The Venetian Vase

Here’s a story about Jimmy Carter that James Ellroy likes to tell. It’s October of 1980. The Presidential election is in it’s closing stages. The incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, is fighting a tough battle against the charismatic Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It’s of minimal importance to James Ellroy, who is working as a caddy at the Bel Air Country Club. Nonetheless, Ellroy has grand plans. His first novel, Brown’s Requiem, has been accepted for publication by Avon. Ellroy is convinced he has a grand literary career ahead of him. There’s only one problem. Ellroy has never learned how to type. Ellroy writes everything by hand and then hires a typist to put the manuscript into professional shape. Avon have requested a series of revisions and Ellroy is so broke that he cannot afford a typist to oversee them and get the manuscript back to the publisher.

Then one morning Ellroy happened to be caddying for two Carter staffers at the Bel Air, and overhears snippets of their conversation.

‘Oh shit’ one of the staffers says. ‘Who will tell the President?’

‘Pat Caddell’s gonna tell him tonight’ his colleague gloomily replied.

The election was being presented in the media as a dead heat, but the Carter staffers had access to private polling from the election guru Patrick Caddell that put Reagan well ahead. Realising that he had just stumbled across a red hot tip, Ellroy called round his friends and placed a series of bets on Reagan to win the election, ‘which I had no right to make as I didn’t have the dough to pay up if I lost.’ Sure enough, Reagan won the election convincingly and Ellroy won his bets, paid for a typist to make the revisions to his manuscript and the rest is history.

Good anecdote, isn’t it. Perhaps too good. I didn’t include this story in my Ellroy biography Love Me Fierce in Danger as frankly I wasn’t convinced. Ellroy enjoys telling the story to friends and at his bookstore appearances, but when I broached the subject with him he got sheepish and changed the subject. It’s seems odd that two Carter staffers would be golfing in the midst of a gruelling election campaign. How could Ellroy know with any certainty that the private polling they mentioned was any more reliable than the national polling? Ellroy may be a gambler when it comes to his career choices and his affairs with women, but when it comes to stumping up cash on a bet he’s a bit more priggish.

Without any evidence to back up the story, I had to cut it from my manuscript. That said, if you ever find yourself playing nine holes with any White House staffers, it might pay to do some sly earwigging.

RIP Jimmy Carter (1924-2024)