Hollywood Confidential

The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.

Hollywood’s Last Lonely Places

Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.

Mobsters and Movie Stars

In postwar Hollywood, mobsters, moguls, and movie stars commingled frequently and often carelessly. Professional encounters were commonplace given the mob’s involvement in the organization of the movie industry’s labor force. Film workers and gangsters routinely crossed paths at nightclubs, bars, clandestine gambling establishments, and private parties where interactions were complicated by alcohol and illicit drugs, human trafficking (prostitution) and the occasional “badger” or blackmail plot. The moral here is fairly simple, at least in retrospect. The movie stars -- and circling about them the many movie aspirants, wannabes, and sycophants -- were always playing at things, trying on roles, aliases, lovers, identities, fads. But the gangsters in the strictest sense of the expression “meant business.” And that was something folks who trucked in the world of make believe failed to appreciate and understand.

The Real Estate of Crime

Elizabeth Short (AKA the Black Dahlia) arrived in Los Angeles filled with aspiration and hope, seduced by a Hollywood narrative fixed in the glamorous studio era. What she didn’t know – what she and so many other Hollywood aspirants and wannabes like her could not possibly have known – was how quickly and systematically the movie business would be transformed and scaled down in the years to come. Short has become the most notorious but hardly the only casualty of an industry and city in transition after the war.

Introduction

On February 8, 1962, the movie actress Lana Turner fainted at a Hollywood party. It was her birthday—her forty-second.1 She was rushed to the emergency room at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, where she made the most of her entrance, dramatically clinging to the arms of two of her party guests, the actor Eddie Albert (Turner’s current co-star in Daniel’s Mann’s ...