Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  In Paris he met Esther Leov, a Russian emigrant from Kiev who was a practicing dentist, a very unusual accomplishment for a woman in 1900. I don't have much information on either of my grandparents, except that it was rumored that Esther Leov's family were the direct descendants of French aristocracy, many of whom fled from Paris to Russia during the French Revolution and returned to France in the nineteenth century. George Sr. and Esther married in France on May 5, 1901, and entered the United States through Ellis Island on May 31, twenty-five days later. The two of them migrated west to California from New York, settling in the desert suburb of South Pasadena, ten miles northeast of the emerging new capital of the silent motion-picture industry, Los Angeles.

  My father, their only child, was born on October 10, 1907, at the Clara Barton Hospital at the corner of 5th Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. On the birth certificate George Sr. listed his occupation as "banker" and Esther listed herself as "dentist."

  My father grew up speaking French as his primary language, in a completely French-speaking home. At age five, because his parents believed he had exceptional mental abilities that required special development, he was sent to Paris, where he was enrolled in the Montessori school, run by Madame Montessori herself. During this time, George lived with a Count and Countess Troubetzkoy, either relatives or close friends of his mother, in their penthouse suite in the Champ de Mars district of Paris, close to the Eiffel Tower. George's schooling in Paris lasted only a year or two, after which he returned home to begin his public schooling in South Pasadena. His mother, ever mindful of his cultural development, retained the services of a noted piano instructor, Vernon Spencer, to teach her son music. Spencer instantly identified him as a musical prodigy, and within a remarkably short time George had become not only an accomplished pianist but was even writing his own compositions.

  By the age of nine, George had become recognized throughout Southern California as a future concert pianist; his teacher predicted a great musical career for him. An old family photograph captures the image of the Russian composer Rachmaninoff visiting the Hodel home in South Pasadena, where he, accompanied by the Russian minister of culture and his wife, attended a private recital given by Father when he was only nine.

  My father's fame as a prodigy spread, and soon the newspapers were writing articles about him. On July 14, 1917, for example, the Los Angles Evening Herald, alongside a photo of my father, wrote:

  BOY OF NINE CHIEF SOLOIST

  AT SHRINE HOLIDAY EXERCISES

  A little boy, 9 years old, has been chosen by the French committee to play before the Belgian mission at the French celebration at Shrine auditorium today.

  The lad thus chosen above scores of adult musicians is George Hodel, son of Mr. and Mrs. George Hodel of 6440 Walnut Hill Avenue. He is a pupil of Vernon Spencer and is regarded in the world of music as a genius.

  Though a mere youngster, he has studied music for years and he was selected as a piano soloist by the French committee entirely because of his great talent.

  While he has composed several musical works, he will play Massenet and Chaminade selections when he appears before the Belgian mission.

  The Hodels had erected a handsome estate in South Pasadena, located on Monterey Road, designed by the famous Russian architect Alexander Zelenko. It was built in the style of a Swiss chalet, a ten-room residence complete with a detached guesthouse, which would later become their son's private retreat in which he was allowed to pursue his intellectual creations in complete privacy. Thus, even from his earliest years, George Jr.'s parents treated him as if he were beyond special, indulging him, nurturing what they were convinced was his unique talent, raising him as if he were a child of European aristocracy, with all the privileges of a superior class. But in truth he was an American child growing up in California in the twentieth century, nothing more. And therein, I believe, were sown the seeds of his later problems.

  In addition to his musical genius, George also tested exceptionally high intellectually, with an IQ score of 186, which apparently placed him one point above Albert Einstein. This "genius mentality" rapidly advanced him through primary and secondary schools, and he graduated from South Pasadena High School at the ripe young age of fourteen.

  In 1923, when he was only fifteen, George began attending college at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, intent on pursuing a career as a chemical engineer. Even then, Cal Tech was one of the most important engineering schools in the country, the home of early-twentieth-century experiments in electronics research, magnetic propulsion, and even anti-gravity wave propagation. However, George either dropped out or was expelled from Cal Tech after completing only one year, for reasons that still remain unclear. There are two versions of the story of his expulsion. In the first, he left college because he had a sexual liaison with a faculty member's wife, who became pregnant as a result and was divorced by her husband. In the second version, he was kicked out for playing poker, because gambling was prohibited on campus. In any event, by the time he was seventeen he had left engineering school and was working at a variety of jobs.

  In 1924, mostly as a result of his performance on IQ tests required by the California public school system during his early teens, the noted Stanford psychologist Dr. Lewis Terman selected him to become a member of a tracking group known as "Terman's Termites." This was one of the first long-running experiments in developmental psychology, in which Professor Terman, credited with originating the terms "IQ" and "gifted," conducted a survey of more than a thousand intellectually endowed students. Beginning in 1924 with a group of specially selected children, Terman's study began to collect data and follow them as they grew older, to see how their intellectual gifts manifested themselves in their lives and careers. In the seven decades since Dr. Terman's groundbreaking studies began, five books have been published analyzing the data provided from these original students.

  Over the years, Father continued to return the extensive research questionnaires; clearly he saw his selection by Dr. Terman as a validation of his own belief that he was special. His scrupulous return of the questionnaires and his adherence to what the study required of him doubtless reinforced in him the elitist feeling instilled in him by his parents. I also believe the fact that his 186 IQ placed him in Terman's highest category of the gifted students to be studied was a vital component of his extraordinary self-esteem that stood him in good stead during his toughest times and into his final years.

  From 1924 through 1928, my father worked in various professions in the Los Angeles area normally reserved for much older and more experienced people. In his first job, he worked as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Record during the most violent years of Prohibition. His particular beat was the LAPD Vice Squad, where he rode shotgun on their raids of downtown nightclubs and local speakeasies. Extracts from an article he wrote on August 20,1924, when he was only sixteen, provide insight not only into what was happening in L.A. during Prohibition but also into my father's thoughts and activities.

  LIFE CAFE

  WHERE LIQUOR IS HARD

  A Raid on the Humming Bird Café

  Outside the brilliantly lit Humming Bird cafe, 1243 East 12th street, officers are waiting, watch in hand, ready to swoop down on the place, on the stroke of 12 Saturday night.

  All possible exits are guarded, all avenues of escape are watched. They are determined that this raid should not fail — that they should clean up the wettest hole on Central Avenue.

  It lacks five minutes of midnight.

  Inside, a motley crowd is reveling unaware of what developments are about to take place.

  The atmosphere is saturated with the odor of intoxicants. The spirit of the men and women inside is changing from one of tipsy fun to that of licentious debauchery. Strong liquor is doing its work . ..

  Three minutes of midnight.

  The Negro orchestra strikes up a tune, assertively synchopative. The players sway their bodies in rhythm with the music, de
ftly juggling their instruments . . .

  Abandonment, unreserved and unblushing, is permeating the cafe. A loud knock at the door. Four men stride in, officers of the prohibition enforcement and vice squads.

  They walk rapidly about from table to table, seizing bottles and collaring men. The proprietor calls excitedly to waiters, who dash about warning the men and women. Dozens of glasses are overturned, dozens of bottles are emptied or smashed.

  The noise of broken glass fills the room.

  The floor is soaked with alcohol.

  The four officers have taken five men, sixteen officers could have arrested four times that number.

  The siren of the police patrol dies off in the distance.

  The music starts up lurchingly.

  Bottles are lifted from the floor. Glasses are refilled.

  A woman looks sorrowfully at the broken neck of a smashed whisky flask. She breaks out into a loud high-pitched sob, gasping drunkenly. . .

  Arrest Men for Booze

  While white women careened drunkenly in the Arms of Negro escorts, in the Humming Bird cafe, 1243 East Twelfth street, early Wednesday morning, vice squad officers swooped down on the place and arrested several prominent citizens for illegal possession of liquor, marking the third raid carried out on the cafe in as many days. ..

  According to the officers the Hummingbird has been a nightlife rendezvous, where whites dine, dance and drink with members of the city's Negro colony. A bevy of showgirls from a downtown burlesque theater were on the scene, enjoying the festivities.

  Many complaints have been received by police authorities against the Hummingbird and it is said that the wildest sort of orgies are carried on there nightly. White women of the underworld make the place a headquarters, according to the officers, and ply their vocation there.

  George isn't just reporting on the raid; he is describing a lifestyle and sexual fantasies that had fully engaged him even as a teenager. He actually recreates an atmosphere of forbidden sexual promiscuity that violates even the taboos of the 1920s. Father's writing was so colorful that he was quickly promoted from cub reporter to his own crime beat. Now he was working with the city's top cops on the LAPD's homicide squad. In a front-page Record story from 1924 about a murder scene he covered with homicide detectives, where the victim, Peggy Donovan, had been kicked to death, he wrote:

  Los Angeles Record

  June 3, 1924

  Two Cents

  THE MORNING AFTER A PARTY

  The splashes of red about the rooms are beginning to change into brown . . .

  Lying in the dust of the floor and bestrewn with the fallen ashes and stubs of innumerable cigarettes are scraps, scraps of paper — rubbish. There are letters — diaries of forgotten years — prayer books — playing cards — ...

  Lying face up on the floor is a card — the ace of diamonds. Over it has fallen a large drop of blood that converts the printed figure of the red diamond to a shapeless and blurred blotch of red.

  Sheets Bloody

  Blood-smeared sheets lie crumpled and torn on the littered floor of the bungalow.

  A pair of dice have fallen from the smashed dressing table. One of the cubes has on it a splashed red stain.

  Rising above the unmistakable odor of spilled and drying blood are mingling those of liquor, of Jamaica gin, of tobacco.

  Forgotten Advice

  "Give up every friend that is sinful and learn the "Truth that makes . . .'"

  Hopeful, pathetically hopeful, words written last December, one day before Christmas, to Margaret Donovan — cabaret girl who was killed in a drunken brawl. ..

  "Give up every friend that is sinful. .." "Find the Truth."

  "I confess to Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, all the sins that I have committed even unto this hour. May the Almighty Lord grant to me pardon, absolution and remission of all my sins. Amen."

  These words are underlined in a little blue book of "Prayers for Daily Use" "Read this some time for Mother's sake," is inscribed on the title page . . .

  Wisps of dark brown hair — long and silken — are strewn about the floor. They are blood-clotted, torn. Torn stockings of sheer silk.

  Detectives Aghast

  In the adjoining room detectives are muttering. "Good God, Archie, those-kicked her to death about three in the morning and then went and slept till nine!"

  Between the pillow and pillow-slip of the overturned cot in which Peggy Donovan was found dead was an age-yellowed newspaper clipping, its sentences underlined:

  "In the GARDEN OF LIFE WOMEN are the FLOWERS, some are gorgeous, gay and yet Have NO PERFUME."

  A few months later, in another crime-scene story in the Record, George turns the description into a literary piece by punning in Latin on the last name of victim Teresa Mors. Mors — her name means "death" in Latin — was shot and killed by her jealous lover, the famous welterweight boxing champ Norman "Kid McCoy" Selby, who was immortalized by the sobriquet "the Real McCoy" when he decked with a single punch a drunk who had challenged his identity in a downtown L.A. bar. Legendary criminal attorney Jerry Giesler would jump-start his career with this famous early Los Angeles murder case by obtaining a manslaughter verdict for his client rather than the death sentence the state wanted.

  In his description of the murder scene George Hodel writes:

  Los Angeles Record

  Thursday, August 14, 1924

  Two Cents

  WORDS OF DEATH

  Death.

  Mors, mortis, morti — glibly the schoolboy declines it. Thoughtlessly.

  Like a cage in which the canary has been stifled, this apartment on the second floor of the Nottingham — the tall, expensive building with a front of blazing white tiles.

  While the yellow bird was alive — flitting and singing —

  The cage seemed a pretty thing. Now with the canary dead it is a dirty cage, tawdry and crusted with birdlime.

  The canary is dead on the floor of this soft room that seems so close — impinging with walls and ceiling — close like a cage . . .

  She lies dead in an unpleasant disarray that is not art but death. And the two batiks of Larry Darwin, monsters of the new niode, bulge with immensity just as the ordered vision of Rubens shrinks into insignificance before the monstrosity on the floor. Larry Darwin's nudes are phantasms — succubi. One smokes a cigarette, perched cross-legged on the devil's head. The other, with stuffed limbs, prances through a garden of exotic lotus flowers. Both leer at the figure on the floor.

  The figure on the floor. Hair waved and hennaed, perhaps. Redly, dankly — plume for a face disfigured by a bullet hole. Eyes purpled. Blood on the bare white arms. And this photograph — of "the Kid." Clasped like a rosary to the breast, flat now, and hard; retreated as a woman's breast retreats when she is on her back.

  The Kid placed the photograph in the white hand.

  A gesture of drama, a futile touch of the romantic school that heightens the grotesquerie; that causes the naked batik succubi to leer the more it seems.

  Pull it away — the picture. The newspapermen would photograph it, too. Yes, it's a picture of the kid.

  Bloodstains on the glass. The Kid stands up young and proud.

  The clutching fingernails scratch and rattle across the back. Ugh! Put it back in the hand. Let her hold it. . .

  On their pedestal the nymph and satyr of Perl's have never eased the tension of their eternal embrace . . .

  Death.

  Mors, mortis, morti — what gender is death?

  Feminine of course. It is of that declension. Yes, death is feminine.

  Later in 1924, George decided to give up reporting and become a publisher. The following month, he and a friend decided to create a literary magazine. Now living in his own detached studio on his parents' South Pasadena property, he published a magazine with his own printing press and named it Fantasia. In his January 1925 introduction to the first issue, he made the following editorial statement:

  A Dedication


  To the portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts, to the delineation of the stranger harmonies and the rarer fragrances, do we dedicate this, our magazine.

  Such beauty we may find in a poem, a sketch, or a medley of colors; in the music of prayer-bells in some far-off minaret, or the noises of a city street; in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin.

  And ever shall we attempt in our pages the vivid expression of such art, wherever or however we may find it — ever shall we consecrate our magazine to the depiction of beauty anomalous, fantasial.

  George Hodel wanted to explore bizarre, off-the-edge fantasies, mostly having to do with forbidden sex and violence. His magazine survived two issues; its only notable piece was my father's review of the newly published hook by the then relatively unknown author Ben Hecht, entitled The Kingdom of Evil. This was a sequel to Hecht's first book, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, a journal narrated by the fictional reclusive artist-genius Mallare, which describes the author's visions of decadence, insanity, and, ultimately, murder. Mallare creates a beautiful mistress, Rita, who becomes his phantom or hallucinatory lover. In this twisted story delusion becomes reality and reality dissolves to dreams until, at the story's end, Mallare has transformed himself into an insanely jealous avenger who beats Rita to death because of her flagrant, wanton seduction, in Mallare's own presence, of his Caliban-like manservant, Goliath. The reader never really knows whether Rita is real or a twisted fantasy spun out of Mallare's psychotic torment.

  The novel's highly erotic pen-and-ink drawings were created by Wallace Smith, who like Hecht had been a journalist, artist, and author in Chicago. Smith was arrested and prosecuted for what the government considered pornography, and because the book was judged obscene, was jailed for a brief period. Both authors would later come to Hollywood to write screenplays, where Hecht would eventually become one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the industry.