Imagine That

Is Tom Cruise gay? Is Jamie Lee Curtis a hermaphrodite? Did Cass Elliot choke to death on a ham sandwich? Was Charles Manson an agent of the FBI?

All of these questions are asked--and answered--by Paul Young in “L.A. Exposed,” an exercise in mythmaking and myth-breaking that is more earnest than its title suggests. Each of the 130 or so entries in “L.A. Exposed” is presented in a lurid tabloid-style layout, but the text is purely ironic: Young is a self-appointed debunker, and he delights in deconstructing the elaborate folklore that has attached itself to Los Angeles and its more celebrated and notorious denizens, ranging from Fatty Arbuckle to Bugsy Siegel to the Hillside Strangler.

“Some call them rumors or hearsay, others call them urban legends or myths, and others still call them gossip or tall tales,” writes Young. “I wanted to explore those narratives that are everywhere and nowhere at the same time; those narratives that guide us through the streets when we wander, spark everyday conversations, and fuel our imaginations, anxieties, and premonitions.”

Indeed, “L.A. Exposed” is a study in fear and loathing. A great many of the rumors, for instance, betray an acute and pervasive sense of homophobia among stargazers in the mass media. Jim Morrison, John Travolta, David Geffen, Keanu Reeves and Rod Stewart are among the celebrities whose sexual orientation and sexual practices have been the subjects of overheated speculation, all of which may say more about the gossip-mongers than about the stars whose exploits, real or imagined, are their stock in trade. “Scandal,” writes Young, quoting critic Richard de Cordova, “is the primal scene of all star discourse.”

Thus, by way of example, Young traces the persistent rumors about Cruise--Is he gay? Is he sterile? Or is he merely celibate?--to a catty but surely jesting remark by one of his former wives, Mimi Rogers, who once cracked that their marriage ended because Tom was thinking of becoming a monk. “[H]e thought that he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument,” she told Playboy in 1990. And, though Young concludes that there is no evidence that Cruise is gay, he argues that Cruise himself has stoked the controversy by protesting too much that he isn’t. “The vehemence of Cruise’s denial of homosexuality,” Young points out, “can be measured by the size of his libel suits.”

Some of the urban legends in “L.A. Exposed” are more famous than others. I had never heard the rumor that “Fidel Castro appeared in numerous Hollywood movies before his career as Cuba’s Communist dictator” until I read Young’s book. (The rumor is false, according to Young.) And some of the questions that Young asks in print are not actually answered: He concedes, for instance, that we still don’t know with certainty who killed the mysterious woman known to reporters of the late 1940s as the Black Dahlia.

Young’s most common finding, not surprisingly, is that any given rumor is “purely speculative” or “not likely” or “almost certainly false.” That’s his conclusion about the reports that Richard Gere used a gerbil as a sex toy, that Charles Manson was an FBI operative and Santa Ana winds move some of us to murder, as Raymond Chandler so famously asserted in the short story “Red Wind.” “In fact, from 1978 to 1998,” writes Young, “the homicide rate actually went down during the months of peak Santa Ana activity.”

Only rarely is an urban legend shown to be true. The Japanese Imperial Navy did, in fact, shell an oil storage facility in Goleta on Feb. 23, 1942. Nuclear waste is actually buried on the site of the Barrington Recreational Center in Brentwood. And Barney’s Beanery in West Hollywood displayed a sign that coarsely excluded gay patrons, although the owner insisted that it was only a joke and later took it down.

Now and then, Young suggests, truth is even stranger than fiction when it comes to an urban legend. He entertains a series of provocative theories about the death of Elliot, a member of the Mamas and the Papas: “Did the mob get revenge? Did she squeal on the wrong guys? Did a drug dealer have her killed?” None of the theories can be proved, but on one point he is utterly sure of his information: “What is known however is that she didn’t choke to death on a ham sandwich.”

“L.A. Exposed” is so provocative, so intriguing and yet ultimately so smart and so sensible that it is tempting to pick up and almost impossible to put down. Even when he is expertly defusing a myth or legend, Young passes along some tidbit that is nearly as intriguing as the one he has just proved false. Young insists that the rumor that Curtis was born a hermaphrodite is “almost certainly false,” for example, but he reports that Joan of Arc, Eva Braun and Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short all suffered from the so-called androgen insensitivity syndrome that causes some female infants to be born with male genitalia.

Much of what Young has collected in “L.A. Exposed” is a matter of lively interest far beyond the city limits. But he insists that Los Angeles is a place that “revel[s] in rumors, hearsay, and gossip,” and he traces the tradition all the way back to the native Californians and the Spanish conquistadors who told tall tales about one another. “Los Angeles remains the most imagined city in the country,” he argues, “one that was born in myth and nurtured on celluloid.”

A far more benign vision of Hollywood is conjured in “The Keystone Kid” by Coy Watson Jr., a man who was born into the movie business in 1912. His family was living in a community called Edendale, north of Echo Park Lake, where the first motion picture studios in Southern California were already in operation and where the neighbors included Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Mabel Normand, Marie Dressler and Arbuckle.

“[N]early everything that happened in Edendale had something to do with the motion picture business,” Watson recalls. “When we passed Aaron Street, we spoke to the cowboys who had ridden their horses to congregate at the corner... each hoping to get a call to work in a picture.” The going rate, he reports, was “$1.00 for each man and $2.00 for a horse!”

Virtually all of Watson’s family found work in the movies, whether as bit players or stunt riders, assistant directors or prop handlers. His father was among the very first special-effects men and animal trainers in Hollywood. “Little Coy” was only 9 months old when he was cast in his first role, commanding $5 for a day’s work in a silent flick starring a young actor from New York named Lon Chaney. Watson appeared so often in Mack Sennett’s series of “Keystone Cop” comedies that he was dubbed “the Keystone Kid.”

By the time he was 18, Watson had appeared in 65 motion pictures, ranging from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” and the filmography for the Watson siblings exceeds 1,000 movies. “The Five Watsons,” as the Watson brothers styled themselves, ran a 1928 trade paper advertisement for themselves; they ranged in age from 1 to 16. Their message: “All Real Motion Picture Troupers in PICTURES!” Although all of the Watson brothers eventually came to earn their living as photographers, the family was honored with its own collective star on Hollywood Boulevard in 1999.

The whole saga is washed in the honey tones of nostalgia. “I have labored to write some true, simple, everyday stories of my boyhood,” explains Watson, “a remembrance of the early days of filmmaking.” “The Keystone Kid” is an authentic, intimate and endearing memoir of the movie industry in its pioneering era, an account that allows us to see what Hollywood was like for those men, women and children whose experiences are overlooked by gossip mongers and even film historians.