Shame City

HUSBAND-AND-WIFE AUTHOR TEAM KRISTAN LAWSON and Anneli Rufus are betting that your visiting aunt is less interested in historical monuments than the corner where Hugh Grant and Divine Brown conducted their business. The Bay Area couple’s new “California Babylon: A Guide to Sites of Scandal, Mayhem and Celluloid in the Golden State” (St. Martin’s Griffin) covers everything from the San Diego stomping grounds of suspected Versace killer Andrew Cunanan to the Tule Lake [Japanese] internment camp near the Oregon border.

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Which of you is the ghoulish one?

KL: It’s not that I’m not ghoulish, but compared to her I’m not.

AR: San Pedro, where I grew up, was a pretty boring place. You ended up reading a lot of books about murder, Jack the Ripper and the Mafia. So I developed an interest in that stuff.

What did you do while researching in Southern California for two months?

AR: We knocked on the door where the Hillside Strangler had lived, where a former lover of JFK lived, the Black Dahlia [body] dump site. I don’t know if these places would feel creepy if you didn’t know the history, but the fun/creepy aspect of California Babylon is that you do know.

KL: We heard that [actor] Jack Cassidy burned to death in a particular apartment in West Hollywood. But it was a huge building and there were dozens of buttons. We pushed one at random, and that was the apartment where it happened. And the guy invited us up and showed us the spot.

Residents don’t mind sharing that kind of stuff?

AR: People in L.A. are proud of the gruesome. People in the Bay Area are much more close-mouthed. They just don’t have the sense of humor that Southern California has. There’s a big gymnasium [the Potrero Hill Recreation Center] in San Francisco that was O.J. Simpson’s childhood gym. And when you tell people [in the Bay Area], they just don’t think that’s very funny.

KL: They’re proud of O.J. There’s a big mural of him, and the walls are lined with photographs of him. It’s headquarters for the pro-O.J. camp.

Any place you almost gave up trying to find?

AR: The Nixon house in San Clemente.

KL: That was tough! Because they don’t want you to know. They’ve changed the name of the street two times. I had to go through real estate agents, pretending I was a rich guy.

What’s the common denominator among the movie, disaster and scandal sites in the book?

KL: The philosophy of rubbernecking. To see where “it” happened in California history.

AR: Not to go out on a limb, but I just don’t think you can really do a Delaware Babylon.

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Kristan Lawson and Anneli Rufus will present slides and readings at 7 p.m. at Borders West Hollywood (tonight); California Map & Travel Center in Santa Monica (Tuesday); Traveler’s Bookcase in West Hollywood (Wednesday).