THE ICEMAN #1: BILLION DOLLAR DEATH

Last month I tore apart the first book in the Black Cop series by Holloway House hack Joseph Nazel (writing under the pseudonym “Dom Gober”), so I had pretty low expectations when I sat down the other day to slog through Billion Dollar Death, number one in his Iceman series, published the same year (1974) under his real name. It’s better plotted and more imaginative than Black Cop, but ultimately witless garbage more offensive than any so-called blaxploitation movie of the period; instead of a Green Beret, cop or private investigator, Nazel’s action hero is a Harlem pimp who operates a high-tech whorehouse in the desert fifty miles outside Las Vegas. Since prostitution isn’t a crime in Nevada, the Iceman was considered an ”entrepreneur” and these books passed with a clean bill of health while movies like THE MACK and WILLIE DYNAMITE (in which the criminal protagonists are served heaping portions of humble pie at the end) sparked public outrage and a backlash from the NAACP.

Henry Highland West is “The Iceman,” who went from being the youngest and most successful pimp in New York to the owner and operator of The Oasis, a multimillion dollar adult fantasyland of pleasure and recreation that’s equal parts Caesar’s Palace casino, Disney World hotel and Bunny Ranch brothel. Because he’s an arrogant s.o.b. who every criminal in the country would love to cut down to size, the Iceman has equipped The Oasis with more security than Fort Knox and even has the whores he employs doing double duty as his private army of martial arts-trained guards! But even with the guards, dogs, closed-circuit TV, electronic sensors, radar, electrified fences and patrolling helicopters supposedly keeping the place safe, someone still manages to detonate a half ton of TNT under the bed of Mafia chieftain Mario Valducci as he enjoys the services of the Iceman’s favorite employee, the luscious Beverly [insert “bang” joke here]. Super pissed that his super security has been super breached, Super Henry – er, I mean The Iceman – sets out to nab the ones responsible for making him look like a chump and, um, for blowing up a fine piece of moneymaking tail like Beverly. Main suspects are Johnny Palermo, Valducci’s injured bodyguard, and Angelo Pettreno, next in line behind Valducci to take over the west coast Mafia operations. Next is J.J. Brown, a friend of the Iceman’s from back in New York, who is working off gambling debts by singing in The Oasis lounge, and his dizzy girlfriend Gloria, one of the Iceman’s former whores who blew the stable for the “straight life.” Let’s not forget Umoto, the prime minister of a small African nation, who’s a guest at the Oasis and has a diamonds-for-weapons exchange going with a seedy U.S. senator.

At first glance, Billion Dollar Death seems to be an attempt by Holloway House to create the black equivalent of Pinnacle’s adventure paperbacks, but it’s too shallow and clumsily written to be of much interest to fans of the Destroyer or Penetrator novels. I have the strange suspicion that Nazel never bothered to read or even pick up one of the Pinnacle books before banging out this tripe, and instead based his series on the Mego toy commercials that were on TV at the time. The description of the Iceman’s subterranean surveillance control room – called The Brain Center – reminded me of the deck of the Starship Enterprise, only not the one from the TV series but the Mego toy version that one of my friends owned (I went for the Little Rascals clubhouse instead). Holloway House most likely had plans for an Iceman movie, but as pictured on the front and back covers, the character resembles a Mego doll of Jim Brown rather than Jim Brown himself. When a few Mafia gunmen get into a helicopter dogfight with the Iceman, the overlong setpiece is so poorly staged and unbelievable that I kept hoping Nazel would reveal it to be the playacting of two 8-year-old boys running around a backyard with toy helicopters in their hands. Even the cover art is more suitable for Mego or Matchbox toys than the front of an action paperback. Makes you wonder what the series would be like if a couple of kids had created it and not a committee of jaded publishing house editors. Maybe the Iceman would’ve been a real hero instead of a cold-hearted pimp.

BLACK COP

The late Joseph Nazel wrote 60 black experience paperbacks for the Holloway House Publishing Company without achieving anything close to the legendary status of their two best-selling authors, Iceberg Slim (Pimp, Trick Baby) and Donald Goines (Never Die Alone, Dopefiend). In 1974, the same year he cranked out The Black Exorcist and six of the seven books in his popular Iceman series under his own name, Nazel penned the first of four novels about L.A. cop James Rhodes under the pseudonym "Dom Gober." The decision to assume an alias for Black Cop could’ve been Holloway House’s due to Nazel’s increased output that year (the reason Goines’ Cry Revenge! and Kenyatta series were published under the "Al C. Clark" sobriquet), but it’s possible that he didn’t want his name anywhere near Black Cop to begin with; it’s a piss-poor effort on just about every level imaginable.

Detective James Rhodes is the titular protagonist, as well as an unmitigated moron. Let’s, for the next several paragraphs, put ourselves in the shoes of this breathtakingly stupid human being and try to understand the pea-brained, round-about way he conducts an investigation. Ready? Here we go.

We are James Rhodes, angry black L.A. cop saddled with a racist white partner, Larry Turner, who hates our guts. We’re on our way to a big drug bust when all of a sudden Turner nervously asks us to pull over to a payphone because he wants to make a call to his wife. So we pull over and let him make the call, and when he gets back in the car he seems even more nervous than he was when he got out. A moment later, as we carefully approach the site of the scheduled drug transaction, we see the three guys we were planning to bust heading for the hills. Hey, ya think someone tipped them off? Before we can rub our chins, frown and go "hmmmm," a gun battle erupts and two of the perps are killed. We take the third perp alive but as we are marching him over to the squad car, that good-for-nothing honky Turner shoots him twice, killing him. "I thought he had a gun," Turner explains clumsily. "I thought he was going to draw down on you. Didn’t you see him move?"

Honestly, no, we didn’t see the perp try anything of the sort -- this unarmed perp, don’t forget, who would’ve revealed not only the name of his supplier but the mole who blew the whistle on the bust -- but it’s comforting to know that at least our racist redneck partner’s got us covered, isn’t it? A few pages later we’re at the station house and on the carpet in front of Captain Graebo (also white and a bigot, but at least he’s honest), who’s apparently seen SHAFT once or twice because he has no problem playing Charles Cioffi to our Richard Roundtree.

"It does look like these dope smugglers are tuned in on us," Graebo says, like the truly swift police captain that he is.

"Yeah," we say, trying not to choke on our own saliva. "I can’t figure it. There’s no way that they were supposed to know that we were on to them. Maybe, it was just a lucky guess on their part."

"I can’t buy that," Graebo tells us. "We’ve got a leak somewhere. A leak that we can’t seem to plug. Every time we get ready to make a raid, they know it. Every time we get ready to so much as sneeze at them, they know it. We might as well throw in the towel and let them have the whole damn city!"

OK, enough of the role-playing. At this point, Rhodes and Graebo -- if they had half a brain between them -- would start going over every single drug bust that went south to see if there are any questionable patterns (like maybe the same rotten cop’s been calling his wife five minutes before all of the raids?). But that’s too much to ask of these knuckleheads. Instead, Graebo decides to send Rhodes into the ghetto under cover to locate the main drug supplier, with the hope that (fingers crossed) he will lead them to the mole inside the department. And Rhodes goes along with this plan, because he never once suspects that Turner is the one who keeps mucking up the drug busts!

As inept as Nazel is in setting up an even halfway believable police procedural, he at least knows that his target audience understands the hardships of inner-city African-Americans. Once the dim-witted investigation relocates to the meanest L.A. streets, with Rhodes (now codenamed "Dark Alley") trying his best to play an average Joe, one or two supporting characters with real-life problems turn up to hold our interest. Rhodes immediately falls for the lovely but troubled Sue, whose brother Roger is a hopeless junkie in debt to Wilson, a flashy local dealer. Wilson is obsessed with Sue and thinks he can parlay Roger’s habit into a roll in the hay with his fine sister. Rhodes and Wilson tangle, as expected, with Rhodes coming out of it the victor; Wilson ends up hiring him as one of his henchmen. Turner, meanwhile, is in cahoots with white syndicate honcho Morrie Slater, who is planning to knock off Wilson and seize control of the ghetto drug trade. From there it’s connect-the-dots, and because the reader knows more than Rhodes every step of the way, none of it is even remotely suspenseful. Beyond the terrible plotting and often embarrassingly bad prose ("He puffed vicariously at the ever-present cigar"), I can't see where Rhodes is a character worthy of one book let alone four. And being the fool who follows the fool, I'm now determined to read the other three!

INSIDE BLACK HOLLYWOOD by Carol Speed

"My friends admit I am black, beautiful and sometimes bitchy, but only when the situation calls for it. If like were a painting I'd be in the middle with a cynical little smile on my face and Hollywood in the background. My name is Dorothy Jean Dickerson. If the name isn't familiar to you, my face and figure probably are. I've appeared in a number of 'black' motion pictures -- blaxploitation films some people call them -- and my star is definitely on the rise." So begins Inside Black Hollywood, the first published novel by actress Carol Speed, who starred in THE MACK and a half-dozen other B-movies back in the early '70s, but is mostly known these days for being mentioned in a Quentin Tarantino script (TRUE ROMANCE).

Like so many other African-American actresses of the period, she never got the chance to nab a really good role in a quality motion picture; take away the cool soundtrack, the strong performances, and all the hip dialogue, and THE MACK is a big, fat, funky lemon -- but as a wise man once said, "When you're given a lemon, make lemonade," and Speed really stirs up an icy cold pitcher of the stuff in Inside Black Hollywood. A fictionalized account of the making of THE MACK -- it's called THE CHANCE here, with Ms. Speed telling the whole sordid story through her Dorothy Jean Dickerson persona -- Inside Black Hollywood drops its readers headfirst into the mire of the '70s exploitation movie scene and makes them swim with the sharks for 250 pages. Sure, all the names have been changed to protect the innocent (as well as the guilty, the stoned, and the just-plain-stupid), but you won't need more than your two eyes and a copy of THE MACK to figure out who's who. First and foremost, there's arrogant leading man Henry Worth (Max Julien?), a borderline sociopath scheming to get Dorothy Jean fired from the film so his girlfriend -- bitchy actress Lisa McLaine (Vonetta McGee?) -- can get the role instead. Next on Speed's shit list is producer Gerald Goldfarb (Harvey Bernhard?), who overestimates Worth's box-office worth and insists on kissing his ass instead of Dorothy Jean's (Bernhard also produced Julien and McGee's THOMASINE AND BUSHROD a year later). Then there's the director, Mark Katz (Michael Campus?), who'd rather bone every actress on the set than make a halfway coherent film. Oh, and let's not forget the pathetic, self-pitying starlet Tanya Stevens (Annazette Chase?), who screwed Mark to get a part in the movie -- a part that's getting smaller and smaller with every passing day -- and out-of-control comedian Bubba Johnson (Richard Pryor?), who's on the skids because he told one too many "big dick" jokes in front of little old white ladies in Las Vegas and got his ass kicked out of town by the Mob.

And in the middle of it all is Dorothy Jean Dickerson, our lovely heroine and God's gift to bargain basement cinema, who proves to be almost as obnoxious and egomaniacal as the others. When she isn't fussing over her wardrobe and fighting with her costars, she's either shoveling coke up her nose by the kilo or bitching endlessly about her shitty personal life and alienating everybody around her. Somehow, she manages to tear herself away from the mirror long enough to hook up with Fred Sullivan -- underworld figure, player extraordinaire, and one of the shady Sullivan brothers, who are putting up the money to make the film. Fred's character is based on Frank D. Ward, one of the Ward brothers, who financed most or all of THE MACK; he even appears in the film as himself, during the Players' Ball scene (he's the first runner-up after Goldie for the "Player of the Year" award). Speed obviously fell head over heels in love with Frank Ward, judging by the way Dorothy Jean literally (and repeatedly) soaks her panties at the mere mention of Fred Sullivan's name. If you remember the dedication that appears at the beginning of THE MACK ("In memory of a MAN -- Frank D. Ward"), you'll know exactly where their relationship is headed.

"Write about what you know" is the advice every well-established author hands out free of charge to the next generation of aspiring writers, and Speed wisely chose the world of blaxploitation moviemaking as the backdrop for her first writing effort. It's unfortunate, though, that she didn't shoot for a straight "making-of" book instead of a novel. There simply isn't enough story here (or a strong enough conclusion) to make for a satisfying 250-page work of fiction – which is understandable, since this isn't fiction at all. It's the truth, reported seven years later from inside the Hall of Mirrors – a broadcast from a parallel universe – a costume ball at Carol Speed's pad – a painful part of her life, presented as supermarket pulp fiction – but above all else, it's therapy.

"When I came to Hollywood everything began to happen for me almost immediately," Speed told Black Stars magazine in 1980. "I was doing one film after the other and my career was moving forward at an extremely fast pace. Then all of a sudden this all ended. I must confess that much of it was my fault, because I committed several acts that contributed greatly to it." Dorothy Jean's behavior during the shooting of THE CHANCE certainly backs this up, but the loss of Frank D. Ward -- more than any bridge burning that may have occurred during the making of THE MACK -- was most likely what led Speed to start writing Inside Black Hollywood in 1974, under the title Dorothy Jean Dickerson – I Thought You Knew! That same year, she had starring roles in ABBY and BLACK SAMSON, and then… nothing. She dropped out of the business and moved in with fading rocker Sly Stone, bringing only the clothes on her back and her unfinished manuscript. "For the most part, we stayed high from one day to the other," she admitted to Black Stars when asked about this period in her life. "Time was of little importance, because one day was like the next one. I did absolutely nothing." She eventually wandered out of Sly's compound and found her way back to her parents' home in San Jose, where she sobered up and got her head together before returning to Los Angeles to finish her novel (probably in late 1978, since Dorothy Jean mentions Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman" at one point). Around this time, she also appeared in her last film to date, the Rudy Ray Moore jaw-dropper DISCO GODFATHER (1979).

Speed may have been a star on the rise when she made THE MACK in 1973, but by the time Holloway House published her book seven years later, her acting career was finished and the "Black Hollywood" of the title was just a memory. A rumor in early 1997 had her joining two of her costars from THE BIG BIRD CAGE -- Pam Grier and Sid Haig -- in JACKIE BROWN, but the reunion never happened. She did contribute to the Tarantino-backed What It Is! What It Was! blaxploitation book in 1998, but was noticeably absent from the special edition DVD of THE MACK a few years later. The whacked-out, paranoid bulletins that were emanating daily from her MySpace page earlier this year seemed to be written by a person who either takes too much of the wrong kind of medication or not enough of the right. That's a shame, because Speed's a strong writer, and Inside Black Hollywood -- when recognized as a work of nonfiction -- is a fascinating and important contribution to B-movie history.