Those Blues in the Knights

By J.D. Reed

THE GLITTER DOME by Joseph Wambaugh; Morrow; 299 pages; $12.95

Through five bestsellers, four films and two television series, Joseph Wambaugh's characters have altered America's view of its police. His Los Angeles officers are neither the lone-eagle heroes of reactionary fantasy nor fascist mercenaries cracking the skulls of the innocent. They are, instead, ordinary, besieged working men and women whose lives are presented with war-zone humor, lively plots and a refreshing lack of night-school sociology. In Wambaugh's newest novel, those servants have grown a little less civil, and the quiet desperation of their lives has moved up several decibel levels.

In The Glitter Dome, the Hollywood detective division is more M*A*S*H unit than police station. Its inmates have one common ambition: survival--from perpetrators and pistols, alcoholism and insanity, suicide and divorce. These are choirboys at the end of the song. Their angst is echoed on the mean streets just below the topiary of Beverly Hills: heroin, child abuse, pornography, snuff films and bizarre murder. When Film Studio Boss Nigel St. Claire is found with two .38-cal. bullets in his face, Al Mackey and Marty Welborn, a couple of Wambaugh's best creations, are called in.

The twice-divorced Mackey "chews on his gun sights" in whisky-fired night sweats. Welborn (one separation, compulsively neat) hangs upside down on an aluminum bar for his bad back, tormented by the loss of his altar-boy faith. But the blue knights possess a unique talent: as Captain Woofer, their boss, puts it, "Nobody's asking anybody to solve anything. I just like the way you two seem to clear every homicide." Seem is the operative word: they once convinced the department that a local cocaine dealer had committed suicide with a hatchet. As for nabbing real and careful murderers, these weary, inventive sleuths know better: that happens on prime time. TV plotting, however, is never far away.

"As all policemen learn," Wambaugh writes, "life imitates not art but melodrama," and he enlivens his dense tale with vivid examples. His heroes carom off two patrolmen dubbed "street monsters" for their appetite for violence; a Marine posing for gay sculptors; the Ferret and the Weasel, a pair of frenzied narcs; a Vietnamese assassin; Tuna Can Tommy, a flasher with a phenomenal physique; and a massage-parlor hostess called Jackin Jill.

Amid the delving and detecting, Wambaugh fires a few rounds at some favorite moving targets. A deputy chief adopts polyester outfits to promote his morale-building lectures: "He topped off his costume with a brass tie tack in the shape of numbers 187, the California Penal Code section for murder. It was perfect. He looked for all the world like a working homicide dick." And when his partner is obsessed with the killing, Mackey explodes: "Marty, deductive thinkers solve crimes. You and Basil Rathbone always agreed on that. Mystics belong in dark bedrooms up in Laurel Canyon floating in homemade tanks of Jello with all those out-of-work actors looking for their life force. The only cop I know that solves crimes sniffing the air works with the airport detail and has four legs, a bushy tail, and bad breath." As the case leads toward Beverly Hills, the pair meets the "baby mogul," a young studio head who likes to out-jargon the police: "You have to get a really good makeup artist to do the blood bags or no one will buy it when you do a tight close-up of a .357 blowing holes." In their off-the-rack suits and cheap haircuts, Mackey and Welborn run through an A-list film-folk party with Marx brothers exuberance. But along the way Wambaugh scatters as much vitriol as laughter. If the pelagic producers, titanium-brained actors and spacy screenwriters are vapidly amoral, he suggests, his law enforcers have become glamorized but empty authority figures. It is a built-in Wambaugh signature piece: winner takes nothing. Welborn tells his partner: "Al, my son, Hollywood, California, is no more evil than Hannibal, Missouri. There's no evil. No good. It's all an accident."

But the police work is no accident. Mackey takes a private "dying declaration" from the Vietnamese. Though the criminal barely spoke English, his confession sings with Anglo-Irish thoroughness. Another murder case closed. But the price of two decades in this numbing war is steep. Welborn retires on his 20th anniversary on the force to meet a belated tragedy. Mackey drinks to incomprehension in the howling disco music of the Glitter Dome, a precinct bar full of frontline hysteria and payday groupies. Even the solution to St. Claire's murder in a last-minute plot twist seems anticlimactic.

For Glitter Dome is not, finally, about the film business, murder or bureaucratic self-protection: it is a tortured battle hymn. Woozy old Sergeant Cal Greenberg speaks for all these officers: "An unlucky policeman's life passes through four phases--cockiness, care, compromise, despair. The lucky ones don't reach phase four." Wambaugh has been lucky indeed, braking his tale just inches from the abyss. But for his cops and our society, he insists, the future remains bluer than any uniform in the country.

--By J.D. Reed

qed qed qed

Joseph Aloysius Wambaugh, 44, sits on the patio of his multimillion-dollar villa, overlooking the Newport Beach, Calif, yacht basin, staring at John Wayne's old house across the water. A new owner is remodeling the place, but the Duke's big American flag still ruffles in the Orange County gold coast breeze. "I joined the police for a little action as well as the security," recalls Badge No. 178, a 14-year veteran of the Los Angeles force. "The John Wayne syndrome. But the reality is that I learned more about myself and mankind in a single night sometimes than a non-cop would discover in a year. And I miss it like hell."

Although he has three homes and enough money to provide the best for Dee, his wife of 25 years, and their three children, Wambaugh remains a restless, driven achiever. The only child of an East Pittsburgh policeman and an upstairs maid, Wambaugh went to California at 14. He served in the Marines, worked in a steel mill and earned an A.B. in English before he joined the Los Angeles police department in 1960. Assigned to the East Side barrio, Wambaugh learned Spanish from watching movies in Mexican drive-ins and augmented his salary by selling Hong Kong suits from the back of his car in the station-house parking lot. He began writing at 30, hoping only to get a short story published some day. His first novel, The New Centurions, hit the bestseller list in 1971--earning the detective a reprimand for criticizing the department. The Blue Knight followed, and so did movie and television deals. Wambaugh became a celebrity policeman, which ended his effectiveness: "I knew it was over one day in 1974, when a robbery suspect I'd arrested asked me for an audition on Police Story." Wistfully, he resigned from the force.

But he did not stop acting like a lawman. When he viewed the film version of The Choirboys, he sued Universal. The studio, claimed Wambaugh, had totally distorted the work. He received a reported $1 million in an out-of-court settlement and went on to do his own film, productions of his nonfiction saga The Onion Field and next novel The Black Marble. The experience in moviemaking brought the wrong kind of enlightenment. "I heard more lies and met more devious criminal minds than in 14 years on the beat," he says. "And I went crazy. I wrote The Glitter Dome like a maniac."

He has still not cooled off. "You like to think that your work has some impact. But police administrators still don't understand a working cop's incredible stress level, or why a guy feels guilty for surviving a gunshot wound. That happens." Part of the reason, says Wambaugh, is the public. "Americans have a love-hate thing with cops. A guy roars by at 70 and they want to know where's the policeman. But if a cop stops him, he's restricting the guy's freedom. If you want love, join the fire department."

Excerpt

" Mackey looked for telltale * I lapses of coherence . . . During his twenty-two years Al Mackey had known too many who succumbed to the Ultimate Policeman's Disease. He had had a radio car partner in 1968 who, during a roll-call harangue on firearms safety which warned that twenty percent of the nation's policemen shot on duty had been accidentally shot by other cops, had startled the assembly by crying out: 'But what percentage shoot themselves!' He had that glittering, thousand-yard stare. Two weeks later, he shot himself and became part of the fearful statistic which the Department didn't keep."

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