Who knows?
Who cares?
It took me three viewings to get the plot down anyway.
Because Dick Contino held me spellbound.
Because I knew–instinctively–that he held important answers.
Because I knew that he hovered elliptically in my “L.A. Quartet” novels, a phantom waiting to speak.
Because I sensed that he could powerfully spritz narrative detail and fill up holes in my memory, bringing Los Angeles in the late ’50s into some sort of hyper-focus.
Because I thought I detected a significant mingling of his circa ’57 on-and-off-screen personas, a brew that thirty-odd intervening years would forcefully embellish.
Contino on-screen: a handsome Italian guy, late twenties, big biceps from weights or making love to his accordion. Dreamboat attributes: shiny teeth, dark curly hair, engaging smile. It’s the ’50s so he’s working at a sartorial deficit: pegger slacks hiked up to his pecs, horizontal-striped Ban-Lon shirts. He looks good and he can sing; he’s straining on “Rock Candy Baby”–the lyrics suck and you can tell this up-tempo rebop isn’t his style–but he croons the wah-wah ballad “Angel Act” achingly, full of baritone tremolos–quintessentially the pussy-whipped loser in lust with the “noir” goddess who’s out to trash his life.
And he can act: he’s an obvious natural, at ease with the camera. Dig: atrocious lines get upgraded to mediocre every time he opens his mouth.
And he’s grateful to be top-lining _Daddy-O_–he doesn’t condescend to the script, his fellow performers or lyrics like, “Rock Candy Baby, that’s what I call my chick! Rock Candy Baby, sweeter than a licorice stick!”–even though my threadbare knowledge of his life tells me that he’s already been to much higher places.
I decided to find Dick Contino.
I prayed for him to be alive and well.
I located a half dozen of his albums and listened to them, reveling in pure _Entertainment_.
“Live at the Fabulous Flamingo,” “Squeeze Me,” “Something for the Girls”–old standards arranged to spotlight accordion virtuosity. Main theme bombardments; sentiment so pure and timeless that it could soundtrack every moment of transcendent schmaltz that Hollywood has ever produced. Dick Contino, showstopper on wax: zapping two keyboards, improvising cadenzas, shaking thunderstorms from bellows compression. Going from whisper to sigh to roar and back again in the length of time it takes to think: tell me what this man’s life means and how it connects to my life.
I called my researcher friend Alan Marks. He caught my pitch on the first bounce. “The accordion guy? I think he used to play Vegas.”
“Find out everything you can about him. Find out if he’s still alive, and if he is, locate him.”
“What’s this about?”
“Narrative detail.”
I should have said _containable_ narrative detail–because I wanted Dick Contino to be a pad prowling/car crashing/moon howling/womanizing quasi-psychopath akin to the heroes of my books. I should have said, “Bring me information that I can control and exploit.” I should have said, “Bring me a life that can be compartmentalized into the pitch dark vision of my first ten novels.”
“What is not brought to consciousness comes to us as fate.”
I should have seen the _real_ Dick Contino coming.
* * *
Alan called me a week later. He’d located Contino in Las Vegas– “And he says he’ll talk to you.”
Before making contact, I charted the arc of two lives. A specific design was becoming clear–I wanted to write a novella featuring Dick Contino and the filming of _Daddy-O_–but a symbiotic pull was blunting my urge to get down to business, extract information and get out. I felt a recognition of my own fears binding me to this man: fear of failure, specific in nature and surmountable through hard work, and the very large fear that induces claustrophobic suffocation and causes golden young men to run from Army barracks: the terror that anything might happen, could happen, will happen. A merging in fear; a divergence in action.
I joined the Army just as the Vietnam War started to percolate. My father was dying: I didn’t want to stick around and watch. The Army terrified me–I calculated plausible means of escape. James Ellroy, age seventeen, fledgling dramatist: pulling off a frantic stuttering act designed to spotlight his unsuitability for military service.