The Blue Dahlia Blues
"I spotted an empty table and went and sat behind it, against the cushioned wall. The light grew still brighter for me. I could even see the buckaroo singer now He had wavy red hair that looked hennaed. The girl at the table next to me had red hair too. It was parted in the middle and strained back as if she hated it. She had large, dark, hungry eyes, awkward features and no make-up except a mouth that glared like a neon sign. Her street suit had too-wide shoulders, too-flairing lapels. An orange undersweater snuggled her neck and there was a black and orange quill in her Robin Hood hat, crooked on the back of her head. She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper's Christmas." --Raymond Chandler, 'Bay City Blues'. Dime Detective Magazine, June 1938.
The Dahlia flower is native to Mexico. It was named for Anders Dahl, a Swedish botanist. Dahl is Swedish for "out of the valley". Beautiful, it exists in garden variety and is a favorite of horticulturists the world over. The novelty dahlia can be open or double. The American Dahlia Society recognizes 15 different colors or combinations, but neither blue nor black. An hardy tuber in all respects, except for the cold weather. The bulbs should be dug out before winter. The dahlia is the flower of the month of August. It means gratitude, among other things.
Orange  Dahlia
The Blue Dahlia was released April, 24 1946. It was directed by George Marshall, with screenplay by Raymond Chandler. It starred Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and William Bendix, partially reprising his Jeff "Little Rubbler Ball" character from The Glass Key (1942), who gets knocked out in one punch by Brian Donlevey, with his scene stealing take on Buzz, a badly wounded WWII vet with a "steel plate in his head", and a low tolerance for the "monkey music" so popular in those days, who gets framed by the house dick/blackmailer at Ladd's apartment building, played by Will Wright, for shooting Ladd's wife, who had it coming, dead.
The title is pure Chandler at the apex of his Hollywood period. The whole moving picture scene was as phony as a silk flower. An Earl Scheib paint job on a beat up '37 Ford. Welcome home, boys. From the mobsters who ran the clubs and the chippies, hop heads and dope fiends, pimps, grifters, smut peddlers, queers, pedophiles, crooked politicans, land devolopment sharks, to a police department who's arteries had hardened to the point where Chandler mocks them by having civilian husband Johnny solve the case for them with a little side show demonstration by Buzz of his carnival trick shooting prowess. Cops were never his favorite subjects, though Phillip Marlowe still had friends on the force, and in the D.A.'s office, where he once worked. Marlowe would get the joke about a Blue Dahlia. Like his stated admiration for writer James Joyce, and poet T.S. Eliot, Marlowe knew things, he was very well read indeed, he had excellent taste, and a discerning eye, for a gumshoe, a bedroom windowpeeper, and a cheapie rent-a-cop, anyhow.
Just like when poor Elizabeth Short blew into Long Beach in early August after abandoning the heights of Chicago, and was staying in one of the many downtown hotels around Linden and Ocean Blvd., the North side which, as it runs from the river on the west to Alamitos street on the East, was home in those day, to maybe half a dozen large first run movie mansions, one of which, legend has it, was still showing The Blue Dahlia, which, given the almost five months since it's release, must have been an huge hit. Betty, still in mourning for Matt, and affecting a dark early post-modern consciousness, was a natural for the Black Dahlia tag, and a big hit herself with the kids on the beach, who all knew her now, as the Black Dahlia. She must have been delighted.
The flesh pits of Hollywood were coming to a full boil by the end of '46. The mid-term elections had gone badly for the Democrats, losing some 55 seats in the House, with most of the winners being recently returned servicemen, who ran on their war records and unshakeable belief that America was being sold out by communists and their sympathizers in the labor movement in general and Hollywood in particular. The 19th. District (East L.A./Whittier) had just elected a former naval supply officer and local college football hero Richard M. Nixon, who somehow defeated incumbent Jerry Voorhis by suggesting, without ever coming out and accusing, that Voorhis was a communist himself. A neat trick, and a tactic the GOP would use to even greater effect over the next decade, and earning it's progenetor the monicker "Tricky Dicky" for the rest of his long and infamous political career.
George Murphy was president of the Screen Actors Guild in '46. He was replaced by Ronald Reagan the next year. 1947 Prospero anno. For all of that had gone down before and got old '46 was the sally port to the future, the calm before the commies came. The House Committee on Un-American Activies was coming to Los Angles, to be followed by the witch hunters and the blacklisters who bankrolled them. And you thought that town couldn't get any crazier? Yes, the year 1946 was still the post war afterglow. Next, reaction and fear mongering would drive American opinion like we drove our cars, too far, and too fast, until we found ourselves feeling threatened from new and unheard of directions, like the movies we watched, and the books our children were being taught out of. The newspapers are owned by the rich guys.
And not that they ever found any communists, either. Not a single fucking one. Dick Nixon was able to railroad poor Alger Hiss with the help of Whittaker Chambers' lies and dear Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sent to their deaths to wrap up the anti-semitic phase of the investigation and the Republicans were safely back in the minority by 1948. But the damage to Hollywood had been done and not the way it was planned either. The unions survived all right and are more powerful in the movie business than ever. The big studios are now all gone with the wind, victims of changing tastes and economies of scale, which made movies too expensive to mass produce anymore. Hollywoodland became"The Slauson cutoff", as Johnny Carson would quip a generation later. "How do you get there? Let me tell you friends, how do you get there! You take the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura Freeway. You drive to the Slauson Cutoff, get out of your car, cut off your Slauson, get back in your car, then you drive six miles till you see the Giant Neon Vice-Squad Cop."
8:08:53 AM 
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