A James Ellroy Playlist: Images of Enchantment

Now that James Ellroy’s The Enchanters has been published and many readers of this site will already be ploughing through it, if you haven’t finished it already, I thought it would be a good time to assess the musical influences on the novel as part of my ongoing series on Ellroy and music.

Image of a Girl

After Marilyn Monroe’s death Freddy Otash’s first-person narration notes that ‘local disk jockeys played ‘Image of a Girl’ twenty thousand times a day’. Later at a beach party he notices some ‘Teen queens preened in Marilyn drag’ while transistor radios play ‘Image of a Girl’. The song by The Safaris reached No.6 in the US pop chart in 1960, two years prior to Monroe’s passing. In The Enchanters ‘Image of a Girl’ is used as a haunting tribute to Monroe, one of the most beautiful women in the world, and perhaps Ellroy first heard the song in the Summer of 1962, although I cannot find any evidence that it was getting constant airtime, as Ellroy suggests, shortly after Monroe’s death.

The song jumped out at me as, when I was writing Ellroy’s biography Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, Ellroy specifically mentioned this song to me when he was talking about one of his former lovers, ‘her song was ‘Image of a Girl”. I subsequently interviewed the lady in question who told me she hadn’t heard of the song, so I played it for her:

How Are Things in Glocca Morra?

Just as Ellroy links ‘Image of a Girl’ to Monroe, he also links a specific song to Monroe’s occasional lover President Kennedy. Otash meets the actress Lois Nettleton at the The Chapman Park Hotel. Dick Haymes is singing ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra’. Otash notes that Nettleton ‘loved the song’. John F Kennedy had more mixed feelings about the song. As this article in The Huffington Post reveals:

JFK was young congressman in 1948 listening to the Finian’s Rainbow Broadway cast album in his Washington apartment when he learned that his beloved sister “Kick” (Kathleen Kennedy) had been killed in a plane crash in France. The song “How are Things in Glocca Morra?” played as he broke down in tears.

Ellroy has chosen two songs for The Enchanters which, in specific contexts, can be associated with premature death and tragedy – the sad love song for Monroe and the ode to a fictional Irish village for JFK.

Below you can listen to Ella Logan sing ‘How Are Things in Glocca Morra’. This is from the original Broadway production that JFK was listening to when he heard the news of Kathleen’s death.

Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy is published by Bloomsbury.