PicoBlog

In April, Grand Central Publishing will release The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars and Marilyn, a new biography of midcentury private investigator Frank Otash by Josh Young, who coauthors book professionally, and Manfred Westphal, an entertainment industry PR executive who has been attempting to write a book about Otash since 1990. A onetime vice squad cop, Otash became infamous as a fixer for Confidential magazine and later claimed to have spied on everyone from Rock Hudson to Marilyn Monroe, alleging that he was present when Hudson admitted to being gay and when Monroe died minutes after a physical altercation with Bobby Kennedy. The book promises to reveal the contents of Otash’s private files, which Westphal shared with the Hollywood Reporter in 2013.

At the time, the “secret” files created a media frenzy when Westphal revealed that Rock Hudson’s wife, Phyllis Gates, hired Otash to secretly record the couple while she attempted to coerce him into admitting he was gay. Westphal provided excerpts in which Gates asked Hudson why sex with him went so fast and whether he made love to boys for longer sessions. “Well, boys don’t fit,” Hudson somewhat implausibly was said to have replied. “So, this is why it lasts longer.” However, Westphal’s revelations weren’t actually revelations. In his 1976 memoir Investigation Hollywood! (a book ghostwritten by a press agent with a record of publishing defamatory material), Otash published the same transcript of that alleged recording. (He does not use Hudson’s name, to avoid a libel suit, but it is obviously him.) The “new” material isn’t new. It’s simply the raw notes Otash used in assembling his memoir.

Otash’s allegation that he was spying on Marilyn Monroe in her last hours, when she had sex with JFK, fought with Bobby Kennedy, and expired, previously appeared in the Los Angeles Times in 1985. Otash then expanded it with more detail and was writing a book about Monroe when he died. So, nothing new in these Monroe revelations either.

Now, whether the claims are true is another story. Frankly, the pages of Hudson transcripts, for instance, are too coherent, structured, and literary to be true life conversation. Nobody speaks in full paragraphs or argues with someone in strict, coherent progression. At best the transcripts were “improved.” At worst, they are fake. Hudson’s most recent biographer, Mark Griffin, who has a record of accepting stories uncritically, endorsed Otash’s claims, citing Investigation Hollywood! in his end notes, but perhaps even he would be troubled by the supposed rough “transcript” in Otash’s files being a verbatim complete and polished play that exactly matches the published version. Marilyn Monroe biographer April VeVea, on the other hand, concluded that Otash’s claims about Monroe are made up and suspected that Otash’s files were fabrications for his books.

Otash, who died in 1992, was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in China Town and also for Russell Crowe’s character in L. A. Confidential. James Ellroy, who wrote the novel L. A. Confidential was based on, used a lightly fictionalized version of Otash by name as the protagonist of his 2021 novel Widespread Panic (expanded from an earlier novella), in which Otash narrates his life story from the afterlife. Even Ellroy, who never met a piece of gossip he didn’t want readers to suspect was true, described Otash as “a con artist” and a “bullshitter”—and Ellroy spent more than a decade trying to sell a TV drama about Otash to HBO and FX. Widespread Panic and its predecessor novella are basically the TV show treatment novelized.

Westphal describes Otash as a “franchise character” whom he envisions as a multimedia property. He has spent the past ten years attempting to write a book to rescue Otash from Ellroy’s vulgar, crude depiction. (Westphal is a business partner of Otash’s daughter, and his parents lived next door to Otash for many years.) Westphal accepts Otash’s claims largely at face value despite some problematic elements. For example, the audio recordings Otash claimed to have transcribed in his files were all destroyed, allegedly in 1966 on orders from the U.S. government, to protect the Kennedys. I have no idea what his publisher’s vetting process was like, but Grand Central Publishing’s marketing materials evince no familiarity with the “new” material coming directly from Otash’s previous publications and claims.

Obviously, I can’t evaluate the whole corpus of Otash’s innumerable celebrity claims. But I can say something about Otash’s claimed connection to James Dean. Frankly, I think he made it all up.

In Investigation Hollywood! Otash relates a story about meeting and befriending James Dean, a story that Ellroy uses with some telling changes as the inciting incident in Widespread Panic. According to Otash, one vaguely defined day sometime in the middle 1950s (we’ll consider the exact date momentarily) Otash was working as a security guard for the Hollywood Ranch Market, a grocery store and bazaar located in Hollywood. It was later popular with young counterculture types and celebrities. Otash said that he caught James Dean shoplifting caviar and ham at the store. “I know he was some kind of idol,” Otash wrote, “but he wasn’t worth a damn to me the day I caught him shoplifting in the place. Here was a top draw star swiping stuff he could have paid for and never felt a dent in his pocketbook.” Otash claimed that he confronted Dean, threatened him, and then befriended the “panic”-stricken youth, turning him into his sidekick who would spend many days with him hunting for shoplifters behind a two-way mirror at the market. “He was one helluva bird dog,” Otash claimed.

Now, it seems odd that no one else ever mentioned this odd habit of Dean’s, but a closer examination reveals how Otash constructed his fanciful story.

First, we need to establish a chronology. James Dean lived in the Los Angeles area from early spring 1954 to September 1955, though he was only in residence for a bit more than half that time, the rest being spent in New York City or shooting movies on location. Otash claimed to have known of James Dean as a celebrity at the time they met, which would further narrow the timeline, since Dean was not an “idol” or a “top draw celebrity” until after the premiere of East of Eden in March 1955. It’s certainly possible he knew something of him from the studio publicity campaign of from the summer of 1954 if he were an interested consumer of gossip magazines, but Dean wouldn’t match Otash’s description at that point. Of course, Otash’s memory could be contaminated, which would call the story into question anyway. That’s probably not the case, since Otash explicitly claims in the book to have been aware of Dean’s incandescent fame and to have let him off of the shoplifting charge because he did not want to be the one to bust a megastar. That means that he imagined the events happening in the summer of 1955.

James Ellroy had the same problem with the chronology; he reimagined the incident happening earlier, when Dean was a poor, struggling actor.

Anyhow, the real tell that the story is fake is that it reflects an incorrect claim that was popularly believed in the 1970s. In one of the last photos of Dean ever taken, photographer Sanford Roth captures Dean in his Porsche parked down the street from the Hollywood Ranch Market, just visible in the background. Consequently, some writers claimed Dean had stopped for lunch there before he died and that he was a regular patron of the establishment. In reality, both on that day and regularly for the year prior, he had been a customer of a different shopping center with a vaguely similar name, the Farmer’s Market, where his friend Patsy D’Amore had a pizza place that he frequented. Ronald Martinetti included the incorrect information, for example, in his 1975 biography of James Dean, released right as Investigation Hollywood was being ghostwritten for Otash.

And for what it’s worth, Dean was notorious for eating cheap food, even when he had money. He purposely developed a taste for Italian food, then considered cuisine for the poor, because he rejected the expensive French food popular with the executive class, whom he considered abusive and exploitative. He ate nauseatingly bad meals, like the raspberry jam, processed cheese, and marijuana omelet that he made for Sammy Davis, Jr. The chances of him seeking out caviar would seem small.

Many books and articles about Dean in the middle 1970s took pains to emphasize negative stories, many of which were untrue, portraying him as, basically, a dirtbag. Otash’s account, while not an exact duplicate, harmonizes with the nasty thug depiction of Dean that arose in response to the anger and betrayal many felt after hearing claims of his homosexuality. While I can’t categorically rule out that Otash had some grain of truth behind the story, the version presented in his book is most congruent with a fabrication created from popular 1970s-era accounts of Dean, accounts that were reevaluated and corrected in the 1990s.

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