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.
“I’ve got all this good dirt and no place to put it. It’s driving me fucking crazy.”
Semper fi.
I assembled my ex-Marine cadre. My porno-prosty boys proceeded priapically apace. My Camp Pendleton pals came up to L.A. and joined Operation Divorce. The two crews crossed over. I had six certified psychos, culled for my command. My Pendleton pit dogs were blood-blitzed from killing Commies in Korea. They were out for chaotic kicks and required tight tugs on their chains. Our marks were adulterous wives and husbands. Donkey Don lured ladies to hot-sheet hotels and instigated insertion. Flashbulbs flared as I kicked in doors, camera cocked. My Pendleton pits were adroit and adept at rolling surveillance. They tailed wayward wives and whorehound hubbies to hotels and walkie-talkied me. Joi was the mouthwatering man bait. She worked off Arthur Crowley’s craaazy crib sheets on the hubbies’ habits. Joi was sinful seductress and cold cocktease. I kicked the doors in just as Joi’s zipper dropped.
Operation Divorce was a Marine Corps maneuver and a mad moneymaker. Operation Otash was the ultimate umbrella command. I had an army of snarky snitches on my payroll. My PI’s license arrived and served to cinch my sinful sanction. I did not much mourn my severed service with the LAPD. I paid vulture Vice cops for tips on quivering queers, jittery junkies, dipsos deep in the DT’s. I built fat files on celebrity secrets and hoarded the horrors hard in my heart. Knowledge is power — the Beverly Hills Hotel bug told me that. The one puzzle piece still missing: how to systematically carve cash from all of it.
Jimmy joined in. I kicked putzy Paul Newman’s ass and held a bag of maryjane primed with his prints. Jimmy got the GE Theater role and groveled with gratitude. I hired him to hump the husband of a divorce-seeking dowager sick of hubby’s hijinks. Jimmy was a swift switcherooer — if it mamboed, he’d move on it. He boffed five babes in one week — topping Donkey Don’s extant record. I camera-caught the wives as Jimmy shot them the schvantz.
L.A. ’53 — radioactive ring-a-ding-ding!!!! That mauve-and-pink sky, ever mine.
Then, at long last — the confounding convergence.
I was on the Landing Strip. I was lolling with Liz and a winsome waitress from Biff’s Charbroil. My mail slot creaked. An envelope hit the floor.
It was a Western Union telegram. I opened it and read:
Dear Mr. Otash,
We here at Confidential are looking for a man conversant in the celebrity secrets of present-day Los Angeles, preferably a man with prior police experience. Would you be willing to meet me in a week’s time, to discuss a possible collaboration?
Sincerely,
Robert Harrison,
Publisher and Editor In Chief
Ava Gardner’s Dusky Dee-lite.”
“Johnnie Ray’s Men’s Room Misadventure.”
“Bad Boy Bob Mitchum: Back in Reeferland AGAIN?”
Oh yeah — Confidential contaminated. Confidential kicked up chaos. Confidential came to work.
I wired Harrison and confirmed the meet. I booked a boss bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I borrowed textbooks from Arthur Crowley’s library and studied libel, slander, and defamation of character. I learned to think and talk like a language-lucid lawyer.
Jimmy bagged back issues of Peep, Lowdown, Whisper, Tattle, and Confidential itself. I studied linguistic loopholes and cultivated codes of mitigation, equivocation, ambiguity. There’s innuendo, inference, implication. There’s many wicked ways to scandal-skin a cat.
I alter-egoed myself in a week’s time. I discovered sinuendo and scandal language. I moved into the bungalow a day early. That talking bug and I conferenced and concurred:
Confidential was the grooved-out grail of this shook-up generation. Disillusionment is enlightenment. Confidential trafficked truth and harpooned hypocrisy. It was a devoutly decorous document. It was the meshugenah Magna Carta of our hopped-up and fucked-up age.
It’s now 9/21/53. It’s now precisely 10:00 a.m. The doorbell rings.
Caviar, canapés — check. Martinis mixed magnifico — check. My dossier on Bondage Bob — malignantly memorized.
I opened the door. There’s the Sultan of Sinuendo. He’s a nervous nebbish in a dreary drip-dry suit.
He said, “Mr. Otash.”
I said, “Mr. Harrison.”
He walked in and went Oooh-la-la. I poured two mighty martinis and pointed to the couch. We raised our glasses. I said, “To freedom of speech.”
He said, “The First Amendment. What it hath wrought.”
We clicked glasses. He made the you-and-me sign. He said, “Strange bedfellows.”
You’re stranger, dipshit. You wear women’s lingerie and love the lash. You published “Honeys in Heels,” pre-Confidential.
“Get my attention, Mr. Otash. Open strong, baby. I need dirt, and a man to excavate it. Hit me, sweetheart. Show me why the cognoscenti says, ‘Fred Otash is the man to see.’ ”
I flashed my Marlon Brando snapshot. Bondage Bob perused it. He spazzed and spritzed me with a mouthful of martini.
It drip-dried on the sofa and my silk suit coat. Bondage Bob coughed and called up composure. He said, “Holy fucking shit.”
“May I give you a candid assessment of your situation, and explain how I might best serve you?”
“Hit me, doll. I didn’t fly three thousand miles for some namby-pamby chitchat.”
I shot my cuffs and showed off my Rolex. Twenty-four-karat gold/diamonds/rubies. I buzz-bombed Bondage Bob with my bold opening thrust.
“You publish what is rapidly becoming the premier scandal magazine in a very crowded field. You compete with Whisper, Tattle, Peep, On the Q.T., Lowdown, and others. Your competitors rely largely on true-crime exposés, reports of miracle cures for various diseases, and rehashes of your own articles on celebrity misbehavior. The specific strengths of your magazine are its staunch anti-Communist stance and sex. Frankly, I find your articles that play on the greed of your readers are both unbelievable and devoid of the heat that people turn to Confidential for. There are no emerald mines in Colorado, and no Uruguayan herbs that triple the size of the male member in two weeks’ time. You’re lying, sir. You’re hoping that bilking your readers with stories like that will both boost your sales and help defray the costs of the libel suits that are being filed against you with greater and greater frequency in circuit courts all over America. My good friend, the esteemed jurist Arthur Crowley, has informed me that magazines that publish filler pieces chock-full of boldfaced lies create what he calls a ‘gap in credibility and verisimilitude.’ This calls into question the veracity of all the articles published in said magazines over time, leaving said magazines vulnerable to both individual lawsuits and the looming specter of what Mr. Crowley calls the ‘lynch-mob-like and Communistic specter of the emerging class action suit,’ wherein aggrieved parties band together under the aegis of left-wing lawyers in order to posit a common beef and destroy the First Amendment right of free speech that we hold so sacred here in America. The mitigating, equivocating, and temporizing language that runs through your groundbreaking articles on celebrity misconduct will not save you. You may use alleged, purported, and rumored as much as you like, but they will not legally extricate you in the end. My first two salient points are these: you must dramatically boost your sexual content, and everything you publish in Confidential must be entirely true and verifiable.”