Review of Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and punishment in postwar Los Angeles by Jon Lewis
233pp. University of California Press. Paperback, £24.95 (US $29.95).
The body of Elizabeth Short was found, severed at the waist and drained of blood, in a vacant lot on the southern edge of Los Angeles, January 15 1947. The mystery of the Black Dahlia, as the newspapers christened her, came to symbolise something brutal at the heart of the city. She was an aspiring actress who had ventured into Hollywood to be discovered, but got lost. The life that the subsequent investigation revealed told its own story of disappointment: ephemeral acquaintances bound by broken dreams, survival by way of barroom pick-ups. James Ellroy called the phenomenon of the body dump murder ‘an epigram on transient lives’ (the body of his own mother had been discovered strangled and posed in a playground twenty miles east of downtown LA). The very geography of the scene – what Jon Lewis describes as ‘the real-estate of the crime’ – seemed to reflect a deeper emptiness: non-neighbourhoods sprawling into the desert, bungalows erected in a frenzy of boom-time speculation, weed-strewn, haunted by their own unfulfilled destiny.
Hard-Boiled Hollywood is, in the author’s own description, ‘a book about dead bodies left by the side of the road in post-war Los Angeles’. It tells an alternative history of Hollywood’s awkward adolescence. In the 1940s and 50s, millions flocked to LA to partake in a golden age that was already over. This disjunction is central to Lewis’s thesis: between 1940 and 1960, LA’s population more than doubled from 3.2 million to 7.8 million; in the same period, output from the film studios halved. That left a lot of new arrivals at a loose end. Three films provide his jumping off point: Sunset Boulevard (1950), In a Lonely Place (1950) and The Big Knife (1955). All involve the death of a film worker and an industry in transition. But Lewis’s novel angle is to move beyond the screen to the mean streets themselves.
If so many bodies came to rest on the outskirts, they began their journey amidst the bustle. As their stories unfold, the defining aspect of LA’s ‘real-estate’ comes to be the proximity of the wild scrub to the busy downtown. This is an era when contact meant physical proximity, and the absence of a studio system overseeing the discovery of new talent meant that breaking in to the movies involved an increasingly vague and seedy process of meeting the right people at the right places. These ranged from the studio lot itself, the ice cream parlours on Sunset Boulevard, to venues such as the Hollywood Canteen, where young women ‘entertained’ servicemen before they shipped out to WWII, hoping to make contact with some of the movie-industry figures who also passed through. They also included the mob-owned clubs, places like La Rue’s, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, Slapsie Maxie’s and Club Trocadero (the ‘Troc), where movie producers Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck and Samuel Goldwyn took part in a regular, gangster-run card game involving chips worth $20,000 apiece. Into an environment such as this, crowded with its various hustles, young men and women wandered at their peril. Jean Spangler had told friends and family that she was in the movies. While evidence of her film career is thin on the ground, it’s true that she was a dancer at Hollywood nightspot the Florentine Gardens, that she had a romantic relationship with Little Davy Ogul, an ‘associate’ of mob-boss Micky Cohen, and was quite likely a ‘badger girl’ sleeping with famous men then stepping aside as they were blackmailed. All or none of which could explain why she went out on the evening of October 7 1949, supposedly to work as an extra on a shoot that didn’t exist, never to be seen again.
Lewis depicts the interweaving of Hollywood ambition and corruption with verve. The organised criminals mirror the legitimate movie industry in the way that the murdered women represent the shadow-side of glamour. Although the joke had it that the mob tried to move in on the studios but couldn’t figure out how the moguls cooked the books, plenty of gang finance did end up in film: during the Great Depression theirs was among the few businesses in the country with liquidity. There were ethnic ties as well: many key players, on both sides of the law, were Jewish immigrants, with a shared experience of starting from scratch, and a conscious self-fashioning as outlaw entrepreneurs bucking the various obstacles in their way (this will feed complexly into the attempt to establish an all-American, anti-communist Hollywood). But the gangsters were bound to the movies by fantasy as well, which intoxicated them as much as victims such as Short and Spangler. Lewis quotes Robert Warshow: ‘The real city produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the gangster.’ It was a city in which Micky Cohen ran his criminal operation out of a high-end men’s clothing store, where even cops arrived at crime scenes in immaculate double-breasted suits and fedoras, and when George Raft, famed for his screen portrayal of criminals, encountered the real-life mobster Bugsy Siegel, he smelt a frustrated actor who wanted a movie career.
For all their success, not many of the gangsters or actors in Lewis’s book got to live happily ever after. The clever move, it becomes clear, was to become a lawyer or a gossip columnist. These professions provide recurrent and entertaining figures in Hard-Boiled Hollywood, men and women who were parasitic on the ‘dead bodies’ in various ways. Lawyers such as Jerry Giesler moved freely and profitably between gangster and movie-industry subcultures, representing Micky Cohen but also movie producer Walter Wanger (who shot and wounded an agent he accused of flirting with his wife), Lana Turner’s 14 year old daughter Cheryl Crane (who stabbed Turner’s gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato), and even the shadowy Dr George Hodel when he was accused of being the Black Dahlia killer after an investigation by his own son. Knowing the whole spectrum of players was helpful: when, in 1948, a police raid led to Robert Mitchum bring arrested for marijuana possession, Giesler was able to accurately portray the whole event as part of a gangster-run entrapment scheme. Columnists fed off this sense of celebrities getting away with it. If the law couldn’t enforce morality, then the press would. Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons and Westbrook Pegler honed a prurient conservatism rallied against sexual and political liberalism. It’s a now-familiar dynamic, at once right wing and salacious, and insisting on the ‘karmic debt’ owed by those who appear both to have success and enjoy it. Roy Howard, editor of the New York World-Telegram, dubbed Pegler ‘game warden for the preserves of the over privileged’. Under the banner of moral crisis, Hopper and Parsons used innuendo and guilt by association to stalk their prey – ambitious, career-oriented women in particular. As the Cold War kicked in, the new perversion of left-wing activity was a gift to these writers. Pegler, who had long smeared politically progressive celebrities such as Frank Sinatra with rumours about his sexuality, could now identify the singer with communism, while warning that the White House, heaving with the Kennedys and the Rat Pack, was at risk of being ‘given over to bongo, espresso, and weird characters wearing Castrovian beards.’
Hard-Boiled Hollywood ends with Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most scrutinised casualty to be metaphorically dumped by the Hollywood roadside. As with the Black Dahlia, Lewis is less concerned with solving the mystery of her death than with exploring the range of suspects for what it tells us about the extraordinary overlap of scenes and social circles in LA at this time. Monroe bridged eras: one of the last big studio stars, she was also one of the first to exploit scandal and play the press at its own game (when a racy, pre-fame photo session surfaced she staged a teary-eyed confession while letting the leaked pictures do their own work). But her death, in a way that is both very different and very similar to the murder of Elizabeth Short, is poignant for a sense of isolation preserved within a wealth of connections. It is only the familiarity of so many names in Monroe’s life – in the little red diary that mysteriously vanished from her deathbed – that makes the conspiracy theories more tantalising. Was she killed by the FBI to stop her relationship with Robert Kennedy causing a scandal? Or by the CIA so as to frame Kennedy and grant them power over him? And what of her time spent with Fidel Castro, or the union leader Jimmy Hoffa and mob boss Sam Giancana? The ill-judged acquaintances line up, yet It’s as a symbol of glamour’s loneliness that the myth of Monroe endures, of the distance between fantasy and reality. Lewis binds the bleak irony of Hollywood – the cruelty of life lived in the shadow of the dream factory – to a concrete socio-historical moment, and demonstrates why it left so many inhabitants feeling, in the words of the actress Sandra Dee, ‘like a has been who never was’.