Shakedown: Freddy Otash Confesses

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.”

Bondage Bob: Ga-ga, goo-goo-eyed, gone.

“So, we—”

I cut him off. “So we also bug all the fag bathhouses. So I have extortion wedges on the informants who supply the dirt for our most explosive pieces. So I polygraph-test them to assure their veracity. So I create a climate of fear in Hollywood, which is the most gorgeously perverted and cosmetically moralistic place on God’s green fucking earth. Because I have an unerring nose for human weakness and have sensed for some time that we have entered an era where the gilded and famous all secretly harbor a desire to be exposed. Because I am willing to burglarize any psychiatrist’s office in order to get the dirt on their celebrity patients. Because I am willing to quash lawsuits through the threat and application of physical force.”

Bondage Bob guuuuuuuulped. “What won’t you do?”

I saw Ralph Mitchell Horvath. I said, “Commit murder or work for Communists.”

Hold now. Hear that pin-drop silence. Let it linger loooooong.

“Would you consent to an audition? To test your inside knowledge?”

I nodded. Harrison hit me. I bopped to his beat, beatific.

“Senator Estes Kefauver?”

“Whorehound. Shacks with Filipino prosties at the downtown Statler when he visits L.A.”

“Sinatra. Give me the latest.”

“Caught his new girlfriend muff-diving Lana Turner at the Beverly Wilshire, went on a six-day bender with Jackie Gleason, and wound up with the DTs at Queen of Angels.”

“Otto Preminger?”

“Mud shark. Currently enthralled with a sepia seductress named Dorothy Dandridge.”

“Lawrence Tierney?”

“Brawling, psychopathic brother of noted grasshopper Scott Brady. Digs the boys at the Cockpit Lounge and the occasional girl who looks like a boy.”

“John Wayne?”

“Quasi drag queen. Fucks women and looks stunning in a size 52-long muumuu.”

“Johnny Weissmuller?”

“King Schlong. Well known to have fathered nine kids out of wedlock with nine different women. Current holder of the White Man’s World Record.”

“Duke Ellington?”

“Current holder of the Jigaboo World Record.”

“Van Johnson?”

“The Semen Demon. Sucks dick at the glory hole at the Wilshire May Company men’s room.”

“Burt Lancaster?”

“Sadist. Has a well-appointed torture den at his pad in Beverly Hills. Pays call girls top dollar to inflict pain on them.”

“Fritz Lang?”

“Known to film Burt’s torture sessions and screen them for a select clientele.”

“The Misty June Christy?”

“Nympho size-queen. My shakedown bait Donkey Don Eversall gives her the big one on a regular basis. Donkey Don’s got a wall peek at his crib. My pal Jimmy Dean made an avant-garde film of their last assignation. It’s called The Stacked and the Hung. The premiere is Friday night, in my living room. You’re cordially invited.”

“Alfred Hitchcock?”

“Peeper.”

“Natalie Wood?”

“Child actress in transition. Rumored to be ensconced at a dyke slave den near Hollywood High.”

“Alan Ladd?”

“Dramatically underhung cunt hound. A man on the horns of an existential dilemma worthy of those Communistic philosopher chumps.”

He’s ga-ga, goo-goo, pulled into putty. He’s martini-mangled and mine.

“Mr. Otash, the job is yours.”

“Fifty grand a year and expenses. My operating costs will go at least double that.”

Now he’s green at the gills. Now he knows there’s No Exit. It’s a felicitous fait accompli.

“Yes, Mr. Otash. We have a deal.”

We shook hands.

Bondage Bob said, “Jean-Paul Sartre’s a pal of mine. He’ll love The Stacked and the Hung.”

That talking bug rocked across the rug and waved at me. I swear this is true.