Bookworm: ‘The Fixer’ – Looking for juicy Hollywood tidbits

“The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars and Marilyn”

• By Josh Young and Manfred Westphal
• c. 2024, Grand Central
• $34, 336 pages

Why are you so nosy? The answer to that is, well, because there’s so much to know! You can learn a lot of interesting things if you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. Being snoopy has its advantages: it’s fun, deliciously scandalous, you know all the good gossip first and, in the new book “The Fixer” by Josh Young and Manfred Westphal, it might just pay the bills.

Fred Otash couldn’t believe his eyes.

Hollywood was much more than he’d ever expected. Like most Americans, he’d consumed a heavy diet of movies and movie stars but as a young man just home from World War II, the reality far outdid what he’d imagined. Impressed with what he saw, he applied for a job at the LAPD, where his intelligence and surveillance skills helped him rise through the ranks. Those attributes also helped him gain access to and rub elbows with the rich, famous, and up-and-coming, a proximity that changed his life.

Being a police officer in the 1950s, Otash had leeway for ignoring petty behavior so he often “looked the other way” when Hollywood’s brightest “got caught up in minor compromising positions...” He was especially accommodating when doing so might gain a confidante for later use. Otash befriended common people, petty criminals, and stars like Liberace, Milton Berle, James Cagney, John Wayne, and Marilyn Monroe.

Three years after launching his career with the LAPD, a new chief of police was named, a man Otash had had conflicts with, and he knew his tenure was in trouble. By then, Otash had gained a reputation for being “both tough and discreet,” and also good with the latest in surveillance technology. Hollywood appreciated that, and they took advantage of Otash’s talents for making bad things go away. Lawyers hired him to catch philandering spouses. Magazine editors hired him to dish the dirt. And he was the first person called when a beautiful movie star – a woman who was sleeping with the President – died under mysterious circumstances ...

If the National Enquirer, a 1950s-era Hollywood scandal rag, and pick-your-favorite-detective-noir-flick moved in together, their apartment would look exactly like “The Fixer.”

With a touch of Sam Spade-like vernacular and lots of behind-the-scenes peeks, authors Josh Young and Manfred Westphal share a story that Westphal swears is all true. He says his mother insisted that he meet Otash when Westphal was a young man, and that Otash offered to show him evidence to back himself up. “I knew in my heart I could trust him,” Westphal says in his introduction, and that included controversial information on Marilyn Monroe.

In the narrative here, Monroe’s platinum head pops up frequently, as if to tease readers who come to “The Fixer” expressly looking for juicy tidbits. As for conspiracy buffs, well, the details may not be anything new but the rest of the scandalous reports will make you be glad you came along for the romp. Hollywood fans, let this be the one if you’re planning a summer with your nose in a book.

“The Wives: A Memoir”

• By Simone Gorrindo
• c. 2024, Scout Press
• $29.99, 407 pages

Thank you for your service. Necessary reaction, or awkward sentiment? To some, it’s a little of both but most would agree that gratitude is appropriate, even needed. Thank you for putting your life on the line. Thank you for your protection. In the new memoir, “The Wives” by Simone Gorrindo, thank you for remaining behind.

She told him she’d leave him.

When her partner, Andrew, said he was thinking of joining the military, Simone Gorrindo couldn’t imagine it. She’d grown up being taught that guns were bad; she’d even protested a war once and then “gotten drinks at an East Village bar.” She had a dream job in New York. They’d just moved in together. An enlistment was unthinkable.

But Andrew never stopped dreaming. Two years later, Gorrindo “noticed an Army recruitment pamphlet on our nightstand.” The couple sought counseling; he told her that if he had to choose between the Army and her, he’d choose the Army.

Still, she chose him. They married hastily and moved near Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Andrew would be stationed with a Special Operations contract in-hand. He’d become a member of “the Unit” if he could “pass a rigorous selection process.”

He’d have a lot to learn, but so would Gorrindo.

They had off-base housing but she couldn’t muster the strength to make it a home. She knew nobody in Georgia, and the wives’ hierarchy on-base was baffling; so were the unknowns and the things nobody – her husband, his team, other wives – could or would tell her. She constantly feared that a “key caller” might notify her of an injury or death in The Unit. She struggled with a marriage, a pregnancy, and a husband who was gone, deployed, way more than he was home, and she missed her old life in New York.

“People told us, from time to time,” she says, “that we knew what we were ‘signing up for.’ But who really knows what she is signing up for?”

Thank you for your service. You hear it often, or you say it often and you mean it every time. Those who protect and defend our country should be lauded but, as you’ll see in “The Wives,” we can’t forget the other half of this sacrifice.

In a big way, it’s painful to read about. Author Simone Gorrindo writes about weeks of trying to fit in and figure out how to live as a married woman with aspects of singlehood, in a place that’s unfamiliar, and sometimes uncomfortable and unfriendly. On that note, when the story’s anger and loneliness have eased, Gorrindo flips it around to write urgently about the necessity of new friends and support – even though that, too, can be fraught with playground-like worries. It’s a struggle that, even if you’ve never been a dependent, feels familiar.

Reading this story is to immerse yourself into a balancing act that millions of military spouses master, making this a book for them, for civilians, and for the appreciative. Enjoy “The Wives.” It will serve you well.

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The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. She has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. Terri lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 11,000 books. Read past columns at marconews.com.