THE FIXER

A breathless exposé of Hollywood’s bad old days, culminating in the presumed murder of Marilyn Monroe.

Young and Westphal’s protagonist is former detective Fred Otash (1922-1992), a man never shy of publicity, given to bragging that he was the model for Jack Nicholson’s character Chinatown. As the authors write, Otash “lorded over LA’s scandalous underbelly in the conservative, hush-hush, highly moral climate of the 1950s and ’60s.” He skirted the edges of ethical conduct but was fundamentally committed to serving justice. At the time, there was plenty of justice to be served in Hollywood, too. Studio executives were tied up with organized crime, treating their stars as pawns to be awarded to the highest bidder in a place where “there was a boatload of money to be made if you were smart, savvy, driven, and ruthless.” One such pawn was Monroe, who, though smart and self-aware, became a kind of plaything of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. As a private detective, Otash knew his way around the demimonde of gangsters and starlets, turning up all kinds of salacious material for a gossip sheet called Confidential, once “one of the best-selling publications in the nation”—until it was sued into the ground. There’s lots of gossip afoot in these pages, with Peter Lawford sweeping up any evidence of the Kennedys after Monroe’s demise, Lana Turner stepping out on Johnny Stompanato with a young Sean Connery, mob boss Sam Giancana and Jack Kennedy sharing a mistress, and so forth. It all ends in a tangled, sordid tale that readers will dismiss, doubt, or take as gospel truth as they like—but one that, the authors insist, is still too hot to handle, with one producer turning their account down because “I’m friends with Caroline Kennedy.”

Sensationalist and unevenly sourced, but good reading for James Ellroy aficionados.