Happy 65th birthday, James Ellroy!

Betty Short died at twenty-two. She was a flaky kid living out flaky kid fantasies. A reporter learned that she dressed solely in black and named her "The Black Dahlia." The tag nullified her and vilified her and turned her into a sainted lost daughter and a slut. The case was a huge news event. Jack Webb steeped his twelve-page summary in the ethos of the time: Femme fatales die hard and are complicitous in attracting death by vivisection. He didn't understand the killer's intentions or know that his gynecological tampering defined the crime. He didn't know that the killer was horribly afraid of women. He didn't know that he cut the Dahlia open to see what made women different from men.


Webb described the Dahlia's last days. She was running to and from men and stretching her mental resources schizophrenically thin. She was looking for a safe place to hide. Two photographs accompanied the story. The first one showed Betty Short at 39th and Norton. Her legs were half visible. Men with guns and pocket notebooks were standing over her body. The second one showed her in life. Her hair was swept up and back -like a 1940s portrait shot of my mother. My Black Dahlia obsession assumed new fantasy forms. I rescued Betty Short and became her lover. I saved her from a life of promiscuity. I tracked down her killer and executed him. They were strong, narrative-based fantasies. They took the queasy edge off my Dahlia fixation.



I took bus trips downtown to the Main Public Library. I read the 1947 Herald-Express on microfilm rolls. I learned all about the life and death of the Black Dahlia. Betty Short came from Medford, Massachusetts. She had three sisters. Her parents were divorced. She visited her dad in California in 1943. She got hooked on Hollywood and men in uniform. She wanted to be a movie star. She was concurrently engaged to several army flyboys. She frequented cocktail bars and cadged drinks and dinners off strange men. She told whopping lies routinely. Her life was indecipherable. I instinctively understood that life. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Betty Short wanted powerful things from men -but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself that she was something original. She miscalculated. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. The new Betty was the old Betty bushwhacked by Hollywood. She turned herself into a cliché that most men wanted to fuck and a few men wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep dark down and cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. She met a man with notions of deep-dark-down-and-cozy cloaked in rage. -"My Dark Places" by James Ellroy (1996)


Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett in "The Black Dahlia" (2006) directed by Brian De Palma


As the story progresses, Bleichert gets more and more erotically obsessed with the Dahlia and Madeleine; it also becomes clearer that Blanchard is nothing like his heroic exterior, but is a deeply corrupt cop. The book develops into an examination of two illusions and the people who become these illusions, and surpass them.


Bleichert ends up a better cop than Blanchard ever was. The Dahlia, who was a lousy actress who had sex as a recourse from loneliness is surpassed by Madeleine, a woman who is a gifted mimic who revels in sex and her image, the image of the dead girl. The attraction of the Dahlia is also an intersection with the now ubiquitous culture of fame, fame exclusively through an image, rather than any achievement. Though Betty Short was entirely unknown as performer or individual, the image of the Dahlia becomes known throughout Los Angeles, and it is the ubiquity of this image, that so many other men lust for this image, that makes Bleichert want it even more. This is something that plagues every well-known beautiful actress: a woman who is not just beautiful, but a beauty ever present in the dreams of men, Liz Taylor or Scarlett Johansson. A line from Ellroy’s Dahlia sequel, The Big Nowhere, is apt: “Downtown came and went; the woman stayed.” Source: italkyoubored.wordpress.com