What do Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, and Rock Hudson have in common, besides being scandal-courting golden-era movie stars? At some point, Fred Otash was hired to keep tabs on each of them. In The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars, and Marilyn, Josh Young and Manfred Westphal tell the tantalizing and tawdry tale of the guy they call "Dreamland's ultimate fixer, a man whose services most prayed they would never require."
In 1947, Massachusetts-born Marine Corps veteran Otash started his job as an LAPD cop. Soon he had a sideline working at Hollywood premieres and location shoots, earning a reputation for canniness as well as discretion. When an opportunity came along to work as a private investigator, Otash jumped at the chance. He and his staff did what he called "creative surveillance," not all of it legal.
The Fixer is written in the third person from Otash's perspective, which gives it the feel of a novel. (That the authors take some liberties in presuming Otash's thoughts is half the fun.) The book has a style suitably reminiscent of golden-age crime stories--e.g., "No one will ever know exactly what happened that night. The one man who did ended up dead, so he wasn't talking." Young and Westphal ultimately present Otash as a swell guy (he helped Judy Garland get clean) with his own moral lapses (he got involved with racehorse doping); readers will have the pleasure of deciding for themselves if the man was a force for good or just a force. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer