Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story
Page 27
Further, Father worshiped and identified with Charles Baudelaire, whom he read and studied in the original French. It is likely that Father read these words, from Baudelaire's Journal, took them to heart, and would later translate and apply them as part of his own surgical crime:
Squibs.
I believe I have already set down in my notes that Love greatly resembles an application of torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be developed, and in the most ironic manner. For even when two lovers love passionately and are full of mutual desire, one of the two will always be cooler or less self-abandoned than the other. He or she is the surgeon or executioner; the other, the patient or victim.
2
Finally, there is exhibit 40 in comparison with Father's original two photographs of Elizabeth (exhibit 7). I call it "The Dream." Taken in 1929, the photo portrays a gathering of the major surrealists in Paris, including Andre Breton, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí. Each member of the group has formally posed for his portrait with his eyes closed, affirming his support and preference for the subjective dream state in defiance of the conscious and rational.
Exhibit 40
The surrealists, 1929
In the 1920s, Andre Breton became the spokesman for surrealism and wrote the movement's first manifesto in 1924. His stated philosophy relating to the importance of dreams and the state of sleep is described in that original manifesto:
The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill, fly faster, love to your heart's content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, events will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless . . .
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a
surreality,
if one may so speak.
3
My father's most revealing thoughtprints are those two damning photos of Elizabeth Short, as seen on page 41 as exhibit 7. Here again the artist/photographer has signed his work, only this one was private and was meant to remain so.
In these photographs of his lover, George Hodel reveals his esoteric "marriage" to Elizabeth Short by personally initiating her into his world. After carefully posing her in both photographs, Father instructs Elizabeth to close her eyes, as if she is asleep or in a dream state. With his lens, he then captures the dream, transporting her to his world, the world of the surreal, where dreams are reality, where the rational and the conscious are only backgrounds and are reversed to become the shadows of unreality.
True to his philosophy, George Hodel remained the absolute surrealist throughout his life, the young poet of seventeen, described in the newspaper of his day:
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.
Add to that his published statement to the police at the time of his 1949 arrest for incest that he was "delving into the mystery of love and the universe," and that the acts of which he was then accused were "unclear, like a dream. I can't figure out whether someone is hypnotizing me or I am hypnotizing someone."
And finally, Father's "Parable of the Sparrows" letter of 1980, with its mystical questioning:
But are there only three of us? The birds, the glass, and we? Or is there a fourth? Who is standing behind our glass, invisible to us, incommunicable to us, gravely watching our brave attacks against the walls we cannot see? Is there a fifth presence, watching all the others? And a sixth, and others, hidden in mysteries beyond our dreams?
These two photographs of Elizabeth Short taken by her then lover, most probably at the Franklin House in the month preceding the crime, are unique and macabre in the extreme, premortem portent of the horrors about to befall her. They are the ultimate surreal irony, where the artist has captured both of their pasts and futures as mistress-victim and lover-avenger.
1 Foresta, Merry, et. al. Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray. Abbeville Press, New York, 1988, p. 80.
† Uncertain of the deity's identity, I consulted Dr. Momi Naughton, professor of Asian art at Western Washington University, who confirmed it to me.
2 Writers in Revolt: An Anthology (Frederic Fell Inc., New York, 1963), p. 50.
3 Manifestos of Surrealism (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1972), pp. 13-14.
20
The Franklin House Revisited
I BEGAN MY INVESTIGATION on the premise that the photographs of Elizabeth Short in Father's album were the innocent mementos of his wanton youth, about which I had always known and because of which my mother had suffered so greatly. Elizabeth Short, I assumed, was probably just one of dozens of women in his life who were nothing more to him than a "three-month fling."
As I went deeper and deeper into both my father's mysterious past and that of Elizabeth Short, however, fitting many scattered biographical jigsaw pieces of their separate lives into time and place, I was slowly moved to the inescapable conclusion: my father was in fact guilty of her murder. Alone, or with an accomplice.
In the pages and chapters that follow, I offer the accumulated evidence, along with the relevant photographs, that will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Dr. George Hill Hodel was the Black Dahlia Avenger.
In October 1999, during the initial stages of my investigation, I contacted the owners of the Franklin House, whom I had met thirty years earlier while working Hollywood Division. The owner's father had purchased the house through my father's attorneys in 1950, after the Tamar incest trial.
"Bill Buck" (an assumed name to protect his anonymity) and his wife had moved into Franklin House in the early 1970s and begun restoring it. While working Hollywood Division in 1973, I chanced to meet the owners while they were gardening in front of the residence. After learning of my connection they graciously offered me a tour. In 1999, after my father's death, I learned that both Bill Buck and his wife were still living there and made an appointment to visit them again. We spent several hours discussing the history of the house, its construction, and its former owners, me sharing with them some memories of my Franklin years. As they had done so many years before, they took me on another tour, during which I took a number of photographs of both the interior and exterior. Included in the tour was a trip to the basement, which for the most part had remained untouched since the original sale some fifty years before.
During a cursory search of the dust-covered past deep in the basement, I found two items of interest, the first of which was a wooden crate, sent from China and addressed to "Dr. George Hill Hodel, 5121 Franklin Avenue, Los Angeles, California."
Inside the crate I discovered a bill of lading, dated October 16, 1946, which inventoried eight packages.
Exhibit 41
Franklin House bill of lading
This document established that the various art treasures purchased and shipped by Father from China had arrived at the Franklin House in the fall of 1946. Whether the crate followed his departure either by sea freight from China or via a reasonably fast military air transport, the receipt date supports my suspicion that George Hodel had arrived back in Los Angeles sometime in September 1946, discharged for what his UNRRA record cited as "personal" reasons. Father's stay in a hospital corresponds to what Elizabeth Short's Massachusetts girlfriend Marjorie Graham told reporters in her telephone interview with them on January 17, 1947:
Elizabeth had told me her boyfriend was an Army Air Force lieutenant, currently in the hospital in Los Angeles. Elizabeth told me that she was worried about him and she hoped that he would get well and out of the hospital in time for a wedding they planned for November 1.
Bill Buck mentioned that my father had left some old magazines in the basement, but he thought they had been
disposed of over the years. During my brief tour of the basement, which for me still held painful memories of leather straps and spankings, I came across a cobweb-covered box of old medical magazines dating from the mid-1940s. Examining the contents, I discovered a medical calendar book for the year 1943 that had belonged to Father. I asked Bill Buck if I could take it and he said, "Of course."
Exhibit 42
George Hodel's 1943 medical calendar
The book was titled Warner's Calendar of Medical History, for the use of the Medical Profession, 1943. A later careful examination of each page of the book provided some interesting discoveries, including samples of my father's handwriting on the inside cover, as well as other entries in my mother's hand. Printed in George Hodel's handwriting on the front inside cover of the book were the following notations: "Genius and Disease: pp 126-269." Page 126 was earmarked and said:
GENIUS & DISEASE
Many attempts have been made to define genius. Some believe it to be no more than "an infinite capacity for taking pains"; others, like Lombroso, aver that it borders on insanity or is a matter of heredity. The fascination of the subject lies in the fact that any approach to it leads to interesting, if futile, speculations. Of course, not all great men have been of unstable nature, but the fact remains that all too frequently geniuses have had to contend with physical, nervous, or mental anomalies of one kind or another. The sketches following have been chosen to illustrate that the superlatively talented in any field of endeavor may time and again be held in check by seemingly insurmountable physical burdens, only to find in them the challenge to greater efforts, even though in some cases the burden ultimately proved too great for human endurance.
Each day following this introduction, beginning with April 24, featured a brief biographical sketch of historical geniuses listed alphabetically, many of whom suffered either physical or mental maladies, including frequent listings of insanity. The list of geniuses included most of the literary heroes from my father's youth. A partial naming from the calendar: Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nero, Nietzsche, Peter I (the Great), Poe, Richard Porson, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, A. C. Swinburne, Tchaikovsky, van Gogh, Paul Verlaine, and François Villon.
Handprinted by my father was the entry:
Poisons: 402 et seq.
This page read:
S
YMPTOMS AND
T
REATMENTS OF
P
OISONING
Unless otherwise stated, oral poisoning is to be understood. The
lethal
dose — taken in a single dose — is of course an indefinite figure. It is to be understood that smaller doses have been taken with lethal effect, while larger quantities have not proved fatal.
The following pages provided a chart of most of the known poisons, listing each one's lethal dosage, symptoms, and treatment.
All the following were dated entries in my mother's handwriting:
November 7, 1943 — Seaman School. Gelka Scheyer for Children's pictures.
November 8, 1943 — George 10-11 am 727 [Presumably this notation refers to Father's downtown office address, which was 727 W. 7th St.]
November 9, 1943 — George 7-10:30 pm Eye lecture Gen. Hosp November 11,1943 — George 2-6 pm Heart [Presumably four hours set aside for testing and examination by specialist relating to George's heart condition.] November 11, 1943 -8-11pm Calif Club
November 12, 1943 — 12-2 Committee Meeting Chamber of Commerce
November 13, 1943 — KFI-Syphilis Show
Two of the last three entries are important because they reveal that Father was associated with both the prestigious California Club, originally established by the Chandler dynasty, and its offshoot, the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. The back-to-back meetings are of particular interest, because they show Father's close connection to some of the most influential men in Los Angeles at the time, the men who were running the city.
As for the final entry, KFI was the NBC outlet in Los Angeles. Mother, in conjunction with Bob Purcell, David Eli Janison, Karl Schlichter, and producer Jack Edwards, wrote a series of radio dramas called 13 Against Syphilis: The Unseen Enemy, which were sponsored by city, county, and state public health departments in an effort to "disperse the fog of ignorance" surrounding venereal disease. Because of his position as the Los Angeles County Health Department's venereal disease control officer, Father served as technical adviser to the show.
I believe both the bill of lading and the 1943 calendar I discovered in the basement of the Franklin House in 1999 are valuable pieces of evidence. The former establishes that Dad's Chinese artifacts, his spoils of postwar Hankow, arrived in mid-October 1946. The latter establishes Dad's 1943 interest in the lethal dosage of numerous poisons. It also demonstrates his fascination with genius and his need to satisfy himself that many men of genius led troubled and dysfunctional lives and tortured themselves emotionally, often to the point of violence either upon themselves or others. There is also independent verification of Father's serious heart condition.
When I moved back to Los Angeles in July 2001,1 saw an article in the Sunday, July 8 edition of the Los Angeles Times, featuring the Franklin House as the "Home of the Week," on sale for $1.5 million. The house was on the market. So I made another appointment with Bill Buck for a final conversation and some more photographs.
When we met, I explained to Buck that I was writing a book about my father that dealt with his mysterious past, adding that my research over the past two years had connected him to some Hollywood underworld figures from the 1920s through the 1940s.
Although Buck had no information regarding the connections of previous owners of the house to any underworld crime cartels in Los Angeles, I did get a chance to take photographs of the secret room, the light fixture in the den, and Father's shipping crate from China, which was still in the basement.
Buck also told me that our fathers had known each other, at least professionally, because both were prominent medical doctors in Los Angeles. They had met at the Franklin House back in the 1940s when Dad called a meeting of a group of six physicians in connection with the L.A. County Department of Community Health. Buck said, "As my father described it to me, after the meeting was over, your father clapped his hands loudly and out came these two geisha girls dressed in full regalia. I guess it was 'party time' or whatever. My father nervously looked at his watch, thanked your dad, and promptly left. I guess some of the other physicians stayed."
Buck said that after his father bought Franklin House from my father, he found some pornography and pictures of naked women hidden there. "It was about a year after he had moved into the place," Buck said, which would have made it 1951 or 1952. "He was changing some light bulbs over that glass fixture above the fireplace and discovered a box wedged and hidden in a far corner. He brought it down and it contained what he called 'kinky pictures.' I'm pretty sure he destroyed them."
Another strange incident: Buck told me about the appearance of a "bag lady" who came to the door back in the 1970s or early '80s. "She looked quite old," he said, "but with street people it's hard to tell." I spoke with her and she said, 'This house is a place of evil.'" He said that normally he would have simply dismissed her, but then she continued to describe the interior of the house. "It was very scary," he said. "She obviously had been inside this place before we owned it. She described in detail to me: the great stone fireplace, and your father's gold bedroom, and the all-red kitchen that your father had painted. No question that she was very familiar with the house when your dad had lived here. She looked at me and said again, 'This is a house of evil.' God knows what connection she had with this place. She left, and I never saw or heard from her again."
Based on a conversation I had with former tenant Joe Barrett, it is my belief that the person Buck described as a "bag lady" was most probably our former maid, Ellen Taylor, Father's live-in housemaid/girlfriend, who lived at Franklin House from 1945 to 1950
. In later years, Joe Barrett had run into Ellen on the street in downtown Los Angeles and discovered that she had been in and out of mental hospitals. Joe Barrett described her as "living on the fringe, delusional, claiming she had had affairs with a number of prominent and locally famous personages." (Knowing what we now know, perhaps Ellen was not as delusional as Barrett thought.)
Bill Buck also told me that another man who had visited the house on three different occasions over the years was a photographer named Edmund Teske, "a local photographer and sort of a fixture here in old Hollywood. He had a home just down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. He visited here three separate times over the years and told me he was a good friend of both your father and Man Ray."*
The overhead fixture where Dad's photographs had been hidden and obviously not discovered during LAPD Juvenile detectives' 1949 search of the house after Father's arrest but only a year or two after his departure would most likely have included Man Ray's nude studies of my then thirteen-year-old sister Tamar as well as other damning photographic evidence.
I thanked Bill Buck for his openness and many courtesies over the years and left the Franklin House in what I fully expect was my final visit. I exited the massive stone structure and paused near the top of the steps in the same spot where I had, as a naive and innocent boy of eight, smoked my first cigarette with Tamar and been caught by Father. I turned and gazed one last time at this Mayan temple, which for me had now been transformed into a haunted house of horror, and in a final reflection paused to wonder how many other unsolved mysteries would forever remain buried in the belly of this beast.
* Teske would in later years become a highly acclaimed L.A. photographer. He was dubbed a romantic surrealist, and some of his works are currently on display locally, in the J. Paul Getty Museum.