Mother Night EMILY GORDON

posed, to hide. Ellroy’s father, he Writes, MY DRRR PLRCES: An L.R. Crime Memoir. “never told me that sitting in the dark was By James Ellroy. a strange thing to do.” Ellroy spent his life Knopf. 351 pp. $25. doing exactly that. Well known for genre-mixing and efore dhwn on June 22, 1958, James -bending, Ellroy here makes his biggest Ellroy’s mother, Jean, a IC a Geneva leap yet: atrue-crime detective story, an OdeIia Hilliker, was raped, strangled to L.A.’ social history and a kind of romance. death and dumped on an empty road The result is a twisted literary memoir, the in El Monte, California. Ellroy was 10. white-hot spinning of a loner and autodi- what does it mean for a best-selling crime dact. “My father was a liar. My mother was novelist when his mother is a case-a num- a fabricator”; being a Writer, Ellroy’s a liar ber filed in a dusty archive labeled “un- too. For years he set fictional characters in solved”? My Dark Places, a memoir as the historical past, then re-wrote history. much about Ellroy’ s evolution as a writer Confined to the forms of real life, cold facts as it is about his mother and the search for and un-outlinable characters, in My Dark her murderer, takes the sustained anguish Places Ellroy is more powerful than ever. of that experience and builds a monument. Nearly all narratives of our parents It’s as The Redhead that Ellroy imagined his are patchy; we spend our lives assembling connections and explanations. Until he was motherfor much of his la$ie: an icon, a beacon, 46, Ellroy had little to go on but this one a red light that arrested gentleness. event, framed innewspaper clippings, and his traumatized memory (her bourbon, ap- He was a history junkie fiom way back. propriately, was Early Times). There was Hooked on crime news as a kid, he was . no trial, and the murder festered in his “developing a tabloid sensibility.. .. My imagination. “Every mystery solved was brain was a police blotter.” In his novels he my love for her in ellipses,” he Writes. He exhumes the past along with the secrets it has signed all 50,000 copies of this book, would have preferred to keep. But to get a sculpture cast from a mold of missing at his own history-not forties L.A. or pieces and silence. J.F.K.’s Camelot-he had to go beyondhis James Ellroy’s dark places are in those fields of expertise: “I had to attack the cen- ellipses and that signature. They are every- tral story of my life.” thing he has censored or pushed under: the Many fans of Ellroy’s oeuvre (twelve street they found his mother on; the bar books, the kind whose spine you break where she was seen dancing with her date, without shame-among them Clandestine, a c‘swarthy man”; the drive-in where they white Jazz and LA. Confidential) are al- had eaten earlier, whose carhop observed ready familiar with that story, an exploita- that Jean’s clothes were disheveled and the tion Ellroy fieely admits. Being “a thief man seemed distracted. One place is Ell- and a voyeur” may have served his Writing , roy’s own body, the pitch darkness of his well, but he felt cheap presenting Geneva’s sexuality; another is the “cavelikey’L.A. history as his own: “I plundered her in a hotel room he rents to consider her; and the fever dream and denied my own message first jail cell whose darkness “jump-started of yearning.’? This time, “I had to submit to [his] imagination.” Darkness is history that her spirit. If I hurt her, I’d feel her censure.” wants to stay, like a weak-shelled creature, My Dark Places is composed of four under its rock. The darkest places of all are sections,replete WithEllroy’s heart-surgeon Jean’s, her involuntary legacy: Divorced humor and cool irony: “The Redhead,” from James’s father, her past life a blank, “The Kid in the Picture,” “Stoner” and she came to El Monte, her neighbors sup- “Geneva Hilliker.” Just the facts: “The Red- 26 The Nation. December 2,1996

head‘, is a chronicle of Jean’s murder, as “I read a beat-up copy of Atlas Shrugged represented by her L.A.P.D. homicide file. and came to the unsound conclusion that It offers the bare bones of a mystery, irre- I was a superman.” sistibly inviting us to play detective. It’s not It can be hard to be in the same book in Ellroy’s voice but the detached narration with this Ellroy, who lives the life of adoles- of cops on the stand-“The coroner’s cent fantasy: expelled from school, sleep- deputy took a scalpel and made a deep 6- ing in flophouses, locked up forty-odd times inch-long incision in the victim’s abdo- for drunkenness, theft and trespassing (jail men.. .jabbed a meat thermometer into the was his “health retreat,’) before he kicked liver and got a reading-of 90 degrees”- what was fueling him. The prevailing voice or a nonchalant private eye: “Dead white in “The Kid in the Picture” is raw and women always stirred things ~p.’~It’sas crass-less the hepcat lingo of his thrillers The Redhead-a noir moniker, a clichk that than a hyper-angry, juvenile slang (“The renders her nameless-that Ellroy imag- high was gooooood... . [it] left me dingy ined Jean for much of his life: an icon, a and schizzy”). Listening to this kid can be beacon, a red light that arrested gentleness. wearying. But then, as Ellroy himself likes to say, not every book should have a true- llroy’s protagonists tend to lose their blue hero; “I have empathy for monsters,” innocence, through betrayal, carnage or he’s said, and so do we. both. But Ellroy was never innocent. His His lust for stories of the dead turns out intimacy was with the politics of divorce, to be even more potent than his chemical [its ugly scenes and shameful loyalties- addictions. Young Ellroy is perpetually “a bifurcated life diwied up between two tanked on a cocktail of ego and media, fol- people locked in an intractable mutual ha- lowing female-murder-victim cases ob.- tred.” Screaming his father’s vicious slurs sessively, fantasizing himself, by turns, at Jean and getting slapped for it is one of as killer and rescuer, punisher and lover. James’s last clear memories of his mother The BlackDahlia murder (which he would You should be subscribing to alive. In a child‘s view of cause and effect, “solve” @his 1987 novel of the same name) our magazine too. it’s a simple equation. “I hated her and lust- was the 13-year-oldJames’s favorite, “ex- Because week in and week ed for her. Then she was dead.” plicitly pomog~aphic’~subject and his deep- out The Nation brings you the “The Kid in the Picture” is Ellroy, at est bad dream: “She was the heart of my likes of Patricia Williams, Bar- 10, posed by newspaper photographers at crime world. I didn’t know that she was the bara Ehrenreich and Alexander his neighbor’s workbench the day of his redhead transmogrified.” Cockburn in every issue. mother’s death. He’s sent back to L.A. to It’s not long before the suppressed live with his father-what he’d wanted‘all longing leaps up and his fantasies collide: They’re not only some of the along-whom Jean had kicked out four “I jerry-rigged a story straight off.. . . My best writers around-they do years before. He and his father (a “Holly- mother didn’t die in El Monte. She wasn’t their best work for us. wood bottom-feeder” and Rita Hayworth’s a drunk. She loved me woman to man.. .. It onetime agent-thenvise a profligate was the most impassioned and loving story with his own invented past) live in a filthy I’d ever perpetrated. It left me ashamed house. His father has his own crude theo- and horrified of what I had inside me.” ries of how Jean, “a drunk and a whore,” He stops short of acting out all the horrors ended up dead. After years of brainwash- he imagines, though; and after a complete TlheNation. ing and neglect, he dies of a heart attack, mind-and-body breakdown, he somehow I=mIm==”m 7 leaving James at 17 a furious, maladjusted manages to pull himself together. He cad- YES! I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE TO orphan-his brain tuned to death as though dies at posh golf courses and starts to write. 1 YOUR MAGAZINE, TOO. Send me 24 I it were a radio frequency. And there we leave him for a while. issues of The Nation for $21.95- I Even before his mother’s murder, Ell- l-.$38 off the newsstand price. roy says, he was “the poster boy for the If- n the scat sentences and wise-ass repartee 1 (Offer good for new subscribers only.) I You-Can’t-Love-Me-Notice-Me chapter in of “Stoner”-a portrait of Bill Stoner, I NAME (Please print) I all child psychology textbooks.” He gradu- the retired L.A. County detective Ellroy ates fiom “stilking” girls fiom school on his hired in 1994 to reopen Geneva’s file- I ADDRESS bike to breaking into their houses for money lie the other romance, besides Ellroy 1 CITY STATE ZIP and panties; from snitching pulp novels to and Jean’s, ofthis book. Stoner has solved 13 My payment is enclosed. I shoving supermarket steaks down his pants; plenty of murders (including the Cotton 0 Please bill me later. from daydreaming to declaiming white- Club case, a movie-biz contract hit, several I- I supremacist propaganda at school; from years earlier), but the unsolved ones itch, All foreign subscriptions please add $27.50 for airmail postage, cf I 59 for surface mail postage, payable in advance in US. dollars only. smoking joints to swallowing the cotton him badly. We don%know why Jean was I wads in 69-cent Benzedrex inhalers. In a strangled that night, but through the lens of I THE NATION I rare moment of adult guidance, a wino Stoner’s thirty-two-year police career, we POBOX37072 $1 called Flame-0 “told me I was wino bait learn a lot about men’s motives. Conclud- I BOONE, IA 50037 myself. I didn’t believe him.”There’s pleni ing a long list: “Menkilled women because LIIIIImImI3 ty of sly wit in the teen-angst story, too: the world ignored and condoned it.” Like December 2,1996 The Nation. 27

Ellroy, Stoner has ‘‘a gender-wide crush on women”; simultaneously, they “both wor- shipped testosterone overload. We both reveled in tales of male energy displaced. We both saw through it. We both knew it killed my mother.” Notable Book of . If you’re steeped in Ellroy, you’ll notice Year how much sweeter Stoner is than EUroy’s the rogue-cop antiheroes and leg breakers, es- “Fredrickson... has again found a pecially in interrogation scenes. He’s not rich field for comparative’study.” the type to kneecap an 85-year-oldwitnessY -The New York TimBook Review and Ellroy soaks up the way Stoner lis- “A profound and necessary contri- tens-no bruiserhalker games in this man- bution to the field of black studies hunt. Ellroy doesn’t presume to sped for ....Definitive.”-Kbh fiVktVd Stoner, respectfully granting the restrained detective his privacy. By the end, though, “A superb sequel to his compari- son of the two countries in White we get a glimpse of Stoner at play, eating Suprernaej, Fredrickson’s Bhk sausages with Ellroy’s new-found cousins. Liberation compares the black , EUroy wears his love for the man on his responses to whiie oppression sleeve; Stonergetsit-so much so that atri- with equal b&ance.”-C. Vann angle forms: Jean, Ellroy and Stoner, who Woodward Ellroy “knew.. .was falling for her.: In BhkLiberation, George Fredrickson offers a fascinating account of how blacks m It’s in “Geneva Hilliker,” the book‘s the United States and South Africa came to grips with the challenge of white supremacy. most lush and revelatory section, that the Beginning with early moments of hope in both countries, when the promise of suffrage investigation-left for dead since 1970- led educated black elites to fight for color-blind equality, he moves through the rising tide recommences. Stoner and Ellroy talk of racism and discrimination at the turn of the century that blunted their hopes and crime and “anthropological tangents” and encouraged nationalist movements in both countries. circle, like cop partners, the small map of $14.95,400 pp. the murder, “chasing names” for fifteen months-finding and re-interviewing everyone in the files (cops, suspects, wit- nesses) who isn’t dead or a senile junkie, hoping someone wants to clear his con- science.’Ithelps that we know the details by heart. . from ‘’ he hallmark of obsession is the endless hope it sustains. Like Ellroy’s novels, The Nation Press. My Dark Places is rich with polygraph and interview transcripts, psychological

~ profiles and autopsy reports. Any one of An illuminating history these details could be crucial, and as vicari- ous detectives, we exhaust each scenario of race relations and civil rights till it delivers or dissolves. As the futility mounts, the pace slows. There are false from 1865 to thepresent leads, delusional confessors, evidence dis- counted or destroyed-and ordinary people as seen through the eyes of like Jean Ellroy, who reveal almost noth- The Nation. ingto the people they know. It’s amacabre dating game: We desperately want one of these names to be the one-who was there, who knows, who will tell. People want to forget the past. Yet what they remember is Featuring essays by Martin Luther King, Jr., Iangston Hughes, startlingly moving. That goes for Ellroy, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dorothy van Doren, Patricia WWams, Mike too, who closes his eyes,to plumb another Davis, Katha Pollitt, Derrick Bell and Oswdd Garrison Villard, darkness: “The 47-year-old man had to in- terrogate the 10-year-old boy.” among many others-all originally published in The Nation. At last, Ellroy loosens his terror grip on the reader and proves himself capable of Uncivil War, $12 postpaid, paper, ISBN: 0-9646929-0-2.Send check to: translucent tenderness. We crave Geneva’s Nation Books, 72 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011. For bulk discoimt story now, too-not out of grief or revenge and classroom adoption information calk 212/242-8400, ext. 213. but as tribute and redemption. With Ellroy and Stoner, we travel to Tunnel City, Wis- 28 . The Nation. December 2,1996 consin, where Jean grew up, look at photo- “Closure”-writing as exorcism- tend toward the adolescent.) The prosecu- graphs and hear stories of the redheaded girl doesn’t work; confession does not equal tion claimed Kimberlin had contracted for before she succumbed to cheap booze and absolution or peace. Early on in the book, the killing, and that the bombings had been slick men. Through the quest for his moth- Ellroy re-creates the scene of his 10-year- perpetrated to distract attention from the er’s killer, Ellroy is finding some of her life; old self eavesdropping on the cops and his murder investigation. and by coming to know “the redhead,” father talking inthe kitchen: “His father was Ellroy begins to love and redeem Geneva calling his mother a promiscuous drunk. o write Citizen K,Singer began pulling Hilliker. By returning to Geneva her true The cops were saying their case was dead. at the threads of all three stories (the name, he identifies her. He’s given her back Jean was such a goddamn secretive woman. Scyphers murder, the Speedway bomb- her dignity and history, as though her grave Her life just didn’t make sense.”My Dark ings and the Dan Quayle allegations), had been unmarked till now. Places is Ellroy’s emphatic rebuttal. talking to investigators in Indiana-and witnesses from the trial, contacting Kim- berlin’s associates in the drug trade, inter- viewing family members, friends, enemies. Zone What he found out was by turns baffling, startling and dismaying. KRISTIN ELIASBERG The three cases reside on ever more elu- sive and unprovable notions, all put forth by CITIZEN R: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Rimherlin. Kimberlin himself. He reports being told By Mark Singer. Knopf. 38 1 pp. $25. of Scyphers’smurder at about 1 in the after- noon, yet she was not mui-deredtill 3. He n October 1992, five weeks and a day before the election that would bring Bill purports to have been meeting Quayle to sell him piddling ounce-size bags of grass, Clinton, notorious non-inhaler of pot, to the presidency, The New Yorker pub- yet by his own admission, at the time these lished a story by Mark Singer about a prisoner named Brett Kimberlin. Kim- insignificant transactions were supposedly taking place he was already involved with berlin claimed he had sold marijuana to Dan Quayle on a number of occasions multi-ton marijuana deals. It seems safe to in the early seventies, and further claimed his fiction. Singer had found the ideal sub- assume that Kimberlin, a very savvy busi- that in 1988, when he tried to speak to the ject: Kimberlin was an immensely success- nessman, wouldn’t have bothered selling press about his dealings with Quayle, he ful drug smuggler with juicy tales of his ounces to a young law student at the Burger was prevented from doing so by officials outlaw adventures; since his incarceration Chef when his business had grown to the in the Bureau of Prisons and was thereby he’d become a jailhouse lawyer whose ap- point of unloading bales of marijuana at deprived of his First and Fifth Amendment petite for litigation was limitless; and,’be- secret airstrips. Singer initially imagines rights. On these occasions, either just after sides claiming to be a political prisoner he can separate fabrication from fact, but talking to a reporter or just before a planned because of his confinements in 1988, he eventually he is reduced to’simply trying meeting with reporters, he was placed in a also claimed that he was in prison in‘the to find somethingthat even resembles fact, holding cell where he was unable to contact ’ first place only because he was the victim as he realizes that he has been “sucked the outside world. There was no ostensi- of a sophisticated government frame-up. whole and cast adrift inside Kimberlin’s ble reason for the confinements except to Kimberlin was convicted in 1979 of a narcissistic universe, a black-and-white silence the prisoner, and it also seemed rash of bombings in Speedway, Indiana, realm of dreams and schemes and factoids, possible that the Justice Department had that had resulted in the maiming of a man a galaxy far beyond the gravity-boundreali- knowledge of these actions. It was even who subsequently committed suicide. ties of politics and logic and justice.” within the realm of possibility that the Government investigators had found As the extent of Kimberlin’s duplicity White House, in the form of J+es Baker, timers and traces of the explosive used in dawns on him, Singer invokes Janet Mal- had exerted its influence. making the bombs in Kimberlin’s car. colm’s The Journalist and the Murderer, Singer wrote an impassioned article on How they came to be searching the car is, and the comparison is apt. Singer refers to Kimberlin’s story, then devoted four years as everything involving Kihberlin would Malcolm’s “famously devastatingthesis.. . to delving deeper into the subject. Citizen turn out to be, a long story. He was illegally that journalism is a confidence game in K: The Deeply WeirdAmericanJourney of in possession of various items with gov- which the reporter holds a stacked deck,” Brett Kimberlin is a fascinating unraveling ernment insignia, clothing patches, fake and he also cites Malcolm’s comparison of Kimberlin’s “life,” which turns out to ID cards, copies of the presidential seal. of the journalist-subject relationship to a be a complicated fabrication, fueled by These had been used in a multi-ton mari- love affair: “Like the credulous widow who his narcissistic ego and overactive imagi- juana deal that had gone awry, one result wakes up one day to find the charming nation. Kimberlin’s bluster and utter self- of which was mqijuana raining down out young man and all her savings gone, so the confidence persuaded many others-from of the south Texas sky as a scared pilot consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction Kimberlin’s mother to the cartoonist Garry ditched his load, and another result of writing learns-when the article or book Trudeau to Erwin Griswold, former Solici- which-wasthe Feds tailing Kimberlin. His appears-his hard lesson.” Malcolm also tor General and former Dean of Harvard drug-dealing had long aggravated law- wrote, though Singer doesn’t refer to it, Law School, and, in part, to Singer him- enforcement agencies, and he was also a that “the metaphor of the love affair ap- self-to play supportingroles in bolstering suspect in the murder of Julia Scyphers, plies to both sides of the journalist-subject who disapproved of the bizarre relation- equation, and the journalist is no less sus- Kristin Eliasberg, a writer, lives iti New York ship Kimberlin had with her teenage grand- ceptible than the subject to its pleasures City. daughter. (Kimberlin’s female interests and excitements.”