Wambaugh Takes On Newport

On this particular morning, with escrow just closed and their furniture still in Newport Beach, it was, as Dee Wambaugh put it, “total chaos” at the new Casa Wambaugh.

Technicians were testing the telephone-intercom system, and soon, more workers would be arriving to install carpeting in the 7,000-square-foot Mexican-style hacienda in San Diego County’s exclusive Rancho Santa Fe.

Outside, where a gardening crew was tending to the more than three acres of landscaped grounds, stood Joseph Wambaugh.

The best-selling author had reluctantly agreed to do something he dislikes--talk about one of his novels, in this case his latest, “The Golden Orange” (Morrow), a romantic suspense story set in Newport Beach, the Wambaughs’ on-and-off home for 13 years.

But first, Wambaugh said above the din of a leaf blower, he had a job to tend to.

Explaining that he doesn’t know his new gardener well enough to ask him to pick up after the two dogs, the millionaire ex-cop fetched a pooper-scooper and went to work.

“The reason I’m so good at this job,” Wambaugh said as he was returning back down the driveway a few minutes later, “is I spent 14 years as a policeman doing relatively the same thing.”

Since his first book, “The New Centurions”--published in 1971 while he was still a burglary detective with the Los Angeles Police Department--Wambaugh has had a string of fiction and nonfiction best-sellers, including “The Blue Knight,” “The Choirboys,” “The Onion Field” and, most recently, “The Blooding.”

“The Golden Orange” is Wambaugh’s 12th book and his first novel in five years.

In the opening scene, 40-year-old alcoholic ex-Newport Beach cop Winston (Winnie) Farlowe, is having his usual 3 a.m. alcohol-induced visitations: Twin hallucinatory buzzards he has dubbed Fear and Remorse. A drunken escapade aboard the Balboa Island ferry comes to the attention of Tess Binder, an alluring three-times-divorced member of Newport’s moneyed elite. Binder shows up one night at Farlowe’s favorite waterfront gin joint and proceeds to introduce him to her world--a world in which shoppers buy slabs of abalone “like it was lunch meat, at $40 per pound” at the neighborhood market and a Mercedes-Benz is “considered a Chevy Nova.”

Binder is a woman with a past, and Farlowe has become dangerously caught up in her present when someone takes a shot at them during a weekend in the desert.

An advance review in Publishers Weekly calls the novel “comic and deeply moving” and raves that it is “virtually sure to be hailed as Wambaugh’s best.”

The author, however, is not going out of his way to do publicity for “The Golden Orange.”

In fact, it was only through the intervention of his publicist that Wambaugh agreed to talk about it at all. He also refused to be photographed until, again, the publicist interceded.

Wambaugh has been described as prickly and obstinate, and at 53, it seems, the description still fits.

During an interview in his family room, however, the author was gracious and relaxed--not at all like the man who, as someone once wrote of his early book-jacket photos, “looked as if he’s about to place the entire world under arrest.”

Although he had just returned from a publicity trip to Australia to promote the paperback version of his 1989 No. 1 nonfiction best-seller, “The Blooding,” Wambaugh said he has not done publicity for one of his novels in at least eight years.

“With nonfiction, you can always talk about the living people in the nonfiction event--you’re a reporter,” he said. “I can talk to you all day about ‘The Blooding’ because it’s about genetic fingerprinting and how it was discovered and how it was used. That’s no problem.” But, he said, there is not much he can say about a novel: “It’s like talking about sex: It’s hard to talk about it; you just do it.”

And, as he sees it, “that’s why interviews with novelists are so boring.”

The Wambaughs’ move from Orange County--”The place is a perpetual traffic jam,” he said--just happened to coincide with the publication of “The Golden Orange.”

“And sure enough,” he said, “30 people have already asked me: ‘Are you leaving Orange County because you wrote a book about Newport?’ ”

The author, whose Linda Isle house is on the market for $3.3 million, shook his head and laughed: “It might sell a few books if they think that.”

He decided to use Newport Beach as the novel’s backdrop, he said, because “I wanted to tell an interesting suspense story, and it seemed that that atmosphere would work. I think a suspense story needs some sort of interesting atmosphere, preferably an exotic atmosphere. Newport Beach is an exotic atmosphere to most of the world--very exotic.”

In creating his characters for “The Golden Orange,” Wambaugh tapped a wealth of first-hand observations from his years as one of Newport Harbor’s most celebrated residents. Take Tess Binder’s home on what Wambaugh’s novel calls “the ghetto” side of Linda Isle. That’s the side of the private island, he writes, where some houses sell for “as little as $1.2 million on leased land” and where residents, instead of having a main harbor channel view, are forced to face Pacific Coast Highway and “endure traffic noise.” Wambaugh, who has lived on both sides of Linda Isle, said he picked up the “ghetto” gag from a real estate agent.

Then there are the “hot mamas,” the “sleek and slim and expensive” fortysomething women at Tess’ club who are constantly on the prowl for wealthy husbands. They spend their days on the private club’s beach working on their tans and they spend their evenings in the club bar.

His inspiration was the Balboa Bay Club, where, he said, there really are “hot mamas.”

“The Bay Club’s famous for that,” he said, laughing: “Everybody knows that. I’m not revealing any big secrets there.”

Wambaugh is not concerned that his portrait will offend fellow Bay Club members. “Oh, they’ll love it,” he said. “They’ll be claiming to be in the book even when they’re not. They enjoy the notoriety.”

With all that material surrounding him in Newport, Wambaugh said, he had to “give it a try and see if I could get a story out of it.” He began writing “The Golden Orange” about a year ago, developing the story as he wrote.

In its acknowledgements, Wambaugh thanks former and current Newport Beach police officers, who “treated me to terrific cop talk.”

As he’s done with all his recent novels, Wambaugh said, he would “just get a bunch of cops together and go to dinner, have a few drinks and talk. Virtually everything in the book that has to do with cops I got from them--working the beach patrol and all that crazy stuff. They were excellent talkers.”

Winnie’s hangout, Spoon’s Landing, is a composite of several bars on the Balboa Peninsula. Although they’re not the kind of places he frequents, Wambaugh himself has been known to be a heavy drinker.

“I was when I was younger,” he said. “I’ve grown up a little bit.”

Still fit and trim, with his hair cropped as short as in his LAPD days, Wambaugh now rides an exercise bicycle instead of running. Running every day for 16 years, he said, took its toll on his knees and back.

“I was absolutely obsessive” about it. “I do everything to excess.”

That includes writing. When he is working on a book, he’ll write up to six hours a day, seven days a week--the act of writing being so intense that, he said, “I get a little nauseous after about six hours.”

Wambaugh completes a book in six months or less. But the time between books is growing longer.

“It’s not that I take time off; the cup empties,” he said. “You have to wait for it to fill.”

Wambaugh said he’s not only five years between novels, but also that he finds “it’s not easy to find a good nonfiction story.

“They don’t come along every day. I don’t know of any right now that I could jump into. Sure, there’s big crimes that happen. . . . But there’s 80 writers out there and 10 TV companies. That’s not for me.”

When he started writing books, Wambaugh said, “writers weren’t conscious of jumping on these kinds of stories.” The story of “The Onion Field,” the nonfiction book he is most proud of, “was just sitting there.”

In his early books, he was working in the same milieu he was writing about. “Now I have to go out and get it,” he said. “I do research. If it’s a novel, I talk to cops. If it’s nonfiction, I talk to the people who lived it. I’m getting out there. I’m not doing these interior monologues for 330 pages about my first experience in the back seat of an Oldsmobile or something.”

Indeed, Wambaugh bypassed that particular literary rite of passage, the coming-of-age novel.

“I was saved, I’m sure, because, one, I had police experience, and two, when I was coming of age, I was too busy to ‘come-of-age.’ ” Wambaugh joined the Marines at 17 and became a police officer six years later. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English attending college in his spare time. “Honestly, the kind of novel you’re talking about, I didn’t have time to think of that.”

Wambaugh sees “The Golden Orange” as his “softest book, the softest novel that I’ve ever written. You don’t find what has been termed ‘the ghoulish glee’ in my stories in ‘The Golden Orange.’ ”

“You find a kinder, gentler, Joe Wambaugh,” he said with a laugh.

That gentler approach, he said, “just seemed appropriate. I didn’t think about it consciously. I just started writing, and that’s what came out.”

That’s not to say he could not have set a harder-edged tale in Newport Beach.

“Oh, yeah. I could have used my ‘Choirboys’ weapons and written a savage satire,” he said.

But he chose not to.

“Maybe I’m mellowing with age. I’ll have to ask Dee about that.”

“Dee, am I mellowing with age?,” he yelled up to his wife in the kitchen. “We’re talking about ‘The Golden Orange’ being a kinder, gentler Joe Wambaugh.”

Dee Wambaugh, his wife of 33 years, peered down into the family room.

“Well, he is mellowing just a tad,” she said. Then she grinned. “I would not say a big tad.”