What Tamar told me were simply stories, communications between older sister and younger brother about a man we'd both held in awe but who had demanded nothing less than fear and worship from his children.
Tamar did not know, of course, that I was actively conducting a criminal investigation of those years. I provided her with no information, and any references to the "Black Dahlia" came only from her. As far as she was concerned, I was simply a listener.
Tamar first came down to Los Angeles from San Francisco when she was eleven, but she returned to her mother, only to come down again when she was fourteen. It was about that second visit that she told me, "The only time I ever slept with George was on that one occasion. I thought that it was going to be this big romantic wonderful thing cause he promised me that when I was sixteen I would get to be a woman and he would make love to me. In the meantime, he was just training me for oral sex and stuff like that."
But my father had not counted on his fourteen-year-old daughter's getting pregnant.
"George said he was going to send me away to an unwed mothers' home," Tamar told me. "The fact that I was going to be sent away was horrible to me. I was scared to death. My girlfriend Sonia told me, 'Oh, you have to have an abortion.' I didn't even know what an abortion was. Then I talked to a few more friends my age and they all said, 'You have to have an abortion.' So I went back to George and put the pressure on him, told him I had to have an abortion. He arranged it with a doctor. It was horrible. They didn't give me any anesthetic, nothing. In the middle of it I was screaming, 'Stop, stop!' But you can't stop in the middle. It was awful, the worst physical experience of my life. I was throwing up and in shock. This very strange man who was a friend of Dad's drove me back to the house on Franklin."
Tamar told my mother about the abortion, the pain and her fear, and Dad's friend who drove her back to the house when the procedure was over. When she heard the story, Mother exploded.
Tamar then related to me a most incredible story told her by my mother, who was Tamar's true and trusted friend and, for that brief period of time, her surrogate mother. The story involved a young woman who had worked, possibly as a nurse, for Father at his First Street Medical Clinic. She never learned the woman's name, but as told by Dorero, "the girl was in love with George." They had had an intimate relationship, and then Father, as was his nature, had moved on to other women. Soon after their breakup, the girl began to write a book, an "expose" which would reveal hidden secrets about George, his life, and his activities. Mother told Tamar that late one night she received a telephone call from George. He ordered her to come immediately to the girl's apartment, where George informed Dorero that the girl had "overdosed on pills." Mother told Tamar it was clear that "the girl was breathing and still alive." Father handed Dorero the secret books the girl had written and ordered her to "burn them." Mother did as she was told, left the apartment, and destroyed the writings. According to Mother's narrative to Tamar, George could have saved her but let his young ex-paramour die. Dorero's story was later independently confirmed by the police, who, after taking Tamar into custody on the runaway charges, told her they "found the death suspicious, suspected George Hodel was involved in her overdose, but couldn't prove anything." Tamar never learned the girl's name or any other information about her.
When Tamar was eleven, shortly after the Black Dahlia murder, she recalled, she was living at the Franklin House and her mother sent her a doll that had curly hair. Tamar took it to Father to have him name her because he had a knack for picking great names. "He told me to call her 'Elizabeth Anne,'" she told me. "I thought that was really strange because he never picked names like that, he always picked unusual names. He did it kind of laughing, like it was a joke. So I called the doll Elizabeth Anne. Years and years later, I told a friend the story and she brought me a magazine, and I opened it and there was a very pretty face with this name, Elizabeth Anne Short. I went 'Oh, my God.' I never knew that was her name. I just heard it as the Black Dahlia."
Tamar also revealed that Man Ray had taken portraits of my parents and was a frequent guest at Father's wild parties. He and Father shared the same hedonistic tendencies, indulging themselves in their pleasures in clear defiance of the society in which they lived. Man Ray was living in Hollywood, just a mile from the Franklin House, when the incest scandal broke, but, according to Tamar, "He and his wife left the country at the time of the trial. He was afraid he was going to be investigated."* Tamar also said that Man Ray had taken some nude photographs of her when she was thirteen.
Although my sister appreciated Man Ray as an artist, she admitted that personally she disliked him. "He was another dirty old man." Nor did she like my father's good friend and my mother's first husband, John Huston. "I don't care how great John was, when I was eleven he tried to rape me. It was your mother, Dorero, who pulled him off of me. He was a big man. He had straddled me in the bathroom at the Franklin House, and he was very drunk. But your mother came in and pulled him off of me and saved me. The next time I saw him he was playing that man in Chinatown."
Tamar remembered Kiyo as our father's beautifully exotic young girlfriend, and recalled that the Franklin House was filled with women: "George had all of these women at the house just waiting to see him. They were literally standing in line at his bedroom. I felt lucky if I could get in to see him. He was a perfect example of an ego gone wild. I think Huston did sex stuff with Dad and Fred Sexton and all the women. I know for sure Huston filmed stuff at the house."
She had this to say about Dad's physical violence: "George was so terrible when it came to punishing you three boys. He was very cruel. Michael got it the worst. It broke my heart to see how he treated you three. Especially how he was with Mike. And he was so cruel with Dorero. I remember before Franklin, visiting you at the Valentine Street house, where I would see Dad pull her around the driveway by her hair."
What was most important to me about Tamar's memories of 1949 and the trial wasn't the trial itself, which was a matter of public record, but the attitude of the prosecutors who interviewed her two years after the murder of Elizabeth Short. Here Tamar was, at the very center of one of the most scandalous news stories in Hollywood — a story that could well have wound up involving Man Ray and John Huston — and firmly under the control of prosecutors, who now believed they could nail my father for crimes they suspected him of having committed but couldn't prove. Tamar was the key to getting George Hodel behind bars.
When she told my mother about the abortion — which, in 1949, was illegal — my mother realized that Tamar was a walking piece of evidence and believed Tamar's life was in danger. My mother lived in deathly fear of George and knew that getting Tamar out of the house would probably save her life. So Tamar fled.
"I ran away," Tamar told me. "And I was found because Dorero had called my mom and told her, 'Tamar has run away and you had better come down here and help her.' So my mom came down unannounced, and George just couldn't say, 'I don't know where she is.' So George put out a missing report. I wasn't adept at running away because I had never done it before. I had just gone to friends' houses."
The parents of Tamar's friend in whose house she was hiding were away in Europe, but her friends were living there with the servants. It seemed to be a safe haven. Tamar knew the police were looking for her, which frightened her, because she'd never had any dealings with the law. So her friends protected her. "This little gang of my friends took me from place to place, hiding me out. That's how all this came about with all the boys. All the guys helped me out, hiding me from place to place."