-Caveat Lector-
"...down these mean streets a man must go..."
Raymond Chandler
---------- Forwarded message ----
by Michael Kaplan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1996 Los Angeles Magazine Inc.
THE DETECTIVE OFFERED TO PRUNE murder file's most disturbing elements, but
James Ellroy waved him away. He wanted to see it all, up close, unedited. He
was in a tiny gray office in the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, facing a
bulging, battered accordion folder with the name "Geneva Hilliker Ellroy"
Magic Markered across its front. He hadn't seen his mother since he was 10
years old, more than three decades ago. He hadn't even seen a photograph.
After gently removing the disorganized contents, arranging everything in
discrete piles, Ellroy journeyed back to Saturday, June 21, 1958. Carbon
copies of police reports described the Desert Inn, an El Monte club with motel
rooms in back for prostitution and gambling, as the place u here Geneva was
seen drinking on the night she was killed. Later, according to witnesses, she
turned up at Stan's Drive-In, a local burger joint, where she had coffee,
chili and a grilled-cheese sandwich.
The next morning, kids playing baseball discovered Geneva's body in some
bushes near El Monte's Arroyo High School. The coroner found freshly
ejaculated sperm inside her; officers on the scene noted that she'd been
strangled with a cotton cord and one of her own stockings. The rest of the
file was filled with anonymous tips, false leads and a final dead end. The
murder was never solved.
Two hours passed in a flash. Only one folder--the one marked "Crime Scene
Picts"--was left. Ellroy leaned close, ready to commit every gruesome detail
to memory. He scrutinized the artless police shots of his dead mother lying in
a pile of leaves, her eyes closed, mouth askew, neck oddly twisted, with an
intricately patterned dress hitched up over her thighs. But the photos didn't
disturb him. Even the terrible image of Geneva stretched out naked on a morgue
slab, her skin pocked with autopsy punctures, failed to rattle his composure.
Decades of speculation about his mother's death and the promiscuous lifestyle
that caused it had left Ellroy with a hardened exterior. For years after the
murder, he and his father routinely referred to her as "that drunken whore."
Oddly, the worst shock came when he saw a photo of his mother taken when she
was still alive. In his mind, she had been a hot-looking,
frisky young woman with a tight body, voluptuous breasts and fiery red hair.
But the snapshot in front of him was dated August '57, making her 42 years
old, four years younger than he was now, and she looked neither sexy nor
beautiful--she looked like a blowsy alcoholic. In another photo, her corpse
resembled a sick woman sleeping. Ellroy couldn't believe it was really her.
His cold-blooded facade crumbled. He looked down at the tawdry still life and
calmly said to himself, "You wanted to know? Now you know. Now, motherfucker,
you know."
THREE YEARS LATER, AN EBULLIENT JAMES Ellroy occupies a corner table at an
El Monte dive called Valenzuela's. He chugs iced coffee and gobbles squid
ceviche, reveling in the fact that this restaurant is on the very spot where
the Desert Inn once stood. He points out where the bandstand and bar had been
and speculates on the exact spot where his mother partied herself to death.
Ellroy is dressed in his standard getup--a Hawaiian shirt, baggy khakis,
spotless tennis shoes--and his personality matches his shirt: outrageous and
attention-getting. He brazenly launches into a distasteful anecdote about a
man named Freddie Otash: "You know, the Hollywood private eye who got the
goods on Jack Kennedy porking Marilyn Monroe in Peter Lawford's beachfront
fuck crib during the fall of 1961. . . " But despite the familiar profanity
and the sick humor, James Ellroy is not the same man I met six years ago. He's
changed--and he has his mother to thank.
After seeing the murder file, Ellroy felt compelled to set aside novel
writing and fully explore his own past once and for all. He invested $130,000
of his own money in a thorough investigation of his mother's unsolved murder.
He uncovered fresh leads and interviewed new witnesses. The result is a
remarkable nonfiction work, My Dark Places, to be published this month by
Alfred A. Knopf.
Ellroy's writing--his whole life--has been leading him to this book. Every
one of his dense, feverish novels has been marked by his mother's death.
Clandestine and the best-selling The Black Dahlia include unmistakable
portraits of her, while L.A. Confidential, White Jazz and American Tabloid all
contain subtle echoes of her sad life. Ellroy compulsively invented and
reinvented Geneva because he never really knew much about her--until now.
The new book is an intensely detailed confessional, far less manic and
hyperbolic than his crime novels, and it will no doubt expose the author to a
more mainstream readership. He is convinced that writing Aly Dark Places has
changed him as a novelist. Dumping a second cup of hot coffee into a glass
filled with ice cubes, he explains, "I don't want people to say, `Ellroy wrote
this heavy-duty book about his mother, but he couldn't implement that into his
subsequent books, and went back to writing the same old shit.' I want to show
a greater diversity of character and motive."
In the last six years, Ellroy has successfully made the transition from
hungry cult novelist seeking a larger audience to middle-aged author whose
early goals ("I want to burn crime fiction to the fucking ground," he told New
York magazine in 1992) have nearly all been realized. Ellroy's not quite on
easy street yet, but he's certainly arrived. Two books ago, he switched
publishers, joining the elite fiction roster at Knopf, and all but one of his
books have been optioned for movies. L.A. Confidential is currently in
postproduction.
He's become a big tipper, tossing twenties to waiters and valets "You can't
go through life stiffing people," he says with a shrug--and his jaunty glee at
all this newfound success is infectious. He lives with his wife, former L.A.
Weekly contributor Helen Knode, in a big house in Kansas City, her hometown,
and now he visits L.A. only to close movie deals, promote books and check out
some of his old haunts.
Ellroy looks better, too. He used to wear his thinning hair in a stringy
cross-comb, and he sported a toothbrush moustache that, along with the
ever-present tropical shirts, gave him a goofy Hitleron-holiday appearance.
Now he's finally grown out the moustache and gotten a buzz cut, which leaves
him resembling a cross between G. Gordon Liddy and Hunter S. Thompson. Tall
and hulking, he's still perpetually amped up, continually bobbing and
fidgeting. Ellroy never just talks, either. He booms out every word.
After I pay the $27 Valenzuela's tab, Ellroy supplements my tip with an
extra twenty. Out in the parking lot, he points to the exact spot where his
mother's car was found the morning after her murder, then offers a thumbnail
bio. "My mother went from an overprotected small-town girl from Tunnel City,
Wisconsin, to a sexually profligate, alcoholic nursing-school student in the
snap of a finger." A master of the memorable kicker, he casually adds, "In
1939, while still in school, she gave herself an abortion."
He learned the new details with the aid of 56-year-old Bill Stoner, a
recently retired detective from the L.A. County Sheriff's Unsolved Crimes Unit
whom Ellroy commissioned to lead his new investigation. At fist, Stoner was a
bit reluctant, even though Ellroy was offering him a generous share of the
publisher's advance. He read some of Ellroy's books and rankled at the
constant portraits of corrupt cops, especially in White Jazz. More important,
he worried about Ellroy's motives. "I'd never heard a man degrade his own
mother the way James did," recalls Stoner, who lives in Orange County.
Eventually the two found common ground, and together they interviewed more
than 100 sources in five states. It was an emotional roller-coaster ride
Stoner will never forget. "We went to Reno to interview Lavonne Chambers, who
waited on Geneva and a man she was with at Stan's Drive-In," he says. "In the
middle of our conversation she began crying. See, carhops were supposed to
write down the license plate numbers of each car in case the people took off
without paying. She saw two well-dressed adults, in for the second time, so
she didn't bother. She's been feeling guilty ever since. The case could have
been broken that night."
IN A RENTED Tercel, Ellroy drives along Valley Boulevard, past check-cashing
joints, fast-food shacks and run-down discount stores. We're going to visit
the place where the body was found, and Ellroy is getting even more hyped,
shifting nervously into full performance mode in an effort, perhaps, to mask
whatever emotion he's feeling. "Shitsville, USA," he calls El Monte with a
smirk, echoing the term his father always used to describe where his ex-wife
took young James after their divorce.
Swinging past the low-lying Anne LeGore Elementary School, Ellroy points
toward a length of chain-link fence. "That's where I smoked reefer with two
Mexican kids named Reyes and Denny," he brags. "When were you born?"
"April of '59," I tell him.
"I remember it well. Bobby Darin singing `Dream Lover' Wilbert Harrison
sieging `Kansas City.' I was 11 years old and in the Van Ness Avenue
Elementary School in L.A. I was stealing crime books from Chevalier's,
scratching my balls--I've always been a big ball scratcher, looking for some
mythical cyst down, there--and smoking reefer before you existed."
We make a quick stop at his old house, stifling hot and the size of a
shoebox, and Ellroy schmoozes with the current resident, a retired
construction worker named Geno. Finally we head out to Arroyo High and pull
into the empty parking lot. Ellroy stares ar the neglected, sunbaked strip
across the street: the exact spot where his mother lay. It seems surprisingly
ordinary, though Ellroy insists that for more than 30 years he was unable to
come back to El Monte. Fear of his past, fear of confronting his memories and
fear of admitting that Geneva shaped his life through her absence--all this
conspired to keep him away. With the new book, Ellroy has exorcised that fear,
and the Redhead, as he now affectionately calls his mother, has ceased to
twist his psyche.
Sitting in his rental car, Ellroy blasts the air-conditioning anti stares at
the spot. "It's as common as dirt here," he says. I hen he starts telling me
that, once he decided to come back, he began visiting at night when the place
had the maximum power to scare him. "There's a high crime rate, so I used to
drive here and park, put myself at physical risk. I hoped it would increase my
perceptions about that night. "
Did it?
"No. But it was a way for me to commune with her."
AS A BOY, James Ellroy lusted after his divorced mother. The year she was
murdered, he was 10 and tall for his age; she was 43 and lied about hers. He
peeped into the bathroom while she bathed, caught her in bed with boyfriends
and says he once spied her in the passenger seat of his sixth-grade teacher's
Nash Metropolitan.
A registered nurse and aerospace worker, Geneva lived for Saturday night.
She trolled San Gabriel Valley dives like the Playroom, Jolly Jug and the
49-er, while James spent weekends in L.A. with his father, watching boxing,
trashing his mother, boning up on show-biz gossip"--I knew Rock Hudson was gay
when I was 11"--and gorging on frankfurters cooked over a hot plate. After the
murder, he lived with his father in an apartment near Hancock Park.
Armand Ellroy was 59 years old at the time, eking out a lousy living as a
freelance accountant. (His career high point came years earlier, as Rita
Hayworth's business manager.) Armand was sickly and broke, but the boy enjoyed
his life with such an indifferent disciplinarian. "I liked living with a guy
who shouted `Fuck you, Fritz]'at the TV," says Ellroy, who admits that he was
secrecy glad to be freed from his mother's stricter control. "My father and I
had this dog, Minna, that bit us sometimes and wasn't housebroken, so the
place reeked of shit and piss."
As a lonely, awkward teenager, Ellroy consumed detective novels like they
were Zagnuts. He obsessed over the Black Dahlia killing, Los Angeles's most
infamous unsolved murder, and secretly stalked the best-looking girls from his
classes at Fairfax High School, the same ones who were openly repulsed by his
wretched skin condition and strange behavior. "I laughed at things that
weren't funny," he says. To get attention, he developed his "crazy man act,"
which entailed doing anything to offend. "I started talking Nazi shit and
reading Stormtrooper magazine," he remembers with crooked bravado. "My father
would torment me by walking around the house wearing a yarmulke. He'd yell,
`You Nazi cocksucket.'" Ellroy pauses to allow the sick scene to sink in. "I
knew everything wasn't quite kosher at home."
After getting expelled from high school, Ellroy enlisted in the army, then
quickly faked a nervous breakdown and engineered a discharge after only three
months. His father had already suffered three strokes and was living on Social
Security. "Basically I came back to L.A. to watch him die," says Ellroy,
admitting that he treated his father shabbily.
After his father's death, Ellroy embarked on a furious decade of degeneracy
and self-abuse. "I began drinking and breaking into houses, satisfying
specific curiosities about the girls who lived there." He stole prescription
pills and swallowed them blindly. He slept in city parks and flophouses,
clerked in a porn shop, shoplifted liquor and Benzedrex inhalers--designed as
decongestants, they contained amphetamine-soaked cotton balls that could be
swallowed. "Though I couldn't find women, my sex drive almost killed me," he
continues. "The Benzedrex inhalers made me want to do nothing but fantasize
and slam the ham for 18, 20, 24 hours straight. When you jack off on uppers,
it feels so good that you don't want to orgasm. And when you finally do come,
you're on your way down and your fantasy apparatus has already shut off.
You're like, `What a drag. Better get some booze or something.'"
Ellroy was tormented, to say the least. He was in the grip of something he
couldn't even begin to understand, and after surviving a painful childhood
right out of Dickens, he began living a life worthy of William S. Burroughs.
As he relates it in the painful, confessional chapters of My Dark Places, his
life was completely out of control. He finally hit rock bottom in 1975, at the
age of 27, when hallucinations landed him in the hospital. Once he recovered,
he stopped drinking (though he kept smoking grass daily) and got a job
caddying at the Hillcrest and gel-Air country clubs. Two years later, he began
attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Venice and, for the first time, had
success with women.
After accruing two years' worth of AA chips, Ellroy began writing Brown's
Requiem, a private-eye novel he'd been thinking about for years. When it was
finished, he found an agent who sold it to Avon Books as a paperback original.
Ellroy received a check for $1,404, all of which he blew on a hooker, a
cashmere sweater, a $500 automobile and a weekend in Mexico.
In a bid to reinvent himself once more, Ellroy moved cross-country to a
basement apartment in Eastchester, New York, just outside Manhattan. He kept
writing, making each book denser and more complex than the last. He wrote four
novels in four years and built enough of a cult following to give up caddying
as a day job. Eventually he upscaled to a two-story house in New Canaan,
Connecticut. But wherever he lived, he was always writing about Los Angeles in
the 1950s, a noirish world of greedy cops, racist men, hopeless drunks,
pathetic whores and murdered women. From exile in Connecticut, he became the
literary chronicler of L.A.'s ugliest, darkest secrets. But one dark place
still remained unexplored.
THE SUN IS BLAZING, AND THANKS TO HIS new buzz cut, Ellroy's scalp is
starting to burn. It has gone from a pale radish color to the raw, beefy red
of a Jersey tomato. He slathers it with a healthy coating of sunscreen, but
that doesn't seem to help. Climbing out of a production van, he squints at the
sky and enters the fabricated world of a Hollywood movie set on a grimy street
in Lincoln Heights. People and equipment are crowded together outside a crusty
brown two-story house being used as a location for the film version of
Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, starring Kevin Spacey, Danny DeVito and Kim
Basinger.
The movie industry has wholeheartedly embraced Ellroy. He's working on an
original script for director Carl Franklin and a screen adaptation of White
Jazz for Nick Nolte. "Hollywood views James as a very hot writer," says L.A.
Confidential director Curtis Hanson, who also directed The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle and The River Wild. "And he is. American Tabloid made a lot of noise.
Now he's turning his attention to doing screenplays and being recognized as a
great talent. Everybody's trying to get a piece of Ellroy."
But here on the set of his own movie, he's unexpectedly subdued. Though
there's a trashed-out room with bloodstained bedding, some boxy '40s cars out
front and big, mean-looking cops in perfectly creased postwar suits--all pure
Ellroy--he's still not the center of attention. Ellroy is a narcissistic
bundle of ego and insecurity, so he's ill at ease. He admits that the only
parties he enjoys are ones in his honor, and on this movie set, there's no
chair with his name on the back.
"Hey, James," calls one of the grips. "Nice haircut."
"Yeah," Ellroy says, waving back. "Thanks for suggesting that I get it." A
second later, out of the side of his mouth, he mutters, "Cocksucker."
Once we're back in the car, Ellroy perks up again, launching into a fairly
rank soliloquy on the pleasures of popping and preserving a lover's
blackheads. After parking on Sunset, he leads the way up some stairs to the
office of his Los Angeles agent, Joel Gotler, one of the hottest book-to-movie
dealmakers in town. Ellroy literally waltzes into the wood-paneled rooms that
once housed the venerable H. N. Swanson Agency, which Goder now owns. Besides
his live authors, Gotler represents the estates of former Swanson clients John
O'Hara, Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain, though it's almost certain that,
in all the times Cain visited these offices, he never launched into an
obscene, off-key version of "Purple People Eater," as Ellroy does now.
"Stop leaving that on my answering machine]" Gotler shouts, recognizing the
tune and standing up with exaggerated alarm.
Ellroy takes a seat at Gotler's heavy wooden desk and confronts a massive
pile of White Jazz script contracts. This office seems to have become the
symbolic locus for all his money- and success-related fantasies. He claims
that Gotler has doubled his income over the last year, and while signing
various clauses ?nd agreements, he keeps jumping up, breaking into song,
dancing around the room and announcing the weird sexual preferences of various
politicians and athletes. Gotler watches the familiar act and exclaims, "Look
at him] He's spinning out of control." After calling his wife at home in K.C.
and trying out a couple of German beer-hall ditties at full volume, Ellroy
announces that tonight's dinner is on him.
Back down on the Strip, a raggedy panhandler approaches. Gotler walks by
without missing a beat, but Ellroy stops, pulls a tan-colored wallet from his
back pocket- and fishes out a bill. "Have a party, Daddy-O," he says, palming
the homeless guy a twenty. To Gotler he adds, "You can get a lot of Night
Train with twenty bucks."
Gotler laughs. "He's out of control]"
IN THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ELLROY, EATING out in Los Angeles inevitably means
a trip to the Pacific Dining Car downtown. The first time he went was with his
father, for a tenth birthday celebration less than a year before his mother
was killed. In the '80s, when his books first started to sell, Ellroy began
revisiting the classic eatery, which has been part of Los Angeles history
since the 1920s and is popular with cops and politicians. The restaurant
figures in several Ellroy novels, and it's where he met and married Helen.
Other than his own home, Ellroy states unequivocally, the Pacific Dining Car
is his favorite indoor space.
We occupy his regular red leather booth in the Grand Central Room. As the
maitre d' approaches, Ellroy looks up and nonchalantly asks, "How's your
hammer hanging?"
Without missing a beat, the maitre d' answers with a slow nod of
recognition. Then, using an old nickname of Ellroy's, he asks, "And what will
the Dog be eating tonight?"
"Woof," says Ellroy, barely able to contain his delight.
"That's one can of Alpo," the maitre d' notes.
Once real orders are taken (Ellroy doesn't eat meat these days and asks for
a Caesar salad), the talk turns to the pitfalls of being a novelist writing
for Hollywood. While he's happy to accept the financial largess that studios
routinely dole out for options and screenplays, Ellroy is deeply skeptical of
the whole enterprise. "The only things that interest me about Hollywood are
who's got the biggest click, who's gay, who's into hookers and who's a
nymphomaniac," he says. "I've probably seen ten profound movies in my life and
eaten ten profound hamburgers. But if, from this point on, I don't see another
movie, I won't care. And I certainly won't eat another hamburger." He digs
into his salad to underscore the point.
ELLROY IS TOOLING HIS BLACK BMW 840ci through Mission Hills, the upscale
Kansas City neighborhood of perfectly manicured lawns and old-money mansions.
"Nice sled, huh?" he says. Wearing a faded Lacoste polo--he swears that the
Hawaiian shirts are all in the laundry--he steers the new car into the
driveway of his pine-tree-fronted Georgian-style home. Not at all what a
die-hard Ellroy fan would expect.
Past an elegant oak-paneled living room, furnished in a tasteful mix of
French country and Biedermeier sleek, a wide staircase leads up to his
austere, fastidiously neat office. For five or so hours each day, Ellroy works
his literary mayhem in slanted, blocky letters on sheets of lined notebook
paper. Above the Stickley furniture, the walls are covered with framed dust
jackets, photos of Ellroy and magazine articles by and about him--in their
entirety, complete with covers and contents pages. The collection extends to a
spare room upstairs, where copies of his books line the shelves and a framed
print of Knopf's famous borzoi logo is prominently displayed.
Sensing my amazement at the shameless self-aggrandizement, Ellroy explains,
"Look at the way I used to live compared to the way I live now, and you'll see
why I want to commemorate my every achievement. If I need to buy a bigger
house in order to continue doing this, I will."
He is unabashedly proud to be published by Knopf--which published the top
crime writers of the '30s and '40s. Sonny Mehta, president and publisher of
Knopf and Ellroy's personal editor, has seen his intense commitment up close.
"James is extremely passionate and obsessive," says Mehta. "There's nobody
with the type of voice he has, and I appreciate the ambition of his work. I
remember my first editing session with him. He came to the house and filled up
an entire legal pad with notes. What impresses me most about James, though, is
the strength of his desire to be a better and better writer."
In Kansas City, Ellroy is more relaxed and more restrained than in L.A.
"People are always amazed that I write very dark, violent, dense books, yet I
am so orderly and controlled," he says. "I wouldn't be able to write these
books unless I could constantly reinforce myself with silence. I like being in
contained, dark, temperature-controlled environments. I love paying taxes. I
love paying my bills. I love earning money. I love the decent,
well-structured, orderly, committed life." He hesitates and gets to the core
of his new existence. "In some ways, I'm just your typical reformed profligate
shithead."
He seems well matched with his wife, who is working on her first novel. They
were introduced by Los Angeles writer Mikal Gilmore just as Ellroy's first
marriage, which lasted two and a half years, was collapsing. He calls Helen
"Cougar," she calls him "Big Dog," and their successful union surprises at
least one member of her old L.A. Weekly gang who is amazed that two people so
different (Knode was known as a hard-core feminist) can get along so well.
"Helen is the big truth bringer," Ellroy says. "She's as intense and driven
and committed as I am, but she also has an omnivorous intellect. That this is
the woman I sleep with, it just blasts the shit out of me."
HE FIRST CAME TO KANSAS CITY TO VISIT her family, and as soon as he saw the
Mission Hills neighborhood, he knew he wanted to live there. The appeal of the
area, Ellroy points out, is rooted in the insecurities he experienced as a
kid. "Look where I grew up, right on the edge of Hancock Park. My old man had
bupkis; he didn't even own a car. Now I live in the Hancock Park of Kansas
City, and I have a bigger house than any of the houses I broke into, which I
fucking love."
It has certainly been a splendid ascent, though it's hard to see how his
wild youth prepared him for such a disciplined adulthood. "My disillusionment
with my father, my mother's death, the fact that I lived such a furious mental
life for so long, all of that instilled an odd self-sufficiency in me."
Sipping from his ever-present cup of lukewarm coffee, he says, "I couldn't be
who I am unless she died the way she did. And I am very pleased with who I am
today"
This begs the obvious question about his motives with the current book,
especially in an era where commercialized confessions litter the pop-cultural
landscape like debris on a beach. "People will say, `Aren't you just
exploiting your mother again?'" he bluntly admits. "I'll say no. If they find
that hard to believe or if they think I'm being disingenuous, I'll tell them
to kiss my ass."
The two-year investigation described in My Dark Places was difficult, but
the results were enlightening. The search for his mother's killer took
Ellroy
from the bungalows of El Monte to a reunion with several estranged members of
his family "He had a reputation for being a bit of a con man," says his
maternal cousin Janet Klock, who figured that Ellroy had died in an L.A.
gutter, "so at first we were a little cautious about dealing with him."
As a result of his work with Stoner, Ellroy feels certain that the killer of
his mother was the thin, well-dressed man with whom she'd been seen drinking
at the Desert Inn and eating at Stan's Drive-In. Stoner feels that they may
actually have found the murderer: a West Covina man whose name was not in the
original file. "He matches the description, he had the right kind of car, he
just loved exposing himself to women, and a week before the Ellroy murder he
pulled a rifle on two police officers," says Stoner. He hesitates, then grimly
reveals that the suspect has been dead for ten years. "I tried talking to his
widow, but she really froze up on me, didn't want to talk, didn't want to show
me a picture of her dead husband. He's got an extensive police record and is
the one person in the investigation that I lean toward as the killer. I'd
still like to take another pass at interviewing her."
What would Ellroy do if he ever came face-to-face with the murderer of his
mother? He brightens at the thought. "I'd feel awe more than anything else.
What would you do? Kill an 80year-old man and go to jail for the rest of your
life? I mean, if I could walk him to the gas chamber and strap him in, I
would. But after all these years, it would be next to impossible to get him
convicted. It would be great to fuck with him, though, to go back and question
him repeatedly He'd be in some rest home, hooked up to a respirator. It'd be a
blast."
Ellroy can afford to joke now, even though the killer's identity will
probably never be known. Researching and writing My Dark Places provided him
with something almost as important as finding the killer: a keener knowledge
of his mother's life as well as his own. Treasuring the new photos he
discovered of Geneva--one has been blown up and framed near the entrance to
his office--Ellroy has a newfound respect for her that never existed before he
started the book. "Over the course of the investigation," Stoner says, "I've
watched James fall in love with his mother in much the same way that a
12-year-old boy does. He's grown up tremendously"
Certainly Ellroy realizes how close he came to living out her sad legacy,
and he now judges her much less harshly. "I have more respect for my mother,
but I don't want to glamorize her," he says, draining his coffee. "I knew from
the gate that we probably wouldn't find who killed her. The bottom line for me
was to get to know her better. I see my mother now and realize that her pain
was greater than mine. But she had grit, she had determination, she took shit
from nobody. I honor those qualities, especially in a woman."
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