This woman’s work

Working for the L.A. Weekly between 1985 and 1991, Helen Knode was known as a fearless, politically conscious movie critic and columnist with a strong feminist perspective. So it’s not surprising that the heroine of her first novel, “The Ticket Out,” is a movie reviewer for an alternative weekly.

But then reality and fiction diverge; in a plot twist worthy of her husband, novelist James Ellroy (“L.A. Confidential”), her fictional character, Ann Whitehead, grows disenchanted with her job just as she abruptly finds herself caught up in a string of murders that connect old and new Hollywood. Whether he likes it or not, veteran LAPD Det. Doug Lockwood, the strong, silent type, finds headstrong Ann insisting on helping solve the mystery, which begins with the murder of a beautiful aspiring filmmaker. “The Ticket Out” is caustic about the current state of movies but appreciative of Hollywood’s past glories.

What got her going in writing her novel were her two main areas of interest: women and movies -- more specifically violence against women and the sorry state of contemporary cinema. In regard to the first, Knode depicts a young woman who goes to dangerous extremes in trying to break into Hollywood as a filmmaker and beyond that the fate of generations of beautiful women drawn to Hollywood with dreams of glamour and stardom. “L.A. is a great brothel,” she said, “filled with ephemeral female flesh. You’re lucky if you end up with some real estate.”

Knode said she was especially impressed with Ellroy’s sympathy for Elizabeth Short, a beautiful brunet Hollywood hopeful nicknamed the Black Dahlia who had drifted into prostitution when her severed and mutilated corpse was found in a vacant lot near 39th Street and Exposition Boulevard in January 1947; it became one of the city’s most legendary unsolved murders.

“In movies and books, dead women like her are treated as if their fates are their fault,” she said. “They’re tramps, they’re loose, they asked for it, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But James completely understood how Elizabeth Short got dead and how it affected the lives of the men around her. I started thinking about men and violence in a different way.”

As for the state of the movies, Knode quotes from director Michael Powell’s memoirs, which suggest that film cannot really advance as an art form as long as profit is the only yardstick and that for now -- Powell was commenting in 1986 -- he concluded, “the tide is going out.”

“Look at live theater, the popular performance art form before the movies,” said Knode. “It stretches back some 2,500 years in Western civilization and during that time there were only four or five golden ages. With movies, I believe we’re now in the long commercial haul. It could end 100 years from now or tomorrow. Sure, there’s still some great stuff being made, but the philosophy in films these days is not saying anything good. It’s not the messages but the philosophy that informs films that interests me. And what they’re saying is depraved or banal and badly plotted.”

Love changes things

A recent party celebrating publication of the book took place at the downtown L.A. Pacific Dining Car -- Knode has a sentimental attachment. “James and I met and were also married at the Pacific Dining Car,” she said. “I happened to be there while he was being interviewed for the Rolling Stone by an ex-boyfriend of mine, who came over and asked me if I would like to meet him.”

Knode admitted that not only had she never read Ellroy, she hadn’t even heard of him, even though by 1990 he was a highly acclaimed novelist. “I’m not a big fan of male genre writers, and James seemed sort of a buffoon,” she said. “But he gave me ‘The Big Nowhere,’ ‘L.A. Confidential’ and ‘Black Dahlia’ to read, and I couldn’t put them down.”

The party for “Ticket Out” also marked the first time Knode had donned a dress since attending the 1997 Cannes festival screening of “L.A. Confidential.” Knode’s attitude toward her appearance could not come as a surprise to anyone who attended countless screenings she covered; Knode favored a thrown-together look, with hair often as spiky as her reviews. Knode allows that she thinks that she would be a much better critic now. “I’m not a jejune girl Bolshevik anymore,” she said, laughing.

The transition from her old life to her new one happened swiftly. It seemed that one day Helen Knode was an L.A. film critic and the next day Mrs. James Ellroy. “He suddenly separated from his wife, we suddenly married, and I was living with him in Connecticut,” said Knode. “My karma ran over my dogma.”

The Ellroys subsequently spent seven years in Kansas, Helen’s mother’s native state and where she has numerous relatives. Last July they moved to Northern California.

“James is a generous guy,” she said. “He tells every unhappy journalist he meets to write a novel.” In time,, Knode took her husband’s advice. “What stops people from writing novels is the belief that all the great novels have been written. You think of Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, and then you think that they all had to start somewhere. Ever hear of Beethoven’s First Symphony -- not very good.

“Anyway, feminists are always seeing women as the object of violence, but I started thinking, what if the woman was the subject instead of the object, and how did she feel. I started thinking viscerally.” Knode said, gratefully, that Ellroy did his share of leaning over her shoulder as she wrote her book, a much longer and harder task than she had ever imagined it would be.

Great inspirations

That Knode could have a novel in her was evident when she turned to writing her Weird Sister column in her final phase at the Weekly. She wrote unforgettably of an intense love affair she experienced in Paris, and one of her key accomplishments in “The Ticket Out” is how she manages to suggest how things are heating up at last between Ann Whitehead and Doug Lockwood and then cut away at precisely the right point to leave the rest to readers’ imaginations. She said that “orchestrating this emotional climax” was one of the toughest challenges in the entire book. “I’ve finally accepted that I am a romantic.”

Years ago Knode would hold forth on her admiration of Scarlett O’Hara as a model for the take-charge woman, and in that regard, Ann has lots in common with Scarlett. But Knode said her view of Scarlett has changed. “I re-read ‘Gone With the Wind’ a few months ago at the age of 44, which I first read when I was 12. I was struck by her lack of self-awareness, her lack of introspection. She was so unreflective and shallow, but I still absolutely admire her: She gets things done. Scarlett is the bourgeois proto-feminist heroine, and the price she pays is very high.”

To Knode, O’Hara represents the double-consciousness women possess when they believe society dictates they must behave a certain way while on another level resenting it. As a result, many women, like Scarlett, “work the sex angle for all it’s worth” -- something which Ann Whitehead never does.

We haven’t heard the last from Ann Whitehead because Knode struck a two-book deal with Harcourt. “The next book will begin five minutes after the end of the first,” said Knode, “But it won’t be about L.A., it will be about California.”

In the meantime, there’s no use hoping to see “The Ticket Out” on the big screen even though it’s easy to imagine that it could work as well as a movie as “L.A. Confidential” did. But no, said Knode, feeling as she does about most movies these days and given the way she trashes Hollywood in her book. She simply and very firmly said: “It’s not for sale.”