The stars, or rather black holes, of these lurid accounts include 70s porn king John Holmes and LA hood Eddie Nash, both implicated in the infamous 1981 quadruple-homicide known as the Wonderland Murders; Barbara Graham, executed in 1955 via California's gas chamber for the brutal slaying of a 62-year-old widow; lazy-eyed hitchhiker-killer Billy Cook, who had the words 'Hard Luck' tattooed across his knuckles and went on a blood-drenched murder spree in 1951 that ended the lives of at least six persons; bandleader Spade Cooley, the 'King of Western Swing', who stomped his wife to death in an alcohol-fuelled rage over her infidelities; and celluloid bombshell Barbara Payton, who starred alongside James Cagney in crime drama Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, but ended it all turning two-dollar tricks in the gutters of Hollywood.
Why did you pick these stories for LA Despair?
I've been working on these subjects for many years. Two or three were ideas I had for books, and two were actually contracted as books. But I realised I did not want to write a book about each one of these subjects. So I thought of putting them together because they all have a relationship to LA.
I've been working on the Eddie Nash thing since it broke, really, in the 80s. And the Barbara Payton thing goes way back to my friendship with actor Tom Neal, her lover. Ultimately, the Payton story fit because nothing could be more despairing than Barbara Payton, except maybe the Eddie Nash/ John Holmes piece. Totally disheartening. From 0,000 a year Holmes was making, to stealing stereos out of cars and sleeping in alleyways.
I met John Holmes when he was just starting in porn. He was kind of an asshole, a self-important asshole. But that's what the drug scene's like. Like that section in the book where I describe a porn film where the girl ODs as they're fucking her, and they decide to finish it anyway, so they reverse angle and shoot it from behind.
Let's talk about the John Holmes piece. What do Holmes and Eddie Nash mean or symbolise to you?
John Holmes is like an LA Frankenstein monster. He comes here. He prospers. And then through drugs and sex and the whole scene, he becomes a Frankenstein. To me, that section, Bad Eddie, represents the core, the basis of what LA is all about. It's a whole other world. The whole Laurel Canyon scene. The hip Hollywood world of the cheesy nightclubs and dope. Nash owned this club called Starwood, and all the kids went there because all the major rock groups went there. It was a major disco place, and they'd give kids dope as they walked inside. They'd actually dish out coke. It was their policy. Nash was a major crime figure. You could not touch Eddie Nash. He was too fucking smart. There were murders and everything going on all the time, but they could never pin anything on Eddie.
Holmes comes to LA almost innocent, and is then corrupted, but Nash comes to LA on the make, and thrives...
Well, if you're evil, you can come to LA and you can do your thing. From day one, Eddie Nash was like a hungry wolf. I don't think Eddie Nash ever did anything for anyone where he could not exploit it or benefit from it. His whole raison d'être was to get what he could out of everything and be on top. He always felt like he was on the run. So he had to keep running, and grab things as he went, like nightclubs. He bought judges, jurors, people downtown [in city government]. Have murders going on. Pay people off. LA is the place where you can do your thing. The city doesn't care what you do. You couldn't pull off what Eddie Nash did in New York, it'd be of a whole different structure. But out here it's the West. And there's still kind of a shoot-'em-up mentality.
John Holmes, though, mutated from that innocent thing you mention. He liked to work with his hands. He loved thrift shops and buying old furniture and fixing it up. Even in the porn scene, he was kind of an outsider. But drugs took him to the other extreme. He was a lost cause with drugs. It destroyed him. And drugs were available. It was part of everything out here. It's interesting that the juries trying the Wonderland murder cases [where four members of a drug den were bludgeoned to death] hated everyone who got killed. They felt it was good all these people got killed because they were rotten people anyway.
I'm not interested in making a historical document. I recreate these things. My presentation is a very clear portrait of the city. The only part that drifts from the city, although it starts there, is the Billy Cook case. This is a book about the way things are, not the way Hollywood wants to see them.
You're known for creating an empathy for these cold-blooded killers, like Billy Cook. But why should we feel sympathetic towards them?
The truth of the matter is these are human beings and they've gone to extreme lengths. The lengths they go to and the why of how they get to that place has always fascinated me. Like if you went in and visited John Holmes when he was dying of AIDS, as a skeleton on a bed, how did he get there and why was he there? Of course, some people have endured a lot of shit in their lives, like Billy Cook. When Cook was a kid, all he ate was biscuits because his teeth were so bad. He wanted a bicycle, and the foster mother he's with gives him one, but then takes it back because it's part of a scam to get the money for it. He never had any emotional closeness because he was a runt, an ugly runt. Cook was very similar to Charles Manson in that way. You have an ugly little runt, you beat him and put him in a cage. Finally, when this runt gets loose, look out! Like a dog. If you whip it all the time, it becomes a fucking vicious animal. Don't turn your back on that son of a bitch.
Even though Billy Cook ends up going on this cross-state hitchhiking murder spree, kills a family of five, including three children, and even the family's dog, you sort of feel sorry for him at times. That scene from his childhood, where Cook's mother dies and his father abandons him and his siblings in a mineshaft is horrific. And then Cook ends up doing the same thing, hiding the bodies in a mine.
Our society's based on a Barbie Doll culture. Barbie and Ken, those are the winners. Those are the real people. It's not Charlie Manson, and it's not Billy Cook. It's Barbie and Ken. Those are our heroes. That's what we aspire to be. I think of all the freaks, all the ugly people, with misshapen mouths. Obese people. Society treats them in a different manner.
Still, there's something cool about Billy Cook, not pathetic.
He's the last desperado. It's pure Americana from beginning to end, like where he meets up with his father and tells him, "I'm going to live by the gun and roam." Or where they have his body on display in a hardware store after he's been executed, and they end up burying him by flashlight in some nowhere cemetery somewhere.
I find Spade Cooley's story the saddest. Cooley was once on top of the world, then ended up an alcoholic, in a torturous relationship with an unfaithful wife. Isn't it your contention Cooley never should have been tried, much less convicted for premeditated murder?
He was as big as Lawrence Welk in his day. He's remembered as "wife-stomper, Spade Cooley". But there's no way you can premeditate, "I'm going to stomp her, and that'll break the aorta and she'll bleed to death." There's no way to foresee that. If anything, he was temporarily insane. Just going through what he went through, it was crazy, that relationship he had with his wife. They loved each other, were going to commit suicide together, seem to reconcile, and then she wants a divorce. I do believe she [Ella Mae Cooley] had an affair with Roy Rogers, and that was part of it. And then she confesses to being in some sort of sex cult, and Cooley just snaps. He wasn't able to let her go. I don't believe he had anything left. It was a totally co-dependent relationship. Pulling her away from him would be dividing himself. They should have separated. If they had separated, they would have both survived. So he spends eight years in prison, gets his big break, is going to get out on parole, is granted this leave to perform with his orchestra, and drops dead of a heart attack after the show. They don't even know what happened to his ashes. They think they were lost during a move. He was a tremendous talent. Thousands of people were involved in his music.
Barbara Graham is the opposite of Cooley, in the sense that people sympathised with her. The 1958 film I Want To Live! cast Susan Hayward as Graham going to the gas chamber for a crime she didn't commit. You believe her to be almost completely immoral, don't you?
She was a fucking rotten human being, through and through. She was screwing these two guys who were guilty of having beaten children to death with pipes. You won't find that in any of the movies, but that's the truth, and that's what Barbara Graham was. A lot of people don't want to hear that. She was attractive. She was claiming she was innocent of murdering this old woman, but the facts prove otherwise.
Considering your view of LA, why do you live there?
Put it this way, you come here and you write your own ticket. Eddie Nash wrote his own ticket. John Holmes wrote his ticket, though it might not have been the one that was most favourable to him. Certainly the ticket Barbara Graham wrote was not in her best interests, but if that's the ticket you want to write, it's your ride, baby. Why am I here? Well, I'm writing my ticket, and LA says, "Cool, man, go for it."
For more information see Johngilmore.com
LA Despair (ISBN 18789 23161) is available on 15 August from Amok Books priced .95
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