Thrill of a Lifetime

Offering a lady coffee is something Viharo learned from watching old Rat Pack flicks. He learned a lot of things from watching old movies, which is one of the reasons he cannot abide remakes. "The Rat Pack sort of helped me reinvent myself," says Viharo. "Pop culture, and Frank Sinatra in particular, sort of saved my life."

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William Viharo was born in New York City in 1963 to up-and-coming actor Robert Viharo and Miss Houston 1960, but, despite the pedigree, it was not a glamorous beginning.

Miss Houston, an aspiring actress herself, suffered from schizophrenia, and while baby Viharo was still in her womb, she had a breakdown. According to Will, she wandered the streets, pounding on her stomach, screaming, "This child will ruin my career!" After Will was born, she threw him against a wall. (Viharo still has stacks of carefully typed letters from his mother, printed on letterhead from the Cuckoo Clock Co., where she later, bizarrely, chose to work as receptionist; for a time, he received as many as three a day.) Baby Will was quickly removed to the care of Miss Houston's parents until he was 6 years old, when Robert Viharo and Wife No. 3 took him to Los Angeles. There, Will got a nibble of Hollywood life -- his father had already appeared in Valley of the Dolls, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and The Evil -- but family bliss was short-lived. Wife No. 3 divorced the restless, self-indulgent elder Viharo and took Will to New Jersey, where she joined up with a guru teaching Sant Mat.

"It was some sort of crazy, fundamentalist group," says Will, still visibly troubled by the memory. "We couldn't wear shoes indoors; we couldn't talk to girls; we couldn't eat meat or watch movies. But we were living in New Jersey, of all places. It was very sheltered and very weird. That's when I really retreated into my head and let my imagination have full reign."

At 16, and already an aspiring writer, Will was kicked out of the religious community and sent back to Los Angeles, where his dad was working on Wife No. 5. Will made the best of it, writing plays and short stories while bumping shoulders with celebrities who were moving up, hanging out, and coming down; when he turned 19, Will's surrogate "big brother," Mickey Rourke, bought him his first car, a 1964 T-Bird that his father borrowed on a regular basis, sometimes to impress the women Will himself admired and desired.

"The closest I ever came to pulling a Hinckley was over [actress] Linda Kerridge," says Viharo, laughing at the thought. "She was my muse; I wrote for her. Then my father bopped her ... after directing her at the Actors Studio in a one-act I wrote called Wrong Turn at Albuquerque. It's OK, though. My father and I get along really well, now. ... It wouldn't have worked out anyway, the thing with me and Linda. I was just a kid."

Realizing his T-Bird was a lemon and his "big brother" Mickey was becoming famous, while his own career as a busboy was going nowhere, Viharo moved to San Francisco to follow in the weary footsteps of Jack Kerouac and Dashiell Hammett. He lived in the Europa Hotel above the club where Carol Doda was still dancing; he took odd jobs at bookstores, restaurants, video stores, and blood banks; he began the first of 16 novels. And, at the age of 25, Will Viharo found himself a very lonely, very angry, very sad guy.

Then he saw the Rat Pack reunion tour at the Oakland Coliseum.

It was Frank, Sammy, and Dean, together again, and it changed Viharo's life.

"I guess you can say it was kind of a religious experience," says Viharo, trying to explain his passion once and for all. "I was so depressed throughout my 20s. I had been living my life as this tragic poem, and they showed me how to look at it like a comic book. Here were these guys, living larger than life and having fun."

Viharo was on the road to Thrillville.

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In 1995, Kyle and Catherine Fischer, two friends from one of Viharo's restaurant jobs, formed Wild Card Press and offered to publish the first of Viharo's six-part Vic Valentine detective series, Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me. The book, an early work Viharo no longer lauds, is a truly enjoyable page-turner that compensates for its lack of thrills with a complex, highly developed central character, who is, of course, Viharo -- sensitive but brusque, alarmingly candid, and pathetically vulnerable to all the "bad" women he loves.