Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles 9780520959910

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Real Estate of Crime: The Black Dahlia Dumped by the Side of the Road
2. Mobsters and Movie Stars: Crime, Punishment, and Hollywood Celebrity
3. Hollywood Confidential: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles
4. Hollywood’s Last Lonely Places: The Sad, Short Stories of Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Hard-Boiled Hollywood

Hard-Boiled Hollywood Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Jon Lewis

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewis, Jon, author. Title: Hard-boiled Hollywood : crime and punishment in postwar Los Angeles / Jon Lewis. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016045492 (print) | lccn 2016046542 (ebook) | isbn 9780520284319 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520284326 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520959910 () Subjects: lcsh: Crime—California—Los Angeles— History—20th century. Classification: lcc hv6795.l6 l49 2017 (print) | lcc hv6795.l6 (ebook) | ddc 364.9794/9409044—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045492

Manufactured in the United States of America 24 10

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For Q, of course

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous. —Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4.

Introduction The Real Estate of Crime: The Black Dahlia Dumped by the Side of the Road Mobsters and Movie Stars: Crime, Punishment, and Hollywood Celebrity Hollywood Confidential: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles Hollywood’s Last Lonely Places: The Sad, Short Stories of Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe

Notes Index

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Acknowledgments

The idea for a book about dead bodies left by the side of the road in postwar Los Angeles grew out of a Winter 2013 film-noir class here at Oregon State. When, some months later, I figured I might be onto something, I staged the idea to colleagues in a presentation to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, organized by Mark Shiel, and then at an invited lecture at University College, London, sponsored by Lee Grieveson. Both Mark and Lee have weighed in freely and frequently during the course of this project. It’s a better book because of them. In May 2015, as a first draft of the book was nearly complete, I turned 60 and received a Distinguished Professorship. Both big events served to remind me how lucky I have been to have landed here in Corvallis, to have enjoyed the friendship of such terrific colleagues, several of whom—Tracy Daugherty, Mike Oriard, and Kerry Ahearn, to name just three—have for three decades now supported my work. Since 1985 I have as well been able to count on the generous support of the OSU Center for the Humanities. A 2014 Center release-time grant freed me to examine with the necessary rigor a decade’s worth of L.A. daily newspapers. My stay at the Center was productive thanks to David Robinson and to Joy Futrell, who found the Garry Winogrand photograph (“Los Angeles, 1980”) that I looked at every morning when I sat down to write. The PowerPoint presentation that I used for my Center lecture was in the spring of 2015 published by the Australian

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journal Contrapasso. Noel King, a longtime friend and advocate for my work, made that happen. In the spring of 2013, I signed an advance contract with Mary Frances at the University of California Press to write a book promising to “map the Hollywood transition.” That’s not the book I ended up writing, but thanks to her that never really mattered. Mary assigned the précis to Tom Doherty—the perfect reader, as things have played out. One of the biggest challenges to writing history is maintaining confidence and interest over the long haul. Tom believed from the start in what would have struck a less imaginative and supportive reader as a crackpot project. His confidence in my ability to write a truly hardboiled Hollywood history has been crucial. When Mary moved on to another press, Raina Polivka inherited the book, and she has from our very first meeting championed its style and appreciated its content. Raina has a talent for encouraging the right things in a writer’s toolbox and has the confidence to say no when that’s what needs to be said. The editorial staff, including especially Zuha Khan, and the production staff—the project editor, Cindy Fulton, and the copyeditor, Paul Psoinos, in particular—have worked hard to make this a better book and me a better writer. Finding and securing permission for the many illustrations included here was made easier by Glenn Bradie at the Everett Collection, Alex and Rebeca Fuchs at the Leo Fuchs Photography Archive, Pierre-Yves Butzbach at the Man Ray Trust, and Julianna Jenkins at the UCLA Library, Special Collections. Finally, on the home-front, there’s Q, AKA Martha Lewis. Without her, without our boys, Guy and Adam, it would be impossible to take pleasure from something so strange, so endlessly draining, so in the scheme of things small as this.

Introduction

On February 8, 1962, the movie actress Lana Turner fainted at a Hollywood party. It was her birthday—her forty-second.1 She was rushed to the emergency room at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where she made the most of her entrance, dramatically clinging to the arms of two of her party guests, the actor Eddie Albert (Turner’s current co-star in Daniel’s Mann’s Who’s Got the Action) and his wife, Margo. It would have made for a compelling picture had anyone bothered to dispatch a photographer. After a preliminary examination, Turner was admitted for “nervous exhaustion,” a catchall malady that for Hollywood insiders begged interpretation and cynicism, and for her still-ardent fans warranted concern. The following day the story made page 5 of the New York Post—a brief item run in a single column about half a page long. The Post dutifully drew from the Turner entourage’s press release, reporting that the actress had been keeping long hours on the set of Mann’s film, getting only four or five hours of sleep each night. For those reading more closely, a relevant subtext was tersely expressed in a two-word caption run under a flattering stock photo; Turner was not so much exhausted from long hours on the set; she was instead, after a long and eventful career in Hollywood, quite simply “tired out.” 2 Aboard the Staten Island Ferry on the cold and snowy evening of February 9th en route to a reading with Robert Lowell at Wagner College, the poet Frank O’Hara spied the story about Turner’s fainting spell. The 1

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reading was an engagement that he was not looking forward to; he loathed Lowell, and the feeling was mutual.3 Killing time, O’Hara began reading the Post. A banner headline and longer article about Jayne Mansfield (she was having an affair, apparently) dominated page 5. But O’Hara dawdled instead over the Turner birthday swoon, fascinated by a single line that for him spoke profoundly to the absurdity of celebrity culture in general: “She’s just exhausted, her fifth husband, Fred May, said.” In the half-hour it took to get from Manhattan to Staten Island, O’Hara wrote a poem titled simply “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” 4 At the Wagner reading he decided to debut a handwritten draft, and by all accounts it got an enthusiastic reception. The poem has since become quite famous, and so has the story of its writing; indeed it has become a foundational work in what the poetry scholar Paul Stephens calls “the poetics of celebsploitation,” works built upon a poet’s “ironic identification” with a movie star.5 O’Hara had long been fascinated by Hollywood and had five years earlier written a longer poem entitled “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” 6 which he opens with a confession concerning his scant interest in “lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals,” at least in comparison with the guilty pleasures of moving pictures and celebrity gossip. “In times of crisis,” O’Hara writes, “we must all decide again and again whom we / love.” And O’Hara loved the movies, and he loved movie stars, despite himself . . . that is, despite himself as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, as an American writer of some renown, as an intellectual instinctively suspicious of popular, mass culture. To capture the Turner incident in all its absurd drama—how many people, after all, have a fifth husband to comment upon a mishap at a birthday party—O’Hara writes “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” in the first person and begins with a reflection upon similar events in his own life: “I have been to lots of parties / and acted perfectly disgraceful.” As Stephens notes, O’Hara is at first sympathetic; Turner is newsworthy because she is “a victim of a rapacious culture industry” . . . and O’Hara is not (newsworthy, nor is he that sort of victim). But then, accounting for the relative dynamics of literary/poetic-versus-cinematic stardom, O’Hara indulges in schadenfreude, taking pleasure in Turner’s “nervous exhaustion” as some sort of karmic payback in a pop culture that has freighted her every experience with such importance.7 “Lana Turner Has Collapsed!” ends with a rumination on the devouring nature of stardom and the absurdity of movie fandom as O’Hara issues an exasperated plea that doubles as an admonition: “Oh

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Lana Turner we love you get up.” Our connection to and with the lives of movie stars, O’Hara implies, the value we place on what they do and what gets done to them, becomes, despite its essential banality, the stuff of history. And much as we’d like to believe we might be part of that history—that our testimony (“we love you”) and entreaty (“get up”) may be heard and felt, we know better. Theirs is a world we watch from a distance. It is history precisely because we are not part of it. This vignette about Turner’s collapse and O’Hara’s response to it is an apt entry point for this postwar Hollywood history. It is the first of many such stories in this book of movie people on their backs, counted down and out, left for dead, run out of town, dismissed in some throwaway piece in the tabloids. Turner did, as O’Hara urged, get back up— plenty of those discussed in the pages to follow did not, could not. But her story nonetheless leaves us rubbernecking, fascinated with the immanence and possibility of catastrophe and humiliation.

hollywood on hollywood in transition To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives. —Walter Benjamin

Work on this book began innocently enough with an accidental and, in retrospect, fortunate bit of programming for a class I taught on film noir in 2013. A propos the topic L.A. Noir, I screened three films: Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), and The Big Knife (Robert Aldrich, 1955). What I discovered after the screenings was how these three movies revealingly showcased not so much or not only the ingredients and characteristics of film noir, but how similarly, how cynically, how profoundly these films told the story of movie workers adjusting to an industry in transition, and how all three situated these Hollywood film workers amid the sprawl of an evolving new and noir American city. The adjustment to changing Hollywood policies and procedures is in all three films uncertain, even chaotic. The film workers gather and (to use a contemporary term) network. They audition and pitch in restaurants and drug stores, in silent-era mansions on the city’s most famous strip, in Hollywood bungalows, in modest houses by the beach, and in a movie star’s compound in the Hollywood Hills; they ply their trade (or try to) in an industry that seems determined to keep them at arm’s length. We see little actual studio space or film work in the films; Sunset Boulevard is the only one of the three that takes us inside a studio and

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onto a soundstage, and in that film the Paramount lot is portrayed as poignant and nostalgic—a set and setting that will certainly be lost as Hollywood reconfigures itself to necessarily fit an evolving new business model. The structured absence of studio space heralds the arrival of a less coherent film business, one in which film workers become independent contractors on the make as opposed to studio workers on the clock. While I remembered that these films offered similarly cynical Hollywood-on-Hollywood parables, what I had not noticed before teaching them together—what I did not see coming, so to speak—was a common and compelling narrative detail. The story told in each of these three Hollywood melodramas focuses on a dead body . . . each of them a film worker: one gunned down in cold blood and discovered facedown in a swimming pool, another strangled and then dumped by the side of the road, and the third a suicide in a bathtub in that movie star’s house in the Hollywood Hills. All three films, especially for filmgoers seeing them in the initial release, eerily recalled the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, herself an aspiring actress who like so many young women after the war ventured to Hollywood to be discovered but instead got lost in Los Angeles’ geographic and cultural sprawl, her life lost in and to Hollywood’s industrial meantime. The long and inconclusive investigation into Short’s murder foregrounded a revised mythology of Hollywood aspiration and stardom. It introduced an unglamorous Hollywood narrative focused not on discovery and transcendence but on the cruel realities of life as it was lived by aspiring film workers after war. When Short was found murdered, in January 1947, her corpse mistaken for a mannequin or a drunk passed out by the side of the road, hers would become the first in a series of disquieting stories in an increasingly perilous city whose urban geography encouraged what would come to be cruelly termed the body-dump killing. Her death and the fruitless investigation that followed set in motion an increasingly dark celebrity narrative that would fundamentally transform how American filmgoers imagined Hollywood. All three films exploit the Dahlia’s notoriety and link her story to fundamental changes in the movie industry. That one may have been be the consequence of the other—that her death might be unique to the Hollywood transition (that is, from the studio era into a forthcoming, anticipated new Hollywood)—compels a rereading of Hollywood (the business, the urban neighborhood, the site par excellence of American aspiration). Such a rereading characterizes the project here.

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All three films as well present a new Hollywood geography; the fragility of contracts and relationships that accompanied the decline of the Hollywood studio system is expressed in dispersed sites of professional and personal engagement. As these films depict, filmmaking in the postwar years became an enterprise in which private and public space overlapped uncomfortably. For those venturing to Hollywood to be discovered, a first and often insurmountable task involved finding a secure and safe site for conducting movie business. As the studios cut back on production and correspondingly diminished their commitment to contracted labor, the studio lots became less and less central to the business of making movies. As the three films suggest, industry workers were forced to find new sites for movie-business networking. As Short discovered, among these new sites for professional and personal engagement were the many bars and nightclubs, sites that attracted a range of real and quasi-industry players, as well as mobsters, hucksters, transients, and psychopaths. Sunset Boulevard begins with an image of a curb in a filthy gutter, and then we hear the voice-over of the failed screenwriter Joe Gillis affirming first what we see—“Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard”—and then, as the camera holds on an image of his corpse floating face-down in Norma’s swimming pool, the terms of the narrative: “Just a movie writer with a couple of B-pictures to his credit. The poor dope. He always wanted a pool. Well in the end he got himself a pool—only the price turned out to be a little high.” The film begins with a body floating in a pool and then, early in the film’s extended flashback, echoes that image with a second corpse, a dead chimpanzee, whose death is treated with more respect. Joe, the dead writer whose Hollywood adventure is chronicled in the film, is initially mistaken for a pet undertaker and then for a working writer; pointedly, he’s neither. For Joe, there is no office to work at, no studio to report to, and there’s no contract to fall back on. His encounters with Hollywood power—the producer with ulcers who reminds him (and us) that the studios are all losing money in 1950; the agent who won’t answer his phone calls and cynically offers that “the finest things in the world have been written on an empty stomach”—get Joe nowhere closer to his dream. The only writing job he can get is with Norma Desmond, and there are, as with everything in transition-era Hollywood, strings attached. In A Lonely Place is rather programmatically film noir, so everyone’s timing is off. Dix Steele is a screenwriter whose uncertainty about things personal and professional fuels his paranoia. Self-doubt and vague (but

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deeply felt) suspicions are at once a natural state for a noir hero and a Hollywood screenwriter who has returned from the war to find his home town, Hollywood, changed, and his role in that home town suddenly intolerable, incomprehensible. Dix indulges his violent urges, built as they are upon fears of obsolescence and abandonment. And although we may find his refusal to adapt to such a corrupt and corrupted place as Hollywood to be mildly heroic, and appreciate his selfloathing at the prospect of dumbing down his work to suit an industry that produces so many awful films, In a Lonely Place complicates this heroism by focusing on his paranoia, which is complicated as well by the distinct possibility that he is at once paranoid and astute: people are indeed out to get him. Dix is beset throughout the film by false accusations: he’s followed by the cops (party to an investigation led by a man he served with overseas), he is interrogated several times as the prime suspect in a murder he did not commit, and he remains a suspect in that murder until the film’s deus-ex-machina ending not because there is any evidence linking him to the crime but because of questionable past acts, because his answers during interrogation betray a disdain for the investigative process and the investigators. In Blacklist-era Hollywood—in a movie about Hollywood made during and set in the Blacklist era—it was and is hard to miss the allegory here. Pointedly, Dix never sets foot on a studio lot; he connects with management through an intermediary, his agent, and spends most of his professional life commingling (networking) at a nightclub with other film workers, who, like him, are held at arm’s length from a transitioning studio system. He sees himself as an artist in an industry given over to “popcorn salesmen.” But even the popcorn salesmen reminisce about a Hollywood that no longer exists. The Big Knife is set for all but a few minutes in a single interior space: the movie star Charlie Castle’s living room. Charlie is the most conventionally successful of the three industry players in these films, but he’s also the most isolated; his lonely place is his home, which doubles as his base of operation. The film pivots on two successive scenes in which Charlie fails to protect that space from the studio executive Stanley Shriner Hoff, two scenes that lead inexorably and inevitably to Charlie’s suicide. What Charlie learns from his encounters with Hollywood power is that although the business is sure to change, he, or at least his contract, will not be allowed to change with it. Charlie can’t even leave his house— and thus he can’t work—without first accepting Hoff’s terms.

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Charlie is a rugged, virile movie actor played by the rugged, virile movie actor Jack Palance, whose masculinity is serially undermined, first by a gossip columnist who sets the narrative in motion, then by a studio fixer who keeps changing the story line. He eventually stands up to these threats to his masculinity and to his autonomy as a professional actor, but doing so leaves him alone, vulnerable, and finally suicidal. What matters most to the central characters in these three films pointedly happens “elsewhere.” While Joe is otherwise occupied at Norma’s, the story editor (and his eventual guilty love interest), Betty Schaefer, convinces an executive to develop one of Joe’s old story ideas. It’s a lifeline of sorts—albeit one freighted with dishonesty and betrayal (of his amiable friend, an assistant director named Artie Green, who begins the film romantically involved with Betty). This potential story deal arrives too late to save him; he is in too deep with Norma by then. The hatcheck girl, Mildred Atkinson, who ventures to Dix’s apartment to help him with a script in Ray’s film is killed off screen after Dix ungallantly dispatches her to a neighborhood cabstand. She is, like the Dahlia, murdered, transported, and summarily dumped in the sprawling “elsewhere” of Los Angeles. Later, when an executive at one of the studios decides to buy Dix’s new script, the message is delivered by Dix’s agent too late to save his affair with the wannabe actress Laurel, and thus too late to forestall his decline into madness. In The Big Knife, the studio fixer arranges the murder of a starlet who can implicate Charlie in a drunken hit-and-run killing. Recognizing his complicity, Charlie kills himself off screen. The film workers in all three films are undone by a Hollywood that has become for them impossibly chaotic—organized so differently from the previous studio model that they fail to find their way in or out. They are dispirited and unmoored . . . conditions that are evinced geographically. The paradigmatic noir narrative—that is, the labyrinthine story structure—abandons them to a profound physical as well as spiritual isolation. The film workers depicted in these three films anticipate a new Hollywood they will not live long enough or stay sane enough to see.

crime and punishment in postwar hollywood I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is “Disappear Here” and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out. —Brett Easton Ellis, Less than Zero

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What follows in this book is a history of Hollywood—the geographic site and the notional construct—built upon stories of the fallen, the stricken, the dismissed, discarded, and exiled during Hollywood’s awkward adolescence stretching from the decline of the classical era after World War II to the beginnings of a new Hollywood in the 1960s. Though its genesis involves the aforementioned noir classics, the book is by design not a history of films and filmmakers or of the demarcations in an industrial trajectory—though this era has plenty of them: the Blacklist, the Paramount Decision, the dismantling of the Production Code. This is instead an alternative history focusing on Hollywood players and aspirants alike literally or figuratively dumped by the side of the road . . . casualties upon which a new Hollywood was constructed. The narrative begins and ends with two dead bodies: the mutilated, blood-drained corpse of the Hollywood wannabe Elizabeth Short, killed one-place, transported, dumped, and posed in another, a vacant lot at the corner of 39th and Norton in January 1947; and the “crime scene” at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in August 1962, where the unclothed body of Hollywood’s last classical-era movie star, Marilyn Monroe, was discovered. The transition era in Hollywood seems to me framed by these two scenes, which fundamentally altered the dreamed-upon and the real Hollywood after the war. There are precedents to such an approach to social history. In the most famous, just before the turn of the twentieth century, the sociologist Émile Durkheim posited how a cultural history might be formulated from the study of suicide (or suicides).8 He focused on four types or reasons for such a desperate act: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic suicide: self-annihilation prompted by, respectively, a feeling of not belonging, a desire for martyrdom (in which one’s death serves a cause), moral confusion or alienation, or both (what he termed anomie), and an affirmation of social constraints so extreme that a person sees no way out, no way forward. An understanding of a society, Durkheim concluded, might thus be formulated upon those tragically unserved and unhappy. Just such a project is undertaken here as well, though the focus on casualties is not so exclusively tied to those so desperate as to take their own lives; indeed the term “casualty” is viewed more broadly here to include the many seekers who ventured to Los Angeles and didn’t find what they were looking for . . . and then stopped searching, their spirits broken as they finally gave up dreaming about a place that no longer existed. The larger ambition of this project involves two conflicting narratives: one complexly tied to American aspiration (dreams of success, of

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glamor, of social mobility, even transcendence) and another grounded, qualified, and profoundly diminished by the harsh realities of a transforming modern American movie business, the complexities of Cold War politics, and the brutality of urban crime . . . new narratives of a new postwar America writ large in the City of the Angels. These new narratives feature a wealth of characters (in the fullest sense of the term): movie-industry celebrities (the players and the wannabes); the transient, anonymous, desperate, cruel, and crazy inhabiting the streets; mobsters, madams, and corrupt police; purveyors of gossip and the subjects and topics of their savage commentaries. Short’s murder called attention to the lives of the many disenfranchised in Los Angeles; she was, after all, once one of them. Monroe’s death implicated the strange entourage inhabiting her movie-star orbit: quack doctors, gangsters, other movie stars and industry workers, Fidel Castro, the FBI and the CIA, and inevitably, the Kennedys . . . so many characters crossing paths—at times disastrously—in the chaotic world of postwar Los Angeles. Theirs are the stories I will tell in this book. In doing so I insist upon the significance of their lives and their ambitions . . . so many of which were so abruptly snuffed out.

chapter 1

The Real Estate of Crime The Black Dahlia Dumped by the Side of the Road

The January 15, 1947, edition of William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner ran with the following sensational headline: “Girl Tortured and Slain: Hacked Nude Body Found in L.A. Lot.” 1 The crime scene was indeed remarkable, and no photographs were run to accompany the story. Instead the Examiner printed an artist’s rendering: a sketch, really. It was a gesture at propriety—though given the headline, propriety seemed even at first gasp beside the point. Absent pictures, an image of the crime scene nonetheless found its way into the city’s collective imagination, thanks in part to the Examiner’s ace crime reporter, Will Fowler, who cast the murder scene in colorful, Chandleresque prose, describing a dead young woman “lying there like a discarded marionette.” 2 With this news story the bodydump murder entered the paper’s lexicon. And there would be reason to use the term again in just a matter of weeks—which is to say, there would be a second body-dump murder to write about by then. By the decade’s end, the body-dump murder would become a symptom and a symbol of Los Angeles’ postwar sprawl, “an epigram,” as the novelist James Ellroy writes, “on transient lives.” 3 The newspapers acknowledged as well the “real estate of the crime”: the unknown site of the murder, the body drained of blood, then transported and discarded in a vacant lot. “The girl had been killed elsewhere,” a January 16th report in the Examiner confirmed, “after hours

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figure 1. An artist’s rendering of the Black Dahlia body-dump killing used by the Los Angeles Examiner. Photographs of the crime scene were (for good reason) deemed unsuitable for publication. (Reality and Fiction: The Story of the Black Dahlia, directed by Laurent Bouzereau: Universal Studios, 2006)

of torture, . . . her body taken to the lot and left in plain view not three feet from the sidewalk,” mistaken for “a drunken man lying in the weeds.” 4 In the initial coverage, the victim was described as “teenaged,” “fifteen or sixteen—possibly older—whose dark brown hair had been hennaed and whose toenails were tinted rose, . . . a good-looking girl, a pert, turned-up nose, and a high forehead and gray-green eyes.” 5 In the twenty-four hours preceding the FBI’s identification of the body, all anyone knew for sure about the murder victim was that she chewed her fingernails. On the 17th, the body got a name, Elizabeth Short, and the FBI fixed her age at the time of death at 22. Over the next few days a sketchy bio emerged: movie-industry wannabe, party girl, Hollywood fringedweller. The crime-beat reporters knew who she was, even though they knew nothing about her. As a result Short emerged from the press coverage of her death as The Black Dahlia, less a person than a character or construct, less one particular and unfortunate young woman who had moved to Los Angeles and met with disaster than, rather, a metonymy for a generation of young women whose dreams were dashed on the streets of the city.

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elizabeth short: wild child, lost girl, body dump It was a funny neighborhood, 39th and Norton. . . . You couldn’t even call it a neighborhood, really. A couple of bungalows, the rest of it empty lots and a pile of weeds. There was a beat-up Hudson Terraplane with no axles sitting on one of the lots. No engine, either, and all the seat covers cut away. This woman who lived around there had been the first to see [her]. She had gone out to buy a bottle of milk and when she turned up Norton, she saw this pair of legs sticking out from under a bush. That’s all she saw, the legs. —John Gregory Dunne, True Confessions

The body of Elizabeth Short was discovered by a twenty-three-year old housewife named Betty Bersinger at 10:45 a.m. on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue, between West 39th Street and Coliseum Street in the 1.2-square-mile Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. As the crime-scene photographs reveal, in January 1947 Leimert Park was at once within the city and on its outskirts. Although the severed body in the foreground was the inevitable object of attention, the photographs taken that day offer as well a perspective on the peculiar geography of the body dump: the sprawling, wild landscape of Los Angeles in transition; a city, in the booming postwar years, composed of newly developed neighborhoods abutting empty spaces waiting, destined, to be filled. Rapid growth fueled perpetual real-estate development in the city after the war. But as Los Angeles sprawled outward, it set the scene, so to speak, for the phenomenon evinced in the Dahlia crime-scene photographs, with developed projects abutting scrubland, lived spaces down the block or across the street from undeveloped land awaiting the bulldozer and building crew. “Los Angeles history has [always] been one of continuous real estate enterprise,” the urban historian David Brodsky writes, “with land speculation a driving force for its never-ending growth.” 6 In his landmark book City of Quartz, Mike Davis similarly characterizes the city as a postwar real-estate boom town: “Los Angeles was first and foremost the creature of real-estate capitalism: the culminating speculation, in fact, of the generations of boosters and promoters who had subdivided and sold the West from the Cumberland Gap to the Pacific.” 7 A quick look at the U.S. Census offers perspective. Between 1940 and 1960, the population in Los Angeles more than doubled, from 3.2 million to nearly 7.8 million. What to do with all these people—a separate

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figure 2. The Black Dahlia crime scene at West 39th Street and South Norton Avenue, January 15, 1947: the city and its outskirts. (LAPD Archives)

problem from what all these people might do once they got to L.A.— was a question city planners never adequately answered. Looking back on the city’s urban growth in 1981, Brodsky concludes that modern Los Angeles developed “not according to any plan but rather at the subdivider’s discretion.” 8 To be fair, there were city planners, even those working in and for the city in that era, who were concerned about unregulated development. For example, in 1942, in anticipation of the population boom after the war, the city-planning commissioner William H. Schuchardt voiced his frustration: “The present situation of the City of Los Angeles, from the standpoint of the city planner, may be couched in one word: Chaos.” 9 It was into such a chaotic urban scheme that well over four million people arrived in the 1940s and 1950s—over four million people seeking a new start in a new American city that promised to accommodate their new American dreams. Elizabeth Short was one of the four million. Short arrived in Los Angeles filled with aspiration and hope, seduced by a Hollywood narrative fixed in the glamorous studio era. What she didn’t know—what she and so many other Hollywood aspirants and wannabes like her could not possibly have known—was how quickly and systematically the movie business would be transformed and scaled down in the

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years to come. The long shot of making it in the film industry got a whole lot longer at the very moment she packed her bags and moved west. The studios produced more than 370 features in 1941, the last year before the United States’ entrance into World War II. Twenty years later, they produced fewer than 150. This decline in movie production traced a decline in box-office revenues and profits. In 1947, ninety million Americans went to the movies every week. A decade later, average weekly attendance fell to forty million. After sporting record profits of $120 million in the first full year after the war, studio profits fell steadily beginning the following year: to $87 million in 1947, $49 million in 1948, $34 million in 1949, and $31 million in 1950.10 The May 3, 1948, U.S. Supreme Court decision in U.S. v Paramount Pictures, the so-called Paramount Decision, added to the studios’ postwar problems. Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas elaborated the Court’s view that the studios were indeed trusts and that the only available remedy was a forced divestiture of studio holdings in film exhibition.11 The decision rather successfully cut to the heart of the companies’ business plans.12 Forcing the studios to sell off their interests in movie theaters broke a vital link in the vertical integration that began with story ideas and development and ended on screen at movie houses owned and/or controlled in-house. The forced sell-off also significantly diminished studio access to short-term credit, which in turn forced a further cut in production. The Paramount Decision was a death sentence for the old Hollywood, but only lawyers and movie executives would have recognized it as such at the time. The forced abandonment of the tradition-bound (studio) site of movie production accompanied a darker, wackier postwar Los Angeles, which was increasingly given over to the grim realities of urban sprawl (alienation, poverty) and, in our point of departure here, its most tragic expression in the Black Dahlia murder. L.A. after the war became home for myriad aimless fringe players; journey’s end for those who, like Short, had imagined a place that no longer existed. In 1947 there were five competing daily newspapers in the city: the Los Angeles Times, the Herald-Express, the Daily News, the Mirror, and the Examiner. The Black Dahlia murder ran on at least one of these papers’ front pages for thirty-two days. The horrific nature of the crime was of course headline-worthy, but all five newspapers continued to follow the story closely because they recognized the larger significance of the crime: they recognized that, as the California historian Kevin Starr writes in retrospect: “The brief and unhappy life of Elizabeth

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Short said something about Los Angeles itself: something about the anonymity, the desperation, the cruelty and brutality life could have in the City of Angels.” 13 As L.A. became less and less a movie-company town, recent arrivals found themselves distracted by and attracted to a variety of assembling urban subcultures. For those disappointed and alienated, there was a veritable confluence of science-fiction prophets and quasi-spiritual profiteers hawking Dianetics, Devil Worship, Southern Baptism. A case in point: the advent of rocketry at Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena introduced an aerospace industry to the California Southland. The industry’s founding father, Cal Tech’s ever-colorful John Whiteside Parsons, became the quintessential postwar Angeleno, a devotee of Aleister Crowley’s sex-magic cult Ordo Templi Orientis, a friend and confidant of Scientology-founder L. Ron Hubbard (who moved into Parsons’ Pasadena mansion in 1945). The evangelist Billy Graham pitched his 1949 tent show in downtown Los Angeles and proved a sensation, attracting an audience of the spiritually hungry that ranged from vagabonds to crime bosses to movie-industry celebrities. Attractive as well to many new arrivals was a burgeoning bar scene where movie stars, mobsters, con men, movie-industry wannabes, and, alas, sociopathic and psychotic transients commingled, more than occasionally with disappointing, even disastrous results. A whole lot of people descended upon Los Angeles after the war. And not everyone found or got what they were looking for. The Examiner frequently touted its role in the investigation of the Black Dahlia murder.14 Taking such ownership required developing a story line about the victim. But this proved to be difficult, because she was such an elusive, such an unexceptional subject. “The fiend’s victim was Elizabeth Short, 22,” the paper reported on the 17th. But that’s about all they knew for sure . . . a name and the fact that she moved around a lot: “She was a Massachusetts girl once employed at Camp Cooke, near Lompoc.” “Once she lived in a hotel at 1611 North Orange Drive, Hollywood.” 15 When reporters for the Examiner looked into Short’s brief residency in the Lompoc/Santa Barbara area, they skimmed over her arrest there as a juvenile (for “underage drinking”), focusing on any detail only as it contributed to the larger narrative of Short as a victim. To highlight her martyrdom (as some patron saint of the city’s disenfranchised and disillusioned), they conducted field interviews. But most of what they got was superficial: “five feet four inches tall,” “she weighed about 125 pounds,” 16 “the blackest hair I ever saw.” There was talk of a husband (who, given what we know now, was likely imag-

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ined by Short or deliberately fabricated) and, more tellingly (and for the narrative’s sake, more dramatically), there was mention of a ticket home to stay with her mother, in Medford, Massachusetts, after her arrest, not long before her murder.17 The letters home prompted a familiar tabloid melodrama depicting Short as any mother’s daughter alone and lost. Correspondence between Elizabeth Short and her mother. Phoebe. was in fact sporadic and painfully mundane: “Dear Mother, . . . I’m in San Diego now. I’m living with a girlfriend, Vera French, and I’m working in the Naval Hospital. I’m feeling fine.” When the Examiner reporters interviewed Phoebe, she introduced a second story line. She described her daughter as “moviestruck,” leaving high school after her junior year because “everyone used to tell her how beautiful she was.” 18 How Short behaved when she got out West—what she did when the film career did not materialize—remains subject to debate. Was she “shy,” “neat,” “one of the few girls . . . who didn’t smoke [and only] occasionally [took] a drink,” as some acquaintances described her after her death?19 Or did she fulfill the “wild girl” tabloid narrative, one with which the reporters in 1947 had to be careful (even though they knew this story line was the more likely). “The girl’s hair was hennaed, but the original dark strands were beginning to regrow,” for example, was less a description than a subtle suggestion of a promiscuous young woman’s vanity and stylishness. And then there was the rose tattoo on her leg mentioned in some of the early articles. It was unusual for women to have tattoos in 1947, and in an Examiner interview with a Santa Barbara policewoman with whom Short lived briefly after her arrest, a simple observation proved plenty suggestive: “She loved to sit so that [the tattoo] would show.” 20 The first coverage of the Black Dahlia murder in the Los Angeles Times appeared on January 16 under a page-2 headline: “Girl Victim of Sex Fiend Found Slain.” The article follows the traditional who-whatwhere-when-how structure, and as such offers unsensational reportage, especially given the content and context of the crime: “Police of the homicide squad described the victim as being about 5 foot, 3 inches tall, weighing about 118 pounds, having a turned-up nose, extremely high forehead, gray-green eyes, brown hair, which apparently had been tinted with henna, and ears with almost no lobes.” The Times’s reporters pondered from the very start the phenomenon of the body dump: “The sadistic killer apparently murdered and mutilated the girl elsewhere, then drove south on Norton Avenue to the deserted spot and slid hurriedly to a stop, as indicated by the marks in the gutter. Why he then

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figure 3. An LAPD medical examiner at the Black Dahlia crime scene. (Reality and Fiction: The Story of the Black Dahlia, directed by Laurent Bouzereau: Universal Studios, 2006)

carried the two sections of the body across the sidewalk to dump them several feet west into the vacant lot puzzled investigators. There was little blood at the scene, and detectives guessed the girl probably was murdered several hours before the killer disposed of her body.” 21 The Times struggled with Short’s biography. Eschewing competitors’ more tabloid style, the Times endeavored to depict her as a character in some Hollywood (movie) melodrama, somehow doomed by fate or bad luck. It quoted her former roommate Dorothy French: “When I read of the murder, I had a premonition it was Betty.” Apropos of the missed opportunity to return home (after the arrest in Santa Barbara) to the relative safety of Medford, Massachusetts, the Times cast Short as a character in some nineteenth-century novel who missed her one chance to escape her sorry fate.22 Much as the letters home (recounted in the Times as well) were mundane, they were also untrue. “She was working in Hollywood doing bit parts for the movies,” Phoebe recounted to the Times—this despite letters that placed her daughter in San Diego, where she worked at a military hospital. “She said she left Hollywood because of the movie strike, which made it difficult to get work as an extra.” 23 There is little evidence that Short ever got much if any work at the studios. Records from Central Casting and the Screen Actors Guild give no indication that she ever appeared in or worked on a feature film.24

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However vague her Los Angeles biography may have been, crimebeat reporters certainly knew who to talk to; they knew how to find the sort of people who would have been likely to come into contact with Short during her brief adventure in the Southland. Foremost among those interviewed was Lynn Martin, introduced by the Times as Short’s “onetime roommate” at 1842 North Cherokee Avenue, Hollywood. Martin was a crucial witness. Just fifteen years old (though she appeared “to be in her mid-twenties”), living on her own, and “believed to be a singer with film ambitions” (as the Times described her, choosing the phrase “believed to be” carefully), Martin had a record of eight arrests as a juvenile. She made ends meet through prostitution and petty theft. The police inquiry into Martin’s whereabouts in January 1947 produced few specifics with regard to Short’s last days and nights on earth; Martin hadn’t seen Short since she moved out of the room they shared (with seven other young women, each paying one dollar per day) on Cherokee. But it did offer a glimpse into the lives of the many lost girls on the streets of Hollywood and Los Angeles. Indeed, while Martin was reputed to be “a singer,” who aspired to become an actress, she was for sure in the meantime sleeping around for fun and money. When the police interrogated Martin, tellingly “she described herself as an orphan.” 25 When Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Herbert Grossman questioned Martin on January 28, he, and subsequently the readers of the Examiner, got a profoundly unpretty picture of the wannabe-starlet subculture. Martin was a serial runaway; her real name was Norma Lee Meyer, and although the press never reported exactly what had prompted her flight from her adoptive parents in Long Beach, it profiled a young woman who had since fleeing her home used sex to make ends meet. She had married a serviceman on one of her first sojourns to Los Angeles, at age thirteen, and had since divorced, or so she “believed.” As the Examiner reported, Martin put a “spotlight [on] the sordid lives of movie-struck girls—many of them minors—who haunt Hollywood Boulevard in hope of a film opportunity.” Well before she lived to see her twentieth birthday, Martin had given up dreaming about anything good coming of her stay in LA: “There are many like me,” Martin told the Examiner, young women earning “meager salaries [who are] forced to accept ‘pickups’ ” who will buy them dinner. When Martin boasted that “a girl can have ten pickups by walking two blocks,” she was at once affirming the exchange value of a young woman like herself (or like Short) on the streets and the relative insignificance, in the day-today lives of these young women, of celebrity—of aspirations of any

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sort, for that matter.26 The implication throughout the Times’s and the Examiner‘s encounters with Martin was that she and Short were quite similar and that the horrifying murder was something that could have happened to Martin instead or as well, something that could have happened to any of the these many young women living in L.A. at the time. The Times subsequently traced Short’s whereabouts from the house on Cherokee to a motel at 10822 Ventura Boulevard, yet another shared habitation, with a new group of young women. This Studio City address was set up much like the Hollywood pad Short had shared with Martin: a random group of young women amassing criminal records instead of acting credits, bar girls (a common euphemism for prostitutes at the time) living wanton, vampiric, futureless lives. Because these young women moved around so frequently, they seldom cultivated strong bonds of sisterhood. They worked with avowed disinterest at odd and unglamorous jobs (as phone operators, for example) and roamed the bar scene at night. Short had a “different boy friend every night.” 27 They all did. When the Times canvassed the downtown nightspots, bartenders consistently recognized Short from a family photograph. On the nights leading up to her murder, reporters were able to place Short at the Dugout, on 634 South Main Street, and at another café at 6818 Hollywood Boulevard, where Short was described as “a regular patron.” In a Teletype message assembled from bar and café interviews and circulated to police at the time, Short was described as “a girl who readily became friendly with both sexes.” 28 Imprecise and suggestive as such a description may have been, when reprinted in the Times the murder scenario became less something done by one person to another and more some symbolic sort of retribution or consequence for women embarking upon a certain lifestyle; the body-dump killing was thus figured as an occupational risk for being friendly, naïve, independent, and free. Was her death, then, a consequence of an abandonment of propriety, of rejecting of the postwar suburban resettlement and the baby boom? The answer was there in the asking. Key here is how we may contextualize not so much the crime that ended Short’s life but the ambitions and dreams that propelled her to Los Angeles in the first place. War’s end brought to a close two decades of economic sacrifice: the Great Depression followed by austerity and rationing during wartime. For women especially, the end of the war augured a return to more settled times, with the baby boom an at-once real and symbolic reaffirmation of traditional social and gender roles.

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figure 4. Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia. (Reality and Fiction: The Story of the Black Dahlia, directed by Laurent Bouzereau: Universal Studios, 2006)

The G.I. Bill subsidized higher education and home mortgages for returning male veterans—a social contract that made marriage all the more attractive and made family life—that is, the production and maintenance of families—nothing less than a patriotic service for women in the rebuilding process after such hard times. Short’s venture to Hollywood may well have included dreams of marriage, motherhood, and homeownership; there is certainly evidence that she was a dreamer, that she dreamed of someday settling down. But Short wanted more, or at least she wanted something else first. She envied the lifestyles of movie stars like Lana Turner, a local girl discovered sipping a soda who became a movie star with seven husbands, hosts of lovers, lots of money, and the freedom to spend it on whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. Short’s murder, then, was in a terrible way the consequence of dreaming of something besides marriage and motherhood. The Black Dahlia/party-girl narrative that emerged in the press had the unpleasant if not fully intended effect of blaming the victim. The papers accumulated plenty of information suggesting that Short was, in the parlance of the times, a “bad girl.” But what had made her that

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way? The papers tried to find an answer. On the 17th, the Times recounted an interview with an airline pilot named Joseph Gordon Fickling, a World War II veteran to whom Short wrote less than a week before her death. Short had told girlfriends that she was engaged to Fickling, but he refuted the story, affirming only that he had “met her” in 1944 just before being shipped overseas. As the Times reported: “Fickling was wary of the girl’s feelings for him and uncertain that a romance might not be any more permanent than her interest in more than twenty other boy friends.” In a letter dated April 24, 1946, Fickling wondered why Short seemed to “want more than [a friendship],” when in a recent letter to him she mentioned “a ring from Matt [presumably Matt Gordon; see below].” Short’s former roommate, Dorothy French, noted that Fickling sent Short a money order for $100 in December 1946, just a month before the murder. Short was living at the time on no apparent income, “known [only] as a girl with a different boy every night.” 29 In addition to her relationship with Fickling, there was a possibly more serious encounter with the aforementioned Matt M. Gordon, Jr., an airman who died in a plane crash in India in 1945. Gordon’s mother knew about Short and her relationship with her son. In fact, she sent a letter to Short informing her of Matt’s death. When the Times contacted Ms. Gordon after the murder, in January 1947, she told the reporters: “My heart goes out in sympathy to that girl and to her mother,” but she insisted that the two were, to her knowledge, never married.30 The Examiner acquired and reprinted Short’s letters to Gordon. They are heartbreaking. “My Sweetheart: I love you. I love you. I love you,” Short wrote to Gordon affirming their bond; “when two people are in love as we are. . . . I’m yours if you want me, Matt, and I’m praying that you won’t change your mind when you come home.” 31 When, on January 25, 1947, Short’s purse was sent to the Examiner by an anonymous tipster calling himself The Black Dahlia Avenger, among its contents was a newspaper marriage announcement for Gordon and a woman whose name had been scratched out. According to one of Short’s acquaintances interviewed by the paper, Short showed the clipping around and said she scratched out the name because the paper had made an error when they identified the wife, implying that the name they printed was not, as she claimed it should have been, hers.32 If readers were looking for a quick psychology of Short, and many were, the lost-love scenario was overshadowed by another abandonment, one having to do with her father. Cleo Short was a nasty piece of

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work. He walked out on Phoebe and Elizabeth, then just five years old, in 1930. He had little to do with his daughter or her mother after that. When the police and newspaper reporters caught up with Cleo after the murder, he was anxious to speak ill of the dead. He told the Times that his daughter had visited him recently; she had somehow tracked him down in Vallejo, California, about four hundred miles north of Los Angeles. She had borrowed two hundred dollars, and then he kicked her out: “[She] spent all of her time running around when she was supposed to be keeping house for me. . . . I made her leave. . . . I didn’t want anything to do with her or any of the rest of the family.” 33 In January 1947, Cleo was living in an apartment on South Kingsley Drive, near the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Normandie Avenue. Though he was by then living in Los Angeles, Cleo declined to attend the coroner’s inquest. After all, he was never going to get his $200 back. The Black Dahlia murder prompted an often-confusing right-wing retrenchment at once glamorizing the Hollywood dream of success and celebrity and damning women in their pursuit of it. The women, including Short, were not always or not necessarily to blame in this scenario; indeed, some socially conservative writers and politicians blamed the city—more precisely, what the city had become. A little over a month after Short’s murder, the Examiner published a piece on Agnes Albro (identified as Mrs. Curtis Albro), the president of the YWCA metro board and the only woman on the city’s police commission. Albro proposed increased city regulation on taverns to better protect the many vulnerable young women who frequented these tawdry nightspots. Despite the Examiner‘s predictable tabloid hyperbole, Albro’s account of the situation for these young women was in fact reasonably astute, especially regarding the impossibly dispersed landscape of L.A.: “The girls are lonely,” Albro told the Examiner. “They come from small towns where they are under Main Street control. They are transplanted here with not too much judgment, and they don’t know what they’re getting into. They come here to get a job. What do they do meanwhile? They drop into these places, and they’re in trouble. Unwholesome taverns are hangouts for all sorts of characters, and they lure boys as well as girls.” 34 The absence of Main Street control is worth pondering here as we reflect upon the decentered logistics of postwar Los Angeles, the ease with which one might suddenly cross from city into outskirts, from safe neighborhood to bad. In The Badge: True and Terrifying Stories That Could Not Be Presented on TV, the Dragnet television showrunner Jack Webb, a staunch

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political conservative, was decidedly less generous than Albro when he offered his version of the Black Dahlia story: Short “was a lazy girl and irresponsible, and when she chose to work, she drifted aimlessly from one job to another. . . . The wrong way of life led to her death.” 35 Morality in the movie colony has always been a relative thing: at once elusive, complicated, and not for everyone. Promiscuity was not necessarily encouraged, but it was expected. Many of those, like Short, who aspired to celebrity, embraced—were compelled to embrace—such latitude in their social and sexual relations well before their status in Hollywood permitted it. As unsympathetic as Webb was about the victim in the case, he was right about the risks routinely taken by the many women drifting into the L.A. bar scene. The LAPD knew that Short may well have been the victim of a bad bar hookup. That was the most likely scenario. And if that was indeed how things played out on that awful night in January 1947, they knew as well that they would never find her killer. The men Short met on the bar scene were a lot like her: transient, promiscuous, damaged, and disappointed. And like her they experienced in some very personal way the rupture between the Los Angeles of their dreams and the bleak reality that they found there instead. Many of these men lived anonymously, adopting aliases as they moved from one temporary living arrangement to another. These men were fundamentally insignificant, and they rather easily evaded notice in their everyday lives. If one of these men killed Short, evading police detection would have been easy; indeed, it was to them second nature.

who killed the black dahlia? The murderer was manifesting a sadistic component of a sado-masochistic complex. He evidently was following the law of analytic retaliation, “What was done to me, I will do to you.” These types of killers are usually highly perverted and resort to various forms of perversion and means of torture to satisfy their lusts. . . . These sadists have a superabundance of curiosity and are liable to spend much time with their victims after the spark of life has flickered or died. —Dr. Paul De River, LAPD Consulting Psychiatrist, January 17, 1947

When the police canvassed the neighborhood where Short’s body was discovered, they asked two questions: “Do you know anyone in the neighborhood who is mentally unbalanced?” and “Do you know any

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figure 5. The search for Short’s killer was front-page news for weeks. (Reality and Fiction: The Story of the Black Dahlia, directed by Laurent Bouzereau: Universal Studios, 2006)

medical students?” 36 Asking the two questions one after the other implied a connection that proved hard to satisfy. Indeed, the first good suspect was neither a mental patient nor a medical student: Red Manley was a traveling salesman who had met Short in San Diego and dallied with her there and in Los Angeles over a few days and nights just before her murder. Manley went from likely suspect to hapless victim in short order. By January 21, his story would be the stuff of another sort of cautionary melodrama: “Knowing Betty Short has taught me to walk the straight and narrow,” Manley told a reporter from the Examiner once the police realized that he did not commit the crime. “No more trouble for me, if I can help it.” 37 In December 1946, Manley figured he’d give infidelity a shot. He explained the dalliance with a comical rationalization: “I decided to pick up Miss Short and make a test for myself to see if I still loved my wife.” A month later he got found out in a manner so public that it was hard to doubt his sincerity when he disappeared from the pages of the Examiner with the exit line “And that’s absolutely the last time I’ll ever try to cheat on my wife.” 38 Manley met Short just before Christmas 1946. As recounted by the former homicide detective Steve Hodel in his book The Black Dahlia Avenger: “After hitting all of [his] sales spots,” on or around December 15, 1946, Manley spied Short standing on a street corner in San Diego

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and, as he told the police, “tried to pick her up.” Short got into his car behaving as if that was why she was standing on the corner in the first place. He drove her to Dorothy’s mother Elvera (Vera) French’s rooming house, where Short was staying, in nearby Pacific Beach. Manley and Short then lied to French about their relationship; they said they were co-workers. Manley left Short at French’s to find a hotel room “to clean up,” then returned, and the two went on a date, spending time at the Hacienda Club, where they had a few drinks, and then at a drive-in for a midnight snack. Manley drove Short back to French’s, where they briefly kissed. That was their first date. Manley returned to San Diego on January 8th. He looked for Short on the corner where they first met. Failing to find her there, he swung by the rooming house, where the two hooked up again. They drove to a hotel, where (Manley maintained) they “didn’t make love in [his] room.” After spending more time together, Manley volunteered to drive Short, who left French’s house with all her belongings, to a bus headed for L.A., then changed his mind and offered to drive her all the way. They made the trip together, and after ditching her belongings at a locker at the downtown Greyhound station, they ventured to the Biltmore Hotel. Short told Manley that she was planning to meet her sister, but he quickly became convinced otherwise. Figuring his opportunity with Short had come and gone, Manley left the hotel alone. That was January 9th, one of the last confirmed sightings of Short while she was still alive. Manley returned home after doing some business in Los Angeles and (so he told the police, at least) did not give Short another thought until he read about her murder in a newspaper while on business in San Francisco.39 Manley had opportunity but no motive. And when he was hauled in for questioning, he produced an alibi and passed a lie-detector test. The Times reported that he fell asleep during the examination.40 After Manley was cleared of the crime, his life fell apart. In August 1954, he was committed (by his wife, Harriet) to the Patton State Hospital, a forensic mental institution in San Bernardino, California. While under psychiatric treatment, he underwent a “truth-serum examination” during which he was asked again about Short. The results were conclusive and “entirely negative”; no new facts were elicited about Manley’s brief encounter with her.41 On January 25th the Examiner’s editorial office received a package containing Short’s purse, in which they found her address book, birth certificate, and Social Security card, along with a note with cut-and-

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pasted letters spelling out “Here! Is Dahlia’s Belongings Letter to Follow.” The newspaper ran a photograph of the note on the front page under the headline “Dahlia Killer Mails Contents of Missing Purse to Examiner!” 42 What interested the police most was the address book, which they cross-checked against Lynn Martin’s testimony. Interviews followed, tracking a range of Hollywood denizens in the movie industry and crime business with whom the two women consorted. On January 29th, the Times reported on its investigation of the address book, highlighting one lead in particular: that Short and Martin had both been involved in “a widespread Hollywood lewd-photograph ring,” a “garish new angle—which . . . led investigators through all the muck of the underworld.” Martin confirmed the lewd-pictures story, and following her lead, police interrogated a photographer named George Price, who Martin claimed coerced her into immoral acts and then photographed her in the nude. Price was briefly a suspect after a witness came forward saying that they saw Short in Price’s car on Hollywood Boulevard, where Price trawled for young girls whom he paid to appear in his work. The photographer denied knowing Short and was eventually dismissed as a suspect.43 Just as Price was released, a second cut-and-pasted note from The Black Dahlia Avenger arrived at police headquarters. It read: “Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.” 44 That was the last anyone would hear from The Avenger. A veritable procession of the homeless, witless, and utterly crazy followed—sex offenders, transients, and lunatics, some of them confessing Sams, others suspects in disgusting and antisocial crimes interrogated only to be released hours or days later. Looking back on this procession today we come no closer to solving the crime, but we learn a lot about the place these men inhabited; we can assemble a collection of character sketches of the Southland’s lowlife subculture—an alternative history of some alternative Hollywood. The first potentially believable confessing Sam, Daniel Voorhees, arrived at police headquarters on the same day as the second note from The Avenger. During an interview with LAPD Consulting Psychiatrist Dr. Paul De River, Voorhess claimed that he “couldn’t stand [keeping such a dark secret] any longer.” The police knew that Voorhees was not The Avenger; his fingerprints did not match those taken from the first envelope. But a preliminary investigation revealed that Voorhees had registered at a downtown hotel on the day Short’s body was discovered

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and that he had checked out the following morning and hadn’t been seen for thirteen days after that. In most any other American city the police would have assumed Voorhees had for those two weeks gone underground, on the lam; but transients in Los Angeles disappeared and then turned up again all the time. Indeed, the whereabouts of the thousands of vagrants in the city were impossible for police to track. Voorhees did not kill Short; soon after confessing to the murder he disappeared back into the chaos of postwar Los Angeles. On February 7th, George D. Kidd, a thirty-five-year-old sailor, was arrested after showing nude pictures to a high-school girl. Pretty much anyone picked up on a sex beef got connected to the murder; the dailies needed leads, and the police needed to look like they were doing something. There was nothing to connect Kidd to the crime, and the press quickly moved on. Also on the 8th, the dailies reported on a Fort Dix, New Jersey, MP arrested for theft named Joseph Dumais, who kept a scrapbook with newspaper clippings about the Black Dahlia murder.45 The Herald-Express proclaimed that Dumais “is the Black Dahlia Killer.” 46 The Los Angeles Daily News went with a twenty-word headline: “Blackout Murder of Beth Short Confessed: Soldier Admits Crime But Holds Back Horror Details; Corporal Dumais Signs 50-Page Confession.” 47 For a couple of days after that, the readers of pretty much any tabloid in the Southland had reason to believe that the police had finally got their man. But on February 10th Dumais was summarily released, and the LAPD issued a press release saying that, according to several eyewitnesses, Dumais was in New Jersey on January 15th. He was, despite all the tabloid excitement, never a plausible suspect.48 Among the zanier plotlines, a thirdhand clue—an informant recalling a conversation with a service-station attendant leaked to the press on February8th—pointed to another new suspect, an “Amazon-sized woman . . . about 6 feet tall and weighing close to 200 pounds.” 49 The story proved at once entertaining and unlikely. Nine days later, Navy Chief Pharmacist’s Mate John N. Andry was arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in Long Beach and confessed to killing Short. After being transferred to Los Angeles, Andry denied any knowledge of the crime. Asked why he confessed, he replied in a matter-of-fact way: “Because I was drunk.” 50 Over a month later, tucked in a shoe amid a pile of clothing found on Venice Beach, police found a confession that doubled as a suicide note: “I have waited for the police to capture me for the Black Dahlia killing, but have not. I am too much of a coward to turn myself in, so this is the

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best way out for me.” The note was not signed, and the clothing gave no clue to its owner. No body was ever found.51 For the March 19th edition of the Times, Los Angeles Police Captain Jack Donahoe recounted an interrogation with a drug-addled car thief named Melvin Bailey, who after his arrest in St. Louis confessed to the Short murder: “Let’s forget about cars. I’ve got something hot. Let me tell you about a murder.” Bailey, who was “hazy about the time and date,” claiming that he was at the time high on coffee and Benzedrine, recounted a story of a wild night with Short, whom he claimed to have met in a bar around Christmastime 1946. When she refused to accompany him on an East Coast trip, Bailey claimed he killed her with the butt end of a marine combat knife and then mutilated her corpse in a stolen car that he planned to drive cross-country. After committing the murder, Bailey stated, he drove the stolen car to a friend’s house in Long Beach, where he disposed of his bloody clothing and borrowed a clean suit for the drive east. Questioned in Los Angeles, William Hughes, Bailey’s Long Beach friend, testified that he hadn’t seen Bailey since well before Christmas; he never found any bloody clothing at his house, and none of his suits was missing. Further investigation revealed that Bailey had traveled to St. Louis via San Francisco by bus, not by stolen car.52 On January 28, 1948, a full year after the murder, the Times ran a page-2 story on an alcoholic transient named Charles Lynch who had accosted two women in a neighborhood bar, threatening them with the same fate as the Black Dahlia. Lynch confessed over the telephone: “I’m tired of fooling around. I killed Betty Short. Come on down and pick me up—and you’d better hurry, because there’s a waitress I’m going to kill too.” Lynch had a rap sheet: a recent arrest for “statutory attack” in Arizona, two for “resorting” (engaging with prostitutes), and an arrest for public drunkenness in Los Angeles ten days after the Dahlia murder.53 But when Lynch sobered up the following day—before making the confession he had eaten the full contents of a Benzedrine inhaler—he recanted.54 The next suspect—the next lowlife in this series of character sketches—was a man whom the Times described as a “confessed hypnotizer of teen-age girls,” Donald E. Hitchcock, who was arrested on a morals charge involving two underage women in February 1948 in Martinez, California. In custody, Hitchcock confessed to hypnotizing the two sixteen-year-old girls from Richmond, California, and having “improper relations” with one of them. What made Hitchcock particularly intriguing were an earlier arrest and conviction for manslaughter

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involving an illegal (surgical) operation—most likely, a botched abortion—that led to the death of a sixteen-year-old girl and a recent stint at mortuary school, where he learned how to dissect bodies.55 Promising as such circumstantial evidence may have been, and creepy as he certainly was, Hitchcock was not the Black Dahlia killer. Nearly two years after the murder, the Times ran with another stranger-than-fiction Southland story starring Leslie Dillon, AKA Jack Sands, “a former hotel clerk and bellhop with an admitted intense interest in sadism and sexual psychopathia.” The pressure to close the case persisted, so much so that the Los Angeles Chief of Police, C. B. Horrall, somehow kept a straight face when he dubbed this newest transient and Benzedrine addict “the best suspect yet.” Dillon had contacted Dr. De River claiming to know a man named Jeff Conners, who seemed to know a lot about the Black Dahlia murder. Dr. De River encouraged Dillon to arrange a meeting with Conners, because he suspected that Conners was a figment of Dillon’s imagination and that such a proposition might reveal that fact. On De River ‘s authority Dillon was detained—this despite evidence that Dillon had been in San Francisco in January 1947. Much to the LAPD’s embarrassment, it turned out that Conners did exist; his real name was Artie Lane, and in 1947 he had lived in Los Angeles and was employed at Columbia Pictures, where Short had aspired to work. (When she could get on the lot, Short lingered at the commissary.) Conners’s use of a pseudonym, a potentially incriminating fact, had nothing to do with evading identification and detection. Indeed, AKA’s were commonplace in Hollywood, especially for screenwriters doing genre or B-movie work. When the police interviewed Conners, he admitted knowing Dillon. But he denied ever telling Dillon about the Short murder. Dillon later filed suit against the city and the LAPD for unlawful detention, which created a brief and minor scandal. He had a good case; he was detained even though the police knew he could not have committed the crime. The police booked Conners though they knew he didn’t kill anybody. Dillon’s lawsuit was eventually set aside when he failed to appear in court. The LAPD had by then assembled a dubious embezzlement case against Dillon dating back to his stint as a hotel clerk.56 When reporters for the Times tracked down Conners’s “attractive blond ex-wife, Miss Grace Allen,” a somewhat sweeter version of the transient-character sketch emerged. She described her ex as “a screwball,” a daydreamer “à la Walter Mitty.” The comparison proved apt; Conners had claimed (falsely) to police that he was once married to a

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dancer named Vicki Evans, who had made news a year earlier when police raided a Laurel Canyon marijuana party that culminated in the arrest of the actor Robert Mitchum. The reporters couldn’t miss the fact that Allen and Evans looked a lot alike; Conners, ever the dreamer, had apparently imagined, maybe even convinced himself, that he was actually married at one time to Evans as well as or instead of Allen.57 In November 1950, nearly four years after the murder, a thirty-fiveyear-old man named Max Handler, AKA Matt Handler, AKA Mack Chandler, called police from a rooming house in Hollywood: “I’m cracking up. I’ve got to confess.” 58 During questioning Handler offered few details about the crime, saying only that he had “met [Short] in a Hollywood bar, danced four hours with her, then realized the following day that he had killed her.” 59 What distinguished Handler from the dozens of other false confessors was a remarkable coincidence. In the fall of 1947, Handler was a part-time screen actor—“part-time” being the operative term, since no screen credits can be confirmed. His day job at the time was as a real-estate agent. Among the contents of Short’s purse ferried to police by The Avenger was a business card from the real-estate agency that employed Chandler at the time. A police spokesman kept a straight face when he told the press that among hundreds of Dahlia sightings at various bars in Hollywood and downtown, four included a description of a man fitting Handler’s basic look and type. But then again, among the sightings were descriptions of men fitting nearly any and every type. By the early 1950s, the LAPD investigation into Short’s murder involved hundreds of leads about dozens of men, all of whom seemed for a while at least possible or even likely suspects. But none of them killed Short. The investigation nonetheless revealed, especially as the newspapers offered their readers a glimpse into these men’s lives, a vivid picture of the real Los Angeles into which Short arrived after the war. These were the sorts of men she met in her search for a Hollywood that was transitioning, shrinking, disappearing. What these men wanted from her and what she was inclined to give remains the key to her brief L.A. life. The better to understand that exchange, permit one final character sketch of one final damaged resident of Los Angeles County who did not kill Elizabeth Short but did in 1957 and 1958 kill at least three other women, disposing of their bodies by the side of the road in the vast, empty desert due east (and a fast and easy drive) from downtown L.A. Harvey Glatman, whom the press dubbed “the glamor-girl slayer” and “the lonely-hearts killer,” was

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arrested on October 27, 1958, struggling with a pinup model named Lorraine Vigil on the shoulder of the Santa Ana Freeway near Anaheim. The arresting officers found in his possession lurid photographs depicting women bound and gagged. Among the photographs were gruesomely posed images of two women he had raped and killed: the pinup model Judy Ann Dull, whom Glatman had hired under an AKA, and Shirley Ann Bridgeford, whom he, again using an alias, met through a lonely-hearts ad in a newspaper. After Glatman’s arrest, Sergeant Jack Lawton, working homicide for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, took a long look at Glatman’s photo collection and made the connection to another unsolved body-dump homicide, the murder of (the novelist James Ellroy’s mother) Geneva (Jean) Hilliker Ellroy, who was discovered in late June 1958 strangled and posed in a playground beside a baseball field in El Monte, California, a small San Gabriel Valley suburb in Los Angeles County roughly twenty miles due east of downtown L.A. Ellroy’s true crime novel The Black Dahlia is dedicated to his mother’s memory, and his fascination with Short’s murder is complexly tied to what happened to his mother.60 The murders of Dull and Bridgeford to which Glatman confessed were crimes not of passion but of calculation, Ellroy writes in his memoir My Dark Places, opportunistic crimes in that they exploited the county’s peculiar geography, in that they exploited the victims’ unwavering belief in the mythology of Hollywood discovery however sullied or distorted such dreams had become amid the pornography of postwar Los Angeles. Two of Glatman’s victims—Dull and Angela Rojas, AKA Ruth Rita Mercado—were lured into his company by the promise of a pulp-magazine, True Detective–style, soft-porn photo shoot—the sort of thing that these two women had posed for before. At a certain point the session got strange, and then . . . with Glatman taking pictures of the entire process from the con to the murder. Examining Glatman’s demented photographs of Dull, Ellroy ponders the murders of Short and his mother, remarking upon the young victim’s seeming confidence: “Maybe she thought compliance equaled poise. Maybe she possessed a skewed pinup-girl bravado: All men are weak and easily moved with the right combination of flattery and pussy.” 61 Dull believed in the dream even after it was clear that it was too late. It’s possible Short did too. If Los Angeles had become what one local tabloid would describe as “the port of missing women” 62 (more on that later), it was as much a matter of geography as of psychology. It was a place that made possible

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figure 6. Brian De Palma’s spot-on recreation of the crime scene in his 2006 adaptation of James Ellroy’s true-crime novel, The Black Dahlia. (Universal Pictures)

the very sorts of crimes that its creepier denizens seemed apt to fantasize. In 1947 L.A. was a place without defined neighborhoods, many if not most of them occupied by transients who never stayed in one place long enough to feel or act like neighbors, who never stayed in one place long enough to feel or act as if they had neighbors. It was a place for which the outskirts—an empty lot (The Dahlia), or a playground (the El Monte/Jean Ellroy body-dump site), or the desert (where Glatman disposed of Dull and Bridgeford)—was always just a short car ride away.

the surrealists If the crowd really knew who we were and what we represented, we’d probably be lynched. —Man Ray, surrealist photographer, 1963

There is today no shortage of published and posted work persisting in the attempt to solve the Black Dahlia murder; some of it is purely crackpot, some of it is plausible, and, for my purposes here, some of it is telling about the various subcultures occupying postwar L.A. The most remarkable of the ongoing investigations, I believe, are the memoirs and Internet postings authored by the retired homicide detective Steve Hodel alleging that his father, Dr. George Hodel, killed Elizabeth Short.63 The circumstantial case mounted by the former policeman is compelling. In the 1940s, Dr. Hodel specialized in the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. The clientele at his clinic included a number of sexually active women who, like Short, frequented downtown bars and in the course of trading sex for food and money came to need a doctor

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with his expertise. There were rumors of abortions performed at his clinic as well. Dr. Hodel had a couple of run-ins with law enforcement that further support his son’s allegations. In 1945, Dr. Hodel was the prime suspect in the drug-overdose death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, who police believed was blackmailing her boss over some fraudulent insurance claims. Four years later Dr. Hodel was accused of incest with his daughter Tamar, then fourteen years old. Though not convicted of that crime, in February and March 1950 Tamar’s allegations prompted the police to put the doctor under surveillance in connection with the Short murder. But that investigation was eventually scrapped. Steve Hodel’s case hinges on a photograph found among his late father’s possessions. The picture bears a certain resemblance to Short. Steve Hodel compares the picture first to the much-reproduced booking photograph of Elizabeth Short taken in 1943, when she was nineteen, and then again next to an airbrushed crime-scene photograph of Short in 1947.64 The resemblance is subtle and debatable. There’s also a reasonable (and, I’d argue, better) resemblance to George’s second wife, Dorothy, whom the doctor photographed frequently. Steve Hodel notes that the pose of the face in a portrait (tilted down and to the left, eyes closed) taken by the doctor and the position of the head (tilted down and to the left, eyes closed) in the crime-scene picture (ostensibly posed by the murderer) eerily match up.65 Even if the woman in the photograph in question is not Short, Steve Hodel’s true-crime narrative compels us to ponder a possible connection to another fringe subculture taking up residence in Los Angeles at time: the Surrealists. As Steve Hodel points out, his father and Man Ray were social friends. Ray took some gorgeous, flattering photographs of Dorothy, including a 1944 picture of her seated alongside Ray’s muse at the time, Juliet Browner.66 In their provocative book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss ask readers to consider Ray’s 1945 photograph of Browner, taken at the artist’s Vine Street studio in Los Angeles.67 The pose of Browner’s arms (up above her head) does indeed foreshadow or resemble (or both) the positioning of the arms of the Black Dahlia corpse two years later. Nelson and Bayliss draw as well a parallel between selected artwork produced from the “exquisite corpse” parlor game in which the artists reassembled and reconfigured cut-up images of naked women (Dali’s 1944 oil-on-canvas Art of Radio and Rene Magritte’s 1930 oil-on-canvas The Eternally

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figure 7. Man Ray’s 1945 photograph Juliet, 1245 Vine Street, Hollywood. The model’s pose, especially the arrangement of the arms above the head, eerily foreshadowed the pose of the bisected corpse of Elizabeth Short two years later. (See Figure 3.) The painting on the wall above the couch is Ray’s oil-on-canvas Le Beau Temps, which, consistent with the exquisite-corpse theme, features the bisected figure of a woman. (© Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2016)

Obvious, for example) and the stylized bisection and mutilation of Short’s corpse. They further note how Max Ernst’s 1921 mixed-media collage Anatomy as a Bride foreshadows the “mutilations” revealed in the Short autopsy photographs and how Dali’s 1936 magazine cover for the Surrealist magazine Minotaure, like Ray’s photo of Browner in Hollywood nearly a decade later, matches the pose of the victim’s arms in the crime-scene pictures.68 The images are indeed macabre, and there are distinct visual correspondences between the stylized depiction of the female body in these Surrealist artworks and the crime signature of the Black Dahlia killer: the horrible mutilations of the corpse, the carefully posed and sectioned body left by the side of the road. A cursory look at the Surrealist subculture that assembled around Ray in L.A. in the mid- to late 1940s reveals a curious set of bedfellows: Dr. Hodel, the A-list actor and director John Huston (to whom Dorothy was married from 1926 to 1933: that is, before she married Hodel), and

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the novelist Henry Miller, all of whom socialized with one another, all of whom shared an interest in Surrealist art and the philosophies of the movement. The L.A. art scene at the time had among its prominent collectors wealthy patrons like Louise and Walter Arensberg and William Copley; the married artists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning (who frequented L.A. from their home in Arizona), and the Hollywood celebrities Vincent Price, Edward G. Robinson, and Fanny Brice, all of whom collected work by Surrealists. As André Breton contended, Surrealist art was built upon amoral provocation, “exempt of any aesthetic or moral concern.” 69 The uncomfortable mix of images of live women and mannequins, the motifs of sectioned or disassembled women (images of mutilation and amputation abound), the contemptuous dehumanization of otherwise-attractive figure models (bound and gagged, posed in scenes that juxtaposed the human and the manufactured or mechanical), the casual violence (Dalí and Buñuel’s simulated severing of a woman’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou, released in 1929, seems only the most awful and familiar) likely did not provoke the hideous crime in question. But a close look at Nelson and Bayliss’s book suggests that the artwork may well have influenced its style, its expression. When the police first canvassed the Leimart Park neighborhood they were looking for someone crazy with surgical skill. Dr. George Hodel fits both counts. So did another doctor in downtown L.A.: Leslie C. Audrain, an abortionist who worked for the notorious Hollywood Madam Brenda Allen. Audrain is implicated in the true-crime study The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Hollywood, written by the journalist Donald H. Wolfe, whose theory of the crime focuses on the so-called McCadden Gang, an outfit run by a mobster named Albert Louis Greenberg, who worked for Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel. It was Siegel, according to Wolfe, who killed Short, and his cohorts, Maurice Clement (a procurer for Allen) and Audrain disposed of the body. According to Wolfe, Audrain performed the postmortem mutilations as a cover-up for the true (sudden, impulsive) nature of the crime. Wolfe’s circumstantial case is built upon a reasonable assumption: that, given the sort of life Short lived—the sorts of places she frequented, the people she met, and the men she “dated”—she may well have found herself in the company of gangsters, and she may well have one day required the services of a woman like Brenda Allen or a doctor like Audrain (or both; or, for that matter, Hodel). When we map out Wolfe’s true-crime story, we find a handful of geographic coincidences that at the very least

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reveal the fluid and overlapping movements of L.A. subcultures as different and distinct as those into which Short, Allen, and Siegel moved: the Ambassador Hotel (frequented by Siegel), Audrain’s office (where he performed abortions for prostitutes and barflies), and Allen’s headquarters (from which she managed a prostitution ring) were merely a few blocks away from one another, clustered together in a fairly busy downtown neighborhood that also included the Biltmore Hotel, where Short was last seen alive. Short’s partly incinerated shoes were, according to Wolfe, found in a dumpster outside a café encircled by these first three sites. Leimert Park, where her body was dumped, was a short distance from the home of Siegel’s rival Jack Dragna (leading Wolfe to allege a plan on Siegel’s part to pin the murder on Dragna).70 The densely populated downtown frequented by celebrity gangsters and their henchmen, along with a plethora of Hollywood fringe-dwellers, wannabe celebrities, and aimless vagrants abutted an undeveloped, sparsely populated outskirts. The Black Dahlia body-dump site suited the peculiar urban geography of downtown L.A. at the time. It also, per Wolfe, was altogether consistent with a Mob hit.

jeanne axford french, the flying nurse She made friends easy, awful easy. She went out alone sometimes. She’s gone now, and I’m sure she would want me to say the right thing. [But] she made a lot of her own trouble. —David Y. Wrather, on hearing of the murder of his mother, Jeanne Axford French

Less than a month after the Black Dahlia killing, the press reported on a second body-dump murder discovered by a bulldozer driver en route to the site of yet another new housing development. The crime scene was staged, eerily resembling what had awaited the police at 39th and Norton a few weeks earlier. Jeanne Axford French, aged forty-five, was found kicked to death . . . killed, transported, and left naked by the side of the road at the corner of Indianapolis Street and Grand View Avenue, near what is now the Venice Reservoir site and the North Venice Little League field. This now-busy corner was at the time vacant; as the Examiner reported, “not a single house or other building is near the spot.” 71 Later reports identified the location as a notorious and “lonely lovers’ lane,” known to local residents as The Moors.72 The ever-colorful Hearst reporters at the Examiner dubbed French “Hollywood’s flying nurse.” The moniker was clever and not inaccurate. French had indeed worked as a nurse during the war. And, as the Examiner reported, she had been, in better times, an “aviatrix [and]

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pioneer airline hostess.” To the capsule bio published on February 11th, the paper added that French had also been an “actress known to motion pictures as Jeanne Axford Thomas,” though, as with Short, the job description is generous, and no screen credits can be confirmed.73 The connections between French and Short were then as now well worth highlighting, especially given the circumstances of their deaths. The Examiner elaborated that connection in its coverage of the murder, introducing the story with a terse headline that recalled its initial coverage of Short’s murder. 74 The Herald-Express ran with the tabloid headline “Werewolf Strikes Again,” 75 which assumed that the police assigned to the French and Short cases were looking for the same killer. On February 13th, the Examiner described the crime scene in lurid detail: “Stockings and underclothing were missing. Mrs. French’s powderblue coat with red-fox fur cuffs and her burgundy- hued dress lay over the body. . . . A flesh-colored brassiere was beside her, and her brown leather shoes lay deeper in the field.” Particularly noteworthy was a message scrawled in lipstick on the victim’s midsection: “A taunting obscene phrase and the letters BD,” the killer’s signature, which the reporters logically concluded was “intended to suggest the ‘Black Dahlia.’” 76 Convenient as such an observation seemed at the time, just as likely—and this is something contemporary true-crime aficionados on the Web point out—the message first read as “Fuck you, BD” was instead “Fuck you, PD [police department].” A second oval that turns the P into a B was, or so these Web detectives argue, the killer’s boot mark. Whatever the precise message may have been, the scrawl led the press to dub the assailant “the red-lipstick killer” 77 and this second posed corpse dumped by the side of the road “a sign of the times.” The colorful naming of the killers and their victims—the redlipstick killer, the flying nurse, the Black Dahlia—conferred celebrity upon folks famous only for being victimizers or victims, otherwise-inconsequential nobodies in a city that was otherwise home to such “real” celebrities as movie stars and gangsters. The police launched their investigation into the murder with a really good suspect in mind: Jeanne French’s recently estranged husband, Frank. The couple had split on February 2nd, eight days before the murder, following his arrest for spousal battery—charges that Jeanne later dropped. Frank subsequently moved to a rented room in Santa Monica, a location from which he called Jeanne at 7:00 p.m. on the night of her murder. She was out, and so Frank left a message with another boarder in the rooming house saying that he wanted to meet and speak with his wife “if she [hadn’t] been drinking . . . she [knew] where.”

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Picked up and booked, Frank announced, “Before God, I did not harm my wife yesterday—before your God and mine.” 78 The added qualification, “yesterday,” was at once incriminating and honest; he and Jeanne had been fighting a lot. The remark “before your God and mine” struck the police and the reporters covering the case as somewhat baffling. On February 11th, the Times led with the headline “Another Woman Slain, Victim of a Mutilation Killer.” The Times reporters drew the inevitable connection between the two body-dump killings and pondered Frank French as a possible serial killer. But on the 12th, the Times ran a photograph of Frank French hooked up to a polygraph accompanying a page-2 article under a headline no one in L.A. except Frank French wanted to read: “Lie Test Fails to Link Husband in Nurse Killing.” Captain Donahoe, who was still assigned to the Dahlia case, supervised the interrogation. He told the Times that after two hours of “grilling” and after consulting with the experts administering the polygraph test, he had not acquired “any information that would link [Frank] French with the killing.” 79 Within twenty-four hours, the police had the polygraph results, an alibi (the landlady at the rooming house into which Frank had only recently moved vouched for him), the fact that the boot marks on Jeanne French’s body did not match Frank’s shoes or his shoe size, and a handful of character references: Frank was a World War II veteran, a recently retired career soldier with a twenty-eight-year stint in the Marines; even his stepson, David Wrather, Jeanne’s boy by another father, believed in his innocence.80 Frank French did not kill his wife. Admitting that, the cops had no reason to suspect that he had anything to do with the murder of Elizabeth Short. After they released Frank French, the detectives began to reconstruct the hours leading up to his wife’s death. And though Jeanne French was twice as old as Elizabeth Short and at a different stage in her Hollywood adventure, the investigation led them inexorably and inevitably to the same sleazy bar culture that sprawled from the Pacific Ocean beachfront east to El Monte, north to the San Fernando Valley, and south to Long Beach. At 9:30 p.m. on the night of her death, Jeanne French had a cup of coffee at a drive-in on Santa Monica Boulevard. She moved on to a bar on Venice Boulevard, where she told the barman that her husband “liked dark things” and that he routinely beat her. After telling the bartender that she was “committing her husband to the neuropsychiatric ward at the Sawtelle Veterans Hospital the following day,” Jeanne French ventured to her husband’s boarding house, where she and Frank

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quarreled, the fight punctuated by Jeanne smacking him in the face with her purse as she beat a hasty exit. Jeanne was later seen in the company of a short, swarthy man. According to the coroner’s office, she was killed just before or just after midnight. A night watchman reported that a man who fit the swarthy man’s general description parked Jeanne’s car in a lot on Sepulveda Boulevard at 3:15 a.m., five hours before the body was discovered and three hours or so after the murder was committed. This testimony, along with fresh skid marks in the dirt adjacent to where Jeanne French’s body was dumped, indicated that the killer had probably made his getaway in her car. When the autopsy was made available to the men investigating the crime, it rather damned or blamed the victim (in their eyes, at least), just as it supported the bad-pickup random-murder angle: Jeanne’s blood contained 0.31 percent alcohol, easily twice the legal limit in 1947, virtually four times the limit in 2016. The Times asked women to be on their guard against “possible forays by a degenerate believed in the area.” 81 Investigators began rounding up the usual suspects, “a score of known sex degenerates.” A handful of these suspects got their names in the paper: Robert Durege, a former wrestler, “ailing mentally”; a Palm Springs–based housepainter named George Whitt who had worked at the boarding house three months before the murder and then, after Frank moved out, dated Jeanne several times. Whitt had burned several pairs of his shoes, claiming later that he did so because he was afraid the cops would try to pin the murder on him. But he needn’t have bothered: his shoe size was not a match, either.82 The public’s fascination with the murders of Short and French accompanied a new Hollywood narrative. Readers of the dailies began to appreciate and understand that Hollywood as a geographical site and as a symbol of social and economic transcendence was in the process of becoming quite a different sort of place, that the city of dreams and dreamers had become the site of a new American nightmare.

l.a.: port of missing women A girl like that, come on, was always finding herself tangled up with rough stuff. . . . Hell, it was surprising that more of them didn’t go missing—skip town, run away with a fella, maybe a married guy, or, sometimes, sure, just know too much, simply too, too much. —Megan Abbott, The Song Is You (a fictional reimagining of the 1949 disappearance of the bit-part actress Jean Spangler)

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On January 12, 1950, the Los Angeles Herald-Express ran a story about a grand-jury investigation into the LAPD’s failure to close a number of murder cases, all of which resembled Short’s and French’s. The front page featured the provocative and telling headline “Unsolved L.A. Crimes Ripped by Grand Jury: They Strayed into Port of Missing Women.” 83 The reporters reinforced public perceptions about police corruption, bribery, and collusion with organized crime. And they lent support to an evolving mythology about the murder victims, that they were starcrossed Hollywood aspirants and that their aspirations were unrealistic, their pretensions to the social and sexual freedoms enjoyed by the Hollywood celebrities they so admired brought about their ruin and violent deaths. As the Herald-Express story made clear, by 1950 Short and French were just the two best-known of the city’s many female casualties. They were joined by a long list of murdered young women dumped, literally and figuratively, by the side of the road:

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Gladys Kern—a real-estate agent found, like French, stomped to death, in a vacant mansion she had shown to a dark-haired stranger. Evelyn Winters—found nude and beaten to death; like Short and French, Winters was a “party girl” last seen cruising the bars of downtown L.A. Laura Trelstad—the victim of the colorfully dubbed “madwerewolf sex killer,” who, like Winters, was found strangled and sexually violated, her body dumped in a vacant lot by some oil rigs after a night of drinking in the local bars. Dorothy Montgomery, the “butterfly-murder” victim, whose nude body was found dead under a pepper tree, . . . another casualty dumped by the side of the road. Mae Lorene Preston, AKA Mae Lund, found dressed only in an unbelted blue taffeta kimono, strangled with a clothes-iron wire by the San Gabriel River. Rosenda Josephine Mondragon, her dead body apparently thrown from a moving car, found nude, her right breast slashed, outside 129 East Elmyra Street, near the downtown city hall.

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Louise Margaret Springer, found in the back seat of her car outside 102 West 38th Street, near the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, concealed under a beautician’s smock. Springer worked in a salon just a few blocks from where Short’s body was discovered. She was apparently the victim of a car-jacking gone south.

At the time, the Winters homicide was a noteworthy case. Found dead in March 1947, she was the third barfly-murder in as many months. But unlike Short, who was a wannabe that never was, Winters had once lived a life of privilege as the wife of an established Hollywood player, Sidney Justin, the head of Paramount Pictures’ legal department. According to the Examiner, after the marriage ended in divorce, Winters fell hard and fast; despite a decent settlement, she was soon among the throng of young women moving from one temporary address to another, spending her time in the same Hill Street bars as Short. Well before they ran their sensational headline dubbing L.A. the port of missing women, indeed as early as January 23, 1947 (and just over a week after Short’s body was discovered and long before the postwar list had grown so dramatically), the Herald-Express reported on a seeming trend in the murder of young women in L.A. Under another eyegrabbing headline, “Werewolves Leave Trail of Women Murder Victims in L.A.,” the ace crime reporter Aggie Underwood drew a connection between the Black Dahlia case and seven other murders of women in the Southland, including the 1943 “White Gardenia Murder” of Ora Murray, who was found strangled to death on the Fox Hill Golf Course in what is now Culver City, posed with a white gardenia under her shoulder, her undergarments in tatters, her dress draped across her like a sarong; and the much-publicized 1944 murder of the socialite Georgette Bauerdorf, found dead by her neighbors (including the famed drama coach Stella Adler), in her overflowing bathtub: raped, beaten, and asphyxiated.84 (The cause of death was a cloth jammed into her throat.) To learn more about this subculture of young women living on their own in L.A. in the 1940s, reporters for the Herald-Express consulted an expert, Short’s ex-roommate Lynn Martin: “There are a lot of girls in Hollywood who could end up like Beth Short. . . . Hollywood is a lonely place. . . . There are few places for a lonely girl to go to except into a bar.” Martin’s sad, pragmatic description of the scene made for troubling reading in January 1947. Women roomed together on daily or

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weekly agreements, Martin explained, to save on expenses—a practice that generated a pay-as-you-go transient culture pinned on casual friendships and semiformal business arrangements (the sharing of rent, groceries, etc.). The picture that Martin painted of the L.A. party girl circa 1947 seemed at first the stuff of Hollywood melodrama: “Most of the girls are pretty innocent and well meaning at first. The road downhill is gradual. . . . Sooner or later they become pregnant, and many of them resort to an illegal operation—and sometimes some of them end up like Beth Short.” 85 But, as Underwood appreciated, it was as well an uncomfortable matter of fact. The party-girl culture wasn’t really much of a party for the girls involved. At first glance, Bauerdorf did not fit the lonely-barfly scenario posited by Underwood and Martin. She was the child of privilege; she lived (and was found dead) at the fashionable El Palacio complex on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood, the rent paid by her parents. But the party-girl culture was inclusive—and seductive, too. Though they had little in common, Short and Bauerdorf were acquaintances, if not fully friends; Bauerdorf’s diary reveals that she knew Short from her nights at the Hollywood Canteen, where young women “entertained” servicemen before they shipped out into World War II. Short went to the Canteen to do more than just a public service. Situated on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Wilcox Avenue, the Canteen was a great place to make movie-industry contacts. Getting on a studio lot was difficult. But the Canteen was open to everyone, especially to available young women. The staff at the Canteen rotated and occasionally included movie stars like John Garfield, Bette Davis, and Irene Dunne. On any given night any number of celebrities and studio executives might be seen and photographed there. Short also frequented another watering hole that attracted celebrities, the Formosa Café, across the street from the Goldwyn Studios on the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue in West Hollywood. According to the true-crime writer John Gilmore, Short dallied at the Formosa in the company of the starlet Barbara Payton, where both women chatted and drank with men they hoped might help their careers. The handsome actor Franchot Tone, who would have his own sordid story to tell involving Payton (much more on that in chapter 4), picked up Short one night at the Formosa and took her to an associate’s apartment on the pretense of introducing her to some folks who might someday put her in the movies. As Tone tells the story, recounted by Gilmore, “I thought it was a pickup from the start—she came with

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figure 8. Bob Hope entertaining the troops at the Hollywood Canteen in 1945. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198 /zz0002qn39)

me so easily, but to her it wasn’t anything of the kind.” As Tone recalled their brief encounter, he and Short talked and kissed briefly, and then he gave her cab fare and sent her on her way. For someone so comfortable in the L.A. bar scene and so invested in making it in Hollywood, Short, Tone recalled, did not seem to understand how the game was played.86 The media regarded the murders of these young women as a symptom of an evolving, increasingly dark, wannabe-celebrity subculture—a subculture awash in social and moral crises endemic to a city in which the movie colony held sway. As such, the series of murders of young women became malleable enough to suit most any socially conservative commentary. The screenwriter Ben Hecht, for example, proffered a peculiar theory of the Dahlia killing in the Examiner, viewing her murder as a symptom of a crisis not of unbridled female freedom but of masculinity in general in Hollywood, a place and an industry in which so many gay movie stars led double lives. Hecht opined with conviction, though without any supporting evidence, “In nearly all torture crime cases and mutilation after death homosexuality is the basic motive.” 87

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However dubious such a theory of these crimes may have been, it does speak to a prevalent gossip discourse of the era, one concerned with policing homosexuality in the Hollywood community specifically and amid American celebrity in general. Readers in the late 1940s were, for example, aware of the ongoing problems of the L.A. sports celebrity “Big” Bill Tilden, unquestionably the most accomplished American men’s tennis player of the first half of the twentieth century. Tilden was arrested on November 23, 1946, on Sunset Boulevard, caught with his hand in a teenaged boy’s pants. He was sentenced to a year in prison and served seven and a half months. The former athlete was arrested again on January 28, 1949, after picking up a sixteen-year-old hitchhiker who accused Tilden of “making advances.” He served another ten months. In the years leading up to the scandal, Tilden had been photographed often for the society and celebrity pages in the company of Hollywood movie stars like Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, and Joseph Cotton. Photographs of Tilden at the so-called right parties with the right people proved in the end to be a cover for his attraction to a different sort of Los Angeles nightclub culture, one at which he had to be careful about having his picture taken. The Tilden story was regarded at the time as emblematic and symptomatic of a wider-ranging decadence of celebrity culture. And much as the Fatty Arbuckle, Wallace Reid, and William Desmond Taylor scandals had cast celebrity subculture in a certain cautionary, reformist perspective in the 1920s, Tilden’s story marked another shift in the discourse on American celebrity and stardom after World War II.

the newport harbor murders We had lust, we had greed, we had frustration. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the raw materials out of which murders are made. —Eugene D. Williams, special prosecutor, opening statement at the 1947 murder trial of Beulah Louise Overell and George (“Bud”) Gollum

A second if not secondary narrative emerged out of the dailies’ coverage of the many body-dump murders; Los Angeles began earning a reputation as America’s reigning capital of weird crimes, a place where the style and content of criminal activity reflected the many competing and in many cases oddball subcultures taking root there. The daily photospread on the back cover of the first section of the Examiner routinely featured accounts of such weird crimes, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not of the Southland. Two stories from March 2, 1947, offer a useful sample:

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the first, an animal-cruelty conspiracy, under the headline “Pets Sold for Torture in Night Auction”; the second focused on an unremarkable photograph of fourteen-year-old Albert Jones with the caption “At 14, He Faces Life in Prison,” a sentence earned after the boy’s inexplicable double murder of a playmate (by strangulation) and “a housewife” (whom he shot).88 One of the most intensely followed crime stories of the era covered on the front and back pages involved the murder of Walter and Beulah Overell, whose yacht, the Mary E, burst into flames on March 15, 1947. The explosion, police discovered, was caused by dynamite charges planted on the yacht, which was buoyed just offshore near Newport Beach. The primary—indeed, the only—suspects89 were Walter and Beulah’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Beulah Louise, and her twenty-oneyear-old fiancé, the exquisitely named George Rector (“Bud”) Gollum. Along with the Black Dahlia and the Flying-Nurse/Red-Lipstick murders, these so-called Newport Harbor Murders introduced an increasingly popular notion of a city gone wild, growing too fast and uniquely crazy. Press coverage of the Overell murders and the subsequent trial focused a lot of attention on Louise (the name that she preferred), a teenager engaged to an older man (Gollum) whom her wealthy parents disliked. The papers cruelly described Louise as pudgy, plain, and homely, as “not like other girls her age” because she read books and aspired to go to college.90 (She was at the time of the trial a freshman at USC.) The Santa Ana Register referred to Louise as “a menopause baby, apparently unwanted, misunderstood and unloved; an ugly duckling daughter.” 91 Gollum was four years her senior, described in the press coverage as a man whereas Louise was consistently referred to as a girl or teenager. Their devotion, at least through the early days of the trial, was routinely labeled ill-advised, premature, and disapproved-of, as the press cast Gollum as a con man, despoiler, or adventurer and Louise as the homely girl whose head was turned, her defenses dropped as she was flattered by the attention of this handsome older man. Here again the papers preferred melodrama over truth; and in service to that narrative, they focused intensely on the romantic and sexual nature of Louise’s relationship with Gollum. This particular angle got quite a boost when the Examiner got hold of love letters that the couple exchanged while behind bars. (The letters were leaked by the DA’s office, no doubt because their case in part hinged upon motive.) In a city so tied to the glamorous and beautiful, Louise seemed strategically, fascinatingly cast.

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The melodramatic plot in the story of the Newport Harbor Murders differed from the barfly narrative, resembling instead some turn-of-thecentury literary melodrama—most closely, Henry James’s 1880 novel Washington Square, adapted for the screen in 1949 by William Wyler as The Heiress. In the novel and the film, an ugly-duckling heiress falls for a handsome and ambitious suitor of limited means. Her father disapproves and vows to disinherit her if she marries beneath her station, mostly because he can’t believe any man would, money aside, be attracted to her. In the climax of the story’s second act, the heiress waits for her lover to steal her away and elope, but he never shows. The father, alas, has paid the suitor off, as much to prove a point as to get him out of his daughter’s life. The denouement stages her coldhearted revenge; the father is dead, and the suitor returns to the promise of wealth through marriage. But the heiress leaves him to wait outside, much as she waited for him years earlier. In the sordid L.A. update, Louise is a teenager in love: romantic to a fault, steadfast in her loyalty, and as the press, the police, and the district attorney contended, brought to a desperate act by her parents’ refusal to appreciate her love and by the promise of a hefty life-insurance payoff should both her parents die . . . so, Washington Square meets Double Indemnity. The initial theory of the crime grew out of the coroner’s report, published on March 25, 1947. It noted that the dried blood found on the corpses matched the blood on a hammer found on the boat. The police surmised that the Overells did not die in the dynamite blast but instead were bludgeoned to death (by Louise and Bud) before the yacht exploded.92 The prevailing theory of the crime was that the young couple had planned a body dump at sea. But they were unsuccessful, as a second dynamite charge set on the yacht, ostensibly to fully destroy the evidence, failed to explode.93 The trial became a national sensation; Time and Life and the New York Times covered it. If the Black Dahlia murder had not fully reconfigured Los Angeles in the popular imaginary, the Overell case rather finished the job. The news coverage was sensational and unpredictable. The Examiner, for example, assigned the former silent-film scenarist Adela Rogers St. John, whose column was syndicated across the Hearst newspaper empire, to cover the trial. She did not disappoint, focusing on appearance over reality at every turn. “Whether Louise Overell is guilty as charged or whether she is only an orphan who lost both mother and father, . . . she wears in the courtroom clothes which show no acknowledgment of loss.” For St. John, such bad taste for a girl so

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wealthy, for a young woman so homely, looked bad in more ways than one: “Her heavy hair, dark brown and streaked with henna red, . . . held back by a huge gold pin [was more] suitable for dancing.” 94 While the press coverage assumed a guilty verdict, Louise’s attorney, Otto Jacobs, remarked with justification that the state’s case was built on “possibilities, probabilities, and a lot of myths.” Aiming to create reasonable doubt, Jacobs posited an alternative scenario: that Walter had killed his wife and himself because he owed money all over town. (He did—owe lots of people lots money, that is.) Following Jacobs’s logic, it was Walter (and not Louise and Bud) who had set the charge to go off after Louise and Bud had ventured off the boat—late on the night in question the young couple ventured to shore for hamburgers— because he had no interest in harming them. The key moment in the trial came when an expert prosecution witness testified that a metal screw found in Gollum’s car matched those used in the assembly of the bomb timer. The expert insisted that the screw was extremely rare, used in a very specific sort of watchmaking and repair; the district attorney then posited that the coincidence (that a screw of that type was found in Gollum’s car) was nothing short of remarkable. In preparation for cross-examination, Jacobs went to a local jewelry store and purchased a barrel of identical screws. During his cross-examination, Jacobs emptied his coat pockets, and much to the embarrassment of the expert witness and the prosecutors, the easily found and purchased screws were sent flying and bouncing all over the floor. It was this trial’s “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit” moment.95 When the couple was acquitted, on October 5, 1947, the crowd in the courtroom cheered. The jury had deliberated for nearly eighteen hours, split initially 7–5, then for a while 11–1 for acquittal. Informal canvassing of jurors afterward suggested that several of them were not convinced that the couple was innocent, but nonetheless found reasonable doubt with regard to the state’s case.96 Throughout the trial the newspapers deferred to the romantic scenario of young love thwarted by narrow-minded nouveau-riche parents, a plot line merged with a noir crime story about schemers who commit murder for a life-insurance payoff. After the trial both story lines fell apart. The jailhouse love letters that had been used extensively by the prosecution to supply motive and that had been excerpted in the press to sell papers referred to a relationship that neither Louise nor Bud decided to pursue after the acquittal. Indeed, the two parted company without so much as a gesture of relief exchanged between them.

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As for the life insurance, much of that went to pay off Walter’s debts. As with a lot of folks in Los Angeles after the war, the Overells’ pretense to living well was just that: a pretense. Like Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, Bud may well have killed for the money and the girl and in the end got neither. Louise died alone and young; yet another young woman in L.A. whose dreams—of wealth, of a future with a handsome man, of whatever that degree from the Univesity of Southern California might have set up for her—were dashed by bad choices and too much booze. Indeed, in the years that followed, Louise squandered what little remained of her inheritance. She married and divorced twice and was dead at thirty-six of acute alcoholism. According to the Los Angeles Times, “her nude, bruised body was found in bed in her Las Vegas home with two empty vodka bottles near her head and a loaded, cocked, but unfired .22-caliber rifle at her feet.” Gollum later served time in prison for assaulting a man he found involved with his wife. But he turned his life around after that; he went back to school, eventually earning a Ph.D. in biophysics, albeit under an assumed name. Gollum subsequently had a brief career working for a company involved in weapons design for the Navy, then moved on to real-estate speculation, in which by all accounts he made a small fortune.97 Of the many Southland aspirants discussed here, Gollum uniquely got a decent second and third act; he got ahead, and he got out alive.

chapter 2

Mobsters and Movie Stars Crime, Punishment, and Hollywood Celebrity

Mob activity in Los Angeles dates to the turn of the twentieth century, when Italian street gangs took root in the city’s Plaza District. The gangs accrued around two outfits: the Matranga Family, run at the time by Charles Matranga; and the Black Hand, headed by Joseph Ardizzone. The two gangs eventually fell into conflict, climaxing in July 1906 with Ardizzone’s murder of the Matranga Family member George Maisano. Fleeing a warrant for his arrest, Ardizzone went on the lam, and two months later, in retaliation, Tony Matranga assassinated Ardizzone’s right-hand man, Joseph Cuccia. The Matranga Family maintained control of the Plaza from 1906 until 1914, when Ardizzone returned, beat the rap for the Maisano killing, and exacted his revenge, murdering Sam and Pietro Matranga. During Prohibition, Ardizzone consolidated power in the city’s evolving underworld. And then, upon Ardizzone’s disappearance and presumed assassination in 1931, one of his acolytes, Ignazio “Jack” Dragna, inherited the Family business. The New York mobster Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel arrived in Los Angeles in 1936, bankrolled by Meyer Lansky and Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano.1 A swarthy Jewish entrepreneur living the hell out of the American dream, Siegel assimilated quickly into Los Angeles and Hollywood life. He looked the part as well, like a gangster-movie extra straight out of Central Casting. (See fig. 9.) Because he had Lansky and Luciano’s organization and support, Siegel’s arrival considerably diminished

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figure 9. Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel with his attorneys Max Solomon and Isaac Pacht in 1944. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem .do?ark = 21198/zz0002qkz8)

Dragna’s autonomy and influence. Dragna, who by then had secured the backing of New York’s Lucchese crime family, never liked Siegel, but on orders from New York he dutifully worked with his new rival. After Siegel’s death, Dragna resisted pressure from New York to work with his successor, Mickey Cohen. The bitter Dragna-Cohen rivalry significantly impacted crime and punishment in the postwar era, an era characterized as well by an endemic culture of corruption in law enforcement and entrenched squabbles between the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD).

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movieland mobsters A group of industrialists [have] finance[d] a group of gangsters to break trade unionism, to check the threat of Socialism, the menace of Communism. . . . When the gangsters succeed at what they were paid to do, they [will] turn on the men who paid them. —Orson Welles, movie writer, actor, and director

There is an old joke about the Mafia and the movie business: that when the Mob tried to move in on the studios they failed because they couldn’t figure out how the moguls cooked the books. The joke refers to degrees or styles of criminal accounting; and though funny, the punch line is not fully accurate. Studio operations dating to the 1930s attracted a fair share of Mob financing; money is money, after all, no matter what the source . . . or so the moguls foolishly believed. In a relationship business like Hollywood’s, business relationships easily morph into social relationships, so much so that by the mid-1930s mobsters, moguls, and movie stars commingled frequently and often carelessly. The death of the comic actress Thelma Todd provided an early hint at the peril inherent to these many encounters. Todd was a popular celebrity with over one hundred screen credits, including featured roles in the Marx Brothers’ comedies Monkey Business (Norman Z. McLoed, 1931) and Horse Feathers (McLoed, 1932). She was also a successful restaurateur with an eponymous Malibu nightspot frequented by movie executives, film stars, and mobsters. On December 16, 1935, Todd was discovered in her garage slumped over the steering wheel of her car. The coroner ruled her death a suicide despite evidence—a broken nose, cracked ribs, and a bruised throat—that she had been beaten. Plausible theories persist into her possible murder, with two mobsters as principal suspects: Todd’s ex-husband, Pat DiCicco, and his alleged boss and Todd’s former lover, Luciano, who had at one point tried to use their relationship to gain control of her restaurant to set up a gambling operation on its unused third floor.2 Gangsters and film-industry workers routinely crossed paths at nightclubs, bars, clandestine gambling establishments, and private parties after the war. The private and professional could and often did overlap at these sites, where interactions and relationships were complicated by alcohol and illicit drugs, human trafficking (prostitution), and the occasional “badger” or blackmail plot that might accompany sexual procurement and indulgence, as well as the frequent exchange of cash and credit at card, dice, and roulette tables.

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Professional encounters involving gangsters and film workers were commonplace, given the Mob’s involvement in the organization of the movie industry’s labor force. Anything that required trucks and truckers— and lots of tasks in the production of movies depended on such labor—by contract had to be organized through the Teamsters, and that meant working with the mobster Jimmy (“The Weasel”) Fratianno, who ran the West Coast branch of the union.3 The Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), which was composed of the many crafts, construction, and technical or so-called backstage workers, depended as well upon a strategic alliance with organized crime; the union enjoyed backing from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, which was firmly under Mob influence and control. Just as the war was coming to an end, the CSU and the even more directly Mob-controlled International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) fell into a bitter struggle, culminating in a strike at Warner Bros. in 1945.4 The strike evinced the western-movie cliché about a town “too small for the both of us” and presaged as well the unique politics of unionism during the Red Scare, which was strangely complicated—that is, complicated in a strange way—by the Mob’s role in the Hollywood guild movement. Labor activism was in the postwar era often conflated with Communist Party (CP) membership. The gangsters who organized and profited from the IATSE exploited such a common and reductive assumption, staking a peculiarly effective claim to union leadership and staunch anti-Communist patriotism. At the time of the Warner Bros. strike, the IATSE leadership included Willie Bioff and George Browne: gangsters and fervent anti-Communists. Herbert Sorrell, who was assumed to be a Red (and not a gangster), headed the CSU. Siding with the likes of Bioff and Browne was—and the studio moguls knew this—a dangerous game; doing business with gangsters inevitably benefited a larger criminal enterprise and placed a range of movie-industry players at risk. But working with supposed Reds like Sorrell was a risky business as well. First and foremost on the minds of studio management was the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC), which in 1947 formally conflated union activism with CP membership by asking subpoenaed film-workers two (so far as the committee members were concerned) related questions: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Screen Writers Guild?” and “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”

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figure 10. Willie Bioff, the Chicago gangster who ran the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE), photographed in a Los Angeles courtroom in 1937. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0025gmdb)

By 1945, Bioff and Browne had cleverly positioned IATSE as a “company union,” profiting at once from worker’s dues and strategic agreements with management that often contradicted or diminished the autonomy and financial security of the rank and file membership. Even though Bioff and Browne were dangerous, dishonest, and violent men, they offered studio executives at the time the proverbial deal they could not refuse. The complex relationship between studio managers and gangsters involved in organized labor was hardly a secret in Hollywood after the war. But journalists covering workforce issues knew enough to be careful about elaborating or exposing the relationship. Arthur Ungar, the editor of Daily Variety, reported on Bioff’s criminal connections but quickly got cold feet. Given Variety’s symbiotic relationship with the studios—his publication was, after all, a trade magazine and depended upon the cooperation of studio managers and public-relations men—

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figure 11. Herbert Sorrell (left), the charismatic head of the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), in an angry exchange with the IATSE business agent B. C. (“Cappy”) Duvall (right) during a congressional inquiry into film-industry unions. The Pennsylvania Congressman Carroll D. Kearns (center) tries unsuccessfully to calm Sorrell down. (Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1947: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla .edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002t3h4)

Ungar could go only so far with the story. So he met with the syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler and then introduced Pegler to Carey McWilliams, who had been leading a group of insurgent IATSE members interested in wresting the union away from Bioff. Via Ungar and McWilliams, Pegler got an audience with Screen Actors Guild (SAG) president Robert Montgomery, in 1939, who by coincidence half a decade earlier had recorded a dramatic reading of Pegler’s shocking report from Berlin on Jewish children being bullied in the early years of the Nazi regime.5 Montgomery was fighting a two-front war, so to speak, at SAG: against racketeers and against Communists. In 1937, Montgomery received five thousand dollars from the SAG board, to which he added nearly ten thousand dollars of his own money, to hire private detectives to investigate Bioff. When Pegler agreed to look into the Bioff-Browne-IATSE story, Montgomery handed him the full dossier.

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In a series of columns published in the fall of 1939, Pegler tracked the history of IATSE in Hollywood back to 1933, when the studio moguls, through the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA), forced IATSE out of business on the West Coast, but four years later, as industry unions gained traction, the studios forged a new deal with Bioff and Browne. The deal established a closed-shop contract that compelled twelve thousand backstage workers to join IATSE or be fired. When the union membership protested the deal—albeit a deal made by its own leadership—they called attention to a required pay deduction of 2 percent of their salaries, amounting to, as Pegler reported, two million dollars that went unregulated and untracked to the racketeers. McWilliams persuaded two IATSE board members to file suit, but the legal action went nowhere, and the studios terminated the board members’ contracts. Pegler targeted Bioff in particular, investigating and reporting on a clandestine deal that Bioff had made well over a decade earlier with Illinois criminal authorities that had seen the mobster serve just eight days of a six-month sentence. Pegler tracked the amnesty arrangement to the Illinois governor’s office; and when the governor filed a twentyfive-thousand-dollar libel suit against Pegler’s Chicago paper, the Daily News, Pegler knew he was onto something. The columnist quoted police investigators who had referred to Bioff at the time of his arrest as “a Chicago pander” and slyly reminded his readers that “pander is Ritz for pimp and not a comical Chinese bear.” The libel suit was dropped, and Bioff returned to Chicago to serve his sentence. Pegler then took on Browne, who throughout the Bioff investigation insisted that he had no criminal connections (except perhaps for his obvious connection to fellow IATSE organizer Bioff). Here again Pegler produced sensational results, including hospital reports from a gangland shootout involving Browne. The series of columns did well to expose Bioff and Browne and won Pegler a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.6 The columnist’s exposé created a public-relations problem for studio management. But it wasn’t until 1946, seven years after the exposé, that management finally engineered the ouster of Bioff. His banishment from L.A. was certainly rooted in the investigative work by Pegler, Montgomery, and Ungar, but what finally propelled them into action were Bioff’s frequent photo ops for the newspapers, inevitably with a starlet on his arm, an image that seemed only to formalize the gangster’s insider status. By the end of 1946, Bioff was back in Illinois sorting out the decade-old conviction, and Browne was in jail on a ten-year sentence for

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a racketeering conviction. Bioff returned to Hollywood after settling matters in Illinois, prompting coverage from the anti-Communist and antiMob columnist Walter Winchell: “Don’t look now, but isn’t that Willie Bioff back in Hollywood? Allegedly having secret meetings with movie producers.” The Herald-Express covered the story as well (“His host, who was the general manager of one of the great studios, called him Willie and took him around to meet the Beverly Hills elite.”), as did the Daily News (which alleged that Bioff and his gangster buddies were responsible for “numerous beatings and at least half a dozen unhappy rides for hapless theater owners, small union officials, and others who opposed him”).7 The CSU did its best to publicly characterize IATSE as a gangster union, but the rival organization’s hold on the studio brass involved politics well beyond anyone in the industry’s ability to control. A 1946 CSU flyer, for example, contended that “the gangsters are coming. . . . The payoff boys, slot-machine kings, brothel keepers, and underworld characters. . . . The movie magnates have again allied themselves with the underworld.” 8 The CSU flyer was impossible to refute but for studio management quite beside the point.

missing, presumed dead The only thing we’ve been able to find out is that this girl really got around. —Unidentified LAPD detective commenting on the disappearance of Jean Spangler

Social interactions between mobsters and movie people were not limited to folks with an office or job on the lot or a list of on-screen credits. Indeed, interactions between gangsters and Hollywood fringe dwellers or wannabes became commonplace as well after the war, especially since both subcultures endeavored to profit from chance meetings with real Hollywood celebrities and power brokers. Absent a healthy studio system to formalize the processes of talent discovery and development, making it in the business in this era had come to involve a vague process of meeting the right people at the right places. Access to these right people and entry into these right places was often facilitated or monitored by gangsters, whose interest in those aspiring to movie-industry success involved an exploitation few on the scene could have dreamed of or prepared for. In Hollywood at this time, the all-American striving for success was thus frequently complicated by criminal capitalism. As we continue to

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figure 12. Jean Spangler, movie extra gone missing, October 7, 1949. (“Hollywood Cold Case: Aspiring Actress Left Cryptic Note”: NBC Los Angeles)

examine the bodies lost and found in this era, those left by the side of the road, we find a coterie of ’40s- and ’50s-era Hollywood aspirants, women and men who encountered unluckily and/or stupidly a parallel American dream made possible by hanging out with, having sex with or for the profit of, and eventually participating in criminal activities for the financial gain of gangsters. Case in point: the strange and sadly incomplete story of Jean Spangler. On the evening of October 7, 1949, Jean Spangler kissed her fiveyear-old daughter, Christine, goodbye on the pretense of working an evening movie shoot. She was never seen again. The shoot didn’t exist, but that was hardly remarkable. It wasn’t the first time she’d used that excuse to head out on the town. And it wasn’t the first time she had planned to mix pleasure with business: an evening at the bars and nightclubs drinking, meeting men, and hopefully making connections. The Jean Spangler/missing-person story broke on the 10th in the Los Angeles Times under the page-2 headline “Missing Dancer Sought by Police.” 9 The night in question began with the aforementioned scene at the front door. Spangler had recently won custody of Christine in a bitter court battle with her ex-husband, the businessman Dexter Benner. The story fit a media template of sorts regarding the struggles of working mothers in the film business—so much so that, despite Spangler’s

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relative obscurity as a Hollywood extra, the custody trial had been covered in the Times in August of the previous year.10 On the night in question, Spangler called her daughter two hours after their kiss goodbye— another habit. During that call, she told her daughter and her sister-in-law, who was babysitting, that it looked like she would have “to work the full eight hours” and would probably not return that night. Spangler’s sister-in-law appreciated this second white lie as code, which explains why she failed to report Spangler missing until well over twenty-four hours had passed. The LAPD began their investigation by assembling a timeline for the night in question. Spangler had been seen by the radio personality Al (“The Sheik”) Lazar at midnight on the 7th at the Cheese Box restaurant, on Sunset Boulevard. She was sitting at a booth with two unidentified men, with whom, according to Lazar, Spangler argued. Just after midnight Spangler and the two men left the restaurant together. That was the last time anyone—that is, anyone apt to speak with the LAPD— saw Spangler alive. The Times broke the story’s first big break: the discovery of Spangler’s purse in Griffith Park. Inside the purse the police found a note: “Kirk: Can’t wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away.” 11 The note implied a familiar Hollywood barfly narrative: that Spangler was pregnant and had disappeared while securing an illegal abortion. That she might have fallen victim to a botched procedure seemed as well part of the scenario. The investigation into the note—that is, the search for the possible father in the impregnated-starlet/abortion story—led the LAPD to consider the many men with whom Spangler kept company, a complex and dangerous mix of characters from the celebrity and gangster subcultures. The Kirk in question seemed easy enough to identify: Spangler had just landed a bit part in the Warner Bros. feature Young Man with a Horn (1950), starring Kirk Douglas, a notorious ladies’ man. Douglas panicked at inquiries into his relationship with Spangler and lied to the police about knowing her. In a subsequent interview, he recanted and confessed to a casual encounter and produced an alibi; he was in Palm Springs on the 7th with his entourage. On the 12th Douglas held a press conference to get ahead of the story. Addressing the rumors and suspicions about his fathering Spangler’s unborn and possibly aborted child and an Associated Press report that revealed he had previously lied to the police, the movie star, carefully coached by his attorney Jerry Rosenthal, issued the following rather rehearsed version of things: “I told

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Detective Chief Thad Brown that I didn’t remember the girl or the name until a friend recalled it was she who worked as an extra in a scene with me in my picture ‘Young Man with a Horn.’ . . . Then I recalled that she was a tall girl in a green dress. . . . I talked and kidded with her a bit on the set, as I have done with many other people around on a day of shooting. But I never saw her before or after that and have never been out with her.” The Times reported on the news conference and drew as well from the AP release, including excerpts from an interview with Spangler’s friend the actor Robert Cummings, who confided that Spangler had told him that she was having a casual affair with a new man (who he assumed to be Douglas). Cummings recalled his conversation with Spangler verbatim. “Is it serious?” he asked. “‘Not exactly,” she replied, “but I’m having the time of my life.” 12 The reporters reached the obvious (if unsubstantiated) conclusion that Spangler was referring to Douglas. The similarities between the Black Dahlia murder and the Spangler disappearance proved irresistible to the tabloid press, at least at first. “Fearful that they had another Black Dahlia horror on their hands,” the Los Angeles Daily News wrote on October 10th, “100 policemen and an army of jail trustees searched Griffith Park[, where Spangler’s purse,] ripped and pawed over,” had been found. The reporters added that the police “were more than half convinced that if they do find the girl’s body, it too may be mutilated—as was the body of Elizabeth Short, ‘the Black Dahlia’ when it was found tossed into the weeds on a vacant lot in January 1947.” The tabloid made explicit the connections between the two women: “Like Elizabeth, Jean haunted night spots and the company of men. . . . Like the Black Dahlia, the lost TV glamor girl [Spangler] was always willing, perhaps too willing, to make a sudden, impulsive date with a stranger, regardless of danger.” 13 In a slightly more sober way, the Times affirmed that Spangler indeed enjoyed the company of men: “Investigators yesterday determined that Spangler, missing actress, had plans [on the night of her disappearance] that did not include ‘going to work.’ ” As to “Dr. Scott,” AKA “Scotty,” the reporters contended that he was “well known to Spangler and her coterie of nightclubbing friends.” 14 The Times thus drew an implicit connection between Spangler’s work—getting out there and getting seen on the nightclub circuit (and its putative endgame, graduating from extra work and getting proper screen credit)—and the possible consequences of that work: an unwanted pregnancy, a back-street abortion. All to say, her disappearance jibed, at least at first, with certain postwar Hollywood facts of life; Spangler, like Short, was depicted as one of the

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many young women on the make in a new Hollywood for whom hustling work had become a particularly dangerous game. And as the story evolved to include dangerous games played with and for the benefit of mobsters, the Spangler/missing-person story took on an even more ominous significance.

degrees of separation: jean spangler, movie extra and mobster’s moll Impressions from the postwar period suggest a city of waitresses and carhops wanting to be starlets, hustlers of various sorts in sports coats and large-collared gabardine polo shirts open at the neck, living in single-room rooms or cramped bungalow-court apartments, everybody from elsewhere, nobody putting their cards on the table. —Kevin Starr, California historian

There is no evidence that the LAPD bothered Douglas much after they checked his alibi. And they never looked all that hard for Dr. Scott. Spangler’s disappearance, they surmised, was more likely connected to the gangsters she ran with on the L.A. club scene. First among these gangsters to be interrogated was Thomas Ellery Evans, who had been deported (he was chased out of the city, a common practice at the time) by the LAPD for his alleged underworld activities. Evans had recently returned to L.A. and had been picked up on suspicion of robbery and a possible involvement in the disappearance of the Bel Air widow Mimi Boomhower two months earlier. The Boomhower case, still unsolved today, offered police unsettling parallels to Spangler’s disappearance. The socialite, dubbed by the press “The Merry Widow” (because after her husband’s death she frequented the L.A. club and party scene), disappeared without a trace on August 24, 1949. Her pocketbook turned up days later in a phone booth at a supermarket, and it too featured a note: “Police dept.—we found this at beach Thursday night.” The investigation involved a range of characters from the Beverly Hills and Bel Air social and financial scene as well as some of the same gangsters (including Evans) who would later be questioned in the Spangler investigation.15 In October 1949, the LAPD knew a lot about Evans; he was a convicted opium dealer and a former bodyguard to the gambling-ship entrepreneur and organized-crime figure Tony (“The Hat”) Cornero. What the police really wanted with Evans—he was never really a suspect in the missing-person case—was information about Spangler’s romantic relationship with Little Davy Ogul, whom the papers politely

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described as an associate of the gangster Mickey Cohen. Ogul, significantly, had disappeared two days after Spangler. Getting information on Ogul and Spangler involved first asking questions about Cornero, and that proved to be a problem. Cornero had long been a person of interest to law enforcement, especially to the California State Attorney General Robert Kenney. But as Kenney knew and the investigators would soon discover, Cornero had powerful friends with ties to the California governor Earl Warren, whose office accorded a degree of protection to the mobster and to his partner, an even scarier gangland character, the Russian crime boss Abraham Smickoff, AKA Allen Smiley. In 1949, when law enforcement detained Evans for questioning in the Spangler case, Kenney was still smarting over a strangely thwarted investigation into an incident at Tommy Dorsey’s house a full five years earlier during which Smiley had allegedly amputated the nose of an actor named Jon Hall. Kenney went after Smiley over the incident but failed to produce a single witness willing to testify. Kenney believed that Smiley was somehow involved in Siegel’s murder as well, though that investigation was again stymied by the governor’s office. When the Daily News endeavored to expose Smiley’s criminal organization in the winter of 1947, calling him a “onetime Siegel bootlicker and frequent homicidist,” a contingent from Beverly Hills put pressure on the newspaper to back off. Some of the scariest men in the California Southland, it seemed, had some very powerful friends. And the cops and reporters knew better than to ask who, how, or why.16 Like a lot of Hollywood fringe dwellers, like any number of aspiring performers dabbling for the time being in the extras pool, Spangler had long-standing ties to L.A.’s gangster subculture. She was one of Mark Hansen’s girls, a dancer at the Florentine Gardens, a popular Hollywood nightspot Hansen co-owned with the mobster and vaudeville entrepreneur (and erstwhile press agent for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s Marcus Loew) Nils Thor Granlund.17 Her relationship with Hansen and Granlund put her in the orbits of Cornero, Smiley, Ogul, and Cohen, and she consorted with these men because it got her escorted to the so-called right places, where she hoped she might get discovered. Spangler and Ogul were regulars at Hollywood nightspots frequented by real and aspiring movie stars and celebrity gangsters alike: Slapsie Maxie’s, La Rue’s, Ciro’s, and the Mocambo. Spangler also made the scene at Brittingham’s, a restaurant near Columbia Pictures that had been frequented by Elizabeth Short. Brittingham’s was a convenient hangout, because Spangler occasionally worked at Columbia as an extra, includ-

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ing an uncredited appearance in what would be her final film, That Petty Girl (Henry Levin, 1950), a project that occasioned her brief friendship and a bit of gossipy confidence with Cummings, the film’s star.18 Exactly what Spangler did with and/or for Ogul has been the subject of some speculation. In her hard-boiled novelization of the Spangler missingperson case, The Song Is You, Megan Abbott ponders Spangler’s involvement in a Mob-run picture-peddling/blackmail racket. According to Abbott, Spangler was, in the parlance of the times, “a badger girl,” making her living “on her back,” 19 sleeping with famous men and then stepping aside as Ogul blackmailed them. In a city and in a business so concerned with appearances, yet so fraught with temptation and inevitable impropriety, blackmail became a logical entry point and steady mode of income for gangsters and the young women they escorted around town. Spangler was, in the cops’ view of the case, collateral damage: “Word is [some gangsters] buried her in Griffith Park,” Abbott writes, recreating the cops’ dialogue; “Must have missed the handbag.” 20 Following Abbott’s narrative, Spangler was the victim not of some random encounter (like Short) but instead got disappeared/killed because of her involvement in a criminal enterprise, because she consorted with a professional criminal. Though Spangler’s disappearance was not connected to and did not finally resemble the likely bad-pickup, stranger murder of Short, the two women did have one important thing in common: both were killed in the meantime of a dreamed-of career in show business, in some sad sidebar to the clubhopping pursuit of that one big chance. Short likely left a bar on that fateful night in the late winter of 1947 with someone she knew couldn’t help her, but she went with him anyway, in the meantime. Spangler got caught up with Ogul. He showed her off and got her seen, but in the end got her nowhere near to what she really wanted, what she put on hold that night when she went missing. In fact, Ogul put her not into the orbit of some studio executive whose personal life they planned to compromise—the badger game she played could get you cast, if you got lucky—but instead it put her into the middle of a bitter feud between Ogul’s boss, Cohen, and his erstwhile rival, Dragna. The police investigation led quickly from Douglas and Douglas’ agent, Charlie Feldman—two guys who could have helped Spangler but didn’t—to the gangsters Ogul and Cohen (both of whom seemed interested in Spangler but, sadly, not in her career), to Cohen and Ogul’s rival, Dragna, and, finally, via Dragna, to the gangster Johnny Roselli, a killer and a Dragna associate likely involved in the young woman’s disappearance. Roselli was by 1949 a fixture in the L.A. underworld, a

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figure 13. The gangster Johnny Roselli in 1948. (Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1948: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http:// digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0017ztdz)

convicted bootlegger and longtime Dragna associate who had been indicted along with a handful of other mobsters in 1943 on federal racketeering charges for extorting money from film producers in exchange for peaceful labor relations. Among Roselli’s coconspirators were Bioff (who was later revealed to be an FBI informant in the investigation) and Frank (“The Enforcer”) Nitti, Al Capone’s successor with the Chicago Outfit, who put a bullet through his own brain rather than testify. The Columbia Pictures chief executive Harry Cohn testified on Roselli’s behalf at the 1943 racketeering trial, reflecting upon what he called his “close relationship” with the gangster, which he dated to 1934. The professional relationships between mobsters and moguls

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when these two men first met smacked of expediency; under the financial strain of the Great Depression, some studio executives turned to bootleggers and other racketeers because theirs were among the few businesses in the country with the liquidity, with the cash on hand to finance motion pictures. There were plenty of gangster silent partners in those days, or so the historian Leo Katcher contends: Arnold Rothstein, for example, the Jewish crime boss who fixed the 1919 World Series, was an early investor at Loew’s, the parent company of MetroGoldwyn-Mayer (MGM) Studios.21 The personal relationships between mobsters and moguls were in some ways the more troubling, tied as they were to corrupted notions of celebrity, to an indulgence in a seemingly boundless range of behavior licensed by the pursuit of wealth and power. The seeming friendships betrayed a curious affinity between these men as recent immigrants. The early cinema moguls viewed themselves as outlaw entrepreneurs bucking Edison’s (at root anti-Semitic) Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) trust, surmounting obstacles to their upward mobility as Jewish Americans. Many mobsters of this era rationalized their criminal pursuit of the American dream in similar terms, romanticizing outlaw capitalism, indulging a tribalism bottomed upon an us-versus-them mentality. According to the historian Gerald Horne in his comprehensive study of Mob involvement in Hollywood, Cohn and Roselli indulged something of a bromance; they played tennis and traveled together to Palm Springs to watch and bet on the ponies. They exchanged expensive gifts; Cohn wore the ruby ring given to him by Roselli, and the gangster carried a cigarette case he had received from the movie executive. Over two decades, Cohn lent Roselli a lot of money. The word “lend” is a euphemism here; extortion and blackmail payoffs, as well as clandestine payments on illegal gambling debts, were frequently recorded or referred to as “loans.” Legend has it—and police in the 1940s suspected—that the “loans” were here instead payments by Cohn to Roselli and the New Jersey crime boss Abner (“Longy”) Zwillman for their financing of Cohn’s 1932 buyout of his onetime partner Joe Brandt, which enabled Cohn to take control of Columbia Pictures. Even though the story of Roselli and Zwillman’s secret $500,000 loan to Cohn has persisted since the 1930s, it may well have been just that: a story. Bernard F. Dick, in his monograph The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures, argues that financing for the buyout came from a legitimate source at the Bank of America, A. H. Giannini, and that Cohn and Roselli’s personal and professional relationship

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began after Cohn had become president of Columbia Pictures Corporation.22 (Cohn testified at Roselli’s trial that the two men met in 1934, two years after the buyout.) As Dick’s timeline implies, the so-called loans more likely accounted for another sort of payoff, as labor relations at Columbia were frequently funneled through Roselli. The gangster’s assistance on the labor front involved strong-arming, of course, but he could also be counted on for more subtle work. For example, Roselli negotiated on Cohn’s behalf to get two prospective Columbia cinematographers, both foreign-born and absent the usual guild credentials, into the American Society of Cinematographers. In exchange for the favor, Cohn canceled the studio’s contract with Eastman Kodak and signed with DuPont, a deal that operated in the Mob’s favor. When the Mob took over the Agua Caliente racetrack in Mexico, Cohn was the legitimate face of the deal, and Roselli, an ex-con, a necessarily silent partner. The gangland angle in the investigation into Spangler’s disappearance hinged upon a second tier or aspect to the gangster–movie colony dynamic; in this case, the story of a midlevel soldier in Mickey Cohen’s organization and a comely extra with ambition. Police investigators quickly dismissed the botched abortion story line, because they believed that Ogul’s disappearance two days after Spangler’s was no coincidence. After all, Frank Niccoli, a member of Cohen’s inner circle, had disappeared about a month earlier. Investigators and Cohen himself believed that Frattiano, at the behest of Dragna, had disappeared Nicolli. According to John Buntin in his tour de force L.A. Noir, Frattiano contacted Niccoli, with whom he had worked in Cleveland. And on the pretense of a reunion drink, he lured Niccoli to his apartment, strangled him, stuffed him in a mail sack filled with lime, and then dumped the body at a vineyard in Cucamonga. When Niccoli’s car was later found abandoned at the Los Angeles International Airport, Cohen surmised that his cohort was dead and made an educated guess at who was behind the murder.23 The police connected the dots as well. Niccoli was at the time of his disappearance out on bail awaiting trial, and his failure to appear cost Cohen, who had staked his $50,000 bond. Ogul was also out on bail, and when he failed to appear in court, Cohen was out another $25,000. Given Spangler’s relationship with Ogul, police figured she had just got unlucky: wrong place, wrong time, wrong guy. They figured that the men who killed her probably planted the note about Kirk to mislead investigators. A second gangland theory is worth considering as well, again involving the badger game run by Ogul and Spangler. According to Donald

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Wolfe, “when Mickey Cohen heard that Jean was pregnant [he] sent one of his boys, Little Davy Ogul, to shake down Kirk in Palm Springs. When Kirk’s agent, Charlie Feldman, heard about the shakedown of his rising star, he told Harry Cohn’s pal, Handsome Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli talked it over with Dragna, and the problem was quickly solved— nobody was ever bothered again by Jean Spangler, or Mickey’s goon, Little Davy.” 24 Though Wolfe exaggerates Spangler’s worth to Cohn, the theory of the crime is certainly plausible. Key to both scenarios were fundamental assumptions about how the various subcultures intersected and intermingled. Moreover, key to either possible gangland story was an acknowledgment of the role gangsters played in an evolving, transitional mode of industry discovery. Spangler no doubt got around. She slept with gangsters and club owners, and when her career as an extra got her on the set with a major movie star, she probably slept with him too. Such was the mode and also the cost of doing business in an industry that so valued youth and beauty (Spangler had both), an industry that was in the process of transforming the relationship between owners, management, and talent. The risks involved were evident, but as her sister-in-law reported to the Times, Spangler dutifully dolled up for battle night after night, claiming she was headed off to work . . . which after a fashion she was. Young women have always been disposable commodities in the movie business. In the absence of the old studio Hollywood, in the absence of a physical site for the film industry that women like Spangler could find easily on a map, the drama of discovery got more complicated. The chances of achieving stardom got slimmer just as the liabilities and risks got more varied and in several cases, like Spangler’s, more awful.

mickey cohen and bugsy siegel: how the jews reinvented hollywood I had a hunch that, like a lot of people, he was a frustrated actor and he wanted a movie career. —George Raft, discussing his friendship with “Bugsy” Siegel in 1944 [Mickey Cohen and I] met at mid-stairway, his chunky body pressed sideways facing me. As we stood fitted together like sardines, he said . . . how much he liked my films. In such close proximity to a genuine underworld insider, my imagination raced. —Shirley Temple (Black), in her autobiography Child Star

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Max and Fanny Cohen were among the many Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States fleeing czarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. With their five children, they settled in Brooklyn, in the Brownsville neighborhood, ostensibly exchanging one Jewish ghetto for another. On September 4, 1913, their sixth child, Meyer, was born; he would for most of his life go by the Americanized nickname Mickey. Max died just two months after his son’s birth; the future gangster would never know him. Seeking a new start, in 1915, with Mickey and his four-year-old sister, Lillian, Fanny moved to Los Angeles, settling in yet another Jewish enclave, Boyle Heights, just east of downtown. Boyle Heights was the product of an informal but nonetheless effective urban segregation. Situated on a bluff overlooking the city, it was where realestate agents took Jewish, Italian, and Mexican immigrants when they hit town. It was as a consequence a ghetto, and a rough one, at that. Boyle Heights proved formative for Cohen; he ascended the ranks of the neighborhood’s furtive underworld as a self-styled Angeleno, copping the natty sartorial style of movie-industry celebrities. (Cohen would later run his criminal operation out of a high-end men’s clothing store.) As soon as he had the money to do so, Cohen moved to the tony westside neighborhood of Brentwood, which was practically and symbolically a far cry from the squalor of Boyle Heights.25 Cohen came of age as a young Jewish man, and as a successful criminal capitalist, at a time when Jews ran most of the movie studios. A kinship between Jewish mobsters and moguls developed easily; they were all immigrants or the sons of immigrants and had a self-belief and a work ethic that served them well in their pursuit of the American dream. The novelist and Hollywood screenwriter Raymond Chandler observed this genetic, tribal bond and in the 1940s quipped that he saw “[a] band of studio executives trooping back from lunch one day and paused to marvel at the sight. They looked so exactly like a bunch of gangsters moving in to read the death sentence on some beaten competitor, . . . it brought home to me in a flash the strong psychological and spiritual kinship between the operations of big money business and the rackets. Same faces, same expressions, same manners. Same way of dressing and same exaggerated leisure of movement.” 26 There’s a hint of anti-Semitism in Chandler’s remark that spoke to wider public perceptions about successful Jewish men at the time. But there is as well a surfeit of truth in the generalization. These were men with a shared immigrant experience; the shtetl—the ghetto and the pogrom—was in their blood. As Jewish men, they were denied the con-

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ventional avenues of social mobility enabled by education. Quotas restricted entry into the top colleges and into the professions of medicine, law, and education that Jews would pursue, even dominate in subsequent generations. Harry Cohn’s relationship with the Italian gangster Johnny Roselli might be explained as well by a shared and romanticized notion of themselves as successes of a similar sort. The extent of Mickey Cohen’s engagement with the Hollywood studio and entertainment-industry subcultures was made dramatically apparent in 1950, when his personal phone book was seized by the LAPD and handed over to the Kefauver Commission charged with investigating organized crime. Included in Cohen’s little black book were Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Joan Collins, Eddie Cantor, Ava Gardner, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall.27 That list would a decade later be expanded to include those mentioned significantly in testimony and/or called upon to appear as witnesses during Cohen’s forty-one-day trial for tax evasion: Jerry Lewis, Robert Mitchum, Ben Hecht, and Red Skelton, whose testimony included a remarkable story about seven-figure “loans” that he had received from Cohen. After Skelton stepped down, a tree surgeon from Cincinnati took the stand and testified to paying Cohen to help promote the singing career of his twelve-year-old daughter. Her audition, set up by Cohen, was performed at Skelton’s house. In attendance were Bobby Darin, Edward G. Robinson, Ginger Rogers, Sinatra, Danny Thomas, and Walter Winchell.28 A complex set of quid-pro-quo deals was no doubt in play, as the tree surgeon’s daughter’s audition revealed just how comfortably Cohen operated within the celebrity subculture of postwar Los Angeles. When he asked for a favor, plenty of A-listers answered the call. Siegel, Cohen’s predecessor in Los Angeles, boasted a similarly extensive Hollywood Rolodex, a network of movieland social and professional connections. These connections would be his downfall finally, which we can trace to July 14, 1946, when, in his characteristic rat-atat-tat newswire delivery, Winchell introduced the following item on his radio show: “According to the FBI, a prominent West Coast racketeer is endeavoring to muscle a prominent West Coast publisher out of his interest in a West Coast hotel.” Winchell didn’t name names; but he didn’t have to. Most everyone—significantly Siegel’s bosses back east, the industry players who read the unnamed publisher’s magazine, and Winchell’s celebrity-savvy radio audience—knew that the “prominent West Coast racketeer” in question was Siegel, and they knew as well the

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identity of Siegel’s partner, the publisher of the Hollywood Reporter, William R. “Billy” Wilkerson, a power broker and scene maker who owned three popular nightclubs: Club Trocadero (“the Troc”), Ciro’s, and LaRue’s. Wilkerson was a gatekeeper of sorts for the Hollywoodpower subculture, supervising entry into his clubs and card games, monitoring publicity and gossip in his magazine. He was also an ardent and opportunistic anti-Communist: he used his magazine to police the politics of the industry players who appeared in its pages, eventually lending support to an industry Blacklist even before the Hollywood Ten were handed subpoenas.29 In July 1946, Wilkerson likely thrilled at the coverage from Winchell; he stupidly thought that palling around with gangsters made him hip, tough, and newsworthy. Siegel better appreciated the risk inherent in the notoriety, because it complicated his relationship with the East Coast Mob. Siegel confided his anger and frustration with the radio item to an associate over a telephone that was secretly tapped by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover recounted that phone call in a memo added to Siegel’s FBI file: “Siegel stated the he was going to New York to have Winchell get hold of the Director [Hoover] and bring the Director to him [Siegel]. Referring to the director, SIEGEL shouted, ‘I’ll make sure that cocksucker tells me how he got his information.’ SIEGEL implied that he would take care of the people who furnished the information to the Director when he learned their identity. SIEGEL ranted that all of his money and his friends’ money, everything he had, was tied up in the Flamingo Hotel, and the publicity given this venture by Winchell might prevent him from getting the licenses, hotel, liquor, gambling, et cetera.” 30 Wilkerson uniquely facilitated the intermingling of the movie and gangster celebrity subcultures. Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and Samuel Goldwyn had a regular card game at the Trocadero, a game staged by gangsters where the moguls bet with chips worth $20,000 apiece. Wilkerson’s clubs offered sanctuary for many such clandestine and illegal activities. More publicly, the clubs normalized encounters for a variety of actors and gangsters. Wilkerson’s relationship with Siegel was built upon a fundamental set of disadvantages: the publisher was a degenerate gambler, and his dealings with the gangster and the L.A. Mob were complicated by debts owed and deals fashioned for repayment. Wilkerson was hardly alone in that regard; in Hollywood, if you gambled, you did so at venues controlled by gangsters. And if you lost money—and most everyone did— you had to pay up or, potentially worse, you were asked to perform a

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favor in exchange for the money owed. According to Buntin, in 1944 Wilkerson had a particularly bad run of luck, losing a million dollars he didn’t have. Wilkerson’s friend Twentieth Century-Fox Chairman Joseph Schenck offered some advice: “If you are going to gamble that kind of money, own the casa.” Legend has it Wilkerson took the advice and began long-range planning on a gambling resort: the Flamingo Club in Las Vegas. But just as Wilkerson embarked on the project, Siegel, with financing from Lansky and muscle supplied by Luciano, bullied his way into a partnership.31 At first, Wilkerson enjoyed the publicity attending the development of the Flamingo; he was a colorful character in a town that loved folks who gambled big. But by the fall of 1946, Wilkerson and Siegel’s relationship became strained. And Wilkerson realized how that conflict would likely end. So he relocated to Paris, putting a continent and an ocean between himself and Siegel. In Wilkerson’s absence, Siegel took credit for the project and more broadly for Las Vegas. But there was a karmic price to be paid for stealing Wilkerson’s dream; the gangster would be assassinated on June 26, 1947, just as the Flamingo opened for business, gunned down by hit men hired by his partners Lansky and Luciano. What most contemporary Americans know about Siegel’s rise and fall they have learned from the 1991 Hollywood film Bugsy, directed by Barry Levinson and adapted by the screenwriter James Toback from Dean Jennings’s sprawling biography We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel.32 The film stars Warren Beatty in the title role, which lends a good deal of glamor to the moviegoer’s gangland imaginary, especially as it builds off the Hollywood celebrity of one notorious womanizer, Beatty, to tell the story of another, Siegel. What the film elides—indeed, what Beatty’s amiable star-persona complicates—are the very differences between one sort of movieland celebrity and another. Beatty’s charisma circa 1991 was undeniable and irresistible, and as such it reminds us that stardom is often a matter of style, of looking and behaving like a movie star. The appearance of star quality can thus transcend the reality of the person behind the image. Beatty in 1991 was a movie star posing as a gangster. In the image-bound world of L.A. celebrity in the 1940s, Siegel was a gangster who rather ably posed as a movie star. There was something fundamentally tawdry and gauche in Siegel’s Flamingo venture, something flimsy, disposable, make-believe, like Hollywood, in its execution and promise of escape. The development of the resort resembled nothing so much as a Hollywood blockbuster—

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a high-risk gamble on something over the top in scale and scope. The initial hotel budget was set at a million dollars. Estimates of its actual cost are about six times that figure. Making matters worse for Siegel, a key to the dream he was selling involved living that dream himself. And while that suited Hollywood, it didn’t much impress Lansky and Luciano. On December 26, 1946, the Flamingo opened incompetently, big and badly, and then shut down for repairs, only to open again weeks later more quietly, no longer the subject of fascination and awe that Siegel had bet his life it would be. There were construction and staffing problems and a poor turnout at the proposed December gala opening as a freak rain and wind storm grounded planes meant to ferry A-list celebrities from L.A. to Las Vegas. Lansky and Luciano had by then grown skeptical about the project. They had financed the hotel with their money as well as capital secured from other East Coast Mob families—so they were disappointed and a little embarrassed. The final straw for Lansky and Luciano was undoubtedly the discovery of $600,000 in cash in a suitcase belonging to Siegel’s bagman Swifty Morgan, an amount roughly equal to shares of hotel stock that Siegel had sold on the sly. Taking this as proof of embezzlement, Lansky and Luciano did not give their friendship with Siegel another moment’s thought; he was assassinated the following day. If Siegel saw the end coming—and he should have: he had killed people on Lansky and Luciano’s OK for far less—it is worth noting that among the last things he did on what he knew would be one of his last days on Earth was contact the Hollywood journalist Florabel Muir to thank her for a favorable notice on the Flamingo’s floor show. At the very end, Siegel was still acting the part of the Hollywood entrepreneur. But Lansky and Luciano were quick to offer a corrective: Siegel was, in fact, just some Jewish gangster who had gone farther than his bosses were willing to allow. Siegel’s rise and fall offers an apocryphal postwar L.A. story. He arrived, succeeded, and then died horribly after just over a decade in town. Within a day or two of his assassination, just as photographs of his corpse reposed on a slab at the L.A. morgue ran on the wire services, complete with a misspelling of his name on the toe-tag, two front men for the Mob, Moe Sedway and Morris Rosen, assumed control of the Flamingo on behalf of a consortium of East Coast investors, the most prominent of whom included, of course, Lansky and Luciano.33

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“ the truth about dope ” : the robert mitchum–lila leeds marijuana scandal The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I’ve spent more time in jail. —Robert Mitchum

On August 31, 1948, the popular actor Robert Mitchum, along with his friend the real-estate agent Robin Ford, a young actress named Lila Leeds, and her friend, a dancer named Vickie Evans, met at a house in Laurel Canyon. A joint task force of the LAPD and LASD arrived at the house a while later, executed a drug raid, and charged all four with possession of marijuana. It seemed at the time a lot of firepower to arrest the likes of Mitchum and his friends—and as the story unfolded, it became clear why. The raid stemmed from information gained from a legal wiretap on Mitchum’s former business manager, Paul Behrmann, who was at the time out on bail appealing a conviction for grand theft. According to the Mickey Cohen biographer Tere Tereba, Behrmann was informing on Cohen as part of a plea deal. Their focus, or so Berhmann was led to believe, was the gangster’s “Hollywood sex-and-shakedown operation.” Leeds and Evans were parties to these “badger” schemes; in fact Leeds had rented the house to stage the grift.34 Mitchum was in this story doubly unlucky. He didn’t know that Leeds and Evans were planning to shake him down. Behrmann, who was working in protective custody for Warren Olney III’s California Crime Commission, had already robbed Mitchum and was now helping the police arrest him. And much as law enforcement was using Behrmann to disclose the blackmail schemes run by Cohen, when they got the opportunity to nab Mitchum for illicit drugs, they could hardly resist the public-relations coup. Things got anxious for the Olney Commission when Mitchum appeared in court with the attorney Jerry Giesler, who not incidentally also represented Cohen. The attorney did not disappoint, offering an imaginative defense. Instead of challenging the evidence of Mitchum’s guilt, he instead called for an investigation into the raid that led to the actor’s arrest, arguing that Mitchum was lured to Laurel Canyon as part of a police setup, which they knew to be a stage in an extortion (drug/ sex photo–shakedown) scheme hatched by Leeds and Evans. As such, in the very act of entrapping Mitchum, Gielser argued, law enforcement

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figure 14. “The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I’ve spent more time in jail.” The actor Robert Mitchum (right), with his attorney Jerry Giesler, in court for marijuana possession in September 1948. (Everett Collection)

had become a party to and complicit in the badger game run by Leeds and Evans. The conspicuous omission in the argument was that by one or two degrees of separation, the shakedown could be connected back to Giesler’s other client, Mickey Cohen. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper took a surprisingly broad view of the story. In her column for September 9, 1948, Hopper contended that the Olney Commission raided Leeds’s rented house solely to get headlines. The drug bust involving Mitchum distracted from their (that is, local law enforcement’s) failure to do anything about organized crime in the city. Hopper astutely reminded her readers of the August 18, 1948, failed assassination attempt on Cohen, planned by Dragna and executed by Frattiano, which climaxed in a wild shoot-out on the city streets and the death of Hooky Rothman, a Cohen associate. “A wild rumor behind the scenes here,” Hopper wrote, knowing well that the allegation was hardly wild or a rumor, “is that the police decided to pull this caper with Mitchum in order to draw the heat off the depart-

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ment because of their inability to deliver any kind of a case on last week’s gangster killing of one of Mickey Cohen’s hoodlums.” 35 At the time of the arrest, Mitchum figured his career was over. Indeed, when the police took Mitchum’s statement and asked for his occupation, he replied “former actor.” The L.A. Times’s coverage on September 2nd ran under the headline “Narcotics Arrest Smashes Film Career.” And it seemed a reasonable prognostication. The Times described the site of the bust as “a secluded West Hollywood Hills cabin . . . perched on a hillside with no near neighbors, and well-screened by shrubbery,” as if the actor and his friends had been cast in some gangster-on-the-lam film noir. But after his arrest, Mitchum played a different part from a different movie—that of a contrite young man who had squandered a run of good luck and was willing to take responsibility for his actions on the long shot of a second chance. The arresting officers described Mitchum as polite, remorseful, and philosophical, . . . affirming that he didn’t behave like an entitled movie star. When he was interviewed by the press, Mitchum recounted a simple celebrity backstory: he had arrived in Hollywood with only twenty-six dollars to his name and, shucks, things had gone pretty well for him, at least until the arrest. So if the marijuana bust meant that his career was indeed over, well, it was fun while lasted.36 While Mitchum seemed to take the bust in stride, Giesler’s presence at this side implied anything but a casual attitude about the trial. Giesler was midcentury L.A.’s most successful and sought-after lawyer. His client list included Mickey Cohen, Charlie Chaplin and Errol Flynn (paternity cases, statutory rapes), Marilyn Monroe (her divorce from Joe DiMaggio), the movie producer Walter Wanger (for whom Giesler won an acquittal on charges of assault with a deadly weapon after Wanger opened fire on an agent who flirted with his wife, actress Joan Bennett), the choreographer–film director Busby Berkeley (for second-degree murder after Berkeley, driving drunk, caused a car accident that killed two people), Lana Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane (for murdering Turner’s gangster boyfriend, Johnny Stompanato), and George Reeves’s mother, who, after the death of her son, the actor who famously played Superman on television, hired Giesler to compel the LAPD to investigate his death as a murder and not, as in the coroner’s report, a suicide. On January 31, 1951, well over two years after his arrest, Mitchum’s conviction was overturned as a district court affirmed Giesler’s claims about entrapment: “After an exhaustive investigation of the evidence and testimony presented at the trial, the court orders that the verdict of

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guilty be set aside and that a plea of not guilty be entered and that the information or complaint be dismissed.” By then Mitchum had served out his sentence: fifty days split between country jail and a prison farm. After his release, Mitchum was asked about his stint at county, to which he replied: “like Palm Springs, but without the riff-raff.” He could afford to be glib; he had by then resumed his career, his star image somehow enhanced. As the Mitchum case revealed, Giesler moved freely in and between the gangster and movie-industry subcultures. He fulfilled as well a role in a popular moralistic template, proffered by the gossip columnists and rather widely embraced by their readers, in which privileged celebrities did bad things but never had to pay for their crimes because of smart lawyers like him. Louella Parsons routinely bemoaned how celebrities used their fame and wealth to skirt justice. But when she found herself in a jam, she too went to Giesler for help. In 1939, Thomas Wood, writing for the Saturday Evening Post, published an article titled “The First Lady of Hollywood,” which dubbed Parsons “the most consistently inaccurate reporter who ever lived” and described her as “a damply sentimental woman” who “started her day with a tumbler of whisky.” To a long list of character defects, Wood added accusations of nepotism and influence peddling—“through osmosis, other members of her family became infected with prosperity,” he wrote, alleging that Parsons used her clout to get her daughter, Harriet, a studio job.37 In The First Lady in Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons, Samantha Barbas unpacks the story behind the Post exposé: Wood was a former employee of Parsons as a so-called leg man, tracking down leads and stories, who, in 1937, after falling out with his by-then former boss, submitted a scathing piece on Parsons to the New Yorker, which the editor, Harold Ross, turned down. Undaunted, Wood then contacted the screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (The Grapes of Wrath: John Ford, 1940) and the gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky to work the piece into publishable form. Johnson and Skolsky agreed to help provided that their involvement in the rewrite was not made public. Such was their fear of Parsons’s retribution at the time. To discuss the filing of a libel suit against Wood and the Post, Parsons met with Giesler, who told Parsons what she already knew but didn’t want to hear: that the Post piece was cruel but, like her own work, not technically libelous. At Parsons’s insistence, Giesler filed suit anyway, but when the case stalled, as he knew it would, it was withdrawn at her request. Predictably, Parsons got a modicum of revenge. After discovering Johnson’s editorial efforts

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on Wood’s behalf, on November 25, 1939, in a snide sidebar, Parsons wrote: “I ran into [Johnson’s wife, the actress] Doris Bowdon last night; she used to be such a pretty girl before she got married.” 38 Giesler was a common denominator in the intersecting worlds of Hollywood celebrities and gangsters. And he played a minor role as well in the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder. When Dr. George Hodel faced accusations of incest made by his daughter Tamar, through his Hollywood celebrity connections (most likely John Huston), Hodel met with and ultimately retained Giesler. Here again we see the fluidity of the Hollywood and L.A. subcultures after the war: gangsters, movie stars, celebrity families, and an L.A. doctor who may or may not have known and killed Elizabeth Short, all with one degree of separation from an attorney whose services proved consistently useful when celebrity and crime uncomfortably converged.

mickey cohen and the seven dwarfs I’m not an educated man, but I’ve read some history. Every kingdom comes up bloody. Every castle is built on a pile of bones. When I came out here, L.A. was nothing. Back east I was a gangster; out here I’m God. —Mickey Cohen

Albert Marsden Pearson ran Sky Pilot Radio, a small electronics shop in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, southwest of downtown. On March 19, 1949, seven of Cohen’s so-called associates turned up at Sky Pilot and with the enthusiastic support of an assembling crowd mercilessly beat Pearson nearly to death. Cohen went after Pearson at the behest of a Los Angeles police captain named Harry Lorenson, inflicting the beating only after the cop and the gangster spoke privately at a downtown restaurant gloriously named Goodfellow’s Grotto. At the Grotto, according to Terebe, Lorenson gave the go-ahead to Cohen, adding that “the scheme [to harm Pearson] had the seal of approval from Mayor Fletcher Bowron.” 39 Pearson was a bad guy; unfavorable ratings with the Better Business Bureau, including two reports of physical attacks on female customers with whom he had disputes; and five recent arrests for a variety of petty hassles and altercations. The one story most newspaper readers knew about Pearson involved a sixty-three-year-old widow named Elsie Phillips, who had failed to pay Pearson $8.91 on a radio repair bill. Pearson won a judgment against Phillips, and then, when she couldn’t pay up,

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forced the foreclosure of her house, then bought the house from the bank for $26.50.40 To stay in what was once her own house, Phillips— who, just to make the melodrama more handkerchief-worthy, was at the time the primary caregiver of her grandchild—began paying Pearson rent. If there was one thing that the cops, the gangsters, the press, the daily-newspaper readers, even the shopkeeper’s own daughter could agree upon, it was that if anyone had ever deserved a good beating, it was Albert Pearson.41 And that is exactly what he got. The story broke in the Times on March 20th under a page-1 headline: “Man in Long Dispute with Tenant Beaten.” 42 The story proved to be very much front-page news. After exiting the scene of the beating, Cohen’s men were stopped and then arrested by a couple of LAPD rookies following a traffic stop for making an illegal U-turn. The officers dropped the men off at the Wilshire Station, out of which Lorenson worked his beat. When news of the arrest reached Lorenson’s colleague Detective Lieutenant Jack Swan—who, reporters later learned, was in on the arrangement between Lorenson and Cohen—the gangsters were quietly released, and their personal effects, which included guns and other weapons, were returned. Cover-up complete . . . or so Swan thought. Unbeknownst to Swan or Lorenson, an amateur photographer had stumbled upon the traffic stop and had taken some snapshots of the arrest, including some good pictures of Cohen’s men being frisked. The photographer then drove to the Times city office, hoping for a modest payday. The night editor perused the photos, failed to recognize Cohen’s men, and passed. Concluding that his pictures weren’t worth much, the photographer left the office empty-handed, leaving the photographs on the editor’s desk. Later that night, a reporter working the crime beat spied the pictures and recognized the seven men, all Cohen soldiers: Neddie Herbert, Eli Lubin, Harold Meltzer, Frank Niccoli, Davy Ogul, Jimmy Rist, and Lou Schwartz. Someone at the Times then tipped off Cohen, who at 4:00 a.m. turned up at the newspaper office and pulled five one-hundred-dollar bills from his money clip.43 The newspapermen turned him down. Tracking back, the reporters caught wind of the arrest and release of the seven men and started asking questions. They discovered that Pearson had recently filed suit against Lorenson (who they knew worked at the Wilshire Station) for $45,000, alleging that the policeman was conspiring to destroy his business. And they discovered why: before the beating, Lorenson had begun paying Phillips’s rent and had taken up a collection to cover attorney’s fees in an effort to sue Pearson and recover

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the house for the widow.44 Someone at the Wilshire Station had covered up the traffic stop and arrest for weapons possession. Lorenson certainly had motive and opportunity. Then Mayor Bowron stumbled into the story. On March 24th, under the headline “Mayor Offers Apology to [Los Angeles County Sherriff] Biscailuz,” Bowron publicly apologized to the sheriff after carelessly remarking to a Times reporter that he didn’t believe the stories circulating about the Wilshire Station, that Cohen and his gang generally avoided interactions with the LAPD, keeping to jurisdictions patrolled by the LASD outside the city limits. Although the remarks were basically accurate—they spoke to a truth (of the LASD’s relationship with Cohen) necessarily kept under wraps at City Hall—they also spoke to Biscailuz’s juice in Los Angeles County, evinced by the mayor’s ready apology.45 When Bowron discovered that the rumors about the Wilshire Station were true, he suspended and then sacked both Lorenson and Swan.46 The Times reporters kept working the story and discovered why: Pearson’s beating involved collusion between law enforcement and gangsters. What began with photographs taken by a teenaged amateur left on the desk of a busy and clueless night editor at the Los Angeles Times became one of the biggest crime stories in the city’s history, and with the evolving story came a significant unraveling of Cohen’s criminal empire. The Times found the perfect frame for the story in an editorial cartoon depicting the widow Phillips as Snow White and Cohen’s henchmen as the Seven Dwarfs, which gave a Hollywood vibe to this complex story of street violence, police collusion with organized criminals, and a mostly botched bureaucratic cover-up. A grand-jury investigation into the Lorenson-Cohen connection was followed by a criminal trial with Cohen’s men accused of assault and battery. The untidy situation proved a significant distraction for Cohen, especially as it prompted a series of bold moves by Dragna, who with the support of the Cleveland Mob began to take back his turf. As mentioned earlier, while out on bail first Niccoli and then Ogul disappeared. When neither appeared for his next appearance in superior court, Cohen testified before Judge Thomas Ambrose that his cohorts had met with foul play—that the word on the street was that Dragna had had them killed. But absent identified corpses, Ambrose operated under the assumption that the two men were more likely on the lam, an assumption supported by rumors, likely started by Dragna, that Niccoli had been seen lounging about in Mexico. (Niccoli’s car, after all, had been found abandoned at LAX.)47

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figure 15. The L.A. crime boss Mickey Cohen in court in 1949. Front, from left: Edward Herbert, Mickey Cohen, Frank Niccoli. Rear, from left: James Rist, Eli Lubin, Louis Schwartz. (Los Angeles Times, May 4, 1949: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla .edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0017r8s7)

The Times dutifully covered the gang-war angle. For the story “Missing Cohen Henchman’s $50,000 Bail Jeopardized,” a Times reporter quoted Cohen audibly muttering that Niccoli was “gone . . . dead.” According to the Times, Cohen appeared visibly rattled by the news, even as he tried to later dismiss the remark about Niccoli “as a gag.” 48 On September 4th, the Times used the discovery of Niccoli’s keys in a sewer drain to cast doubt on the notion that he had simply skipped town, pointing out that the keys fit an empty suitcase found in the gangster’s house, a suitcase he would have certainly used had he left the country.49 One month later, Sherriff Orrin O. Brown and his wife spotted “a swarthy man” resembling the APB description of Niccoli hiding out in the Stanislaus National Forest in Sonora, California. The story prompted the search of some thirty cabins. When the search proved futile, the Times used the news story to further imply Niccoli’s demise.50

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Before Ogul’s disappearance became a fascinating sidelight in its coverage of the misadventure of Jean Spangler, the Times reported on the likely connection between his disappearance and Niccoli’s. “Dave Ogul, chauffeur and bodyguard of mobster Mickey Cohen,” an October 13 Times article began, “was reported missing last night, the second Cohen associate to drop from sight in the past six weeks.” When LASD deputies went to Ogul’s apartment, accompanied by Cohen and his attorney— here again the relationship between Cohen and the LASD was affirmed— they found nothing missing: like Niccoli, if Ogul had skipped town, he didn’t bother to pack.51 Cohen then urged the remaining five dwarfs to return to jail, where they might be kept safe as the story took on surreal dimensions.52 Following nearly eleven months of investigation, grand-jury indictments, and a trial closely followed by the press, in March 1950 Cohen and the five remaining dwarfs were acquitted.53 The Pearson case was hopelessly complicated by police corruption and complicity, which had prompted the ouster of Swan and Lorensen as well as assorted related probes ordered by Bowron’s office. The outcome of the assault trial seemed in the end a minor detail, even though the beating of Al Pearson was the event that set the Times’s story in motion. No one seemed inclined to defend Pearson during the trial; indeed, Hazel Peterson’s testimony captured the mood at the sordid story’s end when she described her father-in-law as “a crook and chiseler.” 54 After the acquittal, Cohen became, briefly, a media darling, thanks especially to an article in the Times titled “Cohen Pays All Debts on Widow’s Home,” a piece that introduced the ridiculous notion that Mickey Cohen was in some way a modern-day Robin Hood.55 (Cohen had indeed paid off the lien against Elsie Phillips’s home before the trial began, which in retrospect seemed at once to confirm a motive for the attack and to excuse it.) The Robin Hood story was no doubt good public relations, but Cohen appreciated how the Pearson incident and ensuing legal issues had weakened him in his struggle with Dragna and the Cleveland Mob that backed him. He had been acquitted, of course; but looking back, it had been a rough year. Frattiano had killed Hooky Rothman in a failed attempt on Cohen’s life the previous summer. And two of the ersatz seven dwarfs, Niccoli and Ogul, were no doubt dead. So in the autumn of 1949, as Cohen wondered where he might find some peace and serenity in such a perilous city, he had an epiphany. As Buntin characterizes this moment: “The constant attempts on his life, his miraculous escapes from death—it was enough to make a man think

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of Providence, for as the Psalms said, ‘It is thou, Lord, only that makes me dwell in safety, . . . [and so] in the summer of 1949, God came calling [on Mickey Cohen] in the form of an unlikely duo: a wiretapper named Jimmy Vaus and a charismatic young evangelist, Billy Graham.” 56

shakedown on the sunset strip In the box are names of dignitaries of the screen and radio and executives of responsible positions in many great industries. Publication of their names would be ruinous to their careers and cause them great public disgrace. I order the exhibit sealed. —Judge Joseph L. Call, following the May 1948 arrest of the so-called Hollywood Madam, Brenda Allen, during which police seized of a box of index cards with the names and addresses of Allen’s clients

Jimmy Vaus was a tinkerer—an electronics whiz.57 He was living at and managing an L.A. apartment building when he became convinced that a neighbor was operating a prostitution business. So he called the vice squad. One thing led to another, and before long Vaus found himself an entrepreneur with a start-up venture providing audio surveillance, wiretapping, even caller-ID equipment for the LAPD’s fight against prostitution, bookmaking, and racketeering. Vaus was very good at his job, which was a good thing because the investigation evolved quickly, moving on from Vaus’s neighbors to the city’s best-known and, as things played out, best-protected madam, Brenda Allen. Vaus’s handler, an ambitious young vice officer from the Hollywood station named Charles Stoker, used Vaus to get at Allen and stumbled upon an even bigger target, as it became clear from the wiretaps that Allen enjoyed (and paid for) protection from Mickey Cohen.58 As Vaus recounted in his 1951 memoir Why I Quit Syndicated Crime, Stoker had a grudge against Allen from the outset: “I’m out to get that woman. . . . She causes me more embarrassment! Whenever I pick up one of the gals [a prostitute not working for Allen] she howls to high heaven because I won’t let her earn a living, while Brenda is running full blast.” 59 Stoker had little interest in the “gals” in question, many of them wannabe starlets in the process of delaying, financing, or just giving up on their Hollywood dream. He was far more interested in the protection racket that allowed Allen to pimp them out. He figured Cohen was behind the scheme. But with Vaus’s help he discovered the awful truth . . . a truth that included but did not exactly end with Cohen.

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figure 16. The notorious Hollywood Madam Brenda Allen flanked by her attorneys Max Solomon (left) and John J. Bradley (right) in 1948. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http:// digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002ns0s)

Stoker misread and underestimated Vaus from the start. The young wiretapper hailed from rural Oklahoma. And he was the son of an evangelical preacher. Stoker figured he was a bit of a hayseed. The truth of the matter was that Vaus had ventured to L.A. to escape a criminal past. Before he hooked up with the LAPD, Vaus had assembled an arrest record as a petty crook—a record he smartly concealed from Stoker, who carelessly treated Vaus like some wide-eyed farm-boy volunteer (as opposed to valued employee) in the good fight against L.A. vice. Among the many things Stoker failed to recognize about Vaus was that the young wiretapper had aspirations and financial ambitions as an

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independent surveillance contractor. And since Stoker did not always pay for services rendered, it was only a matter of time before Vaus enlarged his client base. Vaus’s second client was an L.A. private detective named Barney Ruditsky, who after a long and mostly reputable career in the NYPD had ventured west and quickly secured studio bosses and gangsters among his L.A. clientele—including, early on, Bugsy Siegel, for whom Ruditsky tracked deadbeats and collected debts. One of Vaus’s first assignments for Ruditsky was the very sort of glamorous endeavor a young wiretapper in ’40s Hollywood might have dreamed about: securing proof of the latest accusation made against Errol Flynn concerning yet another of the actor’s many dalliances with an underage girl. The case keenly interested Vaus, because it put him in touch with and up close to the life of a real Hollywood movie star. After Vaus secured audio evidence in the Flynn case, Ruditsky introduced the wiretapper to his associate Harry Grossman, a former sheriff’s deputy and current employee at the Associated Security Council, Rudtisky’s company. Grossman quickly appreciated Vaus’s talents and introduced him to Cohen.60 There is little doubt that Vaus did not fully apprehend how much and how fluidly the lives of movie stars and gangsters intersected, how easily a job listening in on Flynn might lead to a steady gig working for Cohen. As Buntin tells the story, Grossman escorted Vaus to Cohen’s base of operations, Michael’s Exclusive Haberdashery, a clothing store on Sunset Boulevard. Cohen handled the introductions with a simple albeit unnerving statement of fact: “I understand you’re the man who planted a microphone in my home for the police department.” Vaus played the scene carefully and at the end of the meeting found himself in Cohen’s employ as a consultant. At Cohen’s behest, his first task was to design debugging equipment, which Vaus then used to locate and disconnect the bugs he had designed for Stoker, devices that had been planted in Cohen’s home by the LAPD.61 Vaus began playing each of the many sides, the conflicting clients, against the others. In doing so he discovered that the differences between the primary adversaries—the cops and the crooks—were less obvious than he had initially assumed: the vice squad, he soon discovered, was using his information to extort money from Cohen and from Allen, not to fashion criminal cases against them. The cops, he discovered, were running protection, extortion, and blackmail rackets. Stoker and Vaus’s worlds were changed by a seemingly unrelated event, the arrest of Cohen sidekick Happy Meltzer (AKA Harold Fried,

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Harold Mill, Herbert Mason, Harry Levy, Allen McNeese, Harry Miller, and Harry Hirsch) on gun charges. By then disillusioned with the police, and miffed that they seldom paid for his work (say what you want about gangsters, they always paid for services rendered), Vaus agreed to help Cohen help Meltzer by exposing, via audio surveillance, a clandestine business relationship between Allen and two vice cops— Sergeant Elmer Jackson and his boss, Lieutenant Rudy Wellport—a relationship Vaus had discovered quite by accident while working for Stoker during the cop’s investigation of Allen.62 There were rumors about Jackson and Allen: that they were lovers, that Jackson provided Allen’s business police protection. Both rumors gained traction after an incident on the night of February 21, 1947, when Jackson thwarted a robbery of Allen outside her apartment and in the process shot and killed the perpetrator, one Roy (“Pee Wee”) Lewis. The shooting required an explanation, and predictably, necessarily, Jackson lied, telling investigators that Allen was a stenographer and he was just dropping her off after a long day’s work. Vaus had separately learned about Jackson and Allen and about how well their relationship was protected within the LAPD. While Vaus was on a routine stakeout with Stoker, Allen stumbled upon the two men eavesdropping. Keeping her cool, Allen warned the men that it would be in their best interest to back off, implying her business arrangement with Stoker’s superiors Jackson and Wellport. Vaus could hardly miss the significance of Stoker’s reaction. He transferred out of vice, took the sergeant’s exam, and tried to wash his hands of the whole affair. But then, in a cruel twist of fate, after passing the exam, Stoker was assigned once again to vice, and once again had to decide what to do about Jackson and Allen. Meanwhile Vaus continued to work for Ruditsky, and one of his clients, Sergeant Guy Rudolph, a confidential aide to L.A. Police Chief C. B. “Jack” Horrall who specialized in matters pertaining to vice. It was Rudolph who had urged Stoker, for the good of the department, to stay away from Allen. Acknowledging the conflicting interests of Ruditsky’s various clients, Vaus decided to make a bold play. He met with Cohen and hatched a plan. Following the meeting, Cohen contacted Wellport and Jackson, ostensibly to discuss protection for Allen. Cohen arranged a meeting and hired Vaus to record it. The men met, and Wellport and Jackson tried to shake the gangster down for his dealings with Allen. But to their surprise, the gangster refused to pay up. Cohen then handed Vaus’s illicit tape of the meeting to Meltzer’s attorney, Sam

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Rummel, who declared quite out of the blue in his opening statement at Meltzer’s trial: “We will prove that for a period of one and a half years before Meltzer’s arrest, Lieutenant Rudy Wellport and Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson kept up a constant extortion of Mickey Cohen.” Much to the district attorney’s surprise, Rummel then recounted the whole nasty mess: Allen’s payoffs, Jackson’s shakedowns, the extensive complicity between the LAPD and the proprietress of the city’s most notorious brothel. The sordid story undid the careers of Jackson, Wellport, and eventually Stoker, who was, in the aftershocks of the Meltzer case, framed by a shady policewoman named Audre Davis ,63 no doubt as payback for his role in uncovering the Jackson-Allen conspiracy. Davis was (not incidentally) the granddaughter of an L.A. organized-crime figure named Charlie Crawford and the daughter of the former Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Homer Cross, whose retirement had recently and coincidentally been filled with a cushy emeritus gig in Las Vegas—where, as everyone knew, the Mob had established considerable influence.64 Soon after the Jackson-Allen scandal, Horrall retired, making way for, first, the retired United States Marine general William Worton and then Bill Parker, to whom Stoker had confided his suspicions about Jackson and Allen before his arrest. Parker, who promised at the outset to reform and modernize the force, held the position of Los Angeles Chief of Police from 1950 until his death, in 1966.

mickey cohen meets billy graham in downtown los angeles God never takes away something from your life without replacing it with something better. —The Reverend Billy Graham Naturally, I was a little bit uncomfortable in the hands of all those church people. —Mickey Cohen

Working for Cohen and Ruditsky was complicated. It often involved complicity in some sort of illegal activity, and Vaus began to wilt under the stress. As Buntin recounts the story, in November 1949 Vaus reported to Cohen’s house in Brentwood on routine business, but the gangster wasn’t home. His next stop was a bar on Washington Street, downtown. After a couple of drinks, he continued east on Washington, where, at the corner of Washington and Hill, in what was at the time a

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figure 17. The evangelist the Reverend Billy Graham with the former actor and professional wrestler Theodore (“Tiny”) Roebuck at the Hollywood Legion Stadium in 1951. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu /viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002pdb3)

popular shopping district several blocks northeast of the University of Southern California, he spied a revival meeting in a pitched tent. (Just to fill out the scene: the huge tent was rented from the Ringling Brothers, so the show had on several counts a show-biz vibe.) There a young Baptist preacher from North Carolina named Billy Graham was issuing a sermon that stopped Vaus cold; he was sure that Graham was speaking directly to him: “There’s a man in the audience tonight who has heard this story many times before, and who knows that this is a decision he should make. . . . This is your moment of decision.” 65 Vaus’s conversion—his return to the church and to the Gospel taught to him

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by his preacher father—was instantaneous and complete. He abandoned the sketchy business of surveillance and, as the Times reported the following autumn, he was truly born again (again): “J. Arthur Vaus, the wire tapper of Brenda Allen and Mickey Cohen notoriety, is now tapping the souls of the sinful at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cambridge, Mass.” 66 Graham had “a genius for networking,” writes the journalist Cathy Lynn Grossman, “long before that term was a verb.” Indeed, as Grossman reports, the success of Graham’s 1949 L.A. mission was built upon a strategic bringing together of “contacts from his early preaching days with Youth for Christ, the powerful Christian Businessmen’s Committee of Los Angeles, and hundreds of local pastors.” Building upon a foundation in the evangelical community locally and nationally, Graham’s message, pulsating amid the sensation that was his revival show, reached out to and brought together quite literally under one tent many among the lonely denizens of the city’s bar culture, Hollywood’s aspiring actors and actresses, and the assortment of anonymous transients who had ventured to and summarily disappeared in Los Angeles after the war. The tent show attracted an estimated attendance of 350,000, assembled over the course of nearly two months from September to November 1949. Included as well among Graham’s new acolytes was a former World War II P.O.W. named Louis Zamperini, one of the thousands of damaged veterans wandering the streets of late-’40s Los Angeles. On October 23, 1949, Zamperini stumbled upon the tent show and heard Graham intone, “If you suffer, I’ll give you the grace to go forward.” Like Vaus, Zamperini would later claim that it was as if the preacher had been talking directly to him.67 And, again like Vaus, Zamperini became an evangelist for the Billy Graham Crusade.68 Precisely why Graham had come to L.A. is a complex story. No doubt he appreciated the challenge, but he also appreciated the political opportunity. Inherent to Graham’s evangelical message was a fervent anti-Communism. “Guns are not enough to stop Communism,” Graham intoned from the stage; “only God can hold it back.” This was for many in Blacklist-era Hollywood a particularly timely message. Graham appreciated as well the symbolic relevance of Hollywood in the American imaginary. As the Times quoted him: “The return to religion in Los Angeles has brought rejoicing to the hearts of millions throughout the nation.” 69 In an era of cultural and political retrenchment (and not coincidentally box-office decline), Graham figured, what many

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Americans needed was permission to fall back in love with the movies. But first, the movie colony needed to earn the public’s trust . . . through him. And complimentarily, Graham’s larger ambitions for his church and for his own inevitable celebrity required the trust and cooperation of movie people. Throughout the fall of 1949, Graham exploited photo ops with Hollywood’s politically conservative contingent, including the director C. B. DeMille, an anti-Communist activist. The tent show attracted as well a stream of high-profile industry workers, especially as folks began to appreciate how they might use a photo op with Graham to quell inquiries into past political activity. For example, in the fall of 1949, a photograph of Katharine Hepburn posed with Graham was circulated to the press. Hepburn was one of the founding members of the Committee for the First Amendment and had been a featured speaker at a rally supporting the left-leaning former vice president Henry Wallace, where she read from a speech penned by the Communist screenwriter and future Hollywood Ten defendant Dalton Trumbo: “Silence the artist, and you silence the most articulate voice the people have. Destroy culture, and you destroy one of the strongest sources of inspiration from which a people can draw strength to fight for a better life.” 70 These were the sorts of associations and statements that could get a star in trouble in those days. However cynical, posing with Graham in 1949 proved to be a smart public-relations move for Hepburn, a small price to pay for safe passage. Such photo ops helped Graham as well; celebrities made the big story of his L.A. crusade even bigger. Just as Graham was about to close down his tent show, reporters for the Times caught wind of his relationship with Cohen. The story had to be carefully managed; Graham was a popular figure, and the Times could not appear to be gunning for him. On November 16th, the Times cautiously broached the subject with an article titled “Evangelist Will Remain Silent on Cohen Matter,” in which Graham refused to discuss any “attempt to convert the mobster,” because the matter was between Cohen and Graham, and by extension, Cohen and God. When Graham returned to L.A. in February 1951, the Times was decidedly less careful about the story, as the newspaper dispatched several reporters to cover a planned confab with Cohen. On February 20th the Times ran with the suggestive page-1 headline “Cohen, Graham Break Bread—Maybe Twice,” offering a mostly tongue-in-cheek account of Graham’s reunion with the mobster. The key to the story lay in the headline’s penultimate word: “Maybe”: “Mickey Cohen, the gambler, and Billy

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Graham, the evangelist, who broke bread Sunday night in a Sunset Strip restaurant may have held another rendezvous last night, and then again, maybe they didn’t.” What, in fact, stood in the way of the second “rendezvous” (the reporters’ word choice was not inadvertent) were the many keenly interested reporters and photographers in hot pursuit of a good and crazy (even for L.A.) story. Graham tried in vain to duck the newsmen in what evolved into “a high-speed automobile chase on Wilshire Boulevard, Burton Way, and other streets in the Beverly Hills–West Los Angeles area.” The chase, much to Graham’s embarrassment, became the story. His driver, the former hillbilly radio-show host, racehorse owner, and recent convert Stuart Hamblen, at one point stopped and got out of the car to confront the reporters: “You want a story? Well, you’re going to get one.” He was right, but the story was for him and his boss difficult to steer. When the reporters refused to disperse, Hamblen called the police. But to his surprise, when the police arrived, they were disinclined to help. Hamblen and Graham then swore they were not heading to a meeting with Cohen, that they were instead keeping an appointment with “some important Hollywood stars . . . who don’t want publicity.” The newsmen didn’t buy it. Hamblen then drove Graham to his meeting with the aforementioned Hollywood stars. And the newsmen followed. By that point there was little reason to dally on pretense, so the newsmen got their story. As to who-all attended the meeting, which the Times described as more like a party: “Some theatrical people were there, including 10–12 ‘well-known stars.’ The group sat around, had something to eat, drank punch, and discussed ways of combatting Communism. . . . P.S.: Cohen was [there].” Graham was deft at establishing common ground, even in deeply fractured postwar L.A.: at the so-called party, he brought together Cohen, a handful of other gangsters, some movie-industry luminaries, and some local evangelicals—to serve the anti-Communist cause. As to the proverbial $64,000 question: Did Graham try to convince Cohen to join his ministry and “hit the sawdust trail”? The Times reported that that was not discussed. And how did they know? Well, they asked Cohen.71 The impact of Graham’s “Greater Los Angeles Revival,” as the tent banner read in the fall of 1949, was significant and consequential. The preacher was the right man (a charismatic evangelical anti-Communist), in the right place (the L.A. of Elizabeth Short, Jean Spangler, Brenda Allen, and Louis Zamperini), at the right time (Graham arrived in L.A.

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one month after the Russians had tested their first atomic bomb and Armageddon seemed quite at hand). Among the 350,000 Los Angelenos who showed up to hear Graham speak, many were touched and moved by what he had to say. He told them that there was another way of life to be lived in L.A., so long as they were vigilant in the face of the city’s many temptations. That was for the vast majority of those present more easily said than done.

johnny stompanato and lana turner: scandalizing criminal celebrity I find men terribly exciting, and any girl who says she doesn’t is an anemic old maid, a streetwalker, or a saint. —Lana Turner

Lana Turner was the movie star Elizabeth Short and so many other Hollywood hopefuls dreamed of becoming: a former small-town beauty (she was originally from Wallace, Idaho; population at the time of her birth: 2,800) who got discovered sipping a Coke at the counter at the Top Hat Café on Sunset Boulevard. As Turner recounted in her autobiography, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, and the Truth, she was seventeen at the time and playing hooky from typing class at Hollywood High School. Seated alone at the soda fountain sipping a Coke, she caught the attention of the Hollywood Reporter’s Billy Wilkerson, who with Turner’s mother’s approval introduced her to the talent agent Zeppo Marx, the former straight man in the legendary Marx Brothers comedy act.72 Turner’s story gave hope for those looking for their one-in-a-million lucky break, though it was Schwab’s Drugstore, several blocks west of the Top Hat on Sunset, that became the more famous site. Over time moviegoers came to assume that Schwab’s was the site of Turner’s discovery—a mistaken detail really, since Schwab’s was even before Turner’s discovery well known thanks to the syndicated gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky’s Photoplay feature alliteratively titled “From a Stool at Schwab’s.” For those who followed Skolksy’s column, there was always the possibility of spying a star at Schwab’s: Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Judy Garland, and Clark Gable were all known to stop by. For nearly half a century, Schwab’s drew Hollywood hopefuls and tourists alike, at least until its demolition, in 1988. (It is now the site of a shopping mall and a multiplex theater.) Turner had her first credited film role at seventeen, in the Warner Bros. feature They Won’t Forget (Mervyn LeRoy, 1937), and she shared

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figure 18. The young actress Lana Turner with the publisher and nightclub owner William R. (“Billy”) Wilkerson early in her film career. (Lana Turner: A Daughter’s Memoir, directed by Carole Langer: Turner Classic Movies, 2001)

top billing just four years later at MGM in the crime feature Johnny Eager (LeRoy, 1941), a picture that proved eerily prescient as Turner played a young woman who foolishly falls for a ruthless gangster. “I’ve heard all about you, Johnny Eager,” the tagline read on the film’s poster, quoting a line of dialogue delivered by Turner in the film, “but I still want you to kiss me!” A decade later, the sentiment would for anyone thinking back on the film regard instead Turner’s lousy taste in men. After Johnny Eager, Turner became a bankable albeit typecast movie star, appearing in a series of films that played off and supported a studiomanaged public image. The studio dressed her on and off the screen (with constant reference to her origin story) to look like almost any highschool girl of the day; indeed, by war’s end, the studio had successfully promoted Turner as Hollywood’s preeminent sweater girl. The outfit came to identify Turner well before her behavior did as the embodiment of risk and daring; the costume itself, and the way she in particular wore it, was enough to raise an eyebrow or two at the Production Code Administration (PCA) and warrant the very sort of costume-fitting controversies between MGM and Code authorities that made for headlines

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and a profitable box office. As Thomas Doherty alliteratively notes in his biography of PCA chief Joseph Breen, for industry censors Turner became an icon of the prurient war-era come-on: “Besides Jane Russell, a gaggle of pert ‘sweater girls’—Veronica Lake in I Wanted Wings (1941), Ann Sheridan in They Drive by Night (1940), and Lana Turner in anything—stretched Code corseting with the contents of their contour-clinging pullovers.” 73 Like so many Hollywood wannabes, Turner was a former small-town beauty who after making it in Hollywood rather reveled in her movie-star sex appeal. The price of such an attitude, such a public image, was that Turner was perceived well before she fell for the gangster Johnny Stompanato as a “bad girl,” in the way that that term was used in the 1940s. It was a reputation she mostly fulfilled onand off-screen. During the war years, Turner was cast alongside some of the industry’s most popular leading men: Clark Gable in Somewhere I’ll Find You (Wesley Ruggles, 1942), for example. And then at the war’s end she found her signature role, the lurid adaptation of James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946). Garnett’s movie further contributed to the assumed true nature of Turner off-screen; the tagline, “Their love was a flame that destroyed,” appeared to regard Turner as much as the character she played: the quintessentially carnal femme fatale. She was of course playing a part off-screen as well: the part of Lana Turner. And why not? It was great fun. For example, in the early 1950s, just after marrying Lex Barker (an actor who played Tarzan on screen), Turner joined Hedda Hopper at a Hollywood restaurant. At one point in their conversation Turner interrupted Hopper and with a wink asked the columnist to move her chair so that she could get a better view of Barker, quipping: “He’s brand new. And I want to look at him.” In addition to seven different husbands, there were plenty of celebrity boyfriends, all of whom played a role in the public image of Turner as an iconic postwar bad girl: Sinatra, Tyrone Power, Howard Hughes, Fernando Lamas, and last and most relevant here, Johnny Stompanato, a gangster who ran with Mickey Cohen. Legend has it Stompanato cold-called Turner just as she was splitting up with Barker in 1957 and the two carried on a stormy affair for the better part of a year afterward. Unlike the men with whom she had consorted in the past, Stompanato was no poseur, no actor; he was a real bad guy . . . a really bad guy. And though that may have been part of the attraction at first, when the relationship soured, Turner struggled to find a way to end it.74

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And when she did—find a way to end it, that is—one of the decade’s juiciest scandals ensued. The official version of events from the coroner’s office went as follows: at 11:25 p.m. on April 4, 1958, Turner called her mother, Mildred, in a panic. Mildred called the police, who hurried to Turner’s home at 730 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills. There they found Stompanato lying on his back in Turner’s second-floor bedroom, a stab wound in his abdomen so deep it had penetrated both his liver and his aorta. The murder weapon, a bloody kitchen knife, was found in the bathroom sink. Turner’s daughter, Cheryl Crane, then fourteen years old, confessed to the murder, telling the police, “I didn’t mean to kill him.” 75 In his idiosyncratic history of movieland scandal, Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger characterized Turner’s drama-queen performance at the coroner’s inquest into the crime, tongue firmly in cheek: “The press was unanimous; the most dramatic scene of Lana’s career.” Anger posted alongside his account a photograph of Turner on the witness stand holding a handkerchief to her brow in what looks like a film still from an awful silent melodrama. At one point, the inevitable Jerry Giesler lunged forward to catch Turner, as she seemed about to swoon . . . both players hitting their marks perfectly.76 At the inquest, Turner testified that between 2:00 and 4:30 p.m. on the 4th, she and Stompanato went shopping together in Beverly Hills. Both were clotheshorses; indeed, the coroner’s report on the dead body speaks as much to the gangster’s wardrobe as to his wounds: “An orange-rust sweater from Springle of Scotland, a grey shirt with a silk collar from Monte Factor, Ltd., of Beverly Hills; black socks from Genuine Palm Beach, and cleated handmade footwear from London’s Bespoke Shoes.” The couple then returned to Turner’s home. Stompanato went out at 5:45, about fifteen minutes after Crane arrived after spending time with her father. Turner entertained friends until 7:00 or 7:30. Stompanato returned at 8:00, nursing a grudge about how much time the actress was spending with her friends (and not with him). The two argued. To keep the conflict out of Cheryl’s earshot—he was using “bad language,” according to Turner—the couple decamped to the upstairs bedroom. But Stompanato refused to calm down. So Turner asked him to leave. He refused. She shouted: “I can’t go on like this. No more. Leave me alone.” Stompanato got violent, grabbed her by her arms, and shook her. Crane appeared at the doorway and asked her mother if she was OK. Turner said yes, but Crane didn’t believe her: “Are you sure, Mother?” Turner then closed the bedroom door. More

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figure 19. Lana Turner testifying at the 1958 inquest into the death of her boyfriend the gangster Johnny Stompanato. (Lana Turner: A Daughter’s Memoir, directed by Carole Langer: Turner Classic Movies, 2001)

shouting, punctuated by, “Don’t ever touch me again! I’m absolutely finished! Get out!” In what proved to be at once crucial to the official story and the subject of considerable conjecture in the years that followed, Turner told the inquest that when she opened the door to usher Stompanato out, Crane appeared suddenly, struck Stompanato in the belly, and the gangster fell to the floor. As Turner told the inquest: “I thought [Cheryl] hit him in the stomach.” Stompanato indeed grabbed his midsection, twisted, and then fell on his back. It was only after he hit the ground that Turner discovered that Crane had stabbed him, so she got a towel to stanch the wound and tried to revive him.77 The inquest ruled the Stompanato killing a justifiable homicide, ostensibly accepting Turner’s version of the story that Crane killed Stompanato because she was afraid he was going to kill her mother. The police mostly accepted the inquest verdict as fact, in part because it rather solved the case for them. But plenty of people following the story at the time had their doubts, figuring, especially after Turner’s career rebounded, that Crane, a minor, had taken the rap for her mother.

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figure 20. Lana Turner and her daughter, Cheryl Crane, at the 1958 Oscar ceremony. (Lana Turner: A Daughter’s Memoir, directed by Carole Langer: Turner Classic Movies, 2001)

To be fair, Turner’s comeback was well under way before the murder and subsequent avalanche of publicity. In 1957, Dore Schary replaced Mayer at MGM and released Turner from her contact there. This seemed at first bad news. Turner was for the first time in her career on her own and out of a contract—and she was the wrong side of thirtyfive. But she adjusted quickly and smartly, signing with the powerful theatrical agent Lew Wasserman, who talked Turner into taking the older-woman role in Mark Robson’s 1957 adaptation of Grace Metalious’s popular novel Peyton Place. Turner received an Oscar nomination for her performance, news that coincided with the very first press coverage of her romance with Stompanato. The March 26, 1958, Academy Awards show marked the start of Turner’s second act as a Hollywood star. But it revealed as well the problematic fit of Stompanato in that particular scenario. For Oscar night, Turner booked two adjoining rooms at the Bel Air Hotel: one for Cheryl, the other for herself and Stompanato. The plan was to use the room to get dressed and made up for the show and then return to relax

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and recoup following the afterparties. Turner knew enough not to go to the ceremony with her new beau, so she took Cheryl instead while Stompanato remained behind in their room—paid for, of course, by Turner. When Turner and Crane finally returned hours later, they found Stompanato impatient and in a foul mood, and he threatened and then assaulted Turner in front of Crane.78 After hearing about the incident, Turner’s mother called the Beverly Hills police. As the official police report (made available after the murder) recounted: “I received a telephone call from Mrs. Turner, mother of the actress, informing me that her daughter had become terribly frightened of this hoodlum. When she asked me what should be done, I advised her that her daughter should come in and report to the police immediately. This was never done.” 79 Just over a week later, Stompanato would be dead—a victim of a version of the violence foreseen by Turner’s mother.

mommies dearest Joan Crawford has been a priestess at the shrine of success since she was a hoofer named Lucille Le Seur. . . . She’s cool, courageous, and thinks like a man. —Hedda Hopper, The Whole Truth and Nothing But

After the inquest, Crane was made a ward of the State of California and at the state’s behest was sent first to private boarding and quasi-reform schools, then committed to a mental institution, where she stayed until she was eighteen. Reports of persistent psychological problems and substance abuse, and later a public coming-out as gay , reflected, especially given the times, poorly on Turner, in large part because Crane’s apparent struggles accompanied her mother’s professional success after the scandal. In 1988, ten years after the publication of Christina Crawford’s poisonous memoir Mommie Dearest, Crane penned her own tell-all autobiography, Detour: A Hollywood Story, in which she confirmed, she hoped once and for all, the official, coroner’s-office version of the Stompanato murder. Crane included as well awful revelations recounting how her stepfather Lex Barker, who had preceded Stompanato in her mother’s bedroom, had serially assaulted her sexually.80 As to her mother’s role in her life, Crane declined to follow Christina Crawford’s lead; her relationship with her mother was after all decidedly different. In a February1988 interview with People staged during the promotional tour for her book, Crane put the relationship in appropriate context:

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“Mom wasn’t around that much in my life for a Mommie Dearest. . . . She qualifies perhaps for a long cameo role.” 81 Turner, along with Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck,82 to name just three female stars of the era, struggled with the conflicting expectations and responsibilities of motherhood and their work in the Hollywood glamor industry, a struggle exacerbated by Hopper and Parsons, themselves career women with contradictory attitudes about the role of women in American culture at the time. The professional and home lives of these movie stars were exceptional, fundamentally different from the lives of gossip-column readers. Nonetheless, these glamorous actresses were recruited by columnists, by women’s magazines, and by press agents, managers, and studio handlers, to extol the virtues of motherhood, family, and home life, everyday lives that stardom complicated and from which wealth had fairly speaking freed them. The oftenambiguous, even paradoxical requisites of postwar public relations frequently put them on the spot, as features in popular magazines prompted from them advice on so-called women’s issues, the sort of thing “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby” would discuss in daily newspapers from the mid-’50s on. In her book Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading “Photoplay,” the film historian Sumiko Higashi discusses this phenomenon, chronicling, for example, Claudette Colbert’s column for Photoplay titled “What Should I Do?” Colbert was characteristically blunt in print, offering relationship advice often cast as a reprimand or reminder to grow up and act right. To a seventeen-year-old involved with her brother-in-law, for example, Colbert wrote: “You are obviously an immature and romantic child, very much in love with love and lacking either a sense of loyalty to your sister or an insight into the terrible tragedy you are provoking.” Good advice, but as Higashi points out, such socially constructive remarks were, in Photoplay, ironically laid out alongside movie ads for films like The Big Clock (John Farrow, 1948), picturing Maureen O’Sullivan uttering the tagline “All I want is his arms around me!” or lurid ad copy for Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948), a film noir about a woman, played by the star Rita Hayworth, who for fun and profit rather destroys a man’s life—a man, filmgoers recognized, played by her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Orson Welles. As Higashi contends, it is in retrospect comic to find earnest copy and product ads featuring the likes of Joan Crawford advising women on appropriate behavior during dates, or how to be a good wife and mother. The thrice-married Linda Darnell weighed in on how to work

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out marital disagreements. And Turner, in the months before Crane’s confession, spoke from the heart about rearing children: “If we can . . . save our children one ounce of hurt, . . . if we can give them an understanding they can carry with them, . . . then [as mothers] we have succeeded.” 83 The Turner-Stompanato scandal problematized this alreadyproblematic narrative. Indeed, the only one of the major columnists to support Turner during the Stompanato scandal was Walter Winchell, who implored his readers to “give your heart to the girl [Turner] with the broken heart.” The female columnists—Hopper, for example—took a very different approach to the story, dredging up sordid items from past columns to characterize Turner as a sex-crazy maneater.84 Parsons penned a tribute to the “real victim” of the sordid affair, Cheryl Crane, ending the item with the simple declaration “My heart bleeds for Cheryl.” 85 The implication in Parsons’s version was that Turner was a bad mother, that what happened to Stompanato and to her daughter was in many ways her fault. To burnish their own images as more than just glamorous movie stars, a number of actresses exploited the scandal and publicly admonished Turner. Gloria Swanson, for example, attacked Winchell for defending the actress: “Walter, I think it’s disgusting that you are trying to whitewash Lana. You are not a loyal American.” However strange the logic upon which such an accusation was built—the illogic certainly spoke to the politics of the times—Swanson’s real beef was with Turner herself, whom Swanson seemed to blame for tarnishing the reputation of female stars everywhere, and from every era: “[Turner] is not even an actress; . . . she is only a trollop.” 86 For the record: Swanson was married six times, and during her third go-round, with Henri de la Falaise de la Coudraye, she had a much-talked-about affair with Joseph Kennedy, rumored to have been a bootlegger with ties to organized crime. Between marriages Swanson had several affairs with married men, most famously a three-year relationship with the actor Herbert Marshall. All to say that she knew plenty about Turner’s lifestyle and life choices: she had lived them—absent, of course, a dead gangster in her bedroom. The comments made by Hopper, Parsons, and Swanson likely stung. But when Mickey Cohen weighed in, Turner had a very different problem on her hands. From the moment he heard the news, the gangster was convinced that Turner had killed his friend. So he enthusiastically fueled some of the more slanderous stories in the press. After hearing about Stompanato’s murder, Cohen burglarized his friend’s Westwood apartment and stole

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a packet of love letters penned by Turner, which Cohen then handed over to the Examiner and the New York Mirror. Thanks to Cohen, the tabloids ran excerpts from the letters, which in Turner’s own words rather damned the actress as a wanton, spoiled star who when it came to sex cared little about the consequences of her affairs. On April 9th, under the clunky but nonetheless steamy headline “Bare Lana’s Love Letters,” the Mirror ran a facsimile of the entirety of one of the missives, which the editors laid out over several column widths, running along the full front page. Though by contemporary media standards the letter seems fairly tame, remarks like “We are in tune—all the way,” and “Every line [referring to a letter Turner had just received from Stompanato] warms me and makes me ache” seemed to ’50s readers to reference sex all too boldly.87 The Los Angeles Times followed the story of the missing letters as well. Reporting on the 10th, the day after the facsimile ran in the Mirror, an LAPD insider furnished the paper with the official burglary report filed by the staff at Stompanato’s Wilshire Boulevard complex. As the Times reported: “The police . . . have been expressing curiosity as to how Mickey Cohen gained possession of the wildly passionate love letters.” Of course, everyone familiar with the case knew how and why. The Times also covered the funeral in Woodstock, Illinois, where Stompanato was buried with full military honors as a World War II veteran. A propos of Stompanato’s penchant for style, the paper dutifully reported that he was reposed “wearing evening clothes, . . . dressed in death to conform to the manner in which he enjoyed living— high and fancy.” As to the star whose home provided the site for his murder—well . . . “Miss Turner did not send flowers.” The Times’s reporters struggled with the subtext of sexual violence. First, there were the prevailing attitudes of the paper’s readers in 1958, especially regarding a star who seemed attracted on screen and off to dangerous men. From one of the purloined letters, the Times excerpted a particularly suggestive line in which Turner longed “to be crushed in [Stompanato’s] arms again.” Cohen hatched his own theory of the crime after reading the letters. For example, when Turner pondered the possibility of something terrible happening during one of their many fights, in Cohen’s worldview she was establishing an alibi (and revealing a motive). The gangster was convinced that Turner had plotted in advance and coldly executed what happened on April 4th, including the plan to pin the crime on her daughter. The Stompanato family echoed Cohen’s accusations, with

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figure 21. Mickey Cohen at Johnny Stompanato’s funeral. The gangster was convinced that Lana Turner, and not her daughter Cheryl Crane, had killed his friend. (Lana Turner: A Daughter’s Memoir, directed by Carole Langer: Turner Classic Movies, 2001)

Johnny’s brother, Carmine, calling for Turner to take a lie-detector test. But this version never gained much traction, and the Times, and eventually the other area newspapers as well, grudgingly accepted the verdict of the inquest and with it the official story that vindicated the star.88 As a consequence, Turner was eventually characterized as the crime’s victim and moved on with her career.

movie stars and mobsters: a postscript The real city, one might say, produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster. —Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero”

The cult of celebrity after the war normalized, even romanticized the social interactions between movie people and gangsters. Key, then, is a simple question: How much did those in the industry who engaged with gangsters know about the men with whom they were sleeping, the men

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with whom they were doing business? The answer with regard to Spangler and Turner as well as the industry executives Harry Cohn and Louis B. Mayer, who exploited gossip about Turner’s romantic involvement with Bugsy Siegel to promote Johnny Eager, was: Plenty. In a town tied to appearance and artifice, Turner felt she needed Stompanato in 1958; at least she needed a guy like him on her arm. He had “B-picture good looks,” Crane writes in her memoir, and he was “powerfully built and . . . spoke in a deep baritone voice. With friends, he seldom smiled or laughed out loud, but seemed always coiled, holding himself in. . . . [He] had watchful, hooded eyes that took in more than he wanted anyone to notice.” 89 The attraction was for Turner at once superficial and carnal, practical and risky. The relationship begged as well an amateur psychology. It came soon after the disastrous end to her marriage with Barker; a break-up precipitated by the revelation of the actor’s sexual abuse of her daughter, a story Turner never disputed but nonetheless kept secret. Stompanato was younger than Turner and sexually notorious. He made her feel and, more important, appear young and attractive. And after Barker, who had preferred Cheryl to her, he fit the part of the ardent, not to mention macho suitor. Once they became an item, Stompanato was fiercely possessive and jealous. But at least he wanted her and not some teenager, not her daughter. That said, Turner, and most Los Angelenos, for that matter, knew plenty about Stompanato before 1958. As early as August 3, 1949, news reports circulated about the gangster, a so-called bodyguard for Cohen, when he was called to testify in the coroner’s inquest into the shooting of one Edward (“Neddie”) Herbert, an L.A. gangster who had accompanied Vaus when he was first introduced to Cohen. Herbert was shot and killed in July 1949 in a failed attempt on Cohen’s life. This second failed assassination in just over a year was widely covered in the newspapers, most notably by the redoubtable columnist Florabel Muir, who, at some personal risk, had in the previous weeks taken to staking out Cohen’s Sunset Strip haunts hoping to witness just such an event. Muir, who took a bullet in her backside, dubbed the shoot-out “The Battle of the Sunset Strip.” 90 And the catchy descriptor stuck. Stompanato was arrested for vagrancy later, in August 1949, a charge at the time used by the LAPD to strong-arm gangsters.91 Two months later, on October 7th, the Times ran a story on page 2 about verdicts in his trial. For the record: Stompanato was found not guilty of vagrancy, a charge described in the indictment as “being out at late and unusual hours on no visibly lawful business.” (He had been arrested on his way

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home from Cohen’s house, which explained his presence on the streets and the late hour.) But the alibi on the first charge rather implicated him in another—as Stompanato’s business had involved associating with known criminals—and the gangster was found guilty.92 In the fall of 1950, the widely covered Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce (AKA the Kefauver Committee) subpoenaed Cohen to testify about the assassination attempt, and again Stompanato’s name figured prominently. Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) was an oddball scene-stealer, a former math teacher and Yaleeducated lawyer with, in 1950, presidential ambitions. He could not have been less like the men he was investigating. He found Cohen to be at once comical and dangerous, “a Simian figure, with a pendulous lip, thinning hair, and spreading paunch . . . dressed in ‘sharp’ clothing, including a suit coat of exaggerated length, excessively padded in the shoulders, and a hat with a ludicrously broad brim.” The description was not inaccurate, but it is hard to miss the patrician Kefauver’s disdain for Cohen’s ethnicity, his Jewish look and manner, his pretense to nouveau-riche opulence and bad taste. The committee’s chief counsel, Rudolph Halley, interrogated Cohen regarding the Battle of the Sunset Strip and the Seven Dwarfs’ beating of Al Pearson and then inquired into Cohen’s relationship with Stompanato, who in 1950 worked, Cohen testified, as a “manager, bartender, everything,” at Cohen’s Continental Café. Halley asked leading questions about the “very large sums of money” lent by Stompanato to Cohen, money Halley inferred was ill gotten by extortion. The implication was that Stompanato had fronted for Cohen in a number of celebrity shakedowns.93 That Stompanato was involved in whatever Cohen was involved in would have been clear to anyone who read the newspapers in 1950. In 1958, the press coverage of Stompanato was complicated, and it took a while for the media to fully account for the murder victim’s true character and line of work. The Times initially referred to Stompanato as a bodyguard, a euphemism for the sorts of tasks he performed for Cohen. But soon the characterization shifted along with the story line. On April 17th, citing the Beverly Hills Police Department’s chief of detectives, Ray Borders, as its primary source, the Times ran an investigative piece outlining Stompanato’s role in the many blackmail/ extortion/shakedown schemes targeting stars who, like Turner, dabbled, stupidly, with gangsters in ’50s Hollywood. Tasked with following up on leads gleaned from Stompanato’s postmortem possessions (at least those left behind by Cohen), Borders described “unpaid promissory

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figure 22. The gangster Benjamin (“Bugsy”) Siegel (left) and the actor George Raft in a Hollywood courtroom in July 1947. Raft, whose relationship with Siegel was (politely put) complicated, testified on Siegel’s behalf in his bookmaking trial. (Everett Collection)

notes and unexplained bank books” into which large sums had been deposited. The paper trail “indicated a long string of bizarre financial manipulations.” Borders hinted at the existence of a printed list of victims, many of them stars whose identities Borders was inclined and/or under pressure from superiors to conceal and from whom, for example, Stompanato borrowed money he seemed never to repay.94 The Times coverage eventually characterized the reality of the relationship between Turner and Stompanato, and by extension the many mobster–movie star connections of the era: though both subcultures enjoyed celebrity, and both groups enjoyed the liberties afforded by wealth and privilege, their relationship was hardly of an equal or fully cooperative nature. Each got something from the other; but the gangster enterprise only appeared to be glamorous and only until it became violent, only until it involved some shakedown in which the hint of danger that was initially so alluring became a costly reality. Gangsters and movie stars were in a fundamental way after the same thing: success. Both subcultures were populated by strivers, by other-

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wise ordinary folks who had grown up during the Depression and got ahead by working outside the daily grind of workaday capitalism. In both camps, success, once gotten, often proved brief and fleeting. Getting ahead involved climbing over those who had figuratively or quite literally fallen, folks whose careers were on a downward spiral or were figuratively or literally dead. Stars and mobsters lived double lives: private versus public, real versus imagined. And for those watching at arm’s length, reading the columns and news items, gangsters and movie celebrities paraded the accouterments and lures of the American nouveau riche—the very conspicuous consumption to which the average American might reasonably aspire. It is a curious fact of postwar L.A. life that Cohen’s gang, Hollywood movie stars, and LAPD homicide detectives all had one thing in common: they were all clotheshorses, dandies despite a pretense to übermasculinity. Dressed for success, so to speak: the clothes fashioned celebrity in a city built upon the superficial, the make-believe, upon Easy come, Easy go. The moral here is fairly simple, at least in retrospect. The movie stars—and circling about them the many movie industry aspirants, wannabes, and sycophants—were always playing at things, trying on roles, aliases, lovers, identities, fads. But the gangsters meant business, in the strictest sense of the expression. And that was something folks who trucked in the world of make-believe were reluctant, unable, to appreciate and understand.

chapter 3

Hollywood Confidential Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles

Billy Wilder’s 1950 melodrama Sunset Boulevard ends with a handful of Hollywood in-jokes; Norma Desmond’s brilliant exit line, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille,” is only the most obvious. Presiding over the production of her final close-up is Max Meyerling, played by the former silent-film director Erich von Stroheim, who in better times (or so the nostalgic aspects of the film suggest) worked with the former silent-film actress Gloria Swanson, who in Sunset Boulevard plays Desmond, the former silent-film actress. Wilder is filming the filming of the scene, but he smartly leaves the commentary on and context for the dead screenwriter floating in the pool along with Desmond’s descent into a fugue state to someone who in the real Hollywood of 1950 knew her way around a star scandal: the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper. Wilder appreciated the grim reality of Hopper’s power in transitionera Hollywood. She arrives late, well after we’ve been introduced to an array of producers, directors, story-department readers, screenwriters and their agents, along with the aptly termed waxworks—a foursome assembled by Desmond/Swanson that includes Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner, icons, like her and her screen counterpart from a bygone era—who assemble at Desmond’s house for games of bridge. Hopper gets a speech that puts the story in an apt postwar Hollywood perspective: that is, she puts the story of the dead screenwriter and the movie star who shot him in the vernacular of Hollywood gossip. 106

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figure 23. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper makes the most of her cameo in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. (Paramount Pictures, 1950)

In her cameo, Hopper plays herself as the public perceived her. Moviegoers of the 1950s hardly blinked at her exclusive all-access; she is after all at the crime scene as the news is breaking. Hopper’s performance in the film is astonishingly unself-conscious—the epitome of a selfassured arrogance. Wilder had wanted to cast Hopper’s erstwhile rival, Louella Parsons, as well and feature both columnists at the murder scene competing for the single phone line to report on the story. But Parsons declined, recognizing, as the columnist’s biographer Samantha Barbas contends, “that the part, as a crooning, predatory press gossip would tarnish her reputation.” 1 “Hopper,” as Jennifer Frost notes in her book Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism, “had no such qualms.” So when Parsons said No, thanks, Hopper reveled in having the scene all to herself.2 The fictional Hollywood story that Hopper comments upon in her cameo is at once nostalgic—which is to say, sentimental—and deeply cynical. But there is plenty of evidence that she didn’t read the film as Wilder intended or as many other industry players did. In her column dated April 16, 1950, issued some four months before the film’s first

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run, Hopper reported: “At a special showing of Sunset Boulevard for movie bigwigs, many of them sat there and wept. Each saw in it a bit of his own life.” 3 The observation revealed the columnist’s sentimental take on the film and her role in it but vastly misread the reaction of the many movie executives in attendance that night and then later at the film’s premiere. If the executives indeed “sat there and wept,” it was not because they saw a bit of their own lives in Wilder’s cynical Hollywood post-mortem. (Movie executives are not known for their self-reflection.) It was because they resented Wilder’s bitter anti-Hollywood melodrama, his film’s mocking tone, his derisive account of the uncertain future of the decidedly uncertain movie industry of 1950. They knew that Wilder was onto something; the old Hollywood was indeed dying and with it, figuratively speaking, they were too. After the premiere several months later, Louis B. Mayer spoke for his fellow moguls when in front of the assembled press he shouted at the director: “You bastard! You have disgraced the industry that made you and fed you! You should be tarred and feathered and run out of Hollywood.” 4 According to Wilder’s biographer, Maurice Zolotow, the director offered an immediate, terse reply: “Fuck you.” 5 Looking back, both reactions—Hopper’s and Mayer’s, that is—make sense. The film is nostalgic, and that fit Hopper’s übernarrative regarding a decline in old-studio glamor, a change in what it meant to be (and to behave like) a movie star. Hollywood had become a rough town for the old guard, the various waxworks, thanks to the abandonment of the old studio/contract system and the arrival of a very different, new breed of actor/ star, epitomized by anticelebrity celebrities like Marlon Brando, whom Hopper despised. As Frost notes in her monograph, Brando was Hopper’s bête noire. She interviewed him a few months before the release of A Streetcar Named Desire, and though he was at a stage in his career when he needed Hopper more than she needed him, the actor seemed to have little interest in publicity in general and gossip in particular. Their brief conversation ended abruptly when Hopper asked in frustration, “Do you care to answer my questions?” and Brando replied, “I don’t believe so.” 6 Mayer’s reaction spoke to the director’s seeming lack of appreciation for all that the movie business had given him: Wilder, like Mayer, had fled anti-Semitism in Europe and found in Hollywood safety and opportunity. What angered the mogul as well was that the new Hollywood anticipated by Sunset Boulevard was in the summer of 1950 already taking shape at the expense of old-Hollywood dinosaurs like him.

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Indeed, Mayer would in short order become a victim himself in Hollywood’s poststudio transition, left for dead by the side of the road, so to speak. Sunset Boulevard premiered in August 1950. Mayer was forced out at MGM, a company he helped found, a company that continued long after his departure to bear his name, in August 1951. The Hopper cameo appears on page 113, sequence (set-up) “E,” in the Wilder, Charles Brackett, D. M. Marshman, Jr., Sunset Boulevard shooting script dated March 21, 1949. By the time the draft was completed, the five principal roles had been cast: Swanson, von Stroheim, William Holden, Nancy Olson, and Jack Webb, with studio veterans Fred Clark and Lloyd Gough penciled in as Sheldrake, the producer with ulcers, and Morino, Gillis’s agent, respectively. Hopper is mentioned by name in the script, so from the outset Wilder figured she would be game. Shot E-43 begins with a police lieutenant shouting into a downstairs phone: “Coroner’s office? . . . I want to speak to the coroner . . . Who’s on this phone?” His question is answered in shot E-44 and a line delivered by Hopper: “I am.” As mentioned earlier, the scene was initially conceived with Hopper and Parsons in mind. But this revised and, later, filmed version works better, as it reminds the audience of the clout the studios—and Hopper, fronting for them—once had. Film buffs may have recalled as well, or reimagined, really, a similar scene at a real Hollywood murder in 1922, when a chauffeur and housekeeper named Henry Peavey happened upon the corpse of his boss, the Hollywood film producer-director William Desmond Taylor. Peavey knew enough to call Taylor’s studio and give their emissaries time to look over the crime scene before calling the cops. In 1950 as in 1922, L.A. was a company town.7 Shot E-44 begins with the notation of a prop, The white telephone in Norma’s bedroom, which precedes a stage direction: “Standing talking into it is Hedda Hopper.” The vignette lends a note of levity to the dire proceedings as Wilder cuts away from the expository scene of a police lieutenant calling the coroner’s office . . . or at least trying to. One difficulty with reading the film—and this too explains Hopper’s and Mayer’s different reactions at the press screening and premiere—is that the movie is often comic, even in moments of high drama. What Wilder appreciated was that in any story about Hollywood, the possibility of realism is undercut by the fact that no one in Hollywood is actually real. Hopper takes full advantage of her screen time, much as her character rather savors her advantage in relevance and access; the story is hers to tell before the police or her fellow columnists get to weigh in. She delivers

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her lines briskly, reminding the policeman of the power dynamics in play: “Now get off [the phone]; this is more important.” With regard to the dead body in the pool and the woman who put him there, she is right. After all, there is not much for the police to investigate. And there is not much for them to do except get Norma safely downstairs and into custody. But the cops have no idea how. Instead, the scene is stage-managed by Max, who, to the bewilderment of the non–film workers present, exploits Norma’s fantasy of a return to stardom in an adaptation of Salomé directed by DeMille to cue her descent down the stairs. After clearing the phone line Hopper dictates what amounts to a nineline speech, ostensibly recasting a story formerly narrated by a dead screenwriter, a nobody, into a gossip item about someone who did matter . . . at least, someone who mattered once upon a time: “I’m talking from the bedroom of Norma Desmond. Don’t bother with a rewrite man, take this direct. Ready? —As day breaks over the murder house, Norma Desmond, famed star of yesteryear, is in a state of complete mental shock.” . . . Hopper’s memorable cameo ends as The camera pans to another part of the bedroom to show a police captain and a homicide detective asking Norma questions she is in no condition to answer: “Was it a sudden quarrel?” . . . “This guy—Where did you meet him for the first time? Where did he come from?” . . . “Had he been trying to blackmail you?” Desmond’s rage at a changing movie business, her attempt to land and keep a handsome younger man on her arm, in her bed, strutting his stuff by the pool instead of lying dead floating in it, is something they will never understand. Yes, as Wilder makes clear, the story the film tells is very much in Hopper’s wheelhouse. When the police fail to penetrate Desmond’s fantasy, we cut back to the patio by the pool at dawn (shot E-45) to see the police fishing the dead screenwriter’s body out of the water. On the soundtrack we return to Gillis’s voice-over: “Well, this is where you came in.” . . . But we don’t return to his story, really. Instead, Gillis comments on what will happen once Hopper et al. have their way with Norma’s story: “Here was an item everybody could have some fun with, the heartless so-and-so’s.” In the end, Gillis proves to be a believable and faithful narrator, but is Sunset Boulevard ever his Hollywood story? We can’t believe that he saw the murder coming, can we? And after all, the fate of a lowly screenwriter hardly matters in the scheme of things in the movie business, and he knows that. The movie, we discover here at the end, has been about Norma all along. Gillis has been brought in, like Nick in The Great Gatsby, to tell a story about other people from another

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crowd, which he will never fully be a part of. Joe’s empathy at the end explains his failure to fit in; it explains the gossip version of Norma’s postmurder public life: “Even if she got away with it in court . . . crime of passion . . . temporary insanity . . . those headlines would kill her: Forgotten Star a Slayer—Aging Actress—Yesterday’s Glamour Queen.” 8 No wonder Norma falls into and opts for a fantasy at the end: because that is the only place in which she might truly be ready for her close-up. An alternative reading of the coda “I’m ready for my close-up” is that a “close-up” is exactly what she will get from Hopper. Gillis refers to this in his closing voice-over monologue; though Norma had just ended his life, Joe pauses to reflect on her predicament. In doing so he shows empathy; he knows what Hopper will do to her. Maybe—and this is the sick joke at the end of the film—of the two principal characters, Gillis is the one better off. He’s been put out of his misery, saved from the pointless pursuit of a career as a Hollywood screenwriter, saved as well from a life as a gigolo or from the embarrassment of a return home, tail between his legs, to his Midwest newspaper’s city desk. Norma is still alive, left to face the music—the cameras, that is— and the fun that the columnists and their readers will no doubt have at her expense.

cecil b. demille Creative work at its best cannot be carried out in an atmosphere of fear. We will guard against this danger, this risk, this fear. To this end we will invite the Hollywood talent guilds to work with us to eliminate any subversives; to protect the innocent, and to safeguard free speech and a free screen wherever threatened. —Excerpt from the MPAA’s so-called Waldorf Statement, issued December 3, 1947, formalizing its cooperation with an industry Blacklist

Wilder wrote Sunset Boulevard in collaboration with the Harvardeducated attorney Charles Brackett (with whom Wilder also co-wrote Ninotchka, directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1939, and Howard Hawks’s 1941 Ball of Fire) and the Life Magazine reporter D. M. Marshman, Jr. It was Brackett who insisted that Desmond and Gillis should be lovers.9 Norma’s visit to the Paramount lot to see DeMille, and then DeMille’s brief reflection about Desmond afterward—two of the film’s more sentimental scenes—were Brackett’s as well. “We had an idea of a young man stumbling into a great house where one of these ex-goddesses survived,” Brackett recalled. “At first we saw her as a kind of horror-woman . . . an

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figure 24. The director Cecil B. DeMille and the actress Gloria Swanson share a sentimental moment on a Paramount Studios soundstage in Sunset Boulevard. (Billy Wilder: Paramount Pictures, 1950)

embodiment of vanity and selfishness. But as we went along, our sympathies became deeply involved with the woman, who had been given the brush by 30 million fans.” 10 However much Brackett succeeded in humanizing Wilder’s Norma— the director envisioned the character as some monstrous diva—the dramatic use of DeMille to accomplish this goal, indeed the casting of DeMille in and of itself, proved controversial. The New York-based Communist newspaper the Daily Worker made explicit the necessarily quiet rumblings concerning the casting of DeMille (and Hopper) among the Hollywood progressive community. “It is hard to think of a movie with more right-wingers in it than Sunset Boulevard,” the paper reported, later referring to Hopper and DeMille as “two of the most bigoted, Sybaritic, ostentatious and fraudulent reactionaries in all filmdom.” 11 Wilder knew DeMille, which is to say he knew that DeMille was a self-righteous prick: a right-wing, anti-union, anti-Red hard-ass.12 But he also knew that Brackett’s scenes worked: they made Norma’s character more nuanced and empathetic, and they offered yet more layers of

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metacommentary from two industry insiders. The encounter between Norma and DeMille (as DeMille) begins as the director greets the actress at the sound stage and says, “Hello, young fella.” This too was an inside joke, as “young fella” was DeMille’s affectionate nickname for Swanson. The two play off each another’s discrete identities as real movie people rooted in the silent era, one (Swanson) a figure relegated to the waxworks, the other (DeMille) a dinosaur persisting with bloated biblical epics from days past—the film we see him shooting is Samson and Delilah, released nine months before Sunset Boulevard. But much as the scene accomplishes an important end—we come to empathize with Norma’s predicament just as DeMille seems to—the notion that DeMille’s politics were irrelevant to any film in 1950 was, as the leftwing paper contended, at the very least naïve and at the most irresponsible and reprehensible. The Daily Worker more generally disparaged Wilder for making a movie about a frustrated screenwriter that did not acknowledge the many film workers who lost their livelihood for political reasons in Hollywood’s transition after the war. To be fair, whatever Wilder thought about the politics of the Blacklist, he was hardly in a position in 1950 to make a movie to comment upon Hollywood’s anti-Communist purge.13 So Wilder instead depicts Gillis as a Hollywood hopeful, a former news reporter who ventured to L.A. to write for the movies. What Gillis discovers is that the price of achieving his dream of Hollywood success involves social interactions and personal sacrifices that once indulged can’t be undone or forgiven. That’s why he returns to Norma’s side after the New Year’s Eve party at Artie’s. That’s why he sends Betty packing at the end. Gillis is not—and in 1950 he could not be—Dalton Trumbo (as the Daily Worker would have applauded); he is instead a male counterpart to the Hollywood hopeful Elizabeth Short. And like her, he is left for dead, figuratively and literally, in the new Hollywood and in the new American city of Los Angeles. In a matter of months Wilder would come to appreciate the Daily Worker’s argument; he would have ample reason to regret casting DeMille and putting the script’s most empathetic words in his mouth. Sunset Boulevard premiered on August 10, 1950, at the very moment DeMille was preparing to hold the Screen Directors Guild of America (SDG) hostage to a proposed loyalty oath. The Blacklist was by then well entrenched in Hollywood, and such symbolic performances of patriotism or Americanism, and the inevitable repudiation of things deemed un-American, had become commonplace. As one of the founders of the

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Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), DeMille had been a Cold Warrior from the moment such a descriptor had any meaning in the movie business. As the blacklisted director (who later turned rat to reclaim his career) Edward Dmytyrk characterized things in his memoir Odd Man Out: “Nearly all of the ‘friendlies’ [that is, friendly or cooperative and politically sympathetic witnesses before HUAC in 1947] were members of the Motion Picture Alliance. . . . Among the charter members of the organization were directors Sam Wood (also its first president), George Marshall, Mike Curtiz, and Cecil B. DeMille (who should get top billing); the actors John Wayne, Robert Montgomery, Adolphe Menjou, and Ward Bond; union leader Roy Brewer; Ginger Rogers’ mother, Lela; Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper; and a host of lesser lights.” The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI) enjoyed financial support, Dmytyrk notes, from Howard Hughes.14 Many of the guild members had already signed a loyalty oath in 1941 before being commissioned by the Office of War Information (OWI) to make films supporting the military effort. In 1950, several of these SDG members saw no problem, here including the DeMille ally Frank Capra, who headed a war-era production unit, in signing another one. Others, including John Ford—whose politics, for the record here, mostly veered to the Right of center—believed that a distinction should be made between the two oaths, because they concerned two different historical moments: post–Pearl Harbor 1941 and post-HUAC 1950.15 The motivations behind DeMille’s support for a loyalty oath were complicated by but nonetheless consistent with his opposition to unions and unionism in general and the SDG in particular. DeMille had railed against unionism at the guild’s first meeting in1936. But he subsequently accepted a seat on and used that position to politicize its board of directors. DeMille routinely outed progressive guild members, exploiting surreptitiously gathered files supplied by the inaptly named DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, which, according to James Ulmer, a historian of the SDG and the Directors Guild of America (DGA), catalogued “the leftist affiliations of all screen directors” and then “spoon -fed [the files] to HUAC.” 16 The producer-director and former brigadier general Merrian Cooper (King Kong, 1933) publicly opposed DeMille and vowed never to sign “any goddamn loyalty oath” or “be part of any goddamn Blacklist,” even if DeMille “put a pistol to [his] head.” 17 Cooper’s language as well as his sentiments spoke to the heat of the times and foregrounded a

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confrontation between DeMille and the director John Ford (Stagecoach, 1939; The Searchers, 1956), two veteran filmmakers whose careers spanned the entire history of the medium. The future of the SDG (and of its subsequent iteration the DGA) seemed held in the balance. In the summer and fall of 1950, the SDG was deeply divided; one faction supported the guild’s president Joseph Mankiewicz, a moderate Republican and probably the hottest director in the business, having just won Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and riding a wave of publicity anticipating the release of a new picture that would win him two more, All about Eve. DeMille led an opposition faction with the influential guild board members Albert S. Rogell and George Marshall, both with ties to the MPAPAI.18 In August 1950, while Mankiewicz was on vacation overseas, DeMille made his move. It is important to point out here that DeMille had earlier supported— arguably, engineered—Mankiewicz’s election, banking (or so Ulmer contends) on Mankiewicz’s expressed disinterest in political activism in general and his relative inexperience with SDG politics. The guild president was primarily a figurehead anyway; the board ran the guild . . . so much so that upon becoming president Mankiewicz characterized the guild’s political structure as “close to being a gentlemen’s club.” To get his way, DeMille exploited his proxies on the board and bullied the membership, exploiting information gathered by his foundation’s intelligence service. He fabricated and then circulated a rumor that Joseph McCarthy had set his sights on the SDG. The guild should institute its own oath, DeMille argued, before McCarthy did it to and for them. Without Mankiewicz’s knowledge or consent, DeMille sent out ballots to the guild membership. The ballots were numbered, and so the votes were not secret. Given the times and the fear of taking a side or position that might be construed as un-American, or counter to DeMille’s wishes, or both, the vote came in at 547 to 17 (with 57 unreturned) in favor of a mandatory oath. When Mankiewicz returned from Europe, he was upset. But he had to be careful. He knew enough not to challenge DeMille on political grounds and instead focused on procedure, asking the SDG board to determine DeMille’s authority to propose and implement such a vote. The board (stacked as it was with MPAPAI members and DeMille proxies) predictably sided with DeMille and upheld the ballot. Then Mankiewicz called for a meeting of the full membership, again challenging DeMille on procedural grounds. DeMille opposed the call for a meeting, fearing, or so he claimed, that it would accomplish little besides

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“airing [the guild’s] dirty laundry” in the press. He noted that, thanks to Mankiewicz’s actions, such an airing had already begun, citing a trade-magazine story run in Variety reporting on the struggle over the oath. Though the reporters for Variety were careful not to take sides, DeMille nonetheless labeled the magazine story un-American. He was not the only one to hold the press in general and Variety in particular accountable for daring to present Mankiewicz’s side of the story. After the Variety piece was published, Hedda Hopper weighed in on DeMille’s behalf: “Those [writers and editors of Variety] who aren’t loyal should be put in concentration camps before it’s too late.” On October 11, DeMille met with the anti-Mankiewicz cohort on the Paramount lot—the site of his scenes in Sunset Boulevard—and together they proposed a recall of the guild president. Capra walked out of the meeting in dissent—a first sign that DeMille might be pushing his luck. DeMille persisted, printing out ballots that unsubtly read: “This is a ballot to recall Joe Mankiewicz. Sign here: Yes”—with no space provided for a no vote. Again, the ballots were numbered in order that the identity of each voter could be easily traced. Meanwhile, at Chasen’s restaurant, Mankiewicz met with Wilder, Elia Kazan (a Blacklist-era rat but on the right side of history here),19 Richard Brooks, John Huston, and William Wyler—his allies in the guild. Martin Gang,20 Mankiewicz’s lawyer, proposed filing an injunction against the recall pending a full meeting of the membership. To call such a meeting, Mankiewicz needed twenty-five members’ signatures (a quorum), which is to say he needed to find twenty-five members of the guild willing to publicly oppose DeMille, and by extension Hopper, Hearst, and Hearst’s mouthpiece, Louella Parsons (who, like Hopper, railed in print against the anti-oath faction in the guild). The first signatures acquired (in addition to those at Chasen’s, where the plan was devised), were Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Vincente Minnelli, and Fritz Lang. When Mankiewicz got the twenty-fifth signature, from Walter Reich, Brooks went to the SDG offices with the signatures to file an official call for a meeting. But the offices were closed and locked. Shenanigans ensued, but, long story short, a meeting was finally scheduled for October 22, 1950 (for what it’s worth, nine days after the New York City premiere of All about Eve), in the Crystal Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. There DeMille played the part of the melodrama villain—a role he’d directed countless times. Legend has it that DeMille arrived early to stage-direct the meeting, installing a special pink-tinged spotlight aimed at his bald head. (The

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symbolic significance of a pink light was somehow lost on the director.) A propos of an era characterized by demagogues and fanatics like McCarthy and John Rankin holding up lists of supposed Communists and subversive organizations,21 DeMille took the stage and read off his own list of what he called Red fronts to which the twenty-five SDG members who had called the meeting belonged. The list was culled from dossiers assembled by his foundation. DeMille’s stunt’s effect was the opposite of its intention, and the director was shouted down. Don Hartman, who directed the popular romantic comedy It Had to Be You in 1947, took the floor to say, “I resent paper-hat patriots.” Then Rouben Mamoulian took the stage. In heavily accented English, the Russianborn director added, “I feel I have more reason to stand on my being a good American, because I chose it. I wanted to become an American.” Then John Huston spoke: “In your tabulation [referring to DeMille’s dossiers], how many [among the twenty-five] were in uniform when you were wrapping yourself in the flag?” DeMille took the floor again, only to make matters worse. Continuing to question the loyalty of the twenty-five who had formed the quorum, he copped an Eastern European–Jewish accent to refer to “Villy Vyler, Fred Tsinnemann, and [this despite the kid-glove treatment in Sunset Boulevard] Billy Vilder.” The ethnic humor fell flat. George Stevens called for DeMille’s resignation from the SDG board and spoke candidly about DeMille’s conspiracy to obstruct the membership vote, the routing of the numbered ballots to DeMille in order that he could count them and keep track of who voted with him and against him. It was well after midnight when Stevens turned the floor over to Ford, one of the founders of the guild: “I don’t think we should [be] putting out derogatory information about a director, whether he is a Communist, beats his mother-in-law, or beats dogs. That is not our purpose.” Ford made his feelings about DeMille and his cause clear: “My name is John Ford. I make Westerns. I don’t think there is anyone who knows more about what the American public wants than Cecil B. DeMille—and he certainly knows how to give it to them. In that respect I admire him. But I don’t like you, C. B. I don’t like what you stand for and I don’t like what you’ve been saying here tonight. Joe has been vilified, and I think he needs an apology. . . . I believe there is only one alternative, and I hereby so move: that Mr. DeMille and the entire board of directors resign, and that we give Joe a vote of confidence—and then let’s all go home and get some sleep. We’ve got some pictures to make in the morning.” 22

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The struggle for control of the SDG in 1950 offered moments of exaggerated heroism and villainy, a characteristic of the times. But despite the struggle and the clarity with which the heroes and villains staged and played their parts, their actions were subsumed in and by the requisites of Blacklist-era Hollywood. Mankiewicz was not in the end recalled. And he was not forced to resign. The SDG remained viable, so much as any of the guilds were in the era. But while Mankiewicz received a vote of confidence from the membership, and appreciated how the speeches made that night forged a solidarity around a more complete and complex notion of Americanism than DeMille had proposed, one of Mankiewcz’s first actions as the restored president was to write a letter to the SDG membership calling for the adoption of the very oath DeMille had rallied for in the lead-up to the meeting. There was, in the end, no getting around that.23 On the one hand, DeMille rather realized George Orwell’s vision of a nightmare future in which “an army of the unemployed [would be] led by millionaires preaching the Sermon on the Mount.” 24 And it is fashionable today to cringe at DeMille’s sanctimony, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. But we must acknowledge here that his patriotism was—and much the same applies to Capra and many others on the Right—rooted in a fairly simple equation: America had been awfully good to many of the movie directors in attendance that night. These men, many of them immigrants (Capra, again) viewed un-Americanism as ingratitude. If anti-Communism was in some basic way Americanism, then an oath of allegiance, in their view, was a small price to pay. Hollywood’s Communist Party was from DeMille’s point view not only unpatriotic but ungracious and discourteous, and more than a little bit silly . . . lucky, wealthy, spoiled brats bitching about a system that had rewarded them so handsomely. Mayer’s confrontation with Wilder at the premiere of Sunset Boulevard was rooted in a similar sentiment: a great job in Hollywood seemed an unlikely place from which to vent disillusion and disgust. Political grandstanding was at the time at once popular and perilous. The gossip columnists inserted themselves into this ideological struggle and in doing so made everyone’s private politics public. The professional consequences were as a result negotiated in full view of American moviegoers. Movie fans accustomed to gossip about celebrity romances—the private lives of celebrities had been a staple of industry gossip since the 1910s—accommodated tests of loyalty and patriotism as part of the same shaming discourse, delivered in the same judgmental rhetoric

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about flying straight and living right (and on the Right). The dark side of this new politicized gossip was that various committees and commissions as well as industry guilds like the SDG and trade organizations like the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) exploited this discourse of public shame to an unprecedented degree. The discourse fueled management’s victory over the industry guilds, and it empowered studio executives in their dealings with talent at the very moment when the Paramount Decision had otherwise disrupted their business plan. Talent was made peculiarly vulnerable; the failure to fly straight and live right that had always risked adverse judgment from the fan-magazine reporters and then the newspaper gossip columnists quite suddenly carried outsized consequences: exile, imprisonment, ruin, suicide. The role of the gossip columnists in this culture of public shame should not be underestimated. When, during the course of the October 22 meeting, DeMille realized that the guild membership might not support the ouster of Mankiewicz, he proffered a compromise: if Mankiewicz issued a public act of contrition, DeMille would suspend the recall. This act of contrition, DeMille suggested, might come in the form a formal, written apology submitted to the columnist Louella Parsons, “who can read this to the American people . . . [so that they will know] that you are sorry for what you have done.” 25 Parsons’s part in this proposed act of contrition was complicated by two things: first, her role and function in a gossip industry in which public apologies had long been the currency of industry public relations, and second, her role and function as an employee of the Hearst syndicate of newspapers, which were owned and run by an anti-Communist activist. It tells us a lot about Hollywood in 1950 that DeMille’s suggestion seemed altogether reasonable. That Mankiewicz declined the offer—he told DeMille “Stuff your act of contrition”—spoke to the times as well; he knew what a public apology printed under Parsons’s byline would mean to his reputation and career, and he wanted no part of it. The recall of Mankiewicz failed in part because DeMille behaved outrageously at the October 22 meeting—which is really saying something, given the range of outrageous behavior that found approval in Hollywood in the name of the anti-Communist purge. The meeting had featured plenty of grandstand moments, moments that many of the politically progressive directors might later cling to as emblems of their courage in opposition. Several of DeMille’s former allies endeavored as well to put some distance between themselves and the recall agenda. Capra resigned from the guild board. Leo McCarey, a fellow member of

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the Motion Picture Alliance and SDG gang of sixteen who first formulated the recall petition, a director whose anti-Communist movie My Son John (1952) would reveal the depths of his right-wing paranoia, backed away from DeMille as well, because the tenor of the debate had veered uncomfortably from the professional into the personal. DeMille’s ridicule of foreign-born directors was a step too far even for him.26 Once normalcy was restored, Mankiewicz had to acknowledge that DeMille’s various missteps and misdeeds did not alter the basic fact that in 1950 suspicions concerning un-American activity had to be countered and that accusations might be forestalled by formal protestations of loyalty. In his letter to the membership after the October 22 meeting, Mankiewicz asked his fellow directors to set aside their “reservations concerning any aspect of the oath or its method of adoption.” In doing so, Mankiewicz affirmed what the more politically savvy members already knew: that the times were such that an oath had become essential to remove “a misconception that continues to vilify and smear both our persons and our guild.” 27 The role of Hopper and Parsons in the formation and fostering of such misconceptions was implied and understood by those who initially opposed but later signed the SDG oath.

red-baiting as gossip The Commies are trying to destroy the faith of the American people in the institutions and principles of the United States. They make such public attacks upon our government and upon free enterprise. Their aim is to destroy our confidence in our system of government, our system of economics. . . . It is an insidious program, and it has been well directed. —Hedda Hopper, September 3, 1947

Hopper and Parsons approached the overlaps between the professional and personal provocatively; they had lists to assemble, scores to settle, idiosyncratic measures of proper American behavior to impose. Their peculiar policing discourse intentionally undermined the inherent privileges of celebrity (wealth, fame, etc.), but the contradictions were manifold. Hollywood has always celebrated the things money and beauty and some peculiar talent might acquire, and stars were the lucky few in this equation. What the gossip columnists insisted upon was some karmic debt these lucky few owed to their publics, to their families, and, in the postwar era, to their country. Hopper, for example, clung to a fairly simple dictum: “The only way to prevent adverse yarns from getting into print is not to let them hap-

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figure 25. Hedda Hopper with the actress Maureen O’Hara on the columnist’s radio program, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” in 1940. (Everett Collection)

pen in the first place.” 28 Such a commonsensical position failed to acknowledge the otherwise-scurrilous aspects of gossip—the exploitation of innuendo and of guilt by association—and the consequences of the rumors and factoids the columnists repeated and published in their columns. Their so-called items could in an instant destroy a career, not to mention psychologically damage another human being. The columnists demanded devotion, and celebrities were smart to tread lightly. Failing to make a polite detour to acknowledge Hopper or Parsons at a public event was enough to prompt a negative item, the revelation of some well-travelled secret, some innuendo about a past affiliation or dalliance or political misstep. Movie stars had to be careful as well with the very real rivalry that persisted between Hopper and Parsons. Giving one an exclusive risked the ire of her rival. These were

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powerful women with long memories. And they did not always play fair. As the Screen Writers Guild activist Leonard Spigelgass recalls: “What Hopper used to do was run an item saying that the Hollywood Ten and other Communists have been given film assignments. Paragraph. Leonard Spigelgass has been assigned to write Gypsy. . . . She could say it was just a news item that followed the other by chance. But the column had that kind of continuity.” 29 The problems posed by good- and bad-faith accusations alike were exacerbated by the fact of the gossip columnists’ own undeniable celebrity and by the many synergies among the evolving media in which they participated: movies, newspapers, radio, and television. Hopper and Parsons were nationally recognized public figures. They were fixtures at the very parties and Hollywood nightspots they prowled for items. They visited movie sets; they were given access to whatever went on behind the scenes. By the time the Red Scare had begun, they were entrenched in and essential to the public discourse of Hollywood. Hopper’s bona fides on the anti-Communist front date to the founding of the alliance. Parsons made her stand against Communist infiltration in Hollywood well before HUAC as well, in a radio editorial for the Woodbury Soap Box series in which she asked actors to refuse to appear in movies written by suspected subversives.30 Parsons’s Soap Box speech was made with the full support of the MPAA and its chairman, Eric Johnston, the former director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “The majority of Hollywood is loyal and patriotic,” Parsons insisted. “Men such as L. B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Y. Frank Freeman, and Ronald Reagan have proved devoted to American ideals. The Communists in Hollywood are the exception. The motion picture industry should not be put under suspicion because a few have gone to the Left.” 31 Parsons’s insistence that a few bad apples did not spoil an entire industry was selfserving; she was taking the long view on an industry that was facing hard times (declining revenues; competition from an emerging new medium, TV; and the looming decision, most likely going against the studios, in the Paramount case), an industry upon which her livelihood depended. That a key aspect of policing Hollywood was left in the gossip columnists’ hands foreshadowed, even foregrounded, HUAC’s targeting of screenwriters. Indeed, pitting screenwriters (about whom most filmgoers thought and cared little) against actors (and movie stars!) ran deep. Among the loyal and patriotic on Parsons’s list (above), for example, one found executives, producers, and actors. The “few who have gone

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figure 26. The columnist Louella Parsons (second from right) in 1951 with three fellow Hollywood anti-Communists: the actor (and later U.S. President) Ronald Reagan, Reagan’s future wife the actress Nancy Davis; and the popular singer and actress Doris Day. (Everett Collection)

to the Left” were mostly writers, about whom Parsons rarely deigned to comment. In September 1947, the extent to which Parsons might defend actors and movie stars was put to the test as she cautioned her readers not to confuse the roles played by the movie star John Garfield (“champion[ing] the little fellow”) with the actor’s true feelings (“the Communist ideologies attributed to John are as repugnant to him as they are to you and me”).32 Parsons knew better; Garfield had been a member of the Group Theater (a fertile training ground for Hollywood progressives) and the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA—more on them later in this chapter), and his wife, the former Roberta Seidman, was a prominent Communist Party member. Publishing pro-Garfield items put Parsons

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on the spot, which put additional pressure on the actor. Parsons assured her readers: “John Garfield told me that he has learned his lesson and is no longer on the soapbox.” 33 More important than the content of Garfield’s message was the affirmation of Parsons’s scoop, her exclusive access to the truth of Garfield’s deepest convictions. Called in to testify, Garfield was careful not to disappoint Parsons: “I have nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. My life is an open book. I am no Red. I am no ‘pink.’ I am no fellow traveler. I am a Democrat by politics, a liberal by inclination, and a loyal citizen of this country by every act of my life.” 34 The actor penned a further elaboration of his political beliefs titled, revealingly, “I Was a Sucker for A Left Hook.” But before its contents could be widely shared, Garfield died of a heart attack awaiting a second round of testimony. His allies on the Left, like the blacklisted screenwriter-director Abraham Polonsky, viewed Garfield as a martyr insofar as his “heart gave out” sooner than he would testify.35 The facts of the matter are certainly less romantic and more complicated, especially because Garfield was out on a limb with Parsons and with his friends in the Hollywood progressive community. When the New Jersey congressman and HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas visited Hollywood in May 1947, just months before his committee would issue its first subpoenas, he met with Hopper and a delegation from the MPAPAI; such was his “fact-finding” mission. Hopper and Parsons would after 1947 have regular contact with and routinely feed items to the FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who would then repeat them to Thomas.36 As FBI liaisons, Hopper and Parsons’s work was wholly consistent with the MPAA studios’ goals: to keep Washington off their backs and in doing so maintain industry self-regulation, to keep the guilds in check, and to somehow define Hollywood as a site of American cultural production. When HUAC began its investigation of Hollywood, Parsons made her position clear: “I am delighted that Hollywood has taken a stand against communism. I am also happy to be called an enemy of communism and the Soviet government.” 37 The most significant challenge to the veracity and defensibility of Parsons’s contentions about Hollywood was the CFA, which boasted at its inception a membership of approximately five hundred industry workers. While many in the CFA were anonymous backstage workers, the organization’s leadership included a number of high-profile Hollywood celebrities with whom Parsons regularly interacted: Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye, Jane

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figure 27. The Committee for the First Amendment returning to Los Angeles from Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1947 after lending their support to the Hollywood Ten. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002nqfj)

Wyatt, Paul Henreid, Gene Kelly, and Garfield. The CFA proved a tipping point for Hopper as well, so much so that in October 1947 she dubbed one of its highest-profile members, Bogart, “one of the four most dangerous men in Hollywood.” 38 The public pressure from Hopper exacerbated the backroom pressure from executives at Warner Bros., and Bogart was compelled to recant, issuing a press release in Photoplay in the spring of 1948 with the simple rejoinder “I am no Communist.” 39 The reasons why Bogart agreed to distance himself from the Hollywood Ten and his friends and co-workers in the CFA (like John Huston, whom columnists absurdly accused of being “the brains of the Communist Party in the west”) stemmed from a growing realization in Hollywood that once the MPAA backed HUAC (made explicit in the Waldorf Statement, issued on December 3, 1947) there was no future for anyone presumed to support the Hollywood Ten and by extension their political activities. We can in retrospect call Bogart a coward—he often is regarded as such in Blacklist

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histories. But his press release to Photoplay and the carefully orchestrated public-relations campaign to restore his reputation that followed was so overstated as to reveal a desperate man in desperate times in well over his head intellectually and politically. Bogart was a progressive but not a Communist Party member. Why, then, shouldn’t he insist as much? The answer to such a simple question was in the spring of 1948 awfully complicated. In his memoir, titled Bogart: In Search for My Father, Stephen Humphrey Bogart argues that his father recanted because the committee revealed, to the movie star’s supposed surprise, that the Ten were in fact Communists. “Bogie was pissed,” Stephen Bogart writes, “because he felt as if he had been used.” Such a notion is profoundly far-fetched, but it does evince a fundamental distinction between opposing censorship and persecution on the one hand (which was what the CFA claimed to be up to in Washington in the fall of 1947) and supporting (or implying support for) Hollywood’s Communist Party on the other. Hence, the text of the Photoplay release: “I now see my trip [to Washington, D.C., with the CFA] was ill-advised, foolish and impetuous, but at the time it seemed the thing to do. I acted impetuously and foolishly on the spur of the moment, like I am sure many other American citizens do at many times.” 40 Bogart’s public apology in Photoplay and subsequent public-relations releases that he published through various columnists—Bogart told Ed Sullivan on the record: “I’m about as much in favor of Communism as J. Edgar Hoover”—were in the months and years to follow offered as evidence of the movie star’s frustration to appreciate and understand the gravity of the Red Menace in Hollywood.41 After the Photoplay press release, Bogart began making friends with a very different sort of crowd than the one with which he traveled to Washington in protest just two months earlier. In December 1947, for example, the right-wing political columnist George Sokolsky published correspondence with the movie star, an exchange that humbled the actor and at the same time aggrandized the columnist. Bogart—via his handlers, no doubt—appealed to Sokolsky’s readers and in doing so endeavored to set the public record straight (again): “I have no use for Communism nor for anyone who serves that philosophy.” The actor’s word choice here, as in the Photoplay release, was deliberate and significant. The word “serves” was a particularly predictable rhetorical move, and his advisors no doubt played a part in such diction, as no good American would serve a foreign ideology.

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The Blacklist historian Victor S. Navasky cynically characterizes Bogart’s letter to Sokolsky as pure and simple public relations, cast as “advice to the politically lovelorn.” 42 However sincere such confessions may have been—and those interested in distancing Bogart from folks like Sokolsky and Hopper cling to the notion that Bogart was only saying what had to be said at the time—such public confessions were just the beginning of a slide down a slippery slope, as one exchange all but mandated further obeisance to the same or other like-minded columnists. Necessary after that were revelations about other Hollywood figures, further demonstrations of Americanism. Once in the fray, one was either a martyr or a stool pigeon—there was no middle ground. After adding his name to the CFA membership and then anxiously subtracting it, Bogart soon found his name on another list, one compiled by the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU)—a list of industry talent who had crossed guild picket lines. Just as guilt by association with progressives like Danny Kaye had put Bogart in trouble with the right-wing columnists in the fall of 1947, Bogart’s legacy is now, after the public denials and repudiations in the right-wing press, forever tarnished by his association with the likes of John Wayne, Rosalind Russell, and Robert Montgomery, the leading lights of right-wing Hollywood, all of whom were listed along with Bogart as scabs and strikebreakers by the CSU.43 Movie-star confessions had by 1948 a long and mostly apolitical tradition; celebrities had since the silent era used movie-industry columnists to manage public relations. But such public-relations strategies inevitably involved some quid pro quo. In exchange for an exclusive interview or scoop, a celebrity might post (in the classical era, though a studio spokesperson; in the transition era, through a press agent) an item that might quell, diminish, or counter a rumor. Both parties— actors and columnists—cynically regarded this quid pro quo as the cost of doing business. In the late ’40s and ’50s personal items submitted to syndicated columnists might be exchanged for professional ones— which is to say, details on a new romance or impending divorce might be leaked in exchange for a line or two granting the celebrity an antiCommunist or non-Communist bill of health. Take, for example, the curious case of the television star Lucille Ball. In 1952 Ball headlined a top-rated TV situation comedy, I Love Lucy, with her then-husband, the Cuban-émigré bandleader Desi Arnaz. When a 1936 voter-registration card with the party affiliation listed as Communist turned up with Ball’s name on it, she had, in the parlance of the TV show that bore her surname, “some ’splainin’ to do.” 44 And to proffer such an

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figure 28. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball hold a press conference in 1953 at which Arnaz insists his wife is “100-percent American.” (Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1953: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002sjn1)

explanation Ball turned to Hopper. Using Hopper’s column to come clean, Ball described her decision to register as a Communist as “impetuous and foolish”—here using the same terms as Bogart. She had registered as a Communist to impress her grandfather, who was a for-real Depression-era Communist Party member. And now she was really sorry she did. Ball lived in the same Beverly Hills neighborhood as Hopper, and she carefully cultivated a relationship with the columnist. She provided Hopper with a series of intimate exclusives focusing on her stormy marriage, which the columnist cast as up-close and personal accounts of Ball’s struggle to meet the demands of her career, marriage, and, later, parenthood. It was all a ridiculous façade, but it fit a narrative resolutely maintained by the columnist at the time. When Ball insisted in Cosmopolitan magazine that she was “a typical housewife at heart,” Hopper of course knew better. She understood that Hollywood was not like any other town, and its married women with children were not like their counterparts elsewhere. But a certain domestic fiction was an over-

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arching narrative under her byline. And Ball, whom she cast as a personal friend and confidante—such were the benefits of the quid pro quo—proved over the years to be a popular character in that story.45 Ball’s adherence to one party line, modeling domestic bliss and an idealized notion of ’50s womanhood, allowed for a second fiction, that she was not in 1952 and had never been before sympathetic to the folks being blacklisted in Hollywood at the time.46 Again, both Ball and Hopper knew the facts: the comedienne had hosted a number of progressive political fundraisers in the 1940s and had publicly supported the CFA in the fall of 1947 before, during, and after the HUAC hearings. Ball testified twice before clearance committees. At both she claimed an “obvious apoliticism” consistent with her zany, clueless screen character. Coming to her defense throughout the ordeal was her husband, a man with indisputable anti-Communist credentials, and Hopper, who spoke at no small risk to her own reputation as an objective and undaunted anti-Communist enforcer. On TV, Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo was comically inarticulate; his accented English the object and subject of gags on every show. But in the heat of the inquiry into Ball’s political past and present, Arnaz proved to be an adept public-relations sloganeer, quipping: “Lucille is no Communist. . . . [She] is 100-percent American.” Referring to his wife as “[his] favorite redhead,” Arnaz added: “in fact [her hair is] the only thing red, and even that’s not legitimate.” 47 Many of the letters Hopper received from her readers (which form the basis for Frost’s research) reveal a cynicism among the nation’s moviegoers: “So the only thing RED about Miss Ball is her hair, eh? Hedda, how can you be so taken in?” 48 But Hopper wasn’t taken in. She was taking sides. There were in many such clearance scenarios uneasy overlaps between the personal and the professional, and Hopper understood that as well as anyone. Ball was a neighbor and a friend . . . inasmuch as friendship might be defined by a willingness to play along. And after all, we’re talking about Hollywood, a place populated by actors and other professional liars. This was a lie that benefited both parties publicrelationswise, and in this case at least, that was enough.

frank sinatra: pop star/movie star/ gangster/communist He gave me a look . . . It was one of those ‘Who do you amount to’ looks. I followed him out. I hit him. I’m all mixed up. —Frank Sinatra, recounting a 1947 row with the columnist Lee Mortimer

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figure 29. The popular singer Frank Sinatra (front, center) and the tabloid columnist Lee Mortimer (behind Sinatra, hand in hip pocket) after their altercation outside Ciro’s on April 10, 1947. (Everett Collection)

The story recounting a brief fracas outside Ciro’s between Frank Sinatra and the entertainment columnist Lee Mortimer broke on Thursday April 10, 1947. And though it was in the end much ado about nothing—no one was really hurt, and few in the business were particularly surprised; Mortimer was a pissy provocateur and Sinatra a narcissistic celebrity—the Examiner ran the story on the front page under the headline: “Sinatra Arrested After Attack on Film Editor Here.” The paper posted a photograph showing Sinatra slumped over a railing in a courtroom and Mortimer standing behind him; hand on hip, in a gesture that can only be described as mincing. Mortimer, who had used his column to cast a gay innuendo or two in his time, here got a dose of his own medicine. (See fig. 29.)

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There were two very different versions of what happened that night. Mortimer told the Examiner, and significantly the police as well, that Sinatra followed him out of the club, accosted him, and then beat him while the singer’s bodyguards held his arms. Mortimer’s date, the singer Kay Kino, and the Hollywood photographer Nat Dallinger (who drove Mortimer to the sheriff ’s station and then to the hospital after Sinatra and his entourage fled the scene) confirmed Mortimer’s account. Sinatra confessed to the beating, but predictably dismissed the notion that his bodyguards had played a role: “I didn’t need [their help]. Mortimer is a smaller man than I.” Upon his arrest, Sinatra surrendered a licensed concealed weapon. Sinatra moved about town with bodyguards by his side, so the pistol was less a tool for self-defense than an accouterment of his masculine image, a vestige of his upbringing in a rough-andtumble neighborhood in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a reference point of sorts for and to the underworld contacts he had made there and then later again in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.49 Mortimer’s official title was “Motion Picture Editor” for the New York Mirror, a tabloid newspaper owned, like the Examiner, by Hearst. The coverage in the Examiner was as a consequence skewed. In his column for the Mirror, Mortimer had been a persistent critic of Sinatra’s professional and personal life, cynically regarding his celebrity among the so-called bobby-soxers as at once faddish and, despite or because of the unseemly sexual displays by the young female fans at his concerts, unmasculine. The bobby-soxer phenomenon was an early iteration of the avid female fandom that would characterize the early rock-and-roll era to follow. The fans themselves got their name from the ankle-height socks in which they danced at the so-called sock hops popular in the’40s and’50s.50 These fans descended upon Sinatra’s public appearances in familiar and full uniform; bobby socks, saddle shoes, poodle skirts, ID bracelets, and Shetland sweaters. For Mortimer, explicitly identifying a celebrity’s appeal with the bobby-soxer craze was tantamount to a slur on the performer’s manhood; a sneering reference to faddishness and to the fleeting and immature tastes and desires of adolescent girls. There was as well a subtle guilt by association in play, as Sinatra was frequently mentioned along with another bobby-soxer idol, the actor Van Johnson, whose sexual preference (he was a closeted gay man) was widely known (by, among others, Sinatra and the columnists making the comparison). This sort of attack on Sinatra’s manhood was only a new chapter in a longer story that had begun during the war. Back then, columnists treated the singer’s 4-F

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status as tantamount to dodging the draft and then imagined that the singer endeavored to exploit his status to score with lonely women. The Examiner devoted part of page 1 and all of page 3 to the confrontation outside Ciro’s. When the front-page story was continued on page 3, it ran under a new title: “Editor Criticized Crooner’s Left Wing Moves.” Mortimer had previously run a series of negative items on Sinatra focusing on the celebrity’s appearance before the California State Senator Jack B. Tenney’s so-called little HUAC, where Sinatra testified about his relationship to the American Youth for Democracy, a supposed Communist-front organization. Mortimer characterized Sinatra as a Communist sympathizer and a vain poseur, noting that he had been “in New York with advocates of the down with the rich until I get it; fighting for this or that and almost any goofy thing that comes along.” For Mortimer, the proof of the veracity of his accusations lay in Sinatra’s behavior outside Ciro’s: the accusations, from Mortimer’s point of view, would not have bothered Sinatra if they weren’t true. Further proof of Sinatra’s un-Americanism, Mortimer opined, could be found in the ongoing feud between the singer and Mortimer’s colleague in the Hearst syndicate, Louella Parsons (dubbed by Mortimer “Hollywood’s greatest columnist”), and in Sinatra’s recent angry exchange with “another Hollywood scribe,” Erskine Johnson, “whom Frankie has promised to [the word choice here is precious; note the odd preposition] poke on the nose.” Regarding the “poke on the nose” that Sinatra had promised to deliver “on” Johnson, Mortimer added, petulantly, “and I thought he was all mine.” 51 Barry Ulanov, the editor of Metronome magazine, offered a different version of the Ciro’s incident, alleging that the fight was provoked by Mortimer, who, as he passed Sinatra’s table, uttered under his breath an ethnic slur:“Dago.” 52 True or not, the story gained traction, as Mortimer had in fact previously made reference to Sinatra’s myriad connections to unsavory elements in the Italian-American community, rumors rooted inevitably in Sinatra’s 1946 trip to Havana, where he was photographed shaking hands with the notorious mobster Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano. After the fight, this association was highlighted again. Under a provocative page-3 headline, “Name of Notorious Vice King Enters Sinatra Row,” a separate Examiner article ran below four side-by-side-by-sideby-side photographs that covered the full width of the paper: Luciano (who was not at Ciro’s or in L.A. on the night in question), the singer Luanne Hogan (Sinatra’s date for the evening); Kino, and Mortimer. The article moved quickly from Mortimer’s reaction to Sinatra’s attack—“it

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must have been [the mob accusation expounding on the Havana photograph], because I had never met Sinatra before and never had spoken to him”—to a brief history of Luciano’s exploits: his alleged involvement in the murder of Dutch Schultz, his arrest and conviction for human trafficking, his exile in and then deportation from Cuba, and finally evidence of his recent consolidation of a national illegal-drug syndicate. While still smarting from Sinatra’s blows to his face, Mortimer remained steadfast to his journalistic mission (which, in his selfaggrandized version, included fighting organized crime): “I made a couple of cracks about Sinatra palling with Charlie Lucky. . . . I was privileged to do so, and I won’t retract a word of it.” When Sinatra was given the chance to tell his side of the story, he refused to apologize for the altercation: “I won’t take that kind of talk from anybody.” 53 No doubt “that kind of talk” was meant to refer to the“Dago” remark, but as contextualized by the Examiner it referred instead and again to Mortimer’s steadfast journalism.

frank sinatra, orson welles, and westbrook pegler fail to meet up I claim authority to speak for the rabble because I am a member of the rabble in good standing. —Westbrook Pegler, Hearst-syndicate columnist, angry man of the press

Westbrook Pegler’s column was must reading in the 1940s. At the height of his popularity, he boasted over six million readers spread among the nearly ten thousand publications in Hearst’s King Features Syndicate. He went about this work with astonishing candor and with a fanatic’s disregard for the damage his words might inflict. His readers appreciated the absence of diplomacy, in part because parsing words was what distanced them from access to the American political system, in part because Pegler seemed uniquely uninterested in being liked by the political and movie celebrities around whom most readers would be dumbstruck. In the fall of 1944 Pegler had his run-in with Sinatra. And he made the most of, which is to say he cleverly exploited the situation. Pegler began his career as a sportswriter in an era when sportswriters were themselves “characters” in almost every sense of the term. This early body of work offered a first and early expression of an ardent class consciousness that would characterize his later columns as well as a tendency and an ability to merge news reporting with cultural commentary.

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figure 30. The “angry man of the press,” Westbrook Pegler. (Los Angeles Times, September 13, 1953: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198 /zz002h96mj)

On October 15, 1928, for example, writing on a Yale-Georgia football game, Pegler focused on the socially diverse crowd that ventured to New Haven to see the game. In an era when only the few and privileged went to college, when only a small percentage of those who went to college might qualify economically, socially, or ethnically to go to Yale, Pegler was acutely aware of and sensitive to the class dynamics inherent to the public spectacle of a Yale football game. He was first and foremost covering a football contest; he knew that, but he was fascinated as well by its larger cultural dimension, how the various subcultures brought together by a shared affection for the game might, for a few hours at

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least, come to tolerate, maybe even appreciate and understand each other a little better.54 As a sportswriter, Pegler typically championed those whose struggles left them close but just short of transcendence and victory. In a genre that routinely celebrated winning at any cost, Pegler romanticized the struggle of sport and embraced the underdog. For example, after a bloody prizefight between Harry Greb and Gene Tunney—won by Greb by fifteen-round decision—Pegler expressed a “bashful longing to touch [Tunney’s] arm or carry his bucket.” As reported by Pegler’s biographer, Oliver Pilat, when the columnist spied Tunney abandoned by his manager after the fight, Pegler “guide[d] the defeated battler home.” Years later, when Tunney became champion and extracted some degree of revenge against Greb, Pegler criticized Tunney (by then world champion) and the “grubby box-office mercenaries” who profited from his labors.55 In the wake of the Black Sox scandal, Pegler refused to join the selfrighteous call for banning the bribed White Sox players and instead attacked the team’s owner, Charles Comiskey, whom he regarded as a mogul, akin to the studio chiefs in Hollywood—the very celebrity owners and managers he’d later vilify in his column. Considering the underworld’s control of boxing at the time and the mob’s routine doping of horses before races (upon which the clueless and disadvantaged punters bet), Pegler dismissed the cult of purity in sport as a Pollyanna fantasy. The White Sox players’ only crime was succumbing to a desire to be in on the action.56 Pegler’s career as a political pundit began in 1933, when Roy Howard, the editor of the New York World-Telegram, hired him to write a politicsand-culture column and ran it alongside a column written by Heywood Broun, with whom he knew Pegler was bound to disagree. Howard advised Pegler to “write the way you have been writing [on sports]— only more so,” 57 and Pegler complied, quickly becoming a celebrity columnist whose popularity hinged on a cynicism shared, as Howard suspected it would be, by “the common man.” 58 Broun acknowledged this appeal and dubbed Pegler “the light-heavyweight champion of the underdog and game warden for the preserves of the overprivileged.” 59 In 1943, Howard and Pegler’s relationship frayed after the columnist wrote a piece critical of the National Maritime Union. Truth be told, Howard shared Pegler’s view. But the union assembled a thousand pickets outside the World-Telegram’s offices and intimidated the editor. Just as Howard weighed the relative value of his troublesome author, Hearst stepped in with an offer Pegler could not refuse.

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By the time Pegler took on Sinatra, he was one of Hearst’s star columnists, comfortable with his voice and with his audience. His column could be cruel, but this seeming irreverence was buoyed by an implied complicity with his readers. Pegler’s first salvo targeted Sinatra’s frail physique—a cheap shot really, remarking that friends turned off electric fans when the singer entered a room for fear he’d be blown away. This was followed by the inevitable bobby-soxer comments, again targeting the crooner’s masculinity. Then, in the fall of 1944, Pegler decided to give Sinatra the full purple treatment, casting doubt upon the singer’s sexual orientation and inclination. Furious at the columnist’s accusations, Sinatra got drunk and then with Orson Welles in tow went looking for Pegler at the Waldorf Astoria. While Pegler was out on the town, Sinatra and Welles somehow got into his room. Welles told a rival columnist that Pegler “might have been hiding under the bed,” as he neglected to check. Pegler bristled at the comment and got even in his column, pointing out that Sinatra had found the courage to confront him at the Waldorf only after downing several cocktails at the offices of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) Political Action Committee, which Pegler dubbed “the headquarters of the disguised Communist Party.” Pegler further characterized Sinatra’s visit to the Waldorf as an effort to “kick up an hysterical row.” The word choice—“hysterical”—cut deep. As if theirs was a struggle between two nation-states, representatives of Sinatra and Pegler met at a clandestine locale and arranged a confab between the columnist and the singer, at which, according to the celebritygossip grapevine, an accord was reached. So the story went, Sinatra vowed to never act upon his physical threats so long as Pegler agreed to lay off the gay innuendo. In the months after the staged truce with Sinatra, Pegler achieved some modicum of revenge for the hotel visit by giving Welles the purple treatment, referring to him as “a dear roguish boy, . . . whose activities could best be judged by adjectives like ‘cute,’ ‘exquisite,’ ‘delicious’ and ‘precious.’” 60 Though Pegler routinely accused politically progressive celebrities like Sinatra of Communist sympathies or Party membership, at the very moment HUAC was gearing up for its confrontation with the Hollywood Left, the columnist stepped back and reflected on the thorny topic of testing un-Americanism, doing so in a surprisingly nuanced fashion. In his column dated March 24, 1947, Pegler mused that the term “Communism” had lately been applied all too loosely to include wealthy celebrity dilettantes (like Sinatra) whose tendency to sympathize and

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share political action with Communists was merely an expression of liberal guilt. These celebrities, Pegler posited, viewed their own ridiculous success—ridiculous in scale, ridiculous with regard to fortune and luck—as fundamentally undemocratic. Communist sympathy in these cases, he concluded, stemmed from a subtle self-loathing.61 Three days later, Pegler even more controversially pondered the specific manner with which the term “Communist” was being applied to folks in the public eye. At issue was the so-called Davis test, adapted by the Civil Service Commission and thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court more widely applied to institutions and industries other than and in addition to the federal government. The test was formulated by the former Office of War Information (OWI) director Elmer Davis and held that anyone who shared an ideological position with Communist Russia (even back when that nation had joined the allies’ efforts in the war against European fascism) was essentially a Communist sympathizer and could be held to account for and could be asked to repudiate such sympathies now that relations between the countries had so significantly cooled.62 Such a test was, for example, applied to Howard Koch for his screenwriting work on the 1943 film Mission to Moscow, directed by Michael Curtiz and distributed by Warner Bros. Jack Warner, who supervised the production and distribution of the film, appeared as a friendly witness before HUAC in 1947. To demonstrate his Americanism, Warner offered up Koch, the co-screenwriter of Casablanca for his studio in 1942, as the fall guy for the war-era pro-Soviet picture. The screenwriter countered by claiming that he was in 1943 reluctant to take on the Mission to Moscow assignment but did so because Warner had insisted; he was, after all, under contract to Warner’s studio at the time, so he could not refuse the job. In 1947, consistent with Warner’s version of the story, Koch was named as one of the Hollywood Nineteen—he was among the first nineteen industry workers subpoenaed to appear before HUAC. Koch was eventually blacklisted in 1951, after which he left the United States and lived for half a decade in exile in Europe.63 Pegler smartly challenged the Davis test, noting that, for example: “We would be in a terrible fix if we could be adjudged Communists and traitors just because we agreed with the Communists on some one issue. . . . Forgive me if you can, but I agree with the Communists and Henry Wallace . . . that we don’t belong in Greece and ought to get out of Europe as fast as we can.” Much as Pegler affirmed that his bête noire, Wallace, “agreed with [the Communists] almost entirely, as well

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as I can judge,” he conceded that on this one rather significant issue regarding American intervention in Europe after the war he, Wallace, and his fellow travelers were in accord and as a consequence, “though [his and Wallace’s] reasons seem[ed] not to be the same,” per the Davis test, Pegler (of all people!) risked accusation and implication.64 Pegler’s measured opposition to the Davis test posed a complex hypocrisy. He appreciated that accusations stemming from even such flawed tests might accomplish a useful end; such tests might compel the guilty to come clean, to discuss their private politics or their encounters with others’ private politics (or both). And such dubious political outing was for Pegler in his column fair game. Throughout the late ’40s and ’50s the columnist routinely applied his own idiosyncratic and duplicitous tests or, worse, knowingly implied un-Americanism as an extension of his target’s supposed antisocial or unmanly aspects, or both, accusations posed simply because he didn’t like someone—like Sinatra or Welles. Many of Pegler’s most astute observations focused on the orbiting lives of political and pop-culture elites—orbiting in tandem and beyond the world inhabited by the rest of us. In the fall of 1954, for example, Pegler was invited to a fundraiser held in support of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who at the time was facing certain censure in the Senate. Brought together at the event—held in the inevitable Waldorf in New York—were the former isolationist Congressman Hamilton Fish; John Bond Trevor of the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, the King Syndicate cartoonist Arthur “Bugs” Baer, the attorney (and chief counsel to Senator McCarthy) Roy Cohn, the conservative journalist William F. Buckley, and the evening’s emcee, Bob Hope, who walked a shaky tightrope delivering a monologue filled with political humor to a crowd that seldom found politics funny. Hope opened by thanking Baer for the invitation “to address this McCarthy rally” and then segued to some of the luminaries present, ending with Pegler, as if he were—and maybe he was—the room’s most compelling figure. “I consider Pegler my friend,” Hope deadpanned. “He must be my friend, because he doesn’t mention me in his column. It is nice to be on friendly terms with Pegler, because he has so many ways of calling you dirty names.” Pegler frowned. Hope persevered, acknowledging Pegler’s frequent attacks on the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. “Eleanor likes him. She keeps a picture of him in her home. I can’t tell you what room, but the picture blends nicely with the tile.” The monologue closed with a clever acknowledgment of the risk Hope had taken . . . not by lending

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his presence and by implication support to McCarthy but in risking the ire of the columnist. “You can say what you want about Pegler,” Hope quipped as the lead to a final joke, “but he’s a very potent force in our America, a very necessary force and a great American.” And then Hope delivered the punch line, which may not have been funny, but it was certainly necessary: “I guess that [the compliment] evens me up [for the comedy].” To Hope’s undoubted relief, it did. Pegler took the stage, mostly ignored Hope (again), and spoke briefly about the “responsibility of the newspaperman” to “[oppose] people because of their stand on issues.” 65 Pegler appreciated and understood the importance of taking a stand. And unlike Hope, politics was for him no laughing matter. Pegler’s feud with Sinatra was rekindled during John F. Kennedy’s run for the White House. Here again we find Pegler’s instinctive suspicion of celebrity—the pop and the political—and a savvy understanding of how these realms intersected and fed off each other. Pegler was characteristically blunt, viewing the Kennedys’ relationship with the so-called Rat Pack (Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and sometimes Sammy Davis, Jr.) as scurrilous, damning the “plain and social commitment between the presidential family circle and an element which ramifies into the underworlds of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and Florida.” Such “a plain and social commitment” was a first slide down a long, slippery slope, at the bottom of which, Pegler sneered, the White House would be “given over to bongo, espresso, and weird characters wearing Castrovian beards.” As to the (at the time) largely unreported sexual shenanigans of “the Kennedy boys,” Pegler added, incautiously, that the purpose of all those touch-football games played on the Kennedy estate was to offer the men the opportunity to grope each other’s wives.66 In one of his final columns for the Hearst syndicate, Pegler abandoned decorum altogether, lampooning “the national binge of sentimentality” over the funeral of John F. Kennedy as “a maudlin orgy of simulated woe.” However accurate he was about the maudlin aspects of the event, he was wrong about the simulation; and he should have known better on that score, as the sort of devotion so many folks felt for Kennedy resembled the fanaticism apparent in the followers of movie stars, which was part of the reason he so disliked and distrusted the politician. Pegler’s cynicism about any national hour of grief aside, his anxiety to speak ill of the so recently departed revealed the depth of his antipathy for Kennedy and a more general distaste for what he viewed as a national tendency to honor fame and success absent true character, absent true political commitment.67

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Kennedy, Pegler wrote in the days after the assassination, was a villain, “a low-browed donkey with the honor of a pickpocket, . . . a mean, ratty, dough-heavy, Boston-gang politician.” As to Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Pegler saw little hope for improvement, describing the new president as “a high-boot Texan, . . . a vicious and contemptible swine.” In an eerily prescient remark, Pegler turned on Robert Kennedy, writing that he happily awaited “some white patriot of the Southern tier [to come along and] spatter [Robert Kennedy’s] spoonful of brains in public premises [soon, Pegler hoped,] before the snow flies.” 68 Here the anticelebrity populism veered well into the realm of bad taste, a growing tendency that prompted William Randolph Hearst, Jr., to finally fire the columnist. Pegler’s next writing gig would be at the fringe journal American Opinion, the official publication of the ultraright John Birch Society. But it was to be a brief coda, as late-career Pegler proved finally too angry and crazy even for them.

frank sinatra was not a communist, and he was a pretty good guy (when he wasn ’ t drunk) Frank practices a lot that is decent, and never mind who he endorses, politically. . . . There isn’t a jazz musician in need in this country who hasn’t been helped by him. —Faith Hubley, movie director, animator, political progressive

Most historical writing on the Blacklist, mine included, focuses on two sets of players: martyrs and rats.69 Frequently left out of the discussion is a third category, composed of film-industry professionals in-between these two poles, folks who somehow escaped notice and avoided the dreaded subpoena, folks who pursued their careers without making or facing accusations of un-American conduct. Many of these Blacklist-era survivors had politics that warranted conversation, but they handled such conversations carefully, . . . and maybe they were also a little bit lucky. For most of those in this third category, the answer to the second HUAC question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,” was a firm no. But sympathies were another matter, especially since a wide range of memberships, personal and professional associations, and friendships could be (and frequently were) misconstrued. For those trying to evade the political maelstrom, alleged sympathies, however innocently stumbled upon, could be hard to disprove and disavow without betraying something or, worse, someone.

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Frank Sinatra was not a Communist. He was, in the ’40s and ’50s, a political progressive with memberships in the American Youth for Democracy (later considered a Communist-front organization) and the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (HICCASP), which would come under HUAC scrutiny because of its role in the strike at Warner Bros. in 1945. The HICCASP membership included Garfield and the Communist screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and John Howard Lawson, moderate or centrist Democrats like Groucho Marx and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) president Ronald Reagan (who joined HICCASP during the 1944 presidential campaign, in concert with his support for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s run for a fourth term),70 and the pacifist chemist Linus Pauling. Sinatra sat on the HICCASP board of directors along with Welles (an outspoken political progressive), the actress and former Committee for the First Amendment (CFA) supporter Katharine Hepburn, the bandleader Artie Shaw (whose politics veered fairly far to the Left), and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. It was a diverse group with mostly good intentions. The organization’s 1945 mission statement, penned by Lawson and Trumbo, who were both Communists, was deliberately inclusive: “We [the HICCASP membership] go on record saying we are not Communists, we are not Prohibitionists, we are not Republicans. . . . We support democratic rights.” 71 In 1945 HICCASP insinuated itself—more like clambered its way— into the messy walkout at Warner Bros., a move that polarized the membership much as the strike polarized the Hollywood workforce. Most of the HICCASP membership backed the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU), with Shaw writing a letter on behalf of the organization to Jack Warner, urging him to break “the stranglehold of union racketeers,” referring to the studio’s support of the gangster-run International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). But Shaw’s letter did not speak for everyone at HICCASP. Reagan, for example, backed IATSE; he was the only major guild president to do so at the time. He felt that the CSU had been subverted by the Communist Party and appreciated the political and practical advantages to anti-Communism (and IATSE affiliation) in Hollywood. After a fractious July 2, 1946, meeting at which Lawson called Reagan “an enemy of the proletariat” and Shaw recklessly praised the Soviet constitution, Reagan and the actress Olivia de Havilland urged organization membership to adopt and sign an antiCommunist pledge that he would then publish in the L.A. newspapers. When the membership opposed such a pledge, Reagan resigned (which

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was likely his plan all along) and later repudiated HICCASP as a Communist Party front.72 Reagan’s politics were in the process of reformation in1946, and as historical turning points go, it is oddly amusing that we can credit Lawson’s big mouth for rather hurrying things along. Sinatra, who would take a decade or so longer to move to the Right, was in1946 briefly vulnerable as he found himself caught between the progressive, quasiCommunist faction in the organization, with whom he mostly agreed, and the anti-Communist moderates, some of whom were already distancing themselves from the group. Shaw, who had been better known for his many romances (including Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Judy Garland) and eight marriages than for his politics, received his subpoena in 1953. By then he knew it was too late; he had backed the wrong union at the wrong time, and his 1946 remarks about the Soviet constitution were impossible to explain or excuse. Shaw proved to be an entertaining if technically unfriendly witness. On the spot, he quipped, “to the best of my knowledge I have never been a Communist,” which was utter nonsense. When offered the opportunity to resume his testimony behind closed doors, Shaw named names that the committee already knew. But he was blacklisted anyway. Shaw retired from the music business and moved to Europe. He was all of forty-three years old. The blacklisting of the Jewish bandleader evinced a broader, larger public-relations story worth a quick mention here. By 1953, many of the Jewish-American movie executives had come to recognize that in the realm of public opinion Communism and unionism were widely assumed to be Jewish causes. In an effort to make Hollywood appear less Jewish and in doing so to somehow demonstrate their unqualified Americanism (as Americans of Jewish heritage instead of Jewish-Americans— the order of the words was important at the time), the Jewish studio moguls fashioned themselves ardent Cold Warriors. Shaw was just one of the many Jewish entertainers discredited and blacklisted with the moguls’ full cooperation and support. Such was their complicity with HUAC and with the coincident public-relations mission of postwar studio Hollywood—a complicity that revealed as well the depth of their self-loathing.73 Sinatra escaped further inquiry into his HICCASP activism, in part because Shaw was so easily made an example of, in part because he offered the gossip columnists (whose role in the inquisition was complex and far-reaching) plenty of other things to write about. In 1950, for

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example, Sinatra gave Hedda Hopper one of the year’s best stories when the singer, who had been married to his New Jersey sweetheart Nancy for eleven years, entered into an affair with the glamorous actress Ava Gardner.74 Hopper dutifully covered the many stages of the romance: infidelity, abandonment, divorce, second marriage, more infidelities, abandonment, and a second divorce that in Hopper’s universe provoked a predictable defense of family values. First she sided with Nancy and then, after Gardner dumped Sinatra, with the singer. Both Nancy and Frank were separately cast as victims of some uncontrollable, outside, un-American force personified by the homewrecker Gardner. She was a seductress and a homewrecker, the personification of the fleeting, tempting pleasures of an un-American way of life. As one of Hopper’s readers wrote in a letter to the columnist: “Wake up, Frankie, go home to your Nancy and children and become a decent citizen.” 75 For Hopper and her readers, ’50s Hollywood was rife with distractions and seductions that transcended the personal and extended into the professional and the political. Over the years, Hopper would have plenty of opportunities to play upon the metaphorical relationship between improper conduct in the personal and political realms. In 1958, for example, Elizabeth Taylor stepped in to play the Gardner/homewrecker role, stealing another popular crooner, Eddie Fisher, from his wife, the singer-actress Debbie Reynolds. Hopper exploited both scandals to caution her readers about the perils of a freewheeling life, which she cast once again as fundamentally and frankly un-American. If we define “gossip” as the private made public, legitimized by the notion that some folks, celebrities in particular, trade privacy for fame and fortune, then we can begin to appreciate how the transition in gossip from the gawking clatter of the fan magazines before the decline of the studios to the gossip columns and scandal sheets after the war so successfully harried the Hollywood community. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes, and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists through the classical era to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity and then, like Pegler, to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally antisocial and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a very narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked them to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.

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This is all to say that the weight of celebrity in postwar America became unduly heavy, so much so that it victimized the politically naïve along with the emotionally frail and weak. The prospect of pleasing Hopper and Parsons, of safely navigating the worlds lorded over by Winchell and Pegler, became at once necessary and impossible. As a consequence, the movie-star discourse took on a significantly darker character, one evinced in the short and sad stories of Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe told in the following chapter. In an irony not lost but necessarily left unexamined and unspoken in postwar Hollywood, the columnists themselves became media celebrities. And as such, their readers tired of them too, as they began to recognize the fundamental duplicity and self-righteousness at the heart of their discourse, at the core of the struggle for fun in postwar America.

the big knife: death by gossip Nobody’s interested in sweetness and light. —Hedda Hopper

When Hopper took her cameo in Sunset Boulevard, she no doubt enjoyed being part of the process . . . the moviemaking process, that is. And as discussed earlier in this chapter, she appreciated Wilder’s bitter commentary on transition-era Hollywood, especially since, even at the film’s tragic end, her voice was still the loudest in the room. Sure, there was a dead screenwriter floating in the pool, and his killer, a movie star from a more glamorous era, seemed locked in a fugue state, incapable of understanding her predicament. But being Hedda Hopper was still pretty fabulous, and everyone in the room, everyone on the set, everyone in the audience still knew it. Five years later, in 1955, the director Robert Aldrich opens his (and screenwriter James Poe’s) adaptation of Clifford Odets’s 1949 play The Big Knife with the arrival of a gossip columnist named Patty Benedict at a movie star named Charlie Castle’s home. She is introduced not (as Hopper was in Sunset Boulevard) to comment upon a story that has unfolded but instead to set the narrative in motion. She is a Hopper/ Parsons knockoff, to be sure, and her sole function at the start of the picture is to issue a threat that leads inexorably to the protagonist’s undoing and suicide. Like Hopper, she appears just once, because that is all the screen time she needs. We enter Aldrich’s/Odets’ Hollywood melodrama at a moment of crisis for a handful of players at the very top of the Hollywood food

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chain. Charlie Castle’s contract with the film executive Stanley Shriner Hoff is due to expire. At the time it was impossible to miss the narrative’s historical significance. A number of Hollywood actors had by then secured their independence from the studio-contract system. Jimmy Stewart, most famously, on the advice of his agent Lew Wasserman, had allowed his studio contract to expire in order to become a free agent and independent contractor negotiating compensation, including profit points, from film to film. In The Big Knife, all Charlie wants is what other real-life Hollywood actors are already getting in 1955. Hoff, predictably, wants to prevent that from happening. Preceding the time frame of the story told in the film, Hoff has already tried and failed to get Charlie’s signature on a contract, appealing first to the actor’s loyalty and then to his greed. The play attends Hoff’s final attempt to get Charlie to sign on the dotted line as, through various emissaries, the studio executive resorts to blackmail. Hoff, we discover, has some dirt on the movie star; a drunken hit-and-run witnessed by a bit player named Dixie Evans—a hit-and-run for which a studio publicrelations man, Buddy Bliss, has taken the blame and served time in jail as part of a studio cover-up. Dixie, played with drunken abandon by Shelley Winters, appears only briefly in the film. But Odets/Poe give her the film’s best line; this too is a setup, as despite such limited screen time she holds the film’s narrative (that is, Charlie’s and Hoff ’s futures) in her hands. At around the hour mark in the film, Dixie appears unannounced at Charlie’s doorstep. She has been at a party down the street, and someone there on Hoff ’s payroll has sent her on to Charlie’s house. En route she stumbles upon a snake in Charlie’s driveway, so her entrance is marked by a telling albeit drunken observation. “I don’t care if I see a snake,” she says. “I’m sure I’d much rather see a snake than a Hollywood producer.” The playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets knew plenty about snakes in Hollywood, and he had well before the film’s release in 1955 struggled with something quite like Charlie’s predicament. In 1947, HUAC listed Odets as one of seventy-nine members of the film community with known affiliation to the Communist Party. And by the time HUAC came calling in1952, he was barely supporting an ex-wife and two kids, one of whom was developmentally disabled and required expensive medical care. The play The Big Knife was written two years after Odets was first named by HUAC, and the film adaptation was released three years after his friendly testimony, in which he named names from the Group Theater that the committee had heard plenty of

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figure 31. Dixie (Shelley Winters) and Charlie (Jack Palance) reconnect in Robert Aldrich’s 1955 adaptation of Clifford Odets’s play The Big Knife (United Artists): “I don’t care if I see a snake,” she tells him. “I’m sure I’d much rather see a snake than a Hollywood producer.”

times before.76 Unlike his more famous colleague at the Group Theater, the unrepentant rat Elia Kazan, Odets was for the rest of his life tortured by what he did to keep his career on track. And he paid for his compromise with a legendary case of writer’s block: Odets wrote seven plays in the five years before he left New York for Los Angeles but only three in the twenty-two years that followed. The film updates the themes in the original play to include Odets himself as, like Charlie, he must surrender and become complicit in a corrupt and corrupting system or be blacklisted out of the business. Odets named names. Charlie kills himself rather than give in. The film adaptation of The Big Knife is staged like the play. It is set for the most part in a single interior space: the living room in Charlie’s Hollywood Hills ranch house. The setting displays Charlie’s material success just as it reveals his spiritual isolation; the house is his lonely place, his off-Hollywood base of operation. The film pivots on two successive scenes in this living room that bring all the principal players together. In the first of these scenes, Hoff arrives accompanied by his

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steely (and sleazy) sidekick, the aptly named Smiley Coy, to set Charlie straight. And while the actor Rod Steiger, who plays Hoff by impersonating the Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn, is suitably reptilian, his monologue on Hollywood privilege is not without a grain or two of truth; to Odets’s credit, it aptly captures a peculiar ’50s-era anticelebrity moralizing, a trope that had come to characterize the conformist, pseudopatriotic gossip narratives of Hopper, Parsons, Pegler, and Winchell. “A boy like you,” Hoff intones as he delivers the scene’s payoff: “Who are you? You some kind of special aristocracy? Because the female public wants to make love to you? Who are you, with your dirty, unmanicured fingernails? And what are you without Hoff Federated behind you? I made you. I built the studio. I, with my brain, and my hands, I ripped it out of the world. . . . And who are you? . . . [pointing his finger at Charlie] Do I have to cater to this?” For Hoff, Charlie’s reluctance to sign the contract evinces a fundamental ingratitude, a fundamental disloyalty. The studio system was crumbling, and in his view selfish movie stars like Charlie were hurrying along its demise. Repugnant as Hoff may be, his rant reflected public sentiment as well as studio desperation—and what he says is at bottom tough to dispute. The second living-room scene is blocked as well much as it might have been on stage; actors move to a spot and deliver their lines. The camera remains for the most part positioned in long shots at ninety degrees to the action, and we watch as if seated at the center of the balcony section of a theater. There are the necessary continuity cuts, but Aldrich returns repeatedly to the same high-angle long shot showing the players together in full figure. The theatrical style highlights the fact that the one key figure in the drama absent from the scene is the Hollywood aspirant Dixie. She is, we are told, currently being detained in a bar drinking with someone on Smiley’s payroll. “Is he a co-conspirator too?” Charlie asks. It’s Blacklist-era Hollywood, after all; he has reasons for being suspicious. In the film’s hectic climax, Charlie’s fears are realized. Dixie, we are told, is hit by a bus and quite literally taken out of the picture. Coy characterizes her death as a random albeit convenient accident. Charlie figures Hoff and Coy have had her killed, and he can’t help thinking he has a share in the blame. Narrative closure commences once Dixie’s sudden death has seemingly restored Charlie’s relationship to Hoff and his studio to normal. But there is no normal, not even a new normal, in transition-era Hollywood. And the narrative closure and staging—the mise-en-scène— reveal as much, as things continue to get sorted offstage, off screen.

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After Charlie exits to take a bath upstairs and necessarily off screen, Aldrich shows us Smiley fielding phone calls about Dixie’s death, spinning the story to Hoff’s and Charlie’s collective advantage. He is a Hollywood fixer—an adept player in the world of Hollywood gossip. But just as we watch Smiley doing his job, we see him distracted by water leaking down from the ceiling. Charlie’s trainer then discovers his boss dead, no doubt wrists slit, drowned. Though it is an image we never see—we are confined throughout to the living room—we know all we really need to: Charlie has decided he would rather die than give in, a sentiment Odets came to appreciate if not embody. The ending asks us to reconsider the film’s opening scene, in which Charlie’s playful boxing workout with Nick (in one of the film’s few scenes set outside the house—in one of the few scenes in which Charlie seems happy) is interrupted by the press agent, Buddy, who arrives and says with a worried look on his face: “Charles, Patty Benedict is here.” We discover in short order that he is right to be worried; Patty has come for an exclusive on the rumors about Charlie’s separation from his wife. And like Hopper and Parsons, she proves to be a formidable bully. “She just walked right in?” Charlie asks, though he shouldn’t be surprised she has done so. Buddy nods, and then advises Charlie to play ball. Charlie replies, half joking, “I’d like to play ball with her head” and pulls one last punch at his trainer’s head. But Buddy isn’t laughing; he appreciates the gravity of the situation: “Take it easy, will you, Charles? Schmooze her a little. She has eighteen million readers.” Buddy’s advice anticipates and assumes the average moviegoer’s understanding of the role of gossip in the 1950s movie business. We’ve only just met Charlie, and we have no idea what-all he has to hide. But we still know he’d better be careful. And as we quickly discover, being careful with someone like Patty isn’t so easy. In the scenes to follow, Charlie will be asked by Patty and then by Hoff and Smiley to recant former political activities and betray friends and lovers. The price of his freedom, indeed the price of even this current captivity (in this ranch house off-Hollywood) is awfully high. Charlie greets the gossip columnist warmly: “Patty, darling. . . . How are you, Sweetie?” He is an actor, after all, and consistent with his current role as gracious host, he kisses her on the cheek. Patty is at once unmoved and unsurprised, as if such a gesture of affection and supplication from a movie star is her due. Her first line of dialogue affirms the power relations in play: “Light my cigarette, Chuck.” Before he can respond, Buddy steps up, lighter at the ready. But she ignores Buddy

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and waits for Charlie to perform the necessary action. And he does. The conversation veers quickly from the banal—she wonders how she missed him at an industry party the previous night—to the perilously, only seemingly tangential, as she remarks at a French painting on his wall: “Don’t you buy American anymore?” In less than a minute, Odets has Charlie rather firmly trapped by his adversary; there are no right or safe answers to the question about the painting. So Charlie defers to self-deferential charm: “I don’t know one painter from another.” Patty segues then to past history; it is early in the film, and the dialogue is meant to offer exposition and character definition; but, significantly, Odets and Aldrich know just how much the political past matters to gossip writers in 1955 and how much it matters to their readers as well. So when Patty disparages Charlie’s former enthusiasm for the New Deal, it at once defines Charlie as a former idealist and progressive and offers the star an opportunity for a second bit of backpedaling: “I believed,” he says, emphasizing the past tense. Before he can finish the thought, she interrupts: “What do you believe in now?” It is a soft ball, and he ably plays along: “Hard work, . . . rare roast beef, . . . and good scripts.” He knows enough to eschew politics, to dismiss progressivism as youthful indiscretion, as Charlie’s real-life counterpart Bogart had. Charlie has passed this first test, so Patty issues another: What about the rumors of a new contract? Stanley Hoff, she says, has told her he is sure Charlie will sign. Here Charlie veers off-script: “He can dream.” The handler, Buddy, tries to redirect the conversation, but Patty and Charlie ignore him. Finally, Patty gets to the apparent reason for her visit, the rumored separation between Charlie and his wife, Marion. At first Charlie nervously dismisses the subject: “The rumors are just that.” But Patty doesn’t believe him, and Aldrich highlights the tension by cutting from the theatrical full-figure long shot that has characterized the scene so far to a close-up of Patty, with Buddy looming nervously just over her shoulder. She frowns and then warns Charlie about the consequences of lying to her, that she would never forgive him “if someone else printed your divorce story before I did.” We then cut to Charlie as he pauses to light a cigarette. He is for the moment silent, apparently thinking about what to say. But Patty doesn’t wait: “I hope you understand that.” We see Buddy as he anxiously awaits Charlie’s reply. “Oh, he understands that,” the handler opines. Aldrich cuts to Charlie, still in full figure. In contrast to how close we are to Patty when she speaks, the camera is not so close to him. And

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that is because he has so far been performing a role, like an actor on stage. But such an inauthenticity is proving difficult to maintain; Charlie’s patience is nearly gone, and with it his charm. To Patty’s threat “I hope you understand that,” Charlie petulantly replies, “Oh, do I?” Buddy pipes in again and tries to smooth things over, but Patty tells him to shut up: “I want my gossip from the horse’s mouth, not his tail.” Patty is nasty by nature and segues to the rumors about Buddy, who has served jail time to protect Charlie’s career. Patty wonders aloud why Charlie keeps a jailbird around and why Buddy is still on the studio payroll. Charlie refuses to betray his friend and again tries to sidestep Patty’s questions. He decides to appeal to her sense of fair play, noting that Buddy served his time, and anyway: Why dredge up the past? “It’s not in the past if I choose to bring it up again,” she tells him, “Some of you forget: this town’s got to keep its skirts clean.” Patty smells a rat; the official story—that Buddy borrowed Charlie’s car, hit someone, fled the scene, finally and drunkenly parking the car on Charlie’s lawn—still doesn’t feel right. But Charlie is done talking about Buddy. So Patty changes topics again: “I’ll make a swap [one story for another—Buddy for what she was after in the first place]. What about your marriage?” Charlie silently hands Patty her pocketbook. “Is that your answer?” she asks. He nods his head yes. “You’ve just done a very foolish thing, Chuck,” she tells him. Charlie looks over at Buddy, who is torn: Charlie has defended him against Patty’s snubs and accusations, but he has also failed to follow the studio public-relations script that Buddy has been hired to promote. And he has failed to satisfy Patty. Charlie tries charm again, thanking Patty for her visit, “Be well, be strong.” But just as she is about to leave, Marion descends the stairs, enters the living room, and says, “Am I interrupting something?” Patty appreciates a good entrance when she sees one. “Hello Mrs. Castle,” she says, emphasizing the word “Mrs.” “Hi, Honey,” Charlie greets Marion, and they embrace. Patty cuts to the chase: “Do you and Charlie still use a double bed?” Charlie compliments Patty on her persistence, but the rumored separation remains a subject he won’t discuss. “There were over four thousand divorce cases in this country last year,” Patty remarks. “It’s getting as common as the ordinary head cold.” Marion counters with “That’s sad” and then insists that her relationship with Charlie is none of Patty’s business. She’s wrong about that; and everyone in the room knows better. But Marion persists, and in doing so goes too far: “I’m the one in this town who is not afraid to tell you to mind your own business.” Having failed to get her exclusive,

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Patty leaves in a huff. Charlie appreciates what has happened: “I’m in the movie business, Darling,” he says to Marion, “I can’t afford your acute attacks of integrity.” But Marion refuses to back down: “I’m a woman, not a diplomat.” Noir-era male panic comes in many forms, and Aldrich, via Odets, uses Marion to highlight Charlie’s initially shameful attempt to charm the columnist. Marion is rude to Patty in part because she wants Charlie to behave like a man, and in this scene, in her view, he hasn’t. Her judgment is harsh (I think), but he more than makes up for this shortcoming when Hoff later produces recordings of Marion’s infidelity and Charlie breaks the records without listening to them. He may be curious about Marion’s relationship with another man at the studio, but the records seem a betrayal of another sort—of his and her private life. It is wrong to view his suicide at the end as a manly or honorable act—suicide is neither—but Odets leaves us no choice in confronting the sad possibility that it is. Charlie refuses to be compromised by a business that compels complicity, betrayal, and acquiescence. The ending of The Big Knife worked as well as it did in 1955 because the moviegoing audience understood what someone like Patty Benedict could do, what someone like Stanley Shriner Hoff could do to someone like Charlie Castle. Charlie kills himself because he’s a tortured artist, but not in the more conventional use of the terms. He kills himself because he is being tortured by outside forces that should have nothing to do with his work, forces that should have nothing to do with his private life. In 1955, slitting your wrists might be the only way to make that point, and that’s Odets’s parting shot.

chapter 4

Hollywood’s Last Lonely Places The Sad, Short Stories of Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe

I began this history of postwar Hollywood with the dead body of Elizabeth Short dumped and eerily posed in a vacant lot on the near outskirts of Los Angeles. And I end here with two more discarded young women, two more casualties found at the crossroads between the dreamed-of Hollywood (still based, for these dreamers, on a discarded industry model from Hollywood’s golden or classical age) and the real thing, the crossroads between an imagined life in the sunny City of the Angels and the reality lived by the many naïve arrivals after World War II. These two final bodies belong to Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, glamorous movie stars found dead before their fortieth birthdays. Both Payton and Monroe began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did, and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Certainly they believed they were going to be different. Payton and Monroe believed in what ex-boyfriends and photographers had for years been whispering in their ears: “You’re so pretty, you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty, that is) . . . and they did (appear in pictures). But movieland success was for Payton and Monroe a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip.

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barbara payton ’ s hollywood: rags to riches to rags I always imagined, if I could look like her I could toss my red hair into the wind . . . and meet the man of my dreams. —1950s movie fan imagining what it might be like to be a movie star

In February 1967 two garbage men were doing their jobs outside what we would now call a strip mall on Fairfax and Sunset, behind a Thrifty Drugstore, an A&P Supermarket, and The Brush Wave Beauty Shop. They had just emptied a dumpster when they walked over to a pile of what looked like spilled garbage, which they soon discovered was the body of a woman lying on her side, dressed in a loose cotton shift and flip-flops, blood dried and caked thick under her nose. They assumed the old woman was dead. She wasn’t—old, that is—and she wasn’t quite dead yet, either. One of the men later remarked that the woman was so battered, so worn out, that it looked as if she had been “dumped from out of the sky.” She was, sort of. The body in question belonged to a former movie star named Barbara Payton. The garbage men didn’t recognize her; but you could hardly blame them. Her career had ended in 1955, so a long time had passed—by Hollywood standards, at least. Payton hadn’t had a film credit for twelve years, and the scandal for which she was notorious, one that involved a fight (over her, of course) that put one man in a coma and got the other booted out of town, involved Hollywood players long past their best days and likely forgotten as well. In 1967, as her biographer John O’Dowd describes her, Payton was “a former star and tabloid queen,” and maybe not in that order. After twelve years on the bottle, in 1967 Payton had taken to playing a different role; that of “a longtime denizen of Hollywood’s Skid Row.” 1 News of the Barbara Payton body dump—body discovery, more precisely—never made it past the city desk at the Times; there were plenty of drunks found and mistaken for dead in Hollywood by then. And it wasn’t until May 11, a few months after the body dump nonstory outside Thrifty Drugs and three days after her dead body was discovered on the bathroom floor of her parents’ house in San Diego (where she was, at all of 39 years old, “convalescing”) that a Times reporter named Dial Torgerson insisted to his editors that the former actress’s death was newsworthy, that her short and sad life proffered a cautionary Hollywood story worth telling yet again.

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figure 32. Barbara Payton in a publicity still for her film The Bride of the Gorilla (Curt Siodmak: Realart Pictures, 1951). (Everett Collection)

The Times headline put her life and legacy in context: “Barbara Payton, Once Object of Film Stars’ Fistfight, Dies.” She was, as Torgerson noted, an actress for whom, “fame turned to notoriety.” The fateful fistfight between her fiancé and lover was in its day front-page news. Indeed, much of what she did was newsworthy back in 1951, even if her work as an actor never amounted to much. The industry, Torgerson reported tersely, “tried to forget the bad publicity, but instead forgot her.” 2 Payton had resisted being forgotten and as late as 1963, her career well behind her, published a memoir titled I Am Not Ashamed.3 Torgerson acknowledged the book in his article, noting that it “told how her career plummeted from one Hollywood scene to another: from nightclubbing on the Sunset Strip, when she wore a $10,000 mink coat and drove a new Cadillac convertible, to the seamy side street where she

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lived with a bootblack, working as a prostitute.” 4 Payton was in the early 1950s famous for being famous. And then she wasn’t famous any more. And then she was dead. As to the book’s title, the essayist Robert Polito notes that “I am not ashamed” was a phrase the former actress had often used to punctuate the Hollywood stories she told to her fellow barflies at the Coach and Horses, a Hollywood saloon she frequented at the end of her life. Polito befriended Payton and in his contribution to Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrooke Pierson’s collection O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors reminisces about a chance encounter with the former actress at the bar during which she opined: “You know, if I had to do this all over again, I’d do the same. . . . You are what you are, and there’s no out. You do what you have to do.” 5 No one at the bar, Polito recalls, had any idea who Payton was. And even if they did, they would never have been able to reconcile who she once was with the woman they found sitting beside them. Here was a body briefly stalled late in the process of being discarded; here was another Hollywood dreamer about to be dumped literally and then figuratively by the side of the road. Payton’s memoir had a predictable impact, especially among those who escaped her sorry fate. For example, the actress Barbara Stanwyck summed up the book in a terse remark: “I am not ashamed? Well, she damned well should have been.” 6 But shame was beside the point for Payton in 1963; it was already too late for that. And anyway, Stanwyck was hardly one to talk . . . given her activities above and below board for the Motion Picture Alliance and later as a friendly witness complicit with HUAC, given her abandonment of her son, Dion, whom she adopted as a trophy of sorts and then discarded when he never quite fit her plans.7 Sure, some of Payton’s peers, like Stanwyck, were luckier or smarter or more talented; there were of course successful female stars who survived the Hollywood party scene, who survived the booze, the sex, the older men in the movie business, the scary guys in the gangster business. It’s not hard to appreciate why Stanwyck was so quick to dismiss Payton . . . it was because she saw in Payton how a bit of bad, dumb luck might have cost her too. Payton’s career was in fact upended by a run of bad, dumb luck that began one afternoon in July 1951, when she first spied the actor Tom Neal at a pool party at the Sunset Plaza Apartments, in Hollywood. By then Neal had earned a reputation as a brawler and a reckless womanizer. He had palled around with Errol Flynn, with whom he shared a Malibu beach house, and Mickey Rooney, another of Hollywood’s

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notorious ladies’ men. Neal was a for-real badass, and that was a big part of the attraction for Payton. His darker, violent side and her attraction to it would become significant in ways no one would be able to control in the months to come. Before he and Payton hooked up, Neal had had two affairs that had warranted attention: one as the much younger “kept man” of Inez Martin, the former mistress of the gangster Arnold Rothstein in New York and then, upon his arrival in Los Angeles, an affair with the movie star (and at the time the ex-wife of Payton’s future husband Franchot Tone) Joan Crawford, whom Neal had two-timed with a studio executive’s wife. The revelation of Neal’s unfaithfulness led Louis B. Mayer, at Crawford’s insistence, to release Neal from his MGM contract after just one year. The risks and rewards to a relationship with Neal were readily apparent and manifold. Neal famously remarked after the Crawford affair ended so badly that “women come and go like trolley cars.” But that proved to be an empty boast when it came to Payton; Neal fell for her just as hard as she fell for him. And his career, already heading downward after he had so disrespected Crawford, came quite undone after his encounter with Payton. In 1951, Neal was a struggling actor, one of the many unmoored, out-of-contract players in Hollywood. Movie stars benefited from independence after the war. But for character actors like Neal, the contract meant a lot; it meant steady work and a steady paycheck. The banishment from MGM had put him in a difficult albeit increasingly common spot, as he became an independent actor on the hustle, taking whatever roles he could get, mostly in B-movies and on TV. Neal’s one remarkable credit before he met Payton was a starring role in Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, a 1945 B-noir that has acquired cult status with buffs and scholars alike but warranted little attention upon its initial release. The film is an annihilating melodrama in which one false move sets Neal’s character on the road to ruin. Life for him would soon enough imitate art. To get cast, Neal had to put himself “out there,” looking fit and trim in a bathing suit, for example, at parties much like the one at the Sunset Plaza, where Payton first laid eyes on him and he first laid eyes on her. In her memoir, Payton described with characteristic frankness the impression Neal made on her: “He was a beautiful hunk of a man. He had a chemical buzz for me that sent red peppers down my thighs.” Though she knew better—she knew that unlike some of the other men at the party, Neal couldn’t help her career—“[her] heart paid no attention.” 8

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figure 33. Tom Neal in Edgar Ulmer’s B-noir, Detour (Producers Releasing Corporation, 1945)

Payton was at the time engaged to Tone, an actor with a serious pedigree. Tone was at the Group Theater at the very beginning in the early 1930s and studied for a while with the godfather of the Method, Lee Strasberg. After stage roles in New York, Tone went on to an enviable list of major-movie credits, including featured roles in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935). Payton met Tone at Ciro’s in 1950, the year the Hollywood Foreign Press dubbed her the most beautiful girl in pictures. Tone was in style and content quite the opposite of Neal; he was as suave as his rival was rough. But he was as well a veteran of Hollywood scandal; his bitter divorce in 1949 from the actress Jean Wallace led her, then a B-movie star, to attempt suicide, garnering front-page headlines in the L.A. dailies: “Franchot Tone’s Ex-Wife Jean Wallace Stabs Self: Mother Awakened by Screams in the Night, Wrests Knife from Daughter in Kitchen.” 9 A month later Wallace was arrested for drunk driving after hitting a parked car. As the tabloids enthusiastically reported, she was dressed “only in a red coat, lace-trimmed panties, and bedroom

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slippers.” 10 Wallace and Tone had since 1950 been embroiled in a bitter custody suit that would persist for most of the rest of the decade.11 The notorious movie sex symbol Hedy Lamarr and Tone hooked up briefly after his divorce. She was a for-real movie star who had rocked the film world before she turned twenty with a provocative performance in the pre-Code export Ecstasy (Gustav Machaty) in 1933. Her celebrity had hardly diminished in the intervening years; indeed, when she became Tone’s rebound fling, she had just completed playing the role of the notorious biblical temptress in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 epic Samson and Delilah. Tone moved on to Payton after he and Lamarr split. The young actress had in the previous few years impressed in supporting roles: opposite Lloyd Bridges in Trapped (Richard Fleischer, 1949), James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Gordon Douglas, 1950), and Gregory Peck in Only the Valiant (Gordon Douglas, 1951). And though she had just landed the lead in a film a few giant steps below Samson and Delilah— namely The Bride of the Gorilla (Curt Siodmak, 1951), produced for the comically named Realart Pictures—the young actress seemed to be looking forward to her career much as Lamarr would soon be looking back. Lamarr turned thirty-five in 1949, and the DeMille film would indeed prove to be her last important role. When Payton met Tone, she was twenty-four. And he was forty-six. She was at the time a notorious Hollywood party girl who had been for the past few years hitching her star, such as it was, to a series of wealthy and famous men. However much love figured into the equation, Payton appreciated the fact that Tone knew a lot of people who could help her career—people who could get her cast in films better than some silly King Kong knockoff. As things played out, nabbing Tone would be Payton’s last really good idea. And in the end, she wasn’t cynical enough, and she wasn’t practical enough to see it through.

love ’ s lonely fugitive: barbara payton ’ s sad and short hollywood life The glittering clubs along the Sunset Strip have crowned a new queen—Warner Bros.’ blazing blonde bombshell Barbara Payton, who is turning heads nightly as she winds her superb curves through all the hottest spots in town. . . . The impression Barbara made in Warners’ Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is almost as impressive as the one she’s making on the local club scene. —Harrison Carroll, columnist, The Hollywood Reporter, 1950

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In the late winter of 1946 Barbara Payton exchanged a part-time job cleaning other people’s apartments for a part-time job modeling for department stores and local style and clothing magazines.12 The men who took her picture, the men who spied her at department-store showcases, told her she was pretty (she was), that she should be in the movies. It was a pickup line as often as not. And Payton knew that. But by then she knew what she wanted, and she had a decent idea what it might take to get it. At first, Payton seemed to have the right stuff—the ambition and the moxie necessary to complement her good looks. Payton’s moxie was very much on display at her successful audition for her first big part, Holiday Carleton in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye—a behind-closed-doors, off-camera performance that overnight made her one of the most talkedabout young actresses in Hollywood. In retrospect, it may also have been her best performance on screen or off. As Payton tells the story in her memoir: “I went over to Cagney Productions. It was a scorching hot day. I was a little late, and I hurried up the two flights of stairs that led to the casting office. . . . There were about a dozen girls about my age waiting there. They were all cool and looking at ease. I was hot, disheveled, and puffing. What I needed was a trick. I took advantage of the first one that came to mind. I went through the door into the casting director’s office, sat down on the couch, kicked off my shoes, and fanned my legs with my dress and said, ‘Shit! It’s a hot fucking day!’ ” 13 Talk about Payton’s “It’s a hot fucking day” flashing stunt circulated industrywide, as did gossip about its logical second act, Payton’s affair with the film’s producer, William Cagney, who was twenty-two years her senior. Many of the reviews of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye highlighted Payton’s performance. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood beat writer Edwin Shallert wrote: “She’s something of a blond savage when she really gets going in the part, [and she] sustains it remarkably for a newcomer.” 14 The Hollywood Reporter lauded Payton: “In the difficult role of a basically good girl who turns evil in spite of herself, [Payton] makes a vivid appearance. She manages the subtle transition with polished artistry.” 15 And the Variety review of the film singled her out as well: “Barbara Payton impresses as the girl who first falls victim to his tough fascination.” 16 Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye launched the newly formed William Cagney Productions and had a significant, practical importance to James Cagney’s career as he navigated out from under his Warner Bros. contract. In the summer of 1950, Payton seemed to be a surprising reason why the new venture might well be successful.

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Payton’s relationship with the movie-star manager William Cagney came with plenty of perks for both parties. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was Payton’s first big break, a role that certainly got her noticed. For William Cagney, Payton was a dazzling piece of eye candy that made plenty of men in the industry envious. She was fun to be with, and if the film turned out to be the start of something big for her, careerwise, she might well prove to be a profitable new client besides. Whatever his motivations may have been—the quid pro quo in place was easy enough to appreciate—William Cagney had the young actress’s future in mind when he consistently and prominently featured her image in the film’s promotional materials. On the film’s theatrical poster and lobby cards used to support the August 4, 1950, release, for example, we find Payton seated provocatively on James Cagney’s lap with a dialogue bubble above their heads: “Kiss me, Honey. . . . I can handle trouble.” The image ran alongside the tagline “James Cagney makes love to danger in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.” It was Payton, or so the promotional material suggested, who provided the danger; and as the poster image made clear, she was the object of his, as the title suggests, self-destructive desire. Payton soon traded up, exchanging the producer William Cagney for the movie star Franchot Tone. With Tone, she frequented the MGM commissary, where she palled around with her new paramour’s former co-star Clark Gable. As the actor (and another of Payton’s former lovers) Steve Hayes reports of her halcyon days at MGM, “Babs seemed perfectly comfortable and at ease with these guys, like she was exactly where she belonged.” 17 But Payton’s problem was that she was at ease with a whole lot of guys, including her co-star (in William Cameron Menzies’ 1951 film Drums in the Deep South) Guy Madison,18 the millionaire entrepreneur and film producer Howard Hughes,19 and two particularly shady characters from the Los Angeles underworld: the Hollywood drug dealer Don Cougar and his sidekick, a so-called jewelry salesman and Sunset Strip playboy, the mobster Stanley Adams. Her relationship with Cougar and Adams figured within a larger calculated risk that was not uncommon for aspiring actresses in the 1950s. Gangsters moved easily within the very club culture ambitious actresses by necessity frequented. It was a dangerous game that went badly for many of these young women; it got Jean Spangler involved with Little Davy Ogul, which soon involved her participation in shakedowns and blackmail, and then got her disappeared. And on October 29, 1950, just two months after

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figure 34. Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton during the “Singing Abe” Davidian murder trial in 1950. (Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1950: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2.library.ucla.edu /viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz001608jb)

Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye had gotten her noticed (for the right reasons), it landed Payton in front of a Federal Grand Jury looking into the murder of one Abraham (“Singing Abe”) Davidian, a Mob stool pigeon who was discovered shot dead in his mother’s home, in Fresno. Adams had been Davidian’s former partner in crime, and as it turned out, Adams was the gangster Singing Abe was ratting out.20 Payton was called to testify and arrived at the courtroom on Tone’s arm. On the stand and under oath, Payton alibied Adams; she testified that he was with her in Los Angeles at the time of the murder.21When Payton testified that on the night of Davidian’s murder she was entertaining Cougar and Adams in her apartment, her testimony was either an admission of

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a sexual impropriety or it was perjury. Or, as Tone no doubt appreciated, maybe it was both. The press coverage of Payton’s testimony repeatedly put Tone’s personal judgment in question; what, after all, was he doing with her? Moreover, the press coverage of his relationship with Payton was complicating his effort to secure full and permanent custody of his sons in his legal struggles with Wallace.22 Payton was trouble. And Tone was starting to figure that out. In the early fall of 1951, Payton’s affections vacillated with hookups and breakups, reconciliations and recriminations attending a romantic triangle including herself, Tone, and Neal. For those keeping score, Payton was on the fateful afternoon and evening of September 13, 1951, when she decided to spend the day in bed with Tone at the Beverly Hills Hotel, officially or technically engaged to Neal. Neal heard about the liaison and the hours spent afterward partying (in front of his friends!) at Ciro’s, and eventually caught up with Payton and Tone at an afterhours party at her house, at 1803 Courtney Avenue, in the tony Laurel Canyon neighborhood just north of Hollywood Boulevard. It took him a while to get there. He had to find a friend to drive him to Payton’s, as, to make matters even more irritating; Payton had been using his car to move about town with Tone. In her memoir, Payton reflected upon her inability to choose between the two men. It reads like a bad ’50s melodrama; a woman fraught by a choice between practicality and romance, a choice between a man who would be good for her career and another who would be more fun in and out of bed. Tone was likable, she said, and suave; he hung around with Gable and got the best tables at the best clubs in town. But he was a whole lot older than she was. Neal “rocked [her] haunches every time [she] looked at him.” But the relationship was, in her own words, “a train to nowhere.” 23 When Neal finally arrived at Payton’s apartment on the night of the 13th he got into a shouting match with Tone. He had been drinking all day and according to Payton he was spoiling for a fight.24 The Times report on the incident quoted Payton telling Tone to get rid of Neal, an entreaty that the actor foolishly obliged. Payton was cast as the only sure villain in the Times article, the first most Los Angelenos would read about the incident, especially since the reporters based their story on interviews with Neal’s roommate, Jimmy Cross, and his attorney, Milton Golden, both of whom were at the scene. “Neal tried to talk Tone out of fighting,” Cross told the Times, “but [thanks to Payton] Tone wouldn’t have it that way.” Cross further contended that Tone swung

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first and missed and then Neal dropped the older man with a quick combination. Golden separately confirmed Cross’s version, adding that “Tom always liked Tone. They were personal friends.” They weren’t, of course, and Golden knew that. But since the Times offered the attorney a forum, he took full advantage, carefully establishing Neal’s relative innocence in case Tone died from the beating, which was a distinct possibility at the time. Both Cross and Golden insisted that when Tone offered to defend Payton’s honor, Neal tried to reason with him, noting the difference in their ages and boxing skill. (Much was made throughout the coverage of Neal’s brief career as a boxer.) At one point, according to Neal’s friends, the younger actor cautioned Tone about the perils of bad publicity that would undoubtedly follow a fistfight, to which the more established actor allegedly replied: “When you have bad publicity you just have to take it. And this is the way it is going to be.” 25 By most accounts—and there were plenty of accounts on the newsstands in the days to follow—the fight was decided by one punch or at most a single quick flurry of punches from Neal. How many more times Neal hit or kicked Tone while he was prone and defenseless was the only subject of debate; several eyewitnesses reported a brutal, prolonged attack, whereas Neal and his entourage contended that he hit Tone at most once or twice after the first blows had decided things. Payton’s version was decidedly cinematic: she claimed she threw herself on Tone’s prone body to protect him, and for her trouble Neal had blackened her eye and torn her dress. Predictably, the reporters for the HeraldExpress ran with Payton’s fantastical version, commenting on the torn dress in wonderfully inappropriate and typical tabloid fashion: “When Neal socked her, Barbara’s dress was tore [sic] clear up to there . . . revealing the sexy legs both knew so well.” 26 The dailies infused the realHollywood melodrama—one woman, two men: an impossible choice!— with a paradoxical mix of exploitative voyeurism (those “sexy legs both knew so well”) and self-righteous moralizing. Such sensational reports distracted from the facts of the matter—facts that were altogether unsettling; the initial reports from the hospital were that Tone was in grave condition: he had suffered a concussion, a broken nose, and assorted other facial injuries. Neal was unhurt and unmarked. On September 15th, the Los Angeles Times began to speculate on the criminal investigation into the beating under the page-2 headline “Franchot Tone Badly Hurt in Fight at Actress’ Home: Chief Parker Orders Probe on Battle with Actor Tom Neal.” According to the article, Police Chief William Parker had taken a particular interest in the case and had

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turned the investigation over to three veteran officers, one of whom, Lieutenant William Reid, worked in homicide.27 According to the Times, Neal would likely be indicted. After all, Tone had every reason to press charges. And if he died from his injuries, the police and district attorney’s office had Lieutenant Reid already on the case. In a separate page-2 article, the Times recounted Payton’s recollection of the event. This was her first real chance to tell her side of the story. The actress disputed the contention that Tone had thrown the first punch, that the fight ensued only after Neal had advised the older actor to back down. Payton asserted—though as she digressed it became clear that her memory of actual events was pretty vague—that Tone “was not the sort of man who would strike anyone first.” Neal had admitted that he was angry when he had ventured to Payton’s home; he had grown sick of Payton’s indecision and her philandering, and he had decided to break off their engagement. Further, he resented how she had been (and here the Times reporters quoted Neal) “playing him” . . . he was particularly irked that she had used his car to facilitate the afternoon liaison with Tone; a matter that was, for him, “the final straw.” 28 In the days that followed, Payton tried to spin the story. She exploited a series of photo ops at the California Hospital, where Tone convalesced. She kept a straight face as she insisted that she had really loved only Tone and that she would from that day forward dedicate her life to his recovery and ensuing happiness. On the 16th, for example, just two days after the fight, the Times publicized Payton’s new spin on the story under the colorful headline “Barbara Ignores Rules to See Tone: Blonde Climbs Fire Escape for Two-Hour Visit with Suitor.” The headline was suitably cinematic, and the accompanying narrative came complete with Tone’s doctor’s unintentionally comical admonition that a man in Tone’s condition didn’t need the kind of excitement that Payton’s visits had generated. Neal’s public-relations and legal team were engaged as well in damage control; at Golden’s suggestion, Neal offered an apology: “I feel awful about Tone. I liked him even if we were in love with the same girl. I’ll do anything I can to help, blood transfusions, anything.” Neal was for a multitude of reasons worried about Tone’s recovery, and he had become anxious because the cops seemed to be urging Tone to press assault charges. But even if assault charges were not forthcoming, he knew his future as an actor in Hollywood was probably over. As the Times reported, the fight had been the bloodiest in recent memory. And there was a larger Hollywood narrative in play, one that was familiar to

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figure 35. One of the many Barbara Payton photo ops at California Hospital in September 1951. (Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1951: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http://digital2 .library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz00153whf)

anyone following the celebrity beat, one that fueled an increasing public resentment, stoked by the press, regarding entitled movie stars. The scandal featured three privileged Hollywood celebrities, handsome people with too much money and time and little regard for the consequences of their behavior. All three carelessly risked professional and personal lives most Americans deeply desired, and all for a distracting night or two in the sack—a risk many fans could not condone or understand. As coverage of the fight and its aftermath persisted, reporters for the Times got more and more dismissive of the principals and more and more cynical about their motives. They described Payton derisively as a

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sloe-eyed Texas blonde and cynically opined that her handlers planned to use the scandal to promote her forthcoming eighteenth-century costume picture (then in preproduction) . . . after all, an unidentified publicist for the production company remarked, “that’s the way men fought for women in the eighteenth century.” 29 The reporters recast the romantic melodrama (the story line encouraged by Payton) as a bedroom farce, reporting on where Neal was really living in the late summer of 1951 (mostly with Payton, as the story unfolded) and on exactly whom Payton planned to marry (on the 14th it was Tone, even though she was at the time engaged to Neal; weeks earlier she had been engaged to Tone but couldn’t stay away from the younger actor). In the end no amount of damage control could counter the bad publicity. Less than two months after the scandal first hit the newspapers and just days after the absurd Hollywood public-relations event that was the Tone-Payton nuptials—they married on September 28th, less than two weeks after Neal had put Tone in the hospital—Payton was fired from her contract with William Cagney Productions. The eighteenth-century period piece mentioned in the Times never got made; at least it never got made with Payton. Bride of the Gorilla would in the end be the actress’s final Hollywood showcase, and it was, of course, a far cry from Warner Bros. and the A-picture future that seemed just months earlier firmly within her reach. In the late fall of 1951 Barbara Payton was twenty-four years old. And the end of her movie career was already at hand.

hollywood postmortem: actress barbara payton, dead at thirty-nine Everything in this apartment was paid for on my back. And I’m damn proud of it, too. —Barbara Payton, giving a tour of the West Hollywood home she shared with Tom Neal in 1952

In February 1967, when she was found drunk and unconscious, left for dead outside the Hollywood A&P, Barbara Payton was thirty-nine years old. She looked a lot older, and in a lot of ways she was. When she died, three months later, industry columnists exploited the occasion to ruminate on the wages of sin in postwar Hollywood, doing so with a mix of condescension and self-righteous moralizing that had come to characterize transition-era Hollywood history. Payton was to the end philosophical on her rise and fall in Hollywood, which she summed up in the title of her memoir; there was, for

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her, no shame in desire and ambition. That her professional life was complexly tied to sex was not particularly unusual for a female movie star in 1950s Hollywood. And that she would eventually turn to prostitution after her brief acting career faltered was as well a familiar scenario. What were the differences, Payton pondered in her memoir, between what she did to make it in the film business—what she did to get noticed on the nightclub circuit and after that fateful audition for William Cagney—and what she did, what she had to do to pay for drinks at the Horse and Coaches a decade later? The so-called casting couch was a very real aspect of professional mobility for actresses in the studio era. By the time Payton arrived on the scene, the couch was more a metaphor than a real piece of studio furniture; and that metaphor referred to a practice that, like a lot of film work, had moved off the studio lots and into more random, temporary, and sometimes risky sites. As an aspiring young actress, Payton slept with plenty of men to get noticed, to get cast and contracted, to become part of the glamorous Hollywood scene. Looking back in 1967, the price she had paid still seemed a fair-enough deal. Payton was a movie star for at most two years. By the time she published her memoir, she he had been a has-been for fifteen. The intervening years were not kind. First, predictably, Payton and Tone’s marriage didn’t last. She was able to stick with the public-relations story that she created after the fight—that she had always loved only Tone—for all of fifty days. She was never that good an actress. The Payton-Tone divorce, finalized a few months later, was acrimonious, with Tone using a file of photographs that he had assembled from private investigations over the years—of Payton and Madison, of Payton and Neal—to blackball her at the studios where he still maintained some clout. The very executives who had enjoyed Payton’s stint as a party girl now damned her for playing the role so convincingly and so well. Her recollection of the breakup of her marriage to Tone cannily exposes the double standard to which she refused to submit: “[Tone] couldn’t accept me as Barbara Payton from the day of our marriage. If he could have, we might have been happy. But I was the Barbara Payton of Tom Neal’s—of my lovers—of my past—all of it. He hated me for what I had been and loved me for what I was. He tortured himself. I was only somebody for his doubts, fears, recriminations to bounce off. I resolved to [spare him] the torture. It was endless. It built, and there was no end in sight. Every part of my body reminded him of another man. . . . It couldn’t work. I agreed to give him a divorce by default.” 30

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Payton did her best to maintain her celebrity after the brawl. But she was no longer actually in (the) movies. The scandal sheets kept her in the public eye, but they encouraged a fascination with the past: the master narrative presumed that she had thrown it all away. Every time she tried to restart her career, she found herself caught in a double bind; her celebrity after the fall of 1951 was based upon the fact that she was washed up. And there was no getting around that fact. In 1953, Payton flew to London to try her luck there. She signed with Hammer Film Productions and starred in two forgettable B-pictures, the inevitably titled Bad Blonde (Reginald Le Borg, 1953) and Four-Sided Triangle (Terence Fischer, 1953). But the relationship didn’t last. In an interview with the British weekly Film News staged during the production of Bad Blonde, Payton opined: “This business of being beautiful just leads to trouble. . . . Looking the way I do is a curse!” Her producers at Hammer were quoted in the press insisting that she “[had] the goods to become a top international sex symbol,” but in private they acknowledged that she seemed “determined to surround herself with the most unsavory men,” chief among them Tom Neal. When another studio producer mused aloud about Payton during her time at Hammer, he foreshadowed how we would soon talk about Marilyn Monroe, whose arrival on the movie scene with starring roles in Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953) and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) roughly coincided with Payton’s Hollywood exit: “[Payton] was an extremely beautiful person,” he remarked, “but deeply troubled.” 31 That he used the past tense spoke volumes on the trajectory of her career. Payton tried to make the most of her opportunity in London, because she knew that a comeback in the United States was pretty unlikely. When the film offers stateside stopped, she signed up for a summerstock/dinner-theater tour with Neal in a stage version of James M. Cain’s noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. That there were obvious synergies between Cain’s story of a wife who falls for a drifter with whom she plots the murder of her husband and Payton’s love triangle with Neal and Tone was built into the show’s promotion. Thus there was a freak-show aspect to the entire run that Payton surely understood. But by then she was already, committedly not ashamed. Payton’s comeback picture, if it could be called that, in the United States was Run for the Hills (Lew Landers, 1953) for Jack Broder Productions/Realart, the production/distribution team for Bride of the Gorilla. Then came a B-western, The Great Jesse James Raid (1953),

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directed by Le Borg, with whom she had worked on Bad Blonde in the United Kingdom. Payton’s final screen credit was a 1955 cheapie noir titled Murder Is My Beat, directed by—in case there was insufficient coincidence and irony to go around by then—Edgar Ulmer, whose 1945 film Detour had featured Tom Neal’s only memorable work. With the end of her film career came another marriage (to George A. [Tony] Provas, with whom she lived in Mexico, among other places, until their divorce in 1958) and a series of brushes with the law. She was arrested for passing bad checks at a Hollywood liquor store and then again for soliciting sex with an undercover police officer. Her descent into alcoholism landed her in a series of transient hotels and apartments in Hollywood and downtown L.A. Like Elizabeth Short, who in 1947 could only dream of being Barbara Payton, in her final years in Los Angeles the former actress had herself become a version of the Dahlia, trading sex for food and booze, a dangerous modus operandi that landed Payton in a police station one night, the victim of a teenage gang that beat and raped her. It was another bar pickup gone bad, something Short experienced (at least once) as well. Neal finally split with Payton in 1955 and moved to Palm Springs, where he got work as a bouncer at a local pickup bar and then bought into an Italian restaurant that soon failed. He moved on to landscaping, and by the time he met and then married Patricia Fenton, a stewardess nearly ten years his junior, his business was doing well—and so, it seemed, was he. Two years later, Fenton died of cancer; and when Neal married again, this time to a receptionist at the local racquet club—a woman named Gail Lee Kloke, who was all of sixteen back when Neal and Tone had squared off over Payton—his temper and penchant for violence got him in trouble once again. The marriage was volatile, and the jealousy that Payton had exploited a decade earlier reemerged. The couple serially separated and reunited. Less than two days after their final reunion Neal found himself again in the newspapers. The New York Daily News headline succinctly captured the story: “Wife, 29, Slain; Actor, 51, Held: Jail Tom Neal in Palm Springs.” 32 Two versions of the Kloke murder have circulated over the years. Neal’s version is that during a bout of makeup sex, Kloke pulled a gun on him. Was it a game? Rough sex? Just a dumb idea? He didn’t know. They struggled. And the gun went off by accident as it passed by her head. The forensic analysis conducted by the Palm Springs Police Department suggested otherwise. The cops and the district attorney

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believed a simpler and more obvious scenario: the couple argued after having sex, and in a jealous rage Neal grabbed the gun and shot her. Neal was arrested and charged with murder. He was broke and tried to borrow money from his family to hire F. Lee Bailey, a famous criminal attorney whom he had read about in the papers. His family refused to pony up and with a far less expensive and capable attorney in his corner Neal was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, eventually serving six years of a fifteen-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Neal died less than a year after his release, in 1971; he was 58. Legend has it that Payton attended the sentencing hearing, looking, according to these same reports, “plump, blotchy, and missing several front teeth.” The story may or may not be true, but it sounds about right. She wrote to Neal a few times while he was in prison; but she died before he got out.33 One final bit of eerie symmetry: according to the contemporary gossip site Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen, in 1963 Payton met with the writer John Gilmore, who would later write Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder.34 She told Gilmore a story (recounted in his book) about Tone’s “strange encounter with Elizabeth Short.” 35 Payton’s motives were complex and unclear: she had every reason to seek revenge on Tone, who had blackballed her at the studios, and she needed money and figured the story might be worth something to Gilmore. According to the site, Payton died before the writer got to follow up on her lead. Neal, it turns out, contacted Gilmore as well, touting a Black Dahlia script he claimed was in development and to which he was attached to star as an intrepid detective. Crazy as the project must have sounded at the time—Neal had been living in Palm Springs for half a decade by then, his acting career well behind him—Gilmore tracked down the financier of the proposed film, and he corroborated Neal’s story, adding that the project fell apart only after Neal shot Kloke and got sent to prison . . . one incomprehensible Southland murder overshadowing another, at least in the short term.36

hollywood confidential: regarding the legacy of barbara payton Hollywood is in the business of lying. Falsehood is a stock in trade. They use vast press-agent organizations and advertising expenditures to ‘build up’ their ‘stars.’ . . . The problem with their ‘build ups’ is that they create a phony atmosphere which spoils some of those who are ‘built up.’ From Fatty Arbuckle to Bergman-Rossellini, Holly-

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wood has had trouble with its ‘spoiled darlings.’ All we have done is ‘blow the whistle’ on a few of these spoiled ones. We have given the truth to our readers. —Robert Harrison, editor, Confidential magazine, September 1957

The first issue of the publisher Robert Harrison’s Confidential magazine reached newsstands in November 1952, posting a respectable 140,000 copies sold.37 Four years later readership reached its zenith, five million, exceeding the monthly numbers for such popular mainstream publications as The Ladies’ Home Journal, Colliers, Reader’s Digest, and Look.38 In 1955 the tabloid industry, with Harrison’s Confidential the genre’s best-known publication, put fifteen million scandal-filled copies into print every month.39 There seemed by then to be no limit to filmgoers’ fascination with a new brand of impolite and indiscreet gossip. Harrison’s magazine was sensational and deeply cynical; it focused on stars’ beauty because it was sure to fade; it reported on the wild behavior of celebrities because one day the high life would certainly bring them back down to Earth. Confidential pledged to “tell all the facts and name all the names,” and however ridiculous and exaggerated such magazines’ stories may have been, the net effect of the genre was to deglamorize celebrity. The policing discourses proffered by Hopper and Parsons were at bottom nostalgic and sentimental; both women measured transition-era celebrity against an idealized, more glamorous classical period. The tabloids gleefully exploited the tawdry stories of transition-era movie and pop-culture celebrities and looked forward toward a profoundly unglamorous future in which filmgoers indulged a more jaundiced view of their idols, in which the price of celebrity involved the surrender of privacy and decency. (That such a future is upon us today is hardly subject to debate.) Payton’s decline was predictably a popular topic in Confidential and in similar publications such as Bare, Nightbeat, and Vice Squad, in part because the magazines frequently recycled old news. Payton’s 1949 affair with Bob Hope, for example, made the cover of Confidential in July 1956, four months after the magazine had recounted, with photographs, Tone’s discovery of Payton and Madison in “Payton’s boudoir,” which had occurred more than half a decade earlier as well.40 By the summer of 1956, Payton had spent most of the money she had made as an actress. So when Harrison offered to pay her $1,000 for a signed affidavit for information about her affair with Hope, she rather enthusiastically told all the facts and named names. Hope was widely loved

figure 36. The March 1956 issue of Confidential magazine, revisiting Franchot Tone’s discovery of Barbara Payton’s 1951 affair with Guy Madison. (Everett Collection)

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at the time, and his popularity hinged upon an all-American reputation. But Harrison knew—indeed, almost everyone in Hollywood knew— that Hope was a serial philanderer, and more specifically a nasty cheapskate who had treated Payton shabbily, especially at the end. In 1956, Payton got to enjoy a cold dish of revenge cashing a check for $1,000 on a story she had to wait seven years to tell. And Harrison got to cut a self-righteous superstar down to size. The phrase “name the names,” which appeared on the cover of Confidential after 1952, struck many in the business as a thinly veiled reference to what HUAC and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) were asking progressive writers, directors, and actors to do if they wanted to keep their jobs. But much as the phrase alluded to a right-wing agenda served by the gossipmongers in the more mainstream press, Harrison’s come-on was, as his attorney Daniel G. Ross remarked in 1957, intended as a counterpoint to the lies purveyed by press agents and fan magazines, a tearing down of the false idols currently worshipped by a deceived public.41 The priority placed on uncensored, impolite, and indiscreet stories rendered Harrison vulnerable to civil lawsuits and criminal prosecution to an extent the syndicated columnists never were and never would be. After all, Hopper and Parsons had newspapers and news syndicates behind them; they exploited complex personal and professional relationships within the movie colony where they were at once feted and feared. They followed policies and practices that Harrison found hypocritical, a complex system of quid pro quo that effectively protected their sources and their stories. In August 1955, the United States Post Office issued a Withhold from Dispatch order against Harrison, refusing to distribute Confidential through the mail as its uncensored, off-the-record stories (or so the federal agency alleged) defied federal censorship guidelines. Though the order did not portend much of an impact—most of the sales of Confidential were made at newsstands and not via mail subscription— Harrison recognized the importance of an obscenity judgment against him and formally challenged the order. Pending specific proof of obscenity, which in the end was not forthcoming, Harrison forced the postal service to resume mailing the magazine. A growing number of libel suits filed by Hollywood celebrities who claimed that they were damaged by stories published by Harrison proved to be a much more difficult problem. Unlike Hopper and Parsons, whom Harrison regarded as ersatz celebrities beholden to

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Hollywood hype, the publisher fashioned himself to be an industry outsider. Such a role left him vulnerable, especially when the MPAA weighed in on behalf of the many plaintiffs in 1957 and in doing so put the explicit and considerable support of the entire movie industry behind an effort to put Harrison out of business. The MPAA’s clout in Sacramento was considerable. At the trade organization’s behest, the state attorney’s office and Governor Pat Brown commenced a grand-jury investigation into Confidential, an investigation that prompted a criminal trial charging Harrison and his cohorts Marjorie and Fred Meade (who ran the dubious outfit Hollywood Research, which blackmailed celebrities into paying hush money to Confidential to forestall publication of embarrassing items and on occasion, in a twist on Hopper and Parsons’ many quid-pro-quo deals, suppressed a negative story in exchange for embarrassing items about other celebrities) with conspiracy to publish criminal libel; conspiracy to publish obscenity; and conspiracy to disseminate information in violation of the California Business and Professions Code.42 In response, in the September 1957 issue of the magazine, Harrison published a full-page statement condemning the state for filing the suit on behalf of the many spoiled-brat celebrities in Hollywood. Confidential, he claimed, had been singled out for the crime of telling the truth.43 As things played out, Harrison was on firm ground using a First Amendment defense for the first two charges. But he was vulnerable on the third, which called into question the magazine’s dubious coverage of abortions and its inclusion of advertisements for male-enhancement products, pregnancy tests, and surgical cures for frigidity, all of which ran afoul of the state’s business code. A pretrial settlement was sought by both the state and the defense, especially after Judge Herbert V. Walker supported Harrison’s right to subpoena movie stars about whom Confidential had written: “They’ll come to court even if I have to send officers with handcuffs to get them.” Among the celebrities Harrison planned to subpoena were Robert Mitchum, Maureen O’Hara, Lizabeth Scott, June Allyson, Mae West, Walter Pidgeon, and Liberace. However libelous the content of Harrison’s coverage may have been according to the law, the subpoenaed testimony risked an open discussion of topics the celebrities and their studios had, for obvious public-relations reasons, covered up, including homosexuality, miscegenation, and drug and alcohol abuse. Going into the trial, Harrison knew that he could well win the legal argument but lose his business in the process to a long and expensive legal

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battle; the court might finally support First Amendment protection for gossip, but only at a financial cost the magazine, indeed the entire gossipmagazine industry, could not cover. So Harrison decided to settle, agreeing to pay a modest fine for the abortion articles and male-enhancement ads. He promised as well to refocus the magazine’s investigative journalism away from Hollywood and onto the larger political scene. Though it was Judge Walker’s decision to allow Harrison to subpoena celebrities that had led the two sides to settle in the first place, when the state’s attorney brought the signed settlement to court, Walker refused to accept the elaborated terms, forcing both parties to try the case in court. The state’s chief witnesses included Maureen O’Hara, who Confidential claimed engaged in lewd behavior with her Mexican boyfriend at Grauman’s Chinese, a public movie theater; the disgruntled former Confidential writer Howard Rushmore; and a prostitute named Ronnie Quinlin, who Confidential claimed consorted with Desi Arnaz in a Las Vegas hotel room. O’Hara’s performance on the stand—she was, after all, a professional actress—initially supported the prosecution’s case, but the defense subsequently undermined her credibility. They marched in a handful of eyewitnesses who testified that they saw O’Hara engaging in heavy petting (one witness claimed she was having intercourse) with a Mexican man in what would become after the trial a Hollywood tourist attraction, Row 35 of the movie theater.44 Rushmore was a lousy witness even in direct testimony. The jury found him to be easily as sleazy as Harrison and the Meades.45 Quinlin, dubbed a soiled dove in the press, offered nothing that materially refuted the Confidential story about her liaison with Arnaz. The prosecution figured that the very act of buying information from a prostitute was proof of Confidential’s immorality and impropriety and that the jury would certainly view her testimony that way. It wasn’t. And they didn’t. The case went to the jury, which after prolonged deliberation failed to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the three charges. Judge Walker had no alternative but to declare a mistrial. A guilty verdict seemed no more likely in a subsequent trial, but given the cost of mounting a second defense, Harrison decided to settle. The prosecution and defense teams met and agreed again to conditions presented to Judge Walker before the trial. The deal was signed and accepted, and a second trial was averted. Per the settlement, Harrison announced: “We’re quitting the area of private affairs for the arena of public affairs. Where we pried and peeked, now we’ll probe. . . . It’s a big world, a foolish world, a crazy world, . . . and we’ll be taking you

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on an inside tour.” Harrison followed through on this promise, but the pubic had little interest in this new and different Confidential. In January 1958, the rights to Confidential and its sister publication Whisper were sold off to Hy Steriman, and the magazine became steadily tamer and less interesting until it was ultimately and finally pointless.46 The scandal magazines published exposés on sex, drugs, and crime in Hollywood. They banked on and reveled in the provocative and wicked stories of movie stars gone wild and bad. The film historian Mary Desjardins argues that Harrison and his fellow scandal-sheet publishers “realized that the studios’ power was declining and that stars, as the symbols of that system, were left vulnerable to attack.” 47 Whether or not Harrison and his ilk thought so deeply about the state of the industry is subject to debate, but the very existence of the magazines they published, as Desjardins contends, characterized a growing cynicism about the disjunct between public-relations Hollywood and the sordid film colony huddled there. As mentioned earlier, the scandal magazines dutifully chronicled Payton’s fall from grace; Nightbeat, for example, ran a “true-life inside story of the sex-for-sale racket!” that mentioned Payton among a coterie of former “Hollywood slick chicks.” 48 A 1957 issue of Nightbeat promised a look back at the lives of two of the transition era’s most notorious party girls, Payton and Lila Leeds (arrested with Robert Mitchum in the notorious 1948 Laurel Canyon reefer bust).49 The magazine ran photos of the two has-been actresses under the headline “The Queens of the Sunset Strip: Inside Hollywood’s Bedroom Jungle.” 50 Years later, Vice Squad would run a cover story answering a question few by then knew or cared enough to ask: “How Franchot Tone’s Ex-Wife Became a Common Prostitute.” 51 Indicatively, by then it was pointless to run Payton’s name on the magazine’s cover, since few readers would have known or remembered who she was.

marilyn monroe, movie star The ancient Greeks had Oedipus. And we have Marilyn. —Sarah Churchwell, Monroe biographer

On January 30, 1947, just over two weeks after the Black Dahlia murder had captured the attention of its readership, on the back page of its lifestyle section the Examiner ran what at the time seemed an unremarkable piece of industry public relations about a newly signed starlet at Twentieth Century Fox. Under the headline “It Pays to Sit” the paper published

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a “cheesecake photograph” of a blonde starlet dressed in a two-piece bathing suit perched on the arm of chaise lounge. Below the photograph, a caption recounted an old-Hollywood tale of “discovery” . . . this, just days after the Dahlia murder cautioned those who dared to dream about someday making it in the movies. The pictured starlet was a handsome newcomer with the alliterative stage name Marilyn Monroe. A brief caption no doubt scripted by Fox highlighted Monroe’s after-hours work as a babysitter, noting as well that she used this income to pay for acting lessons. It was money well spent, or so the caption asserted, since Fox executives thought enough of her talent to offer a contract.52 But Monroe’s career failed to launch. So in the spring of 1947, she went back to modeling. Broke and a little desperate, Monroe agreed to sit for a session of revealing photographs—a series of artfully staged nudes. Tom Kelley took the photographs. And Monroe received a model’s fee of $50.53 The wannabe actress signed the model release under an assumed name: Mona Monroe. The published calendar withheld her name as well—identifying her only as “Miss Golden Dreams.” The photo session with Kelley was a calculated risk and the AKA reveals that Marilyn Monroe was well aware of that fact. But the alternative—working the club scene, trading sex for drinks, food, and contacts (like Short, like Spangler, like Payton)—was risky as well and harder to keep secret. The gamble paid off . . . but not in a way anyone at the time could have predicted. With the photo session well behind her and the calendar come and gone, Monroe began landing meaty supporting roles: as Angela Phinlay in John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), as Miss Caswell in Joseph Mankiewicz’s Oscar-winning All about Eve (1950), as Nell Forbes in Don’t Bother to Knock (Roy Baker, 1952). But just as her acting career seemed finally on track, the press got hold of the photos. And the public-relations team at Fox freaked out. They urged Monroe to lie, to say that the photos were in fact not of her. It was an oldHollywood strategy, and it probably would have worked. But Monroe kept her own counsel and fashioned herself a new sort of movie celebrity. So she owned up to her past and, teary-eyed, confessed to the press that she had indeed done a desperate thing in a desperate moment: she was broke; she was hungry; she was taking care of her mother, who was mentally ill. The reporters were easily sidetracked; if anyone needs proof of this still, Monroe was a really good actress. They asked, “Didn’t you have anything on?” And Monroe replied in that little-girl voice of hers, “Just the radio.” At that very moment, she

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tapped into a new Hollywood zeitgeist, one that presupposed an appreciation and understanding of the perils awaiting a single woman on her own in such a big, bad company town. The unselfconscious honesty and instinctive vulnerability that has acquired a cultlike dimension in postmortem, here, even before her career had taken off, seemed pinned on the public persona “Marilyn Monroe,” the lonely girl lost, crying out for rescue. And what she needed to be rescued from, even here at the start, was Hollywood. The nude pictures not only did not destroy her career; they became emblems for the Marilyn Monroe origin story. On-screen nudity in a studio film was still nearly fifteen years away. But these revealing images vividly accompanied Monroe’s ascent to stardom as the visionary publisher Hugh Hefner licensed Kelley’s pictures for the inaugural issue of Playboy, which hit the newsstands in December 1953, the very year Gentlemen Prefer Blondes made Monroe a star.54

marilyn monroe is dead: one last body in the scheme of things I knew I belonged to the public and to the world, not because I was talented or beautiful but because I had never belonged to anything or anyone else. —Marilyn Monroe

The sad stories of Spangler and Payton are seldom told in film histories. But there is no such dearth of discussion and commentary on the life and death of Marilyn Monroe. She is unquestionably postwar Hollywood’s most famous and most scrutinized casualty—an actress–movie star–pop-culture celebrity whose ascent to fame, decline into depression and addiction, and death just after her thirty-fifth birthday (a victim of murder? suicide? misadventure?) has warranted scrutiny from a range of investigators including film historians, feminists, biographers, moralizers, and conspiracy nuts. The entry for Marilyn Monroe on the encyclopedic website IMDB lists thirty-three acting roles in feature films.55 Of the first seven, all predating the nude-photo session, four are listed as uncredited:56 that is, Monroe received no on-screen credit, and her name did not appear in any of the studio publicity. Her first big break came in1950 with a small part in The Asphalt Jungle, and her last completed film, a starring role in The Misfits (also directed by Huston, adapted from a story and script written by Monroe’s then-husband, the playwright Arthur Miller) was

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figure 37. Director Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Seven Year Itch, distributed by Twentieth Century Fox in 1955. (Everett Collection)

released in 1961. Fairly speaking, her professional acting career lasted just over ten years, and she was a movie star for eight of them, running roughly from the musical comedy Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1953 through her death in 1962. From the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes through the completion of her last film, The Misfits, we find just nine completed films: a relatively minor comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire (John Negulesco, 1953), in which Monroe ably undermines the Emily Post dictum that “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”; a co-starring role in the western River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954); a scene-stealing part as a hatcheck girl in No Business Like Show Business (Walter Lang, 1954); the unnamed model at the

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core of an adman’s tortured dreamscape in The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, 1955); a waitress surviving on coffee and cigarettes in the adaptation of William Inge’s stage play Bus Stop (Joshua Logan, 1956); as an American variety show entertainer, co-starring with with the legendary British actor Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl, produced by Monroe and directed by Olivier in 1957; a star turn as the perfectly named Sugar Kane in Wilder’s brilliant gender-bending comedy Some Like It Hot (1959); and as a popular stage actress in the uneven romantic farce Let’s Make Love (George Cukor, 1960). Such is Monroe’s star oeuvre. What fuels her enduring reputation as the quintessential ’50s female movie star involves less what she did than what she meant and what she continues to mean in the context of American cultural and Hollywoodindustry history. Her death put an end to what was left of the studio era in 1962. She was one of the studios’ last true contract stars: discovered, groomed, suspended, discarded, recovered, fired, and finally martyred all under the aegis of a system en route to obsolescence. She exemplifies as well Hollywood’s gender-based double standard. She tried, for example, in midcareer to use her celebrity to break away from the studio that made her, to grow out of the endless stream of dumb-blonde and showgirl roles, and to establish independence. To that end she founded her own production company, much as many male stars of the era like Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster did with their respective production outfits, Bryna and HHL.57 But while her male contemporaries successfully reinvented themselves as independent contractors, Marilyn Monroe Productions failed to do the same for her career. There are a number of reasons for this: her manager Milton Greene’s inexperience perhaps, her ill health for sure. When the production company faltered, Monroe re-started her career with Some Like It Hot, a studio film at United Artists. But she was by then in bad shape physically, emotionally, and psychologically. It was clear in 1959 as she worked on Wilder’s film that she had been better off in Fox’s so-called stable of stars—a term embraced by the studios in their heyday, a term that aptly evinced a business plan as well as an attitude toward those who helped industry executives sell their pictures. Monroe here offers one last dead body in the scheme of things— one last corpse left by the side of the road that in fact and metaphor speaks for an industry and city in transition, one last narrative that altered forever the Hollywood zeitgeist. After Monroe, the filmgoing public’s imagined Hollywood as a site of glamor, of social mobility, of

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figure 38. Reporters and photographers hound Marilyn Monroe and her attorney Jerry Giesler in Los Angeles in October 1954 after the movie star filed for divorce from the former baseball player Joe DiMaggio. (Los Angeles Daily News: UCLA Library Digital Collections, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, http:// digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark = 21198/zz0002q02m)

luck and fortune, beauty and smarts, fame and celebrity would never be the same. Monroe died on the night of August 5, 1962, and the story broke the following day. For the front page of the morning edition on the 6th, the editors at the Los Angeles Times weighed the significance of two big stories: the death of the iconic movie star and a report from a news service out of Uppsala, Sweden, that the Soviet Union had just completed a high-altitude test of a forty-megaton superbomb, following through on a promise from the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to respond to recent U.S. bomb tests in the Pacific.58 Desperate and frightening as the arms race had become, the editors gave the headline to the Hollywood story: “Marilyn Monroe Found Dead: Sleeping Pill Overdose Blamed.” Two separate front-page articles ran under the banner headline. Pages 2 and 3 in their entirety were devoted to the Monroe story—and all but two columns of page 4, as well.

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The reporters Howard Hertel and Don Neff were assigned to cover the facts—the who, what, where, and when—but they couldn’t resist opening with what would become a familiar commentary, describing Monroe in their opening sentence as “a troubled beauty who failed to find happiness as Hollywood’s brightest star.” The title of their article, “Unclad Body of Star Discovered on Bed; Empty Bottle Near” presented an enduring image. Monroe always slept in the nude; everyone knew and many fantasized about that! As to the “empty bottle near,” the paper ran a photograph of Monroe’s cluttered night table with a graphic arrow pointing at a bottle of Nembutal.59 Though no note was found, the preliminary and unofficial report from the coroner’s office—what was termed a presumptive opinion— identified the cause of death as suicide, a finding based on amateur film history and informal psychiatry. It was as if the coroner regarded her death as a tabloid story, citing the widely acknowledged “fact” of Monroe’s clinical depression, which had been an unsubstantiated subject of open discussion in the Hollywood community, in industry gossip, and in mainstream press coverage. Monroe had indeed been subject to psychiatric treatment, though the details were kept confidential. The doctors in the coroner’s office seemed to share with the tabloids and with most Americans at the time the notion that if the actress was seeing a psychiatrist she must have been crazy. And if she was crazy, she probably killed herself. The diagnosis of depression was, or so the reporters noted, affirmed by the scene of her death; after all, the glamorous movie star “was unkempt and in need of a manicure and pedicure.” There was on her part “a lack of interest in maintaining her usual glamorous appearance.” As insensitive and politically incorrect as these comments appear today, at the time Hertel and Neff were highlighting a celebrity narrative that had for a year or more already adhered to Monroe. She was, according to this narrative, privileged, gifted, and most of all lucky, but being rich and talented and beautiful was not enough to make her happy. In this scenario, Monroe had what most every other woman in the world wanted quite desperately, and still she found it all to be an unaccountable burden.60 The other front-page article countered or at least complicated this notion of Monroe as spoiled brat with what we might call the “sad Marilyn” scenario. Hertel and Neff’s article cast Monroe’s depression as a symptom of ingratitude; she had everything anyone could want, but she wanted more, she wanted something else. Under the two-column

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headline “Sad Child, Unhappy Star,” Charles E. Davis, Jr., resituated Monroe’s depression as a product of an unhappy childhood. She was, Davis wrote, “born into insecurity and never escaped it.” That Monroe earned fabulous wages and that she was the subject and object of desire, envy, and acclaim never compensated for the sadness of her childhood, of “being shunted from one foster home to another.” In Davis’s armchair analysis, Monroe’s search for happiness was subsumed in a search for self-awareness and self-actualization. “I am trying to find myself,” Monroe had told an interviewer in the last months of her life. Precisely what folks made of such a comment likely guided their attitude toward her struggles and her death.61 The Los Angeles Chief Medical Examiner Theodore Curphey supervised what would be officially recorded as Coroner’s Case 81128. Dr. Thomas Noguchi, who in 1962 was a deputy medical examiner,62 performed the autopsy and submitted the certificate of death to the county clerk, identifying the cause of death as “acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose.” 63 According to the subsequent toxicology study, Monroe had in her blood 4.5 mg percent barbiturates and 8.0 mg percent chloral hydrate (a sedative, technically a hypnotic, likely used by Monroe to help her sleep). In an August 17th autopsy report, Curphey wrote: “Now that the final toxicology report and that of the psychiatric consultants have been received and considered, it is my conclusion that the death of Marilyn Monroe was caused by a self-administered overdose of sedative drugs and that the mode of death is probable suicide.” 64 Curphey cited forensic psychiatric reports from three doctors—Robert Litman, Norman Farberow, and Norman Tabachnick—that referred to the late actress’s frequent depressions and past suicide attempts. She had on these previous, unsuccessful attempts called for help, which was consistent with the discovery of Monroe’s dead body at her home, stretched out on the bed clutching the telephone.65 The curious absence of barbiturate in her stomach, this despite the high levels in her blood and liver, prompted questions about mode and motive: How might the drugs have been administered, and by whom? One possible explanation for the apparent inconsistency was a hotshot: that is, the possibility that Monroe had been injected with the drugs, perhaps against her will. Noguchi dismissed this theory in his autopsy; he examined the body with a magnifying glass and found no evidence of an injection. Another possible explanation for this inconsistency was offered well after the fact by Monroe’s friend Peter Lawford—a movie actor, rat-pack mainstay, and (significantly for those conspiracy-minded

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at the time) President John F. Kennedy’s brother-in-law—who, in an offthe-cuff remark to his third wife, Deborah Gould, curtly remarked after hearing of her death, “Marilyn took her last big enema.” 66

politicians, gangsters, and movie stars: murdering marilyn monroe We had evidence that Marilyn Monroe had not only slept with Kennedy, but also with Fidel Castro. My commanding officer, Jimmy Hayworth, told me that she had to die, and that it had to look like a suicide or an overdose. I had never killed a woman before, but I obeyed orders. . . . I did it for America! She could have transmitted strategic information to the Communists, and we couldn’t allow that! She had to die! I just did what I had to do! —Normand Hodges, retired CIA agent, deathbed confession, April 2015

Monroe’s personal assistant and confidante Pat Newcomb insisted the death was an accident; Monroe’s mood had been on the upswing in recent days.67 Monroe’s psychiatrist, Milton Greenson, who was called to the actress’s house on the night of her death, claimed as well that Monroe was making progress and that she was not a suicide risk. The 1982 Carroll-Tomich Report that revisited the initial autopsy—an investigation that was meant to quell the many conspiracy theories attending her death but rather fueled them instead—referred significantly to an interview with Greenson, noting that his account of her mental health “did not fit with the psychological profile” laid out by the three forensic psychiatrists consulted by Cuphrey.68 Both Newcomb and Greenson viewed the overdose as accidental—a significant distinction in the nature of the tragedy attending her death. The Carroll-Tomich Report lent support as well to the persistent conjecture that Monroe was murdered, a story line that continues to support a cottage industry in print, on film, and online. Following the various theories leads down a rabbit hole we will not venture into too deeply here. Here, as with the Black Dahlia murder, solving the crime is far less important (to this historical study, at least) than acknowledging the range of potential suspects culled from the victims’ orbits, from the various subcultures at play in Los Angeles at the time and the inevitable path-crossing that occurred when the lines between modes of celebrity were so complexly transgressed. The murder and cover-up conspiracy theories implicate the United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy (and at his behest the CIA and FBI), the singer-actor Frank Sinatra and

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figure 39. President John F. Kennedy (center) with his sister Patricia Kennedy Lawford and his brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, in 1959. Peter Lawford’s role in Marilyn Monroe’s rumored relationship with the president remains a controversial subject. (Everett Collection)

his compadre Lawford (who likely pimped Marilyn to his famous brothers-in-law), the gangsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, and the labor leader (and gangster) Jimmy Hoffa. At bottom here again is the often-toxic relationship in Hollywood after the war among celebrities of various stripes: politicians, gangsters, and movie stars. Many of the murder conspiracies hinge upon a diary supposedly kept by Monroe in which she foolishly recounted pillow talk with John and then Robert Kennedy. The diary included embarrassing details of their sexual relationships and, even more troubling, off-the-record musings on official secrets concerning Castro, Giancana and Hoffa.69 This “Red Diary” has never surfaced, but for those who believe Monroe was murdered, its very disappearance supports their view. For those who believe she died by her own hand (by intention or by accident), the red diary is another piece of macabre Monroe folklore. In his critical biography of Monroe, Graham McCann tracks the intrigue, focusing on the actress’s famous lovers and confidants, her

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personal and domestic staff, the investigating officers, and on her doctors.70 According to McCann, Dr. Greenson, Monroe’s psychiatrist, had in the months before her death urged her not to take barbiturates. Her primary doctor, Hyman Engelberg, encouraged her to take them. Monroe trusted both men, but in this instance, at least, followed Engelberg’s advice. Sergeant Jack Clemmons, from the West Los Angeles Police Station, was among the first law-enforcement officers to arrive at Monroe’s Brentwood home, where her body was discovered. (There is a debate about the sequence of events here; more on that later.) He observed Greenson “smirking” and Engleberg looking “remorseful.” Hence: accidental overdose, with Engleberg potentially negligent or maybe just wrong to have encouraged Monroe’s mixed prescription-drug use. Clemmons observed Monroe’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, who was also present, to be “vague” and “nervous.” She had discovered the body but before the authorities arrived had for some reason tidied up. More on that later as well. For the conspiracy-minded, it is worth noting that Greenson treated Monroe and Sinatra. The singer was her chaperone, her beard for her liaisons with the Kennedy men. And if you believe the rumors, it was with Sinatra as well that Monroe spent time with Giancana and Hoffa at the Cal-Neva Lodge, in Lake Tahoe. Monroe and Sinatra shared the same attorney, Milton A. “Mickey” Rudin—a coincidence, perhaps, but the underworld connection is worth thinking about here, especially since Sinatra kept Rudin on retainer as his chief counsel and public spokesman, a relationship that included Sinatra’s failed bid (fronting for the mob, or so some folks suspected) to take control of the Del Webb Corporation (which owned several casinos in Nevada). Rudin was, not incidentally, Dr. Greenson’s brother-in-law and was present at Monroe’s home along with the doctor and the police on the day of her death, a matter deemed significant enough to include in the New York Times obituary for Rudin, on December 17, 1999.71 Approximately twenty years after Monroe’s death, Murray, the housekeeper, significantly revised her story. In this new version of the story, Murray claims that she discovered Monroe overdosed but still alive three hours before the police were called to the movie star’s Brentwood home. Monroe was taken by ambulance to Santa Monica Hospital, where she later died in the emergency room. Walter Schaefer, owner of the Schaefer Ambulance Company, corroborates Murray’s revised version, logging in a pickup at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Monroe’s Brentwood address, and a drop-off at Santa Monica Hospital. Gould,

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Lawford’s aforementioned third wife, now claims that her ex-husband and a private investigator went to Monroe’s house while she was at the hospital, to “clean things up.” (Here it is fair to guess at what they were looking for: the red diary.) Lionel Grandison, a coroner’s-office employee in 1962, adds to the intrigue, here again many years after Monroe’s death, by alleging that he was coerced into signing the death certificate well before all the evidence was in. Of those telling a revised story, or recanting one previously told—or both—Grandison is the easiest to dismiss; Grandison was summarily dismissed by the coroner’s office shortly after the Monroe autopsy for stealing property from dead bodies.72 And then there is the curious silence of Patricia Newcomb, Monroe’s assistant and friend. When Murray began telling her new story, reporters sought out Newcomb, but she refused to answer questions, insisting only that Robert Kennedy had not visited Monroe on the day of her death. After Monroe died, Newcomb, as McCann writes, “entered into a series of working relationships within the Kennedy entourage.” 73 So she has her reasons for refusing to speak about her former employer’s death. On May 19, 1962—less than three months before her death—Monroe flew to New York to sing “Happy Birthday” to President Kennedy. The jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee and the opera star Maria Callas were also on hand, but Monroe’s last great performance is the only thing anyone remembers from that night. Dressed in a skintight gown from the legendary Hollywood costume designer Jean Louis, Monroe sang her brief number in an excruciatingly sexy manner. Kennedy’s embarrassment was palpable, but he gathered himself well enough to improvise in response, “I can now retire from politics after having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” Rumors abound that Jackie Kennedy found the rendition anything but wholesome (it wasn’t, of course) and bristled at such a public display of her husband’s (rumored) extracurricular activity. After the “Happy Birthday” spectacle, conspiracy theorists believe Monroe was passed on from John to Robert Kennedy, likely at Jackie’s behest. Murray, in her revised 1980s version of events, insists that Robert Kennedy visited Monroe on August 5th, adding, significantly, that the two argued in her presence and that during the three-hour gap between the first discovery of the body (alive, though barely) and its subsequent return (by then dead, as efforts to resuscitate at the hospital had failed) Lawford and a private detective secured the red diary while

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Robert Kennedy quietly exited Los Angeles—all before news of Monroe’s death was made public.74 The notion that Robert Kennedy may have been involved in, maybe ordered, an assassination of Monroe dates to a 1964 self-published pamphlet written by an anti-Communist fanatic named Frank A. Capell and titled The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe.75 The American novelist Norman Mailer based his biography of Monroe on Capell’s story, with a rather wild new twist, asserting an FBI conspiracy in which J. Edgar Hoover used Monroe’s death to blackmail the Kennedys.76 In a 1973 interview on 60 Minutes, Mailer backtracked, suggesting that the conspiracy story was just a publicity stunt.77 Robert Slatzer’s 1975 The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe accepted Capell’s version of events as well,78 implicating Robert Kennedy. And later that same year, a journalist best known for writing about rock-and-roll music, Anthony Scaduto, under the pen name Anthony Sciacca, published Who Killed Marilyn?, adding further conjecture to the Monroe–Robert Kennedy connection.79 In 1982, right around the time the Los Angeles district attorney’s office felt compelled to revisit the case—worth noting here: they again found no evidence to indicate murder—a private detective named Milo Speriglio alleged that Monroe was killed on orders issued by Hoffa and Giancana.80 Speriglio’s version was built upon testimony provided by Grandison, who by then claimed he had actually seen the red diary at (what he revealingly called) “the murder scene,” and that Monroe’s body was horribly bruised, as if she had been beaten (allegedly by Hoffa and Giancana’s thugs). The biographer Anthony Summers’s commercially successful book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe alleges that Robert Kennedy and Lawford supplied Monroe with the drugs with which she later overdosed. According to Summers, Monroe felt betrayed and had foolishly made threats to go public about being “passed around” by the Kennedy brothers. Robert Kennedy and Lawford wanted only to calm Monroe down—to buy time to convince her to keep her mouth shut. Her death, Summers concludes, was an accident, albeit an accident in which the attorney general and the actor were complicit. The dirty job of ferrying the unconscious actress to the hospital and then returning her dead body to her home and staging the scene as a suicide was performed by the FBI on orders from Hoover as a favor to (and later as material with which to blackmail) Robert Kennedy.81 Summers’s work is based on hundreds of interviews. But despite such exhaustive research, it too bases its allegations about Monroe’s final

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days on testimony from Capell and Slatzer, who, among his many fictions, claims to have married Monroe in Mexico . . . a story pretty much no one believes, except perhaps Slatzer. Two recent biographers, Daniel Spoto and Sarah Churchwell, discount Summers’s version as anecdotal and speculative. Spoto opts for the most likely scenario, accidental overdose. And Churchwell, somewhat less skeptical than Spoto about a Monroe-Kennedy connection, offers instead (much as McCann did before her) a critical commentary, focusing less on precisely what happened on August 5th than on what Monroe’s death has come to mean across the vast pop- and high-culture landscape, what previous biographers, lunatic fans and conspiracy nuts, famous novelists, and plenty of mostly sober academics have expounded over the years.82 For what it’s worth, I figure we’ll never know what really happened. And while I agree with McCann, that sanity lies with “resist[ing] the obsession with ‘what happened to Marilyn’ ” on the night of her death, I’m less confortable with his conclusion that “She died. Surely that’s enough.” 83 Because, finally: it’s not. What happened to a famous movie star one August night in 1962 in Brentwood, California, has been forever complicated by a subsequent, debatably related event fourteen months later, the assassination of John Kennedy—a death that has as well prompted half a century’s worth of conspiracy theory, a lot of it involving the same cast of characters. Both stories have become collectively fascinating in the transition from postwar to postmodern America. As Churchwell aptly posits via Richard Hofstadter (who wrote his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in 1964, just after the Kennedy assassination), conspiracy theories “project onto [an] imaginary enemy [one’s] own anxieties and desires.” 84 So, yes, Marilyn Monroe is dead. But following Hofstadter, her death figures into conspiracies that have in many ways shaped American political and cultural life in the post-Kennedy era.

last rites for hollywood: some final words on the death of marilyn monroe People ought to know that I never did want her to become an actress. Her career never did her any good. —Gladys Pearl Baker, Marilyn’s mother

When a journalist asked Arthur Miller if he planned to attend Monroe’s funeral, he replied, “Why? Will she be there?” No doubt Monroe was a handful during their brief marriage. And by August 1962 Miller had

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figure 40. Marilyn Monroe with Clark Cable in The Misfits (directed by John Huston: United Artists, 1961), a film written by the playwright Monroe’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Arthur Miller.

already moved on, marrying the photographer Inge Morath, with whom he would spend the next forty years. Still, the remark seemed then as now disrespectful, even cruel. The playwright’s impatience with the question—any question, really—recalling his relationship with the actress betrayed a discomfort with his previous role as Mr. Marilyn Monroe, the movie star’s husband. He was as well already anticipating her martyrdom, already harboring a calculated apprehension at how his role in her life might be elaborated in the evolving postmortem. Here his allegorical 1964 play After the Fall figures significantly. Written two years after Monroe’s death, this “rumination on the dilemma of social responsibility,” as Miller described the work in 1987, struck audiences and critics as rude, vindictive, and self-serving. The play is based in part on Albert Camus’s The Fall, which chronicles a man’s failure to save a woman from suicide. In After the Fall, Quentin, the apparent stand-in for Miller, is a weary witness, at one point telling Maggie, the surrogate for Monroe,

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“a suicide kills two people—that’s what it’s for.” To be fair, the play takes place inside Quentin’s head, significant here because that’s where (in his head) Monroe persisted in Miller’s experience of the world in 1964, when he completed After the Fall. And though Miller uses the play to rationalize his failure to save her, this too is part of an internal drama, something the playwright was still sorting out. As Miller remarked in the 1987 interview, the play was “an attempt to arrive at a real relationship with [Monroe’s] self-destruction”—again, “a suicide kills two people—that’s what it’s for.” 85 During their courtship and brief marriage, Monroe and Miller struck many in the movie business as an odd couple, and the mysteries of their mutual attraction inevitably cast Miller as a Svengali figure. When Monroe contested her contract with Fox in the mid-’50s and ventured to New York to study under Lee and Paula Strasberg at the Actors Studio, her pretensions struck industry insiders as evidence of the playwright’s influence over her. After all, several of Miller’s plays had been staged there, and Miller and Elia Kazan, who helped found the Actor’s Studio, were creative partners, though, after Kazan named names, they were not exactly friends. When Monroe used her production company to cast herself as Cherie in an adaptation of William Inge’s 1955 Tony Award–winning play Bus Stop—the very sort of role executives at Fox would never have secured for her—this too seemed Miller’s doing; indeed it was exactly what he had publicly said she deserved. Miller was as well rumored to have been behind John Huston’s announced intention to cast Monroe in a biopic on Sigmund Freud that he was developing based on a script by the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre, an apparent admirer of the blonde movie star.86 All to say: thanks to Miller, the actress was coming to the attention of, and was frequently photographed in the company of, serious artists and writers. For example, when Monroe attended the Chicago premiere of Some Like It Hot, in 1959, her escort was not one of her co-stars from the film but instead the novelist Saul Bellow. And then there was, more troubling still, Miller’s political influence, in evidence as Monroe became a sponsor for the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy.87 However encouraged or choreographed (or both) by Miller, there was an audacity to Monroe’s midcareer path that confounded Hollywood tradition. It certainly confounded Parsons and Hopper, both of whom, by the late 1950s, were struggling to account for such a transitioning and transforming Hollywood.88 The two columnists appreciated at the very least Monroe’s newsworthiness and competed for control

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over this new celebrity narrative. Parsons reminded her readers that she had played a role in the early evolution of the Monroe story; she knew the actress would become a movie star before anyone else did. Parsons recalled that in October 1952, while she convalesced in a Los Angeles hospital, daily conversations with hospital staff frequently involved Monroe: “There were more questions about Marilyn Monroe than any other star, male or female. Marilyn herself had been in the same hospital not long ago, and she made a great hit with all the nurses and doctors.” Though the release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was still months away, in the fall of 1952 Parsons listed the “Ten Most Exciting Women” in Hollywood, and she put Monroe at the top of the list.89 In her memoir, Tell It to Louella, first published the year before Monroe’s death, Parsons continued to cling to her initial assessment: “Marilyn is the most exciting movie personality of this generation. She possesses the star quality that has to be natural, that can’t be manufactured.” 90 Their relationship—and movie stars were careful to forge relationships with Parsons in the 1950s—proved useful to Monroe in the early years of her stardom. For example, there was the dress incident: a 1953 party at the Beverly Hills Hotel to which Monroe wore a showstopping, formfitting gold lamé dress. Monroe was well aware of what wearing that particular dress would accomplish careerwise; she was in 1952 in control of the very image that would later drag her down.91 The following day, writing for The Citizen News, the columnist Florabel Muir reported on the dress and the would-be movie star wearing it: “With one little twist of her derrière, Marilyn Monroe stole the show. . . . The assembled guests broke into wild applause, while two other screen stars, Joan Crawford and Lana Turner, got only casual attention. After Marilyn every other girl appeared dull by contrast.” Irked by Muir’s assessment regarding “every other girl” in the room, Crawford denounced her rival: “Kids don’t like Marilyn . . . because they don’t like to see sex exploited.” Monroe needed a forum for rebuttal, and she exploited her relationship with Parsons to issue it. At the same time, Parsons exploited her relationship with Monroe to appear important; the exclusive with the young actress marked her relevance in the evolving Hollywood-celebrity subculture. Much as Monroe cleverly turned the nude-photograph scandal on its head, here she deftly used Crawford’s attack to her own advantage. “The thing that hit me hardest,” Monroe remarked through Parsons in the exclusive, “is that I’ve always admired [Crawford] for being such a wonderful mother—for taking four children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I knows what that means to homeless little ones.” 92

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However absurd her remarks appear today in light of the revelations of Mommie Dearest,93 the incident reveals Monroe’s public-relations savvy and Parsons’s professional pragmatism. Monroe exploited the fracas to highlight—and hardly for the first time—the “orphan girl made good” backstory, the “triumphing over disadvantage” narrative that lay at the core of her appeal in the early years of her movie stardom. Moreover, both Monroe and Parsons recognized that Crawford’s remark said more about her than about Monroe. Hollywood was (and still is) an ageist industry, especially for women: Crawford turned fortyeight years old in 1953; Monroe was just twenty-seven. Parsons knew enough to hitch her wagon, so to speak, to the younger star. Monroe’s death posed a distinct challenge to the gossip discourse and to the practice of gossip writing. Much as Hopper observed in her Monroe obituary that “No one in my memory hypnotized the camera as [Monroe] did,” her culpability in Monroe’s disaffection with Hollywood—a disaffection that culminated in the star’s self-destruction—was hard, even for one so unself-conscious as Hopper, to ignore. When, for example, Hopper wrote that “Marilyn Monroe seemed to be touched by forces impossible for any human being to bear” and that “life became a nightmare of broken dreams, promises, and pain,” the columnist seemed, as Jennifer Frost affirms, to hold celebrity culture responsible for the actress’s dysfunction on the sets of her last three films, for her suicidal depression, and for her dependence on pills and alcohol to treat that depression.94 “In a way we are all guilty,” Hopper wrote in her column on August 7, 1962; “we loved her, but left her lonely and afraid when she needed us most.” 95 Melodramatic as such a sentimental account may be, it hardly vindicated Hopper in the emerging narrative of the sad and tragic Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, who more than Hopper contributed to “the forces impossible for any human to bear.” Hopper predictably resorted to melodrama to characterize her role in Monroe’s physical and psychological decline. But many of her readers, astonishingly I think, wrote in to blame the columnist for Monroe’s death. “You knew Marilyn was sick, but you never gave her any sympathy,” wrote a man from South Dakota. Another reader wrote in: “What effect did you think those harsh words would have on her sensitive and unstable mind? . . . But it made for good copy; it Sold!” And finally, projecting into the future: “Now you’ve killed Marilyn with your dirty journalism, I suppose the campaign is on until Liz [Taylor] kills herself too.” 96 Hopper’s column was built upon the fundamental late-’40s notion that celebrities were public property and that their wealth and privilege,

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good looks and even better luck, made them fair game for the sort of sniping she dished out. Movie stars were in such a discourse pampered, spoiled brats—publicly celebrated while secretly envied and despised. Hopper publicized their wonderful lives but at the same time insisted that their wealth and privilege should not free them from traditional American political and social values . . . This, just as Hopper and her readers knew very well that it did. Monroe’s death exposed this fundamental hypocrisy. And after August 1962, there was, for the columnist and her readers, no turning back. Hopper recognized this shift and offered a deft but ultimately unsuccessful counterpoint. “Inside the head of tragedy’s child,” Hopper wrote in the second edition of her memoir, The Whole Truth and Nothing But, an edition published just months after Monroe’s death, “fame and misery were mixed up like tangled skeins of knitting wool.” There were the failed marriages and a surfeit of bad advice from Monroe’s two famous husbands, the retired baseball star Joe DiMaggio (whom Hopper adored) and Miller (whom Hopper despised); the former wanted Monroe to quit Hollywood and settle down as a wife and mother, the latter told Monroe that with the proper training she could be the greatest actress of her generation. Hopper additionally blamed Monroe’s manager, Milton Greene, who in the mid-’50s backed the actress’s decision to leave Hollywood to take greater control and responsibility for her career. Greene, and Hopper was right about this, was inexperienced—she repeatedly refers to him as “a photographer” and not as a theatrical manager—and he was, as Hopper insinuated, likely in love with the movie star he represented. But Greene’s misdeed, in Hopper’s view, was not so much or not only a betrayal of Monroe’s career as a studio-based movie star, it was also a betrayal of a studio system on the brink of collapse, a system that Hopper herself, a former actress, had dabbled in, a system in which her style or genre of gossip had once held sway. “Didn’t it occur to you,” Hopper opined, focusing on the actress’s brief midcareer sojourn to New York, “that great stars pursue their careers in conventional fashion, accepting the experienced judgment of good producers? . . . How did you rationalize that a photographer [Greene] who’d no experience making theatrical pictures could do better by you than the men who made you famous?” The answer was, for Hopper, there in the asking; Monroe had dreamed of stardom and then once she attained it defied the system that made stardom possible. That system was, and maybe Monroe recog-

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nized this in the mid-1950s, in decline. And whatever new Hollywood loomed at the horizon, it didn’t arrive in time to save her. Monroe’s death left us, as Hopper put it in her memoir, “with bitter memories of what might have been.” And while she fervently wished that her “Dear Marilyn [might] rest in peace,” Hopper revealingly surrenders the final word on the subject to the Examiner columnist Gene Fowler—whose son Will was one of the first newspapermen to cover the Black Dahlia story. By way of providing an epitaph for Monroe, Hopper cites Fowler’s famous rumination on celebrity, circa 1962, in which the newspaperman characterized Monroe as “a toy balloon among children armed with sharp pins.” 97 Hopper of course was one of the nastiest of the Hollywood kids, armed with the sharpest pin. It tells us all we need to know about her character that Hopper failed to see that. In the memoir, Hopper recalls Monroe’s “charm of innocence” in the apparent merging of character and actor in The Seven Year Itch. In doing so Hopper stumbles upon (and through) the fundamental rift between illusion and reality, between the imagined Hollywood still locked into the studio-era glamor—the “eternal values of real talent, excitement, and glamor”—that created Marilyn Monroe and the real Hollywood that rather killed her.98

look at me, i ’ m sandra dee . . . the impossibility of celebrity I like to smoke. I’m twenty-five years old, and it so happens that I like to smoke. So out in Hollywood the studio press agents are still pulling cigarettes out of my hand and covering my drink with a napkin whenever my picture is taken. Little Sandra Dee isn’t supposed to smoke, you know. Or drink. Or breathe. —Sandra Dee, movie actress, former teen-magazine icon, 1967

The creative fictions attending the off-screen lives of movie stars— public lives at once sensationalized and sanitized by public-relations gurus, personal managers, and press agents and complicated by newspaper gossip writers, sordid scandal sheets, and nowadays the crazy supermarket tabloids—have fascinated moviegoers since the earliest days of the medium. But the cultural compact, the complex relationship between celebrities and their fans, has by necessity accommodated a basic understanding: much of what we read about movie stars is not fully or fundamentally true. What we have witnessed, filtered through

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the Hollywood public-relations machine, are creative fictions stagemanaged for our consumption and diversion. Monroe complicated this compact, if only because her real life seemed all too troublingly real, rendering her decline for her many fans disconcerting and difficult to disavow. “A suicide kills two people—that’s what it’s for.” “You had the innocence of a baby,” Hopper told Monroe in 1955, at the height of her star appeal. “We knew the words were naughty, but we didn’t think you did.” Amused, Monroe replied, “I didn’t know? But I have always known.” 99 Of course she did. And Hopper knew that. But the gossip writer understood as well that the fiction that was Monroe’s off-screen identity—that too had a reality of sorts. Monroe’s off-screen Method performance of the too-sensitive former foster child facing up to the perils of life in the Hollywood limelight was real too; the actress did in fact endure loneliness and hardship growing up as the daughter of single mother with a mental illness, and Hollywood had become a hard and hard-hearted place in the 1950s. For those who witnessed Monroe’s public decline—movie fans and journalists alike—it finally didn’t matter what the actress intended or what she couldn’t help or stop. There were, finally, consequences to the demands laid at Monroe’s feet. When Monroe died, in1962, two women cut from a very different mold stepped forward: Sandra Dee and Doris Day. Unlike Monroe, these two women were fashioned to be uncomplicated and unsullied. They were Hollywood’s newest new blondes, and they were too good to be true . . . because, of course, they and the stories told about them weren’t (too good, or true). Dee became a movie star as a teenager playing an idealized version of herself.100 She was Gidget (that is, “girl” + “midget”) and Tammy, the quintessential good girl next door, who didn’t smoke, drink, or have sex. She would experience (though in many ways not enjoy) what the New York Times writer Daphne Merkin termed a “spectacularly short-lived fame”—all told, less than a decade from being discovered to getting dropped by Universal. Hers would be one of the last contracts allowed to expire as the system itself hobbled into extinction. Dee won a Golden Globe in 1958 and the following year received the Motion Picture Herald’s nod as the “Number One Star of Tomorrow.” At the height of her fame, she received more fan mail than Rock Hudson and placed on the list of the top ten box-office stars for seven consecutive years.101 She was a valuable property. Universal sheltered Dee and protected her image, just as they had with countless stars in the good old days of classical Hollywood. But as

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figure 41. The newlyweds Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin on the set of Come September (directed by Robert Mulligan: Universal Pictures, 1961) captured by the extraordinary celebrity photographer Leo Fuchs. (Leo Fuchs Photography Archives)

we have discovered in the years since her career ended, Dee had, again as Merkin writes, “a dazzling wreck of a life.” As recounted in Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, the memoir penned by her son, Dodd Darin, Dee was serially raped by her stepfather before she was ten years old. And throughout her Hollywood career she battled anorexia, with at least three hospitalizations in her midteens.102 Dee’s mother pushed her into modeling and then into a movie career before she could have imagined she could say no. To escape her mother’s control Dee eloped with the pop star Bobby Darin. But by then she was already in trouble, crumbling under the pressures of stardom, of living up to an image to which the studio insisted she adhere. The marriage fell apart quickly and spectacularly. The bad press and the advancing hands of time (sped significantly by a drinking problem and an addiction to prescription amphetamines) put Dee out of the movie-star business in her early twenties, her “darling pink world”—that is, in her words, the world Universal had stagemanaged for her—quite suddenly at its end. Absent a contract, drunk, addicted, and weighing in at barely ninety pounds, Dee told a reporter

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from the Newark Evening News in 1967, “Sometimes I feel like a hasbeen who never was.” 103 In her prime—which is to say, when she had a studio contract—Dee regarded herself as something of “a junior Doris Day.” The comparison was at the time inevitable and apt. But as with Dee, Day was never all that or so simply what the industry had made of her.104 Born Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff in Cincinnati, Ohio, Day was a prodigy entertainer as a dancer. Then, after a car accident put an end to that career, she used the prolonged convalescence to study Ella Fitzgerald’s vocal work and fashioned herself into a jazz singer. From the moment she committed to the singing career, she was successful. And she made it look easy. Much the same can be said for her transition into movie acting, a career in which she thrived for a full twenty years, followed by another five on television with, like Lucille Ball before her, an eponymous comedy series. Throughout her career she played a single part, that of Doris Day (and not the diminishingly real Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff), a “heroine who reminds us,” as the novelist John Updike wrote in 1983, “of those tireless, elastic television ladies who exhort us to get up in the morning and do exercises.” 105 Updike contends that Day appreciated the value of her image not because she was ever much like those energetic and earnest television ladies but because like Dee and Monroe and almost every actress worth our time, she couldn’t help what she projected on-screen, and as a consequence she never tried to change what we made of her. The actress credited her effortless performance of Doris Day to the director Michael Curtiz, who early in her movie career offered the following piece of advice: “No matter what you do on screen, no matter what kind of part you play, it will always be you. What I mean is, the Doris Day will always shine through the part.” Following Curtiz’s advice, Day became, as Updike observes, “a dedicated technician in the industry of romantic illusion.” 106 Day’s off-screen life was a more complicated story. And she was a more complicated character in it. There were four bad marriages to men who took advantage of her earning potential—which is to say, they spent her money as fast as she could make it. One committed suicide years after Day dumped him; another claimed, bitterly, that she loved her dogs more than him. Day committed adultery and stole someone else’s husband at least once and shrugged it off: “I didn’t care whether he was married or not,” she quipped in retrospect, “A person does not leave a good marriage for someone else.” 107 Day was, by her own account and others’, profoundly unsentimental.

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Just as her film career was ending and her brief stint as the moral majority’s favorite TV character had begun, Day’s son, Terry Melcher, a successful music producer, rented a house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Bel Air, where, on August 9, 1969, followers of Charles Manson murdered the actress Sharon Tate, the hairdresser Jay Sebring, the screenwriter Wojciech Frykowski and his girlfriend, the heiress Abigail Folger. If rational motives apply at all here—and I don’t think they do—it was Melcher’s casually made and then abandoned promises to help Manson pursue a career in pop music that prompted the attack. Day woke up on the morning of August 10th to find herself one or maybe two degrees of separation from one of the most horrid, notorious crimes of the twentieth century. But it did little to tarnish her image. The hard work at romantic illusions had paid off. The cultural compact that was Doris Day survived the Hollywood transition. Hers was an image uniquely built to endure in such a perilous place and time. Monroe, Updike writes, “lulled us like a moon seen from a motel bed.” There was always going to be a price to be paid for languishing there . . . for her and for us. Day, on quite another hand, had “a kind of fresh and energetic innocence.” She took a “guileless delight in being [herself].” There in the dark “she hinted at how, if we were angels, we would behave.” 108

Notes

introduction 1. The initial coverage tabbed her age at 42. According to the official (MGM) bio, in 1962 Turner turned 41 . . . a distinction that may well have mattered to her. 2. “Lana Faints; In Hospital,” New York Post, February 9, 1962, 5. 3. For the full backstory on the poem, see Andrew Epstein, “Locus Solus: The New York Poets,” https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2014/03/07 /a-visual-footnote-for-frank-oharas-poem-lana-turner-has-collapsed/ 4. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 449. 5. Paul Stephens, “The Poetics of Celebsploitation: Celebrity Culture and Social Media in Recent American Poetry,” http://amodern.net/article /celebsploitation/ 6. O’Hara (above, note 4), 232. 7. Stephens (above, note 5). 8. Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1997). Durkheim’s study was first published in 1897.

chapter 1. the real estate of crime 1. Thus the banner headline on page 1 of the January 15, 1947, issue of the Los Angeles Examiner. 2. See Will Fowler, Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman (New York: Roundtable, 1991), 73–74. 3. James Ellroy, My Dark Places: An L.A. Crime Memoir (New York: Random House, 1996), 125. 4. “Fiend Tortures, Kills Girl: Leaves Body in L.A. Lot,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 16, 1947, 1. 201

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5. Ibid. 6. David Brodsky, L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 136. 7. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage, 1992), 25. 8. Brodsky (above, note 6), 136. 9. Schuchardt, cited by Michael Dear, “Intentionality and Urbanism in Los Angeles, 1781–1991,” in The City, ed. Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 93. 10. See Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 461–66; and Jon Lewis, American Film: A History (New York: Norton, 2008), 193–97. 11. At the time of the decision, Paramount owned 993 theaters. RKO owned 187; Fox, 66; Loews/MGM, 21; and Warner Bros., 20. Additionally, the studios jointly owned theaters with each other: Paramount-Fox owned 6; ParamountLoews, 14; Paramount–Warner Bros., 25; Paramount-RKO, 150; Loews-RKO, 3; Loews–Warner Bros., 5; Fox-RKO, 1; Warner Bros.–RKO, 10. The Big Five studios (Paramount, RKO, Fox, MGM, and Warner Bros.) held interests in 3,137 out of 18,076 theaters nationwide. In the 92 cities with populations exceeding 100,000, over 70 percent of the first-run theaters were affiliated with the Big Five. The Paramount Decision outlawed the many collusive schemes entered into by the studios and many theater chains, including price-fixing, “run clearances,” a standard industry practice that favored first-run houses by assuring them first and regionally exclusive access to big studio films; “pooling agreements,” arrangements under which ostensible competitor-exhibitors operated in collusion in order to share in the profits of a given film’s run; and “block booking,” the licensing of one (choice) feature on the condition that the exhibitor also license a number of other features distributed by the studio over a specified period of time. 12. Before his appointment to the nation’s highest court, Douglas was the chairman of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. His understanding of American business was keen, and the remedy he devised was at once brilliant and, at least initially, effective. 13. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940– 1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 221. 14. See “Girl Torture Slaying Victim Identified by Examiner, FBI,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 17, 1947, 1–2; “Police Aided by Soundphoto,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 17, 1947, 2; Ray Richards, “FBI Head Lauds Examiner for Slaying Case Aid,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 18, 1947, 1. 15. “Girl Torture Slaying Victim Identified” (above, note 14), 1–2. 16. “Killer’s Victim Noted in Home Town for Exceptional Beauty,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 17, 1947, 2. 17. “Girl Torture Slaying Victim Identified” (above, note 14), 2. 18. “Killer’s Victim Noted in Home Town” (above, note 16), 2. 19. “Childlike Charm of Girl Got Her Job at Army Camp,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 17, 1947, 2.

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20. “Girl Torture Slaying Victim Identified” (above, note 14), 2. 21. “Girl Victim of Sex Fiend Found Slain,” Los Angeles Times, January 16, 1947, 2. 22. “Sex Fiend Slaying Victim Identified by Fingerprint Records of FBI,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1947, 2. 23. “Phoebe Short Can’t Believe Slain Girl Hers,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1947, 2. 24. “Daughter Just Quiet, Home Girl, Mother Asserts,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1947, 2. 25. “Police Quiz Chum of Black Dahlia,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 1947, 2. 26. “Lynn Martin Questioned by D.A.; Accuses 10,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 28, 1947, 1. 27. “Black Dahlia’s Love Life Traced in Search of Her Fiendish Murderer,” Los Angeles Times, January 18, 1947, 3. 28. “Police Quiz Chum” (above, note 25), 2. 29. “Black Dahlia’s Love Life” (above, note 27), 3. 30. “Mother of Hero Doubts Marriage to Short Girl,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 1947, 3.On the same day, the Examiner ran a story noting Gordon’s mother’s doubts: “Hero’s Mother Doubts He Wed,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 19, 1947, 4. 31. “Elizabeth Short’s Letters Told Hero Feelings about Love and Marriage,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 19, 1947, 4. 32. “Dahlia Killer Mails Contents of Missing Purse to Examiner!” Los Angeles Examiner, January 25, 1947, 1. 33. “Black Dahlia’s Love Life” (above, note 27), 3. 34. “Mrs. Albro Urges Girls Be Kept Out of Taverns,” Los Angeles Examiner, February 20, 1947, 7. 35. Jack Webb, The Badge: True and Terrifying Stories That Could Not be Presented on TV: http://files.umwblogs.org/blogs.dir/8178/files/2013/10/webb .pdf. 36. Steve Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder (New York: Perennial, 2004), 162. 37. “Exonerated Suspect’s Story Aids Killer Hunt,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 21, 1947, 2. 38. Ibid. 39. The source here: Steve Hodel’s close reading of the police files in Black Dahlia Avenger (above, note 36), 142–50. 40. “Suspect Detained for Questioning in ‘Black Dahlia’ Mutilation Murder,” Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1947, 2. 41. “Black Dahlia Suspect Gets Truth Tests,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1954, 2. 42. “Dahlia Killer Mails Contents” (above, note 32), 1. 43. “Beth Short Slaying Suspect Jailed after Asserted Admission of Crime,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 1947, 2. 44. See “Police Await Black Dahlia Slayer’s Pledged Surrender,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 28, 1947, 1–2.

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45. “Soldier’s Leave Time Checked in Dahlia Murder,” Los Angeles Times, February 7, 1947, 2. 46. “Corporal Dumais Is the Black Dahlia Killer,” Los Angeles HeraldExpress, February 8, 1947, 1. 47. “Blackout Murder of Beth Short Confessed: Soldier Admits Crime but Holds Back Horror Details; Corporal Dumais Signs 50-Page Confession,” Los Angeles Daily News, February 8, 1947, 1. 48. On January 12, the Times ran a six-paragraph story on page 2 titled “Ft. Dix Corporal Checked Off ‘Dahlia’ Murder Suspect List.” 49. “Amazon-Sized Woman Hunted in Dahlia Case,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 1947, 3. 50. “Boast Holds Suspect in Murder of Dahlia,” Los Angeles Times, February 17, 1947, 2. 51. “Suicide Revives ‘Dahlia’ Inquiry,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1947, 4. 52. “Man in St. Louis Says He Killed Miss Short,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1947, 2. 53. “Transient Questioned in ‘Black Dahlia’ Case,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1948, 2. 54. “Dahlia Death Confession Laid to Drug,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1948, 2 55. “Prisoner Faces Dahlia Inquiry,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 1948, 19. 56. See “Ex-Bellhop Held in Dahlia Murder,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1949, 2; and Jacque Daniel’s treatise on how the Dillon affair destroyed the career of her father, Dr. De River: The Curse of the Black Dahlia (New York: Digital Data Werks, 2004). 57. “Conners Accused in Dahlia Killing,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1949, 2. 58. “Clues Tighten in Dahlia Case, Officers Report,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 1950, 14. 59. “Black Dahlia Murder ‘Confession’ Scribbled,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1950, A28. 60. James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (New York: Mysterious Press, 1987), 3. See also idem, My Dark Places (above, note 3), 122–27. 61. Ibid., 89–94. 62. “Unsolved L.A. Crimes Ripped by Grand Jury: They Strayed into Port of Missing Women,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, January 12, 1950, 1. 63. Hodel’s website (http://stevehodel.com/) makes the extent of this supposed conviction apparent. 64. Steve Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder (New York: Perennial, 2004), 504. 65. See also Steve Hodel’s revised edition, Black Dahlia Avenger II (Los Angeles: Thoughtprint Press, 2014). 66. See http://stevehodel.com/2014/08/dorothy-huston-hodel-script-doctorclassic-1948-film-treasure-sierra-madre/. See also http://www.exquisitecorpsebook .com/GeorgeHodel_ManRay02.pdf.

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67. See http://stevehodel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Dorothy-HustonHodel-by-Man-Ray-1944-family-photo.jpg. 68. Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (New York: Bullfinch Press, 2006), 14, 37, 44, 63, 76. See also http://exquisitecorpsebook.blogspot.com. 69. Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26. 70. Donald Wolfe, The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 299– 309; 313–15; 316–17. 71. “Police Jail Mate in Lipstick Killing of Film Actress: Find Nude Body in Vacant Lot,” Los Angeles Examiner, February 11, 1947, 1. 72. “Killer’s Trail Grows Colder in Nurse Case,” Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1947, 2. 73. There is no entry for Jeanne Axford French or Jeanne Axford Thomas on IMDB. Short has an IMDB page, but the screen credits are composed exclusively of documentaries and features about her brief life and death. 74. “Police Jail Mate in Lipstick Killing” (above, note 71), 1. 75. “Werewolf Strikes Again: Kills L.A. Woman, Writes B.D. on Body,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, February 10, 1947, 1. 76. “Slayer May Mail Clews,” Los Angeles Examiner, February 13, 1947, 3. 77. See J’aime Rubio, “Jeanne French & The Red Lipstick Murder—Los Angeles 1947,” Dreaming Casually (Investigative Blog), December 27, 2011: http://dreamingcasuallypoetry.blogspot.com/2011/12/jeanne-french-redlipstick-murder-los.html. 78. “Police Jail Mate in Lipstick Killing” (above, note 71), 1. 79. “Lie Test Fails to Link Husband in Nurse Killing,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1947, 2. 80. “Another Woman Slain, Victim of Mutilation Killer,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1947, 2. 81. “Lie Test Fails to Link Husband” (above, note 79), 2. 82. See “Open Verdict Returned in Mrs. French Death,” Los Angeles Examiner, February 14, 1947; and Stan Mandel, “Colorful Life of Jeanne French Ends in Death by Mystery Killer,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1961, WS9. 83. “Unsolved L.A. Crimes Ripped” (above, note 62), 1. 84. Aggie Underwood, “Werewolves Leave Trail of Women Murders in L.A.,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, January 23, 1947, 1. 85. “There Are a Lot of Girls in Hollywood,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, January 23, 1947, 1. 86. John Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 2015), 36–37. 87. Ben Hecht, “Ben Hecht, Author of ‘Front Page,’ Writes His Views on the Dahlia Case,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, February 1, 1947, 3. 88. “Pets Sold in Night Auction for Torture,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 2, 1947, 10. 89. One competing theory of the crime concerned a letter sent to a Philadelphia newspaper and signed by someone with the initials I. N. N. T. The letter writer

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contended that someone with initials L. W. M. had killed the Overells because Walter owed him money and refused to pay up. There is little indication that the police took the story seriously. With Beulah Louise and Bud, they had motive and opportunity and what they believed to be an open-and-shut case. See “Letter Writer Says L.W.M. Caused Blast,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 27, 2947, 3. 90. See Marjorie Driscoll, “Overell Girl Reveals Romance Secrets,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 3, 1947, 1, 2; “Overell Girl Differs from Most Teenagers,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 3, 1947, 3. 91. The Register as cited in Brooks Wilson, The Newport Harbor Murders Revisited (self-published, 2012), 17. 92. This would later be refuted or at least complicated and confused in a second autopsy conducted on April 23, 1947, in which a panel of doctors disagreed as to the time and cause of death. See Maury Godchaux, “Overell Defense Declares New Autopsy ‘Wins Case,’ ” Los Angeles Times, April 25, 1947, 2. Court testimony was decidedly inconclusive regarding the timing of the head injuries. See Gene Sherman, “Overell Yacht Batteries Normal Previous to Blast, Mechanic Says,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1947, 2. The lack of consensus played a role in the eventual acquittal, along with accusations of police and prosecutorial impropriety. The case’s current reputation as 1940s L.A.’s O. J. (Simpson) trial rather begins and ends, of course, with the seemingly incomprehensible not-guilty verdict. 93. “Overells Dead at Least an Hour before Blast, State Says,” Los Angeles Examiner, March 26, 1947, 1. 94. See Marcia Dodson, “Overell and Gollum—The Most Famous Trial in the Old Courthouse,” Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1988: http://articles.latimes .com/1988–07–23/news/li-6287_1_famous-trial. 95. This refers to Johnny Cochrane’s finest moment in the O. J. Simpson trial—a moment when the prosecution’s case was exposed as flimsy and carelessly assembled. The glove didn’t fit, and because it didn’t, Cochrane established reasonable doubt. 96. Gene Sherman, “Beulah, Bud Acquitted; Crowd at Court Cheers,” Los Angeles Times, October 6, 1947, 1. 97. Dodson, “Overell and Gollum” (above, note 94).

chapter 2. mobsters and movie stars 1. Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 226–27. See also Peter DeVeco, The Mafia Made Easy: The Anatomy and Culture of La Cosa Nostra (Terrence, Okla.: Tate Publishing, 2007), 152–54. 2. Frank Sanello, “Murder of 30’s Starlet No Longer Mystery,” Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1991: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991–05–05/entertainment /9102090725_1_mysterious-murder-patsy-kelly-roland-west. See also Andy Emmonds, Hot Toddy: The True Story of Hollywood (New York: MacDonald, 1998). 3. See Michael J. Zuckerman, Vengeance Is Mine: Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno and How he Brought the Kiss of Death to the Mafia (New York: Mac-

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Millan, 1987), 101. DiCicco, along with the actor Wallace Beery, was also implicated in the murder of the comedian Ted Healy in 1937. For reasons we will never fully appreciate, the police dragged their feet after Healy’s death, scheduling the autopsy after the victim had already been embalmed. Four years later, DiCicco would be in the news again, marrying the seventeen-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. The couple would divorce four years later with Vanderbilt alleging persistent physical abuse. 4. For a complex and complete accounting of Mob influence in the union movement in Hollywood after the war, see Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001). 5. As I will discuss in chapter 3, Pegler was one of the first international reporters to expose Nazi oppression. By war’s end, Pegler would conflate being Jewish with progressivism and Communism, and as the years wore on, he became an ardent anti-Semite. 6. Oliver Pilat, Pegler: Angry Man of the Press (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 166–71. 7. Ibid., 25–26. 8. The research work of Horne (above, note 4: 24–26) unearthed these flyers. 9. “Missing Dancer Sought by Police,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1949, 2. 10. “Dancer Tagged Glamour Girl in Custody Battle,” Los Angeles Times, August 4, 1948, 2; “Full-Time Job: Glamour Girl Gets Daughter Back to Stay,” Los Angeles Times, August 16, 1948, 2. 11. “Missing Dancer Sought by Police” (above, note 9), 2. 12. “Kirk Douglas Questioned in Girl Mystery,” AP News release, October 13, 1949, recounted in “Mother Worried: Film Star Enters Spangler Inquiry,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1949, 2. 13. “Glamour Girl Body Hunted; Parallel to ‘Dahlia’ Case,” Los Angeles Daily News, October 10, 1949, 1. 14. “Lost Actress Jovial after She Left Home,” Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1949, 2. 15. See “Purse Clouds Widow’s Fate,” Los Angeles Mirror, August 5, 1949, 1. Boomhower was rumored to be in some money trouble at the time of her disappearance; she had sold some jewelry and her late husband’s big-game trophies. Her furrier claimed that she had secretly married, though that claim was never substantiated. See also Steve Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder (New York: Perennial, 2004), 319–22. 16. See Horne (above, note 4), 101–4. 17. Elizabeth Short lived briefly at Hansen’s house in 1946; see “The Black Dahlia in Hollywood”: http://www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com/?p = 418. While there is no evidence that Short ever worked for Hansen, it is possible that she lived at one time or another in one of his many rooming houses. 18. See Donald Wolfe, The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Hollywood (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 231–37. 19. Megan Abbott, The Song Is You (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 183–84.

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20. Ibid., 189. 21. Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: DaCapo, 1994), 165, 267. 22. Bernard F. Dick, The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 53–55. 23. John Buntin, L.A. Noir (New York: Random House, 2009), 148–49. 24. Wolfe (above, note 18), 234. 25. According to the 2000 census, Boyle Heights was 94-percent Latino, still a ghetto of sorts for the poorer immigrants of Los Angeles. 26. Excerpt from a letter written by Chandler to a friend, cited by Otto Friedrich in City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 258. 27. The names listed in the book had various degrees of contact with Cohen. Some socialized with him. Others came into his orbit by chance. What the book certainly revealed was that in the1940s and 1950s Hollywood was a place where encounters between a ruthless gangster and a Hollywood movie star were commonplace and unremarkable. 28. Tere Tereba, Mickey Cohen: The Life and Crimes of L.A.’s Notorious Mobster (Chicago: ECW Press, 2012), 256–57. 29. Wilkerson’s Red-baiting predates HUAC; what came to be known as Billy’s List, assembled from accusations made in the Hollywood Reporter, was used by HUAC when it issued its first nineteen subpoenas in 1947. Under Wilkerson’s editorial control, the Hollywood Reporter was throughout the Blacklist era steadfast in its support of the anti-Communist cause. In November 2012, Wilkerson’s son, W. R. Wilkerson III, issued on behalf of the magazine and his late father a public apology for the Hollywood Reporter’s role in the Blacklist. Much as Wilkerson III bluntly addressed his father’s activism on behalf of the anti-Communist cause, he provided as well a novel backstory and amateur psychoanalysis, characterizing his father’s ardent support of HUAC as the consequence of a “schoolyard spat,” revenge for never getting the chance to become a film producer himself. All the elder Wilkerson ever really wanted, or so the apology contends, was to be important in the movie business. See: W. R. Wilkerson III, “An Apology: The Son of THR Founder Billy Wilkerson on the Publication’s Dark Past,” Hollywood Reporter, November 12, 2012: http://www .hollywoodreporter.com/news/blacklist-billy-wilkersons-son-apologizes391977. 30. Verbatim version of the phone-call transcript as entered into the file: ibid., 77. 31. Buntin (above, note 23), 103, 115. 32. Dean Jennings, We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 33. Starr (above, note 1), 228–30. 34. Tereba (above, note 28), 101–3, 134–36. 35. Hedda Hopper, “Hollywood” (column), Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 9, 1948, 27. 36. “Narcotics Arrest Smashed Film Career, Says Mitchum,” Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1948, 1.

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37. Thomas Wood, “The First Lady of Hollywood,” Saturday Evening Post, July 15, 1939, 8–10, 25. 38. Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 207–9. 39. Tereba (above, note 28), 114–15. 40. See “Pearson Case May Bring Property Seizure Change,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1949, 2. 41. When Cohen was acquitted for the Pearson beating, Pearson’s daughterin-law Hazel told the jury: “I’ve never really liked the man.” 42. “Man in Long Dispute with Tenant Beaten,” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 1949, 1. 43. Tereba (above, note 28), 116–17. 44. See “Bowron Asks Grand Jury Action in Police Scandal,” Los Angeles Times, Mar 23, 1949; and “Horall Seeks More Police Case Facts,” Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1949, 2. 45. “Mayor Offers Apologies to Biscailuz,” Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1949, 2. 46. Buntin (above, note 23), 148. See also “Swan Takes Blame in Hoodlum Case,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1949, 2. 47. Buntin (above, note 23), 148–49. 48. “Missing Cohen Henchman’s $50,000 Bail Jeopardized,” Los Angeles Times, September 20, 1949, 2. See also “Police Check Air Flights to Trace Lost Mobster,” Los Angeles Times, September 11, 1949, 3. 49. “Keys of Hunted Mobster Niccoli Found in Sewer,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 1949, 3. 50. “Forest Search for Cohen Aide Ends on Fourth Day,” Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1949, 2. 51. “Another of Cohen’s Aides Disappears,” Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1949, 2. 52. See “Mickey Cohen Dickering for Haberdashery Sale: Underworld Kingpin Admits He Must Raise Cash to Cover Niccoli and Ogul Bail Bonds,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1949, 4. 53. See “Cohen Case Ends in Acquittal for All,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 1950, 1. 54. Buntin (above, note 23), 152–53. 55. “Cohen Pays All Debts on Widow’s Home,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1949, 1. 56. Buntin (above, note 23), 149. 57. The title of this section was also the title of a 1988 TV movie on the Brenda Allen–Elmer Jackson scandal, directed by Walter Grauman. 58. See Buntin’s chapter “The Double Agent” in L.A. Noir (above, note 23), 123–36. 59. See: Jim Vaus, “Why I Quit Syndicated Crime”: http://www.spybusters .com/History_1951_Vaus_Vice.html. 60. See “Cohen Merely ‘Front Man,’ Vigilantes Out for Big Shots,” Miami Daily News, April 24, 1949, 2A.

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61. Buntin (above, note 23), 130–31. 62. See “Sgt. Jackson Tells of Cohen Threat,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1949, 2; and “Cohen Backs Meltzer on Gun Defense,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1950, 4. 63. See “Job Offer to Audre Davis Denied by Brenda Allen,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1949, 2. 64. Buntin contends that the police stiffed Vaus on numerous occasions; his expertise was valuable, but its value was never matched by payment. Cohen paid Vaus from the outset: Buntin (above, note 23), 128–29. 65. Ibid., 151. 66. “Cohen Wire Tapper Turns to Saving Souls,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1950, 39. See also “Wiretapper Vaus Hits Sawdust Trail,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1949, 2; Will Vaus, My Father Was a Gangster: The Jim Vaus Story (Washington, D.C.: Believe Books, 2007). The Believe Books mission statement, as posted on their website (http://www.believebooks.com/About-Us_ep_7.html), puts the Jim Vaus story in context: “Believe Books is a publishing company and online store that gives voice to the inspirational life stories of people from around the world—stories of exceptional lives that will inspire readers to live life to the fullest. In each of these stories, God has intervened in a miraculous way, and the publication of these books is meant to encourage and inspire those who are also in need of a miracle—to cause them to believe.” 67. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Billy Graham, Louis Zamperini, and Two Nights in L.A. in 1949 That Changed Their Lives,” Religious News Service, December 9, 2014: http://www.religionnews.com/2014/12/09/billy-grahamlouis-zamperini-two-nights-1949-changed-lives/. 68. Zamperini offered a particularly inspirational story; he was as well the subject of Unbroken, a feature film directed by Angelina Jolie in 2014. 69. “Evangelist Will Remain Silent on Cohen Matter,” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1949, 28. 70. Margaret Perry, “The Great Katharine Hepburn: Feminism in Classical Hollywood”: http://thegreatkh.blogspot.com/2012/06/hepburn-and-anti-huacbrigade.html#sthash.AAh1ic2p.dpuf. 71. “Cohen, Graham Break Bread—Maybe Twice,” Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1951, A1. 72. Lana Turner, Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth (New York: Dutton, 1982), 26. There remains considerable debate about the year of Turner’s birth. During her film career, Turner insisted that she was born in 1921. But birth records from Wallace, Idaho indicate that she born in 1920. 73. Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 137. 74. In his gloriously sleazy and gossipy Hollywood history, Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1975), 270, Kenneth Anger quips: “[Turner’s] marriages and affairs had been dotted with violence, sometimes provoked or secretly desired.” All to say the notion that Turner was attracted to Stompanato because he was a violent man, because she liked it rough, was a notion quietly held by many of her contemporaries in Hollywood and among those journalists working the Hollywood beat.

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75. Tony Blanche and Brad Schreiber, Death in Paradise: An Illustrated History of the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner (Los Angeles: General Publishing Group, 1998), 107–13. 76. Anger (above, note 74), 275. 77. Blanche and Schreiber (above, note 75), 107–9. 78. Tereba (above, note 28), 220–32 79. Clifton H. Anderson, Beverly Hills Is My Beat (New York: W. H. Allen, 1960), 70. 80. See Cheryl Crane (with Cliff Jahr), Detour: A Hollywood Story (New York: Arbor House, 1988); and Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest (New York: William Morrow, 1978). 81. Andrea Chambers, “Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner’s Daughter, Tells Her Story of a Harrowing Hollywood Childhood,” People, February 15, 1988: http://people.com/archive/cheryl-crane-lana-turners-daughter-tells-her-story-ofa-harrowing-hollywood-childhood-vol-29-no-6/. 82. See Victoria Wilson, Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013). Wilson discusses her interview with Dion Fay on the website Backlots: http://backlots.net/2013/10/24/an-interview-with-victoria-wilsonauthor-of-a-life-of-barbara-stanwyck-steel-true-1907–1940/. Fay was a troubled and neglected child who well into adulthood harbored a grudge against his adopted mother. In 1959 Fay was arrested for selling pornographic materials and soon afterward sold a story to Confidential magazine titled “Does My Mother Hate Me?” After the Confidential piece, Stanwyck never spoke to Fay again. 83. Sumiko Higashi, Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 207–20. 84. She may well have been both, but the relevance of such an active sex life to the dead gangster and damaged teenage daughter seemed at the very least bad faith and bad taste. 85. See Jay Robert Nash, Murder among the Mighty (New York: M. Evans, 1983), 216; and Anger (above, note 74), 274–75. 86. Anger (above, note 74), 275–76. 87. “Bare Lana’s Love Letters,” New York Mirror, April 9, 1958, 1. 88. Jack Jones, “Pack of Letters Vanished Day of Stompanato’s Death,” Los Angeles Times, April 10, 1958, 2. 89. Crane (above, note 80), 17. 90. See Florabel Muir, “Full Story of Mob Shooting of Cohen,” Los Angeles Daily News, July 20, 1949; and eadem, Headline Happy (New York: Holt, 1950), 202–9. 91. See “The Daily Mirror, Los Angeles History: Johnny Stompanato R.I.P.,” April 5, 2008: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/04/johnnystompana.html. 92. “Jury Convicts Bodyguard of Mickey Cohen,” Los Angeles Times, October 7, 1949, 2. 93. Tereba (above, note 28), 152–61. 94. “Police Link Stompanato to Hollywood Blackmail Tries,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1958, 2.

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chapter 3. hollywood confidential 1. Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 313. 2. Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 219–20. 3. Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, April 16, 1950. 4. “101 Greatest Screenplays,” Writers Guild of America, West: http://www .wga.org/subpage_newsevents.aspx?id = 1914. 5. Maurice Zolotow, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1977), 168. 6. Frost (above, note 2), 204–5. 7. Wilder no doubt intended the allusion: Norma’s last name and the producer’s middle name are the same. And one of the actresses implicated in the Taylor scandal was Mabel Normand, slightly altered in Desmond’s surname. 8. The March 21, 1949, shooting script, Paramount Pictures, Inc., property number 11454, 113–17. The script is reprinted in facsimile form in Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999). The relevant pages in the University of California edition are 122–26. 9. Jeffrey Meyers, “Introduction,” in Wilder (above, note 8), vii–x. 10. Charles Brackett, “Putting the Picture on Paper,” Sunset Boulevard file, Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, California. 11. The Daily Worker quoted (without a tinge of irony) in Hopper’s column, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1951, 10. 12. See James Ulmer, “A Guild Divided,” Directors Guild of America, Spring 2011: https://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1101-Spring-2011/FeatureLoyalty-Oath.aspx. 13. Wilder’s most frequently repeated comment on the Blacklist was a snarky little joke that betrayed a tin ear about politics. Three years before the release of Sunset Boulevard, Wilder glibly commented upon the ordeal of the Hollywood Ten, who had appeared as unfriendly witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947: “Of the ten, two had talent; the rest were just unfriendly.” Wilder’s remark was and is profoundly unfunny. It is also inaccurate by most any measure: in 1947 when the Ten were subpoenaed to appear before Congress, Dalton Trumbo was among the industry’s highest-paid and most sought-after screenwriters. Ring Lardner, Jr., was well known and well respected, winning an Oscar for his script for Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942); and the producer-director team of Adrian Scott and Eddie Dmytryk had together just made the Oscar-nominated picture, Crossfire. That’s four, even if we disregard altogether the careers of Alva Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and Samuel Ornitz—careers that include two Oscar-nominated stories: Bessie’s for Objective Burma (Raoul Walsh, 1945) and Lawson’s for Blockade in 1938 (directed by William Dieterle); and Maltz’s Oscar for the short subject The House I Live In in 1945 14. Edward Dmytyrk, Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 34. The parenthetical remark about DeMille was Dmytryk’s, not mine.

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15. For more on Ford’s role in the loyalty-oath confrontation, see Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (Oxford, Miss.: University of Mississippi Press, 2011), 516–19. 16. Ulmer (above, note 12). 17. See Scott Allen Nollen, Three Bad Men: John Ford, John Wayne, Ward Bond (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2013), 218. 18. Much of what follows here is culled from Ulmer, Dmytryk, and McBride. Ulmer’s account reflects the DGA’s official version; Dmytryk’s, his strained apology/explanation for turning rat, and McBride’s does well to revisit Ford’s bold and brave speech, which revealed just how complexly the personal and professional relationships were affected by the Red Scare. 19. Kazan signed the call for a meeting but declined to support Mankeiwicz later at the membership meeting, claiming that DeMille had threatened to use Kazan’s scheduled appearance in Washington (where the director named names) to embarrass Mankiewicz. Kazan’s behavior in this era consistently smacked of cowardice. 20. Gang was a notorious Blacklist-era fixer, adept at engineering so-called clearances for former Communist Party members and assorted other sympathizers. There are questions still about his methods, his integrity, and precisely what his clients said and did on his advice behind closed doors. What we know for sure is that Gang worked on behalf of Mankiewicz in this case, fighting against pro-blacklisters like DeMille. Gang also played a part in Gene Autry’s precedentsetting suit establishing poststudio-era independent contracts for actors. 21. On February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed he had a list of two hundred Department of State workers who were also card-carrying members of the Communist Party. Though he was fond of holding sheets of paper in his hand (as if the list was real and in his possession), over the next few months the number kept changing: to 205, 57, 81, and 10. The changing number of names on McCarthy’s list became the object of parody in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer). Speaking on the floor of Congress supporting HUAC’s recommendation to find the Hollywood Ten in contempt of Congress, Rankin read from a printed list of Hollywood luminaries, all Jews, who had adopted stage/screen names to appear Christian (Edward G. Robinson for example, who had changed his name from Emmanuel Goldenberg; or Danny Kaye, who was born David Daniel Kaminsky). 22. Days later, according to Ulmer, Ford penned a conciliatory note to DeMille, apologizing for his remarks about his character. Ulmer contends that Ford made the gesture on Capra’s suggestion—to make clear that his public remarks solely regarded the undemocratic way in which DeMille had undermined Mankiewicz. Still, it is hard to fathom how the seemingly heartfelt public pronouncement at the meeting jibed with Ford’s private note to DeMille, which referred to the Mankiewicz supporters as “a goddamn pack of rats.” 23. In 1951, DeMille nominated Mankiewcz for a second term, but the sitting president declined to run. The motivations behind DeMille’s actions were and are, to say the least, difficult to understand. 24. George Orwell, George Orwell: My Country Right or Left, 1940–1943, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1968), 90.

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25. See Greg Mitchell, “Hollywood’s Wildest Night Ever: When Legends Faced Off in a Political Showdown,” The Nation, October 20, 2012: http:// www.thenation.com/article/hollywoods-wildest-night-ever-when-legends-facedpolitical-showdown/. 26. See Mitchell (above, note 25); and Dan Callahan, “Late Leo McCarey and His Deformed Son John,” Slant, January 30, 2010: http://www.slantmagazine .com/house/article/late-leo-mccarey-and-his-deformed-son-john. 27. See Mitchell (above, note 25). 28. Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Urges Fact Diet on Film Folk,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1946. 29. Spigelgass as cited by Frost (above, note 2), 132. 30. Barbas (above, note 1), 263. 31. Taken verbatim from the radio script for the Louella Parsons Show, which can be found in the Louella Parsons Collection at USC. 32. Barbas (above, note 1), 264. 33. Ibid., 268. 34. Candace Ursula Grissom, Fitzgerald and Hemingway on Film: A Critical Study of the Adaptations (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014), 141. 35. Abraham Polonsky interviewed in Thom Andersen and Noel Burch’s film Red Hollywood (1994). 36. Barbas (above, note 1), 262–63. 37. Barbas (above, note 1) , 266, citing the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) file on Parsons. 38. Hedda Hopper, “Looking at Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, October 23, 1947, section II, 9. 39. Humphrey Bogart, “I Am No Communist,” Photoplay, March 1948. 40. Stephen Humphrey Bogart and Gary Provost, Bogart: In Search for My Father (New York: Dutton, 1995). 41. Paul Kengor, “When Bogie and Bacall Were Duped by Hollywood Communists,” American Spectator, August 15, 2014: http://spectator.org/60256_ manfred-succeed-selig-mlbs-new-commish-2015/. 42. Bogart’s letter to George Sokolsky was published in the New York Daily Mirror on December 6, 1947. The letter is reprinted in its entirety in Victor S. Navasky’s Blacklist history, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 157–58. 43. Gerald Horne, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 162. 44. Ball’s character on the show, Lucy Ricardo, was a lovable lunatic, and her antics inevitably got her into trouble, prompting husband Ricky (Arnaz) to frequently insist, in heavily accented English, that she had some explaining (some ’splainin’) to do. 45. See Lori Landay, “Millions Love Lucy: Commodification and the Lucy Phenomenon,” NWSA Journal 11 (1999), 42; and Frost (above, note 2), 172–74. 46. For full discussion of Ball and the Red Scare, see Susan M. Carini, “Love’s Labors Almost Lost: Managing Crisis during the Reign of I Love Lucy,” Cinema Journal 43.4 (2003), 44–62.

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47. Ibid., 47, 56. 48. Frost (above, note 2), 173. 49. “Sinatra Arrested after Attack on Film Editor Here,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 10, 1947, 1. 50. The bobby socks (or sox) at issue were tube-shaped calf-length socks turned down twice, covering up and highlighting the ankle, which was fetishized/ sexualized at the time. The socks carried a schoolgirl connotation, because most school-uniform socks were the same length and shape. The act of folding them down was a subtle but nonetheless significant transformation of one style statement (of modest uniformity) into another (of pseudo-adult self-expression). The bobby-sox style can be traced back to World War II, when women sought an alternative to sheer stockings, which had become difficult to obtain. 51. “Sinatra Arrested after Attack” (above, note 49), 3. 52. See Jon Ponder, “Sinatra Arrested for Assaulting Columnist Lee Mortimer at Ciro’s,” Playground to the Stars, April 30, 2011: http://www .playgroundtothestars.com/2011/04/sinatra-arrested-for-assaulting-columnistat-ciros/. 53. “Name of Notorious Vice King Enters Sinatra Row,” Los Angeles Examiner, April 10, 1947, 3. 54. Westbrook Pegler, “Yale Democracy Comes to Light in Game with Georgia,” Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1928, 25. 55. Oliver Pilat, Pegler: Angry Man of the Press (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 99. 56. Ibid., 104. 57. William F. Buckley, “Rabble-Rouser: When Westbrook Pegler Wrote a Column, No One Was Safe,” New Yorker, March 1, 2004: http://www .newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/01/rabble-rouser 4. 58. For what it’s worth, Pegler’s contemporary A. J. Liebling dubbed the columnist “the anti–common man,” one with whom Howard had sympathized because the editor found “ignorance [to be such] an endearing quality.” See Buckley (above, note 57). 59. Broun, writing for the weekly Broun’s Nutmeg on July 10, 1939. A long excerpt from the article can be found in Oliver Pilat’s biography (above, note 55), 162. 60. Ibid., 4–6. 61. Westbrook Pegler, “Pegler” (column), Los Angeles Examiner, March 24, 1947, 3. 62. Davis was an ardent propagandist and censor during the war. But he felt strongly that wartime restrictions need not, indeed should not, be applied during peacetime. So, despite the use and effects of the so-called Davis test during the Red Scare, the man after whom said test was named may be better remembered for his radio show, on which he publicly criticized the methods employed by Joseph McCarthy . . . methods loosely based upon “his” test. 63. When Koch returned to the United States, he steered clear of Hollywood, settling instead in Woodstock, New York. He resumed his career in the mid’50s, writing first under the pseudonym Peter Howard and then under his own name after the Blacklist subsided.

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64. Westbrook Pegler, “Pegler,” (column) Los Angeles Examiner, March 27, 1947, 3. 65. Finis Farr, Fair Enough: The Life of Westbrook Pegler (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1975), 221–22. 66. Pilat (above, note 55), 22. 67. Pegler also disliked the Kennedys (especially Robert Kennedy) because in his view they had once supported but then abandoned McCarthy in the lead-up to his censure. 68. Farr (above, note 65), 22. 69. My own work on the Blacklist includes “ ‘We Do Not Ask You to Condone This . . .’: How the Blacklist Saved Hollywood,” Cinema Journal, 39.2 (2000), 3–30. An expanded version of this essay composes chapter 1 in Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 11–49. See also Victor Navasky, Naming Names (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Reynold Humphries, Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2008). 70. Reagan’s politics were very much in transition between 1945 and 1947. When he joined HICCASP, he was a moderate Democrat. But as a SAG Board member (1946–60) and then as SAG President (1947–51 and 1959) he took a practical as opposed to political view of union activity in the business, which included backing IATSE over the CSU. To be fair, when he testified as a friendly witness before HUAC in 1947, he affirmed a personal distrust and dislike for Communists but nonetheless politely contended that so long as membership was not technically illegal he opposed a Blacklist. 71. See Humphries (above, note 69), 66–68. 72. For a more detailed discussion of Reagan’s history with HICCASP, see Stephen Vaughn, Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 122–32. 73. See Lewis (above, note 69). 74. See Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 1953, 21. 75. See Frost (above, note 2), 175–80. 76. The play opened in February 1949 in New York and enjoyed a successful three-month run. The initial production was directed by the legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg and starred John Garfield, for whom the role of Charlie Castle seems in retrospect all too perfect.

chapter 4. hollywood ’ s last lonely places 1. John O’Dowd, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye: The Barbara Payton Story (Albany, Ga.: Bear Manor, 2006), 11. 2. Dial Torgerson, “Barbara Payton, One Object of Film Stars Fistfight, Dies,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1967, B1.

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3. Barbara Payton, I Am Not Ashamed (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1963). 4. Torgerson (above, note 2), B1. 5. Robert Polito, “Barbara Payton: A Memoir,” in O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, ed. Luc Sante and Melissa Holbrook Pierson (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 28. Robert Polito’s father tended bar at the Coach and Horses, and his first writing job, sort of, was editorial work for Holloway House, which published Payton’s memoir I Am Not Ashamed, the first edition of which Polito transcribed and copyedited. See Barbara Payton, I Am Not Ashamed (Los Angeles: Holloway Press, 1963). 6. Polito (above, note 5), 32. 7. There was plenty of gossip about Stanwyck in the’40s and’50s, and she had plenty to be ashamed of as well. See Axel Madsen, Stanwyck: A Biography (New York: Open Road, 2015); and Anne Helen Peterson, “Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Many Faces of Barbara Stanwyck,” the hairpin: http:// thehairpin.com/2013/03/scandals-of-classic-hollywood-the-many-faces-ofbarbara-stanwyck/. 8. Payton (above, note 3), 23. 9. “Franchot Tone’s Ex-Wife Jean Wallace Stabs Self: Mother Awakened by Screams in the Night, Wrests Knife from Daughter in Kitchen,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1949, 1. 10. O’Dowd (above, note 1), 108. 11. See “Tone Granted Custody of Two Sons in Court Battle with Jean Wallace,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1950, 5. The custody ruling would be amended in 1952, after Wallace’s marriage to the actor Cornell Wilde and Tone’s fistfight with Neal—“Joint Custody of Tone Children Won by Mother,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1952, 5—and that later ruling would persist through 1956, by which time Tone’s disastrous relationship with Payton had made him out to be a prize fool. Meanwhile, Wallace’s life got back on track; the marriage to Wilde had by 1956 lasted half a decade, and she had resumed her acting career, including a co-starring role with Wilde in the terrific noir crime film The Big Combo (Joseph Lewis, 1955). See also “Franchot Tone Compromises Custody Plea,” Los Angeles Times, May 13, 1956, A12. 12. “Love’s Lonely Fugitive” is the title of an August 1956 article by Ruth Seymour in Movie Secrets magazine about another movie star with romantic problems, Rita Hayworth. The article focuses on the actress’s many failed affairs and marriages. The melodramatic coverage of female stars’ love lives has long been a staple of gossip and entertainment-industry news. In the transition era, two parallel narratives emerged: (1) that celebrity hopelessly complicated the search for the right guy, and (2) that celebrity prompted a carelessness, a wantonness, that as well left these fabulous women unfulfilled and lonely. 13. While it is difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in I Am Not Ashamed, Payton’s 1963 memoir released by the frankly disreputable Los Angeles publisher Holloway House, the actress affirms her willingness to perform on the casting couch, so to speak (see pages 106–9), to get acting roles and in at least

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one case (see p. 190) to exchange sexual favors for film financing. For the audition story, see pages 112–13. 14. Edwin Shallert, “Cagney Smart in Rough, Tough Film,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1950, 9. Shallert had written (positively) about Payton before. In “Metro Seeks Long Term Contract with Calhern; Giant Killer Speeded,” Los Angeles Times, July 1, 1949, 19, he complimented her work on Trapped. Months after the review of Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Shallert put Payton’s name in the headline of his column: “Jack London Episodic Film in Offing; Payton Set as Cochrane Spouse,” Los Angeles Times, May 17, 1950, B7. 15. Hollywood Reporter review, cited by O’Dowd (above, note 1), 84. 16. “Review: Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye,” Variety, December 31, 1949: http://variety.com/1949/film/reviews/kiss-tomorrow-goodbye-1200416647/. 17. O’Dowd (above, note 1), 112. 18. The gossip attending Payton’s dalliance with Madison and Tone’s subsequent confrontation, armed with photographs taken by a private detective, with her younger co-star got Payton briefly suspended at Warner Bros., mostly because Madison felt compelled to leave for New York until Tone simmered down and the story fell out of the papers. In retrospect it is fair to surmise that Jack Warner valued Madison and his film over Payton. The valuation proved astute; Madison would be a stalwart performer in film westerns for Warner Bros. and then on TV for CBS; he was the star of the successful series The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, which ran from 1951 until 1958. 19. Charles Higham, Howard Hughes: The Secret Life (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 160. According to Higham, after the Tone-Neal brawl, Hughes, who was at the time a notorious womanizer, ended the affair. 20. This proved to be a complicated case, and even if Payton’s alibi was false—and it may have been—Adams still may not have been the killer. In his book In My Father’s Name (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), Max Arax alleges that the Davidian murder was covered up by the Fresno police at the urging of California Attorney General Frederick N. Howser, who at the time, Arax claims, was in Mickey Cohen’s pocket. A car seen leaving the scene provided a fascinating set of suspects: an unidentified narcotics agent, a former cop and heroin trafficker named Rusty Doan, and a Fresno police lieutenant named John Orndoff, whom the author blames for the murder of his father. 21. See “Payton Backs Story of Accused Man,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1950, 5 and O’Dowd (above, note 1), 121–122. 22. Wallace’s attorneys introduced this argument. See “Actor Backs Adams in Davidian Alibi,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1950, 29. 23. Payton (above, note 3), 23. 24. Her address at the time, 1803 Courtney Terrace, remains a stop on many of the star-scandal tours in L.A. See E. J. Fleming, Hollywood Death and Scandal Sites (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2015), 55. 25. “Franchot Tone Badly Hurt in Fight at Actress’ Home,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1951, 2. 26. “Tom Neal Knocks Out Tone in Love Fist Fight: Barbara Payton Hysterical after Brawl on Lawn,” Los Angeles Herald-Express, September 14, 1951, 1.

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27. “Franchot Tone Badly Hurt” (above, note 25), 2. 28. “Tone Didn’t Hit First, Barbara Payton Says,” Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1951, 2. 29. “Barbara Ignores Rules to See Tone,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1951, 3. 30. Payton (above, note 3), 28. The other men included Neal, Madison, Gregory Peck, and Don Cougar, as well as Howard Hughes, John Ireland, George Raft, and Bob Hope. 31. O’Dowd (above, note 1), 221–29. 32. “Wife, 29, Slain; Actor, 51, Held,” New York Daily News, April 3, 1965, 1. 33. O’Dowd (above, note 1), 390–414. 34. John Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Back Dahlia Murder (Los Angeles: Amok Books, 1994). 35. “Glamour Girls of the Silver Screen”: http://www.glamourgirlsofthesilver screen.com/show/217/Barbara+Payton/index.html. 36. See John Gilmore, “A Story from Someone Who Knew Elizabeth Short and Marilyn Monroe Personally,” Horror Zine: http://www.thehorrorzine .com/Special/JohnGilmore/JohnGilmore.html. 37. This first issue was dated December 1952. 38. J. Howard Rutledge, “The Rise of the Exposé Magazines,” Kansas City Times, August 10, 1955, 30. 39. Alan Betrock, Unseen America: The Greatest Cult Magazines, 1950– 1966 (Brooklyn: Shake Books, 1990), 4, 28. 40. Confidential, March and July 1956. 41. Jack Jones, “Witness Tells of Wild Pool Party,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1957, 18. See also Mary Desjardins, “Systematizing Scandal: Confidential Magazine, Stardom, and the State of California,” in Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal, ed. Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 206–31. 42. This final charge stemmed from the sensational coverage of the clandestine abortion industry as well as dubious advertisements in the magazine for male rejuvenation. 43. For the publisher’s full statement, see http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty /projects/ftrials/confidential/hollyvconfid.html. 44. Miscegenation was a major taboo—indeed, it was still illegal in many states—and thus it was a favorite subject of the magazine, as well as a frequent opportunity for shakedown and blackmail. The African-American actress Dorothy Dandridge’s dalliances with white men and the affairs of Sammy Davis, Jr., with white women were covered frequently in the magazine. 45. In despair over the case in general and with how badly his testimony was received by the jury, in January 1958, three months after the Confidential trial ended, while riding in a New York City taxicab, Rushmore pulled out a gun, murdered his wife, and then shot himself dead. Weirdly, Harrison, whom Rushmore had betrayed at the trial, refused to accept the official version and used his still-considerable investigative resources and connections to allege foul play.

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46. For a full account of the trial (used to full advantage here), see Douglas O. Linder, “The Confidential Trial: An Account,” in Famous Trials, published by the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law: http://law2.umkc .edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/confidential/confidentialaccount.html. 47. Desjardins (above, note 41), 208. 48. Nightbeat, December 1956. 49. O’Dowd (above, note 1), 323. 50. Ibid., 323–24. 51. Vice Squad, April 1963. 52. “It Pays to Sit,” Los Angeles Examiner, January 30, 1947, section 2, 14. 53. In 2015, the negatives and color separations from the original shoot were auctioned off for $6 million. See “That’s One Pricey Pin-Up,” Daily Mail, December 23, 2015: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3235373/Rarestills-Marilyn-Monroe-s-iconic-nude-calendar-shoot-1950s-revealed-worth-6MILLION.html. 54. Hugh Hefner paid just $500 to license the photographs for the inaugural issue of Playboy, which hit the newsstands in December 1953. 55. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000054/?ref_ = nv_sr_1#actress. 56. Of the four uncredited roles, one is listed as undetermined and unconfirmed. 57. Kirk Douglas’ founded his production company, Bryna Productions, in 1955 and produced more than twenty-five films casting the actor in a lead role. Among Bryna’s best-known films are Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957), Spartacus (Kubrick, 1960), and Seven Days in May (John Frankenheimer, 1964). Burt Lancaster’s production company, HHL, formed with Harold Hecht and James Hill in 1954, enabled the actor to challenge studio typecasting and better control his career. Among HHL’s best films was The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957), in which the movie star played a sociopathic newspaper columnist based rather obviously on Walter Winchell. 58. “Red Super Bomb Kicks Off Series,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1962, 1, 13. 59. Howard Hertel and Don Neff, “Unclad Body of Star Discovered on Bed; Empty Bottle Near,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1962, 1. 60. Ibid., 1. 61. Charles E. Davis, Jr., “Sad Child, Unhappy Star,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1962, 1, 25. 62. In 1967 Noguchi would replace Curphey to become the county’s chief medical examiner; in that position he supervised the high-profile autopsies of Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate, Janis Joplin, and Natalie Wood. 63. The autopsy report is available on the Web site autopsyfiles.com. The full document can be found at: http://www.autopsyfiles.org/reports/Celebs /monroe,%20marilyn_report.pdf. 64. This document is available on line as well at: http://www.autopsyfiles .org/reports/Celebs/monroe,%20marilyn_report.pdf. 65. Tony Blanche and Brad Snyder, quoting the Carroll-Tomich Report in Death in Paradise (Los Angeles: General Publishing, 1998), 115–19.

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66. Jay Margolis, Marilyn Monroe: A Case for Murder (Bloomington: Universe, 2011), 138–39. The enema drug-delivery theory has been widely reported (by almost every biographer). Monroe took enemas for weight control, so perhaps that was what Lawford meant by his comment. The biographer Donald Spoto found forensic experts who seriously doubted the effectiveness of such a delivery method—much of the dose would be expelled before it was absorbed. See Donald Spoto, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1993), 588–89. Speculation abounds with regard to this comment, with regard not only to Monroe’s official cause of death but also to the larger conspiracies attending the death of John F. Kennedy. See Richard Gilbride, Matrix for Assassination (Victoria, B.C.: Trafford, 2009), 12. 67. Hertel and Neff (above, note 59), 1. 68. Blanche and Snyder (above, note 65), quoting the Carroll-Tomich Report, 118–19. 69. Worth a look here is the film An American Affair, directed by William Olsson in 2008, in which the actress Gretchen Mol, who in the film bears a distinct physical resemblance to Monroe, plays a free-spirited woman having an affair with an American president. The character bears a greater historical resemblance to Kennedy’s mistress Judith Exner, who carried on an affair with the president and the gangster Sam Giancana. The film pivots on a possible diary and what the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service might do to protect a president. 70. See Graham McCann, Marilyn Monroe (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 53–58. 71. Todd S. Purdum, “Milton A. Rudin, 79, Lawyer for Sinatra and Other Stars,” New York Times, December 17 ,1999: http://www.nytimes .com/1999/12/17/arts/milton-a-rudin-79-lawyer-for-sinatra-and-other-stars .html. 72. Blanche and Snyder (above, note 65), 117. 73. McCann (above, note 70), 54. 74. The 1985 BBC documentary Say Goodbye to the President (Christopher Olgiati) elaborates this version convincingly. 75. Frank A. Capell, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe (Staten Island: The Herald of Freedom Press, 1964). 76. Norman Mailer, Marilyn: A Biography (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1974). See also an FBI memorandum from T. J. Smith to J. Edgar Hoover dated July 23, 1973: https://books.google.com/books?id = eb2oQbu8xcsC&pg = PT32&dq = Mailer+on+Monroe’s+death&hl = en&sa = X&ved = 0ahUKEwiHzLzkj7TKAhUN12MKHeA8CtIQ6AEIOz. AC#v = onepage&q = Mailer%20on%20Monroe’s%20death&f = false; and Mary Dearborn, Mailer: A Biography (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1999), 317. 77. The episode of 60 Minutes first aired on July 13, 1973, on CBS. 78. Robert Slatzer, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe (London: W. H. Allen 1975). 79. Anthony Sciacca, Who Killed Marilyn? (New York: Manor Books, 1976).

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80. Milo Speriglio, The Marilyn Conspiracy (New York: Pocket Books, 1986). 81. Anthony Summers, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Orion, 2000). 82. Sarah Churchwell, The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (New York: Metropolitan, 2005). 83. McCann (above, note 70), 194. 84. Churchwell (above, note 82), 316. 85. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 0P5ijFKk6fU. 86. Huston made Freud from a Charles Kaufman script in 1962, a year after he directed Monroe in her last complete film, The Misfits. Whatever Sartre may have contributed to the production went uncredited. Monroe’s friend Montgomery Clift starred as the legendary psychotherapist, and Susannah York played the role Huston had initially planned for Monroe. 87. Miller’s politics were well known to HUAC. His 1953 anti–witch hunt play The Crucible offered a thinly veiled metaphor for the political hysteria of the times. After Miller found himself on a variety of blacklists, the HUAC chair Francis E. Walter offered (or at least he is rumored to have offered) Miller a unique deal: bring Monroe to Washington to pose for pictures with the Pennsylvania congressman, and the committee would leave him alone, despite clear evidence of what at the time was regarded as subversive political activity. Miller refused to comply, and the committee pulled his passport, preventing the playwright from traveling outside the United States. 88. Both Parsons and Hopper published memoirs in the early 1960s: Louella Parsons, Tell it to Louella (New York: Putnam, 1961); and Hedda Hopper, with James Brough, The Truth and Nothing But (New York: Doubleday, 1962). Both books were nostalgic and retrospective, revealing that the columnists were aware that their significance in the discourse on celebrity had diminished. Parsons retired in 1965, slowly turning over her column to Dorothy Manners through the previous twelve months. Hopper persisted through 1966, the year she passed away, but her power and prestige had diminished noticeably by then. 89. Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Examiner, October 19, 1952, III, 1. 90. Parsons (above, note 88), 170. 91. Michelle Williams’s deft portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011) reveals the complexity of Monroe’s performance of innocence and sex appeal. Much as we see Monroe (as portrayed by Williams) through the eyes of the men who fall (or, in Laurence Olivier’s case, don’t fall) for Monroe’s performance of Marilyn, so to speak, we begin to recognize the calculation, the method to the madness of the woman, and the world that seemed to spin around her. The act, which by then (the film is set in 1956 and 1957) had become second-nature to the mythic and indulged movie star, was— or so Williams’s portrayal suggests; so Curtis’s direction suggests, and so Colin Clark’s memoir (on which the film is based) suggests—a mode of self-defense, all right, but it was also complexly selfish and destructive.

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92. Samantha Barbas, The First Lady of Hollywood: A Biography of Louella Parsons (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 316, citing Muir and Crawford. 93. See Christina Crawford, Mommie Dearest (New York: William Morrow, 1978); and the film adaptation Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981). 94. Jennifer Frost, Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 209. 95. Hedda Hopper, “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1962, C8. 96. Frost (above, note 94), 210. 97. Hopper (above, note 88), 37–43. The second edition (1963) included new material on Monroe’s death and her legacy as a movie star. 98. Hopper (above, note 88), 331. 99. Ibid., 39. 100. There is still some debate about the year of Dee’s birth; it’s pegged at either 1942 or 1944, which would make her either 16 or 14 when she landed her first big role in The Reluctant Debutante (Vincente Minnelli, 1958) and a year older when she starred in Gidget (Paul Wendkos, 1959). Daphne Merkin’s 2005 New York Times obituary sets the birth year at 1944. See Daphne Merkin, “Gidget Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” New York Times, December 25, 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/magazine/gidget-doesnt-live-here-anymore .html?_r = 0; the website IMDB lists the birth year as 1942. Merkin insists on the later birth date, arguing, persuasively, that Dee’s ever-ambitious mother backdated her age to make her appear older and get her career started. 101. See Roger Ebert, “Beyond Miss Dee: Sandra Dee Grows Up,” Roger Ebert Interviews, November 5, 1967: http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews /beyond-miss-dee-sandra-dee-grows-up; and Sandra Dee, “Learning to Live Again: A Former Teen Queen Shakes Free of Her Humiliating Past to End Years of Self-Hate and Loneliness,” People, March 18, 1991: http://www.people.com /people/archive/article/0,,20114698,00.html. 102. Dodd Darin, Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee (New York: Warner Books, 1994). 103. Merkin (above, note 100), citing the Newark newspaper story. 104. See A. E. Hotchner, Doris Day: Her Own Story (New York: William Morrow, 1976). 105. John Updike, “Suzy Creamcheese Speaks,” in Sante and Pierson (above, note 5), 142. 106. Ibid., 139–40. 107. Ibid., 138. 108. Ibid., 136, 142, 145.

Index

Abbott, Megan, 40, 63 Actors Studio, 190 Adams, Stanley, 160, 161 Adler, Stella, 42 After the Fall, 190, 191 Albert, Eddie, 1 Albro, Agnes, 23, 24 Aldrich, Robert, 3, 144, 146, 149, 150 All about Eve (1950), 115, 177 Allen, Brenda, 36, 37, 82, 83, 85, 87, 90 Allen, Grace, 30 Allyson, June, 174 American Youth for Democracy, 132, 141 Andry, John N., 28 Anger, Kenneth, 94 Arbuckle, Roscoe “Fatty,” 45, 170 Ardizzone, Joseph, 50 Arensberg, Louise, 36 Arensberg, Walter, 36 Arnaz, Desi, 127–29, 175 Asphalt Jungle, The (1950), 177, 178 Art of Radio, 34 Audrain, Leslie C., 36 Badge, The: True and Terrifying Stories That Could Not Be Presented on TV, 23, 24 Bacall, Lauren, 69, 124 Bad Blonde (1953), 168, 169 Baer, Arthur “Bugs,” 138 Bailey, F. Lee, 170 Bailey, Melvin, 29

Baker, Gladys Pearl, 189 Baker, Roy, 177 Ball, Lucille, 127–29 Barbas, Samantha, 76 Barker, Lex, 93, 97, 102 Bauerdorf, Georgette, 42, 43 Bayliss, Sarah Hudson, 34, 36 Beatty, Warren, 71 Beau Temps, Le, 35 Behrmann, Paul, 73 Bellow, Saul, 191 Benner, Dexter, 58 Benjamin, Walter, 3 Bennett, Joan, 75 Bergman, Ingrid, 170 Berkeley, Busby, 75 Berle, Milton, 69 Bersinger, Betty, 13 Big Clock, The (1948), 98 Big Knife, The (1955), 3, 6, 7, 144–51 Bioff, Willie, 53–57, 64 Biscailuz, Eugene W., 79 Bishop, Joey, 139 Black Dahlia. See Elizabeth Short Black Dahlia, The (novel), 32, 33 Black Dahlia, The (film, 2006), 33 Black Dahlia Avenger, 22, 27, 31 Black Dahlia Avenger, The, 25, 26 Black Dahlia Files, The: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Hollywood, 36

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Index

Blacklist. See Hollywood Blacklist Bogart: In Search of My Father, 126 Bogart, Humphrey, 69, 124–27, 149 Bogart, Stephen Humphrey, 126 Bond, Ward, 114 Boomhower, Mimi, 61 Borders, Ray, 103, 104 Bouzereau, Laurent, 12, 18, 21, 25 Bowdon, Doris, 77 Bowron, Fletcher, 77, 79, 81 Brackett, Charles, 109, 111–13 Bradley, John J., 83 Brando, Marlon, 107 Breen, Joseph, 93 Breton, André, 36 Brewer, Roy, 114 Brice, Fanny, 36 Bride of the Gorilla, The (1951), 154, 158, 166, 168 Bridgeford, Shirley Ann, 32, 33 Bridges, Lloyd, 158 Brodsky, David, 13 Brooks, Richard, 116 Broun, Heywood, 135 Brown, Orrin O., 80 Brown, Pat, 174 Brown, Thad, 60 Browne, George, 53–57 Browner, Juliet, 34, 35 Bryna Productions, 180 Buckley, William F., 138 Bugsy (1991), 71 Buntin, John, 66, 81, 82, 84, 86 Buñuel, Luis, 36 Bus Stop (1956), 180, 191 Cagney, James, 158–60 Cagney, William, 159, 160, 167 Cain, James, 93, 168 California Crime Commission, 73, 74 Call, Joseph L., 82 Callas, Maria, 187 Camus, Albert, 190 Cantor, Eddie, 69 Capell, Frank A., 188, 189 Capone, Al, 64 Capra, Frank, 116, 118, 119 Carroll, Harrison, 158 Carroll-Tomich Report, 184 Casablanca (1942), 137 Castro, Fidel, 9, 184, 185 CFA. See Committee for the First Amendment Chandler, Mack. See Handler, Max Chandler, Raymond, 68

Chaplin, Charlie, 45, 75, 91 Chien Andalou, Un (1929), 36 Churchwell, Sarah, 176, 189 City of Quartz, 13 Clark, Fred, 109 Clemmons, Jack, 186 Cohen, Fanny, 68 Cohen, Lillian, 68 Cohen, Mickey, 51, 62, 63, 66–69, 73–75, 77–82, 84–90, 93, 99–101, 103, 104 Cohen, Max, 68 Cohn, Harry, 64–67, 69, 102, 147 Cohn, Roy, 138 Colbert, Claudette, 98 Columbia Pictures, 30, 62, 64, 66 Collins, Joan, 69 Come September (1961), 197 Comiskey, Charles, 135 Committee for the First Amendment, 123, 125–27, 129 Conference of Studio Unions, 53, 55, 57, 127, 141 Confidential, 171–76 Congress of Industrial Organizations Political Action Committee, 136 Conners, Jeff, 30, 31 Cooper, Merrian, 114 Copley, William, 36 Cornero, Tony “the Hat,” 61, 62 Cotton, Joseph, 45 Cougar, Don, 160, 161 Crane, Cheryl, 75, 94–99, 101, 102 Crawford, Christina, 97 Crawford, Joan, 97, 98, 156, 192, 193 Cross, Homer, 86 Cross, Jimmy, 162, 163 Crowley, Aleister, 16 CSU. See Conference of Studio Unions Cuccia, Joseph, 50 Cukor, George, 180 Cummings, Robert, 60, 63 Curphey, Theodore, 183 Curtiz, Michael, 114, 198 Dali, Salvador, 34–36 Dallinger, Nat, 131 Darin, Bobby, 69, 197 Darin, Dodd, 197 Darnell, Linda, 98 Davidian, Abraham “Singing Abe,” 161 Davis, Audre, 86 Davis, Bette, 43 Davis, Charles E., Jr., 183 Davis, Elmer, 137

Index Davis, Mike, 13 Davis, Nancy. See Reagan, Nancy Davis, Sammy, Jr., 139, 172 Davis test, 137, 138 Day, Doris, 123, 196, 198, 199 Dee, Sandra, 195–98 de Havilland, Olivia, 141 de la Coudraye, Henri de la Falaise, 99 DeMille, Cecil (C.) B., 89, 106, 110–20, 158 De Palma, Brian, 33 De River, Paul, 24, 27, 30, Desjardins, Mary, 176 Detour (1945), 156, 157 DGA. See Directors Guild of America Dianetics, 16 DiCicco, Pat, 52 Dick, Bernard F., 65, 66 Dillon, Leslie, 30 DiMaggio, Joe, 75, 181, 194 Directors Guild of America, 114, 115 Dmytryk, Edward, 114 Doherty, Thomas, 93 Donahoe, Jack, 29, 39 Don’t Bother to Knock (1952), 177 Dorsey, Tommy, 62 Double Indemnity (1944), 47, 49 Douglas, Gordon, 158 Douglas, Kirk, 59- 61, 66, 67, 180 Douglas, William O., 15 Dragna, Ignazio (Jack), 37, 50, 51, 63, 66, 67, 74, 79 Dream Lovers: The Magnificent Shattered Lives of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee, 197 Drums of the Deep South (1951), 160 Dull, Judy Ann, 32, 33 Dumais, Joseph, 28, Dunne, Irene, 43 Dunne, John Gregory, 13 Durege, Robert, 40 Durkheim, Emile, 8 Duvall, B. C. “Cappy,” 55 Ecstasy (1933), 158 Edison, Thomas, 65 Einstein, Albert, 141 Ellis, Brett Easton, 7 Ellroy, James, 11, 32, 33 Ellroy, Geneva (Jean) Hilliker, 32, 33 Engelberg, Hyman, 186 Ernst, Max, 36 Eternally Obvious, The, 34, 35 Evans, Thomas Ellery, 61 Evans, Vicki, 31, 73, 74

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Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, 34, 36 Farberow, Norman, 183 Farrow, John, 98 Fay, Dion Anthony, 155 Feldman, Charlie, 63, 67 Fenton, Patricia, 169 Fischer, Terence, 168 Fickling, Joseph Gordon, 22 First Lady of Hollywood, The: A Biography of Louella Parsons, 76 Fish, Hamilton, 138 Fisher, Eddie, 143 Fitzgerald, Ella, 187, 198 Fleischer, Richard, 158 Flynn, Errol, 45, 75, 84, 155 Folger, Abigail, 199 Formosa Café, 43 Ford, John, 76, 115, 117 Ford, Robin, 73 Four-Sided Triangle (1953), 168 Fowler, Gene, 195 Fowler, Will, 11, 195 Fratianno, Jimmy “the Weasel,” 53, 66, 74, 81 Freeman, Y. Frank, 122 French, Dorothy, 18, 22, 26 French, Jeanne Axford, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 French, Elvera (Vera), 26 French, Frank, 38–40 Freud, Sigmund, 191 Frost, Jennifer, 107, 193 Frykowski, Wojceich, 199 Fuchs, Leo, 197 Gable, Clark, 91, 93, 160, 162, 172, 190 Gang, Martin, 116 “Gangster as Tragic Hero, The,” 101 Gardner, Ava, 69, 142, 143 Garfield, John, 43, 123–25, 141 Garland, Judy, 91, 142 Garnett, Tay, 93 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), 168, 177–79, 192 Giancana, Sam, 185, 186, 188 Giannini, A. H., 65 Giesler, Jerry, 73–77, 94, 181 Gilmore, John, 43, 170 Glatman, Harvey, 31–33 Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, 188 Golden, Milton, 162–64 Goldwyn, Samuel, 70

228

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Index

Goldwyn Studios, 43 Gollum, George Rector “Bud,” 45–49 Gordon, Matt, Jr., 22 Gough, Lloyd, 109 Gould, Deborah, 184, 187 Graham, Billy, 16, 82, 86–91 Grandison, Lionel, 187, 188 Granlund, Nils Thor, 62 Grapes of Wrath, The (1940), 76 Great Gatsby, The, 110 Great Jesse James Raid, The (1953), 168 Greb, Harry, 135 Greene, Milton, 180, 194 Greenberg, Albert Louis, 36 Greenson, Milton, 184, 186 Grossman, Cathy Lynn, 87 Grossman, Harry, 84 Grossman, Herbert, 19 Group Theater, 145, 146, 157 Gypsy (1962), 122 Hacienda Club, 26 Hall, Jon, 62 Halley, Rudolph, 103 Hamblen, Stuart, 90 Hammer Film Productions, 168 Handler, Max, 31 Handler, Matt. See Handler, Max Hansen, Mark, 62 Harrison, Robert, 170, 171, 173–76 Hartman, Don, 117 Hathaway, Henry, 157, 168 Hawks, Howard, 168 Hayes, Steve, 160 Hayworth, Jimmy, 184 Hearst, William Randolph, 11, 116, 119, 131, 135, 136 Hearst, William Randolph, Jr., 140 Hecht, Ben, 44, 69 Hecht, Hill, and Lancaster, 180 “Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood,” 121 Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism, 107 Hefner, Hugh, 178 Henreid, Paul, 125 Heiress, The (1949), 47 Hepburn, Katharine, 89, 141 Herbert, Edward “Neddie,” 78, 102 Hertel, Howard, 182 HHL. See Hecht, Hill, and Lancaster HICCASP. See Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts and Sciences and Professions Higashi, Sumiko, 98

Hitchcock, Donald E., 29, 30 Hodel, Dorothy, 34, 35 Hodel, George, 33–36, 77 Hodel, Steve, 25, 26, 33, 34 Hodel, Tamar, 34, 77 Hodges, Norman, 184 Hoffa, Jimmy, 185, 188 Hofstadter, Richard, 189 Hogan, Luanne, 132 Holde, William, 109 Hollywood Babylon, 94 Hollywood Blacklist, 8, 53, 70, 87–89, 111, 113–29, 137, 140, 142, 145, 147, 155, 173 Hollywood Canteen, 43, 44 “Hollywood Cold Case: Aspiring Actress Left Cryptic Note,” 58 Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, 141, 142 Hollywood Nineteen, 137 Hollywood Ten, 70, 89, 125, 126 Hoover, J. Edgar, 70, 124, 126, 188 Hope, Bob, 44, 138, 139, 171, 173 Hopper, Hedda, 74, 75, 93, 97–99, 106–12, 114, 116, 120–22, 125, 127–29, 143, 144, 148, 171, 173, 174, 191, 193, 194–96 Horrall, C. B. “Jack,” 30, 85, 86 Horne, Gerald, 65 Horse Feathers (1932), 52 House Committee on Un-American Activities, 53, 114, 122, 124, 125, 129, 137, 140, 142, 145, 155, 173 How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), 179 Howard, Roy, 135 HUAC. See House Committee on Un-American Activities Hubbard, L. Ron, 16 Hubley, Faith, 140 Hudson, Rock, 196 Hughes, Howard, 93, 114, 160 Hughes, William, 29 Huston, John, 35, 77, 116, 117, 177, 178, 190, 191 I Am Not Ashamed, 154 IATSE. See International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees I Love Lucy, 127 In a Lonely Place (1950), 3, 5–7, Inge, William, 180, 191 International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, 53–57, 141

Index It Had to Be You (1947), 117 I Wanted Wings (1941), 93 “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook,” 124 Jack Broder Productions, 168 Jackson, Elmer, 85, 86 Jacobs, Otto, 48 James, Henry, 47 Jennings, Dean, 71 Jet-Propulsion Laboratory, 16 John Birch Society, 140 Johnny Eager (1941), 92, 102 Johnson, Erskine, 132 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 140 Johnson, Nunnally, 76, 77 Johnson, Van, 131 Johnston, Eric, 122 Jones, Albert, 46 Juliet, 1245 Vine Street, Hollywood, 34, 35 Justin, Sidney, 42 Kappelhoff, Doris Mary Ann. See Day, Doris Katcher, Leo, 65 Kaye, Danny, 124, 127 Kazan, Elia, 116, 146, 190 Kearns, Carroll D., 55 Keaton, Buster, 106 Kefauver Commission, 69, 103 Kefauver, Estes, 103 Kelley, Tom, 177, 178 Kelly, Gene, 125 Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier “Jackie,” 187 Kennedy, John F., 139, 140, 184, 185, 187–89 Kennedy, Joseph, 99 Kennedy, Robert, 140, 184, 187, 188 Kenney, Robert, 62 Kern, Gladys, 41 Khrushchev, Nikita, 181 Kidd, George D., 28 King Kong (1933), 114, 158 Kino, Kay, 131, 132 Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950), 158–60 Kloke, Gail Lee, 169, 170 Koch, Howard, 137 Lady from Shanghai (1948), 98 Lang, Walter, 179 L.A. Noir, 66 Lake, Veronica, 93 Lamarr, Hedy, 158 Lamas, Fernando, 93

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229

Lana Turner: A Daughter’s Memoir (2001), 92, 95, 96, 101 Lana: The Lady, the Legend, and the Truth, 91 “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” 2, 3 Lancaster, Burt, 180 Landers, Lew, 168 Lane, Artie. See Jeff Conners Lang, Fritz, 116 Langer, Carole, 92, 95, 96, 101 Lansky, Meyer, 50, 71, 72 Lawford, Patricia Kennedy, 185 Lawford, Peter, 139, 183, 185, 187 Lawson, John Howard, 141, 142 Lawton, Jack, 32 Lazar, Al “The Sheik,” 59 Lee, Peggy, 187 Leeds, Lila, 73, 74, 176 Le Borg, Reginald, 168, 169 LeRoy, Mervyn, 91, 92 Letter to Three Wives, A (1949), 115 Let’s Make Love (1960), 180 Levin, Henry, 63 Levinson, Barry, 71 Lewis, Jerry, 69 Lewis, Roy “Pee Wee,” 85 Less than Zero, 7 Liberace, 174 Life and Curious death of Marilyn Monroe, The, 188 Litman, Robert, 183 Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The (1935), 157 Lloyd, Frank, 157 Loew, Marcus, 62 Loew’s, 65 Logan, Joshua, 180 Lorensen, Harry, 77–79, 81 Lowell, Robert, 1 Lubin, Eli, 78, 80 Luciano, Charles “Lucky,” 50, 52, 71, 72, 132, 133 Lund, Mae. See Preston, Mae Lorene Lynch, Charles, 29 Machaty, Gustav, 158 Madison, Guy, 160, 167, 171, 172 Magritte, Rene, 34 Mailer, Norman, 188 Maisano, George, 50 Mamoulian, Rouben, 117 Mankiewicz, Joseph, 115–20, 177 Manley, Harriet, 26 Manley, Red, 25, 26 Mann, Daniel, 1

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Index

Mansfield, Jane, 2 Manson, Charles, 199 Marilyn Monroe Productions, 180 Marshall, George, 114, 115 Marshall, Herbert, 99 Marshman, D. M., Jr., 108, 111 Martin, Dean, 139 Martin, Inez, 156 Martin, Lynn, 19, 20, 27, 42, 43 Marx Brothers, the, 52 Marx, Groucho, 141 Marx, Zeppo, 91 Matranga, Charles, 50 Matranga, Pietro, 50 Matranga, Sam, 50 May, Fred, 2 Mayer, Louis B., 102, 107, 109, 118, 122, 156 McCann, Graham, 185–87, 189 McCarey, Leo, 119, 120 McCarthy, Joseph, 115, 117, 138, 139 McLoed, Norman, 52 McWilliams, Carey, 55, 56 Meade, Fred, 174, 175 Meade, Marjorie, 174, 175 Melcher, Terry, 199 Meltzer, Harold “Happy,” 78, 84–86 Menjou, Adolphe, 114 Menzies, William Cameron, 160 Mercado, Ruth Rita. See Rojas, Angela Merchant Prince of Poverty Row, The: Harry Cohn and Columbia Pictures, 65 Merkin, Daphne, 196, 197 Metalious, Grace, 96 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 62, 65, 92, 96, 156, 160 Meyer, Norma Lee. See Martin, Lynn MGM. See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Miller, Arthur, 178, 189–91, 194 Miller, Henry, 36 Minnelli, Vincente, 116 Minotaure, 35 Misfits, The (1961), 178, 179 Mission to Moscow (1943), 137 Mitchum, Robert, 31, 69, 73–76, 174 Mommie Dearest, 97, 98, 193 Mondragon, Rosenda Josephine, 41 Monkey Business (1931), 52 Monroe, Marilyn, 8, 9, 75, 144, 152, 168, 176–96, 198 Montgomery, Dorothy, 41 Montgomery, Robert, 55, 114, 127 Morath, Inge, 190 Morgan, Swifty, 72

Mortimer, Lee, 129–33 Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, 114, 115, 120, 124, 155 Motion Picture Association of America, 111, 119, 124, 125, 173, 174 Motion Picture Patents Company, 65 Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association, 56 MPAA. See Motion Picture Association of America MPAPAI. See Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals MPPC. See Motion Picture Patents Company MPPDA. See Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association Muir, Florabel, 72, 102, 192 Mulligan, Robert, 197 Murder is My Beat (1955), 169 Murray, Eunice, 186, 187 Murray, Ora, 42 Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), 157 My Dark Places, 32 My Son John (1952), 120 National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 191 Navasky, Victor, 127 Neal, Tom, 155–57, 162–70 Neff, Don, 182 Negulesco, Jean, 179 Nelson, Mark, 34, 36 Newcombe, Patricia “Pat,” 184, 187 Niagara (1953), 168 Niccoli, Frank, 66, 78–81 Nilsson, Anna Q., 106 Ninotchka (1939), 111 Nitti, Frank “the Enforcer,” 64 No Business Like Show Business (1954), 179 Noguchi, Thomas, 183 Odd Man Out, 114 Odets, Clifford, 144–50 O’Dowd, John, 153 Office of War Information, 114, 137 Ogul, “Little” Davy, 61–63, 66, 67, 78, 81, 160 O’Hara, Frank, 1–3 O’Hara, Maureen, 121, 174, 175 O.K. You Mugs: Writers on Movie Actors, 155 Olivier, Laurence, 180 Olney, Warren, 73, 74

Index Olson, Nancy, 109 Only the Valiant (1951), 158 Ordo Templi Orientis, 16 Orwell, George, 118 O’Sullivan, Maureen, 98 Overell, Beulah, 46, 47 Overell, Beulah Louise, 45–49 Overell, Louise. See Overell, Beulah Louise Overell, Walter, 46–49 OWI. See Office of War Information Pacht, Isaac, 51 Palance, Jack, 7, 146 “Paramount Decision,” the, 8, 15, 42, 119 Paramount Pictures, 4, 111, 112 “Paranoid Style in American Politics, The,” 189 Parker, William H. “Bill,” 86, 163, 164 Parsons, Harriet, 76 Parsons, John Whiteside, 16 Parsons, Louella, 76, 77, 98, 99, 107, 116, 119–24, 132, 144, 148, 171, 173, 174, 191–93 Pauling, Linus, 141 Payton, Barbara, 43, 144, 152–73, 176–78 PCA. See Production Code Administration Pearson, Albert Marsden, 77, 78, 81, 103 Peavy, Henry, 109 Peck, Gregory, 158 Pegler, Westbrook, 55, 56, 133–40, 144 Peterson, Hazel, 81 Peyton Place (1957), 96 Phillips, Elsie, 77, 78 Pidgeon, Walter, 172, 174 Pierson, Melissa Holbrooke, 155 Poe, James, 144, 145 Polito, Robert, 155 Polonski, Abraham, 124 Post, Emily, 179 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (1946), 93, 168 Power, Tyrone, 93 Preminger, Otto, 179 Preston, Mae Lorene, 41 Price, George, 27 Price, Vincent, 36 Prince and the Showgirl, The (1957), 180 Production Code Administration, 92, 93 Provas, George A. “Tony,” 169 Quinlin, Ronnie, 175 Raft, George, 67, 69, 104 Rankin, John, 117

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Ray, Man, 33–35 Ray, Nicholas, 3, 116 Reagan, Nancy, 122 Reagan, Ronald, 122, 123, 141, 142 Realart Pictures, 158, Reality and Fiction: The Story of the Black Dahlia (2006), 12, 18, 21, 25, Reeves, George, 75 Reich, Walter, 116 Reid, Wallace, 45 Reid, William, 164 Reynolds, Debbie, 143 Rist, Jimmy, 78, 80 River of No Return (1954), 179 Robinson, Edward G., 36, 69 Robson, Mark, 96 Roebuck, Theodore “Tiny,” 87 Rogell, Albert S., 115 Rogers, Ginger, 69, 114 Rogers, Lela, 114 Rojas, Angela, 32 Rooney, Mickey, 155 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 138 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 141 Roselli, Johnny, 63–67, 69, 185 Rosen, Morris, 72 Rosenthal, Jerry, 59 Ross, Harold, 76 Ross, Daniel G., 173 Rossellini, Roberto, 170 Rothman, Hooky, 74, 81 Rothstein, Arnold, 65, 156 Rudin, Milton A. “Mickey,” 186 Ruditsky, Barney, 84–86 Rudolph, Guy, 85 Ruggles, Wesley, 93 Rummel, Sam, 85, 86 Run for the Hills (1953), 168 Rushmore, Howard, 175 Russell, Jane, 93 Russell, Rosalind, 127 Samson and Delilah (1949), 113, 158 Sands, Jack. See Leslie Dillon Sante, Luc, 154 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 190 Scaduto, Anthony, 188 Schaefer, Walter, 186 Schary, Dory, 96 Schenck, Joseph, 71 Schuchardt, William, 14 Schultz, Dutch, 133 Schwartz, Louis (Lou), 78, 80 Sciacca, Anthony. See Scaduto, Anthony

232

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Index

Scientology, 16 Scott, Lizabeth, 174 Screen Actors Guild, 18, 55 Screen Directors Guild, 113–20 Screen Writers Guild, 53, 122 SDG. See Screen Directors Guild Searchers, The (1956), 115 Sebring, Jay, 199 Sedway, Moe, 72 Seidman, Roberta, 123 Seven Year Itch, The (1955), 179, 180, 195 Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, 170 Shallert, Edwin, 159 Shaw, Artie, 141, 142 Sheridan, Ann, 93 Short, Cleo, 22, 23 Short, Elizabeth, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11–44, 47, 60, 63, 77, 90, 113, 152, 169, 170, 177, 184, 195 Short, Phoebe, 17, 18, Siegel, Benjamin (Bugsy), 36, 50, 51, 62, 67, 69–72, 84, 103, 104 Sinatra, Frank, 69, 93, 129–33, 136, 138–43, 184, 186 Sinatra, Nancy, 143 Siodmak, Curt, 154 Skelton, Red, 69 Skolsky, Sidney, 76, 91 Slatzer, Robert, 188, 189 Smickoff, Abraham, 62 Smiley, Allen. See Smickoff, Abraham Sokolsky, George, 126, 127 Solomon, Max, 51, 83 Some Like It Hot (1959), 180, 191 Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942), 93 Song Is You, The, 40, 63 Sorrell, Herbert, 53, 55, Spaulding, Ruth, 34 Spangler, Jean, 40, 57–67, 81, 90, 160, 177, 178 Speriglio, Milo, 188 Spigelgass, Leonard, 122 Spoto, Daniel, 189 Springer, Louise, 42 Stagecoach (1939), 115 Stanwyck, Barbara, 98, 155 Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading “Photoplay,” 98 Starr, Kevin, 15, 61 Steiger, Rod, 147 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951), 107 Stephens, Paul, 2 Steriman, Hy, 176

Stevens, George, 117 Stewart, Jimmy, 145 St. John, Adela Rogers, 47, 48 Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, The, 188 Stoker, Charles, 82, 83, 84 Stompanato, Carmine, 101 Stompanato, Johnny, 75, 91, 93–97, 99–104 Strasberg, Lee, 157 Sullivan, Ed, 126 Summers, Anthony, 188, 189 Sunset Boulevard (1950), 3, 5, 7, 106–13, 116, 118, 144 Swan, Jack, 78, 79, 81 Swanson, Gloria, 91, 99, 106, 109, 112, 113 Tabachnick, Norman, 183 Tanning, Dorothea, 36 Tate, Sharon, 199 Taylor, Elizabeth “Liz,” 143, 193 Taylor, William Desmond, 45, 109 Tell It to Louella, 192 Temple, Shirley, 67 Tenney, Jack B., 132 Tereba, Tere, 73, 77 Thalberg, Irving, 70 That Petty Girl (1950), 63 They Drive By Night (1940), 93 They Won’t Forget (1937), 91 Thomas, Danny, 69 Thomas, Jeanne Axford. See French, Jeanne Axford Thomas, J. Parnell, 124 Tilden, Bill, 45 “To the Film Industry in Crisis,” 2 Toback, James, 71 Todd, Thelma, 52 Tone, Franchot, 43, 156–58, 160–72, 176 Torgerson, Dial, 153, 154 Trapped (1949), 158 Trelstad, Laura, 41 Trevor, John Bond, 138 True Confessions (1981), 13 Trumbo, Dalton, 89, 113, 141 Tunney, Gene, 135 Turner, Lana, 1–3, 21, 75, 91–104, 142, 192 Turner, Mildred, 94, 97 Twentieth-Century Fox, 71, 176, 177, 180 Ulanov, Barry, 132 Ulmer, Edgar, 156, 157, 169 Underwood, Aggie, 42, 43

Index Ungar, Arthur, 54, 55 United Artists, 180 Universal Studios, 197 Updike, John, 198, 199 U.S. v. Paramount Pictures. See Paramount Decision, the Vaus, Jimmy, 82–88 Vigil, Lorraine, 32 von Stroheim, Erich, 106, 109 Voorhees, Daniel, 27, 28 Waldorf Statement, 111, 125 Walker, Herbert V., 174, 175 Wallace, Jean, 157, 158, 162 Wallace, Henry, 89, 137, 138 Wanger, Walter, 75 Warren, Earl, 62 Warner Bros., 53, 59, 91, 125, 137, 141, 158, 159, 166 Warner, Jack, 122, 137 Warner, H. B., 106 Warshow, Robert, 101 Washington Square, 47 Wasserman, Lew, 96, 145 Wayne, John, 127 We Only Kill Each Other: The Life and Bad Times of Bugsy Siegel, 71 Webb, Jack, 23, 24, 109 Welles, Orson, 52, 98, 133, 136, 138, 141 Wellport, Rudy, 85, 86

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233

West, Mae, 174 Whitt, George, 40 Whole Truth and Nothing But, The, 194 Whorton, William, 86 Who Killed Marilyn, 188 Who’s Got the Action (1962), 1 Why I Quit Organized Crime, 82 Wilder, Billy, 3, 106–13, 116–18, 144, 179, 180 Wilkerson, William “Billy,” 70, 71, 91, 92 William Cagney Productions, 159, 160, 166 Williams, Eugene D., 45 Winchell, Walter, 57, 69, 70, 99, 144 Winters, Evelyn, 41, 42 Winters, Shelley, 145, 146 Wise, Robert, 116 Wolfe, Donald H., 36, 37, 67 Wood, Thomas, 76, 77 “Woodbury Soap Box,” 122 Wrather, David Y., 37, 39 Wyatt, Jane, 124, 125 Wyler, William, 47, 116, 117 Young Man with a Horn (1950), 59, 60 Zamperini, Louis, 87, 90 Zanuck, Darryl, 70 Zinnemann, Fred, 117 Zolotow, Maurice, 107 Zwillman, Abner “Longy,” 65