Playboy Interview: Joseph Wambaugh

Until Joe Wambnugh came along, American novelists traditionally treated police as either pigs or paladins but rarely as human beings. In 1971, Wambaugh, then a moonlighting member of the Los Angeles Police Department, made his literary debut with "The New Centurions," a highly charged novel based on his career as a cop, and since then, Americans' view of the police has never been quite the same. In subsequent best sellers--"The Blue Knight," "The Choirboys," "The Black Marble"--Wambaugh depicted police the way he knew them: less than heroes, more than mercenaries in blue. Wambaugh's station-house characters are almost never detached "peace officers" or idealistic guardians of the law. Instead, they are often brawlers, liars, petty-bribe takers, skirl chasers and drunks. Yet they are also men who do a difficult job rather ivell even while being battered by what Wambaugh calls the "emotional violence" of police work.

Wambaugh knows whereof he speaks. As a 14-year member of the L.A.P.D., he didn't miss much in the course of going from uniformed patrolman to detective sergeant. He quit the force in 1974, but only after his own celebrity had, made it impossible for him to function as a police officer. As any of his fans who've since folloived Wamhaugh's meanderings can attest, he still yearns for the life as a cop. But there are obvious compensations. By now, he is a wealthy man, yet he doesn't really get off on being a big-shot author. These days, as he himself might put it, his ass might be on a tennis court, but his heart is still in the streets.

Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh is one Irishman who is fiercely proud of his working-class roots. Born in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on January 22, 1937, he was the son of a policeman and an upstairs maid. "I was always very proud of the fact that my mom was in domestic service--she worked for the Morgans of the Pennsylvania Railroad--because I was the only kid living in the shadows of the steel mills who knew how the WASPs lived," he recently recalled. "She used to come home and fill my head with stories about being one of 18 servants taken to Atlantic City for the summer, or how some of the other maids would treat the stone-deaf great-uncle who'd eat dinner alone. They'd say outrageous things to his face, like, 'Would you care for some more mashed potatoes, you old prick?' I loved hearing those kinds of things."

When he was 14, the family moved to Southern California, an unsettling experience for Wambaugh. "Everybody I grew up with in the East had a kind of unhealthy ethnic look," he noted. "I came out to California looking pale and consumptive and all the kids I met were blond and tan and looked like they drank a lot of orange juice. Boy, it was intimidating," he remembered.

After being graduated from Chaffey High School in Ontario, California, Wambaughjoined, the Marines and, a year later, married his high school sweetheart. Upon beingmustered out of the Marines, he worked in the steel mills for three years, while his wife, Dee, worked as a telephone operator. Wambaugh began taking night classes at California State College at Los Angeles and eventually earned a B,A. and a master's degree in English. He joined the L.A. police force when he was 23 and by the time he leftat the age of 37, he had become an adroit detective--and one of the nation's most successful novelists. To interview him, Playboy sent free-lancer Lawrence Linderman to meet with the writer at his home in San Marino, California. Linderman reports:

"I first met Joe Wambaugh in 1973, just offer he'd written 'The Onion Field' and had returned to work in the L.A. Police Department. At the time, Wambaugh was trying to keep a low profile around the station house, and so, despite several hours of conversation, I honored his request not to do a story on him. Joe was then one tense cop/author; but when I recently caught up with him again, he seemed like a different and much more relaxed guy. For the record, Wambaugh stands 5'11" tall, weighs about 165pounds, considers himself a puny physical specimen (he's not) and admits to having a thunderous temper and matching demented green eyes. He's done all right by himself and his wife and three kids: The Wambaugh home is a red-brick mansion on the edge of San Marino, and amenities include a large swimming pool, a tennis court and five and a half acres of manicured lawns and forest glade.

"After getting reacquainted over a cup of coffee, Wambaugh and I headed for Monahan's Pub in Pasadena in search of something more substantial to drink. Monahan's, as it turned out, serves more Stolichnaya Vodka than any other restaurant or bar in the U.S., an achievement, due entirely to the fact that Wambaugh and his pal Peter Monahan, a silver-haired rogue in his 50s, two years ago created the Black Marble Martini--a drink that has often been the ruination of both men. The recipe, according to Wambaugh: 'To begin with, you take two ounces of Stolichnaya--80or 100 proof, depending entirely on the weight of your pelotas--which youpour over ice. You then drop in a Greek black olive for the bitter of life and rim the glass with orange rind for the sweet of life. You then flame the drink for the fireof life and, although the flame lasts for but a second, in your body the fire will burn for hours. With or without the match, you still wind up with the world's greatest martini.'

"Thus fortified, we sat down to do some serious drinking. Wambaugh was winding up postproduction work on the film version of 'The Onion Field,' which he personally produced. It would not endear him to his enemies in Hollywood, and it was on that subject that rue began the interview."

[Q] Playboy: Having been a cop, a novelist and an outspoken critic of the Hollywood establishment, you've just produced your own book as a film--The Onion Field. What do you suppose your Hollywood enemies are going to say about you now?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, at least I know they won't say I'm dishonest. What they will say is that you can't deal with Wambaugh because of his ego, his temper, his immaturity, his lack of tact, his inability to communicate and his big mouth. You'll hear all of that--and some of it will definitely be true.

[Q] Playboy: What would you prefer they said about you?

[A] Wambaugh: I'd like them to say I've made a movie better than a studio could have made it. Movies made by the major studios have become so expensive that it's criminal. I hesitate to use the word criminal, but lately some movie people have been nailed by the law and that's because what they were doing was criminal. I admit The Onion Field would have cost more if I hadn't been willing to give up all my fees, but still, movies don't have to cost what they've been costing.... This kind of talk, by the way, is why a lot of people in Hollywood want me to fall on my ass. Let's face it: If you make a movie that's a commercial and artistichit and if you do it for less than half the studio cost, it's not going to make certain people's jobs more secure. For the same reason, though, a lot of people are wishing me well.

[Q] Playboy: But you're essentially a writer, not a producer. Why do writers have such a tough time of it in Hollywood?

[A] Wambaugh: The way it works right now, every script that goes into a major distribution company is literally emasculated and torn apart by lawyers and former publishers, publicists and agents who are now in positions of power in the film industry and who think they understand movies better than the writer. But I don't give a goddamn what the medium is, any story is nothing but a mix of plot, character and dialog--and who but a writer is in the best position to understand how those three elements are going to work together? I mean, how dare a producer or a studio executive who is a Harvard lawyer or worse--how dare he say he's in a better position to understand plot, character and dialog than a writer? And yet each and every one of those guys thinks he can do it, even though movies are nothing more than stories on celluloid instead of on the printed page.

[Q] Playboy: But movies--you well know--are also very risky financial enterprises. Why don't writers understand the manipulative games played by studio executives?

[A] Wambaugh: My feeling is that writers are vulnerable people involved in a lonely profession. They do their work within the four walls of their office or their home, and they don't necessarily have the opportunity to wheel and deal on a daily basis like those other guys do. Writers are a little like guppies swimming in an aquarium filled with sharks, killer whales, squid, octopuses and other creatures of the deep. And plenty of squid shit. I think most writers are finally unable to swim with the sharks and the killer whales, and so those guppies are constantly getting swallowed up and therefore give out with that famous Hollywood cliché: Take the money and run. I don't know who the hell coined that one. Was it Ernest Hemingway?

[Q] Playboy: Possibly Woody Allen.

[A] Wambaugh: It may have been, but it still drives me insane. I mean, why take the money and run? If members of the Writers Guild of America stood firm and didn't take the money and run--if they kind of became a partner in the operation and had the say-so of a partner and stood up to those people--why, this whole dreadful experience of screenplay writing could be changed. I'd like someone to tell me how those schmucks are going to make a living without a screenwriter. They won't be able to. You can't just take a camera and a bunch of actors and go into aroom or into the street and make a movie. You need that screenwriter to get it started.

[Q] Playboy: If that were true, movies would be a writer's medium, not a director's medium.

[A] Wambaugh: It's only a directors medium at this point in film history. It didn't start out that way, if you'll recall. The last czar of Russia, Nicholas Romanov, actually created the American film industry, because the people he persecuted left Russia, and many of them came to America. Some of them, like Irving Berlin, landedin the East on Tin-Pan Alley; others came to the West Coast, where they created a fantasy world that had always been denied them, a world that never was and never could be. Those guys were producers, and in effect, they said, "Look, we're a persecuted people, and we're going to create a better world on celluloid." And they made all those grand films and didn't give a goddamn how plot, character and dialog worked; it didn't matter, because they were creating spectacles, and that's all movies were about from the very beginning of silent films up until film became a star's medium in the so-called golden age--or Goldwyn Age. For quite a while, movie stars took over by virtue of their charisma, and people went to movies just to see an Errol Flynn or a Bogart or whoever else was popular.

[Q] Playboy: But weren't producers still pulling the stars' strings?

[A] Wambaugh: Yeah, and they'll never really have that power again. About 25 years ago, some fucking Frenchman said, "A director is an auteur." I don't even remember who that frog was. Anyway, he said a director is an auteur, and what is an auteur but an author, right? How does a director suddenly become an author? This auteur label was applied to a bunchof guys who, once again, were former press agents who became directors who became auteurs. A certain mystique developed around a couple of them and, boy, I've got to hand it to the directors: Unlike writers, they were able to seize upon the power that was offered to a few of them and suddenly ten of them had power, and then 20 had power. Look at the power that a Robert Altman has, or a Steven Spielberg, or a Francis Ford Coppola. Power! Man, do you know that the cost of Spielberg's new film, 1941, is now up to $24,000,000? He doesn't care. He says, "So what? I'm goingto make my film." That's mind-boggling power, isn't it? Coppola, meanwhile, has been on Apocalypse Now to the tune of about $35,000,000. I mean, there are apocryphal stories about Apocalypse Now and I don't, even know how much that film is going to cost, nor does anyone else. I'll tell you this: No movie star has everhad that power. No writer ever will have that power. And I don't think any producer ever had that kind of power. Directors must have enough of the killer whale in them to be able to go in there and really get a mouthful and hold on.

[Q] Playboy: Would you prefer that the leverage stay entirely with studio executives?

[A] Wambaugh: Of course not, but it seems to me that the star directors I've just mentioned have at least a couple of turkeys or potential turkeys in the oven right now. Altman, for instance, came out with Quintet, starring Paul Newman, and that was a loser. How about A Wedding--what do you think that baby cost? And what about Buffalo Bill and the Indians?

[Q] Playboy: We take it you don't like Robert Altman's work?

[A] Wambaugh: Listen, I liked McCabe &Mrs. Miller and M*A*S*H and there's no question that Altman has done some good stuff. My point is that any director--and I don't care who he is--had better, by God, have the word in front of him before he starts making a movie. Do not give any director $10,000,000, $20,000,000, or 35 cents until he has the word in front of him. And the wordcan only be written by a writer.

[Q] Playboy: According to what we've heard, top screenwriters such as Paddy Chayefsky are in such strong positions that they actually grant backers the privilegeof financing their screenplays. Have we heard wrong?

[A] Wambaugh: Do you really think any writer has control over what he does? The answer is no. As a matter of fact, when I was going through one of my many lawsuits with Hollywood, Joe Levine, a producer, was quoted as saying, "If Wambaughthinks a writer is ever going to control a movie, he's crazy." To me, that was an absolutely perfect moviemogul quote, for it implied that the writer was the last guy who should ever be able to control how a story is told.

[Q] Playboy: If screenwriters are held in such low regard by producers, whydon't they get together and stand up for their profession?

[A] Wambaugh: They won't because the Writers Guild is controlled by eunuchswho won't fight for their rights. If screenwriters stood together and said, in Paddy Chayefsky's words, "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take this anymore," it seems to me that there could be some kind of clause written into the Writers Guild contracts that would be similar to the one playwrights have--which is that you taketheir work as is or you don't take it at all. Another problem is that screenwriters with clout do a terrible cop-out and say things like, "I'm in screenwriting only until I can become a director," or a novelist, or whatever. They don't get respect for their craft, because they don't demand it. Instead, they just complain about how they're treated and then go on to something else.

[Q] Playboy: So what actually caused you to leave your typewriter and produce your own movies?

[A] Wambaugh: Oh, there are a lot of reasons, but I think the most important has to do with the movie version of The Choirboys, a debacle that caused my black, tormented soul a great deal of trouble. I joke about it a lot, but I really did suffer. I'd been hired to do the screenplay of my novel, and I had certain verbal assurances about script changes that I relied on. I thought the people at Lorimar Productions were my friends, but let me tell you something about that: It's been my experience that policemen who prematurely become cynical--as the cops in The Choirboys did--and who deal in a world wherein they distrust everyone, have to feel excessive trust for a few people or else they suffer the ultimate policeman's disease, which is to end up eating their guns. I think that explains why, in business dealings, I still tend to trust excessively certain people beyond any common sense. In fact, I trusted everyone associated with the movie version of The Choirboys, until two days prior to the start of filming, when a spy in Robert Aldrich's company smuggled a copy of the shooting script to me. What he showed me was this dreadful, slimy, ugly, vile thing that had my name on it. Even though I could recognize pieces of it out of context, it was not my script, and I had had no idea that kindof thing was going on.

I'd never really had anything so outrageous happen to me, and so I initiated the first of my major lawsuits against Hollywood. I went to Universal Studios, which was distributing The Choirboys, and I talked to one of the head men there. Without sparing any words, I described specifically how vile the script was and what a black eye the film would be for Universal. I told him The Choirboys was going to be a disaster movie, but not like Airport '77 or Jaws, the kind Universal was used to. Because I can read, I know that if plot, character and dialog are horrendous, you're going to wind up with a horrendous film, it doesn't matter how good the performers are. So I literally tried to stop production, but that didn't work. Well, I had ten percent of the gross of The Choirboys, from the first dollar to be taken in, which is the kind of deal a Clint Eastwood or a Burt Reynolds gets. My lawyer called Universal and said, "Joe Wambaugh is so outraged that his screenplay has been rewritten and that you are about to shoot this horrible piece of dogshit"--that's what I always called it--"that he's willing to give up half his percentage plus $300,000 to fire Aldrich and replace him with anyone, including your Aunt Tilly."

[Q] Playboy: That obviously got you nowhere, since Aldrich did, indeed, direct the film.

[A] Wambaugh: Right. Universal said that Aldrich had an ironclad contract and that it couldn't do anything about it. Hence my lawsuit, which was based on verbal assurances to me that there would be no script changes. Everyone I knew in the film business told me, "Verbal assurances in Hollywood mean nothing. There is no such thing as a verbal contract."

Well, I know a lot about criminal law from being a cop for 14 years and I also know something about civil law just from osmosis. And I know for damned sure that there's nothing in California law that says a verbal contract isn't binding. On the contrary, if you can prove it, a verbal contract is binding. So I told my lawyer, "Let those schmucks laugh. I believe that a verbal contract is binding and I'm willing to go to the mat, in front of 12 good men and true, at a jury trial and let them listen to this guy and let them listen to me. And if they believe this guy over me, then I'm going to lose. And if that happens, my faith in the American system of justice will be totally destroyed, and I'm just going to pack up the wife and kids and go back to my grandfather's home in County Galway and raise rocks." People said, "That's a silly, frivolous lawsuit, Wambaugh. You're saying that a man broke his word to you. You've got nothing in writing." That's exactly what I was saying, and I was getting ready to say it in a deposition, but the case didn't get that far.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Wambaugh: An offer was made to delete my name as the film's screenwriter and to settle on me what I think is the largest amount of cash any writer has ever taken away from Hollywood at one time: seven figures. Universal wrote me a check. I'dtell you how much it was for, but I believe the final legal agreement is that I'm not allowed to tell. In any case, my part of the settlement was that I couldn't talk about the film or anybody connected with it for a year, which was up last December. I could never tell anyone what a sleazy, insidious movie The Choirboys was. The film was not only an insult to my work, it was an insult to everybody who took part in the goddamned thing.

[Q] Playboy: What bothered you so much about it?

[A] Wambaugh: Among other things, Robert Aldrich had an actor portray a policeman crawling around on his knees and barking like a dog while a prostitute whippedhim. Oh, yes, the guy had a night stick dangling from his neck--how's that for a subtle phallic symbol? When I read that in the screenplay, I took out an ad in Variety apologizing to the American Kennel Club for men who crawl around on their knees and bark like cocker spaniels. When the film was being shot, Aldrich was quoted in one of the movie trade magazines as saying, "Joseph Wambaugh is not going to like my interpretation of his story." Aldrich certainly didn't say that when he and I met in those early days and he was being considered to direct the movie.

What he ended up making was a movie about policemen as fascists, and I'd written a film about individuals who have a job that subjects them to all sorts of emotional distress and causes them to build up outrageous kinds of defensive humor. The Choirboys was a kind of poor man's Calch-22; it was my attempt to approximate inpolice work what Joseph Heller did in his great book. Choir practice is not a term I coined, by the way. It was used in the Los Angeles Police Department long before I joined up, and is still the name given to the wild drinking orgies policemen have when they get together after work to kind of just howl, let off steam, complain, wail, cry, gnash their teeth, commiserate, drink and screw around if they're lucky enough to have women attending. It's all a result of the terrible trauma they suffer as policemen, but you couldn't get that from the movie, because there was no serious intent to the film. For instance, in the book, a homosexual is walking through the park during choir practice; in the film, the guy becomes a flaming lag parading around with a pink poodle. Aldrich didn't even film the movie on location in MacArthur Park. He said he didn't want to subject the cast and crew to the hazards of the park, including dog feces. So, on a sound stage, he created a plastic park, including plastic dog feces. I believe it was Omar Khayyám--or maybe it was Omar Sharif--who said, "Beware, my beloved, lest ye who sow plastic dog feces shall reap the real McCoy." And reap it they did with that film.

[Q] Playboy: Hut The Choirboys made money, didn't it?

[A] Wambaugh: According to Variety, it grossed $6,000,000 in America, which is not a successful film by any measure. But it also did $6,000,000 overseas, which is quite successful. The movie was disgusting enough and showed an American city in such tawdry terms that it appealed to foreign audiences who want exploitation films of violence and sex with little thought.

[Q] Playboy: Why was your screenplay changed?

[A] Wambaugh: Aldrich, like everyone else connected with the project, believed he could do it better. Which is the story of every Hollywood failure made from a good or popular book. I mean, how many atrocious films have you seen that were taken from good books about which you've thought, How could they miss by so much? It seems to me that a decent writer could easily have lifted 120 pages of dialog and stage direction from The Choirboys, and for all I know, the eventual writer of the screenplay did. But when you get an ego involved like the one belonging to Robert Aldrich, or to some of those other people who have control of a film, it's really out of the writer's hands.

[Q] Playboy: By becoming a producer aren't you giving up the fight as a screenwriter?

[A] Wambaugh: In The Onion Field, the credits will say only, "Screenplay by Joseph Wambaugh," which is my little ploy to remain pure: If I'm not identified as a producer, I can always say I'm not one, that I'm still a pure writer. But what you say is true: I've bought and paid for the power to control this movie, because I've always thought The Onion Field was my best work, and I feel a tremendous, tremendous desire to tell that story to as many people as possible. I think it's an important story.

In 1963, two Los Angeles policemen were disarmed at gunpoint by a pair of robbers they'd stopped on a routine traffic matter, and the officers were then kidnaped and driven to a remote onion field, where one of them, Ian Campbell. was summarily executed. Karl Hettinger, the other officer, barely escaped with his life. From then on, subtly and not so subtly, the police department and his fellow officers made Hettinger feel responsible for the death of his partner, and he began to deteriorate. Hettinger was condemned by his peers who believed--because of some totally absurd police concept of machismo--that he didn't do enough to save his partner. The police department, you see, feels that God kills by thunderbolt, and that you don't let some punk disarm you, kidnap you and kill your partner unless you die trying to prevent it. Hettinger suffered the same thing at the hands of the police department that Lloyd Bucher, commander of the Pueblo, suffered at the hands of the Navy. Hettinger finally became so overwhelmed by guilt that he was almost destroyed by it.

[Q] Playboy: In what way?

[A] Wambaugh: In 1966, Hettinger was fired from the police department for shoplifting. I was then a policeman and not yet a writer, and when I heard about it, Ifelt there might have been a connection between his experience surviving the onion-field execution and his shoplifting. I was told at the time that his shoplifting was soclumsily done it was almost as though he wanted to get caught. I filed it in the backof my mind and thought there might be a story there someday, and by the time I began researching the case, psychiatrists had confirmed that Hettinger had, indeed, been overcome with guilt about his partner's death. In an honest man, guilt cries out for punishment, which is why the guy went out and committed some pathetic thefts. He was finally caught alter plunging his hand into a box of cigars and grabbing a few of them.It turned out that Hettinger had been shoplifting for a year, but in our society even an inept shoplifter can get away with it for quite a while. He had to practically shoplift in front of a witness' nose and say, "Punish me, punish me," before he was caught. He was then dismissed from the police department in disgrace, but he felt that wasn't punishment enough, and he almost committed suicide with the very gun that was taken from him by Campbell's killer. And that's basically what fascinated me about the case--that and the fact that I would have done the same thing Hettinger did the night he and his partner were kidnaped.

[Q] Playboy: You seem more obsessed with The Onion Field than with your other books. Why?

[A] Wambaugh: I feel I was put on earth to write this story, and I've never had that feeling before or since. Nothing could ever stop me from writing The Onion Field; I felt it was my sole reason for living, and that no one else understood or knew the ramifications of the onion-field murder. I interviewed 65 people, spent weeks reading court transcripts of what became the longest criminal trial in California history, wrote the book and then sent off a copy to Hettinger, who'd become this strange, disturbed man who mowed people's lawns. And then I waited and I waited for a response from him, and when I didn't receive one I thought. My God, what have I done? A psychiatrist who'd examined Hettinger had told me, "You're fooling around with a man's life. Hettinger is a fragile man who doesn't understand what happened to him. Your book can be good medicine or bad. but you're taking a risk." Well, I knew I was playing God with the man, but I felt that the story was more important than Hettinger, me and everybody connected with the case. And I had to tell that story--but that didn't stop me from feeling what I felt. After I sent the book to Hettinger and didn't hear from him for two weeks, I thought, If anything happens to him as a result of my book, I'm going to inherit his guilt complex. I'm going to be the guy someone else is writing about. For two weeks, I couldn't sleep or eat properly, but then one day I got a call from Hettinger. He'd been away on a fishing trip with his wife and kids, and he'd just finished reading the book.

I've gotten some rave reviews in The New York Times, but I've never gotten a review like the one he gave me. It was six words long. Hettinger said, "It didn't make me feel bad." That was the greatest review I'd ever gotten or will get, and from then on I never worried about him again. He's since gotten a job as a kind of field deputy for a state senator near Bakersfield. After that, I publicly told everyone how a good movie was finally going to be made from one of my books, so I sat down and wrote the Choirboys screenplay--and immediately ran into all of that Hollywood nonsense.

[Q] Playboy: Were you as put off by the movie version of The New Centurions as you were by The Choirboys?

[A] Wambaugh: No, I wasn't. To begin with, I didn't do the screenplay for The New Centurions, I only sold the film rights. I thought the movie was sort of a comic book police melodrama with a couple of good performances. I didn't like it personally, but I could see how people who just wanted a mindless action movie might like it. And George C. Scott was terrific in it, but he did a lot of things in the movie I never wrote in the book. Scott starred in The Nero Centurions on the heels of Patton, and when he joined the cast, he was the biggest movie star in the world. The moment he signed on, it became a different film. That is no reflection on him, but the producers said, "Hey, we've got George C. Scott, a major part of this movie will have to be about his character," which is why The New Centurions never really had a chance. That's one of the ironies of the film business: If you hire an enormously successful actor to play a small part, every studio in Hollywood will throw the script right out the window and redo it for that star. Right after that, I got involved with television. The Blue Knight was made into a TV miniseries with William Holden and it later became a weekly series with George Kennedy, and in both cases, they did a pretty fair job for TV. I only sold the rights for the Holden miniseries, but I did get involved with the weekly series for the short time The Blue Knight was on. We made four or five episodes with George Kennedy in which we attempted to approximate the Bumper Morgan character from my novel, but the series was canceled before those shows were broadcast, which is an old TV story. In any case, I didn't really care too much about it. For whatever reasons they had, the producers felt they could do better than the character I'd written about in The Blue Knight. Which didn't particularly come as a surprise to me.

[Q] Playboy: Why not?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, by then, I knew my way around television. I started getting an education in TV in 1973, when I was approached by a very aggressive producer named David Gerber. He wanted to start a TV series about police with my name on it, so I wrote a two-page outline about an anthology series that would feature different actors each week. I told him we'd dramatize my philosophy about police, which goes something like this: "We will deal with the emotional violence inherent in police work, because that's real, that's what makes police cynical, that's what makes police destroy themselves emotionally. We won't deal with physical violence, which you can see on any cop show on TV and which is not what police work is all about, anyway." In those days, I thought nothing about whoring around a little bit for TV, and I really wanted to get that show on the air.

So, having given them my two-bit philosophy on emotional violence versus physical violence and all the shit that I say all the time. I realized it didn't mean a goddamned thing to those network and studio people. Nothing. They want numbers. They want 35 and 40 shares of the audience, and they think they know how to get them: action; i.e., violence. Also tits and ass, and there's no substitute for that. Well, I didn't have tits and ass to offer, but I do know some violent people. I know a lot of violent people, as a matter of fact. So I took one along to the first meeting I had with network executives in the NBC commissary. He was a one-eyed guy built like a linebacker and he happens to be a colorful storyteller in his own right. Once we sat down, the first thing they all asked him was. What's your job? And he said, "Surveillance detail." Oh, what's that? they asked, and I could see they were all a little afraid of this guy. He said, "Well, our job is to tail people without them knowing it. Let's say a known criminal comes to town; we tail him, but he doesn't know it. We put him to bed at night, we wake him up in the morning--everywhere he goes, we go." They asked him if the point of his job was to gather intelligence information. "Sometimes, but that's really not what we're about," he said. "We prefer to tail the guy until he commits a felony of some sort." Oh, and then what do you do? He said,"Well, there are two choices: We either arrest him, or we kill him." The NBC guys went into shock--and I knew I had my show. Police Story was born that day.

[Q] Playboy: Did that teach you anything about TV executives?

[A] Wambaugh: Oh, absolutely. From then on, I realized how easily they could be intimidated, so whenever I was trying to make a deal, I'd take along some of my buddies from the half-ton squad--four enormous, mean-looking Mexicans with big mustaches like the kind Alfonso Bedoya wore in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The guys all went better than 250 pounds apiece, and in addition to being very fierce characters, they could also be very, very funny. In arrest situations, for instance, if suspects would say to them, "How do I know you're a cop? Let me see your badge," those guys would say things like, "Bodge? I don't got to cho you no stinking bodge." They loved to lay lines like that on people. Anyway, I'd always take those guys with me, off duty, naturally, but we'd still be wearing our suits and our hardware, and we'd all walk into the offices at Columbia and sit down and the first thing we'd say was, "God, it's hot in here." So we'd take off our coats--and all you'd see were guns, guns, guns. We had everything but crossed bandoleers and machetes. In fact, I once had Ray Comacho carry a switchblade knife that must have opened up to about 14 inches--he was very showy about cleaning his fingernails with it. I'm nothing if not melodramatic.

[Q] Playboy: Having made the deal and gotten Police Story on the air, what do you think the difference was between your cop show and other TV series about cops?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, when Police Story was cooking, which was about 20 percent of the time, it was really honest and had some of the best drama on TV. I always felt Police Story earned the Emmy it won for best dramatic series, and it was always nominated. We had a couple of very fine writers, such as Liam O'Brien, who wrote The Remarkable Mr. Penny packer, and Ed Waters--basically, they were fucked-up Jesuits like Jerry Brown. Anyway, they wrote some marvelous shows, and Dave Gerber always used to say, "OK, that's one for the Irish art theater, now let's have a couple of bang bang shows for the network." Whenever we'd do one for the Irish art theater, it seemed to me Police Story would accomplish what I wanted it to accomplish. The trouble was that Charlie's Angels, with all the tits and ass, began giving us some very stiff competition, and the network wanted Police Story to have more pizzazz: pizzazz meant action, and action is a TV euphemism for violence. I've said, and maintain, and can prove that the average policeman never fires his gun in combat in 20 years. But that same average policeman will suffer all sorts of blows to his self-esteem because he starts to believe the world is a garbage pile, and from there it's a short step to saying, "Well, if people are garbage and I'm a person, then I'm garbage, too."

That's exactly what policemen feel, which is why police work is so emotionally dangerous. It's certainly not the most physically dangerous job in the world. I remember that when I worked at Kaiser Steel, four ironworkers in a crew of 500 were killed on the job within a period of two weeks. Jesus Christ, the New York police force has almost 25,000 men, but if four of its guys were killed within a two-week period, it would be treated as the greatest catastrophe the city'd ever seen. I mean, you'd read nothing but headlines about it. So I don't really buy the idea that being a cop is all that physically dangerous. But when you look at figures for suicide, divorce, alcoholism, mental illness and so on, police are at the top of the list.

[Q] Playboy: Since the start of the Seventies, police have made a comeback of sorts; they're no longer seen as "fascist pigs." What has changed?

[A] Wambaugh: The Vietnam war is over, that's what's changed. During the Sixties, everybody was mad about Vietnam, so we'd have a demonstration that would turn into a riot and policemen would be drawn into it to preserve the peace, and so police became the symbol of repression for whatever the hell people were angry about. Honest to God, I'm so glad all that shit's over! It was at the point where, if somebody didn't like the bus service in Watts, there'd be a goddamn demonstration that night that would turn into a riot and we'd be putting our frigging helmets on and using our sticks because somebody in Watts wasn't able to catch a bus to go to Beverly Hills, where she was in domestic service. I was working Watts then, and was I sick of that shit! I think that people--and I'm not restricting this to black people or chicanos in any sense--no longer have any causes they're angry enough about to take out on the visible establishment symbol.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be picturing cops as victims of the Sixties, but isn't it true that--especially during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago--police got their rocks off by slamming antiwar demonstrators around?

[A] Wambaugh: No, it isn't. Listen, Lyndon Johnson visited Century City around the same time and we had a riot in L.A. that was more or less the same as Chicago's: "a police riot," right? You know what it boiled down to? One 23-year-old facing another 23-year-old across a barricade. The guy on the other side might be white, yellow, black or brown, but the guy on our side was blue, I don't give a shit what color his face was. And the blue man's viewpoint would come down to this: "Look, asshole, Idon't want to be here. I don't know what your beef is, and I know I don't care at the moment. Right now, I'd like to be anywhere but here, where I'm looking at your ugly face, which is spitting at me from across this barricade. That's the last frigging thing I want. Besides that, I've got a date tonight and I don't want to get hurt.And I'm scared. So if you take one more step and I run the risk of getting hurt. I'm gonna respond: Me against you."

Now, you're going to say this can be solved with police training, right? Bullshit!It's human nature to respond. I remember people hitting me, and I would hit them back much harder. Or I'd get my buddies to help me, and I mean we'd play catch-up. If they hit me once, we'd hit them twice or three times. They vised fists, we used sticks. They used sticks, we used guns. As Sperm-whale Whalen says in The Choirboys: "There ain't no rules out here, you cocksucker! The Marquis of Queensberry's just some fag over on Eighth Street!" And that's the way it is.

[Q] Playboy: But you must agree there should be rules governing police behavior.

[A] Wambaugh: Absolutely. But remember now, in those situations, the blue guys are identifiable, outnumbered and scared, precisely because there are restrictions on what they can do. They have to think about rules even while they're protecting themselves or retaliating. At the same time, rightly or wrongly, they feel that the other team has no rules, period. At any rate, all that shit ended when the war in Vietnam ended.

[Q] Playboy: How do you think people regard police today?

[A] Wambaugh: I don't think policemen will ever be popular, because, by the definition of their jobs, they restrict people's freedom. If someone feels he should have the freedom to drive 65 miles an hour instead of 55 on the freeway and you restrict his freedom to do it, you become the antagonist. That's what the job boils down to: You preserve the status quo. You may not set the status quo--someone else does that-- but you preserve it. That doesn't sound very romantic, but that's what a policeman does. He restricts people's freedom, and people don't like that. If you want love, join the fire department.

[Q] Playboy: But weren't firemen also getting shot: at for a while?

[A] Wambaugh: Yes, but only because they were establishment symbols. Usually, a fireman is loved by everyone everywhere. I suspect that people have become educated enough to understand that the cops no more started the Vietnam war than they are responsible for whatever the hell's the latest cause. What is it now, pollution? Heterosexuality?

[Q] Playboy: If being a cop in the Sixties was so painful, why did you become one?

[A] Wambaugh: It was a good job. Look, as with any 23-year-old who joins the force, I discovered that police work pays more than being a schoolteacher and that the medical, dental and pension benefits are terrific. A guy on the L.A.P.D. can retire after 20 years with about 40 percent of his salary. Which is tremendous. Do you know what that means? You can be 43 years old and retire with nearly half the gross salary you're earning, and, as I said, policemen get paid pretty damn well. If a guy retires after 20 years and he's a sergeant--which isn't all that much--he'd be drawing better than $10,000 a year for the rest of his life, no matter what else he decides to do. It's guaranteed forever and there are cost-of-living increases, and if he dies, his pension goes to his family as long as the wife doesn't remarry. So that, to me, seemed like a tremendous job. Christ, without lifting a finger, a police widow makes more money than most working stiffs on the street. A young guy sees what a cop makes and he says, "Jesus, I can get all that for a high school diploma and if I can pass their tests and if my background checks out." So there's no ideology; ordinary, healthy guys get into it, but then they start getting bombarded by these emotional forces over which they have no control.

[Q] Playboy: Is that why you became a cop? Was it strictly for the benefits and the money?

[A] Wambaugh: No. I probably wanted a little action. I was going to collegeand was going to become a teacher, and I thought I wanted a job with a little more machismo to it than teaching offered.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of action were you looking for?

[A] Wambaugh: Physical action. I watched the TV cop shows and, at that point, I suppose I was suffering from the John Wayne syndrome--if I could join the force, I could knock down doors and drive fast cars and have people shoot at me and I could shoot back. I discovered that's not what you get. As I said before, when we began talking about Police Story, you start believing that people are garbage and that you are, too.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the kind of police work you wanted Police Story to concentrate on?

[A] Wambaugh: Yes, and I started losing my enthusiasm for Police Story when we got away from the emotional violence of police work. Someone was always insisting that there be a sniper in a window, or a couple of wild-looking black dudes with Afros and shotguns to scare the shit out of white middle-class America. We didn't have to have that shit on Police Story.

[Q] Playboy: Is that what finally caused you to quit the show?

[A] Wambaugh: It was something like that, yes. As Police Story became more and more successful, I had less and less clout, and that's when I left. It was really a cumulative thing about television and the whole show-business scene in general that made me want to leave. Actually, it was the whole goddamn system. I'll never forget one experience I had, after which I knew I had to leave. We did a show based on a true story about an L.A. police-helicopter crash. A chopper carrying three police men crashed during a training exercise; one guy was thrown clear of the helicopter and was hurt badly: another guy died; and the third was trapped in the chopper and suffered terrible burns. I know the guy very well, and he had to spend a long time in a hospital burn ward. He looks OK today, but before his face was reconstructed with plastic surgery, he looked monstrous. His face was horribly scarred and his hands were like claws, and because there was no flesh there, he had to keep them covered with white-cotton gloves. This policeman is one of the bravest men I've ever met, and we signed him on as a technical advisor to the show.

Well, in the show about the helicopter crash, there was a true and beautifully written scene in which he comes home from the burn ward and when his little children see his terribly scarred face, they scream in terror and run from him. That night, he goes into their room, sits down on a bed and talks to his children, who are hiding under their covers. They hear their daddy's voice coming out of this monstrous face, and after a while, the kids come out from under the covers and embrace him in a scene that was just heartbreakingly beautiful. Unfortunately, when that episode was shot, I was told that the actor involved didn't want to play the scene with burn make-up because he would be too ugly. Instead, the actor wore a beard.I mean, Santa Claus wears a beard, right? That beard was supposed to substitute for the horrible disfigurement of the man's face, but how could it? Now you may say, OK, it's no big deal, it's only a television show--except that having read the script, I cannot remember a scene, not only on TV but also in films, that had the potential to be one of the most moving moments an audience would ever experience.

Here's the payoff on the story: I always saw the episodes prior to their being shown on the air, and when this one was being screened, who suddenly walks in the fucking door but the policeman who'd been in the helicopter crash? By then, his face had been rebuilt through plastic surgery, but he still had to wear his cotton gloves, and he came in with his wife and his parents. Well, I didn't know about the actor's wearing a beard until I saw it up there on the screen, and as I watched it, I thought, How am I going to walk out of this screening room in front of this man who had the courage to live through this terrible experience, when we didn't even have the courage to do a TV show about it properly? To this day, I can't really deal with the humiliation I felt in that screening room. If I were that guy, I would have kicked Wambaugh in the balls right there in that screening room. I don't even remember what I mumbled to him when I crawled out of there, but from that moment on, television was never the same to me. I left Police Story soon after that. Then came The Choirboys debacle, after which I said no one's ever gonna make another movie of my stuff unless it's done right, which is why I'm making The Onion Field myself.

[Q] Playboy: In 1973, Columbia Pictures paid you $315,000 for screen rights to The Onion Field, and later shelved the project. Are we correct in thinking they were happy to sell the property back to you?

[A] Wambaugh: You couldn't be more wrong. When I offered to buy it back, Columbia turned me down. I couldn't understand it, so I went to see a studio executive.I told him, "Look, what can you lose? I know Columbia is in debt for $140,000,000, sowe're not talking about a lot of money here, but, Jesus, why say no to it?" And the guy then showed me how the business works. He said, "You have to understand that after we bought the rights to The Onion Field, we hired a producer, a director and two writers, and wound up firing all of them. You come back five years later and you want to buy The Onion Field back from us--but what happens if you make it into a hit movie? How is that going to make us look to the chairman of the board and our stockholders? Like schmucks, right? Sorry, but we can't sell it back to you." And that was that.

[Q] Playboy: How did you finally persuade them to sell you the rights?

[A] Wambaugh: I sat down and wrote The Black Marble and then calculated a way in which I could use it to break The Onion Field loose from Columbia. I knew it was going to be a successful book, and I showed it to Columbia before publication. I told an executive there, "I will give Columbia the right of first refusal for The Black Marble, which is going to be very big. You won't have to better any other deal that is offered to me, you only have to equal it. Furthermore, no one else has even seen it; you have an exclusive. What do I want for this? I want to buy back movie rights to The Onion Field. It's of no use to you, and since you're not the executive who bought it, you can't look bad, even if I make a hit out of it."

[Q] Playboy: A logical argument. Did it work?

[A] Wambaugh: Yeah, it was accepted verbally. In other words, a verbal contract. But when it came down to the nitty-gritty, the project seemed to be tied up. So I walked into this executive's office and said, "OK, your time's up; shit or get off the can. What are you going to do?" And I was told by him that he'd promised to sell me back The Onion Field only if Columbia ended up buying screen rights to Tth Mack Marble--which was enormously different from our agreement about theright of first refusal. I will never forget how angry I became. I got right up out of my chair as the guy was saying, "Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe, Joe--" He'd got the fifth Joe out of his mouth, and I snapped, "Sit down and don't say one more fucking word! Just give me a chance to calm down!" He didn't say another fucking word, and I got myself together while he began talking soothingly to me the way you'd talk to a rabid dog. He then strolled over to a corner and picked up his putter; he didn't seem to have any golf balls around. I was then quickly ushered into another office, where all my demands were duly noted, and where someone else gave me a song and dance. The executive then called my lawyer and told him he'd never been so upset in his life and that Columbia would have nothing further to do with Joseph Wambaugh or his project. I don't really remember putting my hands on the guy, but maybe I almost did. How's that for qualifying something? I know I was thinking about strangling him. The guy then told my lawyer that Columbia didn't want to be added to the long list of my lawsuits, so I immediately sued them for violating a verbal contract. Now, remember, I'd won The Choirboys fight because I said that regardless of what people in this business say, a man's word is good if a jury believes it. I was again ready to go into court and see who a jury would believe, but then a new man took over at Columbia.

[Q] Playboy: Was he more receptive to your overtures, or did you want to strangle him as well?

[A] Wambaugh: Oh, no, the new president at Columbia was a nice guy named Danny Melnick. After I gave a deposition in the presence of Columbia's attorneys, Melnick called me in and said, "Hell, I don't have any use for The Onion Field," and he sold the damn thing back to me. Melnick is gone now, of course. Columbia has this revolving door for executives, and you never know who the hell you're going to windup dealing with from one month to the next. Columbia must actually have trap doors in its offices; people fall through them and go clear to Amagansett, where they get devoured by some of the sharks who were extras in Jaws.

[Q] Playboy: It's good to know you don't hold grudges. After reacquiring the rights to The Onion Field, was it easy to raise money to make the movie?

[A] Wambaugh: No, I discovered I was lousy at it. I can't even sell a used car, because the first thing I do is tell everyone what's wrong with it, and then my guilt drives me to talk about what might go wrong with it two months from now.I couldn't raise movie money for the same reason, because all I'd do was tell Hollywood horror stories to potential investors.

[Q] Playboy: Would you care to give us a sample of your sales pitch?

[A] Wambaugh: It went something like this: "Hi, Mr. Prospect. I know that you've never invested in motion pictures and that you spend all your time here in San Marino singing the same old USC frat songs and going to John Wayne movies and raising your flag and walking your eagles and voting Republican. I don't know if you'll like the movie business, because it's really zany and wacky, and there're a lot of weirdos and freakos in it, and they do a lot of crazy things with spoons, and not just wear them around their necks, either, and I know that's the way you feel about it, too, but I really think that we can make a movie and make some money. Except that everyone's going to cheat us and screw us, especially the distributors, but I'll do my best to keep them from screwing us too much. One other thing to remember is that about 90 percent of the films released last year went right down the toilet, so really, if you want to look at it mathematically, chances are you're going to lose everything you invest."

I didn't get any takers. I was embarrassed to beg money from people, so I went around to the banks and begged them for money, and I discovered that I didn't have enough money or property of my own to finance a film.

[Q] Playboy: How much were you looking for?

[A] Wambaugh: It came to $2,400,000, and there's no way a bank would lend me that. I then had a hostile time with my publisher. I went to Dell Publishing and asked them to cosign a loan with me. I felt it wouldn't really be a big deal if I went bankrupt; I'd just write another book for them. I wanted my publisher to be a loyal, stand-up guy, which is the same code of honor that lifelong convicts and cops share among themselves. Dell didn't go along with me, so I couldn't raise any money, but Dee, my wife, did. The smallest chunk was $25,000, from a retired police buddy of mine, and those investments have me feeling guilty, which is no surprise, really, since I feel guilty even when I don't have a morning bowel movement. In any case. Dee and I put in a third of the $2,400,000, which is all the money I could raise. Right now, everything I own is tied up, and I could use a lew CARE packages for the kiddies. But I got my money, we shot the film and it'll be released in the fall.

[Q] Playboy: Having become, in effect, a producer, did you find yourself behaving the way typical producers are supposed to behave?

[A] Wambaugh: At times, yes. I was there for every minute of the shooting. We were filming during one of the coldest Decembers that California has seen in this century. We'd be shooting at four A.M. in places like a remote onion field up in Saugus, where everything was covered with ice, which was unusual for California, and many were the nights I'd sit there with pencil and paper and compute the overtime we were logging. And I would suddenly announce, "OK, that's it, that's fucking it! You will not do another take." Naturally, you can imagine the frustration of the director and cinematographer and even the actors who felt they needed another take or two to get a scene right. I'd be going frigging crazy knowing something they didn't: We were running out of money. In this business, regardless of what a producer will say, there's always more money. But with me, there was no more. It was so hard to make people understand that.

The whole thing was finally an education for me, and I've already decided to make The Black Marble the same way--for less than $3,000,000, using really good young actors but no stars. Some films are strictly star vehicles, but there are only a few of those. I really think there are only two stars, incidentally, who can guarantee a box-office hit--Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. You cannot but make money with either one of those guys, and they're the only two who can do it.

[Q] Playboy: That sounds more like an opinion than a fact to us. Are you sure about that?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, think about Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty in The Fortune, which lost a bundle. How big do you want to get? Assuming that Marlon Brando is a bigger star than Beatty--and I'm not sure that he is--let's try Brando and Nicholson in The Missouri Breaks, another big loser. Straight Time with Dustin Hoffman was a good film, but it also lost money. I don't know what those movies would have done with actors who aren't stars, but when you're paying guys $2,000,000 or $3,000,000 a crack, I imagine those movies would have lost less if they used lesser-known actors. And there are some wonderful actors around Hollywood who will work for very little money, and a lot of them are in The Onion Field.

[Q] Playboy: Now that you've finished the film, how would you compare producing a movie with writing a book?

[A] Wambaugh: They're both very tough. But really, I'm still comparing everything I do now with being a policeman, which I was for 14 years--and which I miss. In fact, I've had a recurring dream ever since I left the police force in 1974. I've never had it explained satisfactorily, so I hope some shrink will read this interview and write in. I don't know why, but in this dream I'm constantly going back to the police department, and yet, in the dream, I know it can't work. I'm a celebrity writer, and I realize I can't be one and also function as a cop. I know it's not going to work and that I'm going to have to quit the police department again, and people are going to think I'm crazy. And even though I spent my last six years with the L.A.P.D. in plain clothes, in the dream I'm always in uniform and always having trouble getting it together properly for inspection. I'm usually trying to run to auniform store to buy another service stripe to sew on the arm of my uniform, and I'm rushing because I know I'm late for roll call. This dream used to drive me crazy, and for a while I would have it every night, over and over and over and over. The service stripes are always a problem to me, because I left the department too soon. I'm trying to fudge and put on one more five-year stripe that I haven't quite earned yet, but which my classmates have earned. I make a decision that I'm going back to the force, and that's how the dream ends.

[Q] Playboy: You returned to police work after the six-month leave of absence you spent writing The Onion Field. Why did you go back?

[A] Wambaugh: Because I was bored by everything. I was just sitting around the house, and you really can't jump into another book right away, and I'd just had this tremendous experience of writing The Onion Field. But it was over, and I was fucking bored, bored, bored! And so I went back to the police department. It wasn't because I like running around, trying to shoot people or break down doors and all that. I just liked being in the company of the guys.

[At this point in the interview, the reporter and Wambaugh had repaired to Monahan's, a Pasadena bar frequented by cops. Several drinks accompanied the following exchanges.]

[Q] Playboy: Since you gave us your dream to analyze, what would you think if a police psychiatrist diagnosed you as a classic case of repressed homosexuality? The "company of the guys" and all that.

[A] Wambaugh: I hope there's nothing to it, but I'll admit that I like the company of rough men.

[Q] Playboy: How rough? Leather? Chains?

[A] Wambaugh:[Laughing] I don't like them that rough, doctor. I just enjoy their company, maybe because they're so uncomplicated. When I rejoined the force, though, I really couldn't make it work. There were always people calling the station house to talk to me. Guys I'd arrest would ask if they could audition for parts in Police Story. I rejoined the force for about a year, and it was ridiculous. I wasn't a cop anymore, I was just going through the motions. I really felt like an outsider, which, indeed, I was.(continued on page 112) Joseph Wambaugh (continued from page 86)

[Q] Playboy: How could you have possibly thought it was going to work? A famous writer passing himself off as an anonymous cop?

[A] Wambaugh: It was just a mark of my immaturity. Of course, a celebrity of any kind couldn't be effective as a cop. I finally figured that out. But it doesn't feel right to me, even if I did figure it out. When I left, I felt--in fact, I still feel--that I didn't finish my 20 years, that I didn't do my duty in full.

[Q] Playboy: There's no couch in this pub, but it seems to us you've just delivered an excellent interpretation of those service stripes in your dream: guilt over quitting the force. How does that strike you?

[A] Wambaugh: You know, I don't ... I really think that, um ... you really got it. Do you think that's it, doctor? Really?

[Q] Playboy: Definitely. A clear-cut case of a guilt junkie.

[A] Wambaugh:[Averting his eyes] I can't even look at you now. You're getting too close. I should call over the proprietor, Peter Monahan. Peter's always telling me I'm fucked up, too. Anyway ... all right, I do feel a tremendous amount of guilt. [Explodes into laughter] Jesus Christ, you're really getting to my tormented soul now.

[Q] Playboy: You've said that a couple of times. Is your soul really tormented?

[A] Wambaugh:[Staring at the ceiling and still laughing. Finally, he collects himself.] Jesus, let's not talk about me. Oh, boy, those fuckers really gave me a tremendous dose of guilt about everything you can think of. You know something? People think die Puritans understood about guilt, but they didn't really. You know who taught them? The Catholic Church, and you know who the consummate Catholics were?The Irish. In Spain, people would physically whip themselves to expiate their guilt;the Irish do it emotionally. Really, I can't think of anything I ever experienced during my childhood that wasn't associated with guilt and suffering. The whole experience of Mother Church to me was nothing but guilt and suffering. And so, as an altar boy, I did my best to learn my Latin before everybody else. Jesus Christ, you're really getting close here.

[Q] Playboy: Trust us. Here's a tissue.

[A] Wambaugh:[More laughter] You're very kind. Anyway, guilt has always interested me. In the Catholic school milieu of Pittsburgh in the early Forties, guilt was the strongest weapon of the school and the Church. The strongest weapon. Catholicism at that time was ritual, mystery--absolute, awe-inspiring mystery--and guilt. And the Church choreographed ritual, mystery and guilt the way I, as a writer, choreograph plot, character and dialog. But then the liberal saint, John, came along with all of his dullard companions in the Vatican. Thosepriests were too stupid, all of them, to understand that when they decided to "reform"--well, they didn't understand that the Church is nothing more than ritual, mystery and guilt. So, in effect, John began the emasculation of the Catholic Church, which profoundly affected my life. All we're left with now is an ecumenical, Billy Graham love-in.

[Q] Playboy: An ethical-culture club?

[A] Wambaugh: Exactly. You have a group grope where people sit around shaking hands and playing guitars, a kind of Protestantizing of the Church that has destroyed the Church. The Church itself doesn't really know that it's destroyed yet, but millions of Catholics know it. It's the end. It's over, especially for a lot of sorry, middle-aged Catholics like myself, who grew up fed and nurtured by that guilt along with the ritual and mystery. That's where I came from. The idea of Vatican II, of course, was to spread the ecumenical spirit of brotherhood and of all Christians being united and all that. But what Vatican II didn't understand was that Catholics could never have become brothers with other Christians, because Catholics were not any more like Protestants than Jews are like Protestants. They were different animals, let's face it. And you know, 'twould ever have been thus. So what I'm saying is this: In effect, I lost my faith in the Church because I'm not prepared to become a Protestant any more than I'm prepared to become a Buddhist. They took and destroyed what I was.

[Q] Playboy: Just by lightening up on the guilt and magic?

[A] Wambaugh: They destroyed the magic, they destroyed the magic totally. The magic and mystery are gone now. In their place, all I see are just a lot of panic-stricken men wandering around conducting their ritual in the most banal vernacular that you can imagine, doing their very best to make things more banal to accommodate the Philistines. I suppose I was a bit of a snob about all of that, even when I was a working-class kid with not a lot of education, but you know, a Catholic school education is a pretty good one, generally. I think I just sensed what Aquinas and all those people were trying to accomplish--and what lesser minds, like John and Paul VI, were doing to corrupt that kind of purity. Anyway, that's how I became interested in guilt as a concept, and I think The Onion Field was a catharsis.

[Q] Playboy: What value is there in being loaded down with guilt?

[A] Wambaugh: I think it's an opportunity to experience things more intensely. If you don't feel guilt about all the little peccadilloes in life, then you don't feel relieved at times when you're guilt-free, you know. I understood that, I needed it, and it's not there anymore. I'll tell you something else as I look back on what the Church gave me, a Church that no longer exists and that will never exist again. The sense of guilt the Church gave me made me the writer that I am, it made me as sensitive as I am and it actually gave me a great deal of intense feeling about how to enjoy life in all its aspects. Frankly, I would hate to be a sociopath, a person who doesn't experience guilt. I would hate to go to bed at night and just fall asleep without any qualms of conscience about my fuck-ups for that day. How dull that would be.

[Q] Playboy: Guilt is beautiful? Don't you believe that one can experience pleasure without the tension of a guilt trip?

[A] Wambaugh: Pleasure will never be so pleasurable as when you're feeling guilty about it, I'll tell you that.

[Q] Playboy: How has guilt made you a better writer?

[A] Wambaugh: Oh, guilt definitely enters into that, hell, yes. If I'm not doing my duty, whether it's as a cop or as a writer or as an altar boy, or whatever, then I'm too uncomfortable to experience pleasure or anything else, so I must do my duty. I must do my 1000 or 2000 words a day when I'm working. Maybe other people don't need guilt to drive themselves on, but I have no way of knowing that, because I've never been without it.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel at all guilty about not having another book in theworks?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, the mood hasn't come upon me yet and won't for at leastanother year, for I still have to make the Black Marble movie. That will add up to a year of hassles before I can even start thinking about another book.

[Q] Playboy: How do you regard yourself as a writer?

[A] Wambaugh: To be honest about it, I don't think I was very good before I wrote The Onion Field. I've since become a much better writer. You know, I only started experimenting with writing (continued on page 220) Joseph Wambaugh (continued from page 112) in 1967 when, at the age of 30, I wanted to achieve a little piece of immortality by having a short story published. Which was all I ever hoped to accomplish as a writer. I was a full-time cop who was worried about what the chief might think if anything I wrote about the police was published, and so I felt a lot of strange pressures. On top of that, I didn't really have the time to polish my prose. My early books, I think, were primitive jobs of storytelling. The last few were much better, but I consider myself only fair to middling, in any case. I think I'm a good storyteller and that I have a lot of vitality and that I also have a lot of good stories to tell. But I can't handle the English language the way Norman Mailer does; I'll never be able to construct metaphors the way he can. As I indicated earlier, The Choirboys was my attempt at telling a serious, horrible story using gallows humor, but I'm no Joseph Heller. I have my limitations. I liked that book quite a lot. because if you read it and compare what's revealed in it with what was revealed in The New Centurions or even The Blue Knight, you'll see an enormous difference. Deep down inside, I didn't see how I could be fired from the force for writing The New Centurions or The Blue Knight, but what if I'd written The Choirboys first? Even if F. Lee Bailey and Melvin Belli both took my case, I still believe my ass would've been fired.

[Q] Playboy: Is that your favorite fictional work?

[A] Wambaugh: Yes, and it almost didn't get published. In 1974, I'd become a reborn civilian, having just left the police force for good, and after writing The Choirboys and sending the manuscript to Dell, I was told that the book had no redeeming value as far as they were concerned, and that it was hated by every editor in the publishing house. They wanted me to throw it away, just scrap it, and start all over on something else. When I heard that, I went on a downer that lasted six months. The first couple of days were indescribably painful. I hadn't yet adjusted to not being a policeman--I still felt cut adrift --and when I got the news about The Choirboys, I thought, My God, in giving up my badge, have I given up my balls? Have I suddenly lost my ability to tell a story? Letters came to me from Dell saying they'd shown the manuscript to everyone they could think of and the verdict was unanimous: The Choirboys was duckshit. I stuck the book away and began drinking pretty good. I'd been three for three, and I just couldn't figure it out. And then, in '75, I took the book out of moth balls and looked at it and said, "They've got to be wrong. This is not garbage. It might be full of gallows humor and obscenities, but there is a serious purpose to this book." I really had to believe in The Choirboys, I suppose, and so I forced the company to publish it.

[Q] Playboy: How were you able to do that?

[A] Wambaugh: I told them they'd given me an advance and they could refuse to publish the book, but if they did, I'd still keep the advance--and it was a lot of money, six figures. And they said, "You mean you're really going to force us to publish this book?" Well, that's exactly what I did, and The Choirboys was not only an artistic success--and I mean rave reviews in The New York Times and similar publications--but it was also one of the top best sellers Dell ever had. The Choirboys was the number-one best-selling paperback and the number-two best-selling hardback book in the country for a while, and it would have been number one if not for Agatha Christie's death, which made Curtain a collector's item. But I figured, if Agatha wanted to have the number-one best seller that badly, who was I to stand in her way?

[Q] Playboy: Very magnanimous of you. Were you similarly magnanimous with your publisher?

[A] Wambaugh: Well. I think editors better be goddamned careful before theyplay God. I had a strong enough ego not to be destroyed by that rejection, but I was dreadfully wounded and lost a lot of confidence and, really, a lot of money while The Choirboys just sat in my basement. I later discovered that there were several editors at Dell who not only didn't think the book was garbage, they thought it was terrific. But that isn't what I was told by the senior editor there. After the whole experience was finally done with, I coined a new phrase: "To thine own self be true." Do you think it'll play in Hollywood?

[Q] Playboy: Not a chance. You mentioned Mailer and Heller, and we're sure you've read of their battles just to sit down at their typewriters. Why are you able to get down to work and complete your books without similar hang-ups?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, in my opinion, I've had a more interesting life than those gentlemen, and I think that's the bottom line. You know, when I read a review of Joe Heller's most recent book, Good as Cold, and saw that it was about an American college professor and the Jewish experience, I thought, Oh, no, not again. The fact of the matter is that the literati of America are college professors, and what they do is write and teach classes. Well, reading about college professors is getting goddamned boring.

You know, I spent three years in the Marines doing my duty, three years as a fireman at Kaiser Steel doing my duty and 14 years in the L.A. Police Department doing my duty. That's a total of 20 years as a noncivilian working at jobs where either your ass or your emotional well-being was on the line. Now maybe the stuff about doing my duty was all bullshit, but those 20 years were interesting and gave me a lot to write about. If I'd been a college professor for 20 years, I don't know what kind of writer I'd be today. I know that I'm not a Malamud, I couldn't take from that type of life enough interesting experiences that, by the sheer force of my writing skills, would result in a good book. I need broader experiences, which I was able to have for 20 years.

[Q] Playboy: But those days are certainly over for you. You're now living in a magnificent house on a five-and-a-half-acre spread, and the only uniform you wear nowadays is your jogging suit. Are you at all worried that no one is going to be interested in reading about that kind of life?

[A] Wambaugh: Yes. In a word, I've turned into a real pussy. As a matter of fact, going back to Mailer and Heller, in my opinion, those guys never retained the form they had in The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22. Those books were about the period of their lives when they were really on the edge, and I don't think either of them has ever come close to again attaining the thing they had. And look what happened to poor Jimmy Jones when he tried to do something else--and wrote The Merry Month of May. Anyway, I was able to keep it going for a lot of years, living on the edge. And now, here I am. You know, when I was a kid, my favorite book was The Great Gatsby, and look where that sucker wound up. Every time I go out to my Jacuzzi at night, I really think about that guy. In my own way, I guess, I admired Gatsby. I mean, he was a schlemiel and it was inevitable that he wound up the way he did, yet he was a stand-up guy who had a code and who tried to live by it.

[Q] Playboy: Are you worried that your first nonpolice novel--if and when you write it--might be a failure?

[A] Wambaugh: Well, I know I don't want to face the prospects of failure, but I haven't failed yet. My main worry is what will happen if I sit down to write and I have no more colorful stories to tell because I've told them all. What happens then? I don't know, but lately I've been feeling that I don't have any more experiences worth drawing on. I think I've used them all up, so I may have to go out and look for another Onion Field story to write about, which wouldn't be my story at all. I just don't think I can write about myself or my friends anymore. So, yeah, I have that fear, but I don't want to think about it yet. We're taking baby steps for baby feet, and we're trying to live one day at a time here. Isn't that what they teach you at Alcoholics Anonymous--one day at a time? Shit.

"Writers are a little like guppies swimming in an aquarium filled with sharks, killer whales, squid. And plenty of squid shit."

"The movie version of 'The Choirboys' was a debacle that caused my black, tormented soul a great deal of trouble. I joke about it a lot, but I really did suffer."

"The director didn't want to subject the cast and crew to the hazards of the park, including dog feces. So, on a sound stage, he created a plastic park, including plastic dog feces."

"Whenever I was trying to make a deal with TV executives, I'd take along some of my buddies from the half-ton squad--four enormous, mean-looking Mexicans."

"I suppose I was suffering from the John Wayne syndrome--if I could, join the force, I could knock down doors, drive fast cars and shoot."

"I discovered I was lousy at raising money. The first thing I do is tell everyone what's wrong with my film, and then my guilt drives me to talk about what might go wrong with it."

"I've had a recurring dream, ever since I left the police force in 1974. I've never had it explained satisfactorily, so I hope some shrink will read this interview and write in."

"The whole experience of Mother Church to me was nothing but guilt and suffering.... Jesus Christ, you're really getting close here."