Fulford on the mysterious murder that inspired movies.
THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER SPARKED MOVIES, AFFECTED PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS
A23- year- old woman from a small town in Massachusetts, mostly unknown until she was dead, turned out to be a remarkably pervasive influence on the movies of 20th- century America. Her body was found on the outskirts of Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, mutilated and cut in half. Unidentified at first, she was found to be Elizabeth Short. Her mother called her a “moviestruck girl” who went to California for an exciting life, perhaps in the movies. People always told her she was beautiful.
In legend she’s known as the Black Dahlia, a name given her by crime reporters, perhaps a borrowing from a current mystery novel, The Blue Dahlia. She and her murder became famous as a symbol of the newly crimeridden Los Angeles at its worst, a dangerous place for women. “The girls are lonely,” said a woman on the police commission. “They come from small towns with not too much judgment and they don’t know what they’re getting into.”
Short’s story and its implications for popular films dominate Hard- Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles (University Of California Press), by Jon Lewis. A professor of film studies at Oregon State University, Lewis has written 11 books, including a study of Francis Coppola and an account of how censorship saved the film industry.
He has a special interest in stories like the Black Dahlia, real events that spark movies and go on to affect public perceptions. His accounts of the Black Dahlia and other sensations of the film business demonstrate his talent for research and his ability to pull together the scattered facts left behind by moments in history.
Crime reporting was a highly competitive art in Los Angeles when the Black Dahlia myth was constructed. For a month after Short’s body was found, at least one of the L. A. newspapers had a front-page story revealing fresh facts or rumours about the case. This so excited the public that about 60 people turned themselves in and confessed to the crime. Two dozen of them were convincing enough to be investigated. For a while one suspect, though not one who confessed, was the celebrated mobster, Bugsy Siegel. But the crime remained unsolved, and still does. That’s part of its allure for authors and filmmakers who enjoy filling the gaps.
John Gregory Dunne’s 1977 novel, True Confessions, clearly inspired by the Short case, was adapted as a movie under the same name, with Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as two brothers, one a priest and the other a homicide detective. Like many writers on Los Angeles, Dunne placed the Short murder in an elaborate account of corruption, in this case the Roman Catholic church as well as the police force and the city council.
James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, The Black Dahlia, established his reputation and led to three more novels, all of them portraying LA as a hotbed of political corruption. It, too, became a film, made by Brian De Palma in 2006. A short story by Joyce Carol Oates, Black Dahlia and White Rose, partly narrated by a fictional version of Short herself, became the title story in a prize- winning Oates collection. Three separate video games focus on the Black Dahlia killer. In many crime novels and TV scripts we can sense echoes of Short’s story and the speculation surrounding it.
Los Angeles reporters loved to write about the improprieties of movie people with what Lewis calls “a mix of condescension and self- righteous moralizing,” the characteristic style of the era and our own. Even a celebrated fist-fight gets half a dozen pages in Lewis’s book, if a star is involved.
Franchot Tone was a suave leading man in many films of the 1930s, working alongside Clark Gable and Charles Laughton – and Joan Crawford, Tone’s first of four wives, with whom he acted in seven movies. His appeal waned and in the postwar years he had to get by with TV parts in Bonanza and The Twilight Zone, or their B- movie equivalents. In 1962 many moviegoers could barely recognize him when he gave a dazzling late- in- life performance as an ailing Rooseveltlike president of the US in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent.
In 1951 he was in love with Barbara Payton, a young actress whose best part was in The Bride of the Gorilla. He somehow found himself squaring off with another rival for her favours, Tom Neal, a much lesser actor but much better boxer. When it was over Tone spent 18 hours unconscious in the hospital. His broken nose needed surgery. He married Payton but divorced her when he realized she hadn’t given up Neal. A magazine called Vice Squad later ran a coverline, How Franchot Tone’s Ex- Wife Became a Common Prostitute. He died in 1968 and Wife I, Joan Crawford, arranged for his ashes to be scattered in Ontario’s Muskoka district, where he spent happy vacation days in childhood.
Jon Lewis’s range as a film scholar is vast. He’s as interested in traditional Hollywood’s dislike for Sunset Boulevard as in the widespread suspicions about the death of Marilyn Monroe. He leaves us with the conviction that the movie business is even more complicated and dangerous than we ever suspected, but never without great plots.
Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. — Marilyn Monroe