
4/6/54
Research. Reading-room rigor. Know your foe. They might have YOU made, going in. You’re the Tattle Tyrant Who Holds Hollywood Hostage. You’re the Freewheeling Freddy O.
I felt gooooooood. Connie fed me a big breakfast. I chased it with three dexies and four jolts of Old Crow. I hit the library early. I collated a cavalcade of goooooood dish. I tapped solid sources.
The L.A. Herald and the L.A. Sentinel — L.A.’s colored rag. Who’s Who In America/1953. Who’s Who In American Academia/1953. Plus Downbeat magazine, the Daily Worker, and a call to LAPD R & I.
Dig:
Comrade Sammy Ahlendorf. Age sixty-three. That’s “Robin Redbreast” to you. He’s a physicist. He got doctorates in his native Russia and the U. of Chicago here. He’s also a kultural kommissar. He partied with bibulous bohemians in wicked Weimar Berlin and malignant Moscow. He knew Eisenstein/Nijinsky/Stanislavsky/Meyerhold/Okhlopkov. Sicko cinema, dipshit dance, stilted stage productions for the maimed millions enslaved by the Red Beast. Sambo emigrates to the U.S., circa ’36. He’s dumped off the Manhattan Project, circa ’44. He was pro-A-bomb then. He’s anti-A-bomb now. This guy gored my goat. I was hopped-up and out for Commo blood — baaaaaad. I might phone-book Sambo in the studly style of the Hat Squad.
Comrade Robert Jones Crawshaw/aka “KKKomrade X.” Age forty-one. Labor agitator and scurvy scribe for the Daily Worker. Would-be “Racial Reconciler.” Dig this: He tried to integrate the L.A. Klan, circa ’40. Close pal of my pal Billy Eckstine. The august author of Black Pimp, Black Bossman, Black Savior, Black Dictator, Black Kingpin, Black Bwana, and the KKKontroversial Black Führer. Comrade Bob renounces Communism, circa ’51. Comrade Bob heads hard right. He’s pals with nativist nudnik Gerald L. K. Smith. He’s got a righteous rap sheet. There’s three pops for receiving stolen goods. There’s the cancerous capper, circa ’48. Ralph Mitchell Horvath bails him out on a burglary beef.
Comrade Eleanor Price Donnell. Age thirty-eight. Tenured history professor at UCLA. She’s a shrill shrike and shrieky Soviet suck-up. She’s the author of Moscow Miasma — an apoplectic apologia for the show-trial sins of Uncle Joe Stalin. You think you’ve got this bilious babe pegged, don’t you? Well, fuckers, here’s the real reconstructionist riff:
She’s an ex — call girl. She pandered poon to the Party, circa ’44–’45. She sold sex to CPers with gelt. She was part of a poor-working-girls/Stalinist stable. She gets popped V-E Day. A cadre of Commie construction magnates celebrates Hitler’s surrender. It’s caviar and call girls for these cats. La Donnell and her sick sisters turn tricks for striking dock workers. LAPD Vice intervenes. They raid a fuck pad-cum-millionaire’s mansion. La Donnell and eighteen other confessed Commie girls get busted. La Donnell writes a memoir about her salacious sojourn. It’s called Party Girl. She wrote it under the pseudonym “Miss X.” Robert Jones Crawshaw’s publisher published it.
My Connie’s Commie cell. Add on the late Joan Hubbard Horvath: Commo, turncoat, licentious lover. Here’s the tattle-tabloid tilt of a lifetime:
I’m marching into the maximum maw of madness.
They all lived in L.A. I installed an itinerary — north/south/northwest. Comrade Sam lived in the Valley. Comrade Bob lived in Watts. Billy Eckstine set the meet at Club Zombie. Comrade Ellie lived on the Wilshire corridor. It was très close to UCLA.
Sambo and Party Girl were door knocks. Knock, Knock — trouble treads your way. I’d browbeat them. I’d bring them to tears. I’d dig for the dish on Comrade Joan Hubbard. I’d yank them through the war years. I’d push the Claire Klein angle. This dangerous dame is out to kill a man. She thinks Connie Woodard might know him. So, how about you?
I bopped out to bumfuck Van Nuys. The Valley Vista Villas — hotbox huts off Hastings and Harlequin Heights. I parked and popped up to the pad. Knock, knock — trouble treads your—
Sambo opened up. Ooohhh — he’s threadbare thin and cancer cough — consumptive. I flashed my State Police badge. All the HUAC humps had them. Cringe, you Red rat fink.
“Yes. I’ve seen that badge before. It’s not like you people haven’t sought me out in the past.”
I said, “This is a new wrinkle, boss. It pertains to the murder of a woman named Joan Horvath. You knew her as Joan Hubbard.”
Sambo let me in. He rolled an oxygen tank to his chair. He sucked air. He cancer-coughed and said, “Yes?”
I perched on a footstool. “I’m not here to nail you for your CP membership, pops. You should know that going in.”
Sambo said, “That’s white of you — and uninformed. I left the CP in ’44, before I got cleared for the Manhattan Project. I was the first one to abandon the cell I was in, although all of the others, except for our den mother, ultimately saw the light.”
The statement stunned me. Connie’s diaries ditzed me. I saw Sambo’s initials on cell minutes for the postwar period.
“I have documents, sir. These documents plainly state that you attended cell wingdings up to the late ’40s.”
Sambo sighed and sucked air. “Then they’re fabrications. Especially if the den mother proffered them to you. I’m an apostate, Mr. Detective. I renounced the Party, and I’ve been vetted by a great number of committees, both State and Federal. And if Mr. McCarthy should subpoena me for this latest pogrom of his, I’ll testify to that at the outset. You look like McCarthy, I might add. You share his black-haired, beetle-browed look.”
Fuck you, pops — I got your beetle brows swinging!!!
“Joan Horvath, sir. She was Hubbard when you knew her.”
“Yes, and I had an affair with that very lively and brilliant young woman, and I think you’re bright enough to have deduced that I’m in no condition to drive to Hollywood, break into a house, and commit murder.”