Phillips first visited El Cholo in 1969, at the invitation of Jack Nicholson. “We had just started to date,” she remembered. “He said, ‘I’m going to take you to the best Mexican ...

From spray-painted walls to fine-inked tattoos to drawings on prison envelopes sent from fathers to their kids, the cholo clown has for more than a half-century been deeply tied to L.A.’s ...