A James Ellroy Playlist: A Night at the Mocambo

The Mocambo is one of the most famous nightclubs in Los Angeles’s history. From the day it opened in 1941, the club featured lush Latin-American decor, ‘glass-walled aviaries that housed live macaws, cockatoos, parrots and other birds’, and big-band music. It was a favourite haunt of celebrities, and a performance there could make or break a showbiz career. Frank Sinatra performed his first solo gig at the Mocambo in 1943, and Ella Fitzgerald had a breakout concert there in 1955. The Mocambo closed its doors permanently in 1958. In its seventeen year history, amid the dining and dancing, many affairs were kindled, fights broke out, and crooked deals were hatched within its four walls.

Given the Mocambo’s place in LA lore, it is not surprising that the club features periodically in the work of James Ellroy.

Around the World

In Ellroy’s novella, Hollywood Nocturnes, Dick Contino visits the Mocambo and witnesses fellow crooner Buddy Greco perform ‘Around the World’. Contino is full of admiration for Greco’s style: ‘Buddy not only sells you the song – he drives it to your house and installs it.’ This admiration is tinged with envy. Contino spent a fortune on his Oldsmobile Starfire and its ‘Kustom King’ interior purely out of ‘an Italian rivalry thing. Buddy Greco’s got a car like that, so Dick had to have one.’ Greco, like Contino, was a ladies’ man, marrying five times. In Hollywood Nocturnes, Contino lures one of Greco’s glamorous backup singers into an ill-judged kidnapping caper.

Ellroy was on good terms with Buddy Greco, inviting him to perform at LAPD functions in his later years. Contino and Greco died three months apart in 2017, both grand old men of showbiz and throwbacks to another age.

Here’s Buddy at his best, performing ‘Around the World’ on Dick Irvin’s Big Band Swing in Montreal.

Lindy Hop

Singing and dancing isn’t the only entertainment the Mocambo had to offer. A nocturnal visit might grant you the dubious honour of witnessing Mickey Cohen’s stand-up routine. In The Big Nowhere, Cohen is described as ‘a killer-hoodlum who longed to be a nightclub comic.’ In LA Confidential, Cohen spends his nights at the Mocambo where he would ‘crack jokes written by gagster Davey Goldman’.

Slightly less painful to sit through than his comedy routine was watching Cohen dance. Ellroy writes of how Cohen does a ‘wicked Lindy Hop with his squeeze Audrey Anders’. In Brian Helgeland’s original script to LA Confidential Mickey Cohen is introduced at the Mocambo dancing ‘a wicked “Lindy Hop” with THREE different girls at once’. In the published script, credited to both Helgeland and Curtis Hanson, this is simplified (and the dance isn’t specified) to ‘MICKEY COHEN dances with two different girls at once.’

Ellroy references the Lindy Hop often in comical terms, such as in The Black Dahlia when Bucky Bleichert arrives at a house to issue a warrant and is enthusiastically greeted by a ‘big brown mastiff’ named Hacksaw. ‘We stood there, the dog’s front paws resting on my shoulder like we were doing the Lindy Hop. A big tongue lapped at me.’

The Lindy Hop was born in the African-American communities of Harlem in the late 1920s, most likely deriving its name from the aviator Charles Lindbergh. By the 1940s, the popularity of the dance had spread across the US. Given its origins, Mickey Cohen’s love of the dance is somewhat ironic as he often uses racist language to describe black people, and is forced to publicly deny rumours that his wife abandoned him for a ‘shvartze calypso singer’.

Below is one of the most famous Lindy Hop routines, performed by the swing dancers Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers in Hellzapoppin‘. I doubt Mickey Cohen could dance this well…

Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is available to pre-order from Bloomsbury. You can also pre-order a copy from all good booksellers.