In his description of the murder scene George Hodel writes:
Los Angeles Record
Thursday, August 14, 1924
Two Cents
WORDS OF DEATH
Death.
Mors, mortis, morti — glibly the schoolboy declines it. Thoughtlessly.
Like a cage in which the canary has been stifled, this apartment on the second floor of the Nottingham — the tall, expensive building with a front of blazing white tiles.
While the yellow bird was alive — flitting and singing —
The cage seemed a pretty thing. Now with the canary dead it is a dirty cage, tawdry and crusted with birdlime.
The canary is dead on the floor of this soft room that seems so close — impinging with walls and ceiling — close like a cage . . .
She lies dead in an unpleasant disarray that is not art but death. And the two batiks of Larry Darwin, monsters of the new niode, bulge with immensity just as the ordered vision of Rubens shrinks into insignificance before the monstrosity on the floor. Larry Darwin's nudes are phantasms — succubi. One smokes a cigarette, perched cross-legged on the devil's head. The other, with stuffed limbs, prances through a garden of exotic lotus flowers. Both leer at the figure on the floor.
The figure on the floor. Hair waved and hennaed, perhaps. Redly, dankly — plume for a face disfigured by a bullet hole. Eyes purpled. Blood on the bare white arms. And this photograph — of "the Kid." Clasped like a rosary to the breast, flat now, and hard; retreated as a woman's breast retreats when she is on her back.
The Kid placed the photograph in the white hand.
A gesture of drama, a futile touch of the romantic school that heightens the grotesquerie; that causes the naked batik succubi to leer the more it seems.
Pull it away — the picture. The newspapermen would photograph it, too. Yes, it's a picture of the kid.
Bloodstains on the glass. The Kid stands up young and proud.
The clutching fingernails scratch and rattle across the back. Ugh! Put it back in the hand. Let her hold it. . .
On their pedestal the nymph and satyr of Perl's have never eased the tension of their eternal embrace . . .
Death.
Mors, mortis, morti — what gender is death?
Feminine of course. It is of that declension. Yes, death is feminine.
Later in 1924, George decided to give up reporting and become a publisher. The following month, he and a friend decided to create a literary magazine. Now living in his own detached studio on his parents' South Pasadena property, he published a magazine with his own printing press and named it Fantasia. In his January 1925 introduction to the first issue, he made the following editorial statement:
A Dedication
To the portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts, to the delineation of the stranger harmonies and the rarer fragrances, do we dedicate this, our magazine.
Such beauty we may find in a poem, a sketch, or a medley of colors; in the music of prayer-bells in some far-off minaret, or the noises of a city street; in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin.
And ever shall we attempt in our pages the vivid expression of such art, wherever or however we may find it — ever shall we consecrate our magazine to the depiction of beauty anomalous, fantasial.
George Hodel wanted to explore bizarre, off-the-edge fantasies, mostly having to do with forbidden sex and violence. His magazine survived two issues; its only notable piece was my father's review of the newly published hook by the then relatively unknown author Ben Hecht, entitled The Kingdom of Evil. This was a sequel to Hecht's first book, Fantazius Mallare: A Mysterious Oath, a journal narrated by the fictional reclusive artist-genius Mallare, which describes the author's visions of decadence, insanity, and, ultimately, murder. Mallare creates a beautiful mistress, Rita, who becomes his phantom or hallucinatory lover. In this twisted story delusion becomes reality and reality dissolves to dreams until, at the story's end, Mallare has transformed himself into an insanely jealous avenger who beats Rita to death because of her flagrant, wanton seduction, in Mallare's own presence, of his Caliban-like manservant, Goliath. The reader never really knows whether Rita is real or a twisted fantasy spun out of Mallare's psychotic torment.
The novel's highly erotic pen-and-ink drawings were created by Wallace Smith, who like Hecht had been a journalist, artist, and author in Chicago. Smith was arrested and prosecuted for what the government considered pornography, and because the book was judged obscene, was jailed for a brief period. Both authors would later come to Hollywood to write screenplays, where Hecht would eventually become one of the highest-paid screenwriters in the industry.
My father's review of The Kingdom of Evil, in which he's completely absorbed into Hecht's belief system, is the most accurate picture of his psychology. He writes, in part, "Macabre forms, more dank and putrescently phantasmal than any of Hecht's former imagining, grope blindly and crazedly in the poisonous fog out of which loom the rotting fancies that people his 'Kingdom of Evil.'"
My father's magazine went out of existence in the spring of 1925. A few months later he applied for a job as a cab driver. Lying about his age, which was seventeen, he managed to pass himself off as twenty-one in order to obtain his chauffeur's license (City badge no. 1976, State badge no. 34879) from the city's Board of Public Utilities, permitting him to drive a taxi within the city limits. That he was just over six feet and a solid 148 pounds, with black hair and dark brown eyes, made him look older than he was. Dad's route took him mostly downtown, where he shuttled fares among the various hotels, including the Biltmore, and out to Hollywood. Ironically, one of Father's fellow cab drivers out of the same station, and likely his early acquaintance, was a young man studying for his law degree, who twenty-five years later was destined to become LAPD's most famous chief of police, William H. Parker.
Toward the end of 1925, another story about Father appeared in print, this time by Ted Le Berthon, the drama critic for the Los Angeles Evening Herald, who wrote the following unusual and highly illuminating article about Father. In it, Le Berthon changes Dad's last name from Hodel to "Morel" and the name of his magazine from Fantasia to Whirlpools.
This article reveals another side to my father. Besides being a pampered mama's boy, intellectual elitist, poet, and pianist, he was also a fighter who at the slightest provocation would be eager and ready to trade punches.
Los Angeles Evening Herald
December 9, 1925
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
By TED LE BERTHON
The Clouded Past of a Poet
GEORGE MOREL is tall, olive-skinned with wavy black hair and a strong bold nose. His eyes are large, brown, somnolent. A romantic, hawklike fellow, a pianist, a poet, and editor of Whirlpools, a bizarre, darkly poetical quarterly.
"George is a nice boy but —"
How often did one hear that!
What his friends hinted was that George, being young, was inclined to write of melancholy things.
Of course, George could have pointed to Keats, Rupert Brooke or Stephen Crane for precedent, but — "It's not George's gloom, his preference for Huysmanns, De Gourmont, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Hecht that pains us," these "friends" would parry, "but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!"