George and Dorero
Summer 1927
MY MOTHER’S FIRST LOVE, and perhaps her only true love, was John Huston, the son of actor Walter Huston and later one of America’s most celebrated film directors. They met in Los Angeles as teenagers, fell in love, married, and then set off on a joint artistic adventure to Greenwich Village, where John painted and boxed and my mother wrote poetry. They both drank. Then they came back to Hollywood, where both would become contract screenwriters at the studios, socializing with the talented and beautiful people of the 1920s Los Angeles entertainment community. They lived in a bubble of all-night parties, all-night drinking, and all-night arguments.
By the 1930s, they’d become a pair of fighters in a ring with no timekeeper, no referee, and no bell to end the rounds. The alcohol and infidelities took their toll, and after an extended trip to England, Mother decided to quit the fight game for good. Huston would go on to many more fights with many more women, and he would win them all. After Mother’s death, I found in her personal effects the following three paragraphs she had typewritten on a single lonely page, about John Huston:
All his life he was fascinated by boxers. He also loved bullfighters even before he read Hemingway. He had a brief enthusiasm for six-day bicycle racers and even looked into dance marathons and flagpole sitters. But boxers were the best specimens he felt that the race of man had produced.
The first time he tried to tell me about all this, he was 19 years old. I was 19, too, and we were at a party where this shocking thing had just happened. I mean, it was shocking to me, but it left John in an exalted and unusually talkative mood. There was blood all over the floor and on some of the furniture, and my face was green and I was trying not to be sick.
“You’re missing the whole point,” John said. He pulled me to my feet and steered me to the front porch. With the sweet sick smell blowing away and everything outdoors swinging slowly back in focus again, I said weakly, “I am?”
My mother had known my father, George Hill Hodel, for a long time. They had met in 1920s Los Angeles, before Mother married John Huston. In fact, my father and John Huston were very good friends in their youth and they frequently double-dated. At the time, John was dating Emilia, an attractive young woman who worked at the then brand-new downtown public library, and George was dating my mother. Then they switched, and George became enamored of Emilia and John of Dorothy. After John and Dorothy married and ran off to New York, George and Emilia continued their romance, and together they opened a rare books shop in downtown Los Angeles.
Father had always had a strong love of photography. During the mid-1920s he spent much of his free time photographing people and places around Los Angeles. He had his own darkroom at home, where he would process his film. In 1925 he was asked to select the best of these photographs, and a Pasadena art gallery gave him a one-man show.
Another close friend of both my father and Huston during this period was a young Italian artist poet, Fred Sexton, who socialized and partied with both of them. Sexton also drove a taxi in those early days and made money by running a floating crap game. Fifteen years later, in 1941, Huston would put his friend Fred Sexton’s artistic talents to work by having him create the sculpture prop “the Black Bird” for his film The Maltese Falcon. Fred Sexton and my father would remain close friends until Dad left Los Angeles in 1950.
By the summer of ’27, Emilia was pregnant with my half-brother Duncan, who was born in March of 1928. Duncan visited us only on rare occasions through the decades, and was a relative stranger to me when I saw him again in San Francisco in the days following Father’s death.
With their infant son Duncan, George and Emilia moved north to San Francisco, where George enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of California at Berkeley. During his undergraduate years he got a job as a longshoreman and again drove a cab and learned the city streets and its night people and their secret haunts.
In the spring of ’32, George returned to writing, when the San Francisco Chronicle hired both him and Emilia as joint columnists. Together they wrote a weekly feature column entitled “Abroad in San Francisco,” a review and travelogue of the goings-on in the city. Their reviews became popular because of their photo displays and colorful descriptions of the various sections and cultures of San Francisco.
By June 1932, George had graduated from Berkeley pre-med and immediately enrolled in medical school at the University of California San Francisco. At the same time, though living with Emilia and raising Duncan, he became enamored of another woman, Dorothy Anthony. Not wanting to give up Emilia, he convinced her—a testament to his enormous powers of persuasion—that it would be best if they formed a romantic alliance and shared their home with Dorothy Anthony. This arrangement quickly resulted in another pregnancy, and Dorothy, in the spring of 1935, bore George a daughter, Tamar.
George Hodel’s exceptional eye-hand coordination made him a natural as a surgeon, and his professors vied with one another to obtain his services as their assistant in many of their operations. It seemed that my father had found his métier at last, and in June 1936 he graduated from the University of California Medical School, now known as University of California San Francisco.
As per tradition at the graduation ceremonies of all physicians, on that balmy summer day in June 1936, George Hill Hodel, a tall, handsome man of twenty-eight, stood on the campus of UCSF, raised his right hand, and, with his classmates, took the Hippocratic oath. In those years, doctors took the original oath, longer than the one administered today, which included:
I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practise my Art.
I will not cut persons labouring under the stone, but will leave this to be done by such men as are practitioners of this work. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further, from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.
While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and practice of the Art, respected by all men, in all times. But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot.
George’s life was now dedicated to preserving and healing human life. It would be his duty forthwith to alleviate pain and suffering.
Still not yet thirty, my father was now an M.D. with a residency in surgery, having added many more lifetimes to his biography: longshoreman, artist/photographer, weekly travel columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, and father of two children by two different women with whom he was living at the same time.
In 1936, Dad completed his internship at San Francisco General Hospital and accepted a position with the New Mexico State Department of Public Health as a district health officer. With Emilia and seven-year-old Duncan, he moved to a small town near Prescott, Arizona, where he served as the lone doctor at a logging camp. Then he became a public health officer to the Indian reservations and pueblos near Gallup, New Mexico, where he befriended Tom Dodge, chief of the Navajo Indians.
Probably because George had convinced her that he wanted more freedom, Emilia and Duncan returned without him to San Francisco, where she would soon marry a popular local artist/painter, Franz Bergmann. Emilia took a job as a columnist, this time with the San Francisco News, and enjoyed a long and successful career as that newspaper’s senior drama critic. Soon after Emilia left George, Dorothy Anthony and Tamar joined him in New Mexico, where the three of them lived briefly together near Taos.
Again, however, Father apparently felt too confined, and convinced Dorothy to return with their daughter to San Francisco without him.
In 1938, Dad was offered a job with the Los Angeles County Health Department as a social hygiene physician. He accepted the position and moved back to L.A., where he initially moved into his old guesthouse at his father’s residence in South Pasadena. That same year he took a post-graduate course in venereal disease control at University of California Medical School in San Francisco, and was certified as a specialist in the field.
In 1939, he was promoted to head of the division in the L.A. County Health Department and then appointed venereal disease control officer for the whole department. At the same time, he opened his own private practice in downtown Los Angeles and became medical director and chief of staff of his own office, the First Street Medical Clinic, for which he hired a staff of physicians. Its main focus was the treatment of venereal disease, which at that time, before the introduction of penicillin, had reached near-epidemic numbers in Los Angeles County.
In Los Angeles, George was reunited with my mother, Dorothy Harvey Huston, who by then had divorced John Huston. My parents had a whirlwind romance and my older brother Michael was born the following July. George renamed Dorothy “Dorero”—a combination of two Greek words: dor, meaning “gift,” and Eros, the god of sexual desire—in order to avoid confusion with his earlier girlfriend and the mother of Tamar, Dorothy Anthony.
George purchased a home on Valentine Street in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, a ten-minute drive from his downtown office, and my mother and infant brother moved in with him. There was a rumor in the family that John Huston, not my dad, might have fathered Michael. In any case, immediately after Michael’s birth both John and his father, Walter, who at that time badly wanted but was still without a grandchild, visited the house daily. As Mother told me later, “Both John and Walter would sit and stare at Michael in his crib for long periods of time, trying to discern whether or not a likeness between John and Michael existed.” Mother said that it finally became so embarrassing that she had to order both of them out of the house with a firm “Forget it John, he’s not your son.” Michael would grow up to be one of the more celebrated FM radio announcers in Los Angeles on station KPFK, and a writer and editor of detective stories and science fiction.
Dorero, at age thirty-three, though intellectually a full-blown bohemian, was also a mother who wanted her young son to have a name as well as a stake in his father’s growing fortune. She was territorial about her own house. Mother pushed George to marriage, and during a weekend trip to Sonora, Mexico, George and Dorero were married. My twin, John Dion, and I were born the following November, and Kelvin, the youngest of Mother’s four sons, followed just eleven months later.
On May 18, 1942, six months after the United States entered the war, my father received a commission as a surgeon in the U.S. Public Health Service as a reserve officer. Because he wanted to join the active military service like his friend John Huston, however, Dad resigned his commission from Public Health. But, because of a chronic heart condition, he failed his physical and remained in Los Angeles during the war years, practicing medicine, primarily as chief of the Division of Social Hygiene for the Los Angeles County Health Department. He also maintained his private practice at the First Street Medical Clinic and was hired as medical director of the Ruth Home and Hospital in El Monte, where he treated young women with venereal disease.
During the war years my parents’ marriage fell apart. Upset and unhappy, Mother began drinking heavily, and Father stayed away from the house most of the time. After their four-year marriage, they separated in September 1944, and Mother filed a complaint for divorce, alleging “extreme cruelty.”
During the next three years we lived apart from Father, and from December 1944 through March 1946, on three occasions, the police were called out to arrest Mother for drunk-and-disorderly complaints and child neglect. On two of those occasions, we were released back to the custody of our father, and on the third we were placed in protective custody at MacLaren Hall, a facility for dependent children. Ultimately we were returned to Mother.
Dr. Hodel’s chance to enter the international public health service as a military officer did come, after the war ended, when Congress funded UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration—created to distribute health and human services to war-ravaged populations—and began soliciting applications for service. He filed an application for employment with UNRRA, submitted on August 3, 1945, in which he provided a wealth of personal information past and present that bears upon my investigation into the Black Dahlia and related cases. In addition, I found separate documents containing his personnel service record while employed with UNRRA, which provided details relating to his service history and termination.
In his typed application requesting employment with UNRRA, Dad lists his current private medical practice and business office at the Roosevelt Building, 727 West 7th Street Suite 1242, in downtown Los Angeles—near the corner of Flower Street—and said he had been at this same location since 1939. He also listed himself as medical director and chief of staff of the First Street Medical Clinic, 369 East 1st Street, also located in downtown Los Angeles, and the medical director for the Ruth Home and Hospital, community chest agency for the treatment and rehabilitation of girls and young women with venereal disease, at 831 North Gilman Road, in El Monte. Dad listed his current net annual income as $21,000, and he requested employment “outside the United States, preferably in the Far East.”
Dad gave his physical description as “6', 168 pounds,” and said he was “married, son, age 17 years, in Merchant Marines (Duncan), daughter, age 10 (Tamar), and three younger sons, ages 6 (Michael), 4 (Steven), and 2 (Kelvin).” Under “Languages,” he indicated he was fluent in French and could “speak, read, and write it, and lived in Paris as a child.” Further, he stated, “Am currently studying the Chinese language, but have not yet acquired any proficiency.”
My father’s application was accepted and he was hired by UNRRA, effective December 3, 1945, with a position listed as chief regional medical officer for China and a home station listed as Washington, D.C. His official overseas station was the UNRRA regional headquarters office in Hankow, China, and he was granted an annual salary of $7,375.
President Truman had said that China presented the “largest of all the relief responsibilities,” and thus it was to China that my father was dispatched in early 1946 with the honorary rank of lieutenant general, complete with a United Nations quasi-military-style uniform.
Although no records exist to establish his exact date of departure to China, I believe he left sometime in early 1946. From a memorandum he wrote that I found in his file, I can establish that he had traveled to and was in his home station of Washington, D.C, between late 1945 and early 1946, before departing for China. During his absence, Dad maintained his downtown medical office at the same address.
Dr. George Hodel, second front right, with Chinese military, 1946
Dr. George Hodel, UNRRA China, 1946
As chief regional medical officer in Hankow, Father was provided with a military jeep complete with a three-star flag, a driver, his own personal cook, and two administrative aides to comprise his staff. Exhibits 9 and 10 are photographs taken of Father during his assignment in China in 1946:
Exhibit 9 (top) is captioned “arbitrator,” which meant that my father’s diagnosis and opinion regarding a Communist prisoner’s medical condition literally meant life or death. If the prisoner was confirmed as sick he passed through Nationalist lines to safety; if he was not, he remained with his captors; which was probably a death warrant. According to the UNRRA rules of engagement regarding my father’s duties, UNRRA and my father were responsible for the following:
UNRRA ARBITRATES:
At the request of peace team #9 (Hankow), UNRRA acted as referee on eligibility for transport of sick and wounded Communist soldiers through the Nationalist lines. Following an agreement by the peace team, 618 disabled Communist soldiers, along with 120 wives and children, were moved by special train from Kuangshui in Northern Hupeh to Anyang in Northern Honan, where better hospital facilities exist.
Nationalist medical officers challenged medical eligibility of 75. These doubtful cases were reviewed by an American physician, Dr. G. Hill Hodel, chief medical officer for UNRRA-Hankow. Dr. Hodel upheld the challenge in 26 cases, overruled it in 49.
Father worked with both the Chinese Nationalist and Communist generals in 1946. His position in the center as “peacekeeper” (exhibit 10) between the two powers is significant and demonstrates why it was important for UNRRA to have granted him the rank of three-star general, so that he would be considered by both sides an equal rather than a subordinate in his role as medical arbitrator.
The review of Dad’s UNRRA file also contained a fourteen-page typed memorandum, dated March 20, 1946, in response to a Dr. Victor Sutter, who had obviously requested a summary analysis from Dad of the then current problem of venereal disease control in China.
In one of his summary paragraph headings under “Prostitution and V.D.,” Dad included the following observations that reveal what I believe to be his personal feelings about women, venereal disease, prostitution, and the attempts made by government to regulate moral behavior:
For 9 years, as health officer and as administrator of an official venereal disease control program, I have observed the workings of “regulation” and of repression. It is my opinion that prostitution is an evil which cannot be caused to cease by legislative or police action, but which can only be deflected into other channels . . .
I have learned, however, from my American experience, that for corrupt policemen to chase loose women from one end of town to another contributes neither to the peace, health, nor morals of a community.
My father’s personal “American experience” of “regulation,” “repression,” and “corrupt policemen,” most certainly referred to what he had witnessed in Los Angeles, and especially the corruption he had seen in the LAPD.
Dr. Hodel resigned suddenly and unexpectedly from UNRRA on September 19, 1946. His personnel record cites the reason for his termination as “personal,” even though the real cause might have been medical. I have reason to believe that while in China Dad suffered a sudden—and severe—heart attack and was sent back to L.A. for hospitalization. I believe that this heart attack required him to remain hospitalized in Los Angeles for up to a month or more before being allowed to return to the Franklin House sometime in October or November 1946.*
It is clear that Dad thoroughly enjoyed the prerogatives of his rank, because once he returned to Los Angeles in 1946 he immediately purchased a military-style Willys Army jeep identical to the one in which he had been chauffeured about in China. These surplus jeeps were first offered to civilians for purchase only after the war, in late 1945 or 1946. But the jeep was only part of Dad’s lingering romanticized attachment to the military.
In 1946, Father posed for several formal photographs taken by his close friend the celebrated surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray. In these photographs, Dad chose to wear his UNRRA overcoat, complete with epaulets, which gave him the bearing of a military officer.
I have reason to believe that during and after the war years—perhaps up through 1949—George Hodel assumed the persona of an Air Force lieutenant in his romantic overtures to the many women he pursued. It is also likely that his camouflaged identity was either unknown to these women or that there was a mutual agreement that this was a cover story to conceal his real identity because of his marital status.
Exhibit 11
George Hodel, 1946
Dad had become fascinated with Asia, and during his tour of duty in China had bought a large number of rare art objects, available at what amounted to liquidation prices in Shanghai if one had American cash. He invested heavily in Asian antique artworks: rare paintings, antique silk tapestries, and bronze statutes of Chinese deities.
Shortly before he left for Asia, Father had made another investment: in 1945 he bought the Lloyd Wright Sowden House on Franklin Avenue, to which, while he was overseas, he had all of his purchases in Asia shipped. Upon his return from China, Dad also tried to reconcile with Mother, and the four of us moved into the Franklin House on his return in ’46. Although my brothers and I believed we had become a family again, we were actually only there as Dad’s guests, unaware of our parents’ divorce and of our probationary status.
Our old home remains today on the Los Angeles historic registrar, as one of Hollywood’s most unusual architectural landmarks. We simply called it “the Franklin House” because of its Franklin Avenue address, but it is officially known as “the Sowden House.”
Named for the man who commissioned it, the Sowden House is an architectural wonder designed and built by Lloyd Wright,* who was living in the shadow of his famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright. With its brooding stone archways, long corridors, wide central courtyard and pool, and hidden rooms, it is like a Hollywood set out of a 1930s five-reeler: foreign and exotic. Cars driving by would stop and stare at it in astonishment. Passersby could not believe they were looking at what was a recreation of a 3,000-year-old Mayan temple built of giant concrete blocks. It had no visible windows. It was a high-walled fortress, private and impenetrable, right in the center of Hollywood’s residential district, only fifteen minutes from Father’s downtown medical clinic.
From the busy Franklin Avenue street frontage, heavy stone steps led steeply up to our house’s entrance, which was guarded by an imposing iron gate decorated with iron flowers. Once through the gate you turned immediately to your right and continued up a dark passageway, then made another right turn to the front door. It was like entering a cave with secret stone tunnels, within which only the initiated could feel comfortable. All others proceeded with great caution, not knowing which way to turn. Growing up in that house, my brothers and I saw it as a place of magic that we were convinced could easily have greeted the uninvited with pits of fire, poison darts, deadly snakes, or even a giant sword-bearing turbaned bodyguard at the door. Right out of The Arabian Nights.
Exhibit 12
The Franklin House, Hollywood, California
Once inside the temple, there was a blaze of light that came at you from all directions, because all the rooms opened onto a central open-air courtyard. The massive stone blocks were laid out in a giant rectangular shape from the front of the street to the alley at the back. There existed no yard exterior to the home, only the open interior atrium surrounded by the four corridors of the house. The high-ceilinged foyer greeted you at first entrance. Beyond and to the west was the living room, with its ornate fireplace and floor-to-ceiling bookcases that concealed a secret room, accessible only to those who knew how to open the hidden door. The west wing contained the dining room, kitchen, maid’s quarters, and guest rooms.
The east wing held the master bedroom and master bath, along with four more bedrooms laid out one after the other, until finally at the north wing there was a huge room, which Sowden had constructed as an entertainment hall or large stage for performances. From any room one could step into a central courtyard full of exotic foliage and beautiful giant cactus plants reaching straight into the sky. Once inside this remarkable house one found oneself in absolute privacy, invisible to the outside world.
This was a storybook time for me and my brothers, who played the Three Musketeers in service to our father, who played the king. Our father was dashing and confident. At six foot one, with his dark hair, trim mustache, immaculate dress, and the formal bearing befitting a highly respected physician, he cut an exceptionally handsome figure. It seemed as if he walked with the imperial air of an aristocrat, the type of man one might meet only once but would never forget. There was a charisma and a power to his presence that commanded attention. When he spoke, his voice had a resonance and power of authority that confirmed that one was in the presence of a man of destiny. His bearing and demeanor conveyed his ability and confidence to accomplish anything. If he was the king, we, his children, were the court.
I was four when we moved into the Franklin House, and we lived there until I was nine. My memories of that time are only fragmentary, and it was only through my rediscovery of my father later on that I was able to verify some of the truths behind those memories. But, like shadows, these shards of memory have followed me through life, and only now am I beginning to understand their import.
I remember how much I loved Father’s Army jeep, a real World War II surplus model with an engine that growled and gears that clashed. I loved sitting in the front seat when he drove it out from the rear alleyway, across the vacant dirt lot that abutted our property, then over the curb into the busy intersection of Normandie and Franklin. Kelvin and I would take turns riding with Father in the jeep as he made his house calls. Sitting in the front of the open vehicle, I would look over as Dad navigated through the Hollywood traffic, his wondrous big black medical bag on the seat between us. On several occasions when the opportunity permitted, I looked inside this bag without Dad’s knowledge. At that young age, I didn’t recognize the objects, nor could I pronounce the names of the things there, and only later, as a Navy corpsman, would I learn what they were, but my child’s mind knew they were Father’s tools and were important. Cold to the touch and mysterious to the eye, his instruments fascinated me. There were his stethoscope, a tightly wound roll of ACE bandage, a hemostat, the strange-looking sphygmomanometer, and a tourniquet. There were also labeled vials with names I couldn’t understand, such as penicillin, Benadryl, and morphine. But mostly, I recall how I loved the smells that came from inside that bag, the smells of all things medicinal: clean, sharp, antiseptic.
I remember sitting in the jeep outside private homes while Father attended to his patients. After an hour, or maybe two, he would walk outside with a woman, whom I guessed had been his patient, seeing him off. It seemed as if all his patients said the same words, and those words always made me afraid. “Oh, so this is your son. He’s darling. Can I keep him here with me?” I would look up as Father stood by the side of the jeep, holding my breath, not knowing what his answer would be until his slow, hesitant response would finally come: “Not this time, perhaps another, we shall see.” The woman would touch his arm—they always touched his arm—and would smile at us and say, as he climbed into the jeep, “Thank you, Doctor. I feel so much better after your visit.” He would smile, start the engine, and off we would go. Michael was nine, and he never went on these house calls with Dad, nor did Dad ever offer to take him. I never understood why.
Another warm memory from the Franklin years is of Fern Dell Park. My brothers and I spent whole summers there, all day every day. Father would drive us the short distance from the Franklin House to the entrance of the park, just a half-mile from our front door. He would drop us in the mornings with a stern, “Boys, I will pick you up here at 4:00 P.M. Do not make me wait.” We hiked and played and scoured the park. We knew every turn, every tree, every hidden cave. Fern Dell had a creek that ran for miles north to south, and we would search for crayfish and bullfrogs, pretend we were explorers, finding and claiming new lands.
Michael, never without his beloved books, would read to us under the shade of a tall oak at the creek’s edge. In the summer of ’49, he was Robin Hood, Kelvin was Friar Tuck, and I, being larger and taller than either of my brothers, was Little John. Fern Dell became our Sherwood Forest. We laughed at the ferocity of Father’s stern commands and rigid dictates: “Be at the entrance at four and do not make me wait.” And in our make-believe we transformed our father into the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
I also remember lots of people—grown-ups, men, and women—laughing late into the night at the Franklin House. Some of the faces and people I remember, most I have forgotten. Sometimes there were angry words with Father yelling, Mother yelling, then Mother crying. But mostly I remember the laughing. I remember Duncan, tall and twenty then, in his sailor’s uniform, having come down from San Francisco with his friends to see his father and his three younger half-brothers. Even now I can see him standing in the courtyard, laughing and playing with the grown-ups, having fun with Father and his friends. Duncan would stay only a day or two, then back he would go to San Francisco.
Tamar, our half-sister, also came down from San Francisco to be with us that summer of 1949. She was fourteen, blonde with pretty blue eyes, and seemed to me almost like a grown-up. She was beautiful, and I loved it when she came to play and live with us. She was our secret and trusted friend, and she knew much more about grown-ups than we did. She was smart, and would tell us stories, most of which I no longer remember.
But there was one incident with Tamar that I shall never forget. It was early afternoon on a hot summer day in August 1949. Tamar and I were sitting on the steps at the front of the Franklin House. I can still feel the soft breeze that came from the west and the smell of the eucalyptus trees that helped guard the entrance. Tamar and I were sitting side by side and she was smoking a cigarette like real grown-ups did. She asked me, “Do you want to try?” I did. She handed the lit Lucky Strike to me, and I held it for a moment, then put it to my mouth. And as I started to suck on it, I looked up and there was Father. He approached us with his black bag in hand, and he was not three feet away. There I was, holding the cigarette in my hand, frozen with fear. He looked down at us both, nodded his head, and simply said, “Steven, Tamar,” and walked by. He had not seen me holding the cigarette. We both sat, stock-still and silent, as if making any sound would change our luck. When he was safely out of sight we looked at each other and burst out laughing at our good fortune. I threw down the cigarette, stomped on it, and we ran off to play.
Formal dinners were common for our family. We had a live-in maid and cook, and that night when Dad returned from his office we sat in a formal arrangement at the large table: Dad at the south end, the head of the table; Mother at the north; I to Dad’s immediate right; my brothers across from me; and Tamar to my right. That night, we had just finished dessert, after the large four-course meal, when Father said, addressing us with his accustomed formality, “I have an announcement to make.” He paused until all our heads were turned his way and the attention was undivided.
“It seems that Steven, who is not quite eight, has decided he wants to smoke,” he continued. I looked anxiously at Tamar, realizing Father had indeed seen me holding her cigarette. Dad reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrew a cigar. “So,” he said, “we are all going to sit here while Steven smokes this.” He slowly and ceremoniously unwrapped the large Havana that he usually enjoyed after dinners, cut off the end, carefully lit it so that the tip was a bright orange glow, and handed it to me in a cloud of exhaled smoke. All eyes at the table were locked on me as I took it from him and held it in my hand. He continued in a firm, hard tone, “Go ahead, Steven, smoke it.” I fought back the tears as I looked at him, my hands now shaking, as his voice descended into a menacing, controlled anger: “Smoke it!”
I drew on the cigar and coughed loudly. Mother attempted to intervene: “George, I don’t think—” He shot back at her, “No, we are all going to sit right here, all of us, until Steven finishes that cigar.” There was silence around the table as I was made to take more drags of smoke. I was sick, turning green, and I was afraid of Father, but I tried to hide it. Dad, believing he had made his point, finally said to me, “Well, Steven, what do you think of smoking now?”
I tried to look directly at his face, but could not quite manage it as I responded, “That was good, Dad. Can I have another?” My brothers and sister laughed, he stared hard at me, then looked at them. “You are all excused from the table. Steven, I will see you in the basement in five minutes.”
My brothers and I hated the basement. It was a place we never explored and kept out of our minds, because it was a place of punishment. The basement meant the razor strap, and the razor strap meant a searing pain until Father decided we’d had enough.
As noted, among my parents’ closest friends during the war years and after were Man Ray and his wife, Juliet. Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia in 1890, was one of the world’s leading surrealists. In his early twenties, influenced by the nineteenth-century avant-garde French poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, he began drawing and painting. Also while still in his twenties, he became acquainted with the American poet William Carlos Williams, as well as artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the burgeoning New York Dada movement. He had a number of one-man shows in New York and became associated with American modernist painters.
In 1921 he went to France, where Marcel Duchamp introduced him to a number of Dadaists. In Paris, he began his photographic work, establishing himself as a portrait artist, photographing such important literary figures as the expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, as well as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau summoned his friend Man Ray to the deathbed of Marcel Proust, to photograph and immortalize Proust’s passing. His fame steadily increased and soon he was an established artist in the surrealist and Dada movements, each of which has its own relevance in the relationship between Man Ray and my father.
Surrealism, for example, stressed the subconscious and nonrational, principally through its representation of unexpected juxtapositions that defy reality. The Dadaists also stressed the incongruity of artistic representation, while at the same time challenging convention and traditional morality.
Along with their mutual passion for France, its people and language, my father shared with Man Ray an interest in the life and work of the Marquis de Sade. During the mid-1930s, Man Ray devoted six or eight paintings and sculptures to the notorious French writer and debauchee, whom he called his “inspiration.” During his twenty years in Paris, Man Ray read and studied all of Sade’s erotic writings, and through his personal interpretation of the man, the artist represented him as an example of “one of the world’s freest of thinkers.” Man Ray worshiped what he believed was Sade’s complete freedom from convention, from the morals society imposes, and even from the constraints of literary taste. It is believed that while in Paris in the early 1920s, Man Ray was asked to photograph, for preservation purposes, a rare original handwritten manuscript by Sade entitled The 120 Days of Sodom, which had been discovered in the French government’s archives at the turn of the century.
Man Ray’s fame increased as his camera lens continued to capture many of the world’s rich and famous personalities, including Virginia Woolf, Henri Matisse, Coco Chanel, Henry Miller, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. Portraits, however, while a nice source of income, were not really what Man Ray claimed to be about. He was an artist, a very special artist. But now, with the shadow of war lengthening across Europe, he felt it was time to go home.
After his successful one-man show in Los Angeles in 1935, Man Ray decided to settle in L.A. Perhaps he was also attracted to the home of the film industry because he had experimented in filmmaking in Paris. He arrived in Hollywood in November 1940. His artistic return was not auspicious. In 1941, he had a museum show in L.A. that was not well received. The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, H. Millier, in a review of Man Ray’s painting entitled Imaginary Portrait of D.A.F. de Sade in the April edition of Art Digest, equated the subject matter to “crime and torture magazines.”
Man Ray’s reverence for Sade is documented again and again throughout his works. A 1933 silver-print photograph entitled Monument à D.A.F. de Sade depicts a woman’s buttocks framed within an inverted cross, an obvious reference to Sade’s preference for sodomy and his utter disdain for the church.
To say that Man Ray was a devoted sadist, both aesthetically and philosophically, is an understatement. He never made any attempt to conceal his beliefs regarding the subjugation and humiliation of women. On the contrary, he reveled in depicting them as objects and playthings for the true sensualist because, like Sade, he believed women exist for man’s pleasure, which is only enhanced through the humiliation, degradation, and infliction of pain upon them.
Exactly where and how Man Ray and Juliet met Mother and Father I do not know. Most likely they met shortly after his arrival from France, although one unconfirmed report has it that Father originally met Man Ray in New York when he was living and visiting Mother and John Huston in the Village in 1928.
That these four—Man Ray, Juliet, George, and Dorero—would meet was almost inevitable. They were all sensualists; their own likes and strong desires must have drawn them as moths to the same single flame of passion. To Father life itself was surreal, a dream in which each man made up and lived by his own rules and within his own world. Like the sinister Aleister Crowley’s “Black Magician” from the turn of the twentieth century, my father conducted his life according to the dictum, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
The first of our family photographs by Man Ray that I am aware of were taken in 1944, when we lived on Valentine Street in Elysian park, the neighborhood where Dodger Stadium stands today, just a hardball throw from downtown. From 1945 until the fall of 1949, both Man Ray and Juliet were regular partygoers at the Franklin House, where Dad’s guests could relax and indulge themselves in cocktails, a courtesan, or plenty of cocaine.
During these years, Man Ray took a number of photographs at the Franklin House and several formally posed portraits of my mother at his residence-studio on Vine Street, just a few blocks away and directly across the street from the landmark Hollywood Ranch Market. In some of these photographs Mother was alone; in others, she posed with Juliet. In 1946, Man Ray gave Mother and Dad a self-portrait as a gift, which he would later use as the cover for his autobiography, Self Portrait, published in 1963.
His inscription to my parents on the photograph reads:
To Dorero and George—and my homage as I am pleased when I am asked for my phiz—so much more than when I am asked for a portrait of a greater celebrity. I celebrate you.
Man
In 1947, just a few months after the murder of Elizabeth Short and while the investigation was at its most heated, Man Ray left Hollywood for Paris. He later returned and remained in Hollywood through 1950, when both he and Juliet returned to Paris and established permanent residence there until his death in November 1976.
Exhibit 13
Man Ray, 1946
The influence of Man Ray on George Hodel cannot be underestimated. Already an amateur photographer of some note, my father admired and looked up to the world-famous Man Ray. Despite his plethora of professions and accomplishments, in his heart of hearts, George Hodel aspired to be an artist.
* Information received in 2006 suggests Father’s medical condition may have been hepatitis rather than a heart attack.
* After building the Sowden home in 1926, Lloyd Wright’s next architectural endeavor (1927–28) would be to design the prototype shells for what has become one of Los Angeles’s most recognizable icons, the Hollywood Bowl. This magnificent amphitheater is located only two miles west of the Franklin House.
