Black Dahlia Week: What in the What?
Are we at really the point in our Bread & Circuses cycle where we celebrate kidnapping, torture, murder, and mutilation with cocktails and burlesque?
We’re midway through ‘Black Dahlia Week’, according to the various podcast notifications, marketing emails, and social media invitations in my inbox.
I’ve thought long and hard about what that means.
77 years after the fact, the case is officially unsolved and will in all likelihood remain so. The players are long dead: even a handwritten confession pulled from a dusty attic is merely hearsay at this point–and would just add to the 500+ “confessions” extant. Unless there’s a 8mm home movie reel out there somewhere showing the killer’s face (paging Kenneth Anger), hypotheses are all we have. In abundance. “Who killed the Black Dahlia?” returns 69,000,000 results on Google with, doubtless, hundreds more added this week. During these days between her disappearance and discovery, there’s an annual frenzy, as pundits trample the crime scene anew, reviving discarded theories and suspects for clicks.
The Black Dahlia sideshow has always been equally problematic and compelling. It’s a tale told and retold to make money, to entertain the masses, to reinforce repressive morality, misogynistic to its core. It’s the male gaze incarnate, landing on a woman’s body and manufacturing a myth without consent. It’s a broken dream, a perverse inversion of a Hollywood ending. It’s a cautionary fable, about a woman who walked south down Olive when she should have walked north, who climbed out of the car of a man she might have trusted and into the passenger seat of a man she could not. It’s pure LA Noir.
But, before she was dubbed the Dahlia, Elizabeth Short did not aspire to be a femme fatale. She more likely regarded herself as the heroine of a melodrama, a ‘women’s picture’ about a pretty protagonist who chased love and lost and learned some hard lessons along the way. A movie directed by Douglas Sirk, starring Gene Tierney.
A high school dropout with asthma and bad teeth, she moved from city to city in search of an identity, stability. In the mid-1940s, that meant a ring on her finger, a husband-provider. While she pursued her prince, she worked dull, tough jobs, waitressing, clerking. At 18, she was living with a man who abused her, but she found the courage to leave. When she did connect with a handsome pilot, her hopes of a happily ever after were dashed with his death in August 1945. Even though they were never married, possibly not even engaged, she framed herself as a 21 year-old widow, a tragic, but all too commonplace figure of the times. Her sob-story evolved as she added a dead child, for bonus tear-jerkability.
She found her way to Los Angeles for a few months, first Long Beach, then Hollywood, where she marched in step with all the other striving girls. She wrote to her family that she wanted to be an actress, although there’s no evidence that she did anything towards that goal other than having some headshot-adjacent photos taken. Perhaps she didn’t want to be the one broad at the Florentine Gardens who didn’t have showbiz ambitions?
She chewed blobs of candle wax and pushed them into her jaw when she went on dates, to hide her atrocious teeth. In her milieu, a girl’s smile was everything. The difference between a steak dinner and not eating. She wrote men’s names and phone numbers into her little black book. She herself had no permanent address, she crashed in friends’ apartments, booked hostel beds by the night, stored a suitcase with all her worldly possessions in a locker at the station.
She joined the postwar dance among all the drifters and chancers and cads and hustlers and traumatized servicemen and psychopaths, whirling along the Boulevard, between the Frolic Room and Boardner’s, praying she’d land in the arms of The One who’d save her.
When he failed to materialize, she decamped to San Diego. A quieter city, thrumming with more military men, fewer freaks. But the tawdry glamor of Los Angeles had her hooked. Needy little liar Elizabeth hitched a ride north. When Red Manley dropped her outside the Biltmore Hotel, around 5pm, on January 9th, 1947, she was just another low-key grifter, genteel enough to pass beneath the gilt clock in the tea room. Then, she vanished.
When she resurfaced as Jane Doe No.1, she was meat, literally and figuratively. Her killer severed her humanity, butchered her corpse and then slavering newshounds ground her into chum and tossed her into their readers’ collective maw. The Examiner, the Herald-Express, and the Daily News were locked in a heated battle for Angelenos’ eyeballs. Readers, hopped up on wartime’s epochal headlines, wanted their news stories to be dramatic, resonant, ground-tilting.
Rival reporters took a single murder and crafted it into a serial narrative, with salacious new installments daily. When the details of Elizabeth Short’s wispy history proved mundane, they concocted lurid fictions. Daily News scribe Jack Smith turned a chance remark from a pharmacist into a read-all-about-it banner: the Black Dahlia, another bloodstained bloom in the bouquet featuring the White Orchid, the Red Hibiscus, the White Carnation. Yet, while their morbid appeal wilted into the archives long ago, the Dahlia’s has only grown.
From the outset, her story had mythic dimensions. Even in a city notorious for its alchemical prowess, Elizabeth Short’s transmutation was extreme, intimating supernatural forces at play, dark magic, the whim of a malevolent god. The dismemberment and arrangement of her corpse screeched ceremonial: murder as a sacred act. This ritualistic aspect gave the tale its good bones, the underlying structure that has glowed through the decades—and through the best efforts of hacks, cops, podcasters, filmmakers and novelists to smear it with their own obsessions and preconceptions.
The timing of the Dahlia story is important too. Red last saw her at sunset on Thursday and her body was dumped just before dawn the following Wednesday. Six days of re-creation. Six days lost. Six days in darkness1.
Across theologies, fables abound of a deity journeying into the underworld on a savior’s quest. To ascend, they must first descend. Osiris, Persephone, Jesus, Quetzacoatl all endured their own versions of Hell as a way of restoring balance to humankind’s universe.
On the calendar, their expeditions into the world below coincide with the coldest days of winter, when buried seeds are shocked into germinating by a long period of low temperatures. Los Angeles gets as cold as it ever does in the first couple of weeks of January. The hours of sunshine are short, the winds off the Pacific are strong and when night comes the thermometer plummets us, like the Dahlia, into subterranean chill.
And never forget that Our Lady the Queen of the Angels reigns at the intersection of belief and bloodshed. Angelenos reserve a special kind of awestruck for any homegrown cult mired in murder, from the Great Eleven to The Family. Amid our worship of fraudsters and false idols, the Old Ones of the river basin grow jealous and resentful. It’s easy to see why a long-buried swamp goddess might want to punch her way into the current century, via the entrails of a human sacrifice offered up by an acolyte-avenger. Then, ride the media hurricane. And once established, she’d naturally demand an annual ritual in her honor.
Is, then, ‘Black Dahlia Week’ the excuse we make for a practising a pre-spring rite of passage, a symbolic January germination? Is the lip service paid to the memory of Elizabeth Short a cover for our deeper fealty to unseen forces we only half understand?
So, dear readers, be circumspect when raising a martini glass (citrus vodka, Chambord, and Kahlua shaken with ice) to the Black Dahlia this or any January. When we’re careless about celebrating the crime, rather than commemorating the victim, who knows what shadowy deities we invoke.
Although, witness statements suggest she might just have been hanging out with various bar friends until January 14. We’ll never know.