Dark Side of Rodeo Drive

Novelist Bruce Wagner could be the Josephine Baker of the L.A. literary life if the late chanteuse had walked around fully clothed in black. Or perhaps the Jerry Lewis if the comedian were possessed of X-ray vision that penetrated the city’s darkest corners. All three have found their best audience thousands of miles from home.

For Baker and Lewis, their most fervent fans hailed from Paris; for Wagner, the hub of appreciation is in New York. This despite--or perhaps, because of--the fact that his work is so strongly identified with Los Angeles.

“My wife used to say, ‘Why are you always writing about Rodeo Drive?’” Wagner said dryly about his new book, “I’ll Let You Go” (Villard), in a discussion with his longtime friend, actress and author Carrie Fisher at a recent Writers Bloc forum.

But Wagner’s street is not your garden-variety Rodeo Drive, the innocent main drag for “Pretty Woman” and pretty women for whom Prada is a birthright. Wagner’s metaphorical Rodeo Drive is the boulevard of nightmares, where screenwriters go crazy, mega-producers treat their assistants as sex slaves, and big stars seek solace from drug-pushing doctors.

Such suitors of the apocalypse populated Wagner’s earlier novels, “Force Majeure” (Random House, 1991) and “I’m Losing You” (Villard, 1996). Their sting came from his experiences as a screenwriter with a body of work including the edgy TV miniseries “Wild Palms,” directed by David Lynch, and the Paul Bartel film, “Scenes From the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills,” among others.

Wagner’s insider view of the industry has fascinated some high-profile critics in New York, among them John Updike, who reviewed “I’m Losing You” (about a Hollywood producer who learns he’s dying) for the New Yorker. And while the New York Times reviewed the book twice, it went unnoticed by some of L.A.’s media.

“It’s a peculiar sort of below-the-radar situation for me sometimes, but that works for and against me,” muses Wagner, 47. “If one can still be invisible in a sense, then I think that’s a powerful tool, not so much because you can observe in a more fastidious way if you’re invisible, but also just in terms of one’s own vanity. If one is not given tremendous accolades or attention, I think that’s simply better for one’s artistic spirit.”

To Wagner, more grating than being ignored, which is becoming increasingly unlikely anyway, is being misunderstood. Some critics have tagged him a tedious hipster, at one with the jaded landscape he skewers in his books.

Wagner counters that he’s nothing of the sort. “I think there are a lot of very cynical people who misread my work and want me to write about degradation,” he says. “And I do write about degradation, but in the context of many other things. I’m not someone who is thrilled with degradation as an end in itself, so this book is a much broader canvas than my last books, much less claustrophobic, much more humane in a sense, and much more traditional in its narrative.”

At the moment, Wagner is talking about “I’ll Let You Go” in his three-story loft in an austere Frank Gehry building, a residential oddity on an otherwise industrial block in Santa Monica. The front door opens onto an office lined with corkboard, peppered with remnants of Wagner’s voraciously eclectic interests that sometimes find their way into his books.

A quick glance dispels any typecasting of Wagner as someone afflicted with entertainment industry myopia. Painted in gold above one corkboard are the words: “The varieties of religious experience.” Draped over the piano bench of his baby grand is a Jewish prayer shawl. Wagner leads the way upstairs to the kitchen, an airy balcony overlooking his work space. If his books are not necessarily as they seem to the casual observer, neither is he. He’s dressed in his uniform of cool-cat black up to his thick-rimmed glasses. Virtually his entire head is covered in 5 o’clock shadow.

Wagner’s friend Fisher says his bad-boy looks have caused misunderstandings. “He’s a really kind, tender guy, and that’s the surprise of him because he certainly doesn’t look like that,” she says. “He looks like--dare I say it?--a terrorist. We were in Israel and staying in an old part of Jerusalem, and he kept getting carded. He’s a nice Jewish boy who loves his mother.”

Indeed, “I’ll Let You Go” is dedicated to his mother, Bunny. And critics have noted that the 549-page tome is gentler and more sympathetic than his earlier works. Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times that “I’ll Let You Go” is “tender, even sentimental where that earlier novel was corrosive; deliberately old-fashioned where ‘I’m Losing You’ was willfully, sometimes tiresomely hip.”

With his new book, Wagner looks to anti-hipster Charles Dickens for inspiration, from its traditional story structure and formal, lush language to its homeless waifs and baroque narrator. “Why Dickens? Why now? It’s because I’m not a kid anymore,” Wagner says. “And the orderliness that Dickens presented really appealed to me. You’re no longer a young writer, so you’re no longer indulging in violence or wickedness for violence or wickedness’ sake.”

“I’ll Let You Go” centers on the journey of 12-year-old zillionaire Tull Trotter, who stumbles onto a family secret that sends him on a search for a father he’d believed long dead. Helping him in his quest are his pubescent cousins, “girl detective” Lucy and her prodigy brother, Edward, who creates elaborate hoods to cloak his disfigurement caused by Apert syndrome. Tull’s fate is crossed with that of Amaryllis Kornfeld, a homeless orphan who believes the world will open up to her if she can only be canonized as a saint.

To take readers to parts of Los Angeles most well-heeled denizens rarely think about, Wagner played reporter. When he writes about Amaryllis getting caught up in the horrors of the child-welfare system, he’s drawing on experience and contacts he gleaned from acting as a court-appointed special advocate for a child in a group home. When he describes the lost encampments of L.A.’s homeless, he’s invoking his memory of trips to the city’s underbelly.

For all the compassion expressed in the book, Wagner escaped from some of his research oddly unmoved. “I was telling someone about going downtown, and the person said, ‘Doesn’t it make you sad to see the junkies and the amputees and homeless people?’ I said, ‘What makes me sad is when something terrible happens to one of my characters.’ It sounds so bizarre and selfish and rarefied, but it’s true, because I don’t know those people, and I know these characters intimately.”

Wagner hasn’t abandoned his turf--naked Hollywood--and the book is spiced with some scathing references to real people, among them screenwriters Ron Bass, William Goldman and Callie Khouri. The gibes are ascribed to the bitter boyfriend of Tull’s mother, a struggling screenwriter named Ralph who insists on being called “Rafe” because “it oscillates.” “He says terrible things about Ron Bass but ultimately becomes his big buddy, so I think his own sort of shallowness is exposed,” Wagner says. “I think you consider the source. I don’t mean me.” Wagner says he populates his novels with famous people because they’re “part of the fabric of this town, so it’s just become a part of the fabric of my fiction.” And he says that most celebrities and industry movers who make cameos in his books are flattered to do so. But not everyone is.

Fisher says there have been times “he’s written a character that’s potentially unfavorable, and someone may think they recognize themself. Just for a minute it [makes them angry]. I think he walks away without hearing some of these things.” Wagner denies that his books are roman a clefs. “If there’s a character in real life that’s so fascinating that you’d want to portray him in fiction, you’re going to fail because there’s nothing better than this real person. And I don’t want to set myself up to fail.”

Wagner writes like a native son because he is one--for all intents and purposes. When he was 8, his family moved to Beverly Hills, where he was a popular kid at Beverly Vista Elementary School, which pops up in the book. Early on, his own class struggle in Beverly Hills was great sport. His father had relatively modest jobs in entertainment as a radio consultant and producer for TV’s “The Les Crane Show,” but Wagner played and partied in some of Beverly Hills’ wealthiest homes because he grew up with Hollywood royalty.

He moved on to the desert of Beverly High and beckoning adulthood. Neither appealed, so at 16, Wagner dropped out of school and began working as a driver of ambulances and limousines. For all his Hollywood connections, it was serendipity that nudged him into screenwriting when he hooked up with an actress who dabbled in writing. The pair wrote and sold comedies until Wagner went on his own. (He later wed the actress, Rebecca de Mornay, a marriage that lasted less than a year.)

It wasn’t until he was in his early 30s that he began writing prose, starting with short stories modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby stories about a Hollywood hack writer. Wagner called his own beleaguered screenwriter Bud Wiggins, whose travails made the rounds of Hollywood when the author self-published 1,000 slender copies that were sold at Book Soup in West Hollywood.

The buzz led to a book contract, which resulted in “Force Majeure,” a reference to a standard contractual clause that releases studios from the deal if unforeseen disaster strikes.

Wagner delights in giving his books titles with multiple meanings. “I’m Letting You Go” and “I’m Losing You,” both allusions to phone chatter, are part of a “titular trilogy” about love, loss and redemption that will continue with his next book, “Still Holding.” He has also adapted a series of Charles Bukowski short stories for an animated feature called “The Way the Dead Love” that’s being made by “Rugrats” creators Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo.

And following his forays into directing with “Women in Film” (2001) and “I’m Losing You,” (1999), which were based on his novels, Wagner plans to pursue his other career as a budding auteur. But words, luscious and obscure and wittily strung together, will keep drawing him back.

Says Wagner: “I’m creating it as I go. But I’m enjoying writing books a lot now. I feel I’ve hit a certain stride.”