The Black Dahlia

by James Ellroy

  So the brass girl took the heat for her family and I took it for myself. My farewell to the Spragues was a front-page photo in the LA Daily News. Matrons were leading Madeleine out of the courtroom while Emmett wept at the defense table. Ramona, hollow-cheeked with disease, was being shepherded by Martha, all good strong business in a tailored suit. The picture was a lock on my silence forever.

  Thirty-six

  A month later I got a letter from Kay.

  Sioux Falls, S.D.

  8/17/49

  Dear Dwight,

  I didn’t know if you’d moved back to the house, so I don’t know if this letter will reach you. I’ve been checking the library for L.A. papers, and I know you’re not with the Department anymore, so that’s another place where I can’t write to you. I’ll just have to send this out and see what happens.

  I’m in Sioux Falls, living at the Plainsman Hotel. It’s the best one in town, and I’ve wanted to stay here since I was a little girl. It’s not the way I imagined it, of course. I just wanted to wash the taste of L.A. out of my mouth, and Sioux Falls is as antithetical to L.A. as you can get without flying to the moon.

  My grade school girlfriends are all married and have children, and two of them are widows from the war. Everyone talks about the war like it’s still going on, and the high prairies outside of town are being plowed for housing developments. The ones that have been constructed so far are so ugly, such bright, jarring colors. They make me miss our old house. I know you hate it, but it was a sanctuary for nine years of my life.

  Dwight, I’ve read all the papers and that trashy magazine piece. I must have counted a dozen lies. Lies by omission and the blatant kind. I keep wondering what happened, even though I don’t really want to know. I keep wondering why Elizabeth Short was never mentioned. I would have felt self-righteous, but I spent last night in my room just counting lies. All the lies I told you and things I never told you, even when it was good with us. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many I came up with.

  I’m sorry for them. And I admire what you did with Madeleine Sprague. I never knew what she was to you, but I know what arresting her cost you. Did she really kill Lee? Is that just another lie? Why can’t I believe it?

  I have some money that Lee left me (a lie by omission, I know) and I’m going to head east in a day or so. I want to be far away from Los Angeles, someplace cool and pretty and old. Maybe New England, maybe the Great Lakes. All I know is that when I see the place, I’ll know it.

  Hoping this finds you,

  Kay.

  P.S. Do you still think about Elizabeth Short? I think about her constantly. I don’t hate her, I just think about her. Strange after all this time.

  K.L.B.

  I kept the letter and re-read it at least a couple of hundred times. I didn’t think about what it meant, or implied about my future, or Kay’s, or ours together. I just re-read it and thought about Betty.

  I dumped the El Nido master file in the garbage and thought about her. H.J. Caruso gave me a job selling cars, and I thought about her while I was hawking the 1950 line. I drove by 39th and Norton, saw that houses were going up on the vacant lot and thought about her. I didn’t question the morality of letting Ramona walk or wonder whether Betty would approve. I just thought about her. And it took Kay, always the smarter of the two of us, to put it together for me.

  Her second letter was postmarked Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was written on stationery for the Harvard Motor Lodge.

  9/11/49

  Dear Dwight—

  I’m still such a liar, proscrastinator and chicken heart. I’ve known for two months, and I just got up the courage to tell you. If this letter doesn’t reach you I’ll actually have to call the house or Russ Millard. Better to try this way first.

  Dwight, I’m pregnant. It had to have happened that one awful time about a month before you moved out. I’m due around Christmas and I want to keep it.

  This is the patented Kay Lake retreat advancing. Will you please call or write? Soon? Now?

  That’s the big news. Per the P.S. on my last letter, something strange? Elegiac? Plain funny happened.

  I kept thinking about Elizabeth Short. How she disrupted all our lives, and we never even knew her. When I got to Cambridge (God, how I love academic communities!) I remembered that she was raised nearby. I drove to Medford, stopped for dinner and got into a conversation with a blind man sitting at the next table. I was feeling gabby and mentioned Elizabeth Short. The man was sad at first, then he perked up. He told me about an L.A. policeman who came to Medford three months ago to find “Beth’s” killer. He described your voice and verbal style to a “T.” I felt very proud, but I didn’t tell him that cop was my husband, because I don’t know if you still are.

  Wondering,

  Kay

  I didn’t call or write. I put Lee Blanchard’s house on the market and caught a flight to Boston.

  Thirty-seven

  On the plane I thought of all the things I’d have to explain to Kay, evidence to keep a new foundation of lies from destroying the two—or three—of us.

  She would have to know that I was a detective without a badge, that for one month in the year 1949 I possessed brilliance and courage and the will to make sacrifices. She would have to know that the heat of that time would always make me vulnerable, prey to dark curiosities. She would have to believe that my strongest resolve was not to let any of it hurt her.

  And she had to know that it was Elizabeth Short who was giving us our second chance.

  Nearing Boston, the plane got swallowed up by clouds. I felt heavy with fear, like the reunion and fatherhood had turned me into a stone plummeting. I reached for Betty then; a wish, almost a prayer. The clouds broke up and the plane descended, a big bright city at twilight below. I asked Betty to grant me safe passage in return for my love.

  HILLIKERS:

  An Afterword to

  The Black Dahlia

  Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. It’s a quick-march progression of advance publicity and saturation screen-time. My signature novel is now an exceptional film in wide release. The film will possibly expedite book sales in career-unprecedented numbers. More people may read this afterword than have read all my other books to date. This affords me a narrative opportunity of stern moment. I will gratefully capitalize on it here. A personal story attends The Black Dahlia, both novel and film. It inextricably links me to two women savaged eleven years apart. These women comprise the central myth of my life. I want this piece to honor them. I want this piece to redress imbalances in my previous writings about them. I want to close out their myth with an elegy. I want to grant them the peace of denied disclosure and never say another public word about them.

  My mother’s name was Geneva Hilliker. She dropped the name Ellroy when she renounced my father. I laud her repudiation and commend her desire to live without a male surname appendage. She haunts me in deep and unfathomable ways. I often travel her life at a brisk or painstakingly slow mental speed. I start in rural Wisconsin and end on an access road in L.A. The in-between stops are often filled with conjecture. I lived with her for ten years. The passage of time marks my childhood memories suspect. I later granted her a rich dramatic status and further distorted my memory. I did not know her in life. I am determined to know her in death. Summaries of her forty-three years often provide insight. Brevity enhances my process of refraction.

  She grew up near the Minnesota border. Tunnel City was summer green and winter dead-tree barren. Her father was an alcoholic game warden prone to violent fits. Her mother was frail and lovely. Her younger sister worshipped her flat-out. A cemetery sits near her birthplace and the now-boarded church she attended. I’ve visited it several times. My ancestry is framed in the bulk of the gravestones. Hilliker, Woodard, Linscott, Pierce, Smith. Farmers and Protestant clergy. A British-American bloodline of longing and hurt that I will never know and will always sense in genetic code.


  She had striking dark-red hair. She was the most beautiful girl in Tunnel City. Her aunt Norma Hilliker was the most beautiful woman. She blew out of Tunnel City at nineteen. She looked back only at leisurely whim. Aunt Norma put her through nursing school in Chicago. She took to city life and succumbed to fleshpot temptations. She drank to excess. She had youthful liaisons. She won a beauty contest and waltzed through a Hollywood screen test. She returned to Chicago. She learned she was pregnant. She tried to abort herself and hemorrhaged. She had an affair with the doctor who patched her up.

  She went from “Geneva” to “Jean.” She tied her hair back in a frumpy do and wore it with imperious confidence. She married and divorced a sporting-goods heir in fast measure. She traveled with a much older lesbian sidekick. She moved to L.A. and broke up my father’s first marriage. They moved in together. They lived three miles from the Black Dahlia dumpsite in 1947. They read about Betty Short and thought about Betty Short and talked about Betty Short in ways that I will never discern.

  I was born in ‘48. My mother held down nursing jobs and provided support through my father’s feeble stabs at employment. They divorced in ‘55. She considered my father weak, fanciful, and duplicitous in small ways. She was right. He considered her a drunk and a whore. He failed to acknowledge her competence and dutiful nature. She was midwestern-Calvinist rectitude and Saturday night cut-loose girl. She lived in that misalignment. It engendered a desperate unhappiness and killed her.

  She met a man. She met him that Saturday night or knew him from before. She was drunk. She said “yes” or “no” or “maybe” or some encoded combination. She said, “No,” finally. He raped her and killed her. It was June 22, 1958.

  My bereavement was complex and ambiguous. I lived in her sensual thrall and doted on my permissive father. She was strict. Church was a firm mandate. I caught her in bed with men. I lived for naked glimpses. I hated her and lusted for her and got my wish of her dead.

  Her death corrupted my imagination. My reading focus turned to crime stories. My father bought me Jack Webb’s book The Badge for my eleventh birthday. It contained a piece on the Black Dahlia murder. Jean Hilliker and Betty Short—one in transmogrification.

  I could not openly grieve for Jean. I could grieve for Betty. I could divert the shame of incestuous lust to a safe lust object. I could dismiss Jean with a child’s callous heart and grant a devotional love to Betty.

  Jean led me to Betty. Betty led me to Jean. The initial fusing was sharply brief. The sustained process has been attenuated. It’s a torch song with no crescendo and diminishing chords. It’s a near-fifty-year transit that demands these final words of explication.

  I spent the next seven years with my father. I defamed my mother to please him. I grew up hungry for women. I stalked rich neighborhoods and spied on happy families in big houses. I spun Betty Short fantasies. I cast myself in savior and avenger roles. I broke into houses and scoured lingerie drawers. I was born to think singlemindedly and live obsessively. Jean. Betty. Sex. Crime and all its social corollaries. The astonishing conjunctions of deep romantic love—hopeless and hopeful—in fierce men and women.

  My father died in ‘65. I spent the next twelve years in a near-insane spiral. I cleaned up at twenty-nine. I wrote six good novels and crashed Betty and Jean with The Black Dahlia.

  It was a salutary ode to Elizabeth Short and a self-serving and perfunctory embrace of my mother. I acknowledged the Jean-Betty confluence in media appearances and exploited it to sell books. My performances were commanding at first glance and glib upon reappraisal. I cut my mother down to sound-bite size and packaged her wholesale. I determined the cause of my ruthlessness years later.

  She owned me. Her claim rankled. I wanted to portray myself as a man above all Oedipal constraints. I had created a fictional Elizabeth Short to usurp my mother’s claim and upstage her. It worked in the novel. It sold a great many books. It left Jean Hilliker still dead on that roadside, unblessed with love.

  My moral debt to Jean remained. My moral debt to Betty, too.

  I saw my mother’s homicide file in 1994 and wrote a magazine piece about it. I expanded the piece into a memoir entitled My Dark Places. The book was my mother’s biography, my autobiography, and the story of my unsuccessful search to find her killer. I addressed my exploitation and gave her to the world with diligence and blunt finesse. It was candor as expression of love and a long-delayed bestowal of honor. I erred only in one manner. I possessed no prophetic gifts. I could not predict the extent to which my mother would shape-shift inside me. I could not predict the influence of two extraordinary women.

  They changed me. They constellated and derailed my obsessiveness. They taught me to love with a lighter touch. They convinced me to pull Jean back from my personal dramatic arc and let her rest still in my heart.

  “Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”

  A prophecy. An obsessed cop’s words to a friend and rival. An indictment and celebration of male ardor. A soft breath in ellipsis.

  Jean. Betty. Helen and Joan. Slow, now—go at this softly.

  Baby, who were you? How would you grow and who would you love?

  Elizabeth Short was born in Boston in 1924. She had four sisters. Her home life shattered early. She left town a la Jean Hilliker and rarely looked back.

  She roamed south and west. She landed in postwar L.A. She nursed widespread and undiscerning crushes on young servicemen. She was a more decorous James Ellroy crouched outside bedroom windows.

  She was not a porno-film actress or a film-noir succubus. She was not promiscuous by any sane standard. She was a pie-faced Irish girl with bad teeth and asthma. She died at twenty-two. The L.A. Herald-Express called her a “romance seeker.” Her last months were a disordered grasp for selfhood and love. I revere her for that. I underestimated her love-hunger in my book. I couldn’t feel it then. My own love-hunger blunted me to the real her. I failed to comprehend the force of her pure and headstrong youth.

  I survived my youth. Betty didn’t. That gap defines my debt to her. My gender and native street circumspection spared me the abyss. Betty led with a callow heart. Yearning and a silly girl’s trust took her down. I tried to poise my book between sordidness and goodness. Readers will decide the balance for themselves, in ways I can never assess. I think I know Betty more completely now. I believe her balance tips to goodness in a most fulsome way. A disproportion exists in my portrayal. I filtered the fictive Betty through my own urgent lust. That lust has raged and diminuendoed in the twenty years from book to film. Betty Short was indestructibly hopeful. Her destruction resulted from it. That stands as her tragedy.

  Motion pictures pervade the culture far more broadly and immediately than books. Betty was movie-mad and might have sensed this. She had actress dreams. She dressed and coiffed herself with dramatic intent. She killed time in Hollywood movie theatres and subsisted on snack-bar food. She told whopping lies with no small flair. She concocted grand love affairs with doomed army pilots and stillborn babies. Her stories showed her as the focal point of big lives in duress. She achieved prophecy in that manner. She practiced the conjuror’s art. She envisioned herself as storm center and made her lies come true.

  I followed her own lead thusly. I culled physical facts and embellished them. I structured L.A. ‘47 as a passion zone subsumed by Elizabeth Short. Every life touches the Dahlia. Betty rocks definitive. Obscurity defined her life. Celebrity defines her death. Her short time span and narrow purview expand and eclipse great public events. Her ghastly end tells us there is no surcease from human horror. She ramifies in obsessive circuits. She bids artists to fuse truths and lies. I followed her lead. Brian DePalma brilliantly followed mine. My novel. His film. My world as his visual record. The Dahlia as lodestone and magnetic field and arbiter of ambiguous redemption.

  DePalma’s films circumscribe worlds of obsession. They are rigorously and suffocatingly formed. No outer world exists during their time frame. Colors flare oddly. Movement arrests
you. You forfeit control and see only what he wants you to see. He manipulates you in the sole name of passion. He understands relinquishment. The filmgoer needs to succumb. His films are authoritative. He controls response firmly. His hold tightens as his stories veer into chaos. He stands and falls, coheres and decoheres, succeeds and errs behind passion. He was the ideal artist to film The Black Dahlia.

  Now Betty Short’s world and my world are his world. It’s a world that no other filmmaker could have created. It’s casually dangerous and invasively corrupt. It’s a boomtown populated by psychically maimed misfits running from World War II. It’s a fiend habitat. The Dahlia was meant to die here and nowhere else. The players in her drama knew relinquishment. They understood that she was bigger than they were, and that by touching her spirit she granted them transcendence. The dynamic applies to me and to Brian DePalma. She’s bigger than us. She tempted us and seduced us and beckoned us to submission. She gave us this grand strain of her endless story.

  She touched two men and gave them her world and one man’s journey through it. Bucky Bleichert is a fictional cop and a doppelganger/writer-filmmaker. He’s the man writing out the great adventure of his life and the voyeur viewing sex with a camera. Bleichert is me. Bleichert is DePalma. He’s standing outside momentous events. He’s lost in scrutiny. He wants to control. He wants to capitulate. His inner life is near-chaotic. He needs to impose external order to countermand his mental state. It’s Homicide Investigation as Art. He needs to take malignancy and render it something his own.

  Here’s where Bleichert is solely me. He’s a torchbearer. He carries a consuming hurt and tenderness close and doesn’t care if he gets burned. Someone’s out there. It’s a She. I feel her stirring. I need to solve this crime and unlock this riddle and mark this web of circumstance as my own—so she’ll love me.