A Death in the Family
May 17, 1999, Bellingham, Washington
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS at one in the morning, you hope it’s a wrong number. If it’s not, it’s usually bad news. And that’s what it was for me on Monday, May 17, 1999: a hard ring, an insistent ring that wouldn’t go away because my answering machine was off, and it woke me from a deep sleep. June, my father’s wife, was hysterical on the other end, screaming into her receiver at their penthouse suite in San Francisco. “Steve,” she said, trying to regain some composure, “your father. He’s dead!” Between her sobs I could pick up snippets of what had happened. “Heart attack. Paramedics still here. Your brother Duncan and his wife are here with me. Come down. Please come down now. I could have saved him, Steven. I should have done something more. I am all alone now.”
When I was an LAPD homicide detective, I taught myself how to wake up instantly in the middle of the night when we had to roll out to a call. It was a skill I’d lost over the years since I retired, but it came back to me as June kept talking. I tried to reassure her that we would take care of things, offering her whatever comfort I could over the phone. “I’ll be there on the first flight I can get, June.” It was the best I could do. I made coffee and got on the phone to find a seat on the first flight to San Francisco from Seattle, some ninety miles south of my home in Bellingham, where I had been living for the past twelve years.
Eight hours later I was boarding the plane at SeaTac airport, looking forward to two hours of time alone to ruminate upon the passing of “the Great Man.” The grief and the loss that I felt, that all sons feel at the death of their father, was mixed with the satisfaction I had from knowing that his life had been long and remarkable. His life, as much as I knew of it, had been unique, much larger than that of most people I knew. George Hill Hodel, M.D., who seemed to have lived four lifetimes, had been held in awe by all of his children from all four of his families. And now he was gone.
As the plane lifted through the cloud cover and carried me toward the passage that almost all sons must inevitably make (the burial of their fathers), I felt oddly grateful that I had been granted the opportunity to repair a relationship with a father I had never really known. There were only snatches and pieces of memory from my childhood in our mysterious Hollywood house, and then, after he had left, nothing.
Now I was fifty-seven. But my relationship with my father had really begun only eight years earlier. Before that the two of us had been strangers, sharing a hello once in a while over the phone or a handshake now and then when I visited him in Asia or when he was passing through L.A. on business. For thirty-five years there had been brief encounters in hotel lobbies, but ours had never been a real father-son relationship.
What we had had were business meetings, where his stiff and formal demeanor was as offputting to me as it was to all his children. To us, he was the “doctor”—clinical, cold, and remote. It struck me as passing strange that my father, with his brilliant mind and extensive training as a psychiatrist, was so obviously uncomfortable among his children. In lectures, using his vocabulary and wit, he was able to charm and hypnotize whole audiences with his charismatic personality and as a leader in his field. Yet in the role of father he was painfully awkward and inept. This paradoxical disconnect, however, actually gave life and body to the eccentricities that made him a distant legend to all of his children. And I was no exception, having lived in the same house with my father in Hollywood in the late 1940s and then twenty-five years later spending time with him in the Philippines when he wanted to woo me away from LAPD Homicide and groom me to take over his business. But that was more than twenty years ago.
Over the ensuing decades, after my retirement and a subsequent career as a P.I. specializing in criminal cases, I had begun to make a breakthrough into the mystery of my father. Slowly, gradually, since his return to the United States in 1991 after a forty-year absence, I had established the beginnings of a relationship with him. I was almost fifty and he was eighty-four.
I believe my change of career had helped us in some ways. I knew that he had on occasion worried about my personal safety. But now I was no longer the metropolitan homicide detective waiting for the midnight callout to a Hollywood murder. No more six o’clock news interviews with the L.A. press reporters who wanted to be assured that “an arrest is imminent.” Those glory days were behind me now. I liked retirement. I liked my new work as a P.I. I liked the fairness of it all. It had been twenty-four years for the prosecution and almost fourteen years for the defense. A recent major victory for an innocent client was still reverberating through my psyche. My life was moving toward a natural homeostatic balance. And now, seeing my face reflected in the airplane window at 35,000 feet against a cloudscape so thick you were sure you could walk on it, that balance was upset and all I could feel was a hole where the past had been. I kept picturing my father over the years: the young 1920s crime reporter, the bohemian artist, the silky-voiced radio announcer, the meticulous surgeon, the austere but dominating psychiatrist, and finally the entrepreneurial marketing genius who had moved to Asia in 1950, abandoning all of us.
My father and I couldn’t have been more different. My job as a street detective in the Hollywood Homicide Division had taught me how to size up and read a person’s character. I was good at it, and most of the time I was right about people. I made lots of mistakes about other things in life, but rarely was I wrong about people. My judgment was intuitive and accurate, partly developed, partly inherent.
Where Dad was rock, I was water. My father was clinical, almost bloodless in his dealings with people. If he was intuitive, it was so far below the surface you wouldn’t even know it was there. He was a hard and cold individual with a huge ego whose demeanor bordered on the tyrannical. “King George,” friends called him in jest, but it was true. Perhaps his demeanor was the result of his many years of living in the Orient, in Manila, where there are just two classes—the very rich and the very poor. But I think not. I think it was always there, always a part of him. He was a man I had not liked even when he telephoned me out of the blue with what he said could be the offer of a lifetime.
In 1973, he had asked me to come to Manila and take a look at his business. He had said, “Come over and take a look at what I have built in Asia. Come over and consider the possibility of working for me, Steven.” By then he had built market research offices in Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore, and his offer was tempting. I was single again and, at thirty-two, with no children, I was free to remake my life. Visions of exotically beautiful women, along with palatial living quarters, danced like sugarplum fairies in my head at night. So I took six weeks’ leave of absence from my work at Hollywood Homicide. I wanted to get as clear a picture of the operation as possible.
By then I had been promoted to detective. It would have been a huge decision if I had chosen to leave LAPD and give up my pension when I was already halfway around the track. Here I would not be my usual impulsive self. Not on something so important that it would affect the rest of my life. So I took a leave to explore my father’s world and a life that was waiting for me if I chose to embrace it.
The six weeks in the Orient were totally indulgent. This boss’s son was spoiled rotten and catered to beyond his dreams. But beneath the excitement, the fun, and the entertainment of it all, I knew it could not be. I simply could not work for such a man. His oversized business cards with his near-imperial title said it all: “Doctor George Hill Hodel, Director General.” He was a control freak, and I would not subordinate myself to him. I felt like a player in a big-stakes poker game, holding only a pair of sevens and knowing there was a much stronger hand in the game. I folded.
But by the 1990s, all that had changed. He was no longer the megalomaniac of old. He became the prodigal father returning to his native soil, changed and reformed. Now at eighty-three, his fires still burned strong, but not with the white heat of twenty-five years earlier. He was different now, settled into a final long-term marriage with June, whom he had married in 1969. With her encouragement he had exchanged much of his robber-baron lifestyle for a slower, more comfortable existence, more in keeping with his advancing years. By the time he returned to the United States from his expatriate years in Asia, he was more forgiving and accepting. And so was I.
Our attempts at a new relationship were gradual, tentative, and laborious at first, typically expressed through faxes and notes. It was the start of communications between us that would grow stronger as the trust built. As the years followed I would make increasingly regular trips to visit Dad and June in San Francisco, and they in turn would make occasional trips north to Bellingham to visit me and to explore the beauty of the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound.
For the first time in our adult lives together, quality father-and-son time would go beyond the formalities of a business meeting and take on the aspect of something social and even human. Now our gatherings would even contain some laughter, and I would be permitted brief glimpses at the man who had always walked through life behind an iron mask. It would only be a peek, though, and the occasions were rare, but it was enough. I could see that my father, after so many years of being a stranger to his son, was beginning to mellow. I had made a breakthrough with him. Though he still felt awkward and uncomfortable talking about feelings and things of the heart, I knew I could finally begin to broach some personal and honest topics with him so as to touch on what to me was the only truly important thing in life as far as I was concerned—communication and relationships. But it was too little too late.
Just a week before my father’s passing, I was concerned about his health. I had heard nothing by fax from him or June for quite a while. I’d invited them to come up during the summer, stay with me for a week or so, and we could make the short drive to Vancouver, Canada, for sightseeing and day trips.
Sensing that his health was failing or something else was amiss, I faxed them and asked him directly about his physical condition. On May 9, 1999, I received the following fax:
May 9, 1999
Dear Steve:
Thanks for your fax of yesterday May 8. Your photos also arrived yesterday and are great depictions of your beautiful new home, and we do wish that we could see it with you.
There is a reason why you haven’t heard much from us for the past few months. We certainly miss seeing you for prolonged periods such as this.
The fact of the matter is that I have been going through a particularly difficult situation in regard to my overall health. We have not wanted to expose to you or to anyone else the full extent of my present debility and overall weakness and general helplessness. This would be humiliating, and could leave a much tarnished image in your minds.
I am now wheelchair-bound, and cannot get around without a great deal of help from June, plus the wheelchair and rolling walker. On the rare occasions when I must go out to see a doctor we also need the help of a hired limo with a strongly built driver.
None of this comes as an actual surprise to me. The overall clinical picture is just about what we would normally expect in a patient who has moved on into the final terminal phase of congestive heart failure. The clinical fact is that I have simply lived a few years too long.
Let me assure you that this thought does not frighten me in the least. For example, I am going into the hospital tomorrow, Monday, for a procedure, which is called cardiac retroversion. This consists of applying two strong electric shocks to the heart, in an attempt to change its present arrhythmia (disturbance of heart rhythm), which in my case is known as “heart flutter” into a more normal rhythm.
But if this and other corrective procedures fail, I shall not be saddened. I have been fortunate enough to lead a very full and interesting life and to know some truly wonderful women and to have some very fine children of whom I am truly proud. The most recent few years have been among the happiest in a long life, thanks to the remarkable help given by June, who is indeed an angel.
In the meantime, June and I send you our love.
George and June
In light of that fax, and intuiting that the end could possibly be near, even for this man considered by all of his children to be an immortal, I felt an urgency to speak from my heart, and mailed a letter to him the following morning.
May 9, 1999
Dear Father:
Thank you for giving me an honest and accurate picture of your current health condition. I very much appreciate it, and know how difficult and naturally reluctant you are to do that, for many valid reasons. Your communication, of course, will always remain confidential. Personally, I appreciate knowing things as they are as opposed to how others or I may wish them to be.
I want you to know that for me, likewise, the past six or seven years have been the happiest. While I have gone through many difficult personal life-changes, emotional adjustments regarding Marsha and the boys, yet I have been extremely happy and content.
The reason for that happiness was the development of our relationship as father and son. Our relationship, yours and mine, has grown and developed and become real to me. It was not always so. For many reasons beyond both of our control, we did not have the opportunity to share our thoughts. This was neither your fault nor mine. It simply was what was.
But in these past years, thanks to your openness, acceptance, and encouragement it became something real. It was like a reverse of the normal course of a father-and-son relationship. Ours was in my youth, distant, and now has become close. I thank you for that.
And I thank you, Father, for your support and patience in me and of me. I thank you for your wise guidance and advice over the past years. Your positive promptings for me to improve my health in many ways. (I think your encouragement in getting me to quit smoking has probably added ten or fifteen years to my natural life and health.)
Mostly, I thank you for your time. Some wise man said that “Time is our most priceless possession.” And of that you have given me much in these recent years. I look on my computer over the past six years and see hundreds and hundreds of faxes and communications from you. Each one requiring your time and your thought.
The memories I have of visits here and there are warm reminders of these years, and will be with me while I breathe and think. Thank you for those, dear Father. I don’t want this to sound like a goodbye. But if fate should make it so, then mostly I want you to know how much I love you and how grateful I am to you for the gift of life and for the time we have shared together.
You are truly a great man, and I am very proud that you are my father.
ALL MY LOVE
Steven Kent
My father read this on the final day of his life. And now, just twenty-four hours later, the flight attendant was motioning to me to raise my table to the upright position in the minutes before we made our final approach to San Francisco airport.
The uniformed driver met my arrival at gate 33 with a sincere, “I’m so sorry about your father. He was a special man. Very few like him in the world.” I nodded in the polite acknowledgment of his condolences. We drove in silence to downtown San Francisco to their condo, some forty floors above the financial district in the heart of the city.
June was in tears when she met me at the door, and we embraced in our sorrow. I held her as she spoke softly in my ear, “I’m all alone now. I’m so afraid. He didn’t have to die, Steven. I thought we would be together for another ten or more years. He died in my arms. I tried to save him but I couldn’t.” She was shaking and looked near death herself, pale and thin as if his death had drained her of life. I could feel her tremendous grief mixed with the fear of having to go it on her own from now on, after having been under George Hodel’s protection and absolute control for thirty years. The apartment seemed woefully empty. No radiant voice, no great intellect, nothing. And that nothingness shouted out the absence of the man. Her man.
The two of them had been inseparable for the thirty years they had been together. During all of that time they had never been apart for more than a day or two, and that mostly for business purposes. Together they had shared 11,000 sunrises, and now, with him gone, the sun would never rise again for her in the same way.
June Hodel, my stepmother, was younger than I by about four years. She had been graduated ichiban, at the top of her college class in Japan. Bright, eager, and beautiful, she had answered an advertisement Dad had placed in the Tokyo newspaper for a personal secretary and girl Friday. June had beaten out hundreds of competing applicants for the job working directly for my father.
Getting the job wasn’t easy because Dad personally administered the battery of tests to her, as he had all the other applicants. The tests measured her personality, intelligence, and familiarity with English. At the conclusion of the tests she was told she “would be contacted sometime in the future.” A week later the phone call came. And again, as she had been in college, she was ichiban—number one.
She took the job and moved from her southern province of Japan to the Tokyo office, away from her home and family for the first time. From that point on, from age twenty-three, she and my sixty-three-year-old father would remain inseparable, working and traveling throughout the world together. They would reside in Manila, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. They would travel to dozens of foreign countries throughout Asia and Europe, and ultimately move to San Francisco, where they remained inseparable. Then, finally, a few minutes before midnight in mid-May, he would gasp for air, collapse in her arms, and die.
Now June would be alone for the first time in her fifty-four years. It was a terrible feeling for her. And in those hours after my father’s death when I was holding her there in a sorrowful embrace, I could feel the totality of her loneliness. And I feared for her.
We spent that afternoon and late into the evening talking about “the Great Man” and what a remarkable life he had lived. And despite my previous eight years of conversations with him to reestablish our relationship, I realized I actually knew very little about him—as did the rest of his children. Like the Wizard of Oz, he had been the all-powerful figurehead behind the curtain. But in reality, who was he?
My father’s father, George Sr., was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and fled to Paris near the turn of the century. There he met Esther Leov, a dentist, and they married. Like most immigrants, they came through Ellis Island. Then they traveled west to California.
Dad was born in Los Angeles in 1907. I knew that he was a musical prodigy, that he had played his own piano compositions at age seven or eight in the Shrine auditorium, had a genius IQ—one point above Einstein’s, I was told—and later went to medical school in San Francisco. He returned to Los Angeles, opened a successful medical practice, married my mother, had children, and moved us all to the historic Lloyd Wright Sowden House, on Franklin Avenue in the heart of Hollywood.
After a family scandal, my father divorced my mother and moved to Hawaii, where he became a psychiatrist. Then he moved to the Far East and married a wealthy Filipina woman with whom he had four children. Ultimately he became a famous market researcher and respected social scientist with offices throughout Asia.
This was virtually all I knew—just fragments. When my father and I got to know each other during the last years of his life, much of his past, particularly as it related to me and my brothers, still remained a mystery. His children from other marriages probably knew less than I, but that was his way—secret and private—and I respected it. I figured his business was his business and if he chose not to share it with others, even his family, that was his choice.
Even when he had begun to open up with me during his final years, what he said about his life was still very general, but it had taken a new direction. I took it to be more of an attitudinal change than specific information. Our time together was slower, softer, and gentler, in stark contrast to the brisk lunch meetings of earlier years, where my two brothers and I would receive a last-minute summons to meet him for lunch near L.A. airport, “between flights,” where he would give each of us five minutes to “update him on our lives.”
During those last years, when I tried to share my thoughts, feelings, and reflections on life with both my father and June, they seemed to appreciate my openness, but it was never fully reciprocated. Weren’t Renaissance men like that—guardians of their secrets? At least that’s what I thought. Now I guessed that probably no one ever knew the real George Hodel, not even his widow.
After consoling June, I returned to my San Francisco hotel room late that evening filled with an increased sense of loss. For most of the afternoon I’d been a homicide detective, dealing with someone else’s grief. Now my own feelings moved to the forefront as I finally realized my father was gone. Whatever wars would have to be fought between father and son, whatever unresolved issues still lingered in the air, would remain. From this point forward I’d have to deal only with his memory and the unanswered questions in his life that would remain the province of ghosts. At that moment, I too felt the great sense of aloneness that I knew June was feeling. And as I stretched out on the bed in my hotel room, I was overcome with a melancholy sense of the passage of time, of lost opportunities, and above all the loss of my father.
All of us have our own special days in life, days that relate directly to the core of our being and have the same sign hanging on them, saying, “Private, Keep Out.” We usually see such days only in retrospect; only later do we recognize them as turning points in life. May 18, 1999, would be just such a day for me.
On that day I returned to Dad and June’s penthouse suite early in the morning, remarking to myself how beautiful the morning sun could be in San Francisco with its promise of a complete renewal. Standing there in the living room, looking eastward, I could see both the Oakland Bay and Golden Gate Bridge, appearing as if by magic through the early-morning fog hanging low over the bay as it was dissipated by the sun. It was a sight that for a moment dissipated our own sadness. But June’s sobs as she went through my father’s personal effects broke into my reverie.
She was still in a state of shock and emotional trauma. She still blamed herself, believing she could have done something to save him, torturing herself by asking, “What if I had checked on him sooner? What if I had taken him in for a checkup? What if he hadn’t gone to have the arrhythmic procedure done? What if the paramedics had arrived sooner?” I had no words to console her. “It was his time, June,” I repeated. “He lived a long and wonderful life. Ninety-one years filled with adventure and travel is much more than most men have. The thirty years you shared with him were much more than you could have expected. And they were only possible through your love and care.”
But I saw my words gave her no comfort. She wasn’t functioning, and I realized I would have to make all the arrangements. My first priority was to notify the rest of his children, my sibling and half-siblings. Father had had ten children from four marriages. Seven of his children were still living. His eldest son, Duncan, now seventy and semi-retired, lived a short distance away in a San Francisco suburb. His second-born was a daughter, Tamar, who was now living in Hawaii. Then there were the four children from my mother. Michael, my older full brother, had died in 1986. I was a twin, and my brother John had died a few weeks after he was born, his death ascribed to “failure to thrive.” Kelvin, eleven months my junior, was living in Los Angeles. Then there were Dad’s children from his marriage in the Philippines: Teresa, Diane, Ramon, and Mark. Ramon had died of AIDS at age forty, just four years earlier.
Each child was duly notified; still to be decided were the precise funeral arrangements. I asked June if my father had left any instructions; I found it hard to believe he had not. She looked at me blankly, then without saying a word handed me a paper she had pulled from her files. I read from the formally typed page on his attorney’s letterhead:
FUNERAL AND BURIAL INSTRUCTIONS
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
I do not wish to have funeral services of any kind. There is to be no meeting or speeches or music and no gravestone or tablet.
I direct that my physical remains be cremated and that my ashes be scattered over the ocean. There are several crematories in San Francisco which provide these services.
If I die in a foreign country, cremation and scattering of my ashes may be carried out in that country, or the ashes may be shipped to San Francisco for disposition, with the choice to be made by my wife JUNE, or if she is unavailable, as the executor of my will shall decide.
/s/ George Hill Hodel
DATED: June 16, 1993
“Well, June, there is certainly nothing vague about that,” I said. “No funeral services of any kind, no meeting, no speeches or music, no gravestone or tablet.” That said it all. My father and I had never discussed religion or philosophical matters, so I asked June, “Was Dad an atheist?” She didn’t answer.
Dad’s body had been transported to the mortuary, and his personal physician had already signed a death certificate indicating that the cause of death was “congestive heart failure due to ischemic cardiomyopathy.” The cremation was scheduled for a few days later.
“I’ll tell my brothers and sisters of his stated wishes,” I said to June. “And there will be no funeral of any kind. I guess each of us can in our own way and in our own time say our goodbye to Father.” Again June didn’t answer. It was almost as if she had become a robot, running on some computer program. As I read his words, a shiver had gone down my spine: I swear I felt Dad’s presence in the room. I thought to myself that, even after death, he was dictating and controlling the situation. His will be done.
Next on my list was to notify the various businesses: the banks, credit card companies, the Social Security Administration—all a part of the ritual of one’s passing from this world. It didn’t take me long to complete the notifications, at which point I turned to June again and asked, “What about notifying his personal friends? I will be happy to make those calls for you. I know you’re not up to speaking to anyone right now.” Her face remained blank as if, again, my words had not registered. “What personal friends need to be called?” I repeated.
She shook her head. There were none. Not one. They had no personal friends. Oh, there were business associates, many of them over the years, who would be sorry to hear the sad news. But personal friends, social friends: none. While June did not seem to be upset by this, the news pained me deeply. The man had lived a long and remarkable life. After a distinguished medical career, he had also been publicly recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in his field of market research. If I was to believe June, there was not one personal friend to notify.
This was a revelation, underscoring the finality of the man’s death. I realized that there would be no monument to his existence, no celebration of his life. No funeral, no family, no words, no gravestone, no shared remembrances, and no friends to give voice to the impact my father had had on their lives. Not even his children, separated by his serial marriages, by thousands of miles and a score of years, would ever share a moment of silence to respect the life of their father. Other than June, who had been all things to him—lover, friend, confidante, and caregiver—Dad had completely isolated himself from the world of human affection and emotion.
In life, George Hill Hodel had been raised to mythic proportions by all of his children. Therefore it stood to reason that there was a common, if unvoiced, speculation about his wealth. Perhaps it ranged from a low of several million, to vast amounts of monies secreted in offshore accounts and hidden holdings. While I had indulged in my own speculative accounting based on my observations of their lifestyle during my father’s last years, I still didn’t know the truth of their financial state. Then June handed me a copy of the will. I had overestimated. His worth would not exceed a million. Comfortable, but, alas, a secret coffer of treasure from his lifetime’s work, bulging with bags of gold and jewels from the ancient Orient, did not exist. Father had left a small amount of inheritance to each of his living children in equal shares, and the rest of his estate was to go to June. Probate would be simple, handled by Dad’s longtime San Francisco lawyer, who had been named executor. His office was just minutes away and I scheduled an appointment to meet him the following afternoon.
That evening was spent reminiscing. June’s tears would not, could not, subside, as if they were cleansing a pain that would not leave her. As we talked, I was amazed at how hungry I was for information about Father, anything that would tell me more about the man as opposed to the myth, I realized that June was my only source. She alone knew the truth or truths. She alone could help me bridge the gap to intimacy with him.
I felt our friendship, and our mutual need for emotional support, could possibly open the door that had been locked for over five decades. I knew that only June had the key to his heart, and I wanted it. Badly.
June was cautious. As we spoke about him and their shared lives over the decades, I could sense how tentative she was, as if she were trying to avoid a real conversation. I knew this wasn’t her nature. I could feel she wanted to open up, share her innermost feelings. But the reluctance, foreign as it was to her personality, remained dominant, and I quickly got the impression that her responses to me were conditioned. As if she had been programmed not to speak about things personal and private. As she spoke, I could feel Dad’s presence coming through her. She was hesitant, secret, aloof, and cautious with me. Was this an Asian cultural response to dealing with grief that kept mourners from sharing emotions? I’d never seen it before, particularly when as a P.I. I worked with my Japanese colleagues on criminal cases. Maybe it was only specific to widows. I didn’t know, but I also sensed there was something deeper—and it didn’t have anything to do with grief.
I walked to the corner of the living room with its wall of glass. It was almost midnight now, and the evening was clear and in sharp focus. The tall buildings below us shone, even with just a few of the many offices still lit. Behind the buildings the dark bay reflected the lights on the broad spans of the suspension bridges, and headlights still moved across them, hundreds of people going on with their lives as I tried to figure out what to ask June next.
I turned back to the room at the sound of June’s footsteps across the carpet as she approached and handed me a small object I had not seen before. It was a tiny, palm-sized wood-bound photo album, with twelve golden fleurs-de-lys imprinted on the front. It appeared quite old; my guess was at least nineteenth-century. I hefted it, thinking how much heavier it was than it looked. The little book in my hand had a power to it, almost like a talisman. I took it over to a coffee table where I sat down and opened it and paused as my eyes fell upon a picture of Father and me. June saw me smile and looked away, allowing me a moment of privacy.
Exhibit 1
George Hodel’s private photo album
I was looking at a picture I had never seen before. I was two years old, sitting on my father’s knee. The photograph would have been taken in Hollywood sometime in 1943 and had been cut from a larger photo to fit the small size of the page in the album. Across from it was another picture of my two brothers, Michael and Kelvin. It was the other half of the photograph of Father and me, and both Michael and Kelvin were sitting on our half-brother Duncan’s knee. Duncan was a strikingly handsome young man of about seventeen then. He must have been down visiting us from San Francisco, where he was living with his mother and stepfather.
Exhibit 2
Steven, Father, and Kelvin . . . Kelvin, Duncan, and Michael
The next page held a portrait photo of my mother, strikingly beautiful and exotic. Yet one could see the sadness in her face. It had always been there. Rarely had I seen a photo of her that did not capture that terrible sadness, her soul crying out from within her, as her eyes revealed the truth of her unhappiness.
I paused and wondered: was it the unhappiness within her that had made her into the alcoholic she became, or was it her alcoholism that made her eyes so sad? She too was dead, and it grieved me to think about the shipwreck of her life, wasted as it was, all its enormous potential cast away. I turned the page.
Dorothy Hodel
The next picture was of my grandfather, George Hill Hodel Sr., who died in Los Angeles sometime in the early 1950s, after our father had left for Asia. Years later, Mother described his funeral. She said she was amazed that so many strangers and people she did not know had come to pay their last respects. “It was as if a movie star or some celebrity had died, except he was not a celebrity.” She hadn’t known any of these people nor why they had come.
Exhibit 4
George Hodel Sr.
When I turned the page again, I froze, gazing at two photographs of a very young Eurasian woman. In one she was wearing what looked like Native American clothing. These two pictures were of my ex-wife, Kiyo, taken when she was barely out of her teens, years before she met me at a Hollywood party. Mother, who had introduced me to Kiyo, had mentioned that they had known Kiyo during the war, but why would my father include her pictures here?
Kiyo
Two more women. Another Asian woman, a Filipina, also taken in her youth. The picture resembled his ex-wife, Hortensia—whom I’d met in Manila in the early ’60s. This must have been a photograph taken at an earlier time, perhaps when they lived in Hawaii, in the early 1950s.
The facing page showed a young woman and her dog.
Exhibit 6
It seemed as if time itself was out of place in this photo album. There were photos of my mother, looking exotically Eurasian in her setup for the picture, then a photo of Kiyo, who was Eurasian, dressed as a Native American. What was my ex-wife doing among these family photos? I had no idea, but I found it disturbing. And then I turned the page.
Here were two photographs, both of a vividly beautiful dark-haired woman. She was as young and vivacious, her presence reaching out to you across the years, making you believe for a moment that you could step through the frame and be there with her. The right-hand photo was apparently a nude, artistically taken, from her shoulders up. Her eyes were closed as if in a delicate sleep, a sleep of light dreams. In the other photo she was standing next to a Chinese statue of a horse, her eyes also closed, but now she was fully clothed. How exquisite she looked, with two large white flowers in her swept-back black hair and wearing a collarless black dress. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. As if she were calling out to me from a moment in time most likely at the end of World War II. I could almost hear the music of a big band. Maybe I could ask her to dance, and she would say yes.
I turned the open album around to June’s eyes and asked, “Who is this?” She glanced at the photograph. “I don’t know. Someone your father knew. Someone your father knew from a long time ago.” June rose from the table, hands shaking, reached for the box on the glass table, and withdrew several white tissues. She turned and walked out of the living room back toward her bedroom. “I’ll see you in the morning, Steven,” she said. “Goodnight, and thank you for being here.”
Exhibit 7
I was gripping the small album as tightly as I could, not wanting to let it out of my sight. I hadn’t figured out how or why, but the album had opened a door into some strange past, almost like a parallel world that had mingled with my own. I felt like a voyeur, as if I were looking directly into another man’s heart. In these pages Father had clearly assembled those who were most dear to him. His father, my brothers, myself, two of his four wives, and Duncan, his firstborn. But who were these other women? What were my ex-wife Kiyo and this unknown woman’s photographs doing here?
As I walked the slow mile back to my hotel through the early-morning fog that covered San Francisco, I tried to understand but could not.
The feelings that were beginning to take shape in my mind were of an old familiar nature. I had felt them hundreds of times in the past. They were very real and very strong and they spoke to me directly. They were my intuitions, and I knew by their strength and power that they were centered in reality. I couldn’t identify what reality. But I knew I was only feeling what had already been perceived and understood by some other mind. We were in touch, maybe even across the boundary of death, linked by the photos in my father’s secret album. My mind refocused on those two posed photographs of the beautiful dark-haired young woman.
The Sir Francis Drake Hotel loomed up over me out of the fog and darkness. What was it about those pictures? Now she was almost a remembrance. Her hair, the flowers, her dress and style from the forties—all were aspects of someone I strained to remember. But nothing came. But I felt I did know her and had seen her somewhere in the past. Where?
As if in a dream, I walked through the empty lobby of the hotel to the elevators. I entered the waiting car as the doors closed behind me and I felt no motion and heard no sound until the bell rang for the eighteenth floor.
I unlocked the door and a shaft of light from the hall illuminated a cobalt vase of freshly arranged white flowers on my bedside table. A sweet smell of lavender filled the room. I stared at the white flowers caught in the shaft of light, white flowers against the black of night.
I tried to fight the meaning that was trying to break through to tell me what my father’s photographs meant. My cop’s mind grabbed onto it like a bulldog and wouldn’t let go. Were these photographs of her—the one with her stylized black dress and white flowers, and the other one nude—taken by my father? Why had he kept them all these years in his private album?
Then, quietly, softly, as if a breeze were carrying an image from long ago, I remembered the white flowers against the jet-black hair, white flowers set off against a black dress. These were dahlias.
And like a bouquet of flowers overpowering the confines of a narrow room, the realization suddenly filled my conscious mind: it was she, the Dahlia. The Black Dahlia.