Vanity Fair's Women on Women

by Radhika Jones

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  Tamar Hodel was one of six children—by three different women—of the most pathologically decadent man in Los Angeles: Dr. George Hodel, the city’s venereal-disease czar and a fixture in its A-list demimonde. She’d grown up in her father’s Hollywood house, which resembled a Mayan temple, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, and was the site of wild parties, in which Hodel was sometimes joined by director John Huston and photographer Man Ray.

  George Hodel shared with Man Ray a love for the work of the Marquis de Sade and the belief that the pursuit of personal liberty was worth everything—possibly even, for Hodel, gratuitous murder. What has recently come to light, by way of two startling investigative books (2003’s Black Dahlia Avenger, by Hodel’s ex–L.A.P.D. homicide-detective son, Steve Hodel, and—building upon it—Exquisite Corpse, 2006, by art writers Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss), is that George Hodel was a prime suspect in the notorious Black Dahlia murder. (According to Black Dahlia Avenger, Hodel was the killer, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office conducted extensive surveillance of him. There were numerous arrests, but no one was ever charged with the murder.) A striking, graphic array of evidence in the two books strongly suggests that it was Hodel who, on January 15, 1947, killed actress Elizabeth Short, then surgically cut her in two and transported the halved, nude, exsanguinated corpse—the internal organs kept painstakingly intact—to a vacant lot, where he laid the pieces out as if in imitation of certain Surrealist artworks by Man Ray. [In recent years other potential suspects have emerged; in one theory a group of individuals may have been involved.]

  Without knowing any of this, 13-year-old Michelle Gilliam walked through Tamar Hodel’s porch into a room decorated all in lavender and beheld a sultry Kim Novak look-alike. “Tamar was the epitome of glamour,” Michelle recalls. “She was someone who never got out of bed until two p.m., and she looked it. It was late afternoon, and she was dressed in a beautiful lavender suit with her hair in a beehive. I took one look and said, New best friend!” With Tamar was her cocoa-skinned daughter, Debbie, five; folksinger Stan Wilson, an African-American, was Tamar’s current husband. (She’d married her first—who was also black—at 16, in 1951.) “Tamar was instantly my idol.”

  Tamar’s sophistication had a grotesque basis. In her father’s home—where she had often “uncomfortably” posed nude, she recalls, for “dirty-old-man” Man Ray and had once wriggled free from a predatory John Huston—George Hodel had committed incest with her. “When I was 11, my father taught me to perform oral sex on him. I was terrified, I was gagging, and I was embarrassed that I had ‘failed’ him,” Tamar says, telling her version of her long-misreported adolescence. George plied her with erotic books, grooming her for what he touted as their transcendent union. (Tamar says that she told her mother what George had done, and that, when confronted, George denied it.) He had intercourse with Tamar when she was 14. To the girl’s horror, she became pregnant; to her greater horror, she says, “my father wanted me to have his baby.” After a friend took her to get an abortion, an angry George—jealous, Tamar says, of some boys who’d come to see her—struck her on the head with his pistol. Her stepmother, Dorero (who was John Huston’s ex-wife), rushed her into hiding.

  George Hodel was arrested, and the tabloid flashbulbs popped during the sensational 1949 incest trial. Hodel’s lawyers, Jerry Geisler and Robert Neeb, painted Tamar as a “troubled” girl who had “fantasies.” Tamar’s treatment by the defense and the press during that time wounds her to this day. George was acquitted.

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  When Michelle appeared on Tamar’s porch, Tamar saw in her “a gorgeous little Brigitte Bardot” and sensed that she could rewrite her own hideous youth by guiding a protégée through a better one. “Meeting Michelle felt destined, as if we’d known each other in another life,” says Tamar. “I wanted to champion her, because no one had championed me.” Michelle says, “I moved in with Tamar; she ‘adopted’ me right away. Then everything started.”

  Tamar took the lower-middle-class bohemian’s daughter and polished her. She bought her the clothes Gil couldn’t afford, enrolled her in modeling school, taught her how to drive her lavender Nash Rambler, and provided her with a fake ID and amphetamines, Michelle says, “so I could make it through a day of eighth grade after staying up all night with her. Tamar introduced me to real music—Bessie Smith and Paul Robeson and Josh White and Leon Bibb. And I, who’d been listening to the Kingston Trio, was just entranced.” To keep Gil from being bent out of shape by the fact that his daughter had been spirited away, Michelle says, “Tamar put on perfect airs around my dad, and when it became necessary she would sleep with him.” One day Tamar’s husband, Stan, made the mistake of crawling into Michelle’s bed. Michelle shoved him out, and Tamar ended the marriage, leaving the two young blond beauties on their own, with sometimes a third one visiting them, Michelle’s fresh-faced teen-model friend Sue Lyon. “Sue was innocent and naïve, not like us,” Tamar says. Sue’s mother bawled Michelle out for sneaking her daughter a copy of Lolita. Tamar says she had to explain the famous masturbation scene to the sheltered ingénue. (A few years later, Sue was cast in the title role in the 1962 Stanley Kubrick film of the novel—a role Tamar insisted should have been played by Michelle.)

  In early 1961, Tamar and her teenage sidekick moved to San Francisco. They painted their apartment lavender, and, like two Holly Golightlys on uppers, they did the town, watching Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl spew their subversive humor at the hungry i and the Purple Onion. They got to know the cool guys on the scene; Michelle fell for singer Travis Edmonson, of the folk duo Bud and Travis, and Tamar fell for activist comedian Dick Gregory.

  Both girls thought that Scott McKenzie (original name: Phil Blondheim), the wavy-haired lead singer in a folk group called the Journeymen, was, as Michelle puts it, “very, very cute.” Tamar won his heart. She took Scott back to the apartment to listen to La Bohème, and, as Michelle remembers it, with a laugh, they never left the bed. The Journeymen’s leader, whose name was John Phillips, appeared at the door every night, annoyed to have to yank his tenor out of Tamar’s arms to get him to the club by showtime. A native of Alexandria, Virginia, Phillips was tall and lean and exotically handsome: his mother was Cherokee; his secret actual father (whom he never knew) was Jewish, though he’d been raised thinking that the square-jawed Marine captain his mother had married was his father. From the moment Michelle saw him in the hungry i phone booth—long legs stretched out, ankles propped on his guitar case—she knew two things: one, he was married (“You could tell he was making The Call Home”), and, two, she had to have him. “I fell in love with his talent, his poise, his ability to be leader of the pack.”

  Michelle “stepped out of a dream,” John Phillips would rhapsodize in his 1986 autobiography, Papa John. She was “the quintessential California girl. . . . She could look innocent, pouty, girlish, aloof, firey.” Michelle says, “John was 25, married with two children, from an East Coast Catholic military family. He had gone to Annapolis, he performed in a suit and tie—he had never met anyone like me!” Her uniqueness in John’s eyes was no small thing, since he was a habitual trend surfer (“a charismatic snake-oil salesman” is how Marshall Brickman puts it). He’d started a doo-wop group when doo-wop was in, then switched to ballads with his group the Smoothies—just in time for American Bandstand’s body-grinding slow-dancers—then jumped on the folk bandwagon. To John, Tamar Hodel’s protégée was a fascinating hybrid just over the Zeitgeist’s horizon: a street girl, to be sure (“She would have fit into the Ronettes or the Shangri-Las perfectly,” he’d later say), yet seasoned in high culture and political idealism—and with that angelic face. John used to tell Michelle she was the first flower child he had ever met.

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  Gil had recently married a 16-year-old himself, so he couldn’t exactly be indignant about his 17
-year-old daughter’s paramour. “She hasn’t finished high school, so if I were you I would throw a book at her now and again” was his paternal blessing. John and Susan Adams, a ballerina from a society family, prepared to divorce in 1962. She had put up for years with his many affairs and never thought that the teenager who’d recently knocked on her Mill Valley door and brazenly announced “I’m in love with your husband” would actually steal him. (With perfect manners, Susan had invited her little visitor in, made her a tuna sandwich—and herself a stiff drink—and then, with deft condescension, informed her that John had a girl like her in every city.)

  John and Michelle moved to New York and married. He was so possessive that when he left town on Journeymen tours he’d board her at a supervised dorm for teenage professionals.

  To keep her where he could see her (and because he knew her face on posters would rake in the crowds), he pulled her away from the teen-modeling contract she was about to sign and—with the help of voice lessons to shore up her thin soprano—made her a singer alongside him. Jump-starting the New Journeymen, he tapped as its third member Marshall Brickman, of the disbanded group the Tarriers. “I was the polite, grateful Jew from Brooklyn, infatuated with folk music, and now here I was, thrown without a life preserver into the cyclone—the maelstrom—that was John and Michelle,” says Brickman of the day he entered their studio apartment (so tiny “both sides of the bed touched the walls”), which was filled with welcome to the group! balloons. “There were drugs, but not for me, and sex, but not for me.” (Michelle, who’d soon have affairs with all of John’s best friends, says jokingly, “Marshall left the group too soon.”)

  “John lived on his own circadian rhythm—working 40 hours straight and sleeping 10,” Brickman continues. “Everyone fell into his gravitational pull, and it was very seductive and ultimately adolescent, but he emerged from the chaos with brilliant songs. In fact, John was one of the few folksingers in Greenwich Village writing his own songs in the very early 60s.” Another was born-and-bred Villager John Sebastian. “One night I ran into John,” says Sebastian. “We puffed on a joint and walked to his apartment. I was stunned by Michelle’s beauty.” They settled in and started passing a guitar around. Sebastian played the song “Do You Believe in Magic?,” which combined folk with jug-band music (pre-Depression-era blues, hokeyed up for vaudeville), and which eventually launched his group, the Lovin’ Spoonful. After he left, Michelle told John, “That’s the direction we should go in.”

  The path from straight folk to something new got an even bigger boost about a year later, when another Village folkie, Roger McGuinn, a friend of Sebastian’s and the Phillipses’, inserted eight notes inspired by Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” into Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and played the song in the beat he says the Beatles had picked up from Phil Spector, the songwriter turned music producer. The result: McGuinn’s group the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” helped give birth to the phenomenon known as folk rock.

  Even before this signal moment, John Phillips—guitar strapped to his chest, prowling the streets on amphetamines—was coming at the folk-plus-other mix a third way: by channeling the smooth balladeers of his early teen years. One day, late in their first autumn in New York, John set a verse—“All the leaves are brown / and the sky is grey / I’ve been for a walk on a winter’s day”—to a moody, slightly somber melody. Later, in their room in the Hotel Earl, Michelle recalls, a speed-addled John “woke me and said, ‘Help me write this!’” She groggily muttered, “Tomorrow.” “No,” he said. “Help me now. You’ll thank me for this someday.”

  Michelle sat up and summoned a recent visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral (her years in Mexico had given her an affection for Catholic churches) and came up with: “Stopped into a church I passed along the way / Well, I got down on my knees and I pretend to pray.” John, who’d loathed parochial school, “hated the line,” Michelle says, but kept it in for lack of anything better. Lucky he did; the line gave the song its arc of desperation to epiphany. Thus was born one of the first clarion calls of a changing culture, “California Dreamin’.”

  The more John tried to dominate his young wife, the more she rebelled. “One day when we were in Sausalito they had a fight, and Michelle just got in the car and drove to L.A.,” stranding the other two, Brickman recalls. During another trip home to L.A., Michelle was even more rebellious. Her sister, Rusty, was dating a handsome 19-year-old fledgling songwriter and musician named Russ Titelman. Late one night Michelle was in Gil’s kitchen when Russ walked in—“and here was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. We fell madly in love, standing there at the refrigerator,” recalls Titelman, who later produced hits for Randy Newman, Chaka Khan, Eric Clapton, and Steve Winwood. In December 1963, Michelle moved back to New York, and Russ followed. “I was in love with Russ,” Michelle says. “We put a deposit down on an apartment in Brooklyn Heights.” But the in-over-his-head young man broke up—just in time—with his married girlfriend. John called, warning, “You know, a different kind of guy would be waiting outside your door with a shotgun.” Still, no amount of John’s anger could incite remorse or shame in Michelle, who’d grown up viewing free love as perfectly normal. In frustration, John wrote “Go Where You Wanna Go” about Michelle’s affair with Russ. The narrator’s incredulousness at his girlfriend’s independence—“Three thousand miles, that’s how far you’ll go / And you said to me, ‘Please don’t follow’”—captured not only his blithe, guilt-free bride but also the slew of other girls like her, who’d soon tumble into the cities.

  Even before Brickman quit the group to become a writer (eventually he worked on screenplays for Annie Hall and other Woody Allen movies and co-wrote the book for the Broadway-musical hit Jersey Boys), John started wooing Denny Doherty, who looked to him like some “fragile lute player in Elizabethan England,” and whose poignant tenor was a legend on the folk circuit. Denny sang lead for the group John Sebastian briefly played harmonica with, the Mugwumps, whose improbable scene-stealer was the obese daughter of a Baltimore delicatessen owner; she had changed her name from Ellen Naomi Cohen to Cass Elliot. “Here was my big sister,” says Leah Cohen Kunkel, “a fat girl with a 190 I.Q.—so witty she never made the same stage quip twice—who’d come to New York to try to make it on Broadway, knowing no one, living in a cockroach-filled apartment, yet believing in herself. It was her hopefulness that people loved!” John Sebastian adds, “Cass was a star. Whatever room she was in became her salon. She had this wonderful charisma. She was aware of what this moment was going to be—she’d say, ‘Man, if we’re here now, just think where we’ll be in another five years.’ And she was incredibly funny about being madly in love with Denny. I can’t imagine how it took him so long to realize it.”

  John, Michelle, and Denny took the vacation to the Virgin Islands that would become the basis of their autobiographical “Creeque Alley” (which starts, “John and Mitchie were gettin’ kind of itchy”). Every morning they drank rum from chopped-open coconuts, Michelle recalls, and then “we might do a little bit of acid and we might snorkel.” Cass flew down (“We knew she’d come e-ven-tu-ally,” the song goes) to waitress in the dive where the three were singing—“she sang the fourth part from the back of the room,” Michelle says. In one recounting (“the Johnist version,” says Leah, who thinks her sister’s overwhelming popularity made John a little jealous), Cass begged to be let into the group. “Not true! Cass did not have to beg!” insists Michelle. According to the account in Papa John, Cass was catcalled “Fatty!” by the customers. Michelle says evenly, “If I had heard anyone say that to Cass, I would have lunged over the table and killed them. I adored Cass. She made our sound, while I could barely sing (although I was the only one of us who could read music). John, a genius at harmonizing, loved the four voices and that huge octave range.” Maxing out their credit cards, high on acid, they got themselves to L.A. They were invited to crash at a place where Cass was staying with
her musician friends. One day Cass turned on the TV and saw a biker gang calling their molls their “mamas.” They had found their name: the Mamas and the Papas.

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  I closed my eyes and listened to ‘California Dreamin’,” Lou Adler is recalling, in his house atop a Malibu cliff, its wraparound windows serving up what seems like the entire Pacific Ocean. (In the next room, the most famous of his seven sons, starlet-romancing gossip-column staple Cisco Adler, is noisily recording an album.) “You never heard four-part harmony in rock ’n’ roll in late 1965! They reminded me of groups I’d loved—the Hi-Lo’s, the Four Freshmen, the Four Lads. And the girls’ voices—you didn’t have mixed quartets then! John was the tallest rock ’n’ roller I’d ever auditioned; Denny reminded me of Errol Flynn; Cass was in a muumuu; Michelle was this beautiful blonde. I felt like George Martin the first time he met the Beatles.”

  “California Dreamin’” became a huge hit, followed by “Monday, Monday” (a song Michelle and Cass thought so dumb that they snickered over their gin-rummy game when John excitedly previewed it for them). Tamar, in San Francisco, received a postcard: “Watch us on Ed Sullivan and meet us at the Fairmont before the concert.” She took her father with her—“If you’re abused, you stay emotionally a little girl until someone helps,” she explains. “Michelle looked him in the eye and said, ‘I’ve heard all about you,’” Tamar recalls. Michelle says, “He knew that I knew so much that he didn’t want me to know about, yet he stared at me without a flicker of guilt. He looked like he wanted to kill me—I was also his type!” The evening featured “a hash pipe being passed around, mounds of pot on the table that the dogs were eating, and people knocking on the door every 10 minutes to hand us more dope,” as Tamar sums it up.