L.A. ’53 — rampant ring-a-ding-ding! Calendar pages ruffling toward that date with destiny.
I was on the Landing Strip with Liz and a waitress from Biff’s Charbroil. I heard the mail slot open and an envelope hit the floor.
It was a Western Union telegram. I opened it and read:
Dear Mr. Otash,
We here at Confidential Magazine are looking for a man conversant in the celebrity secrets of present-day Los Angeles, preferably a man with prior police experience. Would you be willing to meet me in a week’s time, to discuss a possible collaboration?
Sincerely,
7
“Ava Gardner’s Dusky Dee-lite.”
“Johnnie Ray’s Men’s Room Misadventure.”
“Bad Boy Bob Mitchum: Back in Reeferland AGAIN?”
I wired Harrison and confirmed the meet. I booked a boss bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I borrowed textbooks from Arthur Crowley’s library and studied libel, slander, and defamation of character. I learned to think and talk like a language-lucid lawyer.
Jimmy bagged back issues of Peep, Lowdown, Whisper, Tattle, and Confidential itself. I studied linguistic loopholes and cultivated codes of mitigation, equivocation, ambiguity. Innuendo, inference, implication. So many wicked ways to scandal-skin a cat.
I alter-egoed myself in a week’s time. I discovered sin-uendo and scanda-language. I moved into the bungalow a day early. That talking bug and I conferenced and concurred: Confidential was the grooved-out grail of this shook-up generation. Disillusionment is enlightenment. Confidential trafficked truth and harpooned hypocrisy. It was a devoutly decorous document. It was the meshuggener Magna Carta of our hopped-up and fucked-up age.
It’s now 9/21/53. It’s now precisely 10 a.m. The doorbell rings.
Caviar, canapés — check. Martinis mixed magnifico — check. My dossier on Bondage Bob — malignantly memorized.
I opened the door. The Sultan of Sin-uendo: a nervous nebbish in a dreary drip-dry suit.
He said, “Mr. Otash.”
I said, “Mr. Harrison.”
He walked in and went Ooh-la-la. I poured two mighty martinis and pointed to the couch. We raised our glasses. I said, “To freedom of speech.”
“The First Amendment. What it hath wrought.”
We clicked glasses. I sat facing Bondage Bob. He made the you-and-me sign. He said, “Strange bedfellows.”
You’re stranger, dipshit. You wear women’s lingerie and love the lash. You published Honeys in Heels, pre-Confidential.
“Get my attention, Mr. Otash. Open strong, baby. I’ve got a storefront called the ‘Hollywood Research Bureau.’ It’s been my primary source since we launched. We’ve floated the magazine on the few nuggets it’s panned, plus imagination. It’s been thin gruel, by and large. Hit me, sweetheart. Show me why the cognoscenti says, ‘Fred Otash is the man to see.’ ”
I pulled out my Marlon Brando snapshot. I passed it to Bondage Bob. He gasped and sprayed me with a mouthful of martini.
I let it drip-dry on my suit coat. Bondage Bob coughed and called up composure. He said, “Holy fucking shit.”
“May I give you a candid assessment of your situation and explain how I might best serve you?”
“Hit me, doll. I didn’t fly 3,000 miles for some namby-pamby chitchat.”
I shot my cuffs and showed off my Rolex. I buzz-bombed Bondage Bob with the Freon Fred stare.
“You publish what is rapidly becoming the premier scandal magazine in a very crowded field. You compete with Whisper, Tattle, Peep, On the Q.T., Lowdown, and others. Your competitors rely largely on true-crime exposés, reports of miracle cures for various diseases, and rehashes of your own articles on celebrity misbehavior. The specific strengths of your magazine are its staunch anti-Communist stance and sex. Frankly, I find your articles that play on the greed of your readers are both unbelievable and devoid of the heat that people turn to Confidential for. There are no emerald mines in Colorado and no Uruguayan herbs that triple the size of the male member in two weeks’ time. You’re lying, sir. You’re hoping that bilking your readers with stories like that will both boost your sales and help defray the costs of the libel suits that are being filed against you with greater and greater frequency in circuit courts all over America. My good friend, the esteemed jurist Arthur Cowley, has informed me that magazines that publish filler pieces chock-full of bold-faced lies create what he calls a ‘gap in credibility and verisimilitude.’ This calls into question the veracity of all the articles published in said magazines over time, leaving said magazines vulnerable to both individual lawsuits and the looming specter of what Mr. Crowley calls the ‘lynch-mob-like and Communistic specter of the emerging class action suit,’ wherein aggrieved parties band together under the aegis of left-wing Jewish lawyers in order to posit a common beef and destroy the First Amendment right of free speech that we hold so sacred here in America. The mitigating, equivocating, and temporizing language that runs through your groundbreaking articles on celebrity misconduct will not save you. You may use ‘alleged,’ ‘purported,’ and ‘rumored’ as much as you like, but they will not legally extricate you in the end. My first two salient points are these: you must dramatically boost your sexual content, and everything you publish in Confidential must be entirely true and verifiable.”
Wooooooooo! Bravura breath control and artful articulation! Bondage Bob: flabbergasted and flushed behind Beefeater’s gin.
He fidgeted. He licked his lips. He crossed his legs like a submissive sissy. I saw restraint-rope scars on his soft and sockless ankles.
“Nuisance suits are costing us 25 thou a month. Those Commie lawyers are coming out of the sewers like rats.”
I sailed into my second soliloquy:
“Informants must be both credible and coercible, as well as vulnerable to exposure of their own misdeeds. I served as an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department for close to a decade. I have access to every crooked cop in this town, and they will rat out any celebrity, socialite, Communist, miscegenist, or alluring lowlife that they know of for a simple retainer. The scum that they rat out will rat out six others to stay out of your magazine, and the mathematical equation that I am positing will extend indefinitely. I can tell that you’re thinking, Informants alone will not suffice, and that assumption is correct. You may know that we are entering a bold new era of electronic surveillance. I propose that we install standing, full-time bugs in every high-class hotel in Los Angeles. I will bribe the managers and desk clerks of said hotels to steer celebrity adulterers and queers to specific rooms, where their sexual activities and conversation will be captured on tape. The best bug man on earth is a hebe named Bernie Spindel. I will meet with him soon. Mr. Spindel would love to enter your employ and has a gift for you. He bugged a bungalow at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica last week. The manager of the hotel is a masochistic child molester with a quite understandable urge to be punished for his aberrant behavior. I will physically chastise him on a monthly basis, which will deter him from hurting children as well as keep him under my thumb. He will have strict orders to place all celebs in bungalow number 9. Bernie’s gift is a tape of Senator John F. Kennedy fucking Ingrid Bergman and detailing his preposterous plans to run for president of the United States to her, while she yawns and prattles on about her kids. Be forewarned: the fucking is short-lived. I’ll be frank: Senator Kennedy is a two-minute man.”