Wonderland

I saw the movie, Wonderland, last night, starring Val Kilmer.  

There were other stars, of course, like the gorgeous Kate Bosworth, the beautiful and talented Carrie Fischer, Dylan McDermott, Eric Bogosian as Eddie Nash, Lisa Kudrow as Sharon Holmes, the talented Josh Lucas, and the detective played by Ted Levine, Tim Blake Nelson, and others.

"If You Could Read My Mind," released in 1970, was the penultimate song on the soundtrack.  Val Kilmer was the perfect John Holmes.  He evoked the man, the star, the boy exquisitely.  I think it's his best role.  I haven't seen him in many things, but this was his best.

LAPD Detective, Thomas Lange, was one of two detectives on the crime. It is amazing how watching this movie brought back so many memories of working at Colamco.  I don't know why it has to be Colamco, perhaps that is where Cliff or Steve raised, at least for me it was the first time, the name of Eddie Nash and John Holmes. I will never forget by Shipping & Receiving buddy, Bob, who laughed at all of my jokes.  As a team, he and I would roll Freightliner panels before placing them in large boxes.  

With regard to the murders, which I do recall but was not interested in, the LA Times covers it pretty well. 

"There's somebody out there who wants to kill me," Holmes told Sharon, his wife of 16 years.

For a time, John Holmes was silent. Finally, he replied: "The murders . . . I was involved. . . . I know who did it."

In a recent interview with The Times, Sharon Holmes, who divorced the late actor in 1984, described for the first time the story her husband told her less than three weeks after the July 1 killings.

John C. Holmes, the world's premier pornographic film star, sobbed as he sat in a steaming bathtub early one morning in July, 1981.

Haltingly, Holmes confessed to his wife that he had played a central role in four brutal murders earlier that month in a drug dealers' hillside home in Laurel Canyon.

Frightened, she asked, "Why?"

Drugs can make people a little crazy, not in a clinical sense but to alter their mood so as to make them less available. 

Laurel Canyon.  Anyone who's lived in LA long enough knows where it's at with Crescent Heights and Sunset Blvd being the gateway to Wonderland.  

I wanted to watch the movie following my reading of David McGowan's terrific essay on the music and movie culture found in Laurel Canyon, the westcoast's answer to Motown, Nashville, and Beatlemania.  I found the article over at LewRockwell.com, posted by Charles Burris.  One of the gnawing questions that McGowan asks is "If the music and movies artists of the time who resided in Laurel Canyon above Hollywood were truly rebels, why is it that so few of them when possessed with huge amounts of drugs or guilty as sin for murder, theft, and other crimes received such a light or nothing sentence?  By itself it's a great question.  And in the context of his argument it is poignant because his argument was that this scene in Laurel Canyon was not a protest scene at all but a carefully constructed one, at times chaotic and murderous, that was used as a controlled opposition to the anti-war efforts.  One of the artists of the time said this, 

LOU ADLER: The hippie version of freedom in the 1960s was breaking down the Establishment. Well, we were buying houses in Bel Air; we were becoming the Establishment.

But the artists coming to the new LA music scene, the Grand Ol' Opre of the West, were already establishment players.  What, you say!  Yeah.  McGowan opens with that little diddy about Jim Morrison's daddy, you know, the Navy Admiral who served on the ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, the "incident" that launched the Vietnam War.  So there's that.  Charles Burris offers up the book blurb on the back as a fine description of the times, 

Laurel Canyon in the 1960s and early 1970s was a magical place where a dizzying array of musical artists congregated to create much of the music that provided the soundtrack to those turbulent times. Members of bands like the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, the Monkees, the Beach Boys, the Mamas and the Papas, the Turtles, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Steppenwolf, Captain Beefheart, CSN, Three Dog Night, Alice Cooper, the Doors, and Love with Arthur Lee, along with such singer/songwriters as Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Judi Sill and David Blue, lived together and jammed together in the bucolic community nestled in the Hollywood Hills.

But there was a dark side to that scene as well.

Many didn’t make it out alive, and many of those deaths remain shrouded in mystery to this day. Far more integrated into the scene than most would care to admit was a guy by the name of Charles Manson, along with his murderous entourage. Also floating about the periphery were various political operatives, up-and-coming politicians, and intelligence personnel – the same sort of people who just happened to give birth to many of the rock stars populating the canyon. And all of the canyon’s colorful characters – rock stars, hippies, murderers, and politicos – happily coexisted alongside a covert military installation.

Reading that list made me think of a few folks I worked with, folks who were, and I am sure still are, addicted to drugs, violent in their nature and judgments.  But I guess there are lots of different drugs. Power itself can be a drug on which the individual rides a high for many, many years.  

If you want to see some decent pictures of the crime scene, the people involved, guys like Eddie Nash, then this is not a bad start. Excellent pics at the bottom of this page.  Apparently, Eddie Nash bribed one of the jurors during his first trial, which ended in a hung jury, 11-1.  That lone-standing juror is the guy or gal who was bribed.

Eddie Nash and Gregory Diles were both arrested and charged in 1988 for the Four on the Floor Murders. They were tried twice between 1990 and 1991. The first trial was met by a hung jury 11-1, but Nash later confessed to bribing the holdout juror. The second trial in 91′ ended with an acquittal, but this was not the end of Nash’s legal woes in relation to the murders. Gregory Diles died in 1995 and unfortunately he was not around to be charged again with Nash in 2000.

So the story goes.   

Check out this stunning photo of John Holmes and his wife, Sharon.

Sharon and John Holmes' wedding picture.  They were married from August 1965 to January 17, 1983.  

If you're interested, here are some interesting photos of the folks involved in the Manson murders, 1969, the murder that ended Laurel Canyon as a Shangrila.  The photo of Manson, clean-cut and unbuttoned shirt is interesting.  I've never seen a clean-cut shot of him.  Ever.  The little that I have read on Manson suggested that he did no do any of the murders, that, in fact, Tex Watson, the tall, lanky kid from Texas who shocked his friends by dropping out of college and moved to Los Angeles.

Can't believe that John Denver's real name is John Deutschendorf. Not sure why I am posting this, other than I liked her as Samantha Stevens on Bewitched.   

Think of all the clubs that opened in West Hollywood in that era: The Roxy, The Whiskey-a-Go-Go, the Starwood (which was owned by Eddie Nash), P.J.'s, the Palladium, Cactus Pete's, The Palamino, the Troubadour, and others.  

I like this picture of Elizabeth Taylor.

A stunning list of memorable but dire moments in LA and Hollywood among the celebrities there. And you'll find some more interesting photos. 

Actor, Eric Bogosian, draws an interesting comparison to New York and LA.  He says that LA has these sordid neighborhoods that New York does not.  I doubt that.  My guess is that both areas have their sordid neighborhoods.  But he does cite the San Fernando's porn industry and the Manson murders in Laurel Canyon.  

So there's that.