L.A. Noir (32 page)

On March 18, the county grand jury began its own investigation into the incident. Its discoveries quickly found their way into the press.

“Boys Tell Police Beating,” cried the
Citizen-News
’s banner. “Jurors Told of Slugging on Christmas,” announced the lead article. “Wild Party by 100 Police Described, Youth Tells of Beating at Police Yule Party,” shouted the
Examiner
. Photos of bruised backs, blackened eyes, and smashed noses filled the papers. Jury foreman Raymond Thompson insisted (and DA Roll agreed) that officers who were suspects be summoned in for a lineup so the seven youths could identify their assailants. This was bitter medicine for Parker. The chief was further embarrassed when details of the initial Internal Affairs report leaked out. Its conclusion—“that none of the prisoners was physically abused in the manner alleged, if at all, while in city jail”—seemed hard to square with the photos of the men’s injuries or with injuries some police officers suffered that night.

Meanwhile, more reports of police brutality were surfacing. A complement of eighteen G-men had moved into the department, requesting access to files and questioning department officials about other allegations of abuse. Parker bitterly criticized the FBI’s investigation, intimating that it was an unwarranted Political vendetta orchestrated by local Democrats and the Truman administration. On March 25, Councilman Roybal announced that his office had received more than fifty complaints of police
brutality (ranging from “mere slappings-around” to “hospitalization of the victims with internal injuries”) in the past three months alone and that he was convinced that many of these complaints had merit. Parker’s appearance before the grand jury did little to quiet his critics. One source told the
Daily News
that the chief’s testimony was marked by “a tendency to make windy speeches in response to simple questions.”

Parker’s job was in danger. The
Herald-Express
quoted “well-informed politicians” saying that taking potshots at Parker had become the favorite Los Angeles sport—“They’re shooting at him.” The
Mirror
insisted that it was “time to get to the bottom of these ugly rumblings of sadism and abuse of authority” (although it also carefully hedged its bets by not entirely dismissing “the possibility that Communist Party liners are fomenting antipolice prejudice”). Other papers noted that the average tenure for an LAPD chief was two years—and that Parker had been in office for nineteen months.

It wasn’t just Parker’s job that was in danger. So too was the department’s ability to function autonomously. The first threat to the power and autonomy of the police chief had come just before Parker was made chief, during the scandalous summer of 1949, when the county grand jury took the logical step of examining how well the Police Commission oversaw the department. Its conclusion was that the Police Commission “is virtually nothing more than a licensing agency and cannot take action against officers.” Newspapers such as Hearst’s morning
Examiner
also took up the cry against “an autonomous, star-chamber court for the police” and a Police Commission that “has no power whatever in the internal affairs of the department.” In time, these demands faded, in part because Parker himself seemed like such a straight arrow. But with what the press now called “Bloody Christmas,” the old concerns returned.

Of course, Chief Parker was not without allies. He continued to command support from the city’s many Legionnaires, from Los Angeles’s Catholic hierarchy, and, now that he was defending it, from the force itself. Defenders pointed to the accomplishments of his traffic bureau, which had reduced vehicular homicides by half in nine years and made Los Angeles the safest big city in the world to drive in. The chamber of commerce applauded his reorganization of the department and the cost-saving innovations of the new research and planning bureau. The
Los Angeles Times
was also warming to the new chief. At a (supposedly) off-the-record meeting of civic and business leaders at the California Club (called so that Chief Parker could present his perspective on the current controversy), Parker complained that the allegations of unchecked police brutality were the result of the liberal
Daily News
’s vendetta against him.

But the most potent defense of the LAPD did not come from the city’s business establishment or its dominant newspaper. It came from Hollywood, in the form of a fledgling new television show called
Dragnet
.

      DEAD BODIES, distressed dames, and dangerous games. Bombshell blondes and wisecracking private eyes. High heels, handguns, and homicide. Lonely days, rainy nights, and “streets that were dark with something more than night.” During the 1920s and ’30s, magazines such as
Black Mask, Dime Detective
, and
Gun Molls
created a new genre of writing—pulp fiction (so named after the cheap pulp paper on which the magazines were printed). Schlocky and shocking, full of stock characters and lurid tales, the pulps quickly attracted big readerships. Surprisingly, they also attracted gifted writers, among them Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain, who, in the 1930s, penned great books that in the 1940s became even greater movies—for example,
The Maltese Falcon; Double Indemnity; Farewell, My Lovely; The Postman Always Rings Twice
. In 1946, French film critic Nino Frank gave this style of filmmaking a name—“film noir.”

Then there was the noir radio drama
Pat Novak for Hire
.

Pat Novak
took the classic private investigator formula to the nth degree. Set on the San Francisco waterfront, it featured a world-weary boat captain with a weakness for corny quips and a knack for getting involved in other people’s affairs. The show’s opening lines set the blase, world-weary tone: “Sure, I’m Pat Novak, for hire …” the show began, to the sound of foghorns on the waterfront. Invariably, Novak would agree to investigate a minor case—which led straight to murder. The dialogue was pure camp. Streets were “as deserted as a warm bottle of beer.” Dames who “made Cleopatra look like Apple Mary” appeared in Novak’s office at dusk, and spoke in voices “hot and sticky—like a furnace full of marshmallows.” What made it work was the tremulous, intimate voice of Pat Novak himself—a twenty-six-year-old voice actor named Jack Webb.

Jack Webb had grown up poor, in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles. Early on he developed a passion for jazz and the cinema. During the war, Webb worked as a clerk for the U.S. Army Air Force in Del Rio, Texas (though later press accounts made him a B-26 crew member). Afterward, he married a young singer/actress he’d met at a jazz club before the war, Julie London
—the
Julie London. (During the war, London was a popular pinup girl. None of Webb’s comrades believed that the gangly, intense twenty-two-year-old knew her—until he produced a letter.) In 1946, Webb moved to San Francisco and landed a job as a disk jockey at a local ABC-affiliated radio station, KGO. There Webb and his writing partner, Richard
Breen, created
Pat Novak for Hire
. The sensitive yet cynical PI and his extraordinarily kitschy dialogue quickly attracted a loyal following. However, Webb’s big break came in 1948, when a Hollywood casting director heard one of Webb’s “private-eye plays” and offered him a part in a new Eagle-Lion film,
He Walked by Night
(1948).

Eagle-Lion was a little studio with dreams of becoming the next Warner Bros.
He Walked by Night
was inspired by the recent murder of a California Highway patrolman. The film told the story of the LAPD’s efforts to catch the burglar-turned-cop-killer; its highlight was an extended, real-time chase through the streets (and sewers) of Los Angeles. Webb’s role was a minor one: He played the part of a technician in the crime investigation lab (in real life, Lt. Lee Jones). However, the movie shaped his career in two critical ways. The first influence was stylistic.
He Walked by Night
began with an opening disclaimer: “The record is set down here factually—as it happened. Only the names are changed—to protect the innocent.” Its opening shot was an aerial pan of the city, with a dramatic voice-over: “This is Los Angeles. Our Lady the Queen of the Angels, as the Spanish named her. The fastest growing city in the nation …” The film also had a decidedly documentary flavor. It presented its story as one “taken from the files of the detective division.” All of these elements would later appear in Jack Webb’s most famous creation. The second influence was LAPD Det. Sgt. Marty Wynn, whom Webb met on the set.

Wynn had been provided by the LAPD as a technical advisor to the producers (one of whom, ironically, was Johnny Roselli, the Chicago Outfit’s liaison to Hollywood, who had recently been released from the federal penitentiary after a prison sentence was mysteriously commuted). Although Wynn was supposed to instruct the director in the fine points of police procedure, once the filming got under way, he didn’t have much to do. Neither did Jack Webb. As a result, both men spent a lot of time in the commissary. There the two fell to talking. When Wynn found out that Webb was a radio actor who played the part of a private eye, he took to teasing him about the silliness of radio programs like
Pat Novak
.

“It makes every cop in the country laugh when they hear this nonsense on the radio,” Wynn told Webb. “Why doesn’t somebody show how detectives really break a crime?”

Wynn told Webb that he ought to do it right.

“I can arrange for you to have access to cases in the police files,” he told the actor. “Maybe you could do something with them.”

“I doubt it, Marty,” Webb responded, noting that “the fiction shows have such high ratings.” But the idea stuck with Webb. In fact, he had recently started sketching out another show about a lonely PI, tentatively titled
Joe
Friday, Room Five
. What if Friday became a police officer instead? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. Several weeks later, Webb called Wynn and told him that he was thinking about starting a new kind of police drama, one that portrayed police work as it really was. Wynn was pleased and, true to his word, arranged for Webb to start spending some time with Wynn and his partner, Vance Brasher.

Webb’s hunger for details and verisimilitude was voracious. “How do you frisk a suspect?” “How do you kick in a door?” “How do you clean your gun?” Jack Webb was a question a minute. He was soon spending all his free time at police department headquarters in City Hall. He got permission to start taking classes at the police academy. He was learning what it meant to be a detective.

Now he needed a name.
The Cop
was quickly dismissed as disrespectful.
The Sergeant
was too military. One day during a brainstorming session, writer Herb Ellis and Webb were talking about an earlier radio program,
Calling All Cars
, when Ellis asked Webb, “What do they call it when cops go all out to catch a crook?”

“They put out a dragnet,” Webb responded.

That was it. “Dragnet.” Now Webb had to find a network that would broadcast his show.

His first choice, CBS, passed. No blondes, no Humphrey Bogart-style Sam Spade, no audience was the network’s prediction. Webb disagreed. Authenticity was what would make his show unique. Webb went to NBC. It was desperate for programming, having recently lost prized performers Bing Crosby, Jack Benny, and Amos ‘n’ Andy to CBS—so desperate it was willing to give a true-to-life police documentary a go. There was just one condition: Webb had to have access to LAPD case files.

This was not necessarily an easy sell.
Pat Novak for Hire
had presented policemen in an almost uniformly bad light. (Nearly every episode featured a dumb, brutal police officer who hinders, threatens, and sometimes beats Novak as he attempts to solve the case.) So it was with some uncertainty that Wynn and Brasher took Webb to meet their captain, Jack Donahoe. They were fortunate in their choice. The good-natured Donahoe agreed to provide case notes to help Webb work up a pilot program that he could present to then-Asst. Chief Joe Reed. Webb was delighted when Reed pronounced the pilot “good and accurate.” The show then went to Chief Horrall, who informed Webb “he was on the right track, reflecting the day-to-day drudgery of police work.” It wasn’t exactly the reaction Webb was hoping for, but it got Webb what he needed—a departmental blessing and access to its case notes. In June 1949, the first episode of radio
Dragnet
went on the air, Friday evening at 10:00 p.m.

From the start, Webb was fanatical about getting the details right. Five soundmen were employed to create a range of more than three hundred special effects. Wherever possible, the program used actual recordings from the department. Soundmen staked out the City Hall garage to capture the roar of police cruisers speeding away; they also recorded the everyday background noise of City Hall. When a script called for a long-distance phone call from Los Angeles to Fountain Green, Utah, sound engineers placed a real call, and recorded the relay clicks and point-to-point operator comments. Terminology was precise and correct. A suggestion to replace “attention all units” with the more dramatic “calling all cars” was brushed aside. Understatement rather than the exaggerated accents, over-the-top sound effects, and histrionic acting that characterized most crime radio programs was the order of the day. The most important part of the new program, though, was its central character, played by Jack Webb himself, Sgt. Joe Friday.

In those days, your typical homicide detective had a very distinctive look. “His suits are not cheap, though they don’t always look well pressed,” wrote newspaperwoman Agnes Underwood, “and while not loud, would hardly be called dark, conservative business numbers.” Their ties, however, “shout like a movie homicide detective.”