Black Dahlia Avenger

From the view in exhibit 35a we cannot see whether Elizabeth’s right side was also excised in similar fashion. Perhaps most tellingly the laceration the killer cut into Elizabeth’s face extends her mouth from ear to ear, and her lips appear grotesquely identical to the lover’s lips extending across the horizon in Man Ray’s Les Amoureux.

In the early 1970s, after having lived and practiced in Manila for twenty years, George Hodel attended a one-man show at the Philippines Cultural Center called the Erotic and Non-Erotic Drawings of Modesto, where he discovered the promising young artist Fernando Modesto. Father was instantly drawn to the twenty-two-year-old artist’s erotic works and to what he would later term “the brilliant style of the artist’s approach.” From that first showing until his return to the United States from Asia in 1990, Father would be Modesto’s patron, buying virtually everything he created. And Modesto was prolific. By 1990 Father had amassed a personal collection of over 1,600 Modesto works, 95 percent of which would have to be considered erotica.

In the months prior to his death, George Hodel was preparing to market his private collection to the public, which required that he develop a strategy and promotion campaign. His first step would be to tell the world something about the artist, who by that time had developed a reputation in Europe and Asia but was less known in the States. Included in this marketing program would be a description of the artist and his developing vision, which had evolved over his twenty-year career through various stages. A sampling of the works from Modesto’s different periods of development were included in Father’s brochure, along with relevant catalog descriptions. This catalog copy was not comprised of Modesto’s interpretations of his own art, but rather those of his patron, a pioneer in marketing, a businessman, and a psychiatrist.

June told me that she and George had traveled to Paris in 1986 or 1987, where Father had presented an identical work to Juliet Man Ray.

Dear Steve:

It was good to get your last letter with its long perspectives. To communicate is such a mysterious process, at any level. And to truly communicate is rare. I am glad that you made the effort, and that you succeeded. That you succeeded in beginning to make a breakthrough. One of these days, if time permits, let’s try together, to push through further.

It is not easy to explain what I mean. But let me give you an example. A parable. But a true example. When you visit here in Manila again I’ll show you the birds, and the glass, and the watchers (we), and we can try together to unlock the secrets of the three. Or is it four?

Safely hidden away from harm, in the overhead roof rafters of my penthouse in the Excelsior, are a tribe of small birds. Perhaps they are sparrows, house sparrows. They build their nests there, slip between the curves of the galvanized roofing into their separate havens, mate there, and raise their young.

Each season a generation of brave new little birds squeeze out through the curves of the roofing, and survey their cosmos. They practice hopping about, and pecking at each other, and winging along the balcony. They even discover a tiny swing which I have put up for them (birds love to play, you know) and they jump from the window frames to the metal swing, push back and forward, and hop back delightedly to their take-off place.

And then, somewhere along the line, and usually pretty soon, they make a discovery. A discovery based on advanced technology. A discovery which is totally incomprehensible, but which fills them with joy, and hope, and high excitement.

In Manila, as you may remember, my penthouse apartment faces out toward the west, onto Manila Bay. All through the afternoon, and until the sun sets behind the mountains of Bataan and the island of Corregidor, the sun’s rays beat relentlessly on the glass west wall of my apartment. Air conditioners find it hard to compete with this heavenly barrage.

Therefore, in self-defense, we put up synthetic plastic coating-a mirror film-on all the western windows, to reflect the sun’s rays and help to cool the rooms. It works quite well, and cuts down on heat and glare. Through the glass, we look out on the bay and the mountains and the sunset with slightly bluishly tinted glasses. And they look fine; they look all the better for this bit of blueness.

But to anyone on the outside (and we come back now to our brave young sparrows) the plastic-coated glass is a mirror. It is meant to be a mirror so as to turn away light and heat. It was not designed to deceive little birds. But they are deceived, and aroused, and delighted.

What do they see in the tinted mirror? They see beautiful young birds, amazingly like themselves, hopping about like they do, and full of life, and curiosity. Above all else, our little sparrows yearn to join their companions, and to sport with them, fly with them, even mate with them and continue their flight through eternities of love and time.

But there is a barrier to all these hopes. They do not know and cannot believe that the barrier, the wall of glass, can never be surmounted. There must be a way, they say, to break through somehow, into this paradise of beautiful young birds who await them, who tempt them, and who respond dancer-like to their every movement. How to enter this paradise which is right here, right at hand? How, they ask? Surely there must be a way, if they only persist. Surely they will somehow prevail, they say. Paradise will be theirs. Paradise awaits the brave, the strong, the pure in heart, they say.

And so, for hours on end, our little birds dash against the silent glass. Foray after foray, swooping from a vantage point (the Chinese lanterns near the roof) the little birds strike against the glass. The braver and more patient ones may go on all day, in their assault. The tinted glass is flecked with a thousand marks where little beaks have crashed against it, hour after hour after hour.

And then there is the third partner in this mystery. Ourselves. The tireless birds, the silent glass, and we. We stand wonderingly behind the glass, and contemplate the battle. We are like the gods, watching all and knowing all, knowing that the battle is fore-ordained. But how can we communicate our knowledge to the brave battalions of the birds? How can we warn them, console them? Send them off on other more hopeful missions?

Sadly, as we contemplate the glass and the determined little birds we must settle with the truth. And the truth is that we cannot warn them, cannot tell them, and can only feel for them, and love them for their courage.

But are there only three of us? The birds, the glass, and we? Or is there a fourth? Who is standing behind our glass, invisible to us, incommunicable to us, gravely watching our brave attacks against the walls we cannot see? Is there a fifth presence, watching all the others? And a sixth, and others, hidden in mysteries beyond our dreams?

When you visit in Manila, I’ll show the countless marks on the glass to you. If you come at the right season, you’ll see the brave little birds themselves, and their efforts to break through.

There are other ways, too, in which life’s secrets are shadowed forth. Have you ever watched the insect who flies back and forth in the jetliner, seeking a tiny crumb or wanting out? How can I inform him that he is flying from Amsterdam to Tokyo, and that his life is joined with the lives of us who see beyond the crumb. But not too far beyond. We know as little about our real voyage as the insect knows about the trans-polar flight.

It is good to know that you love me, for this is not easy to achieve, for you, for many reasons. Some of the reasons you have stated, and it is fine that you are able to begin to understand and overcome them. Some of the other reasons, for our love, may be harder to understand, for they may be shrouded in mysteries, like those of the birds and the glass.

I too love you, and this is easier, because you are the very by-product and testimonial of my love. There is an old Irish saying that “Ah, I knew you, me boy, when you were only a gleam in your father’s eye.”

It is also easy (indeed, it is mandatory) for me to love you because I remember things that you do not. I remember the happy, well-controlled, serious, beautiful little boy whom we loved so much. And now love equally, but differently. Only a little difference.

I am enclosing a check for Dorero, for the six-month period from July through December. Wish it could be more. Try to find ways to give to her-a bit of money, a bit of time, and love, much love. Remember-it was she who responded to the gleam. If she had not . . .

Dorero asked me to send her another enlargement (I brought one to her before in 1974) of her wonderful photo by Man Ray. I have had this copied, and will send it soon. If you want a print, I’ll make one for you too. And for Mike and Kelv, if they do not have them and want them.

Congratulations on your work in the case of Charles Wagenheim and Stephanie Boone. There must be an enigma inside a mystery there, too.

Hope to be out your way one of these days soon. I am interested to know what you plan to do after three years. Your life may just be beginning then.

Give my love to all!

Always,
Dad

The photo depicts an object or objects wrapped in a carpet and tied with rope. After photographing the unknown subjects, Man Ray left it up to the beholder to figure out what the blanket concealed. Is it a human body or perhaps something less sinister? Some believe that Man Ray provided a clue to what was hidden inside his “riddle or enigma.” Man Ray’s biographer writes:

Man Ray never revealed to anyone the actual objects inside his photograph, leaving it to the viewer to judge these obscure references to a dissecting table, a sewing machine, and an umbrella. With respect to the Dahlia investigation, it is enough to understand this further linkage to Man Ray’s use of the quote in the light of Father’s statement to me in response to my solving the Wagenheim murder, with his “there must be an enigma inside a mystery there, too.”

Man Ray’s 1920 photograph The Riddle, or The Enigma, which to many people would represent a human body, or body parts, wrapped and bound with rope, becomes the fourth compelling photograph informing the influence Man Ray had on my father and his actions in the Black Dahlia case. Along with Man Ray’s other three works of art mentioned above—Les Amoureux, The Minotaur, and Juliet in Silk-Stocking—they reveal the vivid images that will later turn up throughout the Black Dahlia case. In fact, the Man Ray images themselves help to unwrap the mystery of the case, which has been my father’s riddle-and-enigma to the world for over fifty years.

For my purposes, one of the most telling portraits Man Ray photographed was the one of my father and a statue of the deity Yamantaka (exhibit 39), which probably sums up their relationship to each other and to their private sexual fantasies.†

Finally, there is exhibit 40 in comparison with Father’s original two photographs of Elizabeth (exhibit 7). I call it “The Dream.” Taken in 1929, the photo portrays a gathering of the major surrealists in Paris, including André Breton, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí. Each member of the group has formally posed for his portrait with his eyes closed, affirming his support and preference for the subjective dream state in defiance of the conscious and rational.

My father’s most revealing thoughtprints are those two damning photos of Elizabeth Short, as seen on page 39 as exhibit 7. Here again the artist/photographer has signed his work, only this one was private and was meant to remain so.

In these photographs of his lover, George Hodel reveals his esoteric “marriage” to Elizabeth Short by personally initiating her into his world. After carefully posing her in both photographs, Father instructs Elizabeth to close her eyes, as if she is asleep or in a dream state. With his lens, he then captures the dream, transporting her to his world, the world of the surreal, where dreams are reality, where the rational and the conscious are only backgrounds and are reversed to become the shadows of unreality.

True to his philosophy, George Hodel remained the absolute surrealist throughout his life, the young poet of seventeen, described in the newspaper of his day: