John Gilmore - L.A. Despair. A Landscape of Crimes & Bad Times

Thanks are in order to a parade of people though many named hereinthe good souls along with the badhave since died or are lost in the turbulence of time. I include Spade Cooley, who I first saw at the Santa Monica Ballroom so many years ago and later shared time with, along with his wife Ella Mae, at Rory Calhoun's Rocking Star Ranch in Ojai. Also to the memory of Tom Neal, Franchot Tone, and Barbara Payton. To the still-with-us good souls (you know who you are), I extend my heartfelt gratitude for the myriad chunks of experience shared with me in my dig to the bottom. I'm indebted to so many cons as well as cops (especially LAPD's Sam Sirianni, Shirley Parker, and Dick Ruble, bless you all). OthersMarilyn Chambers, Laurie Holmes, Scott Thorson, you're survivors. Thanks to Tom Neal, Jr., Lila Leeds, Ann Savage, and my dear friend Mamie Van Doren, and appreciation to many like Robert Young for long talks in the desert; to the kin and those long-ago close to Spade Cooley, especially Tex Williams and his wife, Dallas, gone but loved and never forgotten.

Some names have been changed at the request of those who rode stretches of the trail and then said enough's enough.

I'm not a historian or timekeeper, so you will find no qualifications, annotations, bibliography, or footnotes, yet this is how they lived and how the tales were told. What I know is from the trenches; others will have to dig for their own sources and deep throats. My intent is always to offer the grist, with the genuine hope that with the reconstructions of these American scenes, I have delivered what I've learned about the landscape on the other sidethat part we do not see, that gels into a unity of human truth.

John Gilmore
Los Angeles, 2005