JOHN GILMORE: THE VALLEY OF DEATH
By Craig McDonald
An Exclusive Interview In Two Parts
McDonald: Your tapes with Black Dahlia murder suspect Jack Anderson Wilson went to the cops, right?
Gilmore: Oh yes.
McDonald: What about other tapes? Men who dated Elizabeth Short, or who became suspects...others?
Gilmore: No. Other tapes didn’t go to them — tapes with Elizabeth Short’s sister and a few other people, those didn’t go to them. The two tapes with him (Wilson) went to LAPD and they ceased to exist at that point. I had a bone to pick with LAPD a number of years ago, and that is just par for the course. LAPD is all fucked up. It’s unlike the Sheriff’s Department, where everything is logged-in and they have an unsolved unit. There’s nothing left in the Dahlia file. There’s nothing left.
McDonald: It’s all picked over?
Gilmore: Yeah.
McDonald: In your nonfiction books you haven’t used footnotes, or bibliographies or indexing. Why did you choose to do that?
Gilmore: The books are an experience. The books are portraits of these bleeding sides of beef. That is what as a creative writer I was interested in doing. I’m not a historian in that sense. The reason I didn’t put dates and such in the book is that I want the reader to be thrust into the thing. I don’t want to take the reader by the hand and say, “Okay, now we’re going to learn about this crime.” I want the reader exposed to the crime as it goes down. The reader becomes a part of it. When Dante goes down to Hell, he has a guide, but, remove the guide, and he is just thrust into Hell. I wrote them as literary pieces. I have a novelist’s mind. I chose in Severed not to put in dates because — and I am still convinced I am right — that the minute a reader sees a date, he logs it into his mind and moves on. That date shuts off your experience of what’s being told. It takes the reader out of the experience.
McDonald: It affords temporal distance?
Gilmore: Yes. Yes, you’re safe from it. I don’t want the reader to be safe from it.
McDonald: You also did something interesting in Severed in that you wrote about yourself in the third person, using the phrase, “the informant” to describe yourself.
Gilmore: I did that because I never wanted to put myself into any of the books — not Garbage People or any of them. But, a lot of people were bothered by that device in Severed. When the publisher at Amok Books took it to reissue it, he suggested I write an afterword. One of the most exciting things, as far as a potential film, was my meeting with Wilson down on Main Street and so forth. Maybe I was afraid to take credit at the time...but it needed to be explained and Stuart Swezey presented it as an idea so I went ahead and wrote the afterword. I didn’t put myself in the book initially because is seemed intrusive to me. I couldn’t somehow rationalize it. It’s some strange, idiosyncratic thing.
McDonald: It’s interesting coming from someone who worked in Hollywood — such a narcissistic kind of business where you are putting yourself out there — that you have this reticence to do so in your writing.
Gilmore: (Laughing) I don’t know why it is, but it is there. Laid Bare kind of freed me of that in a way, maybe because it was a whole piece. The key about my work is that it’s “peculiar” and “idiosyncratic.” That’s what I’ve been told. That’s what they say and that is the way it is. I can’t help it and I have no intentions of helping it. It’s what a woman said once about my stuff, “The writing has no buffer, so the reader is thrust into the emotional impact of everything that occurred.”
McDonald: It is very immediate and vivid.
Gilmore: And that’s what I go for. The very immediate. The reader wants to experience this. That’s my job. I’m now 66-years-old and it’s taken me a long time to realize I have a very clear-cut job to do. I guess that is where Ellroy is, too, now. I don’t mind James Ellroy. I respect his work as artist because he is unique and he tells it his way because he is moved by something at a certain level. The way it comes out, I don’t like. His approach to certain subject matter bothers me. He’s getting off on it, and that’s cool. I suppose I’m getting off on some of my stuff, too, but I try to disguise it a little bit.
McDonald: Retired FBI profiler John Douglas addresses your book Severed in his recent book, The Crimes That Haunt Us, which contains a chapter on the Black Dahlia killing. The Learning Channel also recently produced a documentary on the Short case —
Gilmore: Yeah, I like that one a lot.
McDonald: It’s hosted by ex-cop turned writer Joseph Wambaugh. He has a coda at each break in which he tends to shoot down theoretical solutions to the crime depicted in the documentary. He shoots down everyone but your’s. Douglas also seems to support your thesis that the murders of (socialite) Georgette Bauerdorf and Elizabeth Short were linked — a connection others have discounted. Do you take heart from those implied endorsements?
Gilmore: Absolutely. The funny part is, for a number of years I’ve liked John Douglas’ works. And, he seems to me to be the only other person who thinks about serial killers in the way that I do. I was surprised to see he mentioned me in his book.
McDonald: I’ve interviewed various people who’ve written studies of murder cases or researched them for a long period of time and nearly been put under by the experience. I think even John Douglas had an episode where it overcame him. In terms of immersing yourself in all of this dark subject matter, how do you remain whole?
Gilmore: I’ll tell you. I wrote the Tucson Murders, and after that Garbage People. I had a contract with Pinnacle to do a book about the Zodiac case. I started getting immersed in that and I started bleeding internally. I realized I didn’t have it adjusted inside myself. I had to make an adjustment in the same way that ambulance drivers who scoop people up off the highway have to make an adjustment. That was years ago. I found it sickening. L.A. Despair will be the last time I do anything with true murder.
McDonald: L.A. Despair is your forthcoming book....
Gilmore: Yes. These are cases that interested me for years and years and I’ve saved and saved, and I’ve talked to all kinds of people over the years, and now I’m just going to do them. Otherwise, they’re lost. Basically, I was in San Francisco several years ago for a reading and I said, “Well, I’m not going to do any more True Crime.” I said, “I did have something in my mind, with a number of different crimes but I don’t think I’ll do it, but I hate to throw them away or stick them in a dead file.” And they said, “Oh, no no, you absolutely have to write them, just for your fans.” I thought about that a lot, and that was a few years ago, but I have noticed there are an awful lot of people out there who buy my books. I was originally going to do a book just on Barbara Payton, but, you know, Jesus, fuck that: her life is terrible. It’s terrible. I decided not to do the Payton book. I’ve really been the last two years, up and down and up and down on writing this thing. Stuart (Swezey), my publisher at Amok, really wanted a book on Eddie Nash, but after I finished going through all the research for that, I just came out and wondered, “What’s the word? What’s the word for all that?” The word, is “disheartening.” I just felt totally disheartened. Then I felt, well, “I’ll just do it completely. I’m just doing to do it for all that it’s worth. I’ll put everything in there.” It’s L.A. at its absolute worst. It’s the underside of every dirty rock in Los Angeles. I know L.A.
McDonald: You’ve sat down with some serious misfits. I realize (Dahlia murder suspect) Wilson was an old crippled man when you met him in those bars, but you’ve also met Charles Manson and Charlie Schmid, among others. Have you ever felt in personal jeopardy sharing space with these people?
Gilmore: No, but I reached a point that after a time, when he (Wilson) was talking about Elizabeth Short’s killer, I realized he was talking about himself. I felt it with Charles Schmid, too, the same thing. I was not looking at human eyes anymore. Leslie van Houten (Charles Manson accomplice) can rot, as far as I care. This type of wanton destruction of innocent individuals....I personally am in favor of the death penalty, because I’ve sat down and had dinner with the devil. I know all these people should be gassed. Lethal injection is fine — it’s a very easy place to go.
McDonald: It’s not the means, it’s the literal end?
Gilmore: Yes. That’s my feeling. I know it isn’t a deterrent for a psychopath, it will not stop him from cutting the heads off little girls. You’ll never stop him from doing that. Never. Never. I’d be fine with locking them up in a dungeon somewhere if they stayed there forever, but they don’t. They get the fuck out. They let them go.
McDonald: Severed has gone through several options for film. What its current status?
Gilmore: I think Severed is going to be filmed by Floria Sigismondi. She’s an artist and photographer in New York. She has a book of photographs called Redemption and she directed all of the Marilyn Manson videos. She has a tremendous following. I think she’s going to do Severed as her first feature. She’s from Toronto, but lives in New York, so she has access to Canadian money. Floria and I have a strong chemistry artistically. Floria, I think, can really do an artistic version of this. She has it in her blood and says she lives it, breathes it, and wants to make this film. She produces this unbelievably vivid photography. Very dark. The feeling is a little like Fincher in Seven.
McDonald: Good luck with it.
Gilmore: Where film is concerned, I love that thing Ellroy said, “I don’t want to hear shit — just send me the check.” But then people on the other side say, “Wouldn’t it just frost you out, just kill you, if they take your book and screw it up?” It doesn’t faze me at all. I’m completely happy if they cast Minnie Mouse as Elizabeth Short. Writers who cry, “Hollywood fucked up my book!” well, the book is still there. Everyone can go and read the book you wrote. The dumbest guy in the world knows they’re not going to take a book and make a movie just like it.
McDonald: You’ve brought us back around to films. Given the distortions that have been made from what you’ve written, do you ever regret your admissions regarding your relationship with James Dean?
Gilmore: No. People have sort of distorted it from time to time, but I like it. I’ve gotten a lot of letters about the book from people who said it was the most meaningful thing on Dean they have ever read and it affected them deeply. James Dean kind of stepped into their life as a person for the first time.
McDonald It’s hard to get around the icon.
Gilmore: Yes, right. And fans are a different breed than real people. Fans do not want reality in any size, shape or form. I find the really interesting things that occur are the real things in people. James Dean would have been the first one in the world to refute any notion that would suggest you could learn anything from a celluloid image that is presented to people. There’s no way you possibly can. You’re only titillated. The whole scope is only to get your money. Movies aren’t about anything. It’s about profit. There are young people sitting around drug stores — way back, and I think they are probably still doing the same things — talking about the great parts they’re going to do. It has nothing to do with that. These poor people. Hollywood has only to do with money. The same thing is happening in New York with the publishing world. They’re cutting their own throats. The industry is collapsing around them. That’s why I look toward the internet.
Gilmore: I’m supposed to write a violent musical, set to open a year from October.
McDonald: Oh really?
Gilmore: It’s called Slit — An American Murder. My goal is to do something like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or Pandora’s Box. I love Louise Brooks and wish she was alive and younger to do this expressionistic thing. It will be expressionistic and very dark. It’s about the Black Dahlia, but I’ve made a leap from a semi-factual approach to one that is non-factual. I’ve had to think about that....I guess I am using these real people as characters as I said I wouldn’t do — like Ellroy and others do.
McDonald: I was about to point out the contradiction.
Gilmore: (Laughing) Right. There’s also a big novel I want to do about a young fellow from Joplin, Missouri who is racing cars and participating in demolition derbies. He’s a weird rockabilly who goes to New York and becomes an actor. He becomes the king of junkyard, hot rod B-movies. It’s the longest book that I’ve ever written because it is told from five different people’s perspective. It’s set from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s.
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