Ellroy finally is laying 'ghosts' to rest

When best-selling author James Ellroy enters a room, heads tend to turn his way. Bald, gaunt, 6'3," with stark features, hard eyes and round glasses, his presence is THAT striking. If Gandhi had a lanky, rebellious, 58-year-old son, he might look something like this.

As we sit for our lunch interview, Ellroy's manner is affable but slightly guarded, and during the next hour it will go through a roller coaster of mood swings: friendly and hostile, outgoing and defensive, endearingly modest and appallingly egotistical.

He seems to regard the press as both his ally, the purveyor of his personal myth, and an enemy eager to bring him down. My tape recorder is useless because he punctuates his sentences with the "F" word like other people use commas and periods.

We are meeting at Seattle's Dahlia Lounge, which is appropriate since Ellroy is in town to publicize the lavish movie version of his 1987 novel, "The Black Dahlia," which is based on the famously unsolved 1947 Los Angeles torture-mutilation murder.

And his publicity tour is something of an anomaly since he had nothing whatsoever to do with the movie. He is not its screenwriter, co-producer or consultant. The studio has put him on the road, apparently, because he's willing to go. "I'm good at it," he boasts.

But his praise for the movie is halfhearted; he admits that "parts are good, and parts are less good." When I ask which parts are less good, he snaps, "Look, you're not going to get me to say anything negative about the movie -- so you might as well give up."

He also doesn't want to talk about the specifics of the real Dahlia murder, or the various theories about who the murderer might be. "The truth is I just don't give a s--t who killed and cut up Elizabeth Short. The question holds no interest for me."

What he will talk about, and indeed seems to relish talking about, is how the gruesome, real-life murder of Short -- the aspiring actress and perhaps prostitute dubbed the "Black Dahlia" by the L.A. press -- eerily mirrors his own tragic history.

In 1958, when Ellroy was 10 years old, his mother -- living away from the family in the East L.A. suburb of El Monte -- was, like Short a decade before, brutally murdered and dumped on a roadside. The crime was never solved.

A year later, as a birthday gift, his father gave young James a copy of "The Badge," a compilation of true-crime stories by "Dragnet" TV star Jack Webb. One of the stories was about the Black Dahlia murder, which Ellroy instantly identified with his mother's story.

He studied the case, he read the old newspaper accounts in the library, he bicycled to the site at 39th and Norton where the Dahlia body was dumped. "I was obsessed with the thing, it just wouldn't let me go, and it's what put me on the path to be a novelist."

Ellroy published his first novel, "Brown's Requiem," in 1981, and he wrote five more before tackling the Dahlia subject with his own fantasy version of what might have happened. The book was a big success, establishing him as a novelist, but "it did not purge me of my demons."

In his charmed career, Ellroy has written 15 books ("all of which are in print"), nine of which have been made into movies (including "L.A. Confidential"). He has a mantel full of literary awards and, as he modestly says, he's earned "a few bucks."

But, in other ways, his life also has been a nightmare: an unfavorable discharge from the Army, years of drug abuse, two emotional breakdowns, a succession of failed relationships. The "twin ghosts" of his mother and the Dahlia, he says, never left him.

Now, however, he feels they're finally put to rest. Sober since the summer of 2003, he's recently moved back to L.A. from the East Coast and started a new life. "After this tour," he says, "I will never say another public word about my mother or the Black Dahlia again."

"I will also never write another crime novel. That's also behind me. What I write about now is people and politics and the present." He's writing a sequel to "The Cold Six Thousand," which he says "will be one of the greatest novels ever written."

Ellroy's own politics are "right-wing" but hardly doctrinaire. "I don't think much of George Bush. But I am a Reagan admirer. I think John Kennedy was a worthless son-of-a-bitch, but I think Bobby was a great man. And he wasn't having an affair with Marilyn Monroe."

Recently divorced for the third time, he says he and his wife have remained close friends. With a coy smile, he throws out the name of a famous actress and says, "This weekend I am going to ask her to be my wife, and I have every reason to believe she will accept."

I suspect he is putting me on here, but it's true that Ellroy mixes with the world of Hollywood. Everything he's written has been filmed or optioned, he pals around with stars such as Nick Nolte, and he's written a half-dozen original scripts "that have come to nothing."

He also seems to have an extensive knowledge of movie history, especially film noir, about which he has some contrary opinions. "Most of it's not very good. I think 'Chinatown' is the most overrated movie of all time. A terrible, terrible movie."

But he has absolutely no interest in directing a movie himself. "People say to me, 'How do you know you wouldn't like it if you've never tried?' I tell them, 'I've never f----d a porcupine either, but I have a pretty good idea I wouldn't like it."

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