 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.
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 days, 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."
I guess the whole "60° of Latitude Killer" thing was a sure non-starter. That's a cold night in L.A. Still, if somebody had piped up with, I don't know, the "Sixty-Minute Murder" we might have been onto something. I was going to call it; "On the longitude where you lived" or "Airport '47," having already passed on "L.A. X" and "Here is the Norton H-Bomb Site". Nyet, me thinks, it wouldn't have made it past the still active movie censors. But the Black Dahlia? Why have I never heard of such a thing? Pass the popcorn.
Tastes change. Back in '46, people who make love to inanimate objects are considered quaint old married folk. American males still saw themselves as lanky, taciturn, and virile, "Aw, shucks" cowboy types like Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper. The women probably saw themselves as part equal parts Veronica Lake, and Mildred Pierce. Roughed up a little, by the world's recent vacissitudes, but still in control. Both sexes were restless and dissatisfied. Big change was inevitable. It was time to forget about the war and the bad old days. Get your kicks, on Route 66. The Fifties would see further strains upon the way things were. By the Sixties, all the old connections would be severed.
All the sublimated needs, and pent-up desires of years of shortages and the hard sacrifices made for the effort were souring in their stomachs, along with all the booze, cigarettes and the poisonous miasma of the ever present gray stinging smog. But things had yet to change all that much on the big, airconditioned sound stages, the movies only got more popular during the duration, and now that the stars were all back in the firmament, things were going to be better than ever. It's really a wonderful life, and these are the best days ever. Let the good times roll. With all this talk of the television menace, yet movie attendance wouldn't peak until 1955.
Hollywood had just rolled along like old man river. Even as the concrete was being poured for the rest of the American Century,and the orders were flooding Detroit for what everybody wanted really wanted in those days, horsepower. One of those big, fast, shiny death machines. Freedom was the call of the open road and automobile production that wouldn't catch demand for a decade. Gas was now plentiful and cheap and the roads hadn't gridlocked, yet. So if you were a young vet who had a car, even a pre-war junker in the Winter of '46, you could do alright for yourself with that type of frail who always seem need a ride somewhere, and who could be very grateful for the ride. A frail like Betty Short, AKA, The Black Dahlia.
Forest Lawn is a very fitting place for any Angelino to fall down dead. The primal forest is long gone. Only the lawn is left, and beautifully manicured, with a view that is non pariel anywhere in the known world, as if anywhere in the world were as well known as there. The four Marx Brothers. As well as all six of the Three Stooges. Betty Davis is here, seatbelt properly fastened. Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power, Spencer Tracy (Cut in half in Captians Courageous), up on the Silver Screen as both Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde and even a dead fighter pilot in A Guy Named Joe. Lucille Ball, Jack Webb, Stan Laurel, George Raft, and Freddie Prinze. Quite the collection of stiffs. Maybe, on his way out of town, the killer had a notion that this place would be Elizabeth Short's last, last resting place. He already knew her last resting place. Her body, as it turned out, was buried nowhere near there, or here. But you can't plan everything, sometimes you have to rely on luck, but even luck will let you down. Planning is everything to a successful crime of passion, like this one. It's what the devil's into today,driving while dead, and the details of the dissection. Beth's a stellar section now, as famous as any movie star and more famous than most. You ought to be in pictures. She is the Black Dalhia now, and forever.
Maybe he didn't care that much. Just doing his thing he knew the Keystone Cops wouldn't make the scene down on Norton, until Harry the Hat got his usual wake up call at eleven o'clock. He probably could've counted on that. The fog usually lifts around noon back down there. Maybe he stopped for breakfast. Maybe then he hopped a military flight out of Burbank. Army, Air Force, they were the same thing in those days, besides the war had been over for a year and a half, and things were going slack, but the glow of victory had not entirely worn off, and the reaction had only started to set in.
Beth wouldn't live long enough to have to take a loyalty oath, or be called to testify to the HUAC people as to whether she had ever been a communist or not. The Red Dahlia scare. She had her own black list though, a long one. She took it from Mark Hansen. Beth was the type of girl who knew how to keep up a written correspondence, something of a lost art today. She had that address book with her when she was killed. The killer mailed it to the Los Angeles Examiner, after tearing out several pages. But why? To deflect attention? No one knew who the hell he was. Why send something like that anyhow, unless the purpose is to taunt the cops? Sure.
It's really scenic from up here, isn't it? Wow. That's a million dollar view, even in those days. It'll cost you ten times that now. The Sunny Southland is your personal orange, give it a fresh squeeze. Do you want to go to Tara and see Scarlet and Rhett? 10202 W. Washington, Culver City. The ceremonial entrance to the Thomas Ince/Triangle Studio. The first studio. I am all but awash with a feeling of nostalgia for a place that never really was. The City of Our Mother Mary, Queen of the Angels, Babylon Westwood, The Big Nowhere, the Dream Factory, Made in Hollywood, U.S.A. More stars than there are in the heavens.
This is Edendale, this place is too beautiful, and too distracting, somehow. The mountians, the sea...I can't concentrate anymore. I'm mesmerized by it all. The Cuneiform and the Cupcake. The killer has led me a merry chase through the compulsory school figures. Way down South, and up into the hills, on a right-outer-back edge the whole way, and then completely disappeared in a scratch spin. Sonja Heine a'la Harry Houdini. Poof, a cloud of dust and an hearty Hi-O Silver. William Conrad, gone Dad. Or did he? I'll speculate on this first.
By leaving Elizabeth Short's body where he did, the killer has made one thing clear, he was driving an automobile. even then, the best way to get around L.A., or through it, as the case may be. And he was doing so on his way out of town by the shortest routes available. Via one of the two, close in municipal airports, both of which while being equally distant from the dump site, will have local conditions which may favor one or the other, in the presumed heat of a getaway. Fleeing South to Hawthorne Airport seems the logical first choice, given it's proximity to both air and rail facilities, and the relative directness of the route. West would be the next best route, giving the preference to the flight-only direction over the railway-only choice, East to Clement Junction. North seems the least like direction of the four. North and East also would entail some backtracking across town, that is, if he came from that way. Going North or East? He keeps the car and drives out of the area.
Suspect #1: Edwin F. Burns, Motor vehicle operator. An unknown person, not from anywhere around there. Lookest thou otherwise, and elsewhere, make like he had skeedaddled on somewhere off the range of suspects. But if home is where the heart is, there Parker hadn't really been in a long, long time. Some smart guy, this hacker to the recently hacked. Maybe too smart by halves? We'll see, man. Somehow, I think he did leave town for parts unknown early on that beautiful, crisp, clear January morning, and he did so by air, and he was going to the place where he "lived" to put in an appearance before the alibi committee, and to feed the goldfish, but he'd be back in L.A. very soon. Maybe the same day. He never could stay away very long. He had business there.
 The Red Dahlia
11:21:48 AM 
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