The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story Read online

  The Kid placed the photograph in the white hand.

  A gesture of drama, a futile touch of the romantic school that heightens the grotesquerie; that causes the naked batik succubi to leer the more it seems.

  Pull it away — the picture. The newspapermen would photograph it, too. Yes, it's a picture of the kid.

  Bloodstains on the glass. The Kid stands up young and proud.

  The clutching fingernails scratch and rattle across the back. Ugh! Put it back in the hand. Let her hold it. . .

  On their pedestal the nymph and satyr of Perl's have never eased the tension of their eternal embrace . . .

  Death.

  Mors, mortis, morti — what gender is death?

  Feminine of course. It is of that declension. Yes, death is feminine.

  Later in 1924, George decided to give up reporting and become a publisher. The following month, he and a friend decided to create a literary magazine. Now living in his own detached studio on his parents' South Pasadena property, he published a magazine with his own printing press and named it Fantasia. In his January 1925 introduction to the first issue, he made the following editorial statement:

  A Dedication

  To the portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts, to the delineation of the stranger harmonies and the rarer fragrances, do we dedicate this, our magazine.

  Such beauty we may find in a poem, a sketch, or a medley of colors; in the music of prayer-bells in some far-off minaret, or the noises of a city street; in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin.

  And ever shall we attempt in our pages the vivid expression of such art, wherever or however we may find it — ever shall we consecrate our magazine to the depiction of beauty anomalous, fantasial.

  George Hodel wanted to explore bizarre, off-the-edge fantasies, mostly having to do with forbidden sex and violence. His magazine survived two issues; its only notable piece was my father's review of the newly published hook by the then relatively unknown author Ben Hecht, entitled The Kingdom of Evil. This was a sequel to Hecht's first book, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, a journal narrated by the fictional reclusive artist-genius Mallare, which describes the author's visions of decadence, insanity, and, ultimately, murder. Mallare creates a beautiful mistress, Rita, who becomes his phantom or hallucinatory lover. In this twisted story delusion becomes reality and reality dissolves to dreams until, at the story's end, Mallare has transformed himself into an insanely jealous avenger who beats Rita to death because of her flagrant, wanton seduction, in Mallare's own presence, of his Caliban-like manservant, Goliath. The reader never really knows whether Rita is real or a twisted fantasy spun out of Mallare's psychotic torment.

  The novel's highly erotic pen-and-ink drawings were created by Wallace Smith, who like Hecht had been a journalist, artist, and author in Chicago. Smith was arrested and prosecuted for what the government considered pornography, and because the book was judged obscene, was jailed for a brief period. Both authors would later come to Hollywood to write screenplays, where Hecht would eventually become one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the industry.

  My father's review of The Kingdom of Evil, in which he's completely absorbed into Hecht's belief system, is the most accurate picture of his psychology. He writes, in part, "Macabre forms, more dank and putrescently phantasmal than any of Hecht's former imagining, grope blindly and crazedly in the poisonous fog out of which loom the rotting fancies that people his 'Kingdom of Evil.'"

  My father's magazine went out of existence in the spring of 1925. A few months later he applied for a job as a cab driver. Lying about his age, which was seventeen, he managed to pass himself off as twenty-one in order to obtain his chauffeur's license (City badge no. 1976, State badge no. 34879) from the city's Board of Public Utilities, permitting him to drive a taxi within the city limits. That he was just over six feet and a solid 148 pounds, with black hair and dark brown eyes, made him look older than he was. Dad's route took him mostly downtown, where he shuttled fares among the various hotels, including the Biltmore, and out to Hollywood. Ironically, one of Father's fellow cab drivers out of the same station, and likely his early acquaintance, was a young man studying for his law degree, who twenty-five years later was destined to become LAPD's most famous chief of police, William H. Parker.

  Toward the end of 1925, another story about Father appeared in print, this time by Ted Le Berthon, the drama critic for the Los Angeles Evening Herald, who wrote the following unusual and highly illuminating article about Father. In it, Le Berthon changes Dad's last name from Hodel to "Morel" and the name of his magazine from Fantasia to Whirlpools.

  This article reveals another side to my father. Besides being a pampered mama's boy, intellectual elitist, poet, and pianist, he was also a fighter who at the slightest provocation would be eager and ready to trade punches.

  Los Angeles Evening Herald December 9, 1925

  THE MERRY-GO-ROUND

  By TED LE BERTHON

  The Clouded Past of a Poet

  GEORGE MOREL is tall, olive-skinned with wavy black hair and a strong bold nose. His eyes are large, brown, somnolent. A romantic, hawklike fellow, a pianist, a poet, and editor of Whirlpools, a bizarre, darkly poetical quarterly.

  "George is a nice boy but —"

  How often did one hear that!

  What his friends hinted was that George, being young, was inclined to write of melancholy things.

  Of course, George could have pointed to Keats, Rupert Brooke or Stephen Crane for precedent, but — "It's not George's gloom, his preference for Huysmanns, De Gourmont, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Hecht that pains us," these "friends" would parry, "but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!"

  George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams. Only part of him seemed present.

  He would muse standing before one in a black, flowered dressing gown lined with scarlet silk, oblivious to one's presence.

  Suddenly, though, his eyes would flare up like signal lights and he would say, "The formless fastidiousness of perfumes in a seventeenth century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight."

  One might have answered "What of it?" — but one just didn't.

  As one of George's "friends" put it: "He's young. He'll get over it. What he needs is contact with harsh realities. At present his writing is tenuous, dreamy, monotonous — and he is like his writing."

  A Future Realistic Novelist

  I HADN'T seen George for about a year —

  And last night, strolling up Spring street in a sort of Morelian reverie myself, I was startled by hearing a familiar voice. The next moment I saw a tall young fellow in a taxi driver's uniform seize a burly, argumentative man by the coat lapels and growl menacingly:

  "Come across with that taxi fare or I'll smack you in the nose, right here and now!"

  The speaker was GEORGE MOREL.

  By the end of 1925, George had switched his schedule to driving on the night shift while he took jobs as a copywriter, first for a local Army & Navy store and then for the Southern California Gas Company. It was through SoCal Gas that he got his first taste of managing publicity, advertising, and marketing, and landed himself another job as a radio announcer, in which he hosted a live show, introducing the public to classical music during the early-evening hours. SoCal Gas sponsored an hour-long program in the early days of radio. Dad, a gas company employee in advertising, possessed the perfect qualities for the job: a musical prodigy with an encyclopedic knowledge of the classics, he also had a beautiful speaking voice. His uniquely meticulous speech patterns, his ability to use just the right words and diction expressed with perfect intonation, rhyme, and meter, would remain his calling card for the rest of his life. George Hodel's voice was as unique and distinct as his fingerprints. However, after shutting off the radio mike for the evening, Dad put on his cab driver's hat and began looking for fares waiting outside the Biltmore.

  Though not yet twenty, Father had already
accumulated the life experiences of much older men and had led several lives: boy genius, musical prodigy, crime reporter, advertising writer, public relations officer, public radio announcer, editor of a self-published literary magazine, poet, intellectual elitist, and cab driver.

  6

  George and Dorero

  Summer 1927

  My mother's first love, and perhaps her only true love, was John Huston, the son of actor Walter Huston and later one of America's most celebrated film directors. They met in Los Angeles as teenagers, fell in love, married, and then set off on a joint artistic adventure to Greenwich Milage, where John painted and boxed and my mother wrote poetry. They both drank. Then they came back to Hollywood, where both would become contract screenwriters at the studios, socializing with the talented and beautiful people of the 1920s Los Angeles entertainment community. They lived in a bubble of all-night parties, all-night drinking, and all-night arguments.

  By the 1930s, they'd become a pair of fighters in a ring with no timekeeper, no referee, and no bell to end the rounds. The alcohol and infidelities took their toll, and after an extended trip to England, Mother decided to quit the fight game for good. Huston would go on to many more fights with many more women, and he would win them all. After Mother's death, I found in her personal effects the following three paragraphs she had typewritten on a single lonely page, about John Huston:

  All his life he was fascinated by boxers. He also loved bullfighters even before he read Hemingway. He had a brief enthusiasm for six-day bicycle racers and even looked into dance marathons and flagpole sitters. But boxers were the best specimens he felt that the race of man had produced.

  The first time he tried to tell me about all this, he was 19 years old. I was 19, too, and we were at a party where this shocking thing had just happened. I mean, it was shocking to me, but it left John in an exalted and unusually talkative mood. There was blood all over the floor and on some of the furniture, and my face was green and I was trying not to be sick.

  "You're missing the whole point," John said. He pulled me to my feet and steered me to the front porch. With the sweet sick smell blowing away and everything outdoors swinging slowly back in focus again, I said weakly, "I am?"

  My mother had known my father, George Hill Hodel, for a long time. They had met in 1920s Los Angeles, before Mother married John Huston. In fact, my father and John Huston were very good friends in their youth and they frequently double-dated. At the time, John was dating Emilia, an attractive young woman who worked at the then brand-new downtown public library, and George was dating my mother. Then they switched, and George became enamored of Emilia and John of Dorothy. After John and Dorothy married and ran off to New York, George and Emilia continued their romance, and together they opened a rare books shop in downtown Los Angeles.

  Father had always had a strong love of photography. During the mid-1920s he spent much of his free time photographing people and places around Los Angeles. He had his own darkroom at home, where he would process his film. In 1925 he was asked to select the best of these photographs, and a Pasadena art gallery gave him a one-man show.

  Another close friend of both my father and Huston during this period was a young Italian artist poet, Fred Sexton, who socialized and partied with both of them. Sexton also drove a taxi in those early days and made money by running a floating crap game. Fifteen years later, in 1941, Huston would put his friend Fred Sexton's artistic talents to work by having him create the sculpture prop "the Black Bird" for his film The Maltese Falcon. Fred Sexton and my father would remain close friends until Dad left Los Angeles in 1950.

  By the summer of'27, Emilia was pregnant with my half-brother Duncan, who was born in March of 1928. Duncan visited us only on rare occasions through the decades, and was a relative stranger to me when I saw him again in San Francisco in the days following Father's death.

  With their infant son Duncan, George and Emilia moved north to San Francisco, where George enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of California at Berkeley. During his undergraduate years he got a job as a longshoreman and again drove a cab and learned the city streets and its night people and their secret haunts.

  In the spring of '32, George returned to writing, when the San Francisco Chronicle hired both him and Emilia as joint columnists. Together they wrote a weekly feature column entitled "Abroad in San Francisco," a review and travelogue of the goings-on in the city. Their reviews became popular because of their photo displays and colorful descriptions of the various sections and cultures of San Francisco.

  By June 1932, George had graduated from Berkeley pre-med and immediately enrolled in medical school at the University of California San Francisco. At the same time, though living with Emilia and raising Duncan, he became enamored of another woman, Dorothy Anthony. Not wanting to give up Emilia, he convinced her — a testament to his enormous powers of persuasion — that it would be best if they formed a romantic alliance and shared their home with Dorothy Anthony. This arrangement quickly resulted in another pregnancy, and Dorothy, in the spring of 1935, bore George a daughter, Tamar.

  George Hodel's exceptional eye-hand coordination made him a natural as a surgeon, and his professors vied with one another to obtain his services as their assistant in many of their operations. It seemed that my father had found his metier at last, and in June 1936 he graduated from the University of California Medical School, now known as University of California San Francisco.

  As per tradition at the graduation ceremonies of all physicians, on that balmy summer day in June 1936, George Hill Hodel, a tall, handsome man of twenty-eight, stood on the campus of UCSF, raised his right hand, and, with his classmates, took the Hippocratic oath. In those years, doctors took the original oath, longer than the one administered today, which included:

  I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my Art.

  I will not cut persons labouring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by such men as are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.

  While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and practice of the Art, respected by all men, in all times. But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot.

  George's life was now dedicated to preserving and healing human life. It would be his duty forthwith to alleviate pain and suffering.

  Still not yet thirty, my father was now an M.D. with a residency in surgery, having added many more lifetimes to his biography: longshoreman, artist/photographer, weekly travel columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and father of two children by two different women with whom he was living at the same time.

  In 1936, Dad completed his internship at San Francisco General Hospital and accepted a position with the New Mexico State Department of Public Health as a district health officer. With Emilia and seven-year-old Duncan, he moved to a small town near Prescott, Arizona, where he served as the lone doctor at a logging camp. Then he became a public health officer to the Indian reservations and pueblos near Gallup, New Mexico, where he befriended Tom Dodge, chief of the Navajo Indians.

  Probably because George had convinced her that he wanted more freedom, Emilia and Duncan returned without him to San Francisco, where she would soon marry a popular local artist/painter, Franz Bergmann. Emilia took a job as a columnist, this time with the San Francisco News, and enjoyed a long and successful career as that newspaper's senior drama critic. Soon after Emilia left George, Dorothy Anthony and Tamar joined him in New Mexico, where the three of them lived briefly together near Taos.

  Again, however, Father apparently felt
too confined, and convinced Dorothy to return with their daughter to San Francisco without him.

  In 1938, Dad was offered a job with the Los Angeles County Health Department as a social hygiene physician. He accepted the position and moved back to L.A., where he initially moved into his old guesthouse at his father's residence in South Pasadena. That same year he took a post-graduate course in venereal disease control at University of California Medical School in San Francisco, and was certified as a specialist in the field.

  In 1939, he was promoted to head of the division in the L.A. County Health Department and then appointed venereal disease control officer for the whole department. At the same time, he opened his own private practice in downtown Los Angeles and became medical director and chief of staff of his own office, the First Street Medical Clinic, for which he hired a staff of physicians. Its main focus was the treatment of venereal disease, which at that time, before the introduction of penicillin, had reached near-epidemic numbers in Los Angeles County.

  In Los Angeles, George was reunited with my mother, Dorothy Harvey Huston, who by then had divorced John Huston. My parents had a whirlwind romance and my older brother Michael was born the following July. George renamed Dorothy "Dorero" — a combination of two Greek words: dor, meaning "gift," and Eros, the god of sexual desire — in order to avoid confusion with his earlier girlfriend and the mother of Tamar, Dorothy Anthony.

  George purchased a home on Valentine Street in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, a ten-minute drive from his downtown office, and my mother and infant brother moved in with him. There was a rumor in the family that John Huston, not my dad, might have fathered Michael. In any case, immediately after Michael's birth both John and his father, Walter, who at that time badly wanted but was still without a grandchild, visited the house daily. As Mother told me later, "Both John and Walter would sit and stare at Michael in his crib for long periods of time, trying to discern whether or not a likeness between John and Michael existed." Mother said that it finally became so embarrassing that she had to order both of them out of the house with a firm "Forget it John, he's not your son." Michael would grow up to be one of the more celebrated FM radio announcers in Los Angeles on station KPFK, and a writer and editor of detective stories and science fiction.