Review of American Tabloid by James Ellroy
LA Noir Novelist Mines JFK Assassination
James Ellroy's style can be deduced from some of his earlier titles: The Big Nowhere, The Black Dahlia, LA Confidential. It's high-grade pulp, laconically violent, 1950s noir on the brink of nihilism.
It turns out that the eight previous novels were merely a warm-up for American Tabloid. The subject is the ethos that gave rise to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Die-hard conspiracy buffs won't be engaged because the novel mixes fictional characters and situations with historical ones. Nor will sentimental wimps the likes of Oliver Stone. Ellroy is in pursuit of "reckless verisimilitude" and it's damned convincing.
Pimps and Playmates
The death squads and narcotics enterprises of the Central Intelligence Agency, domestic spying by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kennedy's revolving door of pimps and playmates (the latter unanimously concur: the guy was a lousy lay). No dilettante could keep track of all the ugly information that continues to spew from government files and private papers, but it does seem to provide the skeleton for this novel.
From there, it's not a stretch to imagine that the contract agents and the exiled Cubans paid by Kennedy's beloved CIA were rather nasty types with psychopathic leanings. Indeed, just the type to be tied up with US gangsters when they ran the gambling casinos in Cuba. With his bootlegging past and investments in movie-making, Old Joe Kennedy had a career not much different from the reclusive Howard Hughes. Hughes, a Red baiter and Nixon banker, descended on Las Vegas alongside the Mafia. Similarly, the people that tipped the Chicago presidential ballot boxes in Kennedy's favor must have received a few favours in return.
The Sinatra Connection
Ellroy has so much material that he doesn’t bother to include some well-documented escapades, such as Kennedy's affairs with Marilyn Monroe, an East German spy, and a girlfriend of mobster Sam Giancana. Giancana, a crony of singer Frank Sinatra, nonetheless makes a few appearances as a target of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a crusader against both the underworld and the powerful FBI director J Edgar Hoover.
The gist is that the Kennedys had others do their bidding, but their tactics and morals weren't different from these rogue cops, shakedown artists, wiretappers, soldiers of fortune and "faggot lounge entertainers." For once, the jacket blurbs can be trusted: American Tabloid is "brilliantly unpleasant" and "compulsively readable." It's also the perfect antidote to bouts of what Ellroy calls "mass-market nostalgia for a past that never existed," such as that so recently inflicted from the grave by the trifling, avaricious Frau Jack.
Reference: American Tabloid by James Ellroy. Knopf, 1995.
ISBN-10: 037572737X
American Tabloid
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